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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.
... in the ass, pussy grabber.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It's absurd to say that ALL of the weather disasters we encountered are attributable to global warming. You could just as easily say that GW has prevented several massive weather disasters we will never know about...
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While the article mentions El Nino, it conveniently fails to take "The Blob" into consideration.
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.
Of the 4 billion, how many supported human life? What's the maths on how long your grandkids live when the planet can only support a small percentage of the current human population?
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"
Individual measurements being inaccurate does not change the validity of the trend. Yes, better calibration helps getting more accurate results with less uncertainties, but it's highly unlikely that all calibration errors were in the same direction and skewed over time into the opposite direction.
Climate change deniers get stuck on individual errors or error margins, and believe they invalidate the entire research. They need to talk to some statisticians. The trends are still perfectly valid and beyond any reasonable doubt and even unreasonable doubt.
You know the maths. We all do.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I have a thermometer that cost $1.29 and I'm a betting man, so I'd go with the odds that it's simply wrong.
However, when the heating system kicks in, that bastard goes up.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Actually, from what little evidence we have, the first "Ice Age" was about two billion years ago, during the time of the Columbia Supercontinent, when what is now Antarctica was close to the North Pole.
"What's the maths on 4 billion vs 120 years?"
What do you want it to be? You obviously have no grasp of the issues involved, so we can make up any maths that you like, that will make you happy and smug. They will be wrong of course, but for people like you, that doesn't really matter, does it? Science is a Liberal Plot.
Woohoo! According the the summary, the US is above average, just like all the children in Lake Wobegon!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We're all gonna die!!!!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You really don't know what you're talking about. Temperature and pressure (and magnetic field strength and orientation) have both been accurately measured for at least 150+years (it's longer, but for purposes of your post, 150 years works). Just because they didn't have the Internet doesn't mean they were clueless savages. Heck you can also get a gauge of global temperatures using a variety of proxies, Tree rings, O16/O18 ratios, heck Dr. Kim Cobb has been doing some fascinating work using coral growth to reconstruct temperature history. All of these can be correlated together to create a pretty comprehensive Temperature history. If you still have doubts, enroll in a paleoclimatology and paleooceanography class, learn the techniques and concepts involved in temperature reconstruction. It's some really cool stuff.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
What with Meryl Streep and all at the Golden Globes. The only year that I can remember that was hotter was Madonna at the 1992 MTV Music Awards.
How do you reconcile between eras so far apart in both the breadth of measurements and accuracies and methodology between now and then?
By comparing datasets from multiple sources that overlap in the time domain.
I don't think it is possible to any close "degree." Look, people didn't calibrate their thermometers all the time back then, nor did they have the scientific rigor in measurement technique to make sure they had an acceptable "averaging" setup for the measurement on a specific time and circumstance each day.
First of all, people did calibrate thermometers "all the time back then." It wasn't hard. The freezing and boiling points of water at sea level are convenient standard fiduciary marks.
As for "scientifc rigor" -- what I think you really mean is the care taken in measurements. Consider for example, Tyco Brahe. He gathered enormous amounts of data that informed Kepler to create his laws of planetary motion. And he didn't have a telescope. He took extraordinary care to use his measuring instruments to the best of his ability. My point is that data that is "old" is not necessarily lacking in "rigor."
Finally, regarding data quoted to a fraction of a degree -- you need to understand that individual measurements can have a moderate errors, but their average can be highly accurate. Google on "standard error of the mean" for details.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Riiiight. Because it's all been hashed out and no one can contribute unless they agree with the consensus that's been all worked out with no possibility of dissent.
Now you are just being intentionally obtuse. He did not say no one could contribute. He said no one without decades of hyper specialized research could possibly contribute. I only have a Masters degree, but I did choose a research track instead of a capstone project, and the most important thing I learned was how specialized someone needs to be to make meaningful contributions to scientific knowledge.
At least 99.999% of the population has no business postulating about climate science. The only reasonable opinion these people can have (myself included) is the position of the vast majority of climate science researchers. The other 0.001% of the population can continue to challenge current theories.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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?
How long has the Industrial Age been going on?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Wouldn't be a regular week on Slashdot without a climate post. We get it, editors: you have an agenda. We all get it.
A paralyzed economy, steady increase in poverty, little to no funding available for stuff like scientific research.
Those are just the first downsizes I can think of.
Here is some science for you....entropy always increases. We can't not speed towards our end, but if we are to have a prayer of getting to another planet we must consume the resources necessary to create an economy capable of supporting the kind of science that must be done to get there.
When the environment gets too bad, the economic interest in restoring it will rise and we will adapt, as we always have.
But there is no adapting to a supervolcano eruption, massive meteor strike, or sun going supernova....there is only escaping....which requires science...which requires funding...which requires an economy....which requires resource consumption.
See how it all ties together?
It would be more convincing if they had error bars on those numbers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Of the 4 billion, how many supported human life? What's the maths on how long your grandkids live when the planet can only support a small percentage of the current human population?
I once read someplace that if a great sudden disaster occurred that wiped out 85% or so of the population, well, once they got over the shock, the rest would find themselves relatively well-off. As long as the disaster wasn't all-out nuclear war or something else that would bring long-term devastation. If it was something like an epedemic plague, well then the survivors would find themselves resource-rich with plenty of real estate. Wars of resources would no longer be necessary unless we later overpopulate again.
The people who would survive would tend to be those who keep emergency supplies of food/water stocked up so they can hold out a while while they try to find new sources. That includes those who understand things like just how fragile the power grid really is (a single "Carrington Event"-style X-flare away from total destruction, not "if" but "when"), or the fact that populous areas like NYC only have 2-3 days of food on hand at any given time. Y'know, the ones who are called "nutters" by the current mainstream, just like those who suspected massive government surveillance until the whole Snowden debacle made it undeniable.
I mean you wear your seatbelt and (presumably) carry insurance, though you have no intention of getting into a severe car crash. Why are other important things treated so differently? Because they imply a world unlike the one you know now? That makes them impossible how, exactly? Ideally, your insurance premiums are wasted money and you never need to file a claim. Ideally the cost of putting away some extra food and water, maybe investing in things like water filters and off-grid power, ideally those things are wasted money too. It's like a weapon - you sure hope you don't need it at all, ever, but if you do need one, you need it RIGHT NOW.
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.
Except of course if you look at those same diagrams that are routinely used to show temperature swings, the current warming trend in most cases isn't just within the norms, in many cases it's below those "extremes." Seriously though, coastal ecosystems seem to do just fine. The shore lines in some cases were 12-30mi further out then they are today, and were able to adjust and swing in less then 150 years when those sea levels rose as the last ice age started ending.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
How long has the Industrial Age been going on?
Just shy of 370 years if you want to be conservative about it, if you don't closer to 450 years.
Om, nomnomnom...
Of the 4 billion, how many supported human life? What's the maths on how long your grandkids live when the planet can only support a small percentage of the current human population?
I once read someplace that if a great sudden disaster occurred that wiped out 85% or so of the population, well, once they got over the shock, the rest would find themselves relatively well-off. As long as the disaster wasn't all-out nuclear war or something else that would bring long-term devastation. If it was something like an epedemic plague, well then the survivors would find themselves resource-rich with plenty of real estate. Wars of resources would no longer be necessary unless we later overpopulate again.
The people who would survive would tend to be those who keep emergency supplies of food/water stocked up so they can hold out a while while they try to find new sources. That includes those who understand things like just how fragile the power grid really is (a single "Carrington Event"-style X-flare away from total destruction, not "if" but "when"), or the fact that populous areas like NYC only have 2-3 days of food on hand at any given time. Y'know, the ones who are called "nutters" by the current mainstream, just like those who suspected massive government surveillance until the whole Snowden debacle made it undeniable.
I mean you wear your seatbelt and (presumably) carry insurance, though you have no intention of getting into a severe car crash. Why are other important things treated so differently? Because they imply a world unlike the one you know now? That makes them impossible how, exactly? Ideally, your insurance premiums are wasted money and you never need to file a claim. Ideally the cost of putting away some extra food and water, maybe investing in things like water filters and off-grid power, ideally those things are wasted money too. It's like a weapon - you sure hope you don't need it at all, ever, but if you do need one, you need it RIGHT NOW.
Funny you mention this now. Here on the East Coast, we just had a major snowstorm. The roads were icy and very dangerous, with multiple advisories warning people not to drive unless strictly necessary. Lots of crashed cars, emergency services deployed, injuries, even a few deaths, etc. I asked around about the grocery stores - they were just plain madhouses. It's amazing there wasn't violence and people being trampled. Shelves emptied, long check-out lines formed, people waited for long times to buy gas etc. I wouldn't know, myself. Snow during winter is a regular occurrence here. Sometimes it's severe, sometimes not. I started thinking "what about winter time?" during late May and early June. When it was hot, summertime, humid, and sticky, that's what I started putting away storable food and water.
I have a modest income, but with months of lead time I can still take care of things. After all, I do have a family to think about. You can get good prices on freeze-dried food that stores for 10 or 20 years. If you hang onto it for 9 or 19 years, you can always cook it up and still get your money's worth. Treat and store water correctly, and it'll keep for five years or more. I have plenty of batteries, plus enough solar panels to recharge them. I'm far from rich, but with patience you can accumulate things over time and make arrangements piecemeal, and if you're the handy sort, or willing to learn, you can save money by doing the work yourself.
So when the area gets snowed-in and power goes out, I hunker down. I don't rush to the grocery stores to deal with traffic, dangerous driving conditions, unruly crowds, long check-out lines, possibly higher prices, shortages, etc. Why the hell would I want to do that?? If you are inclined to be lazy, rejoice! My way is actually less effort and stress. Aesop wrote thousands of years ago of the parable of The Ant and the Grasshopper. I heard that one a long time ago and took it to heart. I consider that planning f
Ever wonder why people are skeptical of claims like this?
Because the fossil fuel industry funds media campaigns to discredit sound, reliable climate science? (Please see: http://www.merchantsofdoubt.or...)
Even their own climate science that they were doing in the 1970s? (Please see: https://www.scientificamerican...)
Oh -- I'm sorry perhaps you missed the bevy of links including ones from NASA and the USGS I posted.
Nice ad-homonym, BTW. I see your grasp of logic is as rock solid as your reading comprehension
It is entirely reasonable that calibration errors tended to one direction over the other if the same methods of calibration were used.
And yet... well, take a look for yourself at the adjustments made to the temperature data. Clearly someone thinks "that all of the calibration errors were in the same direction and then skewed over time into the opposite direction".
See that "Preview" button?
