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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
We're all going to die except the solipsist, whoever he or she is.
That's what I thought you'd say.
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
That's what your daddy said when people wanted to put cancer warnings on cigarette packages, and when the big librul gubbmit came for your grandaddies asbestos insulation.
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.
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.
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
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.
(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...
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.
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.
He was downmodded for (obvious) trolling, not because of some grand political conspiracy against people who confuse science with politics.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy
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 *
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
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".
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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 *