Cold Spring Linked To Dramatic Sea Ice Loss 422
hrvatska writes "An article at Weather Underground reports that researchers have linked large snowstorms and cold spring weather across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice. It is thought that the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere, which shifts the position of the jet stream, allowing cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. Researchers expect that a warming Arctic ocean will drive more extreme weather in North America and Europe (abstract)."
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a reason most scientists use the more accurate term climate change.
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fundamentally, a stable climate is an illusion of the "short now". We think there's such a thing as "normal" temps because we just don't live very long, compared to a planet.
Even on a larger scale, the past 10,000 years have been an amazing anomaly, with a relatively stable climate not seen anywhere else in the data (and it's probably no coincidence that mankind happened to emerge technologically during this rare stable-ish window).
The simple truth about all this Climate Change debate? You don't have an informed opinion either way until you've really looked at the Vostok ice core data [wikipedia.org]. Study the raw data for the past several 100k years yourself - you're intuition is no guide at all for how the climate normally behaves over time.
It's obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Where I live, it's cold right now. That means that annual global average temperature must be colder than it was last year.
(Of course, this is silly "logic", but that's what most Americans in particular tend to be thinking)
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:how does 2013 compare to the 1980's? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I can't see many alternative hypotheses here that aren't ignoring reality. All arguments against it seem to be centered around "Nuh UH! It's NOT warming!" but I haven't really heard much talk about how that could not be the case. Carbon absorbs more heat and we're increasing the carbon doesn't seem to be under dispute. Being skeptical is good, but you don't get to reject hypotheses if you have no other way to explain the data.
Re:Global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
Science predicts. Definitely. Of course there is that other thing you need called a disprovable hypothesis.
Just a thought. Why didn't any of the AGW models predict the last 5 years?
I mean, if you want to laugh at faith-based belief systems, go ahead, but don't forget to include global warming in the mix. It's facts are as elusive as an creation theory.
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been predicting this for as long as I can remember, and I'm quite old.
North-West Europe is warmer than it ought to be. The reason is warm water currents coming up from the Equator. It's called the Gulf Stream.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Europe#Gulf_Stream [wikipedia.org]
If anything disrupts the Gulf Stream, eg. extra ice melt at the North Pole, then Europe's climate will become what it ought to be for its latitude, ie. much colder..
Science. It works.
Re:Queue stupid comments from team creationism! (Score:5, Insightful)
Science has an amazing way of reinforcing crazy stupid by presenting contradicting, independently verifiable facts
I suppose you mean seemingly contradictory, when viewed on a superficial level without real understanding of the matter?
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like the way the AGW people suddenly realized that adding energy to the atmosphere meant more extreme weather, both hotter and colder, after we had some extra-cold winters? I can't say it's not reasonable, but I would have found it much more impressive if any of them had suggested this before it happened, rather than patching their theory to explain something that otherwise didn't fit.
Re:Global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
Actual science predicts unusual measurements. Junk science says "hey, no problem, our model can explain that too".
This couldn't be more incorrect. Actual science is a method of observation and has no business in speculation. Either your scientific model describes the behavior of the natural world or you need to change your model to more accurately describe it. It's an ongoing process.
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, large-scale climactic changes over tens or hundreds of thousands of years are a red herring when evaluating the impact of hundred-year rapid timescale changes on human societies that need much longer to adapt without horrific violence and misery. We live in very different places/cities from where we did 10,000 or 100,000 years ago --- but pretty much in the same cities we had 100 years ago. Expecting the populations of entire nations and continents to just up-and-move over a few decades because habitable ranges have shifted (collapsing food and water supplies in once-fertile regions) doesn't play out so well in current geopolitics. As soon as you're ready to welcome a billion refugee immigrants, dislocated by famine, war, and poverty, into your own country, we can get complacent about compressing multi-thousand-year climactic cycles into human-scale time intervals.
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:5, Insightful)
As you might have guessed from my sarcasm, I don't buy at all that the phrase, "climate change" is somehow more accurate than anthropogenic global warming. Climate would change even if nothing particular was going on, just due to orbital dynamics of Earth around the Sun, volcanoes, and the subtle effects of continental drift.
