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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."
See the "Record Fallacy" at:
numberwatch get with the maths, people...
Yes, we are SURE that global warming will be that big of a problem. So let's all ignore it and continue on as if nothing is going to happen. After all the cost of the loss of planet Earth is nothing compared to the short term loss to the economy because we put in higer standards. If we are wrong, and we are destroying the Earth (the only planet that we know of that can support life) hey we could move to -- uh Mars! Move on nothing to see here.
It is funny. One political party hates the science of global warming, as it contradicts their party line. The other party, though, is just as bad. They don't like the economics of global warming.
Simply put, the economics of global warming solutions are just terrible. You really have to stretch to come up with a cost-benefit that justifies actually doing much about global warming. Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" goes into this in detail, basically demonstrating that beyond a doubt, we can do much, much, much more good for the world by doing things like fighting AIDS or providing clean water to the poor than we can by spending hundreds of billions to put a micro-dent in the projected warming trend. The reason for the cost-benefit results should be obvious if you look at the map in the article. Where is the warming? In "#$"#$ cold places! There are lots of benefits to global warming that offset the costs.
Yes, global warming is happening. What we should do about it is an another matter entirely.
That kind of weather is not normal in that part of India
...based on the records we have, which only go back about a hundred years. You might find that "normal" weather periodically includes the conditions this part of India experienced, but you could only determine that if you could look at more than 1% of the weather data from the past 12,000 years.
The Big News Page
while there are always extremists in any argument, and while models are not perfect, global warming in general and global warming enhanced by human activity are accepted scientific facts.
denying them makes as much sense as denying evolution. oh, wait...
with both global warming and evolution, the only arguments among real scientists are the *details* of the mechanisms, not whether they actually exist or not.
If this is your defination of "crisis" then, for the entire history of the world, we've been in a global "climate crisis".
Look at it this way... there may be local weather that may not be "normal" based on recent data, but there's no such thing as "normal" weather, and despite the active hurricane season this year, there is NOT an increase "catastrophic" weather. When you hear that the temperature on a given day is hotter or colder than average, it means nothing. The temperature has continuously cycled throughout the life of the planet, and there are many different cycles, there are long term and myriads of short term cycles that have all influenced the temperature and therefore the weather.
Some ice caps are melting, most are not, some are actually getting thicker. The ocean is rising; it has been for hundreds of years. The surface of the planet has always been in a continuous state of change. So what is your point?
Before anyone goes off on me, I'm not a fan of pollution, I consider myself an environmentalist, I don't like wasting resources, I drive a car with good fuel economy, I combine trips, I even turn the water off when I'm shaving and brushing my teeth. But I do not believe global warming has been influenced in any significant way by mankind.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
So, the earth is a few billion years old, we'veI suspect the been measuring for a couple hundred, and we can spot a trend?
Very early on in the article they say that the ocean surface temps they are using now only date back to 1982, and before that theyare using sporadic ship measurements. Such a change in sampling technology puts the two sets of data into different categories.
Additionally the use of land based weather stations to come up with the land temperature is perhaps questionable, because an increasing number of those stations are in pockets of development that act as heat islands and so we are losing our ability to track the extent of the heat islands and the temperature outside of them.
In my mind the acurate records will start when we have global satalite temperature tracking, with sampling periods for any given location of no more then an hour. Until then the progresive improvements in our sampling will make it hard to make genuine claims about global weather trends for the last hundred years.
Not to say that the temperature isn't rising, we are just only getting to the point where we have the data to really talk about global temperature averages. That's not to say that we shouldn't do science we just need to be very careful with our data sets and what we do to connect historical data sets with modern ones. And we also need to make sure that we do not assume that a normal earth is a static earth and that we allow for cycles that take much longer then our life time.
Here's a third "fact":
You fundamentally misunderstand science.
There is no such thing as an "accepted truth" in science. Not evolution, not even the phenomenon or explanation gravity are "truths"
Science has two things: data and theory.
You collect data, and you compose theories to explain that data. The more data that fits a theory, the more likely a theory is to represent the underlying dynamics of the physical world. Think of theories as data compression. You are compressing many data points into a simple anecdotal explanation that is easily remembered. The role of theories is to allow we humans, with our limited intellectual capacity to understand more and more of the world by constructing ever more elegant and compact anecdotal descriptions of the data we observe around us.
