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Historic Heat In North America Turns Winter To Summer
An anonymous reader writes "A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the eastern half of the United States brought summer-like temperatures to North America in March 2012. The warm weather shattered records across the central and eastern United States and much of Canada. From the article: 'Records are not only being broken across the country, they're being broken in unusual ways. Chicago, for example, saw temperatures above 26.6Celsius (80Fahrenheit) every day between March 14-18, breaking records on all five days. For context, the National Weather Service noted that Chicago typically averages only one day in the eighties each in April. And only once in 140 years of weather observations has April produced as many 80Fahrenheit days as this March.'"
So it has happened before. And on geological time scales, that was, like, just ten minutes ago.
If only we had some sort of theory that could explain this inexplicable change in weather patterns.
The headline is a bit sensational for what was essentially a heat wave.
Yeah it might be newsworthy that there were record highs, but the seasons haven't suddenly reversed themselves.
...is quite tolerable this week. It's warmer here than in California and I am glad.
Finally all of those CFC's I've been spraying have paid off. Its too bitter cold in Chicago anyway.
Well, the scientific consensus is that global warming is happening and that man is contributing toward it.
Not all theories and consequent predictions are correct and complete - in most areas of science this is accepted calmly and rationally, but in this one it's suddenly proof that the whole premise is wrong. Kinda like saying evolution is a crock of shit just because one piece of fossil evidence isn't fully explained by a previous assumption. Not that I've ever seen global-warming deniers as any more rational than evolution-deniers, but they tend to find it hard to see themselves that way.
Localized weather stories are now considered news for nerds??!! What the fuck?
Is Slashdot next going to post when the summer equinox is coming, or when the first snowball in Peoria is happening?
This place is really turning to shit.
It's becoming more and more clear that we're in for a rough ride - and we're all to blame.
The sad truth is that those who are least responsible will suffer the most.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
And in the southern Hemisphere, We've had one of the coldest and wettest summers on record in New Zealand.
But you only hear about climate change when people are hot.....
-------
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
you can all blame the ring leader of the Weather Underground, Punxsutawney Phil, for spreading propaganda that would deceive you into thinking winter was staying another 6 weeks. it's eco-psycho-terrorism! in our soil!
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
It's effing cold in Seattle. Snowing every other day it seems. I want to be warm and dry.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Sorry but we see this kind of pattern every 10-12 years. in 1995 we had a very unseasonably warm winter followed by a march that was in the 60's and 70's I remember at LEAST 4 times in my 46 years of life having a very mild winter followed by a unseasonably warm later winter early spring.
But That's ok, I've already got a buttload of "ZOMG GLOBAL WARMING!!!" idiots going off around me. Sorry kiddies, this is not global warming, just a freak coincidence of just the right conditions. Maybe if people actually paid attention to their life they would have noticed this stuff.
Oh and dont go off your nuts when it snows in June... Mother nature is a bitch when she teases like this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm from Rochester, NY and I was in Boston last weekend; it's particularly warm in both places.
this is almost surreal
It's around St. Patrick's Day, so the green is fitting
normally Rochester March heat wave means 50
we didn't set our clocks ahead an hour, we set them ahead an entire season
In the words of Monty Python, this is getting silly.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"The sky is falling! Proof of global warming!"
Here's something to ponder - the past two summers were some of the coldest ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest. The last 10 years have seen a reversal of the global warming trend. We are undeniably in a decade-long chill at this point in time. Even desert areas (not "drought ares") in Australia are getting drenched with torrential rains which is extremely unusual there.
It's time to relax, sit back, flip the lights on, rev that engine, and stop worrying about this boogie-man called AGW. Much better to concentrate our efforts at fighting industrial pollution involving actual poison, not carbon dioxide.
Back in October, I was writing 'HAPPY HALLOWEEN!' in the snow, having a chuckle. I stopped laughing when a storm blew in so fierce, so heavy, that it took out the entire Western MA. area's electricity. We were without power for a week, almost exactly. The snow was already heavy, but the fact that trees still had leaves on their branches added to the weight. Entire limbs--or just entire trees were everywhere. It was a spooky time, and it's only getting spookier. I should NOT be sweltering at work while wearing shorts, which is how it went yesterday. Anyone saying "so what, it's a heatwave" doesn't come from New England. We're used to crazy-assed weather, but this has got us all stumped.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
Love sees no species.
I think they also discovered the source of all that heat to be the white-hot star at the center of the Solar System... !
