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World Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Outpace Worst-Case Scenario
Layzej writes "The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record in 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated. A chart accompanying the study shows the breakdown by country. The new figures mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago. It is a 'monster' increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past. The question now among scientists is whether the future is the IPCC's worst case scenario or something more extreme."
Thank goodness that "global warming" is bullshit.
I can't tell if you're trolling, or if you're actually that fucking ignorant.
Likewise, climate models are designed to simulate the physicsof the global ecosystem, and not just perform statistical regressions.
Perhaps next time you might consider having the slightest fucking clue of what you're talking about before joining a discussion with adults?
No comment.
> CO2 outpaces worst-case scenarios yet the heat doesn't show up.
Heat lags CO2. Just like the middle of winter is not Dec 21 and the middle of summer is not June 21.
The earth is warming up a little more each year. Please learn a little before making wrong headed statements.
Adding heat to the oceans takes a long time. Think boiling water. Adding 1 or 2 degrees to the entire oceans takes an awful lot of energy accumulation. The heat we have added so far has just started to turn over the ocean currents.
Currently 1998 is the hottest year on record. Two combined land and sea surface temperature records from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) both calculate that the first six months of 2010 were the hottest on record. According to GISS, four of the six months also individually showed record highs.
At the time the article was written, the first six months of 2010 were hotter than the corresponding months in 1998. Unfortunately that trend continued, and this year NOAA announced that 2010 had tied with 2005 for the hottest year on record. (2005 was hotter than 1998; the guardian got that fact wrong).
Source: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110112_globalstats.html
They were all talking about differential equations, just some of you don't know it. Global circulation models are a collection of coupled atmosphere, ocean, etc models. Each of these models contain a core set of differential equations, which are either discretized to be integrated forward in time in physical space, or decomposed into spectral space, which has certain benefits for non-linear terms in the Navier-Stokes equation. There are a number of parameterizations to handle sub grid-scale processes so their effects taken into account at the resolved grid scale*. In essence you have a bunch of differential equations and a closure to give yourself a closed system for each component of the GCM, which you then use to force other components, and you integrate it all forward in time.
And the gp was right about observations. If you recall your ODE/PDE class, you'll be interested to know this is a boundary-value problem and you need to specify initial and boundary conditions. Initial conditions are your observations, or whatever your assumptions about the current state are. Often the GCM models are initialized in the year 1800 or 1900, giving them 100+ years of simulation time to equilibrate and match known observations before they are really forecasting the future. As for boundary conditions, the model is global, so the boundaries wrap around and you dont need to worry about them.
* An example of this is convection. When moist air rises and condensation occurs (to form cloud drops, rain, ice, etc), energy is released into the surrounding system (enthalpy of vaporization, deposition, fusion, etc). This translates into warming of the surrounding air, and helps drive convection and represents a transport of warming from the surface to the middle and upper atmosphere. The condensation process happens on a much smaller scale than a GCM can resolve, so the equations being integrated cannot represent this process. The process does however have an effect on temperature at the resolved scale. To handle this, parameterizations are employed that make certain assumptions about these processes and then make adjustments to the resolved scale. It would be better to just resolve these effects directly, but when you try to work at the molecular scale globally, realtime moves faster than the model does.
Fear the data, denier: * every year since 1992 has been warmer than 1992; * the ten hottest years on record occurred in the last 15; * every year since 1976 has been warmer than 1976; * the 20 hottest years on record occurred in the last 25; * every year since 1956 has been warmer than 1956; and * every year since 1917 has been warmer than 1917. The two most reputable globally and seasonally averaged temperature trend analyses are the NASA GISS direct surface temperature analysis and the CRU direct surface temperature analysis. Both trends are definitely and significantly up.
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
The models are off because up until 2009/2010-ish were actually experiencing a natural cooling trend, which masked our artificial warming trend and came out as a wash. Now that the cooling trend has subsided, warming is expected to spike in the coming decade.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/03/AR2009090302199.html
Or we could just jump to convenient conclusions given a tiny dataset.
There is a warming/dry trend alternating with a cooling/wet trend every 7-10 years or so. It's called El Nino/La Nina.
No one talks about it much anymore, but my personal experiences over the last 20 years support that cycle very well. Right now we're in a La Nina phase, meaning more cool & more precipitation (hey would you look at that, unprecedented snow in October in the U.S. this year).
One thing that everyone needs to keep in mind is WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE. In fact, one of the most agreed upon results of climate change is more VIOLENT weather, not merely "hotter" weather.
When the climate balance is upset, all hell breaks loose in the weather, it doesn't just "get hotter." As a result you see things like that massive snow in Washington D.C. a year or two ago, snow in Texas a year or three ago, while simultaneously having the hottest summers on record.
It's not rocket science.
> The models don't indicate that there is supposed to be lag, the models were /programmed/ to /assume/ that there will be lag
What the models are programmed with are basic PDE's describing what we know about fluid motion, thermodynamics, mass continuity, etc. In this case there will also be code modeling the known interactions of the CO2 molecule with solar and terrestrial radiation. What the programmers are assuming (not programmers really, but the guys running the model) is how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere. The model equations will handle how a number concentration of CO2 ends up being a warming (radiative transfer would be a good class to have had for this), and the rest of your equation set will move that warming around the system.
You should download some model code (lots of it is open source!) and look at it sometime. Convince yourself its just an iterative march to grind on some PDE's and not a collection of "if CO2, wait 2 years, then T+=4K" type things.
Is that scientists, on average, are not crazed alarmists. They work in a field full of cut-throat peer review where the one who truly, verifiably disproves the most long-standing stuff gets the recognition and the spoils. Their language is conservative, a wide range of speculation must be admitted for consideration but they're going to err on the side of caution.
There's nothing in nature short of a major mass extinction event to match what we're creating. I can't fathom why anyone's having kids. The kids we have already are truly screwed.
I'm guessing you're no scientist.
I work in science, and this is something of a misconception. Cut-throat peer review is anything but exempt from personal politics, as are those who dole out grants, etc. The livelihood of scientists is entirely dependent upon outside money that is often there in hopes that the scientists in question provide a specific answer. And yes, I am certain that global warming falls entirely within this domain. I have yet to meet a well funded scientist that is looking at the data the other way. If at this point you're thinking that it's bad science to be only looking at a problem from one side, you are correct. It's just that sometimes looking from that other side is a poor career choice.