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2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com)
The string of hotter-than-average annual temperatures continued in 2018, as Earth experienced its fourth-hottest year on record, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [PDF]. From a report: Also in 2018, the United States suffered 14 weather and climate disasters with costs surpassing $1 billion during a warmer- and wetter-than-average year, NOAA reports. Global temperatures across land and sea were 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, making 2018 the fourth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA said in a report Thursday. In a separate report, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said global temperatures were 1.5 degrees above the 1951 to 1980 mean, also the fourth highest going back to 1880.
The 2-degrees Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century has been driven largely by growing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, said the institute's director, Gavin Schmidt. The conclusion reaffirms NASA's long-established finding that man-made emissions are driving climate change, which President Donald Trump and some senior administration officials frequently challenge. By both agencies' measures, Earth has now recorded its five hottest annual average temperatures in the past five years. "2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend," Schmidt said in a press release.
The 2-degrees Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century has been driven largely by growing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, said the institute's director, Gavin Schmidt. The conclusion reaffirms NASA's long-established finding that man-made emissions are driving climate change, which President Donald Trump and some senior administration officials frequently challenge. By both agencies' measures, Earth has now recorded its five hottest annual average temperatures in the past five years. "2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend," Schmidt said in a press release.
That's why the article talks about the five hottest years on record (the last five years, with 2018 being the fourth hottest), and not about the weather of a few days.
only idiot zealots still deny AGW
"if you disagree with my orthodoxy it's heresy!"
who's the zealot?
Climate is nothing but averaged weather, both in space and time, which is what they are doing here.
The summary points out that 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record, but neglects to mention that the three hotter years were all this decade, with 2016 being the hottest since records began.
Of course, nothing with stop the global warming deniers...
Satellite data, last I heard, has 2018 ranked sixth hottest of all time, so technically you're correct if you're talking about the RSS dataset.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And if you can't discuss that without shouting HERETIC!!!!, err, "denier", you're just another religious fanatic.
I wont' call you any of those things. I'm just calling you completely misinformed by fossil fuel industry propaganda. When we can see glaciers and ice caps melting at an alarming rate, average sea temperatures rising to the point that marine life is being damaged (let's remember how many billions of people depend on the sea), it becomes quite clear that the climatologists have been holding back the bad news. We have until 2030 to get our collective acts together or future generations are going to be screwed. And they will look back on us with utter contempt for our stupidity - not ignorance -stupidity.
This is not a statistically valid way to confirm CO2 based global warming. For example, according to human measurements that I have access to:
Members of the class of years in the "five hottest years on record"
* Every year from 1850-1855
* Every year from 1866-1870
* Every year from 1877-1878
* Every year from 1887-1888
* Every year from 1896-1897
* Every year from 1913-1914
* 1921
* Every year from 1926-1928
* Every year from 1936-1944
etc, etc
The global temperature appears to have had a positive slope for at least 200 years. If anything, that falsifies CO2 based global warming because there was warming before there was abnormally high CO2. So the warming trend of the last 200 years should raise the bar for confirming CO2 based warming, not be used as evidence. (As in, you need more than "it is warmer", because "it will be warmer" was the best guess prior to any thought of CO2 base warming)
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No point in trying to persuade people in denial about Global Warming of anything. They're shills, morons or trolls, and not open to persuasion by logic and science.
So really, the best strategy is to ridicule and insult them, the same way you'd ridicule and insult a child molester trying to argue from the anonymous safety of their parents' basement that raping children isn't really all that bad.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
...weather isn't the same as climate. At least that's what all the AGW zealots say when we have a cold snap.
Correct: weather is not the same thing as climate. A single cold winter in a single place is not evidence against global climate change, nor, on the other hand, is a single warm winter in a single place evidence for global climate change.
That's why this is relevant: this is not a single location, it is a global average, and it is not a single day or even a single month, it is a average over a year.
And it is one data point in a trend: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...
That is what we mean by climate.
But you knew that.
As I stated in a prior post, this has been true for most years for the last 200 years or so. "It is warmer" does not provide evidence for CO2 based AGW, since it has been getting warmer for at least 200 years.
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Sort of - this is where the real dragons lay.
If you take a chaotic process and average it, you get noise out. So it has not been demonstrated that averaging out the weather (almost certainly a chaotic process) produces anything of value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is an open question weather (sic ;}) simulations of Earth's climate have any value at all. All averaging values together does is send the signal through a low pass filter. That, by itself, is not enough to say it has any relevance to anything.
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NASA does not have a long-standing finding that Mankind is driving climate change; they have a long-standing belief, and have made statements, but still no scientific proof.
They have a hypothesis, which is incorporated into a model, and the model is compared to measurements.
That's the way science is done.
So far, the model is supported by the evidence, and the null hypothesis-- that climate is not being influenced by human emissions of greenhouse gasses-- is very strongly ruled out by the evidence.
If you want to not believe the model, what you do is need to find an alternative model that is not contradicted by the evidence-- one that fits the measurements better than the standard model. So far, such an alternate model has not been put forth.
This is how science is done. "Scientific proof" really is a word used by popularizers; it's not used by scientists. Scientists talk about whether a model is supported by the evidence or not. So far, the models are.
