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NOAA: Earth Smashed A Record For Heat In May 2014, Effects To Worsen
Freshly Exhumed (105597) writes with news that NOAA's latest global climate analysis is showing things are getting hotter. From the article: Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, experts say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Monday said May's average temperature on Earth of 15.54 C beat the old record set four years ago. In April, the globe tied the 2010 record for that month. Records go back to 1880. Experts say there's a good chance global heat records will keep falling, especially next year because an El Nino weather event is brewing on top of man-made global warming. An El Nino is a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that alters climate worldwide and usually spikes global temperatures.
No, no it didn't happen. La La La La La - I can't hear you
Nullius in verba
I wonder what's making all that ice melt then.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It's weird how those old thermometers were always inaccurate in the negative direction.
Of course looking at that we would find that the Earth is in a fairly moderate area between much cooler global temps and much higher global temps.
The earth has been in the not so distant past very uncomfortable for humans in both directions. The earth some day will get much more tropical again. The earth will again see Ice Ages. These are true statements. Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Yes, but the earths population wasn't as large 'way back when'.
The coastline ending up a few more miles inland didn't matter as much when there was room for the population to move back from the edge.
Now ?, well, a large proportion of the worlds most densly populated areas may well become uninhabitable, and really, no where for large numbers of people to go.
The only 'easy' fix is less people, and I imagine one way or another, that will be the outcome.
If only we knew which thermometers are located in the heat islands so that we could filter them out...oh, wait!
Ezekiel 23:20
You know, there's this funny theorem that in the absence of systematic errors, averaging measurements from multiple instruments (each of them systematically, but randomly-per-instrument overshooting or undershooting) and measurement times (each instrument having a random error here) keeps the mean centered on its true value while decreasing the measurement error.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not really. Notice the word "warmists" there? It's used as a tribal identifier. In other words, symbolset's post is actually a boast against a perceived other tribe - no different than "your mom's fat". The actual content of the message is not about your mother's body composition, nor Earth's climate, but rather "this is our territory!". It's only an unfortunate accident of evolution that we use the same mechanism for establishing dominance than we use for problem-solving.
It's quite fascinating how much of human communication is utterly unrelated to its nominal content. And it also explains why these discussions tend to degenerate into poo-flinging contest in short order.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?
As for the the earth being colder during the Devonian period when CO2 was higher, the Sun was significantly dimmer back then.
"The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd"
Understanding reality is not hysteria, trying to deny it is.
I'll take the cold any day. It's easier and usually more fun to warm up than it is to cool off.
Also, snoooowwwwwww!
They never changed the name. Please stop being so freaking stupid.
Global warming = Energy captured by excess CO2
Climate change = how global warming impact the climate.
Climate disruption= Economic change do to climate change.
Te first two came int' use almost at the same time.
They are all related but different things. No one is changing anything. I understand the the media confuses the terms, and some pundits use that as some sort of ad hom attack, but you need to be better then that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The question is not only if the climate is changing, but if it's directly related to CO2. Robert Essenhigh's point is quite interesting. http://bit.ly/11IsUri
It was quite interesting until he failed to explain how heat produces CO2, after claiming that it was easily explainable; when he claimed that a ~5% increase in CO2 release from burning fossil fuel for energy was "statistical noise" and implied that it was the extent of industrial production of CO2, he became a denialist liar. There are numerous other industrial sources of CO2; for example, the production and curing of concrete alone (not accounting for the CO2 release of burning the energy, already accounted for here) accounts for approximately 2.5% of our CO2 emissions. Iron and steel production are likewise carbon-intensive processes, even putting aside the energy consumption. He also doesn't back up his statement that only two possible causes deserve explanation, nor what the four possible causes are, etc etc. He also blames the entire thermal forcing on water vapor, but relative humidity (the only kind of humidity he mentions in the linked page) is decreasing due to rising temperatures.
tl;dr: Essenhigh is trivializing human CO2 production, which exceeds volcanism, and also failing to back up his statements.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
why are so many people her suckered by pundits?
Pay attention:
1) Visible light hits the earth. Falsifiable, and tested.
2) When visible light strikes something, IR is generated. Falsifiable, and tested.
3) CO2 is transparent to visible light. Falsifiable, and tested.
4) CO2 absorbed energy from IR. Falsifiable, and tested.
5) CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Falsifiable, and tested.
6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.
That's it. That is global warming. If you disagree with that, then you need to prove where the science is wrong. I look forward to your noble prize winning paper.