At no point, ever, does a theory graduate to "truth" status. Truth is something we will never know and every scientist that is true to the discipline understands this.
The common perception of science is that there is some ladder on which there's some arrangement of lemmas, hypotheses, theories and laws, and ideas graduate from one to the next. This is borne out of mathematics I think.... but in math there is "truth". The set of axioms that control the toy world you have defined is knowable.
Not so in the real world. There's theory, and data, and naught else.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=180
You are forgetting that at some point, theories start having practical consequences. You seem to want to argue that science is just one big theoretical head game that has no bearing on real life existence. While your specious argument is true---that there is no such thing as absolute truth---you ignores the simple fact that we can apply usually apply well-examined and tested theories to reality and can use them to explain and predict phenomena around us.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Don't forget that the earth is not a closed system.
dEnergy = EnergyGain + EnergyReleased - EnergyLoss
EnergyGain would be the energy absorbed from sunlight. EnergyReleased would be energy that is already on the planet is released by some process (eg burning fossil fuels). EnergyLoss would be the heat radiated out into space.
EnergyLoss has supposedly been decreasing because of greenhouse gasses - CO2 inhibits the radiation of heat off of the planet.
EnergyGain may also be decreasing from the effects of pollution, known as Global Dimming.
EnergyReleased has probably been increasing, as the rate of energy production increases to meet demands. When energy is produced from stored sources such as fossil and nuclear fuels, it ends up as heat in the environment. However, we are gradually running out of stored energy sources... so optimistically this trend can't continue forever.
All someone has to do is crunch the numbers and figure out if there is a net increase or decrease in atmospheric energy.
=Smidge=
Is the planet warming? Yes. Are humans responsible? We don't know for sure (exluding typical scientific uncertainty). So what is wrong? Well, the RATE at which the planet is alarming. Is there only 150 years of data? No. Proxy data of tree-rings, ice cores, geologic samples provide a very robust dataset for comparison. It is good stuff, use it! So, I don't need to stop polluting yet? Well no one is telling you to stop (especially this administration), but do you honestly think polluting less is a bad thing?
As an aside (read: not in response to you, but others), I think that preserving the planet as best we can is our duty as (arguably) intelligent creatures. But I also think that there's a big difference between 'preservation' and natural states. What we want, in theory, is for the earth to continue as if we had no impact. That's NOT preservation. Change is the only constant, and if we're to accept our roles as 'brothers and sisters of our planet's other inhabitants' then we have to accept that things may change, and not always for the better.
But I absolutely agree that our impact needs to be minimized, and that global warming IS occuring. I just don't think we know what the causes are, or how they fit into the natural scheme of cooling and warming cycles. However, I'd prefer that my kids could enjoy swimming and, oh I dunno, BREATHING without decreasing their lifespan due to chemical pollutants. But demonizing industry is no better than demonizing eco-freaks.
Frankly, the way that we (collectively) were doing things 100 years ago, we COULD have gone on almost incessently WITHOUT causing too much damage to the earth. Take stripmining for instance. Horrible stuff, to be sure. But if it was all men with picks and shovels, our impact would be minimal. What we're grappling with now is the RECENT understanding that our technology gives us the potential for widespread destruction and, as a world and an economy, we're trying to deal with that. You've got people at GE spending BILLIONS of dollars to look into alternative energy, and people complain that it's not going fast enough. These things take time, and we should all be reasonable. This is humanity's first and (hopefully, but not necessarily) last time grappling with problems of impact. Everyone's learning along the way, and no one has definitive answers. That's all I'm saying.
The evidence is a little more compelling than that. Greenhouse gases, which are closely linked with global temperature, are at the highest levels they've been at for the last 650,000 years.
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I just wish there would be more science in the discussion rather than "Global Warming is happening, we need to act NOW!!!"
There is pleanty of science it is just being ignored and replaced by annecdotes and references to other times in the earths past the weather has changed.
The fact is that greenhouse gasses causes a greenhouse effect, the question is, how significant is that effect?
The fact is that the Earths average temperature is rising, the question is why?