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.
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:5, Insightful)
It's weird how those old thermometers were always inaccurate in the negative direction.
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course looking at that we would find that the Earth is in a fairly moderate area between much cooler global temps and much higher global temps.
The earth has been in the not so distant past very uncomfortable for humans in both directions. The earth some day will get much more tropical again. The earth will again see Ice Ages. These are true statements. Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.
Re:It's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
Too bad it isn't possible to mod a post "Flamebait" and "Insightful" at the same time.
Re:not a record (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the earths population wasn't as large 'way back when'.
The coastline ending up a few more miles inland didn't matter as much when there was room for the population to move back from the edge.
Now ?, well, a large proportion of the worlds most densly populated areas may well become uninhabitable, and really, no where for large numbers of people to go.
The only 'easy' fix is less people, and I imagine one way or another, that will be the outcome.
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about time (Score:3, Insightful)
But it seems to have stopped in the USA for that time... Globally might be another story.
Has the data been modified? Some have done that in the past and seem to be doing it now in some cases. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear... [telegraph.co.uk]
Does that invalidate your view? Perhaps not, but it does add to the case that you might be wrong.
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Notice the word "warmists" there? It's used as a tribal identifier. In other words, symbolset's post is actually a boast against a perceived other tribe - no different than "your mom's fat". The actual content of the message is not about your mother's body composition, nor Earth's climate, but rather "this is our territory!". It's only an unfortunate accident of evolution that we use the same mechanism for establishing dominance than we use for problem-solving.
It's quite fascinating how much of human communication is utterly unrelated to its nominal content. And it also explains why these discussions tend to degenerate into poo-flinging contest in short order.
Your argument is invalid (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Decide your position
2. When findings are presented that call into question your position, find any flaw with said findings. Preferably one that can't be verified.
3. Present flaw as proof that the findings are not only invalid, but through being invalidated prove your position
Re:It's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh..
What has significantly changed in the oceans so that they do not play a role any other year except when it appears to be cooling or the warming lapsed?
Here is the problem with blaming the oceans. The effects we see aren't new. they were present in the past, they will be present in the future. Separating them when it is convenient is misleading and outright dishonest because you do not separate the effects at other times. It is like saying 2+2 is 4 except when you have less than 5 and some weird unknown rule kicks in and you add 1 but it is still accurate because you want it to be.
Now it is true that the oceans do absorb and release heat. It is true for measurements in 1999, 1918, 2006, 2014 and it will be true for measurements in 2025 and 3000.
What is true also is that the entire "Ocean did its thing so the lack of warming all the sudden is not real" is impossible to test because of decadal oscillations and rotational current patterns. The temp and effects of the temps in the Sargasso Sea for instance will naturally change with deviations in the North Atlantic decadal oscillations as well as the migration of the currents which pretty much guarantee changes in temps from year to year.
The importance of the linked article is for climate modeling, not debunking the lack of observed increases in warming.
Re:not a record (Score:3, Insightful)
Great news if you want to live in the holocene.
Not so good of news if you think a significant environmental change in the middle of a mass extinction is a bad idea.
Re:not a record (Score:5, Insightful)
"The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd"
Understanding reality is not hysteria, trying to deny it is.
Re:It's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
You know that 'scandal' was completely shot done as a media created event, right? Did you fail to notice that as soon as actual facts came out Fox et. al. stopped talking about it?
GLobal warming scien is simple (Score:5, Insightful)
why are so many people her suckered by pundits?
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.
Some of you are very disappointing, falling into ad hom attacks and bad science. Scien that can trivally be checked out. But no, some of ypu moron keeps spouting the same crap.
AGW is a scientific fact.
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors. If they truly are random errors that happen to be distributed around the actual value, then yes. But this distribution of errors is not always true.
Also, remember that we are discussing discrete measurements made on unique devices with unknown accuracy/errors which are NOT duplicated, but are for unique locations which we may or may not accurately know, at varying intervals, under conditions which can have huge impact on measurements. You may be able to normalize away some of these variables in some cases, but when you do this for multiple variables, your data set does not improve in accuracy.