Re:Global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Global warming and cooling aren't a thing, climate change, however, is. Hot places get hotter, cold places get colder, and the bits in the middle will get considerably worse than both combined with the colliding weather fronts.
And what in the world gives you the idea that this sort of "climate change" is going on? Increases in greenhouse gases lead to some degree of global warming not hot gets hotter, cold gets colder. WE have enough trouble debating this issue without imaginary theories coming in.
Oddly, this is more stable than the North-east of America, that place gets whacked silly with storms, and it will get considerably worse in the next decade, not even century.
The Gulf of Mexico provides warmth and moisture which is what you need for exciting storms such as the north east region of the US probably has seen for millions of years.
Katrina was a freak, but that last catastrophe of a storm is just progressive weather change now.
That part of the world sees dozens of such cyclones every year. There was nothing odd about Katrina other than a city happened to be in the way.
There is even a chance of another mini ice-age in the north areas again.
Apparently, glacial periods have been the norm for many millions of years. Unless we do something radical, say like dumping massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or greatly widening the Bering Strait, we will see another full-blown glacial advance.
What's with the anti-environment crowd? (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it really bizarre that Slashdot, a website that usually has intelligent discussion, is filled with climate change naysayers.
Is this real life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record
The 9 warmest years on record happened this century. The Earth is heating up, and rapidly.
Who the fuck are you people?
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
This couldn't be more incorrect. Actual science is a method of observation and has no business in speculation. Either your scientific model describes the behavior of the natural world or you need to change your model to more accurately describe it. It's an ongoing process.
Creation "science" describes the behavior of the natural world (at least at the shallow level I can be bothered to look at it). For any set of data, there are an unbounded set of hypotheses that describe that set of data. Merely being consistent with existing measurements is necessary, but not at all sufficient to be science, not storytelling.
Science is about falsifiable predictions. Why is general relativity so certain? Because it predicted all sorts of crazy stuff, such as gravitation lensing, that wasn't known at the time it was published. Why is the Standard Model of particle physics still the standard, despite being so awkward and unloved? Because it keeps making accurate predictions, and more elegant theories don't.
You can create a million different models to explain anything, but that's not very interesting, nor is such a model chosen at random likely to still be correct once more is known. But a model that accurately predicted new data? That's interesting.
There are a million climate models now (well, a lot anyhow) - are any of them interesting? A model that made a specific, falsifiable prediction that none/few of the others did, and turned out to be right, that would be interesting indeed.
Global Warmin Advocacy is NOT SCIENCE (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously,
weather = super hot = evidence of global warming
weather = freezing cold = evidence of global warming
weather = no snow = evidence of global warming
weather = record snow = evidence of global warming
Global Warming Skeptic exclaims "weather not correlating to global warming" = Global Warming Advocate "weather isn't an indicator of climate change" Weather hot, no snow, etc. And suddenly, Global Warming Advocates use weather as an indication of global warming. Which is it?
Global Warming Advocacy argues ALL changes in weather point to, and are explained by global warming. The only proof we can possibly have against global warming, would be a decade long period in which zero change in average temp, percipitation, ice, or what not occurred. (And frankly, I'd laugh my butt off if that actually happened and we went through 10 years with zero climate change - I'd also say there'd be proof that there is a God and that he has a warped sense of humor.)
But the reality is, that global warming advocates put forth a non-testable hypothesis that can explain everything. And has zero way of being countered per scientific method. And all of this is over a mere 1/2 to 1 1/2 degree variation in temperature. With questionable records at that. Furthermore, we know it was much warmer 150,000 years ago when much of the arctic ice was gone
Just some comments per Wikipedia
"NASA, found that the “rate of warming in the Arctic over the last 20 years is eight times the rate of warming over the last 100 years"
[Okay, a 120 years geologically speaking is a blink in the record.]
"In September 2012, sea ice reached its smallest size ever."
[Really, history records it as having disappeared completely a number of times. Do we mean smallest in modern history? Cause scientific evidence has shown the ice cap has had significant melts several times over the last 2.8 millions years (which is still a short time span geologically speaking)]
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly are the margins of error.
