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Past Measurements May Have Missed Massive Ocean Warming
An anonymous reader writes "Previous estimates of global ocean warming have been significantly underestimated due to historically sparse temperature data from the Southern Ocean, new research has found. From the article: "Earth's oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the warming caused by greenhouse gases, researchers estimate, with the stored heat showing up as warmer seawater. But a new analysis suggests scientists may have underestimated the size of the heat sink in the upper ocean—which could have implications for researchers trying to understand the pace and scale of past warming."
Ahh yes, we've just established that the oceans have been warmer than we expected. And just around the same time we've had a recent minimum of severe hurricanes. Climate change or not, you cannot predict severe weather patterns. Anti-deniers like to attribute every negative event to climate change and none of the positive events. Maybe a warmer planet will have less severe weather if the air temperature is closer to the water temperature as it is the differential that causes severe weather.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The "models aren't 100% accurate therefore we shouldn't trust them until they are" argument is essentially the same as the ones the anti-vaxxers use: Vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore we shouldn't use them until they are 100% safe.
The fact is that the groups plan on never trusting climate models or vaccines because they realize that neither will never reach 100%. Even if we were able to improve climate models by leaps and bounds above the current ones (which themselves are pretty accurate), there would still be *some* uncertainty. We might get it to 99.999%, but there would still be that 0.001% that deniers would point to. Same with the anti-vax groups. If one person gets sick due to a vaccine (e.g compromised immune system & shouldn't have gotten the vaccine or allergy that wasn't known at the time) then this will be proof that vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore shouldn't be used. Never mind that a 99% safe vaccine is orders of magnitude more preferable than any of the vaccine preventable diseases.
Both arguments use the Perfect Solution Fallacy.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
And just around the same time we've had a recent minimum of severe hurricanes.
By which you mean that we had no category five hurricane last year? That's just a consequence of the fact that there is less than one per year on average, and the number must be integer. (If you do the count per decade, then 2000-2009 had the highest number (8) of category five hurricanes in recorded history, but this number is still too small to draw any statistically significant conclusions from.)
There is more information in the data on category four hurricanes. I found this table of category 4 hurricane statistics on wikipedia
Period Number Number per year
1851–1900 13 0.26
1901–1950 29 0.58
1951–1975 22 0.88
1976–2000 24 0.96
2001–2012 19 1.6
Viking wines were made from berries, not grapes. So significantly less warm than "vineyards" might imply.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
I did not chose the years. This was a quick copy-paste from Wikipedia. I suppose they picked the intervals so that the number of observations in each bin would be about 20, which implies a standard deviation uncertainty of about 4.5 hurricanes in each interval.
But since you didn't like that table, here's one just for you:
1851–1900 13 0.26
1901–1950 29 0.58
1951–2000 46 0.92
(Each of the above intervals is 50 years, not 49. I haven't found any statistics on the correlation between being a climate change skeptic and being unable to do simple math, but I'm sure it would be interesting.)
Now, if you really wanted to raise a valid objection, you would point out that weather satellites did not exist until the 1960:s, and that the number of severe hurricanes might have been underestimated prior to that.