2005 Will Probably be Warmest on Record

Nilmat writes "A Washington Post Article notes that 2005 will probably have the highest mean global temperature of any year since the advent of systematic temperature records. At the moment, the mean temperature is about 0.75 degrees C above the global mean from 1950 to 1990, approximately .04 degrees higher than 1998, the year of the previous record. Only something dramatic, such as a major volcanic eruption, could cause enough cooling to miss setting a new record."

Volcanic eruption you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this one?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/10/12/alaska. volcanoes.reut/index.html [cnn.com]

Re:Let me be the first to say

[akzeac]

Correlation is not causation.

But it's the main requisite.

Let me be the first troll to say

[team99parody]

This can cause more good than harm.

There's a ton of arible land in the world that does not have the absolutely-perfect-ideal climate.

• Many cold areas - siberia, canada - may become nice temerate regions.
• Many currently nice areas warmed by ocean streams (england) may suck as those ocean streams move elsewhere -- but it's just as plausable that nice-warm (or cool) ocean streams may end up pointing at other places that are currently too cool (or warm) and make them nice.
• True, some deserts may get worse - others may get rain thanks to more evaporation

The only people who really have a lot to lose are the huge-scale real-estate gamblers (companies like ADM who control a lot of currently nice farmland) - and that wealth will move to people who are now miserably poor (siberia).

Please explain to me what that's a bad thing.

Re:Let me be the first to say

[Doc Ruby]

Why, because an empty logical truism is all you've got as you desperately attempt to deny manmade climate change? Try arguing with the causation in Workweek Causes Climate Change" [sciam.com]. It's just correlation, right?

Grapes in Sweden

[Henriok]

Wild grapes were groing in Sweden during the neolithic age, about 6000 years ago. We'd be lucky to even grow them in green houses now.

Science is hard

[jfengel]

No, correlation is not causation. But when you have correlation and the most accurate models imply causation, you definitely have to think hard about what you're doing. The fact that global warming was predicted by the models before the data could be taken further suggest that it's not simply alarmist readings of the data.

Science is hard; in many fields it's impossible to prove causation completely. But when you have a theory, and the theory holds up to all the available data, you act as if the theory were true and make decisions based on that. You don't over-react as long as there are competing theories that imply otherwise, but this is one more piece of data to suggest that global warming is very real and quite possibly man-made.

The "quite possibly" means that we shouldn't over-react; as you say, the correlation need not imply causation. But as the burden of evidence falls on the side of man-made global warming, it becomes increasingly dangerous to rely on "Yeah, but are you really, utterly, totally, completely sure?" arguments against action.

Global Dimming

[crabpeople]

I saw a program, i believe from the BBC on Global Dimming [wikipedia.org] a few months ago. The idea being that at the same that we have been upping the greenhouse gasses we put into the atmosphere, we have also been blocking out the sun with the various soots and particulate matter that goes with it. This drove us into a net cooling period during those years, as the sunlight was reflected back into space. The researcher explained that this may be why global warming hasnt been as evident as it should have been in the past 30 years.

Now that we burn cleaner gas, and try and be more environmentally friendly, this reflective layer of the atmosphere is getting thinner. this then compounds the global warming aeffect already in motion. perhaps that is what we are seeing today.

 

State of Idiocy

[ceguy]

After having read Michael Crichton's book, State of Fear [crichton-official.com], I am thinking people who pick sides on this issue just like to argue. Crichton is against claims of global warming. Everybody's got an agenda.

We don't even know how much we don't know about our planet. How about we try our best not to pollute the planet we live in while enjoying life?

PS I am not endorsing the book. It has an awkward plot and idiot characters listening to a lot of "explanations" by "experts".

Re:Land sharks in Siberia

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Quebec our summer has been rainy and hot, while we prepare for a dry and cold winter... pain in the ass, but still nothing compared to Siberia, where birds fall from the sky having heart attacks caused by frost.

The real question nowadays is: where would we want to live? Only safe place seems to be SF :P

It's getting pretty hot on mars too!

[TheNarrator]

Those irresposible Republicans! They're screwing things up across the entire galaxy.

Article [nasa.gov]

And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.

Blame the volcanoes

[dada21]

The author must realize that having record low eruptions in 1998 and 2005 is the cause of the temperature hike.

See what happened in 1816 [nasa.gov].

