Scorching temperatures in June’s second half helped the continental United States break its record for the hottest first six months in a calendar year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Monday.
The last 12 months also have been the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, narrowly beating the previous 12-month period that ended in May 2012.
Jim Newell finds the explanation for all of this:
WILL: How do we explain the heat? One word: summer. I grew up in central Illinois in a house that had air conditioning. What is so unusual about this? . . . We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.
The winger response to climate change often puts me in mind of one of my all-time favorite BJ comments:
I imagine 500 years ago, the Aztec ruler-to-be assured his subjects “I believe in Tlaloc. I have always believed in Tlaloc. I believe in motherhood, Tlaloc, and infant sacrifice, all the traditional values. When we get a drought, tradition teaches us that we must flay a ritual sacrificial victim alive and perform a sacred dance in his bleeding skin, and I believe in those traditional family values…”
BGinCHI
He lost me at this:
Stand back everyone! SCIENCE!
Violet
George Will grew up in a house with a/c? In Illinois? His family must have been well off. He’s not young and I remember visiting my relatives in the midwest when I was a kid and they didn’t have a/c.
BGinCHI
Or, corrected for accuracy:
beltane
George Will is old and grew up in a time when only the wealthy had air conditioning. What does the fact that he was a rich kid have to do with global warming? Am I missing something?
gnomedad
Liberals are exploiting this tragedy.
SatanicPanic
This isn’t funny anymore. I’m just hoping I can buy land further north before the dummies catch on.
Culture of Truth
I thought he said he grew up in a house with no air conditioning.
PeakVT
George “I’ll make you hate baseball” Will can bite me at his earliest convenience. Or go jump off the Key Bridge.
Davis X. Machina
If liberal billionaires just stopped bribing climatologists via their fancy foundations, those temperatures would come right down. NOAA and the NSF, too — and they’re doing it with your tax dollars, that you earned, which is even worse.
NonyNony
@Culture of Truth:
That’s what the transcript at Maddow’s blog says (video embedded as well, can’t watch it now to verify).
Makes the sentiment make more sense, even if it is nonsense.
The Moar You Know
Al Gore is fat, and that’s why we’re retrofitting houses in Southern California – homes that never needed A/C since they were built in the 1950s – with full-house air conditioning as it’s now moving from the category of “useless luxury” to “mandatory necessity”.
This place had the same climate from the sixties (when I was born here) until 1995, when it started changing. Every year it is changing more and more. Some years desert hot and dry (normal for the area) some years tropical wet including summer thunderstorms (not at all normal for the area).
The deniers are almost gone in real life public discourse, BTW, at least here. They’re likely tired of getting yelled at by people sick of their obviously untrue bullshit.
Culture of Truth
on that same program he said baseball is America’s most popular sport.
Which is true if you don’t football, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, the Olympics, and American ninja.
Redshift
After the derecho and the heat wave, a local weatherman got frustrated and said on the air, essentially, that this is none of this is normal for our area and anyone who can’t see that it’s cause by global warming is an idiot. He got death threats, and the station took him off the air temporarily (hoping it would blow over, I think.)
MikeJ
We had an honest to gopod thunderstorm here the other day. People on r/seattle were posting pictures because it’s something that never happens here.
Culture of Truth
He said in such a snooty way the transcriber missed it.
Redshift
So, George, if your house burned down, would you say it’s just summer? It’s just heat; how could it be anything different?
Chris
I call shenanigans. I’ve lived in DC for twelve years, it’s been a humid, fetid, unbearably hot swamp for that long, and it had never, EVER been this hot.
Sentient Puddle
George Will is aware that we have devised a system by which we can quantify precisely how hot or cold the weather is, and thus compare various days/seasons/years/other to objectively determine if a particular day is hotter or colder than usual, is he not?
PeakVT
@Redshift: Chris Hayes had that clip at the beginning of his show this weekend, but had to get it in a non-standard way (not specified) because NBC4 refused to give it to him, and refused to explain why it wouldn’t.
lacp
Yeah, just a little hot weather, suck it up people. Or so sayeth the bow-tied dolt.
http://io9.com/5924257/map-pinpoints-the-2284-us-temperature-records-broken-in-june
beltane
@Davis X. Machina: Don’t forget that this all part of the Fat Tyrant Al Gore’s plan for global domination and a One World Government that will take your guns and turn them into wind turbines and organic farming utensils.
