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Humans Are Causing the Earth To Wobble More Than It Should, NASA Finds (bgr.com)
Iwastheone shares a report from BGR: When looking at the Earth from afar it appears to be a perfect sphere, but that actually isn't the case. Because Earth isn't uniform on all sides due to land masses that shift and change over time, our planet actually wobbles a bit when it spins. Now, a new study by researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several universities and science centers has pinpointed the causes of Earth's imperfect spin, called "polar motion," and they found that humans are contributing to it. The researchers used a wealth of data gathered over 100 years to build mathematical models to trace the causes of the wobble and found that three factors are at play, and mankind is responsible for one of them. Two of the three factors identified by the scientists are glacial rebound and mantle convection. Glacial rebound happens when thick ice sheets physically push down on land masses, compressing them, but then release that pressure upon melting. The land then balloons back up over time, causing Earth's spin to wobble as if slightly off-axis. The effects of the last ice age, which would have compressed a huge amount of land across many continents, is still being felt today in the form of glacial rebound.
Mantle convection, the other uncontrollable factor in Earth's wobble, relates to our planet's inner workings. The plates on Earth's surface are in constant flux due to the movement of liquid rock far beneath our feet. The researchers believe these currents also contribute to the planet's imperfect spin. The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas, which is the direct result of global warming thanks to human activities. The researchers estimate that Greenland has lost roughly 7,500 gigatons, or 7,500,000,000,000 metric tons of ice due to global warming. All that ice loss has happened in the 20th century, and greenhouse gas production has been cited as the primary culprit. Losing all that mass has caused a significant shift on the planet and has contributed to the wobble as well.
Mantle convection, the other uncontrollable factor in Earth's wobble, relates to our planet's inner workings. The plates on Earth's surface are in constant flux due to the movement of liquid rock far beneath our feet. The researchers believe these currents also contribute to the planet's imperfect spin. The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas, which is the direct result of global warming thanks to human activities. The researchers estimate that Greenland has lost roughly 7,500 gigatons, or 7,500,000,000,000 metric tons of ice due to global warming. All that ice loss has happened in the 20th century, and greenhouse gas production has been cited as the primary culprit. Losing all that mass has caused a significant shift on the planet and has contributed to the wobble as well.
The plates on Earth's surface are in constant flux due to the movement of liquid rock far beneath our feet.
In terms of the Earth's radius, the liquid rock is not that far. It's close. It's so close. So scarily, scarily close!
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
More precisely it is "Anthropogenic Climate Change" because we know it is caused by humans.
Just as "Comcast" is now "Xfinity" and for much the same reason.
Which song are you talking about?
Sounds like Rep. Johnson was on (to) something!
Also the same "scientists" that claim the earth is round!
So... acknowledgment that we're still coming out of the last ice age (you know, warming), but (and in the very next breath, mind you) blaming (in its entirety) this warming solely on human activity. How fucking stupid do they think we are? ...
sig: sauer
It's turtles all the way down.
Any "wobble" is just turtle farts.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
are the high levels of obesity in the US causing the wobble?
Yo mamma so fat, she makes the earth wobble more than it should.
We all know that's the real cause.
Global production of concrete is 10 billions per year. Every year, just from concrete production, the earth gets 10 billion tons heavier. And what about the hundreds of millions of cars, trucks and busses that didn't exist a hundred years ago. That's a lot of weight that has been added. And it's not evenly distributed either.
How do you explain volcanoes then?
Turtles that ate too much mexican food?
Volcanoes are just pimples, and should be treated Proactivly.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
What an idiot.
Be wary of weasel words like 'contributes to' because they can be misleading yet technically correct (not always the best kind). In particular, if a contributor is responsible for a negligible portion.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Just have like everyone in China jump up and down at the same time for a while. If the wobble gets worse, have everyone in North America jump up and down for a longer period of time.
What, did it escape into space or something?
Because otherwise, regardless of its form, all of that mass is still here, on earth.
