Darker Arctic Boosting Global Warming

The Grim Reefer sends this news from an Associated Press report: "The Arctic isn't nearly as bright and white as it used to be because of more ice melting in the ocean, and that's turning out to be a global problem, a new study says. With more dark, open water in the summer, less of the sun's heat is reflected back into space. So the entire Earth is absorbing more heat than expected, according to a study (abstract) published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That extra absorbed energy is so big that it measures about one-quarter of the entire heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide, said the study's lead author, Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. The Arctic grew 8 per cent darker between 1979 and 2011, Eisenman found, measuring how much sunlight is reflected back into space." The same decrease in ice contributes to the weather circumstances that led to extremely low temperatures across parts of the United States this winter.

Comments

Cloud formation albedo

[prisoner-of-enigma]

And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth ultimately doesn't care; it's older than we are and will outlive us.

We care because civilization as we know it is really shockingly dependent on climatic patterns like rainfall and seasonal temperature and parameters like sea level being what they are.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[TapeCutter]

There is not a scap of evidence for what you claim in your post, unless of course you belive in the fanciful IRIS theory.Yes it's been hotter and colder in the distant past and those extremes usually coincided with mass-extinctions, 98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic. It's not the planet that's in trouble it's our civilization, we can do our worst and life will enthusiastically bounce back after we have gone, just like it has with every other mass extiction.

Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself

It did that by putting carbon into the ground as coal, peat and limestone, humans are doing their best to put it back in the atmosphere by burning the coal and peat, and releaseing the CO2 from limestone to turn it into concrete. The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[ackthpt]

And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.

From what I've seen we're past the tipping point and warming will continue. Further compounding things is Unforeseen Consequences, such as changes in chemistry of the upper water column, resulting in changes in sea life. Change global climates has usually been gradual, this is happening so rapidly only species of flora and fauna which can adapt will survive.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[prisoner-of-enigma]

We care because civilization as we know it is really shockingly dependent on climatic patterns like rainfall and seasonal temperature and parameters like sea level being what they are.

All of these factors (rainfall, temp, sea levels) have changed all on their own without human input over the course of this planet's history. They will continue to change, with or without our input. To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Oligonicella]

This cuts both ways. Your rights to insist someone stop something must have fact, not fear behind them. The current state of our understanding of the climate doesn't support the claims being made. The fact that a number of those claims have fallen is further evidence that it needs further study not immediate action.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth doesn't care because it's not sentient' it doesn't feel or notice anything. It's a ball floating in space with an interesting surface.

But it will fuck us up as the planet orbits on.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[prisoner-of-enigma]

98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic.

The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.

The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.

And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Ol Olsoc]

This cuts both ways. Your rights to insist someone stop something must have fact, not fear behind them. The current state of our understanding of the climate doesn't support the claims being made. The fact that a number of those claims have fallen is further evidence that it needs further study not immediate action.

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

The problem is that while on the surface, your statement sounds quite reasonable, there are a lot of people who simply will not accept any evidence at all, either because of personal incredulity, or being paid for their opinion. In the grand process of Baksheesh, It will take more than the gradual uptick in temperature to change any of that.

Plus of course, with the tendency for people to determine that climate is what they see out their window, it's cold today, so climate change isn't happening. Which is to say, don't worry, Deniers have won.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Kaenneth]

It' more like applying the brakes after going off the cliff.

If it's not going to do any good, we would be better served bracing for the impact, instead of trying to prevent it.

Get ready for mass migrations, seawalls, and such, it's already too late anyway.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[OutOnARock]

Oblig George Carlin:

the planet isn't going anywhere.........we are....

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[prisoner-of-enigma]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.

First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.

Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.

Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?

These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.

Re: Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

who the f made up *THAT* rule? See how this works folks? they just slipped another rule in there.

we are running out of well regulated anarkissed.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[haruchai]

Clouds are troublesome because they have both cooling & warming effects, depending on their type, reflectivity ( which varies even though we see them mostly as "white") and altitude.

But the overall effect of clouds is hypothesized to make the Earth slightly warmer - but the margin of error is pretty wide.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[haruchai]

If the climate isgoing to change because of our input, we should figure it how much and in what direction. It does appear that we are causing more rapid change than ever before short of a major cataclysm.

"Evolve at this particular point in history"? How wide is that historical point? 1000 years, 20,000 years? More? Less?

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[haruchai]

Many of the things that could be done and should have been begun decades ago will make life better for pretty much everyone.

Better housing standards - the roots of the Passivhaus dates back to the '70s and there are even older ideas that would have saved a lot of money if they'd been followed.

Solar power / heating - Carter's initiative from 1980, if it had been pursued would have changed the face of America and the breakthroughs we're waiting for may have come a decade or more ago.
But his "gasohol" idea would probably have fallen flat.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Gavagai80]

You're contradicting yourself. The planet has been through many extremes of warming and cooling, sometimes to the point where the arctic would feel tropical and sometimes near-global glaciation. So, obviously the planet is not very good at preventing extremes by itself.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[mcrbids]

Oh sure, eventually the Earth probably *would* balance it out, and may one day again become a giant snowball for a few million years - That's really not the concern.

The issue is what a change in climate would mean for your kids, grandkids, and related offspring? Just because a small plague wiped out about a third of all humans didn't actually wipe out all of humanity doesn't mean it wasn't a big f---ing deal.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[PortHaven]

Really, cause it's like we moved 1 degree, when the temperature range of the earth's history is like 30-40 degrees.

Just saying...

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[PortHaven]

Probably not very much...Sure, we could lose some land over the next several thousand years. But heck, we'd gain the entire continent of Antarctica.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Will.Woodhull]

To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.

So you are a proponent of stricter emission controls, carbon caps, and forced adoption of green technologies even if they are more expensive? Being as how those are the surest ways of adapting rapidly enough to preserve the greatest amount of your freedom of choice as can be preserved over the next 30 to 50 years? Because that's the direction your train of logic is going toward.

It's a liberty issue. I'd rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices.

The "liberty issue" here is making sure that those 0ne-Percenters who are either too short-sighted or too wrapped up in their own fantasies don't trample your freedom to make wrong choices.

Re: Cloud formation albedo

[operagost]

No. All proposed initiatives have been backed by increased governance, resulting in the destruction of the middle class and most human rights.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Will.Woodhull]

There is a strong argument that can be made that we are a major cataclysm.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[kwbauer]

When starting with "Given that humans are a major cataclysm..." it is easy to make that argument.

Start with the opposite statement (and belief) and it becomes much more difficult.

Personally, I believe that every person who believes humans a "virus" or "plague" or what have you, should stop being hypocritical and remove themselves so they are no longer a plague upon the earth.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Nemyst]

I'm gonna have to ask what claims have fallen and what claims aren't already more than supported by the evidence. The specifics of the models get tweaked continuously, that's what happens with an empirical science, but the climate science community is overwhelmingly in agreement on the situation and the course of action to take.

Of course, that's assuming you actually want to listen to people who have experience in the field.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Will.Woodhull]

About increased cloud formation and the planet's albedo...

What we know is that clouds, in the form of water droplets or ice, increases the albedo more than anything else that is likely to happen. But water vapor is a very strong greenhouse gas. Nobody is talking about the interplay of these factors, because nobody knows how to model them: how much of the increase in evaporation stays water vapor, what layers of the atmosphere will be affected. Another complication is that the atmosphere is expanding as it warms (and we have direct evidence of that: LEO satellites put up 40 years ago have de-orbited from unanticipated increases in drag). How a larger atmospheric envelope will affect the troposphere where our climate and weather live is also unknown.

But expect to see bigger storms as you get older. They maybe warm and wet with lots of flooding, or cold with lots of snow drifts, but they are definitely going to be bigger and stronger than any that anyone today has ever seen. Which in turn suggests that the sea coasts will have it easy compared to the raging river floods that will destroy infrastructure in Colorado, Kansas, the Dakotas, the Missouri and Mississippi drainages, etc.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[phantomfive]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

I think it's actually the "at least show me that there's a cliff, and where it is so I can decide if I should stop or turn" theory.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[riverat1]

Clouds have both positive and negative effects on global warming. They can reflect sunlight reducing insolation but they can also block IR radiation holding heat in. There's a lot of uncertainty but the overall effect of clouds appears to be slightly positive. In the Arctic due to the high incidence angle of the sunlight they may actually reflect it back to the surface and during the winter when it's dark 24/7 clouds will definitely hold heat in. I wouldn't count on clouds to save us from global warming.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

In my part of the world that dependence exists solely due to a newfound (last 50 years) unwillingness to develop new water storage sites. This lack of civilization is in fact what is causing the problem, which is not that it rains too little, but that too much of what does rain runs off into the oceans unused.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[riverat1]

The fact that a number of those claims have fallen is further evidence that it needs further study not immediate action.

What claims have fallen? When I hear specific claims from the contrarian side they're mostly 3rd hand misinterpretations of what was actually said and sometimes totally made up. If you want to know what the scientists really think read the IPCC reports paying close attention to the time scales and uncertainty they attach to the claims. We can argue about those claims but not the straw men I commonly hear.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[haruchai]

About 60% of that rise has been in only the past 30 years.

That history you're referring to had very few temp rises as quick as what we're seeing now although there were some.

One of the most important factors, which is not currently in play and won't be for thousands of years is an orbital forcing or Milankovitch cycle.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[haruchai]

A somewhat benign infection can suppress a more virulent one. But how to know which is which?

I'm backing the ones that are trying to run through our resources more slowly.

Re: Cloud formation albedo

[haruchai]

What are you talking about?

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[rtb61]

More importantly with clouds, they do not just represent a change of moisture within then atmosphere but a change of ability due to temperature change of that atmosphere to hold that moisture without condensation occurring and clouds forming. So the fallacy is that with higher temperatures there will be more clouds, false, the truth is with higher temperatures more water will be held within the atmosphere, whether clouds form or do not form will be subject to local weather conditions and geography, nothing to do with planetary warming.

In fact the only conditions where you can claim more clouds will categorically be formed upon a planetary basis is under catastrophic cooling, cause by mass coincidental tectonic affects or astronomical affects like impact or dust from passing bodies. We of course can still achieve it with nuclear winter, we are not free of that calamity yet.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Dr. Spork]

I think this sort of view is naive and wildly optimistic. You picture the Earth as some sort of self-correcting organism that will extinguish us if we mess it up. It won't. You comically underestimate our resilience. No matter what the Earth does, we humans will figure out how to cling to life, and when push comes to shove, we don't give a fuck what we destroy. We will strip every cubic centimeter of soil, water, fish and fowl when it suits us, and still, we will find a way to survive on the barren rock. We can drop several thousand nuclear bombs, make the planet an ashen hell, and bounce back far faster than all the other creatures that our bombs destroyed. (Studies were done in the cold war...) The reason why our environment seems powerful relative to us is because we're relatively comfortable now, so we don't feel a strong urge/need to get up and destroy it. You have never seen a humanity whose survival is threatened. Let's hope nobody ever will, because that would be an ugly thing. You think we'll shuffle off and Earth will forget about us in time. In reality, I suspect that of all the species that are visible with the naked eye, we will be among the last to go extinct. If the Earth is a steaming radioactive death ball, we will build cities under the sea. (A much friendlier place to live than Mars.) When the seas boil off, we will move into temperature-regulated caverns underground. Think about it this way: Of all the millions of terrestrial species, which has the highest chance of actually being able to have a self-sustaining colony on Mars? Yeah, the answer is humans. That's how fucking tough we are. We can survive even on an otherwise lifeless rock. Anyone who thinks that a difference of 6C poses an existential danger to humanity is silly. Even a rise of 20C would sill leave Earth by far the most human-habitable place in the solar system. Our existence is not in danger. It's everything that lives alongside humanity that's facing the real danger.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[jovius]

But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history.

Yes that's true, but never in the planet's history has one species dominated in such sudden and strong force.

Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.

Precisely, because the changes have been relatively slow and there has been plenty of time for the feedbacks to occur. At the moment humanity is acting like a once per 100 000 years super volcano in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Every year. On top of that we are sustaining a ridiculously big cattle population, which wouldn't be able to sustain itself while cutting trees down (and thus one negative feedback loop).

If an alien species started to pour greenhouse gases to atmosphere, inserts billion strong alien cattle population and cuts rain forests down etc I guess you would be fucking furious. So why aren't you now?

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen we're past the tipping point and warming will continue.

Sweet. I won't try any more. Stay here.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

And herein lies the entire problem with the discussion. You assume that everyone agrees that we are going over the edge of a cliff.
If the assumption is that we are traveling on a narrow slippery road then braking can very well make us fall over the edge. If we are traveling on a highway with a large truck tailgating us then braking us just retarded.
Unless you assume that the climate is stable without human interaction stopping carbon emissions can both create and destroy climate stability. There is no "safe" option where we can just step back and say "if we do it this way nothing bad will happen", we have to actually know what will happen to be safe.

Plus of course, with the tendency for people to determine that climate is what they see out their window, it's cold today, so climate change isn't happening. Which is to say, don't worry, Deniers have won.

That has nothing to do with looking out of the window, it is just basic crowd psychology.
When Slashdot changed to beta there was a large reaction of people voicing their opinion about it. After a while the people who didn't feel as strongly about it got more tired of the complaints about beta than beta itself and started writing posts supportive posts about it. I've seen the same on reddit, when a group of people starts bandwagoning something it eventually causes a counter-reaction in the opposite direction.
The thing that caused deniers to win was the exaggerations from the alarmists. This isn't a new concept. This is what happens when you "cry wolf" as the old tale describes. Once you get to that point you have to let the wolf do actual damage before people will trust you again.
Keeping a level head, not exaggerating the models and only take the actions that are necessary rather than those that follows a political agenda is what will make people trust you when you cry wolf the next time.

Re: Cloud formation albedo

[sg_oneill]

Yes it has. But that don't mean we'll survive it. A 4c warming over a thousand years triggered the permafrost melt (for a total of 10c warming) which damn near sterilized the planet.

Regardless, those massive shifts are not contemporary and not compatible with our survival. In fact we're not even sure 4c is particularly compatible with our survival if history has any say in it.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Jane Q. Public]

"There is not a scap of evidence for what you claim in your post, unless of course you belive in the fanciful IRIS theory."

Well, there's rather more than a shred. In fact prior to the greenhouse gas bandwagon, it was generally recognized that clouds make the earth cooler.

Since I'm posting here on Slashdot, I'd also like to mention that unfortunately for the theory OP mentions, Arctic sea ice is at perfectly normal levels right now and Antarctic sea ice is at a new record for this time of year.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Jane Q. Public]

And before anybody tries to call bullshit:

HERE is the Arctic ice extent and thickness from a week ago, and

HERE is information about the current Antarctic sea ice.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[rs79]

"The specifics of the models get tweaked continuously"

And after 35 years of tweaking the, um, *cough* error bars are um, well...

75% error between the 2007 and 2012 IPCC reports.

You sure they're tweaking the right way?

Look the numbers up yourself.

"When your hypothesis disagrees with nature,it's wrong" - Feynman.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[rs79]

All of them. Which ones have held up? Show me one.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man. I've got mod points and I can't tell if I agree with you or if you're just trolling....I think I'll sleep on it and come back in the morning. Care to elaborate?

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[KeensMustard]

The current state of our understanding of the climate doesn't support the claims being made. The fact that a number of those claims have fallen is further evidence that it needs further study not immediate action.

Which claims are you referring to? Do you mean the claims of the so-called contrarians (e.g. Judith Curry) that climate sensitivity to CO2 is 0 C/(W/m2)? Or Roy Spencer's claim of a cloud iris effect counteracting a greater sensitivity?

If so, you are right - observations have disproven these claims.

If not, we will need to know the specifics of the claims to judge the veracity of your own claim.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Barsteward]

" The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives." - just think how costly it would be if nothing is done, crops washed away in flooded regions, crops burnt in drought areas for example. This "I'm currently al-right so sod the rest of you as i'm keeping my head in the sand until its too late" attitude is all wrong.

Start the mitigating measures yesterday, so what if it costs, fossil fuels cost as well. I'd rather the measures taken even if it all turns out to be wrong because the planet will be much more pleasant to live in afterwards so we all win anyway.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Barsteward]

So what is your benchmark to "seeing the cliff"? When its too late its almost impossible to turn around?

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the problem lies in the fact that you don't have the scientific knowledge to make a decision, but you still insist to decide. The problem is you're blind, but you trust only your own eyes and so you want to see the cliff by yourself.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[stjobe]

First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.

It's a 99.something% consensus, which is as solid as any consensus among a large population is ever going to get. Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed climate articles from 1991-2012, only 24 reject global warming. (source)

Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.

All the evidence we have for previous natural variations show them to be slow (or extremely rapid, as in catastrophically rapid - impact events or super-volcano eruptions); the changes we're seeing today is way too rapid to conform to any known natural cycle. The difference, of course, is that we're around and actively adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. In short, not a "natural variation".

Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?

We don't know; that's the problem. We don't have any crystal balls, so we don't know what the most effective strategy is, or exactly how severe the effects will be. What we do know is that large climate changes historically have been responsible for some of the most drastic extinction events we know of. And it's pretty easy to speculate about what a massive dying-off of e.g. marine life would do to coastal communities - as is the effect on the same communities of rising sea levels.

These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.

