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Global Warming's Silver Lining For the Arctic Rim
Pickens writes "According to Laurence C. Smith, an Arctic scientist who has consistently sounded alarms about the approach of global warming, within 40 years the Arctic rim may be transformed by climate change into a new economic powerhouse. As the Arctic ice recedes, ecosystems extend, and minerals and fossil fuels are discovered and exploited, the Arctic will become a place of 'great human activity, strategic value and economic importance.' Sparsely populated areas like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and the northern United States — the northern rim countries, or NORCs — will become formidable economic powers and migration magnets. Predictions in Smith's new book The Earth in 2050 include the following: New shipping lanes will open during the summer in the Arctic, allowing Europe to realize its 500-year-old dream of direct trade between the Atlantic and the Far East, and resulting in new economic development in the north; NORCs will be among the few place on Earth where crop production will likely increase due to climate change; and NORCs will become the envy of the world for their reserves of fresh water, which may be sold and transported to other regions."
I haven't RTFA, but a bounty of natural resources may have serious drawbacks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
I honestly wonder if people will still deny global warming when we have freighters traveling through the north pole in the summer. I mean, what's it going to take?
I havn't RTFA, but has he accounted for that climate change is predicted to destroy the gulf stream? If that stops flowing Scandinavia is predicted to become /colder/ even with global warming.
For years people have migrated to the beach in warmer weather to get to the NORCs.
I'm no apologist - I think climate change is a very serious issue that is being dangerously ignored - but you've just raised a classic straw-man and it's very annoying.
Almost nobody denies the existence, to a greater or lesser extent, of "global warming." The argument is now whether the observable changes are predominantly attributable to man's impact on the environment, or to the natural climatic lifecycle of the Earth.
It's very important before weighing-in to an argument that you understand what the argument actually is, from both sides.
Meta will eat itself
At least in Scandinavia this has been in the news several times since 2006 when Norway claim to extend it's seabed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_claims_in_the_Arctic
Arctic scientist says the Arctic will become super important.
Is it grant hunting season already?
Wow, that will be great for those impoverished countries on the Arctic rim. The US, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Russia have been shit on for too long. It's time for the low-lying countries to take their lumps too. Polynesian islands, Bangladesh, southeast Asia, the Caribbean, coastal Africa, it's your turn.
Thanks to global warming for upending the existing economic order.
The temperatures may stay nice up there but it will still be night 24 hours a day during the winter.
IMHO this is not really compensed by long summer days, and these places will not be good replacements for the Riviera.
Let's rather try to keep the world temperature steady while we still get a chance !
as long as you can get there and survive there due to the hurricanes.
Increasing the total energy in the atmosphere will not result in a well-behaved warming, but in more variable and extreme weather patterns, and there will be more hurricanes and storms at seas. This little game humanity is playing with the Earth may well end up in tears.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Please stop repeating the same old alarmist conjecture, hypothesis, unfounded speculation, stupefyingly idiotic model predictions and start actually going out and measuring real world data.
It's going to become warmer, but won't people get wet feet when all that ice flows into the ocean?
How much would you pay this prime plot of arctic tundra that I happen to be selling? Ten million dollars per acre? $500,000 per acre?
Would you believe for the low, LOW price of $99,000 per acre this piece of frozen wasteland...er, wonderland could be your very own!*
*Mineral, petroleum, and water rights not included with purchase.
Lets not forget about Antarctica too. The next great War is going to be there. An entire continent ripe for colonisation. An entire continent of untouched resources. It will be like the Americas before Columbus, and even more so, since there are no native peoples there to agonise about. I think it is time that we accept the Earth is not static. This statist view of geography and climate is a by-product of our short attention span. The Earth changes and had always been. Entire ecosystems have many times went through great extinction events. What were once sea bed, are now mountain tops and vice versa. Rivers, lakes, even entire oceans had dried out. We humans will adapt or we will be replaced by other more successful species.
While it might be nice for the peoples of the Arctic rim to be able to move from a "shivering a lot and burning penguins for warmth" based economy(yes, I know, penguins are antarctic; but the arctic doesn't have any birds nearly as iconic), the fact that there are many more people, and a lot more land, closer to the equator is going to make that move a major net downer. Particularly since the inhabitants of the new equatorial desert are unlikely to take kindly to any plans that involve them dying quietly in their place, which will imply a certain amount of desperate migration, which never goes very well....
Mean global temperatures have refused to rise for the past 20 years, now?
I wonder what you could get away with saying. Maybe there was a great volcanic eruption in Chile last week. Maybe there hasn't been any hurricanes over the caribbean for five years. Maybe global sea level has dropped two meters on average?
Because it's about as plausible to say any of that as saying mean global temperature has refused to rise for the past 20 years.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Canadian Mosquito and Black Fly Overlords.
If Smith's unlikely “thought experiment” scenario was to happen. Wouldn't a lot of the Canadian arctic be a shallow sea, caused by the rising sea levels? So don't rush out buying land before checking an elevation chart.
As consistently as mean global temperatures have refused to rise for the past 20 years?
Seriously, how long are we going to keep funding Chicken Little to squawk that the sky is going to fall tomorrow, 4 REALZ TIHS TIEM!!!!!1!!?
What? I read in earlier (Score:5 Insightful) and (Score:5 Informative) posts by h4rm0ny (722443) and tygerstripes (832644) that nobody was denying that global warming was happening.
In any case, dear politically correctly attributed AGW sceptic, which facts are you basing your above assertion on?
My UID is prime. Hah!
This will also put an end to piracy in the eastern part of the Indian ocean, when all ships between Europe and Asia go the northern route. Time to get a decent job?
Its a law of physics that CO2 is an infrared absorber - is someone questioning that?