SatanicPanic
@The Moar You Know: Now that you mention it, the summer storms are pretty strange. Kind of been getting used to chaotic weather, but you’re right, it wasn’t always like this.
trollhattan
And what will George Will (and a millyun-wingnut army on newspaper comments) be saying the moment the year’s first blizzard hits?
“Where’s my global warming?”
jwb
@Sentient Puddle: It is not at all in George Will’s interest to acknowledge such a system. These days half his gig is denying global warming.
forked tongue
Having just returned from a visit with my Republican father, I think I have some insight into the climate-change skeptic’s viewpoint: The DC area’s recent streak of 100-degree-plus days is not an instance of global warming. The near unanimity of climate scientists on global warming means nothing, because some people were concerned about global cooling back in the 1970s. Actually, global warming probably is real but it’s too late to do anything about it.
Yes, he made all of these points during the course of a single conversation. To sum up: The earth probably is getting warmer, but it’s a cheap shot to point to any actual examples of it. And it’s too late to do anything about it, but that is no reason either to blame the people responsible for delaying until it was too late or to hold their other policy prescriptions under suspicion.
MikeJ
Only tangentially on topic, but did you hear the horrible news? Weatherunderground sold to the Weather Channel. Bleh. First the disastrous redesign, now bland corporate suckitude that will be afraid to offend anyone, and then some bean counter will say, “you know we’re duplicating a lot of things that could be rolled into one…” and then death.
BGinCHI
Next on He Blinded Me With Science, George Will explains the Higgs-Boson particle with hand puppets.
handy
Was reading a tech blog this AM about climate change models and rising sea levels and some denier actually stated he didn’t accept any scientific models because he’s never been able to get season states played in any version of the EA Madden games on his XBox to match real NFL numbers. There it is. I don’t trust anything science says because they use models and computers, which are woefully inaccurate because XBox lied to me and told me Tom Brady passed for 19,000 yards and threw 126 TDs in 2011.
scav
Well, I grew up in a house where gay people had socially validated overt relationships. What is so unusual about this? . . . We’re having some hot same sex marriages. Get over it.
BGinCHI
@forked tongue: The It’s Not My Fault Generation.
Profiles in courage abound.
NonyNony
@Sentient Puddle:
Yes. But what he will tell you is that just because it’s hot, that doesn’t mean anything because summer is always hot.
He’s missing the salient point that when the 10 hottest years on record since we started tracking temperature have all happened in the last 12 years, you start to think that there might just be something to this climate change thing.
What’s weird is that even the right-wing scientists for Exxon and whatnot have moved away from the “there’s no climate change” argument. It’s obvious to the scientific community at this point that climate change is happening – you just have to look at the numbers to see it and it’s impossible to deny it. The tactic now is to insist that it’s not man-made, but rather a natural cycle for the Earth. Like the opposite of an Ice Age -something completely natural that we can’t do anything about.
But in the US we can’t do “nuance” – that would be a losing argument. So he has to stick with denying the numbers altogether I guess.
handy
@trollhattan:
They all do. It’s the standard handwave. I see snow on the ground in February therefore Fat Algore flies a jet and lives in a big house. VICTORY!
Ash
This forced me to google George Will and find out that he was born in my hometown of Champaign.
{SOB}
And never in all my time in Champaign was there heat as bad, for an extended period of time, as what I experienced in DC this past week. I’m pretty sure back in the 1910s when George was born it didn’t happen either.
redshirt
This is the ONE issue amongst all the many others that really gets me. Why do the Wingers care? What’s in it specifically for them to deny GW? I get with abortion, or homosexuality, or Unions, where they may see a vested interested (even if they’re wrong/delusional). But Global Warming?
I know – it’s just a tribal identification marker. If the King says he’s against it, I’m against it. Gods, is it pathetic.
redshirt
And of course, in typical Rethug fashion, when the shit does finally hit the fan, and people are dying in large numbers, it will all be the DEMOCRAT PARTY’s fault for not fixing it.
Turgidson
Summer in San Francisco is still cool and foggy. When I first moved here, I thought it was lame (for example, there’s maybe ONE day a year where it stays warm enough at night that short sleeves are an option – having grown up near Chicago, I miss that a little bit).
However, SF’s summer gloom is seeming better and better the more I hear about the intensifying heat and storms elsewhere.
Ash
@redshirt: Because the way to fix global warming is to regulate the industries spewing toxins into our air.
PeakVT
@redshirt: It’s tribalism, but there’s also a large propaganda machine pushing them to be deniers as well. And the people behind the propaganda machine have clear financial interests at stake, of course.
ericblair
Apparently there’s been an increase in the number of people who “believe” in anthropomorphic climate change because of the last heat wave. Unfortunately, that’s the way it works, because you can explain long term trends to most people until you’re blue in the face but they need to have their noses rubbed in the results before accepting anything.
I hate the word “believe” here as well. Reality doesn’t fucking care what you believe in; you can accept conclusions or not, but reality keeps merrily rolling along.
cathyx
@redshirt: Because those who believe in it want them to cut their gasoline consumption and have the country conserve energy on a whole. And that would mean that they would have to change their daily consumption habits. If global warming were a hoax, then they can keep ruining the world at their leisure.
Chris
@redshirt:
There’s an episode of Stargate where the raving politician who wants to shut the program down argues that it’s impossible for an alien invasion to succeed because God protects America and he would never let that happen.
I know, it’s just a TV show, but that line always comes back to me when I hear the faith based community rant that global warming is impossible. I wonder if for quite a few of them, the rationale isn’t exactly that.
Justin Morton
Global warming exists, because scientists have evidence that proves it exists, not because folks in DC and NY had a warm couple of months.
-Sincerely,
The Pacific Northwest.
Redshift
@forked tongue: Yeah, I had a similar experience visiting a rich friend of my father’s last year. My former-Republican dad mentioned the presentation we’d seen about climate change, he exclaimed “Oh, the hockey-stick graph?” with a gleam in his eye that telegraphed “Ah-ha! I know how to beat this one!” When my dad explained that no, it was a presentation from a NASA research expedition with lots of pictures and measurements of disappearing glaciers, he seemed disappointed. He also mentioned the book from the 70s. He actually had it on his shelf, so I got to look through it — it was written by some kind of retired defense analyst with no particular expertise in climate science.
What’s worse is that this guy lives for most of the year in his chalet in Switzerland, within sight of several mountaintop glaciers which have been getting steadily smaller during the time he’s lived there. It’s about the most direct illustration I’ve ever seen of “who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes,” or more specifically, “why should I believe my lying eyes when the Wall Street Journal tells me it’s not true?”
Southern Beale
Winger response: “the circle is just bigger than we expected.” Yeah cuz industrialization began 500 years ago? In what history book?
Rafer Janders
@ericblair:
It’s like “believing” in gravity.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@NonyNony:
A few years ago (~2008 or so I think) I remember hearing Larry Kudlow on CNBC ranting about how global warming was actually due to “solar warming”– there was some fringe paper asserting that the sun itself was getting warmer over time (oddly enough, this is true– but not on a timescale humans would ever notice).
What got me was his triumphant tone: Ha! No need to worry about CO2! The SUN is getting HOTTER! Stupid Libs!. Very weird thing to be triumphant about, if you really think it to be true: We still have some control over the atmosphere. We can’t do a damn thing about the sun.
FlipYrWhig
@redshirt: They think it’s a pretext for Soçialism and/or nanny-state-ism. They have to deny it because if it’s real the government will have to do something about it, which means telling people to change their behavior in various ways, which gives them a twinge in their liberty bone. It’s the same process that produces the rush to declare every shooting incident isolated craziness, and absolutely NOT a teachable moment about the easy availability and evident danger of guns.
pragmatism
why does mother nature hate america? why won’t she just realize how important profits, revenue, increased stock values and so on are and provide an optimal temperature for freedom (27 degrees C)? why won’t the invisible hand of the free market smack mother nature? so many questions.
Kristine
@redshirt:
I think it’s the fear that they would have to give up their gas-guzzlers and buy Priuses and Volts.
Plus a little knee-jerk. Libruls believe it. Must fight against.
sb
@redshirt: Whenever I teach my students about persuasive writing, I always tell them to take into account the counter-argument. In that vein, I’m going to try to come up with the best counter-argument to accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence that GW is real and happening.
1) Our way of life would have to change dramatically and industries with a vested interest in continuing our way of life would have to change their business or go out of business altogether.
2) Government will have the excuse it needs to tell us what to do and when we can do it.
3) Scientists can’t be trusted and besides, some scientists think it’s all hooey.
4) We have more important things to worry about, like the economy.
My little list here is what I came up with after scanning opposing websites and articles related to GW (I’m seriously concerned about it) and, no kidding, these are the arguments in a nutshell. There is also the George Will argument which is to dismiss GW out of hand and honestly, that’s the most popular opposing argument there is.
twiffer
@redshirt: to accept that human activity is driving climate change means having to accept a lifestyle change. conserving energy and other resources, finding serious alternatives to fossil fuel based energy, producing less waste, recycling…it’s the basic fear of change.
now, this may seem like it is a fear of a slight amount of inconvenience and minimal effort only; but it’s coupled with the ludicrous idea that “liberals” want to roll back technological progress. cause, ya know, we hate having cars and smartphones and stuff. it is further compounded by a lack of understanding what the effects of climate change might be. too many people just shrug and think, hey, i like warm weather…global warming is a good thing! fuck winter!
redshirt
@PeakVT: Oh, I know why the Powers That Be want to deny Global Warming – Quarterly Profits, bitches! – but I find it hard to bridge this gap from Oil Lobbyist to John Q. Sixpack. I mean, is there any personal vesting in the issue for him?
Maybe Obamer’s gonna take away his truck too?
elftx
just where the hell has McLaren been anyway…great pithy (?) insights!!
Redshift
@PeakVT: Bingo. If it didn’t impact the bottom line of the most profitable industry in the world, I don’t think it would have gone any further than their mocking of hybrid cars and stuff like that.
Big business invented “manufacturing doubt” with the fight over tobacco. If you see the pattern of “we can’t change anything until it’s absolutely proven,” it’s a safe bet that business is the primary driver.
FlipYrWhig
@twiffer: Or, to put it more simply, it just boils down to “nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.”
scav
Little bit of if the world can change, especially in ways that don’t benefit me than maybe Evolution is true and God didn’t construct the world for ‘Merca’s benefit and sole use.
redshirt
Good answers all. You’ve answered my lingering doubts about why. Now it’s in the same category as all the other things these stupid fucking lemmings believe in – today. Might change tomorrow if they’re told to do so.
JGabriel
@scav:
Shush. You’re giving conservatives a way to blame global warming on gay marriage.
.
NonyNony
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Not really. If it’s something that we have no control over and there’s nothing that can be done about it, then you don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to start to change away from fossil fuels, or invest money into devices to pull CO2 out of the air, or stop deforestation or any of the other things that would help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Where we see something to despair about – a problem of global proportions that nobody can do anything about – Kudlow doesn’t see it as a problem. He’s 64 years old and rich. He can bet that he’ll be dead before he has to deal with any of the serious repercussions and he won’t have to change his lifestyle much.
The fact that this is just an extension of “I’ve got mine so fuck you” merely indicates that Larry Kudlow (and George Will for that matter) is very consistent in his ideology.
trollhattan
@MikeJ:
At least (small comfort, but still) TWC is no longer run by a rabid denialist. John Coleman is a real piece of work.
Hopefully they’ll leave WU somewhat intact–I learn a lot, reading their sciency people.
Rob in CT
@redshirt:
Because trying to mitigate it means serious collective action. Not just national action either. Global action. Treaties with dirty furriners and stuff. Taxes on carbon emissions and such to influence behavior. Actual lifestyle changes will have to occur (that many of us, liberal and conservative alike, probably won’t exactly love). Further, those lifestyle changes will likely hit a little harder in rural areas (dense cities are, after all, more efficient), and rural & conservative are strongly correlated.
Now, remember: collective action is bad (commies, ahh!). International collective action is freaking heresy (Commies I tell you!!!). And taxes (or gummint regulation) are the worst thing in the world (COMMIES!!!!).
It’s like a beacon for wingnut terror.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Chris:
…doubly funny for a show whose main premise had aliens (actually parasitic worm/snake things that took over human bodies) posing as various gods throughout human history.
Jebediah
@ericblair:
Makes me crazy too. It really seems like some morons believe that actual reality would obey, for example, an opinion survey about what it should be.
Bubblegum Tate
The wingnut response:
“I reject reality and replace it with a more pleasing fiction.”
Roger Moore
@cathyx:
That’s only part of it. The other big part is that big oil- and to a lesser extent other fossil fuel businesses- really, really don’t want to lose the money they’d lose from anti-AGW measures. They’ve spread a ton of lies about it that have provided great rationalizations for other denialists to use when they’re confronted on the issue. Either group by itself would be a problem, but together they’re major trouble.
redshirt
I’ve always seen the solutions to GW as inevitably pro-American – new power technologies, new power grids, new car engines and fuel types. Better built houses and energy saving materials. Jobs jobs jobs – the rebirth of the American manufacturing base.
But yeah, I can “see” the Wingnut fear now. CITIZEN! YOU MUST HAVE GOVERNMENT PERMISSION FOR BONFIRE!
Redshift
@redshirt:
Oh, definitely, or his muscle car, and make him drive some wimpy thing.
Government is always bad, so any situation that might justify government telling you what to do is automatically terrible.
I was in our local hardware store, and there was a guy there buying old-fashioned mousetraps. He was blathering on and on to the clerk about how the “safe” enclosed mousetraps don’t work, and the government is making them make all these things “safe” for stupid people and he just wants something that works. He’d had to drive a ways to find this hardware store that had the good ones — stupid government!
Of course, the fact that he can buy them here in this store means the government isn’t stopping anyone from selling them, but it’s gotta be the government’s fault somehow.
JGabriel
@ericblair:
Ya cain’t trust books, or people who write them, or people who read. Ya can onlies trust yer own
empeercalampearicle, er, things that happen t’ya yerself, goddammit..
David Hunt
@redshirt:
You get an extra five points for correctly labeling it the “Democrat” Party in your parody.
trollhattan
Also, too, heat makes you stoopid. Anybody looking forward to having more neighbors like this douche?
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/texas-thumb-mug-shot-241578
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@NonyNony:
True enough. And I’ve heard the exact same argument against AGW mitigation from folks IRL: “I’ll be dead by then so who cares?”.
Pure, total Last Man-style nihilism.
Makes me wonder why any of them bothered to have kids.
cathyx
@Roger Moore: Yes, greedy corporations are a big part. But for your average republican neighbor, corporate greed isn’t why they are in denial. It’s what I said.
GxB
@Southern Beale: Give ’em a couple days, they’ll find rock solid sources in a marvel from Bob Jones University Press.
Just another example of something that isn’t a problem since it’s only going to affect the plebes (for then next fiscal quarter anyway.) Besides, they can just have their entire private island air conditioned or something… But in their infinite myopia they carry on all the same policies and push the same fucked up legislation day in, day out.
MikeJ
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
And the same people will argue that we need to gut government spending and get the deficit to zero because otherwise we’re harming future generations.
FlipYrWhig
@Redshift: That’s a longstanding complaint from the wingnuttiverse. Stupid people with no common sense sue the manufacturers of products that harm them, the government demands that the products be made more safe and less fun and/or effective, and as a result everyone
turns gaygets “soft.”IMHO the core of conservatism is “the government takes my hard-earned money and squanders it on giveaways to Those People.”. But close behind is “the government orders me to do things it says are good for me, and I don’t wanna.”
Roger Moore
@sb:
I tend to see it as a layered defense. They don’t want to accept it, so they have different defenses they use depending on how persistent people are in debunking their points. They usually go something like:
1) It isn’t really happening, the scientists are making it up
2) OK, it’s really happening, but it’s a natural process, not man made.
