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NASA Says 2005 Could Be Warmest Year Recorded
Ant writes "CNN reports that a weak El Nino and human-made greenhouse gases could make 2005 the warmest year since records started being kept in the late 1800s." From the article: "While climate events like El Nino -- when warm water spreads over much of the tropical Pacific Ocean --affect global temperatures, the increasing role of human-made pollutants plays a big part."
eh...
It will only be the hottest year on record for a year or so.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You apparently want Earth colder and Mars hotter. Make up your mind!
Sudden global climate change is a serious issue that should be dealt with, but it is interesting how on one side NASA feels it's possible to control and affect positive massive global climate change on Mars but fears comparatively tiny changes on Earth.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Already in Canada, we have had some January temperatures of ONLY -35 C when normally we get some days of -37 C
Definitely warmer this year!
Girls with even less clothes, is not cool?
...we live on Earth!
Well... We've had one of our colder January's in a while here in South Australia - hardly used my swimming pool compared to last year.
Where the hell is global warming when u need it?
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
Two planets meet in space:
First planet: "You're not looking too well! Are you ill?"
Second planet: "Yeah, I got homo sapiens!"
First planet: "Never mind, that's one illness that quickly runs out. You may get some fever because of all the greenhouse gases, but in the end, they'll just wipe themselves out..."
We should think of the future, and of the planet we'll be leaving to our children. Clearly someone should take out all the environmentalcases, so that our kids won't have to put up with them.
I find Americans to be, on balance, very intelligent and well-informed. They tend to hold views similar to those of intelligent, well-informed people of other countries, with two exceptions:
(1) Gun control. Way more smart Americans believe in the right to carry a weapon than smart non-Americans. Most of the rest of the Western world thinks the US is kind of insane on this issue, actually.
(2) Global warming. It is near-universally accepted outside the US that this is happening, and that humankind is responsible. But many smart Americans doubt this.
I resist the urge to inject my own views here because I simply wanted to point this out. It's odd.
I should buy some cement.
the coldest year on record
the wettest year on record
the dryest year on record
the fewest storms on record
the most storms on record
Depending on where you live, your exact location could have any of these conditions. It's funny how the most generic weather predictions can always be proven true.
All in all, 2005 looks to be pretty scary. I wouldn't go outside, based on NASA's findings.
---gralem
It's interesting that the year following a strong earthquake or tsunami is usually slightly warmer than average. I wonder what will people do when thanks to foolishly burning oil and coal we will have no polar ice and ozone keeping us cool. Isn't it time to use hydrogen as fuel? Hydrogen + oxygen = pure water. Simple as that. Is there any other reason than shady business in the middle east that stops us from using clean and cheap energy today? Is it more profitable for certain people to start wars and control oil than to do something good for the entire humanity? I blame people who vote for immoral politicians. In democracy people can have exactly the government they want. So I ask: why do people want wars? Why do people want the greenhouse effect? This is something I seriously cannot understand.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Frequently asked questions about the science of climate change
I find it very helpful.
In the US, we allow people to call themselves neo-Nazis and salute Hitler while holding a sign proclaiming that "God hates fags." And, as nauseating as I find those points of view, I think people should have the right to express them (but not to act on them.)
The bottom line is that the right to keep and bear arms is directly linked to the right to free speech (which most of us cherish). And one could argue quite strongly that the American tendency to hold opinions that differ from (todays) academic orthodoxy is itself a direct application of that same right of free speech.
If the rest of the world jumps off a cliff, should America join them?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Nasa says 2005 budget could be lowest recorded.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
So, your argument is, since the Bush and his handlers and loony supporters expect good things from judgement day, they're not worried about looming disasters, in fact they welcome the end.
How is this sensible?
There may exist controversy around the topic of global warming and global warming may just be part of this planets natural way of evolving into whatever global climate is next. There were many types of global climates in the past and there is no proof that humans are the ones causing this temperature change.... and I read somewhere that termites and cows produce more green house gases than humans....
But if the fear of global warming causes people to adapt a cleaner and healthier lifestyle then so be it and i'm all for it and infact there should be active participation by all people to keep the enviornment clean.
People should, however, learn to share their concern about global warming with other global disastors happening.. or waiting to happen.. Illiteracy rates, population explosion, terrible health care for people, etc.. should all be taken care of and they all pose a huge short term risk which is much greater than the risk of global warming.
We know the temperature rises, we know know earth changes. - We think we might have something to do with it.
It won't be the hottest year on record for long.
The only uncertain thing about global warming is when mankind will realize that the end of that development is to be avoided.
One can say "only a 1 or 2 deg. Celsius". In fact, first it is a mean temperature, second, the climate might turn out to on the verge of some major deterministic chaos state.
As an example, during the so called Little Ice Age the global temperature dropped by about 1 deg. C, but it caused the following: (from Wikipedia)
Glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held fairs on the ice. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island nation's harbors to shipping.
The chaotic nature of weather patterns might, in turn, hypothetically cause that some very small change causes a major switch, i. e. in sea currents. I do not know if anyone now either predicts or excludes for sure any such event, though.
So, concluding, I think that we do not really know how much serious to the climate the global warming is.
We have a government that does pretty much what we tell it because we have two guns for every three citizens and a tradition of cleaning house when needed.
You mean the American revolution? As far as democratic change goes, that was a pretty lightweight and recent effort. Nations like France fought long and hard for democracy, other nations in Europe have had a tradition of democracy going back a thousand years, and yet others had democracies and lost them again. America is a newcomer in the area of creating and maintaining democratic government, and there is no support for the view that America's gun policies are responsible for the current existence of democracy in the US, in particular since attitudes towards guns and gun ownership were altogether different around the time of the American revolution.
There's no denying that global warming is happening (at least in the short term). It's the cause that that's uncertain. The dinosaurs had much higher global warming but we have yet to find a single dinosaur factory or dinosaur SUV. Unless the dinosaurs ate a huge number of baked beans, I don't know how they could be responsible for generating a significant amount of greenhouse gases..
Are you stupid? There is no longer any doubt that mankind is at least largely responsible for climate change. Let me give you some more perspective on some of your other idiotic comments:
Please feel free to show the evidence that the U.S. government is significantly more scared of its populations than other national governments. Feel free to work in references to legislation such as the Patriot Act, where appropriate. Or any legislative issues where gun ownership made a difference.
CNN's crediblilty has been on self destruction for the last year or so. Their stories have been filled with hype and falsehoods on the hope that their ratings will not continue to fall.
There are always options, never failures.
an accurate forcast for two days out in Oklahoma, and not in the middle of the summer with a high presure sitting on top of us (upper 90s, sunny, 70% humidity), then I will believe them.
Forcast: Partly cloudly and a high of 41
Actual: 1 inch of snow, high of 33
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
-- Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Global warming is deadly serious business and anyone with half a brain sees it coming.
...
There was an article in a 1975 edition of Newsweek where scientists were sure of a global cooling. Now it's a global warming?
I think it's foolish to think that us humans can have such an impact of the climate. I'd hedge my bets that volcanic eruptions and other natural occurrences play a far more significant role that cars and buses.
You're thinking of the Christian right behind Bush - they believe in this thing called 'the end of days'
Yes. The return of Christ to set up his kingdom on earth for 1000 years. It's not because I'm a Christian that I feel I can ignore long-term issues like global warming. I personally think global warming is a farce as far as it being controlled by humans is concerned.
So what source do you cite that says Christians think it's okay to ignore global warming because of the Second Coming? I'd like to see that article.
We're hoping they're the first to starve when the troubles begin
I'm sorry you have such a negative view of Christianity. There are lots of people around this planet that profess to be Christian that don't act like them. My apologies if you've been slighted by someone who has made you hate Christians so much.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
> The Earth's 'normal' temperature isn't what we are used to anyway. Our civilisation has developed entirely in the aftermath of an ice age, and the Earth is still warming up after that.
I don't know what the concensus of scientists is on that, but I've read several articles lately that say we would already be freezing up again, if not for anthropogenic global warming. The problem is, we're warming things up too much, so in additon to neutralizing the onset of an ice age we are actually warming things up compared to what we had in the Neolithic.