The earth is in a mini ice age. There's no know method of extracting temperature rates from the geologic record, which is what leads to the scary xckd graph. It is inevitable that we return to a warmer earth. It's also inevitable that people reliant on government^H^H^H^H^H corporate funding publish what their government^H^H^H^H^H^H corporate overlords expect.
Funny how quickly you were down-moded. I suspect maybe I will be too, though maybe not.
You have a point of view that represents a significant number of people. If I disagreed with it and was certain (with proof) that I was right, then I would falsify your statement with references, right then and there. For (sarcastically) "bonus points", I would explain how one comes to be misled into such a position as yours. The weight of evidence and general "that makes sense!" power of my objectivity would propel me. Nothing else I could do would gain more credibility for my position than a slam-dunk disputation in a public forum. Others are less likely to believe an alluring falsehood, if they firsthand see it tried and see it fail.
If I couldn't do at least some of that, and if I am a die-hard "true believer" utterly convinced of his own right-ness, well then I would demonstrate the "certainty" of my belief by down-modding you. After all, if I can't even answer your charge at all, when so many different responses are available, then "clearly" it must be unworthy of my time.
You're one of those "others" who does not see what I see. Clearly you are unworthy of discourse. A down-mod is my nice, easy, comfortable, anonymous "screw you" that faces no danger of me being personally questioned for choosing it. So there. Ha-ha!
-- Cowardly Slashdot Editors and Moderators Everywhere
Trees, for example, can't migrate towards colder areas quickly enough
Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?!?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Yes, better calibration helps getting more accurate results with less uncertainties, but it's highly unlikely that all calibration errors were in the same direction and skewed over time into the opposite direction.
Good lord folks -- I'm tired of this discussion coming up periodically and people talking out of their asses.
Look: thermometers dating back the mid-1800s were highly precise and did not need frequent calibration. They had perfected glass tubes of mercury and could make very even marks on them by that point. A late 19th-century thermometer had precision that was easily within +/-0.1 degree. (For specialized applications and laboratory thermometers, there were plenty that were manufactured by the late 1800s to be read down to 0.01 degree.)
And a sealed glass tube doesn't need repeated calibration if it's not disturbed or damaged. The issue here is simply how good the (somewhat permanent) calibration was. By the first couple decades of the 1900s, there were standards organizations which existed that would do standardized calibrations (i.e., where you could get a standard calibrated thermometer or send one away to be checked for calibration). We have actual logbooks when many thermometers were checked for accuracy. We have actual logbooks where thermometers were replaced and the old thermometers were compared with the new ones in terms of their scales and calibration. Etc., etc.
Just because you cannot fathom that people 100 years ago could read a thermometer or manufacture an even glass tube doesn't mean they didn't. They did. We still have many of these thermometers today to prove it. A 1900-era thermometers is about as accurate as a 1900-era RULER.
In fact, in terms of precision AND accuracy, what you should be questioning instead is MODERN electronic thermometers, which DO need frequent calibration and are frequently only accurate to maybe +/- 1 degree even when calibrated properly. But they're used for convenience because they no longer need a human to go look at it and write it down. Ask any meteorologist who knows anything about temperature measurement, and he'll likely tell you that stuff they were using decades and even over a century ago (often accurate to +/-0.1 degree) is more accurate than the stuff weather records are generated with now. (And regardless, that +/-1 degree or whatever is plenty to generate an average over several years to compare temperature records.)
No -- the real issue in dealing with old records is questions of siting and distribution. Historical thermometers weren't always located in the best of places, but again, most were, and we generally have records of those that were. The biggest statistical issue is that we didn't have such even distribution for samples all over the globe, so there's some sampling bias. Again, there's a lot of work statisticians do to take this into account when looking at long-term global averages.
Anyhow, I personally have complete confidence that those statistical analyses are good and reflect the overall trend. But people who are arguing that old thermometers were bad and needed frequent calibration simply have ABSOLUTELY no clue what they're talking about.
fuck you and your equating the autism vaccine bullshit to science. get back under your rock, and die.
Looks like someone got one too many vaccines.
(By the way, I want to be clear when I mention modern weather records, I'm talking about all the "observation stations" on average -- lots of them run by random people -- many of which don't have high-precision equipment. It is of course possible to have more accurate electronic devices today, but non-professional observations stations frequently don't have devices that have the precision of thermometers commonly used 100+ years ago.)
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.
Strange, I've read scientific papers who argued in favor of phrenology and eugenics, and the detractors using the same language against critics.
Om, nomnomnom...
I have a thermometer that cost $1.29 and I'm a betting man, so I'd go with the odds that it's simply wrong.
I've got one of those too. It was made in 1803, and I'll bet that $1.29 it's more accurate then most have been made in the last 30 years. Those olde mercury-in-glass thermometers were and are still considered the gold standard for measurements.
Om, nomnomnom...
It is entirely reasonable that calibration errors tended to one direction over the other if the same methods of calibration were used.
But that doesn't matter. What matters are the trends. If all slashdotters buy crappy thermometers from the same manufacturer and they all show 1-3 degrees less than they should, and our average is lower this year than next, we can still say with fairly high certainty that the temperature has increased.
And if we then all buy crappy thermometers from another manufacturer and they all show 1-3 degrees more than they should, and our average continues to increase, we can still say that our average has increased.
What is measured is the same thermometers against the same thermometers. If recalibrating or swapping out the equipment, measuring starts again. If a measuring station shows 15C one year, 16C the next, and then swap thermometers and show 13C that year and 14C the next, the data doesn't show that the temperature has dropped from 15C to 14C - it shows a 2 degree increase. Combined with other measurements that show a similar increase, it becomes significant and gives high certainty for a trend.
Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?!?
With the aid of swallows.
But take your typical sugar maple tree. The wings they spin off don't make it very far from the parent. They spread slowly, generation by generation. That's good enough when temperatures overall change slowly. Then they die off in one direction and thrive in another, and the forests move, even if the individual trees don't.
But the temperature rise right now happens too quickly for the maple forests to be able to keep up the tempo. With the result that maple forests are dying out, and the species that depend on them can't follow a slow migration, because there is no slow migration.
Or look at pines and firs. After the last ice age, most of Scandinavia was covered largely by pine trees. As temperatures slowly rose, fir trees took over as the dominant species, except at higher altitudes. It happened so slowly that the forests and their habitats could move. Not so now. Neither pine nor fir forests are endangered yet, but the trends say that they soon will be.
If I disagreed with it and was certain (with proof) that I was right, then I would falsify your statement with references, right then and there
Why bother going to all that trouble for someone who made some pretty bold claims without references themselves. The most likely outcome would be that when the next climate-related story comes out the OP will simply ignore any evidence posted to the contrary (since all scientists are corrupt frauds) and repeat the same nonsense again.
A down-mod is my nice, easy, comfortable, anonymous "screw you" that faces no danger of me being personally questioned for choosing it. So there. Ha-ha!
Says the Anonymous Coward. Nice one.
Likelihood=1.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Once again you entirely miss the point.
Statistically it proves a rising trend. If there were no trend, we'd expect a 50% chance of getting an above-average year. Now work out the odds of flipping a coin and getting 20 heads in a row (about 1 in 2^20). But with a rising trend, the probability of eventually getting 20 in a row approaches 1.0.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Count of all top level comments taken from page as I loaded it.
People objecting with the first argument they could think of, regardless of validity: 10
Nuts blaming everything on The Conspiracy: 4
Global warming alarmist copypasta: 2
Worthless spam: 7
People discussing the article: 4
Global warming news sure brings out the crazies.
All of that is based on the premise that the economy will tank if do anything to address global warming. But that is the same argument that has been leveled at every attempt to fix an environmental or social problem, like banning CFCs to stop destroying the ozone layer, or stopping the dumping harmful chemicals in any old place without a care for the health effects, or improving safety in factories to prevent workers dying from the chemicals they use, or the abolition of slavery, etc.
And yet here were are after all those changes. The economy wasn't destroyed, and scientific research is still being funded. That is because the economy adapted, as it always does. In this case we might have some short-term pain with the cost of converting to cleaner energy sources and technologies, but that will get forgotten once we find that we can save money by being smart about taking the energy from the air and sunlight around us. While coal miners won't be happy about the reduction of coal use, solar panel manufacturers will delight as their industry booms. While some things might cost us more as we have to find environmentally friendly ways of manufacturing goods, the work we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have the effect of lowering levels of all pollutions. This will lead to a reduction in pollution-related diseases lowering the health care costs.
We will soon forget about what we had to do to fix climate change just as we have with all the other changes that I mentioned above. Eventually, some other problem will occur and nay-sayers will predict the ruin of the economy yet again.
even when facts clearly show the opposite
Still waiting for that to be the case.
You haven't cited any facts. So far, all you've done is deny the existing facts - hand-waving them away as "adjusted" without any evidence that this makes them less accurate, and without any challenge to the methodology. Your only justification is that the corrections are "large", and give results you don't like. In what way do these claims constitute "facts"? Sounds like textbook denial to me.
Perhaps take some time to at least learn why the corrections were needed, so your next attempt to discredit them is worth looking at.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
He was downmodded for (obvious) trolling, not because of some grand political conspiracy against people who confuse science with politics.
I love how these assertions and declarations are just put out there.
Life is far more resilient than you suggest. Life on Earth will be just fine. Humans will suffer but will endure but then again that's what they do to each other regardless of climate.
In 4 billion years the rate of change has exceeded the current one.
Look at any desert ecosystem. Life endures the harshest conditions. Perhaps everyone is just bitching about it because they think such an eventuality can be prevented.
One problem with such large scale disasters is that it can throw civilization back quite a bit (and this has happened before). For example, do you think satellite communications would remain? Sure, they work now, but can the tech last? With 85% population gone because of harsh climate, who will maintain them? To keep satellites running you would need to preserve the whole supply chain of space tech, and if the current (advanced) supply chains are disrupted, high tech stuff may become unmaintainable. It might not be completely deadly, since we could revert to old style industry (and the abundant scrap metal is sure helpful), but current fossil fuel is much less accessible than in the past.
TL;DR collapse of populations can lead to dark ages. It is not just the same old, but with less people around.
"-- Cowardly Slashdot Editors and Moderators Everywhere" - says the Anonymous Coward
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
There's a notion that a reason it is so hard to get rid of ISIS, and survivalists, and well, any kind of "nutter", is that nature keeps her options open. If for some reason life was set back to say, the 14th century, then you'd need the mindset of warlordism, in order to reestablish some kind of organised life, in those earlier harsher conditions.
