Jesse

Titanpoint:
Excuse me, but if you are answering my question, try just quoting it in a posting of your own rather than editing mine.

Oops! Sorry about that, I must have hit the "edit" button when I meant to hit the "quote" button. I'll go back and edit my comments out of your post.

Ok, just fixed it...here was my response, since it's no longer in that post:

If global warming makes these predictions, this aspect of the theory could be falsified by observing that variations in rainfall and temperature have not changed significantly over time. For example, in the map I posted above, there might have been about equal numbers of green dots (increasing extreme precipitation) and brown (decreasing extreme precipitation). Or, in this chart from here:

If the area with a large amount of precipitation was showing no overall increasing trend, again, this would be evidence against the theory.

As for climate, I am still not sure if global warming actually predicts an increase in temperature variations. But certainly it does predict a steady increase in average global temperatures, and this is presumably a more important prediction, so a failure to find this would probably falsify the theory.

theyeti

Aside from the obvious fact that's already been pointed out -- that global warming is, like you know, global such that it's averaged over the whole Earth -- most climate models predict higher temperatures in the upper lattitudes and less change in the lower lattitudes. And IIRC, Alaska this year had an unusually warm winter. In fact, the upper lattitudes have have increased temperatures at a ridiculous rate, something like 1 degree per decade since the 70s (I forget the exact number), as opposed to 0.6 degrees globally since 1900.

You can get an idea of the discrepancy with the following picture. You can also see how some areas, like Australia in this case, can have lower than normal temperatures in a given year while the rest of the world has higher.

theyeti

scombrid

I'd be tempted to reply that it's nice that the weather in that fellow's back yard today reflects the annual global trend.

Water is a nice meter of temperature. It smooths the extremes a bit. Here's the water temp raw data for the York River in Gloucester VA for 2002.



The center black line is the median and the outer black lines are the extremes. Notice that the entire first half of the year was above normal to record levels at times and no record lows were set (the big dip in September is an instrument problem). Note that even in one year there is a lot of "noise" but its the average that we're concerned with.



Here's '99. Notice the winter. It seems that winter is subject to greater variation here in the mid latitudes. Notice how much smaller the range is in summer.



This winter might have been cold but it didn't even approach records.

Over the last 2decades water temps have been above average more often than not.

The coldest winter I can rember is December 1989.



That record cold was brief though.

Coragyps

We have proof of global warming right here in The Home of the (unfortunately long assassinated) White Buffalo, Snyder, Texas. The fifty or sixty buzzards that roost across the street from my house got here last weekend, and for the last six years they've always arrived the 20th or 21st.
And seriously, I've seen three or four papers in Nature or Science recently on just this sort of thing: birds migrating in earlier, flowers blooming earlier, etc, over the last half-century in both Europe and North America. And we, unlike the East, had scarcely any winter this year.