Scientist Warning About Climate Change

[Turtle]

Is knowledge improvement optional? From my perspective, it seems an ongoing thing, much like the flow of a river. I do not know if we all need to improve our knowledge, but it seems though, unless we actively oppose it, it will happen of it's own.

You touted your knowledge and so I commented as seemed fitting.

 

Fortunately, i fell off of a scaffold yestermorn and have given myself a few days off from scaffolds and power tools, so I have time to sit here and read(improve my knowledge).

Fortunately I did not fall off my ladder yestermorn -or todaymorn- but took a break from my hand and power tools to read & improve as well. Ain't life grand!?

 

OK as to your linked:

First, They are communicating their findings for the ice over the Amundsen sea:

 

The Amundsen sea represents a very small part of West Antarctica. To extrapolate from that to all of west antarctica is a rather bold step.

Which was certainly not taken in the linked article, but was implied by the headline.

 

Also they themselves say:

 

 

If you will reference the above topo map, you will note a ridge along the seaward side of the amundsen sea. This grounding point has not been adequately breached to induce a rapid(as in less than a few centuries) destruction of the sea floor grounded ice inland of those ridges.

 

Seriously "four feet in a few centuries" who could know what weather will alter that trend in the intervening centuries?

Yes; I read the article. You seem to quote just what I did. Anyway, a slippery slope is as a slippery slope does. As the melt increases, the ice thins and the thinner the ice the less mass it has and the less mass it has the less it holds back everything behind it. Then the held-back mass gains momentum, goes faster, relieves more blockage on yet more ice behind and so it goes. Slippery do dah.

 

Whether we know the future weather or not, the effects of higher sea levels on coastal human habitation is unquestionable. It's already happening and this new finding indicates it is going to increase faster than previous models predicted. Moreover, this heating is coming from underneath & not the air and no matter what the cause there is nothing people can do about it.

 

In that vein, and slightly off-topic, I find it a throw of good money after bad to have done all the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina. Hell, the place was already below sea level. The money would have been better spent moving people and infrastructure out. Well, science and reasoning don't play well down South I guess, so it shouldn't surprise me.

[sculptor]

Oh my! Well there's your problem dear.

 

Look at the left axis: it's showing a consistent anomaly to the plus side of the spectrum. That's "anomaly" as in "hotter than we expected". The fact that there's an almost insignificant downward trend that's within any margin of error is insignificant. The thing you have to realize is that each of those bars stands on top of all the preceding ones for the prior years, which is why our temperatures are going through the roof.

 

I'm afraid you're going to have to spend a little bit more time studying your graphs before you present them as evidence, because the graph here argues the opposite of what you're saying.

 

 

 

And that's basically my point: That 1970's maximum--take your pick on a lag plus or minus 10 years--says we should be cooling, not getting hotter. That we're getting hotter very consistently (and the graph you posted above shows that very clearly, so thank you for sharing), means that we have indeed swamped what should be a downward trend.

 

 

 

I believe in Santa and the Pesach Bunny. Kinda Pagan. Compatible with science to boot.

 

 

Yes, you should look up the source of that quote ( :phones: is what's called Buffy's Asterisk, which means someone other than Buffy said it and you should find the source for further edification), the guy whose book it came from is really smart and entertaining.

 

 

With their four-dimensional minds, and in their interdisciplinary ultra verbal way, geologists can wiggle out of almost anything, :phones:

Buffy

 LOL     (does NOI mean "no offense intended? if so, then noi) (pardon me for one more LOL)

as re the noaa chart

Amazingly, every single time I have posted that curio(graph), people completely misunderstand why i posted it. :huh:

Here's noaa's blurb on the anomalies:

 Global temperature anomaly data come from the Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) data set and International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), which have data from 1880 to the present. These two datasets are blended into a single product to produce the combined global land and ocean temperature anomalies. The available timeseries of global-scale temperature anomalies are calculated with respect to the 20th century average,

 

So, they're extrapolating from their blended average over the past century as a baseline. Which translates to we're still warmer than the 20th century average. With 2-thirty year warming trends during that century, that should come as no surprise.

True?

 

What i was attempting to reference was "trend"(albeit a very small and short one). But their trendline does indeed support why i posted the referenced the chart.

ok?

Have you ever been looking for something and while staring right at it not seen it?

I have, which is one of the reasons why i openly share my known biases ----just in case I was staring right at something and not seeing it. That is not, however the case for this chart.

 

The trend is towards cooler, not from the baseline average of the last century but, from our maximum gains. (at the current 11 year rate---.02 degrees C per decade) the warmth gained from the last century should last quite awhile longer before hitting the last century baseline. (not to worry)

 

............

santa is a motive spirit or concept, and seems to be alive and well. (When my sons were of an age when they doubted santa, i suggested: "Just write santa a letter and see what happens" My son cedric took my advice and just before christmass received several packages "from santa" with the return address washington dc.)

 

.....

lol, the passover bunny who kept saying "thank GOD I'm not a lamb"?

Edited May 13, 2014 by sculptor

[Buffy]

Physics 101: if you acceleration is decreasing but staying above 0, your speed is still increasing.

 

Statistics 101: You can pick just about any data set to fit your desired outcome. ("Selection Bias").

 

You yourself admit that it's a "small and short one".  

 

Yeppers. :cheer:

 

Note also that the 20th century average already includes a huge amount of increase from what's been normal for the last 6000 years that men have been paying attention and creating stable civilizations (something that I know is not part of your idea of "normal" climate).

 

 

 

BTW I don't see how anyone can believe in someone they can't see. I can go to the mall and sit in Santa's lap. Definitely real.

 

 

When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both, :phones:

Buffy

[sculptor]

no matter what the cause there is nothing people can do about it.

 

Turtle:

That's a tad nihilistic for my taste. We are an amazing species and are creating new technological miracles almost daily. Maybe nothing we can do about it today but i cannot/willnot predict the future.

 

In defense of New Orleans, (I ain't kept up with it but) a couple years ago, New Orleans was the 5th busiest port in the world. We are still the world's biggest food exporter and much of that goes out through new Orleans. If given the option of either rebuilding the port where it is, or dredging a deep ship channel farther up-river, I'd opt for rebuilding where it is, knowing that the option may not last more'n a century or 2 or so.

[sculptor]

Buffy

lol

ain't this amazing, I'm actually certain that you are reading the chart wrong, and it seems that you are absolutely certain that I am reading the chart wrong.

ok

maybe a longer term chart will help?....:

 

Please note the period from roughly 1910 to 1937 We were below the baseline 20th century average, but warming toward that baseline. We went above in '37 below in 46 above in 51, etc and began the recent climb in mid '60s, faltered below again, then resumed the climb in heat above the baseline again circa '77. From the baseline, we;ve only gained .6 degrees, for the century .7 degrees, and from the 1919 low a full degree.

Just because 1910-1937 was below the baseline does not mean that we were not warming then.

We were in a warming trend from 1911 to 1944, then cooled for 6-7 years.

Just because we are still above the baseline does not mean we are still warming(not cooling),

 

The chart is rough, but shows us topping out(at max temperature above the baseline) in '98, '05, and 2010

 The anomalies are either above or below the "baseline" = 20th century average

The change relative to the preceding indicates gaining or losing heat = trend.---which is currently down

Choosing a 10 or in the above case 11 year trendline just smooths the change out to a decade.

 

here's the link:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global

 

If you look at 1900-1999, the trendline shows us gaining about .7 degrees over the last century.

At the loss-trend of the previous 11 years --.02 degrees per decade we have 35 years to erase those gains.

 

Are we on the same page now? 

Edited May 13, 2014 by sculptor

[Turtle]

Turtle:

That's a tad nihilistic for my taste. We are an amazing species and are creating new technological miracles almost daily. Maybe nothing we can do about it today but i cannot/willnot predict the future.

Physics is physics; it has nothing to do with feelings or opinion.

 

In defense of New Orleans, (I ain't kept up with it but) a couple years ago, New Orleans was the 5th busiest port in the world. We are still the world's biggest food exporter and much of that goes out through new Orleans. If given the option of either rebuilding the port where it is, or dredging a deep ship channel farther up-river, I'd opt for rebuilding where it is, knowing that the option may not last more'n a century or 2 or so.

