Critical Shortage of Global Warming Jokes
You know how your semi-informed friends and co-workers love to make facile jokes about “some global warming, eh?” when the snow falls, the wind blows, and the temperature dips into – or past – the single digits?
Click to enlarge
Not so much this year, amirite?
Of course, nine of the ten warmest years on record on Earth have taken place since 2000, with 2011 being the 9th warmest. Climate change / global warming is an empirically real thing, political agenda notwithstanding. Global warming is something you can’t learn from renowned physicists Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, and it isn’t something you measure anecdotally with our local daily forecast.
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It should be made clear that many (probably most) global warming skeptics do not deny that climate change is occurring but rather question whether or not it’s man-made or has natural causes. I don’t think there are many of those types left, Hannity and Limbaugh notwithstanding.
The science data – increases in atmospheric CO2 and methane, primarily – point to at least some of the change being caused by human activity, and most peer-reviewed articles indicate that a significant fraction of that change can be attributed to the increased use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.
Those who completely deny climate change are definitely the lunatic fringe; those that question mankind’s impact on it have some basis for legitimate argument, although I for one think they are losing that battle to the empirical evidence.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
Ward,
Facts are not allowed. Weather only occurs in Buffalo. Cue joke about Siena poll (I got this one guys).
Dailymail link was sweet. Check out the Werewolf sisters on page one! Thanks Wort.
Let’s start here.
http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/01/british-tabloid-says-forget-global-warming-and-worry-about-cooling-should-we/
continued …
http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/tag/henrik-svensmark/
Incidentally, shouldn’t people who believe in creationism be dismissed out of hand when it comes to their opinions wrt anything science-related?
“nine of the ten warmest years on record on Earth” makes it sound like we know what the temperature was millions of years ago.
It’s more honest to say “9 of to 10 warmest years on record since we started really paying attention 150 years ago or so” but that doesn’t quite pack the “I hate corporations” punch of the original.
Yes, I’m sorry I didn’t clarify my largely sarcastic post to include the fact that any historical analysis of the Earth’s climate would, by necessity, include only that time during which such data were recorded.
It most certainly dulled the impact of an anti-corporate point I wasn’t trying to make!
Jesse, climate data goes back much farther than 150 years, but you knew that.
Actually there is a record of the climate going back hundreds of thousands of years based on scientific analysis of ice and sediment layers. Tree rings also provide historic climate data prior to meteorological recording started. All the data points to a sharp spike in warming since humans started burning fossil fuels in large quantities in the last 100 years.
Certainly the climate shifts, and has since time began. If you believe that it’s all mankinds fault, then please, by all means, feel free to park your car, shut off your furnace, don’t have kids, stop eating, and stop breathing. If you truly believe all this AGW stuff, then lead by example. Like that renowned physicist Al Gore – doesn’t.
But that’s not the real agenda, now is it?
1. No one said it’s “all mankind’s fault.”
2. Since it’s not “all mankind’s fault”, but because, as 97% of climatologists agree, human activity plays _a_ role in global warming, the “real agenda” is to minimize that role – to find ways to emit less CO2 into the atmosphere. Your joke about Al Gore-cum-physicist doesn’t work, because Gore’s activism is based on the work of the overwhelming majority of scientists who study the earth’s climate. If you think NASA is deliberately lying to you about empirical data regarding CO2 emissions and how they compare with previous decades, that’s your problem. As with most things, conservatives have constructed their own afactual reality about this issue.
Let’s pretend for a minute that we only have 150 years of climate data.
Do you seriously not find it statistically significant that ALL TEN of the hottest years out of the previous 150 have taken place since 1998? You don’t find this to be a trend?
I can understand not wanting to accept this lousy reality, but now you’re just sticking your head in the sand. I actually believe that MOST of the global warming deniers actually believe there is NO global warming and are not simply doubting the role of mankind in creating it. They are that delusional.
Hi Mike,
What if years 160 – 151 were way the hell hotter than any time where we actually DO know the worldwide average temp?
Sure, we have some idea of how hot it’s been in times past, but last I knew we surely didn’t have a worldwide network of monitoring stations set up. All we can do is estimate given indirect measurements.
