Global warming

[dizietsma]

December 2010 Arctic sea ice update is yet again not a poster child for the sceptics

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

In fact it's an even bigger kick in the nuts. That's like the 100 month running it's been a kick in the nuts !




Must be sunspots ......

 

[gamervivek]

what we are seeing is the shattering of the ice inequality that has gone on long enough, where less than 10% of the earth's surface, holds more than 90% of its frozen water.
The situation is unsustainable and this injustice must end, I demand a snowfall at sea level in the tropics by 2012 end

 

[KimB]

Does anyone have a record of exactly how warm it was in 2010? Also are these sort of lower bound higher temperatures? I.E. The temperature has increased but if we had another outlier year like 1998 if would be higher again by a reasonable margin? Could we have a year which for whatever reason was say 0.3C higher than 1998?

We certainly will. It's just a matter of time.

Basically, even if all CO2 emissions stopped today, the Earth would continue to warm by a little bit more than that (there's a time lag on the warming from CO2). Then, with the average temperature that much warmer, we'd just have to wait for a strong enough El Nino, and bam, 0.3C warmer than 1998.

I expect the GISS temperature for 2010 will be available in a couple of weeks, though.

Also Chalnoth still hasn't apologised for causing global climate change.

Wasn't really planning on it...

 

[Squilliam]

December 2010 Arctic sea ice update is yet again not a poster child for the sceptics

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

In fact it's an even bigger kick in the nuts. That's like the 100 month running it's been a kick in the nuts !




Must be sunspots ......

Im going for a global magnetic pole reversal. Cosmic rays and all that invisible stuff is obviously effecting the ice more now that the magnetic field lines are weakening.

We certainly will. It's just a matter of time.

Basically, even if all CO2 emissions stopped today, the Earth would continue to warm by a little bit more than that (there's a time lag on the warming from CO2). Then, with the average temperature that much warmer, we'd just have to wait for a strong enough El Nino, and bam, 0.3C warmer than 1998.

Maybe the best thing for the world to experience is a 1000 year warm year augmented further by the climate altering gasses already released? Sure it would cause mayhem and chaos in some places if we got a year which was say another 0.5C or more hotter than 1998. Better the swift wakeup to rouse the human psyche than something which feels like it can be put off for another year.

I expect the GISS temperature for 2010 will be available in a couple of weeks, though.

Cool, will you post the summary here?

Wasn't really planning on it...

I figured as much. Almost all people won't take responsibility for causing the climate to change, why should you be any different?

 

[KimB]

Im going for a global magnetic pole reversal. Cosmic rays and all that invisible stuff is obviously effecting the ice more now that the magnetic field lines are weakening.

I rather doubt that.

See, if the magnetic field weakens, that doesn't mean that more cosmic rays will hit the arctic. In fact, fewer will strike the Earth in general, but more will strike the Earth at lower latitudes. Remember that the Earth's magnetic field traps particles in it, and then directs those particles to one or the other pole. It protects the lower latitudes, but increases impacts at the poles, with a total increase in the number of particles striking the Earth.

So I don't see how a weakening of the magnetic field could cause an increase in ice loss. Heck, the cosmic ray particles themselves mostly impact the upper atmosphere, so the only sort of effect they could have would be indirect through the effect of the cosmic rays on the makeup of the atmosphere (primarily, they combine with certain chemicals, CFC's, to deplete the ozone layer).

Maybe the best thing for the world to experience is a 1000 year warm year augmented further by the climate altering gasses already released? Sure it would cause mayhem and chaos in some places if we got a year which was say another 0.5C or more hotter than 1998. Better the swift wakeup to rouse the human psyche than something which feels like it can be put off for another year.

We might get a one-year boost. But in the following years the denialist community will start every temperature graph with that super-warm year to show that the world is really cooling.

That's the thing about dealing with liars. The lying never stops.

Cool, will you post the summary here?

I'll try to keep an eye on it

 

[corduroygt]

Good. Cold is bad for quality of life on Earth in general. We don't want all that ice locked up in the arctic regions.

 

[KimB]

Good. Cold is bad for quality of life on Earth in general.

Your ignorance of the subject is vast and apparently impregnable.

 

[Squilliam]

We might get a one-year boost. But in the following years the denialist community will start every temperature graph with that super-warm year to show that the world is really cooling.

That's the thing about dealing with liars. The lying never stops.

Im pretty confident that if you get a heat wave like that was experienced in Russia happening in the U.S. tens of thousands of people die along with billions of dollars worth of damage caused to crop yields and forests you'd get a different response to climate change, deniers or no deniers.

The best thing for the world is for a disaster of epic proportion to happen soon. People only respond really to what they can see.

 

[corduroygt]

Your ignorance of the subject is vast and apparently impregnable.

I guess that's why you live somewhere with a mild climate huh? Move to somewhere that really gets cold like midwest USA and let's see if you can handle it without at least tripling your CO2 emissions. There is a lot of uninhabitable land due to extreme cold, which is much more of a barrier to human civilization compared to deserts, where people seem to be able to build cities and live just fine.

 

[nintenho]

I guess that's why you live somewhere with a mild climate huh? Move to somewhere that really gets cold like midwest USA and let's see if you can handle it without at least tripling your CO2 emissions. There is a lot of uninhabitable land due to extreme cold, which is much more of a barrier to human civilization compared to deserts, where people seem to be able to build cities and live just fine.

What about all the other non-human organisms? I mean take all the coral reefs being lost for example and the rest of the sea life (and seafood) that they support. Killing the rest of the biosphere or even a decent fraction of it is not an option.

Also global warming is only a few degrees temperature change, nobody predicts it to be like the difference between a desert and snowy area.

 

[Ty]

I guess that's why you live somewhere with a mild climate huh? Move to somewhere that really gets cold like midwest USA and let's see if you can handle it without at least tripling your CO2 emissions. There is a lot of uninhabitable land due to extreme cold, which is much more of a barrier to human civilization compared to deserts, where people seem to be able to build cities and live just fine.

Wait, are you now moving the goals posts to, "well even if warming is happening, it's a good thing"?

And if the desert gets warmer, perhaps too inhospitable to live. Are you willing to let them move to the mid west?

 

[corduroygt]

Wait, are you now moving the goals posts to, "well even if warming is happening, it's a good thing"?

And if the desert gets warmer, perhaps too inhospitable to live. Are you willing to let them move to the mid west?

I am not moving goal posts, it's a well-known fact that the Earth has been warmer in the past, not 100 years ago but thousands of years ago.
There's a lot of empty and ridiculously cold land in Canada and Russia. If their desert gets too hot, they can come. Cold weather is worse than warm weather.

 

[gamervivek]

"well even if warming is happening, it's a good thing"?

It should be, for the coral reefs.

 

[KimB]

I am not moving goal posts, it's a well-known fact that the Earth has been warmer in the past, not 100 years ago but thousands of years ago.

So? Look, obviously in time we'll adapt, as will the rest of the planet. But as we're adapting, that means lots of people will die, there will be lots of economic hardship, and lots of species will go extinct. The problem isn't whether or not a warmer planet is better for us or anything else thousands of years from now, it's what is going to happen over the next few decades. And over the next few decades, it will be almost uniformly bad, simply because human society, as well as life in general, depends upon stable conditions to thrive. A warming planet does not make for stable conditions.

 

[Ty]

Cold weather is worse than warm weather.

That is such a strange argument I barely know how to respond. Can you provide proof of your belief that -1 degree is worse for the planet than +1?

It should be, for the coral reefs.

Really? With warmer weather comes acidification and that is obviously not good for the reefs. I.e. they are dying off right now.

 

[gamervivek]

Really? With warmer weather comes acidification and that is obviously not good for the reefs. I.e. they are dying off right now.

Well, I just said that because warmer water holds less of the gas, a google search turned up this:

http://www.wunderground.com/education/acidoceans.asp

The effect of ocean acidification is more pronounced at colder temperatures, and it is believed that these important micro-organisms will die out or be forced to move to warmer waters in order to survive in the coming decades.

Though warmer water themselves are a cause of concern:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1722

 

[Frank]

WTF? Why are you engaging in AGW discussion if this is the strawman you're attacking? Only complete noobs use CO2 vs temperature to prove or disprove AGW, and they just wind up hurting their case as a result.

No, that has very little to do with how we know what CO2 does to climate. GW theory is based on measuring the physical properties of all gases in the atmosphere, and throwing in bulletproof physics about absorption and emission to make a computer model for an experiment that we cannot possibly conduct in a lab. Even skeptics with half a brain accept that CO2 causes warming. CO2 vs. time just confirms that humans are pumping out enormous amounts of CO2 capable of changing the atmosphere's composition. Model temperature vs. time and proxy temperature vs. time is merely a sanity check to see if the models are plausible. Nobody in the scientific community is using temperature vs CO2 to predict anything, whether directly or indirectly.

The real debate is over the degree and certainty of warming attributable to CO2, as some physical processes (especially cloud formation) are arguably too chaotic and poorly understood to correctly model with our current understanding, and even when we do have hypotheses, they're next to impossible to verify.

So, GW isn't just about CO2, that might even be a minor thing, it's about the big picture? It's just about the Earth getting warmer?

 

[Frank]

Does anyone have a record of exactly how warm it was in 2010? Also are these sort of lower bound higher temperatures? I.E. The temperature has increased but if we had another outlier year like 1998 if would be higher again by a reasonable margin? Could we have a year which for whatever reason was say 0.3C higher than 1998?

Well, we all agree that the global temperature is slowly rising. Like it did for the last few centuries.

The discussion is about the upward fluctuation for the last few decennia being a natural thing and fitting the historic graph (which it does), or being a totally human-caused deviation which will increase exponentially in the future.

 

[Frank]

December 2010 Arctic sea ice update is yet again not a poster child for the sceptics

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

In fact it's an even bigger kick in the nuts. That's like the 100 month running it's been a kick in the nuts !




Must be sunspots ......

Yes, it's warmer in Antarctica and America, and colder on the North Pole and in Europe. Using only a single data point is called cherry picking.

 

[Frank]

Your ignorance of the subject is vast and apparently impregnable.

Your knowledge of the politically correct scientific literature about the subject is unsurpassed, especially compared to your actual knowledge about it.