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

[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

[Sique]

Some basics for you:

1) humans do better in warmer climates

Apparently, they don't. Global population density is highest between the 30th and 50th latitude. If you get into warmer climates, population density shrinks.

2) crops grow better

Most food crops are harvested between 30th and 50th latitude too. Around the 23th latitude (both north and south) you have either large deserts, where nothing grows, or you have the rain forests, which don't have any meaningful soils to put food crops on.

3) a warmer earth has more farmable pand

No, it hasn't. Most farmable land today (90%) lies at less than 100 ft above sea level. If sea levels rise, a large portion of it will be subdued. Yes, Siberia might lose its permafrost. But most of Siberia is either montainous (the whole east of Siberia), or it is far away from any oceans and thus doesn't get much rain. In fact, a Siberia without permafrost will probably turn into a steppe fast (the southern part of Siberia is a steppe already), and finally into a desert, similar to Australia. Thus, no additional farmable land in Siberia.

4) less enerygy, not more is required to live in warmer climates

Because of 1), much more energy will be spend on air conditioning, while many buildings in today's colder climates don't need much heating even during winter season, because they are built as low energy houses, where just the short sun period during the day is sufficient to heat the house enough for the inhabitants.

Global warming is a *good* thing.

We are perfectly adapted to today's warming levels. Global warming above today's levels is a bad thing.

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

[Sique]

Desertification along the 23th latitude has the same cause everywhere. It's called Intertropical Convergence Zone. Because the Sun stands highest in the region around the equator, temperatures are the highest there, and warm air rises every day, taking much water vapor with it into heights up to 20 km. Here, the water condenses, and each evening just before sunset, you have heavy rain along the equator, hence the rain forests. The dry air floats to the side, making room for more warm, wet air coming up. Around the equator, you now have regular winds blowing to the equator. They are called trade winds, and they blow from northwest to the south east in the northern hemisphere and from southwest to the northeast in the southern hemisphere.

The dry air in 20 km height cools and sinks down north and south of the equator, causing a girdle of high air pressure north and south of the equator. But because the air is now dry, having lost most of its water vapor above the equator, it heats much faster when it sinks down. Thus, air coming up from the ground due to being heated during the day, stops somewhere inbetween, because warmer air sinks down, and the convection stops where both meet. As the air is not cool enough for clouds to form, there is no rain where both streams meet. This effect is called an temperature inversion, because the normal layering of the atmosphere with air getting cooler if you get higher is inverted.

Luckily, the zenith of the sun wanders along the year between both the northern and the southern Tropic, thus at least once a year, those regions get heavy rains. They thus have two seaons: the dry season and the wet seasons. Regions closer to the equator sometimes have two wet seasons. The wet season gets shorter and less intense if you get closer to the Tropics. Outside the Tropics, there is no wet season, thus you have desertification along both Tropics.

Before you call me naive, please get at least some basic meteorologic knowledge!

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[swb]

It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves.

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?

Most of European history from the Greeks onward can be seen as some kind of action/reaction to this dynamic. Established civilizations expanding their territories for both economic accumulation but also attempting to build buffers against other expanding or migration civilizations that threaten their borders.

Roman history can easily be interpreted as a continuous defensive expansionism designed to check the destabilizing influence of Germanic migrations from the North and Parthians in the East from time of Marius all the way to Marcus Aurelius. Much of European history from the 7th century through the 12th century can be defined as action/reaction to Viking expansion, from then on attempts to fix borders against expanding Mongols and Islamic armies from the conquest of Hungary, the Crusades and through the Siege of Vienna.

You could argue that almost purely economic colonialism on the part of Europeans didn't even really start until the general borders of Europe were largely established and fortified and external threats were minimized in the 17th century and even then such expansion was motivated by political and territorial stalemates of a fairly established European states and borders. The "new worlds" were conquered for their economic value but this can easily be explained as defensive maneuvers to outflank their local European rivals as well.

And the European conflicts from the 100 Years War, 30 Years War, Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic Wars all the way through WW I and II are attempts to establish hegemony and secure borders within Europe itself.

It would seem that the entire course of human history can be interpreted as a series of conflicts designed to secure specific regions against outsiders who threaten territorial independence and economic security.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

Heating a house for a day can easily consume less energy than cooling it for a week.

I think you might have swapped "day" and "week" there...

But yes, insulation is near free compared to cooling.

What should be obvious to anyone is that you can only "produce cold" by producing even more heat in a different part of the system.

But then again, I talked to someone who kept her fridge door open during the heat wave, thinking it would help cool the house. And I know several people who will run a ceiling fan when there's no one in the room, thinking it will keep it cooler.
I blame Reagan for ruining our educational system so kids don't learn to think anymore. More kids now may know the laws of thermodynamics, but fewer are able to apply it to anything.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[pastafazou]

Carbon Dioxide is the foundation of the world's food chain. It's not pollution. Try studying some geology courses. The earth has had climates in the past with CO2 concentrations 10x higher or more than current levels, and life was thriving. Our planet is still stuck in a glacial climate. People don't realize how close our planet actually came to complete extinction a mere 20,000 years ago when the CO2 concentration was under 200ppm. This is approaching the lower boundary for plant life to survive.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[dcollins]

"The authors of the paper note it’s particularly interesting that global warming keeps winning the bet despite ocean cycles, solar activity, and human aerosol pollution all acting in the cooling direction over the past 15 years. Human-caused global warming has become so strong that it’s consistently overcoming these natural short-term cooling factors... In other words, betting against global warming is an almost sure way to lose money at this point."

https://www.skepticalscience.com/betting-against-gw-sure-way-to-lose-money.html

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[bestweasel]

My belief is that there's an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists who are experts in this field that man-made climate change is real and worth taking action to mitigate.

Re:Ahh, science

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Except here they have it ass backwards with cause and effect, and need to read "The Critique of Pure Reason" from Immanuel Kant.

The industrial revolution was caused by the start of global warming. Before that, humans were huddling under blankets, complaining about how cold it was. When temperatures rose, the folks said, "Hey, it's warm outside, let's go out and build a factory or something!"

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: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[WindBourne]

That is not a belief. That is fact.

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.