Sorry. Hot chicks trump cold Kiwis any day of the year.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Climate change isn't about winter and summer both getting warmer. The climate changes hourly. It has daily patterns, it has seasonal patterns and it has yearly patterns. Our knowledge of patterns beyond yearly is limited by the available data.
These patterns rely on restoring forces within our environment, energy storages and releases through matter within the globe, and energy gains and losses through our atmosphere. It has been hypothesised that a significant change in any of these mechanisms will cause a change in the mean, and variation, of our climate, which will impact all of those patterns. It has been documented that a significant change is being made through accelerated releasing of energy from matter through burning fossil fuels and modifications to our atmosphere.
To suppose that "climate change" is a sensationalist explanation for warmer variations to seasonal patterns is misguided and misinformed. To suppose the modifications we have caused in these mechanisms cannot result in colder and wetter variations in the climate suggests there have been some theoretical and experimental breakthroughs in atmosphere, chemical and physical science that I have not been made aware of. Please forward me to the relevant literature.
Hardly a transition from winter to summer. It certainly wasn't much of a winter this year (at least in the continental U.S.), as in early January it reached nearly 60 degrees F in Wisconsin.
The fact is that we humans live on very short timescales, and we cannot even begin to comprehend the changes that have occurred in the Earth's climate over millions of years. In the early Eocene there were rainforests at the latitude of northern North America. Antarctica has glaciated, unglaciated, and glaciated again. The Earth's climate has been at times much colder than now, and at times much hotter than now. At some times such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum the climate has changed significantly over short periods of time, perhaps by the release of methane into the atmosphere from clathrates.
There are 7 billion humans on this planet and we have extensively modified its land surface and atmosphere. I'm not sure any of us will live to see changes much more severe than some relatively unusual weather, but I believe that the Earth's climate will be transitioning into a new stable state. Maybe not if we change all our habits right this second, but that's not going to happen. Perhaps it will eventually be like the early Eocene, or maybe not. Psychologically, humans will not change their habits without indisputable proof that their habits are highly detrimental to their well-being. This is very difficult in this case because the climate changes over time spans much longer than a human lifetime. All I can really say is that people should think of the future as much as they can... but it happens to be a nice day outside, you might as well go out and enjoy it while it lasts.
Science doesn't work by consensus. The evidence that supports the theory of evolution has been tested over and over again. The theory makes concrete predictions which have been observed to work out, over and over again.
Too bad climate 'science" cannot say the same about their so-called "evidence" that man-made CO2 is the cause of global warming, as opposed to other possible causes, both man-made and natural.
... there goes Winter Wrap-Up. Cross that holiday off the list...
I was surprised, for a minute, to see all these Slashdotters sarcastically pretending this is proof of global climate change, or forgoing the sarcasm and outright denying it entirely. Then I remembered that, despite Slashdot readers being generally accepting of, and, in many cases, even excited about science, they also tend to be generally libertarian in their politics, which means denying ideas widely held by entire scientific and academic communities if it might lead to more gub'mint.
The original source of this article, which was copied verbatim, is NASA Earth Observatory. Give credit where credit is due.
If Slashdot covering a weather story isn't a climate-scale outlier, I don't know what is.
Here's another strange fact: on March 18 the low temperature in Rochester MN exceeded the previous record high for that date.
I'm working on an essay linking this event to anthropogenic climate change ("global warming") which will appear on Planet3.0.
(For what it's worth I might as well submit a Slashdot story when it's up. Hose my host - see if I care.)
mt
Science doesn't work by consensus.
Yes, that's exactly how science works. Newton eloquently explained it in terms of philosophical induction.
(Now Popper's more simplistic view of the scientific method gets a lot of airtime, and that's often the basis for fights with the intelligent design gang who deny empirical falsification as a basis for science. But that's OK because we can disregard Popper too.)
In fact, Europe was extremely cold this winter, and there was a lot of snow (as in meters of snow, something that happens once every 50 years). And last year there was an extremely cold winter in North America.
Exactly like science warns, extreme events are more extreme, and predictability is lost.
new sig
There are summers in New Zealand??? Lived there four years (Nelson "sunshine capital") and weather was horrible year round, kinda Scotland...
So, does this mean I can go hiking next week? (without causing my death)
How about the paths up Mount Moosilauke and Mount Jefferson? How about the trails up to the ridges of Franconia Notch? Ice all melted? Slush gone yet? What kind of temperatures would I get ON TOP (not in the valley) at those locations?
That it's march and its already too fucking hot. It's going to be an uncomfortable summer.
Not summer: spring. 80F is spring weather. Summer weather is 90-103F.
