Tobis on the likely El Nino

Michael Tobis has his own take on climate change which I have always found pretty convincing (he has always emphasised "weather weirding" as being an important sign of climate change), and his recent post on the likely El Nino of later this year is an interesting read.

(Another idiosyncratic take on matters by MT is that he doesn't like the "redefining" of global warming to include ocean warming.  That seems a rather odd position to me.)

Anyway, he is betting that  the El Nino will (finally) lead to a globally hotter year than 1998, which will be followed by persistently hotter years as a further "step up" in the process of global warming.  This is pretty much what is needed to finally shut up and (further) marginalise the denialists.  They already are marginalised scientifically; what is needed is their marginalisation politically.

Incidentally, I just stumbled across in my old magazine collection (I am being put under pressure to thrown them out - I am resisting) a January 1986 Discover cover story on global warming.   Apart from the sensationalism on the cover (questioning whether New York would be more or less flooded by the 2030's), a quick peruse of the article itself shows that the scientific view and warnings (and appreciation of uncertainties) has been remarkably consistent since that time.   I have also read much of Stephen Schneider's book "Science as a Contact Sport", which gives a good background as to how science developed its concern about the topic, and one interesting point he makes is that Lindzen from the start was a skeptic about it being a problem.

Perhaps I should scan the Discover article and link it here one day, so people can see how fair it was.