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NASA, NOAA: 2014 Was the Warmest Year In the Modern Record
Titus Andronicus writes: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both announced today that 2014 was the warmest year in the instrumental temperature record, surpassing the prior winners, 2010 and 2005. NASA also released a short video. They said, "Since 1880, Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius), a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide and other human emissions into the planet’s atmosphere. The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades. ... While 2014 temperatures continue the planet’s long-term warming trend, scientists still expect to see year-to-year fluctuations in average global temperature caused by phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña. These phenomena warm or cool the tropical Pacific and are thought to have played a role in the flattening of the long-term warming trend over the past 15 years. However, 2014’s record warmth occurred during an El Niño-neutral year."
No no, the Republican Congress will just pass a law mandating the destruction of all thermometers. Problem solved!
There are no contradictions except the perceived ones that come from watching Fox News cherry-pick facts and individual data points completely out of context. Stop getting your news from non-news sources.
And then you wonder why no one gives a fuck about global warming or your opinion.
Except they never said that, you did. The last record was in 2010.
you mean like CNN, right? Because CNN is certainly not biased in any way... nope.
The contradiction is due to the cherry picking of data that is the source of this Koch Brothers-bought-and-paid for meme.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Right - Warming from the last ice age peaked about 8000 years ago. Since then we have had a very gradual cooling trend - until about the last 100 years where we appear to be in a warming trend again.
The post notes:
While 2014 temperatures continue the planet’s long-term warming trend, scientists still expect to see year-to-year fluctuations in average global temperature caused by phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña.
Curiously, last year was warmest even though the ENSO trend was neutral. Typically it would take an El Niño to nudge us up past the previous El Niño year, but not so last year. This means that the next El Niño will probably mean another record temperature.
Yes, because one would never actually want to read what the experts in any field have to say, but rather go to some blog populated by people who have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.
Me, if I get a tumor, I'm going to go straight to my nearest witch doctor.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Since 1880, EarthÃ(TM)s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit"
So we need to be alarmed because in 135 years the temperature has increased 1.4 degrees?
I am clearly missing something here.
You're missing the point that water freezes at 32 degrees*, so if the ice fields warm by 1.4 degrees, the result is a lot of messing with the world's oceans, which in turn means significant changes in the atmosphere. This is the sort of thing that can cause extinction events (and may currently be doing so). It can also cause issues for humans in the form of shifting weather patterns, shifting water availability, changed coastlines (water rises, but so do landmasses that used to be covered in ice), changed food supplies (the fisheries we currently depend on my vanish, the aquifers that feed grain supplies may dry up), and other more subtle shifts.
The other point is that you need be no more alarmed just before you hit the ground than you were after you fell out of an airplane -- the situation isn't likely to change for you from 3,000 feet to 1 foot. But when you make contact, the result is the same. So better to raise the alarm at 3,000 feet when there's still time to have someone intervene or deploy a parachute.
*Farenheit, in pure fresh water at standard pressure. The actual temperature melting the world's ice reserves is different but immaterial to this line of reasoning.
The Nature page you cite says that the warming rate has slowed, not that it has reversed.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
As opposed the fucking scientists, idjit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The funny thing about science is that it doesn't give a fuck about your ideology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I never said it reversed i said it hasnt increased.
Your citation says that it has increased, only more slowly in the last two decades than in the decade before. It shows the opposite of that which you want it to show. It suggests that at the current scale, there is a reduction in the compounding effect of the positive feedback loop, or that there is a negative feedback loop which is mitigating it, or both. But it doesn't actually do anything to contradict the concept of global warming. Those of us who believe in global warming are not arguing that the precise course is laid out in full, and that it will be utterly predictable. If it were, then the problems produced by global warming would be much easier to compensate for, because you could foresee them and plan for them. The precise scope is going to be varied and unpredictable, because that's life. We lack a system of sufficient complexity to model the system that we're discussing. That doesn't prevent us from making certain generalized statements, which are being proven out as we speak.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You seem to have internalized wingnut propaganda. There's no equivalent between scientists and propaganda from polluters, but the right-wing sociopaths want you to believe that all beliefs are equal, because that would make your stupid beliefs valuable instead of foolish and absurd.
Im still in the camp that we shouldnt change everything overnight because OMG CO2!!!
Yeah, the problem with the idea that it's "overnight" is that scientists have been warning about this stuff since before I was in elementary school. We discussed CO2 and global warming then (I am not so very old, but I am in my thirties now so I can pretend to be an adult on occasion) and here we are, seeing the predicted consequences now. And I don't recall these consequences coming with a date back then, but now we're actually able to perceive the problem. It's "overnight" just like a musician who is an "overnight success" — yeah, overnight if you don't account for the years of sweat, tears, and possibly other bodily fluids. This is not a new idea, it's not a new warning, some of us have been hip to the idea that the average human lifestyle is harmful to the planet, let alone the western one. And get this straight, humans have been harmful to their environment as long as they've been recording history. Deforestation, it's not just for breakfast any more. It's been suggested that absent the plague, Europe would be basically denuded due to cutting down forests in order to build naval vessels which then got taken out and sunk in the ocean where they did very little good to anyone. Maybe created a little bit of artificial reef if they were sunk sufficiently shallow.
CO2 is not a new problem, and you have not been asked to change everything overnight. You have been asked to change for the last three decades. Now you are being asked more insistently, because the situation is more dire. You can complain about the scope of the changes you're being asked to make today, or you can accept that changes thirty years ago would have led to a lot less upheaval now. If you can do that, then I'll accept that it wasn't just you that refused to change. And hopefully, along in the bargain, people who decided to care before I did will find some way to forgive me. I could, after all, still be doing more. Or, depending on how you look at it, less.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let's start with the fact that "warming" is the wrong term to use (which is why people use the term "climate change" now). It's not really warming. It's energy retention. Warming is just one side effect of the atmosphere retaining more energy.
There are a lot of feedback loops and redundancies built into the world's natural ecosystem. You see it on a small scale, where a bloom of certain resource results in a bloom of the consumers of that resource, followed by over-consumption which results in the decline of the consuming population. On the large scale, there is the same type of feedback loop that's made up of multiple smaller ones.
Right now, what's happening is that these feedback loops are handling a good chunk of the extra energy retained by CO2 so that actual atmosphereic warming is not terribly pronounced. But there's a tipping point. Once the amount of energy exceeds the capacity for these feedback loops to handle, it's going to shut down, and the moderating factor suddenly ceases to exist. The precise points are uncertain, but we know it'll happen based on what we see happening in smaller systems. For example, as prey increases, predators will also increase. This results in prey decline and then predator decline. But if due to external circumstances, the predator population grows out of control, or the prey population is completely decimated, both predator and prey (whichever wasn't affected by the initial event) will die off.
The real open questions today involve when things will happen, and how bad they'll get when these things do happen. For example, if one system fails, it can cause a domino effect on all the other feedback loops and cause them to fail too. That's a possibility. But it's also a possibility that the feedback loop most susceptable to failure won't affect the others much. It's possible that this will happen in a century. Or it's possible there are yet more feedback loops that we currently don't know about that'll push significant atomspheric temperature increase farther into the future.
What we do know is that there's definitely more energy in the atmosphere today. Weather events are getting more extreme. Stronger, more frequent storms. Colder cold snaps and hotter heat waves. And global temperatures are increasing, even if not by as much as predicted in the short term. Just keep in mind when thinking about these things that the entire planet isn't going to feel the same impact at the same time. It's about averages, over the entire system, over long periods of time (geological time scales). Also keep in mind that while certain one-off events can throw the numbers off, the trends will continue barring no behaviorial changes on our part.
The ultimate point is, we, if not as a species then as a civilization, are not facing any imminent danger yet, but we're getting more vulnurable, and by our own doing. It'd be nice to not be digging our own grave, no matter if we're using a large shovel or our bare hands. Of course, it all may not matter in the long run and our civilization and our species will ultimately be doomed anyway. But I'd rather not think that way.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I'm sorry, your claim is incorrect.
The IPCC AR5 ( http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... makes it clear that if you don't cherry pick date ranges, the models are spot on.
A lot of people like to quote the following:
Let's put that in context
Now, the details (emphasis mine)
The take away is this - don't cherry pick date ranges. Instead, look at the effectiveness of the models over the long term. When you do, you'll see they are quite accurate.
I'd say that instead of falsifying data NASA and NOAA need to start being honest.
The difficulty is that once you decide that you can selectively ignore facts because of a huge conspiracy to falsify data, it becomes impossible for any amount of information to ever change your mind. So, the NASA data is falsified? And, the NOAA data, that's falsified too. And the University of East Anglia, of course. And the Berkeley data-- that was done specifically to address the problems people had with the NASA and NOAA data-- http://berkeleyearth.org/ That's faked too.? How about the Japanese data? http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/t... Also faked? The Australians-- fake too?
Once you conclude everything that disagrees with you is fake, your opinion is incontrovertible-- since nobody can confront it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com