Maybe it's caused by this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6j4f8cHBIM
Go ahead, have a seizure
(NSFW)
What about the record breaking cold days this year in Europe, Alaska, New Zealand, Russia and China?
"the theory makes concrete predictions which have been observed to work out, over and over again." That's because we can observe live on our normal macro level. We don't have multiple earths to compare. "Science doesn't work by consensus" Peer review seems a lot like consensus to me.
I blame Al Gore
How much effect on our Weather has the past months Solar activity had on us?
No that's wrong. The Global Consensus is "OMG It's a disaster give us lots more funding to study this!!!!"
I believe it's referred to as loading the dice, where climate change isn't necessarily responsible, but will probably make some of the odd/extreme weather patterns come around more often than normal.
Couldn't this be, you know, weather?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Means extreme weather patterns become more likely. This includes more extreme temp fluctuations while the global overall mean just inches by a fraction of a degree per year.
All well established and advertised for the last twenty years. People pointing to super cold, wet winter in NZ are just emphasizing this, while kidding themselves into thinking it somehow contradicts the climate change trend.
I'm quite certain that once the future history of global warming will be written it'll emphasize that it shows humanity at it's smartest and most stupid at the same time.
At least it seems to me that way.
When I was young, we had a mild Spring from about March to about May, a fairly hot and mostly dry summer between June and August, wet, foggy and generally unpleasant Autumn from September to November and fairly cold and snowy winters from December to February. That was pretty reliable and generally quite ok.
Today we have freeze-your-toes-to-the-floor-when-you-dare-to-get-up Winters from about November to March and then it changes within a week or so to sweltering-hot-unbearable-heat from April to September, with October being the joker for really funky, crazy weather where it snows in the morning, the sun frying your brain during noon and hail hitting you on your way home from work.
So yes, I can somehow see a change in the climate. It gets more extreme and crazier. Not necessarily hotter. Just way less pleasant in either way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All this is due to the choice of my parents to spend their first winter in Arizona rather than stay in North Dakota as they have hitherto always done.
... And the story is tagged climatechange and globalwarming. One data point. Real classy, slashdot.
"Peer review seems a lot like consensus to me."
Peer review has to do with whether a paper is accepted for publication. The reviewer is supposed to be passing judgement on whether the paper makes a valid+ point that is worth considering, not on whether the reviewer agrees with its conclusions. So no, peer review is not the same as consensus. At least it's not supposed to be. It's wrong for a reviewer to let his own opinions of the subject affect his review. This is, of course, one of the major objections to the way in which the Climategate "scientists" took control of the peer review process to exclude papers which were critical of their methods.
Get with it.
To paraphrase Feynman on the topic of science education: "10 idiots shouldn't be able to outvote someone who knows what they are talking about." Science by consensus is bullshit. There are theories that are well supported by data, and theories that are poorly supported by data. If (real) scientists disagree on the validity of a theory, then that usually means that there is insufficient data.
Global warming falls into the bad data problem. All of the research is being funded by groups that want results one way or the other, and this introduces significant bias into research, which could cause people to incorrectly interpret data or even ignore results that disagree with their leanings. I wouldn't publish a paper that supported the wrong conclusion if it meant that my next paycheck would disappear, and I might be able to convince myself that a patten does/doesn't exist in a set of chaotic data depending on what I am hoping for.
The weather has been fantastic here. I've logged many hours on my motorcycle and have a decent tan going already.
It's been a money saver too commuting to work. If this is global climate change I'm begging all of you to rip out your catalytic converters and turn up the heat :) .
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
By definition, this is "weather", not "climate", it only lasts a week.
Climate change is defined by decades at a very minimum. Climate change is this:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/adsc-cmda/default.asp?lang=en&n=8C03D32A-1
Environment Canada takes readings every day, in hundreds of locations outside urban heat islands, and averages them across a whole season to get an average temperature. And then it graphs that number for every year since 1945. While even that graph swings wildly up and down from year to year and even has warmer and colder decades, the regression across almost 70 years shows a steady upward trend. It's most dramatic for our winter (2.8C) but all the seasons have shown statistically significant increases.
I was a huge skeptic until about 2004, but this and several papers I managed to puzzle my way through, plus the book "The Ice Chronicles", finally brought me around by about 2006.
Yes, there are Snowmaggedons. And there are these. And when you add them all up, the warmer spells are getting a little more frequent and the colder spells a little less so. Over decades. That's climate.
It's coming motherfuckers!
I'm doing my part for global warming.
I never turn off my PC, leave lights on all the time, and leave my heating on when I'm on vacation.
I'm hoping the Antarctic will melt so we can see what is buried under the miles of ice there.
