The exception to "cars do almost nothing" is if they have studded tires. In Oregon studded tires are allowed from November through March and they cause lots of road damage. They have to patch the ruts they make in I-5 every few years.
In Oregon trucks with a gross weight over 26,000 lbs. already pay a weight mileage tax ranging from about 5 cents/mile up to over 16 cents/mile at 80,000 lbs.
That was an interesting read. I don't know if Curry's analysis is right or not but there's plenty of uncertainty about the details of sea level over the Holocene and I'm keeping an open mind. Nevertheless she only talks about sea level excursions of less than a meter which would be at most about 15% of Greenland's ice. However if Greenland is melting that much then there's got to be other areas of ice melting as well (like nearby Baffin Island for instance and if the warming was truly global Antarctica) so not all of the rise would have been from Greenland. I'll concede that perhaps something between 10 and 15% of Greenland's ice melted (though I doubt it was that much) but that's a far cry from most of it.
As I said, it there were even 5% less ice on Greenland back then than there is now that would have been accompanied by a sea level rise of about 1 foot (30.5 cm). That would be enough to show up in studies of sea level over the ages. There is no indication that was the case. There may have been marginally less ice especially near the southern tip of Greenland in those times but at best it couldn't have even close to 5% less ice.
Greenland has never had significantly less ice than it has now in at least 6 or 7 thousand years and probably in over 100 thousand years. There is enough ice currently on Greenland to raise sea levels by around 20 feet so each 5% is 1 foot of sea level rise. So if even only 5 or 10% of Greenland's ice had melted it would have caused obvious changes in sea level. Sea level has been remarkably stable over the last 7,000+ years rising around 4 meters or a little over half of a millimeter per year over that period.
You will find the information you're looking for at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The link to Land-Based Station Data is the one you want to follow.
I think he was talking about the Antarctic Peninsula which juts out toward South America from the continent and is in Western Antarctica. And it's the area that's seen the strongest warming on the continent.
Hint, using the word "freezing" usually implies something is turning from a liquid to a solid. Unless you specify otherwise or it's obvious by context it's going to refer to the freezing point of water. Since 23F is the freezing point of water -18F is your answer.
4.4 degrees Fahrenheit is about 2.4 degrees Centigrade. Doesn't sound like much but consider that the difference between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the middle of the 20th Century is only about 1 degree Centigrade.
I think American scientists often use the Fahrenheit scale in pieces meant for wider distribution. It helps cut down on the cranks emailing them about the metric system not being 'murican enough:)
Lucky you. My place would be on an island in Willamette Sound but several miles from the shore. Unfortunately (but fortunately for civilization in general) we'll never live to see it. If you're young you may live long enough to see a meter of SLR or if something unexpected happens maybe 2 meters but it would take thousands of years for that huge hunk of ice that is Eastern Antarctica to melt under any temperature conditions that still allow human life on the surface.
You certainly can make firm conclusions about the climate in the locale of that weather station. Global climate is simply a matter of combining the observations from a globally diverse set of stations. Of course the combining isn't so simple. You have to take care so areas where weather stations are more concentrated don't outweigh the areas where they are sparser and there are other considerations but as long as those things are properly addressed there is useful information to be garnered.
Western Antarctica is the part of the continent that is in the western hemisphere, that is from the Prime Meridian at 0 degrees going west around to 180 degrees west. The Transantarctic Mountains pretty much follow the meridian and provide a convenient physical marker for the division.
But if you're asking the simpler question then if you're standing anywhere but exactly on the South Pole and you face north then west will be to your left. Right at the point of the South Pole the concepts of west, east and even south are undefined.
So what if you can find a dataset for a weather station where temperatures have gone down for 30 years? It's just another single brick or from you POV maybe a missing brick. A few missing bricks here and there won't cause the wall to crumble. Unless you can come up with enough of them to eliminate the warming trend it doesn't matter and you can be certain if scientists knew of enough stations to do that we would know about it.
Absolutely some cycles last much longer than 30 years, the approximately 100,000 year cycle of glaciation and interglacials is an obvious example. But the changes from such long period cycles is hardly noticeable over a century. 30 years is long enough so the shorter term cycles such as the 11 year solar cycle and ENSO average out and have little effect on the overall average. It may be true that there are some medium term cycles that we need to know more about and perhaps some we haven't discovered yet but if they were all that significant you would think we'd see obvious signs of them in the data which we don't.
