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Cold Spring Linked To Dramatic Sea Ice Loss
hrvatska writes "An article at Weather Underground reports that researchers have linked large snowstorms and cold spring weather across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice. It is thought that the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere, which shifts the position of the jet stream, allowing cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. Researchers expect that a warming Arctic ocean will drive more extreme weather in North America and Europe (abstract)."
Yep. Global warming is freezing our asses off...
and earlier times
if you believe in global warming then the current cold temperatures are a return to normalcy and nothing to be alarmed about. up until the early 1900's when we had "normal" weather and temperatures NYC was so bitter cold that the rivers would freeze enough that people were able to walk from brooklyn to queens
Solar storms? ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
we are still in an ice age. Skiiers, snowboarders and global warming enthusiasts would prefer we remain in the ice age.
Normal temperatures are temperatures not affected by the extra CO2 in the atmosphere.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's a reason most scientists use the more accurate term climate change.
But! But! Global warming is a scam!! Lord Monckton and the Murdoch press told me so!!!
Shifting weather patterns make perfect sense. Us being 6 billion people strong and contributing to it makes sense. What these scientist are saying on a month to month basis doesn't... I believe it's called junk science.
Fundamentally, a stable climate is an illusion of the "short now". We think there's such a thing as "normal" temps because we just don't live very long, compared to a planet.
Even on a larger scale, the past 10,000 years have been an amazing anomaly, with a relatively stable climate not seen anywhere else in the data (and it's probably no coincidence that mankind happened to emerge technologically during this rare stable-ish window).
The simple truth about all this Climate Change debate? You don't have an informed opinion either way until you've really looked at the Vostok ice core data. Study the raw data for the past several 100k years yourself - you're intuition is no guide at all for how the climate normally behaves over time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Where I live, it's cold right now. That means that annual global average temperature must be colder than it was last year.
(Of course, this is silly "logic", but that's what most Americans in particular tend to be thinking)
I am officially gone from
Consistent deviations from long established and statistically significant patterns are an indicator to people with a modest amount of rational scientific understanding that the climate system is increasingly getting out of whack. What's so hard to comprehend about that?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Science has an amazing way of reinforcing crazy stupid by presenting contradicting, independently verifiable facts
I suppose you mean seemingly contradictory, when viewed on a superficial level without real understanding of the matter?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
There's a skew factor set that's not a part of the recent rather nicely oscillating glacial cycle or that wasn't a part of the past weather extremes. I'd say normal weathers are those which happen in an environment without the excessive human energy input. The whole planet is affected whether you were or weren't part of it. When the input ceases and the planet response fluctuations ease that's the new normal. Although the coming down period if it happens will probably create a new balance seeking process.
When you are done with that genocide on strawmen, you could start educating yourself.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's also sort of entertaining that when the temperature is different from the average temperature (I prefer that term to "normal"), it's because of global warming or climate change.
No, I'm not a denier. But just because it's been a cold March doesn't mean "climate change." Give me two or three cold Marches in a row, I'll start thinking about it. Otherwise, it's as stupid as the people who, after a big snow storm in DC, said, "Hey, where's that global warming we hear about?"
Out of whack? Sounds like a self-correcting feedback loop to me. Too little sea ice -> colder temperatures -> more sea ice -> warmer temperatures. Or am I missing something else?
Of course, large-scale climactic changes over tens or hundreds of thousands of years are a red herring when evaluating the impact of hundred-year rapid timescale changes on human societies that need much longer to adapt without horrific violence and misery. We live in very different places/cities from where we did 10,000 or 100,000 years ago --- but pretty much in the same cities we had 100 years ago. Expecting the populations of entire nations and continents to just up-and-move over a few decades because habitable ranges have shifted (collapsing food and water supplies in once-fertile regions) doesn't play out so well in current geopolitics. As soon as you're ready to welcome a billion refugee immigrants, dislocated by famine, war, and poverty, into your own country, we can get complacent about compressing multi-thousand-year climactic cycles into human-scale time intervals.
No. It's not. It could be the (long predicted) weakening of the Gulf stream, which leads to colder and longer winters in Europe.
Just wth does a terrorist group, the Weather Underground, have anything to do with the bloody weather????
You are missing that this march is marked by a particular weather pattern which is just as much out of whack as, say, this february's pattern. Look at february - Gistemp data here. Looking ahead for complete March, we will probably see significant arctic warming with a temporary cold snap in the lower latitudes.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's easy. Normal temperatures are called "long term average of the temperature or deviations thereof within the standard deviation".
Simple answer: The weakening of the Gulf stream, long predicted as a direct impact of AGW, which leads to longer and colder winters in Europe.
Indeed. "Climate change" is an effective propaganda technique for enabling observation bias. Have any weird weather? It's climate change and all due to the evil humans and their fossil fuel based industrial societies.
As you might have guessed from my sarcasm, I don't buy at all that the phrase, "climate change" is somehow more accurate than anthropogenic global warming. Climate would change even if nothing particular was going on, just due to orbital dynamics of Earth around the Sun, volcanoes, and the subtle effects of continental drift.
too warm people scream global warming
we get a cool March, which is the opposite of warming...yada yada yada
Logic 101: Global warming doesn't exclude local cooling.
No sig today...
Even on a larger scale, the past 10,000 years have been an amazing anomaly, with a relatively stable climate not seen anywhere else in the data (and it's probably no coincidence that mankind happened to emerge technologically during this rare stable-ish window).
That is why so clearly this anomaly is the result of AGW - Alien Generated Warming. They saw potential in us as a species so they elevated global temperatures for a time, in order for us to reach the point where we are technologically able to continue the warming trend they began - if we can figure out that we need to. That's the test required to enter the IPC (Intergalactic Planetary Coalition).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So what if the North Pole is ice free? Ice free poles have been the normal state for our planet for most of the time that primates have been around.
Last month the cold weather was because warm air from the south rose over the arctic cold air, thus forcing the colder arctic air down to the southern latitudes. So now it is because last summer there was less ice that froze over long before spring ever came. So how again did the ice covering all the arctic now has caused a colder spring? Did anyone tell these guys that the arctic is still frozen over as we speak? It's not open water. So why is the jet stream being affected? I'm just not clear on all this.
I do know one thing. It's still cold outside and the sow is still on the ground. How is this different from any other Canadian winter or spring for that matter? I'm just lucky enough to remember the weather before all this global warming came along. So how is it different again? How is getting snow in the winter anything unusual? How is snow on the ground in March different? How is maple sugar season changed?
... but it's not unusually cold. This is what the weather is like in the UK. Spring is a fairly unpredictable time of year, in a part of the world where the weather is generally unpredictable.
A couple of years ago we had weeks of -25ÂC weather during the winter, but in the last two it barely got below freezing. This winter, of course, it's going to be back to really cold, or maybe it's going to be back to really warm, or maybe just kind of middling with lots of rain.
Weather Scientists: This is further proof of Global Climate Change.
Fundamentalist Christian: This is not the proof that you're look for...
Weather Scientists: This is not the proof that we're looking for...
Fundamentalist Christian: Move along....
Weather Scientists: You're right this is not enough proof, we'll need to keep on looking...
Expecting the populations of entire nations and continents to just up-and-move over a few decades because habitable ranges have shifted (collapsing food and water supplies in once-fertile regions) doesn't play out so well in current geopolitics.
Come on. You have evidence of massive and rapid movement of population (the cities you refer to), and yet you still claim it can't happen. Here's how it'll go. The people will move if and when they choose to. And the current geopolitics will adapt to that reality.
Are you sure you've identified the right thing to worry about? A 100-year time scale is a couple of entire human generations. That's enough time for countries full of people to shift places, easily (in the US, about 75% of the population moved from farms to factories in a single generation.)
Within the next 100 years, robots will probably do ALL human manual labor. You want to talk about drastic changes to the human condition! The end of manual label is not only much more likely to disrupt, it will disrupt in ways that are completely unforeseen. Having to move to better digs -- that we've done before. Not even having a job for most of the world's people, now that's going to be disruptive.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Because these are all weather patterns that indicate a changing climate.
This is just the latest in a series of published work finding that weakening ocean and land temperature contrasts between high and mid northern latitudes is having a profound effect on the Jet Stream. Search for jet stream and arctic on Google Scholar and they'll pop up. They all show that the poles live and die by the circumpolar winds that 'lock' the cold air in those high latitudes (Antarctica included by the way!). If those circumpolar winds diminish, then the cold can effectively 'escape'. In the Northern Hemisphere, it results in the jet stream becoming extremely contorted, sets up 'blocking' and we get these long periods of abnormal weather (extra cold in late winter/early spring, extra heat in late summer/early fall?) The weather channel has a great rundown of the jet stream *today*. Illustrates it perfectly. http://www.weather.com/video/forecast-for-your-spring-35814 Lets just thank our lucky stars that Antarctica is a continent surrounded by ocean, and not an ocean surrounded by continents, like the Arctic. This fundamental difference means the southern circumpolar winds have a huge contrast to work from with the gigantic ice fields of the continent versus the far away lands of Southern America, Oceania, and Africa. Ironically, the ozone hole actually makes the Antarctic colder and the circumpolar winds stronger... so as it fixes itself as human CFC emissions dimish, those winds will start to weaken and warming will be able to creep in there as well. But at least that buys us time. Were the Arctic and Antarctic equal, global warming would have likely been much more immediate. Though who knows, maybe that would have spurred us to action before today (which is still never?) The world and science that attempts to explain it is wonderful and terrifying all at the same time. Lets hope we can get our acts together and change our course before we cause so much change to our atmosphere and oceans that we are unable to avoid the clear and present dangers now on tap.
How the heck are cities evidence of rapid population movement? The city centers we currently have are typically stable population centers, with firmly rooted local/national identities, for hundreds of years --- they don't move around overnight, across national borders, whenever the "grass is a little greener" on the opposite side. I'm sure "geopolitics will adapt to that reality," but "geopolitical adaptation" in the modern world typically involves a lot of bullets, landmines, cluster-bombs, machete massacres, and rape. The US is building huge, fortified walls to keep people *out* --- and most other countries hold similar attitudes (even if they don't invest such resources in border-control) towards mass-immigration of displaced foreigners. Current conflicts over limited local resources are already bloody messes, which will only be amplified by increasing the volume of struggle.
call it -30 or so Fahrenheit in the winter normal temps then.
So to, I would imagine, the millions of people in low lying coastal areas that will be forced to move as rising sea levels
The seas would actually have to rise significantly first.
To date the actual sea rise has been tiny, and pretty consistent - about six inches over 100 years. So the people living in low coastal areas will have a few hundred years to mull over things before thinking about moving.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Global warming and cooling aren't a thing, climate change, however, is. Hot places get hotter, cold places get colder, and the bits in the middle will get considerably worse than both combined with the colliding weather fronts.