I think it would be amazing to walk around on land that was buried under ice for millions of years.
The other benefit is that all that salt ocean water will turn into drinking water (more or less)
1816, the Year Without a Summer. And now this is the Year Without a Winter.
Every time we talk about the weather now, it's global warming. Anyone else sick of global warming? Anyone?
That's a sheep shot, you insensitive clod!
We may be at the top of the curve, if the total solar irradiance is levelling off from its recent decade-highs. http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm Then again, the total solar irradiance hasn't been levelling for enough time to draw that conclusion, the sun may just continue to keep getting hotter and hotter, as it has the past 50 years. Which will lead to more and more air conditioning, which is peak energy demand, creating carbon. So both sides will be right, it will be caused by natural forces and man made forces, and we'll all be happy in our sweatdeathbeds.
Gently reply
Our week has been 80F, 83F, 85F, and today 87F. We might get a few days in the summer that flirt with 90F. This is unbelievable for the month of March. Not a single living person here has ever experienced anything like it in fact we usually still have snow. Farmers are very fearful for the fruit crops because the trees have started to bud. If we get a freeze/snow now it could decimate the fruit crops.
It is strange... very strange... but going to be the beach in March is great. I do not know how this upcoming harvest season will end, hopefully we won't all starve due to the extremely unusual weather.
Best winter ever in the Twin Cities! As a runner it was an awesome winter to train outside.
Don't be silly, it won't be 200F in July.
If it was as much above normal in July, as it is currently in March here in Chicago, the daily high would be 127, with an overnight low of 94.
Fun stuff, isn't it?
Sure glad global warming doesn't exist... it could have been much worse!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Readings in SW suburban areas of Chicago reached 91F today.
Living in the area affected, I can attest that it's been an unusually warm winter. It's been pretty terrible since I have dogs... instead of nice frozen ground its been mud all winter long. It's not just been warm this month, it's been very warm all winter.
BUT... this is not odd at all. We live next to 3 of the largest freshwater seas in the world. The weather in this area is freakish and unpredictable. It's not unusual for us to get snow in the summer, or a random 75 degree day in December followed by -30 the next. The weathers fucking weird next to the great lakes... nothing new here.
New Zealand isn't the whole Southern Hemisphere. Here in Sydney we've had a wet summer too, but it wasn't actually cold, although plenty of people will tell you it was. Most of them never noticed how rarely the overnight temperature dropped below 20c.
Listen, if God didn't intend for man to have sex with sheep, then he wouldn't have made them so damn sexy.
Portland, Oregon, right now in fact, is seeing snow, something that, by all local news accounts, is rarely seen at the lower elevations and doesn't happen repeatedly as it has in the month of March. Climate change indeed!
The idea that this particular warm snap in one part of the globe is caused by global warming is not scientific consensus.
The idea that humans are going to cause problems by warming the globe is not scientific consensus, either.
There is no 'solution' to global warming that is supported by most scientists.
The only thing that IS scientific consensus is that human effects have some effect on the earth's temperature. How much is a huge question; it could be completely negligible.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hopefully you understand that nobody is claiming that carbon dioxide is poisonous to humans in the concentrations discussed in climate change and you were just trying to be funny. But I think it's useful to be clear about what CO2 does. It and some other gases trap heat in the atmosphere. That phenomenon was discovered in the mid 1800s. Things like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder wouldn't work without that effect.
A good link covering that and more: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Note that globally, 10 of the warmest years occurred in the last 12.
Humph.
Bravo, my dear friend, Bravo!
There's pretty good consensus that it will be enough to melt the a lot of ice and raise the sea level. We've got paleoclimate data showing that when there's this much CO2, it gets warm, and the sea level goes up.
The question still in play, now, is how fast will the oceans rise? We do not have paleoclimate data on what happens when CO2 is cranked up this quickly; it took hundreds of years in the past, but it also took hundreds of years to crank up the CO2, so we can't draw solid conclusions.
Election years, like leap years, skew the calendar effects to produce unstatistically amazing flights of lunicy and other forms of mass madness, panic and histeria from all sorts of people, incliding US Presidents as Obama, suffering from psychosis.
But there is a new candidate for the cause and it's even more insidious that greenhouse gases. Look to the connection between the HAARP stations and their uses in weather control. That's a more likely source of anthropogenic climate change than greenhouse gases. Whereas greenhouse gases are emitted willy nilly and mix into the atmosphere possibly creating a overall effect, the HAARP stations can be used to directly tune the weather patterns to give the impression of global warming / cooling / etc whenever and wherever.
