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Earth Stats

NOAA: Earth Smashed A Record For Heat In May 2014, Effects To Worsen 547

Freshly Exhumed (105597) writes with news that NOAA's latest global climate analysis is showing things are getting hotter. From the article: Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, experts say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Monday said May's average temperature on Earth of 15.54 C beat the old record set four years ago. In April, the globe tied the 2010 record for that month. Records go back to 1880. Experts say there's a good chance global heat records will keep falling, especially next year because an El Nino weather event is brewing on top of man-made global warming. An El Nino is a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that alters climate worldwide and usually spikes global temperatures.
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NOAA: Earth Smashed A Record For Heat In May 2014, Effects To Worsen

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  • Re:It's about time (Score:4, Informative)

    by bunratty ( 545641 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @07:25PM (#47301563)
    I wonder what's making all that ice [ossfoundation.us] melt [skepticalscience.com] then [nsidc.org].
  • not a record (Score:1, Informative)

    by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @07:26PM (#47301573)

    Earth provably warmer in the "recent" (less than 12,000 years) past, and moreover that higher peak held for 3,000 years from 7500 B.C.

    The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd, so is basing billions of euros and dollars of cap and trade scams upon them

  • by dbraden ( 214956 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @07:31PM (#47301627)

    And at the same time, there's a story that the NOAA has been fabricating their temperatures for years: The scandal of fiddled global warming data [telegraph.co.uk]

  • by BenSchuarmer ( 922752 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @07:53PM (#47301839)

    Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?

    As for the the earth being colder during the Devonian period when CO2 was higher, the Sun was significantly dimmer back then.

  • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @07:58PM (#47301895) Journal

    Because regional conditions represent global conditions.

  • Re:It's about time (Score:2, Informative)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Monday June 23, 2014 @08:18PM (#47302015) Homepage Journal

    No, it has not been modified, you should look deeper into that story.

    Look at the record since 1880 it rise, levels, rises. levels and so on.
    If there wasn't man made global warming then there would be rise and a return.
    Look,m the global warming science is fairly simple. Certain actor in the industry are paid to intentionally make it seem confusing.
    Pay attention:
    1) Visible light hits the earth. Falsifiable, and tested.
    2) When visible light strikes something, IR is generated. Falsifiable, and tested.
    3) CO2 is transparent to visible light. Falsifiable, and tested.
    4) CO2 absorbed energy from IR. Falsifiable, and tested.
    5) CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Falsifiable, and tested.
    6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.

    That's it. That is global warming. If you disagree with that, then you need to prove where the science is wrong. I look forward to your noble prize winning paper.
    If you read that and still think it doesn't impact the climate(climate change) then you need to show where the absorbed energy is going.

    Seriously, stop being a dolt.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, 2014 @08:20PM (#47302031)

    Telegraph is a climate denier site.

  • Re:It's about time (Score:5, Informative)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Monday June 23, 2014 @08:23PM (#47302051) Homepage Journal

    They never changed the name. Please stop being so freaking stupid.

    Global warming = Energy captured by excess CO2
    Climate change = how global warming impact the climate.
    Climate disruption= Economic change do to climate change.
    Te first two came int' use almost at the same time.
    They are all related but different things. No one is changing anything. I understand the the media confuses the terms, and some pundits use that as some sort of ad hom attack, but you need to be better then that.

  • Smash? (Score:4, Informative)

    by jklovanc ( 1603149 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @08:54PM (#47302279)

    I am not so sure you understand what "smash" means. The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces in 2010 was 0.72C. The same data for this year is 0.74C. I would hardly call 0.02C as smashing.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, 2014 @09:12PM (#47302405)

    Which is why additional methods are used to verify: tree rings and ice cores, for example.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, 2014 @09:22PM (#47302449)
    Water vapor isn't a spoiler - the bands that it absorbs are different from the bands that CO2 absorbs. That's all there is to it really. There's so much water in the atmosphere that water vapor bands are essentially entirely absorbed. We can't reduce the amount of water in the atmosphere, and we wouldn't want to even if we could, so any gains that we make have to be outside the water absorption spectrum.
  • by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @09:33PM (#47302539)
    There's a station here that's been continuously recording the daily data meticulously since the 1780s. In the first half of 1800s, there were up to twenty daily measurements there (before the international custom of three measurements per day became established). Of course everything relevant gets recorded and logged. Don't underestimate the power of the Force^H^H^H^H^HOCD.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, 2014 @10:12PM (#47302793)
    So you've never heard of Canada, Belize, Bermuda, Guyana, or the Falkland islands? All of these were British possessions in the 1880s, and they cover a nice range of latitudes.
  • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @10:15PM (#47302815)

    Such equipment records surely don't exist back to 1880.... So, my argument stands.

