We just came out of an ice age recently by geologic standards. On the scale of human civilization, which is what most of us are concerned about here, that happened a long time ago. And the last ~10ka, in which most of what we now think of as civilization has been created, has been climatically stable to an unprecedented degree.
Of all the arguments often made against the importance of climate change, the one that makes the least sense to me is the one you just made.
No, it's not a long timeframe geologically speaking, but human civilization doesn't operate on geologic timescales. And the warming we're seeing (and what will likely occur in the future, even according to the most conservative models) is on the same order as that seen in glacial/interglacial cycles but is happening on human timescales. That's the whole problem. . . we've never had to deal with climate change this large while at the same time juggling the lives of >6 billion people at the same time.
As far as functionality is concerned, actually, ESRI and others have been able to do everything that Google Earth does since back in the days of ArcView 3.x. I remember putting together a 3D flythrough of the Presidential Range in New Hampshire with satellite imagery draped on top as well as some friends creating a map of my college campus using 3-D buildings.
The two major innovations in Google Earth, as far as I'm concerned, are the massive amount of data available with no effort and the fact that anyone can use it without knowing anything about GIS per se.
Yes, but you're talking about weather and I'm talking about climate. While day-to-day predictions of weather lose accuracy after about 10 days, larger-scale trends in climate are often predicted quite accurately by ERA-40 and other models over the entire model run (1958-2004).
The point that Smith et al. are making is that the process happens in two steps. As continuous permafrost warms, a deeper active layer and the creation of thermokarst causes an increase in the number of lakes. However, as permafrost disappears entirely, lakes underlain by it are drained. The logic is consistent.
Actually, your post is refreshingly valid and free of political vitriol. Nicely done.
So here's the basic explanation: Europe wouldn't actually enter a new ice age. It would just cool down a whole bunch. If you look at the latitude of parts of Europe, the climate just doesn't match up with areas at similar latitudes elsewhere. For example, Southern France is at the same latitude as parts of Maine and North Dakota. So basically, because of the Gulf Stream Europe is kept anomalously warm. If the G.S. slows down, this source of warmth goes away and Europe (and parts of Eastern North America) get cooler while the tropical Atlantic warms up because there's less meridional heat export.
Feel free to ask more detailed questions if this doesn't answer your first one.
Which is why climate models come reasonably close to predicting a whole bunch of phenomena that have occurred over the last half century when input data from (say) 1957 is used. Go take a look at the ERA-40 climate model, which does a hell of a lot better than just predicting cold winters and warm summers, and tell me that our models are utterly useless.
I don't have the full citations on me at the moment, but I think most of these came out of Science or Nature. Shouldn't be too hard to find:
Manabe and Stouffer (1995)
Dickson et al. (2002)
Curry et al. (2003)
Peterson et al. (2002)
That should give you a start on reputable articles suggesting that increased freshwater input to the North Atlantic could (and maybe is) lead(ing) to a slowing of the Gulf Stream.
1. Climatologists accurately accounted for the effect of urban heat islands on temperature data more than a decade ago. Mean global temperature still shows substantial increases. In fact, the urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology.
2. Climate change isn't just evident in increasing temperatures. If it were an isolated record like that then, yeah, I might be skeptical too. However, record after record from biological, atmospheric, hydrologic, oceonographic, and cryospheric sources show effects consistent with increased temperatures, particularly in the Arctic.
3. The lakes discussed in this article, on which my advisor is lead author, have very little to do with precipitation. They are maintained by underlying permafrost which prevents the water from infiltrating beyond the active layer. When this permafrost melts, the lake goes away. You might want to note that increased permafrost temperatures and decreased extent are two of the records I mentioned above.
4. However poor you think the state of climatology is right now, you have to admit that we know a whole lot more than we did in the 50's and 60's when global cooling was de rigueur. We have vastly more data from both observed and proxy records as well as much more accurate climate models. Not perfect, but a whole heck of a lot better.
Look, you'd be hard pressed to find a reputable climatologist anywhere in the world who will say that global temperature increases aren't pretty ironclad. And don't give me any conspiracy theory bs. If a scientist found credible evidence that global warming was not, in fact, occurring it would be published and he or she would become a scientific rockstar.
Actually, there was an interesting article on Slashdot a while back suggesting that a lot of the dinosaurs died from incredibly large amounts of infrared radiation caused by ejecta reentering the atmosphere in the hours immediately following the impact. I thought it was an interesting enough paper to present on it at my department's research seminar a few months ago.
