Suitably Flip

You're As Cold As Ice

But y'ain't.

Scientists are peering into the clouds near the top of the world, trying to solve a mystery and learn something new about global warming.

The mystery is the droplets of water in the clouds. With the North Pole just 685 miles away, they should be frozen, yet more of them are liquid than anyone expected.

So the scientists working out of a converted blue cargo container are trying to determine whether the clouds are one of the causes - or effects - of Earth's warming atmosphere.

"Much to our surprise, we found that Arctic clouds have got lots of super-cooled liquid water in them. Liquid water has even been detected in clouds at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 F)," said Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Research Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This seems to be another one of Mother Nature's global warming head fakes.  Suddenly finding the coldest water on record?  Global warming.  Just like unusually active hurricane seasons.  The only surer signs of global warming than unusually active hurricane seasons are, of course, unusually inactive hurricane seasons, like the one we're wrapping up (despite much doom and gloom (HT: Drudge)).  Mary Katherine has a rant of her own on the convenient self-fulfillment of climate change theories.

That's not to refute the possibility of long-term doom (or even short-term meteorological gloom), but the increasing inevitability that any study of anything remotely weather-related includes a preconceived treatise of the global warming impacts ("Did global warming cause this or did this cause global warming?  If no evidence for either, what corporate interests are covering it up?  Where's my grant check?") is reaching a point of critical fatuity.

Case in point, from the above-linked article:

The American and Canadian scientists at the Eureka Weather Station in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, like the Inuit who are seeing their native habitat thaw, are beyond questioning the existence of climate change.

"If we compare the debate over the theory of evolution with the debate over the theory of global warming - global warming's a whole lot more certain at the moment," said Jim Drummond, a University of Toronto physics professor and chief investigator for the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change.

By and large," he said, "we are not now arguing about whether global warming is going to happen; the argument has turned to: How big is it going to be?"

So before a reliable or consistent consensus is reached (and by "reached" I don't mean presented selectively in a cinematic political vehicle masquerading as merely a preachy academic lecture), these scientists have chosen simply to move beyond questioning.  Aces!  Science made easy.

The biggest danger threatened by the specter of global warming is that we're unable to rely on so much of the related science, as those conducting and presenting the research can hardly be bothered to conceal their preconceptions, while those funding and promoting it have avowed partisan political motivations.  Without sound, dispassionate research, our ability to understand and appropriately respond to whatever dangers global warming may or may not present in the future will forever be diminished by those who claim to support the cause.

Elsewhere:  Ace finds the lily-gilder, Hot Air rejects the source

Comments

You're As Cold As Ice

But y'ain't.

Scientists are peering into the clouds near the top of the world, trying to solve a mystery and learn something new about global warming.

The mystery is the droplets of water in the clouds. With the North Pole just 685 miles away, they should be frozen, yet more of them are liquid than anyone expected.

So the scientists working out of a converted blue cargo container are trying to determine whether the clouds are one of the causes - or effects - of Earth's warming atmosphere.

"Much to our surprise, we found that Arctic clouds have got lots of super-cooled liquid water in them. Liquid water has even been detected in clouds at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 F)," said Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Research Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This seems to be another one of Mother Nature's global warming head fakes.  Suddenly finding the coldest water on record?  Global warming.  Just like unusually active hurricane seasons.  The only surer signs of global warming than unusually active hurricane seasons are, of course, unusually inactive hurricane seasons, like the one we're wrapping up (despite much doom and gloom (HT: Drudge)).  Mary Katherine has a rant of her own on the convenient self-fulfillment of climate change theories.

That's not to refute the possibility of long-term doom (or even short-term meteorological gloom), but the increasing inevitability that any study of anything remotely weather-related includes a preconceived treatise of the global warming impacts ("Did global warming cause this or did this cause global warming?  If no evidence for either, what corporate interests are covering it up?  Where's my grant check?") is reaching a point of critical fatuity.

Case in point, from the above-linked article:

The American and Canadian scientists at the Eureka Weather Station in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, like the Inuit who are seeing their native habitat thaw, are beyond questioning the existence of climate change.

"If we compare the debate over the theory of evolution with the debate over the theory of global warming - global warming's a whole lot more certain at the moment," said Jim Drummond, a University of Toronto physics professor and chief investigator for the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change.

By and large," he said, "we are not now arguing about whether global warming is going to happen; the argument has turned to: How big is it going to be?"

So before a reliable or consistent consensus is reached (and by "reached" I don't mean presented selectively in a cinematic political vehicle masquerading as merely a preachy academic lecture), these scientists have chosen simply to move beyond questioning.  Aces!  Science made easy.

The biggest danger threatened by the specter of global warming is that we're unable to rely on so much of the related science, as those conducting and presenting the research can hardly be bothered to conceal their preconceptions, while those funding and promoting it have avowed partisan political motivations.  Without sound, dispassionate research, our ability to understand and appropriately respond to whatever dangers global warming may or may not present in the future will forever be diminished by those who claim to support the cause.

Elsewhere:  Ace finds the lily-gilder, Hot Air rejects the source