Slashdot Mirror
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!
stuff |
I am sure the Russians wish a little global warming would go their way considering they have reached record lows as of late.
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/
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
You asked to see how the data are averaged, and wanted to see it normalized to variance. Here is the site where those records live. Enjoy.
Climate Research Unit Page
Wasn't that because of the CFC?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
The problem (mostly sulfur in fossil fuels) was reduced significantly, either by removing the stuff in the first place (for example from gasoline), or by using appropriate filters (in coal-fired power plants, for example).
Guess what: The same thing happened to other "scares", like the lead scare. These problems can be reduced or eliminated, after people stop ignoring them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
You are forgetting that at some point, theories start having practical consequences. You seem to want to argue that science is just one big theoretical head game that has no bearing on real life existence. While your specious argument is true---that there is no such thing as absolute truth---you ignores the simple fact that we can apply usually apply well-examined and tested theories to reality and can use them to explain and predict phenomena around us.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Don't forget that the earth is not a closed system.
dEnergy = EnergyGain + EnergyReleased - EnergyLoss
EnergyGain would be the energy absorbed from sunlight. EnergyReleased would be energy that is already on the planet is released by some process (eg burning fossil fuels). EnergyLoss would be the heat radiated out into space.
EnergyLoss has supposedly been decreasing because of greenhouse gasses - CO2 inhibits the radiation of heat off of the planet.
EnergyGain may also be decreasing from the effects of pollution, known as Global Dimming.
EnergyReleased has probably been increasing, as the rate of energy production increases to meet demands. When energy is produced from stored sources such as fossil and nuclear fuels, it ends up as heat in the environment. However, we are gradually running out of stored energy sources... so optimistically this trend can't continue forever.
All someone has to do is crunch the numbers and figure out if there is a net increase or decrease in atmospheric energy.
=Smidge=
You really don't know what you are talking about, do you? Heat capacity does not go down by two degrees when temperature goes up by two degrees. At what point is a substance full, then?
Without going any further into how confused your idea of thermodynamics is, the main points about melting the tundra are these: when ice vanishes, the color of the land gets darker, reflecting less solar radiation into space, warming the land, and tending to cause the ice margin to further retreat (or, in a cooling event, advance). So the ice margin is a potent amplifier of trends. Also, when permafrost melts, various forms of carbon taht were sequestered from the fast geochemical cycles are released. More carbon is in play. Assuming we know anything at all about radiative physics (and I concede that you, apparently, don't know much personally) that will also exacerbate the situation.
You are entitled to be confused. That is not a crime. Obviously there are a bunch of people out there going out of their way to confuse you. Still, I fail to see why people feel compelled to share their confusion with everyone else in such a brashly confident way.
mt
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Well, you have a lot more faith than me, and I'm a scientist too - ocean physics, as it happens. I do believe that somewhere in the next century and change, we will finally shed the industrial era "brute-force and the externalities be damned" approach to industry, and move in earnest to one where inputs and outputs, as well as the marketable product are carefully considered. And I believe that as part of that, we will finally move off of burning fossil fuels, or at least doing so in a way that carbon-loads the atmosphere. Likewise I'm hopeful that we can make mining, manufacturing, etc. a lot less destructive. So in that sense I share your faith.
But there's a lot of work to do, and there's a lot that can happen between here and there. If we manage to let the Artic ice caps melt even 30% of the way off, there would be a huge amount of human misery provoked. All Katrina-style devastation of cities, all the time. That's not a cataclysm, but it's pretty bad. We might well figure out a way to move people and cities inland as the seas rose, but there would be much life, property and well-being lost along the way. The rises in sea level would almost certainly involve catastrophic weather events, and it seems clear that we are now driving the Earth's climate system at far greater intensities than forcings that caused previous events like Ice Ages. So changes could occur pretty fast, and that doesn't bode well for us adapting to them, or developing industries and business practices that deeply internalize the risk of a tragedy of the commons.
The other problem is this. It's clearly important for our current global climate balance to have two cold poles drive ocean circulation, not just one. But if you follow any of the "big amplifier" theories, it's quite possible that we have triggered (or vastly accelerated) a situation where only the Antartic drives ocean circulation. And given how nonlinear the earth's climate is, we may not be able to go back there.
So inaction in the face of anthropogenic climate change does not likely mean the end of the world, but it is nothign to sneeze at. The futurism that you and I espouse should not be mistaken for triumphalism.
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/
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
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?
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
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?"
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.