NASA Scientist: Heat Waves Really Are From Global Warming 605
mdsolar writes with a tidbit from the New York Times on global warming: "The percentage of the earth's land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper. The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,' Dr. Hansen said in an interview."
All This From 1 Degree C (Score:5, Interesting)
All this drought, devastation and disaster from just under 1 degree C. Imagine what it will be like at 2 degrees! When you multiply the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of the oceans and air by 1 degree, it's a number that's off the charts. How did people think we could dump that much energy into any system and it would not make a difference?
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:5, Insightful)
How did people think we could dump that much energy into any system and it would not make a difference?
Well, that's weird: people commenting without having an idea about the issue.
We dumping energy into the system?
We are not giving [so much] energy into the system; we are just pouring green-house gases into the atmosphere, which in turn stop the planet from loosing energy at the rate it has dissipated it before. That's called green-house effect, because it acts as the glasses in a green house, preventing the heat from leaving the system, and increasing the average temperature.
It is not about human turning their air conditioners on and heating the atmosphere; it's about burning gas/coal/petrol to generate energy for those air conditioners (and cars, airplanes, industry, etc.) and increasing the level of green-house gases.
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck me sideways. Can we sort this shit out. To free something is to loose it. To not win is to lose. If you were practising archery you'd be loosing arrows. If you were walking around with coins falling from your pocket you would be losing money. If you open all the cages at the zoo the animals have been loosed. If you drop your keys down the drain they are lost. A sibling's death might mean you lose a brother. A tragedy might occur to someone you are loosely related to. If something is not tight it is loose. To make it less tight would be to make it looser. Not knowing the difference between loose and lose makes you sound like a loser.
If English is not your first language then I apologise: in that case you are a far more capable speaker than many who would call English their native tongue, and I can certainly make no claims to proficiency in any other language, but I see this mistake so very often, from people who should genuinely know better that I cannot keep the inner pedant at bay any more.
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:5, Informative)
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The point was that the energy to raise global temps doesn't come from human activities, it comes from the sun. The difference is now in the process by which the sun's energy is radiated back into space.
We're releasing energy stored over the course of 150 million years, there's a lot of sunlight in that oil, coal and wood. The funny part is we're releasing this energy to do things that are believed to cause less energy to radiate back into space (for the time being).
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:5, Informative)
It requires ENERGY to raise TEMPERATURES. 1 calorie (unit of energy) is required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.
However to keep that water at 1 degree celcius above it's surroundings will require continuous energy input since any item hotter than it's surroundings will constantly lose heat to it's surroundings.
This means in the long term there are TWO ways to increase the temperature of an object. You can increase the rate at which heat is supplied to the object or you can make it harder for the object to lose heat to it's surroundings. The greenhouse affect does the latter.
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Go put on a jacket. Notice how you got warmer? I don't believe your putting a jacket on released any significant amount of energy - it just keeps the system more insulated (eg, energy doesn't escape so quickly)
You'll notice that if you step outside into the sun, there's a short period where you don't feel warmer immediately? That's the jacket doing the same thing - it's harder for energy to get inside the system from without (though the sun and ambient air temperature will quickly overwhelm the difference,
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Prepare for the future of tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing we normal people can do on an individual basis is try to live our lives in the most sustainable way possible. Of primary consideration is the location of where to live, as forest fires, flooding, drought, heat waves, and hurricanes are all increasing in magnitude. Sustainabble energy is important, as is renewable energy. Possessing a generator and solar array is essential, not only do they lower electricity bills, but they ensure life wil not be disrupted by outages. Similarly, storage and conservation of drinking water is also useful. Planting a decent size garden now days can save a family hundreds or even thousands dog dollars a year in food costs.
If one lives in an urban environment (as a majority of humanity now do), live within your means and build up a saving account to deal with unforeseen incidences (disasters, outbreaks, ...anything goes these days!). It pays to be prepared, one cannot say they were not warned. No need to turn into a gun nut and go all survivalist stocking 10 years of food in ones basement, but we clearly need to reevaluate how we live on a daily basis.
Re:Prepare for the future of tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
That's _not_ the only thing we normal people can do. We can learn to reject propaganda. We can pay attention to who we elect, and judge them on the basis of what they do, not what they promise to do. And we can find fellow citizens who also want a better world, and debate with them. People will tell you that this can never happen, and this can never work, but it is the only way change ever happens in a society: from the bottom up. And it has happened many times before. Don't let the no-hopeniks convince you to give up.
This is not to say that any of what you have said above is wrong—just that it's not the only thing you can do.
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The best way to maximize your own well-being is to make sure the people around you are doing well.
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When I see thinking like this, it makes me truly sad. I am torn between thinking you are a rational actor and a self centered dipshit. I think about the tragedy of the commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). The rational thing to do is to grab everything you can-- the inevitable end is total devastation.
If you grow bacteria on a petri dish, they will grow until nutrients are depleted and waste products accumulate-- then they die. A few centuries ago, the earth was in a self sustaining
Re:Prepare for the future of tomorrow (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Prepare for the future of tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that when you give money to the government like that, the effectiveness plummets.
No. Giving money to an ineffective government causes effectiveness to plummet. The correct lesson to draw from that is not "never give money to the government", however, but rather, "make sure your government is effective". I think that is the nuance that Republicans miss when they decide to drown everything in the bathtub.
There are some things (like selling autos and consumer electronics) that private industry is better at, and other things (like basic research, the military, and health care) that government is better at. We should use the best tool for the job in each case.
Re:Prepare for the future of tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem with cheap cynicism: eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. People who don't demand good government won't expect to get it, and when they don't get it they won't punish those who failed to deliver it.
Lazy politicians will take advantage of this because it's always easier to lower people's expectations than to actually deliver results. Left unchecked, that leads to a downward spiral (poor results -> apathy -> corruption -> poorer results), examples of which can be seen in any number of countries. It's not inevitable, however -- it's a choice the country's people make, regarding what levels of performance they will or will not put up with. America didn't go to the moon, or win WW2 or the cold war on the strength of cynicism -- and if those days are behind us now, it's because we chose that path.
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and it's based on the illusionary concepts of the human reality
What other "illusionary concepts" besides reality should I be aware of?
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:4, Informative)
/We/ are not dumping that energy into the system. The sun is. All we are doing is stopping a tiny fraction of the energy that the sun dumps on the earth from escaping.
Given that turning the sun "up" and "down" (the seasons) can make differences of many tens of degrees, the idea that changing the effective reflectivity can change the average temperature by a degree or two does not seem to me unreasonable. What we are doing is painting the earth blacker in the infra-red. And anybody knows how much more a black surface heats up compared to a white one in strong sunlight.
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:4, Insightful)
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All this drought, devastation and disaster from just under 1 degree C. Imagine what it will be like at 2 degrees! When you multiply the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of the oceans and air by 1 degree, it's a number that's off the charts. How did people think we could dump that much energy into any system and it would not make a difference?
What's not to understand...when you're talking to people who think the world has only been around for a few thousand years, you can't really expect them to grasp concepts like global warming.
Re:All This From 1 Degree C (Score:4, Interesting)
It isn't the 1ÂC change that is the problem. It is the bad habitat practices (cities, suburbs, huge parking lots), bad transportation practices (too much driving, too much shipping) and the bad agricultural practices (mono-cropping, feedlots, grain feeding, over production, poor choices of plant species), etc.
Most of this is caused by government subsidization of bad decisions. Stop these subsidies and there will be a lot of self-correction. Yes, people will complain about higher gasoline prices, loss of home mortgage deductible, higher food prices, etc but paying the real cost will help them make better decisions.
All of this is reverse-able, correctable, if you have the will to do better. How much more are you willing to pay at the pump, pay for locally pastured meats, pay for locally grown foods, pay for locally produced products, pay for longer lasting goods, skip the cheap plastics, do more yourself, stop traveling so much? You can make a difference. Act now.
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Do you know the difference between averages and extremes?
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Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:3, Funny)
In the U.S. the conservative political party (the ones opposed to doing anything about this) is called the Republicans.
By and large they live in the center and southern parts of the country, the parts most affected by the heat.
So, in a sense, they are burning in the Hell they themselves have created. Unfortunately the rest of the world is also suffering.
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely. Everybody who doesn't cut backs much as possible on his fossil energy use carries blame for this.
That said, Europe also definitely has its share of conservatives who are not so eager to do anything about this. They're generally not denying the facts as loudly as US Republicans do, but they also don't consider it something that they need to worry about. As if they're hoping it'll go away if they just focus on other problems.
