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2012 Another Record-Setter For Weather, Fits Climate Forecasts
Layzej writes "The Associated Press reports: 'In 2012 many of the warnings scientists have made about global warming went from dry studies in scientific journals to real-life video played before our eyes. As 2012 began, winter in the U.S. went AWOL. Spring and summer arrived early with wildfires, blistering heat and drought. And fall hit the eastern third of the country with the ferocity of Superstorm Sandy. Globally, five countries this year set heat records, but none set cold records. 2012 is on track to be the warmest year on record in the United States. Worldwide, the average through November suggests it will be the eighth warmest since global record-keeping began in 1880 and will likely beat 2011 as the hottest La Nina year on record. America's heartland lurched from one extreme to the other without stopping at "normal." Historic flooding in 2011 gave way to devastating drought in 2012. But the most troubling climate development this year was the melting at the top of the world. Summer sea ice in the Arctic shrank to 18 percent below the previous record low. These are "clearly not freak events," but "systemic changes," said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany. "With all the extremes that, really, every year in the last 10 years have struck different parts of the globe, more and more people absolutely realize that climate change is here and already hitting us."'"
there has to be a better source
on the bright side..."end of the world" forecasts were proven wrong when things seemed to go on as normal today...leading end of the world theorists to re-evaluate their models.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
A lot of people's expectations for the consequences of global warming is the sudden deaths of hundreds of thousands, not wide-ranging low-grade economic impacts that risk hundreds of millions in property damage and puts a strain on global food supply.
We're trained to notice disaster, not statistical drift. There will never be the "event" from global warming, which means denial will continue as the costs keep ramping up.
That ice age was the expected result of the "natural cycles" you idiots like to babble endlessly about. The fact that we're going the opposite direction should have you seriously concerned.
I thought none of the climate change models allowed for accurate short term forecasting? I've been told not to expect short term forecasting (as in, the next five years, the next year, and certainly not the next few months) to be accurately predictable from the models and predictions of climate change experts. Are we working off predictions made ten years ago? I guess I'm confused as to why 2012 was perfectly on track with predictions.
One of the largest threats to global warming (for America at least) is the continued lowering of water levels for the Mississippi River. Historians can correct or amend me here, but empires rise and fall on the strength of their rivers. The US is no different, and should the Mississippi fail then there will be serious strategic and economic threats to the security and health of the nation.
Not good.
Science is not a religion, it is not less valuable when it gets updated. Your belief not withstanding.
Time magazine & researchers were telling us what to do about the upcoming ICE AGE, and how to survive it. Now, the same idiots
[citation needed that these are the same people]
are telling us about global warming (whoops...climate change).
Boy you sure are clever. And alone. Climate science and models have progressed extensively since 1975.
The earth goes through cycles....and it is billions of years old. 5-10 years of data is but a blink in cosmic time.
Those cycles you speak of normally take thousands of years to progress, giving larger life forms enough time to migrate and evolve and gradually change their patterns so that they can, you know, survive. When you start to see those averages change more quickly, you should be worried about the larger life forms (hell, bacteria and cockroaches will probably benefit). But, you know, I'm asking you to pull your head out of your ass and yet even when Fox News reports that things were pretty shitty this year, you dismiss it with parroted narrative.
You're a serious part of the problem when others are trying to discuss rational ways to curb this disturbing trend. But, hey, you read a TIME magazine article in 1975 and that makes you smarter than people who devote their lives to this.
My work here is dung.
Long ago, during the carboniferous era, so named because that's where all the coal comes from, primitive trees grew and died for 60 million years. These dead trees, over millions more years, turned into coal deposits. When a tree falls in the forest, who eats it? In the carboniferous era, nobody. The carboniferous era ended when fungi evolved that could eat dead trees. After that, and continuously to this day, dead trees are decomposed by fungi, and there is NO MORE coal. Meanwhile, in the last 150 years, humanity has burned 50% of the coal that was deposited by all those dead trees. The CO2 that these trees took 60 million years to form into coal is being returned to the atmosphere in a few hundred years. OK, got it? When those trees were alive, CO2 levels were much higher than they are today. The trees sucked the CO2 out of the air over 60 million years. Now we are burning the coal and returning all that 60 million years of CO2 back into the atmosphere in less than 200 years.
I don't have anything to contribute to this thread. Just pointing out the facts. There isn't any point in the governments of the world deciding to stop emitting CO2. It's already too late.
Really,
You think an ice age is preferable to a gradually warming climate?
Time magazine & researchers were telling us what to do about the upcoming ICE AGE, and how to survive it.
Yes, but that was when they measured temperatures using a few dozen thermometers spread around the country and wrote the data in little log books using pencils. They also hadn't developed any decent methods for gathering historical temperature data.
Now we've got weather satellites providing real time, worldwide temperature data with a resolution of a few meters. We can measure polar ice coverage from the sky, polar ice thickness from underneath, Greenland's glacier flow rates, etc., etc. We also have millions of years of temperature/CO2 data from ice cores in the Antarctic, all cross referenced with other data sets like ancient tree ring data so we can make fairly accurate guesses about past temperatures.
No sig today...
Time magazine & researchers were telling us what to do about the upcoming ICE AGE, and how to survive it.
You were also listening to disco at the roller rink. Shows what you know.
Climate change doesn't really bother me. What bothers me are people that willfully choose to live in higher risk geographical locations. I have a short list of populated areas I feel are acceptable loss zones:
Coastal areas - prone to flooding and destructive wind
Seismic areas - prone to destructive ground shaking
Desert areas - prone to being uninhabitable
Flood zones - prone to destructive wetness
Tornado zones - prone to destructive wind
I am forced by the homeowner cartel to pay a higher premium for their supposed right to live in these statistically disastrous zones. I think New Orleans should have been quarantined by the US military and condemned. All the money spent to rebuild a coastal town below sea-level would be better spent burning in a big pile to stay warm.
I might be the only person that gets the popcorn ready at disaster hour.
That would be the same 2012 that continues the trend in the IPCC AR5 report, which shows temperatures lower than predicted by any of the models. That ought to make people happy,, don't you think?
That would the the same 2012 with a drought that joins many others from the past 80 years. Guess what, droughts happen periodically, and this one was very much a local phenomenon within central North America.
We just survived the end of the Mayan calendar cycle. Whew. Quick, let's panic about something else!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Global temperatures have not risen - they have risen more slowly than predicted. Well, that's me convinced!
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Really,
You think an ice age is preferable to a gradually warming climate?
I don't think you understand just how gradual a natural climate cycle has been for Earth. Look at this graph of antarctic temperature changes. Notice how it is windowed to -6 to +4 degrees Celsius within today's temperature and how long those changes normally took. If we speed that same change that took 10,000 years up to 200 years and it only ever increases, what exactly do you think will happen to Earth?
Animals and humans aren't going to have time to adapt or evolve in predicted scenarios.
My work here is dung.
Thanks for proving that the mentally ill still have access to the internet. However, you haven't proved that it is a good thing.
'In 2012 many of the warnings scientists have made about global warming went from dry studies in scientific journals to real-life video played before our eyes
Or "reality," as us old geezers prefer to call it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For how many years in a row, now, has each year been the hottest year on record?
Technoli
I live near Maine, and I definitely NOT want any warming. I want to enjoy ice fishing more than a few weekends a winter and for one is glad to see tourist coming up north for winter sports. GW hurts my local economy.
Tomorrow is another day...
Fox has usually been on the side of the "climate change deniers", so this change where Fox is even reporting on the topic is news in a way. However, not to be a denier just a questioner, how can we tell if this is just part of the statistical variations to be expected over time rather than an actual real trend?
.
Sort of like the "hundred year flood", is there a "hundred year freeze" or a "hundred year overheat" which marks the extreme cold or hot temperatures one would expect to find once in one-hundred years just from normal statistical fluctuations and a normal distribution?
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-year_flood
Disclaimer: I am honestly not trolling here. I really wonder about this.
TL/DR version: Can we really change our behavior, or just start planning for a worst-case scenario?
Should we be trying to combat climate change in the sense that is it really possible? I think that, as a species, we would rather let people in the future (even if they are future versions of ourselves) deal with the problems rather than take hit in the near term for long term benefits.
Coupled with the fact that the most populated countries have a majority of their population relatively poor, I think it is impractical to expect them to stop burning fossil fuels and force clean energy solutions that might be more expensive/impractical (I believe that the industrialized nations consume most of the energy now, but with India and China becoming more economically important and successful, they will also start consuming more energy).
I saw the article about Thorium reactors a few days ago, but I doubt that we can stop burning things for energy in a short term. With all the infrastructure and interests of powerful groups to keep us on fossil fuels (In the words of comedian John Oliver: BP going green? Only in their logo), I don't expect major change in the near future.
Maybe I am too cynical and need to have hope for the future, but I wonder if we shouldn't start planning backup mechanisms to permanently help people when changes happen - right now, we seem to be doing short-term "deal with this disaster now" fixes.
The problem in stopping this trend costs money, and the trend hasn't directly cost us any money yet, though the superstorms coming through these last few years have. The big question is will it be reversible when people finally do start throwing money at fixing the planet.
Leaked figure from IPCC AR5 report shows just how far off even updated IPCC model predictions are:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ipcc_ar5_draft_fig1-4_with.png
note that the grey bands are nothing more than an attempt at IPCC arse covering in light of failed predictions, the temps are consistently riding the low side and even outside of the coloured prediction bands, and most importantly the temperature trend is much much lower than predicted.
The IPCC's models are massively over estimating the impact of increased CO2 - unsurprising when they assume large positive water vapour feedback that don't appear to operate as they assume in practice, and temperature suppressing aerosol impacts that appear to have been overestimated too. They also don't have the capacity to model other dominating effects (like PDO and AMO oceanic cycles, solar variations etc), and have shown no ability to model or explain historical variation covering a 3 C band during the current interglacial - including eras like the Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm period and the little ice age.
An honest question: how many years of no temperature rise would it take for the catastrophic CAGW thesis to be rejected? We've had about 15 years of near stasis, and recent results show that the heat isn't 'hiding' in the ocean - it simply doesn't exist, though CO2 continues to rise. So just how many more years are needed for the IPCC to let go of the millenialist thermageddon fantasy and bring the temperature rise predictions back to a more realistic level (seems likely to be about 1-2C rise for a CO2 doubling).
Not what the GP said. Please visit http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ (in this case, Strawman).
And as it happens, a cooling climate *is* preferable to a warming climate, because it's much easier to counter. All you have to do is burn extra crap to put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (or use methane, it's even more potent). But to counter warming, you've got to *reduce* atmospheric CO2/CH4/etcetera, which means you're working against the direction of entropy. Much harder task. Especially when everybody else is increasing their emissions instead.
[citation needed that these are the same people]
I believe the problem here is that even it these had been the same people, when researchers proposed that Earth might be returning into a new ice age, their claims were refuted within two years or so and the whole thing - at least within the scientific community - was declared a failed idea. The newer suggestion that the temperatures are in fact rising too quickly has been found to be nearly impossible to falsify, and it's more than a quarter of a century now. So if the GP is trying to make us believe that the evidence is ambiguous and not pointing in any specific direction, he should think again.
Ezekiel 23:20
is yours. you can have him.
If the "hockey-stick" curve were real, we should have the warmest year every year.
It's not a curve. It's a set of points on a graph which, when you smooth out the yearly fluctuations, shows a long-term trend (the clue is in the words) of increasing temperature.
By your logic I could declare that winter's over and we're in for an early spring if it's a degree warmer tomorrow than today.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We may live interesting times. Things are going to change, labeling the change "good" or "bad" now could be still premature, but anyway, we are starting in a situation that we can deal with, and going to another that we could or not. And maybe more important, is a trend pretty hard to revert, if things keep changing we could hit in some point of the road a place that is definately bad.
If we are dumping shit everywhere and burning carbon because it's "cheap" we can do something about it. Stop burning carbon and move to renewable and nuclear energy is something right? Heavier regulation and requirements for recycling and fines for polluters is something right? Reducing the stripping forests is something right? Severely limiting strip mining is something right?
