A great and substantive post up at Skeptical Science on La Nina and what we should expect (and not expect) in terms of its impact on global temperatures.
(image borrowed from Skeptical Science)
La Ninas typically redistribute the global heat budget in such a way as average surface temperatures are depressed from where they might otherwise have been, and we are several months into a strong one now.
(image borrowed from Skeptical Science)
Be on the lookout for lots more "global warming stopped!" bull.
More like this
As I noted in the last post, we've now got an official La Nina situation in the tropical Pacific. Here's one of the many figures of current cold anomalies courtesy of NOAA:
As well as Chapman's silly ice-age article, the Australian published a news story about it, treating it
Colorado State's Phil Klotzbach and Bill Gray are out with their next Atlantic seasonal hurricane forecast (PDF), and get this: They're calling for three more Atlantic hurricanes in September, one of them intense
The prognostications are starting to roll in for the upcoming hurricane season, which officially begins June 1 (although really, and as we saw last year, the start and end dates are a bit arbitrary). So far, there's not a lot of optimism.
Bring on the nonsense! Better to inoculate people who follow this once in a while. If they had brains they'd only bust out the easily-debunkable stuff at critical junctures (votes, etc).
Thanks Coby. I've bookmarked this for those pending occasions where I now get the chance to post,
"Not quite, you're wrong, here's why: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2010/11/la_nina_cannot_erase_deca… "
And when they respond with "Blah, blah, blah, nah, nahhhhhh..." I get to post the longer and more detailed Skeptical Science version, too.
If global warming's stopped, I'd hate to see what these pics would look like if it kept going.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/2010vs2005+1998.pdf (2010 Jan- Oct hottest ever)
out of regular net access, so comments will be sparse. la nina is the thing storing atmospheric heat to the ocean, right?