Crap, how did we forget the sun? You should contact the nearest scientist about that before it's too late.
Just a little while ago /. ran an article about the internet becoming more civil. Then this article happened.
BTW, according to NOAA satellites, 2019 was the 14th hottest year and 2018 was the 23rd hottest year.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/la...
Personally, I think the satellite data set is better - it is harder to mess with, avoids the problems of only measuring near humans, and measures more of the system in question.
But again, none of this really says anything about proving CO2 based AGW.
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I've been hearing this a lot more frequently recently, and I wonder what you think scientific "proof" is, and what happens when something is scientifically "proven"?
The reason I ask is that I'm married to a scientist (as it turns out a geophysicist), and as a technologist I've spent decades of my life dealing with scientists and scientific data, and I do not believe I have ever heard a scientist utter the word "proof" in connection to any scientific question. I've heard lawyers, politicians and other laymen do so... even science teachers. I've seen movie scientists talking about proving things. But never actual scientists, at least not when they're talking among themselves.
I think this is because "proof" presupposes something that's outside the scientific paradigm -- establishing a kind of unassailable truth.
It is simply factually false to say there are no findings that there has been warming, but I think you are using "finding" in a way that a scientists would not. There have been findings that contradict the warming hypothesis all along, as well as findings that support it. But when you look at systematic reviews, they have for decades now concluded that the bulk of the evidence is overwhelming in favor of anthropogenic climate change. But I have a feeling that isn't really "proof", which seems to mean "beyond any possible doubt".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm pretty sure that you understand what an average is. So let's work off that. Weather is whatever it is when you walk outside. People record that day's weather, temperature, and other points of data. Continue to do this for a set of locations of which, when talking about global temperatures, is a lot of data points per day. At the end of the year, what you will do is then take the average of those data points for region/entire planet, for month/season/year. The last one of each, average for entire planet for the year, is the one specifically being talked about here. That average number is the fourth highest value in a data set of this particular measure since 1880.
Now take that data and begin breaking down into 30-year buckets. That should give you roughly 4.6 "buckets". This is the value of a particular measure that you would begin to build a climate model on for that particular bucket. Basically, your model indicates "Oh yeah this area usually gets a lot of rain" or "Oh yeah, snow usually comes around November and ends in March" and so forth. Now of course, there's a much more strict language used in terms of statistics than I'm using here but you should get the idea.
However, with those 30 year buckets you can also look at how those climate models are changing. "Snow was common in November in this area in the first bucket, is no longer common in this last bucket." Additionally you can see events that go along with the change in these models, "Snow, which usually requires a cold climate to occur, was not common in November in this last bucket for this region and we saw two days where the temperature in particular years was higher than the average for that specific bucket for the month of November in this last bucket for this region."
To more specifically address the recent cold snaps. We know that the cold air is coming from the arctic region. We know this by looking at things like the jet stream and more specifically anemometer data shows the speed and direction of wind, so it's not entirely difficult to see where cold air is coming from, especially the most recent arctic blasts we've received. Cold air coming from that region of the planet into our region of the planet is not common based on previous anemometer data. Yes, it gets cold during the winter here, but it gets cold here for a different reason other than polar winds sweeping down into our region. Typically, polar winds stay close to the poles and that is because of a feature known as a polar vortex. There are ideas as to why this is happening and ultimately science will have an accurate model for why the polar wind is dipping so close to the equator.
But do know that the most recent "cold snap" we just had is indeed due to a recent development in the polar climate (it's average data over 30 year terms) and not due to more common methods. Now there's not enough data (see definition for the word "recent") to accurately say that this new feature is part of global warming, but it indeed raises eyebrows and it's definitely a starting point to consider. However, we won't know until we have several more decades of data. But it is sufficient to say that "cold snaps" of yesteryear (previous 30-year bucket) are not like the "cold snap" we just recently had, they began in entirely different ways.
The chant of "weather isn't climate" that you commonly hear is to remind folks that today's weather is just a single data point within a sea of data points that make up a climate model. We can have very bitterly cold days within that data set, but if the average is higher because the number of hotter days out number the number of bitterly cold days, then that's just how the data works, that's what averages mean. Something to consider, my neck of the woods here hovered around six degrees during the couple of days we had our most recent "cold snap". Yesterday and today it was a high in the seventies. You can easily see that those very high temperatures will easily over power the two/three days of cold we had.
If anything, that falsifies CO2 based global warming because there was warming before there was abnormally high CO2.
There is indeed an underlying warming trend that has been going on since the 1600s. There is a longer warming trend that began abruptly 11,700 years ago, triggering the Holocene glacial retreat.
The current warming trend, presumably induced by CO2, is happening faster, and overlaying that longer and gentler warming trends.
The existence of these long term trends does not falsify AGW.
you need more than "it is warmer", because "it will be warmer" was the best guess prior to any thought of CO2 base warming
Absolutely. You can't just say "it's getting warmer". The important question is "how much warmer?"
Yes, the sun heats the Earth, but CO2 slows the rate at which that heat escapes.