You folks on the east coast, Washington DC?, may be basking in summer like weather but out here on the west coast, in Washington state, the weather has been so cool that we're still having snow and the state is allowing people to keep their studded snow tires on longer than normal.
There's pretty good consensus that it will be enough to melt the a lot of ice and raise the sea level.
I'd love to see your data for this. How are you measuring the consensus?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm pretty sure not ALL the research is funded by biased groups.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Yeah, sure. Tell that to the pacific northwest.
IPCC
"But you only hear about climate change when people are hot....."
No, it seems we hear most abut it when people deny it during cold weather.
"We've had one of the coldest and wettest summers on record in New Zealand."
Like so.
When people say 'consensus' they usually imply that they went out and did a survey of scientists.
The IPCC report predicted 3mm per year, extrapolating the long-term trend. In the next report, they will probably include some studies that suggest the rise might be higher in the future, but I'm not sure there's much evidence of scientific consensus on that point. If you have some, I'd be interested in seeing it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
According to the almanac, this upcoming 2012 summer will be very mild...not nearly as hot as it was in 2011.
Please explain this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg
The weather here in the south is great. My ghost and habanero peppers are doing fantastic. The strawberry plants started growing berries 3 weeks ago. This weather is delicious and our canning gear will be in overtime this year.
That statement is kind of broad and wrong. Around Washington, Oregon, Idaho, B.C, we have had unusually cold weather, with scatted snow for the last 2 weeks, including some snow and freezing rain last night outside my house.
I live a bit north of US, north of North Dakota. +26C here and that is considered summer weather.
And last year with the supposedly "cold spell" in the US? Well, it was a rather warm winter up here too. And the one before that, and the one before that. Last time temperature reached -40 was almost a decade ago and normally it used to happen at some point every winter.
The Ogallala aquifier is going dry anyway.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/8359076/US-farmers-fear-the-return-of-the-Dust-Bowl.html
Hey hold on. People I know in Europe are complaining of an unusually hard winter this year.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
We need to get them started on the idea of Intelligent Falling. We can make every theory we don't like have a faith based opposite.
Until someone can explain this regular temperature cycle, which at the moment no one can, it's bs to claim to know the major cause of the current one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg
Tell me about it... I've had the goddamn A/C in the window for the better part of a week now here in Vermont!
I distinctly remember it snowing for TWO SOLID DAYS at the end of May last year. What the hell is going on?! This doesn't feel like 'climate change' so much as 'climate schizophrenia'!
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The climate models for global warming/climate change are showing scientists that earth's climate is much like a spinning top, i.e. a delicate balance. When thrown out of kilter, just like a spinning top, it begins to fluctuate widely, which is why you're seeing record breaking heat along with record breaking cold. The entire works is beginning to unravel.
Old guys love to jaw about the weather. Be sure to read this one when you write: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120105_PerceptionsAndDice.pdf
voted against Pi Day.
Have gnu, will travel.
Global warming is a misnomer, it was coined to dumb things down to the level the average person could understand. What it means is that there is more energy in the atmosphere, the extremes become more extreme, and the range of "normal" expands significantly.
Please, enough of the "But I'm freezing, where is your global warming now"
Well, there's this: http://www.post-carbon-living.com/TTHW/Documents/Climate_Change_Consensus.pdf
I don't think that will do it for you.
In everything that I read, I have not seen anyone who accepts the IPCC conclusions who does not also say that eventually, several meters of ocean rise worth of ice cap will melt. Obviously there's the possibility of sample bias. What I do see is a wide range of predicted time spans for that to occur, some of them on the order of a thousand years, some as short as 100.
I guess there's always a summer cottage in northern Alberta.
Most Slashdotters know very little about moisture down under.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
In everything that I read, I have not seen anyone who accepts the IPCC conclusions who does not also say that eventually, several meters of ocean rise worth of ice cap will melt. Obviously there's the possibility of sample bias. What I do see is a wide range of predicted time spans for that to occur, some of them on the order of a thousand years, some as short as 100.
Hmmmm, that does make sense. Ultimately, extrapolating out, 3mm a year (as mentioned in the IPCC report) would be a meter 300 years. So if you continued that extrapolation, it would be a few meters. A few things to mention, each cumulative ton of CO2 added to the atmosphere produces a smaller amount of warming, so it might not make sense to extrapolate it out to 1000 years.
To keep things in perspective, it helps to remember that continents move an order of magnitude faster than the rise of oceans.
Well, there's this: http://www.post-carbon-living.com/TTHW/Documents/Climate_Change_Consensus.pdf [post-carbon-living.com] I don't think that will do it for you.
