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2016 Will Be the Hottest Year On Record, UN Says (theguardian.com)
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century. From an article on The Guardian:The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December. The El Nino weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor.
Raising taxes doesn't make it colder out but the system of cap-and-trade (which most call taxes) does create financial incentives/disincentives to account for the environmental cost of using polluting sources of energy. Absent that system, power companies and manufacturers will use the cheapest source of energy they can find, which usually correlates to the most polluting source of energy. For those who think this interferes with the free market, Milton Friedman was a proponent of a cap-and-trade system and he was a staunch supporter of the free market with near-zero governmental interference.
The record-smashing heat led to searing heatwaves across the year: a new high of 42.7C was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in January; Mae Hong Son in Thailand saw 44.6C on 28 April; Phalodi in India reached 51.0C in May and Mitribah in Kuwait recorded 54.0C in July. Parts of Arctic Russia also saw extreme warming - 6C to 7C above average.
Seriously. Did you read the article?
This article says that it's the hottest in 20 years.
Do you understand how patently *meaningless* that is?
We're in the middle of El Niño right now. Take that away and it's the hottest in 20 years. That's it. TWENTY.
Did you read the article? Apparently not:
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Wow. This is exactly why climate change is still "debated".
From the article - "The WMO’s temperature analysis combines the three main records, from the Met Office, Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and stretches back to 1880."
So, it was the hottest since 1880. This is in line with other sources that have been reporting similar things such as a continuous streak of record-breaking months for over a year now - as in they are now breaking the records set last year.
Elsewhere in the article, it did note that the el nino contributed to the early months of the year but have now dissipated and yet the heat continues.
Also, El Ninos are not a new phenomenon. They have been going on throughout the 136 years since 1880. They have always resulted in peaks, but those peaks are now always higher than before as are the troughs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-r...
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https://www.greenbiz.com/article/ghost-milton-friedman-endorses-price-carbon
And in case you don't believe what's written, here it is from Milton's own mouth - discussion at 2:08 into the video, and he comments on taxing pollution at 3:08:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH0O_JjH06k
Two minor corrections:
global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made)
"Anthopomorphic" means "having human characteristics" or "human-like". The word you want is "anthropogenic".
also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly
It's extremely unlikely that it will kill us all, or even a particularly large number of us. What it will do is make us move a lot of people and a lot of farms, which will be very expensive, likely consuming a considerable portion of planetary GDP for many years. Almost certainly far more than it would cost us to cut emissions.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It was much warmer when there were dinosaurs. They only lived a couple of hundred millions years longer than people.
global warming is actually beneficial for the first couple of degrees for humanity as a whole, according to the IPCC even (AR5)
That finding relies on a paper by Richard Tol called “The Economic Effects of Climate Change”. It found that any benefits are sunk after 1C warming. Since we've already warmed by 1C, any further warming will have detrimental effects. The impact is non-linear so things do go down hill quite fast after the next 1C. This was an aggregate of previous studies. Unfortunately "Gremlins intervened" and among other issues, minus signs were dropped from two of the impact studies. The corrected paper is quite a bit less optimistic.
The CO2 based models are still getting it hopelessly wrong.
CMIP3 from the IPCC AR4 is pretty much bang on.
Do you really think going from 0.025% to 0.040% atmospheric CO2 is what's driving all temperature change?
A change from 0.025 to 0.04 would cause a direct impact of 2.5 Wm^-2 based on radiative transfer codes. Over the surface of the Earth that is equivalent to 1,600,000 Hiroshima bombs per day. Yes, this is certainly what is causing most (possibly more than all) of the warming over the last 60 years.
When you consider that warmer air holds more H2O (a far more potent heat trapping molecule) then you begin to see that the overall impact is even larger than the direct effect.
Why do you claim the models ignore clouds? Of course they're included. The problem is their effect is difficult to predict precisely, as they trap heat as well as increase albedo, so the net contribution can vary significantly. There are a great many studies about their contribution though, and confidence is very high that the increasing humidity is a positive feedback even with the resulting extra clouds factored in.
I'm glad you agree that the climate is steadily warming. Obviously all record temperatures will be on El Niño years, just as La Niña contributes to the cooler periods between them (which some have mistakenly labelled a "pause"). The important part is that this El Niño year has been hotter than all the previous El Niño years - just like 2015, 2014, 2010, 2005 and 1998. Such a string of broken records can only be a sustained warming trend.
And may I suggest less complaining about others examples, and more looking for citations to back up your own claims.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?