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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."
HOT HOT HOT. OK, I know it is not fun to poke fun at the global warming, but it was 65 F in the middle iof January in Baltimore, MD, USA and I was wearing shorts and a tee and I loved it. Use more hairspray Jersey!
Yeah, right.
Now where did that ice cap go?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
...this winter has been mild, but the start of 2005 was pretty cold IIRC. Around New Years, I always see those chuckleheads at football games in California without their shirts on and I always think "We need more greenhouse gases up here"
and continue to pollute?
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone... we're obviously dealing with the direct effects of global warming that have been talked about forever. Over the past few years, we've had more severe weather (hurricanes), higher average temperature, melting ice (Ross ice shelf). Perhaps the most telling sign is the slump in SUV sales (Ford cuts jobs)... are people finally getting the point? I hope so!
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I am sure the Russians wish a little global warming would go their way considering they have reached record lows as of late.
In the UK we were warned this would be the coldest winter in (some large number) years. I know that the loss of the gulf stream would make summers hotter and winters colder here (the gulf stream having a mediating effect) but it does go head to head against the 'hottest year since...' saga
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
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.
Scientists didn't know, so they got more data and analysed the data they had
more carefully so that they got closer to knowing. While a few "respected scientists" can be found to hold out against just about anything,
virtually any competent authority will now agree that there is accelerating warming over the last 100-200 years
which does not look like part of any of the cycles we can see in the climatic record.
This srticle is not old. Journals would not publish it if there were. There is new data, and more careful analysis, and yes, it still supports the view that anomalous warming is occurring.
See the "Record Fallacy" at:
numberwatch get with the maths, people...
What, as opposed to Intelligent Design?
Hey, if the lunatics on one side of the field can have their wacky theories, the lunatics on the other side are welcome to theirs as well!
At least the Global Warming freaks aren't trying to legislate that it be taught in classrooms!!!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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).
Those who are "hardcore" about not believing in Global Warming will continue to do so long after Manhattan is underwater. (They'll say "it's part of a natural cycle! Nothing we did!")
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Seriously, take the time to do some real reading.
Are you a troll or just ignorant (I bet the former)? Global warming does have the word warm in it, but the idea is not that everywhere is going to get hotter; weather is going to get weird. That kind of weather is not normal in that part of India - it adds to the picture of the global climate in crisis, not detracts from it.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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.
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.
The Hadean Eon were the hottest years of the Earth. It is theorized that it was over 1000 degrees Celsius in surface temperature.
Paris Hilton was quoted as saying, "That's hot!"
Incidentally no SUVs, chemical plants, aerosol cans or overclocked processors were found at the scene.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Also, even more than temperature averages, I'd like to see what the standard deviation of temperatures over history is, and how we compare to that. That is the real measure of what's going on, not if we're "higher than average" or whatever.
Of course, I don't at all think that the climate isn't changing, and I don't think that human activity doesn't affect it. I think, though, panic or zealotry is not an appropriate response to the change. I don't even think huge global programs are the proper response: I think the correct thing is a proper response from everyone on the smallest level possible and the large problems will sort themselves out.
Remember, the problem isn't so much the change in temperature, but the resulting change in geographic distribution of certain things like arable land, habitable land, disease, etc. Basically we will need some combination of migration, new construction, etc. to mitigate the changing environment. I don't think any one of those things is necessarily bad. The problem is, humans typically don't handle change well and will just end up fighting each other.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
that we do not understand the relationship between temperature, water vapor and air movements (aka weather) at all... :o)
After reading this poster's tag-line I did wonder, but then I re-read what he's saying and it does seem he wants this comment taken at face value.
Is it possible that he could have overlooked that climate change in our planet's history did not involve quite the same situation as we have today with the human levels of interference in the natural eco-systems ?
Leaving aside the tendency for the media to over-state, over-dramatise and over-simplify all issues surely when large numbers of far more sobre, intelligent and conscientious members of the global scientific community consider a problem is serious enough for research, debate and recommendations for global action, surely we should listen to them ?
Perhaps the poster has already studied the scientific data and drawn his own conclusions but since science is built on small advances in knowledge (with occasional larger ones) it is surely naive to totally dismiss a field of study that is still so active ?
I could hazard a guess that the poster is from the US, which would be based on a suspicion that information circulating in mainstream media in that part of the world might be unduly influenced by interested parties in energy or government, but I don't want to personalise this in any way. I just think it is naive, dangerous and frankly irresponsible to dismiss this debate while we're still collecting scientific data
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.
Anyone heard what they predict for this year? 66 degrees in NYC in the middle of January _isn't_ normal.....
At the same time, the fact that many people can use absolutely any piece of climatological data (like record cold, as you just did) to point to global warming doesn't really help the case.
I really CANNOT believe that 2005 is the record hottest year. This is one where the propagandists really screwed up.. Maybe if they said last year was the hottest they'd get away with it.. It's like they took a somewhat-normal year of weather (though on the slightly cold side) and called it the hottest on record.
People are dying in Moscow because of the near-record cold this year.. (read an article) Steamboat Springs, CO had record snowfall this year (was there for skiing).. Gainesville, FL is a LOT colder this year than last year (live here)..
Ya, I know.. weather is not dependent on just three locations.. But, for every article I can find that says this is the hottest year on record (from liberal media), I can find articles saying this is a fairly cold year (from conservative media)..
The issue is so political now that one has to just choose what to believe.. Unless you want to believe everything you hear - then this would be the hottest and coldest and average year on record at the same time.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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
Know what else was missing? Humans. We don't like those kind of temperatures very much so even if Earth will survive global warming, we might not.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Anthropogenic Climate Change is an accepted truth.
... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"
/. is probably going to become very heated with lots of trolls like yours. There is not a debate in scientific circles.
reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities
It may delight you to try and slander those who accept ACC as valid. Hell, this "debate" on
The ID "situation" on the other hand, is not a debate either. In both cases, the Theocratic and Plutocratic right are sowing FUD to influence the masses and solidify their positions. This idea is probably far outside your worldview, and will cause you to deride and mock me. Im no longer willing to expend the energy to try and convince "your type" nor am I going to apologize for not using language that coddles you.
Here are two facts:
There is no God. Sorry, you'll have to accept death.
Humanity is changing the atmosphere and climate. Sorry, you'll have to accept your actions.
Now, bring on the wacky lunatic insults.
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.
I prefer the term "Global Climate Change" to "Global Warming" - if everywhere was just getting a bit warmer we could cope, no bother at all (as long as it didn't happen too fast) - we would just change what crops we grew where, etc.
It's the fact that the climate is changing (and has always been changing, to and from ice ages and so on) that is the issue. Whether or not our activities are causing the change, we need to plan on how to survive the changes.
And they might well be right. You can never conclusively prove otherwise.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
to the acid rain scare of the 80s? I remember as a kid, the media covered acid rain like it was gonna eat your children or something, geesh
well for the data that is availible, lets see
1. before was colder
2. now its warmer
Happy ? I cleared it up for you.
"Global warming does have the word warm in it, but the idea is not that everywhere is going to get hotter; weather is going to get weird. That kind of weather is not normal in that part of India - it adds to the picture of the global climate in crisis, not detracts from it."
Correct though it says 70 years ago the winter in that region was like this again. So this doesn't exactly support the part where the "weather is getting weird". Just apparently there are some peaks every X years in either direction. Maybe they're totally natural.
While I believe human actions affect the global climate, taking the warmest and coldest temperatures from various regions and turning on the alarms is hardly scientific proof of anything.
Well I'm colder than I was a few months ago! I don't know where they are getting their data from but it's obviously biased.
Well, the data shows that people already know quite well how to produce global warning and are already doing it, so there's no point in teaching them how to do it in a seminar.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
It's always wonderful to see that some of the slashdot-readers are so much smarter than people that actually do research in the area. While there among researchers, that has spent years working in the field, are close to a consensus on the existence of global warming and the man made causes of it, the supreme slashdoters can without reading any peer reviewed journals on the subject at all, judge the results as bogus, the data as flawed and the hypotheses as false. Some even come up with new ideas that I'm sure no one has ever thought about before. Some slashdoters have even made their own much more reliable data collection, in the style of "it's really cold here right now". Impressive!
This message brought to you by ExxonMobil.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
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
Saayyyyy, you're the kind of person that would stay in a burning house to see what colors the flames are, aren't you?
feh. stuff.
Wasn't that because of the CFC?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I remember the coldest years of the century back in the 1970s. Record low temps, record snowfall. No wonder it was so easy back then to agree with the idea of Global Cooling.
I just wish there would be more science in the discussion rather than "Global Warming is happening, we need to act NOW!!!"
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Know what else was missing? Humans.
I agree, the Earth is warming and humans are most likely exacerbating the problem. It is unfortunate that people deny that Global Warming is happening when most of the world's top scientists say that it is. As an earlier post noted, it may be too late for humans to actually do anything about in the short term. Maybe in the long term we will be more Earth-friendly, that is if were are still around to make that choice.
But if there ever was a post deserving 'Flamebait' I guess it is my post about the time in geologic history when Earth almost on fire.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So how much trust to do you have in "world wide" temperature monitoring prior to the invention of the computer, telephone and satelites to measure the thermal IR emmission from space?
I just think it is naive, dangerous and frankly irresponsible to dismiss this debate while we're still collecting scientific data.
I agree with your comment. The problem here is that the side that says global warming is real and is caused by mankind's actions state that it is a fact that mankind caused it. They don't need any more data. Anyone who says we're not sure that it is caused by mankind are tagged as flamebait or trolls. The sun is at the height of a twenty year cycle. Data has shown that Mars is also experiencing global warming. The Earth has undergone normal rises and falls in global temperatures throughout history. No, we shouldn't dismiss global warming as not real or as not caused by man. We also shouldn't say that we know for a fact that it IS caused by man. We don't know. My own opinion on this is that Yes, global warming is happening. I also believe that it is a natural phenomenon wherein man plays a very minor role. I believe that there is nothing mankind can do to stop it but I believe it will reverse itself on a relatively short (on a geologic scale) period of time. Those who can't adapt to the changing world will die off. Those who can will thrive. Evolution in action.
Two things to note. One is my use of "I believe". I could be wrong. It seems most people out there on both sides refuse to use "I believe". They act as if their side knows all the facts on the matter. They don't. Second, queue all those people saying "Data shows the temperature is increasing more rapidly than at any time in history." My only reply is just how accurate are your temperature readings in the past? I'd bet no where near as accurate as those currently in use. Can you PROVE that there wasn't a 200-year blip with a fast increase in temperatures over 40,000 (or millions of) years ago?
But why is the rum gone?
This just in, higher ice cream sales per day linked to more water skiing accidents.
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?
However, if I lived in London, New York, or Bangladesh, I would be rather more concerned for the long term. It's true that clean drinking water and medicines will benefit many people, but the effects of flooding on migration, population disruption and interruption to trade will start off wars. In fact, perhaps I should be worried. I will probably need a few RPGs and machine guns to stop those displaced Londoners coming and stealing my house.
Pining for the fjords
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.
This is just fear mongering. The world might very well have shifted its weather equilibrium. We might see some drastic weather changes. Populations might be displaced and poor nations might experience famines and other natural disasters. Is the world going to become "uninhabitable"? No.
Nature doesn't give a shit what we do. We don't have it in our capacity to make this world uninhabitable. Even if we put our entire collective effort into killing every last creature alive, we would fail. Nature is far too resilient and our powers are far too minuscule to do anything more then weed out the least adaptable species in the most fragile environments. Yes, we might have it in our power to kill off all the cute Koalas. We don't have the power to kill off all the cockroaches, rats, rabbits, or begin to even make a dent in most insect populations. We would kill off ourselves long before killing them.
Outside of pseudo religious environmentalism, we worry about global warming for the effects it has on humanity. Global warming can not kludge the Earth into a position where it is no longer habitable for humans. Even in our most primitive hunter and gatherer state, we are too adaptable and able to handle to wide of a range of temperatures and climates. Throw technology into the mix, and the thought of exterminating humans through global warming is laughable.
The real danger of global warming are the economic dangers, especially economic dangers that can translate directly into lost lives. When the climate suddenly shifts over a poor African nation, people die. They can't change their farming techniques quick enough. Environmental problems compound to give deforestation and soil erosion. Natural disasters can kill in the hundreds of thousands when ravaging an area with poor building, poor warning systems, and few resources to pick up the pieces.
First world nations should worry about global warming if for no other then reason then the selfish reason that they are expensive. Katrinas can't make a dent in the population by killing people. They are however very costly to pick up afterwards. They force us to build more weather resistant structures which in turn cost more. Farmers are forced to change what they grow in an potentially expensive proposition. First world nations are not going to starve, but they are going to feel more then an economic prick if the climate changes drastically. Perhaps even more worrisome for first world nations is the economic and political instability that can spread in the poorer nations of the world. The world doesn't need more dictators, suicidal religious fanatics, and other such monstrosities, but the political and economic stability that climate change can bring is a perfect spawning grown for such dangers.
My point? People need to take climate change seriously without frothing at the mouth and declaring humanity doomed. Humanity isn't doomed, but it does have challenges facing it. While failure to meet these challenges might not spell doom, they can spell lost life and server economic consequences. We need to look at climate change with a calm and objective view of the real dangers and risks.
SUV slams are the darling of the Global Warming excuses. The reality is that SUV referrs to all Truck type vehicles with less strick emissions, which includes the family van and those monster trucks that seat 2.5 adults. My 4 wheel drive, outfitted with studded snow tires gets better gas milage than most vans and town cars, plus has the added benifit of being able to get me and my family around for the half of the year that we have snow and ice conditions. Remember that States and Towns are spending LESS on winter maintenance of roads than 20 years ago. And before you southern folk get to uppity, my heating cost are less than your air conditioning cost to boot. Blame the auto manufacturers, Ford and C*ysler for not offering me the vehicle that I want, all wheel drive with good gas milage. Blame Washington for promoting highway travel rather than mass transit. Blame corporate greed for me having to commute three hours a day in an SUV made in Japan that has 200K miles. Blame me for living.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
As noted in my post above, the costs of global warming, as projected, are simply not that great, and are largely offset by benefits. See Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" for more data than you can handle on the matter.
Simply put, "doing something" about global warming is exceptionally costly, and produces few benefits. If you want to save the world, do something far more productive like removing arsenic from Bangladeshi well-water. You can save lots of lives for little money.
In any case, I think the long-range projections are bunk. They are underestimating how quickly our technology is going to change to renewables in the coming decades - even without any government-mandated global warming panic. Wind is already competitive with coal in many places. It won't be long before it is cheaper. How long after that will it take "greedy" corporations to switch wholesale? In the meantime, petro prices are going up up and up.
Well, there might be some kind of very long cycle we are unaware of, but we do have a pretty good map of global temperature variations for most of the last million years (from antarctic ice cores) and it doesn't show anything like this as part of any of the natural cycles that show up in it.
It may be cheaper to reduce the speed or extent of climate change than to let it happen and adapt to it.
You are quite right, but please don't call me Shirley.
All the hotair and the inevitable flames this article will generate can only add to the problem. Won't someone think of the children?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
The Earth's climate is a chaotic system that strives to achieve balance. Continually modifying the atmosphere so that it has properties that cause it to hold more heat means that as balance is being achieved, things will likely be out of sync. Record highs in cold places and record lows in warm places makes so much more sense when thinking about it that way. As does record number of hurricanes.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. By modifying the atmosphere to hold more heat, it HAS to go somewhere. Will it cause an 80 degree day in Siberia in the dead of winter or cause a record number of hurricanes in the gulf? Nobody knows, but as more and more heat gets added to the equation, you can bet that the AVERAGE temperature will indeed go up as we see it doing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_ 400kyr-2.png
In the words of George Carlin: "The planet is fine, but the people are fucked."
Shall we devote our resources to stopping that ?
The answer is, of course not.
Energy waste is bad for one simple reason, it is wasteful.
Let's devote our energy to reducing energy waste. Let's tighten up the efficiency regulations of automobiles so that SUV's aren't a 'loop-hole' (http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/gu est_commentary/lynch-cafe-standard-insanity.htm) in the CAFE standards. Let's stop producing so much light pollution (url:httpwwwdarkskyorg>)that I can no longer make out the Milky Way from my back garden in a surburb of a small mid-western city . Let's insist that fuck-brains who choose to buy Harley Davidson motorcycles aren't buying them because they make A LOT OF NOISE (http://www.noisefree.org/motorcycles/loudpipes.ht ml), and really only want to look macho http://www.havasy.net/images/bike/chapsleather01_t humbnail.jpg!
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.
Call me a skeptic, it doesn't bother me.
I'm open to believing in _human caused_ global warming. But I want to see what the year to year output of the Sun has been.
Remember that story last year about the ice caps on Mars shrinking? It was on slashdot. Output from stars is not static.
Just humor me before we start pronouncing doom and gloom.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
lot more concerned about the arsenic in my drinking water than a three-inch rise in sea levels over the next hundred years, or one extra typhoon every ten.
Actually, it is not even clear that sea levels would rise. Global warming may cause more snow to fall in the interior of the Antartic, deepening the ice in the middle as the stuff on the edge melts. As of now, there is only scant evidence of any sea level rise. Whatever rise there will be, it will be slow and not an insurmountable problem. It definitely isn't going to cause mass migrations and wars.
I agree - good book. He backs up his research with an impressive bibliography at the end of the book.
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.