3) OK, it’s man made, but we can’t do anything about it.
4) OK, we can do something about it, but anything that would work would be too expensive. This one may get sidetracked into how mitigation or geoengineering is a better approach than trying to reduce greenhouse gas production.
The worst part is that each time they argue, they always go back to step 1. It doesn’t matter that somebody forced them to concede that it really is happening the last time; they’ll go back to complete denial and demand the next person argue the same debunked points every single time.
trollhattan
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
I’ve learned to not discuss climate with geologists. Can’t count how many times I’ve gotten “It doesn’t matter, we’ll all be wiped out by an asteroid like before” or “The Yellowstone Caldera will kill us off, anyway” ending with “The planet will be fine.”
I’ve never discussed it with an astrophysicist, so have yet to hear, “The sun will consume the earth when it becomes a red giant, so there’s no need to worry about a trivial thing like atmosphere.”
Grumble.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Not to forget the common thread among all the counter-arguments: “Some hippies are counting on getting rich.”
Projection is strong, among the wingnut class.
Roger Moore
@redshirt:
I thought there were already rules about bonfires because of local pollution issues. That’s certainly the case with SCAQMD.
Ruckus
@Sentient Puddle:
It is quite possible that he does not know that.
Or he is full of shit.
It is also extremely
possiblereasonable that it is both.redshirt
@Roger Moore: Oh sure. Just like their are Government mandated speed limits. But that’s ok, until they’re given the orders it is not.
sb
@Roger Moore: Yep to this. Well done.
JGabriel
@NonyNony:
In the future, when people are writing about how global warming was ignored by the political leadership in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there will be a special chapter set aside to tell, fable-like, the ironic stories of all the various anti-AGW pundits who died of heat stroke and/or AGW related power failures while they were in the hospital.
.
Ruckus
@Chris:
I would imagine that a lot of the denying is from a religious standpoint. However I always then ask the following: If there were a deity, how could he let global warming ruin his planet? The same way he has let men kill, rape and destroy for eons. So either there isn’t a deity or he is an asshole.
DecidedFenceSitter
If Global Warming is true, then there will need to be regulations that restrict it, reduce it. These regulations are big gov’t, and therefore must be opposed, and/or good blue collar jobs will be lost due to the regulations, and/or something else.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Turgidson: The cold here in SF Bay Area summer is getting worse. The last two years we’ve basically been in a sort of perpetual spring.
GxB
@twiffer:
And this is coming to a head for the shitheels that drone on and on about innovation, “the same word for challenge is opportunity in Chinese”, and survival of the fittest (corporation – natch.) Truth being they’re just bloated fat-assed dinosaurs who are witnessing the meteor streaking through the atmosphere, hoping beyond hope their last days are pampered beyond measure.
David Hunt
@redshirt:
Well there’s loads of the JQS contingent that recognize the reality of Climate Change. However the wingnut portion of the population gets all of its “information” from Faux News, rightwing radio and the Drudge Report. These sources are part of the machine that moves to discredit the truth of Global Warming. So a steady diet of the anti-Climate Change BS plus “if Liberal believe it, it can’t be true” and voila. These people are also where the army of callers that deluge Congressional phone lines to help kill useful legislation. The real work is done by the lobbyists, but deluge of calls makes sure that Congressman X doesn’t think that he’s going against his constituents wishes when he fucks the planet.
Coastsider
I did some digging on the Illinois State Climatologist’s website (http://www.isws.illinois.edu/atmos/statecli/cuweather/) and the Mean temp during summer when George Will was a kid (1941-1959) was around 71 degrees and only about 27 days of the year were over 90 degrees. So he’s full o’ shit when he equates the weather in DC now with ‘summer’ – and he probably never had to worry about AC.
For DC where he lives now, the Summer average went from an average temp of 76.5 degrees F in 1960 to 81.5 degrees F in 2011. For a baseball nut, you’d think Will would love looking at actual data.
GxB
@Roger Moore: Ann Coulter’s Argument Hamster Wheel(TM)
Ruckus
@Coastsider:
Actual data would interfere with his paid narrative.
