Global Warming General Thread

[Dardedar]

2012 Saw Warmest September On Record Across The Globe, Says NOAA

"According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the globe recorded its warmest September on record, tying with 2005 for the title. Global surface temperature records stretch all the way back to 1880. September marked the 331st straight month with above average temperatures, and the 36th straight September with a global temperature above the 20th century average."

LINK

[Dardedar]

"10 Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change"
http://www.skepticalscience.com/10-Indi ... hange.html

Also NOAA:
"Fingerprints of Emissions and the Carbon Cycle: Stable and Radiocarbon Isotopes of Carbon Dioxide
The Data: What 13C Tells Us" http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/infodata/i ... llsus.html

And: "How do we know that humans are responsible?"
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/outreach/faq_cat-3.html#44

[Dardedar]

7 Charts that make it clear the planet is warming fast
Oct 19, 2012

We are living in a period with a significant trend of global warming – not natural at all, despite what many people would have you believe. Global warming and cooling are indeed natural phenomena, but when they happen either in geologic time (by far the most common), or due to some catastrophic event (say a volcano spewing ash into the atmosphere, blocking sunrays). The evidence is numerous, and easy to spot, but alas, denial seems to be sprouting eternally. Just take a look.


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LINK

[Dardedar]

Short term trends: Another proxy fight
— gavin @ 1 November 2012

"...here are a few things that are all equally true, conveniently plotted for your amusement:

The linear trend in HadCRUT4 from August 1997 to August 2012 (181 months) is 0.03ºC/decade (blue) (In GISTEMP it is 0.08ºC/decade, not shown).

The trend from August 1975 to July 1997 is 0.16ºC/dec (green), and the trend to August 2012 is 0.17ºC/dec (red).

The ten years to August 2012 were warmer than the previous 10 years by 0.15ºC, which were warmer than the 10 years before that by 0.17ºC, which were warmer than the 10 years before that by 0.17ºC, and which were warmer than the 10 years before that by 0.17ºC (purple).

The continuation of the linear trend from August 1975 to July 1997 (green dashed), would have predicted a temperature anomaly in August 2012 of 0.524ºC. The actual temperature anomaly in August 2012 was 0.525ºC.



And...



Realclimate

Cherry picker chart:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47

[Dardedar]

Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998

Link


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A sure sign someone's trying to con you is when they cherry pick a start time to coincide with the the strongest El Nino event
of the 20th century which was in 1998. It was a hot year but nevertheless, there have been many hot years that followed.
In fact, the following decade (2000 - 2010) was the hottest on record.

In other words, global warming has not stopped. It's still warming.

Years ranked according to temperature. 2000 to 2010 - hottest. (UK Met Office)
http://metofficenews.files.wordpress.co ... mbined.png

Surface and satellite data sets. Still warming:
(Foster & Rahmstorf, 2011)
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure05.jpg

Because it's still warming, ocean heat content is still rising:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

Because it's still warming, the ice is still melting.
http://tinyurl.com/cwzb9vk

Because it's still warming, glaciers around the world are still shrinking:
http://tinyurl.com/bh9tjvp

Because it's still warming, Greenland and Antarctica are still losing mass:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/5247 ... g-full.jpg

Huff Po

[Dardedar]

NOAA:

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Global Highlights
The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for October 2012 tied with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record, at 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F). Records began in 1880.

The globally-averaged land surface temperature for October 2012 was the eighth warmest October on record, at 0.92°C (1.66°F) above average. The globally-averaged ocean surface temperature tied with 2004 as the fourth warmest October on record, at 0.52°C (0.94°F) above average.

The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for January–October 2012 was the eighth warmest such period on record, at 0.58°C (1.04°F) above the 20th century average."

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/10

[Dardedar]

Climate Science Predictions Prove Too Conservative
Checking 20 years worth of projections shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
has consistently underestimated the pace and impacts of global warming

Scientific American

[Dardedar]

The 1998 canard roasted to a crisp in two minutes flat: Video clip

Debunking the Denial: “16 Years of No Global Warming”

Slate article:

"The difficulties in debunking blatant antireality are legion. You can make up any old nonsense and state it in a few seconds, but it takes much longer to show why it’s wrong and how things really are.