Thanks, but I was specifically interested in the point on sea-level rise. As far as I could tell, most scientists seemed ok with the 3mm a year number. Recently there have been some ideas about how more water-level rise could happen, especially if there is a tipping point. If scientific support has built around that point, I would like to know.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Too bad climate 'science" cannot say the same about their so-called "evidence" that man-made CO2 is the cause of global warming, as opposed to other possible causes, both man-made and natural."
Of course it can. You can measure the CO2 and change thereof, confirm that it is from human activity (fossil fuels) with isotopic ratios, measure the change in infrared emissivity, find it is exactly as predicted by theory and lab experiments, confirm other physical predictions such as lowering and cooling of the stratosphere and followup with global temperature measurements which show patterns consistent with greenhouse increase (and inconsistent with others such as increased solar output) such as more warming at night than at day, more warming at poles, and more warming in winter than summer.
More generally, you can see that your predictions from the laws of physics (which are damn good for anything not producing exotic quarks or understanding the first microseconds of the big bang) plus observed physical facts play out as you think they should which means that more CO2 == warming due to well-understood processes of radiative transfer.
By the way, human emissions of other gases and land use changes are responsible for nearly half of the anthropogenic effect (CO2 is the other half plus a little bit), and these are probably more easily controllable in the short run.
Well it was a similarly cool and wet summer in eastern Australia as well this year. Last summer was too.
Two La Nina summers in a row like that are very rare, but were sorely needed after having about 8 years in a row of MUCH drier and warmer conditions than average. But a cooler year or two doesn't mean anything in the wider scheme of things, especially if its coming off a decade-long warm streak. There are still at least 3 or 4 max temp records being broken for every min temp record, looking across any time scale you wish to use, in the last few decades.
Plus these things are highly regional. While NZ and eastern AU may have been cool and wet, western AU had an absolute scorcher. 40C+ for weeks on end over in Perth (they get periods like that every summer, but the last few have been particularly insane). I don't think you can use regional data to make any judgements either way on climate change ... global mean temp is about the only measure that makes sense.
why is the March being compared to April?
or does the weather service throw out those records?
It will be quicker and easier that way. Blame people, the sun, Apple, Microsoft, China, FSM, Cthulhu, whatever. Everyone has an opinion, with some set of science to back them up for whatever. At this point it is just tiring to listen to endless rounds of "people are at fault," "no they're not!," "yes they are!" and on and on.
Guess what- shit happens, yet we always have to make it about ourselves. Even if humans are causing warming, the proposed solutions are shit. No, I don't have any better ideas, but I sure as shit wouldn't dump $500 million on a piece of shit solar plant that failed a year or 2 later, then paid to retrain all the workers.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
is this news? more Slashtard waste...
how many carbon credits were burned up in publishing this trite tidbit?
http://www.climatedepot.com/
That is all that needs to be said on this topic.
On the Interstate Highway 5 what? On the I-5 bridge? on the I-5 ...what? (You used it like an adjective, you wouldn't say "on the Route 66", would you? Or "on the Main Street" ? Did you mean "on I-5" perhaps.)
I find it funny that Slashdotters, who are so quick to jump down people's throats when they say "OMG it's so cold here today, global warming must be a myth" because hey - anecdotal evidence is just that - are so eager themselves to say "OMG it's so warm here today, global warming is teh realz". And people wonder why there are still doubters out there - it's because you're all just as bad as they are, except on top of the bad science which you spout (and yes, there is also good science behind global warming as well, but that gets lost in the noise all too often) you also seem to want to ruin society.
My understanding of the science (some of this is recent) goes like this on this point. If you look at "paleoclimate", what you get is that the last time it was as warm as it is projected to get, the sea level was meters higher. http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_proj_longer.html That is, the temperature may be predicted by models, but the melting is predicted by "history". What history lacks is a record of how fast things melt during rapid change, because past change was not as rapid as what is currently observed and predicted.
At the fast-melt end, there's this: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/ I followed the links and attempted to understand them, but did not to my satisfaction. One paper notes that we seem to be observing accelerating melt rates (but it is too soon to tell for sure). The other paper ( http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf ) is harder to understand. One issue is the difference in methods of estimating old temperatures; ocean sediment cores give one result, ice cores give another. If you believe ice cores, we have a couple of degrees C before we hit the icecaps-melt temperature; if you believe the ocean cores, we have a few tenths of degree C (i.e., we're essentially there now). Hansen also discusses much faster icecap disintegration, but I have not followed the reference chain all the way back to the papers that reached those conclusions (it appears to be based on more paleoclimate studies, and some inferences from the rate of temperature change then versus now).
