In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

– Karl Popper (HT: Today In Sci.com)

As the snows of another “harsher than expected” Winter blanket Europe, Marlowe Hood of AFP tells us not to believe our lying eyes. He admits it’s counterintuitive, but assures us that it’s simply what happens when Waterworld experiences temperatures less than 0 Celsius. Melting polar ice caps, driven by GHG emissions, are causing Warmal Cooling, you see. The Wise One explains below.

“Say the ocean is at zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit),” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “That is a lot warmer than the overlying air in the polar area in winter, so you get a major heat flow heating up the atmosphere from below which you don’t have when it is covered by ice. That’s a massive change,” he told AFP in an interview.

The result, according to a modelling study published earlier this month the Journal of Geophysical Research, is a strong high-pressure system over the newly-exposed sea which brings cold polar air, swirling counter-clockwise, into Europe. “Recent severe winters like last year’s or the one of 2005-2006 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it,” explained Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and a physicist at the Potsdam Institute. “These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and north Asia,” he said.

– (HT: AFP and Googlenews)

Petoukhov acknowledges that skeptics will disavow the obvious evidence that more Global Warming tends to freeze off your posterior. He claims these individuals tend to exaggerate the impacts of The Sun and The Gulf Stream on the Earth’s climate. I tend to think we don’t describe our little nook of the Milky Way as The Solar System for nothing, but others are paid to see it as Petoukhov does.

As stated above, a critical component of the Warmal Cooling Hypothesis involves the argument that unusually warm Arctic temperatures are strengthening the already dominant Arctic High that typically anchors over the pole. Thus, if we envision this high as a circulating fluid mound, we could then further argue that it would dissipate outward into non-Arctic regions. This pressure forces the Jet Stream into lower latitudes and allows the arctic air to visit the rest of us in a manner reminiscent of Santa Claus. Niall Firth of The Daily Mail describes how this purported mechanism works.

During these grey winters, Britain’s prevailing winds come from the west and south west, and bring with them warm and moist air from the sub-tropical Atlantic. This year a high-pressure system is blocking the jet stream’s normal path and forcing it to the north and south of Europe…blocking the normal flow of milder air…and instead forcing colder air from the north down across the UK.

(HT: The Daily Mail)

I find this fascinating, having actually studied the General Circulation enough to understand the theory proffered and can respect the physics involved in forming a sophisticated and potentially viable conjecture. However, this doesn’t explain why Baffin Bay, for example, is below the jet stream and Newfoundland is having a hot (by Eskimo standards) winter thus far. Or, how these warm regions seemingly coincide with where GISS and other sponsored temperature stations, are not taking many readings. Thus, I’m impressed in how the Warmist Hale-Bopp Cult marshals their supple arguments. But; then I can see the obvious holes that result when struggling theoreticians fight to fit inconvenient data into a normative, pre-determined model of reality.

George Monbiot, ever the Grima Wormtongue of the Totalist Environmental Movement, quickly rushes out to repeat the catechisms. His most recent piece is entitled “That Snow Outside Is What Global Warming Looks Like.” It offers a perfect example of the extent to which the true believer will render truth mutable to discount discontinuities between reality and deeply-held, faith-based precepts.

The denial of man-made climate change mutated first into a denial of science in general and then into a denial of basic arithmetic. If it’s snowing in Britain, a thousand websites and quite a few newspapers tell us, the planet can’t be warming. According to Nasa’s datasets, the world has just experienced the warmest January to November period since the global record began, 131 years ago; 2010 looks likely to be either the hottest or the equal hottest year. This November was the warmest on record.

– (HT: The Guardian UK)

To understand the disingenuous chicanery concealed by Monbiot’s, soothing and ratiocinational tone, it helps to recourse what the settled science on Global Warming was predicting for British Winters back in March, 2000. Charles Onians, of The UK Independent explained back then just how war was peace and that ignorance constituted scientific strength.

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

-“Snowfalls Are Now Just A Thing Of The Past.” (HT: The UK Independent)

This brings us full circle to Karl Popper told us would constitute scientific fraud. If it snows, we decry Warmal Cooling. If it doesn’t our ills a direct result of Global Warming. Nothing perturbs the articles of faith. You can’t test it any more than you could logically experiment to settle the existence of God.

It reminds us of what Dwight David Eisenhower discussed in his farewell address; after his condign castigation of the growing Military-Industrial Complex. President Eisenhower warned us below how we would reach our current detestable equilibrium in which Al Gore settles what science is.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address. (HT:McAdams.posc.mu.edu)

This is what mush much of American Science has degenerated into. An elite, politically connected group decides what gets funded. They also decide what truth is. Data gets ‘normalized” to properly fit the hypothesis. Then the tests get run and the science is thereby settled.

When reality directly contravenes this truth, it must be “framed” and “properly interpreted” in conjunction with the thinking people all know. The Spanish Inquisition was hell at that, and the modern American scientific “consensus” gets better at it every year.

The Denialist mindset, set forth by the Iniquitous Karl Popper, does not play into the above scenario in any way, shape or form. It does not get funded. It quietly goes away. We them face the post-modern conundrum yet anew. The science may be settled, but do we truly know a darn thing that are betters in the Aristocracy tell us?

X-Posted.