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20th Century Warmest In 1200 Years
gcranston writes "Research from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. shows that the 20th century was the warmest for the northern hemisphere since approximately 800AD. Historical climate data were calculated from weather 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice cores, and seashells from Europe, Asia, and North America, and attempted to address the shortcomings of earlier studies. The findings support the argument for global warming as a result of human interference rather than natural climate change."
If this is the warmest in so many years, then back then it was hotter that what we have now.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Historical climate data were calculated from weather 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice cores, and seashells from Europe, Asia, and North America, and attempted to address the shortcomings of earlier studies.
And we all know how accurate and exact historical measurements are.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
From the article, "The researchers think their work bolsters the case that global warming due to human activity has created a change in climate unlike anything seen in more than a millennium". Notice - they "think their work bolsters the case" for global warming. There is no "proof". It is theory or speculation. Can we please submit accurately?
Let's take a pool on exactly how many posts this story will receive from partisans claiming that because the earth has been this warm in the past (the 800s) through natural causes, the earth either is not unusually warm now, or if it is warm now it must be because of natural causes--
not realizing that (1) the thing that makes manmade global climate change distinguishable from natural global climate fluctuations is not how warm the earth has become, but how quickly and consistently the earth has warmed since the industrial revolution;
and (2) the problem with manmade global climate change is not how warm the earth is now, but how warm it will become if this consistent, quick rise continues...
What's your guess? 10? 40? 100?
Yet, in spite of all this, the climate is still cooler than it was in 800 AD.
Get out there and drive more SUV's people, we've got a Mini Ice Age to fend off here!!!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Help me out here. If it was warmer in 800 AD, what 'human interferance' caused the global warming in the 9th century?
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Fact is, we're looking at a ~2000 year snapshot of an incredibly comlex system that's a few billion years old.
I'm not saying that there isn't claimte change -- of course there is. I'm also not saying that man doesn't affect it -- of course we do. But what I'm saying is that we don't know how we are affecting it. Maybe the "Little Ice-Age" ended because of man. Perhaps we saved ourselves from freezing to death by creating a cozy CO2 blanket?
My 2c...
In other news, the Earth celebrated its 4,572,366,124th birthday yesterday. When approached for comment, the Earth joked, "Hey, you think I'm old you should go as the Sun HER age. Just do it from a distance, know what I'm sayin'?"
Our sample is too small.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
And, in a few years, when melting arctic and Greenland ice has disrupted the Atlantic Conveyor, northern europe, including Great Britain and Scandanavia, will be much, much colder.
The article said:
What the fuck?
-Peter
Actually, if you work out the orders of magnitude (Earth being 4.5 billion years old), it is closer to saying:
"It is warmer now than it was an hour ago."
Using 1200 years to judge a 4.5 billion year old system is like using an hour to judge a century (roughly).
The warming of the globe as a whole will cause some locations to actually cool down, as air and water currents re-route.
This does not change the fact that the globe as a whole is warming.
(And frankly it is irrelevent whether humans are to blame or not. It is warming, which is going to cause climate change. Are we ready for it? If not, we may want to try to stop it (or at least slow it down).
I doubt we are.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
We're looking at a ~2000 year snapshot of an incredibly complex system that's a few billion years old and that our immediate livelihood and wellbeing depend on. And we keep pushing it like it has never been pushed before - all the while claiming that because we don't understand the system, it's ok to continue current behavior. How is that smart?
I'm going insane here -- everyone is saying "how does this prove anything if it was warmer in 800AD?" THAT'S NOT WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS! "Warmest in 1200 years" does NOT implicitly mean it was warmer 1200 years ago, people -- read the article, we CAN ONLY TEST BACK 1200 years using ice cores, trees, etc.... it was COLDER 1200 years ago, that's what the article says... and as for the folks who mentioned the Little Ice Age, etc. -- yes, they mention that too (and the Medieval Warm Period from 890 to 1170), but both eras were not CONTINUOUSLY warm or cool, but were PUNCTUATED by hot and cold SPELLS... The concern of global warming is that the CONTINUOUS temperature is changing. I will concede that without data before 800AD, the study is looking at a pretty small sample of time, and that there are so many factors in such a hugely complex weather system to take into consideration, so I have no problem at all with those arguments, just with the fact that the majority of people here seem to be good at quickly sorting through text looking for keywords (such as "since 800AD") without actually COMPREHENDING what they are reading.... /rant.
