24 April 2008
Why is global warming so cold?
Posted by bryanc under: nature; science .
Springtime is a great time of the year. The days are longer, the seedlings spring from the earth, and the buds finally open. But most enjoyable is the warm weather. So it was a bit of a surprise to me when I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and saw… snow? In fact, it snowed three days now with lows near 20 F. The weather hasn’t been warm this Spring, it’s been abnormally cold.
The relatively cold weather is a slight annoyance to me but it is something that I can tolerate. What I cannot tolerate are how some people are reacting. They view the chilly Spring as proof, absolute, empirical, in-your-face proof, that global warming is false and that all the science, concise peer reviewed models, thousands of meticulous studies conducted by some of the worlds most intelligent and educated people, are all false. “Look outside you dimwitted liberal hippie, it’s cold. It’s obvious the globe isn’t warming.”
There is, of course, a simple rebuttal to their claim. It’s so simple it scares me that people do not grasp it on their own. I do not think that people are unintelligent, uneducated, or lack critical thinking skills. What I do think is that their ideals and values block their tools of logic. But that’s besides the point.
Here’s the rebuttal: Weather and climate are two different things. Weather is short term and will have fluctuations. Climate is a long term average of weather. Snow in spring is weather. Global warming is climate (that’s why it is also referred to as “global CLIMATE change”).
The above mentioned naysayers have a blatant misunderstanding of global warming. Somewhere in their heads, I assume, they conclude that because the globe is warming each day at every place in the world MUST be warmer than the corresponding day during the previous year. This is not true as I mentioned before - weather fluctuates.
Weather is an incredibly complex system and it is very difficult to make prediction about it. There are random factors contributing to it that we cannot explain. To disprove a long-term trend based on a short term occurrence when random events are a factor is a mistake. It would be like disproving that the chance of getting heads on a flip of a coin is 50% by getting tails on the first two flips. Or that the chances of rolling a six with a six-sided die is greater than 16.67% because the first two rolls were sixes.
Weather is not completely random. In fact part of the cooler spring this year is attributable to an event called La Nina (the opposite of El Nino) where equatorial ocean currents are colder than usual which cools the air above it. But casual factors aside, it is foolish to extrapolate trends, or basically anything, solely based on a few occurrences.
