2001-2010 warmest decade on record: WMO

[Epic]

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is with warming. On the high end of the estimates, there is a projection of 3mm rise per year. It's not like one day everyone wakes up and there is a 10ft rise.

I hear people talking about a 200' rise in sea level, but those are completely ignorant statements. That would require all global ice to melt. Specifically, most of Antarctica is over 7,000ft which means even with a catastrophic 10F jump in temperature, it will still be below freezing temperatures. Aggressive projections suggest a max of 20ft sea level rise over the next 300-1,000 years. That includes positive feedback loops that are pretty suspect IMO.

So in terms of coastal cities, they will have plenty of time to adapt. Most buildings constructed these days have less than 100 year life span anyway. Effected areas would easily be able to shift with a sea level that rises only 3mm per year. We are constantly tearing down and re-building our cities anyway.

Almost all projections suggest that the amount of arable land will increase dramatically as the northern tundra melts.

So really, what is all the fuss about?

 

[futurecurrents]

Quote from Eight:

this kind of thing is interesting:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

Not really. ..grasping at straws........ from the article.....

"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.

"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report." (Related: "Global Warming 'Very Likely' Caused by Humans, World Climate Experts Say" [February 2, 2007].)



Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."

 

[MKTrader]

Quote from futurecurrents:

I'd like to believe you but about half the nation still thinks like 377 and for instance they think there is no scientific consensus when in fact there is, as you know, overwhelming consensus.

Consensus = grant-seeking academic research to get more grants to do more grant-seeking research. Old paradigms die hard when so much money & politics are involved.

See ClimateGates 1 and 2 if you believe these are a bunch of pure, agenda-less sciencebots "reaching consensus."

 

[futurecurrents]

Quote from peilthetraveler:

Most of the world has only been keeping temperatures for 50 years. There are many places in africa, canada, and the middle east that have been only recording temperatures for less than 10 years. So to say that this is the warmest decade in the last 5 decades is not something big. We had a 20% chance of it being the warmest decade, just out of chance. This decade we have a 16.6% chance of it being the warmest decade again, then a 14.2% chance next decade. If it gets cooler this decade then what? Will we stop with the global warming bullcrap?

Actually the instrumental period is more like 160 years, and before that reasonable estimates are made with ice cores, treerings etc. The hockey stick graph has been proven to be correct.

And no we won't stop with the global warming science because it is true and is one the most serious threats that mankind faces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

 

[futurecurrents]

Quote from jem:

I am pretty stoked. 15 more years of warming. I feel sorry my kids will have to suffer through steep cooling right about the time they will be enjoying the beach.


"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."

Except that almost all other climatologists think he's wrong. His 1% opinion gets 100% of the denier attention.

 

[futurecurrents]

Spencer is another hack with a 1% opinion that gets 100% of the attention from the right wing ideologue deniers. He believes in intelligent design. He is a board member of the Marshall group....

The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a politically conservative think tank established in 1984 in Washington, D.C. with a focus on scientific issues and public policy. In the 1980s, the Institute was engaged primarily in lobbying in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative.[1] Since the late 1980s, the Institute has put forward environmental skepticism views, and in particular has disputed mainstream scientific opinion on climate change, although it continues to be active on defense policy. The George C. Marshall Institute has been described by Newsweek as a "central cog in the denial machine."[2] The institute is named after the World War II military leader and statesman George C. Marshall.

Historian Naomi Oreskes states that the institute has, in order to resist and delay regulation, lobbied politically to create a false public perception of scientific uncertainty over the negative effects of second-hand smoke, the carcinogenic nature of tobacco smoking, the existence of acid rain, and on the evidence between CFCs and ozone depletion.[3]

Quote from Lucrum:

"Global Warming

“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.

Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it. More than one scientist has asked me, “What else COULD it be?” Well, the answer to that takes a little digging… and as I show, one doesn’t have to dig very far.

But first let’s examine the basics of why so many scientists think global warming is manmade. Earth’s atmosphere contains natural greenhouse gases (mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane) which act to keep the lower layers of the atmosphere warmer than they otherwise would be without those gases. Greenhouse gases trap infrared radiation — the radiant heat energy that the Earth naturally emits to outer space in response to solar heating. Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal, petroleum, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is believed to be enhancing the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. As of 2008, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 40% to 45% higher than it was before the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800’s.

It is interesting to note that, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere. As of 2008, only 39 out of every 100,000 molecules of air were CO2, and it will take mankind’s CO2 emissions 5 more years to increase that number by 1, to 40.

The “Holy Grail”: Climate Sensitivity Figuring out how much past warming is due to mankind, and how much more we can expect in the future, depends upon something called “climate sensitivity”. This is the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.

The ‘consensus’ of opinion is that the Earth’s climate sensitivity is quite high, and so warming of about 0.25 deg. C to 0.5 deg. C (about 0.5 deg. F to 0.9 deg. F) every 10 years can be expected for as long as mankind continues to use fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. NASA’s James Hansen claims that climate sensitivity is very high, and that we have already put too much extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Presumably this is why he and Al Gore are campaigning for a moratorium on the construction of any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low.

The case for natural climate change I also present an analysis of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which shows that most climate change might well be the result of….the climate system itself! Because small, chaotic fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems can cause small changes in global average cloudiness, this is all that is necessary to cause climate change. You don’t need the sun, or any other ‘external’ influence (although these are also possible…but for now I’ll let others work on that). It is simply what the climate system does. This is actually quite easy for meteorologists to believe, since we understand how complex weather processes are. Your local TV meteorologist is probably a closet ’skeptic’ regarding mankind’s influence on climate.

Climate change — it happens, with or without our help."

http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

 

[futurecurrents]

Quote from Epic:

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is with warming. On the high end of the estimates, there is a projection of 3mm rise per year. It's not like one day everyone wakes up and there is a 10ft rise.

I hear people talking about a 200' rise in sea level, but those are completely ignorant statements. That would require all global ice to melt. Specifically, most of Antarctica is over 7,000ft which means even with a catastrophic 10F jump in temperature, it will still be below freezing temperatures. Aggressive projections suggest a max of 20ft sea level rise over the next 300-1,000 years. That includes positive feedback loops that are pretty suspect IMO.

So in terms of coastal cities, they will have plenty of time to adapt. Most buildings constructed these days have less than 100 year life span anyway. Effected areas would easily be able to shift with a sea level that rises only 3mm per year. We are constantly tearing down and re-building our cities anyway.



Almost all projections suggest that the amount of arable land will increase dramatically as the northern tundra melts.

So really, what is all the fuss about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

 

[Free Thinker]

The Science of Truthiness: Why Conservatives Deny Global Warming
So the question before us on this panel is, "Will the Planet Survive the Age of Humans?" And I want to focus on one particular aspect of humans that makes them very problematic in a planetary sense -- namely, their brains.

What I've spent the last year or more trying to understand is what it is about our brains that makes facts such odd and threatening things; why we sometimes double down on false beliefs when they're refuted; and maybe, even, why some of us do it more than others.

And of course, the new book homes in on the brains -- really, the psychologies -- of politically conservative homo sapiens in particular. You know, Stephen Colbert once said that "reality has a well-known liberal bias." And essentially what I'm arguing is that, not only is that a funny statement, it's factually true, and perhaps even part of the nature of things.

Colbert also talked about the phenomenon of "truthiness," and as it turns out, we can actually give a scientific explanation of truthiness -- which is what I'm going to sketch in the next ten minutes, with respect to global warming in particular.

I almost called the book The Science of Truthiness -- but The Republican Brain turns out to be a better title.

3. Fox News is the Key "Feedback Mechanism" -- whereby people who want to believe false things get all the license they need.

So clearly, there are some deeply rooted attributes that predispose conservatives towards the denial of global warming.

But there are also "environmental" factors -- things that have come to exist in our world that did not exist before, that interact with these things about conservatives, and make all this much worse.

And here, Fox News is undeniably at the top of the list. There are now a host of studies (video here) showing that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about various aspects of reality, including two such studies about global warming.

So if you've got Fox News, you've got a place to go to reaffirm your beliefs. And that serves this psychological need for certainty and security. So conservatives opt in, they get the


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/the-science-of-truthiness_b_1379472.html

 

[MKTrader]

Gotta love the cherry-picked data. Anyone with a functioning brain can see the motive$ behind this and how it can be used to centralize power...as well as they myriad problems.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/25/cern_cloud_cosmic_ray_first_results/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/july/science-turns-authoritarian

http://www.omsj.org/corruption/mich...n-suffers-three-legal-blows-in-court-escapade

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13834

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/12797...er-Groups-Promotion-of-ManMade-Global-Warming

 

[futurecurrents]

Quote from MKTrader:

Gotta love the cherry-picked data. Anyone with a functioning brain can see the motive$ behind this and how it can be used to centralize power...as well as they myriad problems.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/25/cern_cloud_cosmic_ray_first_results/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/july/science-turns-authoritarian

http://www.omsj.org/corruption/mich...n-suffers-three-legal-blows-in-court-escapade


http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13834

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/12797...er-Groups-Promotion-of-ManMade-Global-Warming

Those articles are misleading, bullshit and pathetic. For instance, saying no warming for five years, cherry picking points on the jagged uptrend chart. Junk pop science fodder for the deniers. Fleas on the back of the huge body of knowledge and evidence.


This idea that the science of AGW is all a grand conspiracy by all the world's scientists to basically lie so that power can be centralized?, has to be one of the most bat-shit crazy things the deniers say. Remember, it's mostly the scientists that are talking about this, the politicians and everyone else just wishes it would go away. When was the last time AGW was even mentioned on TV news shows? Why is that?