This is coupled with how sticky bunk can be. Once uttered, it’s out there, bootstrapping its own reality, getting repeated by the usual suspects.

Case in point: The claim that there’s been no global warming for the past 16 years. This is blatantly untrue, a ridiculous and obviously false statement. But I see it over and again online, in Op Eds, and in comments to climate change posts.

The good news is, John Cook Kevin C. from Skeptical Science has created a nice, short video showing just why this claim is such a whopper." ...

I’ll note that climate change deniers are still going on about climate scientists manipulating data. They’re even trying to cast doubt on the measurements showing 2012 is the hottest year on record in the US! Which it was. The irony is rich; it’s a common tactic for deniers to accuse actual scientists of the very tactics the denialists use. It’s a level of chutzpah so high that even Yiddish can’t do it justice.

You want to hear about real manipulation? Media Matters reports that for the past four years, not once was a scientist on a Sunday morning news show to talk climate change. Those discussions were dominated by politicians or a media people. Sauce for the goose: Media Matters found that every politician interviewed was a Republican. And since I’m at it, please, don’t bother with false equivalencies.

By the way, Lamar Smith (R-Tex) is a climate change denier. And he’s taking over the Congressional House Science Committee.

It’s more than incredible; it makes Orwell look like a piker.



And in the meantime, we saw Arctic sea ice at record low levels in 2012. West Antarctica and Greenland are melting. It is getting so hot in Australia right now that weather forecasters had to add a new color to the weather maps to indicate temperatures above 54° Celsius—that’s 130° Fahrenheit. The heat wave has literally set fire to Australia. And for me (and astronomers around the world) it’s personal; we almost lost a major observatory to Australian wildfires over the weekend.

And instead of doing something about it, we have to tie up all our time fighting denialist propaganda. It’s shameful.

So let this be clear: There is no scientific controversy over this. Climate change denial is purely, 100 percent made-up political and corporate-sponsored crap. When the loudest voices are fossil-fuel funded think tanks, when they don’t publish in science journals but instead write error-laden op-eds in partisan venues, when they have to manipulate the data to support their point, then what they’re doing isn’t science.

Debunking the Denial: “16 Years of No Global Warming”

[Dardedar]

Arctic Death Spiral Bombshell: CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed

“Other people had argued that 75 to 80 percent ice volume loss was too aggressive. What this new paper shows is
that our ice loss estimates may have been too conservative, and that the recent decline is possibly more rapid.”

[Dardedar]

The "climate change is driven by changes in the sun" canard, roasted in one chart:



"A comparison between time evolution in the global mean temperature (dark red) and different solar indices (bottom) as well as CO2 forcing (green). All the curves here have been standardised, and the solar curves are shown along the bottom. The GCR are shown in grey, and have been multiplied by -1 to emphasise the correlation with the other solar indices."

Real Climate

See also: It's the Sun

[Dardedar]

Why we don't get action on climate change in the US. Look into the face of the dumb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... iUc0D6_UPA

[Dardedar]

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Carbon dioxide level breaks 3-million-year record

"What 400 ppm means
In the 1,000 years before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, atmospheric carbon dioxide held steady at around 270 to 280 parts per million.
Scientists believe that the most recent period with a 400 ppm level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the Pliocene, between 5 million and 3 million years ago, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which keeps track of the Keeling Curve.
It was a different world. Global average temperatures were between 5.4 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 4 degrees Celsius) higher than today, and sea level was as much as 131 feet (40 meters) higher in some places. Even the least-affected regions saw sea-level rises 16 feet (5 meters) higher than today's.
A major difference, though, is the speed at which carbon dioxide is rising today. Typically, the Keeling Curve shows increases of 2 to 2.5 ppm a year, Mann said. In the 1950s and 1960s, carbon dioxide increased by less than 1 ppm each year, according to Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
"We're on course for more than 450 ppm in a matter of decades if we don't get our fossil fuel emissions under control quite soon," Mann said."

