NASA Says 2010 Tied For Warmest Year On Record 554
An anonymous reader writes "It may not seem like it, but 2010 has tied 2005 as the warmest year since people have been keeping records, according to data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. That difference is so small that it puts them in a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880." Adds jamie: "This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average — 0.62 +/- 0.07 C above, to be precise. It was the wettest year on record too, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network."
Not so frosty piss (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
are you implying there will be a war due to global warming?
Re:Not so frosty piss (Score:4, Informative)
Actually
Both Climate Change and Global Warming are unique terms that have specific meanings.
To put it simply:
Cause: Global Warming
Effect: Climate Change
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html [nasa.gov]
If anything, we should be talking about Global Warming more.
Because it's amazingly simple when you boil it down to it's bare constuients.
**"Is it the sun?"** Sometimes but definently not for the past half century.
http://greyfalcon.net/solar0.png [greyfalcon.net]
**"Are we certain that less and less infrared radiation is exiting out into space, almost entirely in the wavelength we'd expect CO2 and CH4 to block?"**
Yes
http://greyfalcon.net/greenhouse [greyfalcon.net]
**Is the rate of warming significant?**
Yeah, I'd say 100x faster than you'd expect from changes in earth's orbit alone is significant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bftcWQiZPPg [youtube.com]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-to-explain-Milankovitch-cycles-to-a-hostile-Congressman-in-30-seconds.html [skepticalscience.com]
http://greyfalcon.net/climate2 [greyfalcon.net]
(^^ I need a better source for this comment)
**"Do we know that the CO2 is from fossil fuels. i.e. "Manmade CO2"**
Yes
http://greyfalcon.net/carbon3 [greyfalcon.net]
http://greyfalcon.net/c14 [greyfalcon.net]
http://greyfalcon.net/carbon2 [greyfalcon.net]
DONE. That's all you need to know.
With absolute certainty "manmade CO2" is the main cause global warming.
Re:Not so frosty piss (Score:4, Informative)
The focus solely on CO2 is fueled in part by misconceptions. It’s true that human activity produces vastly more CO2 than all other greenhouse gases put together. However, this does not mean it is responsible for most of the earth’s warming. Many other greenhouse gases trap heat far more powerfully than CO2, some of them tens of thousands of times more powerfully. When taking into account various gases’ global warming potential—defined as the amount of actual warming a gas will produce over the next one hundred years—it turns out that gases other than CO2 make up most of the global warming problem.
Even this overstates the effect of CO2, because the primary sources of these emissions—cars and power plants—also produce aerosols. Aerosols actually have a cooling effect on global temperatures, and the magnitude of this cooling approximately cancels out the warming effect of CO2. The surprising result is that sources of CO2 emissions are having roughly zero effect on global temperatures in the near-term!
This result is not widely known in the environmental community, due to a fear that polluting industries will use it to excuse their greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists had the data reviewed by other climate experts, who affirmed Hansen’s conclusions. However, the organization also cited climate contrarians’ misuse of the data to argue against curbs in CO2. This contrarian spin cannot be justified.
...
By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture.
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/earth-day-update-meat-methane-laughing-gas/ [wordpress.com]
http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2 [timeforchange.org]
We need to eat less meat and switch to less polluting meats (such as kangaroo).
Re:Not so frosty piss (Score:5, Informative)
The issue with this, and the reason why CO2 continues to legitimately get the majority of attention, is that methane's half-life in the atmosphere is much, much, much shorter than CO2. As a result, adjusting methane emissions is less urgent, because the effects of the methane in the atmosphere vanish on much shorter timescales- the CO2 just keeps compounding.
So, while methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas on, say, a 1-year timescale, the comparison is much more complicated averaged over the duration of the substance's lifetime in the atmosphere.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Not much to flame about since I stopped reading TFA as soon as I saw "James Hansen" mentioned as the source.
Re:Not so frosty piss (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are the sensors for temperature located?
Are these the same historical locations, year-to-year, over the statistical time-span?
The devil hides in the details...
Re:What Other Conditions Affect Local Collection D (Score:5, Informative)
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2009/05/antony-watts-and-surface-stations-wait.html [blogspot.com]
Re:Not so frosty piss (Score:4, Insightful)
Oy vey! (Score:5, Informative)
That's an extremely dishonest way to describe it. You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one, wow! what a great idea huh?!?!
