Global Warming

[Exeric]

For those of us with friends or acquaintances who think those of us who believe in global warming are just tree-huggers here's something to ponder, and perhaps mention to them.

Australia heat wave: New color added to weather maps, fire danger "catastrophic."

Edit:
Actually it may not do much good to mention this to the unscientific crowd. Usually the response will be, "I sure wish we could get a little of that heat up north here. It's been dang cold here lately". To me that's the same as a person saying, "I sure wish we could get some of that daylight here in the western hemisphere. It's been dang dark here the last 12 hours." You can lead a jackass to water but you can't make them drink.

[Xringer]

Wow, that's amazing. I lived in south Texas as a kid and 100 deg F wasn't uncommon.
But, when it went over 105 it was time to stay in the creek.
I can't even imagine walking around when it was in the 120s..
That would kill most people who live up here in the NE..


It's been so cold this week, I was dreaming of some global warming.
But, When I checked my local data for January, it's not really all that cold this time..

Ave local temp in Jan

2005 24.1 F
2006 33.7
2007 30.7
2008 29.5
2009 22.2
2010 26.9
2011 23.5
2012 31.5
2013 29.3 (so far). Edit 2/14/2013: Just checked it and it's 29.7 °F this January..

Shows an overall (since 2005) average of 27.93 deg F, so this month could have been even colder!

[ecomodded]

Amazing thing is that people buy into this Global warming money grab scam.

Truth is we are at the end of a ice age.
Hang tight the next Ice Age starts when this one finishes.
Expect weather changes.

They have come up with the proper terminology for the Change. Climate change.

[Exeric]

Based on your thinking on fridge pcm's I'm not surprised that this is what your common sense would be telling you. Unexamined assumptions can be very destructive and wasteful, Ecomodded.

[ecomodded]

Yikes Exeric, lets stop this assumption making of yours and try to co-operate on this website. I have no time for childish remarks. I am out of here.. for a while.

[Exeric]

I perhaps went over the line assuming your thinking on global warming correlated with your thinking on fridge pcm's. I apologize. But I think of global warming as something like a global version of second hand smoke. Back in the day people who complained about second hand smoke were thought of as troublemakers. As more evidence came in it was realized there was a real risk to non-smokers from second hand smoke. It also turns out that the biggest critics of the new paradigm of the danger of second hand smoke were, (surprise) smokers.

I think that even though it may be controversial to talk about global warming, we (as non-smokers, so to speak) have a right to speak up. There is real scientific evidence that it is man-made and not something that is correlated with natural cycles. It is going to hurt all of us, not just the people who are economically helped by the CO^2 polluters.

Really, there is no excuse for the rest of us to go along with such lazy thinking as yours on this subject. That is because that lazy thinking hurts all of us. And just like smokers' denial of second hand smoke dangers, it largely eminates from purely selfish reasons. It needs to be called out.

[stevehull]

Here is just one person's personal observations on rapid climate change - all of it in the last 60 years.

As a kid, I grew up (50's 60's) in Westborough MA, just SW of Woburn (home of xringer). We did not know about wind chill, but I do know that there were many weeks when it did not go above freezing. It was not unusual to go a week (or more) without it going above zero. I knew this as we kept livestock and we had to hand carry water buckets morning/night to water them when the pipe to the barn froze (buried 6 feet down). Cows drink a lot of damn water . . .

The frost line in central Massachusetts back then went down 6-7 feet - now frost rarely goes down 1/2 of that (or less).

When was the last time it was below zero for a week in Boston/Worcester? It is now a big deal if it stays below freezing for a week!

There were no Cardinals nor Robins throughout the winter despite my mother putting out lots of bird seed (Chicakadees, lots of 'em back then). Now both the former are year round residents of New England.

We regularly went skating on the town ponds at about Thanksgiving and we played hockey on same until mid March. I know that as we would have a Thanksgiving bonfire on the lake, would roast chickens and eat fire baked potatos.

Ice fishing was a chore as you had to chop through 12-18 inches of ice. Now you don't dare venture on lakes in central Massachusetts until January - and then at your risk of falling through.

My wife's family was in Island Pond VT (Northeast Kingdom area) for generations where ice in and ice out dates of major lakes have been kept for 200+ years.

They used the lakes for ice cutting (for icehouse and for homes in the cities before mechanical refridgeration). Up to the early 70's ice in on the lakes was late October +/- one week. Ice out was in mid April +/- 1 week. Many people literally banked on those dates as many were employed by ice houses. Now all that has changed by a month at each end. I have seen the posted dates of ice in and out in the family records going back for literally generations. You too can look those dates up in town records.

I used to go to school the first week (just after Labor Day) and we would collect pretty leaves and do the waxed paper thing that first week. Now the leaves change in mid October in Westborough.

All the above simply says there has been climate change - and yes, this has happened hundreds (thousands?) of times in geological history. But it does NOT happen in one human generation.

Situations similar to the recent change normally take many hundreds to thousands of years with the exceptions of large volcanic issues (eg year without a summer, 1830's)

Yet in Europe, right now they are freezing. It takes only a subtle shift of the Gulf Stream to move quadrillions of BTUs to the south - and this is what is being observed. And the summers have been incredibly hot and dry there as well.

