The global climate is an average over the entire globe for at least several years. Probably 20 year averages are necessary to eliminate ENSO variability. And yeah, you wouldn't need a graduate education in geology, because that's not relevant. Try computational geophysics.
No, if the surface and lower troposphere warms but the stratosphere cools, that's a unique (aside from separate ozone effects on UV absorption) prediction of the greenhouse warming models.
Or maybe you could step back and realize that no GCM predicts monotonic warming, that there's a difference between local weather and the global climate, and that reading crackpot websites isn't a substitute for a graduate education in climate physics?
If you'd actually read the link, you'll see that I strongly support nuclear power. The existence of abrupt climate change is a scientific matter, not a political one. For instance, at the moment I own four pistols, a shotgun, and an AK47. I'm just as annoyed as you are about gun grabbers. But if you read the article, you'll see why as a scientist I have to say that abrupt climate change is very well-supported.
No scientific backing? Altering the global average temperature will affect precipitation patterns. Our current croplands are chosen to match current precipitation patterns. Altering them would be extremely expensive, maybe even impossible given the short amount of warning we'll probably get. (That's because predicting exactly how precipitation will change is very difficult.)
OK, what you have done is linked to a modern estimate (if by modern you mean 2006) made by two people. You tried to do this to show consensus.
The paper itself combines multiple estimates from different independent scientists. If you don't want to read the article, the summary says: However, a new paper in GRL this week by Annan and Hargreaves combines a number of these independent estimates to come up with the strong statement that the most likely value is about 2.9C with a 95% probability that the value is less than 4.5C.
You'll get similar results from examining models used in the ensemble of Meehl 2004. Sorry that I don't have time to make all this explicit. As you can tell, I'm swamped with pseudoscientists and I simply can't give everyone a crash course in climate physics.
That's because it's the publically accessible version. Here's the version you want if you're on campus. Citation: Annan, J. D., and J. C. Hargreaves (2006), Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06704, doi:10.1029/2005GL025259.
I've already discussed the lag between temperature and CO2. Aside from your conspiracy theories, the only other thing you say is that model parameterizations in general can't be used to learn about the universe. What a weird attitude coming from someone who's using technology created with the help of computer models!
You summarized one of my points as "The earth's temperature is warmer than it has been in the past" but in fact what worries scientists is the rate of the warming, which is probably higher than at any point in the last 1000 years. Scientists are concerned about the abrupt nature of these changes, not the absolute temperature.
I don't think many people realize that the entire link from CO2 to the warming is based on computer models not being able to think of any other explanation.
It's based on the fact that global circulation models account for temperatures after 1970, which can't be explained by any other process like increasing solar illumination, magnetic effects, etc. Those GCMs have been validated in multiple ways, by correctly predicting climate response to volcanic eruptions, by comparison to independent paleoclimate data and modern temperature records (which are independent because GCMs are dynamical models, not empirical models.) As I've explained, GCMs are able to reproduce strange features of modern warming like the cooling stratosphere which can't be explained using other hypotheses.
That point alone is suspect when you consider that from the time the study you linked to was published until now, the temperatures have not continued to rise as those models predicted would happen. What this means is that there are other factors affecting global temperature, that are unknown, that are at least as big as CO2 (otherwise they would have continued to rise).
Nonsense. I've already been over this. ENSO variation isn't important to the long term climate.
The computers predict a rise from 1.2 degrees to 5 degrees or so. In order to do this, they rely on feedbacks in the environmental system.
Very close. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.
Now, any scientist who claimed to understand all the potential positive and negative feedbacks in the system would be laughed out of the room...
Of course. What's troubling is that our estimates of the long-term feedback effects are known to be too small to account for the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
there are known important feedbacks that they aren't considering, such as clouds (to understand the difference clouds can make, consider the difference in temperature on a cloudy day and a clear day, or even the difference of temperature in the shade of a tree).
Yes, I've already had to explain that I'm aware of how important clouds are.
But why do you say clouds aren't being considered? In fact, all models take clouds into account. I've previously linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.
As for the fourth point, even on your web page you admit it is nothing more than a worry.
Yeah, it's a worry about the future of human civilization.
