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NASA Says 2010 Tied For Warmest Year On Record
An anonymous reader writes "It may not seem like it, but 2010 has tied 2005 as the warmest year since people have been keeping records, according to data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. That difference is so small that it puts them in a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880." Adds jamie: "This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average — 0.62 +/- 0.07 C above, to be precise. It was the wettest year on record too, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network."
Let the flamewar begin!
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
NASA also put out a piece comparing different findings by different organizations, explaining the differences and why they aren't a big deal. The articles also states that year-to-year measures aren't particularly useful - not only are 2010 and 2005 very close, but the next six are also very similar to each other - but looking at it decade by decade (i.e. a larger sample size) gives far more meaning:
On that time scale, the three records are unequivocal: the last decade has been the warmest on record. “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. "It is the underlying trend that is important."
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
It gets hot, steamy, wet and wild!!!
Where is the heat going???! The point is not enough of it *IS* going.
No detectable change in weather or climate? Where the fuck are you living? Not Australia right now for a start.
Your house is not the world. Sometimes it snows over your house, but that doesn't mean it's snowing over my house. It might even be sunny over my house.
Frankly you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to claim that global temperature averages aren't on the increase. That it's all our fault and we're all going to die? I'm still waiting to be convinced.
Here's the temperature plotted over the last 32 years http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate not as dramatic as you might think.
And most of the places people like living were under water. See any problems with that?
No one is saying or has ever said that higher temperatures and levels of CO2 are bad for life in general. They are bad for how humans currently have their civilizations arranged.
without some idea of the error in the measurments, hard to tell what a change of x deg F means
Humans have had an undeniable impact on the global environment -- there is really no point in questioning that anymore. As for dying, well, nobody is claiming that our doom is near at hand, just that things are going to get a lot different and that we should be prepared for it, and perhaps taking steps to slow or halt the rate at which we emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We are already over the edge; it is a question of whether or not we want to worsen things for ourselves (or at least make things change more significantly than they are already destined to change).
Palm trees and 8
Whether it's our fault or not, greenhouse-gas caused or not, doesn't matter as much. The more important question is, can we do something about it before even bigger catastrophes occur?
When people say, "global warming is a myth", they can't prove it with any certainty, but they would still choose to do nothing. If they're wrong, Millions or Billions of people die.
If we choose to do what we can to try and keep it from getting worse, and in the end all the climate scientists were wrong, what are the consequences? We spent more money than we had to?
To me it's kind of like car insurance, you pay money and hope the worst doesn't happen.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Who gives a shit about that?
What I care about is are we hurting our own chances of living here?
Oh and stop quoting that nut case.
Couldn't have anything to do with the urbanization that occurred between 1880 and 2011 could it?
If by "urbanization" you mean "unprecedented emission of greenhouse gases combined with massive deforestation" then yes, that's pretty well supported by theory and observation. If by "urbanization" you mean "the false rumor that the presence of concrete magically makes thermometers in the ocean and in space register higher temperatures" then no, it couldn't
I don't have a master's in statistical inference, just a plain old BS in engineering. And even I can tell that all of this "warmest year on record" business is just people getting worked up about short timescale noise in a signal with periodicity on the order of 400? 11,000? 400,000? years.
Maybe it is the warmest year on record. So what? Keep records for long enough and you'll wind up with a coldest year too.
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
I haven't noticed that. It isn't mentioned in the article. All it says is:
The analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world...
You make it sound like they chose the 5 hottest stations. Logically, they should take some statistical function of all the stations. It seems really unlikely that they are cherry picking stations to produce a result. NASA is a research organization.
P.S. If you get modded down, it will be because you made an outlandish accusation that NASA is falsifying evidence, with no evidence of your own. If what you say is true, that would be quite a scandal. I'd love to see someone point out what stations they are using and ask them why they are doing it that way.
Man can surely destroy man though.
So, are you saying the polar ice caps aren't melting? And how do reporting stations matter when satellites are measuring the temperature? Earth gets warmer, ice caps melt, coastal areas flood. After this does it matter what caused it? Or should we maybe worry about what can be done about it?
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Warmest on record where they keep the thermometers over blacktop as well. LOL Where is global warming when we need it. Snow in every state except Florida.
And the summer was ridiculously hot, yes. Anyone who thinks that global warming means that temperatures will become uniformly higher, or less chaotic, is either dreaming or trolling.
Prepare yourself. Global warming actually means stronger hurricanes, drier dry spells, bigger floods, and more chaotic weather all around.
"Money" is just a medium here; it's a matter of where it makes sense to focus our efforts and resources. You're endorsing misallocation on an unprecedented scale.
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain.
Oh, wait.....
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
This is true. Anyone who tells you anthropogenic climate change means the end of the world is an idiot -- and I say that as a climate scientist.
However, many people including Crichton go on to conclude that human influence on climate is irrelevant and negligible. This is the logical equivalent of saying that since sticking your hand in a bucket of lye probably won't kill you, it's perfectly safe to go ahead and do it on a regular basis.
Nah, we just need to craft and install cybernetic gills! Hail the return of the age of Atlanteans!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The data from NASA is located here http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110112/.
The global average temperature went down from 2005 to 2008. It has gone up from 2008 to 2010. The nature of the data over the last hundred years shows an upward trend.
There are important questions that I wish everyone would consider when reading this. They are,
Is the cause is man made? (Consider volcanoes as a major CO2 source, sun energy output, etc)
Is the change significant?
Is the change preventable? (this is related to environmental factors that we have little control over, such as sun energy output)
What major sources of energy can we make available to replace oil and coal? One way or another, we have to answer this question eventually. Remember that we use close to the energy that the sun delivers to the Earth, so the combination of solar, hydro, bio fuel, and other sun energy sources will not be enough.
These questions are rarely answered, and will lead to a solution better than just using electric cars (which don't solve any problems since most power plants use coal).
The places were most people like living are at or near sea level. That is why there are so many sunken civilizations.
If the water level was 15 meters higher, guess where people would like to live. I will give you a hint as to how to find out: Figure out what land will be at or near sea level.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
NASA, GISS and James Hansen have been busted before (by amateurs) for being wrong several times :
Deja Vu All Over Again: Blogger Again Finds Error in NASA Climate Data
NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world's primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe.
GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm-- a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month's data.
Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA's data didn't agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.
An alert reader on McIntyre's blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier-- the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.
A few locations in Ireland were also found to be using September data..
Steve McIntyre informed GISS (run by Hansen) of the error by email. According to McIntyre, there was no response, but within "about an hour", GISS pulled down the erroneous data, citing a "mishap" and pointing the finger of blame upstream to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)."
http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13410&red=y#366381
NOAA has been singled out for calling 2010 the warmest year using faulty data
NOAA’s Jan-Jun 2010 Warmest Ever: Missing Data, False Impressions
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/17/noaas-jan-jun-2010-warmest-ever-missing-data-false-impressions/
We do.. and we are.
To behave otherwise is to invite extinction.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since you present no evidence, and state neither who "they" are or what the "different sets of reporting stations" are or what publications you found from "them" that list these different sets of reporting stations I can tentatively conclude that you are either paranoid or a liar. I have a friend with a Doctorate in Psychology I ran this by, and she agreed.
When you state that "every year" they "'show' that it's the hottest year," that flies against the fact that the climate scientists I follow don't make the claim each year that it's the hottest year. So again, if you aren't going to document strong claims like this, don't make them.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The problem as I understand it is not change of temperature. It's pretty well documented that temperatures have varried on earth since it's existence. Yeah, it's even probably better for life to flourish when it's a little warmer... Think of all the corn you could grow in the antartic for example. And yes, climate change will transform the landscape of the planet and will destroy some habitats and create some new ones. The real issue is that evolution, being a slow thing, life is only able to adapt if the temperature shifts are gradual as well. So the analog of what's going on today is more akin to a cataclysm (3 or 4 C in a few hundred years is as abrupt as it gets on a planet with a life span of several billion years), than a regular fluctuation of temperature that the planet would experience under "normal" circumstances... Without those changes there would have not been such a need for evolution. But we are talking about a revolution. Revolutions are incompatible with evolution, and will lead to the world as we know it to change radically in short period of time. This puts a wrench in my hopes of a Star Trek Next Generation type peaceful, religion, money and war free future for mankind.
Maybe it is the warmest year on record. So what? Keep records for long enough and you'll wind up with a coldest year too.
That is the point that gets me. I don't doubt that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere raised the temp a little, but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.