No, these are not minor issues, and the ramifications of the decisions are huge. In the end though, doing nothing is probably the worst decision; there is a tipping point somewhere (the edge of the cliff, so to speak) which going past that there is no turning back. More research and discussion is always welcome, but that should not and cannot stop us from starting to act - if nothing else to slow down the rate at which we're approaching that tipping point.

The analogy with the earth-centric cosmic models and burning of a few heretics is really stretching it when we're talking about the possibility of mass extinctions of not only humans but a lot of other species as well.

The earth will survive, and life itself will survive. The question is, will we? And even if we do, in what kind of society? One that has planned for such an eventuality, or one that has had to just react to it. One is liveable, the other is a post-apocalypse society; I know which one I'd rather (have my kids) live in.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

I would like to invite you to read the IPPC FAQ (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-faqs.pdf) that contains the scientific consensus explained in layment terms (more or less) and answers all the typical denier questions: what are the factors that influence the climate, is the climate changing, can the changes be attributed to natural variations, is human activity responsible for the changes and indeed also: are the current models reliable.

If that doesn't convince you I suppose you could go through the actual AR4 report yourself and study the supporting materials (written by 209 scientists with contributions of 600 experts and reviewed by 50 reviewers).

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[towermac]

"98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic."

You state that like it's a fact, but it's somewhere between theory and conjecture; it's an assumption based on evidence we just learned how to interpret, that is millions of years old. Based on what we've got to date, yes; it's the best theory going.

But is it enough to tax the fuck out of me, or create artificial carbon credit markets so the government or the rich profit even more off our emissions? I think not. What about the billions of brown people that were just about to get their chance at the energy rich civilization that we take for granted? Not in a million years would we have the moral authority to hold them back like that.

Yes, everything comes down to politics. We could have all the clean electricity we want, and then some, with modern nuclear. That's the only other source of energy stored in the Earth's crust*. I'm talking modern nuclear that can't melt down, with the worst waste being pipes and crap, that are hot for about 300 years, tops.

You're thinking long term? What about the tons of super radioactive waste we have now? It's not going under Yucca Mountain, and no doubt that's for the best. There's only one thing to be done with it: Burn it up in a nuclear reactor. We need a handful of those, and whole bunch of the little safe ones.

Point being, if you love the planet, and hate carbon, then you support (modern) nuclear. If instead, you're just turning your attention to limiting what others can do, then it's likely that you're being tricked and seduced by the socialists. If you're thinking long term, there's no future in socialism either.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[stridebird]

Awesome post, chapeau sir. I fear there is much correctness in your predictions, there is a feral and ferocious future awaiting us potentially, or is it almost certainly? But I don't know if there will be an energy solution available to power this strip mining and these underwater cities. Possibly, but also very possibly humans will end up back burning firewood and staring up at the night sky in impotent maudlin despair.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

To play devils advocate; Humans aren't a virus or plague... we're just acting like one in modern times.

I hate the argument "humans are a plague" as it's much like saying "all humans are monkeys"... if the audience isn't ready to hear it, it is actually quite an insulting thing to say and so by saying it, you distance the audience from the view point. Valid point or not, you've lost before you've begun.

So it's a stupid thing and careless thing to said by stupid and careless people.

That said, it does hold some water. and by laying out my thinking I'm hoping to not be stupid and careless.

We don't want to be acting like a virus, but it is true that our economic system doesn't account for the envrionment as it's built upon systems put in place before we understood our place in the environment....

What do I mean?

Well, do you think we would be polluting as much as we are if there was an economic cost imposed on those profiting from the polution?

Short answer, no. If people had to pay, in a way that was highly visible to them, they wouldn't pollute. Take fines for leaving chewing gum on the street as an example.

This is because there's a direct and understandable conneciton between the "cell" (the human) and the "host" (the environment). It's important to understand this connection. Harming the host can harm the cell and so the cell must act in the best interests of the host. If the cell isn't acting in the best interests of the host, then it's acting like a virus. Viruses don't care about the host as they only need to survive until jumping on to a new healthy host. Unfortunately, in this case there's only one host. We only have one planet accessible to us.

That's why it's an encouraging sugn to see large coporations taking the environment into consideration. It's lead to improved water supplies, cleaner air, longer and happier lives... The bad behaviour has been corrected when it's been noticed and THAT is what makes us human. We Adapt!

But if we choose to ignore our behaviour, if we choose to think "we're not harming anything" then we are like a virus.

I hope that helps.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're already over the edge too. Now we're trying to figure out if that was a cliff behind us, or a steep hillside, and what's still ahead of us. We can still choose how deep this ravine is, how steep the slope, and what the bottom looks like.

Re: Cloud formation albedo

[coinreturn]

What are you talking about?

He hasn't a clue.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[timeOday]

The earth is 22,500 times as old as the human race. (200,000 vs 4,500,000,000 years). And for most of the 200,000 years in which people have existed, they (we) lived only in Africa.

So, almost all of what has happened to the earth's climate over geological time is irrelevant to human existence.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes you need to explain things at a person's level.

The Grandparent poster has the right to get his face bashed in. He's free to come to my house and exercise it.

As soon as he complains, then I'll exercise my right to bash his face in anyway.

That's what it's like to deal with someone who disregards the impact on others (sorry for the pun) their choices make on the environment. They don't give a damn about others, they just need to exercise their right to bash in faces.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history.

Yes that's true, but never in the planet's history has one species dominated in such sudden and strong force.

Well, species sure, but I think it's fair to consider a single phylum as having the same effect. Cyanobacteria were pretty dominant until this happened. Sure, we wouldn't be here without that, but I think that just reinforces your point about the catostrophic effect a single species (or phylum) can have on the environment.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[phantomfive]

Hansen makes a good attempt at it in this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126

Give that to his credit, he wasn't afraid to make clear predictions. So that's the kind of thing you're looking for when defining a cliff. Unfortunately the paper itself isn't particularly strong.......

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm... excuse me, but... while we have the highest chance of living on Mars of all species - mainly because we can get there and they can't - we aren't exactly able to have a self-sustaining colony on Mars in the immediate future, otherwise we would have a self-sustainable experiment going on the Moon (which is much closer) already - no humans yet, but a few plants, a few bugs, some animals that only PETA cares about... If you hope that human engineers will all of a sudden draw blood from a rock just because everybody is dying, remember that these engineers will be the first to die, because while they thrive in controlled environments (society, economy), they have no idea what to do when killing the first living thing that crosses your path will make the difference between death and survival. The one percenters will need slaves (like people who don't read this site), rather than engineers, who "take forever to make such simple things as rockets".

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not hypocritical because not all humans are narcissists. Taking analogies literally is very insightful indeed.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[bluefoxlucid]

No, you're wrong.

He said: "The climate will change. We must adapt."

You said: "Then we must stop changing the climate."

The problem with your statement is he included all the natural factors: The climate will eventually change outside of human influence, and humans will either need to adapt climate control technology or new behavioral patterns. You built in the assumption that humans are causing climate change and can stop climate change by simply stopping the human influence.

The problem is climate is changing; the earth isn't simply getting hotter. We're seeing areas that were cold become warm, areas which were warm becoming cold, and some areas having greater (hotter summers and colder winters) or lesser (cooler summers and hotter winters) extremes. As well, the seasons are moving about: some plants need 100 days or 50 days or such of freeze, and either a warm winter or a winter that's now balls-cold 40 days long instead of balls-cold 115 days long will cause them to die or stop bearing fruit.

With changes like this, humans don't simply find scarcity; rather they find change. A certain type of keystone crop can be grown more abundantly now, but humanity starves: the 280,000 acres of rice we were growing fail, and it previously would have been commercially unprofitable to take advantage of the new 350,000 acres of suitable land due to it being A) a little harder (more expensive to farm); and B) overproduction beyond the 280,000 acres worth of rice in the market, thus impossible to sell, especially at the inflated price from the cost of farming this. Likewise, maybe suddenly certain fruits and vegetables become more difficult to farm, but others become readily available--but we then need to take on the tremendous commercial undertaking of getting people to accept a new diet of strange and wonderful foods.

A large part of the problem is actually economic. That isn't to say that businesses are dumb and could just fix this by being not dumb; economic problems are real, and taking advantage of abundant resources while they're abundant is a good thing. To be sure, it's the best way to handle flow resources like solar energy: there's as much solar energy as there is, and it's going to go away whether you use it or not. Stock resources... there's something to be said about scarcity planning for things that will become scarce.

The difference between a stock resource and a flow resource is the time required for generation--energy can be produced in time, so anything that can be generated with energy also is a time problem (i.e. gasoline and oil are infinite resources: use solar energy to produce gasoline from atmospheric carbon and water vapor). If we're consuming the resource faster than the flow AND the resource can be directly accumulated (i.e. like oil, not like sunlight), it's a stock resource. If the resource cannot be directly accumulated or we're consuming it slower than we can accumulate it, it's a flow resource. Water for example is considered a flow resource, even though you can stock it: there is an infinite amount of water coming out of a given spring, but you only get so many liters per day. Water stored in barrels or in a basin (pond) is a stock resource.

Taking huge advantage of massive stock resources is economically wealth-generating, but you need a long term conservation plan. For example, oil. Back then, we didn't have the knowledge to do this; but if we had built massive solar generators using oil power and used them to generate oil from atmosphere, we'd be leveraging an OBSCENE amount of oil, an unconscionable amount really. But then we'd have these massive solar processing plants generating new oil, which becomes a flow resource; and we could store the oil in barrels and generate a stock. We can do that now, as well, which is quite likely a good alternative or supplement to electric cars--that is, energy-dense fuel cells or diesel generators as secondary power sources, fed from solar diesel.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[meta-monkey]

That's what kills me about "the climate debate." Um, it's already happened. Enough CO2 to radically change the climate is already in the atmosphere. The oceans are already acidifying. The polar ice is already melted. The deniers can "debate" all they want, but they're still going to freeze in the winter from the disrupted jet stream and bake in the summer.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[bluefoxlucid]

It's a 99.something% consensus, which is as solid as any consensus among a large population is ever going to get. Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed climate articles from 1991-2012, only 24 reject global warming. (source [desmogblog.com])

My god will you people stop this stupid shit? Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed climate articles from 1991-2012, only about 4000 concluded support for climate change. The rest claimed no strong evidence either way.

Look! Look at America! Out of 300 MILLION people, only like a few thousand complain about police state! You know what that means? By your metric it means 99.something% of America actively embraces the validity of a police state and has strong desire to implement one!

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Ol Olsoc]

That's what kills me about "the climate debate." Um, it's already happened. Enough CO2 to radically change the climate is already in the atmosphere. The oceans are already acidifying. The polar ice is already melted. The deniers can "debate" all they want, but they're still going to freeze in the winter from the disrupted jet stream and bake in the summer.

I don't quite buy into the idea that this one cold (east coast) out of many is caused by AGW. What used to transpire roughly every 4 years has not happened for 25 years. This isn't even an anomaly, it's just a relatively cold winter.

If this cold disproves AGW, then we have to find some explanation for Alaska's oddly warm winter.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree. Denialism doesn't have a time line. What it does have is an almost perverse denial of rational thought. I would hold the deniers in a lot more respect if their tactics didn't resemble those of young earth creationists, lunar landing, and anti - vaccination people.

But I get very little in actual science, mostly just denial and some times personal attack.

When we do get science, it is often suspect, as in Oil industry backed research, that isn't presented up front.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Ol Olsoc]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought.

Oh, Bolshy fucking Yarblockos. That's like saying that saving money for retirement is completely stupid because some people deny it is pointless.

Is fossil fuel going to be around forever? A never ending supply that will just keep up with any and all purposes we wish? We shall not want .

So while the smart people deny, deny, deny, Idiots are out there installing solar power, Just like I saved extensively for retirement, while the smart people knew that inflation or some awful reason made it pointless, I'm busy reducing my need for petrofuel.

In your world, you would quit smoking only after you contracted lung cancer.

If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not.

If I might bring up the retirement saving and lung cancer issue again, it is difficult to save for retirement, and as a former smoker, I can assure you it is difficult to give up smoking

But you touch on a very important truth. Most people are simply incapable of doing something difficult unless they feel it is a matter of their life or death.

The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives.

So sad. And not really true. I drive fuel efficient cars (actually small SUV's) that get good gas mileage. Drive a Jeep Patriot that gets 30 MPG, and in the Summer, a Honda 1100 Shadow that gets 50.

I insulated the bejabbers out of my house, and spend less per year than many people spend per month in heat. I recently switched from Oil to an ultra efficient Gas furnace. So efficient that it doesn't have a normal chimney, but a PCC pipe that exhausts what is left after all but maybe one percent of the burning heat has been extracted.

Insulation value has been paid back a long time ago, and while still doing the math on the oil to gas conversion, it appears that that will pay back in a shockingly short time.

I'm saving money.

I'm also doing some Solar panel work, but not ocnvinced it will save me money yet, because I'm living in woods with huge trees.

If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence.

First you need a disposition to accept evidence. Any one who looks into the matter, and correlates the different field like biology, and physics, denying that evolution occurs is just about impossible. But many people do deny it. Same with vaccines.

There are people, and there are many, who simply won't accept any evidence, and never will. They will just move the goal posts, and invent new reasons fo rtheir beliefs.

They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible.

You cannot have rational debate if one side cannot get past the existence of what is being debated. If a person deys that Golbal warming exists, how would one debate what to do about it? For the denier, the answer to that question is nothing, because GW doesn't exist.

This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.

Congratulations! You win one internet. How about telling us about how many deniers have been burnt at the stake, before you make such ignorant statements?

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Namarrgon]

So... 4,000 articles explicitly or implicitly agreed that AGW was real - and only 24 articles explicitly or implicitly disagreed. Since the rest did not even address the question, they're not relevant here.

That still sounds like a 99.4% agreement to me. 166 out of 167 climatologists (from a sample of 4024 relevant papers) are convinced by the observed data; human-caused global warming is very real.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Namarrgon]

Do please enlighten us; what "plenty of evidence" do you refer to?

The reason the deniers are in such a minority among actual climatologists is because they have failed to provide convincing evidence to back up their claims, whereas there are many, many studies that show clear and unequivocal evidence of warming, and strong correlation with the calculated result from observed anthropogenic emissions. None of the alternative hypotheses have anything like the same correlation, and have been judged to be far less likely than the obvious candidate: human CO2 emissions.

If someone can provide solid and convincing evidence of a natural cause to the observed warming, then they'll be famous, but nobody has come up with any. If all the "skeptics" can do is attempt to cast patchwork doubts while ignoring that the data that has been confirmed and re-confirmed by multiple other observations of independent indicators, then IMHO they're more deserving of the label "zealot", and it's no surprise that most climatologists tuned them out long ago. The real scientists have seen the actual data; they know better.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Will.Woodhull]

No, you're wrong.

He said: "The climate will change. We must adapt."

You said: "Then we must stop changing the climate."

I know very well what I said, and it was not that.

As for the rest of parent post: tl;dr. Not much point in doing otherwise since all that verbiage is built on some internal fantasy of the author. Truly a kind of mental masturbation.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[cavebison]

And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction.

If you knew anything about the topic you're commenting on, you'd know that increased cloud cover *prevents* heat leaving the surface. Increased cloud cover is what helps create a greenhouse effect, increasing temperatures. Hard to believe there are people living in the 21st century who don't know these basic things I was taught in high school. Fucking scary.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[dave420]

Yes, they have changed in the past, and will in the future, due to things outside of human control. However, they are currently changing because of human influence. By your logic it's fine if someone stabs you in the face, as you will die at some point anyway, so nothing is lost. We can reduce the amount by which the climate changes by altering our behaviour, which ensures us a smoother transition from our current climactic situation to whatever the distant-future holds. Or we can just play by your rules, scream "fuck it - dinosaurs were hotter!", and mess up the atmosphere even more, hoping somehow it won't end up severely changing the way humanity lives. You're not very sensible.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[dave420]

1. The planet is getting warmer. There is consensus.

2. The warming is mainly due to human action - the pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the various feedback cycles that's causing. The CO2 is measurable, as are its effects.

3. Lessening one's impact on the planet is not as expensive as you seem to think it is. Most of it is things like not buying so much stuff, not farming massive amounts of livestock (e.g. Harris Ranch), and living responsibly with what we have. Yes, improving industry to not pollute so much would also benefit, but that's just sound economics, as a business can't sell in a market devoid of human beings.

They have been debated in depth, and the action they call for is not drastic. It appears, sadly, that you have fallen for the line created by those industrialists who seek to "keep on keepin' on" doing what they want to the world. Comparing the stance of AGW to those of "Earth-centricists" or murderous religious zealots is pathetic, quite frankly, as the latter two didn't have thousands of peer-reviewed papers backing up their positions, and were not arguing from a position of scientific understanding. Disagree all you want, but please remember it just shows your ignorance, and doesn't speak ill of the science or the scientists.

Re: Cloud formation albedo

[dave420]

"All"? Amazing. That one word has destroyed your argument, as clearly that can't be the case. Calm down.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Stuarticus]

Given the consensus of experts on the subject the onus would rather seem to be to show the examples.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[bluefoxlucid]

Concede: the sample with a positive/negative stance have fallen as you say.

Reject: Out of 14000 papers, 99.7% climatologists agree Global Warming is man-made. This is the often-cited statistic: some 14000 papers, 99.7% agree on global warming.