The "infamous" Northwest Passge, searched for since Henry Hudson's time, is now open in the Arctic with the lowest thickness of sea ice ever see. How do we know? The first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, made a trip under the north pole in 1959 and accurately measured sea ice thickness. My uncle was on that historic sub trip and there were times when the ice was so thick that they almost didn't make it between ice bottom and ocean bottom. They measured this to hide from Soviet subs that were non-nuclear. The US Navy has a LOT of data on ice thickness (now ice thinness or open water).

Now, on that same exact route, 80% of the 1959 sub trip is open water . . .

I can literally go on and on with more data personally seen in my lifetime, but you get the message.

And . . . . at the same time as this, there has been a huge increase in man made gasses well known and clearly documented to cause changes in atmospheric heat retention.

No I have not personally measured that change, but I have taught courses where I have had to literally change lectures due to the almost 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 (in my teaching "lifetime").

I know well that association is not causation, but as a scientist with a doctorate and then post doctorate fellowships, I have spent a lot of time studying this. I call what we are seeing is the following:

rapid, human induced, global climate change

You may disagree and have opinions, but opinions are not facts. I too don't appreciate lazy thinking just as I hate seeing a poorly done brazing job done by a person who thinks (tells all) that he/she is good at it . . .


Respectfully,

Steve

[Xringer]

Originally Posted by stevehull

The "infamous" Northwest Passge, searched for since Henry Hudson's time, is now open in the Arctic with the lowest thickness of sea ice ever see. How do we know? The first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, made a trip under the north pole in 1959 and accurately measured sea ice thickness. My uncle was on that historic sub trip and there were times when the ice was so thick that they almost didn't make it between ice bottom and ocean bottom. They measured this to hide from Soviet subs that were non-nuclear. The US Navy has a LOT of data on ice thickness (now ice thinness or open water).

Now, on that same exact route, 80% of the 1959 sub trip is open water . . .

Steve

Ice at the North Pole in 1958 and 1959 – not so thick | Watts Up With That?

It kinda looks like the ice up there, comes and goes..

[stevehull]

Xringer,

Arctic ice does indeed come and go - that is the truth, but the thinning of the Arctic ice cap is not a fallacy.

Guys, if you want to promote fallacies then believe that you can make energy for your car from water, that putting a magnet on your fuel line will increase your car milage by 25% and that a 1 kW wind turbine will supply all your home energy needs.

We know, because we are here, of the laws of physics, engineering and of rational thought. Let's not discard our brains as we think of other arenas.

We are all experiencing the "law of the commons", you may have opinions, but opinions are not facts.

respectfully,

Steve

[ecomodded]

I hate misinformation.
I do understand the posters here mean well, they do not know the role they are playing
spreading this misinformation. They should get paid, like Al Gore.

650,000 years of greenhouse gas concentrations
Filed under:

Arctic and Antarctic
Climate Science
Greenhouse gases
Paleoclimate

— gavin @ 24 November 2005 - (Français)

The latest results from the EPICA core in Antarctica have just been published this week in Science (Siegenthaler et al. and Spahni et al.). This ice core extended the record of Antarctic climate back to maybe 800,000 years, and the first 650,000 years of ice have now been analysed for greenhouse gas concentrations saved in tiny bubbles. The records for CO2, CH4 and N2O both confirm the Vostok records that have been available for a few years now, and extend them over another 4 glacial-interglacial cycles. This is a landmark result and a strong testament to the almost heroic efforts in the field to bring back these samples from over 3km deep in the Antarctica ice. So what do these new data tell us, and where might they lead?

Composite CO2: Click to enlargeFirst of all, the results demonstrate clearly that the relationship between climate and CO2 that had been deduced from the Vostok core appears remarkably robust. This is despite a significant change in the patterns of glacial-interglacial changes prior to 400,000 years ago. The ‘EPICA challenge’ was laid down a few months ago for people working on carbon cycle models to predict whether this would be the case, and mostly the predictions were right on the mark. (Who says climate predictions can’t be verified?). It should also go almost without saying that lingering doubts about the reproducibility of the ice core gas records should now be completely dispelled. That a number of different labs, looking at ice from different locations, extracted with different methods all give very similar answers, is a powerful indication that what they are measuring is real. Where there are problems (for instance in N2O in very dusty ice), those problems are clearly found and that data discarded.

Secondly, these results will allow paleoclimatologists to really look in detail at the differences between the different interglacials in the past. The previous 3 before our current era look quite similar to each other and were quite short (around 10,000 years). The one 400,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stage 11, for those who count that way) was hypotheisied to look more like the Holocene and appears to be significantly longer (around 30,000 years). Many of the details though weren’t completely clear in the Vostok data, but should now be much better resolved. This may help address some of the ideas put forward by Ruddiman (2003, 2005), and also help assess how long our current warm period is likely to last.

More generally, since the extra interglacials that are now resolved have very different characteristics from the previous ones, they may allow us to test climate theories and models over a whole new suite of test cases. To quote Richard Alley “Whether you’re a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a geologist, or any other “ist” studying the Earth system, there is something in these data that confirms much of your understanding of the planet and then challenges some piece of your understanding”. It’s all very exciting (for us ‘ists’ at least!).

RealClimate: 650,000 years of greenhouse gas concentrations

results for CO2, CH4, and the isotopes: