January 12, 2010

Warming up to Pat Prokop

  • By Jim Morekis
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  • jim@connectsavannah.com
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  • 912-721-4384
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More by Jim Morekis

There's one in every crowd: The comedian who says, "How can there be global warming when it's so damn cold outside, ha-ha-ha."

Or perhaps the more direct Southern variation: "Global warming, my ass!"

Those are popular laugh lines this winter for a reason. According to recent polling, the number of Americans who don't believe there's such a thing as global warming is rising dramatically.

And as proof that denial is perhaps the strongest human emotion, of those who do believe in global warming, a clear majority don't believe humans play an active role in it.

So I must again call attention to the outstanding work that WTOC meteorologist Patrick Prokop is doing on his Facebook page to educate the public about the science behind climate change. Last week, he hosted an online forum inviting questions from his 3,000-plus Facebook friends on the topic. In the forum, Prokop - who says, "I desperately try to keep out of politics and stick strictly to the science" - patiently answered each question in as neutral a scientific voice as possible.

With Pat's blessing, and in the spirit of his Facebook forums - "The whole concept is to educate," he says - I'm going to excerpt some highlights below. The boldfaced lead-ins are my own attempt to summarize typical questions, but the answers in quotes are all his.

Why is it so cold if there's global warming? "The answer is short and sweet... it's winter."

Is climate change real or not? "In my eyes, as a scientist, looking at the evidence, I have to say it is real. The evidence is: the ice is melting at the poles, the sea level is slowly rising, the ocean temperature is rising, the oceans are becoming more acidic, the overall global land temperature is rising, the subtropical weather zones are migrating slowly northward, many animals and plants are become extinct at an alarming rate and the glaciers are melting. Is this just a natural event? After all, the earth has been much warmer than it is today, millions of years ago. However, what took earth thousands to tens of thousands of years to accomplish is being done in just a 100 or so years."

How can we know what temperatures were when there were no thermometers? "You can still measure temperature by the amount of snow and ice, tree rings, fossil deposits, rock formation, sea bottom deposits, even little tiny sea shells in those deposits and from them you can deduct the past atmospheric composition. It's all part of historic geology."

On what individuals can do: "No one needs to sacrifice... just live wisely. Cutting your carbon footprint... change lights to energy efficient CFL or LED. Insulate your homes well... Acquire EF appliances. If you are not using it, turn it off. If you have the means, you can even install a solar hot water heater or even solar panels to generate electricity. We've cut our electric bill by more than in half (more importantly, the amount of kilowatt hours that we buy) by doing all of the above."

On those predictions in the ‘70s about a new Ice Age: "Prior to the Clean Air Act, the burning of coal was basically unchecked, which spewed tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. These airborne aerosols acted as a solar reflector, much in the same way a major volcano eruption spews tons of soot or ash into the atmosphere which in turn reflect sunlight back into space. This results in a negative climate forcing value cooling the atmosphere... When the Clean Air Act was passed and scrubbers where introduced on the smoke stacks, the aerosols began to decline and the global temperature began to trend upward. The natural cycle of climate should be toward a cooler event... But now the climate forcing due to green house gases has surpassed the negative climate forcing from natural cooling events, leading to a net gain in global heating."

Prokop, you're a commie pinko liberal and global warming is a hoax. "I am by no means a politician. I am neither Democrat nor Republican. I voted for Democratic as well as Republican presidential candidates. I am more an Independent when it comes to political views. I seek the science in the topic."

Keep seeking the science, Pat, and let the chips fall where they may.


