This is the same IPCC that said we wouldn't have any glaciers by 2010, or icesheets, or that the northwest passage would be open to traffic(never mind it's been open to traffic since it was first charted). Or that there would never be snow again on various mountains, and so on and so forth. Or that we'd all be dead what was it this year? Or is it next year? I can never keep it straight with all these doomsday predictions from all these environmental groups, and government backed organizations.
Reading fail. The IPCC never said we wouldn't have glaciers or ice sheets by 2010. I'd be willing to put my whole retirement savings up to bet you can't back that statement up (and I'm 59 years old so I have some). I wouldn't call requiring a heavy duty ice breaker to get through the northwest passage in less than a couple of years "open to traffic".
Guys like you never examine the projected time frames on IPCC (and other climate scientists) statements very carefully. You think everything's going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years and if it's longer than that you don't think it's worth worrying about.
The 17 year figure was determined by calculating the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variability) ratio and how it changes over time. The S/N ratio for 10 years is below 1. For 32 years the S/N ratio is 3.9. So 17 years must be where the S/N ratio becomes acceptable. I imagine they specify what that is in the paper which I haven't read yet (paywalled by the AGU and I haven't had a chance to visit a library yet). I would have to think that any S/N ratio greater than 2 is plenty to separate the climate signal from natural variability. I imagine the result is pretty robust. The had over 100 years of data to use.
Catastrophic is a subjective term. What I say is the sooner and faster we start reducing and eventually eliminating net CO2 emissions the less bad the final result will be. I don't know where bad becomes catastrophic.
I wouldn't say 10C warming in a century is impossible but it's highly unlikely. It probably is based on a scenario where CO2 and other GHG emissions continue to increase at an accelerating rate as they have for the past century and we hit CO2 levels in the 1000 ppmv range. Why shouldn't the IPCC discuss all the scenarios that they have considered? A more likely scenario is we get our shit together eventually and keep CO2 levels under 700 ppmv and get around 3-4C of warming.
I think civilization is already starting to get a bit strained. The past couple of years haven't been particularly good for agriculture and reserves are low. The price of petroleum is high. We are using many of the planet's resources at an unsustainable rate, making us wealthy and impoverishing future generations. It can't go on forever. Human civilization currently is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet Earth and dependent on it's environment and climate. We ignore that fact at our risk.
When you can light the water coming out of your tap on fire because of the methane in it that's not a good thing. If that concentration of methane in the water only occurred after they started fracking in the area who are you going to blame?
If ur doin' it right the government is an extension of the will of the governed. If enough people were really paying attention instead of sitting fat and happy watching American Idol the politicians would be paying attention the them instead of the guys with enough money to buy their attention. After all they may have all the campaign money in the world but in the end it comes down to an election. Look how much attention the TEA Party'ers get. It's all out of proportion to their numbers in part because they are paying more attention than the average American.
Ten years is not long enough but 17 years of a cooling trend would make me reconsider. That's about how long it takes to discern a climate trend from weather noise according to a recent paper (Santer et. al. 2011).
In addressing the AC's point, I think it is possible the Earth would be warmer if we were to release all of the CO2 stored in fossil fuels than it was back before they were originally laid down. The reason being the Sun is gradually getting hotter. I read somewhere that solar output has increased about 25% in the last 3 billion years. It wouldn't have provided as much energy back when CO2 levels were extraordinarily high.
The dark ages were from the 5th to the 15th century, coinciding pretty well with the Medieval Warm Period. The blossoming of western culture and science coincided pretty well with the start of the Little Ice Age.
Tundra (thawed out permafrost) is unlikely to make good farmland for several hundred years after it thaws out at the surface and you have the issue of lower sunlight (even in summer) and day length.
and there are plenty of states without balanced budgets...
Name me one. They may do some tricks with bonded indebtedness and shifting funds but they still have a balanced budget. They may have to do some short term borrowing if revenues are less than expectations but I'm not aware of any state that carries the kind of long term debt that Federal government does.