The Antarctic ice sheet is definitely not growing. Measurements by the GRACE satellites and other sources show the Antarctic ice sheet is losing over 150 gigatonnes per year since 2000 and the loss is accelerating. Antarctic sea ice has increased somewhat but by less than 1/4 of the ice lost in Arctic so it's still a net loss globally. And your suppositions about weather stations away from UHI's show no warming is demonstrably false.
The "classical period" for measuring climate trends is 30 years. 1958 is over 50 years ago so that's plenty of time to measure a trend for that location. When combined with similar measurements from other locations it's possible to measure a trend regionally on up to globally. The Byrd Station measurements are just one more brick in the wall of evidence for global warming.
It certainly is possible for stepwise changes to occur in the sensor's output but that more likely is due to some external factor and not within the sensor itself. Such a stepwise change would usually be obvious in the record so corrections could be applied.
Often sensors have known curves of their calibration drift that can be used for corrections. I doubt the changes in the sensors occur in a single step or even multiple steps as you seem to believe but rather they slowly drift off calibration in a smooth curve. That's typical of electronic components. That makes it relatively easy to apply corrections that while perhaps not absolutely correct are much closer to the true value than the raw measurements would be.
The banning of CFC's was to protect the ozone layer which is one of the most important features of the Earth system. Without the ozone layer to block UV radiation from the Sun most existing non-marine living things would not survive. That's why UV light is used for disinfection.
Re:/. climate; Yea, I've noticed that too. The heat on the/. climate change posts seems to be dissipating. Reality has a way of slapping you upside the head and saying "This is the way it is whether you like it or not."
But still I think for a lot of those who worship at the altar of the free market it will be tough accepting the necessary solution of (eventually) eliminating fossil fuel use. What they fail to realize is that if you include the externalized costs FF use is already more expensive that renewable energy.
You're right, the warming causes more then simply temperature rise. The warming from CO2 (and other non-condensing GHG's) will tend to increase the level of water vapor (a condensing GHG) which causes more warming and changes in precipitation. The changes in Earth's energy balance due to GHG's has an effect on the wind too. The warming is also causing the Arctic sea ice to melt and that has an effect on climate as well. What else? Anyway, it's all tied together.
Slashdot Mirror
The exception to "cars do almost nothing" is if they have studded tires. In Oregon studded tires are allowed from November through March and they cause lots of road damage. They have to patch the ruts they make in I-5 every few years.
In Oregon trucks with a gross weight over 26,000 lbs. already pay a weight mileage tax ranging from about 5 cents/mile up to over 16 cents/mile at 80,000 lbs.
SCOTUS? I think you must have meant POTUS.
That's assuming we haven't raped it to the point where we no longer have the resources to leave the planet.
That was an interesting read. I don't know if Curry's analysis is right or not but there's plenty of uncertainty about the details of sea level over the Holocene and I'm keeping an open mind. Nevertheless she only talks about sea level excursions of less than a meter which would be at most about 15% of Greenland's ice. However if Greenland is melting that much then there's got to be other areas of ice melting as well (like nearby Baffin Island for instance and if the warming was truly global Antarctica) so not all of the rise would have been from Greenland. I'll concede that perhaps something between 10 and 15% of Greenland's ice melted (though I doubt it was that much) but that's a far cry from most of it.
As I said, it there were even 5% less ice on Greenland back then than there is now that would have been accompanied by a sea level rise of about 1 foot (30.5 cm). That would be enough to show up in studies of sea level over the ages. There is no indication that was the case. There may have been marginally less ice especially near the southern tip of Greenland in those times but at best it couldn't have even close to 5% less ice.
Greenland has never had significantly less ice than it has now in at least 6 or 7 thousand years and probably in over 100 thousand years. There is enough ice currently on Greenland to raise sea levels by around 20 feet so each 5% is 1 foot of sea level rise. So if even only 5 or 10% of Greenland's ice had melted it would have caused obvious changes in sea level. Sea level has been remarkably stable over the last 7,000+ years rising around 4 meters or a little over half of a millimeter per year over that period.
You will find the information you're looking for at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The link to Land-Based Station Data is the one you want to follow.
I think he was talking about the Antarctic Peninsula which juts out toward South America from the continent and is in Western Antarctica. And it's the area that's seen the strongest warming on the continent.
Hint, using the word "freezing" usually implies something is turning from a liquid to a solid. Unless you specify otherwise or it's obvious by context it's going to refer to the freezing point of water. Since 23F is the freezing point of water -18F is your answer.
4.4 degrees Fahrenheit is about 2.4 degrees Centigrade. Doesn't sound like much but consider that the difference between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the middle of the 20th Century is only about 1 degree Centigrade.
