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Greenland Ice Sheet Melts At Record Rate In 2010
RedEaredSlider writes "A study using satellite and ground-based data is showing the Greenland ice sheets are setting a record for the areas exposed to melting and the rate at which they are doing so. NASA says 2010 was a record warm year, and temperatures in the Arctic were a good 3 degrees C over normal."
You seem to have trouble understanding the word "expect".
Not really. If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once, but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.
The parent is questioning whether 30 years is long enough for climate trends to be perceptible.
(I'm not a AGW denier myself -- I don't know enough about it to think I know better than the vast majority of climate scientists)
What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers. Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers - especially over such a small sample size. It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.
Of course it's possible -- that's called "the null hypothesis." The rather more interesting question is, "how likely is it?"
If I roll "6" ten times straight, the dice might not be loaded. After all, the odds of doing so (allowing the first time free, since it had to be something) are one in a mere 6^9 -- one in ten million. One in ten million events happen all the time (especially on Star Trek) and if you're a betting man by all means put your money on them and I'll match you on the other side.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You know from ice, fossil and biological records.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The bigger mistake by GP is to not understand the word "distributed" in statistics. It doesn't mean "how far apart" like in common usage. If you deny climate change, you believe there is equal probability for each year to be picked as an outlier year, a uniform distribution (or as he says it, evenly distributed).
Given the values one can calculate a confidence level that it is NOT evenly distributed. Presumably that's what the researcher did, I've never known journalists to publish confidence levels.
A very good point. For example, just because a mountain that has been around for millions of years disappears doesn't mean that we caused it. Mountaintop removal mining means, however, that these days it's more likely than not.
It seems to me that anthropogenic climate change deniers always start with "you can't prove climate is changing" then when you do, they fall back on "you can't prove that humans are causing it" and finally on "it'll be a good thing anyway with the better weather up North, etc.". Then they reset back to the first position any time new evidence comes out. It seems to me to be mostly hiding their heads in the sand and denying the possibility that humans could affect the environment in any way, all of human history to the contrary. Frankly, there's no way all of the things we're releasing into the atmosphere the soil and the water can't have an effect. Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans. We are definitely having an effect with all the pollution we're spewing out. The environment may have massive reserves, but it's not operating on a scale that much greater than us and we can overwhelm those reserves. The evidence is overwhelming. The environment, and probably even the human race will survive, of course, but in the same way it always does: with massive die-offs and then recovery afterwards. That is not desirable from point of view of the human race or individual humans.
That worked really awesomely in New Orleans.
And of course it's an entirely free proposition, that's dirt cheap, doesn't require reengineering ports, closing beaches with the resulting loss of tourism or anything like that. The US fortunately has a smoothly running system as shown by the exemplary mantenance records of the New Orleans levees.
Yes, indeed. Things went very smoothly.
It's very funny that you use the very thing I'd use to explain why it'd be a monumental mess to try to argue everything would be fine.
I completely agree with you. If we did not have climate models, guessing that an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correlates with rising temperature would be just a guess and would not show causation. It's a good thing we've had a climate model for over 100 years that tells up to expect rising temperatures as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases.
We measured the CO2 increase over the past century and we can calculate based on simple physics that adding a given amount of CO2 into the atmosphere increases global temperatures by a given amount. There is no conceivable way that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere wouldn't have a warming effect on global temperature, that's a physical impossibility.
Solar activity varied something like 0.1% in the past 50 years. Here is a graph where CO2, solar activity and temperature are all on a same graph. The CO2 correlation is a lot stronger.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
We'll get access to more viking camps that are buried by ice and snow
The viking camps are near the coast, and they haven't been buried by ice and snow.
Here's a famous settlement. Note how it's still green.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=61.152222,-45.515&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=61.152222,-45.515