Seriously.... the principles of conservation of matter and energy is like grade 5 or 6 science class stuff.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas"
That affecting the "wobbling" is possible. But the loss of ice - melting and going into oceans - should make earth wobble less, as oceans are more equally distributed on earth than blocks of ice.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I blame this "double-step" music that's apparently all the rage nowadays - it's known for its "wobble".
It's a pretty convincing hoax too. China has invested trillions into renewables and cleaner tech.
Well that's virtue signalling in its most literal, technical (signalling theory) meaning then.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Yeah.. We only have to dig 3000 km to arrive at liquid rock. That's like 0.0001% of Earth's ~6000 km radius. Right?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Uses Wikipedia as the source for science type things...
If the wiki page is wrong feel free to correct it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Whoooooooooosh!
Get out your bag of popcorn folks and grab a soda, the astroturfers are on stage again! What are they gonna give us today? "It's not man made"? "It doensn't happen"? Or are we going to be entertained by a new conspiracy theory around the evil scientist that gets rich from wanting to change our way of life?
Anyhow, we know it's gonna be a blast! Let the show begin!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
we just need a coordinated effort among all the people in the world.
Carbon dioxide has strong absorption bands in the near infrared (namely 2.7 micrometer, 4.2 micrometer and 15 micrometer). That means, that infrared radiation with those wavelengths will not penetrate a layer of carbon dioxide very well, but instead heat the carbon dioxide (which in turn then radiates itself, but in all directions, thus reflecting 50% of the radiation back to Earth).
We also have carbon dioxide data for the atmosphere since about 250 years, when Joseph Priestley first found out that air is actually a mixture of different gasses, and started to measure the respective shares. We know for instance, that around 1900, the carbon dioxide share of the atmosphere was around 270 ppm (or 0,027 percent), as we can read in Anatol Leduc: Nouvelles recherches sur le Gaz (1899) or numerous other publications of the time. We know the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere today (410 ppm or 0,041 percent), for instance measured in the Keeling Curve. So we know that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has risen 140 ppm, and we can calculate, how much carbon dioxide you need, given that the total pressure of the atmosphere is 1033 hPa or 103,3 kN/m. Of this pressure, 140 ppm is caused by additional carbon dioxide since 1900, giving 14 Pascal or 14 N/m. As the whole Earth has a surface of 510 million square kilometers or 510 trillion square meters, this means that the additional carbon dioxide lasts with around 7000 trillion Newtons on the Earth's surface. And because 1 kg causes a force of 9,81 N on the Earth's surface, we can calculate, that we need 700 trillion kilograms or about 700 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to cause an increase of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere from 270 ppm in 1900 to 410 ppm today.
And because carbon dioxide is made up of one atom of Carbon (12 g/mol) and two atoms of Oxygen (16 g/mol), we can calculate that we need to burn 200 billion metric tons of pure Carbon to cause an increase of the atmospheric carbon dioxide from 270 ppm to 410 ppm. And how much pure carbon (mainly as coal and crude oil) have we mined since 1900? About 270 billion metric tons (currently, it's about 4.1 billion metric tons per year). That means, if we have burned all our coal and crude oil mined since 1900, about 70% of its carbon content is still in the atmosphere (the other 30% are mainly solved in the oceans causing acidification, and some of it indeed was bound due to increased plant mass, because we have more forests now than we had in 1900).
Nothing is taught in school. They just repeat shit enough times so that you give up and treat it as fact.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I knew global warming had to be in there somewhere. By the way, it is "climate change" not "global warming". You need to keep updated with the latest propaganda. Meanwhile, your local drinking water is polluted, but go ahead and worry about the Earth wobbling.
Climate Change and Global Warming are two different things. Global Warming refers to the observed surface temperature change. Climate Change is broader, and encompasses many effects that may be induced by increased greenhouse gasses and the resulting change in climates.
Politicians and media personalities have tried to push the use of one over the other for their own purposes. For example, Republicans have (largely successfully) pushed for "Climate Change" over "Global Warming" in public discourse, in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that the Earth really is warming. (This is, I assume, the propaganda you're talking about.)
