When people like you say "every prediction I heard pretty much failed" it's usually because they didn't pay attention to the time frame the predictor put on the prediction, for example "Florida is supposed to be underwater by now". No it's not. It will be another 30 or 40 years before Florida starts having serious problems with SLR.
Or they think the prediction is wrong because they don't pay attention to the uncertainty the predictor attaches to the prediction, for example current temperatures are still within the projections of climate models uncertainty envelopes.
There have been some predictions that failed like more hurricanes but you still need to pay attention to the qualifications that scientists put on their predictions to fairly evaluate whether or not they've failed.
The other thing that happens sometimes is something totally unexpected comes up that scientists couldn't take into account until they knew about it. An example of this is that the melting of Arctic sea ice and subsequently open water being exposed for so much longer than in the past appears to have caused the northern polar jet stream to slow down and meander more widely than in the past. This helps to account for things like the snow in Arkansas in May and temperatures of 40F they saw in Greenland in December or January a couple of years ago. It probably also has something to do with the cold spells in Europe lately.
I know that's all a lot more complex than you'd like it to be but it is what it is.
Yes, when I say independent of the mother I mean they are able to survive once they leave the womb. Yes, after birth the baby still needs care but the biological mother isn't required after that point.
My standard is the point the fetus is able to live independently of the mother. Up to that point it's just a parasite of the mother and nobodies business but hers.
These embryos are essentially just carbon copies of the donor they got the skin cells from. As such I think all that matters is the feelings of the skin cell donor.
Unfortunately the GRACE satellites are deteriorating and the replacement isn't scheduled to be launched until 2017. And who knows if that will actually happen anyway given the current conditions.
Yes, the science of CO2's effect on the atmosphere and climate goes back nearly 200 years now to Joseph Fourier who discovered the greenhouse effect in the 1820's. In the late 1850's John Tyndall quantified the radiative absorptive characteristics of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. In the 1890's Svante Arrhenius made the statement:
if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
(carbonic acid being what they called CO2 back then) which translates mathematically to the formula:
{delta}F = {alpha} Ln(C/C{sub0})
which is still in use today. ({x} notation used to recreate symbols I don't know how to here).
I think for a lot of "those idiots" their perceived economic well being trumps any other consideration and they think this is going to cost them too much money while not realizing that in the long run not responding in a timely way will cost far more.
The point is that what the article is talking about is not precession although it mimics precession a little because it does change the position of the sky relative to the Earth's surface. But the position of the Earth's axis of rotation relative to the sky has not changed (except as normal precession would cause it to).
BTW, Apogee and Perigee are not the correct terms since the "gee" part refers to Earth. The terms you wanted were aphelion and perihelion.
One other point is that the cycles of precession and orbital eccentricity (what you were referring to with your references to aphelion and perihelion) are not synchronous so whether the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun during perihelion or not is a matter of how the timing lines up. It doesn't happen the same every time.
I don't know if it's reasonable to say the geographic axis of rotation has traveled over every single point of the globe or not. One thing you can say is that it doesn't appear that the axis of rotation has ever been anywhere near the plane of the ecliptic. Meanwhile due to plate tectonics most of the surface of the Earth may have moved nearer the the axis of rotation over time.
As far as what they're talking about in the referenced paper, it wouldn't be that hard to test in a laboratory. Set a spheroid spinning, change the mass balance slightly and measure how that changes the axis of rotation. Or in reverse, observe a change in the axis of rotation and calculate how the mass balance must have changed (which gives multiple solutions). It's not that complicated.
Antarctic sea ice has grown some but sea ice is not what we're talking about here. It's the glacial/ice sheet ice that is solidly grounded on land that is causing this. I doubt whether sea ice in the Antarctic or Arctic has much effect on this.
Probably but the movement is on the order of centimeters so take the current climate and move it 10 cm south and measure the difference. It's not going to be that significant.
It would be far more accurate to simply say that none of those things are precluded by global warming. It's a subtle difference that appears to be over the head of many deniers. When they say "Oh, snowfall in Arkansas in May proves there is no global warming." and we say "No it does not." they interpret that to mean the snowfall is caused by global warming, not that global warming doesn't preclude it from happening.