How much of your "weird weather" is due to normal variability in weather? Where I live, there have been years with zero snow accumulation and years with major record-setting blizzards. Sometimes there are droughts and sometimes the floods wash out bridges. There's an occasional tornado or tropical storm left over from a hurricane. It's hard to detect trends when there is so much normal variability in the weather.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
"warming is simply bad science, "
What?? Bad science by some of the most respected climate and
weather experts in the world? Who says bad science? One of very
small minority of naysaying ostritches in the pay of
the oil companies no doubt! Unless of course you're some sort of
climate expert yourself and can give us the real inside story....
Well, we're waiting...
I read it.
They do not insist that the lack of monitoring equipment 100 years ago doesn't make a difference, just that they don't believe that it does.
They do take "full account" of the lack of monitoring stations, like you say. In fact, they explain that this is an area of their analysis that can have considerable error.
They also explain that their very high arctic temperatures are basically estimates from a computer model, and that the high arctic estimates are pretty much what makes 2005 such a hot year on average.
So, I can still give them credit for competence, and disgree with the level of certainty of some of their (and others') statements.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this 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.
True, but when start seeing record rainfall here, record heatwave there, coldest winter over there, record amount of hurricanes elsewhere not stop you cannot help but to start to see patterns and draw some conculsions
I am a scientist myself, and I would say it is just the opposite. It is happening, something we should be concerned about, but far from anything to panic about. I doubt in 2106 we will be pumping much C02 into the atmosphere at all, actually. Hell, we might even be intentionally pumping it back out. I can think of some pretty easy ways to do it, such as pumping biodiesel back into the empty wells.
In all likelyhood, we will get a 2-3F rise in temperatures over the next hundred years, and then it will level off as our emissions fall to nil or even go negative.
Yes, because all we are doing to monitor the temperature is just take it once a year at a random time and random location... Genius.
"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."
Here's an interesting point. The fact that temperature and other characteristics of Earth's climate are cyclical suggests that the effects of higher-than-average temperatures at one point in time result in lower-than-average temperatures at a later point in time. I.e. global heating is not a run-away effect like some people suggest, but a cyclical effect that will self-correct and cause cooling later on (which in turn will cause heating again, as the cycle continues).
Nature is full of such cyclical, non-linear systems. An over-abundance of wolves one year depletes the food supply (e.g. deer) with starvation resulting and the next year there are fewer wolves than normal, so the deer multiply and thrive. Rinse and repeat.
Climate cycles are still poorly understood. Scientists don't know all the reasons that warm temperatures over one period of time cause cooling at a later time.
If human civilization is indeed influencing the cycles, we might just be making the cycles more extreme, or shorter.
In terms of humanity's effect on the environment, there are worse problems (in my opinion) than global warming.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!
it's not global warming. everyone is just wearing thicker clothes.
Eh? Most of the respected scientists and rational thinkers do believe that there is climate change being caused by human activity. I mean, it's logical. How do you pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - without causing some atmospheric effects?
The religious thinkers and propagandists are the ones who say we shouldn't be thinking about this. Usually they are driven by massive money interests, like the oil companies. It's hard to find someone who doesn't take climate change seriously who is not a shill or misinformed.
... and then they built the supercollider.
A few points that are always ignored by the global warming will kill us all crowd:
There are abnormal patterns in today's patterns (not a single one of which has never been recorded before, I might add) and this causes lots and lots of people to suddenly know and understand exactly what the cause is, and who to blame. India is getting abnormally cold temperatures - as CNN puts it, the current temperatures are the coldest in 70 years. If, as you claim, today's really cold temperatures are the blame of "global warming", then what caused the cold temperatures 70 years ago? Or are the climate boogeymen SO horrible that they are setting up kind of a resonant wave of evil that travels back in time and makes the land of the elephants go brrrr?
If greenhouse gas and ONLY greenhouse gas causes India to go brrrrr, what caused the cold snap 70 years ago? If something ELSE caused the cold back then, then how do you KNOW that the same mechanism (which has yet to be identified other than 'sometimes weather does stuff') isn't doing it again today?
The global warming crowd warns that Europe is going to get cold because (and ONLY because) of the greenhouse gasses, yet can't explain all of those old paintings of ice skaters.
Weather fluxuates. Always has. Always will. To claim that every -previous- shift in climate was completely natural but THIS one is caused by humans... well, I'm probably just wasting my breath.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Also add:
-3. before it was colder
-2. before it was warmer
-1. before before it was colder
0. before it was warmer
yeah, and there's a simple solution to that problem... Just send a crapload of Sharper Image Ionic Breezes into the upper atmosphere and run them for a few days.
Yeah, he has a doctorate. But what has he done lately but write 10-grade-reading-level airport novels and Television Serials? Please.
Blar.
Oh really? What's this unshakeable scientific rule that says that there is a category of scientific questions that can never be proved, and Global Warming by human causes is one of them?
You also realize that CO2 is the major minor greenhouse gas. Water vapor is by far the most significant contributor to the greenhouse effect.
It has been for a long time now.
Scream and run around with your hands in the air everyday.
Tune into Chicken Little News Network to see what you should react to next.
Find a scapegoat amongst your political enemies, usually one man will do.
Complain about the price of gas and global warming in the same sentence.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
That's brilliant. Why is this a Score:0?
Also if we wouldn't have pulled out of kyoto, Osama Bin Laden wouldn't have attacked us because we wouldn't have "thumbed our noses at the world."
Ever notice that, no matter what side of the Global warming "Debate" you're on, it's always claimed that the vast majority of Scientists support your position?
Believing in magic I was directed to tis ...
EPA
/.er.
In short, scientists think rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are contributing to global warming, as would be expected; but to what extent is difficult to determine at the present time.
As atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases continue to rise, scientists estimate average global temperatures will continue to rise as a result. By how much and how fast remain uncertain. IPCC projects further global warming of 2.2-10F (1.4-5.8C) by the year 2100. This range results from uncertainties in greenhouse gas emissions, the possible cooling effects of atmospheric particles such as sulfates, and the climate's response to changes in the atmosphere.
The IPCC states that even the low end of this warming projection "would probably be greater than any seen in the last 10,000 years, but the actual annual to decadal changes would include considerable natural variability."
Which also implicitely gives a hint to the average scientific "advancedness" of the average
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Actually, the phrase Global Warming actually means Sudden Dramatic Global Climate Change, it's just easier to say.
A larger sample ought to smooth out statistical variation so one would expect better coverage to reduce spikes if there were no systematic changes to record.
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.
Although this doesn;t prove a global trend it is what you asked for. http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm
Carbon emissions are only part of the problem, in fact, they're only a fraction of the problem. There are far nastier gasses vented by industralizing societies that the US no longer puts out that other nations still belch into the air in great quantity. One of the reasons that Bush didn't sign onto the Kyoto Accords was because the accords did little to nothing to curtail non-carbon emissions.
When dealing with anything in the media (especially on C-SPAN :-), you have to think about the agenda of the person or group behind it. What do they have to gain by saying it, and why is it being reported?
That's not to say that the world isn't getting warmer. The sky may or may not be falling. It's just that NPR and its sources definitely have an agenda, which includes making you believe that the sky is falling.
There's nothing magical about something frozen that somehow makes it a better heat sink than something that's not frozen. A large body of frozen land at -1C has 2 degrees more capacity than one at 1C, no more, no less. The local ecosystem's going to be different, but not its ability to absorb heat. Its water content is a different matter, but it's an open question whether formerly permafrosted areas will be wetter or drier after they melt.
What's more, the Earth as a whole is primarily cooled by radiation from deserts at night, not by heat absorption in permafrost. Winds from the frozen polar areas do cool the ones in lower latitudes, but it's primarily winds at 40,000 feet. They don't know if the land below is frozen or not.
Europe went through a "Dark Ages" period, in part because it was too damn cold for about 1000 years. It might be we're still coming out of that.
Or maybe the whole thing is because Americans are all driving SUVs instead of Jettas. I don't know. I drive a Jetta.
In other words, don't jump off a bridge. Just do your part to make it better, or at least not to make it worse.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Last week in Wisconsin, the weather *was* really nice.
For April.
Admit it, you went to a highschool that had to teach creationism, didn't you?
Or you were stoned in class.
Tell me you didn't actually go to a real science class, actually pay attention, and you still just don't get it?
Global warming isn't a theory. Its an observed fact. There is ZERO question in ANY scientists mind about that. The entire argument is about the cause of the warming. Now, joe ignorant six pack things "global warming" means the whole planet ought to be warmer, and the eight inches of snow he just got proves its not, but joe six pack doesn't understand what adding thermal energy to a system does.
You hope the media stops ushering in the concept that the planet is in distress? Shit, I hope our lousy pathetic schools stop turning out people so void of critical thinking abilities and so lacking in even rudamentary knowledge about how science works.
Don't miss slides 31 and 32.
mt
correct me if i'm wrong, but hasn't the globe been on a warming trend since...oh, i don't know... THE ICE AGES?
