nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

They will have to move.

Richard94611

Yes, you are right. They will have to move. It isn't very easy to move New York City.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Not my problem.

Richard94611

Not my problem, either.

Richard94611

Attention, Deniers


A new study just blew a hole in one of the strongest arguments against global warming

Gene Kim and Jessica Orwig
Business InsiderJanuary 13, 2017
The oceans are warming up faster than we thought. While this is bad news for the planet, it's good news for climate change scientists who have — for the last two decades — puzzled over warming trends in ocean surface temperatures for nearly 20 years.

According to a big chunk of ocean surface temperature recorded by boat, the oceans were not warming nearly as quickly as the rest of the planet. This mystified scientists, but climate change skeptics used it as surefire, "scientific" proof that climate change either wasn't as bad as scientists thought, or it didn't exist, at all.

Now, a new study, published in Science Advances, has confirmed what NOAA first discovered in 2015 — the oceans are indeed warming, and faster than we thought. So why the change? It comes down to what every scientist knows too well — analyzing data collected by different methods, and at different times, is a tricky business because some methods of collecting ocean surface temperatures are more accurate than others.

The new study confirmed that data collected by boats were slightly different than data collected by buoys and satellites. So, when scientists combined all of the data, it skewed the results. To identify what's really happening, the new study analyzed numerous data sets individually — instead of combing them all together.

They discovered that oceans have been warming about 70% more per decade for the last 19 years than previously thought.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Dude, deniers don't deny warming, they deny that man is the sole cause, if contributory at all.

Richard94611

I have been discussing climate change/global warming in this forum for almost 4 years now, and I think your comment shows how we have made at least a little progress in this discussion. When I first began discussing the subject four years ago, almost no one wanted to admit that global warming was real, was taking place. In fact, you will still find people here arguing that global warming is not taking place, citing the argument that Antarctica is gaining snow and ice rather than losing them. They forget that the temperature that matters is the average global temperature, and that this is increasing. Yoiuy will find some people here even now who joke about global warming when they have heavier snow falls now than they did ten years ago. These folks don't understand that we are talking about the average global temperature, not the temperature where they live.

As for the cause, the physics of this is well-known and has been known for more than a century. It is firmly established that global warming is caused by the difference between the amount of energy in the form of heat (ultraviolet waves) absorbed from the sun's rays, and the smaller amount of energy in the form of infrared energy being radiated back into space. CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs and holds radiation as heat. The problem is that with man's production of more and more CO2, more and more energy is being maintained and not radiated back into space. This is a somewhat simplified version of the situation, but at least it gives a good summary of it. The more CO2 you have, the more energy is absorbed and held, and the higher the global temperature becomes. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere was as low as 250 ppm, but it is now around 400 ppm. The graph of the ppm of CO2 and the graph of global temperature when placed in the same x and y axes shows the global temperature rising more or less in direct consonance with the increasing level of CO2.

Nobody says that the sole cause of global warming is man's production of CO2. There are three distinct causes of temperature variation due to the earth's tilt, orbit and closeness (or distance) from the sun. But these cannot account for the overall rise in global temperature, not do they account for the fact that each year for the past 5 years has been the warmest globally on record.

Even today, some participants in this forum deny that climate change/global warming is taking place. One example is Blade_Runner, who may be denying this because he is a troll.

Just thought I would let you know, Dude.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Actually we ARE making progress. You're finally admitting that global warming isn't totally due to man.

I, on the other hand, used to support the idea that man was a huge reason for the warming but over the past three to four years have seen more and more data, much of which contradicted the anthropomorphic model, and am backing off a bit on what I think man is doing to contribute. I am also beginning to suspect that there is some other unknown contributory cause which, when finally deduced, might actually shake up the scientific community, what ever it might turn out to be.

Richard94611

I don't believe I have ever said that global warming was "totally" due to man. I am aware that there are other smaller causes, and have been aware of that for a long time. The term I have used is "largely due to man." This also depends on a time frame, when one of the three positional causes of the earth produces more or less warming. I stand by that usage now, too. I will just sit back and wait for your additional cause to surface in the scientific community. I don't think one will.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

You might be right. Time will tell. I just know that there is an undercurrent of suspicion among the scientific community that we have yet to identify something very significant.

Richard94611

Here we go again, deniers. Check this out.

Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year
By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZJAN. 18, 2017

Ice in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea region. “What’s going on in the Arctic is really very impressive; this year was ridiculously off the chart,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Credit Esther Horvath
Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization.

In 2015 and 2016, the planetary warming was intensified by the weather pattern known as El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean released a huge burst of energy and water vapor into the atmosphere. But the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperature, which scientists say is being driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record
2016 is the hottest year on the historical record and the third consecutive record-breaking year, scientists say.


