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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."
But what will I do with all my "Gore 2012" buttons?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Here comes a raging global warming debate... haven't seen this on the Internet in 5 seconds.
Hopefully for this one we'll get some cashiers, makeup artists and puppeteers to weigh in with their expert environmental opinion, just to mix things up.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Score one fer bloody pirates, mate!
we're seeing the best ski season since 1992. There are now around 4.5 metres of base snow at Mt Ruapehu http://www.mtruapehu.com/winter/turoa-report/
Those of us who are paranoid about the sun have got some justification for our beliefs. First off, the new solar cycle is somewhat late, depending on who you believe. Secondly, there have been very few sunspots this year. In fact, right now, we have gone 30 days without a single sunspot.
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
Fire up those SUVs and coal plants, little ice age, here we come.
This is my sig.
No, the heat output from the sun is not changing to reflect the temperature changes.
Global warming doesn't stop or create the normal cycles. It makes them more active.
The particulate matters in the air reflects light.
Not enough to completly offset the global warming.
Look up global dimming.
The melting of the ice sheets is having a cooling effect on Europe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Uranus is the one that is into that freaky European sex, right?
Hype the headline a little more, will ya?
No one is denying climate change. No one even denies that human activity (or the sun or various natural cycles) influences the change. The argument is over how big a role each factor plays. (Along with accusations of exaggerating selected factors for political or commercial gain.) As with many scientific questions, teasing apart correlation and cause is exceedingly difficult - especially with multi-factor causes.
You didn't hear that they renamed it in honor of Nina Reiser?
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Basically, the logic is that every weather event or phenomenon is somehow either proof of global warming, or happened despite it and in no way can be used to refute it. Haven't you figured that out yet?
... 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
Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease.
I hate to point out the obvious, but global warming models do not predict a year over year increase in temperature. Again, from the article:
"The principal thing is to look at the long-term trend," said Dr Kennedy. "2008 will still be significantly above the long-term average. There's been a strong upward trend in the last few decades, and that's the thing to focus on."
I came here for a good argument
It would be a lot more interesting if 2008 was the coldest year in the last 100 years instead of the coldest year "this century."
2001, or 2000 for those who short-change the first century, set a record as both the coldest and hottest year of the century. The following year broke one of those records.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The short answer: We probably are, but we don't know what is causing it, and it may just be a temporary trend.
Basically there has been a general warming trend that roughly correlates with the Industrial Revolution(IR) in the US and Europe. Year-to-year, it fluxuates, but overal there is an increase. Now the Greenies among us will instantly attribute this to emissions, but remember...correlation is not causation.
The IR brought advances to many aspects of our lives, which include meteorological mesurement and recording. Our temperature readings prior to the IR were not quite as accurate or consistently recorded (mass-produced thermometers anyone?). This is one factor that might affect what we are observing.
There is also geological record, which indicates many cooling and warming periods throughout the history of the Earth. We may just be experiencing a natural trend.
This is a hot-button media topic, and you see a lot of studies thrown around...many of which have questionably biased funding sources. And they all love to throw around one-sided statistics, which are the dirtiest lies that you can tell.
IMHO, don't get worked up about it. You don't need to cover your home in solar panels and go out and buy the first electric car you can find. But I think everyone should be mindful of their energy use, and try not to be wasteful. Save a little where you can, but don't horribly inconvenience yourself.
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This picture says it all - is it global warming or global cooling?
slashdot rocks
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Oh give me a break. The ice caps are melting, or haven't you heard?
That's why we use ice in our cooler chests: when they melt they absorb a lot of heat, and the ice cold runoff keeps the things around them cooler than they would otherwise be. But just because the ice is melting but your beer is cold you can't conclude that the sun has cooled off.
What you should conclude is that you'd better drink your beer before the ice melts, 'cause it's going to warm up real fast as soon as the ice is gone.
--MarkusQ
Did you know that , at the time of 9/11 , 2001 was the coldest year of the 21st century.
It was also the hottest year of the 21st century (at that time).
