“We’re not at a state in the science where we can attribute any single storm to climate change. We just can’t. It’s too early,” said Auroop Ganguly, a senior researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory whose primary research interests include climate extremes and climate change uncertainties.
Generally speaking, Ganguly said, the computer-driven models of global climate change look at longer-term trend lines that are gaining credibility and detail as supercomputers become more powerful and modeling techniques improve.
“When we have warming scenarios, we do see intensification of storms in the future to which we can assign some credibility,” he said.
Conceptually, there’s a good physical basis for that to occur with additional warming in the atmosphere and the oceans, Ganguly said. But, at this point, those projections are not detailed or site-specific, he said.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/jun/26/storms-tied-to-warming/
“I think the most that we can say right now with some degree of credibility for a relatively focused region like East Tennessee is that it does seem that heat waves could potentially grow more intense. On average, we’ll see warming. But what we are also seeing is that the Southeast, in general, may not show as much warming as some other regions of the U.S.”
The SE US has been cooling for the last 100 years.
It is 70F at the Knoxville airport 30 miles south of ORNL. The time is just past noon and we are 5 days past the start of summer. Other than a bit of rain there is nothing extreme to report.
Of course the folks at ORNL have to say something to justify the money spent on their wages. How would it look if he had said: After 30 years of modeling weather and climate we are no closer to an answer than we were 30 years ago! Would you want to keep spending money on a project that has shown no progress?
Personally I interpret his comment as: We are getting nowhere fast and with better computers we can get there faster!
Yes, they do seem to lacking in college physics knowledge.
1) heat engines, like storms, run on temperature differences. So, as the atmosphere cools and the oceans have yet to shed heat, as in a cooling phase, storms generate from the greater temperature difference. As oceans warm and the difference is less, storms are weaker. Duh. They think that, if you add heat ot everything, there will be more storms?
Internal combustion engines HAVE to dump heat to a low temperature heat reservoir in order to keep running. If this reservoir gets too warm, dumping is less efficient and the engine begins to fail.
2) We are always shown averages and variation from an average (anomaly) in temperature graphs. Why? Because they do not want to show all of the high and low daily temperature data. If they did, it would show that daily highs have hardly changed but the daily lows are slightly less cold. The daily average goes up, but not because the daytimes are hotter. This means a better and longer growing season for our crops, not hotter and killing as they want us to believe so as to panic us.
We get heat waves regardless of the warm or cold period we are in. In 1978, Maine, at the coldest of the period, had a heat wave that killed 12 million chickens (>120 deg F on the mainland).
Computer models ARE NOT SCIENCE! They are still primitive compared to the real climate system that integrates all factors 24/7 and gives us the answer daily. It is the modelers who want to claim that studying the past is of no value. This is particularly true with the models as they do not include most of the critical factors, are analog and do not include the actual equations of the physics, and have failed miserably to predict any of the last 20 years.
Claims that the computer models are gaining in credibility are bogus. They produce warming scenarios because they are programmed to tip towards warming, even while the planet is actively cooling. There are just too many factors that they do not have a clue how to model for them to be of any use in the near or distant future, particularly as they still ignore certain factors out of sheer bias and political need.
The USHCN site only gives data upto 2009. Have they set up a newer site?
E.g.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=013160&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr2009.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=TMEANRAW&minyear=1895&maxyear=2011
While I’m at it the UAH site no longer seems to give the graph for the current month which it used to.