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Earth's Temperature at Highest Levels in 400 Years
thatguywhoiam writes "Congress asked, and the scientists have answered: 'The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer. The
National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the 'recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.'"
dont blame me. i use amd.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
I'll start: It was unusually warm at my locale this winter. That's proves global warming.
CNN was reporting on 2,000 years last time I checked. Sensationalism, maybe?
Study: Earth likely hottest in 2,000 years
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
And can we now please take some PRECAUTIONARY ACTIONS?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
It was this hot 400 years ago? Global warming indeed...
Czech language for absolute beginners
Can I have a pink Pony.
damaged by dogma
Last time I looked (although I've largely checked out of this debate), no one - including Bush - was questioning that it's getting warmer. The debate (?) is now shifted to what exactly is causing it. plz correct if wrong, kthx.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
We-- we didn't listen!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Fuckwit:
It was this hot 400 years ago.
Signed,
- W
To: Mr. Liberal Hack
Please accept that "global warming" is not conclusively linked to man, oil, or any other favorite targets of the left. The Earth goes through cycles regularly, and until you can PROVE that man is to blame, stop using man's actions as fuel for political attacks.
Signed,
The Voice of Fairness and Reason
The earth's climate is cyclical. If you place that 400 year figure next to the age of the earth (say 4+ billion years), it does not seem that significant. Even if it were the warmest the earth has ever been, it does not mean that human activity is the primary cause.
Good luck to all those people living in Arizona and Nevada - you're entering a spiraling heat wave. Once people build up the land with houses and roads, the cars, pollution, and A/C makes the air even hotter.
Oh, and with much of China and India either already a desert or turning into a desert due to deforestation thousands of years ago, it's not going to get any better for them.
The desert is actually spreading too - look at China in google earth and see how much of China is sand, and with hunter/gatherer populations foraging for food and fuel, animals eating every plant that springs up from the earth, and pavement being laid down everywhere to speed rain runoff and reduce the amount of water that saturates the soil - the situation looks bleak.
Seriously, I hate to sound like a tree hugging hippie, but if everyone in the world planted a few trees, I believe we could have a positive impact on the global climate
Thanks. What's the point of posting a story like this now, when everyone who reads slashdot has left work already? Nothing relieves the boredom of work like a good flamefest. Now I have to wait until tomorrow. (read from home? and waste MY precious time?)
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning... It smells like slashdot!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'll bet it's warmer than it was 10,000 years ago, too.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is entirely correct. Bush has admitted that global warming exists (and that Iraqi WMDs don't, ho ho ho) but AFAICR (can recall) he doesn't admit a human influence and he doesn't believe that measures need to be taken by humans to prevent continued global warming.
I just want to know if it's true that we're delaying an ice age with global warming. Maybe I'll be a proponent of greenhouse gases :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There was a mini-ice age in the 1700's believed to be related to lower solar activity. All this means is we have returned to pre-mini-ice-age temperatures. I don't know of anyone that does not accept global warming (as in the warming of regions of the earth). I know a lot of people which can't agree on the causes. Temperatures were warmer 1000 years ago. The reason the vikings were so active from Norway was that they had mild temperatures up there, warmer than now. Cyclical Global warming != greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases effect may play a part, but the biggest variable (the sun) is not yet being realistically tracked.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
The 1600s were smack in the middle of the little ice age. The study doesn't say it was this warm 400 years ago. It says that with 400 years worth of data, this is the hottest period observed. Proxy studies and urban heat island effects cloud the results of all such studies. Another way to look at this: The Earth has fully recovered from the Little Ice Age period. Horray! Warmer is far better than colder. The 1600s will go down in European history as among the worst times. Famine from crop failures. Diseases were epidemic.
You'd be right if that was what they said. But they didn't say that.
They said it was unprecedented within the last 400 years, at least. That's not the same thing.
The report was championed by a Republican.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff in this discussion since it's so politically and emotionally charged, but who is the average citizen supposed to trust if both sides are trotting out 'climate experts' to disagree?
Suppose you ask the question: Is X happening?
When a scientist says that a phenomenon "X is probably happening", or "the bulk of the evidence indicates that X is happening", he means "I'm pretty damn sure about it, but because everyting in science is subject to further investigation, I'm open to hear evidence to the contrary."
When a lawyer says that "X is probably happening", or "the bulk of the evidence indicates that X is happening", he means "I haven't the foggiest idea, and I need wiggle room so I don't look like an idiot when someone who knows what he's talking about asks me."
Trouble starts when the two world views are mixed. The scientist hears the bolded words in his part of the speech -- and the politician hears precisely the opposite.
The qualifiers are necessary to the scientist, because they're part of why a theory is explanation falsifiable (and by extension, scientific). Science can't progress except for those areas in which there exists Reasonable Doubt.
The politician hears only the phrases "is probably" (as opposed to certainly), the "bulk of" (as opposed to all of the evidence), and the "indication" (as opposed to conclusive truth pounded out on the table before Judge and Jury) that something is the case. In an adversarial "justice" system, you can't use weasel words, because the holy grail is Proof Beyond A Reasonable Doubt.
And the planet burns because people who don't grok science prefer oratory.
What the hell, the dinosaurs died because they didn't understand science either.
Unprecedented high temperatures in recent history, perhaps. Unprecedented in terms of Earth's history? I'm afraid not. Notice the three sharp spikes occurring at roughly 130,000 year intervals. We started such a rise about 15,000 years ago, right at the expected time if the pattern repeats, but something levelled it off around present-day levels and has kept it there for the last 10,000 years. Whatever cause the levelling-out it wasn't humans, we weren't doing anything on a scale large enough to cause global effects 15,000 years back. If whatever it is stops, I'd expect global temperatures to spike by another 2-3 degrees C, then drop sharply to 4-6 degrees C below "normal".
We don't know that for sure. From another article:
"...researchers said they were highly confident the mean global surface temperature was higher in the past 25 years than any comparable period during the previous four centuries.
They had less confidence the past quarter-century was hotter than any comparable period in the years from 900 to 1600, but found that plausible. For the years before 900, the scientists said they had very little confidence about what the Earth's mean surface temperatures were."
It seems to me like the scientists are sticking with what they can prove demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt (temperatures from 1600). If they claimed that we had the hottest temperatures since the 1000s then people with an agenda would pounce on their "unreliable" data and attempt to obfuscate the whole issue.
Even though your post is the dumbest post I've ever read in my six years of reading slashdot, it does not preclude it from being the dumbest post ever posted to slashdot.
Ah yes, the infamous hockey stick (the chart). It was what convinced me that global warming was human-caused. Until of course I found that when you put random data into the analysis, you got a hockey stick.
What it comes down to is that more than 200 years ago we didn't have accurate temperature measurement. Everything before that is an educated guess. And the precision necessary to show a fractional degree of change is simply unattainable.
Where are the error bars on the hockey stick? It's shown as if we had exact data for the last 1000 years--which of course we don't.
RTFA. The first sentence says 400 years or longer. If you actually read the stories you'll understand why, and get the point that it's hotter than it's been in a long time, and only getting hotter. I have no more patience for these fools who don't have an interest in science or much of anything outside their own little self serving world. They don't read scientific journals, and who hence have no idea how important the global scientific consensus for global warming is. These people don't even give a half a shit literally hundreds of millions of poor people around the world suffer and die from drought, crop failures, and many other near-apocalyptic consequences if global warming is allowed to continue. People often make crazy analogies to Nazis. But seriously, if half of what the entire global scientific community warns of comes to pass, then the ignorant and uncaring people doing nothing to prevent global warming are leading to a holocaust that will be literally tens, maybe as much as a hundred times worse than the holocaust in terms of suffering and lives lost. We're talking about tens to hundreds of millions dying due to climate change. The resistance to accepting the global warming isn't based on scientific logic, or wisdom, or conscience, or anything that could be called credible or ethical. It's just sheer intellectual laziness and choosing to let someone else die because people are unwilling to even slightly inconvenience oneself. That's shameful. The miniscule but well funded dissent is also backed by the fossil fuel industry and people who think their paychecks depend on perpetuating this tragedy so long as it falls on someone else. It's disgusting, tragic, shameful, and represents the worst in human nature.
1. It wasn't this hot 400 years ago... we only have 400 years of reliable temperature data.
2. From the fucking article...
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Please leave your particular country's ideological distinctions out of this scientific debate that they have nothing to do with. Also please acknowledge that there is more to the world than your narrow-minded battle against an ideological perspective that you happen disagree with.
Please at least learn to control your memes to the point that they no longer lead you to infer things that clearly aren't being implied. A phrase like "Please accept that Global Warming Exists." does not imply a belief that ""global warming" is conclusively linked to man [or] oil", or even a preference for left-wing politics.
Your little political campaign has taken your bigotry to the point where you sign yourself off as "The Voice of Fairness and Reason", which is so intellectually dishonest that my dog just read this page and went and took a shit on an encyclopedia in one of his usual crude but poignant symbolic gestures.
Signed,
Fuck You
PS: In case you missed it, I was implying that my dog is smarter than you.
The really interesting question, however, is: is global warming bad?
If you believe the climate is stable, then of course it's bad! But we know better. Based on the data, we're towards the end of a brief (10k year) warm period toards the end of a 100k year warming cycle, but we're still in an ice age. We have 400k years of pretty good temperature and CO2 data now from the Vostock ice cores, and it's clear that a stable climate is an illusion caused by man's relatively short lifespan. This fact is as clear as the fact that global warming is happening.
So, let's assume that mankinds actions are capable of affecting the climate short term (for a few thousand years). Do we want to turn the thermostat up, or down, or try to keep global temperatures about the same? While the last option might sound good, trying to keep achieve stability in a chaotic system that we don't really understand and can barely model is probably pointless.
If we have to choose between sea level rising a bit, and glaciers covering England and most of Europe (on the upside, we'd lose Canada too), warming is probably a smaller problem to del with than cooling. Regardless of what we do, temperatures are certain to return to the ice-age norm long term (all the carbon in the air, water, and all fossile fuels still in the groud are completely trivial compared to the carbon cycle of the lithosphere), but that's a problem we can consider in another 10k years.
If you've never thought about global warming beyond "prevent climate change", you haven't really understood the issue. Preventing climate change isn't a long-term option.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Look, I DO believe in global warming. That said, crap headlines like this are, well, crap.
The fact that this point is warmer then some other point in some arbitrary number of years means nothing. There have been literally countless points in time when you can point backwards and say that it has not been so warm for 400+ years. Any idiot can see that pointing out that we are in another of such periods where the last local max with 400 years ago is thoroughly and completely normal and uninteresting.
Flouting stupid statistics like this is what makes smart people believe that global warming is a crap political ploy by environmentalist/anti-globalist/leftists/exc. If your goal is to divide, crap like this is a great idea as it assures everyone that the opposing side are idiots who couldn't tell the truth if their life depended upon it. If your goal is to build a consensus and spawn action, throwing out junk science is a waste of everyone's time.
There are a lot of good reasons to believe that the Earth is heating in an appreciable way and that humans could very well be the cause of much of that heating. We don't need to throw out junk science and sensationalist crap like "OMFG hottest year in 400 years!" as any idiot with even an ounce of grey matter is going to realize that "hottest year in 400 years" is pretty damn normal during any heating phase, especially heating phases that happen on geologic time.
How am I going to keep my beer cold? I refuse to do like the Europeans do and drink WARM beer.
Is there something unclear about the article? Oh right, you didn't read it. Let me summarize it for you. Scientists have determined that global warming is causally linked to human activities. Any other explanations you may have - supposed "cycles", volcanoes, aliens - have been ruled out. Until there's a reason to doubt what the scientific community has known for years, there's only one prudent course of action. If that doesn't fit with your political agenda, change your agenda.
To: Guy with selective hearing.
Scientists have proven that carbon dioxide emissions from human actions have caused the temperature of the Earth to increase. They have collected evidence which demonstrates this within the margins they find to be acceptable as proof.
Having proven it to other scientists, it is not their responsibility to now come to your house and prove it to you according to your rules, nor are they obligated to sponsor a cartoon version for your consumption. Every scientist who has studied this topic, and does not work directly for an oil company, has come to the same conclusion. There is more debate among experts about the validity of the proof of the Poincare conjecture than there is about the evidence for global warming.
However, I do not suspect that you will be persuaded by this. You will endlessly try to debate and complain about this, and you will simultaneously avoid actually studying the facts or researching more information.
You are ignorant by choice, and I hope you get full blown aids or melanoma.
Signed,
Another Guy
Now, notice something: we're talking about a "warming trend" over the last 400 years. That would be the interval from roughly the beginning of the "Little Ice Age" to now. So, in other words, we're now substantially warmer than the low point of a historically unprecedented low temperature interval.
Well, duh. Does the phrase "regression to the mean" ring any bells?
More
In other words, the conclusions of Mann et al. aren't very well supported --- and those are the ones most often used politically.
Because we are talking about a global increase, the changes to the world climate from a change of a few degrees are likely to be catastrophic.
This congressional inquiry dovetails nicely with the documentary that features Al Gore, An Incovenient Truth. I recently saw the movie, and while I was aware of the problem of Global Warming, I'm now truly worried that my later years (I'm currently 35) are going to be more about surviving in an even increasingly difficult environment instead of just living. Watching graphs with exponential progressions coupled with comparitive photographs taken over the last 50 years is turly sobering.
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
For those who want to bypass the dysfunctional reporting of the MSM, you can get the full report in PDF directly from NAS.
Also available from that link: The press release, audio of the press briefing, an abbreviated report and opening statement.
Stephen McIntyre offers interesting commentary on the report here.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Actually he has...
And 'human influence' doesn't really matter, we are just as screwed if it is caused by sunspots or volcanos as if it were caused by human beings. In fact concentrating on that is likely to make things worse as it only furthers the delusion that we are the sole source of anything bad happening, and that once we all switch to driving hybrids the Earth's climate will magically remain the same for thousands of years.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
To: Brainwashed Conservative,
The scientific consensus is that global warming has been caused by people. It is the politicians and their devoted followers who think that there is some sort of controversy. Secondly, from TFA, solar fluctuations and volcanic activity cannot explain the increase in temperature alone. Finally, you're asking scientists to conclusively PROVE that global warming has been caused by humans. This is impossible. Likewise, it's impossible to PROVE that quantum mechanics and general relativity are true. All scientists can do is look at the evidence and surmise what they think is happening. That's what they're doing, and you're ignoring them because they're telling you what you don't want to hear.
Signed,
Someone who listens to the experts
According to NASA the five warmest years on record are (in order) 2005 1998 2002 2003 2004
Dear "The Voice of Fairness and Reason,"
Download this: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html
Flip to page 103 for Figure 10-6: Model-based estimates of global sufrface temperature compared to observational estimates with contributions of natural (volcanic and solar) and anthropogenic forcings for 25-year periods shown as color bars.
The anthropogenic bar in the last 25 years totally dominates all of the other bars. I haven't read the entire article, but it sounds to me like you haven't even bothered to read any of it and yet you feel totally comfortable spouting off about it.
Scientists will never clame to PROVE anything, so stop using political motivations to attack scientific findings.
Signed,
The Voice of Telling You To RTFA
Education is the silver bullet.
According to the article "Global Warming Skeptics," there are only 12 scientists who disagree with global warming. From the discussion here, clearly there must be more disagreement. I'm sure it's not just a bunch of hacks making stuff up (this is slashdot, home of scientific minded folk), so if you folks could go over to the Wiki and list who your reputable sources for questioning the thousands of scientists who have been trying (and failing) to poke holes in global warming for the last 10 years are it would be helpful. Because from the looks of that article, the creationists have better scientific footing than folks arguing against human influenced global warming. And while consensus does not have a causative relationship with fact, it does, given enough time, seem to correlate frequently in the area of modern science (even ulcers were figured out eventually).
Wow.. great write up. I hadn't thought about it like you laid it out.
.oh.. and that I believe our lifestyle and current population are not sustainable. Either we need to be more conservative of our Earth for our population and trends, or we need to start reducing the number of people on this planet to keep living like we are. That's what scares the crap out of me. Cuz once mother nature says it's gonna take a break for a while.. it ain't gonna be long before 90+% of us are gone and in a not so pretty way.
My big concern isn't global warming but all of the pollutants in our oceans and entire global food chain that could nix us all..
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
What pisses me off is to see people dragging out the age-old fallacy of Pascal's Wager. We don't know, so let's reduce CO2 emissions just in case, because the downside is extreme? We don't know whether there is a Hell, so we had better become devout Christians, because the downside is extreme? It's BS.
What's the likely economic cost of reducing CO2 considerably? What's the likely economic cost of not doing so? If you want to make a rational argument, address the real questions.
Keep in mind that changing power distribution infrastucture takes decades. Replace all gas-powered cars with electric cars? Neat idea, but it will take years to build the new power plants, and decades to build the new transmission lines.
The plan I like?
Got a better plan that's actually practical given the need for infrastructure build-out, and the needmake profits for the companies that would do that build-out?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Clue-bat: scientists don't try to prove things. Scientists have never tried to prove things. People who prove things are called logicians and mathemeticians, usually abstract math.
Instead, what scientists do is provide explanations for observations. If the explanation explains enough observations, the explanation becomes a "theory", defined as "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."
(As opposed to a very different meaning of the word theory that is often incorrectly used by anti-science advocates: " An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.")
Proof is a mathematical concept. It isn't found in the real world. What is found is a quantity of evidence sufficient that it would be foolish to withold agreement. So, Mr. Fairness and Reason, what you're asking for doesn't exist. As such it's not very reasonable or fair to require it as some minimum threshold of something worth learning. But then again, perhaps that's exactly why you are the way you are...
Finally, it doesn't matter all that much if we're to blame. What matters is if we can alter current trends to prevent a forseeable worldwide ecological disaster. Unfortunately, humans lack the political will to prevent disaster (Katrina). Traditionally, we only act collectively to repair disasters. And for ecological disasters on this scale, the only thing that is clear is that by the time global warming really begins to hurt the wealthiest countries on the planet, there will be almost nothing anyone can do about it. As such, things are likely to get very, very bad before any substantive effort is made to change things.
Regards,
Ross
Everyone, the earth is dying because not enough people believe in global warming! Perhaps if we all clapped real hard to show it we believe, it might survive!
Quick! If you believe in global warming, clap your hands!
[monty python foot icon]
Read the actual paper, and you'll find that, instead of all the very firm statements in the Yahoo article, there are lots of caveats, and the note that temperature reconstructions back further than 400 years are very chancy.
As to the greenhouse gas hypothesis, there are a couple of real problems with it:
(1) about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900. The notion that there was a lot of unusual greenhouse gases in that interval is questionable at best.
(2) there is significant data suggesting "global warming" of similar order of magnitude on Mars and other planets.
(3) most of the argument that greenhouse gases are causing the warming are based, first and foremost, on the assumption that there is unusual warming, which is not a very strong conclusion, as noted by the report. Reasoning from "there has been global warming" to "there is an anthropogenic reason for global warming" to "anthropogenic causes for global warming are proven by the global warming" is circular.
Top Ten Good Things About Global Warming (from memory, plz excuse any fuckups)
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Congratulations, you've found the first (of many) issues with this article. The "group of climate scientists" apparently (from the article) didn't do any new research, they simply agreed with the "Hockey Stick" from Mann's group.
The problem is that any and all temperatures taken before 1860 (with a few isolated exceptions) come from things called "temperature proxies". The most common of these, and the ones that the "Hockey Stick" are based on, are tree-rings.
The theory of using tree rings goes like this: If the weather is warmer during a certain year, then the ring is wider. If it's colder, then the ring is more narrow. From a naive point of view, this seems valid. But there's quite a few problems with this.
First, at the very best, a tree ring is a measure of growth from spring through summer. Trees stop growing in the fall and don't grow during the winter, so the tree ring proxy is, at best, a measure of half the year.
Second, tree rings are not a 1:1 correlation with temperature. They are also affected by dozens of other factors, such as precipitation, nutrient availability, insect infestation, and, yes, CO2 levels in the air (since trees require CO2 for transpiration, the lower the CO2, the poorer the growth. Do you already see a dishonesty factor built in here?)
Third, there aren't a lot of trees that grow past a couple of hundred years, so you become extremely limited in your data sets, the further back you go.
Fourth, the trees that tend to live the longest, tend to grow in micro-climates. The Redwoods, the sequoias, the bristlecone pines, all live in very specific micro-climates that don't necessarily reflect the larger climate environment. Because these trees represent the only proxies for date ranges, the data can be skewed.
Fifth, there is no simple linear scale for tree ring growth. It's more of a curve, with the ideal temperature at the widest, and then hotter or colder being thinner, with no way to tell the difference. In most of the proxy studies, the numbers have "erred" towards the higher temperature, *if* they even take this non-linear scale into account.
Finally, there's downright dishonesty on the part of the researcher when picking data. Mann fought for over 8 years to keep from revealing the data he used to produce the hockey stick even though his research was funded with a government grant. Why? It turns out that for the entire 1500's (1501-1598) he used a single North-American Bristlecone Pine located at over 10,000 feet of altitude as the sole source of data for that century, a century which all other proxies pointed to as being much, much warmer then this single Bristlecone Pine points at. His "cherry picking" of the data represents a major flaw in his research, yet this group of "scientists" have backed up his results.
The congressman who commissioned this study (and he's a RINO if there ever was one) responded to the "attack" on Mann by Joe Barton (R-TX) who wanted Mann to publish his data and methods for deriving the "Hockey Stick". What an attack. Mann was only violating the terms under which he received his research grants by not publishing his data and methods. So, we have one congressman complaining that this "scientist" didn't follow the rules of government research grants, and another attacking the first congressman for daring to question this scientist.
This is just another recycling of the "Hockey Stick". Blah.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Well, I for one apologise on behalf of the thousands of scientists from all over the globe for rigging the temperature meters. I mean, how could thousands of bonafide meteorologist be possibly right when their opinions are at odds with an article that can be summed up as "boo hoo, I don't like what Al Gore is saying so I'm going to cook up some facts of my own!".
If you are going to say with a straight face that global warming as evidenced by hotter and hotter summers for instance is not a fact, I suggest you take a good look at the way glaciers in the Northern hemisphere have been rapidly growing smaller and smaller by each heat-record breaking year after another. Of course, glacier shrinkage _could_ just be a part of a huge scientific plot to get everybody to think that this "global warming" is a fact. Surely Al Gore put them up to it!
P.s.
2005, also known as "last year" was the hottest year on record.
You can continue believing all you want about 1998 being the hottest year on record, but sadly for you, that does NOT change the fact that it isn't.
We're all going to die while the people who've been listening to Rush Limbaugh for the past fifteen years just keep repeating "prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it"
To: Mr. Wingnut
Please read the document you are commenting on before spouting empty rethoric. It strongly suggests that "global warming" is linked to man, oil, and other favorite donors of the right. The Earth goes through cycles regularly, but the rate of the current rise in temperature is unprecented as far as scientists can check back. Until you can PROVE that someone has WMDs, or that homosexuality destroys families, or that use of marihuana turns innocent children into crazed killer, or that storing every phone call ever made stops terrorists with the same amount of certainty before taking some inappropriate and inefficient course of action--including, but not limited to infringing on civil rights or starting a war--, stop using your ignorance of the scientific process as fuel for political attacks.
Signed,
The Voice of Fairness and Reason (not assocuiated with the Fair and Balanced Voice)
If human population kept growing as it has in the past few decades, it would be a real problem within a century. But fortunately that's not the observed trend. Developed nations are uniformly experiencing population shrinkage, net of immigration. Current estimates are that the population will level off in our lifetimes.
Interesting note: if human population grew at 2% per year, and we were able to make use of all resources on all planets withing a sphere that grew at the speed of light starting today, we'd still exhaust all available resources within 1000 years or so (assuming the solar system isn't that unusual in our part of the galaxy). Exponential growth is really unsustainable. Since people seem to stop having a lot of kids once they become an economic negative, instead of a positive, for the family that looks like it won't be a problem, however.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Saying there is a debate over whether global warming is real like saying there is a debate over whether the earth is not the center of the universe. What we really have is a debate between the interests of the special interest establishment and the interests of the environmentalists. This debate has been going on in various modes for many many hundreds of years - but science hasn't lost yet. You can't argue down evolution, and you can't argue down global warming - to scientists, these are "theories" because they pass the test for "theory" - which for them is the same test we use to determine *Facts*. IN all meaningful ways, the debate is moot - it's not about facts, it's about obsolete beliefs being replaced in the popular consciousness by newer, accurate beliefs. This needs to happen quickly because we have to start mobilizing our government to action. Data obtained by examining the layers(ice sheets and glaciers form like trees, they have lines indicating how old they are because there is a warming and cooling season *once a year*) of ice sheets which contain bubbles of air(from which we can derive the temperature they were frozen at) trapped from freezing cycles as early as 650,000 years ago reveal a very, very regular periodic cooling and warming cycle. However, it also shows what concentration of CO2 existed in the atmosphere during those cycles, and this graph is almost identical to the temperature graph during the same intervals. The correlation is so strong between CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature that it becomes very, very clear that atmospheric CO2 reflects radiation back into our atmosphere, causing global temperature to rise. . Now, it happens that the concentrations of CO2 are rising at a higher rate than they have ever been measured to rise according to the data obtained from the ice sheets. THey are also at a higher level than has ever been measured according to the ice sheets. This indicates that the global temperature is continuing to increase at a much higher rate than has ever been seen before. This trend started around the time that humans began pouring tons and tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, during the industrial revolution, and is getting worse every year. There is thus a very strong correlation between the trend of human industry and the trend of rapid global warming. Now, you might think - humans can't possibly be contributing that much gas into the atmosphere, the atmosphere is huge! That's crap. 6 billion humans contribute to our pollution, and pour gasses into the atmosphere 24 hours a day 365 days a year, and have been doing so for over a century. Moreover, the atmosphere is not very thick - it represents a sliver of earth's total diameter, equivalent to a *much* smaller volume of gasses than we intuit from looking at the sky. It's very easy to see that humans are very capable of influencing the composition of the atmosphere. The only reason there's a "Debate" over the human cause of global warming is because hack scientists(a minority of scientists) funded by energy lobbies continue to be enlisted(and paid) for their testimonies in front of Congress, which itself is heavily bankrolled by energy companies, who have a very loud voice when it comes to their own interests, and often share the interests of the very wealthy politicans whose campaigns they pay for. The vast majority of scientists believe that global warming has a significant human contribution. There is no meaningful debate over the scientific fact that humans cause global warming, just like there is no good argument against evolution. Even if there was, we should err on the side of caution and as a country(and world) change our attitudes, because this not only relates to global climate, but also the *air* we are breathing. Combustion engines and power plants emit a lot of pollutants, not just CO2. These pollutants cause health problems. BUt casting doubt over global warming undermines *all* environmental endeavors by wrongly discrediting the credible people who want to help protect our health and the earth. There are a lo
Even if the climate isn't stable.. life has existed throughout the periods of change and rapid change. The thing is.. this population wouldnt' survive the change.. could we be smart enough to maximize the numbers that do survive and our society mostly intact?
