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Human Activity to Blame For 2003 Heatwave
Dirak writes "The temperatures of the summer of 2003 were almost undoubtedly the highest in Europe for over 500 years. New research shows how human influence, mainly fossil fuel burning, can be blamed for increasing the risk of such a heatwave and by the middle of this century every other summer could be even hotter than 2003."
Didn't I hear a news report about Mt. Saint Helens just the other day... something about it putting out more C02 than all human civilization? Surely that has no influence on the atmosphere...
If you did it was inaccurate. I don't have the figures any more, but I did work them out for a previous reply on this subject where I had believed the same thing you have been told. It turns out that vulcanism only accounts for about 50% of CO2 emissions in total at the moment. No single source dwarfs human production, as is routinely reported in some sources.
By drilling in the Antarctic ice they DO have thousands of years of data.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Here is the Petagon Climate Report) which was leaked through The Observer.
An interview whith one of its athors (Doug Randall) is here.
The BBC has some reactions from scientists on it.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Many environmental scientists have suggested that global warming will actually make Norway colder. This is because Norway is relatively warm considering its latitude due to the Gulf Stream. If the world warms up, the gulf stream disappears (or shifts), and Norway gets colder.
Thats the theory anyway...
Also, Norwegain cottages are at a premium due to hytte culture- so dont expect any bargains there!!
The North Polar ice cap is floating on the sea. Therefore, the ocean level will stay exactly the same even if the whole lot melted. Try it yourself: half-fill a glass with water, add ice and mark the level. Observe how the level stays stubbornly constant as the ice melts.
The Sciencey Bit: 1 litre of water freezes to give 1kg. of ice. According to Archimedes' Principle, 1kg. of ice floating in water displaces 1kg. of water, which raises the level by as much as adding 1kg. of water -- in other words, 1 litre. Or, for the measurement-challenged: 1 pint of water freezes to give 1lb. 4oz. of ice. 1lb. 4oz. of ice floating in water displaces 1lb. 4oz. of water, which raises the level by as much as adding 1lb. 4oz. of water -- in other words, 1 pint.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
while this is true, the glaciers on Greenland, Iceland, and the northern continents have enough water stored in them to raise sea level some 20 feet (or more). Add to that the increase in sea level due to thermal expansion of the warmer water; and... I need to move.
Have you read the article?
Probably not, because you need a (rather expensive) subscription to Nature to read the full article. I am able to read the article from here, so I can comment on your "analysis".
The findings are basically a statistical analysis of the probability of a summer like the one in 2003 to occur in different scenario's. It was concluded that there is a >90% confidence level that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave of this magnitude. Chances of rising global temperatures in the future were also investigated, as is mentioned in the abstract. Simulations and measurements were utilized that run from 1900 to 2100.I get sick and tired of people that tell me to draw my own conclusions, pointing from one media-hyped article to the next. If you want to draw your own conclusions, do your own research. I can give you this prediction, though: that your model will also give human-induced global warming as a fact, because they virtually all do
Furthermore, if you're talking about mediahypes, please don't pay attention to isolated scientists that storm in and bring atmosphere-devastating vulcanoes to the stage, or give very pretty graphs of relations of solar flares to rising temperatures. I could probably find a correlation with shoe sales in India as well! It doesn't mean there is a causal connection. Most of these people really have nothing to lose, and love the attention!
Not that I think this will convince anyone. It's much more fun if everybody just sticks to his own viewpoints and then we can have a nice discussion/flamewar about it. It's a lot easier that actually doing something about it.
It's an important and clever study. One big question on the observational side of climate change studies is how much the direct observation of warming is due to local rather than global heating. Thermometers tend to be clustered near where people are, and there are local heating effects around cities that, while pretty trivial on a global scale, might be showing up.
The cited paper addresses this question and shows that this bias in the estimate is small. It does this by showing very similar trends in nighttime temperature on windy days as on calm days, though (for compelling and obvious reasons) the local heating effect is (and can be shown to be) much larger on calm days.
The strident denial camp, (many of them paid in the style of 'tobacco scientists') of course, loves the "urban heat island" hypothesis and often parades it around so as to deny one part of the science.
This paper goes a long way toward demolishing that argument. That's one reason why it's very important. The linked breathless journalism article is pretty unclear about that, unfortunately.
This work is also interesting as a lovely demonstration of how science works. I'd teach this one in high school science if I were teaching high school science.
mt