There are plenty of reasons why the past decade+ has had a lower rate of temperature rise than expected. Among them are the current solar cycle was lower than expected, there have been some relatively small but regular volcanic eruptions putting aerosols in the atmosphere, aerosols from industrialization in SE Asia have suppressed temperatures somewhat, the PDO has been in a negative phase, La Nina's have dominated over El Nino's. Put those and some other things together and you get a lower rate of temperature rise. The oceans where over 93% of the heat goes have continued to heat up.
Hmm... lets see. In Edmonton, Alberta the sunrise and sunset times on November 15, 2014 are 8:00 am and 4:36 pm respectively. In Chicago, Illinois that day the sunrise and sunset times are 6:40 am and 4:30 pm. That's 1 hour and 16 minutes less daylight in Edmonton in the middle of November which I'd say is significant. Sunrise and sunset calculator.
You're right. As an experiment to show CO2 causes warming it totally has sucked, because it shows in fact the opposite - over a decade without warming even as CO2 emissions continue to increase.
Of course if you compare the scale of the warming caused by increased CO2 to the scale of temperature variations due to natural variation it's not surprising that over a decade or two natural variation can override the warming due to CO2. It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady often overcomes quick and mercurial in the long run.
3. Reducing CO2 emissions, isn't that Geo-engineering?
You've got the logic backwards. Raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the last 200+ years has been geoengineering. Reducing CO2 emissions would be cutting back on the geoengineering.
Even if the Sun went into a new Maunder Minimum it wouldn't lead to a New Little Ice Age. There's far to much CO2 in the atmosphere now for that to happen. Scientists have analyzed the effect of a new Maunder Minimum and at most it would delay warming by 10 or 20 years.
Huge tracts of land in Canada and Russia are plagued by short growing seasons. Would a longer growing season in these regions allow us to grow more food to feed the (7 billion?) people of earth?
Even if the temperatures get warmer in those regions it won't change the amount of sunlight they get. Many crops are very sensitive to day length. The winters will still get cold in those regions because of the short days. Many perennial crops won't be able to handle the cold winters.
Well, in the last two thousand years, we've had the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. So we've had some genuinely large variation.
The difference between the height of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age was about 1 degree C. That's pretty large but not as large as you seem to think.
Sure. Let's engineer it. Just tell me what the optimum global mean temperature is, and I'll get right on it.
There is no optimal temperature for the Earth. What there is is too great a rate of change of temperature. If the temperature changes we're seeing over the past 100 years and the next 100 years were to happen over 2,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem because the natural world would be able to more easily adapt. At this point it's not clear how well the natural systems that help sustain all life on Earth will be able to adapt to the current rate of change.
One problem with a sunshade (either mirrors in orbit or aerosols in the stratosphere) is that if you reduce the sunlight hitting the Earth you also reduce the productivity of the plants that depend on sunlight to photosynthesize. Whether it's enough to significantly affect things or not I don't know but it will be an effect.
The problem is, we can't even prove global warming even a little bit. And that is not exactly what the Global Warming Alarmists were telling us a few years ago about how bad it was going to get very quickly (no ice in the arctic, super hurricanes, polar bears drowning)... ALL of which didn't happen, but didn't happen spectacularly.
Your attitude is typical of so many today who have short attention spans. Mostly you pay no attention to the time scales placed on those statements and if it doesn't happen in 5 or 10 years (to be generous) it's not real to you.
Current events have yet to show that Al Gore was wrong in any significant way.
But overshooting on cooling could induce an ice age, which geologists have evidence can occur in as little as two years.
[citation needed]
According to climate scientists it's impossible for a new glaciation to start until CO2 levels drop below 250 ppm. Even if geoengineering starts heading us toward an induced ice age all we have to do is stop the geoengineering to head it off.
I don't know where you get your "upper-bound projected sea level rise of 4 inches". 4 feet by 2100 is more realistic. The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now sea level was around 80 feet higher than now. It may be that that much rise is already baked in and it's just a matter of how long it takes to get there (don't worry, it's still a matter of many centuries at least).
How about incorporating proteins from bacillus thuringiensis in corn or other plants. Essentially that's a pesticide and while it's not toxic to humans it is to other arthropods and could attack beneficial species as well as the target species.
The problem I have with geoengineering is that once you start it you can never stop. As long as CO2 levels keep rising or don't drop down into the 350 ppm range you can never stop whatever geoengineering you've done to mitigate the CO2. If you stop all the effects you've been holding back just come on with a vengeance and you get the bad effects anyway. Do you* really think human civilization will be able to maintain that kind of effort over a scale of centuries? The only geoengineering that works in the long run is to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2 and actively reduce it back to something under 350 ppm.
*That "you" wasn't addressed to you personally i kan read but just the general you. I know where you stand on the issues.
It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average
Which also has not been warming either for the past decade or so.:-)
For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.
Ah, such a simple way of looking at it. But the increase in energy retained on the Earth by enhanced greenhouse warming manifests itself in several ways. Not only can the troposphere warm up but the oceans and the land surface can warm up and ice can melt. When you look at the whole picture it's obvious that the Earth continues to warm.
Since around 93% of the warming goes into the oceans normally is doesn't take much of a shift to make a difference in tropospheric warming which is what you've been seeing. There are some hints that that situation may be about to swing back to the situation we had in the 1980's and 1990's so all I can say is enjoy your "no warming for the past decade or so" while you can, it won't last.
Social Security will die very soon. Ponzi schemes always fail.
They were saying the same thing 50 years ago when I was a kid. SS has enough reserves to pay full benefits into the 2030's. All it would take to extend that significantly is to bump the top income subject to FICA up $20,000 or so.
As far as the Solyndra thing goes, it is like this. The federal government has no place picking winners and losers.
The whole point of that loan program was to support promising technologies that private lenders were unwilling to risk lending to. When it was created by Congress it was budgeted for around an 11% failure rate and so far it's less than 7%. The companies in the loan program who have been successful have opened the way for other companies to follow them by showing private lenders that the risk is worth it. The federal government didn't pick winners and losers, they just enabled some things that were having a difficult time in the private market and most of them worked out.
Now the air you breath out is a pollutant.
If you really believe that and it's not just a throw away line you're pretty clueless.
Increased lightning will create more ozone pollution and more global warming Lightning creates nitrogen oxides, which in turn react to make significant amounts of ozone in the lower atmosphere--a dangerous pollutant that seriously impacts human health and crop growth. Ozone is also a greenhouse gas, so global warming-caused increases in lightning could potentially cause additional global warming of a few percent. How much is uncertain, as estimates of lightning-produced nitrogen oxides vary by up to a factor of four. Lower-atmosphere ozone was responsible for about 12% of human-caused global warming due to greenhouse gases in 2011, according to the 2013 IPCC report. However, increased ozone due to lightning could be offset somewhat by the fact that lightning-created nitrogen oxides trigger chemical reactions that help destroy methane, another potent greenhouse gas.
We were told that hurricanes, for example, would be increasing dramatically in the short term. The incidence of hurricanes - and hurricane severity - has gone down, for much the same reason as the article gives for increased lightning strikes.
The number of tropical storms (which includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) hasn't necessarily increased but there is scientific evidence that the severity has increased. Here's one study from 2005.
Medicare is well liked by most of its recipients and has very low overhead compared to private insurance.
Federally sponsored research in the ARPA lead to the basic infrastructure of of the internet. In general federal support of scientific and engineering has produced far more benefits than it has cost us.
The problem with making election day a national holiday is that we usually have more than one day of elections in a year. Maybe it's enough just to make the 2nd Tuesday in November a holiday but you've also got the primary elections and special elections that come up from time to time. I can remember having as many as 4 elections in a year. I think it would be better to have more than one day for an election and have it over a weekend, perhaps Saturday to Monday or Friday to Sunday. I like our system here in Oregon with vote-by-mail where I get my ballot at least 14 days before the election and can turn it in anytime before 8:00 PM on election day.
Yes, the younger generation would understand it better but I doubt even a quarter of them would either. It's mainly computer geeks like us that understand that.
Slashdot Mirror
I938 may have been hotter in the contiguous US but globally it wasn't anywhere near the hottest year.
There are plenty of reasons why the past decade+ has had a lower rate of temperature rise than expected. Among them are the current solar cycle was lower than expected, there have been some relatively small but regular volcanic eruptions putting aerosols in the atmosphere, aerosols from industrialization in SE Asia have suppressed temperatures somewhat, the PDO has been in a negative phase, La Nina's have dominated over El Nino's. Put those and some other things together and you get a lower rate of temperature rise. The oceans where over 93% of the heat goes have continued to heat up.