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:5, Informative)
"And what are the Republicans in China and India doing?"
per capita emissions, in metric tons:
USA - 17.5
china - 5.3
India - 1.5
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:4, Informative)
The conservatives need to change their stance on global warming. The reason they are always "against" it is that all the political solutions to global warming that are proffered by the left represent the left's statist wet dream. But as I have come to realize, the only real way to solve global warming is through advancements in science and engineering to give us cheap reliable sources of green energy.
The left may say that their statist utopia and an all powerful communal government would solve this, but they'd be just as wrong as they were every other time they've gotten that chance in the past.
We need to find the next Einstein or Tesla to think up solutions to global warming, not the next Mao or Lenin.
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:5, Funny)
Think you could shove any more Libertarian catchphrases into that? Of course you do get extra points for using "statist" twice.
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Of course it does. Just see the Prohibition (any of them) for an example of how ineffective regulation will be when people actively resist it.
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Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:5, Informative)
"... and not even the most progressive American or European voter would be willing to make the kinds of sacrifices necessary to make meaningful reductions in carbon emissions."
Complete nonsense: speaking for myself and many others I know we've more than halved our carbon footprint (for example we're carbon negative at home for primary energy now, in suburban London) with relatively little effort, and we're probably just about sustainable even if our consumption was adopted by every one of the ~9x10^9 humans that the UN thinks that global population will peak at. And I don't know if I count as "progressive" with whatever meanings you attach to that, good or bad.
No, we don't own a mansion, SUV or plasma TV(s), nor do we take multiple holidays by jet each year or leave all our lights and appliances on BecauseWeCan(TM), but we are living comfortably and happily as a family of four. We do own our house, etc, BTW.
Are you prepared to alter your sweeping statement given my counter-example(s)?
Rgds
Damon
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite solution to global warming is to tax carbon use and redistribute the proceeds evenly, creating a market incentive for people to stop using carbon. This neatly addresses the externality of carbon use, requires no special bureaucracy, and obsoletes itself as carbon use declines, while at the same time not unfairly penalizing people who are stuck using carbon fuels now.
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Not coincidentally, this is exactly the "wet statist dream" proposed by James Hansen (who voted for Reagan, by the way).
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Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:5, Informative)
The idea usually tossed around regarding CO2 emissions is a cap-and-trade system, modelled after the system created for SO2. That approach was to use market incentives rather than lots of regulations to get companies to reduce their emissions, and it's generally been a success in reducing acid rain. It was conceived of by civil servants at the EPA, but became law only in 1990 with the support of that well-known liberal George H.W. Bush. How exactly is that a "left's statist wet dream"?
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I'm confused. Isn't it the left that generally wants to invest in and stimulate the science and engineering to give us cheap and reliable sources of green energy? Does that make them statist, or is that what you want? It's actually the results from global agreements between mostly authoritarian conservative national leaders that result in more statism.
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Hello!
Nuclear Energy.
If we had continued with nuclear energy instead of letting it die on the cross of the litigators and regulators, CO2 emissions would probably be a fraction of what they are now.
The reason conservatives are suspicious of the entire AGW movement is that the community ignores the obvious solution in favor of the left's statist wet dream.
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Republicans are burning in the Hell they made (Score:4, Insightful)
Well there's a reason why people have taken to calling the Republicans "the party of No" - their strategy in the last few decades essentially seems to have been "block every Democrat proposal when they have the power, then campaign on the fact that the Dems didn't accomplish anything".
I mean, just look our current health care reform that the Democrats had to fight and plead for and still got no Republican votes. The Republicans were adamantly against it, despite the fact that it was largely based on a Republican proposal from the 90's (when it seemed like First Lady Hillary would push for true, single payer universal health care).
They've just gone nuts, their entire political strategy seems to have devolved into a toddler's temper tantrum.
Before the trolls start (Score:5, Insightful)
Limited data set (Score:3)
Finally someone that points out this is about the change in temperature *variance* (square root of variance rather), and not the change in temperature mean. Sigma-dot as it were. The plot of the sigma over the last six decades showed a clear trend that the temperature became more varied in that time. Six decades is nothing in climate terms though. I read the argument on why 1951-1980 was used as the baseline, its mean was near the overall holocene mean, and the mean wasn't changing much during those th
Re:Before the trolls start (Score:4, Interesting)
Strange your weather's not been warm. I live in Iceland and our summer has been crazy-warm and sunny, like 5C over average most days and almost no rain.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you ;)
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In Netherland the last couple of days have seen the most bizarre weather I've ever seen: hot sun shine alternated by short bursts of pouring rain, changing every couple of minutes. Never seen anything like it.