Here's an interesting point. The fact that temperature and other characteristics of Earth's climate are cyclical suggests that the effects of higher-than-average temperatures at one point in time result in lower-than-average temperatures at a later point in time. I.e. global heating is not a run-away effect like some people suggest, but a cyclical effect that will self-correct and cause cooling later on (which in turn will cause heating again, as the cycle continues).
Indeed, wasn't the scare some 60 years ago "global cooling"?
x = x + ++x;
reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"
Whow... that must be the ugliest link I ever saw!
Dependency hell? =>
Yes, they are. There are also situations where those interferences kill off whole ecosystems. The main difference between termites or beavers and their constructions and human interference is the impact. In the most cases for each termite mound and for each beaver dam, there are hundreds of square miles without mounds and dams. Human interference is felt at global level, and it is only comparable in impact with the interference chlorophylic plants have to the atmosphere: Turning an atmosphere that is supposed to consist mainly of N2 and CO2 (80:20) into an atmosphere consisting mainly of N2 and O2 (80:20) by taking out about 99,9% of the world's CO2.
If we killed off all chlorophylic plants on earth at once, the level of CO2 would return to 'natural' levels within weeks. Oxygene is reacting with about everything on earth because it is such a strong agence.
TFA is about "Global Temperature Trends" and "Mean"
That humans can do anything to affect global warming is about as untested as theories can possibly get.
The GGP is arguing, as someone else has pointed out, from a point of consensus as truth. That's about as specious as arguments get.
I'm telling ya, the next ice age is coming!
There is no real proof of this global warming thing you are talking about, we have no data to compare our current condition to. Who knows, the earth could have had a warming up right before the first ice age.
Sure the exhaust-gases we produce can't be that good, and if Bush signs the Kyoto agreement, that would help a lot. But nature is known for its unpredictability, and climate changes are part of nature, that is a fact. In the past there have been much more drastic climate changes, and up to now none of which was because of human wrong-doing.
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
I suspect the important thing here is to also turn off the water when you're not shaving and brushing your teeth.
Troc.
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
You set the strawman up beautifully, but you forgot to knock him down. In the future, please finish the invalid rhetorical devices you start.
Thank you,
The Committee for Ensuring Stupidity in Argumentation
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"Now, bring on the wacky lunatic insults."
/. readers wish to read - and also flattering yourself.
Or, bring on the Score:5, Insightful for bravely posting what the overwhelming majority of
Scientists know that the real reason 2005 was the hottest year on record is because in that year Chuck Norris did more roundhouse kicks than in any previous year. The power behind one Chuck Norris roundhouse kick (symbol: CNRHK) is equal to several atomic bombs.
In a related story, Chuck Norris believes in the sun god. Once a year a child is selected to be thrown into the sun -- by Chuck Norris....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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=
Attacking the messenger rather than the message, eh?
Weather experts? This isn't about weather, this is about climate. And by not knowing the difference you have revealed your ignorance of the topic. All the world's climate scientists are now in agreement that global warming by human influence is real, with the exception of a handful that are being paid by the oil industry.
The fact is, no one knows.
Claims that CO2 fluctuation is the culprit are unsubstantiated. Show me a climate model that can model clouds accurately. You can't do it because no one has solved that problem. How about solar luminosity? Forget it, it's treated as a constant, or at best, a simple approximation of past solar output. 99.9% of the solar system's mass and we haven't a clue as to how hot the sun will be a year from now. All we can do is guess. And yet, climatologists are confident that their models which can't accurately model major components of the earth's climate can accurately forecast 50 years out. It's bull, pure and simple.
Weather is a chaotics system. Global warming is pumping more energy into a chaotic system. You will get varied and unpredictable results. The only certainty is that things won't stay the same. Unfortunately the majority of the economies and lifestyles on earth are based on climates in an area staying about the same.
Please explain to me why the martian polar ice caps have been melting and receeding at a brisk pace over the past 3 yrs of their being monitored? is this due to global warming?
The facts seem pretty clear to me:
1. We know CO2 levels are rising (and we know human activities add CO2 to the atmosphere)
2. We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas. (However, water vapor is actually the number one greenhouse gas, followed by CO2.)
3. We know the greenhouse effect warms our planet. (Without it the average temperature would be -18C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_Effect)
So how can we not be concerned about global warming? You may be able to argue that the effects won't be that bad or that humans simply aren't creating enough CO2 to cause problems (not sure if I'd agree with you on either point) but it just doesn't seem logical to assert we're having no affect on the environment.
I have a (mild) background in statistical analysis, and I can tell you that looking at the last 100-150 years of weather data and concluding crisis is not very sound. the earth's been around for 4 billions years, and with that domain, looking at 100 years and making conclusions is like looking at a handful of sand and concluding beach erosion. We know from geology that the climate goes through large cycles, and the last 100 years is only a small part of whatever cycle we're in. I'm not refuting that air pollution could be impacting the climate and atmosphere, I'm just refuting that looking at our very small sample of historical data is not a sound basis for analysis.
There is an undeniable fact here: we've taken billions and billions of carbon from the ground and put it into the atmosphere by burning it. Start with that. We can argue about what effect the introduction of all this carbon into the atmosphere has had and will have, but don't just stick your head in the ground and claim that it has no effect because Moscow was cold today.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
well, sorry. i am just not as expirienced in stupidity in argumentation as you are.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
India is still developing.. they are not burning the fossil fuels like the US right now.. (rolleyes)
I hate the summer because of the heat. Now my winter has been stolen. Its crazy 50-60F weather in January. Where did the snow and ice go? If winter is this hot imagine the hell we are in for come July & August
Climate change is so much fun to argue about, because people have already concluded everything, so now they just look to support their positions. Anything contradictory is greeted in Pee Wee Herman fashion - fingers in ears, screaming "La la la" over and over.
I have no point, though. I'll post this just to add to the noise.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Actually the measured natural forcings would indicate that the earth should be cooling slowly, as it has been doing for the past 6K years.Admittedly there are some shallow century scale wobbles, not very well understood, that might be in a warming phase superimposed. However, these might also be in a cooling phase. In any case they are too small to account for what we are seeing.
So it is a bit more likely than not that over 100% of the observed warming is anthropogenic. We don't say this to the public very much, as they would find it confusing.
In a way, the issue is not that complicated at all. We know that all else equal greenhnouse gases cause warming. We know that greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing rapidly. We know that temperatures are increasing rapidly. The obvious hypothesis is the same as the consensus.
An alternative hypothesis would have to have two parts. 1) Why the increasing greenhouse gases are ineffective in raising temperature and 2) Why the temperature is rising rapidly anyway, coincident in time with the greenhnouse gas increases. No such theory is being offerred by the so-called skeptics.
The scientific consensus doesn't exist because scientists are immoral or stupid. The scientific consensus exists because the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible.
mt
I believe that is wishful thinking. Often the solution on the local level is ineffective or even contributes to the problem on the large scale. For example, a power plant in Indiana that uses a tall stack to reduce local ground level air pollution contributes to acid rain in the Northeast. Here the "global" response, the Clean Air Interstate Rules, will be much more effective than the local solution, i.e. a taller stack.
Basically we will need some combination of migration, new construction, etc. to mitigate the changing environment. I don't think any one of those things is necessarily bad. The problem is, humans typically don't handle change well and will just end up fighting each other.
I think you are underestimating the potential economic and political consequences. Rising sea levels could result in hundreds of New Orleans around the world. Wholesale redistribution of arable land and freshwater would be interesting to say the least. Wholesale reduction of arable land and freshwater could be devastating. Your last sentence is really key.
Congratulations! You appear to have mastered the ad hominem attack quite easily, and without any instruction from us. There is hope for you yet!
Thank you,
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The Earth's climate is a chaotic system that strives to achieve balance. Continually modifying the atmosphere so that it has properties that cause it to hold more heat means that as balance is being achieved, things will likely be out of sync. Record highs in cold places and record lows in warm places makes so much more sense when thinking about it that way. As does record number of hurricanes.
I have been watching the articles from the scientific community about the Hurricanes and it was pointed out by several that the hurricane season cycles through active to almost dormant. This year was just the peak of the active cycle. The cycle is approximately 30 years in duration. The late 60's or early 70's saw an increase in hurricane activity as well.
The articles also point out that global warming actually has contributed only slightly to the increase. Yes it is a contribution but marginal.
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Ok alot of post here "russia (insert any location) feels colder" how can there be globabl warming?
Global warming is "average surface tempeture" not the temperature in your area every week. Some global warming analysis predicts certain areas are going to get colder, some warmer, but on the whole warmer. Warming changes weather parterns is very difficult to calculate way (the globe has a lot of inputs and is difficult to model, although we're getting better at it)
Whenever someone posts about climate change and global warming people flock to deny it and to mention previos periods of warmth and cold that are more extreme than the current, so what's the problem with 0.1C or 1C average?
... at least on our side of the globe, but there is a whole world, more than 6 billion people out there. If you care about other people, then so should you care about climate change.
This is true indeed and I don't think life on our planet is going to become extinct because of global warming.
But there is one thing that is interesting to note: In all the known climatical periods of the earth, none has been more stable than the past 10.000 years. Coincidencially, in these 10.000 years the human civilisation arouse.
I think it is not just a question of evolution reaching a critical point if not that this point coincides with stable climate.
We may believe our technological know how can now cope with the changes
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
I moved from the US about a hear and a half ago. I was in Hamburg last winter and everyone said that last year was pretty typical. It snowed but didn't stick. It got cold, as usual, but usual is about 32F.
This winter is a way different story. We've had snow on the ground for about 3 weeks now. It's snowing at the moment. And it's also been in the negative numbers for over a month.
The primary area where man has caused global temperatures to rise has been the release of methane and carbon dioxide gas from the increased consumption of Taco Bell, as they have expanded into new markets. Stop the chihuahua! Burrito-laced farts are what's really killing mother earth!
We've had an unusually mild winter here this year.
Last January, we spent a few days below -30F (i.e. it was never warmer than -30F anytime in 72 hrs).
This year I dont think we've gotten below zero yet. It's been a very very pleasant 25F most of January. I have only worn my winter coat once or twice, because honestly, that coat is for when it gets 50-60F COLDER, like it did last winter.
The perfect winter in my mind is bucketloads of snow from Nov-March, and temps right in the 20-35F range the whole time. The January dip into the -30 zone is something i can do without just fine.
A few more winters like this and the city council will shut off the 3-acre Aerosol can we've been holding open the last few years. And we'll change city parking rules so vehicles will no longer be required to idle the entire time they're parked.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
See, I understand all that, but the problem is it makes a difficult case to prove. If the theory is that global warming can cause anything, then you can't point to any single piece of evidence to support global warming. It's called an untestable hypothesis. Since global warming has so many supposed symptoms that are also caused by myriad other things, a whole lot more evidence is required to link them. In most cases, people blame everything up to the Kennedy assassination on global warming with absolutely no support. As a scientist, I find this annoying.
The globe is warming, because ya know, that's what happens when you live in an era that is on the tail end of an ICE AGE.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
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.
Well I do not know about you but I still do not believe my weatherman and what he predicts about the weather. I doubt very much we have the air currents figured out yet.
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So what if global warming isn't occuring? Would it be so bad to have cleaner air to breath? And possibly less dependance on non-renewable energy sources? Saving the world is just a bonus.
Weather fluxuates. Always has. Always will. To claim that every -previous- shift in climate was completely natural but THIS one is caused by humans...
Atmospheric composition fluctuates, too. Always has, and always will (a lot of it has to do with continental drift, for one). But claiming that every previous shift in CO2 levels is natural, but this one is anthropogenic... makes sense. The spike occurs within the period of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The amount is consistent with levels of human CO2 production. If you look at ice core data, the last 150 years isn't just an anomaly. It's off the charts. By a lot. (And yes, CO2 levels have been higher in the past, but unless continents have been moving around half the planet while I wasn't looking, that probably isn't the problem).
So now we know we've got an anthropogenic CO2 spike. And now we're seeing a temperature spike. We've got a theory which connects CO2 to temperature which is really, really well founded (by many, many years of agriculture). Unless someone is proposing a theory which explains the temperature spike via other methods while simultaneously explaining why the CO2 spike doesn't cause it, and predicting something the other one doesn't, Occam's Razor says to choose the first one - it's simpler. One cause, two effects. Saying "it's natural fluctuations, that's simpler" isn't right because you're ignoring data - you have to explain why the CO2 rise isn't causing a temperature spike, while simultaneously a different process is.
It's simply bad science to claim that the climate change we're seeing isn't likely to be anthropogenic. Is it anthropogenic? I don't know. Could be that the Martians simply turned up their remote Earth thermostat. Got me. But until a better explanation comes along, this one's the most likely to be true.
Do we understand everything about climate? No. That doesn't mean that the intelligent course of action isn't prudence.
I don't know how I'm going to die, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't exercise and eat healthy. I could still be hit by a car tomorrow, making all of my work pointless, but it was still the right action to take.
And, until you prove causality, you end up with bad science. There's *always* something weird about the weather, and if you look at it enough, you'll find something. Without proof, that's meaningless.
It's not that 2005 was hotter than 1800, it's that 2005 was hotter than any of the 205 preceding years.
It's never been tested that the sun will rise tomorrow. Nor is it a "truth" that the sun will rise tomorrow. But I'd say based on the amount of data we've collected and based on our understanding of astronomy that it's a pretty safe bet.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
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
fyi - CO2 is not 'pollution', it's plant food.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I hope people can be more open minded on this, when I mntioned that Global Warming was something that we have to deal with now, I got harshly flamed:
0 &cid=14520216
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17456
Yep, I've read evidence from both sides, but still, the fact that today (in January) it's supposed to get to 57 degress in St. Louis, the ice caps are melting and this, that we had the warmest year ever, should give pause for thought. After the Sago mine accident I learned that we still rely on COAL for ~50% of our power production! Can you believe that, this is freaking 2006! Now please go off on me for thinking that Solar or Wind are opinion; no, they will not take over our dependance on coal/oil, but it's a start and will take xx% off of that while we look for other alternatives. It is my feeling that we're living in denial without any concern for the future of our environment or our planet. Someone has to turn this around, why not us and not our children?
fak3r.com
I am not convinced that global warming exists. I mean, by our recorded temperatures, the earth's temperature has risen 3 degrees in the last couple of hundred years. So what? I mean, how accurate could they have been in their ability to measure temperature back then, they were still shitting in the woods.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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?
The global warming crowd warns that Europe is going to get cold because (and ONLY because) of the greenhouse gasses, yet can't explain all of those old paintings of ice skaters.
I thought that they had been painted by people who were around at the time who saw some people skating.
Weather fluxuates. Always has. Always will. To claim that every -previous- shift in climate was completely natural but THIS one is caused by humans... well, I'm probably just wasting my breath.
You still haven't really grasped the difference between climate and weather have you?
No but, yeah but, no but...
I can write a book about anything, doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about. If Larry the Cable Guy wrote a book about how .NET sucked and Java was the best thing ever, would you take his word for it?
Blar.
http://www.livingstonmontana.com/access/dan/107rus sianspacemirror.html
Geosync above the ocean? Just stop the sun!
Simple, this whole global warming thing is alarmism, there is a solution and not a particularly difficult one.
Pollution is a much more pressing concern.
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.
If greenhouse gas and ONLY greenhouse gas causes India to go brrrrr, what caused the cold snap 70 years ago? If something ELSE caused the cold back then, then how do you KNOW that the same mechanism (which has yet to be identified other than 'sometimes weather does stuff') isn't doing it again today?
This is a bit of a strawman. Scientists are NOT saying that only greenhouse gasses affect climate. Climate interactions are complex, but that doesn't mean climate researchers haven't found some of these mechanisms and are beginning to recognize which ones are more important than others.
For instance - the Gulf stream which makes northern Europe much more livable than other areas on the same latitude such as Siberia or northern Canada. There you have one fairly constant feedback mechanism, and one we KNOW have changed over history. It could slow down or even change course as ice melts and more water is added, and that could cause an ice age over the northern hemisphere.
Another is sun spots, periods with high sun spot activity usually means warmer climate on earth.
A third is clouds... warmer weather means more evaporation, more clouds gives earth a higher albedo, and the reflected sun rays means less.
Another - el Nino, but we don't know where that is in the chain of cause or effect.
Computer models of climate do take these things into efffect you know, and they are getting more refined all the time.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
cue in 100000 people yelling about global warming.
seriously, we've only been recording temps since the 1800s. It's the same people who think that hurricane katrina was God being angry at us because of Iraq, totally ignoring the fact that hurricanes come in 30 year cycles, and that there were hurricanes about as bad as katrina 30 years ago (and that most of the hurricane's devastation comes from the fact that new orleans is under sea level).
so getting back to global warming, i mean does anyone know whether cold/hot periods on earth run in 200, 300, or 500 year cycles? i'm no scientist/meteorologist. i really don't know. But I do know that we know now that the poles on the earth are constantly shifting. And as are so many things on this planet.
Anyway, my point is, yeah of course we should reduce pollution, it's for our own good. I love fresh air. And this is newsworthy. But should we be throwing fits of "I-told-you-so" around about global warming? I don't know. Like I said, I'm no scientist.
Remember, the problem isn't so much the change in temperature, but the resulting change in geographic distribution of certain things like arable land, habitable land, disease, etc. Basically we will need some combination of migration, new construction, etc. to mitigate the changing environment. I don't think any one of those things is necessarily bad. The problem is, humans typically don't handle change well and will just end up fighting each other.
When the change is that suddenly me and my family have nothing to eat and your family does... you are either going to share or else we are going to fight. It can get very simple very fast.
Well good timeing on this story.
As I write this, it is raining here when it should be snowing.
At night, we sleep with the windows open when they should be closed.
During the day, we see bicycles and motorbikes when there should be sleds.
Something is wrong.
Very very wrong.
It's not like India has Nuclear Weapons or a space program. I mean they all still live in stone huts. Why should they be seen as a modern nation?
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Not sure who your high school science teacher was, but scientists don't prove things, and there isn't such a thing as "irrefutable", except maybe when it comes to disproving things. Mathematicians get to have the fun of proving things, the real world isn't so nice. So no, global warming hasn't been "irrefutably proven", but then neither has the theory that electricity works because of these crazy things called electrons, but that doesn't stop me from using a computer. Nor should the logically impossible goal of "proving" global warming stop us from moving with all due haste to a post-fossil-fuel based economy.
It amazes me, that with all the technical, RTFM-type people on this site, that not one person has mentioned the following paragraph:
Our analysis differs from others by including estimated temperatures up to 1200 km from the nearest measurement station (7). The resulting spatial extrapolations and interpolations are accurate for temperature anomalies at seasonal and longer time scales at middle and high latitudes, where the spatial scale of anomalies is set by Rossby waves (7). Thus we believe that the remarkable Arctic warmth of 2005 is real, and the inclusion of estimated arctic temperatures is the primary reason for our rank of 2005 as the warmest year. Other characteristics of our analysis method are summarized in footnote (8). [Emphasis mine]
Read it carefully. Think about what it's saying. "We are guessing temperatures for the artic based on readings taken up to 1200 km away." That's like me basing the temperature in Manitoba, Canada on the temperature in Denver, Colorado. Then they go on to say that it's this "guessed at" temperature that makes this the hottest year in history.
What amazing arrogance. And stupidity. We have dozens of satellites that measure the temperature of every point on the Earth, every day. Why are they estimating the data? Is it because the real data doesn't agree with their precious theory?
Sorry, I'll wait until I see a measurement that doesn't require 20% of the Earth's surface to be "guessed" as 3.5 degrees higher in temperature than average. I'll wait for the one with real measurements. The phrase "we believe" moves this story into the realm of religion, not science.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
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.
http://outcampaign.org/
Ya think? Tell me... when was the last time the Thames froze over? If alive today what would Pieter Bruegel be portraying?
Gosh I love you gits. Where do you find your wit and whimsy? Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. In other words, climate is the stereotype. Seattle is wet and rainy. San Francisco and London are foggy. Las Vegas is hot and dry. Chicago is windy (though Chicago didn't get the nickname from anything to do with weather). Stereotypes are bad, no? Are you really going to attempt to induce panic around the world because the planet isn't living up to its stereotypes?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I live in North Pole Alaska.
If global warming is going on, why hasn't anyone told us?
This summer didn't break 80F (record since I got here in 95 was 101F)
It hardly rains. I used my AC for two days. And camping was miserable.
And we had a cold snap in November of 30 to 40 below F.
Can someone tell mom nature to send some of that warm up here? Please?
It's -47F and I still had to drive to work. At this temp, a stomp on the breaks will crack lines. A quick turn on your wheel will break solid metal. And if you have to walk in street clothes, you'll be dead in 20 min. Visibility is near zero this morning because exhaust from cars doesn't disipate at this temp, so you don't know how far in front of you the next car is. If you open your door, the heat will roll out in under 10 seconds, and it takes 10 minutes to heat it back up.
I think we have a few degrees we can spare, if you want to trade.
L8r
Causality can never be proven through statistics, but that doesn't make statistics entirely useless. If statistics show a strong correlation between shooting people in the head and death, it doesn't prove that the shooting had anything to do with it. If your goal is to not kill people, it may be a good idea to avoid these actions based on the correlation.
It boggles my mind how absolutely wrong this discussion is. Please, take about 10 minutes to study global warming. You'll find these facts:
Carbon dioxide is one of the most important greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide has risen by about 30% it the last 100 years. This is caused by humans. 30% is substantial. The rise is accelerating (look up: Keeling curve).
Global temperatures are rising dramatically, in the order of 0.5 C in the last 20 years.
The northern icecap is melting and is expected to be gone this century. Glaciers are retreating.
Now, all of these things are FACTS which are not being disputed by anybody. Now there is a theory, called global warming, which connects all these facts in a quantitative way. The first calculation on this was done already in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, and the predicted temperature rise has not changed significantly since then. WHY DO PEOPLE THINK WE NEED MORE INFORMATION BEFORE WE ACT?
"On Record" - but of course we have records going back to the beginning of time - so this truely is alarming..... hey, wait a minute!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
...scientists predict that 2006 will be the coldest year on record (at E3).
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
I was still riding my motorcycle on Jan 13th, 2006...in Canada, nevertheless. Therefore, I look forward to 2006 stealing the gold medal.
I call BS. You're taking the facts out of context.
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.
It is well known that water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas. As you mention it is also a coolant, by cloud formation. The water cycle is self-regulating and humans cannot effect it directly. Disturbing the CO2-concentration could however change the balance of the natural greenhouse-effect, and a new balance at a higher temperature could be the result. So, factually speaking, your argument about H2O is not relevant.
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.
You obviously have not looked at the reports, because, as always, they take several scenario's into account, including "business as usual", which is also the worst case scenario (i.e. take no action whatsoever).
Don't forget, CO2 makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere and over 90% of CO2 came from natural, non anthropogenic sources.
That it makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere is not a relevant fact. What is a relevant fact is how much it contributes to global warming. ALL of the CO2 came from natural sources, it has just been sitting in the ground for a very long time. ALL of the increase of CO2 (about 30%) since the start of the industrial age comes from antropogenic sources, as can be concluded from isotope measurements. I have the feeling that you just made up the 90%, but if you have a source for that number I'd be happy to hear it.
There's also some evidence that about 30% of the 8 gigatons of annual CO2 can be accounted for by forest fires
Again, this is an irrelevant fact. Even more CO2 is produced by bacteria each year, but this is part of the natural cycle. What is important is, how much humans exhaust in addition to the natural balance of CO2.
My prediction had nothing to do with global warming. I take my cues from the solar minimum and maximum. There are tons of cycles on this planet we have yet to discover and thinking we know it all with 200 years of weather records is just plain stupid. Those that study long term weather trends know one thing, there is no normal weather. It has been much hotter and drier in the past and wetter and colder as well and that is just in the last 100,000 years which in this history of the earth, is nothing.
I believe there could be global warning but the people on the current bandwagon will use anything as proof. If it is hotter this or colder or the same as last year....global warming. More rain, less rain, the same rain.....global warming. More storms, less storms, the same storms.....global warming. While it was a record year for heat and by any logic it would follow that there would be more hurricanes, since they are heat machines, many people were so misinformed.
I was talking to a woman in the store and she was saying global warming, there has never been so many hurricanes, which at that point in the season was not true. I told her that in 1921 they nearly ran out of names for storms and if the global warming people are right it should have been much cooler back then.
If the global warming people want to make their point and I think they should, they should give an area by area forecast of the next summer and winter. This should not be to hard if they claim to have all the proof they need. Give me the jist of the next summer and winter here in Northern California for the next year.
Here is my prediction for Sacramento north to the Oregon border. Not as hot as this year but with 7 days in a row over 100 during late July and early august. At least 15 fewer days over 100 for 2006 than 2005. A drier, colder winter. About 80 percent of normal for the 2006-2007 wet season and a rare valley snow. A couple of days with some very hard freezes as well.
So you are accepting a theory based on thousands of years of first hand data sampling? In that case get back to me about global warming in a couple thousand years when we have first hand data about that. Tree rings, ice cores, and other devices used to infer what was going on around the area of that sample don't count.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
"At least the Global Warming freaks aren't trying to legislate that it be taught in classrooms!!!" No, they just want to legistate a change in the way just about everyone creates and consumes. Much less intrusive.
Global Mean Temperature
Support the FairTax
"Or, bring on the Score:5, Insightful for bravely posting what the overwhelming majority of /. readers wish to read"
yeah people like being told the truth instead of FUD. who knew?
grand parent got schooled.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I defer to your higher karma level as you obviously have told more truth than I have.
/. is spectactular!
/. view.
What do you think the correlation between "truth" and highly rated comments is on slashdot?
What is truth anyway? Clearly there are complex philosophical arguments that can be made in support or against what you called "the truth" in the post that I replied to. The intellectual overconfidence on
My real point is that you get all these people on here self congratulating and acting like they are really going out on a limb by writing stuff they clearly know is the majority
Fundementalism, dogmatism, tyranny of the majority and FUD thrive in the slashdot world to as great a degree as you brave souls seem to believe is happening in the "real world."
I am saying that when there's a general consensus about human-induced global warming amongst many people who study it for a living, it's time to stop quibbling about what is absolute scientific truth.
I suppose if 80% of all reputable astronomers thought a 10 mile asteroid spotted on the edge of the solar system was going to collide with the earth and the other 20% said it wouldn't, you would argue that we shouldn't do anything because the data we have isn't solid enough.
The issue of global warming is a practical problem, not a scientific problem. There comes a time when you look at the data you have and you determine there's a strong enough correlation here that we'd be foolish to not take action against a problem of catastrophic proportions.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Besides which, the surface UV has surprisingly little to do with the stratospheric ozone levels. Most of the reason that there is lower oxone over the Antarctic in the southern winter is because there is little sunlight to create the ozone. (3 O2 + energy -> 2 O3)
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
There are reasons other than catastrophic global warming to reduce our pollution. Like having breathable air that does not cause children and the elderly to have respiratory difficulty. Or clean water that has fish that we can eat and water we can easily process into drinking water. It's also nice to go outside on a summer's night and hear frogs, rather than silence.
A collapsed ecosystem is a more near term and serious threat to civilization than theoretical global warming. Because it has been proven that pollution does impact the environment. And like it or not, there are many industries who are either directly or indirectly dependent on the quality of the environment. Ecological damage can and does have a serious economic impact.
Anytime we have a cold stamp the anti global warming people jump up and say "See this proves there is no global warming". Bad science on both sides. The problem is nobody has a definitive answer to the issue yet. But it's a political issue, and the impatience of the politically motivated has resulted in rushed science (or outright fabrications)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In the US, we still have sulfur in our gas (except in California) until next year.
But my question is what happened to the California drought? It went for 8 years, and all the scientists said it was due to global warming. When it finally broke, now we get quite a bit of rain in the winters. The scientists say we get all this rain because of global warming.
I think I belive in global warming. But I'm pretty sure I also know it is used as a catch-all and scapegoat. I'm not sure we really understand the actual effects of it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Don't forget the monolith that will cause all of our Arcologies to blast off into space! You really enjoyed SimEarth didn't you? ;)
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I find it compeling that it's also been a record year for hot air production in Washington DC. It's widely believed to be the cause of the recent spike in hurriccanes and such high hot air readings coming from DC could very easily sway overall totals.
The philosophy of science is different than science
Look, I live in Louisiana and all of the meteorologists I've seen on tv and read articles from seem to concur that the increase in hurricanes is not due to Global Warming, but is on a 30 year cycle. Just ask Dr. Bill Gray the foremost expert on hurricanes (He's the guy Louisianians look to every year to tell us how many hurricanes are coming).
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4403
Never played it. The concept, though, is valid and workable... I just don't have the numbers to do the calculations.
=Smidge=
1: I never said it could never be proved. You will never prove them wrong, because by the time one of their predicted cycles has come around you'll be dead (and so will they, and I).
2: Science is not, never has been, and never will be about proving anything. You need mathematics for that.
Science is a process which tests the predictions of a hyopthesis and discards it if those predictions are erroneous. If its predictions are not erroneous in a sufficient number of cases it starts to be called a theory. After it's been a theory for a good while it becomes a "Scientifically proven fact" in the minds of morons who don't know what they're talking about. Then, more often than not, someone smart will realise it's all a load of crap and formulate a hypothesis which makes more accurate predictions and the cycle begins again.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Wait, that's too complicated. I can't follow that many points. Where does the Antichrist fit in to all this?
// This is not a sig.
How much CO2 do I need to release making water vapor to shut both you idiots up permanently?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Lets just be a bunch of stupid apathetic fools and just wait and see what happens with global warming. When our children are 30-40 years old it will be them who can deal with things like tornado's in winter, massive dying of wild life, 2 or 3 120 degree summer days in areas where the worst days now never exceed 105. So what lets all sit around and wait for it to be someone elses problem like people do about everything else after all its easier and less expensive to do that rather than spend the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars necessary to correct the problem.
...the article showed a plot of greenhouse gas production to go along with the plot of rising temperatures. How closely do they correlate, and how wide does one's time window need to be to achieve that correlation?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I am not saying you would plant these bombs to steilize the earth, I am saying you plant them to literally destroy it.
If you placed a bunch of hydrogen bombs at the right strategic places in the mantle (think vulnerable fault lines and plate intersections), detonating them all at the same time would cause such a shockwave through the earth's core that it would likely tear itself apart. Afterwards the shards would either drift closer to the sun cooking any and all life on them, or drift away form the sun, freezing it all.
Any microscopic life that survived would need to be hearty indeed, since it would need to be able to survive in a vaccum for extended periods, as the atmosphere would have long since vanished.
It's highly unlikely that any life that has evolved on present day earth could survive those conditions long enough to evolve resistance to them.
And my observation is that the global climate is not a static system. It was much warmer in medieval times, was it the cars they drove? Now, if you reject the observation about the climate being a dynamic system, and global warming is happening... quit crying and buckle up. Changing the climate is something like steering an aircraft carrier. If you notice it's changing, it's already too late.
The rise in temperature can easily be explained by the Brad Pitt & Aneglina Jolie mating combined with the fuming of Jen Aniston. "Celeberities. Is there anything they can't do?"
I didnt know i had a high karma level. Im only +1 and i think thats because im logged in and not a troll (much).
/. view."
there is no correlation between truth and highly moderated comments on slashdot. anyone who thinks differently is crazy.
but what he said was true and it really doesnt matter if its modded highly or not.
"My real point is that you get all these people on here self congratulating and acting like they are really going out on a limb by writing stuff they clearly know is the majority
My point i guess is that you get all these people on here critizing modded up comments and attributing the mod down of oposing viewpoints to the slashdot group think. these people act like they are really going out on a limb trying to fight through the awesome power of slashdot collective will. did you ever consider that everyone on slashdot is completly different and that perhaps the things that are modded up are modded up on their own merits? thats why idiots get modded up as much as insightful posts. every thread has a "why was this modded up" post, which pretty much shows that lots of crap is modded up all the time. groupthink or no.
"Fundementalism, dogmatism, tyranny of the majority and FUD thrive in the slashdot world to as great a degree as you brave souls seem to believe is happening in the "real world.""
yeah thats humans for you.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Yes, that crowd is radical. I am myself rather in the it's bad enough if there is a 1 in 10000 chance global warming will kill half of us crowd.
Really, show me where your consensus is then? I have seen plenty of reports for and against, and honestly the methods used to go beyond the last hundred some odd years of direct measurements (i.e. ice cores, tree ring analysis, etc) don't seem up to the task. I say there is not enough data to reach consensus because there is not enough data to reach consensus.
I suppose if 80% of all reputable astronomers thought a 10 mile asteroid spotted on the edge of the solar system was going to collide with the earth and the other 20% said it wouldn't, you would argue that we shouldn't do anything because the data we have isn't solid enough.
Hurray for ad-hominem. (Yes, I do see the hypocrisy in me saying that)
The issue of global warming is a practical problem, not a scientific problem. There comes a time when you look at the data you have and you determine there's a strong enough correlation here that we'd be foolish to not take action against a problem of catastrophic proportions.
Yes, there is a time to stop looking at the data and do something about it. Too bad (I think) we haven't hit that point yet.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
Too bad, indeed. Let us know when you've decided that we have so we can get to work on this problem.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
In the mean time you can voice your opinion too, as can anyone else. Maybe that way we'll be able to reach consensus about all of this.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
What have you ever seen one of those before? Ecosystems are perpetually out of balance and chaotic! When humans try to artificially "balance" them, as we have attempted repeatedly in our national parks, we usually screw things up. For example, read up on our idiotic manipulations of the predator populations in and around Yellowstone NP.
If you read my source, you will note that potential ecosystem problems were address and included in the calculations.
Yes, but unfortunately "greenhouse gases" and pollutants that cause respiratory and other problems are not the same chemicals. Efforts towards reducing greenhouse gases has, in some places, resulted in abandonment or reduction of efforts towards cleaning up these other pollutants. Some people would say "clean them both up", but with limited resources and money, and ability to absorb the changes at a given time, it's unrealistic. So which is more important to clean up: pollutants that are known to cause health problems and kill people and organisms but are generally reversible, or greenhouse gases which are debatable as a cause of the global warming trend but if true could lead to runaway natural disasters that kill a lot of people and completely change the landscape, or worse? It's a variation of the high risk / low impact versus low risk / high impact problem.
I don't think that's true. We are still gathering data to work out exactly what the impact might be. Seems you are the one who has made up his mind, and you project that onto others.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'll voice my opinion at the polls. I hope you don't run for office.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Well, you have a lot more faith than me
I am just extrapolating obvious and long-standing trends - renewable prices down, petro prices up. The lines are already crossing and soon renewables will be ahead. By 2050, there will be little petro power - and the assumptions underlying the worst-case global warming are just the opposite, with big increases in CO2 output.