Which is also why it is a bit sad to see the last of the hunter gatherers disappear -- but then, there's always a few people fascinated with the skills for running down a large animal over marathon distances. People today keep running marathons for, well, no reason ;-)
It is sort of an evolutionary paradigm: nobody knows the way forward, or what might happen, so nature keeps as many different experiments running at the same time. As humans, we just don't know whether something is a good idea until a long time after it has been put into practice. And I think one can say this about everything from communism to agriculture.
You know, if the Precautionary Principle had seriously been used (and if it had any real worth), we'd never have invented agriculture. I mean, if you'd been back there 12,000 years ago, you'd really wonder who are these nutters who want to stay in one place all the time and ruin their teeth trying to eat ground grains, not to mention the all the hard work which only might pay off several months later. Totally nuts if you think about it.
You just proved his point. You believe your opinion is as relevant as someone who has spent a greater part of his life learning about climate science.
If you truly believe what you're saying, YOU need to go through the rigors of education the researcher you're equating yourself with before you can argue against the consensus.
The "smell test" is fine for localized things that don't matter much, but the reason the science fields exist is to perform research and analysis that the average layman cannot.
You can decide to personally accept the scientific community's consensus, or not, but it's analogous to deciding that 99% of medical doctors don't know how to treat a 20 year old disease, or that 99% of architects dont know how to build skyscrapers, or that most successful businessman don't know how to run a business.
Deciding that an entire field is incorrect in spite of the aggregate expertise of the members of that field is an extraordinary claim, and you'll either need to prove a vast conspiracy or perform repeatable science to properly refute the science. You went be successful at either, but you're welcome to try. Sadly, intelligent yet arrogant folks like you can convince fools of your beliefs, and they adopt them. We are seeing a revolt against expertise, and it's frankly astounding and perplexing in the extreme.
99% consensus on phrenology eh? Tough to believe, but even so, phrenology wasn't debunked until someone debunked it. Simply stating "nuh uh" is not science, and it definitely is not a refutation worth consideration.
Unfortunately the country is filled with impressionable people who desperately want to believe their way of life never needs to change, and cling to folks like you as a lifeline instead of critically thinking about ways to improve their situation when the inevitable comes. Interestingly this applies as much to who we (society as a collective) vote for, who we (individually) decide to socialize with, and how we (as communities) determine responses to risk.
from the first paragraph
"There is evidence that global warming has caused an increase in very heavy precipitation events--the kind most responsible for major floods"
from near the last paragraph
"Pollution may contribute to higher precipitation - It is possible that increased pollution is partly responsible for the increase in precipitation and in heavy precipitation events in some parts of the world. According to Bell et al. (2008), summertime rainfall over the Southeast U.S. is more intense on weekdays than on weekends, with Tuesdays having 1.8 times as much rain as Saturdays during the 1998-2005 period analyzed. Air pollution particulate matter also peaks on weekdays and has a weekend minimum, making it likely that pollution is contributing to the observed mid-week rainfall increase. Pollution particles act as "nuclei" around which raindrops condense, increasing precipitation in some storms."
from the last paragraph
"One of the few studies that did attempt to quantify flooding (Milly et al., 2002) found that the incidence of great floods has increased in recent decades. In the past century, the world's 29 largest river basins experienced a total of 21 "100-year floods"--the type of flood one would expect only once per 100 years in a given river basin. Of these 21 floods, 16 occurred in the last half of the century (after 1953). With the IPCC predicting that heavy precipitation events are very likely to continue to increase, it would be no surprise to see flooding worsen globally in the coming decades."
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I would like to see the papers and the critics. If the critics were some internet randos who are not scientists in the field, then yes, criticism is most likely moot. If the criticism is about some specific aspect of the paper (for example, pointing out problems with statistical methods), then it can be valid so long as the critic understands the aspect he/she is criticizing. If the authors of the research are making policy suggestions, then basically everyone can be a critic (e.g. you if prove that black kids are doing wore in school than white kids, it does not mean that the *right* policy is to concentrate teaching resources on the white kids *or* to attempt to equalize education outcomes).
As for GP case, it is really silly to expect that rather well established field will be overthrown by “that particular thing looks fishy”. Is is like expecting to disprove gravity by pointing to birds.
That's all very well, but here in Britain we know that what really happened in the 6000BC era was "Mainland European is cut off from Britain".
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Rather than linking to a selectively-quoting blog, just cite the source directly (assuming you actually want to hear what it says). I suggest Section 2.6, or at least the Extreme Events executive summary on page 162.
While there is a lack of sufficient data in some areas, the executive summary cites increases in heatwaves and heavy precipitation events, and significant changes in droughts (more in some areas, less in others). Tropical cyclones are stronger in the North Atlantic, though trends elsewhere are not so certain. These are all "meteorological events".
But hey, your link's selective observation about thunderstorms specifically is about right - with the important caveat that we don't actually know what the trends really are because we haven't studied them closely enough yet.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I would like to see the papers and the critics. If the critics were some internet randos who are not scientists in the field, then yes, criticism is most likely moot.
Try your local library or university. Most places haven't digitized anything before about 1940, unless they're pertinent to research in an existing field. It's too expensive, and not worth the effort unless someone is working with them in more then once-in-a-decade work. That requires you gaining physical access to either stored or vaulted information. Universities I can suggest in Canada include the University of King's College and University of Laval. Set up appointments beforehand, otherwise they'll leave you sitting at the door. You may also have to pay, like I did. Though if you want to see the media support, check the articles relating to the works of Gall(the primary person behind it), including the citation examples from around 1810-1895, along with racist literature(you might have problems getting a hold of that depending on your country), especially in colonial countries.
Om, nomnomnom...
So true. This planet's going to be doing fine, a few species might not make it, but then again, I'm not so sure that certain critters going extinct is such a bad thing. That homo sapiens for example sure is a cancer to the world, and throughout its existence there have been ice caps. One can only hope that their demise also means his.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For the same reason capitalism works and communism fails: People are selfish bastards and don't give a shit about the "common good".
Seatbelts and insurance? Sure, they benefit ME!
Saving the planet? Nah. Can't someone else do that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The main problem will be power. Fossil fuel is one of the biggest problems when four out of five people vanish. The main reason we need fewer people today to produce goods than we did 200 years ago is simply that we replaced work force with fuel. A single farmer can feed thousands, but only because his machinery is maintained and fueled.
Are there too many people on the planet? Yes. And I don't even want to doubt the number of 85%. The problem is that you cannot pick and choose who gets to live and who gets to die, because people don't simply and willingly step into the termination booth. And killing off the wrong people is quite likely when 4 out of 5 get to die.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I mean the whole climate debate.
There's a river running through the town I live in. For centuries, the river banks have been devoid of settlements. Why? Because the river has that nasty tendency to rise past its bed every now and then. Doesn't happen often, only every, say, 30 years or so. The periods are apparently long enough, though, that people don't remember it. And hence people did build houses right inside that flooding zone. Some older people have been warning them, telling them that it's not a good idea and that they're going to regret it. They have been rebuffed, damn luddites, we have the technology to tame the river, no problem there, put it in a fast moving bed and let the flood go downstream.
Guess what: They did the same upstream.
Now, last year it was 30ish years since the last flood and now a few people have a new swimming pool in their basement. And instead of now going "Fuck, we should've known better" the same people that ridiculed those that told them that this is going to happen are now lamenting that nobody could foresee that and how they now want to get disaster aid.
And I have a hunch that exactly the same is going to happen when disaster strikes those that now ignore any warnings, build at the beach front and then suddenly stand in 20 feet of water. Then suddenly they'll lament and complain how nobody could have foreseen that and then those that told them for ages are suddenly expected to aid them.
And it will be my pleasure to just shoot to kill when they try to climb my hill to get out of the water.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The important point is that humans have only been around in their earliest forms from about 7-8 million years. Lucy is about 3.2-3.3 million years old. Homo erectus died out about 1 million years ago. Neanderthals were around from about 700,000 to 35,000 years ago. Modern humans have been around since roughly 150,000 (generously) but more likely 100,000 or 75,000 years.
Now, could you please go back to the dawn of the earth's creation, establish a colony, and live your dream. Get back to us, write soon, we'd love to hear how it is going.
Also, calibration is pretty trivial. I mean, we have boiling water and that mixture of whatever that came out to 0F... some endothermic reaction. I suppose you may hav eto adjust for atmospheric pressure where it was calibrated, but that seems easy enough.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
If we had 85% of the population that would put us at about what we had in 1400 AD. Definitely a time of peace and prosperity, where there were no wars over resources or land. Oh wait...
Crikey, dogs and cats sleeping together! I agree with you on something!
Not sure about as long ago as 1803 1803, but certainly at some point in the 1800s they got really good at making mercury thermometers. You can get better thermometers these days---for a price---but as another poster pointed out, a 1800s thermometer was pretty much as good as an 1800s ruler, which is to say, good.
And being of less general interest, they were generally well made scientific instruments then, there doesn't appear to have been a market (or ability to make) cheap, bad ones.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
1 year has no meaning.
You don't just need strict averages though. If the climate was steady, you'd expect extrema (e.g. hottest X on record) to decrease exponentially in frequency since the start of measuring for a quite wide variety of realistic distributions, and the extrema to be in both directions. What we're getting is repeated hot extrema or close and no cold extrema. That itself shows that a warming trend is overwhelmingly likely.
It's easy to get an intuitive feel by dicking around in something like octave or scipy. Generate random numbers (e.g. Gaussian) take a running maximum and running minimum and calculate how often you get a new extreme event. Then add a trend over time (up, down, whatever) and see how it changes.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The earth is in a mini ice age.
It has been going on for about 2.6 million years. When does it graduate to a non-mini one?
"Not the hottest we have seen in the tiny span of time we have been keeping records compared to geologic and astronomical time frames."
At the start of the solar system the Earth was incansescent with heat and at some point the entire thing was very likely covered with ice. Pointing out conditions from billions of years ago does nothing except muddy the waters, intentionally, I feel.
Call me when it is 5C hotter globally and I might actually care (
Unless you're part of the relatively small population that lives far from the coast, your house will be long under water by the time the globe has warmed by 5 degrees C. Either way, almost everyone else's house will be which will cause a colossal amount of worldwide disruption.
honestly warmer temperatures have been historically good
It's not really the steady state temperature that matters (within quite wide bounds), it's the rate of change that matters.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Those poor unlucky souls didn't have giant Amazon warehouses to pilfer.....
The OP's argument that massive and rapid reversal of human population numbers would lead to a period of peace and prosperity because of all the extra resources laying around is more than a little absurd. Sure, there will be tons of brick and 2x4s to make houses with, lots of old cars to rip sheet metal and thousands of miles of decaying road.
But as numerous sci fi books and movies have chronicled, you would end up with a mostly scavenge environment. You would still run out of food (Wal Mart won't be there to restock the veggies), clean water and medications. Not to mention a whole list of other useful items. It will take a long time to boot up advanced civilization. The next group of apocalyptic survivors will have a leg up on their 14th century counterparts, but it's not going to be a real fun time for most.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There was a statistically insignificant difference between 2016 and 1998 (0.02C). Both of these years were very strong El Nino years, fyi. In other words, after 18 years of "global warming" the El Nino years have the same temperature.
Please can we stop the tsunami of bollocks about global warming? It's fucking tiresome.
None of that is really relevant. Yes, there will be winners and losers - that is what evolution does. The big problem, as far as humans are concerned is that WE are likely to be one of the losers given our location at the top of the food chain.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Can you supply any references for the debunked consensus? When I originally looked into the matter, I found several papers confirming the consensus, but it has been a few years since I looked
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Ya know, Einstein, that's what they said to... uhm... Einstein. ;-)
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy
Then why do they keep adjusting old values in the records?
"His name was James Damore."
XKCD on the rate of change
"His name was James Damore."
One theory on why we have farming is that the Earth has been unnaturally stable for the last 20k years.
Errm, apart from the Ice Age ending 12k years ago?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
That's just the start. One of the worst outcomes is greatly increasing the range of disease carrying insects - meaning things like Zika and Malaria can hit a LOT more people than it does now.
And lets put that in context. Malaria is now basically confined to a single continent - and even there, just 25% of the continent lies within the range of the single mosquito that spreads it.
Even so, that mosquito is the deadliest living creature on the planet- killing millions of people every year.
Imagine what happens if it's range is increased by just 5% ? If we double it - millions could easily become hundreds of millions.
Imagine if North America was getting as many Malaria cases as Africa is ? Don't imagine the death toll would be any lower - the higher availability of drugs would simply favour the extreme drug-resistant strains, so EVERY infection would be deadly.
I've had Malaria, I was one of the lucky ones who lived through it (mostly because I could afford good medical care and it wasn't an extreme drug resistant strain)... BELIEVE me - you do not want to experience it. It's hell on earth. It may well be somewhere near the top of the list of worst possible ways to die. And climate deniers are basically people who want their kids to die that horrible death.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Homo Erectus extinct 1 million years ago? George Michael just died last week.
If your conspiracy theory was right- all the scientists would be publishing climate denial papers and a few crazy kooks would be publishing papers saying the theory is right. The exact opposite of what actually happens - because the biggest corporate funders have a massive vested interest in climate change being false.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Ever wonder why people are skeptical of claims like this?
Do you ever wonder why we are skeptical of your claims? I'll demonstrate:
Keep in mind that these data are subject to large adjustments instead of basing these claims on anything resembling the raw data.
Where is the proof of this claim?
Sure, it's necessary to perform quality control, but the adjustments go far beyond that.
Where is the proof of this claim?
In fact, if you plot the quality controlled data prior to the adjustments, the temperature record is mostly flat.
Where is the proof of this claim? What does mostly mean? mostly doesn't sound like it has a scientific definition.
However, the adjustments to the data set look like a hockey stick.
So what? Why would we care?
When you need to adjust the data in order to get a signal, you end up making ridiculous claims like vaccines causing autism. Global warming is about as credible, except that scientists have decided it's true. To their credit, organizations like the National Climatic Data Center are transparent about their adjustments, so we can actually determine that the adjustments are the source of the warming signal.
Where is the proof of this claim?
I respect the scientists at NCDC, though I think their research is very flawed. The problem is that, when someone points out these facts, people show up and aggressively attack anyone who raises these problems.
We ask you for proof, and you treat our request like an attack. It's your job to prove your assertions
Sure. Throughout the planet's history climate change has been the biggest driver of speciation, as life has to adapt to changing conditions. Anthopogenic climate change may ultimately be the single best answer to the similarly anthropogenic Holocene Extinction which has been going on for 10K years or so (but really ramped up recently).
Regardless, the planet and life on the planet will survive and thrive. With regard to AGW, the question we care about is just how much impact the climate change will have on us. We're capable of living in a wide variety of climates, but that doesn't mean that adapting won't be difficult and expensive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Actually the reason we laugh at your lot is because you'd be among the first to die.
The people who ACTUALLY have the best odds of surviving are NOT the ones who stocked up on anything, because it's utterly impossible to predict what you would need in an unpredictable scenario. The most likely to survive are the ones most adaptable, the ones best able to fashion equipment and resources out of whatever is to hand.
Because it doesn't matter WHAT he needs- he has a way of finding it - he can make it. The guys who go to maker shows, the engineers, hell even the less sedentary programmers - THOSE guys will survive. The ones who know something about stealth will defeat all the ones with huge assault rifles every time. You can't hit what you can't see. Hell my ancestors won a war against the biggest army on earth by being good at stealth, and damn near did it again 10 years later.
3-5 Guys who are good at stealth, and who will kill somebody with every shot - using single shot guns, could and repeatedly DID kill entire batallions armed with the latest and greatest multi-shot Lee-Henry's.
Imagine being a battalion facing a small squadron of people who all shot as well as the best army snipers - but were about a thousand times better at hiding. Imagine trying to fight back when the only evidence that they are there at all is every few minutes one of your men collapses with a giant hole in his head. And knowing those guys have no supplies, no food, no more water than they can carry...
When they finished destroying your entire battalion without ever showing themselves... they will walk down and take yours. Imagine being part of that, desperately scanning the hills hoping to find a target, knowing you probably won't... knowing that sometime in the next hour - one of those bullets are going to rip through your head too - and there is nothing you can do about it ?
Those are the people who survive- the ones who never take anything much WITH them into a difficult situation because WHATEVER is there, they can turn to their advantage. They'll beet you paranoid nutters every time.
Besides which, the fist major killer in the climate change scenario is likely to be diseases as the heat increases the range of pest-insects, good luck fighting off mosquitos with your AR15 and your crate of canned goods.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Now let's hypothetically assume that the warming trend would happen regardless. Why should that be a blank check to exacerbate the problem? Our interest is unambiguously in *not* allowing warming to happen, natural or otherwise.
We know that some things we do can be making things worse, and some things we can do that improve things. Rather than arguing about whether or not the warming is our fault or not, we should be focused on doing what we can to slow or stop it.
It's amazing when I see people say 'but it was much warmer millions of years ago, so this is just natural'. Giving that our species was not alive at the time, I fail to see how that argument works.
I guess it's the erroneous position of 'save the Earth'. We really mean 'save ourselves' because the Earth is going to be fine and probably life on Earth will be able to continue, we just might not be able to live in it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Actually, the Ice Age did NOT end 12K years ago. We're merely between Continental Glacial Advances. The current Ice Age started ~2.58 million years ago. And we're due for another Continental Glacial Advance, "real soon now". . . .in geologic terms.
"real soon now" meaning within the next 10-50 thousand years. . .
I rather suspect the poster is referring to the cooling periods associated with periodic solar minima: i.e. the Maunder Minimum or the Dalton Minimum. The Dalton is the most recent, and is often remembered for associated cultural artifacts like Currier and Ives prints of winter, and the book "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates".
There is much discussion that a new solar minimum is underway, and with it a "mini ice age".
Now you are just being intentionally obtuse. He did not say no one could contribute. He said no one without decades of hyper specialized research could possibly contribute. I only have a Masters degree, but I did choose a research track instead of a capstone project, and the most important thing I learned was how specialized someone needs to be to make meaningful contributions to scientific knowledge.
At least 99.999% of the population has no business postulating about climate science. The only reasonable opinion these people can have (myself included) is the position of the vast majority of climate science researchers. The other 0.001% of the population can continue to challenge current theories.
Specialists sure have their uses, and indeed it takes significant effort to even just say current with any particular research field, but don't discount generalists so easily.
Generalists can often make connections between major research branches that specialists simply don't look for, or realise that different branches are investigating the same phenomena but are using different terminology. The most recent example of this is probably Carl Sagan.
Clinton had a 98% chance of winning the election.
Modelling is hard. Especially when you are modelling the future. Systematic bias in the form of attacks and blacklisting if you/your models disagree with the "consensus" doesn't help the matter.
People believe in the common good. It's just a question of who has anything in common with them.
The whole reason humans form communities is the common good. It's easier to all build a well than each person build their own. It's easier to share a plow team than everyone have oxen they use one week a year.
As life has become safer, the need for common good has reduced. It's still a good way to reduce risks, but our risks are so low now, we tend not to worry about it.
-----
There's a notion that a reason it is so hard to get rid of ISIS, and survivalists, and well, any kind of "nutter", is that nature keeps her options open.
Nope, nature is a cold-hearted bitch who doesn't give a fuck about anyone or their ideology and kills basically at random.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
capitalism works and communism fails
More like communism can be toppled and capitalism continues to stomp on the human face forever.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The Earth can handle temperature raising at the current rate. So can life. Even the human specie will survive without any problem.
The problem is the *cost* of that change (deserts, flooding), which is more expensive to mankind as a whole (although some individual obviously benefit) than lowering our emissions.
I'm not arguing for doing nothing. I'm pointing out that billions of dollars is up for grabs here, and that the bankers have the most potential to steal and consequently the largest motivation. They are also tied most heavily with the federal and state governments that regulate them.
The strongest argument for global warming isn't modeling, it's truth data. The data is shown with the hockey stick curve, or the oh shit leg in the XKCD graph. If we had rate data for more than a few thousand years, I'd be convinced. However, we don't have any rate data older than the ice cores, and that in the ice isn't nearly as strong as we'd like to believe.
The idiot progressives hate and belittle everyone who dares dissent. However, the adults in the room see a few trillion dollars about to be stolen by a cartel that moves most of the money in the world, and plausible physics to explain, but the affressive silencing of all dissent and goes "hmm".
Blatant bulls*it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
With it 5C hotter globally, the ice caps are no more. That translates into several feet of sea level rise.
And you are also assuming there isn't a runaway greenhouse effect. See Venus for an example.
guys talking about two diff things.
and I believe he meant to say that its unlikely that the errors from measurement to measurement were non-linear.
his conclusion is right even if how he got there was worded poorly.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The 99% claim is typically misconstrued and misused. While there exists a poll that shows that 99% of scientific respondents believe there is AGW, there is nowhere near that same consensus on the extent of the problem. There are many in that 99% who believe that AGW is not necessarily catastrophic, and there are many who agree that our models are not good enough to make accurate predictions.
I just wish those that constantly scream '99%' add that type of clarification. Otherwise, its just as mindless as denial itself.
