How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Ben D » Wed Jan 15, 2014 6:41 pm

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/14/3149961/silence-lambs-climate-coverage-drops/

Silence Of The Lambs: Climate Coverage Drops At Major U.S. Newspapers, Flatlines On TV

BY JOE ROMM ON JANUARY 14, 2014 AT 3:37 PM

Image

Back in November, we reported that climate coverage had dropped sharply at the New York Times after the paper closed its environmental desk.

The final numbers for the year are in and NY Times climate coverage — stories in which the words “global warming” or “climate change” appeared — has plummeted more than 40 percent. That is a bigger drop than any of the other newspapers monitored by the University of Colorado, though the Washington Post’s coverage dropped by a third, no doubt driven in part by its mind-boggling decision to take its lead climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, off the environment beat.

And remember, this drop happened from levels of climate coverage that were already near a historical low and in a year that was HUGE on climate news. We’ve had devastating extreme weather around the planet. In May, CO2 levels in the air passed the 400 parts per million threshold for the first time in millions of years. In June, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan. And in September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest alarming review of the scientific literature.
As the chart above shows, when the IPCC released its previous reports (2001, 2007), media coverage spiked at the major newspapers. These days, the media herd is not to be heard from.

The major networks’ coverage of climate has flatlined. Robert Brulle of Drexel University counts a whopping 30 stories on the nightly news at ABC, NBC and CBS in 2013, little changed from the 29 in 2012. That’s less than one piece per week on the story of the century. In 2007, there were 147 climate segments on the nightly news.

Interestingly, reporting on climate and energy rose in 2013, “fueled by reporting on energy issues – fracking, pipelines, oilsands,” as the Daily Climate reported. They use an aggregated database of “news articles, opinions and editorials” from media outlets around the world, primarily print and online, though their choices are a tad arbitrary — they include DotEarth and Climate Central, but not Climate Progress or Grist.

Also the Daily Climate counts energy stories where the words “global warming” or “climate change” do not appear. But one of the great failings of the media is too little connecting the dots, such as a story on bark beetles or one on record-breaking wildfires or droughts that never mentions climate change. See last month’s post “96 Percent Of Network Nightly News’ Coverage Of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change.” As Ezra Klein asked back in 2010, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

Sadly, even using with this broader metric, the one-time “paper of record” falls short: “The New York Times, having dismantled its ‘green desk’ in early 2013, was the only major publisher worldwide to see coverage drop in 2013….”
Future generations sweltering through a ruined climate that could have been saved for a tiny fraction of our vast wealth (a tenth of a penny out of every dollar) will probably never make sense of the media’s current climate silence. Heck, I can’t make sense of it.
There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Wed Jan 15, 2014 9:17 pm

@Sounder: That German dude isn't exactly reliable. He's a retired physics professor (As in: Not a climate scientist), who, according to himself, is not an expert on climate. He's associated with "EIKE", a German denier org., which among others have Lord Monckton as an adviser.

@Ben: Another bloody strawman?
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby KUAN » Thu Jan 16, 2014 12:32 am

Here's proof-positive that science can save us. Let's get planting more old growth trees.....
From The Guardian:
Trees accelerate growth as they get older and bigger, study finds
Findings contradict assumption that old trees are less productive and could have important implications for carbon absorption


http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... der-carbon
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Ben D » Thu Jan 16, 2014 7:30 pm

So it is settled...the 16 year pause in global warming is now accepted by AGW main stream scientists...

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525

Climate change: The case of the missing heat
Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.

15 January 2014

The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled.

For several years, scientists wrote off the stall as noise in the climate system: the natural variations in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere that drive warm or cool spells around the globe. But the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field. Although there have been jumps and dips, average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998, in seeming defiance of projections of climate models and the ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt. Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that heat must still be building up somewhere in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere. Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their models.

Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.

“The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. According to this theory, the tropical Pacific should snap out of its prolonged cold spell in the coming years.“Eventually,” Trenberth says, “it will switch back in the other direction.”

Stark contrast

On a chart of global atmospheric temperatures, the hiatus stands in stark contrast to the rapid warming of the two decades that preceded it. Simulations conducted in advance of the 2013–14 assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the warming should have continued at an average rate of 0.21 °C per decade from 1998 to 2012. Instead, the observed warming during that period was just 0.04 °C per decade, as measured by the UK Met Office in Exeter and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.