And what in the world gives you the idea that this sort of "climate change" is going on? Increases in greenhouse gases lead to some degree of global warming not hot gets hotter, cold gets colder. WE have enough trouble debating this issue without imaginary theories coming in.
Oddly, this is more stable than the North-east of America, that place gets whacked silly with storms, and it will get considerably worse in the next decade, not even century.
The Gulf of Mexico provides warmth and moisture which is what you need for exciting storms such as the north east region of the US probably has seen for millions of years.
Katrina was a freak, but that last catastrophe of a storm is just progressive weather change now.
That part of the world sees dozens of such cyclones every year. There was nothing odd about Katrina other than a city happened to be in the way.
There is even a chance of another mini ice-age in the north areas again.
Apparently, glacial periods have been the norm for many millions of years. Unless we do something radical, say like dumping massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or greatly widening the Bering Strait, we will see another full-blown glacial advance.
Oh look, someone blowing a gasket because people disagree with him on the internets. This is so unusual.
I think his point was that using anecdotes to try to prove them wrong was outright stupidity.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Wow, thats about as much intellectual drivel as I would expect out of a political prisoner fresh out of labour-camp.
Climate Change is an acknowledgment that the Earth has many interconnected systems that can be aversely or even positively affected by changes to the environment. Also a tacit acknowledgement that once it occurs its nearly impossible to reverse. It just so happens that it also nullifies any unfortunate and misguided pseudo-intellectualism vaulted or supported by the "Global Warming" meme of the 80s.
But when you can't lean on that khallow, the best you can do is question the motives of "scientists" to prove your point? Scream propaganda and be done for the day? That's a whopper of a fallacy, and a very transparent one at that.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
I find it really bizarre that Slashdot, a website that usually has intelligent discussion, is filled with climate change naysayers.
Is this real life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record
The 9 warmest years on record happened this century. The Earth is heating up, and rapidly.
Who the fuck are you people?
An unusually warm time for Earth's climate during the ongoing Ice Age, perhaps.
But not especially warm when looked at during the long term.
Earth has been a hothouse for ~75% or its existence, it's been in one of its cold phases for the last 10-20 million years, and even being in the warm part of a cold phase doesn't bring it up to even "average" temperatures for the planet.
Not, mind you, that that's terribly relevant to the current climate change - we're used to the way things are, we'd like them to remain that way (never mind that that's impossible, with or without CO2 limits), and we're going to do our best to make sure the problem isn't a big issue for OUR LIFETIMES (and damn the grandkids and later generations)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm quite capable of worrying about more than one thing at a time. I agree that mechanization (like past waves of mechanization) brings its own set of disruptive issues.
I think you over-estimate the ease of population migration against hostile opposition. Past mass migrations from rural to city centers have occurred fully with the support of the "powers-that-be," a wealthy investor class who could both consolidate rural smallholdings into today's mega-scale agribusiness and staff factories with dirt-cheap labor. However, once a region has enough impoverished unemployed residents to solidly depress labor prices, there's little incentive to welcome more (and policy turns towards xenophobic exclusion). There are few places in the world today where the ruling class is thinking "yay, displaced climate refugees, that'll boost business!".
According to the most recent SST anomaly map found here, much of the Gulf Stream is anomalously warmer than expected.
I've decided that trying to engage in a discussion with the climate change deniers is like wrestling a pig... you get muddy and the pig enjoys it.
Go Bacon!
Seriously,
weather = super hot = evidence of global warming
weather = freezing cold = evidence of global warming
weather = no snow = evidence of global warming
weather = record snow = evidence of global warming
Global Warming Skeptic exclaims "weather not correlating to global warming" = Global Warming Advocate "weather isn't an indicator of climate change" Weather hot, no snow, etc. And suddenly, Global Warming Advocates use weather as an indication of global warming. Which is it?
Global Warming Advocacy argues ALL changes in weather point to, and are explained by global warming. The only proof we can possibly have against global warming, would be a decade long period in which zero change in average temp, percipitation, ice, or what not occurred. (And frankly, I'd laugh my butt off if that actually happened and we went through 10 years with zero climate change - I'd also say there'd be proof that there is a God and that he has a warped sense of humor.)
But the reality is, that global warming advocates put forth a non-testable hypothesis that can explain everything. And has zero way of being countered per scientific method. And all of this is over a mere 1/2 to 1 1/2 degree variation in temperature. With questionable records at that. Furthermore, we know it was much warmer 150,000 years ago when much of the arctic ice was gone
Just some comments per Wikipedia
"NASA, found that the “rate of warming in the Arctic over the last 20 years is eight times the rate of warming over the last 100 years"
[Okay, a 120 years geologically speaking is a blink in the record.]
"In September 2012, sea ice reached its smallest size ever."
[Really, history records it as having disappeared completely a number of times. Do we mean smallest in modern history? Cause scientific evidence has shown the ice cap has had significant melts several times over the last 2.8 millions years (which is still a short time span geologically speaking)]
So, accepting the scientific consensus not only because it is consensus, but because it actually makes sense now makes one a liberal/marxist. Well, well, if you want to be taken seriously, you should upgrade your arguments. That goes for tmosley as well, who has been spewing his water vapor bullcrap for years here, in spite of being pointed to actual data, papers and every kind of source which disprove his talking point - which is, in the end, that because of water CO2 doesn't matter - still keeps on repeating the old tired lies. Don't put yourself in the place of Galileo, your intellectual dishonesty is bad enough without it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Who said anything about proving anything?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm a geologist. Yes, looking on that kind of timescale (or vastly longer) gives you a useful perspective. On the big scale of things, is life on Earth going to end because of anthropogenic climate change? No. It's seen much worse. Is the expected change going to be worse in magnitude or rate than any other climate event in Earth history? Heck, no. Or even as long as humans have been around? Again, no. Humans grew up as a species through multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. We're adapted to them, at least during the times we mostly lived in caves. The waxing and waning of continental ice sheets and the realization that (for example) the place I'm at used to be under a couple of km of ice 20000 years ago kind of puts things in perspective.
