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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.

11 of 547 comments (clear)

  1. No by bugs2squash · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, no it didn't happen. La La La La La - I can't hear you

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    Nullius in verba
  2. Re:records go back to 1880, very funny by Ralph+Wiggam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's weird how those old thermometers were always inaccurate in the negative direction.

  3. Re:not a record by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:It's about time by ultranova · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Warming did not stop for 15 years, for chrissakes, and you're either a liar or a moron for restating it.

    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.

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    Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  5. Re:not a record by bug1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  6. GLobal warming scien is simple by geekoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  7. Re:Not quite that simple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Water vapor isn't a spoiler - the bands that it absorbs are different from the bands that CO2 absorbs. That's all there is to it really. There's so much water in the atmosphere that water vapor bands are essentially entirely absorbed. We can't reduce the amount of water in the atmosphere, and we wouldn't want to even if we could, so any gains that we make have to be outside the water absorption spectrum.

  8. Re:records go back to 1880, very funny by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:records go back to 1880, very funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da by CaptainLard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thanks for pointing that out. Its a good thing Christopher Booker (author of your "story") is here to report on NOAA data fabrication.

    AND ALSO to let us know that 2nd hand smoke and lung cancer are not related, asbestos poses no risks and the /. 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!

  11. Re:records go back to 1880, very funny by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 5, Informative

    A cursory googling doesn't paint Steve S. Goddard as someone that has a rigourous approach to statistical analysis.

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    (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons