It is interesting that the same crowd that echos the "we just don't know" refrain gets upset whenever we invest in reducing uncertainty. Ideology will be the death of curiosity.
The contempt for curiosity held by one side of this conversation is alarming. You start by noting how numerous and complex the sources of carbon dioxide are but conclude that gathering data on this is pointless.
Quite the opposite. As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,[ no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
If they had kept nuclear the picture would be even rosier. Hopefully other countries will take a more pragmatic approach, but it is amazing what they have accomplished even while shutting down nuclear.
The U.S. is also making strides: http://climatecrocks.com/2014/... . The revolution is being spearheaded by the Tea Party who values independence from government utilities: http://climatecrocks.com/2014/... "Monopoly utilities want to extinguish the independent rooftop solar market in America to protect their socialist control of how we get our electricity.”
In Germany citizens and co-ops own about half of the solar capacity. So it is the average tax payer who both pays for and benefits from the subsides. It represents a real democratization of the energy market. "Not only has energy production in Germany been pried from the hands of the “Big Four,” namely the four utility giants that had dominated the German energy market, but it is now also radically decentralized." - http://climatecrocks.com/2014/...
It is amazing what they have achieved. Especially in the face of doubters who predicted rolling brown outs that never materialized. The next revolution needs to come in storage. I'm optimistic.
Pretty sure the ggp made up the stat about the eagle kills. Found what I could on the internets but perhaps you could dig deeper? Either way, you can't satisfy the Luddites. They would have us raze the buildings and live in the trees if they had their way.
Across North America, the estimated number of migrating birds killed annually in collisions with buildings ranges from 100 million to 1 billion birds. - http://www.flap.org/faqs.php
But the real killer... CATS! Cats may kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals in the United States alone each year, a new study has found. - http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...
You are right of course, but not according to these guys. According to them God drew an X through the universe that intersects at Earth. Earth is the center of the universe and the "loony left" is doing their best to bury that fact: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
You should read the paper. Geothermal sources are not thought to have changed over the last 100 (or 100,000) years. They cannot be the cause of recent Antarctic melting. However they could make the collapse come about all that much quicker.
It was recently reported that the west Antarctic ice sheet had hit a tipping point and would collapse completely in about 200 years after about 9000 years of stability. The models used to conclude this would not have taken into account the high geothermal sources under the antarctic. The date of collapse may need to be revised forward taking into account this new data.
So no, I don't think this study upends any existing science. It is just one more data point.
Read the paper instead of making inferences from a summary that is significantly lacking in details.
If you look at the poster's history you would be forgiven for thinking that he intentionally submitted a misleading summary. Story should be tagged "bricko".
Contrarians have been predicting global cooling for decades. Who cares? They have been wrong for decades and will continue to be wrong. But I will one up your three nutty links with one of my own. If you are into the fringe you may also be interested these contrarians who can 'prove' that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that there is a great liberal conspiracy to keep this out of the journals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Earth is getting warmer because of radiative physics related to increased greenhouse gasses.
We don't have much more than a few data points on Martian temperatures, so it is not really possible to know whether there are any long term warming or cooling trends. Mars has no oceans and only a very thin atmosphere, which means there is very little thermal inertia. This makes Mars more susceptible to large swings in temperature. Orbital eccentricity contributes far greater changes to Martian climate than to that of the Earth because variations in Mars' orbit are five times greater than the Earth. Massive dust storms may also play a big role in changing the energy balance.
The only papers I can find on Venus indicate that it is likely cooling, but again, data points are sparse so it is inconclusive.
One thing is for certain. If they are warming, it is not because of a warming sun. We know this for sure because the sun has been cooling over the last 40 years.
The researchers mapped geothermal sources, but didn't find an increase in geothermal sources under the WAIS, Something else likely triggered the melting, but the geothermal sources may make this ice sheet more unstable than previously thought. This may explain why we hit the tipping point so much sooner than we had expected.
That is not true. The WAIS last lost mass as we came out of the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. It melted to its current state at that time: http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/...
Neighboring planets are poor proxies for solar output, especially since we have direct measurements from the sun itself. Solar output has been dwindling since the 80's: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
To be clear, the researchers did not find an increase in geothermal activity under the west Antarctic ice sheet, they just mapped sources of geothermal activity and found that there were significant sources. If the models do not take these into account they may greatly underestimate the rate of collapse.
Well, could trust a blog, or check the peer reviewed science?
What are the predictions of climate models, should we believe them, and are they falsifiable? Probably the most iconic and influential result arising from climate models is the prediction that, dependent on the rate of increase of CO2 emissions, global and annual mean temperature will rise by around 2–4C over the 21st century. We argue that this result is indeed credible, as are the supplementary predictions that the land will on average warm by around 50% more than the oceans, high latitudes more than the tropics, and that the hydrological cycle will generally intensify. Beyond these and similar broad statements, however, we presently find little evidence of trustworthy predictions at fine spatial scale and annual to decadal timescale from climate models. -- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Oh lord. I guess every other group studying global temperatures is part of the conspiracy? They all seem to find similar warming, We're supposed to trust some pseudonymous blogger rather than peer reviewed science?
In what way was his predecessor not? Only in the minds of the paranoid conspiracy nut. His predecessor was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996 for his "development of pioneering radiative transfer models and studies of planetary atmospheres; development of simplified and three-dimensional global climate models; explication of climate forcing mechanisms; analysis of current climate trends from observational data; and projections of anthropogenic impacts on the global climate system."
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting that the same crowd that echos the "we just don't know" refrain gets upset whenever we invest in reducing uncertainty. Ideology will be the death of curiosity.
Who should be developing and launching the satellites for our scientific endeavors if not NASA?
The contempt for curiosity held by one side of this conversation is alarming. You start by noting how numerous and complex the sources of carbon dioxide are but conclude that gathering data on this is pointless.
Quite the opposite. As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,[ no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Record levels? Not even close. Not even half: http://euanmearns.com/energiew...
If they had kept nuclear the picture would be even rosier. Hopefully other countries will take a more pragmatic approach, but it is amazing what they have accomplished even while shutting down nuclear.
Solar is being adopted largely by the middle class: http://climatecrocks.com/2013/...
The U.S. is also making strides: http://climatecrocks.com/2014/... . The revolution is being spearheaded by the Tea Party who values independence from government utilities: http://climatecrocks.com/2014/... "Monopoly utilities want to extinguish the independent rooftop solar market in America to protect their socialist control of how we get our electricity.”
In Germany citizens and co-ops own about half of the solar capacity. So it is the average tax payer who both pays for and benefits from the subsides. It represents a real democratization of the energy market. "Not only has energy production in Germany been pried from the hands of the “Big Four,” namely the four utility giants that had dominated the German energy market, but it is now also radically decentralized." - http://climatecrocks.com/2014/...
It is amazing what they have achieved. Especially in the face of doubters who predicted rolling brown outs that never materialized. The next revolution needs to come in storage. I'm optimistic.
Pretty sure the ggp made up the stat about the eagle kills. Found what I could on the internets but perhaps you could dig deeper? Either way, you can't satisfy the Luddites. They would have us raze the buildings and live in the trees if they had their way.
Across North America, the estimated number of migrating birds killed annually in collisions with buildings ranges from 100 million to 1 billion birds. - http://www.flap.org/faqs.php
Somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 million birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
But the real killer ... CATS! Cats may kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals in the United States alone each year, a new study has found. - http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...
undomod
Obviously you are part of the "loony left" conspiracy. ;)
You are right of course, but not according to these guys. According to them God drew an X through the universe that intersects at Earth. Earth is the center of the universe and the "loony left" is doing their best to bury that fact: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
You should read the paper. Geothermal sources are not thought to have changed over the last 100 (or 100,000) years. They cannot be the cause of recent Antarctic melting. However they could make the collapse come about all that much quicker.
It was recently reported that the west Antarctic ice sheet had hit a tipping point and would collapse completely in about 200 years after about 9000 years of stability. The models used to conclude this would not have taken into account the high geothermal sources under the antarctic. The date of collapse may need to be revised forward taking into account this new data.
So no, I don't think this study upends any existing science. It is just one more data point.
Read the paper instead of making inferences from a summary that is significantly lacking in details.
If you look at the poster's history you would be forgiven for thinking that he intentionally submitted a misleading summary. Story should be tagged "bricko".
Contrarians have been predicting global cooling for decades. Who cares? They have been wrong for decades and will continue to be wrong. But I will one up your three nutty links with one of my own. If you are into the fringe you may also be interested these contrarians who can 'prove' that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that there is a great liberal conspiracy to keep this out of the journals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
We don't have much more than a few data points on Martian temperatures, so it is not really possible to know whether there are any long term warming or cooling trends. Mars has no oceans and only a very thin atmosphere, which means there is very little thermal inertia. This makes Mars more susceptible to large swings in temperature. Orbital eccentricity contributes far greater changes to Martian climate than to that of the Earth because variations in Mars' orbit are five times greater than the Earth. Massive dust storms may also play a big role in changing the energy balance.
The only papers I can find on Venus indicate that it is likely cooling, but again, data points are sparse so it is inconclusive.
One thing is for certain. If they are warming, it is not because of a warming sun. We know this for sure because the sun has been cooling over the last 40 years.
The researchers mapped geothermal sources, but didn't find an increase in geothermal sources under the WAIS, Something else likely triggered the melting, but the geothermal sources may make this ice sheet more unstable than previously thought. This may explain why we hit the tipping point so much sooner than we had expected.
That is not true. The WAIS last lost mass as we came out of the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. It melted to its current state at that time: http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/...
Neighboring planets are poor proxies for solar output, especially since we have direct measurements from the sun itself. Solar output has been dwindling since the 80's: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
To be clear, the researchers did not find an increase in geothermal activity under the west Antarctic ice sheet, they just mapped sources of geothermal activity and found that there were significant sources. If the models do not take these into account they may greatly underestimate the rate of collapse.
Well, could trust a blog, or check the peer reviewed science?
What are the predictions of climate models, should we believe them, and are they falsifiable? Probably the most iconic and influential result arising from climate models is the prediction that, dependent on the rate of increase of CO2 emissions, global and annual mean temperature will rise by around 2–4C over the 21st century. We argue that this result is indeed credible, as are the supplementary predictions that the land will on average warm by around 50% more than the oceans, high latitudes more than the tropics, and that the hydrological cycle will generally intensify. Beyond these and similar broad statements, however, we presently find little evidence of trustworthy predictions at fine spatial scale and annual to decadal timescale from climate models. -- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Down with scientific outreach!
Oh lord. I guess every other group studying global temperatures is part of the conspiracy? They all seem to find similar warming, We're supposed to trust some pseudonymous blogger rather than peer reviewed science?
In what way was his predecessor not? Only in the minds of the paranoid conspiracy nut. His predecessor was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996 for his "development of pioneering radiative transfer models and studies of planetary atmospheres; development of simplified and three-dimensional global climate models; explication of climate forcing mechanisms; analysis of current climate trends from observational data; and projections of anthropogenic impacts on the global climate system."