Selective memories of climate science deniers

In a guest post on WUWT, a science denier called Alan Caruba writes an article titled: "Short Meteorological Memories".  He draws together a couple of denier memes.

How can one remember something that hasn't ever happened in living memory?

Caruba writes:

What I always find interesting is the way much of the population seems to have absolutely no memory of any previous heat wave or, for that matter, a major blizzard. Either way the news media goes bananas, usually seeing it an apocalyptic scenario. No, it’s just a perfectly normal heat wave or blizzard.

That may be true or not in any one instance.  Caruba does mention the record heat Australia had last January where the average for the entire continent hit 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.6 degrees Fahrenheit).  That's not a hot temperature in one location, which, while extra hot, would no longer be unremarkable in many parts of Australia these days.  What it is is the average maximum across the entire continent of Australia.

Just think how hot it must have got over such a vast area to record a continent-wide average of 40.3 degrees Celsius.  Not only that, but there have only been 21 days in 102 years where the average maximum temperature for the whole of Australia has exceeded 39°C; eight of these days happened last summer.

I doubt there'd be anyone living today who would have a prior memory of anything like that because it hadn't happened before in the entire instrumental record.  You can see just how hot the continent was in this animated gif chart. (Click to enlarge.)

Global warming causes climate change

Caruba goes on about terminology, claiming that "climate change" has replaced "global warming".  Not so.  The terms are not identical.  Global warming signifies the earth heating up.  Climate change is what happens as a result. Here are some references to the two terms going back some time:

• The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change by Gilbert N. Plass (1956); Tellus Vlll
• Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? by Wallace S. Broecker, published in Science in 1975
• Arctic climate's alarming change - a newspaper article from 1947 on the possibility of global warming and climate change, warning of the possibility of catastrophic rises in sea levels.

It's happened before, but not like this

Caruba then cites two extreme events (for the time) that happened thirty years apart.  One in the UK and one in the north-east USA.  Most reasonable people would come back with ten or more events that have happened in the past ten years.  Consider just these events, listed on Jeff Master's blog on Wunderground:

Earth's Deadliest Weather-Related Disasters Since 2000

1. Cyclone Nargis, Mayanmar, 2008: 138,366
2. Heat wave, Europe, 2003: 71,310
3. Heat wave, Russia, 2010: 55,736
4. Flood, India, 2013: 5,748
5. Cyclone Sidr, Bangladesh, 2007: 4234
6. Heat wave, Europe, 2006: 3418
7. Hurricane Jeanne, Haiti: 2004, 2754
8. Flood, Haiti, May 2004: 2665
9. Flood, Pakistan, 2010: 1985
10. Typhoon Bopha, Philippines: 2012, 1901
11. Hurricane Katrina, U.S., 2005: 1833
12. Landslide, China, 2010: 1765

I reckon it's Alan Caruba who has a very selective memory, deliberately ignoring what is happening around the world weatherwise these days.  I'll amend the last sentence of Caruba's fluff denial of reality:

By the end of the week, deniers on WUWT are sure to issue another boring claim that the latest weather disaster is "nothing new to see, climate is always changing, CO2 levels were higher 3 billion years ago". Ignore them.