"A single warm year is something of a curiosity,” said Deke Arndt, chief of global climate monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s really the trend, and the fact that we’re punching at the ceiling every year now, that is the real indicator that we’re undergoing big changes.”

2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say JAN. 20, 2016

The heat extremes were especially pervasive in the Arctic, with temperatures in the fall running 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal across large stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Sea ice in that region has been in precipitous decline for years, and Arctic communities are already wrestling with enormous problems, such as rapid coastal erosion, caused by the changing climate.

“What’s going on in the Arctic is really very impressive; this year was ridiculously off the chart,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a unit of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that tracks global temperatures.

But Arctic people were hardly alone in feeling the heat. Drought and starvation afflicted Africa. On May 19, the people in the town of Phalodi lived through the hottest day in the recorded history of India, 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

El Niño has now ended, and climate scientists almost universally expect 2017 to be cooler than the year before. But the scale of the heat burst has been startling to many of the experts, and some of them fear an accelerated era of global warming could be at hand over the next few years.


Even at current temperatures, billions of tons of land ice are melting or sliding into the ocean. The sea is also absorbing most of the heat trapped by human emissions. Those factors are causing the ocean to rise at what appears to be an accelerating pace, and coastal communities in the United States are spending billions of dollars to fight increased tidal flooding. Their pleas for help from Congress have largely been ignored.

The finding that a record had been set for the third year in a row was released on Wednesday by three government agencies, two American and one British, that track measurements made by ships, buoys and land-based weather stations. They analyze the figures to correct for known problems, producing an annual average temperature for the surface of the Earth. The national meteorological agency of Japan also confirmed the findings in a preliminary analysis.

The findings about a record-warm year were also confirmed by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, a nonprofit California group set up to provide a temperature analysis independent of governments. That group, however, did not find that three records had been set in a row; in its analysis, 2010 was slightly warmer than 2014.

In addition to the surface measurements, satellites are used to measure the temperature of the atmosphere a few miles above the surface. Two groups that analyze these figures showed a record-warm 2016 in data going back to 1978, though in one data set it was a record by only a small margin.

Since 1880, NOAA’s records show only one other instance when global temperature records were set three years in a row: in 1939, 1940 and 1941. The Earth has warmed so much in recent decades, however, that 1941 now ranks as only the 37th-warmest year on record.

The modern era of global warming began around 1970, after a long stretch of relatively flat temperatures, and the past three years mark the first time in that period that three records were set in a row. Of the 17 hottest years on record, 16 have now occurred since 2000.

Two of the agencies that issued Wednesday’s figures, NOAA and NASA, will soon report to cabinet secretaries appointed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has expressed doubt about the findings of climate science. Mr. Trump famously issued a tweet in 2012 that said: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.”

He has more recently said there might be “some connectivity” between human-driven emissions and the warming of the planet.

Fear has erupted within the agencies about whether their data will now be subject to political manipulation. However, Mr. Trump and his cabinet nominees have given no detailed indication of what their broad climate policies are likely to be, much less how they will manage the scientific enterprise of monitoring the climate.

Some Democrats in Congress have expressed frustration with what they regard as attempts by Republicans to intimidate scientists and undermine basic scientific findings.

Richard94611

Progressive One

Earth sets heat record in 2016 — for the third year in a row
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/

It’s official: 2016 was the hottest year on record since scientists began tracking Earth’s temperature more than 100 years ago, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The 1.69-degree jump over the 20th-century average, according to NOAA, marks the third year in a row that global temperatures have reached record-shattering levels. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration added that the global average temperature for 2016 was 1.78 degrees higher than a baseline period between 1951 and 1980.

Both agencies noted that Earth’s average global temperature — which NOAA pegged at 57 degrees during the 20th century — was higher in 2016 than in any year since scientists began tracking it in 1880.

“For the first time in recorded history, we have now had three consecutive record-warm years,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the findings. “The likelihood of this having happened in the absence of human-caused global warming is minimal.”

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

So, somehow, he has calculated that there could be a small chance that man is not involved; based upon what? It would be interesting to hear him quantify his "opinion."

Richard94611

Trump Day 1: Global Warming's Fate
If the new president delays climate action as promised, the world is far more likely to miss its Paris agreement goals
By Annie Sneed on January 20, 2017

Donald Trump’s presidency begins today, giving him the ability to act on numerous pledges he has made related to global warming. They include “canceling” American involvement in the Paris climate accord, reviving the coal industry and rolling back federal environmental regulations. If Trump follows through, scientists say it could have a profound long-term effect on the planet.
The public may assume the U.S. and the rest of the world can delay climate action for a presidential term or two, and catch up later. But such a scenario is highly unlikely because cumulative greenhouse gas emissions control temperature rise and effects such as sea level rise and extreme weather. The longer the world waits to reduce emissions, the lower its chances are for limiting warming to 2 degree Celsius, acknowledged as the upper safe limit for the planet. “It’s not like you shift the consequences eight years down the line, and you just hit your target eight years later than planned,” explains Ben Sanderson, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “A decade of reduced ambition would have permanent consequences.”
Average global temperature has already risen at least 0.8 degree C above preindustrial levels, and Sanderson estimates the most current number is likely between 0.9 to 1.3 degrees C. Under the Paris agreement nearly 200 countries agreed to limit the global temperature rise this century to less than 2 degrees C as well as consider ways to reach an even tighter 1.5-degree C target. There is little margin left between where the world is now and where it does not want to go. If the U.S., the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, fails to act, the world will find it incredibly difficult to meet the 2-degree C goal. “The consequences of a delay in action,” Sanderson says, “are that we permanently miss our target.”
To hit the 2-degree C mark, Sanderson estimates global emissions would have to peak in the next decade, decline to zero by 2060–70, then go negative. In order to help make that happen the U.S. has pledged to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, which would reduce the country’s climate pollution down to between 4.6 billion and 5.5 billion metric tons annually. The latest EPA estimate put U.S. greenhouse gas emissions around 6.9 billion metric tons in 2014.
Reaching the 1.5 degree C goal would be even harder. “What you need to do to achieve 1.5 degrees is incredibly aggressive,” Sanderson says. To get there the world would need to pull off zero emissions by mid-century, and after that countries would have to start removing a huge amount of greenhouse gases from the air. Both of these scenarios assume people will have invented the technology to economically remove those gases on a large-scale. (Currently such a capability does not exist.)
Even if the Trump administration retains all of the U.S.’s current emissions-reducing policies, and carries out all of the proposed ones, there is a good chance the U.S. will still miss its Paris agreement pledge. The nation may still emit an excess 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually over its Paris target in 2025, according to one study in Nature Climate Change. That is because current and proposed policies do not go far enough to reduce emissions. Experts note the rest of the world has not planned enough emissions cuts yet either to reach the 2-degree C goal; part of the Paris agreement is that nations will ratchet up their pledges over time. According to one estimate, nations’ current mitigation policies would still result in a 3.6-degree C increase in average global temperature by the end of the century.
If Trump pulls the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and follows through on his other declarations, however, he will drive the odds of achieving 2 degrees C even lower. The largest blow to U.S. mitigation efforts will be if Trump rescinds or weakens the Clean Power Plan—a rule that requires power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, which was finalized in 2015 but is currently tied up in court. “I can’t see us reaching our Paris commitment without adopting some form of the Clean Power Plan,” says Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth sciences at Stanford University. The Nature Climate Change study estimates the Clean Power Plan accounts for about half of emissions cuts from the U.S.’s current and proposed policies.
The Trump administration could possibly roll back other climate rules that would increase U.S. emissions, such as automaker fuel-efficiency standards or regulations that limit methane leaks from the oil and gas industry. Trump has also promised to “lift restrictions on the production” of shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal—such a move would increase the market share of fossil-fuel power, and could drive emissions up. Of course, market forces have an immense influence on U.S. emissions, and they are currently favoring natural gas and renewables, and shutting down coal plants. “U.S. emissions have been dropping slowly but steadily for more than a decade,” largely because of those market forces, Jackson explains, “A very plausible scenario would be for us to continue with modest reductions in emissions, but fall far short of the Paris agreement.”
A U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement could have further global consequences. Other countries may reduce their ambitions as well—especially because Trump has said he would “cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs.” As Sanderson explains, “Historically, some countries have been unwilling to act on climate without very comprehensive and clear goals from the U.S.”
Sanderson and his colleagues put together an analysis for various global scenarios under an eight-year Trump presidency. They found that if the U.S. delays its emissions goals for eight years and other nations follow suit—so that emissions increase for that period and there is less investment in low-carbon tech—it would result in about 1,300 billion additional metric tons of CO2 emissions globally. That would drop the chances of the world achieving a 2-degree C ceiling by 2100 from 66 percent (with aggressive mitigation from all nations) to about 10 percent, and move the likeliest warming scenario up to 2.5 degrees C. “There’s no wiggle room in the latter half of the century,” Sanderson says. “We can’t compensate later on, because we’re assuming the world is already doing as much as physically possible.”