Meanwhile, on regular human scales rather than the scale that geologists usually consider, the scale of change expected over the next century is rather frighteningly fast, and it's going to affect temperature, precipitation, all sorts of things. Human societies and agriculture are a lot more fragile than life as a whole is, or humanity as a species is, so saying "It's not so bad when looking at the long view" isn't really much of a consolation. We haven't driven through a significant climate change during industrial times. Human history has shown that these kind of relatively mild changes will likely provoke mass migrations, famine, and often wars over limited resources as the local conditions change for the better or worse. Maybe industrialized society will make us a bit more robust to it, but it's still going to be stressful. You can't solve problems easily if you're (for example) turning parts of the midwest USA back into increasingly arid sand dunes, or drowning significant coastal areas. It can be done, but it's expensive and there are practical limits where it doesn't pay off even if it is technically possible.
So, yeah, do get a longer perspective, but keep in mind that 100k years is freaking long compared to the duration (so far) of modern human society. Even the transition from full-blown glacial maximum to the interglacial we are in now still took several thousand years to complete.
The analogy I've often used is going down a ski slope. Sure, long-term it's a gentle slope going downhill that is quite manageable. But that doesn't mean you can ignore the smaller-scale ski jump or the trees that are right in front of you. You have to pay attention to both. And if you can't deal with the short-term stuff, the longer-term stuff is kind of irrelevant. We'll deal with long-term glacial-interglacial cyclicity eventually, if we make it through the next couple of centuries as an industrial society without killing most of each other off. Otherwise, maybe it's back to subsistence in caves for a small fraction of us that survive. We do know that works long-term. Industrialized society is still early in the game.
Sea water (liquid) absorbs a lot more sunlight than sea ice. How in the world would that lead to cooler temperatures?
At least.
1,000,000,000 years/25,000 years per civilization rebuild = 40,000 trials
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The Sahara desert was a green and lush place just a few thousand years ago: they still have the skeletons of HIPPOS and other beasts to prove it. How much water does a HIPPO need guys? Quite a bit. NASA says it was green "10,000" years ago but I always felt it was more like -- go ahead and laugh -- 4,000 years ago. Areas around Iraq had cities that were surrounded by water, Venice-style. Israel was brimming with BEARS and lions and wolves. Takes a lot of vegetation to support a BEAR. The middle east use to have plenty of forests and trees. The world is filled with examples of gigantism in previous ages. Basically, the world is dying a slow death -- and it all began before a single factory existed. The scientists that insisted that the world was climatically constant for hundreds of thousands of years have basically set everybody up for a big surprise when they begin to realize things are really changing. Now they want to shut down the economies of developed nations to hand manufacturing over to the biggest polluters on the earth.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/industries/182/index.html
You lie.
And you think Detroit is a *positive* model for demographic shifts *without suffering*? The city's transition from a global model of prosperity to the butt of jokes about crime, unemployment, and poverty seems to indicate that it wasn't so easy for a big chunk of the residents to just pack up and move to more prosperous areas as the auto industry deflated. And the people who could move away mostly found other homes within the same country, with a common language and no major internal barriers to freedom of movement. Now consider needing to relocate city populations across a militarized national border, to a country with a different language and culture which views you as an unwanted parasite.
Both are accurate, but describe different things. Global warming describes when the average global temperature increases. Climate change describes changes in local climates.
There has always been hot and cold weather, strong and weak winds, and dry and wet weather, before and after we started consuming so much oil. I echo those above me, I would really like to see a falsifiable statement somewhere in the theory.
How the heck are cities evidence of rapid population movement?
Look at most New World Cities. Except for a few that started prior to Columbus (like Mexico City and Quito), they're all less than five centuries old. In addition, most of the growth of these cities has happened in the last century. So we have massive movement of people recently in the sort of time frames necessary for any sort of catastrophic climate change.
Oft-quoted Princeton scientist and climate-change advocate Michael Oppenheimer speaks of a 65% margin of error in their temperature predictions.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/30/botched-environmental-forecasts/
If you are ignorant of something, that is not our responsibility to correct. Your use of the word "our" implies that you are part of a group. I believe based on your statement that is the Global Warming group. So your group makes a claim of Global Warming. So yes it is your responsibly defend your claims and explain your methodology used to come to your conclusions. I never made a claim I have nothing to expain, you made a claim so you do.
You spelled proof wrong consistently.
But at least he's more consistent than the AWG guys!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Google 'the rest of the f*cking US' to learn that it's filled with right-wing xenophobic nutters like you, who swallow Fox News conspiracy theories about "illegals" voting, despite decades of extremely close scrutiny by anti-immigrant groups never turning up more than a tiny handful (out of billions of votes over decades) of actual cases (while *legal* voters are being disenfranchised by the millions based on such fears). Yes, plenty of places like maintaining a substantial immigrant population to provide a cheap labor force, but no, they aren't hoping *all of Mexico* will flood across the border and set up shanty-towns when the cross-border food supply collapses.
