Slashdot Mirror
New Record High Temperature At South Pole
New submitter Titus Andronicus writes "The South Pole experienced its highest-ever recorded temperature of -12.3C (+9.9F) on December 25, 2011, according to preliminary reporting from the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center at the University of Wisconsin."
Just like snow on Copenhagen is weather, not climate, right?
see http://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/blog/2011/12/29/update-on-record-high-temperatures-at-south-pole-and-aws-sites/
"Here is an update on the South Pole and nearby Nico and Henry Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) record high temperatures recorded on 25 December 2011:
-- The prior record high temperature at South Pole was recorded on 27 December 1978, not on 12 December 1978, as misquoted in some sources.
-- Preliminary assessment of the record high at Nico AWS was -8.2C or 17.2F on 25 December 2011. This breaks the previous known record of -13.9C or 7F recorded on 4 January 2010.
-- Preliminary assessment of the record high at Henry AWS was -8.9C or 16F on 25 December 2011. This break the previous known record of -14.5C or 5.9F on 5 January 2010."
Hope they can swim :)
I all seriousness, I understand the folks who don't believe in global warming. I don't understand how they reach their conclusions, but what I guess I can't wrap my head around is how staunch they seem to be that global warming is absolutely not possible. It seems like they're vehemently trying to prove a negative instead of considering that even if all of the components of global warming aren't valid, there are parts that are worth considering as being problems that need to be resolved.
Bark less. Wag more.
Time to play some disc golf.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
The summary says "highest-ever *recorded* temperature".
previous temp high was in Dec 1978, detail records have been kept since mid 1950's.
approximate annual average temperature records through ice cores date back about 800,000 years.
...with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the farming and cities!
This is indeed weather, it's come close to that before (in the "global cooling" period of the 1970s) Dec 27, 1978 the high was -13.6 C +7.5 F.
It is the record high, but the average high in December is only -15.7F. Keep in mind that they get nearly 24 hour sunlight for all of November, December and January. Can't deny it's getting warmer, but this isn't doomsday material just yet.
First, it's mid summer there. Second, there is no mention of the previous record so we have nothing to compare this "record" to. I have a friend who works there every year and his comments, from camp, last month was that they were battling storms and cold and hadn't been able to get too much work done. Finally, we have only been keeping track of temperatures there since 1956 so it's hardly worth getting into a tizzy over 60 years worth of record data.
What's hilarious is how these people shriek and cry about how the earth has always experienced climate change, pointing to the research of climatologists to prove this, but then when those same climatologists say there is evidence that this warming trend is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, suddenly they can't be trusted.
Oh, it's like this: global warming cause taxes, taxes are wrong and therefore global warming is wrong. QED.
I all seriousness, I understand the folks who don't believe in global warming. I don't understand how they reach their conclusions, but what I guess I can't wrap my head around is how staunch they seem to be that global warming is absolutely not possible.
I find it odd that you characterize adherence to the "global warming" hypothesis as a matter of belief. I thought this was intended to be a scientific matter. If it's a matter of faith, then everybody can choose whether to believe in it or not, right? So what's your beef? Or are we having a religious war...
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
It's simple- you have a group of people who say that they've done the science and have the answers. That group then says that noone should ever challenge their science or examine it (the science is settled). And that the only people who can perform the science are people who already agree with the conclusions and who are close friends to the current researchers - and if you come to any other conclusion then will be personally and professionally destroyed. When the real-world data is shown to be flawed, they insist that it doesn't really matter. Most of the science is done in computer simulations, whose consistency with the real-world should never be challenged. Most importantly, all of the predictions made by the Global Warming scientists are wrong. They predicted that the past 3 years would be the worst ever for hurricanes - they turned out to be some of the most mild. The predicted temperature changes couldn't have be much worse.
Compare that with any other real branch of science and you'll see why any reasonable person would be skeptical. I read an interesting thesis challenging the basis of the theory of relativity the other day written by a layman, and the responses to it were theories on tests that could be performed that would prove or discredit the theory. Science should be challenged - always. Even wild and ridiculous theories are tested and proven or disproved. Tests MUST be reproducible and available to all. That is the very nature of "The Scientific Method".
What the global warming community does is akin to a bad religion. It has its high priests who must never be challenged. They create prophecies which turn out to be false, but then their defenders just pretend that they were true. Anyone who challenges the religion are attacked.
I don't like bullies - especially ones who dress up and play scientists.
Nobody has ever denied that the earth goes through warming and cooling cycles.
I see you've never heard of young earth creationists.
For the climate scientist it is a matter of science. For all others it is a matter of belief (in what the climate scientists tell you is happening). Whether or not you decide to believe the consensus of the experts (climate scientists) is up to you . . . some do, and some don't.
They don't point to research of climatologists to show the earth has always experienced climate change, they point to the research of geologists. Climatologists mostly work with computer models.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Alright, the Earth goes through periods of climate upheaval. Fine.