Granted the waterway merits attention, but all the rebuilding of homes and small business and such that were wrecked just doesn't recognize the reality. The insurance companies and government should have just paid their respective losses and junked the place. Same as when you total a vehicle.

[Buffy]

Just because 1910-1937 was below the baseline does not mean that we were not warming then.

Just because we are still above the baseline does not mean we are still warming(not cooling), 

 

Yeppers! That's the point: whether we are "warming" or "cooling" depends on what period you pick.

 

You selectively chose the last few years of data and drew your "cooling" trend line on that. Then of course you didn't bother to draw the trendline on the longer graph, because that shows that the temperatures are increasing at a very healthy rate:

 

Source: NOAA Climate Graph

 

This argument about a "pause" in the rise of temperatures is a dead horse: I can pick other periods in the 1900-present graph that show huge declines in that trendline, unfortunately they're all a long time ago, and all we've got now is "flat."

 

All of these short-term declines/pauses are typical in stochastic systems--and often come with easy explanations like volcanic eruptions, smog and dust due to drought--which is why cherry picking time periods is so egregiously misleading. 

 

Your argument basically boils down to "the most recent trend is down, so it's going to keep going down and make up for the increase." 

 

Try that in the stock market.

 

 

If you look at 1900-1999, the trendline shows us gaining about .7 degrees over the last century.

At the loss-trend of the previous 11 years --.02 degrees per decade we have 35 years to erase those gains.

 

Seriously, try this in a statistics class and you've got a guaranteed F.

 

But to step back a bit, there's this too:

What critics choose to ignore is that of all the extra heat being trapped by our greenhouse gas emissions – equivalent to four Hiroshima nuclear bombs every second – just 1% ends up warming the air. By choosing to focus on air temperatures critics are ignoring 99% of the problem.

 

Are scientists certain that global warming has continued unabated over the last 15 years? Yes. “The best satellite data we have shows that there is still more energy going into the climate system than is going out, because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Ed Hawkins, at the University of Reading. Another Reading scientist, William Collins, said: “The climate has warmed over the last 10 years, the models are not wrong on the total heat being added.”

 

So where is all the heat going? About 93% goes into the oceans, much of which were largely unmonitored until the 2000s, 3% into land and 3% into melting ice.

Undue focus on the air temperature plateau is cretinous for several more reasons. First, unlike weather, climate is a long term phenomenon and can only truly be assessed over at least 30 years. While the long term warming trend is clear, scientists have long known that air temperatures do not rise smoothly year-on-year in the complex and chaotic climate system and that decade-long ups and downs are part of natural variability.

Source: "The willful idiocy of alleged ‘global temperature decline’ is based on a mirage" Damian Carrington, The Guardian September 27, 2013

 

Seriously, read the whole thing.

 

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream, :phones:

Buffy

[sculptor]

Yeppers! That's the point: whether we are "warming" or "cooling" depends on what period you pick.

 

You selectively chose the last few years of data and drew your "cooling" trend line on that. Then of course you didn't bother to draw the trendline on the longer graph, because that shows that the temperatures are increasing at a very healthy rate:

 

Anomaly1900PresWithTrendpng.png

Source: NOAA Climate Graph

 

This argument about a "pause" in the rise of temperatures is a dead horse: I can pick other periods in the 1900-present graph that show huge declines in that trendline, unfortunately they're all a long time ago, and all we've got now is "flat."

 

All of these short-term declines/pauses are typical in stochastic systems--and often come with easy explanations like volcanic eruptions, smog and dust due to drought--which is why cherry picking time periods is so egregiously misleading. 

 

Your argument basically boils down to "the most recent trend is down, so it's going to keep going down and make up for the increase." 

 

Try that in the stock market.

 

 

 

Seriously, try this in a statistics class and you've got a guaranteed F.

 

 

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream, :phones:

Buffy

oops yer right i should have posted 35 decades, not 35years! Thanx. To quote the president who was in when i exited the army: "I misspoke myself".