And I've been trying to make sense of the Hansen predictions, because at the high end, they suggest rates as fast as 5 centimeters per year, occurring sometime later in this century, which I think counts as alarming.
What happens is that with global warming there's more energy in the atmosphere.
What causes winds is the air warming up in some places more than in others. As it warms up, it expands and rises, creating a low pressure region. Air from some colder region is blown in as wind, to replace the air that went up.
Looking at it globally, air near the equator warms up and rises, cold air from polar regions is brought in. That's why a warmer climate causes colder winters, paradoxical as it may seem. Climate is different from weather, you will still have spells of cold weather in a hotter climate.
Since the air near the equator is warming up more, it rises quicker and brings air from the poles faster. The quicker the air comes from the poles, the less time it has to warm up before it reaches middle latitudes.
If global warming is primarily caused by human action, which some seem to believe absolutely, then Mars has to be inhabited by humans. It is also going through a global warming that has affected the ice caps in the polar regions of the planet. Too bad Mars doesn't have all the water like earth to absorb some CO2. But then again, water releases adsorbed gasses as it heats up. Catch 22...
What happens when it's the middle of july/august? Will we be seeing temperatures in the mid-high 40's or even 50's.
Just look at wikipedia's records.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records
It's called THE SUN.
Something lame brain hand wringing anticapitalist, socialist, marxist
don't understand. Man can't "change" the climate anymore than they can put
a stopper in a volcano and stop it from spewing.
The sun has been in a "cool" stage for the last dozen years and now is starting
to peak with increased activity. Go back and look at the history of the sun and you'll
see that when the temperature drops globally, the output from the sun has decreased.
I remember as a high school student in the 70's, how everyone was worried about how
cold the winters were (-20's in the lower midwest), and how we were entering a new
ice age. Now everyone is worried about (man made) "global warming". It's just another
attempt by the left to change the way 99% of us live, but, of course, the "Algores" of the world
continue to live in 50 room mansions, fly around in jets, drive around in limos.
One good sized volcano can change weather patterns more than a herd of cows farts.
Its been summer down here in Tampa since about Mid Feburary
I swear another Global Warming nut case and I'll smack the biatch; the primary source for all of our temperatures on Earth is... THE SUN!!
We just had a huge solar ejection and the solar winds have picked up. (This is /. right??)
Both is incorrect.
Or three things are incorrect.
a) the winter was not _extremely_ cold in europe.
b) in fact it was not even really cold at all, a normal winter would be that from roughly 15th of december till 15th of march the temperature is around zero degrees celsius. Most of the time, below zero.
c) we don't had much snow this winter. In fact, like the last 20 years, we had very little snow.
I assume you are very young, perhaps less than 20 years old. So you only know the last 16 years of winter, which where UNUSUALLY WARM. So it surprises you that a winter like this one exists, but this winter STILL was UNUSUALLY WARM!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Solar Output of a star like ours increases by about 10% per GigaYear. It DOES change. very very VERY slowly. In another about 2.5-3.5Gy it should increase enough to create a runaway green house effect with the oceans and destroy all life on earth.(Venuification) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle
I'm in Minnesota; I picked a wood tick off my darling daughter last weekend. Tick season isn't generally until May around here.
One thing that amazes me is the continual thinking about small changes in central tendency measures (like mean, median etc) as the hallmarks of climate change. The central limit theorem is very very powerful -- averaging is almost always good. The best markers for climate change are possibly not shifts in central tendency but instead changes in the distributions of measurements. For example: we could shift to a pattern of warmer than historically recorded springs and colder falls without a change in mean -- but for plants and animals that's a very different climate. You can get average rainfall but is it in one storm or regular gentle rains? Means don't mean much.
Really? Have a look at the following links please:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16897068
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16759324
http://www.hotnews.ro/zoom.html?desc=Foto:%20Mediafax&imgUrl=http://media.hotnews.ro/media_server1/image-2012-02-10-11476127-41-oameni-izolati-glodeanu-silistea.jpg (yes, that is the roof of a house beneath the snow)
I have no idea where you live, but you don't really know what the winter was like in Europe. And there were sequences of days with temperatures below -20 C in various places (also note the cold record from the Netherlands mentioned in the first article).
new sig
other causes have been studied, they don't match the facts; and global warming has made several predictions.
1978 called, they want there argument back.
Please, bring forth something besides mans constant emissions of CO2 that match the facts.