If you read that and still think it doesn't impact the climate(climate change) then you need to show where the absorbed energy is going.
Some of you are very disappointing, falling into ad hom attacks and bad science. Scien that can trivally be checked out. But no, some of ypu moron keeps spouting the same crap.
AGW is a scientific fact.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors. If they truly are random errors that happen to be distributed around the actual value, then yes. But this distribution of errors is not always true.
Also, remember that we are discussing discrete measurements made on unique devices with unknown accuracy/errors which are NOT duplicated, but are for unique locations which we may or may not accurately know, at varying intervals, under conditions which can have huge impact on measurements. You may be able to normalize away some of these variables in some cases, but when you do this for multiple variables, your data set does not improve in accuracy.
Say you had 50 recorded measurements for the same time and place taken by 50 devices/methods you might be able to claim better accuracy than just one, but only if you have a reasonable distribution of measured values. If say 25 of your devices just gave you random numbers (didn't measure anything) your data set will still be corrupted.
But the issue here is NOT accuracy but TRENDS. Given that we are NOT using the same devices for the last 200 years, there will be little you can do with the data in regards to trend information. Through the years we have changed how and where we measure temperatures. This means that the absolute error in each data point will remain because it's about how much things have changed. Problem is, there are things that have changed which have nothing to do with the data. Locations, equipment, and techniques have all changed over the last 200 years, many of these changes are invisible in the data, but can change the trends you see in it.
For instance, Say you measured temperature data in the middle of a grassy field for 200 years. What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago? Now add in that the area around the field starts to see a lot of buildings and about 50 years ago light aircraft traffic (piston engines). Then in the late 60's that traffic switches over to jet turbines and a lot more of the field gets paved. Now, consider how many data points this might actually be in the USA data set given that a high percentage of "observations" are made at airports these days and tell me how much affect that has on your TREND or how you think you are going to normalize that out of the data?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why is it that the global warming deniers can't decide whether warming isn't happening, it is happening but it isn't human-caused, or it is happening, it is human-caused, but it isn't economical to do anything about it? It can't be all 3, yet the deniers can't seem to get their story straight.
The truth is that it's the 3rd option. Deniers first argue that it isn't happening. When science proves them wrong, they then argue that it is happening but isn't human caused. When science proves them wrong again, they fall back to their real position that despite it existing and being human caused, it isn't worth doing anything about because that would take work and cost money. It's very dishonest.
About what I would expect to find here on /. Same people that go to AOL, YAHOO, HuffnPuff Post, PMSNBC and CNN and would rather throw the stones at Fox or Rs than offer something constructive.
I am not so sure you understand what "smash" means. The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces in 2010 was 0.72C. The same data for this year is 0.74C. I would hardly call 0.02C as smashing.
Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors. If they truly are random errors that happen to be distributed around the actual value, then yes. But this distribution of errors is not always true. Also, remember that we are discussing discrete measurements made on unique devices with unknown accuracy/errors which are NOT duplicated, but are for unique locations which we may or may not accurately know, at varying intervals, under conditions which can have huge impact on measurements. You may be able to normalize away some of these variables in some cases, but when you do this for multiple variables, your data set does not improve in accuracy.
Every thermometer makes random errors in individual measurements, and every thermometer can have a systematic error, but I'd really like to see a reason why this per-instrument systematic error should be biased in average. Calibrating processes for measurement instruments surely don't work this way.
But the issue here is NOT accuracy but TRENDS. Given that we are NOT using the same devices for the last 200 years, there will be little you can do with the data in regards to trend information.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm pretty sure our local stations keep records of major instrument overhauls which can be taken into consideration. In addition, if we're looking for trends, as you say, the additive systematic error of temperature measurements is automatically cancelled and the importance of the multiplicative systematic error is diminished given that we're looking at small deltas and the measurement error is going to be similarly small, by virtue of being proportional to the delta, so (unless something is eluding me here) the trends shouldn't be obscured by either systematic additive error or systematic multiplicative error of any given measurement instrument.
For instance, Say you measured temperature data in the middle of a grassy field for 200 years. What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago?
Again, fortunately, we happen to have records of these things so that we can make informed decisions as to which measurements are candidates for exclusion due to human development introducing local environmental biases.
