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Global Warming 'Undeniable,' Report Says
BergZ writes "Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming. 'A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record,' the annual State of the Climate report declares. Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, including Canada, the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its analysis of 10 indicators that are 'clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable.'"
It's been pretty cold recently.
Per the "prototype dashboard", rather than tout data only back to 1950, why don't we look backwards 5 million years, because as we know more data means better predictions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Caution: Contents under pressure
This particular report doesn't specify causes. It just goes over the temperature data and factors directly related to it (like humidity and glaciation). Even if the deniers could pick out one of these datasets and show that's its problematic, there would still be 9 others going the other direction--a textbook case of the Strawman.
Anthropogenic factors are proven out in other studies. There isn't a legitimate debate about that anymore, either.
The debate that's left is in the exact effects and what we can do about it. Low levels of extra CO2 in the atmosphere may actually be beneficial, but we've almost certainly blown way beyond that. Then there are large scale geoengineering projects (like putting a solar shield at L1), which are both expensive and may have unknown consequences. They're being discussed because there aren't a lot of better ideas.
Not a typewriter
No, the camps are:
Advice: on VPS providers
I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
We are, as far as we know, the only species on the planet capable of doing the physics and chemistry to understand how CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere. That's a place to start.
Fear of hubris is for barbarians. We're better than that now.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The data as presented indicates a recent warming trend, but does not say anything about whether this is man-made or not; a 0.5deg rise in 50 years is extremely small in the scheme of things, and drawing the usual alarmist conclusions from this is quite unfounded.
So read the report itself:
The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) shows radiative forcing relative to 1750, of all the long-lived greenhouse gases indexed to 1 for the year 1990. Since 1990, radiative forcing from greenhouse gases has increased 27.5%.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) are important atmospheric trace gases with significant man-made sources. Nitrous oxide has the third strongest anthropogenic climate forcing after CO2 and CH4 and is considered a major greenhouse gas (Butler 2009).
The atmospheric N2O budget is out of balance by one-third as a result of man-made emissions, primarily through emissions from nitrogen fertilizers (Crutzen et al. 2007).
Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise, with CO2 increasing at a rate above the 1978 to 2008 average. The global ocean CO2 uptake flux for 2008, the most recent year for which analyzed data are available, is estimated to have been 1.23 Pg C yr-1, which is 0.25 Pg C yr-1 smaller than the long-term average and the lowest estimated ocean uptake in the last 27 years. At the same time, the total global ocean inventory of anthropogenic carbon stored in the ocean interior as of 2008 suggests an uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 at rates of 2.0 and 2.3 ±0.6 Pg C yr-1 for the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, respectively.
In the tropics this increase has been formally attributed to anthropogenic change over the 1988–2006 period (Santer et al. 2007).
all the time series show an underlying rise in OHC consistent with our understanding of anthropogenic climate change.
I mean, the evidence is all over the report. The only thing stopping them from saying that it is conclusively man made is that 1) it's probably impossible to prove it and 2) there might always be some evidence of non anthropogenic warming contributing to the cause but not accounting for all of it.
My work here is dung.
If it's nonanthropogenic, it just means we might not be able to stop it by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are lots of other options. I seem to remember someone suggesting that it would be relatively cheap to just blast large amounts of titanium dioxide particles into the upper atmosphere in order to increase the albedo of the earth and reflect some of the incoming solar radiation, thus reducing temperatures on earth. The scary part of this is that it's supposedly cheap enough that a single country could decide to do it unilaterally.
That's just one possible option, there are others.
Here's the only place I'd like to get to: agreeing that 1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage and 2) man made factors are contributing to it.
I think you might succeed on point #2. But point #1 sets an impossibly high bar. Natural CO2 levels have been much higher in the geologic past and thriving ecosystems existed when there was no ice anywhere on the planet.
The link you are looking for is:
http://www.surfacestations.org/about.htm
and pretty much the worst sites they found are listed here:
http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
Garbage-In, Garbage-Out, anyone?
The current rate of warming is 0.2 degrees Celcius. On any graph of temperatures going back millions of years, the temperature increase over the past several decades appears as a vertical line. To predict the rate of warming over the next century, it would be more informative to use a graph of the past century or so.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Ummm, well if you can't control yourself enough to stop swearing and lashing out then maybe you could control yourself enough to just not post.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
You do realize that the rate of warming at the end of the last glaciation is about two orders of magnitude than the rate of warming we're experiencing today, right?
Yes, the current rate has been experienced before -- the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was the last analogous period. But that was 56mya. And anyway, I don't think we want to repeat it. It changed the world so much that we give the subsequent era a new name (the Eocene).
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
So...you point to the now completely debunked 'climategate' bull, and a book on amazon.
You must have a Ph. D. from liberty university!
Well it would appear that all contrary views are being modded down, but here is another: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Scientists+using+selective+temperature+data+skeptics/2468634/story.html Once again, I'm not saying whose right or wrong, simply that there is still debate.
Furthermore:
Yes, about 3% of active, publishing climatologists disagree (Doran, 2009; EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union)
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
It's funny because that's how religion works, but not how science works. The difference is that each priest hears a different voice of God talking to him, but every scientist looks at the same underlying reality. (That's why science converges and religion diverges, but that's an argument for another day)
Long story short: if you are a truthful climate scientist, you acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer and it is at least in part due to us. Almost every piece of evidence is consistent with this conclusion, and there is almost no evidence against it.
If you don't acknowledge the the Earth is getting warmer, you're either untruthful, misled, not a climate scientist or all of the above.