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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.
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
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."
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!
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?
Your self control is amazing, how were you able to resist writing Rethuglicans? What's your secret?
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.
The conservatives need to change their stance on global warming. The reason they are always "against" it is that all the political solutions to global warming that are proffered by the left represent the left's statist wet dream. But as I have come to realize, the only real way to solve global warming is through advancements in science and engineering to give us cheap reliable sources of green energy.
The left may say that their statist utopia and an all powerful communal government would solve this, but they'd be just as wrong as they were every other time they've gotten that chance in the past.
We need to find the next Einstein or Tesla to think up solutions to global warming, not the next Mao or Lenin.
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!
Think you could shove any more Libertarian catchphrases into that? Of course you do get extra points for using "statist" twice.
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.
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.
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.
The idea usually tossed around regarding CO2 emissions is a cap-and-trade system, modelled after the system created for SO2. That approach was to use market incentives rather than lots of regulations to get companies to reduce their emissions, and it's generally been a success in reducing acid rain. It was conceived of by civil servants at the EPA, but became law only in 1990 with the support of that well-known liberal George H.W. Bush. How exactly is that a "left's statist wet dream"?
I am officially gone from
As an outside observer, I'd say they didn't have much influence on environmental policy (and I'll ignore the extra baggage you've thrown in about war in an attempt to muddy the issue). Those "liberal" environmental policies that give you guys better air quality than shitholes in China came in thanks to Nixon. It seems Democrats got blocked every time they tried something similar even if both parties thought it was a good idea.
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
The Mauna Loa CO2 record goes back 50 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Obviously that's CO2 at a particular spot on the planet --- there are plenty of other records though. Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
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.
"And what are the Republicans in China and India doing?"
per capita emissions, in metric tons:
USA - 17.5
china - 5.3
India - 1.5
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...
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.
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
"... and not even the most progressive American or European voter would be willing to make the kinds of sacrifices necessary to make meaningful reductions in carbon emissions."
Complete nonsense: speaking for myself and many others I know we've more than halved our carbon footprint (for example we're carbon negative at home for primary energy now, in suburban London) with relatively little effort, and we're probably just about sustainable even if our consumption was adopted by every one of the ~9x10^9 humans that the UN thinks that global population will peak at. And I don't know if I count as "progressive" with whatever meanings you attach to that, good or bad.
No, we don't own a mansion, SUV or plasma TV(s), nor do we take multiple holidays by jet each year or leave all our lights and appliances on BecauseWeCan(TM), but we are living comfortably and happily as a family of four. We do own our house, etc, BTW.
Are you prepared to alter your sweeping statement given my counter-example(s)?
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
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)
Thanks for the pretty lecture, but you, apparently, have confused your idealistic views of what the terms should mean with how they're used in practice.
To spell it out for you. Statist is almost always used to mean "Any view that holds the government should do anything about anything." You can see this in the originator of this thread, a pseudo-libertarian rant that ascribes any conventionally proposed government action against AGW to be "statist". "I'm enlightened", sayeth the poster, "I can see there are non-statist things we can do too!" Well, great. Because the conventionally proposed government actions have to do with tradable CO2 production quotas and low wattage lightbulbs. Now you can make an argument, if you so wish, that this has to do with a subset of governments involving "elites", but leaving aside the misuse of the term to the point that it's meaningless in discourse in 2012, the fact is "statist" here simply refers to a proposal that the government use its power in any way whatsoever.
Which is how it's always used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
"States rights". That refers, objectively, to the proposal that States should be able to pass any damned law they wish, and fuck individuals, and especially fuck the Feds if the Feds try to restrict this in any way whatsoever. Now I can prove this quite easily, and I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this term isn't about "limiting" government through scope, but by "empowering one government at the expense of other people and governments".
How? Well, the defining issue as far as States Rights go is not the ability to regulate CO2 production, or sell low wattage lightbulbs - although, like the latter, it does cover degrees of whiteness.
No, the defining States Right issue is race, and the audacity of the Federal Government to trample upon the God-given right of every State to treat Black people like shit. Slavery? States rights! (Funnily enough, the right of a state to refuse to return slaves is never considered a "States Rights" issue by those who use the term.) Opting out of the Union because the other States aren't helping Slave States enforce slavery? "States Rights". Jim Crow? "States Rights". Preventing black people from getting edumicated? "States Rights". Clamping down on Civil rights marches? "States Rights". Preventing black people from voting? "States Rights".
Now, to be fair, the same people will occasionally use it elsewhere, but rarely in any way that suggests individuals be empowered first and foremost, and the Federal government limited with State governments given limited powers that respect individuals. No, it's pretty much a straightforward "Wah! Wah!! The Federal Government says my State has to stop purging its voter rolls of people with funny names. Its time for States Rights FTW!"
Again, that's how it's used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.