Global Warming Started 180 Years Ago Near Beginning of Industrial Revolution, Says Study (smh.com.au)

New research led by scientists at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth suggests that humans first started to significantly change the climate in the 1830s, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The findings have been published in the journal Nature, and "were based on natural records of climate variation in the world's oceans and continents, including those found in corals, ice cores, tree rings and the changing chemistry of stalagmites in caves." Sydney Morning Herald reports: "Nerilie Abram, another of the lead authors and an associate professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences, said greenhouse gas levels rose from about 280 parts per million in the 1830s to about 295 ppm by the end of that century. They now exceed 400 ppm. Understanding how humans were already altering the composition of the atmosphere through the 19th century means the warming is closer to the 1.5 to 2 degrees target agreed at last year's Paris climate summit than most people realize." "It was one of those moments where science really surprised us," says Abram. "But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago."

Comments

Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers do not care, they will be dead before the worst hits. As long as they can live high on the hog on their imaginary money until they die, they are happy. There is not one drop of concern for the future of humanity or life on earth in general.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[HBI]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? Humanity isn't wired that way, we care about those we know, not about the distant future and people we don't know. No one really does, anyway. It's always some self-interest, really, when you dig down into people's true motives. Perhaps to appear better than others by some arbitrary standard.

Anyway, your comment comes off as naive, immature raving. Yes, it's true we don't care, collectively. But expecting us to is idiotic.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot like most religiously driven Warmists.

Some basics for you:
1) humans do better in warmer climates
2) crops grow better
3) a warmer earth has more farmable pand
4) less enerygy, not more is required to live in warmer climates

Global warming is a *good* thing.

Here's my problems with global warming:
1) there is no untainted evicence whatsoever that the planet is warming
2) if it did warm, I'll be dead before it gets warm enough for me to benefit
3) I dont have children to enjoy it either

Those of you with children should be grateful if your children get the opportunity to live in a warmer world than the barely survivable ice ball we're on now. If the temps dropped only a few degrees we'd al; be super fucked, on the edge of extinction. Pray it gets warmed not colder.

And, finally, worth repeating, the PP is still and likely always will be an uneducated religiously driven Warmist idiot.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? I'mm not wired that way, we care about those we know, not about anyone I don't know .

I fixed that for you. There ar ea lot of peopel in this world. Some do not care about anyone outside their immediate or extended family - in fact, some have a great fear outside of their "friend zone". Some don't care about anyone at all. And despite your assertions, there are those among us who actually do care about the future and the people in it.

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[PopeRatzo]

3) I dont have children to enjoy it either

Show of hands: Who here is surprised by this? Now who here is grateful for this?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Who? BLM & SJWs exhibit just what you are describing in massive amounts, despite being on the left.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Barsteward]

"Those people represent a small fraction of the global population." - but if you asked every parent if they'd want a safer world for their kids and grandkids etc, they would all say "yes" - its just that some of them haven't seen the light about the dangers of global warming yet. so the fraction of the population is potentially greater than you think

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Barsteward]

jeez, thats the biggest load of delusion i've seen for a while

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's passe to say that it's both sides, but it is. Consider that the United States no longer has an anti-war party. At the Democratic National Convention, they tried to drown out and laugh off chants of "No more war" from the delegates. I could go on and on about how now neither major party opposes fracking, the liberals are now further right of George W. Bush on Israel, and so much more. Americans as a whole show even less empathy nowadays.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Charcharodon]

Lol, you kids crack me up. The pollution and climate change will get so bad? First off unless you live in the 3rd world shit hole, pollution has gotten lower than it has ever been in my life time and that of my parents and even grandparents. Then again, 3rd world shit holes are not exactly the same as they were when I was a kid either. Back in the day they were truly horrible places to live. Sure they are worse off with pollution compared to say the US or Europe but everything else disease, poverty, crime, famine, etc is much less so. Eventually they will clean up their act as well, and everyone will wonder what the big fuss is about.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[AmiMoJo]

Isn't that what we've been doing for most of human history? Family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village and so on for most of human existence?

Some time in pre-history human beings realized that it was better to work together than to fight each other. It's proven to be a popular philosophy.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on. The heat removed by air conditioners is already present in that environment, it is just moved from one place to another. That movement of heat does not add to warming. What does add is the electrical and mechanical heat waste from the AC motor and compressor cycle, because that heat is generated.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[avandesande]

Not to mention that nobody talks about positive effects of global warming... will increased atmospheric moisture turn the southwest or the sahara into arable land? We don't really know.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

People being in a room makes no difference on whether or not the ceiling fan is actually making the room cooler. People not being in a room will of course make it cooler just due to the heat waste we produce as people.

You're an excellent example of what I talk about.

The primary reason why we use ceiling fans is because air movement across skin helps increase evaporation which has a cooling effect on the person, not on the room. The room gets slightly warmer as a result, but the inhabitants feel cooler.

Running a ceiling fan when there are no people in a room has no cooling effect - at most, it distributes the air so the overall temperature becomes more uniform and slightly higher.

If leaving a ceiling fan on didn't make it cooler, we wouldn't use them when we were in the room, let alone when we weren't.

