The head of WWF Norway, Jørgen Randers, warns in Dagbladet that the Oslo winter has been cut in half by global warming, from four months twenty years ago to only two months today. The average winter temperature in Oslo has, says Randers, gone up by two degrees celsius since 1985, which pushes the temperature above zero often enough to chop two full months off the Oslo winter. A few more degrees, and we'll barely have winter at all.

Looking out the window, I see his point. Mid February, no snow, no ice. I'll be able to walk down the driveway today without fear of breaking anything. In fact, I've only fallen once this winter, and last month was the least unfriendly January I can remember. The horrors of global warming, long thought to affect only strange people far away, has finally come home.

Or that's what Randers wants us to conclude. I'm not sure I see the connection. Winter cut in half. This is bad. Winter cut in half, bad thing. No, I don't see it.

When I grew up in northern Norway, snow was as a wonderful thing. It was like millions of Lego bricks falling from the sky, a flexible material you could form into anything: castles, tunnels, weapons, hills.

But that was up north, where the sun went away for months, where snow was measured by the meter, and school could get cancelled if it was cold enough. We moved south in 1991, and winter has never been the same. Snow in southern Norway is something pathetic that comes in small amounts, and usually either freezes into a thin layer of ice, or melts into disgusting, wet, cold, unusable slush. I remember one of our first winters here - our sisters got angry with me and my brother because we'd used up all the snow around the house. Used up the snow! Unimaginable. To find four months of actual snow landscape, I suspect we must go much further back than 1985.

So I like snow, but I don't like the indecisive, fragile excuses for a winter we have in the south. I'm glad the climate is making up its mind. It'd take a lot of effort to create a respectable winter in Oslo - it only takes a few degrees to make winter less unpleasant, and spring and summer even more wonderful than it already is. (Now if only we could shift the earth's axis so the sun doesn't go away..)

Jørgen Randers misses the Oslo winter, and looks for ways to artificially revive it:

I'm bothered by the knowledge that if we had wanted to, we could have saved the Oslo winter. The winter would have survived if we - in cooperation with the other rich countries of the world - had reduced our emissions of climate gases. We could have done this if we had been willing to raise the price of fossil energy, systematically and permanently through taxation. This would have made it profitable to develop carbon free alternatives and new energy effective technologies. The market would show its creative power. The loss to welfare would be passing and hardly noticable.

So if only we had raised taxes more in the 70's or 80's, not only would we have succeeded by now in making our oil reserves worthless, we'd also have more unpleasant pseudo winters. And those are just the benefits.

I'm confused by this. Randers seems to believe that the real damage global warming does elsewhere is so remote to us that he has to make up a threat at home to make us care, but when "home" is one of the places in the world that obviously needs a warmer climate, all he does is undermine his own case.

If the WWF wants us to do more to halt global warming, saving the Oslo winter is not a good choice of a motivator. And whatever the damage done elsewhere, I'm not willing to do anything to halt global warming until someone convinces me that it is 1) scientifically possible to do so, and 2) worth the cost. There is reason to doubt both, and the burden of proof lies on those who want us to spend vast amounts of money on the hope that a massive effort can indirectly make a climate system we don't understand change in any direction we like.

(Norwegians should read the online science mag forskning.no, which hosts what may be the only open climate debate in the country, with regular contributions from all sides.)

Update: Jørgen Randers was also a coauthor of the influential 1972 book The Limits of Growth, an early use of computer models to predict that unrestricted growth would lead to environmental/economic/cultural collapse. Though the real crisis would only take place some time before 2100, the book also predicted immediate shortages of resources that have failed to come true.

Failed predictions aside, the whole methodology is flawed for the same reason the Europe is doomed-argument is, because the uncertainty factor is too powerful to ignore. To act today on potential future problems predicted by models that (obviously) ignore developments we can't possibly predict, is foolish. Though we may end up regretting it, the vast number of dystopic (and contradictory) predictions it is possible to make about the future requires us to ignore all of them, until we know which one if any happens to be true.

Unless we're predicting a more linear phenomenon, of course. We can predict how and when the sun will die - we can't predict that humanity will run out of usable energy by 2100. We'll just have to deal with these problems as they reveal themselves to us - by which time we'll both be better equipped to do so, and in a better position to decide what benefits are worth giving up.

Is this a bug or a feature?

Here's the score, dudes: People will say ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING to avoid admitting that they don't know the future.

Nobody knows the future of the global climate. (Mostly because humans do not control a lot of external factors, such as solar activity, volcanic ash eruptions, the angle of the Earth's axis, etc.)

Should we be careful with the environment? Yes, I think so. Alternatives to fossil fuels should and will be developed. China is just now introducing a meltdown-safe pebble-bed uranium reactor. Progress is being made! So enough with the doomsaying already.

I'll believe in global warming when I don't have to dress like an Eskimo just to go outside in February...

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

I skrivende stund (130205) har vi snøstorm i sødre Sverige, over 30 000 er uten strøm.

Torsdag den 10 februar sente forskere ved Meterologiske Instutisjonen ved Stockholms Universitet ut en presseinformasjon med titelen
NATUTLIGA KLIMATFÖRÄNDRINGAR KAN VARA STÖRRE ÄN MAN HITTILLS ANTAGIT. Slutsatsen lyder;
"Det är inte bara människan som kan orsaka betydande klimatförändringar-naturen gör det själv hela tiden".
Dessuten har det vel en viss betydning at inflyttningen til storbyer har som konsekvenser at det blir varmere der mennesker flytter sammen.Det neste blir vel krav på tvagsforflyttnig fra Oslo til Trysil.

Have no fear, Kyoto is here!

re: "To act today on potential future problems predicted by models that (obviously) ignore developments we can't possibly predict, is foolish."

As it is foolish to act on information developed from computer models.

I am not a climatologist, but I AM an expert on computers. I've been involved with them, in one way or another, since 1966. So I have a pretty good idea of what they can and can NOT do.

Computers can NOT take a collection of partially correct data and produce usable information from it. This has been known from the beginning of computer technology. GIGO-garbage in, garbage out.

The models NASA uses to predict planetary orbits and such are accurate because they are based on thousands of years of mathematically-oriented observations. So we were able to launch the Voyagers, and after several years they accurately passed by the planets they were sent out to rendevous with.

Environmental science, however, is new. We have only about a hundred years worth of meaningful temperature data, a sketchy idea of how the atmosphere MIGHT work, and a lot of theories. A great number of those theories are going to prove inaccurate. The problem with computer errors is not so much that they produce garbage, but that they so often produce garbage that is off by orders of magnitude! Until we KNOW every single piece of information that must be added in to come up with the solution, it is not possible for the computer models to be correct.

In the meantime, here is another pair of data for the global warming "experts" to plug into their models:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/04/21_jupiter.shtml

...in reference to global warming on Jupiter, and...

http://www.mos.org/cst/article/80/9.html

... in reference to global warming on Mars.

I suppose it must be all those aliens driving around in SUVs out there...

Here,near Narbonne and about 15 k from the Mediterranean we are just coming out of the longest cold spell for some 25 years! Perhaps the Norwegian winter has just moved south?

Sorry, guys, I have to wonder if you are for real. Denial is one thing. a total inability to accept the real world is another. It isn't the computer models that is confirming the human created global warming, but the fact that it's actually happening.
This doesn't exclude the occasional cold spell. In fact some areas in the Pacific will keep turning colder for a few years more. It was very much the same with the glaciers. I (among several others) predicted they would grow to a certain point as it turned hotter, before shrinking fast, and that's exactly what happened, what is happening. It's happening in Antarctica, in the Arctic, on Greenland and in the Himalayas, happening virtually anywhere.
I don't like winters much myself, but comparing to the alternative with increased desertification, increased frequency and intensity of storms, the rising sea, biological life in upheaval, and so on, I'll take it any day.

In defense of computer models:

If you have a hundred years of historical data, feed the model the data at the start of the period and end up with something that is rather close to the current situation, then you have a pretty good model. Your model has matched the emprical data. Isn't that the definition of a good model?

That's what they did. They fed a series of models data and thus were able to teste various hypotheses for global warming.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1489955,00.html

What did they find? The models that took man's emissions into consideration were more accurate than those that didn't.

Sorry folks, sometimes the people on the left have valid points. Get out of denial and deal with it.

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