 

 

I ain't quite where I'd predict a continuation of the down trend

 

If cycle 25 turns out low, and 26 follows making for a grand minimum, then, yeh, most likely .

 

Are you familiar with the work of Gleissberg and the (now called)  Wolf-Gleissberg cycles?

If the concept is accurate, then we may be in for a much longer downtrend. But, I have a  "look closely, then wait and see" attitude.

So, that ain't actually my argument----just a conversational foil. 

 

as/re picking trends I chose the preceding years only because they were the preceding years. You are correct, in that we have had several up trends and downtrends in a (potential) Gleissberg cycle's uptrend. so picking just a few years could yield different trends, both up and/or down.

 

If cycle 25 is lower than 24, then we'll know more in a decade or so.

 

From the charts posted, one could honestly say that the last decade was the warmest on record(for the years available).

and One could honestly say that the recent trend is down. These are not mutually exclusive. 

 

Given Gleissberg, and given the low cycle 24, and prognostications of a lower 25, if I were to bet with even odds, I'd bet for lower temps in 10 years. This is by no means a prediction of trend. Just pocket change on a hunch.

Conversely given our similarity to mis 11(as re the 400kyr pattern in milankovitch cycles, I'd also bet on warmer temperatures 1000 years hence in direct contrast to Emiliani's hypothesis). 

Edited May 14, 2014 by sculptor

[Eclogite]

From the charts posted, one could honestly say that the last decade was the warmest on record(for the years available).

and One could honestly say that the recent trend is down. These are not mutually exclusive.

And one could honestly say, if I may adopt your rather contrived hill-billy patois, that a recent trend don't amount to a hill of beans in a bean processing plant.

 

Your argument appears to be - in precis form - "well things haven't happened yet, and the trends might be misleading, and so rather than accept where the preponderance of evidence points, I'm going to use something analagous to the God of the Gaps argument and believe what my prejudices are most comfortable with."

 

Now, you may be doing something entirely different. However, this is how it appears to me. If you are saying something different you need to say it with more clarity than thus far.

[Buffy]

I ain't quite where I'd predict a continuation of the down trend. 

 

I would surely hope so.

 

Are you familiar with the work of Gleissberg and the (now called)  Wolf-Gleissberg cycles?

 

Yes, among others. There are all sorts of cycles, and I've mentioned the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and its relation to the Earth's wobble. There are all kinds of sources for macro cycles that would effect solar input. I don't have the references handy, but I have seen studies that put many of these together to predict that we should be well into a downturn, which, as I keep saying, we're not seeing. At all. Meaning yes, we are really royally screwing things up.

 

Point here being that sure there are "potential influences" that we have no evidence for, but really, betting your public policy that something that is NOT happening, and which we have no conclusive evidence might happen soon, is risky at best. 

 

Most serious people would not bother. In fact, it gets rather tiresome.

 

 

If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting, :phones:

Buffy

[sculptor]

 

Point here being that sure there are "potential influences" that we have no evidence for, but really, betting your public policy that something that is NOT happening, and which we have no conclusive evidence might happen soon, is risky at best. 

 

 

 

Meaning yes, we are really royally screwing things up

 

Point here being that sure there are "potential influences" that we have no evidence for, but really, betting your public policy that something that is NOT happening, and which we have no conclusive evidence might happen soon, is risky at best. 

 

 

 Buffy:

 

You seem to be defending an AGW position.

 

True?

Edited May 14, 2014 by sculptor

[sculptor]

as/re:

Meaning yes, we are really royally screwing things up

 

Whadd'ya mean "we" white girl ;)

[Buffy]

You seem to be defending an AGW position.

 

True?

 

I dunno, what do you think?

 

Whadd'ya mean "we" white girl ;)

 

Turtle is one of the few people I know who has lowered his carbon footprint enough to opt out of the "we". I think he's even got his computer hooked up to solar cells. :cheer:

 

So, yah, "we" prolly includes you, although I will not jump to that conclusion. I would praise you for lowering your carbon footprint, as long as you don't try to do it on me.