I don't see why you would call this research epic fail. Obviously the location of the Earth's rotational axis can be located very accurately and tracked as it changes. Accounting for why it has changed the way it did is just scientific due diligence.
The problem is a considerable distance in the future...
The problems caused by global warming are already starting to manifest themselves now and will only get worse as time goes on.
Risk management practices say the less you understand about how bad a problem will be the more value there is in trying to avoid it. If you understand the risks well then it's easier to specifically address them.
The spread of disease, desertification, and poverty all are exacerbated by global warming. They can't be treated in isolation either.
It's idealistic to think we can do away with corruption. It's something built in to the human psyche and all we can do is try to keep it to as low a level as possible.
Since the advent of the Argo program in the early 2000's we are getting a better handle on temperature changes and yes, the oceans are warming up. The top 10 feet of the oceans hold as much heat energy as the entire atmosphere and the average depth is over 12,000 feet so there's a lot of thermal mass there.
Adding the "a" implies "ago" so "million years ago". Just saying "my" could imply any million year period but "mya" means millions of years before the present.
If not for the thermal mass of the oceans it would be a lot hotter already. It's going to take some time (decades) for the oceans to warm up enough for the full temperature effect to manifest itself.
That would be a pretty crazy cycle where CO2 levels haven't been above 300 ppmv for over 800,000 years then all of a sudden in a matter of 150 years it jumps to over 400 ppmv. CO2 levels can be measured from the bubbles of air trapped in ice cores and where the ice core measurements overlap with modern measurements they are in agreement.
Actually it's not Carbon 14 they're measuring. It's the ratio of Carbon 12 to Carbon 13. Both are stable as compared to the radioactive C14. Fossil fuels have a lower level of C13 than the atmosphere in general because photosynthesis prefers the lighter C12 atom. When we burn fossil fuels it dilutes the C13 in the atmosphere and changes the ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
When people like you say "every prediction I heard pretty much failed" it's usually because they didn't pay attention to the time frame the predictor put on the prediction, for example "Florida is supposed to be underwater by now". No it's not. It will be another 30 or 40 years before Florida starts having serious problems with SLR.
Or they think the prediction is wrong because they don't pay attention to the uncertainty the predictor attaches to the prediction, for example current temperatures are still within the projections of climate models uncertainty envelopes.
There have been some predictions that failed like more hurricanes but you still need to pay attention to the qualifications that scientists put on their predictions to fairly evaluate whether or not they've failed.
The other thing that happens sometimes is something totally unexpected comes up that scientists couldn't take into account until they knew about it. An example of this is that the melting of Arctic sea ice and subsequently open water being exposed for so much longer than in the past appears to have caused the northern polar jet stream to slow down and meander more widely than in the past. This helps to account for things like the snow in Arkansas in May and temperatures of 40F they saw in Greenland in December or January a couple of years ago. It probably also has something to do with the cold spells in Europe lately.
I know that's all a lot more complex than you'd like it to be but it is what it is.
Yes, when I say independent of the mother I mean they are able to survive once they leave the womb. Yes, after birth the baby still needs care but the biological mother isn't required after that point.
My standard is the point the fetus is able to live independently of the mother. Up to that point it's just a parasite of the mother and nobodies business but hers.
These embryos are essentially just carbon copies of the donor they got the skin cells from. As such I think all that matters is the feelings of the skin cell donor.
Unfortunately the GRACE satellites are deteriorating and the replacement isn't scheduled to be launched until 2017. And who knows if that will actually happen anyway given the current conditions.
Yes, the science of CO2's effect on the atmosphere and climate goes back nearly 200 years now to Joseph Fourier who discovered the greenhouse effect in the 1820's. In the late 1850's John Tyndall quantified the radiative absorptive characteristics of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. In the 1890's Svante Arrhenius made the statement:
if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
(carbonic acid being what they called CO2 back then) which translates mathematically to the formula:
{delta}F = {alpha} Ln(C/C{sub0})
which is still in use today. ({x} notation used to recreate symbols I don't know how to here).
I think for a lot of "those idiots" their perceived economic well being trumps any other consideration and they think this is going to cost them too much money while not realizing that in the long run not responding in a timely way will cost far more.
The point is that what the article is talking about is not precession although it mimics precession a little because it does change the position of the sky relative to the Earth's surface. But the position of the Earth's axis of rotation relative to the sky has not changed (except as normal precession would cause it to).
