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It's So Cold Outside That Sharks Are Actually Freezing to Death (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As climate change ushers in another year of extreme global temperatures -- a phenomenon President Trump seems a little confused about -- cities up and down the East Coast are facing record-breaking snowfall and subzero temperatures. But while city dwellers might be able to hide indoors and crank up the heat, some animals aren't so lucky. According to the Cape Cod-based Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, it's gotten so cold that sharks in the area have been washing up on the shore and essentially freezing to death. This week, the organization responded to three thresher sharks that likely suffered "cold shock" in the surrounding waters. Organisms suffer cold shock when they're exposed to extreme dips in temperature and can sometimes experience muscle spasms or cardiac arrest. Scientists believe the sharks swimming off the coast of Cape Cod -- where temperatures have dropped to 6 degrees -- suffered cold shock in the water, and then wound up getting stranded on the shore, where they likely suffocated. "If you've got cold air, that'll freeze their gills up very quickly," Greg Skomal, a marine scientist, told the New York Times. "Those gill filaments are very sensitive and it wouldn't take long for the shark to die."
Gobal warming is freezing cold. Rain is dry. Snow is hot.
What does Slashdot get out of promoting this "global warming" con? You know it's a fraud, we know it's a fraud, so who are you trying to kid?
Fact: We are headed into a Maunder Minimum Ice Age.
The world is rapidly cooling down due to our sun going quiescent and not producing sunspots. Ironically the best hope for our future is to burn more fossil fuel. In fact, burning anything helps restore the carbon ballance.
If you live in an area that permits it, make sure you go into your backyard and burn any scrap material available: tree branches, newspapers, lumber, cardboard boxes, food wrappers and containers. Anything that burns should be cast on your backyard trash pile and ignited regularly tn order to restore the carbon balance.
It could very well be the case that this IS global warming (AKA "climate change" for those who don't understand averages). A hotter climate can power more extreme weather on both ends of the temperature scale. So those sharks might appreciate *less* global warming.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I thought the missing heat (that which caused the pause for most of the first part of this millennia) was accumulating in the ocean...
It is. But heat isn't uniformly distributed, either in the air or in the oceans. For exactly the same sorts of reasons that global warming can cause land climates to get colder, it can cause some ocean climates to get colder.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Is math hard?
Here's four sets of 9 values.
Each subsequent one has a higher average, and also lower low and higher high.
5 6 7 5 6 7 5 6 7 : low=5; high=7; avg=6
4 6 8 6 6 7 5 6 7 : low=4; high=8; avg=6.1
3 6 9 6 6 8 6 6 7 : low=3; high=9; avg=6.3
2 6 10 6 6 8 6 7 8 : low=2; high=10; avg=6.5
Lots of cooking of data
Except that recalabration of data points based on new knowledge isn't cooking data, but rather valid adjustments.
The one that many of the doubters trot out is the adjustment that was made to the global seawater temperature data sets. For decades, sea surface temperatures were measured by ships, using a temperature sensor on the seawater intake used to cool the engines. As ships crisscrossed the ocean, they would record the temperature and location as part of their normal record keeping, and these have been compiled into large data sets.
In more modern times, the sea water temperature measurement has been supplemented by data recorded by buoys, which in turn report their data automatically. The trouble is that the two data sets didn't jive. The buoy data was showing things were slightly cooler (I think on the order of 0.25 to 0.5C) than what the data from the ships showed. If you took the temperatures at face values, it would make it appear that there had been a slight global cooling of the oceans rather than an ongoing increase, the so-called "Pause."
So what happened? Well, the scientists went back and looked at how the data was collected on ships, and realized that even with properly calibrated thermometers, they would read slightly high due to factors from the ship itself as it travels through the water. The ship's hull, engine room, plumbing, etc... slightly warms the water before it hits the temperature sensor, causing them to read high.
Once these factors were calibrated out, the "pause" largely disappeared. Is this cooking the books? I don't think so, but many people claimed it was.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
nobody denies climate change
Plenty do.
Model output and measured temperatures:
https://twitter.com/ClimateOfG...
Meanwhile in Europe we have been having much too warm temperatures for this time of year. Last week it was 15C (59 F) in central Europe where I live, which is practically spring temperature today it was 8C (46F) when it should be around the freezing point.
It's not the first time that Northern America receives all the dose of winter cold from from Europe. A couple of years ago we had the same situation - record lows in the US, much too high temperatures across Europe and Eurasia.
Nevertheless, global warming is a scientifically proven fact regardless what happens in Northern America, which is only a relatively small area of our globe. The oceans which cover two-thirds of our planet are warming, this is fact. The polar ice caps are melting, also fact. The glaciers are retreating, another fact.
Please just check this website of one very credible, US agency for the details if you still feel like denying it because Trump says so:
https://climate.nasa.gov/
Your logical fallacy is: tu quoque .
You avoided having to engage with criticism by turning it back on the accuser - you answered criticism with criticism.
Pronounced too-kwo-kwee. Literally translating as 'you too' this fallacy is also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. It is commonly employed as an effective red herring because it takes the heat off someone having to defend their argument, and instead shifts the focus back on to the person making the criticism.
An easy way to spot this fallacy is when someone says
You people
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
If you fall in the water with a PFD on, you take a breath of water and are to confused to do anything productive for half a minute or so. During that time, your PFD brings you to the surface, and after that you're very unhappy, but probably alive, and quite likely near your boat.
If you don't have a PFD on, you go further underwater, take a breath of water, and are confused for half a minute or so. During that time if you manage to actually swim, it's very unlikely it's towards the surface. In the meantime, you're breathing water like a madman. Welcome to the afterlife. Cold shock doesn't kill you: it makes you unable to prevent yourself from drowning.
The Canadian and US coast guards did a bunch of experiments with volunteers (and proper medical and dive support) in moderately cold water. Even though the volunteers knew they were going to hit cold water, so a lot of the shock was reduced, the results were pretty dramatic. Since then, both coast guards have added the concept of cold shock to boating safety and certification courses in addition to hypothermia.
In the 1970s, the theory successfully predicted a reversal of a three decade aerosol-driven cooling tend before it happened. That was the result of sufficient computing power becoming available to run detailed models, which successfully excluded the continuation of cooling.
It's also worth noting that by the mid 90s scientists were predicting that "global warming" would also include extreme cold weather events as well as heat waves -- thus the preference for the term "climate change".
Finally, if you actually look at global temperature anomaly map, it's quite evident that the cold snap we're in is a highly localized phenomenon. Almost the ENTIRE PLANET is ANOMALOUSLY HOT, except for parts of North America and Greenland.
It's easy to say a theory has no consistent predictions when you use a straw man.
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