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Arctic oscillation fails, chilling Europe to Florida
This is a natural phenomenon, not related to climate change. Celcias, whose slogan is “climate change is not a spectator sport” uses the Arctic Oscillation as an example of how complicated climate change is. For example, some think climate change could be triggered by sunspots or that our warming planet is being kept cool by a decline in water vapor in the atmosphere.
Are you starting to get an idea of how complex global warming science really is? Good. The UK’s chief scientific advisor, Professor John Beddington, suggests this inherent complexity is the best reason not to shrug off climate change deniers, whose skepticism reflects the inherent unease of the layman faced with a discipline that takes decades to master. Instead, Beddington suggests, be honest; if all the data isn’t in – if a weather phenomenon’s effects aren’t yet fully known – admit it. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know,” or “I was wrong.”
Instead the politics of climate change have become as polarized as any debate in the US. Hard-liners on both sides try to destroy the opposition. This gets us nowhere. It’s not like this in other countries.
Clean Edge visited China four years ago
I was struck by the nation’s lack of animosity, if you will, among energy sources. Coal or gas advocates there didn’t pooh-pooh wind and solar as intermittent, not scalable, or not ready for prime time. The Chinese mantra was (and is): it’s all energy, and we need lots more of it – bring it on.
Europe, the UK, Japan, and India are ahead of the US when it comes to cleantech and renewable energy. We lag behind, having pointless arguments about this (and most everything else, it seems.) Forget the “how many climatologists can dance on the head of a pin” arguments and instead focus on how renewable energy means we produce our energy here without having to import oil or gas. This, most everyone will agree, is a good idea. End of argument.
Ice cores off the Greenland Icecap dating back as far as the fifties indicate this sort of thing has happened before and that there are ‘triggers’ for this phenomenon. For whatever reason the Greenland glaciers are melting at an accelerated rate, dumping hyper-cold water into the North Atlantic, collapsing the ‘conveyor’ of the warmer water and surface temperatures that have kept the N. Atlantic coasts ‘temperate’ for about the past ten thousand years… it has happened before. It seems that about twelve thousand years ago a gigantic glacial ice dam broke in the vicinity of what is now the Hudson Bay complex… dumping hyper-cold water into the North Atlantic, collapsing the ‘conveyor’ of the warmer water and surface temperatures that kept the N. Atlantic coasts ‘temperate’ for about two thousand years following the end of the latest ‘great’ glacial age.
This stuff fascinates me, and has for decades…
One World, we are but fleas.
Indeed. I read once that the geological record shows the Rockies are a mountain range that rose, erode, rose, erode, then rose again.