So, were you asleep in history class, or do they just not teach real history these days?
You do realize that the colonization of the New World "empty frontier" required the largest mass-genocides in history, as European immigrants arrived to claim resources from the tens of millions of prior inhabitants? This is a perfect example of mass population movement resulting in *absolutely horrific* costs to human life (yes, folks not on "your side" count as human too) due to conflict over resources with prior inhabitants of newly-favorable land.
Yep, I am better off by simply not replying to bullshit. Go peddle your crap to the wattsuphiscrap echochamber.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Wow, thats about as much intellectual drivel as I would expect out of a political prisoner fresh out of labour-camp.
I see you fit the profile quite nicely. Let's take a look.
Climate Change is an acknowledgment that the Earth has many interconnected systems that can be aversely or even positively affected by changes to the environment.
The word I was criticizing was "accuracy". This bullshit isn't accurate. Anthropogenic global warming is accurate. It describes the key characteristics of the phenomena, namely, that it is man-caused and that it is a global warming.
Also a tacit acknowledgement that once it occurs its nearly impossible to reverse. It just so happens that it also nullifies any unfortunate and misguided pseudo-intellectualism vaulted or supported by the "Global Warming" meme of the 80s.
That's an awful lot of pointless verbiage for a supposedly "tacit" acknowledgement. No, there is no such acknowledgement. "Climate change" simply means a change in climate. All the rest of your claim is completely unfounded and not implied by the label.
the best you can do is question the motives of "scientists" to prove your point
But of course. There are trillions of dollars riding on convincing the public that AGW is dire enough that we need to spend a lot of money. That's many times what you'd need to completely buy the field of climatology.
You do realize that the colonization of the New World "empty frontier" required the largest mass-genocides in history
No, I don't "realize" this. Neither do you. It's just another entertaining myth.
Sure, most land at some point was taken from someone else. But that has nothing to do with enabling mass migration. Now, in the developed world we'd rent or sell land to newcomers rather than get into a big unpleasant fight. In the undeveloped world, sure there's a good chance that they'd get into a big fight, but that sort of thing will happen anyway whether there is AGW related catastrophe or not.
And... WTF? Completely regardless if there really is an oft-speculated worldwide climate scientist conspiracy falsifying data for great injustice, are you seriously suggesting that continental drift - which tops at about 10 cm annually - could possibly explain any kind of changes in climate in the recorded history, which, at about 6000 years long, means they've moved a whopping 600 meters in all that time?!?
Seriously, WTF?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
When China's grain belt moves north across the border into Siberia
That one is particularly easy since they'll grow food then in both China and Siberia. More food for everyone. The "grain belt" is not some narrow strip of territory. In North America, they grow grain from Canada all the way into northern Mexico. From this map, I see wheat grown from the equator to 60 degrees in lattitude.
China will be able to switch to different varieties, if the climate really does change. Those varieties are already growing now in warmer places, both dryer and wetter. Also the warmer it gets, the more places that will be able to grow two crops of wheat a year.
It's not going to involve nukes, but basic changing of crops to things that are better adapted to the current state of climate.
What part of the genocide of previous "New World" inhabitants is an "entertaining myth"? Do you think there was no-one here before, or they all just joined up with the jolly Pilgrims for a never-ending Thanksgiving feast? Did the terms "conquistador," "pox blanket," "trail of tears," or "reservation" never receive mention in your history class?
"We'd rent or sell land to newcomers" who arrive with truckloads of cash to rent/buy our land. You're utterly deluded if you think anyone "in the developed world" is going to say "aww, your life savings is $1.28 in devalued third-world currency. I'll be nice and sell your family a fertile acre for $0.50." When the vast majority of displaced immigrants, who sure as heck don't have the cash to buy land (or even a month's rent), arrive at "developed" borders, they'll be greeted by razor-wire and machine guns. Likewise, the fighting that "will happen anyway" in the "undeveloped world" definitely gets worse the more people there are with no subsistence to lose by swelling the ranks of warlord's armies.
are you seriously suggesting that continental drift - which tops at about 10 cm annually - could possibly explain any kind of changes in climate in the recorded history, which, at about 6000 years long
Supposedly the closing of the Bering Strait is responsible for the current ice age state of Earth over the past few million years.
What part of the genocide of previous "New World" inhabitants is an "entertaining myth"?
The part where it was, as you put it, "required".
The Gulf stream model was not very much revised. As far as I remember models about Global Warming (at least 20 years back), it was always stated that Global Warming will cause the Gulfstream to weaken or to change course, which in turn means Europe (especially West and North Europe) becoming colder in winter and getting on par with regions on the same geographical latitude in North America and North Asia.
habitable regions haven't shifted anywhere..
the habitable region extends from the tip of northern continents to the tip of the southern continents - just like a hundred years ago. the difference is that now we don't have famines in some of the less hospitable areas.
actually for the past century or so we've been having problems with people moving for various stupid reasons to less habitable regions(middle east etc). those areas didn't have good water supplies to begin with and have been strip farmed for all eternity when they weren't being salted by nasty neighbours on purpose.
in geopolitics as always we'll cross that road once we get there, but for example if the entire northern europe just moved to india we would be just a blip in the overall population over there(this story is about how we're having a cold spring here.. and it's not remarkably cold really). I wouldn't mind too much if we moved entire Finland into Amazon - at least we'd get off from the fucking winters(which have been about as crappy for the past century and further...). we'd save a lot on food too - farming in Finland is now pretty much a completely subsidized operation in other words farming here is like throwing money into the well - literally.
