Slashdot Mirror
NASA Scientist: Heat Waves Really Are From Global Warming
mdsolar writes with a tidbit from the New York Times on global warming: "The percentage of the earth's land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper. The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,' Dr. Hansen said in an interview."
Because, as always, peer-reviewed work is to be scoffed at while wild un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen are to be taken at face value.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Calm down and stop throwing toys, both of you.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
All this drought, devastation and disaster from just under 1 degree C. Imagine what it will be like at 2 degrees! When you multiply the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of the oceans and air by 1 degree, it's a number that's off the charts. How did people think we could dump that much energy into any system and it would not make a difference?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
In the U.S. the conservative political party (the ones opposed to doing anything about this) is called the Republicans.
By and large they live in the center and southern parts of the country, the parts most affected by the heat.
So, in a sense, they are burning in the Hell they themselves have created. Unfortunately the rest of the world is also suffering.
Look at the abstract. This isn't arguing about the accuracy of fractional degree measurements at individual weather stations: it is about > 3 sigma events over >10% of the Earth's surface, quite large changes and exactly the kind of thing that would be expected if more energy was being added to the atmosphere. For years the climatologists have been trying to explain that adding energy doesn't simply make everything slightly warmer, but will have effects larger in one place and smaller in another. This study tends to bear that out and emphasises that the extremes are over large land masses - again as would be expected. I am rather glad I live close enough to the Atlantic to be affected by Atlantic weather patterns, but far enough that we rarely get the worst of the storms, even though I am going to have to put in extra soil drainage in October.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Tell me, if these heatwaves were 1C cooler, would they be less of a severe heat wave or no different?
Hansen is a "scientist" who likes headlines and attention. Nothing to see here, move along...
You tell'em bradley13!
Rush, Hannity and Boortz say (*say with sarcastic snear*) glooooooobal waaaarming is just a method to justify Big Government and Control by Liberals who TRUST that government is the only solution! And it's a method for the control and loss of sovereignty to the UN!
Hear ya! Brother!
Government control is EVIL and UnAmerican!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go to a meeting where we're going discuss methods of getting government to ban gay marriage, abortion, and to start teaching abstinence and the Bible in school!
Damn government control!
Wait for the dirty tricks and personal attacks to begin.
The fossil fuel lobby won't take such a show of flagrant anti-rich, anti-1% dissent lying down.
Like the poor fool who dares to step between the pigs and their swill, this fellow is gonna get mauled.
...heaven forbid we actually do anything about it that's worth more than some blog post. It's like everything is in a bad dream anymore where you're watching yourself trying to run away from something but can't because for some reason, your legs just don't move as fast as they can.
The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural
Don't underestimate nature, it has a habit of killing those that do.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
In the end the planet will be a dry wasteland, but by the time I'm an old man, we'll be able to launch a probe that sends information about humanity amongst the stars - just at the same time I reawaken safe and well to find myself captain of a starship again. Plus I'll have learned how to play the flute - bonus!
Wow, combining "un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen" with "wikipedia" with "proof by ghost reference" (worst heat wave != most days over 37.8C in a place which already has an average January high of over 41C), whose closest resemblance to saying what he claims it says is a reference to a non-peer-reviewed web page from before the heat waves in question discussed by this paper.
Wow, I'm totally sold now, thanks for linking that!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
In addition to being cooler than the 1920's, we're also hipper, awesomer and dress much better.
Apparently in your (and his) worlds:
* Global warming predicts that every location on Earth will increase in temperature at roughly the same rate and roughly the same time
* A region cannot have statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing unless *every* region on earth has statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing.
* Marble Bar, Australia = Earth
* Heat wave = high temperatures in absolute numbers, instead of the standard definition, relative to an area's baseline average.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I don't get it. What does a heat wave (consecutive days over 100F) in the 1920s in one corner of Australia, that lasted 160 days in an area that normally gets 154 days over 100F each year, have to do with it?
The basic claim Hansen made is that these recent heat waves are so far out of the ordinary that it would be virtually impossible* for them to have occurred without global warming. I'm not sure how "there was a heatwave in the 1920s in Australia" proves the claim is false.