May sound odd.. but this is why I support putting bases on the moon and colonies on Mars. Not so much to actually ahve them there, but to start learning how to survive those situations so we can use the same technology here when we need it. Cuz when we do need it, we won't have the time to develop it.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
You seem to not understand the issue either. The question isnt wether or not the climate has changed before, its how drastic a change is potentially occuring now (now being relative = the past 100 or so years and into the next 100 or so years). The change is occuring VERY rapidly relative to anytime before (again period time, not say a volcanic winter type summer event), on a landscape that is VERY different then anytime before. For example species facing wheat fields and roads as well as oceans for blockades.
The data shows a flat line for several hundred years, then a "hocky stick" increase coinciding with our use of fossil fuel, to use the term in TFA.
It's a little off to call those data. Those curves are reconstructions of temperatures from proxy data, like tree rings. What's more, as was pointed out above, feeding statistically appropriate noise to the reconstruction methods used by Mann et al. rsults in a statistically indistinguishable "hocket stick."
Now, this doesn't mean there has been no warming --- in fact, we're pretty durn certain that it's warmer now than it was when Isaac Newton was alive. The Thames doesn't freeze solid like it used to. What it does mean is that the methods of Mann et al. can't distinguish data that shows warming from data that is uniformly random. In other words: warming, yes; hockey stick, no.
That is the crux of the issue.
Except for the part about "not true."
Now I know people who would probably fire back with the cliche "correlation doesn't imply blah blah blah", and then shut their brains off. The cliche is overused, and correlation ABSOLUTELY DOES point fingers at possible sources of the observed trend (that's called the Conclusion of the Results, or rather the interpretation of the experts).
Except the actual report doesn't say that.
The "actual interpretations of the experts" are that they have little confidence in the conclusion that global temperatures have actually increased dramatically or unexpectedly. (Again, that doesn't mean they haven't. It just means that we don't know, and the actual data and the reconstructions from the data don't tell us.)
Since NO OTHER MEASUREMENTS trend the same way, the choices are fairly limited as to what could be causing it.
On the contrary, since reconstructions of plain random numbers provide the same "hockey stick" results as the data, the reconstructions of Mann et al. don't actually tell us anything.
Sadly, I don't think four misstatements in four paragraphs is a
Unfortunately for us all, on matter who is right, and who is wrong, the "experts" and the "leaders" will argue it until we're all dead.
It's well past the time that we pick a problem, and all attempt to fix it.
We can all clearly that noxious emissions are a problem. In some parts of the world, they've pushed the oxygen levels in the atmosphere down to almost unsurvivable levels. Producing lethal chemicals and dumping them into the environment is also clearly bad.
Depsite these obvious problems that we continue doing, we'll argue the finer points of theory until we're dead.
Hell, what's the worst that cleaning up would do? Cleaner air and water? I wouldn't complain.
Many countries agree that there's a problem, and want to fix it. Read up on the Kyoto Protocol. The #1 producer in carbon emissions is also one of the two countries who have refused to agree to the protocol.
Token things are done to clean up the air. For example, passenger cars were required to meet stricter requirements. Unfortunately, trucks and SUV's don't fall into the same rules. Marketing went heavy into putting every Joe-Consumer and soccer mom into a SUV. There's bigger money in oil than there is in clean air.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Since we have no idea how the climate in general works, probably our best bet on that front is to not dump shittons of CO2 into the air.
No matter where you come down on what's really going on, I think rational people can agree than when confronted with an unknown dynamic system upon which the well-being of your children depend, it generally isn't such a great idea to introduce as many changes to the system as you can. Which is exactly what we're doing now.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
There were ice ages before the time of the dinosaurs when CO2 levels were much higher (several parts per thousand instead of the current 380 parts per million or so), but there is a major catch: The sun was much dimmer (most stars, including ours, get brighter, larger, cooler, and more red as they age). The CO2 concentrations during those ice ages were lower than the CO2 concentrations of the periods immediately preceding and following them though.
Over hundreds of millions of years, CO2 levels have slowly dropped because of natural feedback loops that sequester CO2 in hot periods and while accumulating it in the atmosphere during cold periods, so our climate has been kept remarkably constant compared to planets without life and plate tectonics on them. If CO2 levels return to where they were in those ice ages past, then the planet is going to be plenty warmer (10-20 degrees C) than what it is now because our sun is giving off that much more heat.
Global Warming deniers are the new Holocaust deniers.
On the one side you have scientists with the historical and current data, and the liberals who cheer them on. On the other side you have those who say Global Warming is just made up by a conspiracy of scientists and liberals.
Discuss.
Start Running Better Polls
Assuming your first statement is true, and given what we know about evolution, isn't it better for everyone if no one ever carries out your second statement?
Anyhow. I think we're on the wrong debate. Everyone is arguing is global warming occuring or not. And if it is agreed that it is, then the argument shifts to, are people to blame or not.
It's all entirely irrelevant. There are two things we should always be doing.
1) Trying to live responsibly on the Earth. This means, minimizing pollutions of all sorts, etc.
2) Figuring out how to adapt to changes in the Earth.
Ultimatly we WILL have an impact. It's the nature of the beast. At best we can try to minimize it, if only to have cleaner air to breath and cleaner water to drink. The Earth will under go changes. Some caused by us perhaps, many not. We simply have to adapt or die out. Short of killing every human on the Earth, we will never remove any impact that we cause. All we can do is try to minimize it.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Climate on our planet is never constant. It could be global cooling that we were bitching about instead of global warming. Obviously, it was warmer 1,000 years ago in 986 when Greenland was settled but then got a lot colder 400 years later. Think of the slashdot story that would have been.
1) When did the current warming trend start?
2) Is this the hottest the Earth's ever been?
Answers:
1) No. The current warming trend started 100,000 years ago (long before the industrial revolution and CFCs).
2) No. The hottest the Earth has ever been was about 55,000,000 years ago (near the end of the Eocene era).
Humans are not entirely responsible for global warming. To say that we are is fearmongering.
Let us assume for a moment that the climate change is man-made. Let us further assume that all developed nations take immediate steps to completely eliminate their CO2 emissions. What will happen?
CO2 emissions will keep rising. China is building coal-fired power stations at a tremendous rate, and will probably keep doing so for a few decades, at least; India - which will have a larger population than China in a couple of decades - will be doing exactly the same thing. They're doing this because they need electricity to modernise their economies, and coal is both plentiful and cheap. Between them, they will probably pump out enough CO2 to fully compensate for the CO2 not emitted by the developed world.
Conclusion: it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. If it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it, and if it's man-made, it isn't going to be arrested any time soon.
So we are just going to have to live with the consequences.
It's certainly a lot warmer than the ice age that ended due to the industrial revolution 10,000 years ago.
RTFA. Nowhere in the article does it say that 2005 was the hottest year we know of. It refers to "recent warmth". For those who care to look for themselves, the actual news release indicates (in its first sentence) that the findings are about "the last few decades of the 20th century". So, this is not "blatant stupidity and carping that passes itself off as science", it's an ambiguously-accurate digestion of real news that passes itself off as journalism, followed by your blatant stupidity and carping that passes itself off as an informative comment. Don't blame the scientists for doing research that gets ambiguously reported by the media.
I know your comment is a response to Gore's book (I read your link). But your comment is irrelevant to the story you commented on. Thanks for the knee-jerk reaction. Your comment should be modded -1 Offtopic.
“The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published ‘The Limits to Growth’ in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world’s population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving.”
--
The story of wheat
Ears of plenty
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
The story of man’s staple food
[Image] (Still Pictures)
IN 10,000 years, the earth’s population has doubled ten times, from less than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most of the calories that made that increase possible have come from three plants: maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until recently biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is that of humanity.
Yet today, wheat is losing its crown. The tonnage (though not the acreage) of maize harvested in the world began consistently to exceed that of wheat for the first time in 1998; rice followed suit in 1999. Genetic modification, which has transformed maize, rice and soyabeans, has largely passed wheat by--to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming an “orphan crop”. The Atkins diet and a fashion for gluten allergies have made wheat seem less wholesome. And with population growth rates falling sharply while yields continue to rise, even the acreage devoted to wheat may now begin to decline for the first time since the stone age.
It is time to pay tribute to this strange little grass that has done so much for the human race. Strange is the word, for wheat is a genetic monster. A typical wheat variety is hexaploid--it has six copies of each gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived from three wild ancestral species in two separate mergers. The first took place in the Levant 10,000 years ago, the second near the Caspian Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a plant with extra-large seeds incapable of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow them.
The story actually starts much earlier, around 12,000 years ago. At the time, after several warm millennia, a melting ice sheet in North America collapsed and a gigantic lake drained into the North Atlantic through the St Lawrence seaway. The torrent of cool, fresh water altered the climate so drastically that the ice age, which had been in full retreat, resumed for a further 11 centuries. The Scandinavian ice sheet surged south. Western Asia became not only cooler, but much drier. The Black Sea all but dried out.
People in what is now Syria had been subsisting happily on a diet of acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them to depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after 11,000 years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then einkorn and emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon cultivated grain was their staple food. It happened first in the Karacadag Mountains in south-eastern Turkey--it is only here that wild einkorn grass contains the identical genetic fingerprint of modern domesticated wheat.
Who first replanted the seeds and why? For a start, he was probably a she: women have primary responsibilities for plant gathering in hunter-gatherer societies. The time was certainly ripe for agriculture: the ability to make tools and control fire (cooking makes many plants more digestible) was already well established. But was it an act of inspiration or desperation? Did it perhaps happen by accident, as discarded grains germinated around human settlements?
The extreme centre is the paper's historical position. --Geoffrey Crowther
Anyone else notice that they only looked at data for the Northern Hemisphere? How can you say the Earth is warming if you're only looking at data from the Northern Hemisphere!
I play Nerd-Folk!
This is a self correcting problem. There is no way you can stop this. Fossel fuels are a form of "free energy" it's there in the ground all you have to do is dig it up and set it on fire. There is such strong incentive to do this that we will work as hard as we can to do it as fast as we can. The good news is that we are good at this and have likely burned up 1/2 of what's there. All we have to do is burn up the other half and the problem will be gone forever. So the next 100 years it will be hot. But for the next one million it will not. OK maybe my numbers are wrong and we've burned up only 1/4 or whatever. Still it will all be gone very soon in relative terms. Basically the human race stumbles along with stone tools for a million years then discovers hydrocaron and burns half the hydrocarbon on earth only 400 years then the other half in 100 years but then continues on for the next millions of years without using any hydrocarbon. In the larger view of things it's a "blip".
The chart at this site's page http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html , which is becoming a bit more frequently seen, shows the graph of C02 content in the atmosphere and temperature ranges over the last 400,000 years as derived from examining core samples, up to 1950. In that graph there is a strong corellation between C02 content and temperature change (increased C02 == increased temperature, etc.) The high point on the graph happened about 325,000 years ago when C02 content hit about 300 ppm.
In 1950 C02 content was around 285 ppm.
In 2006 C02 content was 383 ppm
That's nearly 100ppm greater than 56 years ago, nearly 83 ppm greater than the greatest peak currently recorded. We've had a 35% increase in CO2 content over the last 56 years. We're 28% above the previously recorded peak level from the last 400,000 years, and we're seeing record high temperatures for increasingly large spans of time into the past.
Given the nearly lock step relationship between C02 content and temperature change, the rate of increase and the extent of the increase over the last 56 years, and the absence of any other major contributor to CO2 content in the last 56 years, I find it really difficult to think that the human activities known to increase C02 emissions we've increasingly engaged in over the last 150 years have had little to nothing to do with the obvious increase in both C02 atmospheric content and resulting temperature/climate changes. The rate and amount of change seem to indicate that we're already beyond the normal range of variation, yet people still feel comfortable saying it's just the normal fluctuation of the planet's climate. I'd sincerely like to hear other viable explanations for the facts, but there haven't been any - the most well supported hypothisis remains that humans burning fossil fuels (in ever increasing numbers do to an also alarming rate of population growth) are truly affecting the climate.
What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious, but that's a task for psychologists and philosophers I suppose.
Right on. There is insufficient data to draw positive conclusions about anything. Yes, it's getting warmer. 400 years out of how many million? You think an ice core sample from one of the poles gives you an idea of the GLOBAL temperature?
g +ice+age%22&btnG=Search
Have a great debate, but throw some science in once in a while. Once again, correlation does not prove causality. This is the science where people study x number of people who drink coffee: "coffee is bad for you".... next study: "coffee is good for you". Have you all seen the articles from the 70s by now of the "coming ice age"?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22comin
Sure, I believe in being conservative and reducing greenhouse gases to be on the safe side, but let's not look like raving lunatics who don't know anything about science while we try to convince peole to do this, k?
Between 1 A.D. and 1850, volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were the main causes of changes in greenhouse gas levels. But those temperature changes "were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas" levels by pollution since the mid-19th century, it said.
That's pretty amusing, given their own admission that they have no reliable data stretching back more than 400 years. You'd think they'd avoid making blanket statements about greenhouse gas levels and global temperatures when there isn't any solid measurement of either thing from 1 A.D. to about 1600 A.D.
I guess passing off speculation as fact is the new empiricism. So long as they're goodfacts, of course.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
...about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900...
That's the most interesting part to me - especially since environmentalists tend to forget that the long term change in land use could be more relevent than burning coal. An exploding human population needs farmland, which is notably not forests or jungles buffering the CO2 content of the air. If cutting down forests and jungles to grow food for humans is actually the problem, then what is the solution? Starving the poor and firing all the farmers are even less popular than shutting down polluting powerplants...
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Why do you omit the fact that population is SHRINKING in the west, and that it is only the "developing nations" that are responsible for it? Too un-PC for you? I think it's important to point this out if only to counter the assumptions some make, that I have seen all too often, in regards to population pressures.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Probably not it's been disputed.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Sure it is. But we don't have to do it all with trying to pump (or stop pumping) into the atmosphere. The sun IS getting hotter (and bigger). When life first started (a couple of billion years ago), Earth was at the outside edge of the "temperate zone" in its orbit around the sun. That is, it's warm enough so plenty of water is liquid, but cool enough that not all the water is in thick water vapor blanket around the planet. The warmer Earth gets, the more water hangs out in the atmosphere, and the hotter the Earth gets.
Anyway, we are now at the *inside* edge of the temperate zone, and the sun is still growing. The long-term climate control plan is to attach some rockets to a big comet or asteroid, and get it sweeping close to Earth's orbit so it pulls it further out from the sun, by just a little bit. This could be a permanent option - set it up to tug Earth every few years ot so just enough to compensate for the growth of the sun, plus any extra radiative forcing effect of the greenhouse gasses going into the atmosphere.
Not only do we get a stable climate, the CO2 levels can be allowed to increase enough to provide a boost for our plants and crops, so we can use renewable sources of energy as the fossil fuels run out. With 1800-2000 ppm of CO2, switchgrass and corn will grow like crazy, so we would have plenty of arable land for both food and biofuels.
It's practically a free lunch.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Not scientifically proven? I don't care what Rush Limbaugh has been telling you... Among scientists that study climatology and related fields there's an overwhelming consensus. Those rare exceptions are typically shills being paid off by Exxon-Mobil. See http://exxonsecrets.com/ and take a look at the ulterior motives of your favorite skeptics.
Ask me about my sig!
"With the onset and end of ice ages, we are talking about geological timescales - minimum of thousands of years for any discernable difference."
Ah, well, no. Look up the 8200 year event, and the Younger Dryas. A 10 degree C drop in like 20 years. And they came out of it in about 50. The end of the previous interglacial was assumed to to take thousands of years, but it appears now it went from hotter than now to full ice age in a century. It obviously took longer than that for the glaciers to build up enough to move, but the temperature regime was established. If you want to worry, then worry about unknown tipping points.
In fact it appears that since Antarctica and South America parted company, allowing the Antarctic Drift to go in circles rather than move cold water to the equator, the climate on this mudball has been notably unstable. Bummer.
And you can hope the solar cycle is partly responsible, because it is peaking now (actually has peaked but the climate effects lag) and that should reduce it's contribution to warming, so the rate of change should be leveling out by 2010. And it should be cooling by 2020.
And if it is all CO2 after all, then move to Denmark, become a citizen, and buy a retirement home on Greenland, which will be quite pleasant by then.
> relatively short lifespan. This fact is as clear as the fact
> that global warming is happening.
But is it happening faster than it typically does?
In many parts of the US, it's common to see temperature changes of 100 degrees over the course of a year. And it's not really a problem - plants are adapted to that cycle, animals migrate/burrow/grow or shed winter coats, people know to wear the right clothes and use the right technology, the change is gradual enough to largely avoid thermal shock to infrastructure, and so on.
If you saw a temperature change of 100 degrees over the course of an hour, though, it would be a disaster. If it happened in summer, for example, vast swathes of vegetation would freeze and die and whole populations of animals would be unprepared and freeze to death, both of which would lead to ripple effects up the food chain, including us (crop failure). Thousands of people would die as they were caught unprepared without proper clothing and heating. The immense heat differentials in the area would whip up enormous storms.
Analogous problems could happen from unusually-fast changes in global temperature -- for example, disruptions of whole ecosystems as plants and animals are unable to adjust fast enough, substantial increases in dangerous weather as energy is rapidly added to the system, flooding displacing hundreds of millions of people over the course of a few years, and so on.
Most of these problems are made worse the more rapid the change is; there's a reason flash floods are more dangerous than seepage. Add to this some of the nonlinear effects that oceanographers I know are worried about (e.g., the Gulf Stream shutting down -- which we know has happened in the past -- and drastically changing the climate of the Atlantic region), and you get the potential for immense human suffering.
Will it kill off the human species? Probably not. But using that to suggest it's "okay" is as nonsensical as saying it's "okay" to have all your limbs blown off, so long as you survive.
> trying to keep achieve stability in a chaotic system that we don't
> really understand and can barely model is probably pointless.
In your opinion, perhaps. Throwing up our hands and crying "ohh, it's all too complicated" is not the approach that has led the advance of civilization and knowledge. We control chaotic systems pretty successfully every day - the turbulence around jet engines, for example - so there's reason to believe we could usefully influence other chaotic systems.
If nothing else, the simple fact that we're already influencing this chaotic system and pushing it into a state which is worse for us makes the question somewhat moot. We're already influencing the system, so we have no choice about whether to influence it, only about how. Unless you're arguing that blindly whacking away at an incompletely-understood system is just as good as employing what knowledge we do have as best as possible.
But that would be a strange claim for you to be making, given the continued success of jet engines and our continued incomplete understanding of turbulent fluids. If that's your claim, the evidence isn't on your side.
You should link people some of these reports to read, preferably by reputable scientists who research the subject...infact, let me clarify that last part:
Reputable as in not politically biased (ie, Al Gore would certainly not be reputable), published multiple papers on the subject and/or adjacent subjects in notable Journals (ie, Nature, Science, whatever, not "Wicca Quarterly," "The Limbaugh Letter," or other nonsense), and preferably a resident at a University (not their Mom's basement). Knowing who funds the research is a big plus.
And of course, by scientist, I mean people who actually, you know, do science. Not some quasi-science bullshit like most people injest and take as the truth, either. The person better have cited his sources, included his scientific data (and not summarized it like a fucking news paper article), and lastly, included error analysis. No PhD = not a reputable scientist. This isn't Coast to Coast.
I have not read any serious reports on the subject. I've heard PLENTY of media spin to the point where I wouldn't believe the truth if they told it to me. It's pretty easy to do a google search and find about 10^6 links from unqualified bloggers, cheesy geocities pages, and your typical array of leftist banter, all claiming the sky is falling but never citing just who determined that. Last time I checked, I'd file under the category of "ignorant" with most of the world (even if they don't believe it.)
Finally, let me say this (and recall I've already admitted my ignorance of the subject): I question just how accurately temperatures from 2000 years ago can be measured, relative to, say, satellite technology now. If the global mean temperature has increased 3C (and from I've heard it's less than that...) and your error is +/-5C then just how useful is that data?
What are you looking at? The temperature lags, and CO2 is leading.
It's true that there is a lot of disingenuity on the warming-is-fake side, but some of it is caused by disingenuity and outright stupidity on the warming-is-real side.
If you look at places like dailykos.com and other political proponents of "we need to do something", even mainstream ones like Al Gore, they're at huge odds with the scientific literature. For example, you now hear all sorts of nonsense about how increased hurricane frequency proves we need to do something, even though there is no evidence at all of a relationship (some scientists have hypothesized a relationship between warming and hurricane intensity---not frequency---but even that is highly speculative and not generally accepted).
In addition, I've heard claims that severe winters also support global warming, but the UN's general reports on the subject dispel that as a myth, and claim that global warming would result in, on average, slightly less severe winters. (Of course, severe winters don't *disprove* globl warming either---there are still plenty of year-to-year fluctuations even if the average is getting warmer.)
People are also conflating multiple trends. The important issue from a human-change point of view is the extent to which greenhouse gases and other human creations are changing climate. That's a separate question from the *aggregate* climate change. There *is* indeed good evidence for human-caused climate change, but it is still a separate question. For example, glacier retreat is often cited, but is largely a different phenomenon---Canadian glaciers have been retreating since about 1842, long before significant human-caused global warming. Current glacier retreat does appear to be caused or accelerated by global warming, but showing a picture of "glacier in 1840" and "glacier now" is just shady politics, when most of that recession happened from 1840-1930. And, of course, we should also take into account the estimates that about 30% of current warming is caused by an odd increase in solar output.
I think on the whole shoddy pro-global-warming argument is hurting the case. When the facts are on your side, there's no need to embellish them, and it damages credibility. This is why Real Scientists tend not to do it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The people who respond to these articles with "...but we don't know what's causing it; It may be part of normal variation." miss the point. The question is not whether it has been hotter in the past but:
1) Will climate changes significantly affect the carrying capacity of our biosphere/economy/ecology?
2) Is there anything we can do to mitigate such affects, if any?
3) At what point do we lose the ability to make such an impact?
Scientific opinion seems to be crystalizing on at least the first two items. Yes, the Vikings may have thrived in warmer temperatures, but the entire population of the planet in 1000 A.D. was less than the U.S.'s today (about 265 million). There was more resilience in the system to accept large migrations and crop/prey shifts. I think that's not so true today.
We also seem to be reaching agreement that yes, mankind does have an effect of some kind on world climate. How much of an effect is difficult to define.
In the end, it becomes a question of risk mitigation: If we can take action that might make the affects of climate change less, and the actions would have low enough impact on worldwide standards of living, we should take those actions. The debate seems to come down to this: What level of impact on current living conditions are we willing to accept, given what we know, and our confidence in the information. The answer will be different in Washington, Beijing, Paris, Islamabad, and the Kalihari desert.
In any case, the argument will be decided in the next 10-50 years by nature: either conditions will continue to deteriorate, and you will be forced to agree that there is a problem, or they won't, and you can crow about how you were right all along.
Heh. You have more faith in human reason than I do. It's more likely that, long after the issue is settled, we'll still have an ongoing political debate, and we won't be doing much about whatever the problem has escalated into.
This is why there's a growing number of people saying that we shouldn't waste time trying to fight global warming. No matter what the evidence, our political and economic systems are going to keep barging ahead with their current behavior. So the question "How can we prevent or reverse it?" may be irrelevant; a more practical question is "How can we prepare for the changes that are ahead?"
The first step, of course, is getting good scientific information on what's happening, and we're doing a lot of that (with only occasional obstruction from politicians and businessmen). The information, including what predictions are possible, should be made available to those who want to know, and we're doing that, too (with a lot of obfuscation by the deniers and the simply illogical).
But there's really no way that humans can be "forced to agree" on anything. That's not what we're like. Even when Mother Nature hits us over the head, as She has done innumerable times in the past, we usually attribute a disaster to an angry god, and carefully ignore the evidence around us as to what actually happened.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
...what made it so hot 400 years ago?
Was it all those sailing ships the European explorers used to exploit the world? Maybe they trapped the winds and caused a shift in global air currents!
For that matter, what was up with the Cambrian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous eras, when it was as much as 10 degrees C hotter than today (global average). Was that due to flatulent herbivorous dinosaurs?
The entire "global warming" sham is the most egregious abuse of science for political benefit since eugenics.
The hottest temperature in 400 years does NOT imply that it was this hot 400 years ago. It simply means that if we look at the records of the last 400 years, the hottest temperatures are right now. Furthermore, if we look at the records of the last 1000 years (which are a little harder to read since there are fewer means of cross-correlation), the hottest temperatures are right now. Please try to understand that these two statements do not, in any way, contradict each other.
Ben Hocking
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Mars is also hotter than it has been for 500 years. Not to mention we have not been collecting accurate climate information for 400 years and the means by which to collect that data accurately has only existed for the last hundred or hundred and fifty years. Damn humans we are just not satisfied with screwing up our climate, but even teh climate of planets we don't even exist on... I am sooo ashamed :P,
Ray
The earth is billions of years old. Lets put things in perspective. If you put it on the scale of a human life, the last thousand years corrosponds to 1 second of an average lifespan. Who cares if its the hottest in 400 years - does it really mean anything in the scope of billions of years? We simply freak out if there is any change whatsoever - it scares us - but it is the only certainty. Unfortunately there will always be those who think that 1) they can somehow stop change from occuring 2) think that anything that is foreign to what they are used to is bad and 3) will miss the point that while we should understand our environment, maintaining it just as it is now is simply never going to be a possibility no matter what we do.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
No, if it's caused by human beings, then human beings can do something about it. Heck, if it's caused by volcanos, there has to be _something_ we can do.
I don't really give a damn what the cause is. We -- the human race -- can have a net positive effect on this issue. That, alone, is reason to do it. The potential to save our children and our planet only adds to that reason.
What do you mean by sudden jumps in temperature? As far as I know there has never been such a sudden jump in temperature (and definitely not in CO2 concentrations) reflected in any of our measurements that matches the current jump. Yes, it has been hotter than it is now - and many areas that are now inhabited were underwater then.
Ben Hocking
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Imagine I see a line of people going on and on, until that line bends around a corner. Now, let's say I tell you that I'm taller than everyone in that line until it bends around that corner. Would you necessarily conclude that immediately after it bends around that corner you'll find someone taller? Because that's the kind of logic you're applying here.
Now, let's imagine that you do claim that. I now find a way to see around that corner and find tham I'm taller than everyone I can see there until it bends around yet another corner. Will you know claim that this claim means that there's someone taller right around the next corner?
Has it ever been hotter than it is now? Absolutely. Were we here to suffer the consequences? No. Has it ever heated up this quickly before? Probably not since the Earth first coalesced.
Ben Hocking
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