"As for the 420ppm is nothing" B.S. - The atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen(~78%), oxygen(~21%), and argon(~0.9%), all of which are transparent to infrared radiation, and thus irrelevant to the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet from being a frozen ball of ice. That leaves the last 0.1% of trace gasses for greenhouse warming - and over 93% of that is CO2. (There's also water, but that varies wildly and self-regulates through evaporation and precipitaion)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wait, you are saying that the temperature has been increasing over the past 200 years. Right when we started massively burning fossil fuels.
And this is supposed to falsify the claim that CO2 cause global warming?
thankfully, we have proxy data for years before that. And guess what, it's pretty flat overall, even if there was a medieval warm period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even the medieval warm period warmed much more slowly than what happened in the past 200 years.
Posted like a true coward. Excellent work.
Thanks Tool; sorry, O'Toole. I made no statement that GW was not true; but we need to seek proof that humans are causing it. Difficult for you?
AGW is well documented in scientific papers. There are easy to read and understand summaries for the general public. No excuse to still be a denier.
That'd only show CO2 was not the *sole cause* of warming (which should be obvious) - if you'd demonstrated significant warming before significant CO2 (which you haven't).
There are many short-term causes (like ENSO et al) and weaker long-term causes (like orbital cycles, and changes in solar output & vulcanism) - even colonisation can have an indirect effect. None of these come close to accounting for the dramatic temperature rise we've observed.
But CO2 does. We've measured its effect in the lab, and measured the amount we've added to the atmosphere, and confirmed it with measurements from GOSAT and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 - and guess what? The rise is nearly all due to greenhouse gases.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
...but still no scientific proof
Proofs are for mathematicians. Scientists work with things like data, hypotheses, and predictions.
Wait, you are saying that the temperature has been increasing over the past 200 years. Right when we started massively burning fossil fuels.
The amount of fossil fuels burned 200 years ago was negligible. The warming trend in that era was likely caused by variations in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, and changes in ocean circulation. The Little Ice Age was ending, so the increase in temperature was more of returning to normal. 1816 was known as the Year without a Summer, or more colloquially as "Eighteen hundred and froze to death". From there, there was nowhere to go but up.
Fossil fuel consumption didn't add appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere until the 20th century, when temperature rises appear to have accelerated.
It's so absurd to try and make sweeping assessments of things like climate based on a record that's less than 40 years old. We started tracking data in the 80's...
You might want to read the summary a bit more carefully.
since record-keeping began in 1880
That would be 140 years, not 40 years.
Note that 200 years ago, the USA used a bit less than 200ktons of coal. Now, we're using on the order of 1Gton of coal per year.
While I consider a Gton of coal per year to be a serious problem, I fail to see the environmental impact of 200ktons of coal per year. At which rate that Gton of coal would last 5000 years or so....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
200 years ago was, when new methods to make steel were invented, when the United Kingdom began to built its railway system and the European countries followed. 200 years ago was, when settlers in the Americas cleared the forests. Don't underestimate the amount of industrialization that was going on 200 years ago! The first steam boat was built 215 years ago, and the first transatlantic cable was laid 155 years ago -- with a 700 feet long steel steamship, the SS Great Eastern, built 160 years ago.
Using that same logic, people die of cancer even if they have never smoked; therefore, smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The global temperature appears to have had a positive slope for at least 200 years.
I notice you fail to give any source for your assertion.
Here is a graph of temperature data reconstructed back to 1850:
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/land-and-ocean-sea-ice-comparison-large-1024x788.png
The slope has a marked increase after 1900.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Citation needed.
The industrial revolution started between 1760-1840, depending upon whos benchmark you adopt as a starting point Unsurprisingly, the same period includes a marked and sustained uptick in global average CO2 concentration from ~280 ppm. 1850 starts at 285 ppm and it keeps on climbing...
BTW, according to NOAA satellites, 2019 was the 14th hottest year and 2018 was the 23rd hottest year.
1. This is not surface temperature. They call it "lower atmosphere," but from a satellite perspective, "lower" means temperature about 5 km above the surface. The discussion you're replying to here is about surface temperature.
2. The satellites (despite what Spencer implies) don't measure temperature. They measure intensity of oxygen microwave emission on the integrated optical path between the satellite and the ground. They use a algorithm to "correct" this data to subtract out noise and turn the line-averaged intensities into altitude-dependent temperatures (by basically subtracting out the upper atmosphere from the data using upper-atmosphere data from a different wavelength), but there is some amount of disagreement over how to accurately correct the data, and different groups come up with different answers. There's a Wikipedia article on it here: that gives a good introduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Summary, this is measuring a different thing, and the meaning of the data is somewhat less clear.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The big "but" here is that emitting carbon dioxide is only one of the forcing factors. The other big big forcing factor in carbon dioxide that's affected by humans is due to deforestation . There was a enormous amount of deforestation going on in the 1800s.
If pedophiles ever get a social justice campaign, it will be conservatives running it.
And did you ever stop to think that your 8-year-old might have wanted to change sex so it would make him/her less desirable to you, and therefore better able to grow up as a child rather than a sex object?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
The amount of non-fossil fuels burned 200 years ago was not negligible. The fuel for steam engines may have been renewable, but it was not renewed. The vegetation removed in cropland conversion wasn't all used as building materials either. Fossil fuel consumption was dwarfed by land use emissions until the second half of the 20th century, while the latter started adding appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere in the second half of the 19th century.
But again, none of this really says anything about proving CO2 based AGW.
Out of interest do you dispute the absorbtion and emission spectra of CO2?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They have a hypothesis, which is incorporated into a model, and the model is compared to measurements. That's the way science is done.
So far, the model is supported by the evidence, and the null hypothesis-- that climate is not being influenced by human emissions of greenhouse gasses-- is very strongly ruled out by the evidence.
It's far from the only way science is done - try repeatable experiment, or control group (obviously difficult).
A repeatable experiment is one way to compare models to results, of course. In some fields, like astronomy and climate science, however, we use measurements. Either way, however, the point is to compare models with results.
That's how science is done.
If you want to not believe the model, what you do is need to find an alternative model that is not contradicted by the evidence-- one that fits the measurements better than the standard model. So far, such an alternate model has not been put forth.
Someone not believing the model does not have to provide an alternative.
Obviously you're not a scientist, because in fact this is how science is done. You compare your hypothesis to an alternative hypothesis, and keep throwing out the hypothesis that doesn't match the observations.
The null hypothesis (LOOK IT UP), that human carbon dioxide doesn't affect climate, has failed to match observations. It has been ruled out. The best model we have right now is that the physical effect known as global warming is real. If you want to convince scientists it's not, you need an alternate model, and you need it to not be contradicted by the measurements.
This is how science is done. "Scientific proof" really is a word used by popularizers; it's not used by scientists. Scientists talk about whether a model is supported by the evidence or not. So far, the models are.
Those providing the model need to prove that it's true.
No, you weren't paying attention. Scientists don't "prove a model is true". The best they ever do is show that it fits the observations, and they then accept it as the best model until a model that explains the observations better is found.
In this case, the increased human contribution to greenhouse gases is minuscule compare to other sources, so the model is really assuming that we;'re at an (unproven) tipping point. Starting with a false hypothesis or set of assumptions can only lead to a false outcome.
Um, what? You are basically saying you don't know anything about the history of scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect?
Yes, indeed, the human-contributed greenhouse gasses produce warming that is small compared to the natural greenhouse effect. This has been known for a century. Without the natural greenhouse gas in the atmosphere (primarily water vapor), the Earth would have an average temperature below zero.
It is the change in temperature due to human contributed gasses that we're talking about. And, fortunately, we have really good measurements of how much carbon dioxide we've put in the atmosphere, and also good measurements of the infrared absorption profile of carbon dioxide.
Let me alter it slightly:
Being called foolish for disagreeing with the commonly held position does not mean the person calling you an idiot is religous. Sometimes it means you really are an idiot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pollution will us much quicker than fucking Global warming.
You accidentally a word there.
you put a stop to pollution, your fucking Global Warming crisis will disappear.
Sure, as long as you include CO2 pollution.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So it has not been demonstrated that averaging out the weather (almost certainly a chaotic process) produces anything of value.
Tell you what, since you don't believe that averaging weather is useful then I have a wager for you. If it snows in London in on August 10th this year I will pay you $100,000, but if it fails to snow, you pay me $100.
If averaging weather is useless then you'd be a fool not to take the wager since your expected gain is $50,050. If you refuse to take the wager then you are admitting that averaging of weather is meaningful.
I know, I know you don't believe that I'll honour the wager. You're probably right, since I'm a pseudonymous rando on the internet. So take it up with a betting shop and post a picture of the betting slip to prove you stand by your claim. They'll give you MUCH better odds than I did.
$10 says you won't!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Sort of - this is where the real dragons lay.
If you take a chaotic process and average it, you get noise out.
No, in fact you're wrong here. If you average noisy data, you get less noisy data.
This is fundamental to measurement theory.
https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/understand-tradeoffs-increasing-resolution-averaging
http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3488/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_averaging
https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-averaging-noise.htm
Why don't they post about solar activity like the upward trend in solar flares and the sun's cycle of sunspots. I beleive lower sunspot activity actually increases the amount of energy expelled into the solar system. What happens when you turn up the furnace in your house . . .it gets hotter.
Because we measure the energy output of the sun and have been measuring it constantly, with good resolution, since the 1960s (and with poorer resolution for longer than that.)
We know that changes in solar activity aren't causing the warming because we measure the changes in solar activity, and the sun is not putting out more energy now than it was in 1960.
(The main change is the 12 year sunspot cycle, which averages out)
It's possible to worry about more than one thing.
There are more ways to measure historical temperature than with a thermometer. Hard to believe, but true.
I don't respond to AC's.
Go get hit by a bus cunt
What is a bus cunt? And what would be the effect if one hit you?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Anything before about 1900 is not reliable though, as the equipment and measurement techniques and global coverage were inadequate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The warming trend in that era was likely caused by variations in solar radiation,
Unlikely.
Solar activity does not vary enough to have any significant effect on earth.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
ENSO has no effect in global warming.