My problem is that some 30% or 37% or so have agreed that Global Warming is real and man made; a fraction have rejected this outright; there's even one or two that say that global warming isn't a real thing; but then there's this huge majority that say there's not enough data to draw strong conclusions, that it appears that man-made climate change is probably a minor effect but could be negligible to non-existent or possibly bigger than they can conclude from the data. They're not saying that global warming and climate change aren't real, and they're not even saying it's not man-made; they're just saying that they've looked at the data and the data simply does not support a strong conclusion.

That's important: 31 scientists say the sky is falling and it's falling because we drink Coca-Cola. 68 scientists look up and say, "It looks like the clouds may be a little lower today... but clouds float up and down all the time. The measurements we've taken have shown some interesting deviations, and the manufacture and shipment of Coca-Cola seems to have some interesting potential to influence this, as well as some hit-and-miss correlation that we can't seem to pin down a model for. It seems possible, but uncertain at best, potentially unlikely, that Coca-Cola has a major effect on this lowering of cloud cover; we see other factors that at the moment look much more important. We can't rule out that the full effect of Coca-Cola on the sky falling is not yet understood, however--there is good evidence that we don't quite fully grasp it yet, since our models don't fucking work." You cannot then claim that science has "Concluded" that Coca-Cola is causing the sky to fall.

What's happened here is a minority opinion has been repeated loudly so many times that people think it's a scientific consensus; and the majority opinion is that the minority isn't necessarily wrong, just that they may be jumping the gun a little, as the evidence is non-conclusive. A lot of really smart people don't think this is a real, solid, scientific conclusion. In fact, most of them don't. They don't think it's quackery or wrong; they just don't have the scientific data to support this and reject other hypothesis, and so a lot of other hypothesis seem just as likely if not more likely, and so the answer is "We're not quite sure what's causing this, but we're more certain that this is a thing that's happening."

I Science Thee unto Oblivion.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[bluefoxlucid]

So you are a proponent of stricter emission controls, carbon caps, and forced adoption of green technologies even if they are more expensive? Being as how those are the surest ways of adapting rapidly enough to preserve the greatest amount of your freedom of choice as can be preserved over the next 30 to 50 years?

Emissions control to do what? Carbon caps would accomplish what, precisely? Would these adapt us to the inevitable change of climate, or simply cease the change?

You see, the OP said that we must adapt to changes that are coming. Changes that will make it hard to grow food here, but easy to grow food there. And you said... well then let's stop doing [list of shit that we presume causes these changes].

So, no, you know not what you say. You are the Fool of the Court.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[meta-monkey]

We had similar cold weather in the south last year. Basically what's happened is two years ago massive, massive amounts of polar ice broke off and melted. This means that there is now water farther north in the atlantic and pacific than there has been. The warm air over this warm water creates a high pressure system. The jet stream is the band of cold air that circles the north pole. Its path has been disrupted by these high pressure systems, so now it squeezes between the high pressure system and the pole and then shoots down into the states. It happened last year, it's happened this year, it'll happen next year. At the same time, Australia was baking in record heat. July in the northern hemisphere will also be hot as fuck.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Will.Woodhull]

Stricter emission controls and carbon caps are adaptive responses to climate change. These begin the changes in society that are necessary for society to adapt. Without the increased societal awareness brought about by emission controls, we would not have an electric car industry, investments in wind farms and solar power, research into neighborhood sized fission power plants, etc. Taken together, these are the beginnings of society level adaptations to the changing environment.

Repeated failure to understand that society is beginning an adaptive response to global warming cannot be explained by any kind of logic or reason. It appears to be an entirely emotional form of denial. Fortunately it is limited to a few individuals who will either change or get increasingly marginalized as the world changes around them. I understand that there are a few flat earth crackpots still around; the remaining climate change denialists will soon be keeping them company.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[bluefoxlucid]

Your "adaptive response to global warming" is "stop global warming".

The assertion was that without human input--without humans living on this planet, at all--the climate would change. With humans living on this planet, with carbon caps, with emission controls, and whathaveyou, the climate will change. Carbon caps are not adaptation to this; when it is impossible to grow wheat in our wheat field, we will need to have adapted to this. Not by carbon caps, but by being able to grow in the new climate.

You are ignoring the argument, and bypassing logic and reasoning by pretending the question you've been posed is a different question. It's like if someone says: "There are wild wolves in the forest which occasionally eat people, so we must adapt to prevent wolves from attacking our villages." Your response is: "We have domesticated dogs. More people just need to own dogs, then the dogs won't attack us." Yes but what about the WOLVES that are still in the FOREST?

That's climate change. You can have your electric cars and emissions controls and fancy renewable energy, but the climate will still change. Will those things help you survive in a radically different global climate? Answer: No.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Namarrgon]

there's this huge majority that say there's not enough data to draw strong conclusions

Where did you get that idea? In fact, where did you get the figure of 4000 articles endorsing AGW? The original link (Powell's study) makes no mention of that.

Perhaps you're confusing it with Cook et al 2013, which does say that 4,014 of 11,944 papers "expressed no position". Reading the actual study however shows that 0.7% of papers examined rejected AGW and a tiny 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.

Let me repeat: of 11,944 published papers, 66.4% expressed no position on AGW - they concerned themselves only with a specific area of climate science - and no conclusions can be drawn from them. Only 1% felt the evidence was inconclusive OR counter to AGW. Thus, of the papers that did take a position, including that no conclusion was possible yet, 97% supported AGW.

If you've read "analyses" that claim otherwise, they are being deliberately misleading.

Plus of course the half-dozen other studies over the last decade confirm and verify these results.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Ol Olsoc]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

And herein lies the entire problem with the discussion. You assume that everyone agrees that we are going over the edge of a cliff.

Have you actually read my posts? Because I explicitly state many times that consensus is impossible.

For any situation such as this, there are people who will not ever accept that AGW exists. Many of these people deny that such a thing as a greenhouse gas exists.

This is a position not at all unlike creationism, whose adherents refuse to accpt anything other than some number they deduced frmo the KJV Bible. This even though adhering to their creationist view means that all of modern biology is false, all of modern physics is false.

Greenhouse warming effect is a well established physical fact. I'd love to see some evidence on what is mitigating the warming, instead of people demanding that everyone agree there could be a problem.

Interestingly, the OP of this thread hits on a possibility for mitigation or cancellation, as in cloud cover and reflecting heat away from teh atmosphere.

But as usual, it quickly descends into nonsense about scientists and their filthy lucre - as if an 80K a year scientist trying to get a million dollar grant is somehow the monetary equivalent of say, the Koch Brothers. Or pointing out a punctuation error, or misleading graphs that stretch

Now as for the cloud layer mitigation factor. One of the effects of oceanic warming is increased evaporation. This should lead to more cloud formation, which should lead to more sunlight being reflected away from the earth.

It's an interesting idea, and would go a long way toward self regulation of temperatures.

Some things that come to mind, are whether the clouds are high enough to reflect that heat away effectively (they might or might not be).

Another matter is that water vapor is an even better heat trap than the greenhouse gases.

But who knows? Seems like a good topic for an experiment. And it is certainly more productive than the attack dog mode used by people who understand politics, but are clueless about science.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Ol Olsoc]

No, the problem lies in the fact that you don't have the scientific knowledge to make a decision, but you still insist to decide. The problem is you're blind, but you trust only your own eyes and so you want to see the cliff by yourself.

No doubt the view on the way down will be awesome.

I liken the attitude of many of the deniers as simliar to people that smoke.

"I'm 20, I feel great, how can smoking be bad for me?"

I'm 30, "You know, there is still some question about smoking's effects

I'm 50, gosh, I kind of get winded easily - but it's so hard to quit".

I'm 60 - Honey, the doctor had some bad news for me. I should probably get my affairs in order.

I'm 61 "cough, cough - guess I shoulda quit smoking when I was 20. I love all........you.....g g g ....aaaaaaaaaa"

WIthout the silly smoking reference, the point is many people just cannot see much of the future beyond their nose, nor take guidance from their past.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[bluefoxlucid]

That is different than what I've read. I've read that there were 11944 or whatever (who needs to track the full number?) papers on global warming and a bunch of them didn't find any evidence leading to a firm conclusion. In other words, the jury's out.

Somebody is bullshitting me, and when I find out who I'm going to write "GLOBAL WARMING" on a crowbar and hit them with it.

Re:Cloud formation albedo

[Namarrgon]

You could just read the Cook 2013 paper for yourself. Even just the abstract - it's pretty clear about that.

As we've always said

[0123456]

When the planet starts to cool down, the Global Warmers would blame that on Global Warming, too.

Re:As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

You put extra energy in a non lineal system and results go bananas, we already knew that.

Re:As we've always said

[the eric conspiracy]

The PLANET is getting warmer. The eastern half of the United States experienced a cold winter.

Re:As we've always said

[drfred79]

I wish that after their climate models were disproved time and time again they would try and find another model. That's science. But this has never been about science or the climate. Its about personal gain and subversive people's ideal society that takes away other people's rights to add to their own.

Re:As we've always said

[PopeRatzo]

When the planet starts to cool down, the Global Warmers would blame that on Global Warming, too.

Exactly!

I can't have a fever because my feet are cold!

Re: As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

Winter? This year? In Europe? Nope. Mild fall extending into an early spring it is. Here in Germany there was no snow and not even frost yet. 12 degrees C today.

Re:As we've always said

[bunratty]

Our models can been getting better and more accurate. But even the very basic model Arrhenius used was fairly accurate. He estimated a climate sensitivity of 4 to 5 degrees C, and our current estimate is 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C. What about these models do you think has been "disproved time and again"? They've only been confirmed, because the warming Arrhenius predicted has now been observed.

Re:As we've always said

[allcoolnameswheretak]

very cold throughout europe

Er... no. Seems like the U.S. got all our dose of winter this year. I don't think we (central Europe) had more than a couple of days below freezing point all winter. Quite often temperatures reaching above 10C.

Re:As we've always said

[Ol Olsoc]

I wish that after their climate models were disproved time and time again they would try and find another model. That's science. But this has never been about science or the climate. Its about personal gain and subversive people's ideal society that takes away other people's rights to add to their own.

You are going to have to provide the citations and references for that.

Tell us about that incredible personal gain of these scientists? We need some numbers. You as the arbiter of the truth, need to do more than just tantalize us with your knowledge.

Re:As we've always said

[ArtForz]

Errr, where in Europe?
Certainly not Germany, so far it was one of the warmest winters on record.

Re:As we've always said

[budgenator]

Actually the warming has been stalled for about 17 years

Re:As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

Incredible. I'm looking at that graph right now. Amazing how often the warming "stalls". It "stalled" at 0.0C between 1970 and 1977. It "stalled" at 0.1C between 1978 and 1986, then at 0.3C between 1987 and 1997, then at 0.4C between 1998 and 2003, and most recently, at 0.5C between 2004 and 2013.

I wonder how hot the next "stall" will be?

Re:As we've always said

[LynnwoodRooster]

What dataset are you using to show the planet is getting warmer? RSS, HADCRUT4/HADCRUT5, GISS, UAH) all show temperature stalled for at least 17 years (actually, a few show a slight negative trend - RSS and UAH show approximately -0.2 deg C per century cooling trend over the last 17 years).

Re:As we've always said

[LynnwoodRooster]

Not a single IPCC5 model matches reality, nor even comes close. The real data disagrees with the models; which do we believe?

Re:As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean all that grant money given out to scientists trying to prove AGW is real isn't personal gain?

Re:As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeating a lie doesn't make it true.
Look at the data yourself instead of regurgitating misinformation.

Re:As we've always said

[bunratty]

You're calling missing by a few tenths of a degree "not even close"? We're experiencing possibly the lowest solar activity in hundreds of years and the temperatures are higher than we've seen in hundreds of years. It seems that something other than the sun is causing warming somehow. Hmmm... I wonder what it could be?

Re:As we've always said

[Ralph Wiggam]

But if you ignore all of the evidence supporting the models as "hippie liberal bullshit", then they're easily disproved.

You just need to use the Right Wing Scientific Method.

Re: As we've always said

[PortHaven]

And the prior year where China, India and Europe had some several hundre year old records broken.

Re:As we've always said

[PortHaven]

Thinkprogress points to a 0.79 degree increase in temperature

"average temperatures in and around the North Atlantic rose or fell by 10C or more in the course of a decade or two—a pattern that lasted for 70,000 years."

http://news.sciencemag.org/ear...

Just saying, that makes um the thinkprogress 0.79 degrees seem like nada.

Re:As we've always said

[LynnwoodRooster]

Please check the link. You'll see the average IPCC model misses measured data by 0.6 deg C; the vast majority of models are off by 0.4 deg C or more. Given that there is so much wailing and gnashing of teeth over a projected 1 deg C change over the next half century, I'd say an error of 0.4 deg C over 17 years is significant.

Now there IS ONE model that actually got the current stall spot-on. Of course, that model doesn't rely upon CO2, and it's not by a climatologist (just a geologist), so many discount it. But considering he nailed the stall - and has a rational, reasonable explanation as well, it is worth considering.

Re:As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I've looked into this I end up seeing a huge el-nino type jump 17 years ago and then a resumption of a larger warming trend... not a stall nor a cooling as you indicate. I don't think the average person would agree with you when they see the data.
I'll keep looking though.

Re:As we've always said

[marsu_k]

Oh yes, looking at the rain outside here in Finland, where it actually has warmer than in Florida last month, I couldn't help but to think how exceptionally cold winter we're having.

Re:As we've always said

[rs79]

'Gaia' scientist James Lovelock: I was 'alarmist' about climate change

"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_...

Re:As we've always said

[rs79]

"Our models can been getting better and more accurate"

75% error between the 2007 IPCC prediction and 2012 IPCC results doesn't really man we're more accurate.

It means a chimp tossing a coin could have got better results.

Have you actually looked at the data? How bout them error bars, hmm?

Re:As we've always said

[rs79]

" temperatures are higher than we've seen in hundreds of years"

False.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

Re: As we've always said

[riverat1]

Ah, you've discovered the variability of weather.

Re:As we've always said

[Barsteward]

agree, in the UK it seems to be the wettest. it looks like its all related to the Gulfstream being moved, hopefully not for good, and that looks like it is down to climate change

Re:As we've always said

[stjobe]

very cold throughout europe

You don't live in Europe, do you?

In Northern Europe it has been one of the mildest winters in 50 years.

Re:As we've always said

[garethjrowlands]

It's not the gulf stream, it's the jet stream. The gulf stream is in the oceans, the jet stream is a wind high in the atmosphere. The gulf stream carries warn waters past the UK, so if it were to move, the UK would experience very cold winters. The jet stream tends to divide weather systems and it makes a difference to the UK whether it's to the north or south of us. Recently, it's been moving less, staying south, leading to more stable weather patterns (the continual storms that have been battering the UK).

In general, you can't put particular weather events down to climate change. In particular, there is currently no conclusive evidence that that anthropogenic global warming was a significant factor in this winter's weather events. It is, however, broadly consistent with climate predictions and there may be evidence in the future, since it's the subject of much active research.

Re:As we've always said

[Ol Olsoc]

That chart would be even more imperessive if measured in hundredths of a degrees. You'd be able to say that the data couldn't be shown on the same chart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Re:As we've always said

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are saying we are out of bounds of what we think the temperature has done over the Holocene? What was the cause of all those temperature excursions throughout the last 10k years? Your CO2 bogeyman? How did we arrive at the Holocene, a very stable temperate time, when previously the temp was much lower with many more extreme temperature excursions? On top of that you think there is some kind of optimum CO2 level? Just wtf is that? 350 ppm cuz 350.org? We are up possibly a fraction of a degree, and you have to torture data to even see that. We are currently going through ANOTHER cycle with open water in the arctic, which will make more snow, which will start a cooling cycle, etc.
Call us when you get the causes of the exact same previous events, not when the IPCC (inter governmental panel) pushes an agenda.
I wonder what it could be to, and i have not settled on CO2, and I don't want cooler temps, and even if it turns out CO2 is the control knob, I don't want you fucking with it.

Re:As we've always said

[david_thornley]

And why are you using 17 years? That's an odd number. Why not 20?

Could it be that you're cherry-picking a couple of unusually warm years to measure from?

Re:As we've always said

[budgenator]

"Because of the pronounced effect of interannual noise on decadal trends, a multi-model ensemble of anthropogenically-forced simulations displays many 10-year periods with little warming. A single decade of observational TLT data is therefore inadequate for identifying a slowly evolving anthropogenic warming signal. Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature."
Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2011JD016263, in press.

B.D. Santer, Carl A. Mears, C. Doutriaux, Peter Martin Caldwell, Peter J. Gleckler, Tom M.L. Wigley, Susan Solomon, Nathan Gillett, Detelina P. Ivanova, Thomas R Karl, John R. Lanzante, Gerald A. Meehl, Peter A. Stott, Karl E Taylor, Peter Thorne, Michael F Wehner, Frank J. Wentz.

So 17 years without warming doesn't support the assumption that past warming due to anthropogenic CO2 will continue into the future toward catastrophic levels; if equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3 C and CO2 levels is 400 ppm, for temps to increase 3 C, we'd have to be at 800 ppm..

Re:As we've always said

[the eric conspiracy]

There are several datasets that show a long term warming trend. 17 years is a clear attempt to cherry pick data as outlined in this Forbes article.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/pe...

Really, you can argue a bit about causation if you want, but at this point in time there is no credible argument about the actual trend in temperature. The idea that the earth is not warming is sheer poppycock.

Re:As we've always said

[Barsteward]

yep, i always mix those 2 up.

Re:As we've always said

[LynnwoodRooster]

There are several datasets that show a long term warming trend.

