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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."
I've changed my view on global warming. I used to think the whole earth couldn't warm or cool, but it would stay the same over time. Now I believe that the earth does warm and cool over significant variations. So we are in a global warming phase, if the toposphere is absolute proof (which we can't be sure about.)
The question is: What can we do about it?
The answer is: Unfortunately, not much. If we cut all the world's emissions of greenhouse gasses drastically in half, that wouldn't account for the other variations responsible for global warming like a more active sun or just the phase of the weather patterns on earth or the temperature of the sea. I have to think about it this way: If humanity did all it could to cool or warm the earth, what would we accomplish? The answer is that the earth is so huge and so complicated that we can't predict whether our actions would cause havoc or remedy. I mean, we could spend trillions of dollars on a system to cool the troposphere only to find out that by doing so we are causing more hurricanes and such.
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.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I blame the sun!
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
since all storys about environmental degredation get plugged up with rediculously weakly argued and unsubstantiated anti-global warming comments modded +5, why not just waste your mod points here instead?
Perhaps the biggest source of the problem is contrails. The study they did in the near airplane-less skies after 9/11 seems to indicate that they have quite a massive impact on weather patterns.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
there is no evidence yet for man-made global warming.
Yes there is and stating otherwise won't change it any more and throwing a temper tantrum will. There is a tremendous amount of evidence of man-made global warming. Your political bias may make you unwilling to read the evidence, but man-made global warming is a fact accepted by the vast majority of respected scientists.
Rush said that global warming was a communist plot of the liberal hegemony, backed by anti-NRA and pro-ACLU supporters, in an attempt to get a feminist abortion doctor elected to the presidency thereby preventing the birth of the Anti-christ, thwarting Jimmy Swaggart's and Jerry Falwell's predictions of the second coming of Christ and the fall of Israel.
I think he's exagerrating.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Are we causing our demise by driving around? No. Factories killing us? No. Do those things contribute? Sure!
So you admit that they contribute, but you don't think they are a problem? If you have enough "contributions" they eventually add up to some nasty effects.
Now stop the panic and go do more research.
Hey great idea! Maybe we can finish the research just in time to show conclusive evidence that we did indeed mess up our planet beyond repair. Or maybe we could just try to cut down on those "contributions" now, until we can convince you crack pots that we are a danger to our environment.
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.
Because there is no evidence of man-made atmospheric changes contributing to anything. So what you end up with is 100% political efforts like Kyoto which requires that "bad" countries decrease CO2 emissions and requires that "good" countries increase them. If these efforts were in tune with the phony environmental theories instead of vengeance politics, you would think that they would demand that all countries decrease emmissions.
"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."
I'd rather pay more for banana's and CDs to stop Martian invasion, Godzilla attacks, and hangnails. As long as you are paying to affect something that has nothing to do with anything....
Really. Does it now.
Because you just said that a "new ice age fad" is starting, and you're claiming it has something to do with global cooling. And now you're refering to a story about a thaw in Greenland threatens a new ice age, and you're saying this is about global cooling. Whereas the story is actually only about Global Warming. "Global Cooling" isn't mentioned - probably because no serious scientist believes it exists.
"Global cooling", in the sense of the temperature of the Earth lowering on average across the planet, is distinct from the idea of an "ice" age, at least in terms of the one you quoted. The Guardian is reporting, correctly, that one effect of a global shift in climate, even one that warms the Earth on average, can be that ice forms in areas where currently it doesn't. That's because warming can effect sea currents and other weather patterns, changing systems that usually bring warmth to areas of the planet that would normally freeze.
Try, for example, comparing London with Moscow. Compare how far North either one is, then ask yourself why London is usually temperate and Moscow is usually covered in snow. A brief look at other areas of the world level with London will tell you that there's something wierd about the weather in Britain (I mean, other than the rain, five year hurricane-strength storm cycle, etc): it's far warmer than it should be. That's because there's a weather system that actively moves heat from the Gulf of Mexico up to the British Isles (and thereabouts.)