Just to save some time:
The Sun has been ruled out, as has cosmic radiation, planetary alignment, and pirates.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"The idea that humans are going to cause problems by warming the globe is not scientific consensus, either."
yes it is, actually.
"There is no 'solution' to global warming that is supported by most scientists."
reduction in CO2 is the consensus on that.
"How much is a huge question;"
not really.
"it could be completely negligible."
consensus says otherwise.
Fucking read up, asshole.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"I've moved my garden activities ahead as much as possible. I really hope that we do not see another hot summer like last year."
Then you've probably also already noticed that the USDA has updated its hardiness zones to reflect the warming. The fact is that you can plant less hardy seeds earlier and further north that you used to be able to. The warming is having real results.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
My name's Commander Shepard, and this is the warmest winter I've ever experienced here on Earth or on the Citadel.
This is not necessarily directed at you, because your post was kind of witty:
It's funny when there's a warm stretch, global warming promoters cry "global warming!"
But if there's a cold stretch, and global warming deniers say "so much for that theory", promoters say "you don't know the difference between climate and weather."
So how come it's climate when it's warm, and weather when it's cold?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
pro-science? You're kidding, right?
Anyway, what would constitute falsification of the theory?
If it's warm, it confirms the theory. If it's cold, that also confirms the theory. Same for rain and drought.
An unfalsifiable theory is indistinguishable from a belief.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I've been to O'Hare, it may be outside the city limits but it is certainly not outside the urban heat island.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Fucking read up, asshole.
Fortunately your rudeness is only surpassed by your ignorance.
yes it is, actually.
No it's not. If you've ever actually read a survey of scientists, like the actual questions they asked, you would no this. Unfortunately, you seem to be the kind of person who doesn't think about things, only believes someone else.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It DOES change. very very VERY slowly.
I pointed out that solar output also varies on time scales of decades and centuries, not just the long term trend above.
I don't have links to the studies but the studies themselves were funded by reinsurance companies, the money that backs up the insurance companies you and I buy from. They wanted to know how global warming was going to affect the future of storms.
Looking ahead with a non-ideological eye is probably why they have most of the money.
More bugs? My chickens and guineas will get fat eating them. I keep the airconditioning set to 10 degrees below the average outside temperature. That makes my hot weather costs the same no matter how hot it gets. The garden will do great. If the polar ice melts enough I'll have ocean front property. There's not a down side for me.
Perhaps you should read the links you linked?
So you get a damn clue? I live in germany. Since roughly 25 years the weather is TO WARM. Every winter. So if we now have winter which is as cold as 28 years ago (your first link) then this winter is NORMAL! And not UNUSUAL. The last 25 winters that where WARM are the UNUSUAL winters.
As I'm FAR older than 25 years, I perfectly WELL KNOW how the winters where before.
-20 degrees is NOTHING special. For a January or February that was the NORM 25 years ago!!!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yea, living up here in Minnesota I can tell you all about this one. About 2-3 weeks ago we got a huge blizzard that forced me to head home from college early. Cost me 8 extra credit points for bio the damn thing... Then about a week ago it just... turned to spring. Hell, it feels like summer to be honest. The only real hint that it's still actually spring is that most of the flowers haven't yet bloomed. This is not normal weather. I'm used to there being around a month of mushy slush being on the ground and, while I welcome the skipping of that phase, it is a tad concerning. Having taken an Environmental Bio course I know well enough that it's not like global warming is solely at fault here but I still can't really put the thought out of my mind. Ah well, here's hoping it's just a pleasant fast-forward past the two worst months of the year!
Yeah, I'm aware of these ideas. I'm not sure there's much scientific consensus on them, though. As one paragraph from your first link said,
"Present day contributions from the Greenland come from both surface melting and iceberg calving and for the Antarctic ice sheet from iceberg calving only. The contribution from the ice sheets is poorly understood at the moment and is an active area of research."
I will be interested in knowing if most scientists do begin to support this point of view, (which in turn would hopefully mean that the view would be supported by evidence).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's the Republicans trying to screw things up and make them bad for Obama to be reelected.
All this blathering about eastern US heat waves causing record high temperatures, but did anybody notice that on March 21-22, record snowfall occurred in Oregon? Seems only warm temperatures get any headlines in order to reinforce belief in the religion of global warming. Somebody will probably blame the Oregon snowstorm on global warming, too.
I have to say, I am down right pissed at those easterners.. I have been suffering with snow, ice, hail, and cold temps all month. They are saying yet another big cold snow event is headed my way. When is Spring supposed to spring? I'll take Summer now, this is insane.