Now, knowing that, why on Earth would we NOT want to minimize our own artificial contributions to the process? Wouldn't it be in our best interest to limit our hand in climate change? If global warming is a natural phenomenon, then we may be in for hundreds to thousands of years of progressive warming. In the interest of helping our species survive, wouldn't we want to manage our resources intelligently in order to better survive what you consider an inevitable natural process?
Oh man! Thank GOD you beat that addiction. Fan dependence and ODing is a serious problem! Just ask any South Korean!
"..end suburban and rural living"
we don't.
we need to stop burnig fossile fuels.
Nuclear and SOlar can do that.
The only really massive change that needs to happen is people need to drive smaller vehicles, for shorter duration. Some thing that will get better with battery design improvements. which in the US is a big deal. But too bad.. I say that as someone who loves driving, love V8 engines and love going really fast.
But that time needs to end. Frankly, I would ban any SUV or large truck unless it is used commercially. I would put some strict regulations and rules on 'commercially'. Selling Avon door to door wouldn't count, for example.
I wouldn't take anyone SUV away, but I wouldn't let them buy a new one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and all at the last minute because deniers keep blocking any effort to plan for it and make it an orderly transition.
"Last minute" is several decades to several centuries long. That's the big problem with claiming urgency for global warming.
In fact, if some of this is happening naturally, then that just means we need to have a net reduction in CO2, below past where it was 1000 years ago.
I swear, we're in a crashing car, and scientists are blaming the driver, and insisting he needs to drive better. However, some people insist a tire just blew, it has nothing or almost nothing to do with the driver at all...and thus he doesn't need to drive better and we should crash?
Uh, no.
And even if we're going to crash no matter what, and can't fix it, should we not start buckling our seatbelts and installing airbags? Perhaps climate change is unavoidable...all that means is that we should redirect energies from trying to avoid it to trying to survive it.
Which, when it comes to energy consumption, would be a lot of the same things, because climate change is going to start sucking so much added energy we really can't afford to not be energy efficient everywhere we can. We've going to have to save our energy for climate control. (And we're going to run into some serious problems with water, also. No just sea levels, usable drinking water.)
Likewise, climate change is going to make already scary political situations worse, and if the world really was going to face a disaster on that scale, it would be clever to, you know, stop relying on middle east oil. Or oil at all. The more local the energy, the less likely it is that random world-wide problems will interrupt it. (Do you know what happens if shifting weather patterns start dumping 100x the amount of water in a desert? Sounds great in theory...in practice, not so good.)
If someone was standing there arguing that the government shouldn't spend money installing solar panels, but instead should spend money trying to build flood walls around Manhattan or subside sheltered farms to avoid the random weather, okay, I could respect that. I'd disagree, but we'd both be in the same universe. It would be a legitimate disagreement....I think a problem can still be corrected in time, he thinks it's too late and we have to deal with the results.
But the people pushing 'Climate change is not cause by us' aren't actually 'People who disagree about the best next step', they're 'People who profit from the status quo and assume they'll be dead before they have to deal with it, so are literally arguing everything in order to delay any change'
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
A First World country wherein thousands of people die simply because it was hot outside? What's wrong with this picture?
Perhaps you should ask the people in the Chicago? The difference is that a lot of Europe rarely (or at least it used to be rarely) gets hot enough to require air conditioning in contrast to parts of the US that trace their population growth to the invention of air conditioning due to the stifling heat (at least that's what Atlanta claimed in some of it tourist literature several years ago).
I would hazard a guess the the main reason for this is that the US is at a lower latitude that much of Europe and lacks the moderating influence of the ocean (no Mediterranean, Rockies block air from Pacific), but I am by no means an expert in such matters. Whatever the cause the US does seem to be, on average, hotter than much of Europe in the summer and colder in the winter. Europe does get hot but not for the prolonged months that the US seems to suffer. This means that not only is air conditioning a lot less common but heat waves occur far less frequently and are typically less severe so, when bad ones do happen, there are far more vulnerable people around because their population has not been reduced by frequent heat waves and there is little/no air conditioning available to help.....of course this does not explain the deaths in Chicago but I'll let you figure out why they happened.
Global warming doesn't preclude local cooling. In fact, it's a natural consequence as weather patterns change.
And no, the naysayers are not saying "Hang on a asecond, let's take a look at this", they're coming up with any number of reasons to not look.
Nuclear and solar is going to take a LONG time to replace all the coal power plants, especially with the massive opposition to nuclear from quarters that include the current administration.
The only really massive change that needs to happen is people need to drive smaller vehicles, for shorter duration.
That's the end to suburban or at least anything resembling rural living.
Commuter / personal vehicle travel is actually a pretty small factor in CO2 emissions. It fact it appears that The major ones are coal power plants and freight transportation. Moving all that freight around is going to be even more critical as population densities grow and distances between them are greater. Stop moving those trucks and it only takes about 2 weeks before people in urban areas are going hungry.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Nobody is seriously stating that global warming research should not be held to scientific scrutiny. The only people making that baseless accusation are the people who actively deny it, usually for political or financial reasons.
My problem with the naysayers is that they consistently make broad sweeping claims without backing up their claims with results from independent peer reviewed studies that HAVE NOT BEEN FUNDED BY SPECIAL INTERESTS. They also consistently and embarassingly rehash tired strawman arguments on isolated incidents (Eg. One unethical scientist fudging data) or a couple of questionable inputs (Eg. A few subsets of input data that may not be completely accurate). These aren't the actions of a scientist seriously trying to reproduce experiments and legitimately test real theories on climate change, these are the typical actions of a defense lawyer trying to spread confusion and cast doubt in the face of hard concrete evidence.
Further still you accuse climate change scientists from having an agenda and predetermining their own conclusions? Do you get this from one bad apple in the bunch? Of course they have a preconceived notion of what the truth is, its called a hypothesis, which is exactly what the experiments aim to prove.
I don't like bullies, especially those that take marching orders from their messianic right-wing talking heads.
A heater converts energy from one form to another. i.e. electricity to heat.
A cooler is a heat pump - it moves "heat" from one point to another, hotter, point.
It is easier to get a high efficiency from a heater because most forms of inefficiency in a system turn out to be “waste” heat – i.e. what you want. Moving heat from one point to another is different. It’s though to get a highly efficient method of moving heat – unless you have demons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
For instance, in physics labs I've proved a lot of physics to myself, and I "know" that bit of science ... Biology, on the other hand, is something I'm not terribly versed in ... I'm sure this sounds like a drunk college conversation, sorry. It'd be better but I'm driving and typing...
Not to worry. You're about to witness first hand a classic biologic experiment.
Say hello to Mr. Darwin for us ....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"and if you come to any other conclusion then will be personally and professionally destroyed."
>> "I deleted the rest from the quote because there's not point. The above already shows you are insane or a paid-for-by-assholes troll."
The above proves that the above above was in deed correct.
Global warming doesn't preclude local cooling. In fact, it's a natural consequence as weather patterns change.
Maybe, maybe not. In any case, do you have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell me? If so I'll just hand over my checkbook to you right now. Do you get my point? Or should I sledgehammer it home? In otherwords, whats your evidence for that statement? I'm not ready to take 5 steps backwards economically becuase you and your friends have fears with regards to this supposed phenomena. Even if the the world's climate were warming, you have no evidence to support that it is more than a perodic aberration.
You are actively admitting that you have a financial incentive as an individual for man-made climate change to be untrue. You are also likely not a climate scientist that has a lab and funding to where you can perform your own experiments trying to discover the truth for yourself, therefore you must accept a conclusion derived by experts in the field that have the means to perform these experiments and publicly disclosed their evidence for their conclusions in scientific journals.
So despite the vast array of evidence from independent research, versus the much smaller subset of contrary evidence from research known to be funded by individuals and entities who also have a direct financial incentive for this to be untrue, you choose to accept the latter. I am okay with you disagreeing in man-made climate change in this case as long as your truthful with yourself and others about your vested interests coincidentally being aligned with your viewpoints.
Do you get my point?
You are actively admitting that you have a financial incentive as an individual for man-made climate change to be untrue.
Sure, as long as you actively admit that you have an interest yourself. Those Greenpeace t-shirts aren't going to sell themselves...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
You are making a very simple logical and scientific error. The position being advocated is that AGW is true because the preponderance of scientific evidence strongly suggests that the probability that is is false is quite small. In fact, it is becoming vanishingly small as more and more observations are made. There reaches a point, in ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY, that any reasonable person can take it for granted that it is true in every meaningful sense of the word.
Its pretty much the same reason that you don't stay in bed in the morning thinking that, well I won't have to get up today because the sun is simply not going to appear on the horizon in the east today, since there is always an infinitely small probability that it won't. Normally, if someone used that kind of thinking as an excuse for not showing up for work, you would get yourself fired and FOR GOOD REASON.
However, you don't have to take my word for it. I suggest an experiment. Next summer, when temperatures reach new record highs run outside with your parka on yelling that everyone is an idiot for not believing you that its getting colder outside. Let us know what they say about your new career as a logician and scientist. I predict that you won't have to wait too long for the next opportunity.
"It's just doing what it's always done."
This is patently false. Although there are cyclical events, except for a brief period in the Pleistocene, there is no evidence that warming and cooling of the climate are cyclical in nature. Beside, the rate of change during the Pleistocene was about 100 times slower than what is occurring now, so even if it were "cyclical" the nature of the cycle and consequently the cause must be entirely different.
One could make a much stronger case that the fossil fuels industry is getting filthy rich by spreading ignorance. Compared to their profits, poor Al Gore wouldn't couldn't even be regarded as a welfare recipient.
Slashdot's previous article was titled: "Sun Storms May Affect Radios, Cell Phones Today".
Ya think that shiny thing up there has anything to do with global warming?
Of course it does. It's where the heat is coming from.
Is it putting out more heat?
No.
So more heat is being trapped by the atmosphere?
Yes.
Why?
Because there's more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Wow. Where is that CO2 coming from?
Burning fossil fuels.
Whoda thunk it. Maybe we'd better cut down?
Might be a good idea.