Ezekiel 23:20
The big spoiler that makes models a bit more difficult is water vapor. It is both more prevalent than CO2 in the atmosphere and more variable in the amount (CO2 is pretty uniform, water vapour varies a lot based on location, time of year, etc). Also when you look at the absorption spectra, water vapour absorbs larger bands of IR than CO2, particularly in the thermal IR region.
That's not the only extra bit of complexity, but it is one that confounds the situation.
Now before you fly off the handle and start screaming and ranting: I'm not challenging the validity of the theory here, I'm just saying you are oversimplifying things. Going after people for being stupid, but then showing ignorance of the complexity of the issue is rather silly.
The problem is that it is complex. If it were a simple system, we'd likely have a very accurate model for it. The complexity is precisely why despite general agreement on the theoretical mechanism of action there are such wide error bars on the predictions.
There's a station here that's been continuously recording the daily data meticulously since the 1780s. In the first half of 1800s, there were up to twenty daily measurements there (before the international custom of three measurements per day became established). Of course everything relevant gets recorded and logged. Don't underestimate the power of the Force^H^H^H^H^HOCD.
Ezekiel 23:20
So you've never heard of Canada, Belize, Bermuda, Guyana, or the Falkland islands? All of these were British possessions in the 1880s, and they cover a nice range of latitudes.
Such equipment records surely don't exist back to 1880.... So, my argument stands.
Just because you think something couldn't possibly be true doesn't mean it isn't.
Thermometer manufacture was precise enough to produce very high quality instruments by the late 1800s. The issue, as GP points out, isn't random errors popping up (thermometers were about as accurate as rulers could be in the late 1800s), but rather whether we know how the instruments were calibrated and how older scales might match up to instruments that were calibrated against modern international standards.
And, at least in the U.S., standard regular calibration standards had been agreed upon by the first couple decades of the 1900s. Good instruments even decades before then should have very little random error -- the question is only whether anyone bothered to check new equipment calibrated to international standards against the old equipment (or sent the old equipment to be tested once such standards were developed).
So, then you have to ask yourself: people who are bothering to meticulously record scientific data continuously for decades on end -- and they're not going to even bother to check whether their old instruments line up properly with new calibration standards?
Sure, I'm positive there are plenty of places that don't have such records. But we have continuous logbooks going back for centuries in many places. The idea that people taking meticulous records wouldn't even bother to check new equipment against old just seems a little ridiculous... not saying it wouldn't happen, but we have plenty of data points where it did happen to extrapolate estimates for error distributions.
You're acting like temperature measurement in the late 1800s was people guessing random numbers or drawing them out of a hat. But that's not what it was like, and there were lots of places with VERY detailed records.
You must have failed your stats 101 course in college. Let me educate you: any random sampling has limited accuracy. A randomly sampling of real temperatures that is made using low quality thermometers will probably have a very limited accuracy. But as you take more samples, you will either find that the measurements are biased or that they are normally distributed. If they are biased, you should be able to model the bias and apply a correction to achieve a normal distribution. Once you have a normal distribution, you know that an increase in the number of samples allows to say with a greater degree of confidence that the real value is within a certain range of the mean of those samples. So, even if you have shitty thermometers, you may be able to draw useful conclusions from them if you have thousands of measurements. This is the kind of stuff that the big boys talk about when they prepare journal articles for peer review. You know, p 0.05 and all that.
Goddard's site shows the current NOAA chart, and the previously published NOAA chart.
The "smoothing" to fit the AGW story is pretty evident, and he is using THEIR data, so there is no "denying", just your projection.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
When El Nino leads to a new record high temperature by a large margin (for argument's sake, in 2015), the denialists will quietly adopt this as their new standard for 'normal' and in 2025 they'll be saying "warming is a hoax because temperatures haven't risen on average since 2015."
http://xkcd.com/1321/
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?
Yep. There's one right here. And here is another one you won't like.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Thanks for pointing that out. Its a good thing Christopher Booker (author of your "story") is here to report on NOAA data fabrication.
/. favorite...get ready, its a doozy... Evolution is based on BS assumptions and BLIND FAITH and Intelligent Design is the truth!. If you include that last bit when you quote him it will be much easier to keep the stories straight. Your welcome!
AND ALSO to let us know that 2nd hand smoke and lung cancer are not related, asbestos poses no risks and the
I used to set lead type in my parents print shop as a kid, and I'm perfectly fine, even after setting lead type in my parents print shop, it had no effect on me, just like setting lead type in my parents print shop.
