Slashdot Mirror
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."
> nonono, the science is settled.
Science, by definition, is never settled. What's far more difficult is to bring a scientific attitude to the table if there is a political dog (or two) in the fight.
You outed yourself with your last sentence. The only place global cooling was discussed was in the media, not in the scientific literature. It also wasn't the 1980s or 1990s, but the 1970s, which also means you either have a terrible memory, or are regurgitating something you heard someone else say. So, to sum up, you just demonstrated that you:
1. Get your scientific information from the mass media
2. Have a terrible memory of this topic, or simply regurgitate what others say without checking.
Just one of those is enough to make people not listen to you, but you got both. Brilliant.
Enough already. The Earth is warmer, probably. We don't know for how much longer. We don't know how much warmer. We don't know how it's happening, mostly. We don't know why it's happening.
That's climate in a nutshell. Do you want a _government_ ringing in new policies based on that? A government can't even get well understood problems under control ... like say, traffic, or urban development. And if you dare say, "Hey, traffic is hard to model!", well guess what, climate is harder.
We know car accidents happen, probably.
We don't know when you will be in one
We don't know what type of accident you will be in.
We don't know the severity of the accident you will be in.
This is car travel in a nutshell. Aren't you glad that the government mandates safety belts, airbags and car seats for children?
Just because something is not 100% does not mean we should not protect against it. I feel like using some ad hominem against you but I will refrain today.
Silence is a state of mime.
Models will NEVER be accurate enough for any real predictions, causes or illustrations.
I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.
Good enough, IMO.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Myth: The models arent accurate
Fact: The models are accurate.
"Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean."
"While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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