Bill Nye: Hurricane Irene evidence of climate change
We tend to avoid outright politics here on SmartPlanet, but Bill Nye -- known as "The Science Guy" after his popular television show on PBS -- recently visited the Fox Business channel's Freedom Watch to explain to host Charles Payne and his viewers the intricacies of drawing a line between Irene's destruction and climate change as a whole.
The conversation, while expectedly argumentative at times, was interesting if only because Nye took great pains to simplify the science in a way that's understandable to the layman.
For example, his first response to Payne's question of whether Irene was proof of global warming:
I don't think the word "proof" is what you're looking for. "Evidence," or "a result of"? Yeah. Yeah. Now here's what the people will tell you who run these climate models. Now everybody, the word "model" in this usage is a computer program, a very sophisticated computer program. So you take data from satellites about the thickness of clouds and the extent of cloud cover over the sea. You take data about the temperature of the sea surface. You take data about the existing weather in let's say, North America or the Gulf of Mexico, as the storm moves into it, then you compute how much rain fell out of it, how much energy must have been put into it to create that much rain and it takes many months to analyze an event like Irene. Now, climate colleagues that I have will tell you that they cannot tell you today that Irene is evidence or a result of climate change, but check in with them in about March, next year, after they have a few months to collect all these millions and millions of data from weather services and satellites and compile them and run a climate model and show that Irene was a result of the world having more energy in its atmosphere.
The conversation of course continues, with Payne asking whether it was fair for Newsweek to run the coverline, "The New Normal" in reference to Irene. And it gets a bit contentious when Nye asserts that the Earth is getting warmer ("You can't disagree with that") and the two banter back and forth about whether the phenomenon is man-made, impossibly, through the lens of racism as a cultural, not scientific, construct.
Heady stuff, but Nye receives my respect for retaining his patience in outlining a life's worth of work in a six-minute segment.
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He said we won't have the data for months to know.
Does CBS generally censor comments for no reason other than it happens to go against their view on something?
(Yes, that was sarcasm)
What's their excuse for that?
I'm sure their grandchildren will thank them for that.
And it especially does NOT mean that this is the END of the WORLD, which is what the global warming people sound like to me: a bunch of Chicken Littles who think the sky is falling.
The glaciers have been melting since forever, it seems like. I think the real question is how they got here in the first place, not why they're melting.
Something only a narrow minded "librul" could say. Read my above reply to the other post.
We've had one Hurricane of consequence this year (for crying out load).
I don't think we know as much as we "know." For instance (I know this has nothing to do with the story, but the Dinosaurs were more likely decimated by disease rather than a meteor. As a matter of fact, they had massive piles of "waste," just lying around. Also, people have been looking at the stomach contents of fossilized mosquitoes and finding many cells to diseases like small pox and other deadly things.
It never reached anything more than Category 3 that I am aware of, and it was downgraded before making landfall. If this were a Katrina or Andrew following the same path, maybe I would buy it..but it wasn't.
It was a lot of wind in the NJ area that did most of the damaged, we have been soaked with rain for the past 3 weeks. So most tree roots were already softened up. I had a 5'6" wide oak tree in my yard taken down by Irene, i will not have power back until sunday, hopefully
Science is an amazing thing, and while you are welcome to your own opinions, you aren't welcome to your own facts.
Several recent peer reviewed published studies state that in the past 10,000 years there have been several times where the Arctic had LESS ice than present day.
Next, it's just Arctic sea ice that has been decreasing - the Antarctic has been holding steady. See the second graph, bottom curve: http://wp.me/P7y4l-5Kc
If polar caps are melting so fast, why is it that the "Glacier Girl," one of three planes that set down on the Greenland ice cap in 1942, was found 268 ft. below the ice in 1992? http://p38assn.org/glacier-girl.htm
If sea level rise is such a concern, why have the sea level rates decreased in the last few years? Why is it that islands around the world have increased their total land mass, not decreased? Not to mention at a rate of 3mm/yr, even assuming that continues, it just doesn't sound like much to worry about any time soon. If we can't keep ahead of that crawl, well, there'd be something a lot worse going on. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Here is the link to the peer-reviewed paper in Geophysics Research Letters by Maue, et al that clearly demonstrates hurricane activity and energy at historic lows:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL047711.shtml
Enjoy!
But don't worry, Dr. Ryan Maue has pointed out all the inaccuracies you should have found at WattsUpWithThat: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/30/bill-nye-is-the-anti-science-guy-when-it-comes-to-global-warming-and-hurricanes/#more-46334