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2016 Was Second Hottest Year For US In More Than 120 Years of Record Keeping (climatecentral.org)
Last year was the second hottest year for the United States in more than 120 years of record keeping, according to the National Climatic Data Center, marking 20 above-average years in a row. While Georgia and Alaska recorded their hottest year, every state had a temperature ranking at least in the top seven. Climate Central reports: The announcement comes a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which released the U.S. data, and NASA are expected to announce that 2016 set the record for the hottest year globally. Both the global record and the U.S. near-record are largely attributable to greenhouse gas-driven warming of the planet. In addition to the pervasive warmth over the last year, the U.S. also had to deal with 15 weather and climate disasters that each caused more than $1 billion in damage. Together, they totaled more than $46 billion in losses and included several disastrous rain-driven flooding events. These events, along with continued drought, lay bare the challenge for the country to learn how to cope with and prepare for a changing climate, said Deke Arndt, the climate monitoring chief of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. The temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average for 2016, displacing 2015 and ranking only behind 2012, when searing heat waves hit the middle of the country. More notable than the back-to-back second place years, Arndt said, was that 2016 was the 20th consecutive warmer-than-normal year for the U.S. and that the five hottest years for the country have all happened since 1998. Those streaks mirror global trends, with 15 of the 16 hottest years on record occurring in the 21st century and no record cold year globally since 1911.
the earth is over 4 billion years old and has had icecaps for 20% of the time.
What's the maths on 4 billion vs 120 years?
Well, considering that humans have been on earth for only about the past 200,000 years, I wouldn't want to risk our chances with an earth that has no ice caps. It may be inevitable, but let's slow it down long enough for us to find some other place in the universe to live, m'kay?
And keep in mind that no ice caps means very high temperatures and flooding over most of the coastal areas. Not to mention the loss or migration of other species we depend on to survive.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You're right. 120 years is a blink of the eye in the context of life on earth. And that's what makes it such a big problem.
It's the current rate of change that scares scientists. Not the amount. The Earth can handle temperatures raising or dropping over millennia, but over mere decades, it's considered a catastrophe.
Trees, for example, can't migrate towards colder areas quickly enough, and then the ecosystems that depend on the trees die too.
And coastal ecosystems can't migrate as fast as the water is rising, and ocean life can't evolve into more acid resistant species quickly enough as the CO2 levels increase and oceans get acidified.
Your back of the napkin familiarity on the subject matter in an age of scientific hyper specialization makes any opinion you have on the matter totally moot.
How on earth do you think you could possibly add any line of thinking that hasn't already been thought of, proposed, hashed over, and sorted out by the people who've been studying these lines of science for decades?
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's absurd to say that ALL of the weather disasters we encountered are attributable to global warming.
No one says that. Scientists say that climate change is a significant contributing factor.
Weather changes, sometimes to extremes. Over time there will be massive droughts and floods and hurricanes and all other things, just as there have been through the entire history of Earth. So stop with the nonsense of trying to tie all that to GW because it just makes you all look like a bunch of panicked idiots.
That's the same argumentation people used for cigarettes not causing cancer. Yes, cancer occurs even among non-smokers. And no, you cannot point to any individual cancer case and say with certainty that it was caused by smoking. But the statistics are overwhelmingly showing that smoking causes cancer, and even the most die-hard smokers or tobacco manufacturers have long since given up this kind of "reasoning". When pitched against statistics and hard math, it doesn't hold up.
One of us is an idiot, yes. I don't think you have the mental capacity to determine which of us it is.
I think you're at the "ok, global warming is real, but its not a big deal, honest" stage?? But that's at least semi-positive. You've accepted the basic warming, even if you want to downplay the short time scale its happened over by adding in ancient ice cap melts.
The earth will be fine, its not a living thing in and of itself, it's the stuff on the earth that dies e.g. Dinosaurs, Triassic extinction event, trilobites extinction and the biggest of them all, the Permian extinction (96% of life wiped out), life gets wiped out on it's surface, but the earth chugs on.
It's worth looking at the Permian extinction, the great dying where 96% of species died out. A similar style dyout would wipe humans off the planet. That was a rise of 8 degrees celcius, with 2000 parts per million CO2. We've raised the CO2 from 280ppm to 370ppm to the year 2000 and to 404ppm this year and still accelerating.
So we're looking at as much as 1000ppm by 2100, which is really past a point at which we could stop it.
Permian is believed to be a de-oxygenating event of the ocean, so all marine life died out because it couldn't breath, which in turn released decay gasses into the atmosphere and snuffed out the land animals.
That's potentially Trumps great grandchildren dead, so not really a big deal, he'll never meet them, let alone date them.