CC3 -- Why I believe that a third option is needed for climate change

The "meandering jet stream" concept is something that was trotted out to explain the inconvenient appearance of the polar vortex over North America in 2014 and 2015, which at the time was linked to earlier severe cold spells in Europe around 2010 to 2012. Something had to be invented to explain how in a steadily warming climate there would be severe cold spells and months that were just about the coldest on record. So they came up with this displaced polar vortex theory as a supposed consequence of meandering jet streams. It is neither provable nor disprovable, as with a lot of AGW sub-theorems which are actually descriptions rather than theories.

It is rather like saying the Sun is hot because it is emitting a lot of heat. Bingo.

I don't accept descriptive analysis as theoretical explanation. I have spent a lot of time trying to explain this to climate people but they don't seem to get the concept of circular reasoning. This is why the science is bogged down and not making much progress. But it doesn't explain anything just to describe it, you need a more robust theory that can say why a polar vortex appeared over North America in 2014 and 2015 and not much since then (it tried to form early in the past winter and got obliterated after a few days before winter really got started, but managed to produce quite a cold November).

The problem with this pet AGW theory is that exactly the same weather patterns occurred in colder parts of the 19th century when various winters came in colder than the average back then. So that would tell you that the theory is not sound if it can explain weather patterns in both colder than normal climates and warmer than normal climates.

You seem to be unaware that you have simply hit upon a different way of describing a commonly understood phenomenon, what lawyers might call a difference without a distinction.

There's nothing wrong with your analysis but you are incorrect in saying that other scientists are in error and fail to recognize something you recognize.

I've read that this is some very specific form of trolling which cannot be perceived from source, but only from those receiving.

An analogy would be if I were to say that odd numbers were those that ended in 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, which makes my understanding superior to those benighted mathematicians who say that an odd number is one that cannot be divided by 2 with an integer resulting.

While my "superior theory" is true, it is not actually superior or even different. However it is also not inferior. It is just different.

Google if you wish the subject of "scientific cranks" and look for the specific form that you are exhibiting. It is said to be quite rare, most of us have probably never encountered it before (a person who presents an alternate theory to orthodox science that is not contradictory but is maintained to be different although actually the same thing in different terminology).

Your circle of illumination is simply the result of how the Sun shines on a tilted earth at any given point. There's nothing wrong with it, but you are in error thinking that it is an alternative to orthodox science. It is not different in any way, just a different choice of paradigms.

I have no idea how anything would shake you out of this, but we can't waste our time trying to deal with it here.

If it looks like the CET or Toronto (or NYC) graphs of mean annual temperature, the trend is obscured by the year to year variability and 2015-16 represents the high point, 2019 closer to the long-term average, 2020 to date back up again (although this month is pulling it back downward).

The general similarity of trends at all locations (in terms of year to year variability) suggests that solar variations combined with Pacific heat release must be important factors, but the tendency towards similar variations washes out at time scales below seasonal, month by month comparisons are much less integrated.

The graph that Oneiric3 posted is basically a comparison of the years 1981-90 to 2011-20, since the running 30-year average for either period at each point in the graph contains the same 20 years running between those decades.

Early data points compare just one or two years (2011 vs 1981, then 2011-12 vs 1981-82) etc. No surprise that the graph would shoot up rapidly around years five and six when 1985-86 were being added to the comparison vs 2015-16, as 1986 in particular was quite a chilly year and 2016 a rather warm one, 1985 closer to average but 2015 one of the warmest. Then the graph flattens towards its end because the new data introduced is 1988-90 vs 2018-20, sometimes warmer back in the first interval there.

In fact the disparity between the period Nov 2015 to Jan 2017 vs Nov 1985 to Jan 1987 appears to contribute about half of the observed warming in the past decade (as the stat increases from .05 to .13 (diff .08) in that interval and the overall increase is 0.16 after ten years).

If the graph was your electricity use over time, then 2012 would be where you went out for a couple of hours and 2016 would be where you did the laundry while taking a hot bath with the heater on.

There was an almost identical heat wave in similar latitudes of Alaska and Yukon in summer 1969. Temperatures hit 38 C near the Alaska-Yukon border at about 65 deg latitude and while no weather stations between there and the Brooks Range south of the coast, it was probably quite hot almost to 70 deg latitude in that instance.

In sharp contrast to some recent years, there is almost no forest fire activity in western Canada at this point, which is a relief because health officials were very concerned about getting the poor air quality we had in 2018 during this pandemic situation (also our rates are low which is a pleasant surprise).

Have now finished posting all the NYC data that I obtained for 1869 to present. The overlap with Toronto allows for a comparison of ranks and values. In general there is high correlation for temperatures (I can see that rainfall correlations will be weak or even negative, storm tracks either favouring one or the other, with a few cases of mutual drought).

One interesting thing that emerged from the comparison was that most of the highest temperatures on record occur in years that are otherwise rather cold. I think that may be a difference in the climate as compared to western Europe where more of the extremes happen in years that are overall quite warm.

While they avoid the bottom third of the average temperature series, these high extremes cluster around the median and somewhat below it, other than the high summer extremes, these years are often quite chilly for other portions. December mildness seems to correlate with the hot spells of summer too. Then quite often the year following a high extreme will be overall warm with a summer extreme that is somewhat above average too.

Although the past thirty years do show up as warmer in ranks and averages, the summer extremes have not moved up with that trend, almost all of the daily and monthly records for maximum temperature are back in the mid-20th century. Toronto and NYC share monthly extremes for most cases and sometimes on the same date although NYC tends to hit a lot of records one or two days after Toronto (as a cold front forces warmest air into that vicinity).

The last table posted in my thread (on net-weather) has a full list of yearly extremes for comparison, about half the years have a case of same hot spell (within 2 days) setting the extremes, about a quarter have two peaks that are similar at both locations but one peak edges out the other at each location, and the other quarter are more randomly distributed. Although NYC tends to run 1-3 deg warmer on most comparisons, there are a few that run in the other direction, but very few cases of hot spells that fail to materialize altogether at the other location; I found perhaps one case in each direction. An offshore low prevented any warmth from reaching NYC when Toronto hit high values around June 30, 1927, and a storm track between locations cut off any warmth from reaching Toronto in another instance.

NYC has two years with an April annual maximum; Toronto has none in the overlapping period. Both locations have a few cases in late September but none in October although both stations have had temperatures in October that are higher than the weakest annual extremes.

I don't see anything like that happening here, just a discussion of what factors go into the observed warming of recent years. Maybe they are right and all of the recent warming is AGW, some of us feel there's a historical trend of warming that began before AGW so why (using logic) would it suddenly stop around 1980 to allow AGW to take over?

You're right, it only takes a few seconds to formulate that paradigm. So the question is, who's right? How do you prove that one side is right and the other side is wrong?

We are not the ones who defined ourselves to be the "experts" from whose opinions nobody may dissent. They chose that path, not us. Nor do I think anyone involved in this discussion believes the equivalent, we are interested in the facts and looking for the best possible analysis. Just because some people declare themselves to be infallible and incredibly informed does not make it so. If it were true we would have reliable seasonal and annual forecasting by now.

Everyone in this science needs to take a humility check. If you're not humble then you're not aware of all the facts, and those facts include an obvious lack of completion of this science relative to many other sciences. We don't have the degree of predictability that other physical sciences have. Until we do, nobody should criticize anybody's ideas or assumptions.