Can you point me to one of those datasets, that shows warming over the last 17 years?

17 years is a clear attempt to cherry pick data as outlined in this Forbes article.

Nope. It's not cherry picking. Dr. Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore and UEA's CRU climate scientist explicitly stated that you need 17 years to identify a trend. That's a world-respected climatologist who's been unapologetic about his support for the AGW model. Well, we've surpassed his 17 year statement. Can we now identify a trend?

After all, Phil Jones, Richard Lindzen, and Pat Michaels (all noted climatologists from the pro-AGW side of things) have identified the trend starting about 17 years ago. So the trend does exist, and per a respected climatologist, it's plenty long to identify as an independent trend - separate the signal from the noise.

PS: in accordance with standard AGW-supporter techniques, you can only disagree with the 17 year claim if you, in fact, are a PhD climatologist. They are apparently the only ones who can speak authoritatively on issues related to climate. Otherwise you need to have credentialed climatologists who state that the trend does not exist, or that the 17 year period is not suitable for identifying climate trends.

Re:As we've always said

[jwhitener]

Why would you trust the selection of data from a single scientist (who also happens to believe in intelligent design, which indicates to me that this person may have an agenda beyond pure scientific analysis) versus the selection of data from hundreds of scientists who all agree?

If you have a longer range of data, you can see that the climate models and observation are very close. How reliable are climate models?

Further reading about climate models, and the predictions they made and got right: http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/climate-models

Re:As we've always said

[drfred79]

The 4.5 is throwing climate alarmists a bone. If it does rise at all it will be closer to 1.5. And again this is still a revised prediction on an estimate. Compared to real data the models have been completely false.

Re:As we've always said

[LynnwoodRooster]

Great - can you steer me to one of those datasets which shows an increase in temperature over the last 17 or so years? UAH, RSS, HADCRUT4/5, GISS - all show a flat or slight decline. I'm not aware of another dataset which shows otherwise - even though lots of people claim they are out there.

As far as trusting one (or in this case, two) scientists versus all those others - they seem to simply report data (in the case of Dr. Spencer) and draw conclusions from it, rather than just using models and cherry picking data to fit (for example, Mann's famous single tree to create the entire hockey-stick issue - Yamal 6, the Tree of Destiny). And the model by Dr. Easterbrook not only matches the past, but correctly predicted the current stall in temperatures. Of course, it's not dominated/driven by CO2 so that makes it somewhat heretical in today's climate circles, but the fact remains - it actually matches history and correctly predicted the current stall (whereas not a single IPCC-approved model did so).

There is that famous Einstein quote about the number of scientists needed to disprove his theory - just one. Well, we have two here who actually disprove the vast majority of accepted/pushed climate science. The actual data doesn't match any of the predictions made - and the one model that does match the data is driven predominantly by natural oscillations in the oceans. At what point would you decide the current models are wrong?

Re:As we've always said

[jwhitener]

can you steer me to one of those datasets which shows an increase in temperature over the last 17 or so years?

Sure, as long as we can account for some very well known natural cycles and we are not only measuring air temperature.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/no-warming-in-16-years.htm
http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/25/steve-goreham/global-warming-skeptic-says-global-surface-tempera/

If I recall correctly, the RATE of increased warming has diminished to nearly flat due to multiple factors, however, the overall temperature is still going up (if you take Ocean warming into account). The reason the planet is still retaining an increasing amount of energy is attributed to GHG emission.

Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[deathcloset]

Looking on the bright side - thanks to all our wanton climate changing industrial activity and glacial public acceptance of the situation, we are getting our first experiences with terraforming. Admittedly, these experiences are like one's first experiences with learning how to paint - finger painting and messy, but with much larger existential consequences and no actual paint.

Hopefully "soon" we get a good foothold on Mars, and hopefully, and this sounds weird I know, there is NO life on Mars. Because that would give us a nice "sterile planetary lab" on which to experiment as we find ways to control global climates without operating on the only global climate we have available - which we happen to depend on completely and utterly for our survival.

Better to start experimenting on another one as soon as possible, because even when we get a handle on our climate changing activities, nature is standing by with a much larger list of climate changing activities which we will have to confront.

Maybe Venus too - if we can fix that place we can fix anywhere! So Mars would be like our lab and Venus is like our final exam.

And I think we really need to pass this course.

Let it be

[Anonymous Coward]

The earth isn't some fragile little thing, or a static rock like mars. Just let things take their course and we'll see what comes out of it.

Re:Let it be

[MightyMartian]

The Earth isn't, but people are, and a good many are living in fairly marginal areas, and not just in terms of agriculture. Will humanity die out. Most certainly not. But there will be consequences, and they will ultimately be fair more expensive than if we had tried to curb emissions.

Re:Let it be

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait for some mad biologist to design a super bug that kills off plankton. Then watch most life on earth suffocate.
retard.

"Give me a lever and I can move the world." brute force isn't required.

Re:Let it be

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that would give anaerobic life forms a chance to make a comeback.
I'm not too worried.

Re:Let it be

[sexconker]

The Earth isn't, but people are, and a good many are living in fairly marginal areas, and not just in terms of agriculture. Will humanity die out. Most certainly not. But there will be consequences, and they will ultimately be fair more expensive than if we had tried to curb emissions.

Some people might die? I'm with Goldmember. Too bad for yooooouuuuuuu!
Losing a few (billion) people would ultimately be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Re:Let it be

[sexconker]

"Give me a lever and I can move the world." brute force isn't required.

Tell that to the fulcrum and the lever.

Re:Let it be

[phantomfive]

But there will be consequences, and they will ultimately be fair more expensive than if we had tried to curb emissions.

That's an interesting hypothesis. Hopefully someday you will do some research to back it up.

Re:Let it be

[slackware 3.6]

Funny how people like you never take one for the planet and start depopulating yourselves.

Re:Let it be

[Anonymous Coward]

But there will be consequences, and they will ultimately be fair more expensive than if we had tried to curb emissions.

got any evidence for that? if not, i'd still like to at least hear your own beliefs for why that would be the case.

Re:Let it be

[sexconker]

Funny how people like you never take one for the planet and start depopulating yourselves.

I'd rather take a billion for the planet than just one. Beyond that, I will die, so I'm guaranteed to "take one".

Re:Let it be

[Namarrgon]

Already been done.

Re:Let it be

[phantomfive]

From your link:

[The Stern Report's] core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest [...] falls apart when one actually reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.

Re:Let it be

[Namarrgon]

Which is an opinion from a single writer with no scientific credentials; not exactly a detailed critique. But if lay opinions are important now, here's some much more influential people that support the Stern Report's conclusions:

* Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK
* Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank
* Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency
* Kirit Parikh, Member, Planning Commission, Government of India
* Adair Turner, Former Director of UK Confederation of British Industry and Economic Advisor to Sustainable Development Commission
* Sir Rod Eddington, Adviser to the UK Government on the long term links between transport and economic growth, and former chief executive of British Airways

Re:Let it be

[phantomfive]

* Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK

Wow, what an endorsement. No wonder you believe the analysis with that kind of genius supporting it.

Re:Let it be

[Namarrgon]

Wow, what an objection. No wonder you believe the denialists with that kind of genius of your own.

Re:Let it be

[phantomfive]

When your argument is based on appeal to authority (seriously, wtf were you thinking making a list of politicians there, like anyone cares what they think), you should expect an ad hominem in response, because it directly calls into question the authority.

Re:Let it be

[Namarrgon]

When your only objection is some out-of-context and unsubstantiated quote about one of the reports from an unqualified writer, ignoring the actual substance completely, I naturally thought that meant you felt random opinions were actually important.

I guess they're only important if they say what you want to hear. Never mind the opinions of the respected economists and CEOs on my list (how many politicians can you count?), or the credentials of the reports' authors, or gee, the actual contents of the reports and all that cited data that backs them up, you go straight to the first contrary quote you can find, regardless of the total lack of substance or believability. Who exactly are you trying to convince here?

Re:Let it be

[phantomfive]

There's a whole section on wikipedia about economist (not politician) criticisms of that report.

Who exactly are you trying to convince here?

No one lol, I'm trying to find how deep your idiocy goes.

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you RTFA?? I'm guessing that this guy is using "fractal statistics" to describe the probability of the atmosphere moving into different states. I don't think that this necessarily implies that "The weather is fractal" or self-similar or whatever. The fractal statement is usually at best an approximation anyway, and at worst completely untrue :)

But don't trust me too much on this. All I know about fractal statistics is that it uses fractal function as it's distribution. Maybe someone else knows more about fractal statistics?

On the other side

[viperidaenz]

How much more light is reflected by the extra snow cover from the polar vortices?

Re:On the other side

[Anonymous Coward]

None.

The snow happens every year.

Re:On the other side

[Raumkraut]

Perhaps about the same amount that isn't being reflected from those areas of the world where snowfall has been at a record low this winter. Like here in the arctic.

Re:On the other side

[Anonymous Coward]

and white roof-tops?

Re:nope

[MightyMartian]

But the Earth has got warmer. It doesn't mean every spot on the globe warms up.

If you're going to criticize a theory, at least have the wit to understand what it says. Otherwise, you just come off looking like an infantile moron.

Global cooling

[hottoh]

Kind of obvious that white reflects more solar energy than do dark colors. So the point of the story is a several year old point, less ice/snow the faster the poles warm in the sun.

Imagine the stories if the opposite were happening, global cooling. The panic.

Re:Global cooling

[Anonymous Coward]

Both would be a panic.

Global warming because entire countries go under water, If enough happens, things like the central US (you know, where most of the food is grown) can go under water.

Global cooling becomes a problem because the entire North America (as far south as Virgina) could get covered in ice, Europe gets covered in ice (at least as far south as Italy/Spain... Not sure how much of China gets hit. That Mongolian desert might hold it back... As for the southern hemisphere... a LOT more ice - possibly as high as South Africa.

There are two "Arctics"

[jamesl]

The Arctic and the Antarctic.

It's a good thing that the amount of ice in the Antarctic is growing.

Antarctic sea ice extent continues to track very high in January, reaching the second-highest monthly extent in the 36-year satellite monitoring record. New monthly extent records were set for each month between August and November, and December was tied for the record (within the limits of the precision).
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicen...

Re:There are two "Arctics"

[hamburger lady]

antarctica is losing an astonishing amount of land ice. this land ice melts and flows into the southern ocean, freshening the upper layer of water, which of course will freeze easier adding to the amount of sea ice.

Re:There are two "Arctics"

[bunratty]

The sea ice extent is the surface area of ice that is floating in the sea. Unfortunately, there is more ice floating in the sea because it's calving off the land. The total volume or mass of ice in the Antarctic is decreasing.

Re:There are two "Arctics"

[hey!]

Indeed we do have two poles, but they have entirely different climate dynamics, due to the fact that the Antarctic has a continent surrounded by water and the Arctic has an ocean surrounded by land.

Re:There are two "Arctics"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are confusing the arctic with Antarctica, Antarctica is not losing land ice at all, it doesn't even get warm enough in the height of summer for the land ice to melt, the only loss it receives is glacier movement that breaks off into the ocean.

Re:There are two "Arctics"

[riverat1]

By measuring changes in gravity the GRACE satellites have documented the loss of land ice in Antarctica, mostly in the West Antarctic ice sheet. The rate has been around 50 Gt/year and appears to be accelerating.

Re:There are two "Arctics"

[rs79]

Check *recent* data.

Yeah, it does. Though sometimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Though sometimes it can take 25,000 years before it returns.

Re:nope

[Chas]

Yet, when a specific locality talks about an unusually warm spot of weather, we have people screaming "CLIMATE CHANGE!"

The problem is, there's too damn much noise at BOTH edges of the issue and it's completely drowning out the center.
There's been WAY too much alarmist bullshit injected into the discussion, and it simply distorts said discussion away from the facts of the matter.

Re:Small problem

[the eric conspiracy]

Arctic ice rebounded somewhat from the all-time record low of 2012.

However It was still the 6th lowest level on record.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The problem is the lack of context in whatever warped source you are reading.

Re:But???

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Damn furners...

... but on a serious note, the fucking Koch brothers are now the puppeteers running our state govt. Help us internets! You're our only hope!

Re:BS junk science

[hamburger lady]

getting cooler or stagnate in warming in recent years due to solar lull and dining

your ideas are intriguing and i would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

At work we took the three-dimensional world limitation of a polar vortex to be resolved in higher dimensional space. In higher, multi-dimensional projective theory, it is possible to create string nodes that describe significant components of simultaneously identically yet different mathematical entities. Within this space it is possible and is not a theoretical impossibility to create a point that is simultaneously a square and also a cube. In our example all three substantially exist as unique entities yet are linked together. This proprietary methodology is capable of intentionally introducing a multi-dimensional patterning so that the nodes of a target binary string simultaneously and/or substantially occupy the space of a Low Kolmogorov Complexity construct. The difference between these occurrences is so small that we will have for all intents and purposes successfully encoded lossley universal compression. The limitation to this Pigeonhole Principle circumvention is that the multi-dimensional space can never be super saturated, and that all of the pigeons can not be simultaneously present at which point our multi-dimensional circumvention of the pigeonhole problem breaks down.

Re:Small problem

[Stephan Schulz]

Small problem with that is this summer had 50% less ice melt in the arctic

Says who? 50% less than what? 2012 was a record minimum year. 2013 has bounced back from that record low (in ice extend, not ice volume), but is still one of the years with the least sea ice extend science measurements began. And all the other similarly low extend years have been after 2005.

Old News

[BlindRobin]

To anyone that has been paying (not even very close) attention this is nothing new.

Re:Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you look at the data, it is not obvious how they got this result.

Re:BS junk science

[robbadler]

Right now the arctic ocean and Hudson Bay are 100% frozen due to this thing we call winter. Summer it is a different story.

Second the world is getting cooler or stagnate in warming in recent years due to solar lull and dining as evident in the lack of solar flares. Last time this happened we had the mini ice age from 1400 - 1850. There is no scientific basis of global warming causing the polar vortex.

<citation needed>

asphalt

[Anonymous Coward]

So the amount of asphalt has an impact also, right?

Re:asphalt

[tompaulco]

So the amount of asphalt has an impact also, right?

Yes, we should clearly use more concrete, it is more reflective than asphalt.

Re:asphalt

[Anonymous Coward]

so alt.pave.the.earth has it wrong? Dang.

Can we still chrome the moon?

Re:asphalt

[budgenator]

There was serious consideration of banning dark colored roof shingles!

Re:But???

[chipschap]

I'll put forth what I always do:

1. It would be nice if global climate change were to be debated not on the basis of politics (etc.) but on a rational, unbiased, scientific basis. If we would stick 100% to the science I think we would come to a sound conclusion in fairly short order. But factor in all the special interests (on all sides) and you get the current mess.

2. Having said that, I also think it is prudent to act as if climate change were real. This is in the Willilam James sense: if it's real, we dare not fail to act. If it isn't real, we still have acted in a manner that supports long-term sustainability (distant paraphrase of James' views about religion).

I am neither a "supporter" or "denier" by the way. Those labels represent the idea that there is room for widely-varying opinion on something that ought to be a matter of science.

Re: But???

[Anonymous Coward]

If the koch brothers were so powerful how come they don't own most of Wichita? I live in Wichita and they are not the all powerful.

Re:Small problem

[hamburger lady]

the year after a record year is usually not a record year. it's called 'regression to the mean'. it's an actual thing, look it up.

Re:BS junk science

[hamburger lady]

north, north central, midwest, and eastern, and southern parts of the U.S.. How much global warming do you see?

i didn't know that the entire globe consisted merely of those portions of the US.

Re:nope

[MightyMartian]

No scientist is going to point to a specific event and go "That's caused by AGW". The theory cannot hope to explain every weather event. But what it can explain are trends.

Re:nope

[PopeRatzo]

Yet, when a specific locality talks about an unusually warm spot of weather, we have people screaming "CLIMATE CHANGE!"

Citation?

Reflect back the heat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution : Install a massive array of mirrors everywhere.

Re:BS junk science

[Billly Gates]

Right now the arctic ocean and Hudson Bay are 100% frozen due to this thing we call winter. Summer it is a different story.

Second the world is getting cooler or stagnate in warming in recent years due to solar lull and dining as evident in the lack of solar flares. Last time this happened we had the mini ice age from 1400 - 1850. There is no scientific basis of global warming causing the polar vortex.

<citation needed>

here

Re: But???

[Anonymous Coward]

Because most of their time is spent outside KS both living and working. I'd guess that if they need something done for their PAC you wouldn't see it. It's not like Warren owns Omaha as his power is national - like your Kochs.

Not Prudent

[SuperKendall]

I also think it is prudent to act as if climate change were real.

Not if it involves spending billions or trillions to simply reduce CO2 emissions, when it could have gone to medical or space research.

Or even in fact to reducing REAL pollution.

There's no sign anything like a runaway greenhouse effect is going to happen. CO2 levels have continued to increase even as global average temperatures have hit a lull. In the simplified glass jar experiments that is not what happens, so pretty obviously the earth is lots more complex than a glass jar with CO2 inside. The current rate of ocean level rise is less than foot over the next 100 years, not exactly a panic situation.

Lets get back to spending money on real issues instead of a bogeyman created to funnel large sums of government money in the hands of special interest groups or creating new things for financial moguls to get rich off of (looking at you carbon credits).

Re:Not Prudent

[bunratty]

Running out of fossil fuels certainly is a real issue. We need to find alternative sources of energy because fossil fuels will run out some day. By developing the technologies now, we can drive the price down so it'll be easy to switch over to these sources long before fossil fuel costs skyrocket. And even dealing with one foot sea level rise will cost trillions, so we're committed to spend the money one way or the other. The issue is not whether or not to deal with climate change and develop alternative energy sources. We need to do both anyway. Let's spend money on the real issues rather than stick our heads in the sand and pretend they don't exist this fiscal quarter.

Re:Not Prudent

[Anonymous Coward]

You do not understand the economy. Until the fuel prices go up because there is an actual shortage [1], alternative fuels can not compete without subsidies.

An actual long term shortage meaning there is no more to be found, not the speculation, not the OPEC cuts to try to raise prices, the switch between winter and summer formulas, some processing plant blow up etc.. Oil is dirt cheap and will be until it gets close to running out. Nothing can compete and be produced in large scale reducing its price until it hits a critical mass. Getting that critical mass is near impossible with oil prices being manipulated to keep them out of the market.

I say use up the oil. Eventually no amount or political power or marketing tricks won't help when we actually run out.

Re:Not Prudent

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the environment that cause adverse changes. Just because CO2 does not directly cause adverse changes the way Chernobyl or Bhopal did does not mean that CO2 is not pollution. Over thousands of years we have built our civilization around the relative stability of the global climate. A rapid increase in temperatures basically undermine all that investment we have made. Many of our largest population and industrial centers are in areas directly threatened by rising sea water. We already know that adapting to the unprecedentedly quick climate change will cost trillions of dollars and countless lives. We should do our best to mitigate that and slow down the increase in the greenhouse effect, giving us more time to adjust our economy and infrastructure to the changes in temperature.

Re:Not Prudent

[SuperKendall]

Running out of fossil fuels certainly is a real issue.

It might be in a few hundred years, at which point I'm pretty sure technology will have a pretty obviously better answer.

If people really cared about not using fossil fuels ten we'd use nuclear power everywhere, since that's not the case its's really hard to care much about it.

Re:Not Prudent

[SuperKendall]

Just because CO2 does not directly cause adverse changes the way Chernobyl or Bhopal did does not mean that CO2 is not pollution.

The fact that the entire plant kingdom relies on CO2 rules it out as pollution for me. The Earth's whole ecosystem is devoted to processing CO2. It's probably the most benign thing we could possibly be emitting.

A rapid increase in temperatures basically undermine all that investment we have made.

As I said it's clear that will not happen. CO2 levels have risen heavily, temperatures is flat. It's clear that the levels of XO2 we are producing are not enough to cause a runaway effect.

Many of our largest population and industrial centers are in areas directly threatened by rising sea water.

NOTHING is threatened by sea level rise of around a foot over 100 years. That is LOTS of time to adapt and shift. We also can tell now the absurd predictions of 20 feet sea level rise are not going to happen either. Even the IPCC admits that now.

We should do our best to mitigate that and slow down the increase in the greenhouse effect

Why should we expend any effort to stop something that is not happening, when all that effort can go to fight real issues?

That's the thing that tans my hide. People are expending so much effort to fight CO2 that real problems are utterly ignored. The planet is being fucked for sure but it's not by CO2, and all action taken against CO2 is to me the same as action against the planet.

Re:Not Prudent

[quantaman]

Just because CO2 does not directly cause adverse changes the way Chernobyl or Bhopal did does not mean that CO2 is not pollution.

The fact that the entire plant kingdom relies on CO2 rules it out as pollution for me. The Earth's whole ecosystem is devoted to processing CO2. It's probably the most benign thing we could possibly be emitting.

You can use that standard it you want to but it's kinda useless in practice. Say it turns out that low levels of background radiation are good for us, does that mean radiation is no longer pollution? We use sound to talk, I guess I can open a night club next to your house because there's no such thing as noise pollution.

A much better standard is pollution is anything that's harmful when emitted in excess or the wrong circumstance, CO2 emissions are harming the planet right now, thus they're pollution.

A rapid increase in temperatures basically undermine all that investment we have made.

As I said it's clear that will not happen. CO2 levels have risen heavily, temperatures is flat. It's clear that the levels of XO2 we are producing are not enough to cause a runaway effect.

Forget about decades of research and thousands of peer reviewed papers. They apparently were just doing a grade 3 science fair experiment with glass jar, you've pointed that out and now none of us have to worry and can go back to seeing what happens if we drop nails in Coke.

Many of our largest population and industrial centers are in areas directly threatened by rising sea water.

NOTHING is threatened by sea level rise of around a foot over 100 years. That is LOTS of time to adapt and shift. We also can tell now the absurd predictions of 20 feet sea level rise are not going to happen either. Even the IPCC admits that now.

There's also the worry that the changing climate will lead to larger storm surges which combined with the sea levels could cause a lot more damage. Though I'd agree that the other consequences from global warming are a lot more serious.

We should do our best to mitigate that and slow down the increase in the greenhouse effect

Why should we expend any effort to stop something that is not happening, when all that effort can go to fight real issues?

That's the thing that tans my hide. People are expending so much effort to fight CO2 that real problems are utterly ignored. The planet is being fucked for sure but it's not by CO2, and all action taken against CO2 is to me the same as action against the planet.

Because all the science indicates that it almost certainly IS happening. You are apparently not convinced, I don't know why, but the fact that you do not agree with the science does not jeopardize my belief in the science at all because nearly all the very smart and honest people who study the topic agree that it is happening and it's a serious problem.

Re:Not Prudent

[rahvin112]

As climate change deniers like to frequently post, the sun drives energy input to the planet and we are in the longest, most extreme solar minimum in recorded human history. If temperatures are even holding even in such an event what happens when the sun finally returns to a solar maximum?

The scary thing about climate change isn't sea level increases (at least to people other than the dutch). What's scary is that the breadbasket zones where humanity grows 90% of the worlds food supply are going to move. And where those zones are going to move to is drastically different than the current. To put that in perspective what happens when the Mexican Sonoran desert moves into Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, along with shifting the US breadbasket into Canada?

You'll likely say that we just grow all that food in Canada then. Northern Canada, much like Siberia and most of the northern climate that these bread baskets will move to is frozen swap land. When temperatures reach the point that the US breadbasket moves north it's going to move into a swamp where growing anything will be damn near impossible without trillions of dollars in civil improvements to drain the swamps at which point we have a drained formerly arctic swamp with little to no topsoil and a very short growing season that will have some of the harshest winters on the planet because latitude and because the jet stream has been destabilized by the loss of ice. Instead of the current farming where they have 2 major growing seasons and a slightly risky winter wheat crop you will have one growing season with probably a 10% chance it will freeze in the fall at a total loss. This doesn't even take into account what the changing rainfall patterns will mean to water supplies. See the desert band is going to move north and places like Phoenix that rely on water from the Rockies might not have that water in the future because those mountains might not get winter snow anymore. What happens when they shut down the municipal water in Phoenix because there isn't any water?

When those breadbaskets and rainfall zones move we're going to have what will likely be some of the ugliest war in human history. Wars that ultimately might lead to the extinction of the human species.

Putting a cost to carbon is ultimately going to be relatively cheap (even worst case estimates are less than $100 per person per annum), but the money interests that own that carbon energy are terrified by the prospect of carbon no longer being subsidized and they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince people ignorant of the science that there is some doubt about the reality of climate change. Not only that it will make the US no longer dependent on stabilizing the middle east. We will no longer be beholden to Islamic nations that are engaged in war against the the west. This scares the defense industry which is reliant on the US playing world police. If we subsidized renewable energy even on an equal footing with Oil, Coal and gas we would probably be in a position to displace carbon energy within a couple decades without hardship. Yet even that simple step, of simply providing a level playing field is adamantly opposed by Carbon interests.

Re:Not Prudent

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to resort to this but you're an utter idiot.

- Based on what do you claim that one foot of sea-level rise will not be harmful?

- Your analysis of CO2 level change not affecting things because temperatures have leveled off is fit for a retard

- CO2 build-up could have adverse effects on more than just temperature. You'd suffocate if you were in a CO2-rich environment - so clearly ever-growing concentrations might be dangerous.

- Yes the climate and our planet are very complex. Drawing conclusions by merely correlating "the levels of XO2 we are producing are not enough to cause a runaway effect" is ignorant of the ways in which many different mechanisms on this planet interrelate and might be affected by CO2 levels we might hit in the future - come back and say all is peachy when the currents stop moving or alter drastically

I guess at causes and effects - but I think its important to keep in mind that we need a better understanding of what we're doing and thus be cautious (not with $ but with the environment). Action now is justified because we know CO2 can kill and polluting less is simply smart (& moral?). We need to invest in 1) understanding the climate and our planet better; and 2) becoming more efficient & more clean.

Re:Not Prudent

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

The plant kingdom relies on nitrates too, that does not mean that dumping thousands of tons of nitrates into a river is not pollution. CO2 fixation is a feedback cycle. It normally is in stable equilibrium, which means that more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to faster fixation by plants. This is kind of like how a ball in a bowl will return to the equilibrium point if you disturb it. However, if you push the ball hard enough, it will go over the edge and no longer be in equilibrium. This is what happened to CO2. Since the industrial revolution, we have broken the balance of nature, the normal feedback cycle. We pushed the ball over the edge. Before the industrial revolution, CO2 was not a pollutant; now it is. Raising the sea levels by a foot can be the difference during a surge (such as a storm during the king tide) between a few low-lying areas getting flooded and massive floods sweeping across the New York or San Francisco metropolitan areas. Also, a few feet is just what is projected over the coming decades. The ocean rise is not stoppable at this point and rises above a meter are inevitable. It is just a question of how much time we have to adapt before that happens. The more severe and more rapid the action, the more time we buy. It is easy to say, "well, this won't happen during my lifetime", but that will be small comfort to our great grandchildren.

Re:Not Prudent

[flaming error]

"it could have gone to medical or space research."

That's rich. Who do you think has been at the forefront of identifying the problem?

Re:Not Prudent

[SuperKendall]

I'm not sure why I am the idiot when you are the one with stupid ideas:

Based on what do you claim that one foot of sea-level rise will not be harmful?

Over 100 years? Come on, we can move anything needed over that timeframe. But someone would have to be insane to build something near enough to the ocean where a foot mattered much anyway.

Your analysis of CO2 level change not affecting things because temperatures have leveled off is fit for a retard

CO2 has risen (by a lot). Temperatures have not. Pretty clear what is happening and have a tantrum doesn't make you any less wrong.

CO2 build-up could have adverse effects on more than just temperature.

And that shows you have zero understanding of the levels of concentration we are talking about here.

I guess at causes and effects

And everything else.

The sad part is, you don't have to guess. You could know. But your religion forbid knowing, just mind-addling hatred towards anyone who disagrees with your philosophy.

Re:Not Prudent

[SuperKendall]

You can use that standard it you want to but it's kinda useless in practice. Say it turns out that low levels of background radiation are good for us, does that mean radiation is no longer pollution?

Actually yes.

There are background levels of radiation. In amounts around as high as that, radiation is not really pollution.

The same goes for CO2. The amounts we are emitting are not nearly enough to be pollution, the ONLY concern was the RUNAWAY greenhouse effect, which is not happening.

Forget about decades of research and thousands of peer reviewed papers.

You are forgetting about the same decades having many papers showing there is no runaway warming.

There's also the worry that the changing climate will lead to larger storm surges

The "more XTREME Weather" line is the equivalent of "we took away all your privacy and freedom because of the CHILDREN".

Because all the science indicates that it almost certainly IS happening.

Science should look up the overall levels of Earth temperatures because there is no runaway warming, and hardly any warming of any sort at the moment.

But in reality of course, many real scientists would not agree with your statement.

Re:Not Prudent

[quantaman]

You can use that standard it you want to but it's kinda useless in practice. Say it turns out that low levels of background radiation are good for us, does that mean radiation is no longer pollution?

Actually yes.

There are background levels of radiation. In amounts around as high as that, radiation is not really pollution.

The same goes for CO2. The amounts we are emitting are not nearly enough to be pollution, the ONLY concern was the RUNAWAY greenhouse effect, which is not happening.

So if AGW was a real threat would you consider CO2 pollution?

Forget about decades of research and thousands of peer reviewed papers.

You are forgetting about the same decades having many papers showing there is no runaway warming.

I don't know if you're being cute with the term 'runaway warming', referring to the short investigation into cooling, or are talking about denialist cargo-cult journals. If you're going to claim there's no scientific consensus around AGW then we're no longer discussing the same reality and I'll just claim 1998 was an outlier because of the emergence of Sauron.

There's also the worry that the changing climate will lead to larger storm surges

The "more XTREME Weather" line is the equivalent of "we took away all your privacy and freedom because of the CHILDREN".

Ahh, now I understand your model of the climate science community:

Step 1) Create a fake global warming scare

Step 2) ?

Step 3) PROFIT

Because all the science indicates that it almost certainly IS happening.

Science should look up the overall levels of Earth temperatures because there is no runaway warming, and hardly any warming of any sort at the moment.

But in reality of course, many real scientists would not agree with your statement.

Ahh yes, countless scientists studying the climate simply forgot to check the thermometers, it's a common mistake.

And I'm going to assume your 'many real scientists' doesn't include many climate scientists. I can show you a list of creationist scientists as well, I guess Kan Ham was right!

Re:Not Prudent

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what is most upsetting is the stupidity of people, including the Slashdot editor, making outlandish claims like:

The same decrease in ice contributes to the weather circumstances that led to extremely low temperatures across parts of the United States this winter.

Really? It can't have anything to do with the massive ball of fire that we call the Sun having record low activity?

Nope, apparently the obvious answer is too obvious.

People like him pushing inane reasons for a cold winter are the same idiots that make climate change seem like a religion: blind faith when a far more obvious reason--at least for the little things, like a single winter--exists.

Re:Not Prudent

[tragedy]

But someone would have to be insane to build something near enough to the ocean where a foot mattered much anyway.

You're just picturing the high tide mark moving a foot higher up the beach, aren't you. How did you get modded +5?

Re:Not Prudent

[riverat1]

NOTHING is threatened by sea level rise of around a foot over 100 years.

You're just doing a linear extrapolation of the current rate of sea level rise, ~3 mm/year. But sea level rise was ~1 mm/year in the early 20th century, ~2mm/year through the middle and ~3 mm/year since the 1990's, tripling in less than a century. What if that trend continues? We'd certainly see well more than 1 foot of SLR. Assuming a linear trend is the simplest of science and is more often than not wrong.

Re:Not Prudent

[rs79]

" The plant kingdom relies on nitrates too, that does not mean that dumping thousands of tons of nitrates into a river is not pollution. CO2 fixation is a feedback cycle. It normally is in stable equilibrium, which means that more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to faster fixation by plants. This is kind of like how a ball in a bowl will return to the equilibrium point if you disturb it. However, if you push the ball hard enough, it will go over the edge and no longer be in equilibrium. This is what happened to CO2"

Excuse me but do you actually know anything about plants and ecology? This really sounds like you're making it up. It's not even close. We don't know what happens over 7000ppm. But under that, things are fine. How did corals, for example, survive this - they did. Any guesses there?

You are aware aren't you that people that grow plants, both terrestrial and aquatic pump in tons of CO2 to enhance growth and that all plants are C02 rate limited and that when NASA addeed this fact into the the model is showed that doubling CO2 made things just one degree warmer? And the next year the IPCC folks "discovered" trees eat CO2...

Please tell me this isn't news to you.

Re:Not Prudent

[riverat1]

Really? It can't have anything to do with the massive ball of fire that we call the Sun having record low activity [newscientist.com]?

Yes, really. The current total solar irradiance (TSI) is about 1361 W/m^2. For the satellite era (1979 to the present) it has varied between a low of around 1360 to a high of around 1364 W/m^2 so it's not outside the norm. Changes in solar irradiance such as we've seen have a small effect on the climate that mostly cancels itself out when averaged over several cycles.

Re:Not Prudent

[riverat1]

As climate change deniers like to frequently post, the sun drives energy input to the planet and we are in the longest, most extreme solar minimum in recorded human history.

I agree with what you say but that statement is little over the top. So far we've had one exceptionally low solar maximum in the 11 year cycle. I think that has to continue for another cycle or two before you can make that statement. Even though it wasn't measured as accurately as we can today I think you have to give the crown to the Maunder minimum for now.

Re:Not Prudent

[Barsteward]

Seems like you are the sort of person would disbelieve evolution happens because you can't see it happening. Those "billions or trillions" spent reducing CO2 etc would be creating new jobs, new economies and a cleaner environment. i'd love to walk around a city with clean air and not smelly dirty exhaust fumes.

Re:Not Prudent

[Barsteward]

if no-one is buying fossil fuels then it has to get cheaper to move product. they can only limit digging it out of the ground to force prices higher but that would then be counter-productive if there is a viable alternative energy

Re:Not Prudent

[Barsteward]

Why does the temperature have rise a lot to cause an issue? As more forests are chopped down to make way for more meat production, there are less ways of capturing CO2 .Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Did you think that wasn't a problem, should have it been ignored? If things like CFCs were not removed from appliances etc, it would not have let the hole reduce and repair itself. pushing the problem to the people in 100 years time makes any resolution more difficult and expensive.

Re:Not Prudent

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analysis of CO2 level change not affecting things because temperatures have leveled off is fit for a retard

CO2 has risen (by a lot). Temperatures have not.

What happens if the current plateau on global temperatures is due to the current on-going solar minimum?

Re:Not Prudent

[Xyrus]

Not if it involves spending billions or trillions to simply reduce CO2 emissions, when it could have gone to medical or space research.

Where are you going to get the billions and trillions it will take to deal with a changed climate? Or are you one of those people who think a changed climate isn't going to happen/won't be a big deal?

There's no sign anything like a runaway greenhouse effect is going to happen. CO2 levels have continued to increase even as global average temperatures have hit a lull.

If you had any idea behind what you were talking about you'd realize how stupid this oft-repeated phrase is. Not only is it mathematically dishonest, it also ignores the fact that global temperatures include more than just atmospheric temperature. We have these great big heat sinks called oceans, and they haven't been in a lull of any kind, for example.

For a better explanation you could try actually reading the research.

In the simplified glass jar experiments that is not what happens, so pretty obviously the earth is lots more complex than a glass jar with CO2 inside.

Yes. It is. That's why we have scientists from multiple different branches of science contributing research to build ever more complex models of the climate.

The current rate of ocean level rise is less than foot over the next 100 years, not exactly a panic situation.

No. It isn't. Sea level rise has been accelerating over the past 100 years. It is both foolish and dishonest to extrapolate some static number and assume it will remain constant over the next 100 years when data clearly shows otherwise. Current research indicates a 2.5 to 3.5 foot increase.

You also show your ignorance by thinking 1 foot of sea level rise is no big deal. It is. A 1 foot rise is enough to significantly change inundation rates along many coastal areas, not to mention other negative effects. That's billions of dollars right there.

Lets get back to spending money on real issues instead of a bogeyman created to funnel large sums of government money in the hands of special interest groups or creating new things for financial moguls to get rich off of (looking at you carbon credits).

Re:Not Prudent

[Xyrus]

The fact that the entire plant kingdom relies on CO2 rules it out as pollution for me. The Earth's whole ecosystem is devoted to processing CO2. It's probably the most benign thing we could possibly be emitting.

The carbon cycle is balanced. Disrupting the carbon cycle, as we are doing, unbalances the system. Claiming that adding Gt of sequestered carbon back into this system has no effect is idiotic. The carbon cycle can't handle it, hence the rise in atmospheric CO2.

As I said it's clear that will not happen. CO2 levels have risen heavily, temperatures is flat. It's clear that the levels of XO2 we are producing are not enough to cause a runaway effect.

Did you fail math? Your claim of "flat temperatures" is complete nonsense. Over the past 100 hears, CO2 has increased and temperatures have increased. I've no idea where your "flat temperatures" are coming from unless your cherry picking.

NOTHING is threatened by sea level rise of around a foot over 100 years.

I guess all those inundation maps showing greatly increased rates of flooding are not really threats. Someone call FEMA, we got a super genius here.

That is LOTS of time to adapt and shift.

Sure, if everyone were on the same page and was taking action. But when we have leaders who are legislating "this research doesn't exist because I say so" then 100 years becomes much much shorter.

We also can tell now the absurd predictions of 20 feet sea level rise are not going to happen either. Even the IPCC admits that now.

There is not now, or has ever been, a single shred of peer reviewed research that claims 20 feet of sea level rise in 100 years. It doesn't exist. It isn't there. The IPCC never said it. Climate scientists have never said it. Stop being an idiot and backing up your claims with bullshit. Read the research. Understand it. Then you'll be in a much better positiontion to make your case.

Why should we expend any effort to stop something that is not happening, when all that effort can go to fight real issues?

I really have no words for this. Only a complete fucking moron could look at the research and events that have been occurring and say that nothing is happening. Are you even paying attention?

That's the thing that tans my hide. People are expending so much effort to fight CO2 that real problems are utterly ignored.

The thing that tans my hide is when willfully ignorant idiots such as yourself make sweeping claims when every credible shred of scientific evidence shows the complete opposite. They do not understand, and don't want to understand the impacts subtle changes in climate can have on our civilization, let alone major ones. You're content just making shit up, putting blinders on, and pretending everything is just peachy. It's ignorant asses like you who get elected, piss in the eye of science, and delay taking responsible actions that could head off issues.

George Carlin was right.

Re:Not Prudent

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actually this:
Step 1) Create a fake global warming scare
Step 2) Create a world government that is firmly in control of the means of production with the power to limit CO2 emissions
Step 3) Profit from being in control of a centrally planned global economy where you pick the winners and the losers
There are people who honestly believe that a centrally planned economy would be better and more fair and that change in that direction is progress. Those people enthusiastically jumped on the AGW bandwagon and started flogging it after the collapse of the soviet union. If you look at what is being proposed as the solution to global warming it is just wealth transfers from rich to poor countries and building the apparatus of centrally planned energy consumption. These measures don't even address the actual issue of climate change since only modest reductions in the rate of CO2 emissions would result, while they primarily redistribute wealth and centralize control. It is true that only the establishment of a global tyranny with a monopoly on violence and the ability to coerce everyone in the world not to burn fossil fuels can quickly change our fossil fuel consumption patterns. In the case the medicine is far worse than the disease. I prefer global warming to global socialism.

Re:Not Prudent

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it was a trade off between spending the money on something really really useful vs. reudcing CO2 - but in reality the trade off is between tax breaks and reduced profits for fossil fuel companies vs. reducing C02 and CEO bonuses - I am a lot less sympathetic to reducing Exxon't tax bill or giving the Koch brothers a haircut than reducing funding for cancer resarch - we spend only a token amount of our GDP on anything like research, so for fuck's sake the argument is not about medical research vs. C02 reduciton - it is energy company profits vs. CO2

Re:Not Prudent

[rahvin112]

You do realize they've been measuring solar output (very accurately) for several decades and there are earlier (though less accurate) measurements for almost 200 years? They actually have a lot of data about the solar mins/maximums.

Re:Not Prudent

[Agent0013]

Over 100 years? Come on, we can move anything needed over that timeframe. But someone would have to be insane to build something near enough to the ocean where a foot mattered much anyway.

You make it quite apparent how much of an idiot you truly are. Have you ever looked at what humans actually do rather than just imagine what would be best for them to do? How about New Orleans? "Someone would have to be insane to build something " lower than the sea level and not upgrade the dikes when told they were insufficient. "Someone would have to be insane to " re-build a city in the same location after it gets wiped out from flooding. You really think that they are going to tear down New York because of hurricane Sandy? If they don't tear it down now and rebuild it higher above sea level then what makes you think they will do that in 100 years. Each year of those 100 years is in itself just one year. If New York were to be flooded each and every year like hurricane Sandy did then they might start thinking of abandoning the city. The storms will not all hit the same place. Each time a storm floods a location it will be a new place, a new city destroyed. And they will want to rebuild, just like New Orleans and New York did. Perhaps we should start calling them New New Orleans and New New York.

Re:Not Prudent

[quantaman]

Those people exist, but to think they're the driving force behind the science of global warming is nonsense. The scientists' motivation is they're trying to save us and the planet, they're not involved in some bizarre plot to create a world government based on carbon credits.

Re:nope

[artor3]

So how about we ignore the loud idiots on both sides, and just listen to the scientific community? Their consensus is available to anyone who cares to read it.

Oh, but I doubt you'd agree to that. Because, like most deniers, you probably think all the scientists in the world are in a great, globe-spanning conspiracy. You'll choose to ignore the 99.99% of scientists, and listen only to the guy who's saying what you want to hear. Who cares that he's on BP's payroll?

Re:BS junk science

[MightyMartian]

Now let's move to California and Australia...

Re:BS junk science

[MtHuurne]

Right now the arctic ocean and Hudson Bay are 100% frozen due to this thing we call winter. Summer it is a different story.

The summer story is much more relevant though. In winter, when there is a low angle sun a few hours a day, sunlight is reflected back into space. In summer, when the sun is at a higher angle and there are only a few hours of night a day, increasingly large areas are not reflecting much sunlight back into space. I don't see how this invalidates TFA.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_2013_v5.5.png

Positive over 30 year time frame.
Flat over a 15 year time frame.
Sharply negative over a 3 year time frame.
Positive over a 2 year time frame.

Which one do you think best fits a 50+ year time frame.

Re:BS junk science

[g8oz]

Good thing we have you to refute those damn scientists.

Re:Repeat the mantra

[MightyMartian]

People die all the time. I wasn't aware that was an argument for allowing them to be murdered...

The whole point of anthropogenic climate change isn't that we should stop climate change, it's that massive CO2 emissions from human sources over the last three centuries are producing far greater and more harmful changes than natural processes. This

the skynet is spauling the skynet is spauling

[Anonymous Coward]

hard to resist the notion of considering ourselves in relation to one another & our new clear options

Ask Slashdot: Why No Paragraphs?

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

This doesn't happen to other users as far as I can tell. It has only recently started happening to me. If I separate two paragraphs with a blank line then press the Submit button, until recently the blank line would result in separate paragraphs above and below the blank line. But more recently all of my comments post as just one giant paragraph, which makes them hard to read. For example this particular comment should have five separate paragraphs but I expect it will post as just one. I don't see any option for it in my user options. Could it be because I cannot be bothered to update Firefox? That's because I grew weary of Mozilla.org pushing out frequent new versions without fixing any bugs that actually affected me.

Re:Ask Slashdot: Why No Paragraphs?

[tepples]

There's a posting format switch in your posting options between "Plain Old Text" and "HTML Formatted". You have it on "HTML Formatted". Switch it to "Plain Old Text" which converts newlines to HTML /> elements.

Re:nope

[MightyMartian]

Those evil climatologists are up there with the evil evolutionists who medical researchers. It's a global conspiracy to kill oil, Christianity and cigarettes!

Paint your roof white

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

The best dye for that is Titanium White - Titanium Dioxide. However it is rather expensive; Zinc Oxide is good, not as good as Titanium Dioxide, but far cheaper. If we all painted our roofs white, I expect it would have a measurable effect.

Re:But???

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, fucking Kochs! Human pustules that fester in the rotted flesh of America's "elite", made rich by helping to fuel Stalin's revolution. How many millions of lives has this cancer caused? And how many more?

spalling you ediot

[Anonymous Coward]

the skynet is spalling...

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you miss the news that in general the world IS getting warmer moron?

Re:BS junk science

[bug_hunter]

Thank you.
Adelaide had it's hottest February day on record, 44.7 degrees celsius.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/...

To respond to the parent of your post, yes when a jet-stream pushed air from the north pole over North America, and it got cold.
As you point out, that doesn't mean the entire world is colder.
And of course, obligatory XKCD http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Re:nope

[roc97007]

Yet, when a specific locality talks about an unusually warm spot of weather, we have people screaming "CLIMATE CHANGE!"

Citation?

TFA?

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

No scientist is going to point to a specific event and go "That's caused by AGW". The theory cannot hope to explain every weather event. But what it can explain are trends.

You only have to look at news or journal reports any day of the week to see that there are scientists that most definitely DO point to specific events and blame it on AGW.

Re:BS junk science

[sexconker]

How about look at the current weather in the north, north central, midwest, and eastern, and southern parts of the U.S.. How much global warming do you see? I see JACK $H!T!

It's climate change now, not global warming, so they can never be wrong.
When it's hot or there's a drought they blame you and Al Gore takes your money.
When it's cold or there's a storm they blame you and Al Gore takes your money.
When it's nice and the weather is calm they say it's thanks to their continued efforts.

"Continued efforts" means Al Gore continues to take your money.

Re:BS junk science

[Billly Gates]

Name one scientist who believes the polar vertex is caused by warming based on scientific evidence? One!

Please tell me I'm not dreaming!

[wdhowellsr]

Please tell me the browser cache is screwing with me. Please tell me that my wife wants to have sex more often ( ok that isn't going to happen, I have a 12 and 15 year old) Do we really have Slashdot.org back?

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

Second the world is getting cooler

Too much coolaid? Want to check reality?

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/...

The year 2013 ties with 2003 as the fourth warmest year globally since records began in 1880. The annual global combined land and ocean surface temperature was 0.62ÂC (1.12ÂF) above the 20th century average of 13.9ÂC (57.0ÂF). This marks the 37th consecutive year (since 1976) that the yearly global temperature was above average. Currently, the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 0.66ÂC (1.19ÂF) above average. Including 2013, 9 of the 10 warmest years in the 134-year period of record have occurred in the 21st century. Only one year during the 20th centuryâ"1998â"was warmer than 2013.

Re:nope

[MightyMartian]

I don't read scientific journalism any more. Can you point me to some journal citations?

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a one dimensional issue. There is no center. You sound like self proclaimed agnostics who think it's some kind of theistic middleground, and end up looking like fucking idiots when doing so.

Just like you look like a fucking idiot.

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in the center of a discussion isn't automatically a virute or the right position. It's a lazy thought process to say "I'm right!" popularized by Bill O'Reilly. While centrism works well in politics, it has little place in science.

People arguing 2+2=4 and the other side arguing 2+2=9, do you want the centrist position here or one of the "extremes".

Re:BS junk science

[bussdriver]

1) Reflectivity of ice vs snow is different.

2) Water is great at storing and DISPERSING heat; it raises averages even if it still freezes part time.

3) Anecdotal to mention some areas that are frozen today and ignore the larger trend. Can you see the forest or just the trees?

4) Net energy increases to the atmosphere are not going to be uniformly distributed (if that was the case, we'd likely not ever have much WIND which is created by the uneven temperatures.)

5) Higher energy input, NOT uniformly distributed is going to increase the severity of the natural flow to equilibrium. Global Warming doesn't make weather, it makes it stronger. You can't definitively proof such a thing. Give an athlete performance enhancing drugs and you'll not likely notice without blood tests... (the fact they relatively improve might clue you in... but that involves looking at historical trends and using fuzzy things like statistics.)

6) Polar vortex always existed; not as common and they are weaker than the equatorial vortex (with many names: hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones.) Note: they exist almost entirely above land/ice unlike the equatorial ones.

Finally, you can't seriously discuss terraforming Mars in 100 years and deny global warming.

Re:BS junk science

[MightyMartian]

At some point the denialists will run out of runway, but sadly, by the time they do, any notion of being able to even mitigate the effects will be long gone. And probably around the same time, we'll start running out of cheap fossil fuels, so we'll get a nice double whammy.

But as long as the Koch Brothers make money today, well, fuck the future.

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that the trend is currently down. You might know that but most of your type are stuck listening to the Alarmist nut jobs focused on covering up their totally failed models and predictions.

Yet, you continue to listen to them and spout their b.s.

Re:nope

[MightyMartian]

You mean the cherry picked time period that you trumpet to declare that AGW is false, even as the actual trends show the opposite. Yes, we all know about pseudo-skeptics and their ability to defy what the scientists are actually observing.

How to measure Slashcot Participation

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

My own log file analysis quite clearly tells me that to understand my overall site performance, I must average over seven-day periods. This because some visitors visit while at work, others in the evenings, others on the weekends. But the overall shape of the traffic periodic, with a period of seven days. This would be easy to do, but rather tedious: Go back over the last few months, since at least a month before the beta was announced, and enter into a spreadsheet the timestamp of each story, and how many comments it got. For extra credit, count how many comments had each possible moderation score, from -1 to 5. Now tally those up weekly, and compare the trends both before the Slashcott - february 10 through 17 - and during it. Eventually you'll get significant data for after the Slashcott as well. I haven't actually done this but my vague impression is that an insignificant number actually participated. I did. It was sorely tempting just to peek a little, being a nerd I need news that matters on a daily basis, but no, I never visited the site from the 10th until midnight this morning, on the 18th.

Re:BS junk science

[Mashiki]

Funny you mention Hudson's Bay being frozen over, it hasn't happened in awhile. And it was such huge crisis back in the 70's and early 80's that the Government of Canada commissioned nearly 100 air compressors from Gardner Denver in Woodstock, Ontario to keep sections of the bay open so they could land sea planes to deliver supplies to remote communities. You'd think that landing on ice would be okay, the problem was two fold. There was never enough clean ice to make a runway. The other was high levels of erosion from the water under it eating holes through it or thinning it to the point where it became dangerous to land craft.

It was a fucking ICE AGE. Get over it

[Anonymous Coward]

The FUCKING ICE AGE was never going to be a permanent thing. There were no polar ice caps for MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF YEARS before the recent ice age. There are tropical fossils in the bedrock in NORTHERN CANADA.

God dammit. Can we please just finally accept the fact that the Earth is changing, realize that we are powerless to do anything about it, and start adapting to our changing environment like we should?

Solution...

[Lawrence_Bird]

man made fake icebergs, painted white of course.

Re:BS junk science

[Bartles]

Which one do you think best fits a 4,500,000,000,000 year time frame?

Re:BS junk science

[Bartles]

oops that's billiion not trillion. Take three zeros off that.

Re:BS junk science

[Bartles]

And yet, a brontosaurus would disagree with that.

Re:nope

[slackware 3.6]

You mean like how NASA changed historic climate data this year? Doesn't really matter what scientists are observing if they change the facts.

Hey its slashdot's daily Rothschild global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

story:

slashdot fully support the Rothschilds bankers in making money off "global warming":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdqNds9pNuI

Re:BS junk science

[shocking]

Incorrect - the world has continued to warm. You need to update your knowledge, please see http://www.skepticalscience.co...

It'd help you to wander around that site - they're on top of recent developments and watch new papers as they come out.

Re:nope

[Chas]

Nowhere did I say the issue was one-dimensional.
That was you, putting words into my mouth and trying to skew the scope of the issue and maximize argument potential while minimally helpful in working towards a working, palatable solution.

Yes, the climate IS changing. Anyone denying that the climate is changing pretty much has blinders on.
NO, we're NOT going to render the planet uninhabitable tomorrow. Acting like we're going to wake up at the end of this month and it's going to be 150 in the shade and only get hotter is unwarranted.
Yes, we, as a species, need to live cleaner in a multitude of ways. Yeah, humans have been pretty frickin' nasty to the environment in the last thousand or so years, and in the last 2-300 years especially.
NO, we should NOT simply dump millions/billions into trying whatever harebrained "band-aid" idea happens to float into the public consciousness today without extensive study. We need to KNOW that any massive changes we try to impose are going to work how we want and NOT further damage the environment.
Yes, there are going to be changes in how people live. It's inevitable. But not ending human civilization in a heat crisis is probably worth it (depends on how I'm feeling about humanity on a given day).
NO, we should NOT be reverting to living in caves, eating grass and rooting for grubs. And we really need to start shooting dickheads who scream about how horrible others are to the environment, yet are first class environmental nightmares themselves.

Re:But???

[Anonymous Coward]

** WARNING ***

MODERATORS: Calibrate Humor and Sarcasm detectors immediately. Do not attempt to moderate further until calibration stabilizes.

Re:But???

[Anonymous Coward]

made rich by helping to fuel Stalin's revolution

You mean the revolution that sent the rich landowners to the gulags? That's bad now?

So hard to keep up.

well, um ahem

[Stumbles]

without the ice ocean water heat ups meaning it HAS to absorb heat.

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[Pharmboy]

You've already failed, they don't have magnetic fields. All the oxygen in the world is useless for real habitation without a magnetic field. Not a place I would want to live, with cosmic rays flying through my brain all the time.

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is the name of a Federal agency.

Just say'in...

Ok then...

[TopSpin]

And that, kind reader, is why we must outlaw meat.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not be an American. Of course it does.

Re:Repeat the mantra

[bunratty]

A little bit of warming may be good, but there's widespread agreement that we want to avoid a warming of over 2 degrees Celsius due to the negative consequences. It now looks as though we won't even be able to meet that modest goal.

Re:nope

[Chas]

The main problem is, too many people are playing at "Little Dutch Boy".

And no, this problem is NOT as simple as 2+2=4. I'm sorry, it just isn't. Anyone trying to make it out as that simple is misleading you.

It's a heavily multi-faceted problem with no "one true way" as a given solution for just about any of said facets.

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[linear a]

we are getting our first experiences with venusforming

FTFY

It's worse than that

[Anonymous Coward]

As ice melts a fraction of the impurities are left on the surface of the ice. When the summer melt melts all of the previous winters snow fall it reaches a layer that is slightly darker because it contains all the impurities of the previous year. If this process continues the ice will get steadily darker each fall as the melt goes further down the layers. Luckily this affect only occurs after the previous winters fall has completely melted. Unfortunately if we ever have a winter with a light snow fall or a very warm summer that melts through the previous winters accumulation quickly we are left with dark snow even earlier.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, a brontosaurus would disagree with that.

What? Did your grandfather tell you what he and the bronto that took him to work each day talked about?

Re:nope

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well, Dr. Mann was able to take a single tree (YAD061) and deduce that we were going to have a high hockey stick in temperatures.

Is every advance in climate science

[Jmc23]

just pointing out how bad climate science is because they always fail to take the most logical things into account?

Re:Is every advance in climate science

[Nemyst]

There's a truckload of people constantly whining that climate science isn't backed up by observations. If you just took for granted that warmer poles meant darker poles which accelerated warming (a logical, but theoretical claim), you'd have people whining that they're just speculating and have no data to confirm it. This is scientists doing exactly what's being asked of them.

Re: BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

why? does changing the angle of reflection somehow limit the distance light travels?
or does it just turn hollow like your head? what happens to the light that is bouncing around in your big stupid hollow head? what happens to it? is it doomed? is it trapped for eternity with the stupidist idiot on the plant?
or maybe you are not so bright. yes, that's it, i'm afraid. very afraid.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me but not all Americans are that docile and insular. For example, Canadians, Mexicans, Central and South Americans are much too intelligent to believe that.

Re:Repeat the mantra

[Anonymous Coward]

You're coming across as so Conservative that you're retarded. Have you considered SpecialKendall as a user-name?

Consensus

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard the 97% consensus and looked it up. First story I found is one of those quoted 97% said he didn't agree with the consensus. They read a paper he wrote and jumped to conclusions that were not in it and added him to the list of agreement.

So not only is there not consensus, they are lying about the amount as well. It turns out a very small number of scientists actually agreed to have their name added to that list, I think it was 11 of them.

If it were as you claim, why would you have to lie about it?

Re:Consensus

[Anonymous Coward]

"one of those 97%" quoted in "a story". That's a credible source if I ever saw one.

Re:Consensus

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real.

The 97% meme is also a damned story. And having read the paper that story is based on, it's pretty easy to see how the number was cooked up.

Heh. I just noticed that. The paper's author is one, John Cook.

Anyway, take a look here for a compilation of over 1300 papers which are skeptical of the AGW premise:

http://www.populartechnology.n...

AGW is an emotionally manipulative lie designed to distract from the real causes of climate change, and of course, to levy new taxes and controls on the population.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

yes just bring up the Koch Brothers...Do you even live in Wichita where they are based? Guess what they don't own the whole town let alone the state of Kansas. Stop trying to make them bigger than they are.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need, it was definitely cooler. If I remember my OT classes, Xenu was exploding nukes around volcanoes about that time.

Re:But???

[Anonymous Coward]

"I also think it is prudent to act as if climate change were real" ... followed by

"I am neither a "supporter" or "denier" by the way."

Nigga please. If you advocate walking the walk of the "supporters", you most certainly ARE a "supporter" in every way that matters.

You Da Man. /.'s UI is poorly designed.

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

This.

Is.

A.

Test.

When I click on my username, a drop-down menu appears with "Options" and "Account". Actually both items permit me to set preferences; the posting format switch is under Account and not Options. That's a poor design.

But thank you!

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

Polar vertex ... ha ha. Polar vertex ... HA HA HA HA HA. Polar vertex? HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!!!!!

You're gorgeous.

Re: But???

[Anonymous Coward]

he has 2 kochs?

Re: But???

[Anonymous Coward]

Because most of their time is spent outside KS both living and working. I'd guess that if they need something done for their PAC you wouldn't see it. It's not like Warren owns Omaha as his power is national - like your Kochs.

- Headquarters of Koch industries, Wichita KS
- Chairmen and CEO Charles Koch, residence Wichita KS

It seems I know more about them than you do. In fact they main office is only a few miles down the road from mine.

Re: Gay Nigger Seed

[Anonymous Coward]

nobody laughs at nigger jokes anymore.

the question is, is this statement a rebuke? or just whimsical thought?
The English language is best at these constructs. It evolved that way on purpose, well, if you think evolution has purpose.

One thing for sure, once evolution comes up with gay nigger seed, you start thinking about extinction events.

Not prudent != Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some statistics to show that, as pertains the Arctic, the Earth is measurably warming. I can tell you offhand that annual temperatures in Alaska have warmed by 3 degrees in the last century, and winter temperatures by 6 degrees. Southeastern Alaska is characterized by stable temperatures throughout the year, heavy precipitation, and a gradual transition from getting most of that as rain vs snow as one goes further north. Thus the warming is shall we say particularly noticeable to costal inhabitants. Another good measure of long-term climactic changes is the extent of permafrost.[pdf] Much of the ground in Alaska, and practically all the ground above the Arctic Circle is permanently frozen. Ice being less dense than water, if you happen to melt it, you create a subsidence and potentially a small lake. Either way, it's extremely disruptive to what little vegetation (or structures) there are that can survive on top of permafrost and hence easy to observe. Other good measures are the many glaciers, which I am told take thousands of years to form. 98% of all glaciers in Alaska are in retreat, and I mean visibly, over the last two decades. I lived in a fairly glacier-heavy area, and every successive spring brought more bare rock where once there was towering ice. The most dramatic of these was Columbia, of course, and I'm told that is not strongly linked to climate changes, but nine miles of ice melting in two decades is really an incredible pace.

I've recently been probing my ignorance of atmospheric science. I've found a couple fairly informative resources, including this more general introduction to the maths, and a more thorough examination of carbon dioxide's role as a greenhouse gas. It really doesn't take a great deal of learning to see that, aside from the observed warming trend, a higher partial pressure of carbon dioxide must result in increased heat transfer to the Earth's surface. There's really nowhere else for it to go. What happens from there is obviously a complex topic, but as you say, the glass jar experiments show pretty clearly that CO2 absorbs long-wave outgoing radiation. Where else do you imagine the heat goes?

Re:Not prudent != Not a problem

[PortHaven]

I can tell you in the several millenia before that, it got much warmer. Heck, the ice bridge between Asia and N. America completely melted. And the world was flooded and doomed.

Re:Not prudent != Not a problem

[PortHaven]

You do realize that glaciers have been in retreat for thousands of years...with the occasional blips of moving forward, usually due to anomolies like large volcanoes, a solar output shifts.

Re:Not prudent != Not a problem

[MightyMartian]

You do realize that it too on something like 12k to 13k years for the major glacial retreats from the last glacial maximum to about 10k years ago when the current period began? You talk as if accelerating glacial losses (along with land ice losses in Greenland and Antarctica) measurable in mere decades were the same thing.

Re:Not prudent != Not a problem

[rs79]

The earth is warming? Really?

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

http://news.ku.dk/all_news/201...

Can you please explain these then?

Re:Not prudent != Not a problem

[riverat1]

No, the ice bridge between Asian and North America forms every winter (for now). What got flooded out as sea levels rose was the land bridge between the two.

Re:Not prudent != Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining. I asked where the heat is going. You can cherry-pick whatever you like, but the fundamental science cannot be hand-waved away. If CO2 absorbs outgoing longwave radiation (which is trivial to confirm), and yet you say there is no warming, (despite the fact that warming has been observed, especially in the Arctic) -- where is the heat going? Are magic fairies carrying it off into space? Let's hope they don't get too ambitious, this planet isn't actually liveable without an atmospheric greenhouse effect.

Look, this is simple: if you have specific objections to the science, say so. If you just have a collection of facts in search of an argument, why is it even worth my time to point out the flaws in your charts? Go through those educational links, and educate yourself, and until then let the adults talk.

Learn to work out of your home

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

Rather oddly, I don't know why but have some theories, remote work is available today that was not just a year ago.

If more of us worked remotely, and more business owners hired more workers, then there would be far less need to live near our places of work.

Then as sea levels rose, or it got too hot to live, or too dry to grow food, or so humid that rains caused constant flooding, both the remote workers and those who employ us could just go somewhere else.

The world is not as overpopulated as it looks. There are vast amounts of completely undeveloped land, with abundant resources of water and energy. The problem is that there are some countries that are very populous, that are poor agriculture, or poor education.

Were we to more equitably distribute our food, education and jobs, global warming would be far less of a problem, because it would be easier for more of the population to migrate to better climes.

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some carbon credits I'll trade you for some bitcoin, cool?

Re:BS junk science

[chipschap]

"Continued efforts" means Al Gore continues to take your money.

That's the essence of the problem. People like Al Gore act like they are the "experts" and there are similar loonies on the other side of the question. Can't we just do unbiased scientific work and rely on that?

Re:BS junk science

[dryeo]

And Alaska (northern USA) and Greenland.

Well first of all....

[PortHaven]

Claiming a 1 degree change as having tipped the point is a tad ridiculous...

Second, I'll argue that the goal of life on earth is to evolve, adapt and die. And don't give me any of that symbiotic bs. Symbiosis is merely a temporary precursor. The true goal should be the eradication and elimination of all life - there can only be one species.

Whether that will be humans, which shall learn to photosynthesize as well as metabolism their old in the form of soylent green, I do not know. My money is on the Octopus....but hey.

Can't be held responsible if you fail to evolve. :-P

Re:Well first of all....

[Splab]

You don't seem to grasp just how much energy one degree change is. We are not talking about your local body or your local city, it's a whole friggin planet that has risen one degree over a very short period of time (again, planetary scale, not human).

It is most likely very bad, what should be worrying the crap out everyone is that currently less energy is being deposited where stuff happens, we have been on a cooling trend in the El Nino cycle and the sun has been unusually "inactive" - signs are that the El Nino cycle will change, which means a lot of the heat the oceans have trapped will probably be dumped back out. The flooding in England and drought in California are just the briese before the real shitstorm hits us.

Re:Well first of all....

[Barsteward]

A drop of 2 degrees in body temp puts you into hypothermia so small changes in temp can be catastrophic.

" I'll argue that the goal of life on earth is to evolve, adapt and die" - correct

"The true goal should be the eradication and elimination of all life - there can only be one species." - sounds like a crackpot religious argument to me.

Re:Well first of all....

[suutar]

The flora in your intestines would probably beg to differ.

Albedo Doesn't Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask the "lead" author about Arctic albedo in the Mesozoic. You'll get an answer of the sort, "Mesozoic? Oh! You refer to 'Geologic Time.' Ah, well the Earth is only 4004 years old of course, so your question is moot, let alone ignorant."

1/1

[PortHaven]

I agree with point 1. Disagree with point 2. But will postulate a point 3. That we should strive for changes that reduce and eliminate pollution. Not because of some theory, but because it's the right thing to do - leave our children a clean world, and no need to have to send troops to the middle east.

Silver Lining

[Anonymous Coward]

space debris

Personal Gains by scientists =

[PortHaven]

Grant $$$

Lots of it...

Why?

Because globalists want a global tax, and CO2/Carbon Tax was as damn close as they've ever managed to come. Why do you want a global tax. Because, whomever you have to pay taxes too, you are subservient too. Taxes (aka Tribute)

Re:Personal Gains by scientists =

[riverat1]

You don't have a clue what they do with that grant money do you? It goes in to equipment, transportation, computer time, paying post-docs a stipend. Most of the time none of it goes in to the grantees pocket and if some of it does it's in lieu of the salary the scientist would be paid by their employer.

Re:Personal Gains by scientists =

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, many, many, many research are funded SOLELY by grant money, don't get your grants, don't have a job.

Re:Personal Gains by scientists =

[Ol Olsoc]

Grant $$$

Lots of it...

Yeah, that scientist making 80 K a year is just itching to get their hands on the trillions of dollars in grant money.

Having worked in a University environment, I can tell you that if you get a million dollar grant, you are ecstatic. Then the money goes towards equipment, travel, writing and paying graduate assistants. Profit? Not likely.

Now compare that to the baksheesh for the deniers.

The money accusation is probably brought up all the time because when you follow the money trail of the denier culture, it always ends up at institutions that have a monetary interest in those industries that stand to make a lot of money by being unfettered. The people who see everything in terms of money try to apply it to all endeavors, just as if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If scientists were all that worried about money, they would be MBA's or Petrochemical industry lawyers.

Just a couple weeks ago we had a case of an Anti-global Warming journal that was using nepotism in it's peer review, plagiarizing, but more to my point, the Editor in Chief was employed by a Petrolem institute. Always follow that money trail, because in all things, it reveals the motives.

I'd chat more, but I have to join the scientists on the Great Socialist Falsehood Explorer in the Bahamas, paid for by gullible citizen's tax dollars. Tonight is hooker night. We'll all laugh at you while on deck sipping on our Mojitos, getting our lap dances. Felicity promises me some navel shots too!

Re:Personal Gains by scientists =

[riverat1]

Sure but that's true of all science, not just climate science. The amount of money spent on medical research dwarfs that spent on climate research. Should we just cut off the gravy train and stop doing scientific research entirely?

Than damn it you fool...

[PortHaven]

Maybe we should stop wasting money studying CO2 and check and make sure our sun is okay. I'd hate to clean up all the CO2, only to find out we should of been building ships to get us off planet before the earth shattering ka-boom.

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"1979 and 2011"

32 years is an odd span.
Why not 30 years, or 25 years.
why not till 2012?
why not till 2013?
why not till Jan 2014?
If things are accelerating the way the lobbyist say, then why not?

guess the years after 2011 doesn't support the agenda.

Re:Small problem

[neilo_1701D]

Since when was stating facts trolling?

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

One shouldn't start a new paragraph with the word 'and' while bitching about grammar .

Re:Small problem

[solanum]

Since they were stated out of context to suggest a meaning that wasn't in line with the actual fact stated.

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is keeping us from generating a magnetic field on a planetary scale?

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[theIsovist]

Admittedly, these experiences are like one's first experiences with learning how to paint - finger painting and messy but with much larger existential consequences and no actual paint.

So it's more like "Baby's first handgun?" Let's hope we survive our first "test" here.

Re:BS junk science

[Anonymous Coward]

The Koch brothers?

They rank 59th in money given to politicians.

Six of the top ten donors, who give exclusively to the left, are unions.

Actblue, a PAC, gave 5 times as much as the brothers from Kansas, all to democrats.

If they are evil for buying influence, does that mean the above groups are 20x as evil?

Sounds like rule #13 "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Re:Small problem

[musmax]

That rebound was just a hop of the ball rolling down the hill. Once the permafrost is 30% gone the climate hysteresis curve flips to the hot side. No gradual slide, no slow "glacial change", rapid, furious, chaotic and violent ringing around the new norm.

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trolling from a CGA 40 character-wide monitor or something? There's this thing called word wrap, look it up.

Botany 101

[rs79]

"did does not mean that CO2 is not pollution"

It's plant food. Fact: all plant life on earth, terrestrial and aquatic, is carbon dioxide rate-limited.

While you're looking this up (please do) look up what "CAM" plants are, too.

Re:Botany 101

[Barsteward]

yes, it is plant food but with all the deforestation going on for mankind's predilections, there are less and less plants to capture the CO2

Re:nope

[rs79]

Ok, here's a trend: look a the line through the curve. Please show me the warming "trend". If you see one your monitor is upside down.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...
http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

Re:nope

[rs79]

Who pays for all those news reports?

How come NASA didn't have to advertise it's hypothesis about space travel 100 times a day for 30 years, too?

Are you aware all this talk of climate has attenuated talk of pollution? Which isn't exactly less of a problem: look at the gulf, the dead zone(s), Fukushima or the dead coral. Turns out that it's only the coral near man, opean cean coral, even warmer bits is fine.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

Re:nope

[rs79]

I call bullshit on the 99.99% number.

Here's "1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skeptic Arguments Against ACC/AGW Alarm"

http://www.populartechnology.n...

Can you show me 1,350,000 papers in support of agw?

Re:BS junk science

[rs79]

Are you aware Lake Ontario froze two months early this year? I haz photos even. That's not because "winter".

Also, remember when the Greenland ice sheet melted last year and everyone freaked out?

"Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time," says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data."

In a warming world wouldn't this have happened even one day early?

And if it's cyclical why did the headline read: "Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt"

How can it be "unprecedented" if it's cyclical? And on time?

No, no alarmism there. That's not "spin" at all.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...

Hansen doesn't work there any more. I'm sure thats just a coincidence. But this sort of self inconsistency has stopped showing up in NASA stuff now. Just another coincidence I'm sure.

Re:nope

[Barsteward]

Probably Fox News, we know how credible they are..

Re:nope

[Barsteward]

" It's a global conspiracy to kill oil, Christianity and cigarettes!" - lets all hope thats true and it works

Adaption

[Bongo]

Be it as it may that nobody who isn't a mainstream climate scientist is allowed to hold any opinion on the subject, and that climate science trumps all other related fields like statistics or geology, it is still reasonable to question the proposed remedies and actions, perhaps more so when those remedies appear to be promoted by idiots.
Technology and social values progress anyway, but the idiots seem to think this can be made to happen to a schedule, and if it can't then they want to reincarnate as a virus to smite the selfish human race. Meanwhile people all over the world continue to make little improvements in technology and society and well, patience is a virtue. There is what's commonly known as the "third" world and the "second" world which are working gradually to improve and educate their girls, and get basic treatable diseases handled, so child mortality can come down, people can return to having two kids per family, and afford a bicycle to get to market, and so on. Doomsday didn't happen, they shifted the date into the future. Well nobody knows the future. Let's all just do our best to make the incremental improvements we can, and test and assess each innovation to see what value, if any, it really offers.

Please for the class define a foot rise

[SuperKendall]

You're just picturing the high tide mark moving a foot higher up the beach, aren't you.

A foot higher in elevation (not distance), yes. Over 100 years.

You aren't picturing the fact that structures are generally built much higher above a beach than that, if only because of storm surges and the like. And again, 100 years to fix anything that will be a problem.

Sigh...

Re:Please for the class define a foot rise

[tragedy]

A foot higher in elevation (not distance), yes. Over 100 years.

...

You aren't picturing the fact that structures are generally built much higher above a beach than that, if only because of storm surges and the like

Yes, that's what I thought. You're looking at a contour map and saying: "one foot of sea-level rise brings the high tide mark from point A to point B." You're completely ignoring the realities of what even a small increase in water level will do to the dynamics of the ocean and to a coastline. Also, at this point, 1 foot over a century is looking like a best case scenario.

Re:Please for the class define a foot rise

[SuperKendall]

You're completely ignoring the realities of what even a small increase in water level will do to the dynamics of the ocean and to a coastline.

It will change, yes - but the main point you seem to be missing is IT IS OVER THE PERIOD OF 100 YEARS!!!!!!!

People have easily kept water at bay that changes that slowly. They will continue to do so.

It does not, for example, put all of New York City under water as was commonly proposed as a downside of global warming.

Re:Please for the class define a foot rise

[tragedy]

It will change, yes - but the main point you seem to be missing is IT IS OVER THE PERIOD OF 100 YEARS!!!!!!!

Yes, but what I think you're missing is that gradual changes in these sorts of systems tends not to actually be so gradual. What actually tends to happen is that things remain more or less the same for decades, then there's a storm or some other typical but infrequent condition and entire sections of coastline vanish overnight.

People have easily kept water at bay that changes that slowly. They will continue to do so

People tend to ignore it when it changes slowly. What actually happens is that people with a good understanding of the system speak up about what will happen, then shout when no-one seems to be listening, then get marginalized (if they actually work for the organization that's supposed to be fixing the problem, they get fired, asked to resign, demoted, re-assigned, etc.). Long term budget concerns are always beaten by short-term concerns, even if the long-term concerns will end up saving money in the final accounting. Roads are a great example. In most areas, they could be made a lot better than they are, and last a lot longer, but instead, they just get constant repairs and frequent repaving which ends up costing more than if they did it right in the first place. The marginal costs are completely ignored: all the extra damage to cars from bad roads (or under construction roads), plus all the fuel and time wasted by construction delays. The same kinds of people who make those decisions make the decisions about how to deal with rising waters.

Consider, for example, New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. That was an entirely predictable man-made disaster. All the paving and man-made drainage systems, etc. plus the short-sighted design of the levees were what made things so bad.

Re:Please for the class define a foot rise

[SuperKendall]

Yes, but what I think you're missing is that gradual changes in these sorts of systems tends not to actually be so gradual.

Except that for sea level changes it absolutely has been, and will continue to be so.

People tend to ignore it when it changes slowly.

All it would mean is possibly some abandoned structures by the coast if people ignore it, or hastily placed mitigation elements put in place until a more permanent solution is realized - and again all this happens over the course of 100 years as sea level rises gradually affect different areas. But no-where near something to panic over.

Re:Please for the class define a foot rise

[tragedy]

Except that for sea level changes it absolutely has been, and will continue to be so.

But what I keep saying is that this is _not_ just about sea level rising. The sea level doesn't rise and everything goes on just the way it has with slightly higher sea level. The actual effects of the sea level change can be catastrophic and sudden.

All it would mean is possibly some abandoned structures by the coast if people ignore it, or hastily placed mitigation elements put in place until a more permanent solution is realized - and again all this happens over the course of 100 years as sea level rises gradually affect different areas. But no-where near something to panic over.

And you're completely ignoring the example I gave of New Orleans why? That example makes it abundantly clear is that what happens in most of these situations is that people ignore it and put things off and dismiss the people warning them about it as hysterical. Then things collapse in a rush and it's time to _really_ panic.

WTF

[SuperKendall]

Why does the temperature have rise a lot to cause an issue?

Because all of the supposed harm is caused by runway temperature rises.

Otherwise we just have a better climate overall which will lead to improved fro yields across the globe, which doesn't sound nearly as scary.

As more forests are chopped down to make way for more meat production

Which grow back faster in a warmer climate...

Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Did you think that wasn't a problem, should have it been ignored?

No because that was a REAL problem.

As noted the earth is a CO2 processing system. Even with abundant CO2 it simply encourages greater plant growth and makes up the difference.

Re:WTF

[Barsteward]

"Why does the temperature have rise a lot to cause an issue? Because all of the supposed harm is caused by runway temperature rises."

that was badly worded by me, i was commenting on the poster only expecting a large jump in temp for it to be an issue whereas a small rise is an issue.

"Which grow back faster in a warmer climate..."

yes, but where will they grow once the land has been claimed for animals and animal feed> ?

"As noted the earth is a CO2 processing system. Even with abundant CO2 it simply encourages greater plant growth and makes up the difference"

yes but as its all being cut down for animal feed, logging, animal grazing etc where will all these plants grow? It'll possibly also encourage more deserts or growth of existing ones.

Re:WTF

[SuperKendall]

yes but as its all being cut down for animal feed

Animal feed is still plant life. Even if you increase the number of animals raised a lot, you are still processing a lot of CO2.

Incidentally, this is why if you are for the environment you really should not be also against animal cruelty. The tighter you can pack in animals the less plant life that needs to be cut down.

Re:WTF

[Barsteward]

"Animal feed is still plant life." - yes and when you cut it down it releases the CO2

"Incidentally, this is why if you are for the environment you really should not be also against animal cruelty. The tighter you can pack in animals the less plant life that needs to be cut down." - weird rational that sounds like a troll - just eat less animal product and don't use as much land and lower emissions from their rear end

Re:nope

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

NO, we should NOT simply dump millions/billions into trying whatever harebrained "band-aid" idea happens to float into the public consciousness today without extensive study.

I agree with you with one nuance: that we have studied the problem for more than 20 years and that there is a consensus: we simpy need to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses we put into the air. Watever other actions may or may not be possible or appropriate first priority is to stop the bleeding (to keep up the metaphore) and take away the cause of all these changes: the amount of greenhouse gasses that are released into the air.
Without that any solution is indeed a bandaid.

Re:Small problem

[Pino Grigio]

Not sure why this comment is modded "troll". It's 100% accurate.

Re:Small problem

[Pino Grigio]

Once the permafrost is 30% gone the climate hysteria curve flips to the hot side

There, I fixed it for you.

Tkwasny

[Anonymous Coward]

This can be accomplished by NOT knee-jerk legislating away the world economies and the peoples freedoms based on zero facts. Right now there are only computer models and theory that happen to be proving not so correct. Lets get the sciences and the FACTS correct first without any embelishments, lying, falsifying data, using uncalibrated sensors improperly placed, on and on.

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

And antarctic sea ice is up by 25%

Please prove it will be in the opposite direction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that's a contentious issue amongst the climate sciences at the moment, but here we have an internet gallileo that has apparently proven it is DEFINITELY going to a negative feedback, despite all the best evidence being "probably positive, a bit".

So let us know where your working out is.

TIA.

Re:Small problem

[Muros]

Not sure why this comment is modded "troll". It's 100% accurate.

Beacause it had at least 50% more trolling.

Hanson 1988.

[Anonymous Coward]

It predicted within 10% the climate sensitivity for the next 20 years.

It's expensive, so the problem doesn't exist

[Geoffrey.landis]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought.

So, instead you're adopting a position of "any possible action would be be expensive, therefore no problem exists?

Is this what you call "rational thought"?

If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives.

So, here's a solution. Rather than discussing other possible solutions and looking for ideas that won't be costly in terms of real money and quality of life... let's just attack the science, which doesn't cost much.

If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence.

And we have drastically good evidence... except, when people make deliberate point of ignoring all evidence presented that disagrees with the position they've already taken, no amount of evidence, however good, can convince them.

Here's a question for you, by the way. What's your opinion of Murphy's Law? Do you read it as
"anything that can go wrong will go wrong," or do you have an alternate version, "when something can go wrong, we can count on some hitherto-unknown phenomenon cancelling out the known effect to make everything come out right."?

Show me [Re:Cloud formation albedo]

[Geoffrey.landis]

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

I think it's actually the "at least show me that there's a cliff, and where it is so I can decide if I should stop or turn" theory.

OK. Here: Working Group I Report: The Physical Science Basis

Re:Show me [Re:Cloud formation albedo]

[phantomfive]

Have you read it? That doesn't answer the question.

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Fifty years fro now, AGW theory will be seen in the same light as Phrenology.

Models that have failed empirical tests.
A theory that can't account for current conditions.
Fanatical supporters who behave more like a cult than scientists.

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Once C02 hits 400 PPM, then it's all over. Wait...never mind.

Predictions by mouth breathing, mother's basement dwelling, Slashdot spamming, wanna be brown shirts of Environmentalism like you count for shit.

Garbage alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get our science back, and move on to more important things, like actually studying real climate and weather...

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is one of a society that has been trained to misunderstand Science. In the USA Science is replaceable with a body of facts and argument (which isn't really what Science is in either circumstance). Yes, there are a few people who really understand it better than I mention, but the masses do not.

These people who misunderstand Science are the same ones that misunderstand wealth. When people complain that there is a large increase in poverty, they will state that they have $80 in their pocket. The cannot separate out a fact finding from their personal observations. Personal observations are selective, not accounting for data that was not observed, which is exactly why Science first determines the pool of data to be collected and then attempts the collection randomly.

So the USA had a record cold winter, but the north and south poles had a record warm winter. It was so warm that the ice packs didn't rebuild equal to previous years. As a result, the upcoming summer will devastate the ice packs. It's already to the point that the north pole could be in the water, in just a few years. http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/arctic-seaice-2012.html

.

Note that this image is based on the shrink from an 30 year average that ended in 2010. In 2010, they reported a trend of massive melting. Back in 1979 it looked like this

Faced with this evidence, most people will still say, "Well, it's actually getting colder, because they live in the northern USA, and they can't see further than their own backyards.

Lack of Context???

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah... This article actually reads kind of like a childish grade school rebuttal to "Change Deniers". Which seems to be the mentality of modern Climate Catastrophe devotees.

Articles like this are pure junk to researchers. If articles like this help form the foundation of your beliefs, then I'm sorry to say you're the warped one, eric the conspirator ...

Merica

[Anonymous Coward]

There aint no Cimate change; its jus a Democrate roose!

Alter Earth's Orbit/Wobble

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Global Warming can alert the Earth's wobble! I knew it all along! As the Arctic loses ice, the Antarctic gains ice which jacks up the balance of the spinning globe. Which further jacks up the weather cycle. And, with enough change in the Earth's wobble, the orbit itself will change.

Oh, Al Gore and United Nations, where are you? Help us! Save us! We neeeed youuuuu! Ooooohhhhh. Alas. We. Are. Doomed.

soot? asphalt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because all that soot from the far east and pavement over the entire world wasn't doing enough

Not so fast there sparky

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I doubt we are out of the :"ice age". Out of our lovely little inter-glacial maybe and back into the freezer? Hope not but the longest running and most accurate climate prediction was by Dr Libby and Dr Pandolfi in the 1970s. They've been accurate for close to 4 decades and what they predict next isn't warmth :(

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/1979-before-the-hockey-team-destroyed-climate-science/

Ever since the Panama connected north and south america we have been in a recurring ice age for 100k years with brief 15k inter-glacial nice warm weather. Open up Panama or stock up on some warm clothes.

Who is kidding whom?

[Benders]

There is one simple problem regarding human beings and the Planet we call Earth; there are way too many of us! And those that are here are so arrogant they feel they need to help the Planet. If you want the planet to remain 100% Natural, leave. Your very existence is obviously Unnatural in and of itself as far as the planet is concerned. We cannot exist and have no impact on the planet. That is a physical impossibility. As far as the Weather is concerned; it is spelled wrong. It should be correctly spelled Whether. We have about as much real knowledge about the Whether on our planet as we have of the inhabitants five miles deep in our oceans. What if every person in the continental US did not exhale for 24 hours? Would that be a worthwhile reduction in the carbon footprint our populace creates? And, if it is a worthwhile reduction, does that mean we just have to wipe out every animal, (Human or otherwise) in North America to save the planet? We should be stopping all forms of aerobic exercise of any kind for all reasons. That would reduce our carbon footprint as a Nation. Anything that gets us breathing hard increases our carbon dioxide output. You fix our Global population explosion, and you will find that our possible impact on "The Planet Earth" will be greatly reduced to the point of being a non-issue. It is unbelievable how arrogant we can be. Mother Nature, and The Planet Earth are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They have been doing so for far longer than our species has been here.

Re:BS junk science

[sexconker]

"Continued efforts" means Al Gore continues to take your money.

That's the essence of the problem. People like Al Gore act like they are the "experts" and there are similar loonies on the other side of the question. Can't we just do unbiased scientific work and rely on that?

Of course not. It's a political issue, not a scientific one. All the rhetoric, research funding, international conferences, projections, plans, and reporting are politics first, science last.

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[cavebison]

Looking on the bright side - thanks to all our wanton climate changing industrial activity and glacial public acceptance of the situation, we are getting our first experiences with terraforming.

You're kidding, right? The only thing we are affecting here is a few degrees of temperature, and you're equating that to "terraforming"? On top of that, it has taken *decades of activity of millions of people and vast industrialisation* to achieve *a few degrees of change*. No, we are not doing terraforming. We are just fucking with the atmosphere a bit. It's not even enough to wipe us out, or make Earth "unliveable". It's just enough to wipe out our food production and cause millions - perhaps billions - of people to starve or be killed in resource wars, etc. until we adjust to the new climate conditions.

That's not terraforming, that's just another day in human civilisation.

Re:Small problem

[Pino Grigio]

Disagreeing with someone is not trolling.

Re:Small problem

[Muros]

Disagreeing with someone is not trolling.

I agree! It's a good thing that your statement has 50% less disagreement.

Here's a tip

[CmdrTamale]

If we are beyond the tipping point, there is no point trying to ameliorate our CO2 contributions. We should devote all available resources into surviving the inevitable disasters.

Assigning blame is an exercise best left to the survivors.
--
Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist. -- George Carlin

Re:Small problem

[Anonymous Coward]

For albedo extent matters more than volume.

Re:Terraforming 101: Chapter 1 - What not to do

[Pharmboy]

Physics.