
Why the US and much of Europe are shivering in the cold - kmod
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/01/why-the-us-and-much-of-europe-are-shivering-in-the-cold.ars
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j_baker
I live in Dallas where it's been below freezing most of the winter. Which is
odd for Texas!

I suppose this explains all the "temperatures are going down in the US, not
up" pieces of "research".

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SamAtt
Where I live (Los Angeles County) it's been in the upper 70s to lower 80s for
the entire month of January. It's 74 degrees right now!

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fretlessjazz
I wonder if Fox News got this memo.

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coffeemug
I have no opinion on global warming itself - I don't know enough about
meteorology to form an opinion (and don't know enough to know whether an
opinion can even be formed with any reasonable degree of confidence). However,
every time I see far more explanations post factum than predictions, it raises
a red flag in my mind.

Anyone can make up explanations after the fact, and a good expert will make
them sound so convincing they'll even fool themselves (a great expert will
know better). Consider: if the chill didn't happen, they'd say we're
witnessing global warming in action; now that it did happen, they're saying
it's a perfectly natural consequence of global warming. Real science would be
_predicting_ the chill before it happened and explaining how it relates to
global warming. We have yet to see this type of analysis. If climatologists
can't predict weather for a laughably short period of one month, what gives
you confidence they can predict it long term?

After all, predictive power is one of the key pillars of science. Without it
all we have is old wives' tales.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize that "real science" is too strong a phrase, I actually
edited it out in other places but missed this one. My main point, however,
still stands.

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trevelyan
Predictions of global warming go back to at least the early 1990s and clearly
precede findings like this:

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101419.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101419.htm)

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coffeemug
Yes, but I haven't seen specific predictions of local chills, only post factum
explanations. Consider an excerpt from the article you posted: "2007 started
with record breaking temperature anomalies throughout the world. In parts of
Europe, winter and spring ranked amongst the warmest ever recorded, with
anomalies of more than 4°C above the long-term monthly averages for January
and April." They're using a short term local warming as evidence for global
warming here, however the original article clearly states you can't do that
(and explains the chill away in this manner).

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fretlessjazz
"Yes, but I haven't seen specific predictions of local chills, only post
factum explanations."

This is actually a textbook difference between Climate and Weather. We're
better at predicting the former than latter.

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coffeemug
Are we? Is there a study that compares a sophisticated climate prediction
model with a trivial model (one that simply adds the delta from the previous
two years, for example) and demonstrates that in comparing each result to the
real temperature the former gives a statistically significantly better result
than the latter? That's the only way to know if we're any good at predicting
climate. If you can point me to a study on this (or some review study) I'd
really love to take a look.

