Slashdot Mirror
Climate Change Is Altering Global Air Currents (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: One of the scientists who demonstrated conclusively that global warming was an unnatural event with the famous "hockey stick" graph is now warning that giant jetstreams which circle the planet are being altered by climate change. Jetstreams are influenced by the difference in temperatures between the Arctic and the equator. But the Arctic has been warming much faster than tropical climates -- the island of Svalbard, for example was 6.5 degrees celsius warmer last year compared to the average between 1961 and 1990. The land has also been warming faster than the sea. Both of those factors were changing the flow of these major air currents to create "extreme meanders" which were helping to cause "extreme weather events", Professor Michael Mann said. In a paper in the journal Scientific Reports, Professor Mann and other researchers wrote that evidence of the effect of climate change on the jetstreams had "only recently emerged from the background noise of natural variability." They said that projections of the effect on the jetstreams in "state-of-the-art" climate models were "mirrored" in "multiple" actual temperature measurements. The jetstream normally flows reasonably consistently around the planet, but can develop loops extending north and south. The researchers, who studied temperature records going back to 1870 as well as satellite data, said these loops could grow "very large" or even "grind to a halt" rather than moving from west to east. The effect has been most pronounced during the past 40 years, they found.
Your house is on fire. Do you:
A. Call the fire department?
B. Accuse the neighbor of telling you your house is on fire that "Fire is just somebody's religion!"
C. Convene a study to determine if the house really is on fire, and if so, if it was due to spontaneous combustion or if there's a arsonist about?
D. "Blame Liberals!"
E. Post to Facebook or instagram?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
No, there's not.
Some compelling evidence, yes, but I've seen nothing that's convincing.
Peer reviewed research? There is oodles of it, check out TFA for one of them.
Of course some probably are more easily convinced than others.
I can't argue with that, you conspiricy theory types are the most gullible people on the planet, all you need is a badly written website, a few poorly researched facts and people like you will believe anything.
Of course some probably are more easily convinced than others.
While others are fatally slow to appreciate danger and take evasive action ... In this particular case, however, so well publicised and so overwhelming is the evidence that a failure to be convinced more likely reflects a studied ignorance than any natural lack of perspicuity.
why isn't there more recent material published showing the proven change?
For the same reason physics journals are not filled with recent papers investigating whether falling objects move towards or away from Earth. The human contribution (established not only by the C12/C13 ratios but also by estimates of rates of fossil fuel consumption) is no longer a matter of serious dispute. The argument has moved on to issues of climate sensitivity; just what the actual effect will be on tropical storm formation &c. If you want to see the original work establishing the human fingerprint you would need to look at papers from last century, when this was still a live issue. You are better off going to the most recent IPCC summation of the science (which will link you through to original papers), which in this case would be Chapter 8 and Chapter 10 of the 2015 WG1 report of AR5.
In the meantime that link provided gives a very nice concise summary of one of the lines of evidence by which the human fingerprint was established.
I would think that ...
... you would have thanked OP for that informative link. Or were you not the AC who wanted to know how we know about the anthropogenic contribution to observed warming?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Uhh, yeah lots of climatologists driving around in Ferraris... Those guys are way too smart to use their brains in the financial or military sectors. The real money is in siphoning pennies from government grants. Good thing Trump sees through the lies.
I've been modded down already
Well it wasn't one of your more accurate contributions was it? Oooops.
Beside the confusion between Penn State and the University of East Anglia, to say Dr Mann is "really really bad at statistics" is perhaps to overstate the actual criticism leveled at his now infamous 1998 paper. In any case subsequent reconstructions, --and the last word, I presume, goes to Marcott et al. 2013 --more or less confirm the original conclusions of Mann et al.. I'm would assume you (and I genuinely respect your intelligence and erudition phantom) are already aware of that.
it's also worth mentioning that this paper is using computer models
And, invaluable though they may be, we would certainly exercise caution when considering the findings of simulations. In any case, we would naturally be sceptical of any only recently published paper. It's the weight of the extant literature of course, including the examination and perhaps replication by the entire profession of newly published work, that forms the best available science.
I realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, and I realise that warming here in Australia is occurring at a faster rate than globally, but this summer just gone has been truly alarming. Driving my family through 46C heat on the NSW South Coast in Feb was the first time I was literally scared of the temperature (not just uncomfortable but frightened that the vehicle and air-con might give out).
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Sounds legit.
Question is, though, what if the police comes and finds out that the houses actually ARE on fire. Will you at least then agree to call the fire department? Or are you too upset that you were wrong that you'd rather see your house burn down than admit you were wrong?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He has an MBA (Multiple Blog-reader Award) and a PHD (Plentiful Hogwash and Disinformation)
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You and I see this: here is a theory with a lot of evidence. The deniers make a claim, it gets debunked so they make another claim and the cycle repeats endlessly as one bullshit claim after the other gets debunked.
But the people who believe the deniers don't see that. They see "For everything the scientist say the deniers make a counter-argument that sounds convincing to me".
At least part of the reason they see it so differently is that it's a helluva lot easier to sound convincing when you don't try to be accurate. Explaining complex science so laymen can understand it is hard - to do it convincingly as well is very hard. Reality doesn't care about your individual biases. It's the same reason people are scared of investing in long-term proven ways to grow your money - but will give their life savings to a conman after one meeting.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I can't really explain it, but it's at least interesting to ponder. Take a look at Climate change opinion by country.
Awareness that there is something like this is pretty much as one would expect: People in countries with a free or mostly free press and open and affordable access to the internet are way more informed about it than people in countries where information is scarce, hard to come by or government controlled. Also, the more spare time people have to waste, the more informed they claim to be.
The map on whether it's caused by humans is interesting. Why is practically all of South America convinced that humans are the source of global warming? There is also an interesting difference between Western/Middle Europe and Eastern Europe/Russia, with the former being more convinced of human caused global warming than the latter. It's not quite the divide the Iron Curtain formed, rather it seems to be more a matter between former USSR countries being less convinced than the Rest of Europe, with some noteworthy exceptions in the BeNeLux states and England. And Japan being a real puzzle, being absolutely convinced of human-caused global warming and it being a threat.
Really interesting is now, though, when you compare that map (human caused yes/no) with the last map that deals with the question whether people think that global warming is a threat. It looks like whether people consider climate change a threat is more dependent on the country having a free press than whether they think it's human made. It's also interesting that in Western Europe more people think it's a threat than people think it's caused by humans.
All in all, pretty interesting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, why work for oil corporations and say everything's great when you can get a fraction of the money predicting doom.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If your work in climate prediction is accurate or wildly wrong, nobody knows in your lifetime
I see you've never looked into climate science, research or peer reviews before.