That said, I do like cars that pollute less, developing better technologies that use less energy or pollute less, but not because of global warming. I just like to breath, drink water, fish, and want to have a national energy policy that isn't dependent on people half way around the globe. If were were making decisions based on those issues, it would make more sense as those are issues we can all agree on and benefit from, and don't require drastic, job killing measures, nor as heated of a debate.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
life != species.
a lot of species can die, and a lot more can come in their places that are better adapted to CO2.
so what are we in those two categories? i believe we can adapt, but probably not without a massive "correction" in our population (read: billions may have to be shed from our population in order to reach an equilibrium. our only defense in this situation is better technology. some choose to work on mitigating this, others choose to bury their heads in the sand)
Sorry: A lot of species will go extinct too, yes, as fragile ecosystems disintegrate. This has happened over and over throughout the Earth's history. I tend to like the animals we have, so I think that sucks. But, other animals (usually the ones we think of as nuisances) will surely flourish, and new species would eventually rise again (provided we don't clear-cut and kill everything).
No, they're talking about the thousands of years of proxy data that's available, that shows a significant increase in global temperatures in the last 100-200 years, with last year being tied with 2005 as the hottest. BS indeed.
when we know that this is a lie, and temperatures have not risen since 1998.
You've been claiming this for years even though it's been shown to be bullshit the entire time. Why don't you just post it again a little later. The more you post it the truer it becomes, right?
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The dolphins will just say 'so long' and thank us for the fish when it gets down to it.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Stop spreading that FUD.
It's called GLobal climate change becasuse even thougn it's gett hotter, the world still has cycles.
Stupid people assume if the climate gets warmer, then there won't be and snow anywhere.
Or the 'It's false because it's snowed more this year.' In fact they fall prey to the same type of illogical thinking deniers do.
The world is getting hotter, and because of the increase in energy, weather is getting more radical. And not the good radical like King Radical, either.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?
http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate
Both sides of this debate _outside_ of the scientific community are disturbingly simplistic. On the one hand we've got the chicken littles who blame _every_ major weather event on global warming. The flooding here in Australia is point-in-case - we are in the grip of a very strong La Nina event, climatologists might argue that it is particularly strong because of an underlying warming trend but the floods themselves are due solely to La Nina. On the other hand we have the "temperatures haven't risen since 1998 crowd", well the graph provided here shows a clear upward _trend_ in temperatures since 2000 and when you take into account the local minima and maxima (Mt. Pinatubo and El Nino) there is an obvious upwards trend over the whole graph. Come on people, this is basic high school math.
News for nerds... I don't think so.
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter3.pdf
Page 244
(warning: the pdf is 24 MB, so it takes a significant amount of time to download)
Studies that have looked at hemispheric and global scales conclude that any urban-related trend is an order of magnitude smaller than decadal and longer time-scale trends evident in the series (e.g., Jones et al., 1990; Peterson et al., 1999). This result could partly be attributed to the omission from the gridded data set of a small number of sites (1%) with clear urban-related warming trends. In a worldwide set of about 270 stations, Parker (2004, 2006) noted that warming trends in night minimum temperatures over the period 1950 to 2000 were not enhanced on calm nights, which would be the time most likely to be affected by urban warming. Thus, the global land warming trend discussed is very unlikely to be influenced significantly by increasing urbanisation (Parker, 2006). ... Accordingly, this assessment adds the same level of urban warming uncertainty as in the TAR: 0.006C per decade since 1900 for land, and 0.002C per decade since 1900 for blended land with ocean, as ocean UHI is zero.
:(){
A brief anecdote from current events. Western North American pine forests are being decimated by pine beetles that are thriving due to rising temperatures. Their historic range has grown because a lack of an adequately lengthy freeze during the winter is allowing them to live longer.
As a result, forests are turning gray and falling. The ecosystems they support are waning. Without tree coverage, snow melt will happen earlier and be more abrupt. Water typically stored in reservoirs will instead just flow downstream and into the ocean (unless we retrofit reservoirs to handle more capacity). This can also ultimately lead to desertification. It's also worth noting that millions of acres of decomposing trees releases quite a bit of CO2.
So, while it may be great for specific forms of agriculture in specific areas, there will also undoubtedly be terrible catastrophes caused by rising temperatures, and they have already begun.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
[citation needed]
:(){
Is the cause is man made? (Consider volcanoes as a major CO2 source, sun energy output, etc)
Yes. That it is predominantly man made has been conclusively shown.