One area of NASA that didn't even get a mention in these stories is Earth science research. A whole bunch of the U.S. money going into research on climate change, oceanography, terrestrial hydrology, and atmospheric science is coming through NASA at the moment, but NASA's earth science budget is under serious threat. Virtually all future earth science missions now planned will face serious delays, and in the face of growing pressure to focus on manned missions, current satellites essential to understanding earth processes are recieving relatively little support. While they aren't as sexy as moon missions or manned flight to Mars, earth observing satellites are relatively inexpensive and are exceptionally useful in improving our understanding of Earth. In particular, deep cuts to NASA's earth science budget would hamstring efforts to understand climate change, a goal that even those sceptical of anthropogenic effects (ie the current administration) agree is reasonable (at least in public). For more info, check out recent editorials in Nature (April 29) and Science (April 22 and May 5). I would provide links, but they require paid subscriptions.
Yes, but there are advantages to doing this via satellite as well. For example, repeat passes allow observation of subtle changes in topography due to things like subsidence from withdrawal of water or petroleum, glacier movement, tectonic and volcanic activity, etc. Basically, think about all of the applications of SAR (synthetic aperture radar, for non-remote sensers) Interferometry. There are also LIDAR satellites such as IceSAT that observe elevations with great precision along transects. There are actually quite a number of satellites up there with the capability of doing things similar to this, but generally not at this spatial resolution (2.5 m). I'm involved with a group proposing a satellite to NASA that would be used to obverve changes in water heights on floodplains and in rivers, allowing observation of ungauged rivers in remote regions as well as helping to get a handle on discharge from rivers (such as the Amazon) which are impossible to gauge along much of their length.
Actually, using oxygen isotope ratios as a proxy for temperature is fairly spatially integrative. The ratio of O18 to 016 in ice is associated with sea surface temperature. Basically, as SSTs warm or cool the isotopic ratio of oxygen in water molecules being evaporated from the sea surface changes. That water is then deposited on the ice cap surface and, by examining the changing ratio over time, we can get a good idea of sea surface temperature variability over a wide area surrounding the ice core.
It is true that calibrations of the oxygen isotope record aren't perfect. We're learning more and more over time. For a good example of this, I'd suggest a paper by Cuffey et al. published in Nature in 2000. However, we do know with a relatively high degree of certainty when it was warmer or cooler over the past ~120,000 years (from Greenland) or ~2 million years (from Antarctica), even if we don't have a perfect handle on how much.
It sounds like you have a somewhat limited grasp of the scope of actual evidence for global climate change.
Surface warming over the last century or more has been observed at thousands of stations lying on a continuum from urban to very, very remote (I work in Siberia. I should know.) In addition, a vast array of proxy data including sea, lake, and river ice duration and extent (my own area of specialty) corroborate these temperature records. Saying that a bush growing in Australia has lead to the entire theory of global climate change is patently ridiculous.
Oh, and as a previous poster suggested, do a search on Google Scholar. You'll find many, many papers on changes in global sea surface temperature using both in situ and a variety of satellite data sets that are widely accepted by the scientific community as valid.
If you want to debate the anthropogenic influence on global climate change, go ahead. While I personally accept the evidence that a subsantial portion of this change is human-induced, arguments can be made to the contrary. Saying that the globe isn't warming up (and yes, there are a few areas that are cooling, such as eastern Canada) at this point is simply not a viable argument.
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Let me introduce myself. I'm a reviewer for a number of peer-reviewed journals and, broadly speaking, a climate change scientist. If a journal sent me a paper to review that questioned some aspect of current theories onglobal climate change, I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. If the methodology and data were there and matched the conclusions, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend publication. From past conversations with my colleagues, I know lots of other scientists feel the same way. Look, ultimately it's not that hard to get something published in a peer-reviewed journal of some kind. If scientists were finding evidence refuting global climate warming, it would be published.
Since I don't feel like finding another post to attach this to, here's a response to a couple of other points:
1) Forget the whole theory that global warming is simply an artifact of urban heat islands. We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s. The urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology, and even with the effects removed climate is still warming.
2) Sunspot activity doesn't explain most of the climate change story either. It's part of the story, but definitely not all of it. If you want to check out a paper on the subject, I suggest the following (I know its a few years old, but the findings haven't changed subsantially since this paper):
Cedric Bertrand, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Potential Role of Solar Variability as an Agent for Climate Change, Climatic Change, Volume 43, Issue 2, October 1999, Pages 387 - 411
note: I'm not telling you to believe the paper. Just to read it. If you understand enough about what's going on to do so, please feel free to poke holes in it. That's part of science.