I'm going to ignore the rabid conspiracy theories you're presenting. As a scientist who sees a lot of evidence that our CO2 emissions are changing the climate, you'd probably just dismiss me as lying scum with a political agenda anyway.
But just in case someone else reads this, greenhouse warming models predict cooling and contraction of the stratosphere. The cooling is predicted to be strongest between altitudes of 40 and 50km.
The quick explanation is that greenhouse warming shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a lower altitude. As a result, the surface warms but the stratosphere cools. In fact, I consider this good evidence for the link between CO2 and increasing global temperatures. No other single cause warms the Earth from the surface like a greenhouse gas. (For example, an increase in solar illumination wouldn't have this effect.)
What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature.
Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.
I'll repeat that again, because some people have trouble with this concept: the IPCC report draws no connection between CO2 and world calamity. If you've heard of New York being flooded when the glaciers melt, it wasn't based on any real scientific research. It was some weird propaganda that you picked up somewhere.
Okay, something we can agree on. The estimates at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting placed an estimate of ~1.2 meters of sea level rise by 2100, though it varies around the globe due to factors like the gravitational attraction of the glaciers that are melting. People who quote estimates of ~20 meters are simply calculating the volume of the glaciers as a whole, which is absurd because even our most pessimistic estimates don't allow glaciers to completely melt in less than ~500 years.
But even a 1.2 meter increase in sea level would bring substantial economic hardship. For example, a storm surge in New York up to a level that would now be considered "once in 100 years" would happen every ~5 years.
While this doesn't sound as melodramatic, it's a real threat, and it's not the only one. I worry that the most damaging impact of abrupt climate change will be unpredictable changes in precipitation patterns. If a substantial fraction of the world's farmlands experience droughts because water is falling in areas that are currently deserts, serious disruptions of the global food supply could result.
If people are willing to kill for territory and nationalism now, imagine how much more aggressive starving people will be. This is what worries me. Not the immediate effects of climate change, but their secondary effects on international relations.
I actually disagree with you on your assessment of the risk, there is no really good scientific evidence of a threat from CO2 (and I seriously doubt you can show me any good evidence of a link).
I've tried to condense the science into a (hopefully) accessible summary, complete with dozens of references to genuine peer-reviewed scientific articles showing the seriousness of the threat posed by CO2.
Yes, GRACE gravity measurements can be inverted to show that sea level behaves exactly as you describe. But since it defines sea level, the gp was accurate too.:)
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the quantum wheel is just an efficient photon drive. That is, normal use results in excited vacuum states (photons) carrying momentum in the opposite direction as the spacecraft. So the reverse process would be like a solar sail that absorbs photons and spins magneto-electric nanoparticles. This seems like it would require an incoming stream of photons.
What you're describing sounds like two (or more) of these quantum wheels placed against each other, coupled to an accelerometer. Whenever the object begins to accelerate in a particular direction, the quantum wheel in that direction starts emitting photons to counteract the acceleration as much as possible. That would result in an object with enhanced inertia, but it would require an insane amount of power (300MW) to resist a force of 1 N.
You're right- normal objects couldn't penetrate the Earth significantly without completely destroying it. Degenerate matter could, though. For instance, a strangelet (if they exist and are stable) would probably go straight through the Earth for the same reason that bullets fly through air: the density contrast is enormous. Same with primordial mini black holes and non-interacting particles like neutrinos and (probably) dark matter.
No, 2007 was not the 'steepest drop' in arctic ice cover, it was the 'smallest minimum extent' recorded. The increase and decrease in arctic ice cover follows the seasonal cycle and the rate of the decrease and increase in the seasonal change is similar from year to year. It is the 'minimum' and 'maximum' extent of the ice cover during the year that are of interest as a monitor of climate warming or cooling.
Thanks for the lecture about seasons; it would've been informative if I were still in elementary school. If you'd clicked on the "steepest drop" link, you'd notice that the plot's title is "Sea ice area at summer minimum." A casual visual inspection will confirm the peer-reviewed conclusion that the summer minimum experienced its steepest drop from 2006-2007.
The increase in the 'minimum' extent in 2008 and 2009 indicate a cooling trend that cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases since the concentration of those has increased during that time period.