Re:Before the trolls start (Score:5, Informative)
what I'm asking, where the fuck is this summers heatwaves? there hasn't been a single good heatwave in Finland all summer now.(just couple of days every now and then).
Well, unless the Arctic ice starts to recover, there's a pretty good chance that you won't be seeing many hot summers in Finland in the near future. The warming of the Arctic has weakened the air currents and made "blocking patterns" far more likely, those blocking patterns are keeping warm air over most of North America and preventing it from flowing east to Europe like it used to. The net result may be that some of Europe (particular the northern parts like Norway and Finland) will experience temperatures that are significantly below your previous normal temperatures while the southern parts experience temperatures significantly above normal.
Oh, and it's so unlikely that the Arctic ice will recover, that the posters at Watts Up With That (WUWT), one of the big climate denial blogs, seems to have finally stopped predicting that the Arctic ice will recover "next year". It looks like seeing how very, very wrong they were in previous years has tempered their predictions a bit.
Re:Before the trolls start (Score:5, Informative)
(1) global warming isn't uniform
(2) read the paper again—that's not what it says. It compares what was normal in the past to what is normal now, and shows that the statistical probability of such a change occurring due to random variation is too small to take seriously. It's actually a really good argument, unless you are determined that its conclusion is unacceptable.
Re:Before the trolls start (Score:5, Informative)
where the fuck is this summers heatwaves?
Most of the US. Springfield, IL had the hottest July on record, and more record breaking high temperatures this year than any other year. And we had an incredibly mild winter last winter, no sub-zero (farenheight) temperatures at all iirc and no snow to speak of, only an inch or two a few times.
Here, this year is unlike any other in recorded history.
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Eh. (Score:5, Insightful)
The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural
Don't underestimate nature, it has a habit of killing those that do.
Re:Eh. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't anthropomorphize nature, it hates it when you do that.
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Moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone needs to take a long, hard look at the moderation of climate threads on /. Quoting from the moderation guidelines:
I'm not taking sides either way in the climate debate; I'm saying that sceptics are moderated down because the moderators disagree with their point of view. At least one comment here already has the score '0 Flamebait' when I'm pretty sure the author of that comment posted what he posted because he honestly believes it, not because he's trying to stir up a flame war. Another comment is titled, 'Before the trolls start...', immediately branding anyone who disagrees with the author as a troll. They're not, they just disagree with you. Build a bridge and get over it.
Re:Moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm saying that sceptics are moderated down because the moderators disagree with their point of view"
No. They are modded down because they argue against evidence without bringing evidence of their own to the table. An argument with evidence is informative. An argument without evidence is at best uninteresting in the context of global warming, and at worst trolling.
I assume... (Score:3)
Please, no accusations of being a right-wing nut. I just don't jump on any bandwagons until I'm sure of the facts.
Re:I assume... (Score:5, Informative)
The Mauna Loa CO2 record goes back 50 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png [wikipedia.org]
Obviously that's CO2 at a particular spot on the planet --- there are plenty of other records though. Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html [noaa.gov]
Socialist science (Score:5, Interesting)
My dad, who gets most of his news and opinions from Rupert Murdoch's corporation, and my brother, who gets most of his news and opinions from libertarian blogs, assure me that climate science is socialist science. You see, there is a conspiracy at the universities, where all the faculty is implicitly socialist (evidently not having to really work for a living fosters that political belief!) to end capitalism. Climate scientists are the cutting edge by which that conspiracy seeks to slice the capitalist throat. Everything in their journals and public pronouncements is a concerted lie in the furtherance of their conspiracy.
What Joe McCarthy warned us about — a communist conspiracy in government (at a time where there really were some communist conspirators in government, if perhaps not as many as he claimed) — doesn't begin to compare to this (where rather than a minority of government workers being communist, over 97% of climate scientists are in on the grand conspiracy)! To find a parallel, we must look back to earlier in the 20th century, when "Jewish science" threatened to undermine that most advanced of states, Germany. Top non-Jewish scientists in Germany, many with fundamental discoveries to their credit, elucidated precisely how the "theory" of relativity and certain quantum claims from "Jewish science" threatened to undermine the Thousand Year Reich, and more than that were specifically designed to.