E pluribus unum
You mean when I'm not assaulting women and lynching black people? I'm a pro-science former-Democrat.
Which means I probably raped someone back in the eighties at a party somewhere.
Keep calling everyone who disagrees with you names though. Seems to be working.... For the other team, that is.
According to some reports it's shrinking, so you might be right. In more ways than one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I hope it's because of all the fucking.
Uh, what are you talking about? "Anthropogenic" is the standard term in the community. If you don't know what causes it, how can you fix it? How stupid.
You better fix the local pollution problem first, because it is going to kill you first. Also, it has been a problem for many decades and is only getting worse so when are you planning on fixing it? There is no discussion about it, because everyone is up in arms about how to spend billions fixing climate change.
(OTTMAR EDENHOFER, UN IPCC OFFICIAL): Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War... First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Monika Kopacz, atmospheric scientist: "It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ — and readers’ — attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty."
Researcher Robert Phalen's 2010 testimony to the California Air Resources Board: "It benefits us personally to have the public be afraid, even if these risks are trivial."
Actually "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" are terms that came from the science, not the politicians. And stop blaming the Republicans: the Democrats aren't doing anything about it either.
I knew global warming had to be in there somewhere. By the way, it is "climate change" not "global warming". You need to keep updated with the latest propaganda. Meanwhile, your local drinking water is polluted, but go ahead and worry about the Earth wobbling.
Global warming is one cause of climate change. Both terms are useful in the proper context.
I have observed that when you put a heavy solid object on a spinning object, such as a washing machine, it throws it off balance and makes it wobble.
I have also observed that if the washing machine is full of water, in the spin cycle the water self- balances. It's not off balance and doesn't wobble because the water automatically centers around the center of the spin.
Helicopter rotors use the same effect to self-balance, allowing each blade to move a bit relative to the others. When they can move, they self-balance.
I wonder if these researchers have ever washed their own clothes and seen that solids can throw the balance off, while liquids do not. Put a chunk of ice in the spin cycle and it'll wobble. Melt the ice into water and it won't wobble.
Did the Earth wobble more before the ice age compacted the surface? What's the correct amount of wobble? What's the best temperature for the planet? Who gets to decide all of this?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Oh, nice quotes.
An environmentalist, who worked in advising on carbon credits, told me basically the same thing, that it doesn't matter if the CO2 issue isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you will force everyone to cut production and so you force everyone to cut consumption, and she added with emphasis, "it's about reducing greed".
That was a good ten years ago. It shapes my opinion that people are here using "science" as a narrative, to wrap their entical and moral ideas in a science theory so as to give it objective validity, whereas moral and ethical issues are inter-subjective, social, cultural issues, not objective issues.
By all means, people can and should debate the ethical issues around co-habiting on a planet, where a child born in Somalia faces entirely different opportunities and hardships to a child born in Norway. We as a humanity should be talking about that ethical issue.
But leave science to the objective study and testing of objective phenomena. Don't corrupt science for the sake of propaganda.
Most of the world's population is not ethically developed enough to start viewing the world as a common humanity. We are barely growing out of the ethical dogmas of the traditional religions, as it is.
Trying to convince everyone that they "must act" because of imagined disasters, will NOT end well, because existential threats cause people to RETREAT and go back to earlier more primitive moralities.
Making everyone fearful for existence does NOT make them more globally compassionate people.
It is kinda sad how they are damaging the reputation of science, and damaging the ethical development of humanity, at the same time.
The best one can hope for is that they just get generally ignored.
No. But we have some facts.
But they have alternative facts.
Carbon dioxide has strong absorption bands in the near infrared (namely 2.7 micrometer, 4.2 micrometer and 15 micrometer). That means, that infrared radiation with those wavelengths will not penetrate a layer of carbon dioxide very well, but instead heat the carbon dioxide (which in turn then radiates itself, but in all directions, thus reflecting 50% of the radiation back to Earth).