It's hard to say if you are trolling or just an idiot. Claiming there is nothing you can do about it is worse than claiming a problem does not exist in my opinion.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I would have figured someone like you would be hiding in your Faraday cage bomb shelter today in anticipation of the end of the world.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Maybe if you had a clue.... Temps have been rising CINCE that ICE AGE... Oh wait, that truth gets in the way of your dilusionary comment.... sorry...
Time rate of change. An important construct. Think about it.
And do check those spellings....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's been the prediction since Malthus and it has never come true. Agricultural productivity has been growing so fast that arable land will increasingly become disused over the next few decades.
Even if the prediction were true, it wouldn't make much of a difference. As meat and other food products become more difficult to produce, their prices rise, and people would switch to something cheaper.
he should think again.
Or just think. First time hurts, after that it gets easier.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
With regards to earth, rape, torture, and murder have already happened. There's no sense to talking “what if” scenarios. It's done, and now we have to live with it. Even if we cut carbon and methane emissions to zero, and plant trees over millions of acres, we'll still have to cope with the consequences for our bad behavior.
Not at all. You have a problem with graph scales, which is fair, because everyone who draws a graph apparently sucks at graph scales.
The hockey stick graph is over a fairly long time scale. As a result, variations on a short time scale are invisible. It makes global warming look like a very fast temperature increase. It is, compared to the historical rate of temperature increases over long time scales.
On shorter timescales, there's a huge amount of variability -- seasonal, year-to-year, El Nino cycles, etc. The effect of global warming is relatively small on these time scales, resulting in some years being particularly hot and others being not so hot. Incidentally, this graph is pretty popular, too, and looks like a gradually-increasing noisy sinusoid.
The influence of global warming on short timescales, relative to the influence of other effects, is small enough that if you pick appropriate endpoints for a graph, you can say all sorts of inaccurate and misleading things about trends. ("In the past 13.5 years, the average temperature has actually decreased!") You'll see those graphs a lot, too.
I loved the weather this year. It was our best year yet. If you're from the north country you'll appreciate global warming. Thank you to all you SUV drivers!
"Globally, five countries this year set heat records, but none set cold records."
I guess, AP didn't get the memo that this past week Russian weather has been setting cold records both in the European part and in Siberia (-40 F). The year isn't over yet, you know...
Without even one mention of these ionospheric heaters that ARE in use all over the world by every capable government in the first 38 comments available to this article leads one to believe that slashdot itself has been usurped and the comments posted (readable) are a continued effort to smokescreen the absolute truth of this global warming man-made disaster. If this confrontational comment is correct, no one in the general public reading slashdot will be able to view it, remarkably. WAY TO GO (here's to your form of censorship) SLASHDOT
Took you a while to wake up this morning. Must not have palmed your meds last night.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You know you don't have to rely on Time magazine and unnamed researchers (I actually know which ones you are referring to in so far as the ones proposing global dimming would have a significant effect, although Time couldn't get them to go on record to say what they wanted so they had to invent a source - 'climatalogical cassandras'). You can read the peer reviewed literature. You know the problem with doing that? As far back as the 1970s researchers were, broadly speaking, predicting global warming. There wasn't a consensus and they was plenty of doubt, but more thought the greenhouse effect would dominate.
You might want to go take a closer butchers at those cycles, the thing that amplifies them from little changes in temperature to big swings is CO2, precisely the gas we are now dumping into the atmosphere.
30 seconds of thought to type up a slashdot comment vs decades of a career spent researching global climate.
Pretty convincing argument.
Not.
Can't stop this train called climate change now... Join the party or hide in the corner worrying about the end of all things. We all know that human kind will be on this planet for but a short while. There is no use worrying about things beyond our control. Life is too short. Now go outside and enjoy your +5 degrees centigrade above average Christmas!
Sorry to burst your bubble but the warming has stalled about 15 years ago while CO2 levels in the atmosphere keep rising, every year the chances that this could be a statistical fluctuations in a long term trend diminishes, all you have to do is look at IPCC AR5 draft figure 1-4 to see how badly the models have failed to predict reality; as Richard Feyman said "When actual observations over a period of time contradict predictions based on a given theory, that theory is wrong!"