Science News

[Dardedar]

"...a team of researchers to painstakingly comb through the abstracts of more than 12,000 scientific articles published between 1991 and 2011 to determine just how much scientific agreement exists on the subject of climate change, and humanity's role in driving it. The team was led by John Cook, a Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland and the founder of the climate change education web site SkepticalScience.com.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, were clear: of the more than 4,000 abstracts that had anything to say about human-driven climate change, 97 percent endorsed the notion. A little less than 3 percent either rejected the idea or remained undecided.

In a follow-up email exchange, Cook said that the evidence for consensus on the topic among individual scientists was even stronger, given that more researchers were listed as co-authors on papers endorsing the idea of human-driven climate change... than on papers that rejected it.

"Consequently," Cook said, "among the 10,000 scientists who had expressed a position on AGW in the peer-reviewed literature, 98.4 percent endorsed the consensus."

LINK

[Dardedar]

Five minute clip on how science deniers sow seeds of DOUBT.
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Extreme Heat Is Killing Off Thousands Of Fish In Alaska
AUGUST 5, 2013

Unusually hot, dry weather in Alaska is wreaking havoc on fisheries, as thousands of fish perish in overheated waters. Last month, 1,100 king salmon died on their way up to the Crystal Lake hatchery due to water temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit and lack of oxygen. That’s the bulk of the 1,800 adult salmon that were expected to return to the hatchery this season."

LINK

The heat is doing this too:

"The Lobster Bubble: Maine’s Lobster Boom, And Why Experts Predict A Dramatic Bust"

Excerpt:
"In 1999, lobstering in Long Island Sound collapsed without warning. It was a record-breaking hot year, and the unusually warm water temperatures seemed to unleash a hitherto rare infection. Shell disease, a bacterial infection that up to that point had only been observed commonly in the infrequently-molting older lobsters, claimed 80 percent of the lobster stock off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. More than a decade later, the lobster fisheries still haven’t recovered and the water temperature has passed the threshold that these otherwise-hardy crustaceans can endure. Average water temperatures are now routinely at that record-breaking 1999 level.
“Anything above 20º C is extremely stressful for lobsters,” explained Bob Steneck, Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. “While warmer waters off the coast of Maine in recent years have probably aided the boom in lobster numbers, putting us right in the temperature sweet spot for this species, we’re getting closer and closer to that point where the temperature is just too stressful for them, their immune system is compromised and it’s all over.”
If this leads to a crash in the Maine lobster industry, experts agree it would almost inevitably lead to irreversible gentrification of Maine’s coast."
Link
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[Dardedar]

I think the climate science deniers are getting dumber. Huckabee and Inhofe in a competition to see who is the most scientifically illiterate:

Mike Huckabee, Jim Inhofe Give How-To On Denying Climate Change Without Any Concern For Facts

"The senator's appearance on Huckabee's show was mostly a chance for him to rehash bad science on global warming, including claims such as:

"We go through these 30-year cycles." (The planet doesn't warm on its own; something has to force it, and scientists have found that the current warming is being driven by the build-up of human-produced greenhouse gases.)

"We went into a leveling-out period about eight years ago." (Nope. Sorry.)

"You have to have CO2. It's a form of fertilizer to grow things. It's actually sought after in many cases." (There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.)

Huckabee also threw in a few of his own theories:

"When I was in college, all the literature at that time from the scientific community said that we were going to freeze to death." (No, it didn't.)

"The volcano that erupted over in Northern Europe actually poured more CO2 into the air in that single act of nature than all of humans have in something like the past 100 years." (Even when it was erupting, the European aviation industry's emissions alone dwarfed the volcano's daily emissions.)"

Breathtaking. (rebuttal links to each point at the site).

[Dardedar]

The Climate Change Deniers need to consult a study done with a grant from the Koch Brothers regarding Climate Change

"....of course it did not turn out as the Koch's hoped......
Richard Muller, a physicist and climate change skeptic who founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project and his team of scientists, thanks to a Koch Brothers grant, were asked to pull together all the data available.
Based at the University of California-Berkeley, they gathered and merged a collection of 14.4 million land temperature observations from 44,455 sites across the world dating back to 1753. Previous data sets created by NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Met Office and the University of East Anglia's climate research unit only went back to the mid-1800s and used a fifth as many weather station records.