I have attempted to get the idea of the concept of the greenhouse gas effect through some folks by the concept of energy retention. Different gases and water vapor have the effect of energy retention. A few, like Sulfur Dioxide function in reverse of that.
I have no expectation that I will actually convince any person who denies this energy retention for political reasons. I only put it out there as an example of politics trying to trump physics, and hopefully others might see the folly of that.
Meanwhile, as of 2007, we have had 800 Terawatts of radiative forcing. since 1750. http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla...
We also have carbon dioxide data for the atmosphere since about 250 years, when Joseph Priestley first found out that air is actually a mixture of different gasses, and started to measure the respective shares. We know for instance, that around 1900, the carbon dioxide share of the atmosphere was around 270 ppm (or 0,027 percent), as we can read in Anatol Leduc: Nouvelles recherches sur le Gaz (1899) or numerous other publications of the time.
Something important to point out here. Over this long timeline, nothing has changed except the accuracy of the measurements. The first mention of the global effect was made in the late 1890's by Svante Arrhenius.
This ain't rocket surgery, AGW deniers, the physics is real. The release of much sequestered Carbon Dioxide and Methane is real. The denialists need to come up with a sound reason why these simple truths fail on a global scale.
So far, they have failed miserably. The political rhetoric, like calling Michael Mann an asshole - he isn't - doesn't hack it, and the tactic of jumping on every anomaly like it is a smoking gun simply helps point scientists in the direction to send their research. Cherry pick away deniers, you are helping refute your denialism.
because we have more forests now than we had in 1900).
Side note. I was at an old iron furnace a few years ago. Greenwood Furnace to be exact, in that section of Pennsylvania made famous by the LANDSAT images from space for it's tortured terrain.
They cut trees and turned them into charcoal for the furnaces. So much that you could stand on top of the mountains in that area, and eventually not see one tree from horizon to horizon. Which is what always put the furnaces out of business before coke production allowed the big furnaces in Western PA to take over and kill charcoal smelting for good.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Glacial rebound means the Crust is rising, as a result land will rebound higher than current sea level leaving plenty of room for all the melted ice. Such immaculate design!
Joke aside, have the Global Warming "scientists" taken into account glacial rebound with relation to their flood models?
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
"...The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas, which is the direct result of global warming thanks to human activities...."
Yes, no begged questions there at ALL.
Perhaps the title could have been better formed as "Since we're all believing that THIS spike in temps - comparable in frequency and size to the last 20 times this has happened over the previous 3 million years - happens to be caused by humans, we're going to blame everything on humans.
No, this is not just humans thinking they're the center of the universe as they have since Aristotle."
-Styopa
Al Gore reported yesterday that the dangers of global wobble were now dire, with the danger of Earth whirling out of its orbit and falling in to the sun becoming more and more likely. Human activity is entirely responsible for this situation and the only cure for it is enormous taxes on the developed nations, who move around more than the rest of the world and, of course, have lots of money. Gore has formed a wobble bank that will be selling wobble credits to rich people so that they can assuage their consciences over causing this terrible situation.
"Glacial rebound"...
"Mantle convection"...
"massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas"...
That's two causes. Two.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Is there anything they can't or didn't do?
Kim Kardashian's ass for the wobble.
Just another day in Paradise
Climate change has become like a bad "as seen on tv" product where some coked up asshat just keeps adding on to the pile of worthless nonsense with another "but wait, there's more". Next they'll tell us climate change is responsible for Bill Cosby raping women.
Stewart, Kopacz, and Phalen seem like douche bags. They're effectively saying that lying is ok, and that they can't imagine that coming back to bite them in the ass. If you keep saying the sky is falling, and it doesn't, then no one will listen to you. Wasn't this covered in everyone's elementary school?
The NASA's website in the link doesn't say anything about humans. Just glacial rebound, convection and water mass redistribution (mainly from Greenland). So what on Earth???
