One of the recurring themes in my climate video "What is Normal?" is that despite the fact that we have only observed climate for about 100 years, and have only studied it with modern tools like satellites for about 30 years, we want to insist on calling some condition "unusual." My favorite example of late was when a number of news sources claimed "Arctic Ice at All-Time Low." Really? The lowest in the 6 billion year history of Earth? Well, no, "all-time" means since satellite measurement began ... 28 years ago. (By the way, the simultaneous story that Antarctic ice hit an "all-time" high on the exact same date failed to be mentioned in the press for some reason). TJIC has a great post (mercifully unrelated to climate, for all of you with climate fatigue):
As the price of crude oil approaches $100 a barrel, New Englanders are bracing for their most expensive winter ever.
May I suggest that the average family expended more hours of labor
to procure their firewood in 1650, and more hours of labor to procure
their coal in 1750, and more hours to procure their gas in 1850 than
they are spending, today, to heat their (much larger, much better
furnished) homes today?
I swear, whenever a journalist says the word "ever" I hear
"since I was in high school, or since 1990, whichever was more
recent"¦and I was drunk at the time, so I honestly can't tell you which
one that was".
There has been a lot of interest in my new climate video. Already we have nearly 450 1500 views at Google video and over 200 700 downloads of the video. I am now releasing the video through YouTube.
YouTube requires that all videos be under 10 minutes, so I have broken the film into six parts. If you want to just preview a portion, the second half of the fourth film and the first half of the fifth are probably the most critical.
A Youtube Playlist for the film is here. This is a cool feature I have not used before, but will effectively let you run the parts end to end, making the 50-minute video more or less seamless.
The individual parts are:
Climate Video Part 1: Introduction; how greenhouse gases work; historical climate reconstructions Climate Video Part 2: Historical reconstructions; problems with proxies Climate Video part 3: How much warming is due to man; measurement biases; natural cycles in climate Climate Video Part 4: Role of the sun; aerosols and cooling; climate sensitivity; checking forecasts against history Climate Video Part 5: Positive and negative feedback; hurricanes. Climate Video Part 6: Melting ice and rising oceans; costs of CO2 abatement; conclusions.