From our point of view as Americans, we have much to thank "Jewish science" for. It shows how scientists, when they conspire, can undermine what they see as an evil empire. Similarly, future citizens of Greater Socialist Scandinavia may thank the "climate scientists" whose clever scheme if successful will spell the end of the Capitialist American Empire.
Sample size is too small (Score:3)
He based his conclusions on a 60 year time frame. 60 years is statistically insignificant when looked at on geologic time scales. It is the equivalent of stating a person's average life-time activity level by looking at what said person did over the last minute.
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Mankind is insignificant on a geological time scale.
Why should we care how the climate looks like in a million years if we're extinct in a millennium?
Re:Hansen again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because, as always, peer-reviewed work is to be scoffed at while wild un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen are to be taken at face value.
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Calm down and stop throwing toys, both of you.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:4, Funny)
Calm down and stop throwing toys, both of you.
One of my favourite things about slashdot is the good, solid, thoughtful and well reasoned arguments in the comments.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet you that it will get dark tonight, and then brighten up again tomorrow. Care to take my bet, or want to modify your broad-based claim?
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Yes. Our Lord the FSM might at any moment extend his noodly appendage and delete the very ground upon which you walk. At which point you would fall, unless by the grace of Our Lord he chooses to hold you in the air using his appendages.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you realize that the underlying theory, the greenhouse effect, goes back 100 years? Global warming is not a new idea. 50 years ago there were people predicting that extra CO2 would cause temperature to rise. In the last 2 decades, we've seen the start of that, and it fits the theory quite well. Of course the earth is an incredibly complex thing, and there are millions of factors that also have some impact, but the foundation is pretty solid.
Considering that we know that CO2 traps heat, and we know that CO2 levels have gone up, and we know that global temperature has gone up, you need to come up with a really solid alternative explanation if you want to flat out deny a causal relationship between these facts.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Informative)
The guy in the 1850's was John Tyndall who quantified the absorption of IR by CO2 and the Swedish guy was Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
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Oh absolutely. Predicting local weather is unbelievably hard, and distinguishing exact causes of individual instances of weather is practically impossible. This reminds me of a situation with a nuclear power plant that had a higher number of cancer deaths in its vicinity. Those deaths happen normally too, just not quite as much. So there was no individual case where you could state that it was caused by the presence of the nuclear power plan, but it was very likely that the plant had to be the cause of some
Re:Hansen again? (Score:4, Insightful)
So as of right now when I hear very specific claims such as "this weather pattern was absolutely caused by global warming", I'm definitely going to be suspicious.
I think the claim here is more 'statistically, this weather is almost impossible to have happened without being caused by the warming'
I think that's a reasonable claim. It's sorta 'As a doctor, pinpointing the exact cause of long term health problems is difficult, but statistically, your ten heart attacks last year are likely to be due to you eating a pound of bacon every day'.
Yes, any specific amount of heat might be due to anything. Pockets of extreme heat does happen randomly, for no reason we can determine.
But this much? This fast? This long? The odds of that happening without something causing it as very low. Something has clearly changed. And the obvious change is, well, obvious.
And exactly what predicted.For several years I, at least, have been hearing 'The problem with global warming isn't just gradually increasing the temp and sea level. The problem is wild swings in weather.' Well...here's one of them. (And boy will hurricane season this year be fun. Hurricanes are due to the amount of warm water on the surface and cool water below, and guess what long-term heat waves do. So, yeah, lots of fun coming up.)
Now, there could be some other cause out there, something else that happened that cuases heat waves. But as global warming deniers have been looking for quite some time for another explanation of the _gradual_ warming we've had, and constantly failed to find it, it seems unlikely that there's some other explanation of this heat wave that's been overlooked.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Funny)
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
Remind us again what the 'good' arguments against it are...?
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
I wish that were true, but there aren't any good arguments against manmade global warming. That was what actually convinced me it was real.
There was no global warming in the last 10 years.
This is a common error [skepticalscience.com], frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator [skepticalscience.com]. I think it's a type of confirmation bias, where people only look for the trends that confirm their pre-existing views. The particular reasons temperatures look stable over the past decade are known (Weak El Ninos, increased sulfur emissions from China, below average solar activity and above average volcanic activity) and known to be short-term effects. Furthermore, satellites can measure the energy surplus the planet is accumulating. We know from those satellites that more solar energy is entering than is leaving, and that it hasn't changed.
It's unfortunate that this isn't actually isn't any room for debate, but the amount of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) means that only laymen who refuse to accept the consequences of AGW continue to dispute the issue. You may recall even the CEO of Exxon says AGW is real and he has billions of reason to deny it is happening. The actual scientists have a remarkably high level of confidence (97% of researchers in the field agree with 2% undecided) that AGW has been occurring for decades. I wish it was not happening but wishing doesn't make it true. There are, of course, uncertainties in what exactly will happen in the future, but some things are predictable, especially in broad strokes. We know leaving a pot of water on a hot burner will eventually cause it to boil, even if we can't predict the exact second that it will boil over.
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I never really got why anyone cared if it was Man Made or not. If Asteroid was careening towards the earth, would anyone really care when, where, or how it was formed (above and beyond the need to learn its geology).
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peer reviewed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hansen is a PNAS member, meaning he can either skip peer review entirely or pick his reviewers. Even if the review process had been rigorous, peer review guarantees nothing about the correctness of a paper. Peer review simply means that the paper passes basic quality standards and editorial policies for the publication in question. If you want to judge by external factors, none of the authors are statisticians, so their statements about statistical anomalies amount to little more than opinion.
I don't know whether the hot summers have been due to global warming; I tend to believe so. But to claim that as a fact, I'd certainly like a valid statistical analysis from someone qualified to make such an analysis, not from a climate hack like Hansen.
Re:peer reviewed? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see a few places with potential for error:
*) The period chosen is very short. Going from 1950 to present isn't a very long time for measuring, especially when you divide it into two pieces.
*) Given a small enough piece of data, it's easy to divide it and find trends that show your point. You see AGW opponents do this a lot by saying "It's actually cooled since 1997." It's 100% true, but doesn't matter. I'm not saying Hansen has done this, but it's an easy trap to fall into (even accidentally) and should be checked.
*) The method of defining 'extreme' can make a huge difference in a paper like this.
*) Even if the first statistical analysis is correct, it's a jump to say that Moscow 2010 heatwave was caused by CO2. They'll need to back that up.
*) If the Watts study proves to be correct, that could invalidate this entire paper (statistics performed with poor data = garbage)
And now I'm off to read the paper.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, combining "un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen" with "wikipedia" with "proof by ghost reference" [google.is] (worst heat wave != most days over 37.8C in a place which already has an average January high of over 41C), whose closest resemblance to saying what he claims it says is a reference to a non-peer-reviewed web page from before the heat waves in question discussed by this paper.
Wow, I'm totally sold now, thanks for linking that!
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Funny)
In addition to being cooler than the 1920's, we're also hipper, awesomer and dress much better.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently in your (and his) worlds:
* Global warming predicts that every location on Earth will increase in temperature at roughly the same rate and roughly the same time
* A region cannot have statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing unless *every* region on earth has statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing.
* Marble Bar, Australia = Earth
* Heat wave = high temperatures in absolute numbers, instead of the standard definition, relative to an area's baseline average.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't get it. What does a heat wave (consecutive days over 100F) in the 1920s in one corner of Australia, that lasted 160 days in an area that normally gets 154 days over 100F each year, have to do with it?
The basic claim Hansen made is that these recent heat waves are so far out of the ordinary that it would be virtually impossible* for them to have occurred without global warming. I'm not sure how "there was a heatwave in the 1920s in Australia" proves the claim is false.
* Less than 0.1% probability
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a hilariously distant leap of logic. Real scientists will try to correlate power output, fuel burned, soot and CO2 and methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc with their heat-trapping and heat-reflecting effects, and show a model that then predicts weather pattern changes based on these things. If that model holds, global warming due to such factors; if it doesn't, then global warming is possibly real (look, it's getting hotter) but the idea of it being caused by human meddling with the atmospheric composition is a myth. That's how science works: we see these things, hypothesize these effects, then point at the changes and say this is what will happen... it happens, we're right; if not, we try again.
That in mind, global warming science is a lot of double-think bullshit. The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it. We're learning new things all the time, and refining our understanding of all this stuff... but while we don't understand it and are continuously wrong in our predictions, we swear that we see proof about some fuzzy concept in front of us. That's not science, it's religion. Cult of global warming.
Interesting. How do you explain stratospheric cooling which has been directly observed in the past few decades then? Note that stratospheric cooling is inconsistent with any natural cause of global warming.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take this chart [forgottenliberty.com] for example
That chart looks like it's been mislabelled or doctored, depending on how charitable you want to be to Spencer. Here's a video [youtube.com] explaining the provenance of several such errors.
Real scientists will try to correlate power output, fuel burned, soot and CO2 and methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc with their heat-trapping and heat-reflecting effects, and show a model that then predicts weather pattern changes based on these things.
There are a lot of "real scientists" doing exactly that, Hansen is taking a different approach to tackle the "is this global warming or nature" question. It's still science, even if you disagree with the results.
That in mind, global warming science is a lot of double-think bullshit. The scientists can't get the model to work quite right, and keep changing it. We're learning new things all the time, and refining our understanding of all this stuff... but while we don't understand it and are continuously wrong in our predictions, we swear that we see proof about some fuzzy concept in front of us. That's not science, it's religion. Cult of global warming.
From that paragraph, it's clear you don't either understand science and/or don't understand religion. It seems to me, that "learning new things all the time and refining our understanding of this stuff" is clearly science and clearly not religion.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you look at a computation so complex that it takes multiple CPU-centuries to calculate wasn't 100% accurate the first time and the inputs weren't 100% complete at the very beginning, and you're surprised that it didn't create a 100% accurate solution on its first run? Don't you think that your expectations were just a tad high?
**OF COURSE** they keep changing it. They keep finding new ways to add additional data streams, better algorithms, new sources of data, additional variables to account for, etc. I'd start to wonder if they DIDN'T change it (them actually, there are various models in use). This is Science, not Scientology.
Re: (Score:3)
The basic premise of science is you say, "When I put a cheese here, the mouse runs out from there to come get it." When the mouse doesn't run from there, but instead digs through the ground to get the cheese, you're supposed to go, "Oh, the mouse seems to be a burrowing land critter. And it likes cheese."
Now here's the tough part: The mouse burrows, but doesn't eat the cheese. It eats grubs. You thus proscribe that, interestingly the mouse is apparently a burrowing land critter that likes grubs (I su
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Informative)
Now show that this warming trend is really just the upward half of a fluctuation that's been repeating every eleven years.
Oh, you didn't know the sunspot cycle was only eleven years long? Maybe you should have researched a bit about sun activity.
Re: (Score:3)
I have, and that was not my experience.
Re:Hansen again? (Score:5, Funny)
Hansen is a "scientist" who likes headlines and attention. Nothing to see here, move along...
You tell'em bradley13!
Rush, Hannity and Boortz say (*say with sarcastic snear*) glooooooobal waaaarming is just a method to justify Big Government and Control by Liberals who TRUST that government is the only solution! And it's a method for the control and loss of sovereignty to the UN!
Hear ya! Brother!
Government control is EVIL and UnAmerican!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go to a meeting where we're going discuss methods of getting government to ban gay marriage, abortion, and to start teaching abstinence and the Bible in school!
Damn government control!
Re: (Score:3)
You mean like how the government use to print bibles to be used in teaching in schools but due to hyper-political correctness stopped?
You must be reading or listening to David Barton, because he's the one that recently popularized that completely bogus claim:
No, Mr. Beck, Congress Did Not Print a Bible for the Use of Schools [huffingtonpost.com]
Chris Rodda is an actual historian with real credentials who's repeatedly demonstrated that Barton is at best wildly misinterpreting evidence, and at worst is a fraud (No, I'm not someone who believes everything on HuffPo, in this case it's right).
The lack of Bibles in school is a clear part of the First Amendment: You
Re:Hansen again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Once we have a perfectly reliable, free and easy form of contraception, and rape doesn't happen, then, maybe, I'll agree with you, but only in cases where there aren't medical complications.
And what's worse: having an abortion or having a child which grows up in poverty and is neglected, abused and has more kids who won't be taken care of?
Re:Hansen again? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong with banning abortion, as long as you don't take away a woman's liberty in the process. I would be fine with banning abortions if the anti-abortion coalition (Republican party, churches, or whomever - just not the government because we can't afford it) would set up "non-abortion clinics" that would induce labor instead of performing an abortion. That way a woman could keep her liberty (old white men would not be forcing her to carry a child to term that she does not want). Of course, the anti-abortion coalition would be financially responsible for ensuring that the children they deliver are taken care of until they become self-sufficient adults. And, if they have any health problems due to being born early then the anti-abortion coalition would be responsible for their healthcare (we shouldn't socialize those costs into Obamacare).