The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability. Much like the swings between warm and cold in day-to-day weather, chaotic climate fluctuations can knock global temperatures up or down from year to year and decade to decade. Records of past climate show some long-lasting global heatwaves and cold snaps, and climate models suggest that either of these can occur as the world warms under the influence of greenhouse gases.

But none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

But even those scientists who remain confident in the underlying models acknowledge that there is increasing pressure to work out just what is happening today. “A few years ago you saw the hiatus, but it could be dismissed because it was well within the noise,” says Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. “Now it’s something to explain.”

Researchers have followed various leads in recent years, focusing mainly on a trio of factors: the Sun1, atmospheric aerosol particles2 and the oceans3. The output of energy from the Sun tends to wax and wane on an 11-year cycle, but the Sun entered a prolonged lull around the turn of the millennium. The natural 11-year cycle is currently approaching its peak, but thus far it has been the weakest solar maximum in a century. This could help to explain both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the model simulations, which include a higher solar output than Earth has experienced since 2000.

An unexpected increase in the number of stratospheric aerosol particles could be another factor keeping Earth cooler than predicted. These particles reflect sunlight back into space, and scientists suspect that small volcanoes — and perhaps even industrialization in China — could have pumped extra aerosols into the stratosphere during the past 16 years, depressing global temperatures.

There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.

** or Nirvana, Allah, Brahman, Tao, etc...
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby justdrew » Fri Jan 17, 2014 12:20 am

Q: How Bad Is Global Warming?
a: it's SO bad, when it warms the globe it REALLY warms the globe :jumping:
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 17, 2014 1:03 am

is that a chemtrail in your pocket....or are you just happy to see me? :jumping:

Published on Thursday, January 16, 2014 by Common Dreams
Geoengineering Global Cooling: 'Insane, Utterly Mad and Delusional'
Al Gore sounds off on plans to seed the clouds or "suck out" bad air to reverse climate change

- Jon Queally, staff writer
Responding to a draft version of an upcoming IPCC report on climate change mitigation obtained and reported on by Reuters on Wednesday, former US vice president and well known climate change activist Al Gore says that any plans to execute "geoengineered" solutions to global warming are "insane, utterly mad and delusional in the extreme."

"We are already engaged in a planet-wide experiment with consequences we can already tell are unpleasant for the future of humanity. So the hubris involved in thinking we can come up with a second planet-wide experiment that would exactly counteract the first experiment is delusional in the extreme." –Al Gore

Though the draft IPCC report, as presented by Reuters, does not seem to advocate strongly for some of the most outrageous proposed schemes, the report does say that the inability of the world's governments to reduce emissions will necessitate more aggressive and pro-active measures in the future to avoid the global temperature increases the scientists are now predicting.

As the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg reports:

The UN climate panel, in the next edition of its blockbuster reports, will warn that governments might have to extract vast amounts of greenhouses gases from the air by 2100 to limit climate change, according to a draft copy of the report seen by Reuters.

But the former vice president of the US said that searches for an instant solution, which he said were born of desperation, were misguided and could lead to an even bigger catastrophe.

"The idea that we can put a different form of pollution into the atmosphere to cancel out the effects of global warming pollution is utterly insane," he told a conference call for South African reporters.

He added: "The fact that some scientists who should know better are actually engaged in serious discussion of those alternatives is a mark of how desperate some of them are feeling due to the paralysis in the global political system."
Long a fixation for some, a multitude of geoengineering schemes have been floated based on the idea that if human interference (ie. widespread industrial and carbon pollution) has caused the planet to warm, some kind of additional human interference with nature can reverse the trend.

Just last week, as Common Dreams reported, a study by University of Reading researchers showed that a plan to employ "stratospheric aerosols" to block solar heat could bring a "new unintended side-effect over a large part of the planet" that could be as bad as the effects of rising CO2.

And as journalist and climate activist Naomi Klein articulated last year, in an interview with Earth Island Journal, geoengineering is the "ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that’s the appeal of it. I think we will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn’t threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch."

"If we start tinkering with the earth’s thermostat — deliberately turning our oceans murky green to soak up carbon and bleaching the skies hazy white to deflect the sun — we take our influence to a new level." –Naomi Klein

Of course, a distinction is necessary between sustainable mitigation plans, emission reductions and large scale geoengineering projects. As nearly all experts agree, there will be significant technological and scientific solutions necessary to help lessen (if not solve) the destructive impacts of global warming but what Gore and Klein are specifically rejecting are large scale projects like seeding the oceans or the clouds with chemicals in vain attempts to reverse the damage wrought by the industrial age.