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
People blather on one way or another about climate change.
I think we should keep track of who holds which positions.
Though maybe we'll all be too busy with suffering the effects of global warming to have time to tell people I Told You So.
Leads me to wonder what the prediction markets say on climate change.
That is a meme big carbon has been pushing for a while, and is likely nonsense. We have seen, with moderately little effort and in a reasonably short time, significant rejuvenation of the great lakes, replishment of the ozone layer, reductions in acid rain and particulate emissions.
None are worthy of a âoeMission Accomplishedâ banner yet, but we already experience the benefits of the work in progress.
In each case, the conventional wisdom was that the damage wasnâ(TM)t reversible and the efforts would be herculean.
The herculean effort was over-riding the well paid campaigns to suppress any effort to address these problems. In retrospect, executing all of the advertising professionals and Phd-for-hires would have saved a lot of time, money and damage.
People have a history of innovation, and I doubt that this is beyond us. We have to get fat, dumb and happy out of the way.
Don't you think that your "data set" is a little bit laughable? Yeah, interpolating through ten points with seasonal variations, that's the way to go. See you in two decades.
Ezekiel 23:20
You need to understand the following to understand why the turnaround. From 1960-1990, 2-3% per decade less sunlight as reached the Earth's surface. In that same time period, global average temperatures maintained or increased. So... despite the fact that the Earth received less energy from the Sun for 30 years straight, it never cooled as expected.
I'll let that sink in for a moment. Climate is driven by the Sun's energy. The Sun's energy is reduced. The climate, with less energy from the sun, should get colder. But, it didn't.
Now, the trend of global dimming is reversing. And, the climate is warming up faster than it should purely from global brightening. Many scientists believe that the ice age we should have gotten in the 1970s and 1980s was masked by global warming happening back then. But, now, we just have global warming.
I won't lie: there may be people who are jumping of the bandwagons to keep them in the spotlight. I don't know this James Hansen. The one thing to point out is that at least is willing to change his views to match the evidence. Unfortunately, that's a very rare thing today.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
The most amazing part of the whole AGW movement is that developing remediation technologies is a topic that is almost completely off the table.
For some reason, its fine to plan out lots of new taxes and move money around the planet while simultaneously throttling back selected economies but it is unthinkable to actually work on reasonable technologies that could capture and use carbon.I find it hard to believe that a world that could put a man on the moon in a decade couldn't come up with efficient ways to deal with existing greenhouse gases while developing alternatives to them.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
We don't talk about facts and history when talking about global warming. Were talking about the future and fortune tellers and the future is hotter and full of death and destruction.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
People constantly confuse Science with Scientists. Science is a process for understanding the world we live in. Scientists are fallible human beings who are motivated and controlled by a wide variety of variables and who make mistakes just as often as they make real breakthroughs. Then you get to add politics into the whole mix and you can see how fact and truth are easily distorted.
Point in case. This was not the hottest year on record but it was the hottest "La Nina" year. Well "La Nina" is just a scientist made up phrase to describe when the certain parts of the ocean are cooler or warmer. Its meaningless in this discussion.
in 1975, when I was in High school. The thing that makes me suspicious is that the same people -- James Hansen in particular -- were the major alarmists for an ice age back then
Strange isn't it, that despite all the AGW deniers in the world, not a single one has put this "fact" on Wikipedia, with a citation.
Silly old Wikipedia seems to be of the opinion that James Hamsen was studying Venus right through the 1970s.
Clearly roc97007 must be entrusted as the world's fact keeper.
FYI, the rest of us are actually living 37 years after 1975, not 5-10. On a more serious note, despite a few predictions of cooling in the 70's the majority of the climate community still endorsed global warming. (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s.html) Funny enough, the cooling theory was based on human particulate pollution outweighing the human caused greenhouse effect. Good thing we got a handle on pollution right?
I figured that the Mayans used significant celestial events for the under pinning of their calender, and the end of their calender's epoch is suspiciously on the day of the solstice. The solstice is an actual event, where the sun is directly overhead at solar noon on the latitude of one of the tropics which occured at 11:12 UTC in Namibia; I happened to have slept through it. If the world was going to end, the end would have started at 11:12 UTC, by my reckoning.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I believe the misconception that there was no warming since 1998 comes from it being tied with 2005 for having the hottest surface temperature on record. 1998 was especially hot due to the century's strongest El Nino event. But even when you pick 1998 as your starting point, there is still a warming trend over the past 15 years. I'll see your blog's .gif with a peer reviewed paper: http://www.aussmc.org/documents/waiting-for-global-cooling.pdf
That's really what you're going with? Google "james hansen" "global cooling" and 1971. This is hardly a secret.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And how are "we" going to do that? Do you think China or India or Africa or Russia give a damn about what "we" decide? European and American voters get irate if their economies aren't growing fast enough; do you think they're going to reelect any government that's going to spend tons of money on reducing carbon emissions?
"We" can't even bring ourselves to helping refugees, or living up to our international aid commitments, or making many our drug patents available for generic use overseas, actions that are trivial compared to meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. Look at the lack of results of Doha or all the other previous conferences. "We" have been importing cheap "shit" from South America and Asia, knowing full well that the way it is produced is destructive of the environment and rain forest, and nobody gives a damn.
The idiot is you, because you believe that global warming is somehow different than all the other issues that we have failed to act on. With the current political situation in the world, everybody looks out for their own interests first. Given the current political situation, there is nothing any government can do to reduce global carbon emissions meaningfully.
Carbon emissions will fall on their own when technology makes burning coal and oil obsolete. I think that's going to happen within a few decades. But it will happen with or without government intervention.
There was never an ice age expected in the 1970s to 1980s. The next ice age is still a few 10 thousand years in the future (if there is one comming at all).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It is absolutely not meaningless in this discussion as a "La Nina" year is a COLD PERIOD. ....
So we just had the warmest cold period, ah ha
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's not a blog's gif, it's a graph from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report 5, it's current unlike your 4 year old peer reviewed paper.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'll give it a shot cause I'm now on vacation
t | ___/__ /___ /____
e | __/__
m|_
p |
--- year
Learn to control the weather, if it's broken, then fix it. I fully agree that people's behavior will not change, it's a lost cause, which is why we should start R&D on geoengineering as early as possible.
This video from Potholer54 on YouTube is pretty good at summarizing the story about scientists predicting an ice age in the 70's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms
Basically, Time and Newsweek published that there was an impending ice age, since a few scientists said that their data showed that the Earth was cool at that moment. One of the scientists even said that the period of cooling was about to end.
Of papers published in scientific journals between 1965 and 1979, there were zero that predicted an ice age, seven that predicted global cooling, and 44 that predicted global warming.
On top of that, even restricted to newspapers and magazines, the vast majority predicted global warming. That people only seem to mention the two magazines that say that there is going to be an ice age is a pretty obvious indication of cherry picking.
Yes I'm going with that because your claim is bullshit. And that's also the reason it doesn't and never will make it into Wikipedia.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=11
Indeed, unlike my link which was published in the past, your link was published in the future. Coincidentally, that's when we'll find out who's right. If AGW deniers are right then they get to laugh at scientists. OTOH if AGW is occurring as the greedy grant chasing scientists claim, our kids are all fucked...from our POV anyway. Maybe tropical resorts in Canada will all be worth it. I do know one thing about the future, no matter what happens in 2014 when the report is published, AGW deniers will say its bullshit because there's a cover-up or its bullshit because previous predictions weren't on the nose.
But as my buzz wanes, I'll get to the point...why keep throwing dubious charts around when we can take reasonable steps that that actually sound like great ideas to everyone that's not going to be put out of business by abundant clean energy to avoid worst case scenarios based on the best knowledge available at the time instead of spending millions (billions?) trying to discredit researchers. Will funding renewable energy really destroy the economy or will it just destroy OPEC/Exxon's shareholder value while creating a whole new industry? I say we find out!
PS: I spent a good 15 minutes trying to find the source data for your chart, searching numerous AGW denier sites. If you still feel like debating some schmoe on the internet, please include a link to the "leaked" report before it gets "covered up". Thanks - MGMT
The ozone destroyers, acid rain and particulate emissions all have relatively short lifetimes in the atmosphere. All it takes to to reduce the damage they caused is to reduce or eliminate emissions of the things that caused them and they wash out in a few years (or decades in the case of ozone destroyers). That isn't the case with CO2 or more generally carbon in the active carbon cycle. Once it is there it takes thousands of years for natural processes to reduce the level significantly. That means on human time scales it's close to irreversible. Even if we do things to actively remove carbon from the carbon cycle it's hard to imagine we could do it any where nearly as fast as we put it in. Once we stop adding carbon to the cycle the changes will start slowing down after 30 or 40 years but even then it will take hundreds of years for the ice caps to catch up with the forcing. The other thing that's irreversible is species extinction. Once they're gone, they're gone.
So you're right, we have to overcome the efforts to suppress addressing the problem but that just stops it from getting worse (after a few decades). The changes already wrought won't go away anytime soon.
No! Temperatures have not been rising since the last ice age (that ended around 10,000 years ago). That's just another meme on the contrarian side. Temperatures reached a maximum during the Holocene climatic optimum around 8,000 years ago and have been slowly declining since. (Holocene temperature graph)
The natural climate drivers of the Milankovitch cycles and other things indicate the slow cooling should be continuing with the onset of the next glacial cycle at least 5,000 years and perhaps as much as over 20,000 years away. But recent research has found that we've probably delayed the onset of the next ice age indefinitely because of global warming.
The thing that makes me suspicious is that the same people -- James Hansen in particular -- were the major alarmists for an ice age back then ... (emphasis added)
Oh really? Citation definitely needed for that! But I doubt you're going to find anything. Hansen, an astrophysicist, didn't switch from studying Venus to studying the Earth until around 1980 well after the ice age "alarmism" came out.
Now, the same idiots are telling us about global warming (whoops...climate change).
What you don't realize is that global warming is a subset of climate change which also includes changes in precipitation and winds and who knows what else.
Fair enough, but there was an expectation of a cooling trend.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Excellent!
What a ridiculous statement. Here's the data. No year since 2001 has been colder than the warmest year from 2000 on back except for 1998. 2005 and 2010 are basically tied for the warmest temperature in the record, The slope of temperature rise in the 2000's is less than it was in the 1980's and 90's but it's still positive.
No they use all of the data including Roy Spenser's which although showing the lowest anomaly of the various temperature records isn't that far off from the other satellite record and the several surface records.
Here's a rebuttal of the WSJ editorial. The scientist Ridley cites in the piece reject his analysis.
Must have been an american thing ... no one ever claimed something like this in europe.
For what reason should there have been a cooling trend?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
He might be remembering the propaganda of Carl Sagan who was always talking about Nuclear Winter on his science programs. It was a pretty popular theme to talk about the coming ice age, even into the late eighties. Indirectly it lead to many nuclear test band treaties. In any case much hype about something that didn't come about, in some part because of the hype.
that this is not perverse; it is natural. Man is doing this and it is the inevitable result of his intelligence. Nature is learning that intelligence in a species is pathological. The experiment in intelligence is showing that it is better to have dumb animals that do not change the environment than smart animals that do. The smart animals end up wiping themselves out in biological short order. The sustainable "human" was the Neanderthal.
E Proelio Veritas.
"Globally, five countries this year set heat records, but none set cold records."
"Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80ÂF set in 1971, which is not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, it seems the battery died in the weather station just at the critical moment."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/30/bitter-cold-records-broken-in-alaska-all-time-coldest-record-nearly-broken-but-murphys-law-intervenes/
LOS ANGELES -- Southern Californians awoke Thursday to record cold with sub-freezing temperatures in the mountains and deserts, but forecasters said a slight warming trend was on the way.
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/20/5066818/s-calif-winds-ease-as-cold-temps.html
Winter cold record broken in Kuusamo ...
http://yle.fi/uutiset/winter_cold_record_broken_in_kuusamo/6424159
An accurate and meaningful qualifier.
If you paid more attention to the time frames attached to those predictions you wouldn't be scratching your head so much. Meters of SLR and 7C of temperature rise predictions are the end result a century or more from now, not in the next decade or two and then only if we continue BAU.