BTW, Apogee and Perigee are not the correct terms since the "gee" part refers to Earth. The terms you wanted were aphelion and perihelion.
One other point is that the cycles of precession and orbital eccentricity (what you were referring to with your references to aphelion and perihelion) are not synchronous so whether the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun during perihelion or not is a matter of how the timing lines up. It doesn't happen the same every time.
Or maybe it's just lamebrain idiots like you who think scientists aren't smart enough to think of those things and take them into account.
Well, they're not directly blaming global warming on this shift, it's the loss of ice mass on Greenland that's causing it.
I don't know if it's reasonable to say the geographic axis of rotation has traveled over every single point of the globe or not. One thing you can say is that it doesn't appear that the axis of rotation has ever been anywhere near the plane of the ecliptic. Meanwhile due to plate tectonics most of the surface of the Earth may have moved nearer the the axis of rotation over time.
As far as what they're talking about in the referenced paper, it wouldn't be that hard to test in a laboratory. Set a spheroid spinning, change the mass balance slightly and measure how that changes the axis of rotation. Or in reverse, observe a change in the axis of rotation and calculate how the mass balance must have changed (which gives multiple solutions). It's not that complicated.
Antarctic sea ice has grown some but sea ice is not what we're talking about here. It's the glacial/ice sheet ice that is solidly grounded on land that is causing this. I doubt whether sea ice in the Antarctic or Arctic has much effect on this.
Probably but the movement is on the order of centimeters so take the current climate and move it 10 cm south and measure the difference. It's not going to be that significant.
Precession is a change in direction the axis of rotation is pointing, not a change in the rotational axis through a body.
It would be far more accurate to simply say that none of those things are precluded by global warming. It's a subtle difference that appears to be over the head of many deniers. When they say "Oh, snowfall in Arkansas in May proves there is no global warming." and we say "No it does not." they interpret that to mean the snowfall is caused by global warming, not that global warming doesn't preclude it from happening.
I think the straw graspers here are those trying to claim there has been no warming for 17 years. Good luck with that.
I don't see why you would call this research epic fail. Obviously the location of the Earth's rotational axis can be located very accurately and tracked as it changes. Accounting for why it has changed the way it did is just scientific due diligence.
Wow, so I guess this paper published 43 years ago in 1970 titled “Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change” must have been way ahead of its time.
The problem is a considerable distance in the future ...
The problems caused by global warming are already starting to manifest themselves now and will only get worse as time goes on.
Risk management practices say the less you understand about how bad a problem will be the more value there is in trying to avoid it. If you understand the risks well then it's easier to specifically address them.
The spread of disease, desertification, and poverty all are exacerbated by global warming. They can't be treated in isolation either.
It's idealistic to think we can do away with corruption. It's something built in to the human psyche and all we can do is try to keep it to as low a level as possible.
Since the advent of the Argo program in the early 2000's we are getting a better handle on temperature changes and yes, the oceans are warming up. The top 10 feet of the oceans hold as much heat energy as the entire atmosphere and the average depth is over 12,000 feet so there's a lot of thermal mass there.
Adding the "a" implies "ago" so "million years ago". Just saying "my" could imply any million year period but "mya" means millions of years before the present.
Or they could cross check their results with thousands of measurements from around the world that are all in pretty good agreement.
If not for the thermal mass of the oceans it would be a lot hotter already. It's going to take some time (decades) for the oceans to warm up enough for the full temperature effect to manifest itself.
That would be a pretty crazy cycle where CO2 levels haven't been above 300 ppmv for over 800,000 years then all of a sudden in a matter of 150 years it jumps to over 400 ppmv. CO2 levels can be measured from the bubbles of air trapped in ice cores and where the ice core measurements overlap with modern measurements they are in agreement.
Actually it's not Carbon 14 they're measuring. It's the ratio of Carbon 12 to Carbon 13. Both are stable as compared to the radioactive C14. Fossil fuels have a lower level of C13 than the atmosphere in general because photosynthesis prefers the lighter C12 atom. When we burn fossil fuels it dilutes the C13 in the atmosphere and changes the ratio.
The 800,000 year history is based on samples from ice cores.