Floods and Warming

Watts Up With That has a good post on the Warmists, and their media stooges, attempts to blame the recent flooding on AGW:

In the midst of this tragedy, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) tried to capitalize on heightened public interest with an attempt to gain headlines by tying these tragic events to “global warming.”

The EDF proclaimed: Did Humans Cause the Midwest Flooding? In the piece, EDF’s James Wang writes, “Another element [of the Midwest floods] may be global warming, which increases the probability of extreme weather events like torrential rain.” NCDC, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, headlined, Extreme Weather to Become More Common. The respective headlines can be found at http://environmentaldefenseblogs.org/climate411/ and www.noaa.gov/ .

This is fear mongering, not the advancement of science. And, it detracts from NOAA as a whole because its National Weather Service performed heroically - with its field staff working long hours coping with the floods and accompanying tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.

It is unseemly to work to score public relations points when people are losing their homes, their crops, and their lives.

And, it leaves us to ponder a key question: Does the science justify tying the Midwest floods to Global Warming? My answer? An emphatic “no.”

The above is a chart of satellite-measured lower tropopsphere temperatures pretty much says it all: if warm temps are the problem, why did this flooding happen at a very definite low in surface temperature? (I've modified the graph somewhat to give Eliot Spitzer's hooker expenditures as a convenient reference point) The area highlighted in blue shows shows the 'Delta T' drop in temperature leading up to these floods. The shaded green box shows that, had he skipped a few appointments with the call girls, Eliot Spitzer could have bought himself a fairly nice minivan.