Now, the evidence that global warming may cause Britain to turn into some icy wasteland isn't exactly scientific (not because it's impossible, but because right now they're trying to predict a chaotic system and simply assuming a change in the weather system will almost certainly have the worst result - nobody however really knows what the results will be), but it's being talked about as a possibility. It's a possibility because if you shove a huge amount of water into the ocean, it's not likely to act the same way as it did previously. The media, not the scientists, are raging about ice coming to currently unusually temperate parts of the world as some kind of inevitability. Do yourself a favour and don't pretend the rash harping of the media and the current scientific consensus are the same.
Utterly meaningless. This was a fad, a real fad, that lasted a few months. No serious scientists hung their hat on it. Scientists investigated it, but the ultimate conclusion was that the phenomena was bunk, and the reverse was, if anything, more likely.
The scientific community has been concerned about global warming since the mid eighties, if not earlier. They've been largely consistant. They've investigated trend after trend, and everything found has pointed in one direction.
The latest evidence is right at the top of this article. You see the headline "New Satellite Data Confirms Global Warming"? It's because, well, basically, there's this satellite data, it's just come out, and, erm, it also shows the globe has warmed.
The underlying concerns have a firm foundation. There's a lot of money being poured into discrediting it because, well, there's a lot of money to be lost if, say, we switch from oil to something more sane; because there are a lot of businesses that stand to see their costs skyrocket if their CO2 emissions are regulated; because there are ideologically swivel-eyed psuedo-libertarians who find it hard to comprehend that we might, as a group, need to do something. We rarely if ever see credible reports that GW isn't an issue. We regularly see well researched
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This means China needs to radically boost its efficiency (not hard even with current technology), Indonesia has to prevent the drainage and burning of peat bogs, and all that. If things there continue as they have been going, the USA could cut emissions to zero and still not make things better.
This also means that the Kyoto system of quotas is fundamentally broken. It will not do to give each nation a quota; each emitter of CO2 and other climate-changing gases has to have an incentive to prevent those emissions, and the competitive advantage should go to those producers and nations which are doing it the best. This means something like a unified system of carbon taxes.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Which brings me to my next point: if you change the characteristics of the attractor, the behavior of the system can change radicaly in a very sudden fashion. I fear that this is what we are doing with climate change, and we may suffer huge damages from the results.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Ice cores
Any discussion of global warming as a climatic cycle needs to extend in a timespan of tens of thousands of years to look at a single cycle. The problem with the "global warming" as being a man-made effect is the localization of the time period were talking about. Most of the data being used to "prove" the theory are on the order of a decades and at best centuries. From a historical perspective we are in a regular warming trend that is situated inside of the end of an ice age. To this end it is highly likely that it will continue to get hotter regardless of human activity. This is factual based on data from hundreds of thousands of years. As the gp has said, while human efforts do have an effect on this pattern, to what degree is unknown. Anything contrary to this has to date has not modeled the climate to any appreciable margin of error. The problem lies in the complex interaction of a very large system. The simplifications assumed to actually compute projections cause unacceptable margins of error in a short future window.
everyone know that global warming is going on. the only question being aruged over is "are we to blame?" and i say no.
this is almost exactly like what happened to the climate 1000 years back. it got warm enough that Greenland was usable for farming. that just seems like to much similarity to be a coinsiance.
but still, what is causing it??
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Spencer and Christy published the original paper on microwave sounding and atmospheric temperatures.
Because there is no evidence of man-made atmospheric changes contributing to anything.
Here is an article from the BBC News about a scientific study that gives strong evidence of man-made greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. So you can stop with your bullshit claims about there being "no evidence." That link proves that you are either ignorant or a liar.
So what you end up with is 100% political efforts like Kyoto which requires that "bad" countries decrease CO2 emissions and requires that "good" countries increase them.
More bullshit. The Kyoto treaty did not require any country to increase CO2 emissions. That's just complete and utter fabrication.
I'd rather pay more for banana's and CDs to stop Martian invasion, Godzilla attacks, and hangnails. As long as you are paying to affect something that has nothing to do with anything....
Since you've already proven yourself woefully ignorant about the entire subject, your opinion about the topic is worthless. Do us all a favor: Stay home on election day and study rather than going out to vote. We'll all be better off if you do.
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.
That is, quite simply, crap. You're wrong and embarassingly so.
"There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity." - Scientific American
Moderators, please don't mod up silly statements like these where sources aren't cited.
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!"