Not to mention reducing ocean acidification. A significant portion of the human food supply comes from the oceans and acidification is bound to affect that.
No competent climate scientist has ever said that a change in the climate baseline must necessarily be a result of man-made activity. They approach it from the opposite direction. The climate baseline is changing. It changes for reasons that we can understand. What are the things that affect climate? How are those things changing and what affect do those changes have on climate? From answering those questions they determined the change having the biggest effect on climate at this time is the increase in greenhouse gases (GHG's), mostly CO2, in the atmosphere. So what is the source of the increase in GHG's in the atmosphere? The answer they found was most of the increase is due to human activities, mostly from burning fossil fuels. GHG's released into the atmosphere, particularly CO2 quickly diffuse to and even spread throughout the atmosphere. That by definition is a global effect.
Personally I wouldn't call weather satellites, communication satellites and GPS satellites a hobby. NASA spends more on Earth facing satellites than all of the others put together.
I think if you're wealthy enough not to work you send your kids to some high end private school. I think most home schoolers do it because they have ideological/religious differences with what public schools teach.
What a great jobs program that would be. Duplicating effort in each state for phenomena that are regional and global in scale. Where do you think the locals get their information from? Also, what state is going to launch weather satellites?
Freight rail got their right-of-ways mostly by Federal Government grants. Shipping and barges use government built facilities extensively. Here in Oregon the Port of Portland and the shipping on the Columbia River wouldn't be possible without the government dredging of the lower river and the dams with locks upriver from Portland.
Freight rail is/was heavily subsidized by the Federal government since that was how they got the right-of-ways to build their rail lines. Even oceanic shipping is subsidized by the port facilities they use that are at least partially government supported.
Isn't that pretty much what I said? How is any one year more or less scientifically valid than any other to take in computing this trend?
In a statistical science like climate science generally the longer the trend period the more accurately it reflects the true situation. I don't think anything less than about 20 years is likely to be reasonable for detecting climate temperature trends. Climate scientists mostly use 30 years. The only years you can use to show a negative temperature trend are all less than 20 years ago.
There really is very little debate in the climate science community over global warming. Snow in Baghdad, cold winters in Peru and Chicago are anecdotes, examples of natural variability in weather. If Chicago continues to have colder than normal winters for most of the next 20 years then maybe you have something. The polar regions warming more than other regions is a predicted effect of global warming.
I would say the "normal" temperature would be what it would be without the influence of human caused factors. But that's not really the issue. Our civilization, its infrastructure, agricultural and food systems are built around the climate as it has been and change will be disruptive. The greater and faster the climate change the more disruptive it's bound to be. That disruption will cost money to deal with as we have to adjust to changing conditions.
What does global warming theory have to do with the proposed solutions? Climate theory is a scientific endeavor to understand how the Earth's climate works. It is based on empirical knowledge. Since that theory points in the direction of increasing CO2 levels being the primary cause of the sharp warming trend we've seen since the 1970's the obvious scientific solution is to quit increasing CO2. Since the main cause of the increased CO2 levels is human burning of fossil fuels the obvious solution is to cut back and eventually end the use of fossil fuels. I'd love it if the free market had a answer for that but it is notoriously poor at accounting for the long term (like 50-100 years out). I'd love to hear your solution for that but as far as I can see the government, as the agent of its citizens, is the only thing that can force the free market to look longer term.
I'm realistic too. It will take at least 30-40 years to wean ourselves from fossil fuels but the sooner we get serious about it the less costly it will be in the long run. I'm not against nuclear power per se but it is one of the most expensive ways to produce power. Solar PV power is already cheaper than nuclear power. Recently some proposed coal plants were cancelled because at the rate the cost of solar PV is dropping they will be cheaper than coal by no later than 2020.
The main reason no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's is economics, not government interference. The cost of building and operating coal power and now natural gas power is so much cheaper than nuclear power that it doesn't pencil out. The only organization that is going to fund research to create safer, cheaper nuclear power is the government. It's too expensive and takes too long for the payoff to materialize for private entities to take it on unless the answer is already obvious.
Saying "government is the problem, not the solution" is too simplistic to me. What it really comes down to is how involved the citizens are. If enough of us want something to happen it will* but until the past few years we've been mostly to fat and happy to care that much about it. Now we have the TEA Party and Occupy Wall Street so things appear to be picking up.
*The 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18 took only about 4 months to be passed in the Senate and House and ratified by enough states.
You deal with the data you've got. Climate scientists in general have little power to specify where weather stations are placed. The other thing to keep in mind is that climate science is more interested in how temperatures change over time, not so much what the absolute temperature is. So even if a station is placed somewhere where the reading is affected by non-weather influences it may still accurately reflect how temperature is changing over time.
You are right, it does say that. But at the same time the temperature graph doesn't show any increase in temperatures during the last two millennia until the recent sharp increase.
That's precisely why I said "the end of the last glacial period" rather than "the end of the last ice age". We are in an interglacial period of the current ice age right now.
It's not an environmental movement concept. Hubbert in 1956 accurately predicted peak oil for the US to be in the late 1960's to early 1970's. No reason the concept shouldn't apply to the world.
AC is right. Sea level is going to continue rising by millimeters per year (maybe centimeters by 2100) so you hardly notice it. But then along comes a hurricane and the storm surge floods places that have never been flooded before along with the concomitant destruction of property and loss of lives. At some point it becomes untenable to maintain the infrastructure too close to sea level. Expected sea level rise by 2100 is in the 3-6 foot range.
The fact that global warming has increased the level of water vapor in the atmosphere by about 4% since the 1960's means that there is more water to produce heavier rainfall which would produce larger floods. Global climate is the base on which weather occurs and global warming/climate change changes that base.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention reducing ocean acidification. A significant portion of the human food supply comes from the oceans and acidification is bound to affect that.
No competent climate scientist has ever said that a change in the climate baseline must necessarily be a result of man-made activity. They approach it from the opposite direction. The climate baseline is changing. It changes for reasons that we can understand. What are the things that affect climate? How are those things changing and what affect do those changes have on climate? From answering those questions they determined the change having the biggest effect on climate at this time is the increase in greenhouse gases (GHG's), mostly CO2, in the atmosphere. So what is the source of the increase in GHG's in the atmosphere? The answer they found was most of the increase is due to human activities, mostly from burning fossil fuels. GHG's released into the atmosphere, particularly CO2 quickly diffuse to and even spread throughout the atmosphere. That by definition is a global effect.
Personally I wouldn't call weather satellites, communication satellites and GPS satellites a hobby. NASA spends more on Earth facing satellites than all of the others put together.
I think if you're wealthy enough not to work you send your kids to some high end private school. I think most home schoolers do it because they have ideological/religious differences with what public schools teach.
What a great jobs program that would be. Duplicating effort in each state for phenomena that are regional and global in scale. Where do you think the locals get their information from? Also, what state is going to launch weather satellites?
What state government is going to launch GPS satellites? Or even try to develop it in the first place?
They already are. The main tsunami detection system for the Pacific Ocean is the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center operated by NOAA.
+1 Insightful
You help pay for my tsunami, earthquake and volcano warnings and I'll help pay for your hurricane, tornado and blizzard warnings.
Freight rail got their right-of-ways mostly by Federal Government grants. Shipping and barges use government built facilities extensively. Here in Oregon the Port of Portland and the shipping on the Columbia River wouldn't be possible without the government dredging of the lower river and the dams with locks upriver from Portland.
Freight rail is/was heavily subsidized by the Federal government since that was how they got the right-of-ways to build their rail lines. Even oceanic shipping is subsidized by the port facilities they use that are at least partially government supported.
I think you're on to something there. :)
Water vapor is not evenly distributed through the atmosphere which means there can still be droughts too.
Isn't that pretty much what I said? How is any one year more or less scientifically valid than any other to take in computing this trend?
In a statistical science like climate science generally the longer the trend period the more accurately it reflects the true situation. I don't think anything less than about 20 years is likely to be reasonable for detecting climate temperature trends. Climate scientists mostly use 30 years. The only years you can use to show a negative temperature trend are all less than 20 years ago.
There really is very little debate in the climate science community over global warming. Snow in Baghdad, cold winters in Peru and Chicago are anecdotes, examples of natural variability in weather. If Chicago continues to have colder than normal winters for most of the next 20 years then maybe you have something. The polar regions warming more than other regions is a predicted effect of global warming.
