Global warming?

The only way to construct a climate simulation that isn't chaotic is to get it entirely wrong.

John

hey are

ld

he 4 I

fore the

data

In your ever-so-expert opinion.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

are

the

I simulate and design dynamic systems for a living, and sometimes for fun too. You don't earn a living, and apparently don't have fun.

John

. They are

cold

f the 4 I

fore the

al data

of a

d."

its

And you are sufficiently ill-informed to think that simulating simple, isolated dynamic systems gives you the background knowledge required to judge climate simulations. This is funny enough to amuse even me.

Thanks for the entertainment.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ah, righto, you would have been comfortable through the last ice age then?

So the ice cap there has disappeared before. Why so melodramatic about it this time around?

Do they indicate to you that ice ages come and go, and that the polar ice caps do likewise?

Denial of a false claim doesn't make one stupid or wrong. You and many like you can't see the forest for the trees.

It might tell you things that you seem to choose to ignore when it suits your AGW argument.

hey are

ld

he 4 I

fore the

data

to

Your ancestors and mine stuck relatively close to the equator when it got really cold; they were comfortable enough to breed and survive.

nts

any

ht

If the Greenland ice cap disappears, the sea level rises by 7.2 metres. If you live in a coastal city, this woukd be rather melodramatic.

the

Mount St. Helens and the El Nino/ La Nina alternation are good for a couple of years at most - even shorter term.

The polar caps have been tolerably stable for the last couple of million years. The alternation of ice ages and interglacials is explained by the Milankovitch cycles, and a fair bit of positive feedback; some of the same positive feedbacks that make adding extra CO2 to the atmosphere are rather bad idea.

Sure. But denying a well-established scientific case because some greedy fossil-carbon extraction company has paid money to the propaganda machine that the tobacco industry set up to cast doubt on another well-established scientific case is evidence that you don't have a particularly firm grasp of reality.

Such as?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's supposed to snow in Ocala tonight.

There was a small segment on the late news last nite here in NY about, get this, iguanas falling out of trees down your way, due to the cold. Apparently they pass out in the cold temperatures. The announcer said iguanas aren't native to Florida, but have established themselves there, having been bought as pets and then escaped or been released.

Obviously, the iguanas didn't know that "global warming" was gonna make them freeze their asses off.

Ed

The Manatees and Green Turtles are suffering from the cold, as well and they have both been in Florida for a long time.

Tree Frogs are always falling out of trees, but they are tiny and won't hurt as much as an Iguana if they hit you. :)

They are still calling for some snow in Ocala tonight which will be interesting if it sticks. There isn't a snow plow within 500 miles, or any road salt.

Get used to it.

John

The Daily Mail isn't exactly a quality newpaper, and British science reporting isn't wonderful, even in the quality papers. I wouldn't get too excited about this revelation, which the reporter has probably lifted from a denialist web-site.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Which nonsense, of course, authorizes you to dismiss the peer-reviewed journal article. And all the snow on the ground as well.

You seem to have stopped thinking some decades ago.

John

The Slow man school of science:

re

I don't think that the journalist had understood the peer-reviewed journal article at all well (in the unlikely event that they'd actually read it). If memory serves, it certainly wasn't predicting this kind of cold snap, but merely a slowing down in the rate of global warming from the rate we saw from the late 1970's to the end of the 1990s.

The snow on the ground is just the usual winter weather - more extreme than usual, but there's no evidence that it falls outside the expectations one would have of the regular Gaussian distribution of extreme weather.

I probably stopped having thoughts that you could follow on global warming quite some time ago, back when I started doing a bit of reading in the area. In this case, absence of evidence that you can follow isn't evidence of the absence of underlying thought processes.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

are

..

One wonders how many scientific articles Ravinghorde has published in peer-reviewed journals?

If he wanted to find out how many I had, he could search on scholar.google.com with the search string "A W Sloman" (including the quotation marks).

His own grasp of science isn't all that secure - he can read scientific papers, but he tends to quote the bits he likes, ignoring that fact that the paper as a whole doesn't tell the story he's understood from the bits he has quoted.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I understand that the iguanas in Florida are dying because it is too cold...

I had heard that they were falling out of trees, but nothing about them dying.