Its a fact that CO2 levels are rising in our atmosphere - is someone questioning that?
Its a fact that most of that rise is due to man - is someone questioning that?
No?
So what are they questioning then and who is doing it? I mean who of significance , not the kind of pig ignorant
arts graduates who couldn't tell you what CO2 is composed of or its physical properties if their lives depended on it.
I've long thought that Global Warming was a cruel, Canadian plot for world domination...
I've observed a bit of a spectrum (with some people occupying an 'area' of the spectrum instead of a single point - not being absolutely positive of where they stand).
For example, I've heard the following from several different people:
* there's no possible way we have accurate temperature readings of the global temperature 'state' - you'll find out that someone placed the thermometer too close to the earth (too warm) or in direct sunlight in the Sahara, etc, etc (they don't seem to understand the concept of taking lots of samples from lots of places and averaging the result)
* I heard Rush Limbaugh spend most of a program once going on and on about the eruption of a volcano, and how it was putting out more CO2 than mankind would emit in like 200 years or something like that, and concluding there's nothing mankind could possibly *do* to change the climate.
* I've heard people say there might be warming, but it is related to Solar activity cycles and has nothing to do with human activity.
* I've heard people say "So what? Global warming means winter is less horrible. I'm all for that." - which, I suppose, if you live in Canada or the Northern States of the lower-48 (places like New England, NY, PA, the Midwest, etc), is true - some people, as this article discusses, will likely *benefit* from global warming; unfortunately, that benefit comes at the expense of a lot of other (some of whom are very poor to begin with and their lives will be made even worse) people.
* I've heard people say maybe global warming will/is happening a little bit, but that as it happens, cloud cover will increase, which will reflect solar energy, so it will be self-moderating.
* Then there are the folks who believe that any kind of problem is just the fulfillment of prophecy, and Jesus will come rapture the righteous, while the damned will suffer 'real global warming'.
So basically, among the deniers, there's a range of people from "it's definitely not happening", to "maybe it's happening, but I don't think we need to do anything about it", to "it's happening, but there's nothing we can do about it, so eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die".
I find it amazing that people who report on climate change/global warming/armageddon fail to appreciate the nature of weather. Weather is *water moving in the air.* This simple understanding explains just about everything that happens with the weather.
Sure, warmer areas mean melted ice and areas that were before inaccessible or unusable. But there's more to it than that. There will be global weather pattern changes as well. Places that once got rain will dry up. Places that were arid will get wet. Conditions favorable to certain life and vegetation will change and that life and vegetation will simply die off and even become extinct. We have a global ecosystem that is being changed and upset in ways that simply cannot be predicted. Being able to reclaim some land is what I would characterize as some "short term gains."
(yes, I know, penguins are antarctic; but the arctic doesn't have any birds nearly as iconic)
Did anyone ever try to transplant penguins from the Antarctic to the Arctic? It would be an interesting experiment, and definitely worth a Ig Nobel. On the other hand, when folks start transplanting animals into foreign environments, it always ends in tears. Ask someone in Australia about rabbits, or someone in Florida about pythons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_Pythons_in_Florida
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Someone needs to read the news.
Does this:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
look like "mean global temperatures have refused to rise for the past 20 years?"?
Maybe if your head is wedged FIRMLY up your (or Koch's) arse it does.
What happens if you remove El Nino 1998 from that graph? We know that's not an atmospheric phenomenon, it's an oceanic cycle, and it was the most powerful El Nino for a very long time indeed, nothing to do with CO2. According to Phil Jones, there's been no statistically significant warming since 1995. That's 15 years. Around 1/2 of your usual "significant" timescale. It's not looking good for the hypothesis, is it?
Truthiness is just making up whatever bullshit acronym you want out of thin air and publishing it in a global warming article, then adding the acronym to wikipedia to try and give it some credibility when confused people try to look it up.
"As the Arctic ice recedes, ecosystems extend, and minerals and fossil fuels are discovered and exploited,"...and ecological disasters are inevitable and we need to stop the exploitation of the natural environment in order to burn fuel.
Sorry, but this just annoys me, we should be working on green, renewable energy and NOT exploiting and damaging more of our natural environment. Our oceans are completely stressed as it is, and we don't need another BP oil spill in the Arctic or Antarctic.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
And in addition, we (I live in Canada) have this to look forward to:
1) diseases that normally get killed off by cold temperatures will move in (e.g., West Nile virus and Lyme disease are becoming more common);
2) areas that are already highly productive for grain and other agriculture will probably experience more extreme droughts (e.g., southern Alberta, which is already very dry, and where extensive agriculture is possible only because of irrigation);
3) glaciers that supply drinking and agricultural water from the mountains will recede and probably supply a lot less (e.g., major rivers in the Rocky Mountains that empty eastward onto the plains -- see implications for #2);
4) hydroelectric power production will diminish for the same reasons;
5) permafrost areas in the north will start melting, leading to serious problems with roads, buildings, and other construction (e.g., winter ice roads are already thawing earlier than normal -- and what's the point of increased agricultural potential if you can't get to/from there and you can't live on the melting permafrost because it turns to mush?);
6) coastal communities are going to experience more coastal erosion because of the absence of ice much of the year (waves are more intense without sea ice on the surface -- this is a serious problem for Tuktoyaktuk, for example);
7) forest fire season will probably start earlier, persist longer, and be more intense -- which is really bad for the boreal forest areas (e.g., witness what happened in Russia this summer -- record temperatures and fires);
8) we're going to be spending a lot more energy and money on air conditioning in the south;
9) and probably all sorts of other changes that aren't desirable.
It might seem obvious that cold parts of the world will be "better" if they were a bit warmer, but no. Like most change, it's going to be a mixed bag. And some aspects will be very bad for some parts of the country.
