Playing With Our Heads

I’m sure some of you have noticed by now that AGW proponents are playing with our heads.

I decided to run a little experiment to show this; it actually started three years ago, when I first heard the claim “People around the world have noticed that something is very wrong with the weather…” going on to say that ordinary people see “spring arriving weeks earlier”, “winters shorter and warmer” and so on.

So I began to note down rough basics; first day of 75°F+ weather, last frost, first frost, storm frequency, and so forth. Apparently, according to AGW people, spring is now up to three weeks earlier than “just a few years ago” (a vague term). Let me share with you my relatively unscientific findings, based on local observations of the climate here in Missouri.

The first “warm stretch” of spring (3 consecutive days of 75°F or more) occurred within 5 days of each other in both 2006 and 2007.  In 2008, it occurred 10 days late.

The first “cold snap” of fall/winter fell within 3 days in 2005-6, 2006-7 and 2007/8.

The last frost occurred within 3 days of each other in all years. This past winter was the 3rd snowiest on record. We hit record lows on no less than 3 occasions.

In March-April of 2006 and 2007 there were 10-12 stormy days (by “stormy”, I mean “severe storms”, i.e. hail, heavy rain, thunder and lightning, etc) In 2008 there were (so far) 3.

The dogwoods (the first things to bloom here) came out in late march in both 2006 and 2007.  this year, they arrived in mid-April.  The trees came into leaf in 2006 and 2007 by early april.  they’re just starting to today (April 25th, 2008 )

OK, I know; small samples, highly unscientific and so forth, but remember the claim: Everyone has noticed winter becoming shorter and warmer, and summers are hotter and drier.  Spring is getting earlier and earlier… etc etc. Since this is a statment about persnal experience, I decided to test it.  And my “experiential” findings? No “later winters, earlier spirings”.  If anything, things are pretty static. And spring was technically really late this year.

So what’s going on?

Surely in your life you’ve come across people who say things like “we never really had a summer last year, did we?”, when you can plainly remember lying on the sofa, fans and A/C on high with a cold cloth on your head, sweating in misery as the mercury hit 100 for the third straight day (not a terribly unusual occurrence here in the midwest).  It’s basically that everyone constructs their own reality based on faulty recollection, and our minds fill in the gaps with invention that is utterly identical to real experience.  We lie to ourselves.  Every day.

The AGW crowd has gotten hold of this phenomenon and is using it against us now, playing with our own memories and implanting the idea that we have all experienced global warming in our everyday lives.  The figures to back this up, however, are missing.  In the reports where they cite our “personal experienec”, they never quote any real observations about how much warmer year X was over year Y, or how much later spring was (except vague terms like “weeks” or “days”.  How many weeks and days? No response.)

I’m not suggesting that you need to perform this little experiment, although it might be interesting if you did. Nor am I saying that the AGW people are explicitly, deliberately doing this, although I am sure some are.  Instead, I think it’s that a lot of well-intentioned AGW people have convinced themselves that the seasons are going haywire, and misremember the experiences of previous years to justify it, almost entirely unconsciously.

The only real result of my experiment, as far as I can tell, is that the world might be warming, or might not.  It just isn’t doing much of anything here; so it’s hardly a Global phenomenon, is it?

 

Not with a bang…

It’s been over a month since my last post, and what a month it’s been! Tornadoes! Earthquakes! Yard work! Yes, I have seen all this and more. So very much more…

Anyway…

Well, that little Expelled! movie is getting a little bit of attention, it seems. I saw ads for it on CNN (surprising), Fox News (very, depressingly, absolutely unsurprising), and Discovery Channel (horrifying). Of course, Ben Stein began to tarnish in my eyes when he became a regular Fox contributor, redeemed himself with very funny performances in Fairly Oddparents, then dropped off the radar of my respect with this movie. Not, I’m sure, that he will wake up sobbing at the prospect at having lost my respect. His bank balance will take care of any lingering qualms he might have in that regard. I understand Fox News Channel pays a fair bit to its contributors, too… why else would Dick Morris be there? (Except that Fox hates the Clintons more than he does?)

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised about the ad appearing on Discovery Channel, though… after all, they continue to shove AGW down our throats on a regular basis, joined now by NGC and History Channel. They have large numbers of worthy talking heads all real scientists, saying “There is no debate”, which, considering several hundred scientists are doing just that, is pretty ludicrous now.

They still harp on about the polar bears being endangered, and how terrible it is that the US Government wants to take them off the protected list as part of their horrific scheme to claim that AGW is a myth, despite the fact that the figures show that the Polar Bear population has increased 90% since 1980. Yes. 90 percent!

We’re told Greenland is melting, although the interior isn’t, that Antarctica is melting, the Arctic is melting, and we’re all gonna die. But the Arctic sea ice in the 2007-8 season contained about 1.8 million square kilometers more ice than last year, and the 2007 Antarctic season substantially more than that.

In NGC’s “Last Days on Earth” special, Global Warming was the “NUMBER 1 THREAT TO ALL LIFE ON EARTH!!!!”, ahead of asteroid impact. This despite the fact that even the most dire projections raise the temperature far less than the Triassic Global Desert event, which only managed to wipe out 60% of life, and Asteroid impacts are a lot more common than we imagined only 10 years ago, and Toutatis is going to pass within a few hundred miles of the surface of the Earth on Friday, 13th April 2029. Toutatis is not an extinction-level event, but it’s pretty nasty all the same.

In the meantime, the world is stubbornly refusing to get hotter, cooling by almost a degree over the last ten years, and even the IPCC says this year, globally, will be “cooler than average”. Whatever “average” is.

So, the World is apparently going to hell in a handbasket, and we’re all going to die of heatstroke and dehydration. Or cold and flooding. Or something nasty, anyway.

The only problem is, someone forgot to tell the World.