what's remarkable globally about the past half-century - and even the whole century - is how good we have gotten at not fighting massive wars and fending off famine(percentually). it's been a long while since USA had it's war with mexico over lebensraum. so why do you see signs of the opposite? we live in the same places as we did after the last ice age, from Finland to Australia. how the fuck did people live around here 10 000 years ago? not well I can tell you! point being that there's no such concept as a habitable region when it comes to humans as long as we're talking about living on earth, the reasons for immigration have been 100% sociological and 0% about how habitable a region or another is - we're not mere animals in that sense.
so somehow I have hard time believing in another wave of mongol invasions. for practical reasons which make it obvious for even pretty dimwitted that living like an invasion horde is pretty impractical - there's not even any adventure left in invading far away lands from which your cousin sent you a postcard while he was working there as a janitor.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The historical population movement that occurred did "require" this (in the important sense that what happened, happened). Perhaps in an alternate history, everyone would have been nice to one another and just gotten along without bloody conflict --- in which case it would have been a different form of mass migration, which didn't "require" genocide. Since I see little historical evidence for common "everyone's nice to one another" mass migrations into otherwise inhabited areas, or signs that present societies are any less viciously violent towards masses of impoverished newcomers wanting to "nicely share" their resources, I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that climate-induced migrations won't display the unprecedented triumph of new-found human unity and neighborly love over fear and greed.
the one thing that has been a true fact all around is that the Earth IS getting warmer. Yeah, they might have predicted half a degree and got a full degree, which is a 50% error, but that doesn't change the fact that it's STILL WARMER. :P.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The system most certainly is self regulating. So is my living room. If I light my sofa on fire, my air conditioning will kick in. I don't think it'll do much to prevent my house from burning to the ground though.
The historical population movement that occurred did "require" this (in the important sense that what happened, happened).
That's not a definition of "require".
Since I see little historical evidence for common "everyone's nice to one another" mass migrations into otherwise inhabited areas
The huge migrations into the New World are an excellent counterexample. The US, Brazil, Argentina, and a number of other countries had vast, peaceful migrations over a period of centuries.
The online merriam-webster isn't exactly the "final word" on vocabulary usage. However, their "def'n 3" ("compel") fits pretty well. The combination of factors in the historical migration --- including European theories of divinely-granted dominion over "sub-human savages," martial superiority, and the natives' unwillingness to politely cede their hunting, agricultural, and cultural sites to European newcomers --- compelled the historical outcome of mass-genocide so the immigrants could get what they wanted. If the historical parties involved had been substantially different (e.g. more averse to calculated slaughter, or more willing to give away everything you have to pushy strangers), then perhaps genocide would not have been compelled/required --- but that's not what happened.
And again, what "peaceful" migrations into pre-inhabited New World areas are you talking about? They were only "peaceful" if you mean "successful for the victors, and who gives a damn about the indigenous populations who were easily crushed." Areas like Argentina were only "peacefully" populated to the extent that they were only very sparsely inhabited before, with no large opposing populations to generate large bloodshed. To the extent that the inhabited world is a lot more crowded place now than it was then, modern-day migrations are not likely to go as smoothly.
Heck, the who idea of a "grain belt" is a pre-genetic-engineering idea.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The online merriam-webster isn't exactly the "final word" on vocabulary usage. However, their "def'n 3" ("compel") fits pretty well.
No, it doesn't. Hence, my point of providing the link.
And again, what "peaceful" migrations into pre-inhabited New World areas are you talking about?
For example, immigration into the US from about 1780 through to the present day, in particular, the migration of people to New York City, Chicago, LA, and other urban areas of the US.
Here in NW Europe, we're being told we're kept warm in the winter by the "warm waters of the Gulf Stream". Unfortunately, we don't literally bathe in those waters. Heat is transported by SW winds that blow across them, picking up moisture which is then rained out over us and releasing latent heat.
This unseasonably weather is nothing to do with the Gulf stream weakening, it's simply the winds are blowing in the opposite direction (from the cold, dry land). Why they are prolonged is to do with the jet stream position's much further to the south. The mid-latitude jet's a product of the atmosphere's thermal gradient (and some orographically introduced wobbles) and its odd, prolonged position could quite conceivably be to do with Arctic sea ice loss.
Here's some content:
Sometimes you actually should listen to the people who dedicated their lives to science. These people spend years learning their field, they are rigorously tested in their field, and most of them graduated as doctors in their field. So forgive me for actually listening to what they have to say as opposed to some schmuck on Slashdot who thinks they know better because they read the weather report last week.
You're making a joke out of the entire scientific method, and fuck you for doing it.
OK, let's look at immigration into the US from 1780 on.
For the first major chunk of your post-1780 period, immigration largely fueled continued Westward expansion --- with the associated continued internment and extermination of natives, squeezed into ever less hospitable reservations with endless promises of "this is the last time we'll break the treaty and make you move elsewhere".
Initial and later immigration waves were also welcomed to provide disposable labor for the mills and mines, under horrific conditions (which certainly count as violence against humanity). As with potential climate refugees, refugees arriving for a short, miserable life of hard labor might have been a bit better off than starving in various famines back home --- but they arrived to exploitation and contempt, rather than welcome as fellow human brothers and sisters (hardly a model for a nice way to treat people forced from their homes by our Hummers).
