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UN Study Shows Record-High Increases For Atmospheric CO2 In 2013
Figures released Tuesday by a United Nations advisory body reveal that 2013 saw new recorded highs for both carbon dioxide and methane, as well as the largest year-over-year rise in carbon dioxide since 1984, reflecting continuing worldwide emissions from human sources but also the possibility that natural sinks (oceans and vegetation) are near their capacity for absorbing the excess. From the Washington Post's account:
The latest figures from the World Meteorological Organization’s monitoring network are considered particularly significant because they reflect not only the amount of carbon pumped into the air by humans, but also the complex interaction between man-made gases and the natural world. Historically, about half of the pollution from human sources has been absorbed by the oceans and by terrestrial plants, preventing temperatures from rising as quickly as they otherwise would, scientists say.
“If the oceans and the biosphere cannot absorb as much carbon, the effect on the atmosphere could be much worse,” said Oksana Tarasova, a scientist and chief of the WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch program, which collects data from 125 monitoring stations worldwide. The monitoring network is regarded as the most reliable window on the health of Earth’s atmosphere, drawing on air samples collected near the poles, over the oceans, and in other locations far from cities and other major sources of pollution.
The new figures for carbon dioxide were particularly surprising, showing the biggest year-over-year increase since detailed records were first compiled in the 1980s, Tarasova said in an interview. The jump of nearly three parts per million over 2012 levels was twice as large as the average increase in carbon levels in recent decades, she said.
saying otherwise makes you a denier.
No it doesn't - it just shows that you really don't give a fuck about any future human beings. It's the kind of selfishness that ignores even the slimmest chance that you are wrong because even if you are you will not have to deal with the consequences.
You're like a screaming child that wants their own way no matter how much someone else has to suffer. You're difficult to ignore and eveyone wants to slap you.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The problem is people are still trying to convince the deniers that there is a problem.
All this does is increase the radicalization of the deniers. The Deniers will not believe any logic or proof that you tell them. Because...
1. They don't want to believe it. Any logic your bring up is part of a conspiracy.
2. It is inconvenient to believe it. AKA they have a lot of money in industry that profits off of releasing global warming gasses.
3. Their religion/philosophy/political view has chosen to not to believe it. Not form any religious text per say but because of a charismatic Person for #1 or #2 who has manipulated the text. It isn't because all these people are just brain dead followers... But because they are in a situation in their lives where they have learned growing up that they are good guys and bad guys. And the bad guys are obviously wrong, or corrupt.
Now there are liberal agenda items that are not backed by science however they will firmly deny them as well, so it isn't that the other group is that stupid, but it is due to the human condition.
To correct climate change, We need to stop trying to convince the deniers about the problem, they won't listen. But you need to create solutions where alternatives are available.
For example don't mention green.
1. It is cheaper.
2. You have more control of your power and you are not as dependent on someone else.
3. Jobs available in a new energy market.
You need to get the tree huger/I HATE AMERICA type cast from the issue. That way you can sneak it into their culture without them having to really believe in global warming.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Indeed, in a few years, they'll be emitting as much per capita as Germany 9.5t, the UK 7.7t and the US 17.5t
t=tonnes of CO2 per annum per capita..
I'm no fan of China's pollution 7t record but it seems odd to single them out.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The story below says "US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom" and asks 'do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?'
Well, do they?
Honestly, this explanation doesn't sit well with me. I'd love to get in their heads, because I don't get them. But this explanation of their behavior doesn't seem to mesh with how they act.
They seem like people who want to imagine cynicism and naive skepticism lets them see further than everyone else. You know, like truther types do.
I'm going to wager that you didnt watch Cosmos did you? He presented probably the simplest most accessbile explanation posssible.
Here's a good link to the clip: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/nei...
That or you still dont understand the concept of averages.
It's not that "climate != weather"
It's that climate = sum(weather) / (time*area)
IE, climate is the average of weather over time or a region or both.
hurricane, tornado, drought, and heat wave to global warming?
Do those thing represent one day of local weather, or large events on large scales that last a long time?
I'll break it down for you again, and ignore your attempt to put words in my mouth, and then tell me how I'm wrong.
-Weather is what's ouside your window. It's what's happening right now. In a very small time scale, in a very small regional-scale. Local, short term observations.
-Climate is a whole bunch of those local observations strung together. It's a very large time scale, on a very large regional-scale.