In fact they used that tree ring data without caveat for most of the chart, then silently omitted it near the end of the sequence, substituting data from the other set only for those years where the data from the first set didnt fit their hypothesis. Then they labeled the chart so it looked like a single, reliable data set produced the whole sequence, and presented it to the world as such.
I find this line deliciously ironic. Perhaps you are not acquainted with the phenomenon of psychological projection [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Oy vey! (Score:5, Informative)
You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one
Well yes that's in fact what they did. The problem is deciding how much of the less reliable data to throw out. Upon discovering that a (small) number of trees displayed anomalous results in the 1960s, they could have i) decided there was something wrong (eg. chemical treatment) with these particular trees and excluded these trees only. ii) decide that a small number of anomalous trees invalidated dendrochronology and throw out all tree-ring data or iii) excluded that data from the years which included the anomalous tree ring data given that the instrumental record rendered it unnecessary anyway. The first would have been cherry picking and the second deliberately blinding oneself. Sensibly they chose the last option.
In fact they used that tree ring data without caveat for most of the chart, then silently omitted it near the end of the sequence
That is an outright LIE. There is nothing silent or secret about this. The problem encountered and the method used to deal with it was discussed in the original 1998 Mann et al. paper in Nature.
Now I don't think that you are suffering from projection. You are simply easily duped.
Decadal count is more important (Score:4, Informative)
NASA also put out a piece comparing different findings by different organizations, [nasa.gov] explaining the differences and why they aren't a big deal. The articles also states that year-to-year measures aren't particularly useful - not only are 2010 and 2005 very close, but the next six are also very similar to each other - but looking at it decade by decade (i.e. a larger sample size) gives far more meaning:
On that time scale, the three records are unequivocal: the last decade has been the warmest on record. “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. "It is the underlying trend that is important."
Re: (Score:3)
Are averages even the best measure?
Sure, so we're getting more energy from the sun. Which means more heat, which makes air rise, and suck in cold air from the polar regions.
Thus, we have the polar regions rapidly heating up in not-so-statistically-insignificant terms of 5 - 10 degrees. And record unseasonably cold and hot flashes in the temperate regions in between.
There must be some measure other than an averaged thermometer readings that is actually meaningful in this context. Insert joke about hospita
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And Generalissismo Francisco Franco is still dead. Your point?
The point is, it's getting hot in here.
Re:Decadal count is more important (Score:5, Informative)
The trend is flat since 1998.
No it's not. 1998 was an outlier, as anyone with more than half a brain can tell by looking at the data. By definition, trends do not rely on outliers.
Re: (Score:3)
8 million decades is 80 million years dum-dum. 10^6*10=10^7 (a decade is 10 years). Observe that a billion years is 10^9.
It's probably not back that far, but almost certainly millions of years (from when the continents weren't where they are now, causing the climate to be different) and certainly we have the highest CO2 in 400,000 years. If you look at a graph of CO2, there are characteristic undulations corresponding to glacial periods and interglacials (CO2 is a strong positive feedback with Milankovich
When earths go bad!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Also (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just like Master Chief is the answer to all the Floods.
Yeah, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Type "global warming" into Wolfram Alpha and limit the graphic to 100 years, 50 years and 10 years. You get an increase of 0.7C, 1.44C and somewhere between -0.8 and +0.6C. Depending on your starting point, the trend may be misleading. The one with a range of 500 years and 100 years are pretty alarming though.
Also, people massively tend to underestimate the amount of energy to warm up an entire planetary atmosphere by this amount. 0.4C looks small, until you calculate the amount of energy necessary to heat up an *entire planet*. It's like a massive juggernaut - once it rolls, it's going to take a lot to stop it.
Re: (Score:3)
Personally, I'd be concerned with what happens when all the permafrost and polar ice/glaciers melt. Have you seen the temperature graph of a glass of melting ice water? While everything is frozen, the temp rises with the energy input. When you hit the melting point, the temperature rises very little for the energy input, as all that energy is going into phase changing ice into water. Once that ice is all melted, though, the temperature rise returns to mirror that of the pre-melting glass, quickly matching t
Re: (Score:3)
If you want disturbing, consider the melting of subsurface methane-ice concentrates. Methane is an excellent greenhouse gas, and a lot of methane is stored in ice. Once that melts, you could have a situation where more and more methane gets into the air, leading to more and more ice melting, until we run out of ice. But by then, we could be in a huge amount of trouble in a very short timeperiod, and not much you can do about it either.