"The most discussed so-called geo-engineering proposals – like putting sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere to reflect incoming sunlight – that's just insane," said Gore in the conference call. "Let's just describe that clearly – it is utterly mad."

He added: "We are already engaged in a planet-wide experiment with consequences we can already tell are unpleasant for the future of humanity. So the hubris involved in thinking we can come up with a second planet-wide experiment that would exactly counteract the first experiment is delusional in the extreme."

And as Klein wrote in the New York Times in 2012:

The scariest thing about this proposition is that models suggest that many of the people who could well be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Imagine this: North America decides to send sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun, in the hopes of saving its corn crops — despite the real possibility of triggering droughts in Asia and Africa. In short, geoengineering would give us (or some of us) the power to exile huge swaths of humanity to sacrifice zones with a virtual flip of the switch.

The geopolitical ramifications are chilling. Climate change is already making it hard to know whether events previously understood as “acts of God” (a freak heat wave in March or a Frankenstorm on Halloween) still belong in that category. But if we start tinkering with the earth’s thermostat — deliberately turning our oceans murky green to soak up carbon and bleaching the skies hazy white to deflect the sun — we take our influence to a new level. A drought in India will come to be seen — accurately or not — as a result of a conscious decision by engineers on the other side of the planet. What was once bad luck could come to be seen as a malevolent plot or an imperialist attack.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby NeonLX » Fri Jan 17, 2014 10:25 am

Jeez. Let's just tweak the Earth's orbit a little. That oughtta do it.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Jan 17, 2014 2:41 pm

Planting trees, always a good idea, but unfortunately they are being harvested more quickly than replacements can grow to become efficient carbon sinks. Planting one tree for every few thousands harvested is inadequate. Even if we planted two for every one harvested, we would be far beyond the tipping point when the new-growth trees become efficient carbon sinks some 20 to 40 years after their planting.

While cloud seeding may be helpful in combating excessive atmospheric carbon, but the risks to our health and environment are too great to seriously consider this technology, which if applied may have the opposite effect than that expected.

Must be really chilly in Oz, considering it's getting colder, huh Ben?

Must be breaking all sorts of Australian records for being the coolest summer in a long time!
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby slimmouse » Fri Jan 17, 2014 3:04 pm

Just jump in here quickly to say, that it seems to me what we really need somewhat urgently are some truly clean energy renewable technologies. The kind of stuff that might for example allow us to irrigate deserts. Not to mention the more minor stuff, such as powering your home, or your vehicle for example.

I read somewhere that irrigating desert was what Gaddaffi was up to. If it's true, I bet he got an extra kick for that particular crime against humanity.

We also need a new synthetic ( possibly hemp based) product to take the place of timber.

And heres the long and the short and the extremely stupid of it.

I reckon that there are thousands of examples of the above technologies just waiting to be given a real chance.

However, dont worry yourselves too much about it.

In the future, you'll probably be able to plug into gargoyle if you want to see what such a world would have looked like.

As long as youve got both the time and money, that is.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Jan 17, 2014 7:20 pm

Say, Slim, "I read somewhere that irrigating desert was what Gaddaffi was up to. If it's true, I bet he got an extra kick for that particular crime against humanity."

Ever hear of Las Vegas, Slim? Israel too, irrigates desert lands as does most 'dry' nations across the globe. Every country with agriculture irrigates.

Irrigation is one way to build soil in soil depleted areas. Takes a very long time, though. Personally, I feel irrigation was one of his best moves, if not his only noble one.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Jan 17, 2014 7:55 pm

Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.

Psst... Hey, you guys... take a look at this:

Why Is It So Hot in Australia?

By Laura Poppick and Tanya Lewis, Staff Writers 8 hours ago

Image
2013 was Australia’s hottest year on record. (Image acquired December 27, 2013 - January 3, 2014)

Record-high heat has scorched Australia this week, with temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) for several days in a row in some areas. Relief is expected for this weekend, however.

Blazing temperatures have hit athletes and fans at the Australian Open in Melbourne, in what forecasters said could be the hottest stretch of weather in a century for the city. So what's causing the inferno?