It does not make the room cooler. And most people are smart enough to not leave them on when there are no people to cool.

The amount of heat waste produced by the fan is also more then offset by the effects of the fan.

Poppycock, balderdash and codswallop. A closed room is an isolated system. The fan motor will produce heat. That makes the sum of heat (entropy) go up.

If you could cool down a room with an internal fan, you would have an invention that reduces entropy in an isolated system. This is impossible - the second law of thermodynamics applies.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

'What effect population had on that is harder to say but I don't think that we can seperate the technological and organization growth which made it possible from the change in population if we were to going to play "what if?"'

I do. In the US we are actually poorer than in the 50's and 60's. During those times unskilled workers owned cars and homes, products were manufactured out of more expensive but far more durable materials. The only real constant coins in the world are labor and raw materials. While that same worker might have more cans of soda in your fridge those cans are less durable, contain cheaper and fewer raw materials, and represent less labor expended to serve you. You might say, what do I care, I have more beverages! Well, you should care because that worker hasn't gained the value of those raw materials and labor somewhere else. Even within the United States the labor pool has nearly doubled with the addition of women to the workforce but the household hasn't increased the total value of raw resources and labor it controls where it should have doubled. Technology and process would have improved without globalization. For the most part the rest of the world is really riding on the tails of truely revolution technology invented in the US and Western Europe and that technology was developed before globalization.

People have been duped, they are buying cheap disposable, breakable goods, with planned obsolescence to distract them from how little value they have by showing them the quantity of "stuff" they have. An inexpensive safety razor carries most of it's cost in its raw materials (therefore will not drop in value), can be used for less than $2/yr in consumables, provides fewer cuts/razor burn and provides a closer shave vs disposables. It only takes 2-3 shaves to get used to one. Even a fairly inexpensive one is of such high quality they can passed down generations. Disposables cost hundreds a year, they are so cheap that new ones pass the holes used to save plastic off as stylizing, fake innovations are created to make old models obsolete and custom interfaces for replacement blades are used so they can phase out old blades and force people to buy new bases before even that cheap crap has a chance to break.

Mowers, gas and electric mowers don't do the job any faster than push mowers, again there isn't much material of value in them. Your fancy electric mower will break in 2yrs and doesn't do a better or faster job than an old push mower that will last forever with occasional need for oil and blade sharpening. Modernized these would be carbon fiber, use dry lubricant, possibly have rigid blades that don't need sharpened with a few flexible joints to allow for deflecting on hard objects, they would be so much lighter they'd need a strategic weight which would double as a flywheel to store mechanical energy.

Who is going to make and sell them? Nobody. It isn't worthwhile for the rich to invest in goods that are worth something and last forever unless the price is just as high as it would be for those cheap throw away goods. And if they did that people would realize they can't actually afford the modern day equivalent to grandpas old push mower.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[haruchai]

"pollution has gotten lower than it has ever been in my life time"

It hasn't "gotten lower" - laws were passed that FORCED individuals & industry to clean up or not a a horrible mess in the 1st place.
If those laws aren't enforced or if they are repealed as more than a few politicians have been trying to do, you'll be living in your grandparent's mess.

Ahh, science

[SuperKendall]

Making the data fit the narrative since 1970.

I wonder when exactly we just start calling all science scientology? Vastly more accurate, what with the e-Meter like shifting uses of temperature data that has been so stretched and re-formed it's kind of a digital taffy now.

Re:Ahh, science

[Opportunist]

Did they place it next to the 401, or did they place the 401 next to the weather station?

There are a few weather stations in my home country (and during my studies I had to deal with them a lot), some of them having been in place for centuries, and many of them in rather unfortunate positions, mostly because when they were established it was a necessity to put them close to where people lived (so you could get there on foot), without considerations for projects that were decades or centuries in the future.

Moving those weather stations isn't a good idea either, though, because by taking readings where they are, you get a very good instrument for examining change over time. Moving the weather station would destroy that ability.

Of course such changes in the environment have to be taken into account. If you had a weather station in the middle of a sunny, grassy hill and a huge skyscraper is built in front of it so it's now permanently in the shadow of said building, it doesn't mean that the average temperature dropped by 5 or even 10 degrees Celsius.

Environmental impact on the weather stations have to be taken into account!

So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

...even before humans had any significant CO2 output.

Good to know. I'm sure someone out there will find some magical particle humans were emitting in the 1800s at a certain level that didn't scale with the massive growth in population of humanity.

Re:So global warming started...

[Mr0bvious]

Surely that's a stawman argument.

"Reducing use of fossil fuels" != "halting all progress"

You use the phrase "slow this progress" but the remainder of your comment implies almost halting progress.

Limiting use of fossil fuels has (relatively short in terms of human history) economic consequences which will be overcome. If we drastically reduced the use of fossil fuels today I doubt it will take hundreds of years to find a working cleaner alternative, especially when there is economic motive.