I don't know if you realised, but you just told everyone how little you know about scientific research, at the same time as trying to use your knowledge of scientific research to make a point. It's rather entertaining for everyone else, but I imagine for you it's somewhat embarrassing. Let me help you for future times you insist on chiming in:
1) Yes, and? Oncologists research cancer, climatologists research the climate. Or should they swap every once in a while to keep you happy? Or is it this particular study? I have news for you - this study is duplicated many times the world over at the end of each year/start of the next. Of course climatologists are going to perform it.
2) Nope. Continued funding relies on society surviving. Extraordinary-payout-massive-awesomeness-funding would come from showing how climate change is not happening, as that will get you a Nobel prize, $1m, tenure wherever you want it, and funding for the rest of your days. Science LOVES upheavals, as that's where fantastic amounts of learning is found
3) Again, not at all. See 2)
4) Not even close. See 2)
The idea of science and scientists you are arguing against is indeed horrific, but as it only exists in your mind and the minds of people similarly disposed to you, you shouldn't worry about it perverting scientific research.
That Ice Age was perpetrated by the Chinese!
Sad!
siberian mosquitoes
Sorry for your experience but it had more to to do with the DDT ban than global warming.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It's like a weapon - you sure hope you don't need it at all, ever
While I agree with the rest of your points, I imagine a not insignificant percentage of weapon owners (ok who am I kidding - gun owners) are absolutely pining - secretly or not so secretly - for a need to use their weapon to present itself, for various reasons (fantasies of being The Hero, vindication of their having said gun(s)...).
It's not hard to imagine the same could be said for many preppers actually looking forward to WTSHTF Day.
(Yes, there is some overlap between the two groups.)
Then why do they keep adjusting old values in the records?
For reasons you've demonstrated that you're not bright enough to understand. I saw some of your other posts in the thread. You're either too dim or too emotionally invested in believing lies to absorb the answers. So, I shall not waste my time.
By the way, being contrarian doesn't make you smart. It's only clever to disagree with the experts if you actually have very good reasons to and are right.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But that 99.999% of population has a right to decide whether they want to fund the fight against climate change or not.
That is absolutely true. The climate scientists aren't the ones who should be deciding whether coastal cities are worth saving, for instance. That is the responsibility of the general public. The general public certainly has the right to say they simply don't care, or aren't willing to make sacrifices for future generations. They can even let some amount of uncertainty about the negative effects of climate change enter into their risk management, such as using a predictive model where there is a 10% there are no negative effects.
But the current strategy of claiming the science isn't solid enough to be taken as "fact" by non-experts is indefensible.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
1400 AD, that would be the middle of the Little Ice Age version 1, when crop failures and famine were common and the black death killed about 30-40% of Europeans and temps were 1.5K below average.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Actually, yes, there is. Building a dam to prevent a flood would benefit everyone, but it would also first of all require everyone to pitch in to build it, because nobody could build it alone, and nobody would because his personal loss with every flood is smaller than the cost for building and maintaining the dam.
You might have heard about a concept called "taxes". In general, that's the idea behind them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Generalists can often make connections between major research branches that specialists simply don't look for, or realise that different branches are investigating the same phenomena but are using different terminology. The most recent example of this is probably Carl Sagan.
I don't really disagree with that statement, but I think I disagree with the implications you are making overall in your comment. If your example of a "generalist" is someone with a PhD in Astrophysics then I certainly agree there are those in the field of science you work better as a liaison between sciences than specializing in one area of research (I am roughly paraphrasing one of Carl Sagan's students, David Morrison, as he described Carl Sagan's role in their field).
But Carl Sagan's scientific accomplishments were mostly (I believe entirely, but I haven't done much research) in the field of planetary sciences, which was his specialization. His other accomplishments were as an educator of the public, not as a research scientist. This is certainly where a non-specialist can make a tremendous contribution to society's relationship with science, as Carl Sagan did. Carl Sagan would have been able to do great work in spreading the message of climate scientists if he were alive today, but he wouldn't be very useful in advancing that research unless he devoted more efforts into specialization in that area.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
No, it actually is exactly that.
The communist promise is "work hard today, and one day we'll all be living in paradise where everyone can be living well". In turn that means, though, that if everyone but me is working hard, we'll all be living comfortably, so I don't really have to pull that hard, do I? And if it fails, we're all to blame. In other words, when that fails, "the system" is to blame because, well, what can a single person do?
The capitalist promise is "work hard today and one day YOU will be living in paradise where YOU can be living like a king". It's much more personal. The weight of that is squarely on you, if you fail, you're to blame, the system works because, look, there are people who got rich and live like a king. You failed.
That's why one lie works while the other one was far easier to see through.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"The idiot progressives hate and belittle everyone who dares dissent"
hypocritical alert.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
We know that some things we do can be making things worse, and some things we can do that improve things. Rather than arguing about whether or not the warming is our fault or not, we should be focused on doing what we can to slow or stop it.
Sure, but the political solution offered by the left exempts China and India, so it's all for nothing. Vote Republican and we all die. Vote Democrat and we all die poor. Shrug.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
That's a very good argument, but why are you arguing for believing in God, when the subject is climate change?
Climate change should fall under science, where any talk about consensus and who has the highest number ("majority") of priests is only useful for discrediting a hypothesis.
You are confusing the process of performing scientific research, which consensus should have little effect on, and the public's understanding of current research results. Consensus among leading scientists is vital for the public to make informed decisions, because they cannot be expected to gain enough knowledge about any individual field without possibly decades of dedicated effort.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
i heard the russians hacked the climate
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
humans in earth are that old?!
another win for Trump!
fucking commies!
C'mon, I can easily be cynical and misanthropic without giving a shit about global warming.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why does his graph start at 20k BC?
Why doesn't it go further back?
The gall of those heathens, only we the anointed have the right to prophecy, only we know the secret rites, how to shake the beads and rattles! Insolent dogs, You'll anger the Gods, just tender the tithe without question. Pay no attention to the man behind the paywall, the smoke and mirrors are simply for your protection.
It shows deep ignorance to equate higher education with some religious cult. There are hundreds of climate science, earth science, etc. undergraduate and graduate programs in the US alone where you are free to educate yourself if you want to make meaningful contribution to the sciences. There is plenty of room for debate as long as you know what you are talking about first.
If you want to treat any deference to qualified professionals as equal to religious dogma, you are going to lead a very ignorant life for quite some time.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
By the way, that whole "97% consensus" thing is pure organic fertilizer. So not even your claims of consensus hold up to scrutiny.
Did you even read the articles you quoted? The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but the Politifact article rated the statement "Over 97 percent of the scientific community believe that humans are contributing to climate change." as mostly true. The only reason it wasn't entirely true is that over 97 percent of active researchers in relevant fields of the scientific community agree, not 97 percent of the entire scientific community. Considering those are the only people in the scientific community whose opinions hold much weight, its not a big mistake. There was also another researcher who disagreed with the criteria used to determine if the researcher agreed, and independently came up with a 91% consensus. That same researcher then stated "There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans."
So it seems your own Googling backs up his consensus statements quite well.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yeah, but Fahrenheit wasn't based on water at all, so I should have been more explicit that boiling water was only an alternative. Fahrenheit was based on two thermally stable processeses. I believe 0 was a mixture of ammonia and something else?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
What other science allows you to edit historical data to make it fit the trendline of your model instead of editing your model to make it fit the historical trendline?
But hominids have been around for 20 million years; mammals for 80 million years (120 - 225 million years depending upon ones classification of mammals).
The point is not that we ignore human activity, spewing poisons etc... but that we don't turn into chicken littles.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
...science demands not only predictions, but reproducibility, falsifiability, and controls.
So all we need is another planet on which to run the experiment!
(Or to be absolutely sure, another two or three.)
Can you supply any references for the debunked consensus? When I originally looked into the matter, I found several papers confirming the consensus, but it has been a few years since I looked
Comment on ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
a 2016 survey of american meteorological society members about climate change Initial Findings graph on page 11 shows 33% of AMS members believe the climate change is at least equally or more attributable to natural causes.
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: A re-analysis
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
Climate Consensus Con Game
Sorry, global warmists: The ‘97 percent consensus’ is complete fiction
The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up
Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books
Climategate 3.0: Blogger Threatened for Exposing 97% "Consensus" Fraud
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I've made two posts in this thread.
Yes, and both were stupid. Now you've made three and all are stupid.
You are exactly the reason nobody takes climate shit seriously.
If by "nobody" you mean the purposly ignorant, then sure, nobody. However if you mean "people who actually stufy climate" then your marks are way off base. And if your "nobody" you mean oil companies, then you're also way off base.
Meanwhile you are accusing others of being emotionally wrapped up [...] asshole
Ah yes, "asshole". Now that sounds like the sords of a man who is not emotionally invested! There's nothing I can do to convince you: others have posted intresting and detailed posts which you ignored in order to post your silly rhetorical question. So it's clear you're not just ignorant but wilfully ignorant. I'm not here to change your mind, I'm just here to point and laugh at the silly people :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Christ, gas prices are only $1.115 compared to the Canadian average of $1.1375 or the $1.35+ that we're paying here on the west coast where we have to depend on Canadian oil refined by the Americans.
Electricity prices don't look bad either if you ignore the peak price from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM, only 8.7 cents a kW/hr during off-peak, it's 8.29 cents for the first 1350 kW/hrs here and then 12.43 cents compared to 13.5 cents mid peak there. Off course BC Hydro has gone $5 billion (soon to be $10 billion) in debt to keep our prices so low without any alternative energy sources coming on-line, most of the cost increases has been to subsidize the natural gas industry so I guess that is a good reason to have high prices.
Of course most other stuff is also cheaper in Ontario, I understand you can buy a small house for less then $2 million and the minimum wage is also higher.
At least you're not as much as cry babies as the Albertans, who almost have to pay slightly over $1.10 a litre for gas while they pass on costs to us. (too lazy to look at their electricity prices on my dial-up internet connection)
https://www.google.ca/search?q...
https://www.google.com/search?...
https://www.google.ca/search?q...
https://www.google.ca/search?s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It shows deep ignorance to equate higher education with some religious cult.
Really why? There is plenty of evidence to show political influence over research. Consider all those social sciences, economics, etc, that fail repeatedly to explain events in society or markets. Things might not be as bad in the physical science space but its essentially a fact that litmus tests exists. All those smelly hippies from the 60's staged their little disruption campaigns and forced curriculum to change they then got their PHDs etc and filled in the academic structure as the old guard aged out. Now outside of a few religious affiliated institutions just try getting anywhere with a conservative view point on any issue.
Its not at all clear where the corruption is or how far its tentacles spread. Much like a number of Washington institutions at this point the only answer is burn it all down and start over. You can't trust them anymore and there is no fixing it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I don't know if a roulette wheel will pay out on the next spin, but I DO know how fast I'll lose money if I continue to put my money down on black.
