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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.
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.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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.
The PLANET is getting warmer. The eastern half of the United States experienced a cold winter.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
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.
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.
Stephan
To anyone that has been paying (not even very close) attention this is nothing new.
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.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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 world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Funny how people like you never take one for the planet and start depopulating yourselves.
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
we are getting our first experiences with venusforming
FTFY
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).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Not a single IPCC5 model matches reality, nor even comes close. The real data disagrees with the models; which do we believe?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
Since they were stated out of context to suggest a meaning that wasn't in line with the actual fact stated.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
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.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
'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/_...
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
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.
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.
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.