    Just because you think something couldn't possibly be true doesn't mean it isn't.

    Thermometer manufacture was precise enough to produce very high quality instruments by the late 1800s. The issue, as GP points out, isn't random errors popping up (thermometers were about as accurate as rulers could be in the late 1800s), but rather whether we know how the instruments were calibrated and how older scales might match up to instruments that were calibrated against modern international standards.

    And, at least in the U.S., standard regular calibration standards had been agreed upon by the first couple decades of the 1900s. Good instruments even decades before then should have very little random error -- the question is only whether anyone bothered to check new equipment calibrated to international standards against the old equipment (or sent the old equipment to be tested once such standards were developed).

    So, then you have to ask yourself: people who are bothering to meticulously record scientific data continuously for decades on end -- and they're not going to even bother to check whether their old instruments line up properly with new calibration standards?

    Sure, I'm positive there are plenty of places that don't have such records. But we have continuous logbooks going back for centuries in many places. The idea that people taking meticulous records wouldn't even bother to check new equipment against old just seems a little ridiculous... not saying it wouldn't happen, but we have plenty of data points where it did happen to extrapolate estimates for error distributions.

    You're acting like temperature measurement in the late 1800s was people guessing random numbers or drawing them out of a hat. But that's not what it was like, and there were lots of places with VERY detailed records.

  • Re:It's about time (Score:3, Informative)

    by khallow ( 566160 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @10:16PM (#47302825)

    There is nothing in that paper about increasing geothermal flux. Nothing.

    Fortunately, we have other places where we can look. It's well known that volcanoes are not constant in behavior or nature. They have spurts of activity. This is universal behavior for any volcano we can observe, even for relatively well-behaved volcanoes like Mauna Loa or Stromboli.

    So for volcanic activity in Antarctica, we would, like any other volcanic activity on the planet, expect it to have periods of greater and lesser activity. So while it hasn't been shown that there is increasing geothermal flux (it may well be ice melting in the face of decreasing geothermal flux), this is something that has a greater effect than previously thought on the current situation in Antarctica.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, 2014 @10:24PM (#47302873)
    You must have failed your stats 101 course in college. Let me educate you: any random sampling has limited accuracy. A randomly sampling of real temperatures that is made using low quality thermometers will probably have a very limited accuracy. But as you take more samples, you will either find that the measurements are biased or that they are normally distributed. If they are biased, you should be able to model the bias and apply a correction to achieve a normal distribution. Once you have a normal distribution, you know that an increase in the number of samples allows to say with a greater degree of confidence that the real value is within a certain range of the mean of those samples. So, even if you have shitty thermometers, you may be able to draw useful conclusions from them if you have thousands of measurements. This is the kind of stuff that the big boys talk about when they prepare journal articles for peer review. You know, p 0.05 and all that.
  • Re:It's about time (Score:4, Informative)

    by funwithBSD ( 245349 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @11:19PM (#47303121)

    Goddard's site shows the current NOAA chart, and the previously published NOAA chart.

    The "smoothing" to fit the AGW story is pretty evident, and he is using THEIR data, so there is no "denying", just your projection.

  • Re:It's about time (Score:2, Informative)

    by funwithBSD ( 245349 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @11:21PM (#47303141)

    Obviously you would not look at the actual article and graphs presented, or you would know the smoothing is done on pre-1970s data, not 2000-2007 data.

     

  • by Curunir_wolf ( 588405 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @12:11AM (#47303365) Homepage Journal

    Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?

    Yep. There's one right here [sciencemag.org]. And here is another one [scienceand...policy.org] you won't like.

  • Re:It's about time (Score:5, Informative)

    by riverat1 ( 1048260 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @02:13AM (#47303859)

    Yes, long before him. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1956 titled:

    Plass, G.N., 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change, Tellus VIII, 2. (1956), p. 140-154.

  • by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @02:36AM (#47303933)

    wrong, they are not filtered out, instead a correction factor is applied

    Steve S. Goddard has made it his career to track these "corrections" and missing data points for the USHCN (Historical Climatology Network). He has uncovered a lot of "corrections" where there should be none, and inappropriate "filling in" of missing data points. Not to mention that the "missing" data points have been overwhelmingly in areas of colder climate. He has easily 100 examples of deliberate distortion of the data in USHCN, and he has even tracked this progressive re-writing of history over the last couple of decades.

