Slashdot Mirror
2006 Was the Warmest Year Ever
kpw10 writes "Dr. Jeff Masters from Wunderground has a great summary of this year's rather abnormal weather (his blog is the best source on the net for in-depth weather analysis). The post discusses some of the cyclical climate forces at work this year and compares this year's record temperatures to records from the past. There are some interesting differences, particularly in the extent of the northern hemisphere seeing record highs this year." From the article: "December's weather in the Northeast U.S. may have been a case of the weather dice coming up thirteen — weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago. The weather dice will start rolling an increasing number of thirteens in coming years, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summertime by 2040 is a very real possibility..." Here is the The National Climatic Data Center's report announcing the entry of 2006 into the record books.
No, the bulk of the snow is on the eastern side of the divide (i.e. denver). The snow is maybe a bit above average for this time of year (but the snow is nice). If you want lots of snow, try the northwest.
As to the airport closure, it was actually only closed for 36 hrs for the first storm only. On the second storm, airlines assumed a closure would happen and flights were manipulated. As it was, the airport never closed. The storm hit hard to the south east. Had the storm moved just 41 miles north, then most likely DIA would have been closed for 48 hours or more.
But in my 25 years of living in Colorado, this is the first time that I have seen this much snow on the ground at this time of year. It reminds me of xmas in south wisc (which actually had no snow).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Could this really be avoided? Is it still time to revert those climate changes?
Shouldn't we be preparing for the worse yet?
Instead of deciding whether or not it's really happening ?
I just watched "An inconvenient truth" yesterday. It was the creepiest film I ever watched, way scarier then "The Shining" or "The Ring". I hope most of you out there, have seen it already... I the film Al Gore shows multiple graphs illustrating the drastic changes in the climate - due to our smoking and scorching of Earth - in the last few decades. 2005 was the warmest year, now 2006 bits that questionable record. Are we all running towards the flames of self-destruction? I would say we are all to blame here - It's true, we can all contribute something to the cause. Drive less, own less - endorse global warming awareness in our community. But that will solve a fraction of the problem - America has to wake the hell up and say no to all those fat corporations and say (in the words of the great wizard) "You Shall Not Pass". I mean - we have the technology to turn into cars and motors running on alternative types of energies - we had that technology more than 20 years. Why is the fat fuck the suit - always louder than the suffering masses? Voice out people - let's start our own revolution here - make our children proud of this spineless generation.
Locksmith
Idha khatabahum lijahiluna qalu salaman
Firstly the hurricanes were dwarfed by the El Nino effect. This wasn't known at the time the predictions were made. As for the question about the deep freezes that's a misunderstanding. Global Warming is a misnomer, a more accurate name would be Global Climate Change. On average the earth is warmer, however in the short term you are going to end up with more extreme weather. You will end up with places that deep freeze, other places that face rather sudden flash floods, as well as extreme winds and drought. On average there will be less rain fall, but when the rain falls it should be extreme and sudden.
You can expect deep freezes and heat waves, no snow and blizzards. On average it will be warmer and dryer, but you can pretty much get anything day to day.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Speaking of strawmen, never mind that the lack of observable stellar parallax made stationary earth models scientifically more tenable. See the discussion of Tycho's observations here: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/b
Personally, I never subscribe to the "we can't possibly understand it" argument. That also explains my deeply atheistic beliefs.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Not to mention all sorts of fun deceases you are not used to. Warmer weather means some of the insects will migrate carrying fun stuff like malaria or sleeping sickness.
It's going to be real fun trying to survive in a few decades if we don't deal with the problems right now.
The Earth is 4 Billion years old. This talks about the weather over the last 120 thousand years.
That is 0.003 percent of the age of the Earth.
Maybe they should look a little farther back. Maybe 4 Million years. Of course, if we want to look at the last 1% of the age of the Earth, we would have to look back 40 Million years.
The fact is, the climate over the last 120 thousand years could be the exception and not the rule.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
This "economy vs environment" debate is full of shit. Ever heard of the term "dysfunctional production"? Let's use an example:
Some company builds a house in a foreign country. Jobs created, lotsa money. good. Then, the weapon industry lobbies another country to go to war with the other foreign country. Lotsa money, lotsa jobs. good. End result? House is destroyed, bombs are consumed, nothing *useful* have been created in the end, but in the balance sheet, everything is positive, GP is raising (and everyone likes it when GP is raising). All it did is to redistribute some capital from the taxpayers to the weapon/housing industries, for a nil end result.
We have to change the way we see economy.
perception is reality
Just to address a couple of points in your ill-informed confused rant:
We're putting a LOT of heat out, as well as large amounts of CO2. So anecdotally it seems credible to me.
The amount of heat we produce is negligible. The major concern is the CO2 we are producing which is trapping the sun's heat.
But the earth is a BIG system. Almost inconceivably big. Larger shifts in CO2 and temp have occurred historically, and just as quickly, long before humans showed up.
This is completely wrong. This is, to the best of our ability to measure it, the fastest increase in CO2 levels (and, not conicidentally, temperature) in the history of the Earth.
There seems to be a common theme in arguments against taking action against climate change: Just Making Shit Up.
Yeah, I'm from western Pennsylvania. Normally we're snow-covered for 5 months out of the year, but so far we've had two dustings that haven't lasted more than 3 days. Our temperatures have also not even been cold enough to allow the ground to totally freeze like it usually does in October.
No snow for Halloween, we were happy. No snow for Thanksgiving, weirded out, but pleased. No snow for Christmas, just depressing. Then on the 5th of January (when we're usually buried under a foot of snow) it was 67 degrees. I never thought I'd grill hamburgs and hot dogs in January.
If its this warm now, I'm really not looking forward to the heat this summer.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
From the National Weather Service: The average temperature of 34.5 degrees tied 1996 as the second warmest December on record. The warmest December was 34.8 degrees in 2001. In contrast, the coldest December was in 1989 with an average temperature of 14.1 degrees. Normally December has as average of 27.6 degrees.
[...]
The average high temperature for the month was a record 43.3 degrees. The old record was 42.8 degrees in 1953. The coldest high temperature was 24.7 degrees in 1989 and the normal December average high temperature is 36.4 degrees.
[...]
The average low temperature for the month was 25.6 degrees, warm enough to be the 3rd warmest on record. The warmest average low temperature was 27.8 degrees in 1996 followed by 26.8 degrees in 2001. The coldest average low temperature was 3.4 degrees in 1989 and the normal December average low temperature is 18.7 degrees.
[...]
The temperature never got below zero degrees in December. In fact, the coldest reading was only 9 degrees and that didn't occur until the last day of the month.
[...]
The warmest temperature for the month was 61 degrees on the 1st. I'm going to have to move to Canada if I ever want to see a white Christmas again.
Gasses become less soluble in warmer water. That's why you get bubbles when heating a pot of water even before the water reaches boiling. Those bubbles are O2, N2, and CO2 (among other gases) that were dissolved in the water.
Venus' atmosphere:
Earth's atmosphere:
Mars' atmosphere:
You can't infer any correlation between CO2 and temperature with the limited dataset provided above. From general knowledge we know that electromagnetic (and thermal) fields fall off with an inverse-square of distance, so we can assume that Mars would be receiving less heat input from the sun than Earth, and Venus more.
My point is that there are more factors affecting temperature than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There might well be factors other than CO2 affecting the temperatures here on Earth, such as: a possible shift in our orbit around the sun; a possible weakening of the Van Allen Radiation Belts (allowing more radiation input); deforestation (trees help to cool things as well as absorb CO2 and product O2); Urban Heat Islands (ok, I don't buy this one myself since satellite measurements do actually show increases in some places away from urbanized areas and cooling over some others); and probably a whole bunch we haven't identified yet.
All we know for certain is that the global average temperature is increasing, but we don't actually know for 100% certain what's causing it. CO2 is just the most-likely suspect at the moment.