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COMMENTS
(4) comments posted for this article  
Report AbuseMemeMine (01/12/10 at 1:01 PM)

DISCO SCIENCE says Cooling Causes Warming. Real environmentalists saw the smoking icebergs of truth from Climate Gate as a good thing, those with other agendas didn't. We the majority now know the climate emergency is called off so you can stop TRYING to scare our children like "climate cowards" as the history books will call you climate changers. Be happy! Is that possible? Finally this modern day witch burning is over so now we can be civilized environmentalists who "Preserve, Protect and Respect Nature" and who face the future energy challenges with courage, not the old fear factor from an old CO2 mistake. Get ahead of the curve doomers because promising a dead planet for another 24 years is not sustainable in support from "WE" the people, the voters. Voters decide science policy, not paid consultants in lab coats who somehow strangely out number climate change protestors by thousands. So how come it wasn't your scientists marching instead of you flat earthers of Climate Change? Al Gore and others will be arrested for leading the planet to an Enviro WMD war against itself, a non existent enemy so don't look like the last fella to show up at the party with disco duds on. This cultural and scientific and political mistake was a growing pain and it's about time this advanced society grew up. Remember, environMENTALism caused globull warming.


Report AbuseNikFromNYC (01/12/10 at 5:01 PM)

Why would we "believe" something that is in the future but utterly fails to show up in actual thermometer records going back 350 years? http://i49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg Well, those only cover two continents, I guess, so it's not global. So let's check in on the global average which despite enough word-wide data back to 1850, only goes back to 1880: http://i49.tinypic.com/2mpg0tz.jpg Uh-oh...no unprecedented variation there either! Let's make sure: http://i48.tinypic.com/dy5a3m.jpg Er..."but it would have cooled without CO2", they say, because we are guilty of leaving all the lights on in the house at night and trickle charging our iPhones which we don't need since we are blithering idiots who can't enjoy a reverse racism joke about poor non-college graduate white "Southerners" who must after all be the demographic who make up the bulk of skeptics. That is along with the New Age types who believe in UFOs, ESP, crystal therapy and all manner of conspiracy. Oh, wait, those are the tree huggers. Hmmm....who might those skeptics *be*? Nerds? It can't be them since making fun of nerds is a losing strategy if you are no longer a teenager. I have news: it's the nerds. This nerd with a Ph.D. in chemistry who attended Columbia and Harvard wonder why your scientist (meteorologist) uses the phrase "becoming more acidic" when the correct phrase is "becoming less basic"? The ocean is not acidic. The ocean will never become acidic. Any "scientist" who misleads people like this has a severe problem with his moral compass. Did you ask your scientist (TV weatherman, actually, not a research scientist) if he is a creationist? He runs a church web site (http://www.asburymemorial.org). Don't get me wrong...it's quite healthy to incorporate faith-based belief systems into one's life. I'd just like to know if he really thinks all animal species really were loaded into a wooden boat, including the ones only found on the then-undiscovered continents of the Americas. I also wonder what he thinks about the need for a Reformation, to stop the church from selling indulgences to sin. I ask because carbon trading clearly does the same thing, which caused Jim Hansen to exclaim: "The fraudulence of the Copenhagen approach – "goals" for emission reductions, "offsets" that render ironclad goals almost meaningless, the ineffectual "cap-and-trade" mechanism – must be exposed."


Report AbuseNikFromNYC (01/12/10 at 5:01 PM)

Talk about back woodsy...your web site DELETES users' comments after they wrote them but still need to sign up for an account. Then it merges all the paragraphs of a carefully-formatted comment into one big one. All I can say is that you small town types can't get away with fooling your readers any more. Look at alarmist news articles on any site these days that has everyday local readers. All it takes is for a single reader to send the link to the skeptical clearing house at http://tomnelson.blogspot.com and competent skeptics can show up and drop a few links and corrections that utterly contradict the usual alarmist nonsense. There *are* good arguments for global warming, actually. That's what's so funny. It's just that alarmists can't really state what they are since that would open the actual important topics up to debate! Namely, what is the sensitivity of climate to *any* temperature rise? Is it highly amplified? Alarmists claim it is. But none of them can claim there is a consensus about their claim rather than it being pure speculation on their part so far. Actual measurements are only now being hashed out. So far Lindzen's work on this seems to be headed for a correction of his claim of high negative feedback to slight positive feedback, and NOT the extreme positive feedback that alarmists plug into their computer models.


Report Abuseccollier (01/15/10 at 1:01 AM)

I guess we made the right decision in the 70s not to have any children. From the "comments" above and generally everywhere these days, people are letting their FEAR of change jeopardize future generations, and probably civilization altogether. In other words, the world is screwed.






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