I think American scientists often use the Fahrenheit scale in pieces meant for wider distribution. It helps cut down on the cranks emailing them about the metric system not being 'murican enough :)
Lucky you. My place would be on an island in Willamette Sound but several miles from the shore. Unfortunately (but fortunately for civilization in general) we'll never live to see it. If you're young you may live long enough to see a meter of SLR or if something unexpected happens maybe 2 meters but it would take thousands of years for that huge hunk of ice that is Eastern Antarctica to melt under any temperature conditions that still allow human life on the surface.
You certainly can make firm conclusions about the climate in the locale of that weather station. Global climate is simply a matter of combining the observations from a globally diverse set of stations. Of course the combining isn't so simple. You have to take care so areas where weather stations are more concentrated don't outweigh the areas where they are sparser and there are other considerations but as long as those things are properly addressed there is useful information to be garnered.
Western Antarctica is the part of the continent that is in the western hemisphere, that is from the Prime Meridian at 0 degrees going west around to 180 degrees west. The Transantarctic Mountains pretty much follow the meridian and provide a convenient physical marker for the division.
But if you're asking the simpler question then if you're standing anywhere but exactly on the South Pole and you face north then west will be to your left. Right at the point of the South Pole the concepts of west, east and even south are undefined.
So what if you can find a dataset for a weather station where temperatures have gone down for 30 years? It's just another single brick or from you POV maybe a missing brick. A few missing bricks here and there won't cause the wall to crumble. Unless you can come up with enough of them to eliminate the warming trend it doesn't matter and you can be certain if scientists knew of enough stations to do that we would know about it.
Absolutely some cycles last much longer than 30 years, the approximately 100,000 year cycle of glaciation and interglacials is an obvious example. But the changes from such long period cycles is hardly noticeable over a century. 30 years is long enough so the shorter term cycles such as the 11 year solar cycle and ENSO average out and have little effect on the overall average. It may be true that there are some medium term cycles that we need to know more about and perhaps some we haven't discovered yet but if they were all that significant you would think we'd see obvious signs of them in the data which we don't.
The Antarctic ice sheet is definitely not growing. Measurements by the GRACE satellites and other sources show the Antarctic ice sheet is losing over 150 gigatonnes per year since 2000 and the loss is accelerating. Antarctic sea ice has increased somewhat but by less than 1/4 of the ice lost in Arctic so it's still a net loss globally. And your suppositions about weather stations away from UHI's show no warming is demonstrably false.
The "classical period" for measuring climate trends is 30 years. 1958 is over 50 years ago so that's plenty of time to measure a trend for that location. When combined with similar measurements from other locations it's possible to measure a trend regionally on up to globally. The Byrd Station measurements are just one more brick in the wall of evidence for global warming.
It certainly is possible for stepwise changes to occur in the sensor's output but that more likely is due to some external factor and not within the sensor itself. Such a stepwise change would usually be obvious in the record so corrections could be applied.
Often sensors have known curves of their calibration drift that can be used for corrections. I doubt the changes in the sensors occur in a single step or even multiple steps as you seem to believe but rather they slowly drift off calibration in a smooth curve. That's typical of electronic components. That makes it relatively easy to apply corrections that while perhaps not absolutely correct are much closer to the true value than the raw measurements would be.
The banning of CFC's was to protect the ozone layer which is one of the most important features of the Earth system. Without the ozone layer to block UV radiation from the Sun most existing non-marine living things would not survive. That's why UV light is used for disinfection.
Re: /. climate; Yea, I've noticed that too. The heat on the /. climate change posts seems to be dissipating. Reality has a way of slapping you upside the head and saying "This is the way it is whether you like it or not."
But still I think for a lot of those who worship at the altar of the free market it will be tough accepting the necessary solution of (eventually) eliminating fossil fuel use. What they fail to realize is that if you include the externalized costs FF use is already more expensive that renewable energy.
I imagine that people with serious bee sting allergies are best advised to avoid this treatment.
You're right, the warming causes more then simply temperature rise. The warming from CO2 (and other non-condensing GHG's) will tend to increase the level of water vapor (a condensing GHG) which causes more warming and changes in precipitation. The changes in Earth's energy balance due to GHG's has an effect on the wind too. The warming is also causing the Arctic sea ice to melt and that has an effect on climate as well. What else? Anyway, it's all tied together.
Anthropogenic climate change encompasses global warming but includes changes in precipitation, wind and other things as well.