    Here [wordpress.com] is just one of a great many examples.

    Steve has also found many historical records that directly contradict what modern "climate scientists" have been saying about the past 200 years. And make no mistake: these are scientific papers, and government's own data he has been collecting.

    Not to mention that through May of this year [cfact.org], not only were large parts of the Northern hemisphere experiencing record cold (including the averaged United States temperatures), but the Antarctic sea ice in the Southern hemisphere was also setting records. That is hardly my only source... I have been following the climate reports because my own region was experiencing record weather.

    And please don't give me this "weather vs climate" guff, because we are discussing a single month, which is by definition weather.

    It hardly seems credible that with all that world record cold virtually everywhere (except for the Pacific El Nino event), that May could have ALSO been a "record warm" month. It just doesn't add up. Just like so many of NOAA's other figures.

  • by rrohbeck ( 944847 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @02:46AM (#47303959)

    The carbon increase in the atmosphere can a) be compared with the amount of fossil fuels burned and b) has a different isotope isotope composition because 14C has only a few thousand year half life so fossil carbon is practically devoid of 14C. Not speculative at all, falsifiable and tested.

  • by TapeCutter ( 624760 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @04:16AM (#47304245) Journal
    All well and good, but we're not looking at the absolute temperature, we're looking at the change in temperature. A thermometer is quite likely to give you an inaccurate spot reading but the error will be consistent across all the spot reading from that thermometer. ie: There is much less room for error when looking at the variance over time, which is what we are interested in.

    You can demonstrate this quite easily as many others have already done, take the "best" 100 stations listed by the contrarian Anthony watts and compare it to his "worst" 100 stations, the upward temperature trends for both sets are almost identical and match the trend for the entire data set of ~1100 stations, precisely because the absolute reading need not be accurate to get good idea of the variance.

    Watts and his followers are actually doing us all a favour by pushing for better climate monitoring, but the data he has does not support his claims, nor has he ever attempted to publish his claims in the peer-reviewed literature.
  • Citation please (Score:4, Informative)

    by Namarrgon ( 105036 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @05:42AM (#47304425) Homepage

    Depends which temperature proxy you look at, but on average, nope [wikimedia.org].

    Of course there may have been warmer days in the "recent" past, but we have no records of that, so the article's claim stands. And your claim requires ignoring most of the various proxy reconstructions that have been done, so it doesn't hold up either.

  • by Ginger Unicorn ( 952287 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @06:42AM (#47304565)
    A cursory [hotwhopper.com]googling [climatecrocks.com] doesn't paint Steve S. Goddard as someone that has a rigourous approach to statistical analysis.
  • Re: It's about time (Score:5, Informative)

    by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @08:45AM (#47305107)

    There are multiple carbon cycles around us. One is the obvious, atmospheric one, where rotting plants and animals release CO2 and growing plants sequester it again, on a timescale of dozens of years. Another is a long term one, in which carbon contained in marine sediments gets transported deeper in the tectonic subduction zones, the hydrated carbon-containing rocks then get into areas of high temperature where their hydration decreases the melting point of those rocks and the surrounding environment to the extent that the rocks melt, form magma, and volcanism and CO2 outgassing ensues. That happens on a timescale of millions, or tens of millions of years.

    There seems to be a number of feedback loops in this latter process that increase the absorption of CO2 if there is too much of it in the atmosphere and decrease its absorption if there is too little of it, while the volcanoes dump the CO2 back at some random but I guess roughly stable rate (dictated by how fast the tectonic plates deliver the carbon to be outgassed, and this process doesn't care much about what happens on the surface).

    And here's the problem: The carbon we're digging up and burning right now had been slowly deposited from the atmosphere into coal and oil over a long period before we started mining it, while these feedback mechanisms had enough time to continuously keep the atmospheric CO2 at some level using these deep crust reservoirs. But now we've been burning the coal and oil quickly, so even though the total amount of carbon in the air, water, continental rocks, marine rocks and generally, the Earth's crust stays the same, and while these feedback loops are stil in effect, we're pumping it from continental rocks (coal, really) into the atmosphere way faster than these long-term cycles can re-deposit it back into the deeper crust.

    (But I'm Not A Geologist, so if there is one around and I got it wrong, please correct me on anything.)

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