Across the developed world, death rates are highest in winter and lowest in summer. Contrary to what so called “scientists” would have us believe, warmth is obviously a good thing for people.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/goklany_winter_deaths_figure4.png
But we all know the earth is warming and has for hundreds of years. So gradually you will expect high temp. records to be broken and especially in increasingly large concrete cities. The question is how much is due to man and how much of that is due to CO2? And is the rate of temp. increase now larger than it was previously and how many more records have to be broken to be able to say conclusively that any increases in temp. records are due to AGW or CAGW as opposed to just GW?
The only scientifically valid thing to say is that we don’t know for sure yet. If this keeps happening and happens in many places of the world at some point it could be possible to say that yes, something critical is happening. We have not reached this point. Study it for 10-15 more years, then maybe we can ALL come to some kind of consensus.
If global warming is a bad thing for the US, explain this graph. Why is the death rate highest in winter and lowest in summer? If warming is bad, it should be the reverse.
An argument that could only come from people who have never heard of microbes.
Warmer winters have generally higher death rates than colder winters; winters in warmer years too have generally higher death rates than winters in cooler years.
The ‘excess winter death’ phenomenon is most pronounced in the tropics and countries with warm winters.
Deaths due to temperature extremes are often much higher in summer than in winter.
Deaths due to high temperature extreme during extreme weather far outnumber cold deaths during extreme weather: people die in the cold when they’re drunk, stupid or unlucky; they die in the heat when they can’t escape it.
Certainly, the idiotic claim that some socialists make that heating fuel ought be subsidized to avoid excess winter deaths is baseless: across the socialist nations, removing other factors, availability of cheaper heating has no effect on death rates whatsoever, either comparing year over year or region by region.
You’re repeating a silly and specious argument that misattributes causes, and has no relevance to ‘benefits of global warming’.
cr,
It is always interesting to watch the true believers contort themselves and the plain words of their prophets. Thanks for getting fan of more deception to give us such a fine example.
Chris,
You seem like a nice young man. I’m sure that you are a responsible scientist and will admit in the future where you may have been misled or overstated your confidence in some cases. In 10-15 years I think a real consensus will come about naturally and I look forward to your more mature outlook at that time.
But for now, can you address 1. how difficult it would be to pick out this pattern, not in a stationary climate, but in one that is naturally warming already for several hundred years? and 2. how to account for the UHI effect on temperature records between 2012 and 1950 and 1905 and 1877 and 1755. With anomalies, you can try to correct for UHI but with temperature records, there could easily be 1-2 degrees of warming (if not more) due to thermometers at airports rather than in the countryside. How can you address this (with error bars for example) so that you are making a correct scientific appraisal?
If both of these have been well addressed in the paper(s) you have cited, please let me know and I will take a closer look at them as I really do want to know. I just get frustrated by the obvious gamesmanship on both sides. Scientists really should play fair since the truth comes out in the long run.
“The only scientifically valid thing to say is that we don’t know for sure yet.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica
Rule 4: In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
While one can take issue with your assertion that the earth has warmed for hundreds of years, we can’t take issue with the assertion that CO2 levels have been increasing due to human causes for hundreds of years. We can’t dismiss the Greenhouse Effect due greenhouse gases. We don’t really have to ask the question of how much is due to man, either.
Suppose six people organized a negligent and dangerous streetcar race, and you were injured, but only one of those six people could be identified for you to sue for damages. You could sue them for the whole amount, though attribution might go six ways. Suppose it were 36 organizers and participants, not six? You could still sue the one that got caught for the entirety of damages.
Maybe the odds any individual weather event might be due AGW is under 3%; maybe it’s over 17%: one in 36 to one in 6, you can still blame AGW fully and completely for its liability.
Yeah, and then there’s the ‘told you so’ meme. When somewhat extreme events occur a tame PA journalist is there to ask:
SB: So might call this an I told you so moment? What do you think?
Well, is it a told you so moment or not? Everyone apart from Judith Curry had, very reluctantly, to our great surprise, to agree with the questioner that it was. Not that they pointed to specific warnings they had made about the US weather in 2012 – and all the failed warnings, come to that – no no. But they told us so and we didn’t listen.
Let’s have a recap of that. What did they tell us? That we would regret it if we didn’t listen to them. And here we are – even me in the UK – and what are we experiencing but that regret?
Not about anyhing very specific … and that’s the great thing about a told you so moment in climate science.
I’ve told you the whole thing now but I bet you don’t listen.
See:
Main, Douglas. “What’s Behind the Record Heat?” Text.Article. LiveScience, July 7, 2012. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/03/what-behind-record-heat/
Boils 
down to this: Jet Stream + North Atlantic Oscillation + Blocking pattern = we get to keep the warm air.
Sounds like a legal argument to me.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, part II, act IV, scene ii, lines 83–84. Dick the butcher is speaking. /sarc
Nonsense, you are simply rationalizing. People die when it is cold in far greater rates than when it is warm.
Without technology, human beings cannot survive temperatures below 82F. A naked human will die of exposure in summer outside of the tropics.
The reason is that human beings are warm weather adapted. We are designed to shed heat. There is no place on earth too hot for a naked human to survive so long as there is water. (volcanoes excluded).