Hurricanes are a climatological event that produce extreme weather (wind, rain). They are spawned by climatological factors, but grow and self-reinforce on a large scale and themselves grow to affect climate (in a way they give vent to rather large pent up energies). Tornadoes are a weather event, but the supercells that form them are themselves driven by climate trends. A heat wave is a string of related weather events. It may be localized or cover a large area, but being a string of related weather events again points more to the climate side of the scale. Droughts again: large scale, long term, climate.
In the case of AGW those scales are a) global, and b) range from a couple centuries, to several My depending on which line of evidence you're looking at.
It was unusually cold in New England this winter. That's weather. But overall, this winter was still one of the 5 warmest on record. That's climate.
All these things are interwoven together. Ocean currents, the jet stream, warm/cold water layer mixing, warm/cold air mixing, humidity, water/air temperature gradients...all these things combine and interact to create the global climate which you see on a daily basic as weather. If an ocean current shifts it can reduce cloud formation lowering the water content of an air mass and increasing the radiative heating of the land surface immediately inland. these combined factors can lead to a lack of rainfall and/or increase in temperates. IE, drought and/or heat wave. In Cali's case, the Sierra range normally causes some preciptation as the air mass moves eastward, trapping it as snowpack, which then feeds water over the year into the arid region we know as the Central Valley. its what allows an arid region to also be good farmland inspite of its aridity. this year, there wasnt even enough moisture in the air for the mountains to squeeze any out.
The polar vortex happened because something pushed the normal wind pattern out of shape. it allowed a large mass of unusually cool air to penetrate south a long ways. The reverse also happened: a large mass of warm moist air pushed much north than normal, leading to increased temperatures in the North Pacific and Alaska, and parts of western Canada. Some climatalogical event altered the normal roughly stable route of the vortex. The vortex itself then affects large scale climate effects and drives local extreme weather.
See, the mistake here that denier consistently make is in thinking that this is a basic input output machine. It's not. It's a web of interconnected loops. Every output is the input to another stage in the machine, and every stage of the machine is linked to every other stage. Everything is in a feedback loop to something else.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Okay, so that doesn't actually answer the question of whether you think this innane point is meaningful.
Either own it or don't defend it.
Higher acidity [CO2 dissolved in water forms an acid] in seawater is known to disrupt the life cycles of many marine species — from reef-building corals to shellfish beloved by humans — by interfering with the creatures’ ability to use sea-borne calcium to build their shells.
This bit should be scaring the pants off us. Not because we'll suddenly not be feasting on oysters, but because of zooplankton that form delicate calcium-based shells. If those critters go bye-bye, we will likely see the collapse of more ocean fisheries as food sources dry up.
And, in something of a double-whammy, coastal regions in the tropics are often protected by reefs from the ravages of some tropical storms. If those reefs slow down their growth (that replaces damaged reefs structures), or start dissolving, we're going to be have a tidal wave (bad pun!) of starving refugees.
You don't need to believe in global warming to see those two issues becoming problems. You need enough empathy to see this as being a problem, even if it's not in your own backyard.
If you do believe in global warming, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not the oceans will rise high enough to wipe out their homes before acidification lays a licking on marine ecosystems.
Also didn't click the link.
Good job.
Thing gets predicted.
Thing happens.
Mindless Douchebag says: "Betcha didn't see that coming"
All you can do is roll your eyes.
It's not public? Horseshit.
You're just cheerleading for your team, it has nothing in particular to do with facts.
No one is disputing that CO2 levels are rising. No one can dispute that CO2 absorbs radiation in the IR spectrum. No one can dispute that having more CO2 will trap more heat in the CO2-rich regions. An early argument against AGW was that the atmosphere is already opaque to Outgoing Long-wave Radiation (OLR), which is true but incomplete. Increasing the partial pressure of CO2 extends the CO2-rich region further into space, acting like a blanket. The mean free path of an IR photon varies with altitude, but is generally in the low tens of meters, even in denialist literature. See also why IR photos from any distance look fuzzier than visible light photos. It turns out that the direct effect of a doubling of CO2 is about 3.7 W/m^2, which gives a figure of ~1 degree C rise in global temperature.
No one is particularly worried about that. The issue is that we have a shit ton of this "H2O" stuff lying around, which will phase change into a much more effective greenhouse gas given the slightest provocation. In point of fact, the ability of air to contain water vapor rises exponentially with temperature.
The figure of 1 degree C is extremely simple physics; a trivial application of the Stefan Boltzmann law. The amplifying effects are not understood quite as well, leading to a range of estimates for the total forcing effect. However, as denialists are so quick to point out, H2O is a much stronger greenhouse gas; it is not at all unreasonable to expect the combined forcing to show a positive feedback.
