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2005 Was the Hottest Year on Record
Gulthek writes "As predicted, 2005 was the hottest year since accurate temperature recording began in the late 1800s.
This news is all the more interesting because 2005 was not an "El Niño" year like 1998, the previous record holder."
We all know what we believe in regards to Global warming. Most of the time we want to believe the worst... or the best. Here in Texas, it has been a very weird winter indeed. There's no denying that. When I was a kid, I remember snow in this area. I haven't seen snow in a really long time. There has been ice and the occasional white stuff that never sticks to the ground, but nothing that could make a christmas white.
The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable. The interesting thing about that particular story was that they believed it has been past the point of no return for quite some time now and that even if any of the "green people" had been able to make a bigger difference, it wouldn't have changed anything.
And so long as everything costs money, (i.e. that money can be worth more than people) we'll never pull ourselves together enough to find another place to go, let alone get off this rock in any efficient manner.
I think it's time to make peace with whatever the future holds and enjoy the moment like the 80's.
Give these people some credit for competence. Their analysis takes full account of the locations of the monitoring equipment (see reference 8 of the linked article).
You are incorrect on multiple counts.
The direct data sample is actually smaller. It is less than 30 years. Before that there were no weather satellites and ground stations have never covered the entire globe. 200 years from ground stations are available only for 20-30 locations mostly in Western Europe and Eastern USA..
Indirect data sample - Oxygen isotope distribution, CO2 content, methane content, morphology of some algae and plankton, etc spans back nearly a million years now. All of these can be used to get an estimate for a global or local temperature average. The last 10000 are covered with fairly good precision.
So your 200 years claim is bogus. If you are talking about direct data there is considerably less than that. If you are talking about all data, there is a useable sample going back 10000+ years.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Actually, you have a point. (Although I thnink it was flamebait.)
According to Arthur Robinson at http://www.junkscience.com/news/robinson.htm, global warming doesn't exist.
You think there's no such thing as global warming? You should come to New Zealand.
Because of global warming a hole has been developing in the ozone layer where we now have burn times of 10 minutes.
Really, we're having one of hashest winters in the recent X years...
It was -26C here just a few days ago, on the latitude of 50N.
So even though the average temp is increasing, the amplitude is increasing even faster.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Some of them do, some of them don't. Global Warming is a very complicated issue. Definately things are getting warmer, this is know. Definately a natural cycle is contributing to it, this is known. However, what is not so sure is how fast the temperature is rising -- a lot of evidence sugests that it might be rising significantly faster than the natural process can account for.
One thing that is for sure is that human polution is not helping the enviroment any, and has other deletarious effects on human habitability as well. Global Warming is just one of several reasons why reducing carbon emmisions would be a good plan, but because it's easier to argue against than the others it tends to get jumped on and pushed into the limelight as if it was the be all and end all of enviromental issues.
James P. Barrett
You know, I'll bet that New Delhi is experiencing cold air from somewhere that's not supposed to happen. The wind currents of the earth were very complex to begin with and it took us a long time to figure them out. The changes that are starting to occur are going to be even more difficult to predict.
My work here is dung.
Well, one of the (theoretical) effects of global warming is making the weather more extreme. One of the (also theoretical) dangers with global warming is that the Gulf stream will change direction. If that happens, Northern Europe will become MUCH colder.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
You asked to see how the data are averaged, and wanted to see it normalized to variance. Here is the site where those records live. Enjoy.
Climate Research Unit Page
Wasn't that because of the CFC?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It is not a useful site for anything other than to learn what propaganda points Bush and his cronies are pushing this time around. Please see this entry in skeptics dictionary.
The IPCC Report is not really a scientific study, it's a meta study, a study of studies.
The problem with this approach is it tends towards argumentum ad populum which basically means if enough people believe in something it must be true which is not at all how science works.
Wein's displacement law gives Earth's radation peak in the infrared region at about 10 micrometers. H20 makes up 2% (50 times more than CO2) of the amosphere and has a much higher reflectivity in the 10 micromenter region.
As water vapor, H2O has a positive feedback causing further "warming" but when it forms clouds it has a negative "cooling" affect. So there's a least one model than suggests CO2 will cool the Earth. Also, more clouds means more rain which means more plants which means less CO2. So it's quite possible for the Earth to self regulate itself.
I'm not saying CO2 isn't a problem but what the IPCC has done is to take the worse possible senario out of a whole bunch of other options.
Don't forget, CO2 makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere and over 90% of CO2 came from natural, non anthropogenic sources.
There's also some evidence that about 30% of the 8 gigatons of annual CO2 can be accounted for by forest fires
Let's not even get into volcanic activity.
Actually overall ice depth in the Antarctic regions has steadily increased with the exception of one small ice shelf. Scientists have concluded that will all the C02 emissions from cars and factories it is still a microscopic amount. Michael Crichton does some in depth research and wrote a very provoking article upon environmentalism. You can read it here Enivronmentalism as Religion. As for SUV's not selling as well you can blame the increase in gasoline prices as the cause of that. The earth is in a natural warming period, what we have done since the Industrial Revolution has only increased the C02 slightly, which was on the rise before then. We do need to be careful of the resources we have, they are limited, but to say the earth is coming to an end anytime soon is silly. Check the research!
Hmmm. Is it that warm in New Zealand that you bake outside? Or are you talking about the hole in the ozone layer? CFC's and related molecules can act as greenhouse gases, but it is their ability to destory O3 molecules that you seem to be talking about. Greenhouse warming is different from the ozone layer. The world may be getting hotter because of greenhouse gases, but the ozone layer is quietly rebuilding itself as we speak:
_ 3115000/3115707.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid
Now, let's open the bets. Which will sink first: New York or Venice, Italy?
The "ozone hole" is not caused by global warming (which is correctly called Climate Change). It is caused by chemical depletion - the chloroflourocarbons and other chemicals reacting with the ozone. Now, this thinning of ozone does not help the warming effect - as it lets more heat in. Climate change is the net effect of things like ozone depletion and the "greenhouse effect" which is the trapping of carbon dioxide and heat.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If you were to roll a 1000 sided dice, when you first started rolling, you would get record highs and lows almost all of the time. As time wears on and you keep rolling the dice, record highs and lows will keep appearing, just in lower frequency. You could be a 100 rolls in and get a new record. This doesn't mean that the chance of rolling a high or low number has changed. It doesn't imply any sort of trend.
His point is that declaring a "record" high or low doesn't mean anything. You will get record highs and lows all of the time, especially if the system tends to be variable and chaotic.
The real interesting thing to look at are not these "record" highs or lows. Records are good for headlines, but worthless in terms of science. A record high doesn't mean anything. What IS interesting is to look at trends over time and the variablity in this trend over time.
I'll cut myself off here because I really don't know the data all that well to talk much about the trends or their variablity. Just take away from these posts that seeing "record!" high or low, doesn't mean anything. It is the long term trends that really matter.
Definitely obvious, but the reasoning is "trivial". Weather is not a stochastic process, but is linked to variables including (but not limited to) the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. If you look in terms of only records, then your argument is correct. However, if you look at average global temperature rise, you'll note that while the global temperature fluctuates, the overall trend is a steady rise.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
There is a consensus about evolution. There is a consensus that tobacco is carcinogenic. There is a consensus that the world is a sphere. There are a few people here and there who would argue otherwise. Does that make the consensus disreputable?
To be sure, there are (increasingly rare) cases of a solid scientific consensus that is in error, but to bet against the common opinion of the best informed people on a given matter (in other words, against the scientific consensus) is to take very long odds.
mt
Even if you're kidding, there are still too many knumbnills out there that think the ozone layer depletion from CFC use is contributing to global warming, when it's a buildup of greenhouse gasses that does it.
Though note that CFCs are strong greenhouse gasses too...
It would appear that, as usual, Rush doesn't know what he's talking about.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
You really don't know what you are talking about, do you? Heat capacity does not go down by two degrees when temperature goes up by two degrees. At what point is a substance full, then?
Without going any further into how confused your idea of thermodynamics is, the main points about melting the tundra are these: when ice vanishes, the color of the land gets darker, reflecting less solar radiation into space, warming the land, and tending to cause the ice margin to further retreat (or, in a cooling event, advance). So the ice margin is a potent amplifier of trends. Also, when permafrost melts, various forms of carbon taht were sequestered from the fast geochemical cycles are released. More carbon is in play. Assuming we know anything at all about radiative physics (and I concede that you, apparently, don't know much personally) that will also exacerbate the situation.
You are entitled to be confused. That is not a crime. Obviously there are a bunch of people out there going out of their way to confuse you. Still, I fail to see why people feel compelled to share their confusion with everyone else in such a brashly confident way.
mt
They are linked you fool. CFCs are responsible for 15 - 20% of global warming. Apparently you didn't do your googling and have never been to school.
This I'm bemused by. I'm aware that global warming can give rise to local/regional cooling (eg if the thermo-haline transport were to slow or stop), but I'm flummoxed as to how global warming (average surface temperature of the globe rises) leads to global cooling (average surface temperature of the globe falls).
Firstly a nitpick - anatomically modern H. sap arrived on the scene about 150,000 years ago, which was about the time that the last ice age got started - so the first sentence is correct, but not the second (since that ice age most definitely occurred). I think what you're referring to is the recent research (Ruddiman, 2003) which suggests that GHGs released by agricultural societies over the past ~9000 years has countered what would otherwise have been a slight cooling trend in the global climate. The jury's still out on this hypothesis - but if, for the sake of argument, we take it as being correct; what is your basis for accepting that human activity can affect the global climate (by clearing forests for agriculture, draining swamps and so on) and yet other human activity (mining fossil fuels out of the ground, burning them and dumping the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere) isn't having any effect at all? Even though the latter, industrial era, activity is running about twenty times faster than the previous, agricultural, practises when it comes to tonnes CO2/year.
Not sure what you're getting at here - is this the urban heat island thing? UHI is a known factor and has been accounted for (Parker, 2004; Petersen, 2003). The warming trend is still in the instrumental record after UHI has been corrected for.
Correct. There are no such data. Which is why every climate scientist's opinion on the subject that I've seen has said that a next-stop-Venus runaway temperature excursion is impossible under current conditions.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
How did this get modded 'insightful'?
The chief cause of global warming is not the heat produced by humanity (though I'm sure that's a factor), it's the ungodly amounts of carbon we've been dumping into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. This affects the amount of solar energy retained by the planet - this extra energy far outstrips the heat produced by humanity.
Worse, warmer air holds more water, which is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. It's a positive feedback cycle. I continue to be amazed at the supposedly technically adept Slashdotters who don't get that.
If you want to understand climate as a whole and not just weather, you have to look at the geological systems that represent the balance of all the weather effects.
Good examples: alpine glaciers. The extent of an alpine glacier in any given year depends directly on how much snow falls on it (how much it grows) vs. how warm it has been (how fast it melts).
Alpine glaciers throughout the world are in retreat. This means that either less snow that recent historical average is falling on almost every glacier in the world, or almost every glacier in the world is melting faster than its recent historical average. But wait, you can measure precipitation separate from the glacier--you can control for that variable. And when you do so it becomes clear that for most glaciers the issue is a higher melting rate. Alpine glaciers are melting faster than they used to, all over the world. This is a pretty good clue that something is changing in the climate as a whole.
And, as an extra bonus, it's visible to the layman's naked eyes. In fact there have been hundreds of news stories over the last 5 years about the retreat of the glaciers world wide. Or you can just ask mountaineers or local villagers.
Are we causing it? That's a tougher nut to crack. We know of a mechanism that can contribute to greater global atmospheric heat storage--greenhouse gases. We also know that human systems create and store an unnatural amount of heat (car exhaust, AC exhaust, plus the urban "heat island" effect). And we know that global overall temperature is going up.
We'll probably never know the exact percentage of our responsibility vs. sunspots. But the point is we know there's a trend and we know we probably are contributing to it to some degree.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You would think so. I did as well but then I just sent a question to realclimate.org. Here is part of the response I got:
The global energy usage is around 316 quadrillion BTUs (World Bank, 1995 figures) per year. 1 BTU = 1055 Joules. Therefore spread out over the globe the effective forcing (W/m2) is
More explanation: The laws of theromdynamics lead to the conclusion, hat every bit of energy used is converted to heat eventually. So this calculation takes all the energy used by humans (transportation, electricity,3.16 x 10^17 * 1055 / 5.1x10^14 / (3600*24*365) = 0.02 W/m2
this should be compared to 0.25 W/m2 for a solar cycle, or 2.8 W/m2 for well mixed anthopogenic greenhouse gases or, -3 W/m2 for a big volcano, like Pinatubo.
Keep open minded - but not that open your brain falls out...
Well, you have a lot more faith than me, and I'm a scientist too - ocean physics, as it happens. I do believe that somewhere in the next century and change, we will finally shed the industrial era "brute-force and the externalities be damned" approach to industry, and move in earnest to one where inputs and outputs, as well as the marketable product are carefully considered. And I believe that as part of that, we will finally move off of burning fossil fuels, or at least doing so in a way that carbon-loads the atmosphere. Likewise I'm hopeful that we can make mining, manufacturing, etc. a lot less destructive. So in that sense I share your faith.
But there's a lot of work to do, and there's a lot that can happen between here and there. If we manage to let the Artic ice caps melt even 30% of the way off, there would be a huge amount of human misery provoked. All Katrina-style devastation of cities, all the time. That's not a cataclysm, but it's pretty bad. We might well figure out a way to move people and cities inland as the seas rose, but there would be much life, property and well-being lost along the way. The rises in sea level would almost certainly involve catastrophic weather events, and it seems clear that we are now driving the Earth's climate system at far greater intensities than forcings that caused previous events like Ice Ages. So changes could occur pretty fast, and that doesn't bode well for us adapting to them, or developing industries and business practices that deeply internalize the risk of a tragedy of the commons.
The other problem is this. It's clearly important for our current global climate balance to have two cold poles drive ocean circulation, not just one. But if you follow any of the "big amplifier" theories, it's quite possible that we have triggered (or vastly accelerated) a situation where only the Antartic drives ocean circulation. And given how nonlinear the earth's climate is, we may not be able to go back there.
So inaction in the face of anthropogenic climate change does not likely mean the end of the world, but it is nothign to sneeze at. The futurism that you and I espouse should not be mistaken for triumphalism.
Yup... we are having an extremely mild winter here in eastern canada. Pretty much like early spring weather at the end of January. It's damn eerie, really.
No, it wouldn't. This is the Big Number Fallacy. Nukes are big. Planets are big. But the two are not equally big. Planets are many orders of magnitude bigger. Your average volcano releases more energy that one of those nukes, and the amount of energy released on an ongoing basis due to tectonic plates shifting is so much vaster than that that your nukes aren't even worth measuring.
You want numbers? In order to disintegrate the Earth, you have to counter gravity. This is equivalent (if I can trust my figures) to about 1x10^16 megatonnes. The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated was at Bikini Atoll in 1954, and was 13.6 megatonnes, which is rather smaller than 10'000'000'000'000'000.
You say that the bombs' shock waves merely liberate energy already inherent in the Earth's core? Well, if it could happen, it would have --- Earth has been struck with a lot of very big asteroids in its history, and it's still intact. As are all the other planets in the solar system: the asteroid belt always was debris, there's not enough there to form a real planet. It's worth mentioning that on the scales we're talking about, rock flows like liquid. Any big impact will cause a splash, and the result will very quickly reform into a sphere again.
Sorry if I'm seeming rude, but this is something that I've seen a lot and it always irritates me --- I think it stems from people wanting to believe that humankind is a lot more influential that it actually is. On a planetary scale, we have no power whatsoever. We're barely at the stage of being able to affect ecosystems, and that is, quite literally, only just scratching the surface.