That's the difference between weather and climate. You don't need to predict the next 5 day's weather to know that 100 years from now we're fucked if we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere... and we may be fucked even if we manage to reduce greenhouse gases dramatically in the near future.
The data HAS been verified. For instance, look at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. This was a project funded by right-wing activists who doubted the climate science. They specifically objected to use of satellite data and felt that terrestrial weather stations were not being vetted correctly. (For instance, showing pictures of temperature stations a few feet away from buildings or barbecues which they said tainted the results.) The Berkeley guys were led in part by Richard Muller, who has been a long-time skeptic. They went and got original raw data, and did a thorough job vetting each data point.
The result is that their data agrees completely with the climate change models. Muller's public summary is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...
There are other contrarian opinions, but very few of them work with large data sets in any honest way. Nearly all the contrarian viewpoints can be linked to right-wing money and other professional gains that their mainstream colleagues do not enjoy.
But mostly, the arguments they make are trash - which is why they aren't published. They're dumb ideas, easily seen through. Science works by honest appraisal of ideas and data, not opinion or groupthink as you seem to believe. It's not perfect - lord knows I disagree with a lot of scientific colleagues' approaches - but by and large good science tends to win out over bad science.
Stolen? By whom?
You do know that money is not really created or destroyed, right? What is being proposed is to impose friction on fossil fuel use, and remove friction from renewables. (Plus maybe doing carbon reclamation, if we can figure out any good way to do so. Or maybe an L1 Fresnel Lens, which is my preferred solution.) Preliminary evidence shows that money invested in green technologies has good rates of return on creating jobs... whereas long experience shows that fossil fuel industries have huge capital gains with workers being screwed more and more.
Why not give incentives to change our investments? Why not charge those who profit by fossil fuel use more?
Your stuck in conspiracy-theory land.
If idiots want to keep insisting that water is dry, waddya gonna do?
Hardly - unless you're up in the Arctic, starting your own breeding program to turn polar bears from a slow moving species that hunts in the ocean, into a slim fast moving predator chasing down caribou in a matter of decades. And that your fellow anti-vaxxer friends are doing the same thing in every ecosystem undergoing change.
Yes, a handful of humans may survive in a DOD-powered Vault 13, waiting a century or two until the methane effect wears off, and then try to get by with your GECK's. Billions might die in the process, though.
Right. In the same way that starting your own business means you will defraud your partners, sell defective goods to your customers and sexually harass your secretary while dumping toxic waste in the river. Because reasons.
You mean be a good little serf in neo-feudalism, where the company you work for collects 90% of your output and hard work is rewarded with....more work and a 2% annual increase in pay.
To be fair, that block of text with almost no punctuation or whitespace is somewhat difficult to comprehend..
That's what it should remind you of. Greedy land developers (and the banks giving them loans) have been driving the development of flood-prone areas, and buying off politicians so as to not get in the way with (shudder) regulation. Capitalism ensures that these kind of "mistakes" will happen, all the time, in every industry it touches.
But that's the genius of the religion, as failures are treated as successes, as the failing company will go through the capitalist natural selection process, and be replaced by the next company who may make the same sort of "mistake", but with different loans and shareholders backing it up.
... the amount of Greenhouse Gases produced by Mankind far outweigh the Pollutants naturally produced by the Earth 2.4 MILLION pounds of Co2 are released by us every second -- that's 207.36 BILLION pounds of CO2 every day. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ca... That amount DWARFS the amount of CO2 the Earth produces naturally -- in fact the Earth now produces less than 1% of the CO2 in the atmosphere
https://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcan...
Okay, take a breath, now humans add 29 gigatons of CO2 a year, but natural sources add 771 gigatons, Humans add a little less than 4% of the total emissions. The CBS link wasn't wrong, but they just threw out a big scarry turd to be sensational, and the USGS link was just talking about volcanoes not all natural sources.
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Our interest is unambiguously in *not* allowing warming to happen
That's unfortunately not true, and why there's still so much misinformation out there. There's a lot of very powerful people whose interest is very unambiguously "make more money than any person could ever possibly need, regardless of the consequences." And they are doing everything they can dream up to retain the status quo even if its likely to be the end of us all sooner or later.
The fact that global warming is threatening to undo what DDT once achieved (the negative side effects aside) doesn't bother you then, does it ?
And reading that article - it's pretty clear the author is a rampant denier of climate change theory as a whole - despite having no expertise about it. All the usual crap about "bad science" and "pushing an agenda" that you get from fringe lunatics who think they are smarter than all other scientists.
That makes me doubt his word even on his actual field of expertise - because his judgement is clearly compromised.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If you're going to troll, "Anonymous" Coward, man up and use your real name.
15% of our current population is about 1 billion people. We had 1 billion people by around 1800. There had been plenty of wars by that point, over resources or otherwise.
Estimates suggest under 70 million people around the time of Rome's collapse. That's ~1% of our current population. And we still fought over land and resources.
Basically, as long as there's two humans within shouting distance of each other, we'll find some resource, even a relatively useless one, that's limited enough to justify fighting over it. We just love conflict, historically speaking.
(Numbers from the "World population" Wikipedia article but still, its accurate enough for my point.)
And all that said, "well-off" is definitely a relative term. Sure we might have lots of available land but unless the survivors have a lot of farming knowledge, that land is going to be fairly useless until we re-develop the technology. All of us folk who sit around on our computers and buy all our food from the grocery store are going to have some serious issues when the power grid is offline. We'd all have to learn, very quickly, how to live like it was 1800 again. Or die in the attempt.
Dynamics of positional warfare malaria: Finland and Korea compared, a more reputable source then.
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The reason its so hard to get rid of ISIS is because we don't particularly like the concept of civilian casualties and they use that to their advantage (set up their command centers in schools or highly populated areas or whatnot that we're unwilling to destroy.)
If we gave up on that ethic, ISIS would be gone in a week -- we'd just bomb the hell out of half of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else we consider to be ISIS strongholds and the problem would be solved.
Well said, I don't take an accusation of ignorance as an insult, but as an invitation to educate, I am curious as to why deference to qualified professionals isn't practised by the current class of Climatologist toward those who preceded them?
Weather being an instance of Climate, and weather being unpredictable over long ranges, would by necessity place a great burden of proof on the climate models to prove they are valid. So far the models haven't prove very robust in the mid-range forecasts as the IPCC keep lowering the estimates of predicted decadal warming with each report.
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"Keep in mind that these data are subject to large adjustments"
http://berkeleyearth.org/under... [berkeleyearth.org]
This page doesn't seem to indicate that the adjustments are large. Can you quantify "large" and "small" adjustments?
Instruments have been upgraded from mercury thermometers to digital sensors. The "scientists" claim that this introduces a cooling bias and adjust temperature upward.
Is there a reason to doubt their conclusions? What is this reason? Explain and demonstrate with observations.
The time of day in which observations are made has changed. The "scientists" claim that this change also introduces a cooling bias, so another upward revision is made.
Is there a reason to doubt their conclusions? What is this reason? Explain and demonstrate with observations.
"Urbanization" (basically heat from pavement) creates a warming bias, etc. etc.
So you are saying that urbanisation does not create heat islanding? Why not? Explain and demonstrate with observations.
There are also certain "quality control" adjustments.
And what is the net effect of these quality control adjustments? Are you saying they are not required? Why not? Explain and demonstrate with observations.
"If you plot the quality controlled data prior to the adjustments, the temperature record is mostly flat."
See figure #5 at the above URL
Figure 5 is not a temperature record. How does it demonstrate that the temperature record is mostly flat.?
What does mostly mean?
What happened to the energy incursion predicted by Arrhenius et al? Did the energy just disappear?
From a statistical standpoint we'd probably want a good 100 parallel Earths to get a proper sample.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
With 85% population gone because of harsh climate, who will maintain them?
This is one reason I cannot support reliance on wind and solar power. PV cells require a very high tech infrastructure. Wind power might be something that can be reduced to pretty low tech stuff but at the cost of efficiency. With wind being so unreliable and dilute it's real easy for a small loss in efficiency to make the technology nearly worthless.
I recall someone pointing out how giving poor communities solar power to "save" them from their poverty was backwards. It didn't "save" them because with solar power this community would now be reliant on an outside source of energy for a very long time. If shown how to dig up locally sourced coal, build boilers, and so forth these communities can become self reliant fairly quickly. It might still mean years or decades to true independence but this is much better than a scale of centuries like solar power would require.
I wish I could remember who pointed this out so I could give him proper credit, he called this "spanner and hammer technology". The idea is that by giving poor community things like diesel tractors, coal fired boilers, and such centuries old technology they can learn to maintain this stuff on their own. Within a short amount of time they'll be building new stuff and making improvements. This kind of technology doesn't even require electricity to build an industry, just like we've used gas lighting before in the Western nations they can use it too in these developing nations until they build out how to draw copper into wires and build their own motors and generators.
When it comes down to it nuclear power is actually a better choice that wind and solar. Nuclear power can be spanner and hammer technology and still be safe. Some of the monitoring equipment might have to be shipped in for an added level of personal safety for the workers but the society at large would still benefit even if many individuals died in radiation accidents. Much like how coal mining is deadly for many but the energy produced saves many more from freezing or starving to death.
This goes for the threats of CAGW or some other mass extinction event. The number of places that can create PV panels are relatively few. The places that can build a nuclear reactor are actually quite large, we just don't use them for that for political reasons. The technology to mine and refine uranium and thorium is not all that different than mining most any other element.
If you want to see a way to prevent humanity from being knocked back to the stone age and staying there for thousands of years then we need people trained in nuclear power, and a wide spread infrastructure in nuclear technology.
Nuclear power doesn't have to produce electricity to be useful. Once we can get it to boil water then we can do things like we did a century ago and use that steam to pump water, produce "town gas" (synthetic gaseous fuels) for heating and lights, and drive factories. It's that kind of spanner and hammer technology that allowed humanity to thrive in the past. We lost much of our ability to do that again by digging up all the easy to get fossil fuels. The difference with nuclear power is that we're never going to run out of uranium and thorium like we could with coal. We were given a gift with nuclear power, it would be a shame to lose that technology out of irrational fear.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This trend has continued much longer than the solar cycle, or the ENSO, PDO, and ADO cycles - yet it's far too rapid to be due to the longer cycles like Milankovitch orbital variations. Nobody has found any evidence of a medium-length natural cycle that would fit the bill. But known human CO2 emissions have a calculated effect that fits the observed trend very nicely.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Actually, the Ice Age did NOT end 12K years ago. We're merely between Continental Glacial Advances. The current Ice Age started ~2.58 million years ago.