Is the change significant?
Yes it is, and will be getting even more significant as time progresses.
Is the change preventable? (this is related to environmental factors that we have little control over, such as sun energy output)
Theoretically, yes. It is even economically feasible to do so. But I highly doubt that humanity has the collective brains to do anything about it. So no, the future changes will not be prevented. When things get bad enough, humanity will start doing stupid and dangerous things to try to repair the damage.
What major sources of energy can we make available to replace oil and coal? One way or another, we have to answer this question eventually. Remember that we use close to the energy that the sun delivers to the Earth, so the combination of solar, hydro, bio fuel, and other sun energy sources will not be enough.
What? Someone is giving you bad information. Incoming solar radiation (correcting for cloud losses) is 2.8 Million exajoules per year. Current human consumption is 484 exajoules per year, or about 0.017% of the solar input. So solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric, geothermal, bio, and nuclear will be fine.
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but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.
Except, of course, that it's not. In case you're too busy to click and read, it's an article that explains that CO2 levels are substantially higher now than any point in the last 800,000 years. Typically the largest increases were around 30 ppm/1000 years. In the 17 years prior to that article in 2006, CO2 had risen 30 ppm.
But by all means, let's continue to ignore these things and wait until we're absolutely certain before we go off and improve our planet and (if you're in the US) reduce our dependency on foreign oil and other such drastic, uncomfortable measures.
The Earth, dear old Terra, is around 4 billion years old. That is about 114,000 times older than modern humans. If one were to scale that time to an average human lifetime, modern humans have been around for the last 5 days of the Terra's life.
People looking at the last 100, 1,000 or even 100,000 years of climate aren't looking at a statistically significant sample of data. When one gets a statistically significant amount of data, one sees that we are living in a remarkably stable period and for most Terra's history, there have been massive climate changes.
What people are really saying is that they want things to continue on in a way favorable for themselves. The simple fact is that while climate change might kill off a lot of species including humans, but it won't end all life, let alone destroy the Earth.
There will life here again. It just won't be you and that pisses you off. This entire thing is about the over-sized collective ego of the human race.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
the earth is 4,500,000,000 years old. We have only been keeping track for 100 years of that, or 0.00000002% of the time! Warmest year on record, please....... who cares, just live and wonder why. damn....
No doubt its been getting warmer for the past 200 years. But, as an engineer, I question our ability to measure average global surface temperature to +/- 0.07 C. Such a measurement system would be an amazing engineering accomplishment. I don't question that the temperature anomaly for 2010 was 0.62, what I question is the asserted measurement error of +/- 0.07. I would accept a number of something like 0.62 +/- 0.50 with only a bit of skepticism. At +/- 0.25 my BS detector goes off. At +/-0.07 my rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-that-people-could-be-so-gullible reaction takes over.
Wow. We can't build a city in a few years and have a seamless transition from one to the other. That is absolute lunacy to suggest. Most of Europe was not flattened, either. I have no idea what world you live in, but it certainly isn't this one.
And except that before the industrial revolution, it was also at a plateau for centuries, at almost the highest level for at least 400,000 years, before the industrial revolution, so perhaps something besides Buicks was causing it for the many centuries before 1800. Yes it took off after the IR, but why was it so much higher before then, when human populations were rather sparse? That is the point that people like YOU keep ignoring. There is an issue, but the cause/effect is NOT as cut and dry as you would like to make it.
People like ME are saying, yes, lets cut emissions, lets cut CO2, but in a measured, progressive but sustainable way that might even provide jobs, and there are reasons and justifications for it even if you don't believe the science. People like you TWIST the words of conservationists, who want the same thing you want but in a more reasonable way. We aren't saying to not make changes, we are saying to meet in the middle with serious, ongoing changes with a wider base of benefit, and instead you jump on a soap box and tell everyone that either we agree with your ideas, or we just want to shit on the planet. It is no wonder that people tell environmentalists to fuck off when you are so arrogant. No wonder you post as AC. I'm not ashamed of what I know, or believe.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The shit thing is, if the "correction" is disruptive enough, we may never get the chance to rebuild what we have now. There's only so much easily-accessible energy sitting around waiting for us to get it. If we deplete our oil reserves to low enough levels and then suffer a major global cataclysm, our descendants will be permanently stuck living an Amish lifestyle.