As the population stabilized to fill Capital's need for labor, the immigration influx was cut off. The Immigration Act of 1924 made sure that "undesirable" Eastern Europeans (including Jews fleeing shortly before and during the rise of fascism) would be under strict quotas. While nationality quotas were officially eliminated in 1965, the free flow of anyone-who-wants-to-come immigration remains severely curtailed through the present day. Entry through official or unofficial channels is difficult, expensive, and/or dangerous. Immigration policies set a steady, controlled rate of influx to serve the needs of corporate masters (whether tomato-pickers or high-tech H1-B workers), rather than to fulfill the desires of everyone who would rather be here.
So, does America provide a model for how to relocate huge swathes of refugees? Not at all --- we're already letting in only a small trickle of applicants, and will gun down people at the border for circumventing the quota. Past cases of more liberal immigration policy depended on historical specifics that no longer exist: land to grab from natives, or a deep shortage of the unemployed for bottom-rung manual labor. We sure won't be taking in whole populations from African countries, and nor will any of the other developed countries (if anyone was willing, they'd have immigrants pouring in already), beyond the usual trickle of just enough to maintain a cheap labor pool.
A plausible mechanism (though not necessarily a correct one - I am not a climate scientist) is: less sea ice -> more air exposed to water -> higher relative humidity -> heavier snowfall as moist air moves ashore -> more snowpack -> less sunlight absorbed on land.
So, does America provide a model for how to relocate huge swathes of refugees?
Of course it does. But you have to actually understand the history to a modest degree rather than just ridiculously caricature it. Tens of millions of people came to the New World and found a home without violence.
The Immigration Act of 1924
Hence, my cutoff date of the 1920s.
Brilliant!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So, over ~400,000 years of records, the most drastic climate changes were ~2C/ka.
Compare to the IPCC numbers of +1.1-2.9C over the 21st century, in the *best* low-emissions case (and considerably higher for the emissions trajectories we currently seem to be on). That's ~10x faster than the *fastest* changes in the "always swift" Vostok record. And those past dramatic climate changes correlate with pretty serious ecological upheavals; while "life" in general finds a way to go on, the picture isn't so rosy for particular species, populations, and ecosystems. If you happen to have a particular concern for Homo sapiens species populations (and, by extension, the complex ecosystems that support them), you might get pretty worried about 10x more abrupt ecological upheavals than the worst the planet has recently seen.
And yes, though atmospheric temperatures are cited/measured in many circumstances, climate scientists aren't so absolutely f*cking stupid that they ignore that the earth has an ocean. Climate models indeed include that ~90% of the excess global warming heat is being absorbed into the oceans, which lag the atmosphere somewhat in temperature because of their higher thermal mass but are on their way warming up too (with some potentially highly disruptive nonlinear changes from disintegration of the polar ice cap and re-routing of major currents). No, climate predictions don't have the air rising by 28C before the oceans rise 0.1C, which would only be possible in the completely unphysical ridiculous case where the solar heat pumped in gets 100% absorbed by the atmosphere before touching the oceans, instead of (as expected) being 90% absorbed in the (dark colored) oceans instead of the (mostly transparent) atmosphere, then being trapped from radiating back from the ocean to deep space by greenhouse gases. I don't see why you bring up ocean temperatures in this manner, unless you are intentionally trying to confuse and spread FUD with insinuations from misleading half-truths.
"Inadvertent climate modification" was the original name and one that has some real meaning to it. It describes human activities that change climate unintentionally. It's quite straightforward and descriptive like any scientific term should be. "Climate change" OTOH has no descriptive power aside from describing changes in climate. Human sources are only one possibility. It's also worth noting that your cited article uses "global warming" in the very title. So global warming has been kicking around for a long time as well.
But most people who study so-called "climate change" actually study human-caused global warming. So why the use of an inappropriate, undescriptive term?
That's where the propaganda aspect comes in. There are some ridiculous fallacies being passed off as argument, particularly the "extreme weather" thing which blames all extreme weather on global warming even though nobody has a clue whether extreme weather gets changed at all. It's classic observer bias where you blame whatever happens on the fad environmental danger of the decade.
But by kicking around this vague label, you can incorporate any weird weather in as a "change" in climate due to human activity. Soothsayers and chicken entrails readers couldn't do any better. So how about we actually use honest language and honest debate, rather than just skipping forward to the "spend the money" stage?
Your characterization of "without violence" is the whopping ridiculous caricature here. Though much of the violence occurred in waves somewhat preceding the immigrant settlers, immigrants were encourage by, e.g., the Homestead Act of 1869 to expand/settle into land "vacated" starting from the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and continuing during enclosure of land by settlers. Note that the earlier part of the settlement waves (correlated with Westward expansion) required specific historical happenstance --- the temporary availability of large tracts of arable land --- which we don't have lying around to hand out free to immigrants any more.
The later immigrant waves (late 19th - early 20th c.) relied on a different form of violence, but violence nonetheless: immigrants were welcomed to be shunted into the worst extremes of unregulated Capitalist labor --- short, miserable lives in deadly factory and mine conditions. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse was rampant. Dissent and worker organization was brutally suppressed, by private police forces like the Pinkertons. As before, this immigrant wave no longer provides a model for current refugee relocation: the immigrants were only "welcomed" because the industrialists needed a big disposable labor pool in this country. In today's globalized economy, industrialists are happy leaving laborers in whatever poorer-off country they started in; with neocolonial arrangements, you no longer need to move laborers to your own country of residence to exploit them.