The people of the north have mixed feelings about warming.
"Imagine how this feels: The land and weather are turning erratic and dangerous. Warmer, unpredictable winds are coming from strange directions. Severe floods threaten to wash away towns. And native animals, the food supply, aren't behaving as they used to, their bodies less capable in the changing climate."
On the other hand, birds are coming north who have never been seen before. More game == better hunting. The winters are less cold so it is more comfortable and people can get outside a bit more.
"These observations by Inuit elders are detailed in a groundbreaking new documentary, Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, by acclaimed Nunavut filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (The Fast Runner, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and environmental scientist Ian Mauro."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/new-documentary-recounts-bizarre-climate-changes-seen-by-inuit-elders/article1763952/
One of the important lessons from the film is that scientists aren't entirely to be trusted. They spend, at best, a couple of months in the arctic. The native people live there and are expert observers of the environment. The scientists say polar bears are endangered. The people who actually live with the polar bears say the scientists are wrong. (The same argument happened over the Beluga whales. The scientists finally admitted they were wrong.) The native northerners say the sun is setting later. The scientists said the northerners were nuts. Then a scientist observed that thermal inversions were causing the sun to be visible long after a naive astronomical calculation said it should be below the horizon.
The bottom line is that I do not entirely trust all the scientific predictions we are hearing about the arctic. In any event, the real experts do not seem to be unduly alarmed. Change is constant and there will always be some good and some bad.
The argument is now whether the observable changes are predominantly attributable to man's impact on the environment, or to the natural climatic lifecycle of the Earth.
Is there, really? I believe this question has been answered pretty decisively by the scientific community, with a resounding consensus that man's actions are moderately to significantly affecting global warming.
Agreed. And regardless of how much, we are contributing *some* to global warming and reducing that contribution, especially in a non-linear system, seems to make sense. However I think that also means we need to accept that there may be nothing we can do about global warming and we need to spend more time thinking about how we are going adapt. Personally I look forward to having the weather of the Carolinas here in Boston when I'm ready to retire. ;-)
"NORCs will become the envy of the world for their reserves of fresh water, which may be sold and transported to other regions."
Great for the NORCs. But for the countries suffering climate-change induced droughts, the solution is "Buy your water from other countries, or die"? Not quite a broken-window fallacy, but not quite the climate utopia that a focus on the NORCs would suggest.
The climate is changing. It is ALWAYS changing with or without us. Whether humans have an effect on the rate of change doesn't matter at this point. If you think we are going to turn this boat around, then get a grip. It's like trying to cure 6 billion heroin addicts at once. Expect the change and deal with it.
Yes there has. There has been statistically significant warming since 1995 because we've got the majority of 2010 in now.
In any case, that's the only year you can manage to say that (as long as you ignore the 2010 figures) and only if you take 95% confidence as your limit.
The confidence limit of warming since 1995 is 93%.
And you say there's been *no* warming????
Funny how the idiots know enough about statistics to assert themselves right and NOT ONE JOT MORE.
Great the Arctic will be booming while the rest of the planet is uninhabitable.
All I can say is that my wife's NORCS [sic] are definitely a source of some economic power, and the envy of some (me, in particular) for their reserves of natural resources.
(if that link is being slow, try the google cache instead)
Since a lot of measures that help reduce potential warming actually save money, there are people who are improving their standard of living as a result of doing something to help.
h4rm0ny = psychopath. found you bitch.
You know that in the 70ies it was common knowledge that the cooling cycle was about to begin somewhere in the late 90ies, but instead of the cooling, we got a warming.
You know that in the 70ies it was common knowledge that the cooling cycle was about to begin somewhere in the late 90ies,
"Common knowledge"? Maybe, by the public. But not among scientists.
According to Richard Lindzen, atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it's probably less than 1C.
Then continue in your ignorance. But for anyone else reading, Hansen predicts a water vapor based runaway just as must have occurred on Venus. You might want to find out who wrote the book on Venus when you get a chance even though you love ignorance and hate knowledge.
Did someone try asking them nicely?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1.2 degrees in a century is a fraction of a degree per year or decade. Cloud feedbacks are the major weakness in the models, as they also cause cooling. But while we're talking H20, the greenhouse effect from H20 absorbtion dwarfs that of CO2. It absorbs the same spectrum as CO2. Why isn't anyone proposing a global kettle tax?
people are questioning the causes of climate change
And the group-ego continues full steam ahead, oblivious to new information.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Deniers question all three facts that you have listed. Yes, I am afraid, the debate is really that stupid.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You need to read up on history. The list of muslim massacres from those times can fill entire books ("Granada massacre" is a good starting point, just don't think the phenomenon was limited to that region). And please, do not forget that "islam" means "a region that, while nominally islamic, consisted of a large majority of christians, both on the street, culturally and in government".
There are VERY few important scientists from that era, and the problem is that of the very few they had, a large majority were non-muslims.
It really is that bad, even when it comes to accomplishments that muslims claim for their own, like say the construction of the blue mosque ... it was built by a Jew (and anyone who thinks that's an example of tolerance needs to read up on the life story of that specific Jew, and exactly what "devshirme", the muslim practice of demanding children in exchange for "protection", has to do with it).
And this whole "detail" called slavery, followed by the systematic extermination of slaves (nearly all muslim slaves were black, and they consisted a majority in northern africa before islam). Let's just look past that, right ? Otherwise islam would look ... like a religion with a paedophilic genocidal slaver as a founder ... and adherents that follow in his footsteps in all the ways that matter ...
So medieval islam only was "tolerant" if you look past the
-> many massacres, mostly religious and racist massacres
-> slavery (including the use of kidnapped slaves, and don't forget that muslims are the only existing that killed slaves for amusement on a regular basis (even the Romans had the -small- amount of respect of using criminals if at all possible)
-> total repression and destruction of scientific knowledge (e.g. the destruction of the library of alexandria, followed by the destruction of all middle eastern libraries - and there were a LOT of them)
-> religious wars, segregated society, dhimmi laws and child-tax
Other than, that, sure, islam was tolerant. Of course, medieval islam makes Hitler look positively benign.
Islam was founded by a paedophilic genocidal thief and slaver. His followers, even today, outdo him in all the ways that matter.
What happens if you remove El Nino 1998 from that graph? We know that's not an atmospheric phenomenon, it's an oceanic cycle, and it was the most powerful El Nino for a very long time indeed, nothing to do with CO2.
Adding more energy to the atmosphere adds more energy to the oceans, too, since they are connected. HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where did you pull a century from??? And CO2's effect is not like a dynamo, where its existence continues to increase its effects. The concentrations increase, the effect increases. If we double CO2 in 20 years, that will be 1.2C in 20 years.
Centuries has fuck all to do with it.
"But while we're talking H20, the greenhouse effect from H20 absorbtion dwarfs that of CO2."
Really?
66% from H2O. 25% from CO2.
Hardly "dwarfing".
"It absorbs the same spectrum as CO2."
No it doesn't. Try looking up the absorption spectra some time before spouting complete bollocks.
"Why isn't anyone proposing a global kettle tax?"
Because that would be stupid.
Next idiotic question, please!
Bumhard: "According to Richard Lindzen"
According to him, it's 1.2C for CO2. Not 1C.
And please explain why we have 2.64:1 sensitivity through the past 380ppm range of CO2 but we "magically" have a less than 1:1 now.
Dick doesn't manage it, and you haven't shown any knowledge on your behalf, merely mouthings you've been trained to repeat by your masters.
Then his prediction is already falsified with our current data.
And IPCCs predictions (even from the end of 80-s) are by now statistically significant enough and if anything they are too conservative.
> Its a law of physics that CO2 is an infrared absorber - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
Its a fact that CO2 levels are rising in our atmosphere - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true
Its a fact that most of that rise is due to man - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
- - - - -
But your questions are too simple. The last time I posted an answer like this, I was immediately modded troll. But hope springs eternal, so here is why I count myself as a skeptic. Here are some further questions:
Will increasing CO2 increase the temperature of the earth? This is not certain, because of the complex interactions of the climate. One example: raise the temperature, and you get more water vapor. More water vapor yields more clouds, which have a *massive* cooling effect. In short: it is entirely possible that CO2 has a negligible effect on the temperature.
Set the temperature question aside for a moment: is a higher CO2 level a bad thing? CO2's primary effect on the planet is "plant food". Commercial greenhouses deliberately increase CO2 in order to increase their crop yields. If we could magically reduce CO2 to 19th century levels, we would see crop yields fall substantially.
Back to temperature. If the earth's temperature does rise, is this a bad thing? Historically, warmer periods have been times of prosperity. Most of the earth is in the temperate zone, and warmer temperatures improve the climate, lengthen growing seasons, etc. Imagine frozen Siberia as the bread basket of Asia. It is not clear that a warmer earth is bad.
Finally, how do we measure the temperature of the earth? There are many temperature stations scattered about, but the majority of them do not comply with the guidelines set up to ensure accurate measurement. Many are at airports (lots of tarmac), others - especially in very cold climates - are placed conveniently near buildings. These and other siting issues make the temperature measurements inaccurate. Satellite measurements have their own difficulties. The more you read about these issues, the clearer it becomes that we do not currently have reliable temperature measurements.
So: on the basis of inaccurate temperature data and ineffective models, what should we do? Should we commit trillions of dollars to drastic policies based on questionable science? Or should we, maybe, invest in a decent network of weather stations, invest in climate science, and *understand* what is going on?
Climate is complex, and the one thing certain about all of the climate models developed to date is that they fail to model climate. If a model is to be useful, it must make falsifiable predictions of future events. To date, no model has done better than a random-number generator. Tropical storms were supposed to increase, but did not. Sea level was supposed to rise faster that ever. In fact, the sea level has been rising steadily since the last ice age,, but the rise has actually slowed in recent times. If one thing is clear, it is that our understanding of climate is woefully inadequate.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
How is destroying even more of the environment for economic gain a silver lining?
The local CBC Radio 1 had an interesting interview with an Inuit hunter who expressed opinions which contradict some current conventional wisdom. He said his opinions were based on what he said was common knowledge among Inuit hunters. He was being interviewed along with an author who was giving a lecture at the U of A. :
1. Across the Canadian Arctic territories (NWT, Nunavet), polar bear numbers are increasing not decreasing. He questioned the methodologies of scientists and government agents.
2. Polar bears will survive quite nicely in an ocean environment as they are highly adaptable and they are more at home in the water than on ice. He said it is not unusual to see a bear swimming in open water 100 km from land. (Oh great... another ocean swimming phobia to go along with my fears of jellyfish and sharks).
3. The Inuit will adapt to the climate changes and circumstances will improve for them.
His expressed fear was not of climate change, but of the societies and processes which are contributing to it because they are not close to/part of the earth.
Caveat: I tuned in part way through so I didn't catch the names and I may be mis-remembering some of the items. Accuracy not guaranteed. ;->
As if Lindzen trumps all the other work done in this field over the past few decades.
Before holding him up as the holy grail of climate sensitivity estimates, you might want to run an inverse citation search to see the published rebuttals of his feedback estimates.