Though, Republicans would never agree to this because it is contrary to their values. The main two are "socialize risks and privatize rewards" and "every life is precious until it is born, then it is a leech on society and we should let it die".
Democrats also want to get rid of abortions. But, they don't want to ban them. They want to make them unnecessary by making it possible to only get pregnant if you want to. Republicans, on the other hand, love unwanted pregnancies. And STDs. They are God's punishments for having sex. That is why they hate both birth control and abortions. You are circumventing God's will that you be punished with a child. If you don't believe me, look up the controversy over the HPV vaccine. They don't want to prevent cancer in girls because that is one of the ways that girls are punished for having sex. If there is not the risk of cancer, then more girls might have sex, so we can't give them the vaccine.
Same as why they are in favor of allowing abortions in the case of rape. They don't want to punish that woman with a child because she didn't do anything to deserve to be punished. If they truly believed that the child is a life, then they would not want to kill the child for the sins of its father.
I personally believe that all children are a gift, and that if you are using them as a punishment then you are doing it wrong.
Re:Bulletproof cage that accepts no dissent (Score:4, Insightful)
Because all contradictory evidence has been appropriated into the model in such a way that it is impossible to cite any weather pattern or trend that contradicts it.
I suspect you were modded into oblivion because you don't understand the difference between climate and weather, data and anecdote, and continuously refining a model to fit new data and making shit up.
And that's just from one sentence.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Explaining things in terms of physics is not denying evidence. You obviously didn't understand the basic concept of global warming beyond the name. Increased temperatures, on average, doesn't mean everywhere increases uniformly. It means there is more thermal energy in the atmosphere, making stronger hurricanes, stronger heat waves, stronger storms.
It's a bit like taking a pool and having more people swim in it. Sure, the pool will be slightly fuller, on average, due to the displacement, but it will also ha
Re:Hansen is delusional (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hansen is delusional (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hansen is delusional (Score:5, Informative)
Another paper [doi.org], published in the same journal, concluded that "the heat wave falls within the realm of natural variability ... [and] appears not to be the product of long-term climate changes"
That quote neither appears in the paper you reference (M. Matsueda, "Predictability of Euro-Russian blocking in summer of 2010", Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L06801, 2011) nor the NOAA press release.
Also, some researchers in Germany analyzed the data and published a paper, entitled "Large scale flow and the long-lasting blocking high over Russia [ametsoc.org]", which says that the heat wave "appears as a result of natural atmospheric variability".
The quote taken from (the abstract of) that paper, by Schneidereit et al., was in reference to R. Dole, et al. ("Was there a basis for anticipating the 2010 Russian heat wave", Geophys. Res. Lett. 38: L06702, 2011). Schneidereit et al. also mentioned, citing a study by Schar et al. ("The role of increasing temperature variability in European summer heatwaves", Nature 427: 332-336, 2004), that a long-lasting blocking high could occur more often with climate change and the expected change in the year-to-year variability.
Re:Hansen is delusional (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you either read or understood Hansen's paper. The argument isn't that these events are individually impossible to occur. They all fall within the bounds of possibility for the baseline climate of 1951-1980. The argument put forward in the paper is that together they are each "once in a century" events, which means we should not get 3 of them in less than a single decade. The reason we do get them is because global warming is "weighting the dice", changing the probability distribution so that once in a century hot events occur once a decade on average, and once in century cold events occur once in a millennia. That's a rough description of the paper, you really should read the original.
In short, the claim about Russia is false. The claim about the European summer of 2003 is also debunked. (I am not familiar with Texas.)
Sorry, but the evidence you cited doesn't actually conflict with Hansen's paper. Each of the papers claim the events were "low predictability" events. Additionally, there's new research [wunderground.com] which contradicts the papers you cited that you cited, and points towards Arctic sea ice loss (driven by global warming) as the reason for the "low predictability" of those events.
And why does Hansen not mention extreme cold recently in Alaska?—is that also due to global warming?
Actually, it is. The same block pattern that's been keeping warm air (and record high temperatures) over much of the U.S. is keeping cold air (and cold temperatures) over Alaska. The ice loss appears to have weakened the air currents that would normally break up the blocking patterns.
Bad weather has always existed.
Indeed it has, however, Hansen's paper says the bad weather is biased hot now. It's like taking a 6 sided die, and changing the 1 to a 7. You won't get the same results you used to get.