BGR isn't reporting on NASA's information. They're pushing a political agenda. Distorting NASA's findings was simply something added to trick naive people.
"I am certain that the world is hurtling ever closer to the Sun, overbalanced as it is on one side by the overbreeding of the fecund Hindoo, but at present there is little I can do about it." ( https://www.theonion.com/my-su... )
"Local" pollution has been significantly reduced within my lifetime, so, yes, we can have both.
Another one not mentioned is the massive weight of water for when we create MASSIVE dams such as 3 gorges, Kariba Dam, Bratsk Dam, etc. In fact, the biggest ones have had plenty of earthquakes associated with them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Something important to point out here. Over this long timeline, nothing has changed except the accuracy of the measurements. The first mention of the global effect was made in the late 1890's by Svante Arrhenius.
And even if the measurements are more exact now, we are talking one hundred ppm here, the ten thousandth part. In 1900, chemical analysis was good enough to separate Praseodymium and Neodymium (1879 Cleve, 1885 Auer von Welsbach), two Rare Earth elements which basically are identical in all chemical properties. Carl Auer von Welsbach repeated his separation method (fractioned crystallization) several hundred times(!) to actually split Didymium (supposed to be an element) into Praseodymium and Neodymium. 15 years later, analytical chemists were surely able to determine the share of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for five digits after the decimal point (something a teacher today can show his pupils).
So the actual numbers of 270 ppm and 410 ppm are not the problem (they even change a little over the course of a year due to different temperatures). They didn't change from 1900 to 2018 because Carbon dioxide can be better measured now. They changed because the share of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose by 50 percent.
http://rs79.vrx.palo-alto.ca.u...
Huh? Why? Where is it?
Need Mercedes parts ?
The ice sheet on Greenland is, on average 7,005 ft thick. Greenland's ice sheet is 660,000 sq miles. Ice weighs 57.3 lbs/ft^3. A back of the envelope calculation shows that the 1.5 X 10^16 lbs of ice mentioned in the article amounts to about 2.62 X 10^14 cubic feet of ice, or a cube 63,970 feet on a side. Or, 4,092,160,900 sq ft X 9.13 = 37,369,811,959 sq ft, or 1,340 sq mi.
0.20% of the total ice covering Greenland.
WWII fighter aircraft crash landing on Iceland were found 46 years later buried 260 feet deep. That amounts to an average ice layer of 5.7 feet per year, which is 0.08% of the 7,005 feet of ice cover.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
IMHO, climate scientists build all these models and collect all this data, and you don't even quote a single fact to support your argument, or even float a hypothesis as to how your family's house is representative of the worlds climate.... so if its all the same, I'll trust the scientists. Because their mechanisms stand up to basic fact checking, and yours don't even quote facts to check.
There are significant concerns about HOW they built those models and "collected" all their data.
In the 2009 FOIA zip files were 1,072 emails which were dated from 1999 to Nov of 2009, two weeks before the whistle blower released the zip file. In it is HARRY_README.TXT, which describes the horrible state of the data used to generate the hockey stick graph. They dropped all the thermometer temperature data between 1960 to the date prior to the release of the graph and replaced it with "synthetic" data (i.e., made up out of thin air), combined with a "neat trick" (their words) by Mann to hide the decline in global temperature which has obviously been taken place since 1997. The plans to deliberately create a website for propaganda purposes, the deliberate withholding of data on which their published reports were based, their constant and continuing change of data taken decades ago in order to make it fit their agenda ... all of it suggests what has been repeated in other posts citing comments made by IPCC reps and supporters that "Climate Change" is about redistribution of wealth from the Western world to Marxist countries.
Various emails discuss getting journal editors who don't favor AGW replaced with people that do, which they did, and stuffing "peer review" panels with AGW proponents, which they did. They colluded between themselves to give each other's papers high "approval" marks.