Neither El Nino nor La Nina are warming or cooling phenonema.
Both effects only shift the areas where it is particular warm and areas where it is particular cold around. That is all.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Beyond any possible doubt" is, as you say, not something scientists adhere to, since it's possible to doubt everything. However, I think it is also important to say that science also does produce findings that are "beyond any reasonable doubt". And deniers like that guy pick and choose what understanding best agrees with their already-made decision.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
It's true they don't affect overall heat content, but they can still have short-term effects on atmospheric temperatures, as they cycle heat between the ocean surface and subsurface.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Ice cores and tree ring data count as measurements, so about half a million years. No, not long.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Whatever, another article about how we are all doomed.
Here's what I want to see, solutions that work. Wind and solar don't work because without massive levels of storage to even out the varying load to the varying demand then it simply cannot keep the lights on. Also, add up all the resources needed to build all these windmills, solar panels, and batteries, and you will find yourself a situation that will destroy the economy and/or the environment in trying to dig up all the materials needed.
You think wind and solar don't have any environmental impact? Where do you think all that steel, aluminum, copper, concrete, rare earth elements, and so on come from? We dig it out of the ground, that's where it comes from. Same for the batteries, that stuff has to be dug up, refined, machined, molded, and transported to the construction site. This takes energy and materials. Energy and materials we cannot produce in any meaningful time frame.
We need solutions, not another restatement of the problem. Seems no one wants to speak of what that solution might be.
Oh, and I give citations on why the solutions brought up so often will not work.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
https://www.withouthotair.com/
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Up next: The fear mongering Net Neutrality article if the day where we pretend its about equal bandwidth rules when it's actually about kicking conservative media off the internet.
Whut? How is making sure conservatives can get their traffic about kicking them off the internets?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, rounding errors exist. But look at your own source a little more carefully, my error was in the 0.1%, NOT the 93%: All trace gasses combined are actually 0.04338% rather than 0.1%. Which means that CO2 is 0.0407%/0.04338% = 93.82% of all trace gasses. And it's worth noting that most of the remaining gasses are ALSO not greenhouse gasses, so CO2 is approaching 100% of greenhouse gasses.
You also seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that the percentage of CO2 is only miniscule compared to the gasses that have no effect on global warming. It's like trying to shine a light through a stack of 996 sheets of crystal-clear glass, and 4 layers of mylar. The glass won't really make much difference compared to the mylar. We could have 10x more oxygen and nitrogen in the air, and the planet wouldn't get noticeably warmer. Or we could get rid of the CO2 and the surface of the planet would freeze solid.
The moon is a good reference point for the "normal" temperature of something our distance from the sun. It gets the same amount of sunlight we do, and actually absorbs a lot more than us since it's surface is basically coal black, but it's temperature swings from -183C at night to 106C during the day - averaging out to about -39C (-102F). Without the "miniscule amount" of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere Earth would be even colder.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The best part...the trend line shows the temperature going down not up. Of course this display was back when they were telling us were still in an ice age and all going to die and they needed more money to study the phenomena.
Basically I'm sure we could chart all the dangerous threats from weather/climate and discover a correlation with the funding levels in the scientific community. ....... "Ok just keep it at these levels until I can retire.....er I mean find a solution to the crisis"
Funding going down......"OH NO WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE FROM.......please insert crisis here [cold/heat/flooding/bees dying/asteroids/starvation/radiation]"
Funding going up
Basically I've got my bases covered I live far enough south another ice age will at most just force me to start wearing pants on a regular basis, and I'm far enough from the ocean to enjoy a boost in my property values if the oceans were to rise from global warming. I've got plenty guns for dealing with all the starving looters that either crisis will generate.
Measuring temperatures on land surfaces and sea surfaces gives a misleading sense of the heating of the planet. Almost certainly 2018 is the warmest year in recent times if you consider the total heat content of the seas. Deep ocean temperatures are rising but there is not yet systematic measurement of the deep seas. But as long as CO2 keeps rising, it's very likely that total heating of the Earth does too. Every year is the hottest year on record and the capacity of the deep ocean to moderate surface temperatures via mixing with surface water and cooling the air is being diminished.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
they measure radiance in IR and microwave bands and so get the surface temperature that way.
sounds like you made a Trump sound bite there. Satellites have been obtaining surface temperature via radiance measurements for decades.
(There's also water, but that varies wildly and self-regulates through evaporation and precipitaion)
Waitaminute. How does water self regulate? If a temperature rise causes evaporation and a temperature decrease causes precipitation then would not this process overwhelm any warming effect from CO2 given the far higher quantity of water on Earth by comparison?
The heat that Earth gets comes from the sun, with minor additions from things like radioactive decay, cosmic radiation, and so on. This heat is dissipated into space by the rotation of the Earth in relation to the sun, and the movement of a powerful greenhouse gas we know as H2O in the atmosphere. The claim that the incredibly minuscule levels of CO2 is the cause of any kind of global warming seems quite implausible if one were to claim that H2O regulates it's content in the atmosphere based on temperature through phase changes from vapor to liquid.
The climate changes, we always knew that. What seems to be the debate is the cause. If we can show human activity is participating then there is debate on how much. Then we must debate on if this is good or bad. Seems quite possible that the change in CO2 could be not from human activity but a result of natural warming. It's also possible that the increase in CO2, and the warming that caused it or resulted from it, is beneficial to human life. Humans are a tropical species and a bit of warming might be helpful. Plants are currently starving for CO2 since they evolved through periods with far higher CO2 than we have now, more CO2 means more plant life. More plant life means more food, cheaper food, healthier food, and therefore an improvement in human lives.
Yes, the sun heats the Earth, but CO2 slows the rate at which that heat escapes.
Sure, I'll buy that. What I have a problem with is the teeny tiny contribution that CO2 has on the rate of heat loss compared to the huge self regulating effect H2O has on the atmosphere. Don't take my word for it because I'm a nobody. Listen to far more educated people than myself like Dr. Patrick Moore. There is no global warming gas like H2O. The CO2 will not acidify the oceans because there are far too many natural buffering agents for that to matter. Sea levels rise and sea levels fall, CO2 has next to nothing to do with it.
With that said I will go along with the theory of human CO2 caused catastrophic global warming so long as there are meaningful, logical, and practical solutions. You want to tell me that my daily commute in a gasoline burner truck is killing the planet? Fine, give me a practical alternative and I'll take it. I've seen practical solutions proposed but we don't seem motivated enough, yet, to make it happen.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Much of which was burned. It was due to shortages of wood to burn that coal became popular as a source of heat, both for heating and industrial use.
Interestingly, here in BC, the largest emitter of CO2 last year was the forests, largely due to fire as well as destructive logging practices which includes slash burning and the mountain pine beetle.
Fires alone released estimated 190 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2017 and likely a similar amount in 2018, compared to 63 million tonnes by the usual subjects (industry, people etc).
https://www.nationalobserver.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
only idiot zealots still deny AGW
"if you disagree with my orthodoxy it's heresy!"
who's the zealot?
Do you make the same argument about the flat Earth?
Perhaps the germ theory of disease, something that some were very skeptical about? Usually those who had to change if the germ theory was true. Surprising resistance to washing at the time, even with studies showing higher survival rates when surgeons washed before operating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
My bad... small screen, bad eyes. But even 140 years is nothing in terms of climate and we lack enough data to make any reasonable judgments.
You are correct, I just didn't want to get into the details with someone who quite likely doesn't care. Especially since the behavior of water in the atmosphere is quite complex, and not completely well understood (e.g. do clouds reflect more sunlight and cool the planet, or more infrared and warm it? Recent studies suggest the latter, though a narrow enough margin that there may actually be no net effect either way".) It's still very much an area of active research, and I'm far from an expert. I can give a basic 1000ft overview though.
Basically yes, water is a potent greenhouse gas, and as temperature rises (globally) the amount of water vapor in the air will also rise, and accelerate the process. But water alone can only push things so far - adding an extra unit of water to the atmosphere will raise the temperature of the air, but not by enough to raise the maximum amount of water the air can hold by a full unit. Keep adding more water, and eventually the air is saturated (100% humidity) and you get precipitation and/or condensation dumping water out of the air at least as fast as evaporation is adding more. That's the self-regulation: you can't get runaway global warming with water alone, because the higher you drive the %humidity, the faster the water leaves the air.
Add a unit of CO2 though and you get a similar warming effect, so that the air can hold more water, without changing the amount of water in the air, so the % humidity actually drops and precipitation becomes less likely. Evaporation will obviously continue adding more water until a stable %humidity is reached, but the important detail is that at the exact same %humidity, the absolute amount of water in the air is now higher, and thus so is the greenhouse effect of that water.
As for your various debates: We've shown pretty conclusively that Humanity is responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 - it's easy to calculate roughly how much fossil CO2 we produce based on how much fossil fuel we consume, and we're producing it faster than the atmospheric concentration is increasing. If you were filling a pool with a garden hose, and the amount of water in the pool is increasing more slowly than you're adding it, then it doesn't matter how complex any other plumbing is, you can be fairly confident in stating that the amount of water would be decreasing without your contribution.
The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas can be tested in any middle-school science lab, and to argue that increasing amounts are somehow not raising the temperature of the planet is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence. Exactly how much it will do so directly is also relatively easy to calculate. The knock-on effects though, such as the effects of the correspondingly greater amount of water in the air on weather patterns, are indeed up for debate. As is exactly how much heating the planet can take before we tip its bistable climate out of the last 2.6 million years of icehouse conditions into the hot-house state it was in when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Which might be a good thing in the long term - but the transition has always been accompanied by mass-extinctions in the past, so even if we win in the long term, those intervening centuries of transition are likely to be brutal. There's also the rising sea levels to contend with, and it appears that the global climate patterns may actually have been even less stable than the glacial/interglacial cycle that characterizes an icehouse Earth.