Actually, after my last post I took the time to explore the ESRI website as you suggested. Please let me know if I'm mistaken, but it looks like the server products (ie ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, etc.) run under various *nixes but the desktop products (ArcExplorer, etc.) do not. AV 3.x, of course, runs on a variety of platforms as does ArcInfo 7.x.
Back in the summer of 2001 I used GRASS pretty extensively. At the time, it could do a lot of the same stuff as ArcView and ArcGIS but was vastly clunkier in doing it. Think Gimp vs. Photoshop a few years ago. I'm glad to see that open source GIS lives on, since a workable alternative to ArcGIS is absolutely essential for those of us in academia. In fact, I've given up on ArcGIS and still use ArcView because I can't stand the damn thing. It also doesn't help that you can't run ArcGIS under anything OS but Windows, since its all written in VB. I've even tried to run ArcGIS under Windows via VMWare, but it doesn't recognize the necessary hardware key. Enough with rant there, but in any case I guess I'm just hoping that one of these open source alternatives will be viable in the near future.
Actually, there are science-based satellites launched on a regular basis. I attended a meeting of a NASA hydrology working group this weekend in which we discussed a bunch of satellite mssions including GRACE, Hydros, Aquarius, ICEsat, CryoSat, and others that have either gone up in the last ~2 years or are going up soon. And those are just missions with relevance to hydrology. In more general terrestrial remote sensing, both Aqua and Terra are big platforms that have gone up in the last few years. So in actuality, there are quite a lot of satellite missions being launched all the time. Something like this, with an important purpose relevant to a lot of scientists, probably stands a pretty good chance. I don't actually know how much it would cost, but I would bet on the order of a few hundred million dollars, if its similar in cost to the other platforms mentioned.
Um. . . you might want to check some facts there. It is well known that far less than 50% of the oscar voting body is female. In fact, the typical oscar voter is a 50ish white male. Hence, it is movies that appeal to this demographic that tend to do best. Thus fanboy films like Pulp Fiction don't always do so well.
Yes, I know what you mean. I rented one of those metros recently, as that was the only thing in stock at the time other than a sports car or an suv (too expensive for me). I got on the freeway, and at about 53 the steering wheel shook so badly that I had to slow back down to about 50. On the other hand, I got about 40 mpg.
You're right, the article is pretty thin on the details. Perhaps the gps will allow authorities to know the precise position of each train, so that any problems on the track can be relayed quickly to the necessary trains. The other possibility is that the tracks could somehow be wired to detect and report singificant movement of the rails such as would occur from falling boulders. Given the immense amount of track in question, however, this seems implausible. So basically, I would bet that someone who doesn't really know anything about gps wrote the article.
Yes, actually it was mentioned on slashdot a couple of months ago:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/2 6/2335202&tid=126
It will be nice to have an alternative, considering the sometimes clunky nature of gps and the fact that the u.s. government controls it and can switch on selective availabilty any time it wants to.
Slashdot Mirror
Of all the arguments often made against the importance of climate change, the one that makes the least sense to me is the one you just made.
No, it's not a long timeframe geologically speaking, but human civilization doesn't operate on geologic timescales. And the warming we're seeing (and what will likely occur in the future, even according to the most conservative models) is on the same order as that seen in glacial/interglacial cycles but is happening on human timescales. That's the whole problem. . . we've never had to deal with climate change this large while at the same time juggling the lives of >6 billion people at the same time.
Only if we launch you into low earth orbit.
The two major innovations in Google Earth, as far as I'm concerned, are the massive amount of data available with no effort and the fact that anyone can use it without knowing anything about GIS per se.
Yes, but you're talking about weather and I'm talking about climate. While day-to-day predictions of weather lose accuracy after about 10 days, larger-scale trends in climate are often predicted quite accurately by ERA-40 and other models over the entire model run (1958-2004).
The point that Smith et al. are making is that the process happens in two steps. As continuous permafrost warms, a deeper active layer and the creation of thermokarst causes an increase in the number of lakes. However, as permafrost disappears entirely, lakes underlain by it are drained. The logic is consistent.
So here's the basic explanation: Europe wouldn't actually enter a new ice age. It would just cool down a whole bunch. If you look at the latitude of parts of Europe, the climate just doesn't match up with areas at similar latitudes elsewhere. For example, Southern France is at the same latitude as parts of Maine and North Dakota. So basically, because of the Gulf Stream Europe is kept anomalously warm. If the G.S. slows down, this source of warmth goes away and Europe (and parts of Eastern North America) get cooler while the tropical Atlantic warms up because there's less meridional heat export.