If people are rejecting the message simply because they hate the messenger rather than paying attention to the reality behind the message then they're doing it wrong. Very little of what Gore has said has been found to be wrong.
Your graph cuts off in 1950 and so doesn't show the last 60+ years of temperatures.
The conclusions of the AR5 draft report are not significantly different than those of the AR4 report in 2007.
Get back to me when you understand that climate models don't even try to predict year by year temperatures.
IPCC AR5, draft, is going to be difficult to cover up.
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Sorry to burst your bubble but the warming has stalled about 15 years ago while CO2 levels in the atmosphere keep rising, every year the chances that this could be a statistical fluctuations in a long term trend diminishes, all you have to do is look at IPCC AR5 draft figure 1-4 to see how badly the models have failed to predict reality; as Richard Feyman said "When you've got morons talking about something they don't understand, you get something hilarious"
FTFY. Anyway this explains it.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Thanks for the link. I perused a few chapters and it looks legit. I also read the sections that Alec Rawls highlights as the "Lead story from the Second Order Draft". His claims are 1) Climatologists finally admit there is some unknown amplifier increasing the suns effect on GW and 2) Other authors are liars because they still claim that human activity is the cause despite the possibility of an "unknown mechanism"
To me this smacks of the ol' "cherry pick a seemingly inconsequential potential loose end to singlehandedly refute a 50 year body of work with a mountain of evidence backing it up". Just like when fox news (ironic perhaps given how they are the source for this story) breathlessly shouted that GW is a hoax because a Himalayan glacier grew slightly in 2011. Nevermind any analysis on what the cause might have been or the fact that virtually all other ice on the planet is receding. It does produce talking points such as "Tax funded AGW is treason when its a FACT that glaciers are EXPANDING!". Technically true but completely off base (as fox is wont to do IMO).
Here is how I see the cherry pick is applied by Rawls: The line he took is from the aerosol chapter in a section talking about the theory of cosmic rays amplifying changes in the sun based on a few observations. Then he implies the theory or one similar to it means the true cause of GW is the suns variance according to the scientists and thus they are liars.
HOWEVER...
The quoted section is actually only refuting the theory that cosmic rays have a significant effect on GW. The observed properties of the theory (cosmic ray induced free ions alter cloud properties) is too weak to have a significant effect on anything, closing with: there is no observed trend in cosmic radiation in the last 50 years to match the warming trend. Section 8.4, the one actually devoted to solar radiation measurement and observation, concludes that solar output has not varied much in the time empirical data was available and if anything, improvements in measurement techniques and additional data suggests that previous reports over-estimated the effect of solar radiation on climate change.
The bottom line is, IPCC AR5 is not a smoking gun against AGW. It unequivocally states that our planet is undergoing a significant warming trend in every geographic region from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere. There has been significant research in many aspects of climate science, many of which have a medium to high degree of confidence. The conclusion of the report is this: there is current global warming, almost entirely due to human activity. Period. There is no logic bomb hiding in section 136.4.16.347.4.a subsection 13 appendix B or anywhere else. There will be nothing to cover up. It will not be difficult to throw up a website with the cherry pick attack though. Look I can even do it with your posts:
CO2 levels in the atmosphere keep rising, every year the chances that this could be a statistical fluctuations in a long term trend diminishes
going to be difficult to cover up.
And speaking of websites, "stop green suicide"? WTF? we're all going to die because $80B has been spent on research? Gimme a break. Even if that figure is correct, Exxon pulls in 6x that in a year. The US will recover from banks losing $trillions and spends close to another trillion on the military each year. I might believe it if the site was called "stop scaring the executive board"
In closing (yes believe it or not I'm going to wrap this up) I would like to sincerely thank you for this thread. This is the most research I've done on AGW to date. I looked at all of the denier's evidence and gave it an honest chance (BTW, I couldn't find anything to corroborate your original "theres no warming" post which got this whole train moving - that chart may well be somewhere in the report but if so I think its a safe bet it was taken out of context). What I have now I believe is a more balance
You might have fun at Wood for Trees , comparing the different temperature records against each other can be enlightening.
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