Davis X. Machina
@Roger Moore: Outdoor burning permits certainly required here — and I’m far enough in the boonies to find bear poo in the back yard periodically.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Funny thing is, many of the energy companies, at least their technical folks, have accepted that there is anthropogenic global warming. Shell, BP accept it. Even Chevron, you’d have a hard time finding a denier amongst their technical staff.
ExxonMobil’s the only sorta-kinda holdout amongst the big multinational oil/gas extraction companies.
But the propaganda continues, mostly because deniers hate hippies, especially environmentalists, and can’t bear to admit that the hippies were right. And, that if they’d listened to the hippies, we’d be much less further up shit creek.
Chris T.
@trollhattan: I occasionally point out that we have only five billion years or so until the sun goes out, so obviously there’s no need to worry about the next five minutes, let alone tomorrow or next year!
Davis X. Machina
You’ll have my truck when you can pry it out from between my hairy palms.
Oh, wait, you mean my truck?
I often get them confused.
murakami
@trollhattan:
Once you get into a geologist’s mindset, if you encounter a very short term (geologically speaking) problem, such as global warming, you can easily dismiss it. Once you start studying geology, which I am, this is mindset becomes almost addictive. Why stress about anything when everything you built, and the very ground you stand on, will eventually be subducted into the molten depths and there will be no trace left of anything you’ve done. No wonder the majority of geologists I’ve known don’t seem to worry much about day-to-day life and regard beer as a holy sacrament.
GxB
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: Heard a while back that Real Estate developers (you know they’re real big on passing the pipe around the drum circle) have begun to devalue future ocean floor property. To the point that they are paying actual scientific consultants to determine how long it will be before the investment is literally under water. Damned if I can find the link at the moment.
Anyway, point being once the big money starts to notice, there will be no denial and anyone who carries on will be like a smoker today: Yeah, I know it’s fucking my future, but I just can’t quit.
trollhattan
@murakami:
A very realistic summary and as fate would have it, the best homebrewer I know is, yes, a geo.
Another fun observation: hydrogeologists hate being called geologists.
scav
@trollhattan: similar from the other geo (graphy) any of the geos involved in field work tended to rank higher on the quality and quantity of beer scale.
Turgidson
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Yep, I have a completely unscientific theory that in the early stages of global warming, SF will get cooler because the inland heat will pull the marine layer further in and sock SF in with fog more severely and more or less all the time. Could already be happening.
scav
@Turgidson: Gut reaction is that it’s possible but but I think will also depend on the time of day. Temp gradient will switch direction at night and you’ll get the hot breezes off the land. I’d think amplified versions of what you’ve probably already got going. Don’t know about eventual Stanta-Ana like configuration, there’s a lot more geography involved there adding heat to the winds.
Bill Arnold
@redshirt:
Fixing it, the Republican way, will alas involve geo-engineering, with lucrative contracts for supporters because … free enterprise. (I don’t know what the arguments will be for cooling the planet via tax cuts for the rich.)
Something like running the air conditioner because the closing the blinds on the wall-to-ceiling south-facing windows (northern hemisphere, ok?) would be admitting that wall-to-ceiling windows tend to have an expensive house-heating effect if full sunlight is streaming through them. The reality-based (right wing) contingent will acknowledge that leaving the blinds open has a house heating effect, but will argue that closing them has a negative esthetic effect that outweighs the increase in air conditioning costs.
[I am familiar with this argument :-)]
Herbal Infusion Bagger
In the 1990s I didn’t believe in climate change because it terrified the crap out of me. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where we could go off fossil fuels and not tank the economy.
Then, in the early 2000s, I had to do some research on climate change, and concluded that if we used about 6-9 not-that-expensive technologies, we could cut emissions to avoid environmental catastrophe, and do so for less than 1% of GDP a year.
That was 10 years ago, though. Now I think so many coal & lignite plants have been built in China and India, while we in the U.S. have continued to grow emissions, that our emission for the next 30 years are set, plus we have Germany and Japan going off nukes.
So I’m very pessimistic. Either we go through a wrenching decrease in emissions, with the economic cost that entails, or we blow past 450 ppm CO2 by 2040 and hit an irreversible change as our albedo drops, the oceans acidify mucking up the hydrogencarbon-carbonate equilibrium that mineralizes carbon, plus we have all the methane locked up in the permafrost and the ocean clathrates just waiting for a bit more warmth to be released.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Here’s the issue though: if you can geo-engineer the climate, you also have a weapon.
Let’s say the Chinese did geo-engineering, and lower temperatures over China, but the next three years there’s a severe drought in the Corn Belt here and crops fail.
Wanna bet a future John McCain would be characterizing their geoengineering as a WMD?
Hungry Joe
@trollhattan: John Coleman has for many years now been the weatherman — and I use the term as loosely as is allowed by law — on a wingnut-oriented San Diego TV station. He’s a piece of work, all right, a gibbering buffoon whose chortles, screeches, and brays attract an audience comprising, as best as I can figure it, of 1) people who think he’s a lovable old coot who sticks it to those liberal global-warming believers, and 2) stoners past and present who laugh themselves near sick every night.
Bill Arnold
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
This is a rhetorical question. If Real-Americans (aka Republican-Americans) did the geo-engineering, it would be fine, and any negative side effects would be, simultaneously, (a) unprovable and (b) arguably positive.
That is, Real-Americans would be extremely unhappy if they didn’t control the geo-engineering project.
Bill Arnold
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
(Seriously) I agree that this will be a major cause of strife in the future. I doubt it will cause more conflict that the actual warming.
Let us hope that we don’t resort to “budget geo-engineering” using thermonuclear-ignited firestorms (lots of cities available), to cause a controlled, sustained nuclear winter.
Tonal Crow
So, how do we explain the heat? Three words: New Climate Dice. In other words, when you shift a normal distribution right (increase the mean), what used to be very rare events rapidly become common.
mclaren
As Bruce Sterling remarked on June 29:
mclaren
@Tonal Crow:
The exact shape of the tails also matters a huge amount. You’re assuming that heat distribution around the mean as a function of short-range time values is a normal (Gaussian) distribution: do you have any evidence to show that it’s specifically Gaussian? How do we know it isn’t a slightly different shape–say, Weibull? Or power-normal? Or Tukey-lambda? Or a t distribution? Or a Cauchy distribution?
As the hapless financial traders discovered during the financial crash of 2007-2008, assuming you’re working with a normal distribution while you’re actually dealing with a different type of distribution with much fatter tails (like a Cauchy) can have dramatic consequences. Events which are hundred-million-to-one unlikely on the thin tails of a Gaussian distribution suddenly become 100:1 or 10:1 unlikely on the much fatter tails of Cauchy distribution.
This is why people who assure me that “we’re not going to get 135 degree F heat in Los Angeles” are assuming without evidence a Gaussian distribution. If it’s not a Gaussian distribution, all bets are off–and on 26 June 2006 in Woodland Hills CA, the temperature has already hit 119 F, while in 2010 in downtown Los Angeles, the temperature hit 114 F.
How many 130 degree F days in a row will it take to depopulate Los Angeles, especially when gasoline hits $7 a gallon?
Tonal Crow
@mclaren: Sure the shape of the distribution matters. Please read the cited paper, and you’ll find that temperature anomalies up to the 1960s closely tracked a normal distribution with a somewhat exaggerated peak at mean. Now the mean is moving right, the right-hand tail is growing, the peak at mean has disappeared, and the distribution has developed a significant rightward skew.
It’s a hard rain’s ‘a gonna fall.
ETA: There can still be local areas that have oddly-shaped distributions.
El Cid
HA! I bet them thar fancy pants ‘scientists’ never thunk of nothin’ like it gettin’ hotter in summer!
Nope, not one of them big government scientists’ so-called “models” ever took into account things like seasons — hell, they never even thought of the fact that the Sun is hot until common sense conservatives pointed it out!
They musta just thought that the Urf wasn’t a frozen iceball because Al Gore told them that free enterprize killed the dinosaurs!
Pseudonym
@mclaren: Yes, please tell us all about your theories of ergodic distributions that predict electing more Democrats to Congress will result in a more right-wing Supreme Court.
OzoneR
must’ve missed the part about summer starting in January.