Not that it matters much to us, here and now - I'll be long dead before anything like that happens. But I still feel some responsibility to try and keep our species moving forward.
Sure, that's totally fair in an ideal world; however, the forests have developed a mono-culture because of all the fire suppression that has been going on for decades.
The forests were already over-crowded and unhealthy. The current pine beetle outbreak (which mostly affects lodgepole pines, but can also hit pinon, and a few others) is so devastating because of this.
In the past, outbreaks would be limited by a hard freeze in the winter which killed all the beetles and limited their range. Also, naturally healthy and diverse forests limited the scope of devastation. Today we have forests that are composed almost entirely of a single species in many places and the trees are all roughly the same age and present a similar amount of susceptibility.
Once the beetles have taken every last tree, the ability for the forest to replenish itself will be hindered by the fact that there is very little other plant life around to protect the soil. Unprotected soil leads to more violent snow melt runoff, erosion, water contamination, etc. The forest will have a much more difficult time replenishing itself.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2009/05/antony-watts-and-surface-stations-wait.html
Fandroids hate facts.
Well it's pretty clear that wealthy people are normal human beings and wouldn't spend a dollar to save the life of someone they don't know or, even worse, someone who hasn't been born yet. Money and who has it, that's all the argument has ever been about.
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People have always believed that it's perfectly acceptable to kill off other species to keep humans around. Why do you think the Grizzley bear and wolf populations got so low?
Who are you to say that we are more important than, say, the really clever octopods who will come after us?
What a stupid question. I'm more important because I'm me and I want to live, and if that motherfucking octopod thinks he's going to take my place he better bring a whole bunch of bros and some serious weaponry otherwise he's ending up on my plate for dinner. I think a better question is what type of self hating species WOULDN'T do anything and everything in their power to survive? If you feel a deep rooted urge to jump into killer whale's mouths in order to save THEIR species then by all means do so before you spread your genes and hurt ours.
That's an extremely dishonest way to describe it. You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one, wow! what a great idea huh?!?!
In fact they used that tree ring data without caveat for most of the chart, then silently omitted it near the end of the sequence, substituting data from the other set only for those years where the data from the first set didnt fit their hypothesis. Then they labeled the chart so it looked like a single, reliable data set produced the whole sequence, and presented it to the world as such.
I find this line deliciously ironic. Perhaps you are not acquainted with the phenomenon of psychological projection?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I'm not a global warming denier. I'm someone who thinks the globe is warming, but we don't know how much of it is man made. Likely much, maybe most, maybe less than half. But it doesn't matter if we can meet half way and make some of the changes while we debate, the changes that will improve life even if global warming was a myth: better fuel economy means less reliance on Arab countries and less pollution.
I think you will find many, many outdoor types agree with me. I'm not Johnny Huntalot, I just fish regularly and I am outdoors a lot. I also live in a county with no manufacturing, few humans, and yet we fail EPA every month from pollution from areas 90 miles from here in two different directions. (between Charlotte and Greensboro/Winston-Salem, NC) If you bother to ask, and don't ask in framing the question around global warming, you will find that most people like the idea of reducing pollution and dependence on Arab oil. Over half the nation has consumption warnings on fish from our lakes due to years of dumping PCBs in the water, for instance.
Many people who enjoy the outdoors, live in the south and are either Republican or Libertarian (like myself) or otherwise conservative at least fiscally, would agree with half the points if you don't make it a debate about global warming. There are reasons to doubt the motives on some people on both sides of the debate. The smart money avoids the debate and simply focuses on things we all already agree on. You keep harping about "global warming", you tune out half the people who would agree on half the ideas you would like to see implemented. Does it matter if people disagree on the reasons, if they agree with you on at least some of the methods?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Yes it took off after the IR, but why was it so much higher before then [grida.no], when human populations were rather sparse?
Some was the natural slow increase for the interglacial period. Some was deforestation, both natural and artifical. It releases CO2 and prevents absorption of CO2. Humans burning forests to clear the way for croplands. Formation and expansion of the Sahara. Transformation of the Middle East from temperate lands to a desert. Nobody is saying all climate change is man made. We're just really good at doing it quickly.
