Climate Change, Hurricanes, and Witches?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Moderator Note: this first post was not from ‘system’ but a now-deleted user on the forums, which made the thread disappear.

Phil, I join in prayer for Jamaica and all those in the path of this storm. May protection, mercy, and healing surround them.

Since you mentioned climate change, I’d like to share a reflection I’ve been working on for some time. Beyond carbon levels or atmospheric models, I believe creation itself reflects the moral and emotional currents of humanity. When wars erupt, when hatred swells unchecked, when collective anger becomes the dominant vibration, it does not simply stay confined to politics or borders. It ripples. Like waves in the quantum field, what we release — whether peace or fury — reverberates through creation. Fix this and you will also solve the over consumption problem leading to adverse effects

In that light, natural disasters can sometimes be seen as pressure relief — the earth bearing the weight of our unrest. Just as anger is “caught” and amplified in human interaction (one person’s fury sparking another’s), the same kind of imbalance seems to echo at a larger scale: tempests, quakes, floods, fire. The cosmos has its own way of rebalancing.

Of course, we still need responsible stewardship of the planet. But I also believe that what we sow spiritually and emotionally matters as much as what we emit physically. Creation listens. When humanity rages, creation groans. When humanity prays, creation breathes easier. That’s why prayer is not only comfort — it’s participation in recalibrating the balance between us and the world entrusted to us.

So yes, I pray for Jamaica, but I also pray that our world awakens to the truth that both climate and conscience are entangled. If we sow mercy, peace, and reverence, perhaps creation itself will reflect more of that back to us.

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Of course, we have had strong hurricanes in the past, but this seems part of a changing pattern consistent with climate change.
What leads you to the conclusion that climate change is nonsense and foolish to consider as a factor?

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The “ane” in my name stands for Atmospheric, Nuclear, and Environmental….chemistry. The earth has been warming for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. The Climate Alarm Industrial Complex has been quite frustrated this year because the storms have mostly stayed in the middle of the Atlantic. They are eager to blame every strong rainstorm on the kind of climate change that can only be solved by humans returning to caves. Even Bill Gates has admitted that the NetZero idea does now work for human well being. Part of the problem is the absence of records. If there had been a storm like this one, who would have recorded it? Back when the Norse were living in Vineland when the temperature was warmer than it is now, who would have been keeping track of Atlantic hurricanes? The interesting weather pattern this year has been the absence of strong east-to-west upper atmospheric movement. Storms over the continental US have “lingered”. The Jet Stream has mostly moved north. The reason for spoofing climate change as responsible for THIS storm is because there are no records from 400 years ago in the middle of the little ice age, nor 1200 years ago in the medieval warm period. My estimate would be that there were fewer in the little ice age and a comparable number in the medieval warm period. The Clausius Claperyon equation that relates vapor pressure and temperature would indicate less water on the atmosphere in the little ice age, and more now. Warmer water, more vapor. The nonsense is to attribute THIS particular STROM to “climate change”. Had there been half dozen this year like this …… as the Complex was hoping for…..that trend might be worth noting.

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Where’s your consilient data? Mine doesn’t show that.

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For another view.

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Part of this is incorrect. I think a case can be made that there is mounting evidence for stronger storms or more rapid intensification, but it’s certainly not obvious the number of tropical cyclones worldwide have been increasing and that anthropogenic warming is to blame. Good info from a Redditor a few months back:

And very reliable hurricane data doesn’t go back very far in my humble opinion. Not like we have 800,000 years of hurricane strength and intensity data. Before satellites there is going to be quite a bit of uncertainty.

It seems hurricanes are intensifying more, moving slower, dumping more rain and so on now due to increased warming, but the idea of there being more storms from climate change is not demonstrable.

Vinnie

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Thanks for the clarification. That is consistent with what Dr. Hayhoe is saying in the link I posted above as well.

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Part of that warming is due to humans. The ocean temperatures in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are warmer than it would be without the greenhouse gases we have added to the atmosphere. Warmer water means more energy for storms. How that shakes out in number and intensity of storms is difficult to determine without more data, but we can’t be helping, that is for sure.

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Very little of the warming is due to humans. The Alarm group always starts their data at 1850 showing a gentle rise in temperatures….often using graphs with suppressed zero to make the rise look much larger. But, the temperature rose as much between 1650 and 1850 as it has since that time when effects of humans were considered negligible. As the alarm group cannot provide an argument as to why that first jump was not human caused, but the second on is. A look at reasonable scientific data for the last 2,000 years shows many swings in the temperature.

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Here is a link to a YouTube story by John Christy. John R. Christy is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has served as Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000 and is best known for developing, along with Roy Spencer, a global temperature dataset from satellite microwave measurements. For this work, Christy and Spencer were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991 and a Special Award from the American Meteorological Society in 1996. This was made a year ago. The first headline he discusses is “Helene was made ….stronger by warm water” caused by climate change. Every time a drop of rain falls, it is climate change.

The story can also be found by entering: John Christy: Climate Change is Not a Crisis | Tom Nelson Pod #260

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I’d say he is worth watching if you want to see an actual, credentialed climate skeptic that can produce healthy scientific discussion. A lot of what he says about UHI and problems with temperature data is good science. I also agree with him on the benefits fossil fuels have had on the world. I explain that to my students. Also how important cheap energy is for poorer, developing nations in the here and now and how it leads to higher qualities of life. That is undeniable to me. I also grow tired of the ultra-fear. mongering and alarmism where every storm or bad thing that happens is linked to climate change or called a mega-flood or mega-drought when, climactically speaking, its often just a newer example of what has happened in the past as the record shows.

Yet I do think climate change is real. For me, CO2 is a GHG, it has increased tremendously to levels not seen in hundreds of thousands of years due to fossil fuels in a very short period of time, the global temperature is also going up, and there really are no natural forcing that can explain the warming we’ve seen.

But I also think climate change has become big business (as has medicine) and now it is a political talking point (instead of science) and truthfully, halting or stopping it is not realistic. No one I know is out there telling people to not have kids, to stop eating meat, biking to work and not taking hot showers. [Edited to add: also I don’t see a lot of people shying away from AI which uses up a lot of water and energy making some of these bigger companies basically say to hell with climate in favor of AI profit. Good luck with Google or Microsoft being carbon negative.] We need to adapt and if we are thinking long term, be happy we are preventing the world from entering what should be a new ice age, which as bad as global warming can be, I don’t think it can be nearly as bad as an ice sheet a mile thick over my home state.

I think this scenario plays out:

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The final peak there is when the world exhausts fossil fuels and slowly CO2 levels go down…

Vinnie

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Data. Where is it.

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Got a consilient, relevant graph on that? Like Christy doesn’t have? Pictures vs. words, words, words?

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Sorry? ’ What do a £52M ROAD in GUYANA,’ etc is political propaganda.

Where’s your consilient D A T A. I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.

The stuff that backs up your claims.

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I guess the warming of the climate has become something that cannot be denied anymore without closing both eyes and ears. It is not just what the long-term temperature graphs show (strong evidence), also the changes you can observe in the nature are revealing.

Here in Finland, mean temperatures have already risen +2-4 C during the last century and that has had a visible impact on both the animals and plants. Populations of northern species have strongly declined and almost disappeared from large parts of the country. Instead, hundreds of species demanding warmer climate have become established and species formerly restricted to southern parts of the country have spread northwards hundreds of kilometers.
Warming climate is not the main reason for the invasions but the new species would not survive long here without a warmer climate.

What seems to still be a debated issue is the role of human activity in this warming. In most parts of the globe, there is a wide agreement that human activity has played a key role. The results of the climate research are simply too convincing and the consequences too serious to be neglected. USA is a major exception, as are some countries that are dependent on the production of fossil fuels.

The main reason for the denial appears to be both economy and an unwillingness to change the old style of life. Green energy is becoming economically cheaper than fossil fuels, which leaves the producers and supporters of fossil fuels in a difficult situation.

It is interesting to follow what happens in the near future, within the next two decades. Unfortunately, a warmer globe seems to be the new reality until someone develops an economically profitable way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. With the warmer globe, exceptionally strong storms like what happened in the Jamaica will become more common because of the increased energy available to the storms.

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I watched the video by John Christy (No climate crises).
What I found generally positive was that he collected accurate climate data from many local sites and with that data, showed a potential flaw in the national temperature data used in the modelling. Unfortunately, he did not tell how the corrected data would have changed the large-scale predictions of the climate models.

Otherwise, there seemed to be some basic weaknesses in the approach.

The weathers within a site do not tell much about global climate change. Climate models even predict that certain areas could become colder because of the global climate change.
USA-level records may tell more but are still fairly small-scale phenomena that only become relevant when connected to what happens at the global scale. Proper connection to the global-scale patterns was missing.

The warm period around the 1930’s was an interesting result because that was a warm period also in the northern Europe. However, the warming during the last decade has exceeded all the records from that era, at least here. Perhaps not in USA but the video did not take into account the accelerating warming during the last decade in much of the globe.

The last part trying to show the blessings of fossil fuels to humanity were at the level of correlations, not cause-effect relationships. There is no doubt that the availability of cheap energy has made many advancements available for many. Yet, I could use the correlation between the number of babies born in Europe with the number of storks to claim that declining stork populations explain why we have less babies in Europe - correlations are just correlations.

The advances of healthcare have lowered the mortality caused by diseases and disasters but it is really questionable to claim that this kind of changes are caused by fossil fuels.

Increased agricultural production is partly dependent on the fuels used in the vehicles and manufactoring of fertilisers but it is questionable to claim that the increased agricultural production is caused by fossil fuels. Christy even tried to explain the increased production by increased CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a misleading claim.

Overall, the video did not prove that the climate change does not happen or that there is no global crises caused by the climate change. The data and claims appeared to be very focused on the terrestrial locations within USA and this ‘narrow-mindedness’ lost the grand picture of the global climate change. It had very little to do with what happened in Jamaica.

What is more important data from the viewpoint of Jamaica is how temperatures of sea surface have changed. There are easily available graphs showing that seas have warmed, examples below.

What is important background information is that seas have acted as a buffer that has assimilated much of the CO2 and the associated heat from the atmosphere. IIRC, the buffering capacity of seas seems to reach the limit where we do not get that benefit anymore. The recent rise in sea surface temperatures is a sign suggesting that temperatures within the atmosphere will become more sensitive to the increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Take a listen to this: View on YouTube here.

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Potholer54 is another YouTuber worth watching.