Puxsutawney Phil, the famous resident ground hog of Puxsutawney Pa. whose first residents were the Native American Delaware Indians; Puxsutawney translates: "area of the sandflies", well anyway, as you recall, Puxsutawney Phil came out of his log on a cold and snowy day and did not see his shadow, predicted an early Spring. Six weeks later, ie, the flip side of him seeing his shadow and predicting 6 more weeks of winter, it seems that his prediction model was backwards. This morning in East Lansing, it was 24 F and expected to go up to 39 degrees F. When looking out our window, the snow on the ground and the ice on the pond, it looks like a typical March 15th beginning and forecast for the rest of the day. Average. Now I realize that the weather of just one day in the life of Ivan Ivanovich does not totally invalidate any Climate Prediction Model for catastrophic weather on March 15th 2100, however, ALL climate prediction models (here labeled as such although generally called General Circulation Models), predicted warmer winters and warmer nights with increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. So far, at least over the last 13 years, that hasn't happened; we've been on a sort of plateau as far as the weather and temperatures are concerned (since 1998). What we do see is that Mother Nature has agendas like earthquakes and Tsunamis that have far greater impacts upon our human condition than computer models, which are based upon other computer models which are based upon yet other computer models that are amalgamated into an assemblage of computer runs to give us a forecast for 90 years into the future of a 3 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Today in East Lansing, there is ice on the sidewalks from yesterday's melting snowpack that ran over the sidewalk and froze last night making for treacherous walking, still! Yes, winter is slowly fading into Spring, all pretty average for this time of year; averaged over record keeping for the last 150 years. Is there Global Warming? Possibly 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. After all, we are coming out of the Little Ice Age, the end of which was in the early 19th Century, Charles Dicken's "Christmas Carol", cold and snowy in London England and all that; just like this winter. Ground Hogs and computer simulations have similar predictive abilities.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Beware the Ides of March
Puxsutawney Phil, the famous resident ground hog of Puxsutawney Pa. whose first residents were the Native American Delaware Indians; Puxsutawney translates: "area of the sandflies", well anyway, as you recall, Puxsutawney Phil came out of his log on a cold and snowy day and did not see his shadow, predicted an early Spring. Six weeks later, ie, the flip side of him seeing his shadow and predicting 6 more weeks of winter, it seems that his prediction model was backwards. This morning in East Lansing, it was 24 F and expected to go up to 39 degrees F. When looking out our window, the snow on the ground and the ice on the pond, it looks like a typical March 15th beginning and forecast for the rest of the day. Average. Now I realize that the weather of just one day in the life of Ivan Ivanovich does not totally invalidate any Climate Prediction Model for catastrophic weather on March 15th 2100, however, ALL climate prediction models (here labeled as such although generally called General Circulation Models), predicted warmer winters and warmer nights with increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. So far, at least over the last 13 years, that hasn't happened; we've been on a sort of plateau as far as the weather and temperatures are concerned (since 1998). What we do see is that Mother Nature has agendas like earthquakes and Tsunamis that have far greater impacts upon our human condition than computer models, which are based upon other computer models which are based upon yet other computer models that are amalgamated into an assemblage of computer runs to give us a forecast for 90 years into the future of a 3 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Today in East Lansing, there is ice on the sidewalks from yesterday's melting snowpack that ran over the sidewalk and froze last night making for treacherous walking, still! Yes, winter is slowly fading into Spring, all pretty average for this time of year; averaged over record keeping for the last 150 years. Is there Global Warming? Possibly 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. After all, we are coming out of the Little Ice Age, the end of which was in the early 19th Century, Charles Dicken's "Christmas Carol", cold and snowy in London England and all that; just like this winter. Ground Hogs and computer simulations have similar predictive abilities.
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