Well, first of all it's not that simple. Ice extent at the summer minimum is just one observable, others include duration of the melt season, and thickness of the ice.
More importantly, please recognize that climate models don't predict monotonic warming. This strawman you're attacking simply doesn't exist. Short-term variability is expected; long-term averages are what's important.
If you want to claim that cooling somehow validates the models (which it obviously does not)...
The models predicted drops in sea ice extent, but nothing like the drop observed in 2007. If the drop in 2007 had continued for (at least) several years, that would've been a genuine climatic signal rather than short-term variability due to weather. But since the models never predicted such an extreme drop, that would've indicated that the models were flawed.
... you need to explain where a significant amount of planetary heat is being stored since the 'greenhouse gas' theory of planetary warming requires that the amount of heat being radiated from the earth must continuously decrease.
Contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.
For example, modern dynamical climate models can't account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have no effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to st
Based on the articles I cited, scientists clearly expect windy days to have a lower trend due to the UHI effect. You're saying the trend should be higher on windy days, and it'd be nice to see a detailed source for that statement. But regardless, all those studies I cited confirm that the observed trends are the same to within the limits of uncertainty. Perhaps convection really can carry away the heat in materials like asphalt that have been warmed by radiant solar energy?
Surfacestations.org is saying that the surface temperature record is contaminated by the "urban heat island" effect-- that temperatures are only rising around cities because of economic growth. One example he shows is that exhaust vents have been placed closer and closer to the sensors over the years.
This is a superficially compelling argument, but it's also one that scientists have considered and rejected. One test is that the urban heat island effect should be less pronounced on windy days than calm days. That's because if this warming is just caused by local exhaust vents, wind should carry that heat away whereas calm weather won't. This doesn't happen: calm and windy days have the same warming trend. This conclusion is from an article published in Nature by Dr. Parker in 2004; here's a BBC article quoting it. Other studies have confirmed this result using different methods and data in 2003, 2006, and 2008.
NOAA recently published an answer to that specific website. They took the 70 stations that surfacestations.org designated "best" or "good" and created a time series based on them. Then they used all 1218 stations to create another time series. Both of those time series are plotted on page 3. They're practically identical.
Also, scientists don't have to blindly trust these sensors because surface temperature measurements are also confirmed by satellite measurements and proxies such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits.
There are no mountains of research that show why any climate change is
happening or even IF climate change is happening.
I've collected dozens of independent, peer-reviewed articles in my article devoted to engaging with climate skeptics. I even described my own personal research which independently confirms Greenland and Alaskan glacier melt through their effects on time-variable gravity. Just last month at the most recent GRACE Science Team Meeting, my advisor displayed the most recent GRACE results over Greenland, showing that the mass loss is accelerating and spreading from the southeast coast to the entire western coast.
There most certainly is a mountain of evidence showing that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it's due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Arctic ice cover has increased
every year since 2007...
As I keep repeating, 2007 was the steepest drop in ice cover on record. It scared a lot of us when the extent of the drop was shown at the 2007 AGU conference because the climate models weren't predicting such a huge drop. The subsequent increases actually confirm that this decrease was due to weather, not climate, which tends to validate the models.
...while the AGW models pushed by the NSIDC and IPCC
don't allow for any such increase.
Completely wrong. Global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. Please remember that weather is different than climate, which is an average over at least several years.
Carbon dioxide is
routinely pushed by politicians as the cause of global warming...
When studying any science, it's best to ignore politicians and only focus on peer-reviewed scientific articles. In this case, you should be paying attention to the fact that scientists are saying CO2 is causing abrupt climate change.
...and yet it is a simple calculation to show that there is already more
than sufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb ALL of the
IR radiation radiating from Earth that is in the wavelength where it
can be absorbed by carbon dioxide... within the first few hundred
meters of the atmosphere.
Again, I've discussed this in detail many times. You're neglecting to consider pressure broadening, which forces any realistic climate model to treat each layer of the atmosphere differently. CO2 isn't saturated in the highest layer of the atmosphere, which is what really matters.