Feel free to ask more detailed questions if this doesn't answer your first one.
Mod parent up despite AC status. Unlike most here, he or she actually knows what they're talking about from a paleoclimate perspective.
Which is why climate models come reasonably close to predicting a whole bunch of phenomena that have occurred over the last half century when input data from (say) 1957 is used. Go take a look at the ERA-40 climate model, which does a hell of a lot better than just predicting cold winters and warm summers, and tell me that our models are utterly useless.
That should give you a start on reputable articles suggesting that increased freshwater input to the North Atlantic could (and maybe is) lead(ing) to a slowing of the Gulf Stream.
1. Climatologists accurately accounted for the effect of urban heat islands on temperature data more than a decade ago. Mean global temperature still shows substantial increases. In fact, the urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology.
2. Climate change isn't just evident in increasing temperatures. If it were an isolated record like that then, yeah, I might be skeptical too. However, record after record from biological, atmospheric, hydrologic, oceonographic, and cryospheric sources show effects consistent with increased temperatures, particularly in the Arctic.
3. The lakes discussed in this article, on which my advisor is lead author, have very little to do with precipitation. They are maintained by underlying permafrost which prevents the water from infiltrating beyond the active layer. When this permafrost melts, the lake goes away. You might want to note that increased permafrost temperatures and decreased extent are two of the records I mentioned above.
4. However poor you think the state of climatology is right now, you have to admit that we know a whole lot more than we did in the 50's and 60's when global cooling was de rigueur. We have vastly more data from both observed and proxy records as well as much more accurate climate models. Not perfect, but a whole heck of a lot better.
Look, you'd be hard pressed to find a reputable climatologist anywhere in the world who will say that global temperature increases aren't pretty ironclad. And don't give me any conspiracy theory bs. If a scientist found credible evidence that global warming was not, in fact, occurring it would be published and he or she would become a scientific rockstar.
Actually, there was an interesting article on Slashdot a while back suggesting that a lot of the dinosaurs died from incredibly large amounts of infrared radiation caused by ejecta reentering the atmosphere in the hours immediately following the impact. I thought it was an interesting enough paper to present on it at my department's research seminar a few months ago.
One area of NASA that didn't even get a mention in these stories is Earth science research. A whole bunch of the U.S. money going into research on climate change, oceanography, terrestrial hydrology, and atmospheric science is coming through NASA at the moment, but NASA's earth science budget is under serious threat. Virtually all future earth science missions now planned will face serious delays, and in the face of growing pressure to focus on manned missions, current satellites essential to understanding earth processes are recieving relatively little support. While they aren't as sexy as moon missions or manned flight to Mars, earth observing satellites are relatively inexpensive and are exceptionally useful in improving our understanding of Earth. In particular, deep cuts to NASA's earth science budget would hamstring efforts to understand climate change, a goal that even those sceptical of anthropogenic effects (ie the current administration) agree is reasonable (at least in public). For more info, check out recent editorials in Nature (April 29) and Science (April 22 and May 5). I would provide links, but they require paid subscriptions.
Yes, but there are advantages to doing this via satellite as well. For example, repeat passes allow observation of subtle changes in topography due to things like subsidence from withdrawal of water or petroleum, glacier movement, tectonic and volcanic activity, etc. Basically, think about all of the applications of SAR (synthetic aperture radar, for non-remote sensers) Interferometry. There are also LIDAR satellites such as IceSAT that observe elevations with great precision along transects. There are actually quite a number of satellites up there with the capability of doing things similar to this, but generally not at this spatial resolution (2.5 m). I'm involved with a group proposing a satellite to NASA that would be used to obverve changes in water heights on floodplains and in rivers, allowing observation of ungauged rivers in remote regions as well as helping to get a handle on discharge from rivers (such as the Amazon) which are impossible to gauge along much of their length.
It is true that calibrations of the oxygen isotope record aren't perfect. We're learning more and more over time. For a good example of this, I'd suggest a paper by Cuffey et al. published in Nature in 2000. However, we do know with a relatively high degree of certainty when it was warmer or cooler over the past ~120,000 years (from Greenland) or ~2 million years (from Antarctica), even if we don't have a perfect handle on how much.