Re:Let me be the first to say

[Erioll]

How about This Site [friendsofscience.org]?

Some excerpts:

Myth 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
Fact: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.

Average ground station readings do show a mild warming over the last 100 years, but well within the natural variations recorded in the last millenium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands") which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").

And this:

Myth 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.

Fact: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. The CO2 increase was only 0.4% over the last 50 years, rather than the 5% per 100 years quoted by Kyoto. However, as measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this. There is solid evidence that as temperatures rise naturally and cyclically, the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

And don't forget the worst greenhouse gas of all: WATER VAPOUR!

Myth 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.

Fact: Water vapour or clouds, which makes up on average about 3 % of the atmosphere by volume, and - according to several researchers - about 60% by effect, is the major greenhouse gas. 97% of greenhouse gases are water vapour by volume. Moreover, because of its molecular weight and absorptive capacity, water vapour is 3000 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.

Better start campaigning to remove all the water vapour emissions. Oh wait, water covers 71% of the earth's surface. No dice there...

Yes there are advocates for global warming, and "evidence" therein, but there is much evidence against it, and ESPECIALLY against man-made warming. Today's Calgary Sun [calgarysun.com] article by Licia Corbella [canoe.ca] also has some things to say on the topic.

Re:Let me be the first troll to say

[Anonymous Coward]

* The intermediate period where famine and human suffering are caused by difficulty in both regions due to growing human population and temp. shinking food supply

It's hard to believe that arible land would move faster than the farming companies can rotate their crops. For staples (rice, wheat, etc) in a single planting season, they could choose more appropriate crops. For luxury goods from trees with many-year lifespans there might be shortages (wait for the orange trees to grow in greenland); but that's hardly a crisis.

* Massive flooding along costal areas

Which will make some insurance companies suffer until the government bails them out - but even the rich homeowners there will simply move to the new coastal areas in central-califoria/death-valley.

* Increased weather event strength due to warmer tropic waters

Agreed with this one. Building codes will have to be updated; and new cities probably shouldn't be built on flood planes (which was true before).

* (and this is sure to get me modded +1 True) The poor Canadians when Texas gets the US to invade due to Texas becoming a desert... "YEE HA"

+1 Ok, this one sold me. :-)

Re:Let me be the first troll to say

[clayasaurus]

Because it can trigger the next ice age, like a less dramatized version of "The Day After Tomorrow." "if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world." http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_age s.html [clearlight.com] http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/articles/02/101014 0.html [21stcenturyradio.com] http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12 374,1083419,00.html [guardian.co.uk] http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm [commondreams.org] Or just google it yourself.

Re:Grapes in Sweden

[Misagon]

Wine is grown on Gotland [gutevin.se] today and there is information on that site which you can use to compare the growing conditions to other parts of Sweden.

You should also consider that many of our cultivated species are not as resilient to weather conditions as the older variations they originate from. It is quite possible that the grape found in Sweden in the neolithic area could survive the present-day climate.
Humans have also wiped out entire species in prehistoric times. Grapes are tasty. :)

Re:Science is hard

[jnaujok]

Those models do not "predict" global warming. They show a trend towards warming with an increase in atmospheric CO2. However to call these models "the most accurate" is quite a stretch. I ask you to look into the quality of these models and ask simple questions, such as, "do you accurately model the largest heat sink on the planet, or are your oceans just a thin slab of water that is basically a rigidly driven model that doesn't adjust to changes realistically." Ask if they solve their fluid model for all variables, or do they just solve for two of the three (pressure and temperature, but not volume). I can go on for hours about how completely inaccurate these models are.

But I don't have to. The models show that CO2 causes an increase because the modelers set up the model so that CO2 holds more heat in the model. Good golly, what a shock.

On the other hand, we have data that all of the inner planets are now heating up. The Twin MER rover teams were shocked at how warm the Martian winter was this year on Mars. They never expected their rovers to make it through the winter, yet both survived without a problem. In just the 30 years since the Viking missions, the temperature of Mars has increased substantially. In fact, it's done so by very nearly the exact same percentage as the temperatures seen on Earth. Similar remote measurements of Venus have shown the same increase.

Now, unless you want to claim that Dick Cheney is secretly driving his SUV's on Mars, that means the cause of the rise in temperature must be mainly external. And, oh look, here's a study that's found just that. [livescience.com]

Science is hard, Climatology is very hard. We have no hard evidence to support anthropogenic global warming theories. We have computer models. The same people on this list who would scoff at the idea of a computer predicting the weather one week in advance, will accept, without the slightest hesitation, the prediction of a computer 100 years into the future. And, no, don't give me the "it's climate, the little changes disappear into climate" because that's bullshit. It's been disproven time and time again. The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300%. That's not a minor mistake, that's not within one standard deviation, that's a wild-ass guess that was totally wrong.

Trillions of dollars and Millions of lives will be lost if the "we should take action just in case" crowd wins. Some of the best estimates say that cutting CO2 by 50% will cost 1.5 BILLION LIVES by 2100. Are you so eager to pull the trigger?

Whoa, hold on a second

[benhocking]

Are you actually suggesting that a web-site called "friendsofscience.org" wouldn't actually be friendly to science? Next thing you're going to tell me is that the Clear Skies Initiative [epa.gov] allows for increases in pollution [sierraclub.org]...

What I see

[metotalk]

Living a city where there are two major cities sitting vary close to each other and a major airport between them. (Dallas - Ft. Worth) You start to see patterns that make you think a bit more about really is causing global warming. What you can all ways see temperature wise in the north Texas area is that it is most of the time 5 to 10 degrees F cooler West of the Dallas - Ft. Worth area. Then you moving east in to Ft. Worth the temp starts going up and the more east that you go the higher the temp gets. Done and told Dallas (being east of Ft. Worth and the DFW airport is all ways 2 to 3 degrees hotter then Ft. Worth. So, what is making Dallas hotter then Ft. Worth? The fact that the normal jet stream of air here moves mostly west to east. So when the Sun shines on the concrete or asphalt on the roads all day long and makes the ground that much hotter and then the wind blows the air over this increased temperatures of the roads and airport runways it just keeps building until it gets back over an area where there are less roadways to start cooling the air. Every one keeps looking at pollution as being the main reason for global warming. It is a factor that should not be over looked but no one is looking at the fact that cities are growing all over the world so this means that roadways are being added to and widened all the time. Thus adding to the surface area of a really big heater. Having lived out in a country environment I know that once the sun goes down it starts to cool off, but the city is not the same. It can take a city a hour or two to start to see any real drop in temperatures.

Re:Recent demonstration of global warming

[Erioll]

How about you re-insert the section of the quote that you edited that talked about the heat islands of populated areas before posting misleading information.

Re:Science is hard

[nihilogos]

Now, unless you want to claim that Dick Cheney is secretly driving his SUV's on Mars, that means the cause of the rise in temperature must be mainly external. And, oh look, here's a study that's found just that. [livescience.com]

From the article "Increased output from the Sun might be to blame for 10 to 30 percent of global warming that has been measured in the past 20 years, according to a new report."

The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300%

What the hell does this ridiculous statement mean? That the model predicted an average temperatue of 90C for the year, but it turned out to be 30C?

We have no hard evidence to support anthropogenic global warming theories.

Isn't that exactly what Bush and Cheney are saying? The same people who had hard evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. I'm not sure they'd understand hard evidence if it gave them concussion.

comment about part of article

[Robocoastie]

I see this a lot in articles about this issue and I think it needs addressed: "A vocal minority of scientists say the warming climate is the result of a natural cycle." Me: no duh! No one's saying it's NOT part of a natural cycle. What is alarming though is that the current trend has occurred faster than other periods in history which means an investigation was needed to determine just why that is. All the evidence has led to the affect of the industrial revolution. That's the one thing differing from all other "natural cycle" trends of the past. What can be done about it? Nothing. Short of an asteroid hitting us and turning our clocks back 200+ years I don't see anything meaningful being done to change anything. As the expression goes "the genie can't be put back in the bottle." On top of this, global population has forced the governments to lock down just where we can live tighter than a popcorn fart so you have a hard time escapeing the toxic asthma bothering gasses and pollution of the city.

Re:I'm starting to believe.

[scotch]

Immigration isn't driving up housing prices. Increase demand for houses is driving up housing prices. That demand doesn't come from an influx of immigrants, it comes from an increasing trend for people to buy multiple homes (e.g. vacation homes, summer homes) and from people buying homes as investments (i.e. speculation). If you weren't an AC, you would know all that.