In the DOCS section of the ZIP file are Word documents in which the "researchers" apply for grant money from the IPCC. In it they set up "milestones" (their word) for delivering "proof" of AGW on a timely basis. When I was doing research in grad school one couldn't claim that any particular line of research would prove any hypothesis. In fact, the exact opposite is how science is done. One assumes their hypothesis is true and designs an experiment to test its validity, the "null hypothesis". A thousand experiments can not prove an hypothesis correct, but it takes only one to prove it wrong. If that happens the hypothesis is modified to take into account the new data and it is retested. Here is an example email about Greenpeace and the IPCC working toward "the globalization agenda" (their words)
*******************
From: "paul horsman"
To: m.kelly@uea.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:45:23 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Subject: climate negotiations/wto etc.
Priority: normal
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b)
Status: O
Hi Mick,
It was good to see you again yesterday - if briefly. One particular
thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and
the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation
agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question
is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything
particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?
My second question is that I am invovled in a working group
organising a climate justice summit in the Hague and I wondered if
you had any contacts, ngos or individuals, with whom you have
worked especially from the small island States or similar areas,
who could be invited as a voice either to help on the working group
and/or to invite to speak?
All the best,
Paul
---------------
Paul V. Horsman
Oil Campaigner
Greenpeace International Climate Campaign
Greenpeace,
Canonbury Villas
London N1 2PN
Tel: +44 171 865 8286
Fax: +44 171 865 8201
Mob: +44 7801 212990
*********************
The 2011 FOIA zip contains more damning evidence of fraud, collusion, corruption ...
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
No way dude!
This is Anthropogenic Global Wobbling!
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Text of email: 1255523796.txt from FOIA-2009.zip
"Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." forced me to remove some email reply addresses and reduce boundary markers.
From: Kevin Trenberth ,...
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:36:36 -0600
Cc: Tom Wigley
Mike
Here are some of the issues as I see them:
Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes?
Where did the heat go? We know there is a build up of ocean heat prior to El Nino, and a discharge (and sfc T warming) during late stages of El Nino, but is the observing system sufficient to track it? Quite aside from the changes in the ocean, we know there are major changes in the storm tracks and teleconnections with ENSO, and there is a LOT more rain on land during La Nina (more drought in El Nino), so how does the albedo change overall (changes in cloud)? At the very least the extra rain on land means a lot more heat goes into evaporation rather than raising temperatures, and so that keeps land temps down: and should generate cloud. But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with CERES
data. The CERES data are unfortunately wonting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.
Kevin
Michael Mann wrote:
Kevin, that's an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense, we can "explain" it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models.
I'm not sure that this has been addressed--has it?
m
On Oct 14, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Trenberth wrote:
Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin
Tom Wigley wrote:
Dear all,
At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.
Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.
These sums complement Kevin's energy work.
Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't". I do not agree with this.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Models are NOT evidence of anything except the hypothesis, which has to be tested using the null hypothesis. Experiments are not designed to prove something right. They are designed to prove an hypothesis wrong.
Classic case: Einstein's prediction of the bending of light from a star on a certain date during a solar eclipse. He didn't need the support of a newspaper blasting his opponents, or of a radio host denigrating anyone who didn't believe he was right.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
The model has three parts, with the last one being the stuff unaccounted for by the first two. Let's add hype by labeling it "anthropocentric".
Ok, the definition is simple in words. In practice though, to decide what a human needs, one has to bring to mind an image of what a human is and what the potential of a human is. Does a human have potential to live a healthy life to 140? If that's the vision then all health preserving methods are a rational need. Is a human's value in life simply to make a contribution to society in knowledge and standards of living? Then a human has ZERO needs as soon as they stop being able to work productively. Does a human life have a right to happiness, and to freedom? Then their needs are again, going to be defined accordingly. So, as soon as we ask, what is a human being, we start making value choices and defining what is and isn't a real need. Were we living in a caste system two hundred years ago, our lives would be defined by the system and our opportunities "rationally" determined. My point isn't that all value judgements are arbitrary, rather, that they are complex and context dependent, and we still have to make them, and pretending they are simple actually undermines their significance, if you see what I mean.