This is not a religious argument. Your ignorance is not equal to the knowledge of others, or even the ignorance of someone who trusts in the scientific consensus. The physics involved here is not so complicated that you could not test it yourself; an IR source, a thermometer, and a CO2 source should be all you need.
You are, for whatever reason, focusing on the noise, on your sense of outrage. You enjoy feeding that sense, especially with the idea that other people are trying to tell you what to do. You are ignoring the scientific foundation of these ideas. Science is empirical, and it took a long time before any scientist believed that humans could affect the climate, and just as long for the mechanism to be accepted. AGW has stood the test of about two centuries of real skepticism, coming from a point where there was even less evidence for it than for plate tectonics. There's practically no one misanthropic to the point where they want widespread disaster, including climate scientists. No one comes to this idea willingly. I am sure it's good to be skeptical of the extreme predictions, but jumping to another extreme (that nothing will happen) is also not warranted. I encourage you to seek knowledge, not spout ignorance.
Oh please.
Millions is admittedly and obviously an expression.
And the point still stands: to deny the existence of oil and gas subsidies, to deny their massive lobbying power, to promote the myth of the rich scientist, is to deny reality.
the myth of the rich scientist pushing it for his own personal gain is just that: MYTH. much like the supposed "vaccine" or "cancer" conspiracies: the idea that thousands of scientists or doctors or researchers are all complicit in a global conspiracy, with not one person of integrity among them (keeping in mind that science doesnt function without integrity), not one whistleblower in the lot is simply farsical on its face.
and the further idea, that their "stakes" are somehow in any way comparable to that of the oil and gas industries, is just laughable.
From 1950 to 2010 toil, natural gas, and coal received $600 billion in subsidies, or 10 billion annually. From the US alone.
The EU. being similar in size and makeup to the US, is probably similar. Then factor in the other big producers in Russia and hte Middle East and South America...
http://www.misi-net.com/public...
Their profits for last, excluding some Chinese companies as they dont have same reporting requirements, exceeded 270 billion.
And here's their *reported* lobbying ammounts: https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...
So stuff you "credibility" attack.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I think a bit part of the problem is the "A" in "AGW". Does it really matter whether the warming is anthropogenic or not? Won't the effects of warming be the same, regardless of the cause? I mean, it's not like we don't have ample historical data showing large swings in global temperatures over the course of just a few years, including to averages much, much higher than what we have now. Indeed, the geological record offers ample evidence that the most common (not "normal", because there really isn't a "normal") state of the planet's climate is quite a LOT hotter than what it's been in recorded history -- the human time period has been during a short warm period in an era of ice ages. Sure, the current warming is most likely caused by our actions, but regardless of that it could also be entirely "natural" and happen just the same, with the same effects.
I think people focus on the question of anthropogenesis because there's an implicit assumption that if it's not anthropogenic, then there's nothing we can/should be doing about it. The "can" alternative is at least possibly-logical, though it assumes powerlessness that I refuse to accept. The "should" alternative is just ridiculous.
The fact is that even if we manage to reduce our CO2 emissions to zero, we will face serious climate change eventually, and we have little idea when that might be. Perhaps even right now. Therefore, what we should be doing is learning to understand and modify the Earth's climate. The only way we can have "sustainability" is if we take control.
An obvious corollary of this view is that we should not be looking merely to emissions reduction as a way to fix the problem. First, it may not fix the problem, either because it's already too late, or because our emissions aren't the cause, or aren't the major part of the cause (note that I don't believe that, but it's possible). Second, even if it does fix this problem, at some point we'll face warming which we can't stop that way. So, in addition to trying to limit emissions, we should also be seriously researching other approaches to cooling the planet, perhaps by raising the albedo, or reducing incoming solar radiation (which we may have done a few decades ago by pumping a lot of particulates into the atmosphere, along with the CO2). For that matter, we should also be looking into methods of warming the planet. Should the local warm period end and return us to the ice ages, we may well appreciate the outcome of our recent accidental experiment in global warming via CO2 production.
Knowledge is the key. We need to understand how the system works, and how to manipulate it, because we DO need to be able to manipulate it. Or adapt to it, but manipulation will be more cost-effective in many cases, I think.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You moved the goalposts, you're the first in this thread to ask for raw data, as in unadjusted daily (not monthly) values. That's gigabytes of data you're asking for which may not exist anymore - the climate models almost certainly don't use daily values after all, that's probably useful for a local weather report but unnecessarily fine-grained for long-term climate predictions.
And couldn't unadjusted values cause errors due to the urban heat island effect? That was all the rage among "skeptics" in the early/mid-2000s.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel