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Arctic Ice Loss Driven By Natural Swings, Not Just Mankind, Says Study (reuters.com)
Alister Doyle, reporting for Reuters: Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday. The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode. Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30-50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979," the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change. Sea ice has shrunk steadily and hit a record low in September 2012 -- late summer in the Arctic -- in satellite records dating back to 1979. The ice is now around the smallest for mid-March, rivaling winter lows set in 2016 and 2015. The study, separating man-made from natural influences in the Arctic atmospheric circulation, said that a decades-long natural warming of the Arctic climate might be tied to shifts as far away as the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Just a bad summary... this article is better: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
"Anthropogenic forcing is still dominant -- it's still the key player," said first author Qinghua Ding, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara who holds an affiliate position at the UW, where he began the work as a research scientist in the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory. "But we found that natural variability has helped to accelerate this melting, especially over the past 20 years." ...
"In the long term, say 50 to 100 years, the natural internal variability will be overwhelmed by increasing greenhouse gases," Ding said. "But to predict what will happen in the next few decades, we need to understand both parts."
Guestimation of ranges based on no science what-so-ever. Good one.
What? It's based on the study that is being discussed here. Based on the article, I don't have enough details about the study to find how they came up with those figures, but neither do you have enough information to say that it was based on "no science what-so-ever".
FWIW, air conditioning in hot climates is substantially less energy-intensive than heating in cold ones.
Read the article...
30-50% of the warming is due to natural, not man made, effects.
Or, as scientists have been saying for decades, the majority of the warming (50 - 70%) is due to man made effects.
This includes scientists at shell oil and Exxon-Mobil. I remember debate class in high school, fall of 1979, our team was 'pro' nuclear power. We used research from oil companies about the dangers of global warming as one one the arguments in favor of expanding nuclear power use. We won the debate, despite the fact that the 3 mile island accident happened in spring of '79. That made it a very tough debate to win the pro nuclear side of the argument.
Ding Q, J. M. Wallace, D. S. Battisti, E. J. Steig, A. J. E. Gallant, H. J. Ki, L Geng: Tropical forcing of the recent rapid Arctic warming in northeastern Canada and Greenland, [PDF] Nature, 509, 209-212, (2014)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
propose a solution that doesn't bounce us into the dark ages please.
Nuclear energy. It's clean, it's safe, and it would be cheap if it weren't for paranoid over-regulation. Yes, some safety regulation is needed, but the nuclear industry has far more than it needs, which only restricts its much needed development.
"Violence is not the answer. Violence is the question. The answer is yes."
The problem is you graduated in 2002. If you had graduated in 1972, this propaganda had not yet been introduced to the education system.
That XKCD comic WOULD be very scary, if it was accurate. But it is not. The hockey stick runaway temperatures since 1900 never happened.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/0...