re: #246 Unakite

Let me reply seriously to your comment. This is actually important and a lot of lizards on this thread seem to be a little confused by it.

So first off, it is absolutely correct that weather is not climate and that individual weather events in of themselves do not constitute proof for or against AGW.

There are simply too many confounding factors when talking about an individual event.

However, climate science is about the trends.

We predict that there will be more and more storms of greater magnitude for a period. We can not predict that there will be such and such a storm on such and such a day, however, we know for a fact that there are going to be more and bigger ones over the long term.

The fact that for a period of time the north east would have harsher winters due to the warming shifting ocean currents has been predicted for some years and has been discussed here by me many times. This is not new.

The science behind it as a trend is actually simple. More water vapor in the air means more intense storms when bodies of hot and cold air collide. Shifting currents means more warm water amongst many other things.

The analogy is like cigarettes and lung cancer. Someone who smoked as an individual, may have gotten cancer from something else. There are too many confounding factors when you talk about an individual case. However, over the trend of looking at many smokers, it becomes clear that the there will be more cancer. The science there is simple too. Cigarettes have many chemicals in them that cause mutations. the mutations accumulate and the more one smokes the more chance one has for a cancerous mutation.

So again, there are more hurricanes and blizzards as a trend. They are more intense and more frequent and the winters in the Eastern US will get colder overall. This is what was predicted, and this is what we are seeing.