By chance there's an article by William F. Ruddiman in the March Scientific American (arrived yesterday). His position is that you can model the long term fluctuations of temperature, CO2, and CH4 on the basis of several astronomical cycles, but something has gone awry in the past 8,000 years. Apparently early agriculture and the associated deforestation started driving the CO2 up about 8,000 years ago, and the invention of wet rice farming started driving CH4 up about 5,000 years ago. Each had been declining on the curve predicted by the astronomical cycles up until then, but suddenly started increasing when the should have kept on decreasing. (The article has some interesting plots; look it up if you get a chance.)
The astronomical cycles also predict that reglaciation should have started about 5,000 years ago, but instead the temperature remained essentially flat from then until the start of the Industrial Revolution. (The global warming increased as agriculture spread, fortuitously keeping temperature flat when it should have been dropping - until the Industrial Revolution kicked in.)
Thus at the start of Industrial Revolution things were already warmer than we had any right to expect, and then we started really driving it up from there. Regarding the present delta between actual temperature and expected temperature, Ruddiman attributes about half of it to historical agriculture and half to the Industrial Revolution, though like most other scientists he expects the I.R. component to keep going up (until we run out of cheap fossil fuels).
In a side bar he makes an interesting suggestion that the major cooling periods of the past 2000 years have followed plagues and depopulation of the Americas, both resulting in farmland reverting to forest (a CO2 sink). Frankly his graph for this effect doesn't look as convincing to me as the ones supporting his main thesis, but perhaps we'll be hearing more for or agains the idea in the future.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You honestly think the government is more responsible because you have guns? You actually believe your government is afraid of you? Talk about an inflated sense of self-worth :-)
Seriously though, your "tradition of cleaning house when needed" would come to an abrupt end when that small gathering of armed civilians gets an Apache-helicopter-beatdown. Don't kid yourself about being able to wrest control of the government away by force.
Funny enough, do you know what the US would look like if this scenario were to play out?
Iraq.
Before you base your response to a very serious environmental situation on a work of fiction, please read this. Crichton uses a bunch of proven-false arguments, and wraps a transparent opinion piece in a layer of fiction, yet still tries to make a political point. And in the process he basically slanders a whole bunch of very earnest, hard-working scientists. It's really quite despicable.
Personally I think there has to be a balance where we work to protect the enviroment but do not have to tramatize our kids with scary tales of the world ending in their lifetimes.
I grew up in the 80's; the nukes could fly any minute (that really could've happened). I turned out just fine. So I'm not too worried about traumatizing kids. Besides, the consensus view states that there would be a 2-6 deg increase in global average temperture, not "that the world will end". You can infer from such a rise that the disruption will be very severe, but I think it is simply idiocy to argue that we shouldn't warn people "just because it might scare the kids".
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
There was an article in a 1975 edition of Newsweek where scientists were sure of a global cooling. Now it's a global warming?
Scientific hypothosi(sp?) evolve; religious nut jobs stay the same. That's the big difference. I'd be a lot more worried if thirty years of scientific research resulted in no changes in theory.
So what source do you cite that says Christians think it's okay to ignore global warming because of the Second Coming? I'd like to see that article.
You seem to be considering the relationship. Here's a link to your Rapture Index on your site. You have climate at "5" in your "waiting for the end of the world" chart. To be fair, your do say "We cannot take a defeatist attitude and just let things fall apart. Each of us has a responsibility to one another to care for the world around us.". But for us liberals out there, we don't actually see the fundamentalists doing much except burning books and bombing things. Maybe if the fundamentalists occasionally tried to save an endangered species or kept a national park from being turned into a stip mine or simply lobbied for higher fuel efficiency standards, we might think your words meant something.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
What that should have said in order to be meaningful was "simulating nuclear weapons". But you knew that. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Global "warming" isn't going to just raise everyone's thermostat by 5'C. It's cranking up the chaotic fractal dimension of the atmosphere. Some places will get colder. Like when the Greenland ice melts, flushing fresh water into the North Atlantic, it will push the "Thermo Haline Circulation" farther south, making the warm Gulf Stream flow more directly from America to, say, France, instead of warming the Baltic. The UK will plunge into an arctic climate like northern Scandanavia, along with the rest of northern Europe. Other places are likely to also freeze or drop, though the average will be higher, meaning some places will become hellishly hot. And the kinds of storms we'll see in the ongoing transition will make hurricanes look like mist.
--
make install -not war
in particular since attitudes towards guns and gun ownership were altogether different around the time of the American revolution.
I suspect you're referring to the book "Arming America". Are you not aware that it has been pretty well established that the author committed academic fraud. IOW, he misrepresented records in some cases, and in other cases made up facts supposedly based on records which he didn't realize had been destroyed long ago?
Some so-called "statistician" had the gall to tell me that the odds in roulette are stacked in favor of the house! He mumbled some nonsense about "probability" which I was too stupid to comprehend and told me that while I "might have short-term, unpredictable changes in winnings, the long-term trend favored the house by several percent."
But I don't believe him anyway (we all know there are liars, damned liars, and statisticians). I asked him what number the ball would land on next, and he didn't know! He just gave me some lame "forecast" with a bunch of percentages. I may not understand this "probability," but I've been around the block a few times and know a quack when I see one.
How can he claim to predict what is likely to happen to my money in the long term if he can't even predict exactly what number the ball will land on next?!
Alright, croupier, I've got my kids' whole college fund to invest here, so let's start with a thousand on black! Wooo!
You REALLY need to get some facts straight.
"healthful" - bullshit. Despite what even some doctors claim, circumcision does not bring any health benefit. It is also potentially lethal (by related hemorrhage and infections) and monstrously painful.
"better sex" - just the opposite. The foreskin is extremely sensitive erogenous tissue. Circumcision seriously decreases man's capacity to feel sexual pleasure.
"more women" - and in certain parts of the world a woman can not find a husband if she is not mutilated. American women prefer circumcised men because they were taught that this is normal, so it is just a matter of teaching them that it is NOT normal!
: Dude, its not even a choice. - that's right, in a way: helpless babies have their body integrity brutally violated - and are never given a choice. Anyone who performs circumcisions - be it a doctor or a jewish mohel, each driven by equally preposterous and disproven myths - is a child abuser a hundred thousand times worse than any Michael Jackson.
Circumcision is child abuse.
That's just typical. It takes the arrogance of some NASA rocket scientist to proclaim world shaking doomsday scenarios based on a single transitory fluctuation like 30 years of data. President Bush says we don't know enough to be able to make predictions about the changing climate one way or the other. And who are you going to believe? A man who told us that 'God talks through him' or some ivory-tower egghead who studies weather satellite data all day?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
No, it wasn't. It was based on a mixture of outright falsehoods ("Global warming is defined by the global mean surface temperature...[]..it's effect is presumably the same everywhere in the world"), and selective use of facts in such a manner as to be outright misleading (Antarctic cooling does NOT contradict the idea of global warming; in fact it is consistent with the results from models, which show local cooling there). Again, read this rebuttal , written by scientists active in the area.
And that there are many scientists who do not believe in global warming.
It is a consensus among published papers by atmospheric scientists and climatologists that there are increasing levels of CO2 and global warming.
On a more precise note, asking a climatologist whether or not he "believes in global warming" is like asking an economist if he believes in inflation. Global warming is happeneing; the question is a) whether it is unusual, b) whether it is caused by humans, c) whether it will be harmful. The majority of scientists in the field would answer "yes" to all three, but not every single scientist you can find will do so. (There are always cranks - to this day there are scientists who claim the Sun is made primarily out of iron). There are also some uncertainties to some of those answers - just that most scientists think that the predominance of evidence points to humans causing problems.
Just like they said in the 70s which has proven to be false.
Puhleeeaaase not this old canard again. Read a rebuttal here. Same website, but its a collection of rebuttals to the most common claims by contrarians, most of which you've manged to parrot pretty well.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
SUVs are not bad, they are the result of quite a lot of evolving engineering that has revolved around peoples needs and wants. You don't NEED a later model computer to surf the net, you can surf just fine with a 486, but do you want to? Are you still on a 486 era computer, or are you driving something bigger/better/faster/fits your needs better machine right this second? I own solar PV and a wind genny, do you? I think anyone with a gram of brains should own some, and if they don't they are evil and stupid. Whoops, sounds elitist doesn't it? I advocate people do, but I wouldn't say they are evil and stupid if they don't. I'm still on a computer that most slashdotters would chunk in the rubbish, an old pp200, yet it fits my needs enough I don't have to junk it or pollute to get a larger/faster/ more energy hog one at this second. That will change obviously, but everyones needs are different, yes? So what is "evil"? what's stupid really? Is it because it's just different? Glass houses and stones.
People will naturally switch to practical alternatives once they are, to use the expression, "on the shelf' for purchase. Practical is the keyword there. Some of the hottest best selling vehicles in the US are the hybrids now, including SUV hybrids that are just now hitting the market. You look at what is hot at the car shows, look at what is being demanded at the dealers. I'll tell you if you haven't looked, Hybrids are hot, besides in small cars like the Prius, they are coming in the SUV design and pickups, and new design high mileage cleaner burning diesels are hot and coming on strong in the near future, as well as the increasing interest in such things as biodiesel. Those are the two really large trends now you can readily see with a little research.
We are such a physically large nation that mass public transportation is not near as practical as in other nations, so we use roads and private vehicles more, just the way it is and no amount of complaining is going to put light rail to everyones doorstep or back yard mr fusion reactors in everyones aprtament or home. The tech and money isn't there yet for that. Neither. Nor would it even be remotely practical, that's why it isn't being done, there's little demand for it, because it just plain wouldn't work. It would be a humongously impractical polluting expensive lame idea to try and put some sort of light rail everyplace that humans need to go to.
We have "cars" of various types. that is what suits our needs in the US presently as a universal general concept in transportation. Primarily this is what we use. Those few areas and niche markets that absolutely can be better served by light rail or walking, ARE being served with light rail and walking right now, daily millions commute on light rail, IF it serves their needs, and everyone has different needs. When I lived urban I frequently took the commuter train, except when it didn't serve my needs, then I drove the approriate vehicle, or occassionaly rented a large truck, say when moving.
It's just how we socially evolved, and those sorts of SUV styled vehicles are practical for a lot of people, millions and millions of people. SUVs caught on because they are just a latter version of the old "family station wagon",just with even better features, and more useful features. These got popular because they filled a "needs" niche so well, people (a lot of people, not all but a lot) needed a "universal" designed vehicle that could function to get dad to work (a commuter vehicle), haul the family to the beach(a very large car or van to fit all the family and their gear), bring home the lumber and bricks and bags of cement for the back yard weekend patio project (some sort of truck), and etc. You can buy three specifically designed vehicles for those purposes, or one vehicle that covers all the needed uses. If you don't believe it, go to any Home Depot on the weekend and look at the parking lots. You'll see huge numbers of SUVs packed with stuff that would normally
When you hear the US talking about a "war on [fill-in-the-blank]", you have to realize that the main philosphic drivers of the attitude are a belief that a zero-sum game is in play. The US has excelled, in the private sphere, at pareto-optimal games, but politically, has never gotten the hint.
I forget what 8 was for.
...where it goes over 120degF every summer. The kangaroos don't seem to mind much.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Well, you read a book by a guy who firmly believes global warming is a myth and he claims to show that it's all bunk... so, which are you going to believe? An author of fiction, or a bunch of scientists whos professional code requires that they be objective? Obviously not all scientists achieve that objectivity; the difference is that they are expected to. Crichton can claim the Earth is flat if he wants, and suffer no professional consequences.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
There is no evidence that the author committed fraud (i.e., intentionally falsified data)--the committee says so.
You are confusing "lack of absolute proof" with "lack of evidence". There is most certainly some evidence of fabrication, as the report clearly states:
If Professor Bellesiles did indeed read Contra Costa records believing they were from San Francisco, then the issue could again be one of extremely sloppy documentation rather than fraud. There are three aspects of this story, however, that raise doubts about his veracity.
And that's not the only such passage in the report. You do realize that an academic committee is bound to be both polite, based on the traditions and customs of the community, and cautious based on the very real possibility of being sued over any misstep?
You do realize that even without the suspicion over the data, much of the book's arguments consist of graphing two trends together and saying: "look, when A went up B also went up, therefore A caused B"?
Well, if you look at the graph of temperatures, then there is indeed a warming trend between 1900 and 1950 that comes before human GHG emissions would be expected to have caused any effect; but the warming post-1980 is far greater than what would be predicted by the 'sunspot-only' model. Indeed, if all natural forcings are used, then we should have seen a very slight drop in temperatures over this period. Climate modellers do indeed look at external influences.