CapitalistImperialistPig

...and I'm a bit cold. The latest winter storm brought us about 3 inches of snow and far colder weather (very slightly below zero Fahrenheit) than we are used to in Southern New Mexico. As a result, all schools and many government agencies are shut down. Say what? Three inches of snow shuts down the government? It's a bit more complicated. The reason schools, etc are shut down is that we don't have enough electricity to go around. If the schools etc. opened, somebody else, businesses and homes, would lose power. As it is, we are subject to "rolling brownouts" - my wife turned on a space heater last night and it blew the circuit breaker for the room. One of the benefits of a largely deregulated power industry. And, perhaps, global warming.

OK, maybe not so much here in southern New Mexico, though I suppose you could get a sunburn if you left your shirt off too long outside - but Europe is having its third tough winter in a row and the eastern US is also in the fridge again. So what does it mean? Proof of global warming or disproof (I couldn't bring myself to say "a refudiation", but I was tempted). Judah Cohen, a commercial weather forecaster, offers a interesting meteorological theory in the NYT . Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters. But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has ex...

What's up with the recent weather related travel debacle in Europe? Five inches of snow shuts down the biggest airports in Europe. Should we attribute it to a typical failure of those damn European socialists? Not exactly. Actually this one is more like a typical failure of greedy and short-sighted capitalists. Clive Irving has the story of Heathrow and other British airports. It seems that after the Brits noticed that airports could be made into shopping malls, they turned airports over to the British Airport Authority, which, despite the name, was a private company, rather than a government entity. As a result, the BAA became a prized, highly profitable business, much admired beyond the U.K. It caught the eye of an ambitious Spanish multinational—until then a specialist in building highways—called Ferrovial. In 2006 Ferrovial bought control of the BAA. Then the problems really began. Passengers complained of poor maintenance, filthy toilets, chaotic security lines, and poor commu...

Arun asks: Facts 1. Polar ice melt this summer was unusual. 2. Atlantic hurricane season was very quiet. Question - hurricanes are a byproduct of necessary energy transfer from the tropics to the higher latitudes; but some mechanism is already working better than expected, melting so much polar ice. Is that why the hurricane season has been so quiet? I'd expect the Pacific season also to have been quiet. If the Antarctica has not been seeing unusual melts, the southern ocean cyclones should have been the same or worse. The Northern Hemisphere ice melt has been spectacular, but the South is pretty much trucking along as usual - peak ice was actually (barely) a record. See the charts at http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ (Cryosphere Today). This year's Atlantic hurricane season has been odd, but not actually especially quiet by long term standards. Now to the point: If we look at net Northward heat transport (ocean plus atmosphere) as a function of latitude, it is nearly a...

It's well known that in fluid flow that becomes turbulent, details of the turbulent motion are quite unpredictable. Set up an experiment as identically as possible and watch the detailed motions over and over, and they will vary dramatically. Motions of individual tracers, velocities at a given point in space and time vary drastically for experiment to experiment - and moment to moment. Statistically, though, the behavior is quite consistent. Average over a large number of runs of the experiment, and the average of velocities and distribution of trajectories becomes quite consistent. These facts underly the well-know inability of scientists to accurately predict the weather a few days from now, and their much better capability to predict the average long term weather - aka the climate. These properties apply not only to actual physical experiments, but also to numerical experiments modelled on the physical experiments. The story for long-term climate prediction is considerably ...