I've never paid CA sales tax on anything I've ordered out of CA, not that I do that much. There's always a line at the bottom of the order form that says Add ?% sales tax if you are a resident of CA with a line above the total to add it.
It's been millions of years since Antarctica or Greenland have been totally ice free. None of the life of today is evolved to handle those higher temperature conditions. If it took 10,000 years to increase the temperature everything would be fine but doing it in less than 200 years is going to mess things up.
So all we need to do is release 1.744 megatons of NF3 to equal the warming of all of the CO2 we released last year. I'm not saying it isn't a potential problem but it's way down on the list right now. Let's worry about the big things first.
CFL bulbs have less mercury in them than would be released by burning coal to supply the excess power that the equivalent incandescent bulb requires. Besides, I take my CFL's to the HazMat recycling center, don't you? (I've only done that once about 4 years ago after accumulating about 8 early CFL's. Of the ones I've bought since only one has burnt out.) And why wouldn't hybrid car batteries be recyclable? Lead-acid batteries certainly are.
The CLOUD experiments will be going on for years. The recent reported results were just the first of many tests to be made. But it's true that the results of the recent experiment didn't help the argument that cosmic rays are a big factor in cloud formation. They're too preliminary and not directly applicable to the natural world.
Nothing over the next 5 years could make me change my mind. That's too short a period to separate the warming signal from the weather noise. A recent paper by Ben Santer et. al. said, based on statistical analysis, that 17 years was the minimum period to be able to separate those two so if we get a cooling trend that lasts 17 years or more that would be pretty convincing to me.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same IPCC that said we wouldn't have any glaciers by 2010, or icesheets, or that the northwest passage would be open to traffic(never mind it's been open to traffic since it was first charted). Or that there would never be snow again on various mountains, and so on and so forth. Or that we'd all be dead what was it this year? Or is it next year? I can never keep it straight with all these doomsday predictions from all these environmental groups, and government backed organizations.
Reading fail. The IPCC never said we wouldn't have glaciers or ice sheets by 2010. I'd be willing to put my whole retirement savings up to bet you can't back that statement up (and I'm 59 years old so I have some). I wouldn't call requiring a heavy duty ice breaker to get through the northwest passage in less than a couple of years "open to traffic".
Guys like you never examine the projected time frames on IPCC (and other climate scientists) statements very carefully. You think everything's going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years and if it's longer than that you don't think it's worth worrying about.
I remember all the headlines about New York city would be buried under ice as part of the new ice age to be here by the year 2000.
[citation needed]
Wanna bet!
If you keep having "bloody cold" winters for the next 10 years then you might have something. Otherwise you're just experiencing natural variation.
The 17 year figure was determined by calculating the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variability) ratio and how it changes over time. The S/N ratio for 10 years is below 1. For 32 years the S/N ratio is 3.9. So 17 years must be where the S/N ratio becomes acceptable. I imagine they specify what that is in the paper which I haven't read yet (paywalled by the AGU and I haven't had a chance to visit a library yet). I would have to think that any S/N ratio greater than 2 is plenty to separate the climate signal from natural variability. I imagine the result is pretty robust. The had over 100 years of data to use.
Catastrophic is a subjective term. What I say is the sooner and faster we start reducing and eventually eliminating net CO2 emissions the less bad the final result will be. I don't know where bad becomes catastrophic.
I wouldn't say 10C warming in a century is impossible but it's highly unlikely. It probably is based on a scenario where CO2 and other GHG emissions continue to increase at an accelerating rate as they have for the past century and we hit CO2 levels in the 1000 ppmv range. Why shouldn't the IPCC discuss all the scenarios that they have considered? A more likely scenario is we get our shit together eventually and keep CO2 levels under 700 ppmv and get around 3-4C of warming.
I think civilization is already starting to get a bit strained. The past couple of years haven't been particularly good for agriculture and reserves are low. The price of petroleum is high. We are using many of the planet's resources at an unsustainable rate, making us wealthy and impoverishing future generations. It can't go on forever. Human civilization currently is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet Earth and dependent on it's environment and climate. We ignore that fact at our risk.