We've also got some big data points already: as the polar icecaps melt the temperature difference between equator and poles decreases - and that difference is the driving force behind most of the world's wind and sea currents, which are slowing down in response. As those slow they start to wander, sometimes even looping back on themselves - the reason we're having to contend with the polar vortex here in the US, when it used to be a fast stream confined much closer to the poles. Slower more meandering air currents mean weather systems are
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't know where you're from, but in the USA:
The water in lakes and rivers is much cleaner than it was 20 years ago. And even cleaner compared to 30 years ago.
The air is much cleaner than it was 20 years ago. And even cleaner compared to 30 years ago.
Trash and littering are much less of a problem than 20 or especially 30 years ago.
Groundwater has always needed filtering, in most parts of the world.
Those are just facts. If you live somewhere else, where it's getting dirtier instead... that's YOUR problem, and your fault.
People tend to totally underestimate some time frames. The first usable steam engine was patented by Thomas Savery more than 320 years ago. The Newcomen engine found widespread usage 300 years ago. James Watt used to sit in front of a Newcomen engine and watch it running as a child, and Boulton & Watt, the company building the Watt steam engines in large numbers, was founded in 1775, nearly 250 years ago.
Those date also mark the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Excellent post. I will add, in addition, that land use was also responsible for the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, when CO2 levels plunged from about 1550 to 1610, and then started to recover.
What happened to CO2 levels between 1550 and 1610? Well, starting in 1539 Hernando de Soto, starting with 660 men (carrying typhus, measles, and small pox) began to explore North America. De Soto encountered dense settlements along the Gulf Coast, and rivers of the South East. The next group of explorers found those same areas thinly populated.
It appears that the diseases spread by De Soto and his men started a wave of pandemic sweeping across the densely settled section of North America, killing perhaps 90% of the inhabitants. This meant that the large areas of the continent that had been under agricultural or horticultural care by Indians (large areas were cleared by burning at regular intervals for example) began to regrow forests, and lock up CO2 on a huge scale.
BTW, the hordes of Passenger Pigeons observed by later European observers appear to be a result of this same event. They genetic analysis indicates an enormous population explosion around 1600. Apparently all the now untended nut trees used for food by Indians served as windfall for the pigeons leading to a previously uncommon species to dominate, for awhile.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
If you reject all solutions by claiming without any credible evidence that they "don't work", what's the point?
My credible evidence:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
I'm taking Dr. Ripu Malhotra as far more credible evidence than most. Same for Dr. Patrick Moore. There's many others I follow on this topic, all very educated in energy and/or the environment. All far more credible on finding workable solutions than repeating the same mistakes with solar and wind hoping for a different result. Stop the insanity. We've had the solution for our power needs decades ago but it seems many are willfully blind to it. Civilization cannot continue without nuclear power, I'm quite certain of that as are many people smarter than you or I.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That is a strange question. Do I dispute that we "KNOW" it? Yes. It is wrong in at least the hundredth decimal point. We likely will never know all there is to know about it.
I believe what you are trying to imply is that if you believe that CO2 can absorb IR energy then the case is closed and global warming is going to kill us all.
For more clarity, here is what I believe:
1) The science isn't settled. Gravity isn't settled! If someone says that the science is settled, they are merely trying to cut off debate which implies that their position is weak.
2) Whenever a politician starts quoting science to me, I am far less likely to believe the science is grounded in reality.
3) When a "leading scientist" (Michael Mann) goes in front of congress and tries to prove his case by showing two charts that look similar, only when examined closely the similarity is artificially created by using different color scales, I severely discount any work product from his team or anyone related to his team.
4) When you review the previous reports by the teams in question (the IPCC reports) that are now old enough to have predictions about current events, and current data values are now almost exclusively outside the predicted confidence interval, the theory is wrong. You can't just adjust some parameters to save it, because you can always adjust parameters to save any theory. At this point, the bar to prove that they know what they are doing should be extremely high in anyone's mind that has been paying attention.
My predictions:
1) It is extremely unlikely that global warming will be more than a minor nuisance to humans in the future. Technology is increasing far faster than the possible danger, and we will be able to continue to improve life for everyone on the planet.
2) CO2 will eventually be found to have some effect on world temperature, but not a driving force. There are much stronger greenhouse effects in play, and cloud feedback could throw the whole CO2 effects out of the window, for example.
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Look, I'm not arguing in favor or against. I am saying that the current temperature does not prove anything.
By the way, your argument seems to imply that deforestation may be more significant than CO2. Does that make you a denier, or is that OK as long as you still blame the humans?
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Um, that is not temperature, that is see ice. Google "global average temperature", and use the NASA data (I believe).
No, it's a graph of temperature. Read the axis label.
I happened to pick a temperature graph that shows two different methods of reconstructing past temperature, depending on whether the reconstruction puts sea ice in the "land" category or the "ocean" category, and showing that the TEMPERATURE result is the same. I picked that temperature graph, out of several choices, because it was the one that happened to a horizontal axis that covered the years in question.
I could have used a different one, this one for example: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-co...
I'm pretty sure I gave a link to the source data in this thread somewhere.
That's an assertion that can be easily checked.
No, you did not.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Best moving the goal posts slashpost post yet today. The data doesn't mean what we want, so we deny it. You are as bad as the deniers who think global warming is a hoax. You accept all the data, you don't remove outliers without a damn good reason (ideology is not a reason)
Um, no. The article and this discussion has been about SURFACE temperature. The post by WhiplashII linked to (one researcher's reconstructions of) temperature at 5 KM ALTITUDE. Saying "that's not surface temperature" is not "moving the goal posts"-- it's pointing out that the post was not relevant to the discussion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Look, I'm not arguing in favor or against. I am saying that the current temperature does not prove anything.
I don't even know what you mean by "doesn't prove anything". This is not mathematics. We're talking about evidence, not mathematical "proof".
By the way, your argument seems to imply that deforestation may be more significant than CO2. Does that make you a denier, or is that OK as long as you still blame the humans?
Neither. Human-produced carbon dioxide is one of the forcing factors of climate. It is not the only forcing factor. The total carbon dioxide forcing, of course, is the integrated carbon dioxide input into the atmosphere minus the carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. If you had somehow simplified that in your mind to "all that matters is that we burn coal, nothing else affects the climate" the problem is on your end. Actual climate modelling looks at both sources and sinks.
Not all the factors affecting climate are human produced. Anthropogenic factors are not instead of natural factors, they are in addition to natural factors.
For the current era, however, we have very good measurements of the forcing factors. We can attribute what is causing the temperature rise to human activity because we measure the forcing factors, and other factors are too small to have the effect we are measuring.
I just did a search of your posts, and: bullshit you're not. Every single post you make a point that just "happens" to be an argument against the science.
Do note, though, that world carbon-dioxide emission is 37 billion tons, so the 190 million tons from fire and logging and insects is still a comparatively small number. (Large compared to other British Columbia emissions mainly because British Columbia doesn't have a lot of other emissions).
Still: very interesting data; something to think about. thanks for posting it.
That's not a coincidence.
So, let's look at your latest claims.
1. Yeah, popularization bullshit. You know what? Gravity actually is settled. If you want to argue what "settled" means, and make it a point to say "gravity isn't settled science!"--well, fine, but it's pretty clear you're really obfuscating. That is philosophy, not science.
2. It doesn't matter what politicians say. A fucking shit-ton of Republican politicans are telling me climate change isn't real. You know what? The science is what it is regardless of what the politics are.
3. Why don't you ignore the stuff presented to congress, and look at the actual science which is very well documented in many, many, many papers?
4. Nope. You're reading denialist websites, which cherry-pick both data and predictions. Read the actual IPCC reports, and it turns out the predictions so far are matching the data to well within error bars.
Summary, you're mostly either obfuscating, or saying "I don't like politicians". What politicians say isn't science.
The question is, what in the world is the downside of curbing our CO2 activity? Why would anyone be so vehemently against doing that. Sure, make arguments we need to continue research and measure the effects and don't presume victory, but at least make a go of our current best guess, with the undeniable side effects of conserving petroleum (that won't last forever) and reducing related pollutants.
What would one possibly hope to accomplish by fighting *any* attempt at mitigating the situation?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
1. Even gravity isn't settled: https://youtu.be/8RCG_4JG6Hg?t... (really, you should watch - if it pans out this as big as relativity - extraordinary claim require extraordinary proof of course)
2. OK, but it is still annoying. And to be honest, I really think the politicians are driving most of the discord on this.
3. Micheal Mann (the actual scientist writing many of those papers, and the actual gatekeeper of what gets published) was the one testifying to congress.
4. I actually don't visit any "denialist" web sites other than Judith Carrie's site on occasion when someone else points things out to me. I read the source data, which you obviously haven't. I can't believe you linked to the IPCC reports! Those are the specific ones that have been falsified!
From the 1992 IPCC report titled "Climate Change: The IPCC 1990 and 1992 Assessments", in the "Policymaker Summary of Working Group I", page 74 there are charts showing predicted temperature rises, and discusses several options for dealing with CO2. The temperature anomaly in 2018 is given as about 1.7 in "business as usual", and 1.5 for their different scenarios. The actual temperature anomaly for 2018 was about 1.4, less than all those mitigation scenarios that did not happen.
On page 81, sea level rise predictions were made. 2018 was supposed to have a sea level of 15 cm compared to 1990. The actual value was 8 cm.
I could go on. Obviously, you have not read the reports. (I was trying to find the slide where they have the error bars on the prediction results, that is the one I was referring to, but I don't want to spend the time on it. We are now well outside the error bars.)
I don't argue against good science. I do argue against bad science. I am willing to accept the anthropomorphic catastrophic global warming hypothesis once the verifiable facts outweigh the certainty that I am being lied to. When I catch someone lying to me, I have to severely discount what they say. Because if they could have proven it without lies, they probably would have.
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When you say "gravity isn't settled science!" you are either a. clueless, or b., pretty much saying that the word had no meaning. (Or both.)
If your sentence saying gravity isn't settled is intended to mean "climate science is settled to the same extent as the understanding of gravity is," then you're saying climate science is pretty damn well accepted in the scientific community and is well understood experimentally. Nobody with a clue challenges 9.81 as the acceleration of gravity at the Earth's surface..
OK, I'll go with that. Climate science is about as settled as gravity.