With respect to your big problems, the evidence for more chaotic weather is rather thin, and even if it is true, nowhere as apocalyptic as you claim. Yes, maybe we will have four big hurricanes hit the mainland US instead of three. This is annoying but it is also a relatively easily-quantifiable problem. In short, the cure costs a lot more than treatment. Same is true with sea-level rises, which will be very, very slow. Cities are going to be "drowned" - they will slightly adjust their borders over the decades.
Yes, the climate is extremely non-linear, which is why the climate projections are all over the map. Yes, it is quite likely that various ocean currents will change or stop. Again, hardly the end of the world.
but it is nothign to sneeze at
The problem is that the proposed "cures" are both ineffectual AND cost us far, far more than sneezing.
The rise, even if it exists, will be slow and mostly contained by seawalls. To the extent that people move, they will move a few miles inland and stay in the same city.
As I noted in my post, part of the reason that global warming will not be a big problem is that people are going to solve it without ignorant government mandates - precisely for the reasons you mentioned.
As a related point, companies have been "going green" for decades. Trust me, I am a chemist, and along with the engineers we are thinking about this all the time. The problem is not so much corporations, but individuals, who are hugely wasteful and dirty relative to what they could be if they made sound technological choices.
Your corporate headquarters and the factory floor are probably equipped with all sorts of smart, energy-saving devices. You are probably still burning ridiculously inefficient incandescents in your house. See the problem?
> This year was just the peak of the active cycle.
> The cycle is approximately 30 years in duration.
I hereby predict the next 10-15 years will show a decrease in temperature, and it will be claimed Kyoto will be the cause of it (and everyone will conveniently forget that the Kyoto promotors are, at the current time, whining that this will actually do very little to slow down global warming.
Given the Maunder Minimum, I don't see how anyone can begin to take drawing conclusions from time periods shorter than 30-100 years seriously anyway, and even then just barely. And you get into hundreds to thousands of years, you're butting up against the ice age cycle. For all we know, we just staved off another one.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Though you are right, other people may pollute in order to please them.
Quit attacking sources. Attack facts.
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.
Hurm. There are probably more efficient nuclear strategies, to be sure. Gravitational fields are tricky wossnames - dropping something into the Sun isn't anywhere near as easy as you think. Because the Earth is moving, it stays in orbit and never falls in. Dropping into the Sun means you need to stop it moving along its orbit. That means a hell of a lot of kinetic energy of the Earth in motion has to GO somewhere (just as a lot of KE needs to COME FROM somewhere if you want to hurl the Earth into space). It turns out the first value is larger than the second. The happy medium, of course, is to hurl the Earth outwards - into Jupiter. Slingshots are more complicated. You could probably save a little energy by passing the Earth in front of Venus (thus slowing Earth and accelerating Venus) and the same for Mercury, but as for how much... I don't know. You'd need to get the Earth there in the first place too, of course.
qntm.org
Cool. I'm looking forward to even more videos of Steve Ballmer sweating.
Then, more often than not, someone smart will realise it's all a load of crap and formulate a hypothesis which makes more accurate predictions and the cycle begins again.
Which is garbage. Consensus among scientists is seldom overturned. Once it's got to that stage there is huge amounts of supporting evidence. It's usually simply modified. For example, the theory of relativity didn't overturn Newtonian mechanics. It added to it, saying that in the large scale, space time isn't linear, so Newtonian calculations will be fractionally out on the large scale if it assumes space time is linear. If you disagree, make me a short list of occasions when scientific consensus has been "a load of crap" and completely overturned.
No scientist is pretending that they can predict the climate accurately. But they can do it accurately enough to be sure that global warming through human causes is happening. Further scientific work will make the predictions more accurate, but is extremely unlikely to reverse the conclusion that GW though human causes is happening.
While we can certainly wipe life off the face of the planet, we've got nothing yet that can touch the planet itself.
The explosions you talk about are insignificant on the planetary scale. Even if we assume the effect is as great as you think, the worst that would happen would be to damage the upper mantle (about 20km, I think). Considering that the tectonic plates slide over and under each other, any real damage would be 'cleaned' in a few hundred million years.
There's no reason why shockwaves would cause the planet's core to explode. We've had some pretty big impacts, and it's not happened yet. In fact, looking around the Solar System we see lots of big impact craters on moons - some as big as the moon's radius - but the moons haven't exploded. There's conjecture over whether Earth's Moon hit the planet once, and it
The only way we can actually hurt the planet with the technology we have today is to wait for a massive meteor to come nearby and somehow guide it to hit the Earth. The question of guiding a meteor that large is tricky though - you need a huge reaction mass to do that quickly. Even when the thing hits the planet, the Earth will just absorb it and go on.
The critical thing is my first point though - we can wipe all life from the face of the planet, and we can do this today. That's the real cause for concern.
Thus we've been keeping the climate comfortable for ourselves by merely existing.
That's a bold statement. The planet may become colder, but from the destruction of the atmosphere we will all slowly be backed into a radioactive crisp
why do people keep modding posts like the parent troll? if you don't agree with something it doesn't mean it is a troll, it just means you are closed minded for thinking that.
OK... and what if we're wrong and there is global warming.
Which is the safe side?
Oh yeah? Then what is my opinion?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Or... (though I don't know if I really believe that there are people who're ACTUALLY this fucking retarded -- I think religious convictions just sound marginally better than greed) they think that the world is not going to be around because that is what god wants and that they are powerless to A) cause global warming or B) stop it.
I'm not sure about this, but I wonder if the ID stance doesn't include a lack of concern for extinction as well.h
"The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years," said James Hansen, director of NASA GISS. NASA Scientists Say 2005 Was the Warmest Year in a Century
Daily News http://newsblaze.com
You're right --- my information was out of date. Sorry about that.
Your argument about moderation seems pretty logically consistent. But it seems there certainly are majority views that more easily slide up the mod ladder.
And such bold confidence in opinions still trouble me.
It doesn't have to be big, it has to be timed. Any large scale explosion placed on a fault line causes a force ripple throughout the magma along this channel. Alone this does not matter, but if there is another explosion at a complimentary point that is timed properly, it will cause an opposite force ripple that will double the effect of the initial one. Mutiplying this by 50-100 times by strategic placement and computer-controlled timing and it is *very simple* to do.
No, it doesn't work like that --- that sort of thing's additive, not exponential. (Otherwise detonating the hundredth 50 megatonne bomb is going to somehow add on 1x10^30 megatonnes of energy from somewhere, which is obviously impossible.)
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).
A homeostatic system overcompensating for a perturbance is how that seemingly paradox comes about. It's not unique. Think about the human body fighting an infection, an automatic self-defense mechanism, by raising it's temperature to lethally high levels.
The global avg. temp rises, so the global weather system (water & air currents) alters itself automatically to return to "where it was" like a spring. However, like a spring, the changes won't immeadiately stop once "where it was" is reached.
So corporations are amazingly energy-efficient, right? Just to take some examples from offices I've worked in:
- many people leave their PCs and CRT monitors switched on all night and weekend
- huge numbers of flights are made (probably the biggest CO2 emission generator for any white collar employee who is not wholly office based)
- vast amounts of commuting, business car trips, Fedex delivery, etc
Some of this is unavoidable, but greater use of videoconferencing, shared whiteboards, wikis, blogs and telecommuting could greatly reduce this.
Please stop being complacent about this - corporations are part of the problem, just like individuals.
Pumping previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere cannot help but to change the energy absorbtion characteristics of the planet as a whole. To say otherwise is to ignore basic physics, I think, and I don't think it would be hard to devise an experiment to demonstrate this. Note I am not that kind of scientist, though!
Calculating average temperatures across the planet is mostly just an indirect, half-assed way of monitoring the change in atmospheric carbon. I met the guy who coined the term "global warming" about a decade ago, and he told me the worst thing he ever did in his scientific career was popularize that term. Pretty strong coming from a guy who once purposely contaminated a forest with plutonium!
It's clear that at some point, if you have enough carbon available, you can modify the environment - in the most obvious extreme by making the air unbreathable to mammals. We probably don't have the abillity to do that through human industry, unless we get really serious about it and start kicking off volcanoes with nukes on purpose. Maybe not even then; and I'm not in favor of doing the experiment, personally.
We don't really know where the tipping point is that will make human life impossible. It may have already passed - weather patterns may have already begun an inexorable change to a higher energy state that will wreak some yet-unforseen havoc on our species. Or, perhaps there is some counterbalancing factor that will restore equilibrium without human intervention, that we have not yet triggered. Or a thousand other maybes. Having no spare Earth for experimentation, it's all fantasy.
But there's no reason to believe that everything will continue as normal. As you've observed, weather variation is already pretty extreme and historically always has been. It's reasonable, given the observable data available, to act on the theory that this variability will increase as more solar energy is input into the system as a whole.
Myself, I agree with Nikola Tesla, who pointed out in 1905 that burning oil or any other non-renewable resource is stupidly wasteful. That stuff is so incredibly useful! Oil, for example, is a honkin' good lubricant.