Yeah. That means no. I wasn't talking about the "Quaternary glaciation" aka the "current ice age", I was talking about the last glacial period popularly known as the Ice Age..Please do mind the Capitalization.
But fine, pretend that "Earth has been unnaturally stable for the last 20k years", like the AC did. I sure hope that was your point, or your little nit-pickery (that failed) totally made you look like an ass otherwise. Well, if that was your actual point, it also made you look like an ass. Congrats.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Learn what burden of proof of means.
honestly warmer temperatures have been historically good for life in general and humans in particular). ...
In northern europe, perhaps. However I can iterate plenty of places on earth where it is not that case. Likely in 5 seconds more places than you have fingers
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Aaah the old fallacy of pretending weather and climate science is the same thing. It's not, and predicting the weather is a LOT harder than climate. Weather is chaotic, but climate is an average - and averages are a lot easier.
I'll use the same analogy I always use.
This is Pete. Pete will be finishing high-school this year. Please predict his final grades.
Can't do it can you ?
Now what if I give you his academic record up to now ?
You can make a prediction and get it right some of the time (you can't know if a weak student will suddenly take fright and work really hard in the last year to greatly raise it, or maybe his dad gets sick and he has to get a job after school to help support the household and they drop signigicantly - you can get it mostly right, but there's too much you can't know which could change it for your prediction to be completely accurate)... this is weather prediction.
Now what if I asked you to predict the distribution of grades in Pete's class ? Well that's easy. 25% will fail. 50% will achieve an average pass and 25% will get distinctions. That's the normal-distribution-curve and I know that the 2017 class will have a normal distribution curve because ALL years have one, in fact if ever there isn't one - that is proof positive in a court of law that there was cheating in the exams !
Predicting the average grades is easy, because the chaotic effects on any particular one is smeared out in the large average. The blips dissapear.
Climate is the average weather over a long, long time - that's EASY to predict.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And the absolute lack of conscience to experiment on those 100 paralel earths with different approaches - and not mind killing 99*7 Billion people in the failed experiments...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I would still support giving wind and solar tech to poor communities. If they actually have coal (and not all do), then they will use up those resources that are easily available and when chips go down, the more unavailable stuff will be out of reach. If near surface coal stays there, bootstrapping will be easier.
Besides, we are trying to prevent the tragedy in the first place. Using fossil fuels IS the cause of the problem.
Finally, we can't force others to go through the industrialization evolution like we did. Solar and wind electricity tech is available in free market and it is competitive, and getting more so every year.
What has your reply to do with the text I wrote?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But there's a huge difference between "97% think mankind is playing some part" and "97% think that mankind is KILLING THE PLANET AT A RATE THAT ONLY GIGANTIC FINANCIAL REDISTRIBUTION WILL FIX"... which is what it has morphed into...
Actually the research did use this threshold: "man is the main reason for the Earth’s warming temperatures", so in this case the quote actually undersold the research findings. If he really did want to use the threshold of mankind playing some part, the number may actually be 100%.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
-The first link is merely a comment paper, and seems measured in it's response. The methodology critique seems nit picky.
- The second link is about the AMA, which is not made up of the same folks that would be publishing climate science research. From their website:
Our more than 13,000 members include scientists, researchers, educators, broadcast meteorologists, students, weather enthusiasts, and other professionals in the fields of weather, water, and climate.
-I don't have access to the 3rd paper at home, so can't comment.
-The springer article seems unduly narrow in their definition of consensus:
the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.
It seems like the tipping point in many of these articles is whether the environment has a significant or equal impact on climate change. Even in the cooking the books article:
"Only 59% of the scientists said the ‘climate development of the last 50 years was mostly influenced by man’s activity. One quarter of those surveyed said that human and natural factors played an equal role.’"
Put another way, that's 84% say that humans play at least an equal roll in climate change. I'd still call that consensus, even if it's not 97%.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Ah yes, "asshole". Now that sounds like the sords of a man who is not emotionally invested!
Emotionally invested in preventing you from lying about me while insulting me.
Clearly you cant answer the question, fuckhead. You believe what someone else told you about the science, tried to defend it, but couldnt answer a simple question about it, so went on an insult campaign... conclusion: a lying asshole,. a real fuckhead.
"His name was James Damore."
How do we figure we make ANY difference, when one volcanic eruption spews more toxic fumes, ash, and other pollutants than humans ever could?
For starters, they don't. Volcanic eruptions are less than 1% of the annual human emissions.
I think there are a few people out there that give humans way too much credit for what we can do to change something as big as the weather on the planet.
Rather, you give humans way too little credit. We've been influencing the climate for a long time now.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
- The second link is about the AMA, which is not made up of the same folks that would be publishing climate science research. From their website:
Our more than 13,000 members include scientists, researchers, educators, broadcast meteorologists, students, weather enthusiasts, and other professionals in the fields of weather, water, and climate.
Well the problem is there really is no definition of who a Climatologist is, compared to a field like physics, it not even a science. Physicists have been around for a millennia, a degree in Climatology for a decade or two. I would say a typical AMS member is certainly more competent in climate matters than people like Cook and Lewandowski. The whole 97% thing just reeks of the appeal to authority fallacy.
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Clearly you cant answer the question, fuckhead.
hee hee hee :)
Clearly you cant answer the question, fuckhead.
Course I can, I'm just not answering you because I don't believe you were ansking the question in good faith.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You could have at least done a quick google to find the answer to your last question. Here's the answer for just the U.S.
http://www.gao.gov/key_issues/...
Just another day in Paradise
You're off by a few centuries. At a current population of 7.4B, .15% of that would be 1.1B. Looking at the link below, they mention that it's estimated that we hit one billion around 1804, so add a few years for the additional 100M.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just another day in Paradise
First off, if all the ice on the planet melted, sea levels would rise 230ft. I live 15miles from the coast and my current elevation is 775 feet, so yeah, not really worried on that one. (Further, these figures do not account for the exponential increase in dissolved water in the atmosphere with increased temperatures, so the actual rise is somewhat lower). (strike one)
http://www.amnh.org/ology/feat...
Beyond that, NO ONE thinks that all the ice would melt. (If someone tells you that they are full of shit.) The Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day, Antarctic is a bit higher. Changing those temperatures to -53C to 35C is not going to change the fact that for most of the time, most water that hits the polar caps is frozen and will stay frozen. Experts still hotly debate whether or not the elevated temperatures which cause more moisture in the atmosphere would significantly increase the annual snowfall rate on the polar caps, actually significantly increasing the rate of ice accumulation. Sea levels have risen 2.9mm per year since 1993, even with the slight 0.6C warming we have seen since then. From 1870 to 2004 sea levels rose an average of 3mm per year or about 7.7inches over 134 years. Not even a blip of increase or anywhere near a cataclysmic rise or a cataclysmic increase in sea levels like you are asserting. Anyone who tells you that sea level rise is a foregone conclusion with global warming is lying to you. (strike two)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
Taking scientific advice from a (even popular) web comic strip written by an ex-software engineer completely lacking in the hard sciences (he even insists on disclaimers as a non-expert on his work because of this) is not helping your cause. He is just regurgitating the erroneous assumptions of the so called "climate scientists" who are as much scientists as my local sanitation engineer is an engineer. (See that last link above, that graph shows just how wildly off these "scientists" were with their models vs reality.) They can barely predict the weather 3 days from now and you blindly trust their models of 100 years from now when they have been consistently wrong for the last 15 years? Sorry, no thanks. (strike three)
You can educate yourself or continue in self righteous PC ignorance, up to you. As you can see here, though, you are hardly batting 1000...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Your erroneous assumption is that the polar caps median or average temperature is -4C. This is not the case. TLDR summary: Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day. Interpolating 5C into observed sea level rise is something like 2.5 inches of sea level rise. Not exactly something that you would even notice in 99.9% of the planet. The other 0.1% may have to adapt or move, but such is life. (It takes 26,300 cubic miles of water to raise the sea level by 1".)
You are assuming that runaway greenhouse effect is likely, and using as an example a completely different planet, 30% closer to the sun with a 98% CO2 atmosphere (vs our 0.04% atmospheric CO2)?!?! My argument is that all the CO2 we are releasing was once living matter on the planet and we know past CO2 levels were higher during very lush planetary times and we did not have runaway greenhouse effects and got from prehistoric times to now without global flooding. My argument is both more similar (same planet, same orbit, same atmosphere) and more reasonable (we have a historical record supporting my assertion, there is no historical record that elevated CO2 levels ever lead in the past to greenhouse runaway.)
Excerpt from my response to another post above:
First off, if all the ice on the planet melted, sea levels would rise 230ft. I live 15miles from the coast and my current elevation is 775 feet, so yeah, not really worried on that one. (Further, these figures do not account for the exponential increase in dissolved water in the atmosphere with increased temperatures, so the actual rise is somewhat lower).
http://www.amnh.org/ology/feat... [amnh.org]
Beyond that, NO ONE thinks that all the ice would melt. (If someone tells you that they are full of shit.) The Arctic temperature range is -58C to 30C depending on the time of year and time of day, Antarctic is a bit higher. Changing those temperatures to -53C to 35C is not going to change the fact that for most of the time, most water that hits the polar caps is frozen and will stay frozen. Experts still hotly debate whether or not the elevated temperatures which cause more moisture in the atmosphere would significantly increase the annual snowfall rate on the polar caps, actually significantly increasing the rate of ice accumulation. Sea levels have risen 2.9mm per year since 1993, even with the slight 0.6C warming we have seen since then. From 1870 to 2004 sea levels rose an average of 3mm per year or about 7.7inches over 134 years. Not even a blip of increase or anywhere near a cataclysmic rise or a cataclysmic increase in sea levels like you are asserting. Anyone who tells you that sea level rise is a foregone conclusion with global warming is lying to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... [drroyspencer.com]
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I hope you realize that the moisture/rain cycle, jet stream and global currents all work to spread heat out over the planet and the planet loses more heat preferentially to space the hotter it is locally as a function of the fourth power of the absolute temperature (293K = 20C = 68F). Thus, all of these mechanisms work to keep the hot places (i.e. equatorial zone) from getting much hotter, while the colder places become much more comfortable and habitable. The places you thought you were able to count off would actually only be something like 0.2C warmer on average than they are now. Sorry to burst your bubble.
(Hint: Death valley is not the hottest place on the planet because it gets the most solar radiation, or looses the least, it is because it is largely isolated from the mechanisms I described above, and not coincidentally it looses a lot more that usual heat at night due to radiation and can drop below freezing.)