Prevention is half the cure for some ills, but in this case it could well
where are the error bars and raw data ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:where are the error bars and raw data ? (Score:5, Informative)
The actual data this press release is based on is here [nasa.gov].
Versions of this data released to the media generally don't include error bars, though they should. But the methodology is the same as Hansen's 2006 paper [nasa.gov]:
"Estimated 2-sigma error (95% confidence) in comparing nearby years of global temperature (Fig. 1A), such as 1998 and 2005, decreases from 0.1C at the beginning of the 20th century to 0.05C in recent decades (4)."
Thus, the data errors are just a little smaller than the year-to-year variations, but are far, far smaller than the century-long trend. Which is why Hansen stresses that it doesn't really matter exactly which year is the hottest on record: what matters is how this decade stacks up to the rest of the 20th century.
Let's All Be Careful with Our Units (Score:2)
Summary is wrong: the difference was actually 0.018 degrees Rankine, not Fahrenheit.
Sheesh, don't these article-summary writers know anything about Science...?
So we've been keeping records for 130 years... (Score:2)
Do these people have any idea how old the Earth actually is?
Re: (Score:3)
A climate model is nothing more than a pure physical model of the earth. All you need to produce a graph from 1900 to 2010 is to plug in the initial conditions, and all external influences from 1900 onwards (solar output, atmospheric composition, volcanic eruptions). The model calculates what happens next. Temperatures are not plugged in the model, so please explain why you need a bigger sample.
Global Warming a hoax? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain.
Oh, wait.....
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince everybody that there is a problem it will be far, far too late to do anything about it.
You have to remember that we live in a world where most people still believe in the supernatural, where people in power still consider prayer to be of value and where people still go around killing each other because they disagree about invisible beings with superpowers.
Trying to convince everyone is a pointless waste of effort. We need to find ways of ma
And yet... Curiously Cold and Wet in So, Cal. (Score:2)
I dare say we didn't have a proper summer... and may indeed be having a proper winter.
NASA Gets Busted All The Time (Score:3, Informative)
NASA, GISS and James Hansen have been busted before (by amateurs) for being wrong several times :
Deja Vu All Over Again: Blogger Again Finds Error in NASA Climate Data
NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world's primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe.
GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm-- a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month's data.
Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA's data didn't agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.
An alert reader on McIntyre's blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier-- the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.
A few locations in Ireland were also found to be using September data..
Steve McIntyre informed GISS (run by Hansen) of the error by email. According to McIntyre, there was no response, but within "about an hour", GISS pulled down the erroneous data, citing a "mishap" and pointing the finger of blame upstream to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)."
http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13410&red=y#366381 [dailytech.com]
NOAA has been singled out for calling 2010 the warmest year using faulty data
NOAA’s Jan-Jun 2010 Warmest Ever: Missing Data, False Impressions
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/17/noaas-jan-jun-2010-warmest-ever-missing-data-false-impressions/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That was two years ago, it was not NASA who made the mistake and it was quickly corrected. Why are you trying to mislead readers about this?
Re:NASA Gets Busted All The Time (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, data errors are NOAA's fault as they're the ones providing the raw data. The mistakes usually get corrected on their own when the records are reviewed (such as when the hurricane season gets reviewed at the end of the season). Most errors may not get discovered for awhile, as they are not used to make a sensationalized public release.
But McIntyre and Watts like to play the conspiracy card, and either encourage (or at the very least don't discourage or correct) erroneous data/conclusions of their own or that of their participants. Every single mistake is vindication for them and their audience. It's all the proof they need to mischaracterize the thousands of climate scientists in the world as evil, money-grubbing, fascist socialist bastards bent on world domination.
Basically they do the same thing the IDers do to the theory of evolution, only with less Jesus. Every now and again they discover an error, which is good because it makes the science that much better. But they have yet to do anything meaningful in discrediting the current body of climate science. The papers I know about authored by McIntyre on the subject have been ripped to shreds. Their collective postulations about weather stations was thoroughly debunked (though, of course, they continues to deny it). Most of their other arguments that I've seen in the climate community have been torn apart piece by piece by experts in the field.
It's possible to be a skeptic without being an asshole. I work with a few skeptics. We have interesting conversations ranging from analytical methods to atmospheric dynamics. But the only time McIntyre and Watts are brought up is when we either want to laugh or when we want to point out how NOT to do something.
Re: (Score:3)
>>Their collective postulations about weather stations was thoroughly debunked
Postulations are just a theory. ;)
But seriously, the temperature station project was worthwhile, and various (real) papers have credited Watts for his work. He *guessed* that fixing problems with the weather stations would disprove global warming, and was wrong, but that doesn't mean that the work that he and a bunch of volunteers did was meaningless. It's always better to have empirical data on things than trying to heurist
Re: (Score:2)
We have reliable proxy data for much earlier than 1880.
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:5, Insightful)
And most of the places people like living were under water. See any problems with that?
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The places were most people like living are at or near sea level. That is why there are so many sunken civilizations.
If the water level was 15 meters higher, guess where people would like to live. I will give you a hint as to how to find out: Figure out what land will be at or near sea level.
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:4, Insightful)
We do.. and we are.
To behave otherwise is to invite extinction.
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:5, Insightful)
People have always believed that it's perfectly acceptable to kill off other species to keep humans around. Why do you think the Grizzley bear and wolf populations got so low?
Who are you to say that we are more important than, say, the really clever octopods who will come after us?
What a stupid question. I'm more important because I'm me and I want to live, and if that motherfucking octopod thinks he's going to take my place he better bring a whole bunch of bros and some serious weaponry otherwise he's ending up on my plate for dinner. I think a better question is what type of self hating species WOULDN'T do anything and everything in their power to survive? If you feel a deep rooted urge to jump into killer whale's mouths in order to save THEIR species then by all means do so before you spread your genes and hurt ours.
Re: (Score:3)
life != species.
a lot of species can die, and a lot more can come in their places that are better adapted to CO2.
so what are we in those two categories? i believe we can adapt, but probably not without a massive "correction" in our population (read: billions may have to be shed from our population in order to reach an equilibrium. our only defense in this situation is better technology. some choose to work on mitigating this, others choose to bury their heads in the sand)
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:4, Insightful)
The shit thing is, if the "correction" is disruptive enough, we may never get the chance to rebuild what we have now. There's only so much easily-accessible energy sitting around waiting for us to get it. If we deplete our oil reserves to low enough levels and then suffer a major global cataclysm, our descendants will be permanently stuck living an Amish lifestyle.
Not that it matters much to us, here and now - I'll be long dead before anything like that happens. But I still feel some responsibility to try and keep our species moving forward.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
No problem (Score:2)
Yeah and when life was the most abundant on earth, it was between 4-7C warmer and the CO2 was in the 20 times as much as today.
Agreed, life will adapt. Even we can probably adjust to hotter climates in a few hundred thousand years if the cull rate is high enough (but of course not too high.) Of course, there's a limit to how hot mammals can tolerate and still produce viable sperm but evolution has done wonders in the past.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad about all that land we will lose to the sea though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:"Since people have been keeping records" (Score:4, Interesting)
A brief anecdote from current events. Western North American pine forests are being decimated by pine beetles that are thriving due to rising temperatures. Their historic range has grown because a lack of an adequately lengthy freeze during the winter is allowing them to live longer.
As a result, forests are turning gray and falling. The ecosystems they support are waning. Without tree coverage, snow melt will happen earlier and be more abrupt. Water typically stored in reservoirs will instead just flow downstream and into the ocean (unless we retrofit reservoirs to handle more capacity). This can also ultimately lead to desertification. It's also worth noting that millions of acres of decomposing trees releases quite a bit of CO2.
So, while it may be great for specific forms of agriculture in specific areas, there will also undoubtedly be terrible catastrophes caused by rising temperatures, and they have already begun.
Re:Alternate scenario (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, that's totally fair in an ideal world; however, the forests have developed a mono-culture because of all the fire suppression that has been going on for decades.
The forests were already over-crowded and unhealthy. The current pine beetle outbreak (which mostly affects lodgepole pines, but can also hit pinon, and a few others) is so devastating because of this.
In the past, outbreaks would be limited by a hard freeze in the winter which killed all the beetles and limited their range. Also, naturally healthy and diverse forests limited the scope of devastation. Today we have forests that are composed almost entirely of a single species in many places and the trees are all roughly the same age and present a similar amount of susceptibility.
Once the beetles have taken every last tree, the ability for the forest to replenish itself will be hindered by the fact that there is very little other plant life around to protect the soil. Unprotected soil leads to more violent snow melt runoff, erosion, water contamination, etc. The forest will have a much more difficult time replenishing itself.
Re: (Score:3)
Where is the heat going???! The point is not enough of it *IS* going.
No detectable change in weather or climate? Where the fuck are you living? Not Australia right now for a start.
Re: (Score:2)
Weather and climate are not the same thing. It's stupid to even bring them up in the same sentence.
Re:Utter utter rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
Your house is not the world. Sometimes it snows over your house, but that doesn't mean it's snowing over my house. It might even be sunny over my house.
Frankly you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to claim that global temperature averages aren't on the increase. That it's all our fault and we're all going to die? I'm still waiting to be convinced.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
None of them have had as profound an effect as human beings.
Re: (Score:3)
When people say, "global warming is a myth", they can't prove it with any certainty, but they would still choose to do nothing. If they're wrong, Millions or Billions of people die.
If we choose to do what we can to try and keep it from getting worse, and in the end all the climate scientists were wrong, what are the c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Money" is just a medium here; it's a matter of where it makes sense to focus our efforts and resources. You're endorsing misallocation on an unprecedented scale.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?
Re: (Score:2)
I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?
http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate [reason.com]
News for nerds... I don't think so (Score:3)
I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?
http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate [reason.com]
Both sides of this debate _outside_ of the scientific community are disturbingly simplistic. On the one hand we've got the chicken littles who blame _every_ major weather event on global warming. The flooding here in Australia is point-in-case - we are in the grip of a very strong La Nina event, climatologists might argue that it is particularly strong because of an underlying warming trend but the floods themselves are due solely to La Nina. On the other hand we have the "temperatures haven't risen since 1
Re: (Score:2)
How about this from the NOAA?
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100915_globalstats.html [noaa.gov]
Hansen is known for tweaking the data, anything that comes out of his mouth is suspect.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
Re: (Score:2)
The data from NASA is located here http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110112/ [nasa.gov].
The global average temperature went down from 2005 to 2008. It has gone up from 2008 to 2010. The nature of the data over the last hundred years shows an upward trend.
There are important questions that I wish everyone would consider when reading this. They are,
Is the cause is man made? (Consider volcanoes as a major CO2 source, sun energy output, etc)
Is the change significant?
Is the change preventable? (this is related
Re: (Score:3)
Is the cause is man made? (Consider volcanoes as a major CO2 source, sun energy output, etc)
Yes. That it is predominantly man made has been conclusively shown.
Is the change significant?
Yes it is, and will be getting even more significant as time progresses.
Is the change preventable? (this is related to environmental factors that we have little control over, such as sun energy output)
Theoretically, yes. It is even economically feasible to do so. But I highly doubt that humanity has the collective brains to do anything about it. So no, the future changes will not be prevented. When things get bad enough, humanity will start doing stupid and dangerous things to try to repair the damage.
What major sources of energy can we make available to replace oil and coal? One way or another, we have to answer this question eventually. Remember that we use close to the energy that the sun delivers to the Earth, so the combination of solar, hydro, bio fuel, and other sun energy sources will not be enough.
What? Someone is giving you bad information. Incoming solar
Re:Skimpy data (Score:5, Insightful)
when we know that this is a lie, and temperatures have not risen since 1998.
You've been claiming this for years even though it's been shown to be bullshit the entire time. Why don't you just post it again a little later. The more you post it the truer it becomes, right?
Re:Prologue to Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gives a shit about that?
What I care about is are we hurting our own chances of living here?
Oh and stop quoting that nut case.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
This is true. Anyone who tells you anthropogenic climate change means the end of the world is an idiot -- and I say that as a climate scientist.
However, many people including Crichton go on to conclude that human influence on climate is irrelevant and negligible. This is the logical equivalent of saying that since sticking your hand in a bucket of lye probably won't kill you, it's perfectly safe to go ahead and do it on a regular basis.
Re: (Score:2)
He stole this crap from George Carlin http://gospelofreason.com/2007/05/24/george-carlin-the-planet-is-fine [gospelofreason.com].
The difference that he missed however, was that George was being his (typical) sarcastic self.
Re:urbanization (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't have anything to do with the urbanization that occurred between 1880 and 2011 could it?
If by "urbanization" you mean "unprecedented emission of greenhouse gases combined with massive deforestation" then yes, that's pretty well supported by theory and observation. If by "urbanization" you mean "the false rumor that the presence of concrete magically makes thermometers in the ocean and in space register higher temperatures" then no, it couldn't
No, it couldn't (Score:3)
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter3.pdf [www.ipcc.ch]
Page 244
(warning: the pdf is 24 MB, so it takes a significant amount of time to download)
Studies that have looked at hemispheric and global scales conclude that any urban-related trend is an order of magnitude smaller than decadal and longer time-scale trends evident in the series (e.g., Jones et al., 1990; Peterson et al., 1999). This result could partly be attributed to the omission from the gridded data set of a small number of sites (1
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it is the warmest year on record. So what? Keep records for long enough and you'll wind up with a coldest year too.
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it is the warmest year on record. So what? Keep records for long enough and you'll wind up with a coldest year too.
That is the point that gets me. I don't doubt that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere raised the temp a little, but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.
That said, I do like cars that pollute less, developing better technologies that use less energy or pollute less, but not because of global warming. I just like to breath, drink water, fish, and want to have a national energy policy that isn't dependent on people half way around the globe. If were were making decisions based on those issues, it would make more sense as those are issues we can all agree on and benefit from, and don't require drastic, job killing measures, nor as heated of a debate.
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:5, Informative)
but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.
Except, of course, that it's not [bbc.co.uk]. In case you're too busy to click and read, it's an article that explains that CO2 levels are substantially higher now than any point in the last 800,000 years. Typically the largest increases were around 30 ppm/1000 years. In the 17 years prior to that article in 2006, CO2 had risen 30 ppm.
But by all means, let's continue to ignore these things and wait until we're absolutely certain before we go off and improve our planet and (if you're in the US) reduce our dependency on foreign oil and other such drastic, uncomfortable measures.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And except that before the industrial revolution, it was also at a plateau for centuries, at almost the highest level for at least 400,000 years, before the industrial revolution, so perhaps something besides Buicks was causing it for the many centuries before 1800. Yes it took off after the IR, but why was it so much higher before then [grida.no], when human populations were rather sparse? That is the point that people like YOU keep ignoring. There is an issue, but the cause/effect is NOT as cut and dry as you wou
Re: (Score:3)
Yes it took off after the IR, but why was it so much higher before then [grida.no], when human populations were rather sparse?
Some was the natural slow increase for the interglacial period. Some was deforestation, both natural and artifical. It releases CO2 and prevents absorption of CO2. Humans burning forests to clear the way for croplands. Formation and expansion of the Sahara. Transformation of the Middle East from temperate lands to a desert. Nobody is saying all climate change is man made. We're just really good at doing it quickly.
Re: (Score:3)
The CO2 plateau is so narrow on a geologic scale that it isn't often discussed. The apparent plateau you see on the right of the page you mentioned is in fact only a few pixels wide on the left and occurs naturally every 100,000 years. This link [google.com] is somewhat more readable. I hope you don't view this as me ignoring the cause/effect so I'm going to be redundant: I think that the effect is historically normal, and the cause is the same historical cause of the last three jumps from 200 to 280 ppm, though I d
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a global warming denier. I'm someone who thinks the globe is warming, but we don't know how much of it is man made. Likely much, maybe most, maybe less than half. But it doesn't matter if we can meet half way and make some of the changes while we debate, the changes that will improve life even if global warming was a myth: better fuel economy means less reliance on Arab countries and less pollution.
I think you will find many, many outdoor types agree with me. I'm not Johnny Huntalot, I just fish regularly and I am outdoors a lot. I also live in a county with no manufacturing, few humans, and yet we fail EPA every month from pollution from areas 90 miles from here in two different directions. (between Charlotte and Greensboro/Winston-Salem, NC) If you bother to ask, and don't ask in framing the question around global warming, you will find that most people like the idea of reducing pollution and dependence on Arab oil. Over half the nation has consumption warnings on fish from our lakes due to years of dumping PCBs in the water, for instance.
Many people who enjoy the outdoors, live in the south and are either Republican or Libertarian (like myself) or otherwise conservative at least fiscally, would agree with half the points if you don't make it a debate about global warming. There are reasons to doubt the motives on some people on both sides of the debate. The smart money avoids the debate and simply focuses on things we all already agree on. You keep harping about "global warming", you tune out half the people who would agree on half the ideas you would like to see implemented. Does it matter if people disagree on the reasons, if they agree with you on at least some of the methods?
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
I haven't noticed that. It isn't mentioned in the article. All it says is:
The analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world...
You make it sound like they chose the 5 hottest stations. Logically, they should take some statistical function of all the stations. It seems really unlikely that they are cherry picking stations to produce a result. NASA is a research organization.
P.S. If you get modded down, it will be because you made an outlandish accusation that NASA is falsifying evidence, with no evidence of your own. If what you say is true, that would be quite a scandal. I'd love to see someone point out what stations they are using and ask them why they are doing it that way.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Melting ice is a good indication that it is really getting warmer, and that it's not just a bunch of measurement errors/cherry picking.
Re: (Score:3)
Since you present no evidence, and state neither who "they" are or what the "different sets of reporting stations" are or what publications you found from "them" that list these different sets of reporting stations I can tentatively conclude that you are either paranoid or a liar. I have a friend with a Doctorate in Psychology I ran this by, and she agreed.
When you state that "every year" they "'show' that it's the
Re: (Score:3)
Have any of you noticed that every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year?
[citation needed]
Re: (Score:3)
If you think they're manipulating ground station data through selection, then ignore the ground stations and just look at the satellite data, which is showing the same warming trend.
"I have a friend...."
Speaking of bad science. Look, if you can demonstrate in a clearly well thought out manner that their science is completely wrong and bullshit, then write a paper about it and get it published in a peer reviewed journal. Seriously. But you better have rock solid impenetrable arguments or it'll be ripped to s
Re:Lies, damned lies and statistics (Score:4, Informative)
No, stations within 1000 km distance are actually very closely correlated in their temperature.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1987/Hansen_Lebedeff.html [nasa.gov]
Re: (Score:3)
Warmest on record where they keep the thermometers over blacktop as well. LOL Where is global warming when we need it. Snow in every state except Florida.
And the summer was ridiculously hot, yes. Anyone who thinks that global warming means that temperatures will become uniformly higher, or less chaotic, is either dreaming or trolling.
Prepare yourself. Global warming actually means stronger hurricanes, drier dry spells, bigger floods, and more chaotic weather all around.
Re:Please stay up to date... (Score:4, Informative)
Stop spreading that FUD.
It's called GLobal climate change becasuse even thougn it's gett hotter, the world still has cycles.
Stupid people assume if the climate gets warmer, then there won't be and snow anywhere.
Or the 'It's false because it's snowed more this year.' In fact they fall prey to the same type of illogical thinking deniers do.
The world is getting hotter, and because of the increase in energy, weather is getting more radical. And not the good radical like King Radical, either.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Time for a reality check (Score:4, Informative)
Aside from your incorrect comments about statistical significance and the insinuation that scientists aren't fully aware that they're studying a system with a very long history...
Yes, nobody thinks we'll push the world into a state that is entirely anathema to it. It's simply that we're pushing the world into a state different from that we find particularly convenient and have come to depend on. Considering that it is humans that like the climatological state and also humans changing it, I don't think you can call it particularly egotistical.
Re: (Score:3)
What people are really saying is that they want things to continue on in a way favorable for themselves. The simple fact is that while climate change might kill off a lot of species including humans
Strangely, this is somehow all I really care about.
Re: (Score:3)
You can actually remove every weather station that has been claimed to be faulty for the above reason without significantly changing your results.
Re: (Score:3)
If you look at the maps, you'll notice most of the recent warming was not near those areas.
Here you can play with the data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ [nasa.gov]
For instance, if you choose Jan-Dec 2010, you'll see that Europe was on the cool side, the USA was only slight warmer, and that there are big red areas where nobody lives.