Heat is on its way.

Your friendly Futurism Now writer is not a scientist so I’m not qualified to fully interpret the latest paper from James Hansen, but maybe you are. He is asking for comments on the following, If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?, which you can download in full from his Columbia University web site here.   He says,  “Criticisms are welcome.  This is a draft essay that I wanted to get out because we are releasing our December and annual surface temperature analysis on the GISS web site.  We will prepare a write-up on 2009 temperatures for the GISS web site next week.”   Some of the findings include:  The warmest recent year was 2005, not 1998!  And he also kills a few other wrong conclusions of the skeptics, such as that there has been a decade-long cooling trend, which most certainly is not the case.  One thing is clear: James Hansen (or someone he knows) surfs the internet for comments on climate change. Here’s a bit of an excerpt:

“Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short?term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. Yet many lay people do understand the distinction between regional short?term anomalies and global trends. For example, here is comment posted by “frogbandit” at 8:38 p.m. 1/6/2010 on City Bright blog:

“I wonder about the people who use cold weather to say that the globe is cooling. It forgets that global warming has a global component and that its a trend, not an everyday thing. I hear people down in the lower 48 say its really cold this winter. That ain’t true so far up here in Alaska. Bethel, Alaska, had a brown Christmas. Here in Anchorage, the temperature today is 31. I can’t say based on the fact Anchorage and Bethel are warm so far this winter that we have global warming. That would be a really dumb argument to think my weather pattern is being experienced even in the rest of the United States, much less globally.”

I wonder about those people too.  It’s the usual USA-centric viewpoint of Americans though — what we think and experience is universal, or at least, the desired norm and if not, you’re weird. Of course, that’s not true.  There’s a big world out there that isn’t like us, and doesn’t experience our cold snaps from Canada or the Arctic.

Hansen is not the only person fighting the perception of the Cold Snap versus Global Warming. One thing global warming skeptics don’t seem to get is the difference between winter and a global warming trend (which lasts longer than two months). In fact, where I live we had a very cold December and January, but it wasn’t record-setting cold by a long shot, as it wasn’t in [...]