OK, again I thank you for explaining all this. I know you didn’t say anything about global warming…I did. WTF, should I have started a new thread? I’m trying to relate the process you so clearly described to the much reported problem of global warming. Do the two have nothing in common?
If the ‘globe’ is warming how will that event affect drought, rainfall and climates? What is it that so many are so worked up about?
Anita
I have spent the past couple days thinking about how to deal with this and not end up looking like Im obfuscating, or putting myself up for a Golden Louie Award.
One of the first things we need to do is get the terminology straight, weather versus climate. Weather is what is going on outside right now,what happened yesterday, what happened a month ago, and what happened on July 4, 1776. Climate is what happened in the 20th century, the 1990's, and in 2005. In general, a one year time span is about the lower limit when asking any sort of question about "climate". If you were to translate this into the world of personal finance, weather would be everything you spent your money on yesterday, climate would be everything you spent your money on in, say, 1998.
Sticking with the personal finance analogy, every day you spend money, maybe a cup of coffee everyday in the morning, a bag lunch one day, fast food another, and maybe a sit down business lunch on another. Plus everything else that you spend money on every day. So when the qustion is asked "how could there be record cold" when there is global warming, its a lot like asking how come I spent so little money yesterday if Im making more money than ever.
Climate is all about long term patterns of weather. Heat waves, cold wave, floods, droughts, snow storms, hurricanes will all continue to happen as climate ch-ch-changes, what ch-ch-changes is the FREQUENCY and SEVERITY of these events over long periods of time, like years or decades even. If you were to look back over your life, you periodically might buy a new car. That is spending a LOT of money on one particular day. An unusual event, but something that can be expected to happen every so often. So what would you say if you bought a new car after 4 years instead of 6 years. If it happens once, its probably not a big deal, maybe you got a bonus that year . But if we start seeing it happen repeatedly or a new car happening more often on 4 or 5 year intervals, rather the previous 6 year interval, and the new cars are more upscale than they used to be, maybe something significant has happened to your personal finances, like a significant raise. Climate ch-ch-change research involves looking at these long term ch-ch-changes and trying to make sense of what is being observed.
The concerns that you ask about are really multifaceted. Some deal with ecological effects such as species extinction, both plant and animal. Other concerns are economic, especially food supply related. Most of this is done with very elaborate computer modeling. These models are developed based on long term observations of weather. The models are tested and retested and the results are compared to other observations using completely different data sets (and we are not talking weather data necessarily). This process is called "validation". The same process is used in economic models. Validation is not trying to predict the future, but using one aspect of the past to predict another aspect of the past. The more a model is successful at correctly predicting past events based on other past events, the more comfortable scientists are about using the model to predict the future.
MANY (but honestly, not all) of the predictive models paint an uncomfortable future for many aspects of global and American economy. Much of that dealing with agricultural issues. Most move the prime grain growing areas north into Canada,
leaving Kansas looking much more like Texas. Some even indicate that the US could become a food importing nation in our great-grandchildren's time. Water usage, especially in areas that are already dry may be problematic. Look how much the west already depends on the Colorado River. If drought in the Rockies becomes more frequent which is a frequent scenario, the cities and agriculture that depends on that source will experience more restrictions to economic growth, more frequent crop failures, and greater conflict over water use rights.
I will leave it at this point for now. Comments and questions?
G