Clearly, God must hate America. There’s no other logical explanation.
2011–through its entirety–was record-setting for extreme precipitation in the U.S. dating back 100 years. Jeff Masters at Wunderground was the first to blog about this and offered the evidence…. To me, as striking as the fraction of the country affected by these extremes was the close proximity between the downpours and the desiccation.
As I read the article, I became hopeful that the author was going to resist the temptation to blame this interesting bit of weather trivia on global climate change, but alas – the second to last paragraph did him in.
As we’ve discussed many times before, climate change is about trends, not individual data points – no matter how recent those data points are. The graph accompanying the article shows absolutely no trend over the last hundred years. In fact, there isn’t even a trend over the last TWO years – 2010 was one of the lowest on record.
Every time someone does this, IMHO, they lend credence to the equal and opposite article, which picks out a random statistic about average weather conditions or cooling climates for a particular year or region, and uses it to claim that climate change is a hoax.
There’s plenty of real evidence to explain the climate trends – why do people feel the need to “invent” more of it?
Dang. Clearly I need to subscribe to my own comments feed….
Quick response: I think the refutation to your “data points” argument comes from the red curve-fitting line on the graph. Remove the large spike from 2011, and the red line would still show an upward trend over several years.
More to the point, though: by its nature, scientific statements of confirmed hypotheses are very slow in coming, so there’s a value for informed laypeople to make preliminary conclusions. A hotter climate overall means a climate with substantially more energy in it, which in turn logically leads to more extreme weather conditions. So I don’t think it’s either unsubstantiated or anecdotal to point at 2011 weather extremes and presume (until more data is available) that this is the knock-on effect of climate change.