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

do you not know history? coal, wood livestock. many of the same things that contribute to global warming today, existed back then, too. the steam engine, for example, PREDATES the 'industrial revolution' by over a century... it was a catalyst for the rapid advances during that period, but it was invented in 1606 for fucks sake. open a history book, huh?

and as far as the so called report goes... geographically isolated australia might have been a little slow back then, the 'industrial revolution' started in the mid 1700s, not 'near' 1830... and well, DUH. a fifth grader could have made the same conclusion.. that global warming started around that time period.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[bestweasel]

(+2, Interesting) after 23 minutes. What is it about global warming that drives Slashdotters so crazy? We don't see the same anti-science attitude here about, say, evolution.

The anti-science sure is odd.

[SuperKendall]

Yeah, I don't know why Slashdot attracts these anti-science nutters that cannot understand the data has been totally blown on the whole global warming scam. Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about - at least that's what the hard facts and careful research tell us. Heck it's probably not even enough to counteract the next global cooling phase which is close at hand even in human turns, then will be the time to panic...

Now the soft facts and panicked revelations made by so called "scientists" who are backed by governments trying to bilk the people into more central control - isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them? But then I guess it's not since other religions have been around thousands of years as well.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Namarrgon]

anti-science nutters that cannot understand

My irony meter just exploded.

Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about - at least that's what the hard facts and careful research tell us.

Funny how the anti-science nutters are always so highly selective about their "hard facts and careful research", hand-waving away all the rest of the data that doesn't fit their own narrative as "manipulated". Let me guess, the whole of the IPCC Working Group II's collected data is all compromised and ignorable, every bit; none of those described impacts could possibly happen, amirite?

Heck it's probably

Ah, another hard fact, with more careful research behind it?

not even enough to counteract the next global cooling phase which is close at hand

It started 8000 years ago, temperatures have been dropping since then - up until we changed everything.

Now the soft facts and panicked revelations made by so called "scientists" who are backed by governments trying to bilk the people into more central control

Now the baseless allegations of conspiracy and paranoia, with the inevitable government agenda behind it. Did you notice all the Australian climate scientists recently protesting their government's agenda?

But of course I forgot, they just want to keep their jobs, and they have to keep manipulating their data and falsifying their results even when their government clearly doesn't want to hear it - low-paying research on global warming is all they can do, because the fossil fuel industry certainly doesn't have any money for them.

isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them?

Dammit, my brand new irony meter just exploded as well.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[zapadnik]

Easy. Real Scientists follow the Scientific Method. They are empiricists who look at ALL the data, and if the data doesn't match their hypothesis they adapt their hypothesis.

The pseudo-scientists are also easy to spot. They talk about "consensus" (which is not part of the Scientific Method) because they don't want to talk about the satellite observations. They talk about computer models, but refuse to discuss why the computer models don't match observed reality. They discard any and all observations that don't match their hypothesis. They call for the legal punishment of their opponents. They care more about global wealth redistribution than whether the empirical data matches their Statist Collectivist worldview. They seek to control the flow of money, and want to dictate how you can live your life:
http://green-agenda.com/

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[TheRaven64]

And yet that's precisely what the original poster was complaining about. Climate scientists have progressively refined their models over the last few decades as more data became available and as computational power increased to the level that they can run simulations on a desktop that would have needed a supercomputer in the '80s (and far more complex ones on modern supercomputers). When they refine their models and obsolete some of their old predictions (or those of other researchers - there's nothing an academic enjoys more than proving another one wrong) then you grumble about the wrong predictions. When the new models predict some of the same things as the old, then you complain that they're not adapting their hypothesis.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the warming crowd keeps "refining" the adjustments to the measurements so the past keeps getting colder so today is warmer. The fix is in and everyone knows it, though some refuse to admit it.

Only time will tell

[ITRambo]

These have been increases in temperatures. This implies global warming. Since we are still at the infant stage of understanding and accurately predicting what will happen over mid to long spans of time it's best to stop arguing, try to pollute less since that just makes sense, and enjoy our lives. Life is too damn short to fight about issues primarily created and controlled by oil, gas, and energy corporations.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[quantaman]

This is not Reddit, FFS!

How about an article on the dozens of predictions made by climate scientists that never ended up happening? The ones like " No more snow by 2012" etc?

Why always toe the line?

Yeah! Why isn't there an article blaming scientists for all the bizarre predictions you imagined them making?

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[quantaman]

The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!

That was 200 million years ago, even the days were 23 hours long and the years more than 20 days longer.

There's a reason scientists publish papers in peer reviewed journals, not every decision is as simple as jumping on the first convenient looking factoid.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[WindBourne]

That is not a belief. That is fact.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Namarrgon]

The *planet* is clearly fine with high levels of CO2. The biosphere is fine with it too - given enough time to evolve and respond.

But we humans won't enjoy our cities getting flooded and our crops drying out (adapting will be very expensive). And a lot of the biosphere isn't being given time to respond either, since the temperature rise is happening so quickly. Those coral reefs can't just pick up and walk to a cooler area.

Little Ice Age

[bradley13]

As always, TFA fails to look at the broader context. 200 years ago was the Little Ice Age", i.e., an unusually cold period in history. Much of the warming of the past 200 years is simply due to coming out of this cold period. Exactly how much, is difficult to say.