No, TFA doesn't say this at all. Rather, their reconstruction only goes back to 800 AD; apparently they felt like the quality of their data wasn't sufficient to support a hemispheric temperature reconstruction prior to this -- not too surprising if they're relying heavily upon tree rings, though others (e.g. Mann et al.) have taken this sort of reconstruction back at least 2000 years (with essentially the same results).
"7th century A.D. found to be warmer than 20th."
Reads a bit differently, doesn't it?
How many cars were belching so-called greenhouse gases across North America in 800 A.D.? Were the theories of man-caused global warming correct, then shouldn't the 20th century be BY FAR the warmest century ever, thanks to car emissions and CFC's?
Perhaps, before they were thinned out, the environment was being catastrophically altered by all the buffalo flatulence.
That's an important point. Calling the phenomenon Global Warming is perhaps misleading. Some places will get warmer, others colder. Some will be wetter, some dryer. Dumping more energy into a chaotic system like the climate means more extreme climates, not necessarily warmer ones.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This would all be well and good if we actually measured temperature at the same place where the tree-ring and other calculations were made. But we don't. Nowadays, we typically measure temperature in cities and in trade-routes. Well, newsflash, cities have grown, and trade-routes are increasingly traversed. Thus, global warming? There's something wrong with that. Not to mention that we've only taken modern reliable temperature measurements for the last 100 years or so.
This whole matter is pretentious, to assume that humans can change the climate so easily is pure hubris. Krakatoa erupting put more chlorine, CO2 and CFC's into the upper atmosphere, and more carbon-based pollution in a single month of eruptions than all of humankind has in the last two hundred years, way more, and global warming did not result. So, why do we think we can do better? Sure, for the next 5 years we had real nice sunsets because of the particulate matter in the upper atmosphere, but ozone holes didn't start opening everywhere. Why doesn't that end that argument right there???
And, speaking of ozone holes, do you know what creates the ozone hole over the arctic? The sun does. You see, it is the sun that creates ozone by striking the atmosphere. So when we wonder why there's less of it over the arctic the reason is two-fold: first that the sunlight has to travel through far more atmosphere to hit the poles because of the angle of the earth relative to the sun, and second because for as much as six months out of the year the poles don't get any sun at all! That being the case, should we really be surprised at seasonal ozone holes??? I think not. It's been that way long before we 'discovered' them in the 80's and thought they were new just 'cause they were new to us! They've been there for millions of years!
The earth is at its current temperature because the environment as a system has established a balancing point. We do not have enough information yet to know what checks on the system are in-place to regulate drastic swings in temperature. As for the last ice-age, it's likely that we were hit by a huge comet which threw up enough particles in the atmosphere to block off the sun for years. So, unless that happens again there simply won't be another ice age. Well, I suppose the planet could somehow shift off orbit, but as long as we stay at this distance from the sun there will never be another ice age, barring comet/meteor activity. And then the earths checks on temperature swings brought us back to normal. So we can forget about worrying about that, 'cause we can't cause it and we can't stop comets or meteors. As for global warming, the alarmists act as if not only is the balance of temperature fragile, but that if the earth does warm up that this will cause things to happen that cause further warming. Well, I disagree, it's more likely that a small warming of the atmosphere will cause things to happen that lead to cooling once again. Like if the oceans all really did rise a foot or so, then that would lead to a great deal more cloud-cover, rain, more reflection of light off the water, more ice being formed at the poles, etc. And if carbon-dioxide increased by eve one-percent in the air, plant-growth would go crazy! That would then lock up far more CO2 than we could ever dream of doing ourselves. Temperature on the earth is in balance as a system. And again, unless we can figure out how to throw as much pollution into the air EVERY DAY as Krakatoa did, then we don't have much of a chance of creating global warming.
I walk around now in the "Winter" without a jacket on year after year and as a kid I couldn't do that. The hopelessly corrupt and biased arguments not withstanding my experience tells me something is different.
When we can get a reliable weekly weather forcast I'll start putting more faith in their predictions and understanding of a few billion years of changes.
The last ice age started melting roughly 10,000 years ago. The climate has been on a warming trend since that time. The average temperature for the earth over the historical period since complex life developed is much warmer than it is now. Logically, our current mean temperatures are abnormally cold compared to the mean temperatures over the last 35 million years.
The high probability is that "global warming" is simply the globe resetting from the "global cooling" of the last 100,000 years. That may not be good for us, since we evolved to live in a cooler climate, but its normal for the planet.
At the end of the day, the argument is not how to prevent global warming since that cannot be done. The argument is how to adapt to the new conditions.
Not necessarily:
Assume we are looking at n time intervals numbered 1, 2, ..., n. If the maximum observed temperature was in interval n, we can assert that this interval was the warmest of the last n intervals.
Now consider interval 0. If this interval is warmer than n, the strongest assertion we can make is that the recent interval is the warmest of the last n. If the recent interval is warmer than 0, we could make a stronger assertion. However, the validity of 'warmest of the last n remains.
In effect, you are assuming that the researchers made the strongest possible assertion. Another alternative is that they were only able to measure a certain number of intervals.
Just a question for those who say " there isn't enough proof we are causing this!"
there are pretty good indications we MIGHT be causing this.
is it really such a bad thing to err on the side of caution with something like...the climate of the planet we're living on?
if I'm wrong....we reduce our emissions and have cleaner air.
if you're wrong the world (as far as humans are concerned) ends.
personally I'd rather be wrong and have the consequences be we cleaned up when we didn't have to.
A very distinct possibility is that their data collection methodologies are flawed.
Now let's look at the other hot-button sentence: The key word here is 'bolsters', not 'makes' the case. How could it bolster? Because we know CO2 is going up, and climate models show CO2 leads to heating. Also note that there are two things to prove -- first, is global warming occurring (whatever the cause), and second, what caused it? This study makes a strong case for proving the first. The fact that the tree-ring data agrees with the CO2 models must be explained somehow -- it could be a coincidence, it could be there are errors with the models or with the tree-ring study, or it could be CO2 heating. I'd accept your criticism if they said 'conclusively proves', but 'bolsters' is acceptable.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Everyone stop fighting over whether humans have caused the current climate change. Those saying "NO" aren't going to change their minds, even as incremental new evidence adds to the substantial body already accepted by climatologists - or maybe they're right. It's not worth arguing about, because it's an abstract blame game.
What is worth arguing about is how to slow, stop or reverse the change obviously now underway. The same science used to fight the blame game is much better used to learn how reducing emissions and sinking carbon can mitigate the serious risk of climate change destroying our civilization. Past civilizations, like the Anasazi in the American Southwest and whatever you want to call the civilization that desertified the Sahara across to the Gobi in China, might not have had our advantage of science and engineering. So their change happened slower, but was more inevitable. Let's harness our climate science to create new climate engineering to cope with this climate change, whether it's manmade or as natural as the arrival of Winter.
--
make install -not war
The problem is, for every isolated instance of cooling that you dig up, someone else can dig up a (or, more likely, a whole bunch) of isolated instances of warming. This kind of argument doesn't get us anywhere.
Even if the human race and all trace of our existence were to be wiped off the face of the planet, Do you really think things will return to normal now? And if you can answer that question, maybe you can explain just exactly what normal is anyway.
/. Anyway cause it's Friday and we're obviously all bored and ready to go home and fire up the "Green" computer and play WoW....
I think most people get so caught up in the argument that they don't realize how stupid they sound. You do realize that even if everyone in the world got a soft heart and green conscious, we'd still be burning fuels, we'd still be pumping out WV and Co2, We'd still need fires or some type of heat to keep us warm, still need livestock or something to eat, and still need some way to get around.
Even tree-hugging green freaks won't give up their modes of transportation or winter heat, or processed / clean foods. If they did, they'd be living the hermit life in the back woods competing with the wildlife for food. Which would be a fantastic TV show, but I digress.
What really makes me laugh are the people who are fully clothed with picket signs walking around telling industry to stop killing the world. As if the clothes on their back were completely made industry free. As if their food were industry free. Tofu is processed... Common folks... Hybrid cars contain plastics, yes they are derived from petroleum products. Most "Necessary" chemicals and vaccinations are either based on petroleum, or produced in "Industry" that uses petroleum.
Paper signs are produced in factories, guess what, they use petro to power the factory.
The world cannot be saved by us. You can preach, picket, and protest all you want, but some moron somewhere is going to burn something, releasing heat, Co2 and WV into the atmosphere and 'WHAM' we're back to square one. But we might as well argue the what if on
Right?
-Duff
What a lame criticism. I use CE/BCE because that's how I was taught throughout high school and university. You should try to deal with the fact that terminology changes. Or do you still refer to the sky as "the heavens", refer to the number 20 as "a score", and your car as an "automobile"? Do you use Roman Numerals? For that matter, AD itself is a relatively new term; people used to refer to "the 2006th year of our lord". Why not just revert to that, while you marvel at the miracle of fire and ponder the concept of using round wooden structures to accelerate travel. Seriously, grow up and try to live in the real world.
You seem to think that reducing carbon emissions is free.
In fact we're talking about trillions of dollars of costs per decade - some estimates go higher than a trillion per year FOREVER - to implement just the Kyoto Treaty's reductions. Yet these reductions are expected to produce only a fraction of a percent reduction in the expected warming. How much MORE would it cost to bring it to a halt?
So the cost is high. Like perhaps starting a global depression that would put the 1930s to shame, decimate the human population, AND deplete the funds that otherwise would have been used on the research to find alternative energy sources AND determine whether the threat is even real, and better ways to counter it if it is.
But what's the benefit?
The claimed benefit is eliminating a rise in the global average temperature of a tad over a couple degrees C - call it five degrees F. Maybe. If the models are right. (And some other models - which say all global warming is really doing is holding off an ice age for about four more centuries - are wrong.)
So IF those models are right, agriculture might move a couple hundred miles north over a century or two (even if crop breeding stops COLD). And the next waves of building move coastal cities a little inland as the seas rise a few inches over a couple centuries.
Unless some OTHER scare models that just came out in the last year or two are closer, in which case Europe gets a long-term cold snap and agriculture moves toward the equator instead of the poles.
Seems to me that with the models pointing every which way we need to do some more work to figure out what is actually going on, before crying that the sky is falling, the polar ice caps are melting, and throwing so much money at it that there's too little left for even subsistence existence.
Meanwhile, if it turns out there really IS a problem, there are a number of ways to deal with it short of totally curtailing humanity's emissions of carbon.
Like parking a sunshade / solar (or array of them) in orbits around the gravitational dip between the earth and sun, producing as much reduction in solar input as necessary to drop the temperature to any amount desired.
Or seeding the oceans to encourage the plankton to suck down atmospheric CO2 and sequester it in deep water - for several times longer than it takes to burn all the economically - useful fossil fuel.
Just to name two.
IMHO:
- the costs are VERY high,
- lower cost alternatives exist IF any action is needed,
- action isn't needed for decades to centuries,
- the benefits are low (even if the real situation approaches some of the worst-case scenarios)
- and the "problem" is too little understood to be worth throwing money at it (except to understand it better) today, or even to know which way to push.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way