Say you had 50 recorded measurements for the same time and place taken by 50 devices/methods you might be able to claim better accuracy than just one, but only if you have a reasonable distribution of measured values. If say 25 of your devices just gave you random numbers (didn't measure anything) your data set will still be corrupted.
But the issue here is NOT accuracy but TRENDS. Given that we are NOT using the same devices for the last 200 years, there will be little you can do with the data in regards to trend information. Through the years we have changed how and where we measure temperatures. This means that the absolute error in each data point will remain because it's about how much things have changed. Problem is, there are things that have changed which have nothing to do with the data. Locations, equipment, and techniques have all changed over the last 200 years, many of these changes are invisible in the data, but can change the trends you see in it.
For instance, Say you measured temperature data in the middle of a grassy field for 200 years. What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago? Now add in that the area around the field starts to see a lot of buildings and about 50 years ago light aircraft traffic (piston engines). Then in the late 60's that traffic switches over to jet turbines and a lot more of the field gets paved. Now, consider how many data points this might actually be in the USA data set given that a high percentage of "observations" are made at airports these days and tell me how much affect that has on your TREND or how you think you are going to normalize that out of the data?
Re:It's about time (Score:3, Insightful)
About what I would expect to find here on /. Same people that go to AOL, YAHOO, HuffnPuff Post, PMSNBC and CNN and would rather throw the stones at Fox or Rs than offer something constructive.
Re:It's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, then separate the oceans from the other readings and claims of warming. That is the point, it is either built in, meaning you walk outside and take the temp and it is accurate despite the oceans, or it is not and needs separated completely.
The problem is that the oceans also contribute to the recorded heat. Only considering them separate when it is convenient or when the temp readings are inconvenient is misleading bordering on fraud.
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors. If they truly are random errors that happen to be distributed around the actual value, then yes. But this distribution of errors is not always true. Also, remember that we are discussing discrete measurements made on unique devices with unknown accuracy/errors which are NOT duplicated, but are for unique locations which we may or may not accurately know, at varying intervals, under conditions which can have huge impact on measurements. You may be able to normalize away some of these variables in some cases, but when you do this for multiple variables, your data set does not improve in accuracy.
Every thermometer makes random errors in individual measurements, and every thermometer can have a systematic error, but I'd really like to see a reason why this per-instrument systematic error should be biased in average. Calibrating processes for measurement instruments surely don't work this way.
But the issue here is NOT accuracy but TRENDS. Given that we are NOT using the same devices for the last 200 years, there will be little you can do with the data in regards to trend information.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm pretty sure our local stations keep records of major instrument overhauls which can be taken into consideration. In addition, if we're looking for trends, as you say, the additive systematic error of temperature measurements is automatically cancelled and the importance of the multiplicative systematic error is diminished given that we're looking at small deltas and the measurement error is going to be similarly small, by virtue of being proportional to the delta, so (unless something is eluding me here) the trends shouldn't be obscured by either systematic additive error or systematic multiplicative error of any given measurement instrument.
For instance, Say you measured temperature data in the middle of a grassy field for 200 years. What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago?
Again, fortunately, we happen to have records of these things so that we can make informed decisions as to which measurements are candidates for exclusion due to human development introducing local environmental biases.
Not quite that simple (Score:4, Insightful)
The big spoiler that makes models a bit more difficult is water vapor. It is both more prevalent than CO2 in the atmosphere and more variable in the amount (CO2 is pretty uniform, water vapour varies a lot based on location, time of year, etc). Also when you look at the absorption spectra, water vapour absorbs larger bands of IR than CO2, particularly in the thermal IR region.
That's not the only extra bit of complexity, but it is one that confounds the situation.
Now before you fly off the handle and start screaming and ranting: I'm not challenging the validity of the theory here, I'm just saying you are oversimplifying things. Going after people for being stupid, but then showing ignorance of the complexity of the issue is rather silly.
