As you sit by the pool and sweat this summer, one book you should be reading is The Impact of Global Warming on Texas (University of Texas Press, June 2011, second edition). This book, written by a group of Texas academics, is a sober analysis of our state’s vulnerability to climate change — and the things we can do about it.
It is a particularly appropriate read as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011. While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer’s unpleasant weather, one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it. The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011.
Texas temperatures show no trend over the last 115 years
“The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011.”
The rest of the sentence must have been inadvertently cut off by the editor.
“The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011, which is identical to the hot and dry weather of every other decade in Texas except the ice-age-is-coming 1970’s.”
“While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer’s unpleasant weather, one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it. The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011.”
This just doesn’t make sense to me. Reads like something in a throw-away newspaper not a product of University Academics. Let’s parse it out….
From the provided graph, the weather of 2011 appears to be just about the average for Texas, so it makes perfect sense that it is “unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer’s unpleasant weather.” It may be plausible that human activities are contributing nothing at all to “this summer’s unpleasant weather”, which appears to be just weather typical of Texas.
Looks to me so far like a simple tautology with no new information added. How is it that the weather is “unpleasant” and how can calling it “unpleasant” mean anything at all in this context outside of expression of a personal bias about warm or hot weather. Personally, I like hot to very hot weather – to me Phoenix Az is just glorious right now – we even had a little monsoon rain yesterday – just beautiful. My personal judgment. Call it aesthetic. Good topic for a poem, a photograph or a painting perhaps – but adding new information to a technical or policy discussion? No.
So the qualifier, or grammatically more accurate adjective “unpleasant” is a subjective judgment, adding nothing to our knowledge of Texas weather, and could be replaced by “pleasant”, “balmy”, “nice” and would not change the logical content one bit; it would just be a differing judgment of Texas weather – and this is true because said weather is practically dead-on the average.
So far so good.
“Get used to it”. Adds no information. An imperative. In this case, it is IMHO being used as a colloquialism, and a crude one at that. Foul to put that in writing in this setting by my taste. Question – What is it about the Warmisa that they so love shouting orders at people? Anyway, moving on…
“The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011.” Really. How does it follow from “While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer’s unpleasant weather” that we somehow know it will be hot and dry in the future when it was just stated we don’t know the amount of man’s contribution to Texas hot weather? Maybe man-made warming is nearly nothing. How did this conclusion just pop into existence.
That this illogical, rhetorically weak twaddle was written by University Academics is a sorry commentary on American education.
The NCDC graph only goes through 2010, as there is not annual data available yet for 2011
Speaking of jokes…..
TSA pats down 6 year old TWICE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w76WhDIAWkg
Concur. I was thinking if I take out the sine wave, it might be a negative trend. Looks like slightly positive, not significant: (0.0016°F/year)
http://naturalclimate.home.comcast.net/~naturalclimate/texas.jpg
I moved to Texas during the ice age years — guess what? It was hot and dry then. Then we had a tropical storm blow through and it was hot and wet for a week. I suspect that very few of the faculty are from Texas….
Hot and dry in Texas!!! How long has this been going on? ; )
I’ve heard this guy, Dessler, speak. He’s a crusading nut job in the mold of Hansen & Mann. Nothing this guy says should be given any credibility.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sciguy/2007/12/17/a-debate-on-the-science-of-global-warming
Dessler claims cloud feedback is positive; Roy Spencer has shown it to be negative:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/12/the-dessler-cloud-feedback-paper-in-science-a-step-backward-for-climate-research/
It gets really hot here when clouds block the sun.
In the linked interview from 2007 Dessler laments that the climate community doesn’t fully understand the role of clouds in the climate system. Surprise… Surprise… a scant few years later Dessler has the cloud issue all figured out, and guess what? Clouds are going to act to worsen AGW. Who would have thought that a CAGW zealot would have come to that conclusion?
I wonder why you don’t see mesquite trees growing in Seattle. I mean, Texas must have been cold & rainy in the distant past before humans invaded (some time before 1950 Anno Domini) & there are definitely mesquite trees older than the earliest records of Texas weather (see above), so they must like cold & rainy weather.
Watch how many times Dessler can say “heat-trapping gases” in this editorial. Quite worthy of Joe Romm.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6900556.html
Dessler and his ilk never let facts stand in the way of a a good enviro-rant.
I just hope that the efforts of blogs like this one have the effect of holding these people to account once global climate fully swings opposite of their predictions. It would be a cosmic injustice and significant indictment of the intelligence of human beings if these people were able to somehow ‘save face’.
Fro those of you who have not seen a picture of Dressler:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xjUcdac0A4
It’s gonna be hot in Texas? Saints preserve us!
Fifty years ago, the playground at my elementary school had to be closed due to huge drought-cracks that would break your ankle. Christmas Day 8mm film at my house in Houston showed women in summer dresses and men in short sleeve white shirts with huge sweaty arm pits. They were outside because it was hotter inside (no A/C).
Yep, it was hotter and drier than now. I was there. Don’t hand me any more Bovine Sewage about “unprecedented” temperatures, please.
P.S. About a decade later there were three snowman-capable events in one year (1973) and that’s beginning to happen again.
I remember people skiing on an overpass on the SW Freeway during Christmas 1980