When you can light the water coming out of your tap on fire because of the methane in it that's not a good thing. If that concentration of methane in the water only occurred after they started fracking in the area who are you going to blame?
Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma by the aforementioned Austin Holland of the Oklahoma Geological Survey.
If ur doin' it right the government is an extension of the will of the governed. If enough people were really paying attention instead of sitting fat and happy watching American Idol the politicians would be paying attention the them instead of the guys with enough money to buy their attention. After all they may have all the campaign money in the world but in the end it comes down to an election. Look how much attention the TEA Party'ers get. It's all out of proportion to their numbers in part because they are paying more attention than the average American.
Is that you George (W. Bush)?
Ten years is not long enough but 17 years of a cooling trend would make me reconsider. That's about how long it takes to discern a climate trend from weather noise according to a recent paper (Santer et. al. 2011).
In addressing the AC's point, I think it is possible the Earth would be warmer if we were to release all of the CO2 stored in fossil fuels than it was back before they were originally laid down. The reason being the Sun is gradually getting hotter. I read somewhere that solar output has increased about 25% in the last 3 billion years. It wouldn't have provided as much energy back when CO2 levels were extraordinarily high.
The dark ages were from the 5th to the 15th century, coinciding pretty well with the Medieval Warm Period. The blossoming of western culture and science coincided pretty well with the start of the Little Ice Age.
Tundra (thawed out permafrost) is unlikely to make good farmland for several hundred years after it thaws out at the surface and you have the issue of lower sunlight (even in summer) and day length.
and there are plenty of states without balanced budgets...
Name me one. They may do some tricks with bonded indebtedness and shifting funds but they still have a balanced budget. They may have to do some short term borrowing if revenues are less than expectations but I'm not aware of any state that carries the kind of long term debt that Federal government does.
Got any proof of that?
I've never paid CA sales tax on anything I've ordered out of CA, not that I do that much. There's always a line at the bottom of the order form that says Add ?% sales tax if you are a resident of CA with a line above the total to add it.
+10 Insightful
Bonus question: What is the proven co2 ppm we need to be at right now that would save the world?
Anything under 350 ppmv would probably be tolerable.
BTW, the science the deniers put forward is even more full of holes and uncertainty so why should we pay attention to that?
It's been millions of years since Antarctica or Greenland have been totally ice free. None of the life of today is evolved to handle those higher temperature conditions. If it took 10,000 years to increase the temperature everything would be fine but doing it in less than 200 years is going to mess things up.
Of course the "fuel" for solar panels is free. And oil may be 60-70% efficient in a heat furnace but in an IC engine it's generally under 40%.
It's all the government's fault is another strawman.
So all we need to do is release 1.744 megatons of NF3 to equal the warming of all of the CO2 we released last year. I'm not saying it isn't a potential problem but it's way down on the list right now. Let's worry about the big things first.
CFL bulbs have less mercury in them than would be released by burning coal to supply the excess power that the equivalent incandescent bulb requires. Besides, I take my CFL's to the HazMat recycling center, don't you? (I've only done that once about 4 years ago after accumulating about 8 early CFL's. Of the ones I've bought since only one has burnt out.) And why wouldn't hybrid car batteries be recyclable? Lead-acid batteries certainly are.
Where's the mod for "Brilliantly sarcastic"?
The CLOUD experiments will be going on for years. The recent reported results were just the first of many tests to be made. But it's true that the results of the recent experiment didn't help the argument that cosmic rays are a big factor in cloud formation. They're too preliminary and not directly applicable to the natural world.
Nothing over the next 5 years could make me change my mind. That's too short a period to separate the warming signal from the weather noise. A recent paper by Ben Santer et. al. said, based on statistical analysis, that 17 years was the minimum period to be able to separate those two so if we get a cooling trend that lasts 17 years or more that would be pretty convincing to me.