"Almost all heat waves form due to unusually strong areas of high pressure at high altitudes — or a so-called ridge in the jet stream," said Jason Samenow, weather editor at The Washington Post. "This one is no different."

Samenow said the heat wave is already Australia's second this year, following record heat earlier in January. The country had its hottest year on record in 2013.

Beware of bushfires

Authorities have issued bushfire warnings for much of the southern part of the continent, calling it the worst fire danger since "Black Saturday" in 2009, when a firestorm in Victoria state killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

"The forecast weather patterns are quite reminiscent of conditions before Black Saturday, with severe and expansive high temperatures across the southern part of the continent and the presence of low pressure cells on either side of the country in the tropics," bushfire specialist Jason Sharples of the University of New South Wales in Canberra told Agence France-Presse. Due to the high temperatures and low relative-humidity, the vegetation will be very dry, so a bushfire would spread more quickly than usual, Sharples added.

Heat and wildfires are common during December through February (Australian summer), but the heat is unusual this year. That's because the El Nino — a band of unusually warm ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific — is supposed to be in a neutral period. When it's active, El Nino tends to bring hot, dry conditions to Australia, so seeing them during the neutral period is surprising.

Climate change to blame?

Debate exists over whether climate change has played a role in this or other extreme heat waves in recent years.

James Hansen, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, co-authored a report in 2012 that made a close connection between climate change and the increasing occurrence of heat waves since 2000. Hansen's team wrote, "It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small."

Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., on the other hand, says that climate change has not affected the frequency of heat waves, which are part of normal weather patterns. However the maximum temperatures of those heat waves have increased as average global temperatures have risen over the past century or so.

"There is no evidence that the patterns are becoming more energetic or more frequent. It's simply that when those weather patterns occur, they now occur in a warmer climate," Hoerling told LiveScience.

The features of the atmosphere that drive large-scale air currents related to heat waves are seated deep in the atmosphere, Hoerling said. The warming planet's current warming is occurring lower down in the atmosphere, and therefore has not yet deeply affected the atmospheric patterns that drive large-scale weather and climate patterns.

As the planet continues to warm, however, those deep-seated features of the atmosphere may, indeed, experience more significant changes, Hoerling said.

Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter and Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:40 pm

Massive Antarctic Glacier Uncontrollably Retreating, Study Suggests

By Laura Poppick, Staff Writer January 16, 2014 12:36 PM

Image
Topographic map of Antarctica, the Pine Island Glacier is marked in red.

The glacier that contributes more to sea level rise than any other glacier on Antarctica has hit a tipping point of uncontrollable retreat, and could largely collapse within the span of decades, a new study suggests.

Pine Island Glacier accounts for about 20 percent of the total ice flow on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — an amalgam of glaciers that covers roughly 800,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) and makes up about 10 percent of the total ice on Antarctica. Many researchers think that, given the size of Pine Island Glacier, its demise could have a domino effect on surrounding glaciers and ultimately — over the course of many years — lead to the collapse of the entire ice sheet, which would raise average global sea level by between 10 and 16 feet (3 and 5 meters).

The glacier is not only massive, but also one of the least stable of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet ice flows. In the past 40 years, its melting rate has accelerated due to relatively warm ocean currents that have seeped underneath its base and lubricated its flow seaward. As it slips into the ocean, the glacier's ice shelf — the part that floats on water and extends beyond the glacier's base — disintegrates through a natural process called calving, exposing yet more of the glacier to warm waters. Last year, an iceberg larger than the city of Chicagobroke off into the surrounding Amundsen Sea.

'We have passed the tipping point'

Many researchers have tried to predict the future behavior of this important glacier using mathematical models but, given the complicated nature of glacial dynamics, all of these attempts have been limited and prone to error. Precipitation, wind patterns, atmospheric temperatures, oceanic currents and the shape of bedrock underneath the glacier are only some of the numerous factors that control glacial growth and retreat. Models predicting glacial behavior are therefore very complicated and always prone to some degree of error.

Researchers based at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble have now developed state-of-the-art models that, while still limited, provide the best estimates yet of the future behavior of Pine Island Glacier, they say. The team has found that the glacier's grounding line — the point where glacier and its ice shelf meet — is about to retreat over an oceanic trench that would increase the amount of water that seeps underneath and melts the glacier. Their models suggest that this would cause the glacier to uncontrollably retreat about 25 miles (40 kilometers) over the next several decades, potentially raising global sea levels by more than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter).