Note your subtle hypocrisy, by the way. You'll automatically dismiss an arbitrarily large number of studies that disagree with you. (You don't even seem to be aware of their existence.) But as soon as you run across somebody "on your side", all of a sudden you uncritically swallow his position without investigating its evidentiary support or whether his findings have been contradicted by subsequent research. After all, even if there were rebuttals (which there are), they're products of biased researchers who are only in it for the money, right?
This is why climate "skeptics" are generally pseudo-skeptics, not actual skeptics.
Second case in point: when you run across a guy on your "team", all of a sudden you quote his full named-chair title and institution. I haven't seen you cite anyone else's position on climate sensitivity, with title and institution. And I thought that titles and institutions weren't supposed to matter, that any obscure persecuted scientist can overturn the religious orthodoxy as long as his science is sound?
Face it: you're unaware of the scientific literature on this subject, are intentionally or unintentionally representing the IPCC's position (they don't claim "a few degrees C" for climate sensitivity, with or without feedbacks), and are just trolling for support for your preconceived opinion that CO2 doesn't matter.
I think at this point I just like arguing with people... :)
However as convincing arguments that climatologists make, and however rational it may be, their science seems to suck at predictability, and their models never seem to get anything right in reality. So while they very well might be right, the nature of their field makes it very hard to prove in any uncertain terms any of the claims they have thus made. Personally I think they have a sound idea, it's just the assumptions and methods that leave me wanting. Of course you've got to work with the best data you have, it's just that the stuff that they have is less than ideal, but such is life.
Of course I live in a Arctic country, so bring it on! Might suck if you live already in a desert zone, or don't have much land mass, but hey if its that important to you, then you can worry about it!
Doesn't anyone else think it is somewhat ironic that the most Major contributor to the CO2 (if we concede that it is causing it, and that its humans as well) is the production of Oil from the Middle East countries (they might not be using, but they are dealing... enablers to be sure!), and they are also likely they most sensitive to climate change. I.E. when the few rivers they do have dry up, they will be even less able to support their populations. Of course you have a few island nations that might go the way of Atlantis, but really none of them really have all that much population anyway, sucks just the same but, when I think of shoveling snow half the year, while they sit on a beach drinking rum and smoking reefer, well my sympathy evaporates, other than a sad feeling when trying to plan my next vacation.
Cheers and flame on!
Sorry, that is not true. Byzantium was carrying the torch of civilization and culture.
True... however, "Byzantium" -- known at the time as Constantinople -- was, of course, a Christian city, not an Islamic city.
The collapse of Byzantium happened as the rennaissance was beginning in Italy.
The collapse of Byzantium happened when the 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople. Even though it was a Christian city, it was rich, and much easier to take than the not-terribly-rich-but-well-defended holy land.
There is probably a relationship between the two.
Undoubtably. The Italians not only eliminated a powerful trading rival, they sacked it and took the riches home.
I'm not sure what this has to do with global warming, but it's fascinating history.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is just ONE of the big problems I have with the cult of global warming. It's always the doomsday predictions when the Earth warms. Good luck trying to find a story about the BENEFITS of a warmer climate.
The term was changed because morons interpreted "climate is in average getting warmer" as
"At any location of the world, the temperature in one year will be higher than the temperature today",
followed by "last year, it was warmer where I live therefore the AGW theory has been falsified".
What happens when the temperature increase melts the permafrost? ISTR reading that in region where this happens, solid ground turns into an impenetrable bog, so you may end up with a warmer climate but less usable ground.
(the silver lining here would be that hovercraft would become very popular).
It's not the Gulf Stream (a wind driven phenomenon), but rather the thermohaline circulation (a primarily density driven phenomenon). According to the last IPCC report, it is unlikely that this circulation will shut down this century, but it could shut down in coming centuries. Right now the observations are too poor to tell whether it has been weakening or not.
Also, if it does shut down, some regions in the north Atlantic will become colder than surrounding regions, but they will probably still be warmer than today. That's because a global warming large enough to shut down the circulation is probably large enough to outweigh the amount of cooling experienced in that region. (You might be tempted to say, "Great, it will counteract global warming and keep everyone there in a comfortable climate". But this neglects the likely profound changes in precipitation patterns, fisheries, etc. that would occur in response to a fundamental change in the Atlantic ocean circulation ... not to mention new, large spatial temperature gradients in the region.)
Snowball Earth is an interesting hypothesis and shows us some things about the climate system of Earth - that it is a complex dynamic system with many variables.
The more recent snowball Earth glaciations are thought to have happened as three or four glaciation events with the most recent, the Marinoan, happening about 650 million years ago. At the beginning of these glaciations the CO2 was relatively low for the time and the continents were distributed around the equator.
The mechanism which started the cooling periods is not known, but if they are cold enough the resulting ice can spread down to close to the equator. As ice has a higher albedo, about ~60% compared to the sea which reflects about 6% of incoming light, we get a "positive" feedback where cooling reflects more of the suns energy away from the Earth causing more cooling. This locked the Earth into a frozen period for millions of years. This poses a problem how can the climate system unfreeze now most of the Sun's energy is reflected away?
With much of the Earth frozen, CO2 will build up as there is very little rock weathering as it is all covered by ice and not much photosynthesis either. By the end of the snowball Earth period, CO2 may have risen to 12,000 ppm. The warming effect of the CO2 would have been weaker in this frozen state then it is now, because CO2 traps infrared radiation while most of the sun's light was being reflected in the visible part of the spectrum. This is why the CO2 level had to raise to such a high level to bring us out of this cold phase even though we are presently in a much warmer climate with less CO2. This is physics!
The most dangerous drug
And IPCCs predictions (even from the end of 80-s) are by now statistically significant enough and if anything they are too conservative.