The term 'century' is often used to refer to a period of 100 years. However we have had less than 8 years of the 21st century so far. Wake me up when you have the results from the whole 100 years (ie in 2101)
Speaking of Al Gore (many people mentioned him already), this reminds me of the day he gave a speech about global warming in New York... on the coldest day in that city's recorded history!! Ok, so some will tell you that it's not global warming, it's climate change. I have no proof to either confirm or deny that, so I do not have an opinion. However, let's examine this situation from another vantage point: History indicates that the Earth has had warmer and colder periods (such as the Ice Age) in the past, so it stands to reason that the climate probably has periods of increasing warmth followed by periods of increasing coldness. We have recorded data going back decades or maybe a few centuries at most. Beyond that, we rely on data collected from cores drilled out of ice and whatnot, and we make certain assumptions about how to interpret that data. Let's also take into consideration that although it is possible to fly across an entire continent in a matter of hours (for example, a trip from New York to Los Angeles takes less than six hours in the air), if you try to trek across that same continent by means available to the human race two hundred years ago, you will find that it takes you months; thus, the Earth is a big huge ball. I once worked on a project where the temperature of a giant steel fixture was taken at various points, several feet apart, every hour of the day. Part of this fixture was exposed to sunlight for several hours. We only BEGAN to measure increased temperature AFTER the sun was no longer shining on it, since it took it that long to respond to temperature changes. Applying this to a huge ball like the Earth (which, as I said, is so big that trekking across a continent will take months), any change to the climate will be extremely slow and will only show up after a delay of years or decades. Indeed, I once heard (though I don't remember where) that when the industrial age began and there was incredible pollution (much more than today with all the regulations we have), it took several decades for the climate to respond, and several more decades to respond after changes were introduced. All I'm trying to say is that we should examine the methods used to determine this "climate change" and figure out if all the SUVs and factories are really making as large of a dent as we think they are. I have a feeling that the Earth is so large, and it's part of such an enormous larger system (the solar system) that it is probably heating up more due to effects from the sun and the ever-changing distance between the sun and the Earth than from what we're doing down here. So are we affecting the climate? Or is it something that simply changes and we couldn't possibly control it? If you have any data to back up one viewpoint or the other, please throw it in...
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
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)
As a practical matter, it's going to be difficult to keep up political momentum in the face of cooler trends. The movement could be essentially dead in a couple years. In ten, we could be looking at films like An Inconvenient Truth, The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld in the same way we now look at Population Explosion, ZPG and Soylent Green from the sixties and seventies.
Hysteria tends to go in cycles. Buried amongst discredited doomsday theories might be the one that actually does kill us. When that happens, I wonder if we'll all be surprised that it's nothing like the articles running in Time, or if scientists will actually see the prediction-of-the-decade come true, whether by brilliant insight or sheer coincidence.
What worries me is that with the best of intentions we do something profoundly stupid and damaging like, I dunno, dumping old tires in the sea in the insane (in hindsight) belief that they would serve as artificial reefs. In the seventies there were plans to coat the ice caps with soot to combat the global cooling that never came about. Now we're talking about dumping iron oxide in the sea as a solution to global warming, something that would be called "polluting our environment" if it didn't have the Climate Change seal of approval. Confidentially, it's unintended consequences from plans like this that scares me more than the fear that the seas will rise and drown us all.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
CO2 content 2x higher than it has ever been in the history of our planet? Where are you pulling this garbage from?
CO2 levels were [b]11x higher[/b] 500 million years ago. 3x as high just 100 million years ago. This is all through proxy measurement, but if it's even remotely accurate then atmospheric CO2 levels today are some of the lowest in the last 500 million years. There's a nice article all about it that you might want to read.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
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!*
Quit paying the ACs, that only makes them post more.
"Nobody says that climate change isn't happening. The temperature data is fact. It can't be denied any more than it can denied that the sky is blue."
All that temperature data tells us is that temperatures have risen At Thermometers. GLOBAL WARMING SCIENCE HAS MOVED ON.
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
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.........
Doing stuff is overrated. Hitler did stuff! And look where that led! Wouldn't we all have been better off if he had just stayed home and gotten high?
What were we talking about again?
Queue in 10 million "global warming is a scam", "don't look at me, people didna doit" and "Al Gore is a weenie" comments.
But all of these comments on the legitimacy of global warming/cooling/climate change all ignore one very simple, inescapable fact: Most "carbon-neutral" energy forms can be generated locally. Windmills use the wind in your area. Solar panels use the sunlight from your roof. This is also true for geothermal, ocean-wave, and bio-fueled energy. All can be generated locally, with local resources.
Only oil and nuclear have limited supply.
So if, for example, you were a wealthy, North-American country with a severe foreign-debt problem, you might consider the actual costs of oil in lost lives, civil liberties, currency devaluation, and raw wealth shipped oversees to fund a petroleum addiction. This cost is so huge and multi-faceted it baffles the mind. Average people just cannot even begin to understand wealth drain and cost of this magnitude.
But if we were to generate our energy locally, with renewable resources, not only would we leave a nicer place for our kids, grandkids, and their offspring, we'd also improve our national sovereignty. Rather than fund deadly radicals, we'd fund the nice guy down the street. Rather than ship our cash to entities who threaten us at every turn, we'd fund your next-door neighbors. No matter where you live, no matter who you are, no matter how wealthy you happen to be, this is a good idea.
Ignore the matter of global warming, because there's a much more immediate reason to "go green". And it has nothing to do with carbon footprint, it has to do with the green bits of paper in your back pocket. It will be expensive in the short term. It will pay and pay and pay for generations thereafter.
Which would you rather be remembered as: the generation that ignored the problem until it was too late, or the generation that set your state/country/civilization on a long-term course of prosperity?
I choose the latter, thank you.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
...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.
...perhaps the fact that 2008 virtually wiped out any direct evidence for global warming should give us pause to reflect that we really don't understand how global climate works and that a multi-trillion dollar plan to combat it might help, hurt, or, most likely, do nothing but eat up so much tax money that if and when we finally do know what to do we will no longer be able to afford it.
And that is a very inconvenient truth.
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.
Thank you for this post. I am no scientist, but I am an undergrad in a dual major in Engineering/Science (mathematics), there are certain things that really trouble me about contemporary climate science. For one, there appears to be an over reliance on climate models based on broad sweeping assumptions, and an extreme exaggeration of the capacity of any given model to produce accurate results. Increasingly, the GW science seems to be violating Poppers fundamental philosophy of scientific hypothesis: The only theory worth considering is that which can be disproven. Or rather, science is not about proving as such, it is about disproving. I want to see the falsifiability of climate change theory thoroughly discussed, but it never is, nobody can challenge the models, nobody is allowed to question the methods, nobody is allowed to offer alternative to the mainstream narrative. Its a dangerous place for science to be. More and more I see GW predictions failing the falsifiability test: hot year? Earth is warming, cold year? Earth is unstable due to warming, flood: GW, everything, everything under the sun is being attributed to GW.
The 'consensus' worries me also, moreso in fact. There is rarely consensus in science, especially when dealing with fundamentally complex, non-linear dynamical systems which are proven to be inherently chaotic. Even when a theory is sound and mature, the most important consideration is that you are making predictions by using a model, an inherently and unavoidably flawed model. It is always, always important to cite assumptions and errors when making predictions with any model. But if you question the validity of current climate modelling, you are branded a heretic, a denier, and the worst of all: a skeptic. As if being a skeptic in science is suddenly the wrong thing to do? What happened?
All scientists are skeptics, a scientist without skepticism is no scientist, he is a fool. Worse still believing that computer models are completely trustworthy is like believing your lego starship enterprise will fly you to the moon.
I am not a denier, but I am certainly skeptical. I am certainly open to hypotheses, theories, models and all manner of explanations for given data sets, observations etc. But I am deeply troubled by the way discussion and debate about something as highly chaotic and poorly understood as the climate is shut down so vigorously these days. Worse still, the politicians and economists are on board. I can't help but be just a tad aware that politicians will leap on any populist position and economists are always hungry for new derivatives markets.
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.
Actually it's El Niño.
As in, "the little boy".
This is a reference to the birth of Christ, since El Niño usually occurs around Christmas time.
La Niña actually means "the little girl"
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."
already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now
You clearly don't understand nuclear physics.
Thorium natural isotope has a half-life 13 billion years (yes, 13 billion).
Uranium's natural isotope has a half-life of 4.4 billion years.
Neither are "burning up underground".
Most fuel is created by modifying it to create less stable isotopes. Then, when you put a big pile of it together (and/or bombard it with particles, as in the previous article), it creates a chain-reaction that triggers rapid fission. This is VERY different than half-life decay.
You do, indeed, "burn" it up. I'm not arguing against nuclear power, but just pointing out that your post is pretty much 100% entirely made up gibberish .
So you're saying that 'AC' button in my car doesn't activate an anonymity cloak for when I want to drive quickly through speed check areas or flip off cop cars? Uh oh.
which is totally what she said
Yeah, who would have thought that it was possible to make it through childhood to being an adult and still have all their teeth!
Just kidding.... :-)
Actually, the "carbon credit" is soon to be renamed to an "indulgence".
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am