Why are you asking us? If you are ignorant of something, that is not our responsibility to correct. You are criticising the margins of error whilst simultaneously claiming to not know what they are. Hardly convincing.
Re:so WTF are normal temperatures then? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a geologist. Yes, looking on that kind of timescale (or vastly longer) gives you a useful perspective. On the big scale of things, is life on Earth going to end because of anthropogenic climate change? No. It's seen much worse. Is the expected change going to be worse in magnitude or rate than any other climate event in Earth history? Heck, no. Or even as long as humans have been around? Again, no. Humans grew up as a species through multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. We're adapted to them, at least during the times we mostly lived in caves. The waxing and waning of continental ice sheets and the realization that (for example) the place I'm at used to be under a couple of km of ice 20000 years ago kind of puts things in perspective.
Meanwhile, on regular human scales rather than the scale that geologists usually consider, the scale of change expected over the next century is rather frighteningly fast, and it's going to affect temperature, precipitation, all sorts of things. Human societies and agriculture are a lot more fragile than life as a whole is, or humanity as a species is, so saying "It's not so bad when looking at the long view" isn't really much of a consolation. We haven't driven through a significant climate change during industrial times. Human history has shown that these kind of relatively mild changes will likely provoke mass migrations, famine, and often wars over limited resources as the local conditions change for the better or worse. Maybe industrialized society will make us a bit more robust to it, but it's still going to be stressful. You can't solve problems easily if you're (for example) turning parts of the midwest USA back into increasingly arid sand dunes, or drowning significant coastal areas. It can be done, but it's expensive and there are practical limits where it doesn't pay off even if it is technically possible.
So, yeah, do get a longer perspective, but keep in mind that 100k years is freaking long compared to the duration (so far) of modern human society. Even the transition from full-blown glacial maximum to the interglacial we are in now still took several thousand years to complete.
The analogy I've often used is going down a ski slope. Sure, long-term it's a gentle slope going downhill that is quite manageable. But that doesn't mean you can ignore the smaller-scale ski jump or the trees that are right in front of you. You have to pay attention to both. And if you can't deal with the short-term stuff, the longer-term stuff is kind of irrelevant. We'll deal with long-term glacial-interglacial cyclicity eventually, if we make it through the next couple of centuries as an industrial society without killing most of each other off. Otherwise, maybe it's back to subsistence in caves for a small fraction of us that survive. We do know that works long-term. Industrialized society is still early in the game.
Re:Global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
You are an idiot. There are lots of branches of science where you can't run 'proper' experiments, only look at what has happened in the past or is happening now. Astronomy, anthropology, any branch of evolutionary theory...
Re:Global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
So the scientists are postulating that our spring is cold because the arctic Sea Ice is greatly diminished; then they publish a scary looking picture show lots of open water, but wait, that picture is from August 2012, going to the Danish Meterological Institute's site we see how bad it was [ocean.dmi.dk] infact august, september and november had dramatic reductions in Arctic sea-ice sea ice extend, yet it is now spring, a cold spring it seems, and what do we see, Arctic Sea-ice extent is at several time higher than it has been in the last 7 years, so what does it look like today well the National Snow and Ice Center says it looks like This [nsidc.org]!
So if a lack of Arctic ice cause cold spring weather, then I should be unpacking my bathing suit!
Re:Global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
But you're focusing on the non-interesting questions. How much warming would we expect without man? How much longer until glaciation resumes (we are in the Quaternary Ice Age after all)? What normally brings both temps and CO2 levels down every 100k years? Why didn't that happen 10k years ago? How powerful is that mechanism? How significant is man's contribution to normal warming? Does that mean we get warmer? Trigger the cooling mechanism earlier? Delay the return of the glaciers, or hasten that? Heck, do we want it to be warmer, or cooler, since stable is an illusion?
Lots of interesting questions, don't you agree? A good, scientific climate model would have answers to all of those, and be making unexpected predictions. Getting warmer, with the ice melting and resultant changes? That's expected, even without AGW, and not useful to pick a better theory than the rest.