Which is all well and good. Human brains like to find patterns in statistically insignificant data. Pretending that the climate of 150 years ago was the ‘right’ climate and that current increases are significant and ‘wrong’ is a result of that. Whether you feel like its “statistically significant” or not doesn’t matter.
As to the “constructed reality”, “denialist” turd-flinging, I certainly have no problem with the climate changing, nor in accepting the FACT that humans are a cause (and am at worst 50/50 as to whether or not we are the primary cause).
To the rest of you mooks, accepting AGW necessarily means HUGE ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL!!! must be undertaken RIGHT NOW, at whatever the cost. That’s where we disagree.
And to me, where you lie on the “what should we do about global warming” scale is determined almost entirely by where you lie on the political scale. If you’re the anti-corporate type (which is where that crack originates Alan), then you’ll be all over the AGW bandwagon. If you’re a braindead republican, you’ll hate AGW.
I don’t hate it. I buy it. I just don’t buy the implicit “if you’re not with us you’re against us” garbage coming from the AGW (leftist, anti-rightie) crowd. And pretending that anyone here has any authority on the matter is just silly.
If the ten years before weather data was collected were actually the ten hottest years on record, that would be statistically significant. However, that is pure speculation. For now, we know that the ten hottest years have occurred in the last 13 years, which is way beyond “the human mind wanting to see a pattern”.
A normal pattern over 150 years would tend to show the ten hottest years spread around some. The fact that they are entirely bunched together at the end cannot be chalked up to coincidence. Taking in the data from other sources that goes beyond 150 years only reinforces and corroborates these results.
That being said – doing something about it would mean economic upheaval, at least for someone. Right now, the GOP only has one response – deny that it is happening. And the followers eat it right up, because it would kill them to agree with hippie tree-huggers on any point, regardless of the evidence.
The great Brian Castner said it best – (I paraphrase) “when Republicans don’t like or can’t find an answer to a problem, they deny it exists. When Democrats don’t like something, they blame Bush”.
My long standing answer on climate change has been – maybe I can’t prove that human activity is heightening global warming, and maybe they are right and it’s not….but what if they are wrong?”
Given Ward’s utter inability to be right about anything whatsoever, if he ever tells me it’s sunny outside, I’m grabbing my umbrella.
Wow, glad I checked in, to see some mad Pete Herr name dropping.
Of course, Jesse has the right point. When the Romans claimed Britain 2000 years ago, they did so (in part) to provide vacation homes for their elite . . . it was a warm island full of palm trees. The climate is changing, and we probably have some (a lot?) to do with it. But that doesn’t make *this* climate so special or perfect that should spend trilions to “fix” it, especially when doing so potentially imperils the fortunes of the world’s poorest.
I think George W. Bush is responsible. if Al Gore won the election, we’d be up to our necks in snow. That’s the truth.
@brian- since you know I admire you and your thoughts, I assume you’ll take it the right way when I point out that Teh Poors of the world have no fortunes to emperil.
Complete false equivocation. I have never heard a single Democrat or environmentalist blame George Bush for global warming. I have heard Bush (and every other president) criticized for not doing enough to respond to it
In addition to denying that something exists, Republicans will also just completely make up shit to deflect blame.
@ Ethan – Ah, damn you logical conclusions! How about “potential bare minimum low-income lifestyle and moderately acceptable health outcomes” of Teh Poors?
@PeterHerr the same argument exists for belief in God and Heaven and Hell. Better to believe in God and be wrong than not to believe in God and be wrong and end up in Hell.
@Alan Bedenko I will not believe in Global Warming until at least 97.8% of climatologists agree.
I really wish this topic could move out of the realm of politics and who we should vote for based on belief in it or not. The reduction of hot air produced by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity alone have increased the world temperature. The hypocrisy of Al Gore on the subject has done nothing but poison the well. I have seen Al Gores home just outside Nashville. Honest truth it had the driveway lights on in the middle of the day, I later found out that very day he flew a private jet from Nashville to San Francisco when at least a half dozen commercial flights existed. He has made personal millions off of Global Warming. It seems a good leader would find a way to prove the effects and provide solutions to any problems without paying off his cronies who fund his elections. Whether they be Oil Cronies or Solar Panel Maker cronies.