Climate Change? Nahhh ...

On Tuesday, the temp had dropped 40 degrees. And now four or five inches of snow on the ground.

 

Sunshine Skyway bridge closed because of wind warnings. It was 82 degrees in Palmetto (Terra Ceia) but gusts up to 35 mph made for a crappy golf day.

 

PolitiFact - Wisconsin Sen. Baldwin makes point with claim on costs of climate change damage in U.S.


"If Your Time is short
• A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report estimates the United States incurred $400 billion in damages from weather and climate disasters from 2015 through April 6, 2018.

• The NOAA calculation includes damage to buildings and public infrastructure, among other costs. The agency tracks damage from drought, flooding, freeze, severe storms, tropical cyclones, wildfires and winter storms.

• Several experts from academia agreed that the NOAA numbers are probably the best available for the United States."

 

It raises the question, what was it for 2012 through 2015? Or 2009 through 2012? Or 2006 through 2009? Or 1950 through 1953, for that matter.
$400 billion is obviously a huge number, but is it in line with other three-year periods? Are there other factors that might have jacked that number up, like a hurricane in a densely populated stretch of coast where there is more to damage? Or a tornado striking an area where there is more to damage than there was 50 or 100 years ago?

This is one of my major issues with the climate change debate. This country -- hell, this planet -- has grown and been developed a lot in the last century. So threats and estimates of property damage can of course be inflated. If you randomly swing a baseball bat in your living room you'll destroy a lot more stuff than if you swing it in the yard.
At the same time, meteorology as a hyper-accurate science is still in its relative infancy. Just think about what we know and can measure in tornadoes and hurricanes now, compared to 50 or 60 years ago, and there are still things we don't know or understand about them. How many tornadoes when undetected or unrecorded in the 1890s?
So when it's thrown out there that we had more tornadoes this year than any other, is it really true? Or is it on the high end of a historical average and we detected more of them this year than we did in 1920?
Saying a hurricane was the costliest in U.S. history is certainly noteworthy, but was it any more intense a storm than one that hit the same spot in 1915, before the area was built up the way it is now? Like with tornadoes, how many fish storms went undetected or were written off as merely bad gales before the advent of satellites and radar?
Bottom line, it's hard to digest a lot of these long-term predictions of doom and gloom when it's largely based off of 100 years or so of accurate data. Even something as basic as temperature data, when you're comparing it over the course of the past 200 years, falls victim to that when you're talking about the dangers of an average rise of a degree. Is it that temperatures are rising, or is it possible we've gotten a lot more accurate measuring it in the past few decades?

 

We will hopefully never have a hurricane as destructive as the Galveston hurricane of 1900 or the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.
You can't base it strictly costs. Of course a hurricane hitting somewhere today is going to be more destructive in cost (both actual and adjusted).
You don't have to have data or even a thermometer. Just look at the glaciers and polar ice caps. They are melting. We need them. Sea levels are rising, and people live in those areas.
I'm not even concerned about why it's happening or who is causing it.
It is happening. We need to figure out a way to counter the change, or the planet as we know it is hosed.

 

It was 65 in Antarctica yesterday.

 

Harrisburg, PA is in a severe thunderstorm warning on February 7. We haven't even reached six inches of snow for the year yet.

 

3-4 inches of snow so far in Pgh.

 

Tuesday afternoon low 40s driving through Victorville, Barstow and Baker on the way to Vegas. Thursday evening low 70s on the way home. Conditions at the gaming tables, frigid.

 

We had flurries one day in Richmond, but that's it. We're usually good for one decent snowfall in the 6-10 inch range each year. Driving rain all day yesterday. Flood warning and high wind advisory all day today. It was bright, sunny and pouring down rain earlier. Weird freaking day today.