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
A roulette wheel spin is unpredictable over the short term, but this doesn't stop casinos from taking a very predictable share of the bets.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"You do know that money is not really created or destroyed, right?" I don't know this. Please convince me with evidence, facts, and accurate definitions. I suspect by money you mean wealth because I can come up with examples of money being created / destroyed all the time. The US Mint's primary purpose is to create money. Every time I use a $100 bill to light my cigar I destroy money. So, assuming you mean wealth, or some other economic term, please explain and defend. On the face, your entire claim appears to be built on a false fundamental assertion.
The difference in solar radiation during "solar minimum" (few or no sunspots) and a maximum is less than 1%. And right now we are in a minimum ... just for your interest.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wars of resources would no longer be necessary unless we later overpopulate again.
Wars over resources only in very rare cases happened out of necessity. They usually happened because the winner, the one who attacked and wanted the resources: could! And the loser the one who had them, could not go to war.
In other words: most wars were tun by purely monetary interests by one of both parties.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
just like we've used gas lighting before in the Western nations they can use it too in these developing nations
But you are aware that those developing nations do no longer exist? Right? They are developed meanwhile. It is 2017 right now, not 1957.
The technology to mine and refine uranium and thorium is not all that different than mining most any other element.
Sorry to sy it os bluntly (but why do I say sorry anyway?): you are an idiot.
produce "town gas" (synthetic gaseous fuels) for heating and lights .... just in case you missed that, too.
Town gas is made from coal
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
In turn that means, though, that if everyone but me is working hard, we'll all be living comfortably, so I don't really have to pull that hard, do I? And if it fails, we're all to blame. In other words, when that fails, "the system" is to blame because, well, what can a single person do?
Against popular believe: most working people enjoy their job. And working in communist environments has the same ethics as in capitalists: the one who show worthy and work hard get promoted, the others not so much.
The capitalist promise is "work hard today and one day YOU will be living in paradise where YOU can be living like a king".
Never heard about that promise. Are you sure you are not somehow brainwashed?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A roulette wheel spin is unpredictable over the short term, but this doesn't stop casinos from taking a very predictable share of the bets.
Climate has numerous quasi-cyclic and interdependent forcings, for A roulette wheel to be similar,
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Which continent? Asia or Africa?
It's probably significantly worse In Africa than Asia, over all. But plenty of people die of Malaria in Asia too. Southern India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand. Have I left anyone out? If I recall the reports from a couple of years ago, artemisinin-resistant malaria was being reported from SE Asia before the Nobel had even been awarded for discovering artemisinin.
Which is not to diminish malaria. I had a friend collapse with a recurrence of cerebral malaria one day when I was a youngster, and it was not a pretty sight. Which is why I was always pretty good about my anti-malarials, even as they played havoc with my bowels. But I think you've over-baked your comments a bit.
There's an adequate mortality from malaria in South America to consider too.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Hence my use of the word "basically". Those mortality rates are concerning, but compared to Africa - they are insignificant. It's the single largest source of death on the continent - and many economists have argued that without the economic burden of Malaria this continent would be wealthy. It wipes out most of the continents GDP every year.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
But malaria isn't by a long shot the only problem that Africa has (rampant corruption and beggar-my-neighbour capitalism for two others). "Curing" malaria wouldn't be a panacea for the continent. for as long as the cure lasts, in any case. We've had a generation or so of access to effective antimalarial drugs, and guess what - the production pipeline is pretty dry. After all, there's fuck-al profit in saving the lives of poor people, and not enough rich people at risk to be worth developing for. Simultaneously, in the hundred or so generations of the malaria protozoan, different populations have developed different spectra of resistance to the various anti-malarial drugs, which is why you need to tailor your prophylaxis and treatment to the specific regional strain you're exposed to. That's inconvenient for travellers, so they sufficiently often don't do it. The spread of all the resistant trains to all areas, and their recombination into pan-resistant strains is a certainty. At which point, the empty drug pipeine is going to become a bit better known - as rich travellers start to die more often.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Much of the decrease in malaria rates in the pre-drug era was accomplished by dull, low tech approaches that reduce mosquito numbers - draining land to improve it agriculturally ; managing both waste water and rain run-off in cities to minimise pooling of stagnant water ; improving garbage management - and in the last couple of decades by techniques that reduce the access of mosquitoes to humans (i.e. bed netting, and particularly netting coated and regularly re-coated with insecticide). But most importantly, the education of people so that they know why they're advised to tuck the netting in under their child's mattress is reducing the infection rates. Not to zero - but enough to improve matters.
Of course, all those things - education, public health, infrastructure - are costs which many countries are unwilling to bear - or at least, to bear for reducing the deaths of poor people. As long as rich people have effective drugs and don't die of malaria, the effective, resistance-proof techniques won't be applied. Start killing rich people, and something might be done about it, but not until then.
That's a hell of a claim. the costs of malaria could well exceed the continent's healthcare budget, and it certainly exerts a cost on business (the last time I was working there, we had an anti-malarials bill of tens of thousands of dollars a month for the transiting crew, and routinely would find that the local crew who we wanted - for shorebase or shipboard operations - were unavailable due to "illness" (often malaria, but also dysentery ; we lost access to a couple of dozen specialists when Ebola broke out in their home country ; that cost a couple of million dollars), which means increased costs finding new people, importing them , or training new people. Definitely there are real costs associated with poor health. But the entire GDP? Hyperbole is an effective rhetorical tool, but you do need to try to keep it in contact with reality.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Well it is a pretty big claim yes, but it's a claim backed up by solid economics. The exact quote from Jared Daimond's citations: "Can entirely account for Africa's negative GDP rates".
The other problems you mention are, at the very least, severely aggravated by the poverty effects of Malaria. I live in Africa, and I've travelled the continent extensively - not just visiting countries but actually living with residents for extended periods, seeing things up close and experiencing other parts of the continent as the locals do. On more than one occasion I've spent more days outside my home country in a year than in it.
Keep in mind the cost is not just in lives lost, or even lives lost + healthcare to treat the ill. A child gets Malaria - one of the parents has to stay home to take care of them, there's huge ancillary productivity losses involved. You mentioned more. And it goes further - a continent full of frequent illness is a continent where education levels suffer - ill kids can't go to school, kids with ill parents are more likely to drop out to support them. The list just balloons.
You saw it from the perspective of an outsider, as a native with a western education - that statement sounds entirely feasible to me.
Malaria is by no means the only disease problem in Africa, TB remains one of the biggest killers here - and it is aggravated by HIV (it's extremely hard to treat TB in an AIDS patient). The latter is still a major concern but not as much as it once were/is often imagined. Antiretrovirals have significantly reduced the issues of HIV (absent TB at least), and infection rates have been on a consistent decline for over a decade - it's by no means the pandemic it was when I was growing up anymore.
This has been a bit of a mixed blessing. As HIV declined in the wealthy parts of the world, and became manageable in Africa - a process that was done entirely thanks to large financial investment - the money is drying up. It's no longer a sexy cause to donate to. Which of course threatens a resurgence.
And of course - HIV makes people much more susceptible to Malaria.
There is an odd factor to consider - the malaria pandemic as it looks today is almost entirely the fault of colonisation. This seems like a stretch but there is solid reasoning behind it. African culture never really encourage large cities - even the biggest ones built pre-colonization (think of the Zimbabwe ruins for example) were relatively tiny by European standards - even for a thousand years earlier. And they had another odd aspects: they were never built near water. This is almost unique in human history. Nowhere else in the world did large settlements *not* naturally happen close to sources of fresh water. But Africans built their towns high up on mountains - and carried water long distances from rivers, and kept the towns small.
There was, in fact, a good reason for it. Keeping towns small meant outbreaks did not turn into epidemics - because the next settlement was far away and outside of trade visits every few months had little contact. And being far from the water kept the risk of outbreaks small to begin with. Building higher also reduced the risk of infection - mosquitos don't like the thin air on mountaintops. Africa didn't build cities because cities were plague ridden on this continent.
Colonisation saw the continent being upended by Europeans, who built European style cities next to the major rivers - and malaria went from a sad, but occasional, tragedy to a full blown pandemic. Africans had little choice but to migrate to these cities and still have little choice but to live in them - it's where the work is.
You are right that low-tech solutions are generally the best, educated Africans use them as par for the course. Indeed we avoid prophylactics for a different reason: they suppress symptoms and are not entirely effective so it's better NOT to use them, because if you don't then you guarantee if you do get it you'll show symptoms fast and get treated quickly. This is only true if you *li
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Otherwise, all well-known points for anyone who looks beyond the western world. Which most people don't want to do. Apart from your point about the smallness of pre-Colonisation sub-Saharan African cities. That's news to me. I knew ("Great") Zimbabwe was relatively small, with significant "megalithic" structures (which implies a substantial construction population, but without knowing the details of the place's construction history, that's hard to be more precise on). But OTOH places like Timbuktu were quite significant population centres. The Ashanti and Beninese civilisations in West Africa had appreciable population centres too. Not to the size of Middle Eastern, Chinese or European contemporary cities I'll grant, but not village-size centres either. But you're plumbing the depths of my knowledge of African history now - it's just a continent I work on sometimes.
Yeah. That's pretty common l for me too. At least until the current slump.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Answered to the wrong comment?
Or which bubble do you mean?
It is quite difficult to judge where global warming will be beneficial and it is equally difficult to judge where it is not.
The claim that warming in the moderate regions is out weighting the losses in other regions is just idiotic. E.g. plant growth cycles in the north or south are mainly dependent on sunshine aka season, not heat. Plenty of plants and environments need a somewhat harsh winter ...
heat preferentially to space the hotter it is locally as a function of the fourth power of the absolute temperature (293K = 20C = 68F). ... and the problem we are talking about is: trapped radiation by CO2 and CH4 water vapour etc. Most water vapour is in the hottest zones on earth ... not in the arctics or tempered zones.
That is btw. wrong. Typical application from text book formulas without knowing about what you are talking. Simply speaking: it is more complicated than that. The temperature loss is via radiation
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Everything. It has everything to do with the absolutist line you took to organized labor - some organized labor did something bad a some point (true or not) so right-wingers form negative stereotypes to be used until the end of time. Lets try the same absolutist reasoning to capitalist businesses, shall we?
BP blew up the Gulf, so all oil companies are bad.
MCI Worldcom defrauded investors, so all telecom companies are bad.
All the major banks ripped off their investors and shareholdes, so all banks are bad.
Remington sold a defective trigger for decades, so all firearm manufacturers are bad.
GM killed dozens of people with faulty ignitions, so all car companies are bad.
Vioxx killed some people, so all pharmaceuticals are bad.
And so on.