Care to back this up? Probably not because the exact opposite is true: IPCC 1990 report predictions wrong.
Really? You think it's "communist sympathizers" who favor the term "climate change"? You haven't read the Luntz memo, have you?
That's why I wrote "common knowledge" and not "scientific consensus". There is also the common knowledge, that "summa cum laude" means "with highest praise", while to a philologist it means "everything with praise".
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we18.htm
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SeaLevelRising.htm
Alarmist projections of 11mm/year are totally without scientific basis.
Real sea level rises are 2-3mm/year, and have been for the past few hundred years (before large fossil fuel burning), though they show some slowing in the past decade or so.
The earth may be entering a cooling period, and the CAGW folks are on the ropes, climate gate exposed their schemes, and the real data has shown no cause foa alarm.
Where are all those hurricanes Al Gore warned us about the past 3 years?
Even Phil Jones admitted on the BBC therer has been no significant warming the past 15 years.
Cap and trade has been exposed as a political and financial power grab.
What data would that be? He demonstrated (in LC) a sensitivity of 0.5C in a recent paper. Which IPCC predictions are you going on about? Didn't James Hansen say we'd all be underwater by 10 years ago? Why do you believe the horse-shit these doom-sayers come out with?
No that's what they are questioning all right - change itself challenges the overly literal idea of creation which is the foundation of Christianity Lite. Climate change denial is just part three after rejecting an educated clergy and rejecting evolution.
Then of course there are those that jumped on the bandwagon just because their political party said they should and while they can make pretend rationalisations that they are only questioning the cause the REAL reason is simply that Rush Limbaugh or whoever told them so.
Once it became a Democrat vs Republican issue and once economists were pretending to be experts in a science it all became a noisy circus that is best ignored. You don't ask a fucking astrologer to put fillings in your kids teeth, so you just ignore them if they give dental advice and ask somebody with a clue. Why should we treat the climate issue differently and in such an incredibly stupid and impractical way waste everyone's time and money?
What data would that be?
Well, pretty much all historic temperature and forcing data, paleotemperature and forcing data, and direct observations of feedbacks. Stop pretending to have read the IPCC report and actually read it. With a 0.5 C climate sensitivity, you can't reproduce any past or present climate changes.
He demonstrated (in LC) a sensitivity of 0.5C in a recent paper.
As has already been pointed out to you, this result has already been disproven.
Didn't James Hansen say we'd all be underwater by 10 years ago?
No.
Why do you believe the horse-shit these doom-sayers come out with?
I could ask you the same about Lindzen. You obviously haven't read any of the literature about climate sensitivity estimates, don't know that rebuttals of his work exist, and have no scientific capacity to evaluate such claims yourself. Rather, you rely on picking the studies that support your prejudices and ignoring the ones that don't. You are aware that there are estimates other than Lindzen's, right? Why are you ignoring them?
I did listen to an In Our Time postcast on BBC Radio 4 that suggested a link between Snowball Earth and the Edicara Biota (pre-Cambrian life-forms) in terms of cause and effect. Although the link was tentative, it was interesting.
That's because in the '70s they thought forcing due to sulfur compounds in the atmosphere and stratospheric cloud cover (caused by high altitude aircraft) were going to cause global cooling. We cleaned up the sulfur emissions. The aircraft induced cloud cover was not as significant as thought. And... They underestimated the magnitude of and effects of CO2 production.
Yes resources and trade are always nice, but the good news is :
Africa & Central America will turn into uninhabitable deserts unable to support life.
We westerners will finally free ourselves from our hated farm subsidies! yey!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
We are saying "Climate Change" now, not "Global Warming." That way, whatever happens we can say we predicted it.
Those thinking about climate change in terms of simple changes to our planet are misinformed about the effects of warming our oceans. They will emit massive amouts of methane, which will double the temperatures, then they will be dead and start emitting h2s in copious quantities (by the way, by then 50% of our earths oxygen producing organisms are dead as well). H2s will gradually kill everything but a few percent of organisms (including all plant life), reptiles being best equiped.
So forget any treasure trove fantasies.
More here:
http://www.sunreign.com/info/OceanFertilization
Support my activities http://www.rincker.nl/
The point that agriculture will increase in the Arctic is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the temperature would rise enough to support agriculture. The soil in the arctic is very poor. It will not support agriculture on the scale that humanity will need. Maybe if growing conditions prevailed for many centuries the soil would improve.
And the sun 30% cooler. Maybe that has something to do with it.
Or are you one of those denialists who proclaim that the IPCC "faithful" are ignoring all the other factors when you are doing that very thing yourself (and the IPCC don't).
Since the right wing believes that global warming is not occurring, or that if it is occurring, it has nothing to do with humans and in any case is just a temporary fluctuation that has already turned around; there's nobody there to discuss whether or what part of climate change could be beneficial. The left is only interested in pointing out the adverse effects, and the right has abdicated any science discussion that involves climate.
Of course there are beneficial effects as well as adverse effects. But there's nobody there to discuss it. You would have to pay attention to the models to do so.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So, if global warming turns the arctic into a temperate zone, then they can dig up more oil. If we ever reach that point, can we agree that "more oil" is not the answer to our problems?
And even that common knowledge is false, because it was at most restricted to the US. Europe was already aware in the seventies that Global Warming was a more likely issue than Global Cooling.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Get off my rapidly-melting Alaska lawn!
There is no such data, unless you are talking about data output from models. But models are conceptual representations of the entities as we currently understand them. They have little predictive power when it comes to climate. The one firm fact we have is that the models are wrong; this should be obvious from their many predictive failures. How can they be right when they don't operate at anywhere near the required resolution and so many of the forcings are just guesses at unknowns? It's an exercise in curve fitting, nothing more. At least Lindzen works with actual data, not models. If more people in Climate Science actually did this what a fucking difference it would make!
