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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.
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.
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
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.
gee whiz guy, no one EVER thought of that! Seriously, of the thousands of scientists to tackle this problem, you are the VERY FIRST to realize that there cycles to the Earth's climate. Scientists have just never taken this into account! /sarcasm
Now I'll tell you to look up the term Milankovitch Cycles and be done with you.
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.
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.
How the hell did this get modded +2 insightful? For one, the article said, "for at least 400 years," implying that is how far they looked through the records! If it had been 400 years since the global temperature averaged this high, they would have used a word like "since" rather than "for at least!" Did this guy, as the Slashdot saying seems to go, "read the fucking article," or is reading the headline enough these days?
I know I'm anonymous coward, so it's harder to get the coveted +5 blessing, but really, sometimes the wisdom of anonymous cowards is better than the Wisdom of Cowards.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
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
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.
Errm... there wasn't anyone around to name the Earth anything a few hundred million years ago, unless you count the Vogons and the mice.
I think the point was that since this is either caused by A) nature, or B) us, perhaps we should start working on B just in case it isn't A.
If its A) and we worked on B), then we profit from less oil dependence and less smog, particulate matter,etc
If its B) and we assumed A), we all die.
Until we know more, I wish people would stop pretending they know what's happening. We have a couple theories, thats it, no proof. (correct me if I'm wrong)
:x
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.
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).
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
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.
If you put it next to the age of the Earth, the meteorite-induced disruption to the world's climate that put the nail in the coffin of pretty much every large land animal on Earth (including the dinosaurs) doesn't seem that significant.
Nevertheless, to the dinosaurs it was pretty significant.
Likewise, the question with anthropogenic global warming and other alterations to the environment induced by man is not "are the disruptions a huge deal on a geological timescale", but "do the disruptions pose an intense danger to the continuation and quality of human life on earth." To which the answer, for global warming, seems to be a pretty clear yes.
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.
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
We're not talking about how things were for the dinosaurs. We didn't develop our coastal cities and argicultural centers during the Triassic, we developed much of what we call Modern Civilization in exactly the last 400 years, and we sure as h3ll didn't grow our species to over 6billion people a million years ago. And to say that this doesn't matter entirely misses the point that everything we thought was steady and sturdy about the earth over the last 395 years is as of recently, apparently, changing and in ways we don't entirely understand and therefore will have a hard time predicting.
But sure, let's sit back and watch what happens. Big experiment in social restructuring, could be fun. Could be hard for someone, but that's the breaks. And maybe in 100 years, after the migrations have started in earnest and whole continents empty into whole other continents, rivers of human flesh and misery passing each other in hopeless crawls from one ecological disaster area to another, maybe our grandchildren won't be digging up and violating our corpses in blind rage at how stupid and cynical we were at the very moment in 400 years of screwing up when we could have turned this ship around and saved them a lot of human misery.
Cuz you know, it's just 400 years of history. Blip in the continuum man. Not my problem.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
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.
Yes, some glaciers are growing. However, the combined net change is a loss of glacial mass.
A similar effect is true of global temperature. Despite global warming, there are areas of the earth that are coolear. However, the global average is up. Note that temperatures at the poles can be affected very dramatically, the average at the north pole by as much as 8 degrees. This obviously has a greater impact on the polar ice than a 1 degree rise would have had.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time it happened the dominant life form wasn't industrialised and happily stuffing the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses
Thing is, it's going to be very difficult to remove greenhouse gasses and stop global warming in 100 years' time should the majority of climate scientists actually turn out to be right. It's really not going to hurt us that much to stop producing greenhouse gasses now, and it might even turn out to be the right thing to do. Why not do it?
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!
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?
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
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
Need a professional organizer?