Image
A NASA satellite image snapped Nov. 13, 2013, shows open water between Pine Island Glacier and its massive iceberg.

Retreat may slow once the glacier passes the trench, the researchers report, but it will not likely regain stability or enter a positive-growth phase.

"Whatever it will do, we are already engaged in a big change," study co-author Gael Durand told LiveScience. "We have passed the tipping point."

Uncertainties remain

Eric Steig, a glacial geologist at the University of Washington who also studies Pine Island Glacier but was not involved in this study, thinks the study provides the best models yet of this particular glacier's dynamics. Still, he points out that the models make the assumption that melting rates will increase in the near future and that, while this is likely, it is not necessarily a given.

Last month, Steig and colleagues published a paper in the journal Science reporting that Pine Island Glacier's retreat slowed significantly in 2012 due to oceanographic changes related to La Niña. While this seems to have been an anomalous event, Steig says that the 40 years of data gathered on the glacier may not be enough to make accurate predictions about its future behavior, and about what is normal or anomalous for its flow.

"I actually think it's a good assumption that the melt rate will stay high," Steig told LiveScience. "But my confidence that that is right is extremely low and the reason that it is low is that it depends strongly on what happens elsewhere."

For example, La Niña — a weather pattern related to El Niño that brings cold-water masses up the coast of South America, into the central equatorial Pacific, and eventually along the coast of Antarctica — originates as far away as the equatorial tropics, and has a significant impact on the behavior of the glacier. Future work will need to take these distant global factors into account in predicting the behavior of the glacier.

Still, despite these shortcomings, Durand is convinced the glacier has little chance of regaining stability.

"We showed that it will need a very large decrease of the melting condition below the ice shelf and that the oceanographic conditions would need to be much colder than it was before it started its retreat [to maintain stability]," Durand said. "What will come next is an open question, but to recover to its 1990s position is unlikely."

The study findings were detailed earlier this month in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Ben D » Fri Jan 17, 2014 9:02 pm

Iamwhomiam » Sat Jan 18, 2014 9:55 am wrote:Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.

Psst... Hey, you guys... take a look at this:

Why Is It So Hot in Australia?

Sure Iamwhomiam, it is a fact that heat waves occur every year during summer weather in Australia, that's the nature of the climate here, but that doesn't change the fact that, on a global basis, the average temperature has not increased over the last 17 years.

Posting articles on transient weather events does not change the facts concerning the seventeen year hiatus in global warming, do you understand?
There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.

** or Nirvana, Allah, Brahman, Tao, etc...
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Rory » Fri Jan 17, 2014 9:18 pm

Ben D » Sat Jan 18, 2014 1:02 am wrote:
Iamwhomiam » Sat Jan 18, 2014 9:55 am wrote:Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.

Psst... Hey, you guys... take a look at this:

Why Is It So Hot in Austroiksalia?

Sure Iamwhomiam, it is a fact that heat waves occur every year during summer weather in Australia, that's the nature of the climate here, but that doesn't change the fact that, on a global basis, the average temperature has not increased over the last 17 years.

Posting articles on transient weather events does not change the facts concerning the seventeen year hiatus in global warming, do you understand?



Do you understand, iamwhoiam - REALLY understand? 16 years is too short a time frame to prove anything, unless it is being used to disprove CAGW.

Psst - It's the SUN, stupid

Namaste :angelwings:
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Jan 18, 2014 1:22 am

Posting articles on transient weather events does not change the facts concerning the seventeen year hiatus in global warming, do you understand?


Ben, is your climate warmer this year than it was last? And last year's was the warmest ever, right? Until this year's, anyway. See where I'm going with this?

Only a fool would claim increasing high temperatures (40C+) year after year proved our climate was warming even though yours has.

Similarly, it would be foolish for anyone to claim colder low temperatures year after year for several years running was the beginning of an ice age.

But it's been decades since I last experienced a winter cold as this, -16F.
(didn't like the C equiv)

So, what I do hope you will grasp ultimately, finally, is that a short period of aberrant temperature extremes does not necessarily constitute a trend although it could if extended over 100 years time.

SO we're back to Benopause.
(Where's that image that so well demonstrates this?)

Which is where we began:

Posting articles on the seventeen year hiatus in global warming does not change the facts concerning global warming, do you understand?
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