Hmm... lets see. In Edmonton, Alberta the sunrise and sunset times on November 15, 2014 are 8:00 am and 4:36 pm respectively. In Chicago, Illinois that day the sunrise and sunset times are 6:40 am and 4:30 pm. That's 1 hour and 16 minutes less daylight in Edmonton in the middle of November which I'd say is significant. Sunrise and sunset calculator.
Oh really?
You're right. As an experiment to show CO2 causes warming it totally has sucked, because it shows in fact the opposite - over a decade without warming even as CO2 emissions continue to increase.
Of course if you compare the scale of the warming caused by increased CO2 to the scale of temperature variations due to natural variation it's not surprising that over a decade or two natural variation can override the warming due to CO2. It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady often overcomes quick and mercurial in the long run.
3. Reducing CO2 emissions, isn't that Geo-engineering?
You've got the logic backwards. Raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the last 200+ years has been geoengineering. Reducing CO2 emissions would be cutting back on the geoengineering.
Someone ought to figure out how much reduction there will be in agricultural output due to the reduced sunlight first.
Even if the Sun went into a new Maunder Minimum it wouldn't lead to a New Little Ice Age. There's far to much CO2 in the atmosphere now for that to happen. Scientists have analyzed the effect of a new Maunder Minimum and at most it would delay warming by 10 or 20 years.
Huge tracts of land in Canada and Russia are plagued by short growing seasons. Would a longer growing season in these regions allow us to grow more food to feed the (7 billion?) people of earth?
Even if the temperatures get warmer in those regions it won't change the amount of sunlight they get. Many crops are very sensitive to day length. The winters will still get cold in those regions because of the short days. Many perennial crops won't be able to handle the cold winters.
Well, in the last two thousand years, we've had the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. So we've had some genuinely large variation.
The difference between the height of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age was about 1 degree C. That's pretty large but not as large as you seem to think.
Sure. Let's engineer it. Just tell me what the optimum global mean temperature is, and I'll get right on it.
There is no optimal temperature for the Earth. What there is is too great a rate of change of temperature. If the temperature changes we're seeing over the past 100 years and the next 100 years were to happen over 2,000 years it wouldn't be that much of a problem because the natural world would be able to more easily adapt. At this point it's not clear how well the natural systems that help sustain all life on Earth will be able to adapt to the current rate of change.
One problem with a sunshade (either mirrors in orbit or aerosols in the stratosphere) is that if you reduce the sunlight hitting the Earth you also reduce the productivity of the plants that depend on sunlight to photosynthesize. Whether it's enough to significantly affect things or not I don't know but it will be an effect.
The problem is, we can't even prove global warming even a little bit. And that is not exactly what the Global Warming Alarmists were telling us a few years ago about how bad it was going to get very quickly (no ice in the arctic, super hurricanes, polar bears drowning) ... ALL of which didn't happen, but didn't happen spectacularly.
Your attitude is typical of so many today who have short attention spans. Mostly you pay no attention to the time scales placed on those statements and if it doesn't happen in 5 or 10 years (to be generous) it's not real to you.
Current events have yet to show that Al Gore was wrong in any significant way.
But overshooting on cooling could induce an ice age, which geologists have evidence can occur in as little as two years.
[citation needed]
According to climate scientists it's impossible for a new glaciation to start until CO2 levels drop below 250 ppm. Even if geoengineering starts heading us toward an induced ice age all we have to do is stop the geoengineering to head it off.
I don't know where you get your "upper-bound projected sea level rise of 4 inches". 4 feet by 2100 is more realistic. The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now sea level was around 80 feet higher than now. It may be that that much rise is already baked in and it's just a matter of how long it takes to get there (don't worry, it's still a matter of many centuries at least).
How about incorporating proteins from bacillus thuringiensis in corn or other plants. Essentially that's a pesticide and while it's not toxic to humans it is to other arthropods and could attack beneficial species as well as the target species.