Surface warming over the last century or more has been observed at thousands of stations lying on a continuum from urban to very, very remote (I work in Siberia. I should know.) In addition, a vast array of proxy data including sea, lake, and river ice duration and extent (my own area of specialty) corroborate these temperature records. Saying that a bush growing in Australia has lead to the entire theory of global climate change is patently ridiculous.
Oh, and as a previous poster suggested, do a search on Google Scholar. You'll find many, many papers on changes in global sea surface temperature using both in situ and a variety of satellite data sets that are widely accepted by the scientific community as valid.
If you want to debate the anthropogenic influence on global climate change, go ahead. While I personally accept the evidence that a subsantial portion of this change is human-induced, arguments can be made to the contrary. Saying that the globe isn't warming up (and yes, there are a few areas that are cooling, such as eastern Canada) at this point is simply not a viable argument.
Since I don't feel like finding another post to attach this to, here's a response to a couple of other points:
1) Forget the whole theory that global warming is simply an artifact of urban heat islands. We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s. The urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology, and even with the effects removed climate is still warming.
2) Sunspot activity doesn't explain most of the climate change story either. It's part of the story, but definitely not all of it. If you want to check out a paper on the subject, I suggest the following (I know its a few years old, but the findings haven't changed subsantially since this paper):
Cedric Bertrand, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Potential Role of Solar Variability as an Agent for Climate Change, Climatic Change, Volume 43, Issue 2, October 1999, Pages 387 - 411
note: I'm not telling you to believe the paper. Just to read it. If you understand enough about what's going on to do so, please feel free to poke holes in it. That's part of science.
Actually, after my last post I took the time to explore the ESRI website as you suggested. Please let me know if I'm mistaken, but it looks like the server products (ie ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, etc.) run under various *nixes but the desktop products (ArcExplorer, etc.) do not. AV 3.x, of course, runs on a variety of platforms as does ArcInfo 7.x.
Must be new for version 9. I gave up on it after version 8.something. Regardless, I don't think I'll go looking for it unless I can't avoid using it.
Back in the summer of 2001 I used GRASS pretty extensively. At the time, it could do a lot of the same stuff as ArcView and ArcGIS but was vastly clunkier in doing it. Think Gimp vs. Photoshop a few years ago. I'm glad to see that open source GIS lives on, since a workable alternative to ArcGIS is absolutely essential for those of us in academia. In fact, I've given up on ArcGIS and still use ArcView because I can't stand the damn thing. It also doesn't help that you can't run ArcGIS under anything OS but Windows, since its all written in VB. I've even tried to run ArcGIS under Windows via VMWare, but it doesn't recognize the necessary hardware key. Enough with rant there, but in any case I guess I'm just hoping that one of these open source alternatives will be viable in the near future.
Actually, there are science-based satellites launched on a regular basis. I attended a meeting of a NASA hydrology working group this weekend in which we discussed a bunch of satellite mssions including GRACE, Hydros, Aquarius, ICEsat, CryoSat, and others that have either gone up in the last ~2 years or are going up soon. And those are just missions with relevance to hydrology. In more general terrestrial remote sensing, both Aqua and Terra are big platforms that have gone up in the last few years. So in actuality, there are quite a lot of satellite missions being launched all the time. Something like this, with an important purpose relevant to a lot of scientists, probably stands a pretty good chance. I don't actually know how much it would cost, but I would bet on the order of a few hundred million dollars, if its similar in cost to the other platforms mentioned.
Um. . . you might want to check some facts there. It is well known that far less than 50% of the oscar voting body is female. In fact, the typical oscar voter is a 50ish white male. Hence, it is movies that appeal to this demographic that tend to do best. Thus fanboy films like Pulp Fiction don't always do so well.
Yes, I know what you mean. I rented one of those metros recently, as that was the only thing in stock at the time other than a sports car or an suv (too expensive for me). I got on the freeway, and at about 53 the steering wheel shook so badly that I had to slow back down to about 50. On the other hand, I got about 40 mpg.
You're right, the article is pretty thin on the details. Perhaps the gps will allow authorities to know the precise position of each train, so that any problems on the track can be relayed quickly to the necessary trains. The other possibility is that the tracks could somehow be wired to detect and report singificant movement of the rails such as would occur from falling boulders. Given the immense amount of track in question, however, this seems implausible. So basically, I would bet that someone who doesn't really know anything about gps wrote the article.
Yes, actually it was mentioned on slashdot a couple of months ago:2 6/2335202&tid=126
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/
It will be nice to have an alternative, considering the sometimes clunky nature of gps and the fact that the u.s. government controls it and can switch on selective availabilty any time it wants to.