No, it hasn't. The paper in question was criticised (at real-climate amongst others), but the revision dealt with all of the criticisms without changing its central finding. It has not been retracted, has it?
His position is more reasonable. He says he's a denier. What's not to like? I note Judith Curry ("high-priestess of global warming") is asking how it's going lately in the warmist community. She's really distancing herself from you alarmists at quite a speed.
I'm a layman. I can have an opinion. I can say, yes, I agree with what you say or no, I think you're talking horse-shit because you underestimate the uncertainties in your work and furthermore, I wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you because I've read the ClimateGate emails and the associated books. If this scare was about Human affects on plate tectonics, I'd be all in. The thought of Scotland flying off into the Arctic Ocean, taking our naval bases with it really scares me. But to my (left-brained) mind, the idea that we can control what are probably natural climate cycles is absurd. No, it's ridiculous... and I don’t understand why you don’t question it.
P.S. I’m not a neo-con.
the chemtrail spraying has a cooling effect intentionally designed to counteract the ionospheric heating effect from HAARP and its like.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Comparing-IPCC-projections-to-observations.html - a nice summary.
Economics is not a scientific discipline. Those studies are not very credible.
I'm not sure if I would to that far as to say that economics isn't a science. It does follow the scientific method in that it has hypotheses that are intended to model human economic behavior. The experiments done to support or refute the hypotheses can consist of measurements of different economic parameters.
All science is inductive, that is, it only gives probabilities of truth. It is only probable and not certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only know the sun will rise because it always has. Bertrand Russell wrote about this, giving a story of a chicken who every day of its life saw the farmer coming and was then fed. One day, the chicken saw the farmer coming and inductively concluded that it was going to be fed, only to have its neck wrung. Science is never absolutely certain.
So then, if science is inductive, this provides us with a means of judging the "quality" of particular scientific hypotheses. Newton's Laws are highly accurate in their predictions of motion for speeds sufficiently slower than the speed of light. We might say that Newton's laws have a high degree of inductive validity within a particular type of motion. Can we say the same about one of the primary hypotheses of economics, the "Efficient Market Hypothesis"?
In a nutshell, the Efficient Market Hypothesis implies that the price a market decides for a particular good, service, or security ALWAYS reflects ALL available information. This implies that price distortions such as speculative bubbles or panicked market collapses are impossible. I think that the recent real estate collapse poses substantial problems for the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Does the EMH meet the standards of high inductive validity or probability? Questions and problems like this often lead thinkers to label economics as the "Dismal Science".
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
"What data would that be? He demonstrated (in LC) a sensitivity of 0.5C in a recent paper."
[citation needed]
"Which IPCC predictions are you going on about? Didn't James Hansen say we'd all be underwater by 10 years ago?"
No. And IPCC's predictions on sea level rise are actually lower than the reality.
"Why do you believe the horse-shit these doom-sayers come out with?"
Why do you believe the horse-shit these sooth-sayers come out with?
I (or my kids) am gonna be rich!
-- Alastair
"P.S. I’m not a neo-con."
Yes, you are just an idiot.
Care to link to a few articles disproving AGW in peer-reviewed journals with nice impact factors?
No? Oh, that's what I'd expected.
Sparsely populated areas like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and the northern United States
Eh, that's called Canada. And if you ask any Canadian if Canada is part of the USA, then expect some form of... unhappy reaction.
Also, there's the saying "No jobs on a dead planet."
Although I don't believe the world will actually die, it certainly will be (further) badly injured.
That injury will extend to the health of human societies and, as a consecuence, the health of humans' ability to trade.
Sparsely populated areas like [...], Scandinavia, [...] will become formidable economic powers and migration magnets.
Will become?
Back in the age of the vikings, we basically stole all the nice chicks from the rest of Europe (together with the all the gold and silver the good people of the church was kind enough to collect for us). The rest is history. Today, Denmark is the happiest place on earth.
The good news: global warming good for arctic.
The bad news: everybody else is fucked.
Wouldn't it have been a better idea for Mr. Smith to just keep this to himself? Way to encourage bad behavior.
There is no such data, unless you are talking about data output from models.
This is nonsense. As I already noted, past climate changes are far too large to be explained by a low climate sensitivity. This has nothing to do with models, other than the "model" that a climate sensitivity of X leads to X degrees of temperature change under a CO2-doubling equivalent forcing.
If you choose a climate sensitivity of 0.5, then the climate simply doesn't change enough to explain anything we observe. The Little Ice Age and Last Glacial Maximum aren't cold enough, the PETM isn't warm enough, you can't get the Earth out of a Snowball state, etc. This doesn't even have to do with CO2 directly; a climate sensitivity of 0.5 C means large negative feedbacks, which act to suppress any climate change. This is inconsistent with the very fact that there are large climate changes.
The one firm fact we have is that the models are wrong; this should be obvious from their many predictive failures.
Also nonsense.
How can they be right when they don't operate at anywhere near the required resolution
Of course they don't run at the "required" resolution, if you make up what the requirements are.
At least Lindzen works with actual data, not models.
None of my statements require anything more than an energy balance model to verify (which is what Lindzen is also implicitly using).
No, it hasn't. The paper in question was criticised (at real-climate amongst others), but the revision dealt with all of the criticisms without changing its central finding.
Lindzen claims it dealt with all the criticisms, but it hasn't even yet been subjected to peer review, so I guess you're just taking his word for it? Note that Lindzen's previous paper passed peer review and was wrong. Perhaps you ought to at least wait for comments to appear on the paper before declaring victory. Certainly his paper only focused on Trenberth et al.'s criticisms and is silent on the criticisms of Murphy (2010), Lin et al. (2010), etc.
It has not been retracted, has it?
It hasn't even been published, as far as I know.
His position is more reasonable.
Why, other than it agrees with your preconceived opinion? It's not like Lindzen is the only guy to have published observational climate sensitivity estimates, you know. Why is his "the more reasonable" one, when it's at least 4x smaller than every other estimate out there? What evidentiary support do you have for the claim that Lindzen's estimate is the most reasonable out there?
I'm a layman. I can have an opinion.
Of course you can. It may be ridiculous and biased, but you can have an "opinion". So why should anyone pay attention to your opinion?
But to my (left-brained) mind, the idea that we can control what are probably natural climate cycles is absurd.
Again, what is your EVIDENCE that what we're seeing is (a) a cycle and (b) probably natural?
No, it's ridiculous... and I don't understand why you don't question it.
I questioned it, but all the competing theories so far put forward are ridiculous, or at best poorly supported by data and physics.
Global Warming is good...to a certain point.
"The polar bear will be dead, the walrus will be dead, the baluga whale will be dead, but on the upside you won't be cold outside the Indian casino" seems to be the message here.
We can't keep pumping shit into the atmosphere and water supplies thinking it won't have some major cumulative effect down the road.
Sure you can. If you don't pump it in faster than it is cleared it doesn't accumulate.
In particular, take the case of shit into water: That's where it's been going since early ocean life invented shit. (Before that it was things like dead bodies of bacteria...) One life form's shit is another's dinner.
Meanwhile, destroying one's own habitat is normal for many higher animals. One example is the three-way cycle of migrating elephants, hippos, and (i forget the third beast), where each destroys the local area for itself (while making it suitable for the next) and migrates on, coming back many years later after the other two species have rehacked things and made the location suitable again. (That's one we get to manage now that we've broken the normal migration pattern. Similar to having to cull and drive deer around now that we've eliminated many of the predators that used to chase them to fresh food and kept their population in check.)
= = = =
The issue with the environment isn't whether we're affecting it. Of COURSE we are. The issue is a stack of stuff related to the Global Warming Catastrophe claims and prescriptions.
We recently got instrumentation and techniques in place capable of coming up with a reasonably good set of data for global temperature for the last several hundred years. And of course we discovered that the temperature is different in different years. Well, duh! We already knew that. We already knew about ice ages and that human civilization rose during the warmup at the end of one. No surprise there.
But the Global Warming mongers jumped on it and started promulgating a complete kit of sky-is-falling predictions, prescriptions for fixing it that involve a massive transfer of power from populations to governments and wealth from populations to new institutions - set up by the same people (example: Al Gore's new companies to trade carbon credits and manufacture and sell carbon offsets), and cries that this must be done RIGHT NOW or we're ALL GOING TO DIE! And of course claims that it's "settled science" (an oxymoron) and demonization of anyone who wants to check the work as a "denier" (as in "holocaust denier" with all the genocidal NAZI references that implies.)
We've heard that before. Look up Malthus and the "Club of Rome" simulations for one example. Or the "new ice age imminent" predictions from the mid 20th century. So before we enslave and impoverish ourselves we need to check the claims - ALL of them:
Is the temperature really climbing as a result of human action? Some other possibilities:
- We're still coming out of that ice age.
- It's an honest artifact from things like cities growing out around locations of the long-term temperature measurement instruments.
- There's a long-term oscillation around a stable or slow temperature change trend, the measurements got it during an upcurve, and this was extrapolated with an exponential, turning a gentle wave into a discontinuous "hockey stick".
- It's just errors in the model.
- The data was faked.
- Maybe we've been holding off the next ice age with our carbon emissions and once we throttle them back (or run out of fossil fuel) we'll freeze over - and all this cutback does is start it earlier (and push us off a "snow reflects solar heat" positive-feedback cliff).
If it's really happening, is it bad?
- How much will it warm up, and how fast?
- Does this kill things off? Or does it just mean that animal habitat moves a few hundred miles toward the poles over a couple centuries and farmers switch to crops that used to be grown a couple hundred miles farther south.
- Maybe global warming IMPROVES things food-wise: Growing grapes in England and veggies in Iceland like in the Medieval Warm Period, turning the permafrost tundra into anothe
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That didn't deserve to be modded down. Must be the RealClimate reference.
Replying to Burnhard about what Phil Jones said, here is the transcript:
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
I believe the confidence level Jones calculated was 93% so not that far from being statistically significant. As Jones said statistical significance is less likely with shorter time scales so your 1/2 of the significant time scale is meaningless.
Global Warming is the biggest fraud in history! http://ditelhead.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/global-warming-science/
Offtopic but whatever: Could Norcs be the foul progeny of Northmen and Orcs?
Yeah, I agree about the right/left politics and the way that observation/analysis gets coloured and distorted by political positioning.
The interview I heard was from the local CBC station and I haven't found it in the CBC podcast archive. Too bad because it was a good interview. The fellow was not taking a political position. He was just saying that he did not have any great fears for either his people surviving or for the future of the polar bear based on what is being seen by people who live in the high Arctic.
He also expressed some frustration with the way that his people's observations are ignored and gave some examples. For years, scientists have dismissed Inuit observations that there has been change in the position of sky objects with respect to the landscape. Attention is now being paid to the atmospheric effects of the warming air mass above the arctic, including how changing refraction causes objects to shift.
The Inuit are careful observers.
These are the people who live in the land, need the cold to allow their hunting for meat and poultry, and cultivate in the short 24hr/daylight in the summer. Surely the land belongs to them. I guess now is the time for them to stake claims, or be treated the way North Americans treated their native indians in the last and current centuries.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada