Heidi had a bit of a meltdown yesterday, as she blamed everything on climate change. And, by climate change, she doesn’t meant what has been occurring for 4.5 billion years naturally. No, she means it’s because people take unnecessary fossil fueled flights to exotic vacation spots to discuss people not taking unnecessary fossil fueled flights
(Salon) “All I know is this didn’t happen when we were kids.â€
Obviously, Brian has a very poor memory.
That’s how Brian Williams tagged a recent NBC Nightly News report on this year’s extreme weather. Floods, droughts, wildfires and tornadoes dominated the news many nights in 2011. Even this week, weather forecasters are keeping tabs on reports from coastal villages in Alaska, like Kivalina, which is under a coastal flood warning from “one of the most severe storms on record†packing hurricane-force winds while it pushes up the Northwest Alaska coast. Lack of protective Arctic sea ice – which is disappearing because of climate change – is making the surge from storms like this more dangerous. Kivalina’s very existence is threatened due to flooding and erosion fueled by climate change, and the Native Alaskan community struggles to relocate. It’s no wonder the Inuit have a word for the changing weather — “uggianaqtuq†— which roughly translates into “stranger.†As in “the weather has become a stranger.â€
So, the Inuit actually have a word for changing weather? That word is also very old. Hence, the climate and weather ……changes!
The big question is, why has the weather become so strange? Is extreme weather like a heart attack (as my Climate Central colleague Mike Lemonick recently suggested in his Op-Ed in the LA Times) or bad credit, symptomatic of our own bad choices? Is this recent run of extreme weather somehow our fault?
No, the big question is “why do you not live the life you think everyone else should live, Heidi?”
The fact is: Human-caused climate change has increased the odds of extreme, even unprecedented weather events. Senior scientist Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) puts it this way, “Just as steroids make a baseball player stronger, and increase his chances of hitting home runs, greenhouse gases are the steroids of the climate system.†So in the case of climate, the extra juice (greenhouse gases, not performance-enhancing drugs) doesn’t result in more home runs but in the greater likelihood that heat waves and other forms of extreme weather will occur.
Huh. That’s weird. The global temperatures had tended to flatline or decrease over the last 10-15 years. The climate alarmists cannot account for the missing warming (though, they do attempt to come up with some amusing whoppers to save their asses and cult). But, then, this is the “climate scientist” who said in front of Congress
And the urgency is that the longer we wait, the further down the pipeline climate travels and works its way into weather, and once it’s in the weather, it’s there for good.
Anthony Watts got a good chuckle out of that one. Scientista Heidi doesn’t seem to understand that weather is part of climate, and long term weather creates what is called climate.
Remember, though, when we have 1, 2, 3, 4 cold winters, we are told that it is just weather, and not a long enough trend to be considered climate. But, when you have a year with wacky weather (no US mainland striking hurricanes again), just like most years, it must be someone driving an SUV.
When we were kids, most of the news was local and big honking storms were in someone else’s state. Today we know when someone in Texas farts, and if a state has hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or other weather related problems we know it as soon as it happens. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen when I was a kid. It means that the 24/7 news cycle is boring us to death with weather issues that people have been dealing with in their states for eons. So, in order to avoid any more climate changes, all Heidi need do is turn off her TV. And think of the energy she’d save.