* Less than 0.1% probability
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Calm down and stop throwing toys, both of you.
One of my favourite things about slashdot is the good, solid, thoughtful and well reasoned arguments in the comments.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The only thing we normal people can do on an individual basis is try to live our lives in the most sustainable way possible. Of primary consideration is the location of where to live, as forest fires, flooding, drought, heat waves, and hurricanes are all increasing in magnitude. Sustainabble energy is important, as is renewable energy. Possessing a generator and solar array is essential, not only do they lower electricity bills, but they ensure life wil not be disrupted by outages. Similarly, storage and conservation of drinking water is also useful. Planting a decent size garden now days can save a family hundreds or even thousands dog dollars a year in food costs.
If one lives in an urban environment (as a majority of humanity now do), live within your means and build up a saving account to deal with unforeseen incidences (disasters, outbreaks, ...anything goes these days!). It pays to be prepared, one cannot say they were not warned. No need to turn into a gun nut and go all survivalist stocking 10 years of food in ones basement, but we clearly need to reevaluate how we live on a daily basis.
I bet you that it will get dark tonight, and then brighten up again tomorrow. Care to take my bet, or want to modify your broad-based claim?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I'm not assuming Hansen is correct, but your analysis is flawed. You are comparing studies of local conditions with a study of global conditions. Just because a single heat wave is not anomalous locally, it does not mean that a series of distributed heat waves is not anomalous globally. In case that's not clear, consider an extreme example : A hurricane in Florida in a year is not anomalous. Each major coastal city in the world being hit by a hurricane in the same year would be.
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
The summary is great though. "It's so drastic it HAS to be a man-made event! It's proof! Something that BIG wouldn't just HAPPEN, and this is the obvious cause!"
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Do you realize that the underlying theory, the greenhouse effect, goes back 100 years? Global warming is not a new idea. 50 years ago there were people predicting that extra CO2 would cause temperature to rise. In the last 2 decades, we've seen the start of that, and it fits the theory quite well. Of course the earth is an incredibly complex thing, and there are millions of factors that also have some impact, but the foundation is pretty solid.
Considering that we know that CO2 traps heat, and we know that CO2 levels have gone up, and we know that global temperature has gone up, you need to come up with a really solid alternative explanation if you want to flat out deny a causal relationship between these facts.
Have you ever produced peer reviewed work? The massive amount of politics that goes into getting published turned me away from a career in academics. It literally has more to do with who you know and how your paper fits into their world view than the merits of your paper.
i am so very tired....
Someone needs to take a long, hard look at the moderation of climate threads on /. Quoting from the moderation guidelines:
I'm not taking sides either way in the climate debate; I'm saying that sceptics are moderated down because the moderators disagree with their point of view. At least one comment here already has the score '0 Flamebait' when I'm pretty sure the author of that comment posted what he posted because he honestly believes it, not because he's trying to stir up a flame war. Another comment is titled, 'Before the trolls start...', immediately branding anyone who disagrees with the author as a troll. They're not, they just disagree with you. Build a bridge and get over it.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Another paper, published in the same journal, concluded that "the heat wave falls within the realm of natural variability ... [and] appears not to be the product of long-term climate changes"
That quote neither appears in the paper you reference (M. Matsueda, "Predictability of Euro-Russian blocking in summer of 2010", Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L06801, 2011) nor the NOAA press release.
Also, some researchers in Germany analyzed the data and published a paper, entitled "Large scale flow and the long-lasting blocking high over Russia", which says that the heat wave "appears as a result of natural atmospheric variability".
The quote taken from (the abstract of) that paper, by Schneidereit et al., was in reference to R. Dole, et al. ("Was there a basis for anticipating the 2010 Russian heat wave", Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L06702, 2011). Schneidereit et al. also mentioned, citing a study by Schar et al. ("The role of increasing temperature variability in European summer heatwaves", Nature 427: 332-336, 2004), that a long-lasting blocking high could occur more often with climate change and the expected change in the year-to-year variability.
Just to be clear, when you say:
Are you trying to imply global warming is nothing to worry about?
It's a hilariously distant leap of logic. Real scientists will try to correlate power output, fuel burned, soot and CO2 and methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc with their heat-trapping and heat-reflecting effects, and show a model that then predicts weather pattern changes based on these things. If that model holds, global warming due to such factors; if it doesn't, then global warming is possibly real (look, it's getting hotter) but the idea of it being caused by human meddling with the atmospheric composition is a myth. That's how science works: we see these things, hypothesize these effects, then point at the changes and say this is what will happen... it happens, we're right; if not, we try again.
That in mind, global warming science is a lot of double-think bullshit. The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it. We're learning new things all the time, and refining our understanding of all this stuff... but while we don't understand it and are continuously wrong in our predictions, we swear that we see proof about some fuzzy concept in front of us. That's not science, it's religion. Cult of global warming.
Interesting. How do you explain stratospheric cooling which has been directly observed in the past few decades then? Note that stratospheric cooling is inconsistent with any natural cause of global warming.
I don't think you either read or understood Hansen's paper. The argument isn't that these events are individually impossible to occur. They all fall within the bounds of possibility for the baseline climate of 1951-1980. The argument put forward in the paper is that together they are each "once in a century" events, which means we should not get 3 of them in less than a single decade. The reason we do get them is because global warming is "weighting the dice", changing the probability distribution so that once in a century hot events occur once a decade on average, and once in century cold events occur once in a millennia. That's a rough description of the paper, you really should read the original.
In short, the claim about Russia is false. The claim about the European summer of 2003 is also debunked. (I am not familiar with Texas.)
Sorry, but the evidence you cited doesn't actually conflict with Hansen's paper. Each of the papers claim the events were "low predictability" events. Additionally, there's new research which contradicts the papers you cited that you cited, and points towards Arctic sea ice loss (driven by global warming) as the reason for the "low predictability" of those events.
And why does Hansen not mention extreme cold recently in Alaska?—is that also due to global warming?
Actually, it is. The same block pattern that's been keeping warm air (and record high temperatures) over much of the U.S. is keeping cold air (and cold temperatures) over Alaska. The ice loss appears to have weakened the air currents that would normally break up the blocking patterns.
Bad weather has always existed.
Indeed it has, however, Hansen's paper says the bad weather is biased hot now. It's like taking a 6 sided die, and changing the 1 to a 7. You won't get the same results you used to get.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Hansen is a PNAS member, meaning he can either skip peer review entirely or pick his reviewers. Even if the review process had been rigorous, peer review guarantees nothing about the correctness of a paper. Peer review simply means that the paper passes basic quality standards and editorial policies for the publication in question. If you want to judge by external factors, none of the authors are statisticians, so their statements about statistical anomalies amount to little more than opinion.
I don't know whether the hot summers have been due to global warming; I tend to believe so. But to claim that as a fact, I'd certainly like a valid statistical analysis from someone qualified to make such an analysis, not from a climate hack like Hansen.
Finally someone that points out this is about the change in temperature *variance* (square root of variance rather), and not the change in temperature mean. Sigma-dot as it were. The plot of the sigma over the last six decades showed a clear trend that the temperature became more varied in that time. Six decades is nothing in climate terms though. I read the argument on why 1951-1980 was used as the baseline, its mean was near the overall holocene mean, and the mean wasn't changing much during those three decades, but that is still just too little data to base such a strong conclusion on. A similar study could be conducted with indirect measures (ice cores, tree rings, permafrost bands, or who knows what), and we could ascertain the previous "sigma-dot" maximums. Using a second order statistic was a good idea and I suspect that if the variance isn't simply tied to the mean (the plots kind of look like that), that he is on to something, but only grabbing a handful of data points in extremely close time proximity and then drawing a conclusion from them is overreaching.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
If you don't like it don't have one. Otherwise none of your business.
Please, no accusations of being a right-wing nut. I just don't jump on any bandwagons until I'm sure of the facts.
And yesterday you knew humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
Take this chart [forgottenliberty.com] for example
That chart looks like it's been mislabelled or doctored, depending on how charitable you want to be to Spencer. Here's a video explaining the provenance of several such errors.
Real scientists will try to correlate power output, fuel burned, soot and CO2 and methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc with their heat-trapping and heat-reflecting effects, and show a model that then predicts weather pattern changes based on these things.
There are a lot of "real scientists" doing exactly that, Hansen is taking a different approach to tackle the "is this global warming or nature" question. It's still science, even if you disagree with the results.
That in mind, global warming science is a lot of double-think bullshit. The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it. We're learning new things all the time, and refining our understanding of all this stuff... but while we don't understand it and are continuously wrong in our predictions, we swear that we see proof about some fuzzy concept in front of us. That's not science, it's religion. Cult of global warming.
From that paragraph, it's clear you don't either understand science and/or don't understand religion. It seems to me, that "learning new things all the time and refining our understanding of this stuff" is clearly science and clearly not religion.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
My dad, who gets most of his news and opinions from Rupert Murdoch's corporation, and my brother, who gets most of his news and opinions from libertarian blogs, assure me that climate science is socialist science. You see, there is a conspiracy at the universities, where all the faculty is implicitly socialist (evidently not having to really work for a living fosters that political belief!) to end capitalism. Climate scientists are the cutting edge by which that conspiracy seeks to slice the capitalist throat. Everything in their journals and public pronouncements is a concerted lie in the furtherance of their conspiracy.
What Joe McCarthy warned us about — a communist conspiracy in government (at a time where there really were some communist conspirators in government, if perhaps not as many as he claimed) — doesn't begin to compare to this (where rather than a minority of government workers being communist, over 97% of climate scientists are in on the grand conspiracy)! To find a parallel, we must look back to earlier in the 20th century, when "Jewish science" threatened to undermine that most advanced of states, Germany. Top non-Jewish scientists in Germany, many with fundamental discoveries to their credit, elucidated precisely how the "theory" of relativity and certain quantum claims from "Jewish science" threatened to undermine the Thousand Year Reich, and more than that were specifically designed to.
From our point of view as Americans, we have much to thank "Jewish science" for. It shows how scientists, when they conspire, can undermine what they see as an evil empire. Similarly, future citizens of Greater Socialist Scandinavia may thank the "climate scientists" whose clever scheme if successful will spell the end of the Capitialist American Empire.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Really? Let's see your data, genius.
If you're a complete moron, that is.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Oh absolutely. Predicting local weather is unbelievably hard, and distinguishing exact causes of individual instances of weather is practically impossible. This reminds me of a situation with a nuclear power plant that had a higher number of cancer deaths in its vicinity. Those deaths happen normally too, just not quite as much. So there was no individual case where you could state that it was caused by the presence of the nuclear power plan, but it was very likely that the plant had to be the cause of some of them.
As for climate models, actual real climate is influenced by millions of factors. The greenhouse effect is definitely an important factor, but not remotely the only one. Predicting that average global temperatures go up is easy. Predicting that that will melt ice caps isn't that hard either. But predicting where it will cause more (or less!) tornados, rain or draught, is practically impossible.
I'm not sure what the current state of the art is, but I'm sure more work is needed.
Indeed, you obviously aren't making it very well.
You mean like how the government use to print bibles to be used in teaching in schools but due to hyper-political correctness stopped?
You must be reading or listening to David Barton, because he's the one that recently popularized that completely bogus claim:
No, Mr. Beck, Congress Did Not Print a Bible for the Use of Schools
Chris Rodda is an actual historian with real credentials who's repeatedly demonstrated that Barton is at best wildly misinterpreting evidence, and at worst is a fraud (No, I'm not someone who believes everything on HuffPo, in this case it's right).
The lack of Bibles in school is a clear part of the First Amendment: You don't make everyone else's kids read the Bible, we don't make your kids read the Koran or Rig Vedas. If you want your kids to learn the Bible, teach it to them at home or in church, but a public school cannot support particular religious texts.
I am officially gone from
Because all contradictory evidence has been appropriated into the model in such a way that it is impossible to cite any weather pattern or trend that contradicts it.
