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2014: Hottest Year On Record
Layzej writes Data from three major climate-tracking groups agree: The combined land and ocean surface temperatures hit new highs this year, according to the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United Kingdom's Met Office and the World Meteorological Association. If December's figures are at least 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit (0.42 degrees Celsius) higher than the 20th century average, 2014 will beat the warmest years on record, NOAA said this month. The January-through-November period has already been noted as the warmest 11-month period in the past 135 years, according to NOAA's November Global Climate Report. Scientific American reports on five places that will help push 2014 into the global warming record books.
...it was the warmest year in the CET (Central England Temperature) record, which goes back to 1659.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ha...
This is a legitimate question
Since the answer is a trivial google search away, I doubt that. I found this in 5 seconds: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
No doubt man contributes to it, but Solar activity and earth history going back millions of years indicates this is a normal pattern shift.
The temperature seems to be defying its historical link to solar activity. Based on solar activity we should have been seen fairly severe cooling over the last few decades: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
For some places, Climate Change will be a positive. But the net is hugely negative. 1/3 of the world's people are close enough to a coast that they will have to do something when sea levels rise.
Climate Change is happening too fast for much life to cope. The speed of the change is all negative.
The driver of Climate Change is Atmospheric Change. Everyone talks about warming, but all this CO2 has a lot of other effects. The other big effect is Ocean Acidification. This is deadly for shells and corals. The whole oceanic food chain is being strained to the limit from this, and from overfishing.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Q. Why can't we use just raw data?
A. Just averaging the raw data would give results that are highly dependent on the particular locations (latitude and elevation) and reporting periods of the actual weather stations; such results would mostly reflect those accidental circumstances rather than yield meaningful information about our climate.
Q. Can you illustrate the above with a simple example?
A. Assume, e.g., that a station at the bottom of a mountain sent in reports continuously starting in 1880 and assume that a station was built near the top of that mountain and started reporting in 1900. Since those new temperatures are much lower than the temperatures from the station in the valley, averaging the two temperature series would create a substantial temperature drop starting in 1900.
Q. How can we combine the data of the two stations above in a meaningful way?
A. What may be done before combining those data is to increase the new data or lower the old ones until the two series seem consistent. How much we have to adjust these data may be estimated by comparing the time period with reports from both stations: After the offset, the averages over the common period should be equal. (This is the basis for the GISS method). As new data become available, the offset determined using that method may change. This explains why additional recent data can impact also much earlier data in any regional or global time series.
Another approach is to replace both series by their anomalies with respect to a fixed base period. This is the method used by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. The disadvantage is that stations that did not report during that whole base period cannot be used.
More mathematically complex methods are used by NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NOAA/NCDC) and the Berkeley Earth Project, but the resulting differences are small.
The problem I have with global climate change "debate" is not that climate is changing, but that there is an assumption that the net effect will be negative. Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable. I'm disappointed that more studies haven't shown which will prevail (or if there will be a net neutral effect). Instead we just get fear mongering about famine and war.
How can you say this when an entire third of the IPCC report (Working Group II) was dedicated to the "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" of climate change? They show the positive and negative affects (both direct and indirect).
Here is a quote from the introduction of the Summary for Policymakers:
The assessment of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (WGII AR5) evaluates how patterns of risks and potential benefits are shifting due to climate change. It considers how impacts and risks related to climate change can be reduced and managed through adaptation and mitigation. The report assesses needs, options, opportunities, constraints, resilience, limits, and other aspects associated with adaptation.
We need these to store it. For 100.000 years.
Sure. If we're stupid.
If we're smart, we start using thorium reactors instead (so we don't add any more waste than necessary), and build some breeder/burner reactors to reduce the current waste handling to manageable amounts/time spans.
Yeah, nuclear energy research has moved on from the 60's, even though we still use reactor designs from back then. We should really, really stop doing that.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley