Global Warming Myth

[howeird]

dinogrl posted a link to a recent news item I'd heard a couple of days ago on the radio, which reminded me I wanted to say a few politically incorrect words about the great global warming myth.

When I was a fledgling journalist back in the 70's in Astoria, Oregon, one of the issues had to do with floods, and how the greedy insurance companies were gouging home owners in the low-lying neighborhoods by using actuarial tables which went back 100 years. Turns out that about every 100 years there's a record-breaking flood. Which basically means weather cycles are about 100 years long. I'm over-simplifying here because my point is not changed by trivia such as sometimes it's 112 years and sometimes it's 80 years and sometimes it happens twice in a 5-year period. The point is, global warming is part of a cyclical weather pattern which we can expect to peak about every 100 years.

Accurate global weather statistics have not been kept for anywhere close to 100 years. It's only been since the advent of the network of weather satellites that we've had global stats capability.

What I'm saying is we're merely approaching the peak of a cycle. The same way the dust bowl days of the 1920's and 30's are now a distant memory, this year's Gorefest will be forgotten 80 years from now.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to save the rain forests or drive cleaner vehicles. I'm just saying we shouldn't be all in a panic about it.

Which reminds me of something Henry Kissinger said when he was asked about the threat from Chile when a socialist was elected president there:
"Chile - an arrow pointed right at the heart of Antarctica."

Comments

[cinchntouch.livejournal.com]

Ages ago I worked in property insurance and I really don't think that a 100 year actuaraial expreience/loss rating gouges the insured. In my experience Flood Zones that regularly cost insurers a lot of money tend to be in areas that flood more than once every 100 years. Look at some of the areas around the Russian River that flood with some regularity every decade.

Then there's the unexpected like New Orleans (or the dust bowl), though that technically wasn't a flood (from an insurance perspective)but the failure of levees.

One of the issues with Hurricanes and global warming (and I don't think it is all hysteria - Scientific American has had a few very good articles on this topic as of late). Using hurricanes as one loss variable, we encounter the problem that we didn't start keeping detailed data about hurricanes until (if memory serves) slightly before or after WWII -- by which I mean a time period of 1940 - 1947. I think the war actually stopped the earlier attempts to collect this data, and it was picked up again in 1947. So when we are discussing Hurricane data we don't even have a reliable 100 year period to draw conclusions from. So when we say there are more hurricanes we are really using a base measurement of roughly 40 years.

I am sure somewhere some grad student is collecting this historic data.

BTW

[cinchntouch.livejournal.com]

Did you see this article about NASA's response to the temperature error http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/16/must-read-from-hansen-stop-the-madness-about-the-tiny-revision-in-nasas-temperature-data/

Seems to me I heard a similar story not to long ago....

[edith-mf.livejournal.com]

Well, if we conserve more in many ways, we make more wealth. There are a lot of pragmatically good things to following the advice of the hair-pullers.