Massive dislocated refugee groups need a country that will accept them in order to help them. History only shows countries accepting immigrants to help themselves; and, currently, no one is particularly running short on labor material (hence high unemployment across the globe). In a better world, governments would be controlled by people more willing to help their fellow humans. In the world we have, it's best to avoid dislocating people in the first place, because they won't be given anywhere to go. The problem is not that *theoretically* large populations of humans can't be peacefully relocated, but that the conditions under which such peaceful relocation could theoretically occur (including charitable and self-sacrificing nations with vast resources) exist virtually nowhere on earth.
I brought up ocean temperatures because they are relevant. Not only do the oceans outweigh the atmosphere 280x, but they have a mutual energy exchange interface of 361 million square kilometres, and an easy energy interchange method in evaporation also. We are discussing air temperatures to a fraction of a degree as if it was an issue of merit when it is not.
/yeah, that was me. Apparently I can't restrain myself.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Reading your post I sense you might have anger issues. Would you take a referral to a qualified therapist?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And those past dramatic climate changes correlate with pretty serious ecological upheavals; while "life" in general finds a way to go on, the picture isn't so rosy for particular species, populations, and ecosystems. If you happen to have a particular concern for Homo sapiens species populations (and, by extension, the complex ecosystems that support them), you might get pretty worried about 10x more abrupt ecological upheavals than the worst the planet has recently seen.
You don't mind if I quote you, do you? Let's settle a couple of things right off: crops don't grow on glaciers. That's a pretty well established fact.
We have seven billion people, and if they must starve to support your AGW theory, they're likely to get a little pissy about that.
Some of these people have guns. A few have nuclear weapons. That's likely to get iffy
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There's a reason most scientists use the more accurate term climate change.
And not "Weather change"!
Weather != Climate. Some mention of Weather extremes inevitably gets linked to Climate extremes. Some comment that ammounts to "It's colder today than and by next week it will be an ice age!"
There is huge difference between Climate and Weather.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
You like throwing around "big" numbers about the oceans as though (a) they are not warming at a similarly unprecedentedly fast rate (albeit somewhat behind the atmosphere), and (b) as though air temperatures (of a couple degrees over the coming century, not just a "fraction of a degree," though measuring those fractions is important to seeing the larger change) don't matter on their own.
Hint: even though the deep ocean stays about the same temperature, we up at the surface experience these things called "seasons" where weather patterns vary significantly due to changes in air and shallow-surface temperature, with the corresponding shifts in air current patterns, amount of moisture retained and released, etc. Messing with these variables impacts all the parts of the biosphere not deep under the ocean: including those systems that supply the bulk of food and drinking water to humans.
I may need a therapist, but I'm doubtful of your ability to judge professional qualifications. I might end up with an Oil/Coal lobbyist posing as a shrink.
And from where, in that quote, do you leap to the conclusion that I want people to grow crops on glaciers and starve?
"The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries."
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
it's in my head
This is just too closed minded to reply to. Don't think zombie-mods are in any way a validation of your fallacious and contradicting opinion. In the context Climate Change is more accurate description.
>Anthropogenic global warming is accurate
False.
I'm sure a climate scientist from Europe or a desert nation would love you to explain how the statement is true. I won't even bother to argue with you further the implied context of "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" which exists in the minds of those whom fund actual sciences (the taxpayer).
So please explain for the rest of us....
> There are trillions of dollars riding on convincing the public that AGW is dire enough that we need to spend a lot of money.
Oh and I wouldn't mind if you source this please.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
If that were a significant effect, then it would be self stabilizing. That doesn't appear to be happening.
The problem with climate change is theres a debate happening and theres research happening, and they are not happening in the same place.
Within the scientific community, there isnt really a debate about it anymore. We actually know climate change is happening, and its largely driven by human CO2 output. That much isn't controversial [i]amongst scientists[/i].
But there IS a debate amongst the political class who appear to have developed a raging case of the Dunning Kruger effect, and latched onto a tiny minority of scientific outsiders and cranks, and become bedazzled by the graphs and arguments from "experts" who are actually no such thing. (Seriously, when your local newspaper starts quoting a high school graduate journalist with a pretend lord title [monckton,, he's not actually a real lord, or a scientist or mathematician] you know the newspaper has no idea how to identify an expert in the field).
In my view the problem is that the public simply dont know how to identify actual experts on the topic. The newspapers are bombarding people with false expertise and as a result a very sizeable minority of lay people believe that there is still an open question about the topic, and thats proven itself very harmful to the politics of actually acting on the problem.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Climate-change denial are certainly not ready to welcome a billion refugees; they are though ready to kill a billion "aliens" trying to "invade" their country.
If you can't find the logic in right-wing selfishness, it's usually because you didn't apply enough of it.
the climate change discussion has devolved to the levels where certain monied interests want it to be...
kspacey join amnesty international www.amnesty.org
how many posters - on both 'sides' of this so-called 'debate', who are lending vociferous insights about The Scientific Method and climate 'science', and denigrating the intelligence of certain folks, interestingly many coming from Anonymous Cowards - actually have PhDs in organic chemistry, atmospheric chemistry or physics, or even physical geography... apart from I Kan Read's link (and i admit I may have missed something), I don't recall seeing one piece of 'support' from a peer-reviewed science journal... whereas the original article derives rom a source which cites folks with such degrees, most of the comments echo 'arguments' heard from one form of propaganda or another (take your pick)... which clearly demonstrates propaganda works
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