Reply to post: Re: @PCar This article was first published at The Conversation.

Re: @PCar This article was first published at The Conversation.

I fail to see how an article explaining some of the current results of climate research is "alarmist bullshit".

Until this "alarmist bullshit" appears in university level textbooks such as TR Oke's Boundary Layer Climates some of us will continue to call it "alarmist bullshit".

Climate is the local average of not just temperature, but also precipitation, evaporation rate, windiness, cloudiness and storminess. The type of vegetation is also used to determine the classification of a climatic zone. Until ~30 years ago, the concept that a global temperature average was a climate did not exist. The obsession with a variable that cannot be measured is the giveaway that it's "alarmist bullshit".

Any physicist worth their salt will tell you that increasing temperature results in an increase in the evaporation rate of water. There are chefs and cooks who will tell you the same thing. Housewives even. You can conduct experiments yourself demonstrating that this is so. Despite this, the evaporation pans situated at rural weather stations have shown a decline in evaporation rates since the 1960s when they came into widespread use. It is called the Pan Evaporation Paradox.

Despite this, the promoters of "alarmist bullshit" insist that the "alarming" rise in average temperature means increasing drought. This would only be true if the evaporation rates had increased, hence the use of the term "paradox". It is a paradox only if you believe that temperature change equates to energy change. It does if you are dealing with a single substance such as a pan of water. The atmosphere is not a single, uniform substance. It can contain anywhere between 0% water and whatever the saturation point is for a particular temperature. Air can be moving or stationary. Ocean currents that move swiftly contain more energy than slower moving currents, or stationary ocean.

The variable that is of real interest in global changes is energy, or more accurately changes in energy content of the planet. This variable, energy change, is called enthalpy. Despite many millions of dollars of funding, there has been no attempt at measuring Earth's enthalpy. Instead, it is calculated by measuring changes in average temperature. The nice thing about averages is there are so many of them: the arithmetic mean, RMS, median etc. In the case of climastrology, the arithmetic mean of the median of recording stations is used. Execept when the station reports its own arithmetic mean using hourly temperatures. And for good measure [joke alert] in the US, the highest quality meteorological network on the planet, only 17% of weather stations comply with the World Meteorological Stations standards for temperature measurement.

As well as the challenge to point to a tertiary level text wherein all of this is properly explained, I have another. Go to the International Standards Organisation and find the definition of Global Average Temperature. A committee was set up some decades ago, but I suspect that you will find there is no such definition. It's Rafferty's Rules as we say in Australia and the Global Average Temperature is whatever you want it to be.