I suspect you were modded into oblivion because you don't understand the difference between climate and weather, data and anecdote, and continuously refining a model to fit new data and making shit up.
And that's just from one sentence.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
Remind us again what the 'good' arguments against it are...?
No sig today...
Once we have a perfectly reliable, free and easy form of contraception, and rape doesn't happen, then, maybe, I'll agree with you, but only in cases where there aren't medical complications.
And what's worse: having an abortion or having a child which grows up in poverty and is neglected, abused and has more kids who won't be taken care of?
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
He based his conclusions on a 60 year time frame. 60 years is statistically insignificant when looked at on geologic time scales. It is the equivalent of stating a person's average life-time activity level by looking at what said person did over the last minute.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There is nothing wrong with banning abortion, as long as you don't take away a woman's liberty in the process. I would be fine with banning abortions if the anti-abortion coalition (Republican party, churches, or whomever - just not the government because we can't afford it) would set up "non-abortion clinics" that would induce labor instead of performing an abortion. That way a woman could keep her liberty (old white men would not be forcing her to carry a child to term that she does not want). Of course, the anti-abortion coalition would be financially responsible for ensuring that the children they deliver are taken care of until they become self-sufficient adults. And, if they have any health problems due to being born early then the anti-abortion coalition would be responsible for their healthcare (we shouldn't socialize those costs into Obamacare).
Though, Republicans would never agree to this because it is contrary to their values. The main two are "socialize risks and privatize rewards" and "every life is precious until it is born, then it is a leech on society and we should let it die".
Democrats also want to get rid of abortions. But, they don't want to ban them. They want to make them unnecessary by making it possible to only get pregnant if you want to. Republicans, on the other hand, love unwanted pregnancies. And STDs. They are God's punishments for having sex. That is why they hate both birth control and abortions. You are circumventing God's will that you be punished with a child. If you don't believe me, look up the controversy over the HPV vaccine. They don't want to prevent cancer in girls because that is one of the ways that girls are punished for having sex. If there is not the risk of cancer, then more girls might have sex, so we can't give them the vaccine.
Same as why they are in favor of allowing abortions in the case of rape. They don't want to punish that woman with a child because she didn't do anything to deserve to be punished. If they truly believed that the child is a life, then they would not want to kill the child for the sins of its father.
I personally believe that all children are a gift, and that if you are using them as a punishment then you are doing it wrong.
Explaining things in terms of physics is not denying evidence. You obviously didn't understand the basic concept of global warming beyond the name. Increased temperatures, on average, doesn't mean everywhere increases uniformly. It means there is more thermal energy in the atmosphere, making stronger hurricanes, stronger heat waves, stronger storms.
It's a bit like taking a pool and having more people swim in it. Sure, the pool will be slightly fuller, on average, due to the displacement, but it will also have more waves and more of the water will then splash over the sides. Of course, sometimes, at certain locations, the water will be lower due to troughs in between the wave peaks. If you're trying to live your life on the edge of the pool, having exactly the right number of people in the pool will make sure you get exactly the right amount of splashing for watering your crops, but not so much as to have your house washed away. However, if your way of life involves breeding new people to throw into the pool and swim, it's not that hard to realise that eventually your way of life will have to change. In this analogy, the name to the phenomenon would be called "Pool Filling", and that the people we are throwing into the pool to swim are just going to sit there or get out is the assumption you are making. Global warming denialists are saying "But at my edge of the pool, right now the water is *lower* than it was, so it must be false", and you are believing them.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it.
So you look at a computation so complex that it takes multiple CPU-centuries to calculate wasn't 100% accurate the first time and the inputs weren't 100% complete at the very beginning, and you're surprised that it didn't create a 100% accurate solution on its first run? Don't you think that your expectations were just a tad high?
**OF COURSE** they keep changing it. They keep finding new ways to add additional data streams, better algorithms, new sources of data, additional variables to account for, etc. I'd start to wonder if they DIDN'T change it (them actually, there are various models in use). This is Science, not Scientology.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
How many consecutive "local anomalies" will it take for you to acknowledge a distinct pattern of increasing dynamism?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Just a nit-pick. The physics goes back to Fourier who predicted CO2 would be a GHG in 1824 (while inventing spectroscopy), someone else confirmed it by experiment in the 1850's (forget the name, he used glass jars, sunlight, and thermometers). A Swedish guy who's name I can't spell came up with AGW ~1900, nobody really believed him until the 1950's when hi-res spectroscopes made it possible to separate CO2 and H20 spectra. In 1958 the National Academies claimed they had detected AGW, their basic claim has not changed, their confidence has grown with the evidence collected over the last half century.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Now show that this warming trend is really just the upward half of a fluctuation that's been repeating every eleven years.
Oh, you didn't know the sunspot cycle was only eleven years long? Maybe you should have researched a bit about sun activity.
(IANAL)
The basic premise of science is you say, "When I put a cheese here, the mouse runs out from there to come get it." When the mouse doesn't run from there, but instead digs through the ground to get the cheese, you're supposed to go, "Oh, the mouse seems to be a burrowing land critter. And it likes cheese."
Now here's the tough part: The mouse burrows, but doesn't eat the cheese. It eats grubs. You thus proscribe that, interestingly the mouse is apparently a burrowing land critter that likes grubs (I suspect you've mistaken a mole or gnoll for a mouse...). So you set out the cheese again, and the mouse comes out to inspect it, but sees a small lizard and eats that instead of the cheese... apparently the mouse likes lizards too. You improve your model, writing down that the mouse likes grubs and lizards. You remove these and put out the cheese again, but the mouse is distracted by a grasshopper.
If you continue to insist that the mouse likes grubs, lizards, grasshoppers, AND CHEESE, you aren't doing science. You keep adjusting your model as you learn new things; but your model has yet to show that the mouse will even eat cheese, or has a preference toward it. Even if you starve the damn mouse and give it cheese with nothing else around, you might just show that the mice can eat cheese and will register it as food; if you then assert that mice find cheese palatable or otherwise hold a preference to it, you are making shit up.
That's the problem here. Scientists design a climate model, and then find out that they don't understand the damn thing and it doesn't work out the way they predicted. They then improve the model. Across all these improvements, they start making baseless claims that they've yet to actually show a valid experimental model for, because their model never works. Politicians and journalists would have us believe that scientists know that when we increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by 150ppm, we'll see a rise of 0.6 degrees Celsius global average temperature; THAT WON'T HAPPEN, but they'll point at the increase in both and the changes in the weather (including drought, increases and decreases in different places, etc) and claim it's related and that one is caused by the other.
The reality is random shit is happening, and we haven't figured out how to fit a model to it to show that it's really not random. We're pretty sure it's not, we just don't have an explanation yet.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Reduction of volume of ozone layer gasses is linked strongly to stratospheric cooling as a cause. That said, the only decent explanation for that is CFC crap in the air, rather than a natural cycle.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
I wish that were true, but there aren't any good arguments against manmade global warming. That was what actually convinced me it was real.
There was no global warming in the last 10 years.
This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator. I think it's a type of confirmation bias, where people only look for the trends that confirm their pre-existing views. The particular reasons temperatures look stable over the past decade are known (Weak El Ninos, increased sulfur emissions from China, below average solar activity and above average volcanic activity) and known to be short-term effects. Furthermore, satellites can measure the energy surplus the planet is accumulating. We know from those satellites that more solar energy is entering than is leaving, and that it hasn't changed.
It's unfortunate that this isn't actually isn't any room for debate, but the amount of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) means that only laymen who refuse to accept the consequences of AGW continue to dispute the issue. You may recall even the CEO of Exxon says AGW is real and he has billions of reason to deny it is happening. The actual scientists have a remarkably high level of confidence (97% of researchers in the field agree with 2% undecided) that AGW has been occurring for decades. I wish it was not happening but wishing doesn't make it true. There are, of course, uncertainties in what exactly will happen in the future, but some things are predictable, especially in broad strokes. We know leaving a pot of water on a hot burner will eventually cause it to boil, even if we can't predict the exact second that it will boil over.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The guy in the 1850's was John Tyndall who quantified the absorption of IR by CO2 and the Swedish guy was Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
I never really got why anyone cared if it was Man Made or not. If Asteroid was careening towards the earth, would anyone really care when, where, or how it was formed (above and beyond the need to learn its geology).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I have, and that was not my experience.
Because if global warming was man-made, then presumably it is possible to be man-unmade.
- Look how fucking cold it is in July (in the Northern hemisphere)! Global warming my ass!
- LOL you stupid denier you don't even know that weather != climate lololololololol go back to faux news and pray away the gay before you suck on my liberal, enlightened cock!
- Look how fucking hot it is in July (in the Northern hemisphere)! It's more proof of global warming!
- Wait, I thought weather != climate. Are you just picking and choo
- LOL you stupid denier you don't even know that the latest liberal IndoctriCast clearly shows a scientific consensus that you're uneducated and I should feel superior to you lololololol!
So as of right now when I hear very specific claims such as "this weather pattern was absolutely caused by global warming", I'm definitely going to be suspicious.
I think the claim here is more 'statistically, this weather is almost impossible to have happened without being caused by the warming'
I think that's a reasonable claim. It's sorta 'As a doctor, pinpointing the exact cause of long term health problems is difficult, but statistically, your ten heart attacks last year are likely to be due to you eating a pound of bacon every day'.
Yes, any specific amount of heat might be due to anything. Pockets of extreme heat does happen randomly, for no reason we can determine.
But this much? This fast? This long? The odds of that happening without something causing it as very low. Something has clearly changed. And the obvious change is, well, obvious.
And exactly what predicted.For several years I, at least, have been hearing 'The problem with global warming isn't just gradually increasing the temp and sea level. The problem is wild swings in weather.' Well...here's one of them. (And boy will hurricane season this year be fun. Hurricanes are due to the amount of warm water on the surface and cool water below, and guess what long-term heat waves do. So, yeah, lots of fun coming up.)
Now, there could be some other cause out there, something else that happened that cuases heat waves. But as global warming deniers have been looking for quite some time for another explanation of the _gradual_ warming we've had, and constantly failed to find it, it seems unlikely that there's some other explanation of this heat wave that's been overlooked.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yes. Our Lord the FSM might at any moment extend his noodly appendage and delete the very ground upon which you walk. At which point you would fall, unless by the grace of Our Lord he chooses to hold you in the air using his appendages.
Ok, my first off-the-cuff response got modded "flamebait". I hadn't RTFA, I just based my opinion on Hansen's past publicity stunts. More, look at the timing: Right after the Curiosity landing sends NASA hits through the roof, to stage your next publicity stunt as a "NASA scientist".
So now I've read the publicly accessible parts of the paper. I stick by my initial opinion: he's a publicity hound, nothing more. The paper is based on the trend of "hot weather" incidents starting in 1950 through 2000. Why didn't he include the 1930's and 1940's? Probably because they were hotter than the 1950's and would mess up his nice little trend. Anyway, looking for serious climate trends over a period of only 50 years is just dumb. There is a natural 60-year climate oscillation (see Scafetta, 2010) that lines up nicely with this little line segment that Hansen has chopped out. If you cherry pick your data, of course you can find a trend.
I stick by my original message: Hansen is a publicity cow, cynically using the Curiosity publicity to advance his own agenda.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
One more little tidbit. You mentioned the weak El Nino's but on the other side of ENSO La Nina's generally lead to somewhat cooler global temperatures but 2011 was the warmest La Nina year ever recorded.
According to this study, the heatwaves would be less frequent of the temperatures were 1C cooler.
I have read enough comments to realize that people on /. will continue to debate whether the adverse environmental conditions are man-caused or natural. It really does not matter any longer as there is nothing that can stop it. Storms will be more destructive year after year and those islands no one cares about will disappear in to the water. Of course, people will debate if the weather is really worse than before. We are only just starting to see weather that will scare the crap out of you and your wallet. Who to blame for it, does it really matter?
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products