This week I discovered that my colleague who teaches weather also thinks manmade climate change is bunk. I was surprised because that's not the politically correct opinion or the common sobriquet in academia. She made some good points, and I shared my recent observations, calculations, and remonstrations that point out that on average things are average. This means that as many days come in below average as come in above. I notice that they get apoplectic about microdeviations in excess of average and then say absolutely nothing about deviations below average. No mention is made about our ability to capture weather data or capture it with more frequency or precision than in aforetime. Sometimes they pick what appear to arbitrary standards, random places, or silly references to which to compare. How can we possible know what the average was before we started measuring?
Barb pointed out that some of the claims depend on new technology. As our measurements become both more precise and more frequent, people jump to conclusions about micro shifts in weather. Just yesterday, a band of rain ripped across the Las Vegas valley, and it was spectacular, but unless it hit the airport, the news will report that we got "no rain". That's interesting when any tiny fraction of a degree over a previous record is considered "record breaking" but when it was only 67F in June this year, the news heads didn't seem to think that warranted a special mention. Below Hoover Dam on the Colorado river you can see the remnants of the station where, twice per day, a gauger would go take depth measurements, but that was only twice per day assuming he didn't just fabricate them. There is plenty of data fabrication today, and if your equipment isn't accurate your measurements won't be either. Our equipment now measures accurately and for a reasonable price deviations to the 1000th decimal place, but if we were still using mercury thermometers most people wouldn't be able to tell if it was 98.4F or 98.5F without a trained eye. Is it really different or have we been able to detect the differences? Let's also not forget the paradox that you change the outcome by measuring it!
Last Saturday I found a tree that constitutes a much better weather vane than the ones touted by science and pseudoscience. On the south side of Fletcher Peak in the Spring Mountains where I volunteer there is a 29 year old white fir tree alongside a regularly albeit not heavily used trail. This particular tree shows that in the 29 years of measurable growth each node grew an average amount with two exceptions. The first exception is that, the year before the Mt. Charleston fire, the tree grew only 40% of normal. The second exception is this year where the growth node is 300% of normal. In the case of the first deviation, it illustrates the conditions that led to the fire- bad water, low growth, and possibly lots of dead underbrush, and in the case of the second it tells me that although it rained very little in the valley in June that the mountain got a lot more rain than usual. Sure, you could get into the details and show that the nodes vary in size, and if we're talking a 5mm differential on a 30mm node, that's 19% variance, but an honest and cursory glance at the internodes shows that they are essentially uniform and that these two are the only interesting outliers. This tree, which I will show below, tells me that the weather on Mt. Charleston has been more or less the same for the last 30 years despite what they may claim about "hottest year ever" or "driest year ever" because the trees don't seem to get all that excited about microdeviations.
Since I watch the weather each day, I am aware of what actually happens and what happened in antiquity. If you look at the record temperatures in Las Vegas, you will notice that a large majority of high temperatures were recorded in the 1940s. I wonder what happened here back then to cause a change in the balance of energy leading to higher temperatures... I am currently doing the math, but every month except May this year actually came in below the average for all days compared to history. We even had fewer 110F+ days than average (10 instead of 14), but the news made a big deal out of the fact that eight of them were in a row, and they said nothing about the fact that it never broke 107F in August and twice barely made it into the 80s. Sure, the summer is hot, but summer is SUPPOSED to be hot, and it's supposed to be hot in the DESERT anyway, so it comes as no real surprise. As of last month, we had 4" of annual rainfall, putting us on track to hit our average rain even though we only got 0.2" in June which is our "monsoon" month. If you average it out, I bet this year comes up completely average. There will be fluctuations from the normal, but that's also normal. Said the mathmetician: "what appears to be chaos is often nothing more than the search for equilibrium". That, I believe, says it all. All life has balance, but if you only look at a tiny fraction you can find deviations that corroborate your agenda. Let's not forget that these same people also "know" that the earth is 450 million years old and that, if you go back far enough, the average temperature, average CO2 concentration, and average population of life forms varied widely from what it does now. Who decided to compare it to fossil records? Did everything fossilize equally? If not, their sampling is biased by the fossil record and therefore only as reliable as the odds are that what we leave behind survives the magma, the meteorites, and cosmic rays.
The world is full of junk science and scientific facts of which we are not aware. That does not make them not true. It makes them not known. I love how scientists look back with condescension on the theorems of yesteryear but insist that they cannot possibly be victim of anything fallacious, that they must be right because they are scientists, as if scientists are never wrong. At one time we knew things that everyone knows are not true; what was normal yesterday isn't normal now; average means that it is just as likely to be below average on average as it will be above average. That's how it works. Small deviations are made newsworthy, and whoever selects the news likes to leave out things that don't corroborate their forgotten conclusions. We are so vain to think that we understand weather, that we know what weather "ought" to be, and that we can control weather. If the earth wants, it can shake us off like a bad case of fleas (George Carlin). We are so vain about our weather. Today is another beautiful day in Vegas...
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