It is even easier to show
that gas-phase H2O in the atmosphere (commonly referred to as humidity)
is present in much higher concentrations in the atmosphere than CO2 and
is a far more potent 'greenhouse' gas than CO2...and yet the planet is
obviously still able to radiate sufficient heat to space in the
non-absorbable IR wavelengths to cool itself.
Yet again, I need to repeat that water vapor is a feedback in the climate, not a forcing. We can't change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere because it establishes equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks. However, because we're increasing the temperature of the planet by increasing CO2 concentrations, water vapor will tend to provide positive feedback which will make the problem worse.
No research or objective evaluation of empiric data used as a basis for this claim; pure conjecture.
Research and data are available in the link to another article which makes essentially the same point.
If things are that simplistic what happens with a child that receives no praise? Or different sort of praise for different tasks? Or praise one day and none the other.
Yes, the research included a control case. I previously saw this idea in an article that is now only available for subscribers. The evidence is clear: praising children based on effort is effective, while praising for intelligence is highly counterproductive.
Not to mention the fact that even point source radiation falls off as the inverse square of the distance, which isn't at all the same thing as falling off exponentially.
At speeds above Mach 8.0, you can drive a pencil through a 100mm armor steel plate - even the pencil tip stays intact and sharp.
Though I completely agree with your overall point, I'm curious if you have a citation for this sentence. The plate and pencil are in relative motion, yet apparently the impact drills a hole through the plate without even dulling the pencil? I tried googling for an experiment like this with no luck. Now I'm just trying to figure out what insane combination of high-speed photography and a hypersonic wind tunnel with a "pencil of death" feature would be required for proof...
Slashdot Mirror
The global climate is an average over the entire globe for at least several years. Probably 20 year averages are necessary to eliminate ENSO variability. And yeah, you wouldn't need a graduate education in geology, because that's not relevant. Try computational geophysics.
No, if the surface and lower troposphere warms but the stratosphere cools, that's a unique (aside from separate ozone effects on UV absorption) prediction of the greenhouse warming models.
Or maybe you could step back and realize that no GCM predicts monotonic warming, that there's a difference between local weather and the global climate, and that reading crackpot websites isn't a substitute for a graduate education in climate physics?
If you'd actually read the link, you'll see that I strongly support nuclear power. The existence of abrupt climate change is a scientific matter, not a political one. For instance, at the moment I own four pistols, a shotgun, and an AK47. I'm just as annoyed as you are about gun grabbers. But if you read the article, you'll see why as a scientist I have to say that abrupt climate change is very well-supported.
We're trying to, as fast as we possibly can. But note that this is a 95% confidence interval, not a 1-sigma error bar.
No scientific backing? Altering the global average temperature will affect precipitation patterns. Our current croplands are chosen to match current precipitation patterns. Altering them would be extremely expensive, maybe even impossible given the short amount of warning we'll probably get. (That's because predicting exactly how precipitation will change is very difficult.)
The paper itself combines multiple estimates from different independent scientists. If you don't want to read the article, the summary says: However, a new paper in GRL this week by Annan and Hargreaves combines a number of these independent estimates to come up with the strong statement that the most likely value is about 2.9C with a 95% probability that the value is less than 4.5C.
You'll get similar results from examining models used in the ensemble of Meehl 2004. Sorry that I don't have time to make all this explicit. As you can tell, I'm swamped with pseudoscientists and I simply can't give everyone a crash course in climate physics.
Huh? What? Please explain.
That's because it's the publically accessible version. Here's the version you want if you're on campus. Citation: Annan, J. D., and J. C. Hargreaves (2006), Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06704, doi:10.1029/2005GL025259.
I've already discussed the lag between temperature and CO2. Aside from your conspiracy theories, the only other thing you say is that model parameterizations in general can't be used to learn about the universe. What a weird attitude coming from someone who's using technology created with the help of computer models!
You summarized one of my points as "The earth's temperature is warmer than it has been in the past" but in fact what worries scientists is the rate of the warming, which is probably higher than at any point in the last 1000 years. Scientists are concerned about the abrupt nature of these changes, not the absolute temperature.
It's based on the fact that global circulation models account for temperatures after 1970, which can't be explained by any other process like increasing solar illumination, magnetic effects, etc. Those GCMs have been validated in multiple ways, by correctly predicting climate response to volcanic eruptions, by comparison to independent paleoclimate data and modern temperature records (which are independent because GCMs are dynamical models, not empirical models.) As I've explained, GCMs are able to reproduce strange features of modern warming like the cooling stratosphere which can't be explained using other hypotheses.
Nonsense. I've already been over this. ENSO variation isn't important to the long term climate.
Very close. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.
Of course. What's troubling is that our estimates of the long-term feedback effects are known to be too small to account for the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
Yes, I've already had to explain that I'm aware of how important clouds are. But why do you say clouds aren't being considered? In fact, all models take clouds into account. I've previously linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.
Yeah, it's a worry about the future of human civilization.
I'm going to ignore the rabid conspiracy theories you're presenting. As a scientist who sees a lot of evidence that our CO2 emissions are changing the climate, you'd probably just dismiss me as lying scum with a political agenda anyway.
But just in case someone else reads this, greenhouse warming models predict cooling and contraction of the stratosphere. The cooling is predicted to be strongest between altitudes of 40 and 50km.
The quick explanation is that greenhouse warming shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a lower altitude. As a result, the surface warms but the stratosphere cools. In fact, I consider this good evidence for the link between CO2 and increasing global temperatures. No other single cause warms the Earth from the surface like a greenhouse gas. (For example, an increase in solar illumination wouldn't have this effect.)
Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.
Okay, something we can agree on. The estimates at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting placed an estimate of ~1.2 meters of sea level rise by 2100, though it varies around the globe due to factors like the gravitational attraction of the glaciers that are melting. People who quote estimates of ~20 meters are simply calculating the volume of the glaciers as a whole, which is absurd because even our most pessimistic estimates don't allow glaciers to completely melt in less than ~500 years.
But even a 1.2 meter increase in sea level would bring substantial economic hardship. For example, a storm surge in New York up to a level that would now be considered "once in 100 years" would happen every ~5 years.
While this doesn't sound as melodramatic, it's a real threat, and it's not the only one. I worry that the most damaging impact of abrupt climate change will be unpredictable changes in precipitation patterns. If a substantial fraction of the world's farmlands experience droughts because water is falling in areas that are currently deserts, serious disruptions of the global food supply could result.
If people are willing to kill for territory and nationalism now, imagine how much more aggressive starving people will be. This is what worries me. Not the immediate effects of climate change, but their secondary effects on international relations.
I've tried to condense the science into a (hopefully) accessible summary, complete with dozens of references to genuine peer-reviewed scientific articles showing the seriousness of the threat posed by CO2.
Yes, GRACE gravity measurements can be inverted to show that sea level behaves exactly as you describe. But since it defines sea level, the gp was accurate too. :)
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the quantum wheel is just an efficient photon drive. That is, normal use results in excited vacuum states (photons) carrying momentum in the opposite direction as the spacecraft. So the reverse process would be like a solar sail that absorbs photons and spins magneto-electric nanoparticles. This seems like it would require an incoming stream of photons.
What you're describing sounds like two (or more) of these quantum wheels placed against each other, coupled to an accelerometer. Whenever the object begins to accelerate in a particular direction, the quantum wheel in that direction starts emitting photons to counteract the acceleration as much as possible. That would result in an object with enhanced inertia, but it would require an insane amount of power (300MW) to resist a force of 1 N.
You're right- normal objects couldn't penetrate the Earth significantly without completely destroying it. Degenerate matter could, though. For instance, a strangelet (if they exist and are stable) would probably go straight through the Earth for the same reason that bullets fly through air: the density contrast is enormous. Same with primordial mini black holes and non-interacting particles like neutrinos and (probably) dark matter.
Thanks for the lecture about seasons; it would've been informative if I were still in elementary school. If you'd clicked on the "steepest drop" link, you'd notice that the plot's title is "Sea ice area at summer minimum." A casual visual inspection will confirm the peer-reviewed conclusion that the summer minimum experienced its steepest drop from 2006-2007.
Well, first of all it's not that simple. Ice extent at the summer minimum is just one observable, others include duration of the melt season, and thickness of the ice.
More importantly, please recognize that climate models don't predict monotonic warming. This strawman you're attacking simply doesn't exist. Short-term variability is expected; long-term averages are what's important.
The models predicted drops in sea ice extent, but nothing like the drop observed in 2007. If the drop in 2007 had continued for (at least) several years, that would've been a genuine climatic signal rather than short-term variability due to weather. But since the models never predicted such an extreme drop, that would've indicated that the models were flawed.
Contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.
For example, modern dynamical climate models can't account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have no effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to st
Based on the articles I cited, scientists clearly expect windy days to have a lower trend due to the UHI effect. You're saying the trend should be higher on windy days, and it'd be nice to see a detailed source for that statement. But regardless, all those studies I cited confirm that the observed trends are the same to within the limits of uncertainty. Perhaps convection really can carry away the heat in materials like asphalt that have been warmed by radiant solar energy?
I've already discussed this issue:
Surfacestations.org is saying that the surface temperature record is contaminated by the "urban heat island" effect-- that temperatures are only rising around cities because of economic growth. One example he shows is that exhaust vents have been placed closer and closer to the sensors over the years.
This is a superficially compelling argument, but it's also one that scientists have considered and rejected. One test is that the urban heat island effect should be less pronounced on windy days than calm days. That's because if this warming is just caused by local exhaust vents, wind should carry that heat away whereas calm weather won't. This doesn't happen: calm and windy days have the same warming trend. This conclusion is from an article published in Nature by Dr. Parker in 2004; here's a BBC article quoting it. Other studies have confirmed this result using different methods and data in 2003, 2006, and 2008.
NOAA recently published an answer to that specific website. They took the 70 stations that surfacestations.org designated "best" or "good" and created a time series based on them. Then they used all 1218 stations to create another time series. Both of those time series are plotted on page 3. They're practically identical.
Also, scientists don't have to blindly trust these sensors because surface temperature measurements are also confirmed by satellite measurements and proxies such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits.
I've collected dozens of independent, peer-reviewed articles in my article devoted to engaging with climate skeptics. I even described my own personal research which independently confirms Greenland and Alaskan glacier melt through their effects on time-variable gravity. Just last month at the most recent GRACE Science Team Meeting, my advisor displayed the most recent GRACE results over Greenland, showing that the mass loss is accelerating and spreading from the southeast coast to the entire western coast.
There most certainly is a mountain of evidence showing that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it's due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
As I keep repeating, 2007 was the steepest drop in ice cover on record. It scared a lot of us when the extent of the drop was shown at the 2007 AGU conference because the climate models weren't predicting such a huge drop. The subsequent increases actually confirm that this decrease was due to weather, not climate, which tends to validate the models.
Completely wrong. Global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. Please remember that weather is different than climate, which is an average over at least several years.
When studying any science, it's best to ignore politicians and only focus on peer-reviewed scientific articles. In this case, you should be paying attention to the fact that scientists are saying CO2 is causing abrupt climate change.
Again, I've discussed this in detail many times. You're neglecting to consider pressure broadening, which forces any realistic climate model to treat each layer of the atmosphere differently. CO2 isn't saturated in the highest layer of the atmosphere, which is what really matters.
Yet again, I need to repeat that water vapor is a feedback in the climate, not a forcing. We can't change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere because it establishes equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks. However, because we're increasing the temperature of the planet by increasing CO2 concentrations, water vapor will tend to provide positive feedback which will make the problem worse.
Also, water vapor isn't well-mixed to t
Research and data are available in the link to another article which makes essentially the same point.
Yes, the research included a control case. I previously saw this idea in an article that is now only available for subscribers. The evidence is clear: praising children based on effort is effective, while praising for intelligence is highly counterproductive.
Not to mention the fact that even point source radiation falls off as the inverse square of the distance, which isn't at all the same thing as falling off exponentially.
Though I completely agree with your overall point, I'm curious if you have a citation for this sentence. The plate and pencil are in relative motion, yet apparently the impact drills a hole through the plate without even dulling the pencil? I tried googling for an experiment like this with no luck. Now I'm just trying to figure out what insane combination of high-speed photography and a hypersonic wind tunnel with a "pencil of death" feature would be required for proof...
Why buy new underwear when you can just use Chipotlaway?