The results...Per Dr. Mueller......"Our results show that the average temperature of the Earth's land has risen by 2.5F over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases,"

Unlike previous efforts, the temperature data from various sources was not homogenized by hand—a key criticism by climate skeptics. Instead, the statistical analysis was "completely automated to reduce human bias." The BEST team concluded that, despite their deeper analysis, their own findings closely matched the previous temperature reconstructions, "but with reduced uncertainty."
When the BEST project was announced last year, the prominent climate skeptic blogger Anthony Watts was consulted on the methodology. He stated at the time: "I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong." However, tensions have since arisen between Watts and Muller."

More at http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... ard-muller

Huff Po comment

And another:

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IPCC is
1995: 50% sure that Global Warming (AGW) is caused by humans.
2001: 66% sure.
2007: 90% sure.
2013: 95% sure.

AGW was first proposed in 1896, was reintroduced in 1931, and by 1960 was widely understood. In the 1970's, over 60% of all climate science papers focused on Global Warming. By 1980, there was essentially no controversy in the Scientific community about this issue: action was warranted even THAT long ago. And if we'd taken action then, the cost phase of that action would be done - we'd already have transitioned to a green economy by now.

The 15 years it took from the time climatologists were sure AGW was real and the time IPCC was able to declare with 50% certainty that that was the case, was undoubtedly ANOTHER aspect of fossil-fuel money greasing palms. It's just not credible, by 1995, to be anything less than absolutely sure what was going on.

How does this play out in other IPCC predictions? Example: IPCC has NEVER had to lower its estimated of sea level rise by 2100. It's always had to INCREASE that estimate. Today, it estimates 3 feet, which was dated knowledge five years ago. The realistic estimate is 3-6 feet, and possibly higher." Link

[Dardedar]

Sea levels rising 60 percent faster than UN forecast: scientists

"PARIS - Sea levels are rising 60 percent faster than the UN climate panel forecast in its most recent assessment, scientists said on Wednesday. At present, sea levels are increasing at an average 3.2 millimetres (0.125 inches) per year, a trio of specialists reported in the journal Environmental Research Letters. This compares with a “best estimate” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, which projected that by today, the rise would be 2 mm (0.078 inches) per year. The new figure converges with a widely-shared opinion that the world is heading for sea-level rise of around a metre (3.25 feet) by century’s end, said Grant Foster, co-author of US firm Tempo Analytics. “I would say that a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century is probably close to what you would find if you polled the people who know best,” Foster said. “In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts,...”
Link

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Sea level is rising at an increasing rate

"There is strong evidence that global sea level is now rising at an increased rate and will continue to rise during this century.
While studies show that sea levels changed little from AD 0 until 1900, sea levels began to climb in the 20th century.
The two major causes of global sea-level rise are thermal expansion caused by the warming of the oceans (since water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice (such as glaciers and polar ice caps) due to increased melting.
Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) per year since 1900.
This rate may be increasing. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year.
This is a significantly larger rate than the sea-level rise averaged over the last several thousand years."
NOAA

[Dardedar]

NCDC

[Dardedar]

Arctic sea ice


Six Things We Learned About Our Changing Climate in 2013

Link: Smithsonian

[Dardedar]

"A major new study in Nature finds that “our climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.”

In the press release chief scientist Steve Sherwood explains findings:

“Our research has shown climate models indicating a low temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide from preindustrial times are not reproducing the correct processes that lead to cloud formation," said lead author from the University of New South Wales’ Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science Prof Steven Sherwood.
“When the processes are correct in the climate models the level of climate sensitivity is far higher. Previously estimates of the sensitivity of global temperature to a doubling of carbon dioxide ranged from 1.5°C to 5°C. This new research takes away the lower end of climate sensitivity estimates, meaning that global average temperatures will increase by 3°C to 5°C with a doubling of carbon dioxide."

The key to this narrower but much higher estimate can be found in the observations around the role of water vapour in cloud formation."

http://www.climatescience.org.au/conten ... ter-future