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West Antarctica Warming Faster Than Thought
New submitter dgrobinson writes "NY Times reports that West Antarctica has warmed more over the last half century than was first thought. A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience (abstract) found that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth."
Water almost up to my keyboard.
Their they're doing there hair.
Single weather station indicates climate too - local climate.
The difference is not spatial, it is temporal. Weather is short duration. Climate is average over long period of time.
Single weather station measures local climate over decades. It also measures local weather.
Which way is west in antarctica?
Face north, then turn left.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is 4.4 much? Or is it not so much? ... disgusting.
Scientific articles that suddenly use Fahrenheit are
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You cannot tell with a single coin flip whether the coin is fair (50% probability of heads) or not. You cannot predict any particular flip of the coin. But if you flip a coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 659 times, you can say with a high degree of confidence that the coin is not fair. You still cannot predict any particular flip, but we can predict that we would see about 66 heads if we flipped the coin 100 times. If tomorrow we flip the coin 1000 times and it comes up head 831 times you have a high degree of confidence that the distribution of heads and tails changed since yesterday.
Weather is like a single coin flip. You cannot tell in advance easily whether it will rain or not or exactly what temperature it will be. But we can make statements about the average temperature in January or the average number of rainy days in April. If we see those values change over time, as we have all over the Earth, you can say that the climate is changing. With enough measurements over a long enough period of time, you can see the climate change at only one weather station. If we also see the same thing happen at thousands of other weather stations over decades, and we observe the ice sheets melting and the humidity increasing, then that's clear evidence of the climate changing.
That's the difference between weather and climate. Weather determines what you wear on a particular day. Climate determines what clothes you have in your closet.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I just looked at Antartica in Google Maps. According to Google, it's bigger than the rest of the continents combined! Forget about raising ocean level. That fucker's gonna extinguish the sun if it melts.
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...is an interesting place. It "stick out" more than the rest of the continent and hence is surrounded by more water, and it's home to at least 6 surface volcanoes (http://icecap.us/images/uploads/AntarcticVolcanoes2.jpg).
A few years back scientists discovered at least a bunch of sub-oceanic volcanoes with at least one merrily bubbling away. They remarked on how warm the waters were and how this had caused unique "oases" of lifeforms all along the extent. (http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=1541}
These and the unusual "surrounded by water" nature of this area are more likely contributors to localized melting.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
It's how Geordi solved the locked intercooler problem in season 7 episode 14 - the Ferengi warp coils had damaged the nydomium lines to the point where crystalline anti-pores were building up inside the reaction chamber. He had to redirect the hauser inverters to counterfeed through their own backup loop just to keep the Marfa separators from clogging.
Unlike Earth, whose temperature varies as one moves closer to or farther from the equator, Jupiter's temperature depends more on height above the surface. This is because heat is driven not by the sun but by the interior of the planet. Nice try, though!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It will be hard calling you six years ago.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This is a better link, and has more info: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-rapid-west-antarctic-ice-sheet.html
Amazing. I have now seen the AGW skeptic equivalent of "there are no fossils of fish turning into humans."
Most data has gaps of some kind. That's why you use statistical analysis and correction. Once again the need to deny AGW means having to deny methodologies used in vast and diverse areas of science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://data.un.org/Explorer.aspx?d=CLINO
About 5 minutes on google, didn't really check for much else being that i don't really care, but that should give you a starter point at the minimum.
-Noc
We would expect to see some record lows even during warming. The important point is that there are many more record highs being hit in recent years than record lows, which is exactly what you'd expect if the climate is warming. You can't tell whether the Earth as a whole is warming or cooling based on cherry-picking data.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Well, if we manage to melt Antartica, we are in hot waters!
Here is the sea rise interactive map. You can choose how much sea level rise and see if you still live on land. I recall melting the whole Antartica would cause a sea rise of 70 meters. I do not know if it includes water thermal dilatation, but I hope it does.
no one with half a brain cell cares whether or not the cause of warming over time is due to burning of fossil fuels or some yet undiscovered natural process...the only important question is whether or not there is anything we as a people could conceivably do to mitigate the environmental changes
Fortunately those of us with more than half a brain cell realize that the two are very closely linked. If the current rise in temperature is driven by natural cycles then stopping the burning of fossil fuel will have little, if any impact. So how do you know what to do to mitigate the impact if we are not certain what is causing it? Reducing fossil fuel use is probably a good idea but when I talk to scientists active in the field of climate research they themselves say that the jury is still out on how much is human driven vs. natural but reducing fossil fuel consumption is probably a good idea while we figure it out.
so in summary shut the fuck up and deal with consensus reality for once
What an enlightened attitude. I suppose a few thousand years ago you would have been arguing that the Earth is flat because that was the consensus? I'm a scientist so actual reality, rather than a group consensus of reality, is what I'm interested in. If you want to convince be I am wrong provide evidence and reasoned argument. Swearing about a consensus will help be form an opinion about you but will do little to persuade me that I'm wrong especially when I've spoken with colleagues in climate research and they say the same: it is not yet clear how much of the recent climate change is due to humans.
So, when I still worked on protein structures, each structure I ever calculated was a fabrication, since my raw spectra were averaged, zero-padded, treated with a window function, fourier transformed, phase corrected and baseline corrected, therefor, by your logic, not data, but mere fabrication. I let the publishers know that, guess I have to retract some papers and hand back my PhD then.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yes. No need to retract your PhD, your whole domain is a sham.
Yes. That's why we produce the same structural data as the X-ray crystallography guys do with a completely different method.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the above was only the digital processing. Before the raw data - i.e. the signal of the receiver coils - get digitized, they run through a preamp, a couple of analog filters, the main amp and the a/d-converter, each component, even the cables in between, adding artifacts and distortions to the signal.
In summary, every non-trivial measurement yields heavily processed data. You just need to be aware how exactly you processed them. Science, it works, bitches.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The error margin is 50%? So the 2.4 was twice what was expected BUT with the margin of error, it actually could be what was expected?
What is satisfying is seeing someone actually included the error margin. The climate models never seem to. The best you can say is that they reflect their assumptions very precisely, you just never know how bad the assumptions are.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.