Chief
I’m practsing conservation by allowing the snails to eat everything. Does that count?
Tonyb
My analysis of Prof. Salby’s Syndey Institute talk has been posted at SkS, the URL is http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1491 .
Essentially a correlation with the growth rate tells you nothing about the cause of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 because correlations are insensitive to the mean value of the growth rate, and it is the mean value that gives rise to the long term increase, not the variability in the growth rate (which the correlation can explain).
omnologos | July 3, 2012 at 3:53 pm |
At a ratio of 7:1 heatwaves to igloo domes in the 2% of the globe that is the USA, we’d be looking to wait for tens of thousands of cold records to balance the heat records. But then, that’d be tens of thousands of extreme weather records, too. Which also could be a climate change effect due more energy and disruption in the world climate system. So we’d need for a sudden drop in heat events (also an extreme change, but as a singleton hardly evidence of anything) and a gradual increase in cold events in the USA but not in the rest of the world.. and for about a hundred other types of far more reliable observations to also be invalidated independently.
Wishful thinking is not the same as skepticism. It’s just fantasy. Which has little place in a discussion of science.
Huh. And here I thought it was record low snowpack in the mountains.
Can’t meteorologists all just get along?
David
You have presumably worked out the percentage contribution of the atmosphere to the total angular momentum of planet earth. Can you let us know what it is?
fan,
Yr: “historians, scientists, writers, military folks, and the like…”
And the money-shot of your above, dork-on-fire-playing-the-vicitm comment, fan, was a link to some doofus, alternate history, “It could happen here!”, “I feel threatened!”, Hitler-scare, sci-fi novel of the sort can’t-get-a-date, spoiled-rotten nerd kids with over-protective moms freak-out on while nursing a Saturday-night-at-home, bad break-out of the zits.
Also, fan, I think we can further safely conclude that the “literature”, one finds in your link, also belongs to the literary genre of choice of lefty-flake youth-masters angling to corrupt and brainwash vulnerable adolescents entrusted to their care (I can just see you, fan,–all solemn and uptight serious-like–reverentially offering up your precious, this-is-what-we’re-up-against!, please-keep-this-just-between-the-two-of-us-O.-K.?, secrets-of-the-inner-circle, idiot novel for the delectation of some needy, awestruck, dumb kid who has fallen for your greenshirt come-on).
And, oh by the way, fan, dear Mr. Godwin just read your comment, shouted out something about “The big one!”, and keeled over dead. Maybe you know what that’s all about.
fan, you really do have a sicko streak to your clownish zaniness. I mean, like, you really believe that anyone who doesn’t buy into your CAGW scam and its gulags-galore, hive-heaven end-game is a Nazi!, don’t you? You know, fan, when Dr. Lacis disparaged the conspiracy-theorists that plague the “climate-so-called-science” debate, I think he had you and your fellow hive-creeps in mind. And ol’ Andy has a point there, I must say.
timg56 | July 4, 2012 at 5:01 pm |
See, that’s fine for you.
Live at the expense of others, leave the world worse off than it was when you came into it. Have no worries that last longer than your last breath, and no concerns beyond your own skin. If that’s your way, who am I to criticize?
Sorry, but you’re not even in the right ballpark.
The link referred to is only using a one-layer model, which maximizes warming at the emission temperature times 2^0.25; for two layers, it would be 3^0.25, and for n layers it would be the emission temperature times (n+1)^0.25. Thus, there is absolutely no limit to the amount of warming you could get from the greenhouse effect, except when the planets temperature approaches that of the sun itself.
In any case, the layer model presented in that link is far too simplistic. The real efficiency of the greenhouse effect arises from the absorber and temperature profile, and becomes stronger as you put your absorbing layer at colder temperatures aloft.
David L. Hagen | July 4, 2012 at 10:37 pm |
I’ll see your woodfortrees and raise you another woodfortrees.
A simple, rough-and-ready test for when a climate regime (a period with at most one extremum) begins and ends, repeatedly smooth the subject curve until subsequent ‘regimes’ fail to ‘express the same opinion’; we can see this in Series 1, 2, 3.. from 1957, where each of the phases containing only one extremum represents a subsequent rise. Now, you can smooth any line, of course, until it becomes a meaningless nub. There’s an art to deciding when to stop this process. But no matter what you do with the smoothing, you can’t produce a new regime where there isn’t one. And there just isn’t one ending in or near 1998. (Maybe 2005, but unlikely.)
There’s one pair of regimes starting and ending in 1909 (or 1909 is the one extremum); another pair in 1943 and the bookend is 1957 — that is, 1909 to 1957 is one regime with its extreme point in 1943. Or, 1943 is the start of a regime with its extreme point in 1957 and no endpoint yet apparent in the data; for 1998 to be the endpoint, we’d need a very deep drop in global temperature very swiftly.
Outcalt’s speculation, while it’s nice to see someone finally try to elevate WUWT from mere trendology, simply isn’t very persuasive. If global climates are just single decades, Outcalt’s possibly right after some fashion. If we don’t think a period so short as a single decade — and the lapse between external forcing and diffusion of effect tends to suggest ten years is far too short a time — then Outcalt’s entertaining diversion is nice and all, but not climatology.
he doesnt Pekka. Lost cause that one.