Speaking truth to power
Holy smokes are you president of the Christopher Booker fan club?? From his wikipedia page "...he speaks truth to power...". From the 2 minutes of research I've done on him I'd say he speaks truthiness to power. He makes his living as a professional contrarian. All of his pubilished views are the opposite of scientific consensus in a vast variety of subjects. Its possible he could be smarter than all climate scientists, cancer scientists, infectious disease scientists, and Evolutionary Biologists. But there is a much higher likelyhood that he is just full of shit.
Yes, long before him. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1956 titled:
Plass, G.N., 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change, Tellus VIII, 2. (1956), p. 140-154.
Google "Frank Lutz memo", that's where this stupid "change of name" thing originated. The term "global warming" was coined in the seventies to describe observations of climate change, the phrase "climate change" goes back to the 50's. People in the 1950's were not looking for global warming they were trying to explain the ice ages, which cannot be done without understanding the role of CO2. The detected AGW as a consequence of that investigation. It was not until the 1950's that spectroscopes (for heat seeking missiles) became good enough to separate the H20 and CO2 absorption spectra. Until that time the H2O absorption spectra was assumed to overlap the C02 absorption spectra and thus CO2 was thought to have no effect on climate.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm pretty sure our local stations keep records of major instrument overhauls which can be taken into consideration.
I used to work in climate science and we had a saying: "If you give a thermometer to a meteorologist, he knows what temperature it is. If you give him two, he's confused."
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.
It has been known for a while now that CO2 has been the "thermostat of global climate", for the at least as long a multi-cellular life has been around. In the past CO2 was a natural positive feedback wrt the direction of change, thus amplifying the ice ages changes that are driven by orbital cycles. This effect is still at work today and it's perfectly feasible to control the CO2 concentration to ward of the extremes of these changes. We have been doing this for a while now but in wrong direction, over the next 40yrs we will add half a trillion tons of CO2 into the air, the same amount as what we have put into the air over the last 250yrs, the spike in CO2 due to man is not the highest in the geologic record but it is almost certainly the most rapid change in levels (up 30% in 250yrs and accelerating exponentially ).
It's been clearly shown to all independent observers that we have already significantly altered climate with the first half trillion tons, we can easily observe the North pole melting over the last few decades. So given all that, what makes you think the next half trillion tons won't have an accumulative effect on climate? We could, if we so desired, start scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere today to restore the climate to the equilibrium our agriculture and civilizations have evolved to suit, the technology is there to do whatever the politics wills with CO2 levels over the next 50yrs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Depends which temperature proxy you look at, but on average, nope.
Of course there may have been warmer days in the "recent" past, but we have no records of that, so the article's claim stands. And your claim requires ignoring most of the various proxy reconstructions that have been done, so it doesn't hold up either.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A cursory googling doesn't paint Steve S. Goddard as someone that has a rigourous approach to statistical analysis.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
There are multiple carbon cycles around us. One is the obvious, atmospheric one, where rotting plants and animals release CO2 and growing plants sequester it again, on a timescale of dozens of years. Another is a long term one, in which carbon contained in marine sediments gets transported deeper in the tectonic subduction zones, the hydrated carbon-containing rocks then get into areas of high temperature where their hydration decreases the melting point of those rocks and the surrounding environment to the extent that the rocks melt, form magma, and volcanism and CO2 outgassing ensues. That happens on a timescale of millions, or tens of millions of years.
There seems to be a number of feedback loops in this latter process that increase the absorption of CO2 if there is too much of it in the atmosphere and decrease its absorption if there is too little of it, while the volcanoes dump the CO2 back at some random but I guess roughly stable rate (dictated by how fast the tectonic plates deliver the carbon to be outgassed, and this process doesn't care much about what happens on the surface).
And here's the problem: The carbon we're digging up and burning right now had been slowly deposited from the atmosphere into coal and oil over a long period before we started mining it, while these feedback mechanisms had enough time to continuously keep the atmospheric CO2 at some level using these deep crust reservoirs. But now we've been burning the coal and oil quickly, so even though the total amount of carbon in the air, water, continental rocks, marine rocks and generally, the Earth's crust stays the same, and while these feedback loops are stil in effect, we're pumping it from continental rocks (coal, really) into the atmosphere way faster than these long-term cycles can re-deposit it back into the deeper crust.
(But I'm Not A Geologist, so if there is one around and I got it wrong, please correct me on anything.)
Ezekiel 23:20