 

 

My mother did literally hitchhike barefoot to the country store, :phones:

Buffy

[sculptor]

my carbon footprint is negative

I'm lighter than air

When i got here to Iowa, I consulted the local forester from the dnr. He came out and looked at the land and my planting plan, made a few recommendations, and gave some advice. Following which I rototilled the spots for the trees, crawled around on my hands and knees and planted mixed 1458 trees for a biologically diverse forest. With the care in the planting, and watering and weeding, i now live and work in a CO2 eating forest full of birdsong and oxygen. The forest eats about 35 tons of CO2 annually.

While digging the foundation for my studio, I had the backhoe guy dig a frog pond----this was 23 years ago and I was unaware of the chytrid, but the frogs got a pesticide free pond. We lost the green frogs but still have leopard frogs, pickerel frogs, tree frogs, peepers, and toads. The evenings are full of frogsong.

The guy who sold the place bragged that it was the worst rated corn farm in the county. Over the years the forest has rebuilt almost 6 inches of rich forest soil over the brown fayette  sub soil.

The buildings are super insulated with r38-r44 walls and r60-r80 ceilings, with most of the fenestration on the south and east walls. I built an attached greenhouse/solar collector which supplies over 1/4 of the heating load---eg: it is 50 degreesF outside today and 100 degrees in the greenhouse(on a day with full sun, it gets over 129 degrees), and that heat is blown down to the lowest basement under the garage. The set-up heats the thermal mass down there to eighty degrees, which warms the air which rises to warm the house and studio all night long.

(the greenhouse is where I was working when i fell off the scaffold)

I garden and compost through a flock of free range chickens. Most of what I buy to eat comes from less than 30 miles away from here. 

 

I suppose that i could be a little bit greener, but could die tomorrow satisfied in the knowledge that I am not, was not and will not be part of the ecological problem.

 

My one son once accused me of being a conservationist, to which i responded: "well, I would've been a conservationist if there was anything here worth conserving. The old maps showed a forest here, so that is what I recreated----------call me a recreationist"

 

.................

I see a lot of problems with our society, and agw is real low on the list. Up the list are overuse of aquifers, pesticides, herbicides, monoculture,  overspending on useless wars and prisons and under-spending on science and education. The ridiculously high cost of education, and debt, enslaves millions to the yoke of the economic imperative.

The lake el'gygytgyn project cost less than one fighter plane, and completely reformed our concepts of previous interglacials. We need more investment in science. 

 

That being said:

reduce your consumption

repair

rebuild and

reuse everything that comes under your control, then

recycle

 

be green

plant a tree, or 2 or 3 or.....1458, then nurture them until they're big enough and old enough to take care of themselves.

Do this, and you will enrich your life far beyond that which you could do with the power of money.

Edited May 14, 2014 by sculptor

[Yoron]

a pleasure reading you Buffy. A decade is not enough, just as I think you try to explain, give it some thirty years, at least, to make a statistical trend. Looking at shorter terms than that will only lead one astray. And so it does :) for some of us, and as all our memorys are short,  as well as adapting to what we want to believe, we easily get confused trying to remember how it was ten years ago. At least if we start to compare our rememberances. What we do know is that CO2 is storing energy, releasing it as IR, heat. And with that comes unstable weather patterns, and humidity, falling out as rain and snow, as a guess. How it will look over a whole planet? I don't know, but it will change it.

Edited May 14, 2014 by Yoron

[Yoron]

Actually I think it's to late to do anything. We won't change course, and neither will most of us who write here be alive when the real changes come. It will take time, and my guess is at least fifty years for changes to be really noticeable, maybe a hundred before everyone have to admit that their ancestors f*ed up royally. We're not, no matter what papers or politicians may state, diminishing our CO2 production.  And if you believe in a tipping, then that is what I think we're in now. A slow and unstable tipping, wobbly for now, until it stabilizes into a new climate. Some know this I suspect, but are chancing on that their money/clout will give them a out. That's a very stupid thing to think when it comes to a whole planet changing climate.

 

Shows you that money isn't everything, doesn't it :)

==

 

Weird, the site keeps forgetting that I don't want 'emoticons', a normal smiley is perfectly sufficient for me.

Edited May 14, 2014 by Yoron

[sculptor]

Why is climate change mostly viewed in the negative?