Slashdot Mirror
New Satellite Data Confirms Global Warming
starannihilator writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have analyzed satellite data using a new and more accurate method (using channel 4 on the Microwave Sounding Unit satellite) to show that the troposphere has been warming faster than the Earth's surface for more than two decades. Nature reports that previous interpretations (using MSU channel 2) did not indicate such dramatic tropospheric warming because the data were compromised by stratospheric conditions. For years, the debate over global warming raged largely as a result of an incongruency between trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures. The new data gained by MSU channel 4 are consistent with the surface temperature's rising trends and indicate that global warming is, in fact, occuring in the troposphere. Read the full article in Nature, or similar stories in the Seattle Times and Newswise."
yeah, look out... here come melting ice caps.. ahhhhg! run for your lives.
Seriously though, there's millions of years of evidence of earth going in cycles of warming and cooling. I've never understood why this is even a debate. Yes global warming exists, yes global cooling exists. What are the causes? There's thousands of factors. Are we causing our demise by driving around? No. Factories killing us? No. Do those things contribute? Sure!
Now stop the panic and go do more research.
The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable. A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.
Just because some aspects of weather are chaotic doesn't mean nothing can be predicted. Global average temperatures don't go up or down independent of any contributing factors: ice coverage, atmospheric composition, humidity and other factors all have well-defined effects. There are some relationships we don't understand yet, but that doesn't make those relationships chaotic.
We can be certain that if we continue on our current path, growing emissions of greenhouse gases, we will change the climate dramatically some time this century. That's simple physics: changing the earth's energy balance significantly must lead to changes in something on earth. What we don't know yet is whether it will kick in a new ice age (which would be negative feedback), lead to gradual warming (no feedback), or runaway greenhouse effects (positive feedback). Even if negative feedback would magically keep the temperature constant, something (vegetation, ice cover, etc.) would have to make up for change in energy balance. But no matter what the change, it will end up being costly.
First you say we are powerless over it because we have so little effect, and then you say a variation of a few hundreths of a degree can cause a hurricane. Of course it's so complex it also requires 'more study', and by the tone of you comments you seem to suggest that it will be impossible to predict nature.
Which is it? People: don't mistake this for anything other than it is, a bad ostrich immitation and an excuse to continue current habits because it is profitable - to the body and to the wallet.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
We can be certain that if we continue on our current path, growing emissions of greenhouse gases, we will change the climate dramatically some time this century.
The thing is, we can also be certain that even if every last human keels over dead, taking all technology with them, that the climate will change significantly over the next century.
Already I've noticed a climate shift starting in my area (Michigan)... we're returning to the type of winters we had 30 or 40 years ago, which had a lot more snow and cold weather then the winters we saw in the 90's, which typically had one hell of a snow-storm... but only that one, with temperatures reaching into the 50s sometimes in mid-December.
Human influence? Natural processes? The only answer is yes. Worth panicking over? I'm inclined to wait until something actually bad happens before panicking. (Note that "panicking" isn't isomorphic to "doing something"; I'm in favor of pre-emptive environmentalism, where on general principles we try to reduce our impact to the environment as much as possible. I don't see panicking as a valid reason to do anything, though.)
Maybe some more of those research dollars should be devoted to understanding why the warming is occuring and developing ways to cope with a warmer earth, rather than redundantly measuring the temperature via every possible method and then shouting: "GLOBAL WARMING!!!! GLOBAL WARMING!!!!"
Similar in concept to women learning to cope with rape rather than shouting about it, right? Rather than trying to "cope" with global warming, why not try to exert some control over man-made atmospheric changes that have a strong likelihood of contributing to it? What's the worst thing that happens? We reduce pollution and it doesn't solve the global warming problem? That seems a lot more desirable than assuming that pollution is not the cause of global warming, in which case being wrong could mean an ecological disaster.
Who the hell cares if we have to pay a few cents more for a banana or stack of CD-ROMs due to costs associated with reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (in manufacturing and/or transportation)? It beats the hell out of mass extinctions and ecological disaster.
Actually, there is not. Stating there is does not make it any more true than saying that the sun revolves around the Earth. Bad science uttered over and over is still bad science.
"Your political bias may make you unwilling to read the evidence"
I have a scientific bias (toward actual facts). Thanks for bringing up politics (foremost on your mind, not mine). The camp making up the "man-made global warming" myth is politically motivated.
"but man-made global warming is a fact accepted by the vast majority of respected scientists."
Since there is no evidence for it, they certainly aren't respectible in thie regard. These "political hacks first, scientists second" will be singing a different tune when the phony-baloney cycle turns around to global cooling. They'll scapegoat the same people for global cooling when that happens.
Now, the hypothosis of global warming has not been irrefutably proven and certain discrepencies have not been accounted for.
For instance, A volcanic erruption can cause so much more so called "greenhouse" gasses to be released into the atmosphere than all the polutants man has expelled since the first machine of industry.
Secondly, there are periodic climate changes throughout earth's history that have still yet to be explained. Also, the depletion of the green house gasses has not been proven to be solely the cause of the BAD human made CO/CO2 and not the GOOD naturally occuring CO2 (See eruptions)
Since there is no explanation for the past trend nor the fact that looking even further back the entire planet had a higher median temperature. as is evident by the many hypothosis that the thunder lizards may have died due to an ice age... I don't really have to point out there weren't humans then to contribute to that natural disaster that caused a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.
We need to continue to regulate our usage of all natural resources, since not doing so would be insane, but saying that greenhouses gasses are the sole influence that causes this affect. Believing so would discount all other evidence available. That humans contribute, is surely true. But how much, and is it even measurable compared to a massive volcanic eruption?
The only thing I am panicking over is will we be able to get the US administration to give a shit about the environment. We have seen enough evidence to the contrary that I believe this to be sufficient reasoning for a *panic*.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
What did you find there? Warming caused by factory smokestacks in the year 120,000 B.C.E.?
"evidence is so strong that there is indeed a worldwide consensus amonst reasearch scientists"
Correction: there is a concensus among scientists who happen to believe this trendy view.
"that there is a great chanc that we are indeed causing massive global climate change and hence we should attempt to progress with caution."
Correction: we don't have any idea that we are, and if we did, we don't know how actions one way or another would change things (IF AT ALL). We know so little about these matters. , to more recent data collected by statlite and other earth
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Chaos now has a relatively precise meaning in science - that very small, perhaps nearly invisible, initial conditions can produce, under some conditions, disproportionately large divergences in outcomes. But, if understood, this can make a system more, not less, predictable, for there are patterns to the kinds of changes that happen. The weather pattern over the earth is not well-understood, by any means, but we know at least two things - mankind is doing things that, theoretically, could produce a warmer earth, AND, the earth is getting warmer. Causality, or, more to the point, the importance of other factors affecting said causality, is not irrefutably established, but caution definitely would advise some courses of action over others. Those who say we don't understand so should do nothing are worse than B.F. Skinner, who in his time said, essentially, we don't understand the brain's workings, so we won't even try to investigate it. They have their heads in the sand, and are not doing any thinking worthy of the name. (And they may be pushing some sort of other agenda, and are hoping you are too stupid to think for yourself.) You don't light a fire in your house, and then notice the temperature rising, and claim "the proof isn't in yet, so I'll just keep burning!"