I would say the "normal" temperature would be what it would be without the influence of human caused factors. But that's not really the issue. Our civilization, its infrastructure, agricultural and food systems are built around the climate as it has been and change will be disruptive. The greater and faster the climate change the more disruptive it's bound to be. That disruption will cost money to deal with as we have to adjust to changing conditions.
What does global warming theory have to do with the proposed solutions? Climate theory is a scientific endeavor to understand how the Earth's climate works. It is based on empirical knowledge. Since that theory points in the direction of increasing CO2 levels being the primary cause of the sharp warming trend we've seen since the 1970's the obvious scientific solution is to quit increasing CO2. Since the main cause of the increased CO2 levels is human burning of fossil fuels the obvious solution is to cut back and eventually end the use of fossil fuels. I'd love it if the free market had a answer for that but it is notoriously poor at accounting for the long term (like 50-100 years out). I'd love to hear your solution for that but as far as I can see the government, as the agent of its citizens, is the only thing that can force the free market to look longer term.
I'm realistic too. It will take at least 30-40 years to wean ourselves from fossil fuels but the sooner we get serious about it the less costly it will be in the long run. I'm not against nuclear power per se but it is one of the most expensive ways to produce power. Solar PV power is already cheaper than nuclear power. Recently some proposed coal plants were cancelled because at the rate the cost of solar PV is dropping they will be cheaper than coal by no later than 2020.
The main reason no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's is economics, not government interference. The cost of building and operating coal power and now natural gas power is so much cheaper than nuclear power that it doesn't pencil out. The only organization that is going to fund research to create safer, cheaper nuclear power is the government. It's too expensive and takes too long for the payoff to materialize for private entities to take it on unless the answer is already obvious.
Saying "government is the problem, not the solution" is too simplistic to me. What it really comes down to is how involved the citizens are. If enough of us want something to happen it will* but until the past few years we've been mostly to fat and happy to care that much about it. Now we have the TEA Party and Occupy Wall Street so things appear to be picking up.
*The 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18 took only about 4 months to be passed in the Senate and House and ratified by enough states.
You deal with the data you've got. Climate scientists in general have little power to specify where weather stations are placed. The other thing to keep in mind is that climate science is more interested in how temperatures change over time, not so much what the absolute temperature is. So even if a station is placed somewhere where the reading is affected by non-weather influences it may still accurately reflect how temperature is changing over time.
Did you miss where I said "peak oil for the US". That refers to domestic production in the United States. Hubbert's prediction was accurate.
But you probably weren't even an itch in your dad's pants then.
Bzzzt! I was born in 1952.
You are right, it does say that. But at the same time the temperature graph doesn't show any increase in temperatures during the last two millennia until the recent sharp increase.
That's precisely why I said "the end of the last glacial period" rather than "the end of the last ice age". We are in an interglacial period of the current ice age right now.
If we pick one year I can show "scientifically" that the temperature is rising. If I pick another the "science" shows global cooling.
No, if you cherry pick one or two particular years you can show a cooling trend up to 2010, if you pick any other year you will see a warming trend.
It's not an environmental movement concept. Hubbert in 1956 accurately predicted peak oil for the US to be in the late 1960's to early 1970's. No reason the concept shouldn't apply to the world.
So go read the actual peer reviewed paper that article is based on. (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010). They are not in the armchair climatologist class.
AC is right. Sea level is going to continue rising by millimeters per year (maybe centimeters by 2100) so you hardly notice it. But then along comes a hurricane and the storm surge floods places that have never been flooded before along with the concomitant destruction of property and loss of lives. At some point it becomes untenable to maintain the infrastructure too close to sea level. Expected sea level rise by 2100 is in the 3-6 foot range.
That has been looked at and it doesn't appear that even if the Sun went into a Maunder minimum type period it would be enough to stop global warming. How would a Solar Grand Minimum affect global warming.
The fact that global warming has increased the level of water vapor in the atmosphere by about 4% since the 1960's means that there is more water to produce heavier rainfall which would produce larger floods. Global climate is the base on which weather occurs and global warming/climate change changes that base.
And you think climate scientists are too stupid to take those factors into account. The effects of those things has been studied and compensated for.