The problem I have with geoengineering is that once you start it you can never stop. As long as CO2 levels keep rising or don't drop down into the 350 ppm range you can never stop whatever geoengineering you've done to mitigate the CO2. If you stop all the effects you've been holding back just come on with a vengeance and you get the bad effects anyway. Do you* really think human civilization will be able to maintain that kind of effort over a scale of centuries? The only geoengineering that works in the long run is to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2 and actively reduce it back to something under 350 ppm.
*That "you" wasn't addressed to you personally i kan read but just the general you. I know where you stand on the issues.
It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average
Which also has not been warming either for the past decade or so. :-)
For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.
Ah, such a simple way of looking at it. But the increase in energy retained on the Earth by enhanced greenhouse warming manifests itself in several ways. Not only can the troposphere warm up but the oceans and the land surface can warm up and ice can melt. When you look at the whole picture it's obvious that the Earth continues to warm.
Since around 93% of the warming goes into the oceans normally is doesn't take much of a shift to make a difference in tropospheric warming which is what you've been seeing. There are some hints that that situation may be about to swing back to the situation we had in the 1980's and 1990's so all I can say is enjoy your "no warming for the past decade or so" while you can, it won't last.
I'm not against nuclear power but I have a hard time seeing how it's going to compete on costs with solar and wind in the long run.
Social Security will die very soon. Ponzi schemes always fail.
They were saying the same thing 50 years ago when I was a kid. SS has enough reserves to pay full benefits into the 2030's. All it would take to extend that significantly is to bump the top income subject to FICA up $20,000 or so.
As far as the Solyndra thing goes, it is like this. The federal government has no place picking winners and losers.
The whole point of that loan program was to support promising technologies that private lenders were unwilling to risk lending to. When it was created by Congress it was budgeted for around an 11% failure rate and so far it's less than 7%. The companies in the loan program who have been successful have opened the way for other companies to follow them by showing private lenders that the risk is worth it. The federal government didn't pick winners and losers, they just enabled some things that were having a difficult time in the private market and most of them worked out.
Now the air you breath out is a pollutant.
If you really believe that and it's not just a throw away line you're pretty clueless.
Yes lightning produces nitrogen oxides which in turn can produce ozone. From a post on the study by Dr. Jeff Masters at .
Increased lightning will create more ozone pollution and more global warming
Lightning creates nitrogen oxides, which in turn react to make significant amounts of ozone in the lower atmosphere--a dangerous pollutant that seriously impacts human health and crop growth. Ozone is also a greenhouse gas, so global warming-caused increases in lightning could potentially cause additional global warming of a few percent. How much is uncertain, as estimates of lightning-produced nitrogen oxides vary by up to a factor of four. Lower-atmosphere ozone was responsible for about 12% of human-caused global warming due to greenhouse gases in 2011, according to the 2013 IPCC report. However, increased ozone due to lightning could be offset somewhat by the fact that lightning-created nitrogen oxides trigger chemical reactions that help destroy methane, another potent greenhouse gas.
We were told that hurricanes, for example, would be increasing dramatically in the short term. The incidence of hurricanes - and hurricane severity - has gone down, for much the same reason as the article gives for increased lightning strikes.
The number of tropical storms (which includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) hasn't necessarily increased but there is scientific evidence that the severity has increased. Here's one study from 2005.
Social Security has paid out all benefits owed since its inception with an overhead of less than 3%.
The infamous loan program under which Solyndra failed is expected to profit taxpayers by $5 billion over its lifetime.
The Clean Air Act has produced far more benefits than costs. This page has some links. The Second Prospective Study 1990-2020 estimates $65 billion in costs for $2 trillion in benefits.
Medicare is well liked by most of its recipients and has very low overhead compared to private insurance.
Federally sponsored research in the ARPA lead to the basic infrastructure of of the internet. In general federal support of scientific and engineering has produced far more benefits than it has cost us.
The problem with making election day a national holiday is that we usually have more than one day of elections in a year. Maybe it's enough just to make the 2nd Tuesday in November a holiday but you've also got the primary elections and special elections that come up from time to time. I can remember having as many as 4 elections in a year. I think it would be better to have more than one day for an election and have it over a weekend, perhaps Saturday to Monday or Friday to Sunday. I like our system here in Oregon with vote-by-mail where I get my ballot at least 14 days before the election and can turn it in anytime before 8:00 PM on election day.
Yes, the younger generation would understand it better but I doubt even a quarter of them would either. It's mainly computer geeks like us that understand that.