Why the US and much of Europe are shivering in the cold | Hacker News Reader

Why the US and much of Europe are shivering in the cold

arstechnica.com

18 pointskmod14 comments

I live in Dallas where it's been below freezing most of the winter. Which is odd for Texas!

I suppose this explains all the "temperatures are going down in the US, not up" pieces of "research".

Where I live (Los Angeles County) it's been in the upper 70s to lower 80s for the entire month of January. It's 74 degrees right now!

I wonder if Fox News got this memo.

I have no opinion on global warming itself - I don't know enough about meteorology to form an opinion (and don't know enough to know whether an opinion can even be formed with any reasonable degree of confidence). However, every time I see far more explanations post factum than predictions, it raises a red flag in my mind.

Anyone can make up explanations after the fact, and a good expert will make them sound so convincing they'll even fool themselves (a great expert will know better). Consider: if the chill didn't happen, they'd say we're witnessing global warming in action; now that it did happen, they're saying it's a perfectly natural consequence of global warming. Real science would be predicting the chill before it happened and explaining how it relates to global warming. We have yet to see this type of analysis. If climatologists can't predict weather for a laughably short period of one month, what gives you confidence they can predict it long term?

After all, predictive power is one of the key pillars of science. Without it all we have is old wives' tales.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize that "real science" is too strong a phrase, I actually edited it out in other places but missed this one. My main point, however, still stands.

If you don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the legitimacy of weather patterns, then why are you dismissing Norther Annular Mode analysis as not "real science"?

"Real science would be predicting the chill before it happened and explaining how it relates to global warming."

I have a degree in Geology and tend to think that, even though I cannot predict an earthquake, I did learn a real science:)

Yes, but given the initial parameters of the earth quake you know nothing about you can predict various other parameters of the quake with pretty good accuracy. The same isn't true for meteorology: giving some initial state isn't sufficient to predict anything beyond a very short-term time period.

EDIT: err, this argument is rather weak. I shouldn't have used the phrase "real science", that was a dumb mistake on my part.

Predictions of global warming go back to at least the early 1990s and clearly precede findings like this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101419.ht...

Yes, but I haven't seen specific predictions of local chills, only post factum explanations. Consider an excerpt from the article you posted: "2007 started with record breaking temperature anomalies throughout the world. In parts of Europe, winter and spring ranked amongst the warmest ever recorded, with anomalies of more than 4°C above the long-term monthly averages for January and April." They're using a short term local warming as evidence for global warming here, however the original article clearly states you can't do that (and explains the chill away in this manner).

"Yes, but I haven't seen specific predictions of local chills, only post factum explanations."

This is actually a textbook difference between Climate and Weather. We're better at predicting the former than latter.

Are we? Is there a study that compares a sophisticated climate prediction model with a trivial model (one that simply adds the delta from the previous two years, for example) and demonstrates that in comparing each result to the real temperature the former gives a statistically significantly better result than the latter? That's the only way to know if we're any good at predicting climate. If you can point me to a study on this (or some review study) I'd really love to take a look.

> This is actually a textbook difference between Climate and Weather. We're better at predicting the former than latter.

According to the text book, warm days are climate while cold ones are weather.

You're asking them to predict a "chill" when in fact measurements show that there isn't one.

Look at the large image at the top of the article. The parts in blue and purple (which just so happen to be where you probably live) are colder than normal, the green through red bits (mostly ocean but also Greenland) are warmer than usual.

This is just a more extreme version of the usual brain dead "If there's global warming, why is it snowing?" nonsense you get all the time. Emphasis on Global warming.

They also specifically say that this behaviour hasn't been shown to be connected to climate change which annuls your accusation that they'll claim any weather, cold or hot, as support for their hypothesis.

I don't know much about meteorology either, so most of my facts come from the media. Perhaps that's the problem. For all we know, there may have been posted lots of papers that predict this. When I see all the errors in the reporting of technology, I don't have much hope for an accurate reporting of meteorology.

For what it's worth, I do remember reading that one of the consequences of global warming is more extreme weather (both rain, wind and warmth/cold)

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