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2008 Is the Coldest Year of the 21st Century
dtjohnson writes "Data from the United Kingdom Meteorological Office suggests that 2008 will
be an unusually cold year due to the La Nina effect in the western
Pacific ocean. Not to worry, though, as the La Nina effect has
faded recently so its effect on next year's temperatures will be
reduced. However, another natural cycle, the Atlantic
Multidecadal Oscillation, is predicted to hold global temperatures
steady for the next decade before global warming takes our planet into
new warmth. If these predictions are correct, there must be
a lot of planetary heat being stored away somewhere ... unless the heat
output from the sun
is decreasing
rather than increasing
or the heat being absorbed by the earth is decreasing due to changes in
the earth's albedo."
... unless the heat output from the sun is decreasing rather than increasing or the heat being absorbed by the earth is decreasing due to changes in the earth's albedo.
TFA missed one: ... or the current sunspot shortage continues, as it did in the "little ice age", causing another one.
Given that, by at least one model, we only have maybe 8 or so centuries until the fossil carbon runs out and we plunge back onto the orbital-mechanics driven end of the current interglacial and dive into a BIG ice age (whose steepening slope we may have been holding off with greenhouse gases since about the dawn of agriculture) we might not see any significant "global warming" at all.
All of this is assuming that we don't establish enough space industrialization to let us tune the insolation and just FIX the issue. (Which seems likely. The current government prescriptions for patching "global warming" would destroy the wealth and technology bases needed to drive a space program.)
And also assuming that polywell, POPS (Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere), and other fusion power approaches ALL don't work out. (Cheap aneutronic hydrogen fusion power would drive fossil-carbon based fuels out of the market for most uses and provide the energy needed to drive several technologies that could tune the Earth's temperature.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The climate does nothing but change. The debate is always about which direction it is going. Long-term ice records indicate it should be cooling. CO2 theorists say it should be warming. ! Could we be heading into a period of climate stability as trends cancel???
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
No, you can't. The only thing that we can really know for sure, is if, the lack of sunspots continues for say a year, maybe two years, AND, the climate temperatures deviate from what the climate models would otherwise predict. While I'm not 100% sold on the climate models that we have, and am sort of skeptical of them, I'm not jumping into bed with those skeptics who would dismiss AGW as bunk. It would seem to me that those skeptics should have their own climate models that have something we can test. As it is, all we have is this notion that there might be some link between sunspots and climate, but not much of a physical link that we can really go out and measure and correlate to climate, and we won't have that until those climate models we do have fail spectacularly. So, right now, the La Nina is taking the rap for the present global cooling, but, La Nina has been over for a few months now, and the earth's temperatures are either slightly declining or flat, according to the latest satellite temperatures. If we have falling temperatures for at least year we can worry, and if we start falling faster, than we can really worry, but for today, all we can really do is note that if it snows unusually, toss out a link on Slashdot to sunspots and make some snarky comments about how Hansen's FORTRAN really blows.
This is my sig.
But what will I do with all my "Gore 2012" buttons?
Ha.
Still, remember that the Gore stance is roughly (yeah, it's exaggerated, but roughly) in line with the science.
The global warming platform from the Republican party is to shoot into the air and yell "yeeehaww!" a bunch.
Maybe so, but gas prices aren't $4.00 a gallon because rednecks shot their guns. What you are paying at the pump is the direct result of environmentalist's policies fed by the FUD spread by AlGore.
Meh. Not entirely accurate, really. If Al Gore's "recommendations" had really been followed by a large proportion of Americans (ignoring for now his own failure to follow them), demand for energy should have decreased significantly. With everybody switching to more efficient lighting and appliances, driving less and buying more fuel efficient cars, etc., chances are that energy prices probably would not have spiked the way they did.
The NIMBYs and the environmental lobby that slowed US drilling and new power plant construction to a crawl and completely stopped any increased capacity for oil refineries and other infrastructure were the real culprits in keeping energy supplies too far below the demand curve. Not that Gore had any solutions for helping improve energy supplies.
Of course, the big jump in oil prices has more to do with the declining value of the US dollar than anything, but that's another issue altogether.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's not going to just get warmer over short time periods.. It always amazes me that folks don't realize that.
What surprises me even more is how few people know that we've been experiencing global warming since 1830. AFAIK, we don't currently have a good model that can explain this.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Mod parent up.. The earth's climate is a control system. As it becomes unstable, you will start seeing more records: cold, hot, rain, drought, record single day temperature differentials, etc.
Which, conveniently, lets just about any type of weather be attributed to global warming (or is that climate change?)
Which is exactly what is happening anyway. Every big storm or unusual meteorological event these days is automatically assumed to be yet another affect of global climate change. According to some, it's even causing forest fires and earthquakes.
NPR has a whole series where they go to some part of the world each week, and talk about how climate change is affecting the people there in some way or another, and how the people are coping (or are doomed).
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Could have something to do with three volcanos going off in Alaska and the Aleutian islands. I've noticed the temperature in Texas drop and we've gotten a lot of rain after the 3rd one went off and cold fronts have come down from that area.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
It's funny the weatherman can't predict whether it will rain in a week yet the GW movement knows the exact temperature 100 years from now.
I was going to expend a lot of space explaining the basics of chaos theory mathematics but then I decided to let someone else do it.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=204
Now you either accept that a chaotic system can be characterized statistically, or you have to admit that you don't believe in computers--because this is the *same math* that described the quantum physics that makes most of the modern world work. If you're going to accept that it works in one realm you have to accept that it works in the other.
-- Cerebus
There was a story a couple of years ago about how Al Gore supposedly uses an enormous amount of energy himself, but buys carbon offsets to, well, offset it. Personally, I think carbon offsets should be reserved for companies that produce carbon during the normal operation of their business, and an individual buying them is working against the spirit of the system.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
I gotta say, I was completely shocked, when about 10 years ago or so, I visited a friend that lived in the far NE of the US. I was amazed to find out, there were houses...LOTS of them that didn't actually have air conditioning?!?!
Growing up in the south, I'd always known everyone to have AC. The oddball ones were the ones that didn't have central heat and air...although after I moved to the NOLA area, in so many old houses, there are a lot of places with window units, but, I'd just never thought there were places in the US that didn't have AC at all. Then again...I'd never been exposed to people that actually used heating oil before as a means of heat. I'd always grown up with gas heating, or possibly electric...
Definitely some strange things and ways of life up there in 'yankee land'.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
...and thus experiencing winter right now, I'd just like to say NO SHIT SHERLOCK!!
We're freezing our butts off down here. Record low temperatures, frost for the first time in many places, etc.
I pretty much agree with you, except for one point:
Nuclear doesn't have a limited supply in any realistic sense. This is just part of the massive anti-nuclear FUD brought to us by big oil & friends. In fact, it was one of the first, since nuclear was the first serious alternative to fossil fuels. The only reason nuclear seems limited is because we've let ourselves get boxed in to thinking in terms of one of the most wasteful and dangerous fuel cycles imaginable, which relies on comparatively rare feedstock and produces much more waste than it needs to*.
In a rational world, what we now call "nuclear waste" would be known as "fuel reserves" and we'd be set for the foreseeable future.
--MarkusQ
* But still nothing compared to what fossil fuels produce. There isn't a coal plant on the planet that could get an operating license as a nuclear plant, given the amount of radioactive carbon they dump into the air.
Actually, the republicans have been in charge for years doing less than nothing to get the US of their oil addiction, and now they want to take away tax credits for renewable energies, while they have given several huge tax breaks for oil companies over the yers, companies who making more money than any other corporations in the world history. And when the shit hits the fan, the repubs blame liberals for not letting them drill off-shore in 2015. Talk about leadership.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
It's not that simple, I'm affraid.
1. At the very least the cost, or "danger", in acting rashly upon a fairy tale to please some cultists is to not do something that would actually work. At worst it's doing something outright unproductive, that compounds the problem in the long run or creates a bigger problem.
As the stereotypical example, take Easter Island. Instead of doing what would have worked (start replanting trees) they did what the priests told them (cut more trees to build and haul more statues to the gods, 'cause the gods would surely take care of all problems.) Eventually the problem got so bad that they couldn't even make enough fishing vessels any more. Maybe stopping and thinking before acting couldn't have been worse.
I find that to be, ironically, a decent metaphor for _both_ extremes of the climate debate. Both have their a priori "truth" set in stone, both don't actually do real science (in real science, no truth is set in stone, and everything is falsifiable), and both would rather act now, goddammit, instead of at least trying to understand the big model. I can almost imagine a bunch of Easter Island tribesmen doing the same, waving fists and shouting slogans to act now to please the gods, and calling anyone names if he even tries debating the already decided orthodoxy.
2. To also answer the question what is the danger: the economy is already in a precarious position in most western countries, having worked on, essentially, over-spending ever since the Great Depression. We don't really have a better model to replace it with.
The old laissez-faire model essentially died in the Great Depression. Not that it was that great a model to start with. It produced increasingly erratic swings between boom and crash, with each boom setting the stage for the following crash. Increasingly more money and resources were going not into satisfying people's needs (which, may I remind, was how the Wealth Of Nations was supposed to be measured), but into rebuilding the industry after the last crash. The actual standard of living for workers decline through the 19'th and early 20'th century, with the general theme being demanding more hours work for less pay.
(And it's funny to see Libertarians pining for _that_ model. But I digress.)
Even if some claim (rather unproven, but ok) that it was the corrective measures that finally caused the big crash, it still just wasn't a that great model anyway. The swings were getting bigger and bigger, and the whole situation shittier and shittier. Even _if_ it would have bombed a bit later without the corrective actions, bomb it would have. And it wasn't much fun to be an employee in that model even before it bombing.
Some also tried other stunts in the meantime, like supply-side economics, but even those failed to work better than the current model.
Or, of course, we could actually be Keynesian as Keynes actually intended it to work: overspend in times of crisis, yes, but cut back and pay the debts in times of boom. No government yet managed to do that, and it could be argued that it would make for a very unpopular government to cut back, say, welfare, _because_ the economy is doing great. Plus other problems.
But, of course, adding yet another permanent burden to it, really doesn't help there.
Basically most first world economies are in a bigger trouble than they seem. We all _seem_ to do great, but we're steadily heading towards the end of the model that makes it work. At some point, the debt gets so big that you can't go on like that any more. And all we've been doing is postpone the next crash. Quite successfully and for a remarkably long time, duly noted, but that's what we've been doing. And each averted crisis added even more debt. Not just in the USA, but everywhere.
Fear what will happen when we all no longer have the reserves to avert the next one, because it won't be pretty. Unless you're at least, say, 90 years old, you have only seen minor crises, held small by having the money to throw at them. To
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't see us running out of thorium anytime soon
This raises another good point, regarding the 'scarcity' of nuclear fuels alluded to a few level up in this thread. All the radioactive material we could be using to turn water into steam to power electrical generators is already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now, it's just heating the surrounding rocks in a more diffuse spread than if it was all stuck into a reactor together.
We will run out of nuclear fuels at the same point in time whether we're using them or not, cause by their very natures, radioactive materials are always sitting there radiating. It's just a question of whether we take advantage of that energy while it's there, or just let it warm a lot of rocks a little bit until it all burns out.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If your house was designed properly, it wouldn't even need a huge-assed A/C.
Architects have known about these techniques for decades, and there is one problem: in the UK, for example, the housing stock is replaced at about 1% per year. So we will be stuck with housing that can't use this tech for many decades to come. I wish it wasn't so, and that's the state of things. All the homes I have lived in in the UK would have to have been demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, including the local neighborhood, to really become an autonomous, off the grid, facility. The avoidance of doing the numbers has created a generation of eco-conscious people just switching off chargers, but they don't hesitate to take a job where they will have to travel more, or go forth and have more kids. Environmentalism needs to be more than feeling, it has to be a bottom line, and that means looking at the cold hard numbers. People who promote solutions that will take 50 or 100 or 150 years to implement are not going to win any credibility.
You're confusing republicans with conservatives, I blame the republicans as much as you do... in 1996 the republican congress passed legislation to allow drilling in ANWR, which I support. Clinton vetoed it. That's fine, but from Jan 2001 to Jan 2007 the republicans had both executive AND legislative and did nothing, and now they're whining that a democrat led congress isn't doing the job they could have done for years.
It IS a very hypocritical stance, and republicans have squandered 6 years of opportunity for a conservative agenda.
Stupid sexy Flanders.