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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."
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"
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.
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).
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)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
and I was wearing shorts and a tee and I loved it.
Those that saw you sure didn't
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.