The problem is that it is complex. If it were a simple system, we'd likely have a very accurate model for it. The complexity is precisely why despite general agreement on the theoretical mechanism of action there are such wide error bars on the predictions.
Re:It's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
And you do not seem to understand.
Regardless of what the oceans are doing at this moment, unless they all the sudden started doing it, it has been happening for all of time. Well, with it's variations within the system. So either the temp measured today is as valid as the temp measured yesterday, or 150 years ago, or the temps measures yesterday and 150 years ago are invalid also- due to the oceans.
You see, you cannot change mid stream and trot something that has always existed out when it is convenient or the temp record becomes inconvenient. The data as presented needs to be at least congruent with the calculations within it. Otherwise it is smoke and mirrors trying to hang onto belief that doesn't appear to be true any more.
Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
When El Nino leads to a new record high temperature by a large margin (for argument's sake, in 2015), the denialists will quietly adopt this as their new standard for 'normal' and in 2025 they'll be saying "warming is a hoax because temperatures haven't risen on average since 2015."
http://xkcd.com/1321/ [xkcd.com]
Re:GLobal warming scien is simple (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice try, unless you're sitting on a supermassive volcano that nobody knows about, one that's been building for the last 50 years or so. But, that's the easy thing about being an anti-science troll...you just move on the to next canard, no matter if it's one that's been debunked a hundred times over. Because those debunkings haven't been reposted in this conversation. And when they are....you just move on to the next canard. Next in the rotation: scientists were worried about a new ice age in the 70's, so you can't trust anything they say!
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da (Score:5, Insightful)
AND ALSO to let us know that 2nd hand smoke and lung cancer are not related, asbestos poses no risks and the
Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking truth to power
Holy smokes are you president of the Christopher Booker fan club?? From his wikipedia page "...he speaks truth to power...". From the 2 minutes of research I've done on him I'd say he speaks truthiness to power. He makes his living as a professional contrarian. All of his pubilished views are the opposite of scientific consensus in a vast variety of subjects. Its possible he could be smarter than all climate scientists, cancer scientists, infectious disease scientists, and Evolutionary Biologists. But there is a much higher likelyhood that he is just full of shit.
Re:It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm pretty sure our local stations keep records of major instrument overhauls which can be taken into consideration.
I used to work in climate science and we had a saying: "If you give a thermometer to a meteorologist, he knows what temperature it is. If you give him two, he's confused."
Re:records go back to 1880, very funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.
It has been known for a while now that CO2 has been the "thermostat of global climate", for the at least as long a multi-cellular life has been around. In the past CO2 was a natural positive feedback wrt the direction of change, thus amplifying the ice ages changes that are driven by orbital cycles. This effect is still at work today and it's perfectly feasible to control the CO2 concentration to ward of the extremes of these changes. We have been doing this for a while now but in wrong direction, over the next 40yrs we will add half a trillion tons of CO2 into the air, the same amount as what we have put into the air over the last 250yrs, the spike in CO2 due to man is not the highest in the geologic record but it is almost certainly the most rapid change in levels (up 30% in 250yrs and accelerating exponentially ).
It's been clearly shown to all independent observers that we have already significantly altered climate with the first half trillion tons, we can easily observe the North pole melting over the last few decades. So given all that, what makes you think the next half trillion tons won't have an accumulative effect on climate? We could, if we so desired, start scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere today to restore the climate to the equilibrium our agriculture and civilizations have evolved to suit, the technology is there to do whatever the politics wills with CO2 levels over the next 50yrs.
But, but, but, weather is not climate??? (Score:0, Insightful)
I love how all you alarmists are quick to point out that weather is not climate whenever we have a record snowfall or the coldest winter on record. The second a weather event (one month average) supports your theory, it's definitive proof.
Even better is how the article blindly inserts "man-made global warming" in the tagline.
Please line up and give your money to whichever politician claims they are going to save the Earth for you. Sheep.