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I think you are too much of a pessimist. There are a lot of way we can use a lot less energy and still maintain our standard of living. For instance I believe with advancement in building techniques we will find that it is cheaper to build underground than it is to build above. This alone will decrease home use of energy by more than half. We will be a lot safer in those home too. If we could build our roads underground too we could easily have automobiles that drive themselves since they would not have to contend with either humans or animals. There is also a lot of new energy production methods that have not yet come to fruit. Fusion is just one. Are you saying that there is no way that we are ever going to solve that. How about space energy? Are we never going to have mirrors in space that beam down energy? Either the invention of a space elevator or a large rail gun could vastly help with that. Than there is fuel from plants. I read a study that states that we could get enough energy by using marginal lands growing certain plants without increasing the cost of food. I agree with that since farm land in my county in Michigan is a small per cent of the total land available. The reason that we have not already solved this problem is that we have not yet reached the point where we absolutely need to. Only when we are about to reach that point will the demand be great enough to put enough manpower into it.
If you think they're manipulating ground station data through selection, then ignore the ground stations and just look at the satellite data, which is showing the same warming trend.
"I have a friend...."
Speaking of bad science. Look, if you can demonstrate in a clearly well thought out manner that their science is completely wrong and bullshit, then write a paper about it and get it published in a peer reviewed journal. Seriously. But you better have rock solid impenetrable arguments or it'll be ripped to shreds before it hits the presses. You would think that with so many glaring holes that people seem to be able to see in climate research, that someone would have been able to put forth a paper that tore the climate science community a new one with relative ease.
But the best that has been managed so far are correcting some relatively minor issues. Some have tried to put forth papers based on your premise and have summarily been laughed at due to the poor quality of the papers.
If you can summarily disprove the conclusions of the science and that there really is no warming, for fuck's sake put together a paper and do it. You will win a Nobel, you'll silence the ignorant masses who equate their backyard thermometer to the global energy balance, and you'll save billions to trillions of dollars that would have otherwise been wasted trying to come up with ways to prepare for and battle a crisis that doesn't exist.
Until you can produce that in reviewed/validated way, I'm going to side with the current body of scientific research. That has a lot more weight than some random slashdot poster who "has a friend".
~X~
You can actually remove every weather station that has been claimed to be faulty for the above reason without significantly changing your results.
The CO2 plateau is so narrow on a geologic scale that it isn't often discussed. The apparent plateau you see on the right of the page you mentioned is in fact only a few pixels wide on the left and occurs naturally every 100,000 years. This link is somewhat more readable. I hope you don't view this as me ignoring the cause/effect so I'm going to be redundant: I think that the effect is historically normal, and the cause is the same historical cause of the last three jumps from 200 to 280 ppm, though I don't know exactly what that is.
What we've seen in the last 200 year has been an increase from 280 to 370 ppm, more than enough to end a glacial maximum, not to mention the other greenhouse gases like methane. Furthermore, the hockey stick graph is only a 1 dimensional picture. Scientists now have climate models with huge numbers of parameters; I've yet to see one that doesn't predict global warming in the next century due primarily to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
Most environmentalists are trying to make some progress and would be ok with half the progress they think the world needs, as a step in the right direction. The oil and coal lobby is fighting against all compromise, because for them compromising is losing.
Since global warming is a negative externality of CO2 emissions, the free market will operate best if this cost is internalized -- so I advocate a gradually increasing CO2 tax so as not to shock the economy but to make it clear that the price of fossil fuels will go up. The entire proceeds can be spent on domestic research, solar panels for government buildings from domestic manufacturers, or even giving the proceeds back to the people in the form of tax credits.
Someday, a CO2 tax or cap and trade will happen. Global warming can only be denied for so long. Not too mention, someday we'll run out of fossil fuels (not literally, the prices will start spiking). Long-term smart money is in clean energy.
If you look at the maps, you'll notice most of the recent warming was not near those areas.
Here you can play with the data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
For instance, if you choose Jan-Dec 2010, you'll see that Europe was on the cool side, the USA was only slight warmer, and that there are big red areas where nobody lives.
A climate model is nothing more than a pure physical model of the earth. All you need to produce a graph from 1900 to 2010 is to plug in the initial conditions, and all external influences from 1900 onwards (solar output, atmospheric composition, volcanic eruptions). The model calculates what happens next. Temperatures are not plugged in the model, so please explain why you need a bigger sample.
No, stations within 1000 km distance are actually very closely correlated in their temperature.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1987/Hansen_Lebedeff.html
Melting ice is a good indication that it is really getting warmer, and that it's not just a bunch of measurement errors/cherry picking.