India Records Its Hottest Day Ever As Temperature Hits 51C (123.8F) (theguardian.com) 217
An anonymous reader writes: A city in northern India has shattered the national heat record, registering a searing 51C -- the highest since records began -- amid a nationwide heatwave. The new record was set in Phalodi, a city in the desert state of Rajasthan, and is the equivalent of 123.8F. It tops a previous record of 50.6C set in 1956."Yesterday (Thursday) was the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country... 51C in Phalodi," said BP Yadav, a director of India's meteorological department, on Friday.
Refugees (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, technology could alleviate many of the problems of living in a place with extreme heat, but that requires money and political will.
We have already seen the warnings about areas of the Middle East becoming uninhabitable later this century.
Where will these people go?
Who will support them?
How will governments deal with the crisis?
Re:Refugees (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously?
The previous record was from 60 years ago and the difference was 0.4 celcius.
Alarmist much.
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Shattered!
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A slight increase means a slight increase on average, so max and min will increase slightly, too.
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If the government there were more Republican, the society would be wealthier and closer to American, and more could afford air conditioning.
In India, a government job is the way not to security, but wealth, via demanding kickbacks. That is why it is such a struggle to get the economy growing.
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It's interesting how the US economy usually does better under Democratic administrations than it does under Republican administrations.
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Seriously?
The previous record was from 60 years ago and the difference was 0.4 celcius.
Alarmist much.
0.4 degrees Celcius = 32.72 degrees Farenheight. I would say that is a pretty big change.
Oh my god.
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It will become more difficult to support life in certain parts of this planet, places that have had human civilization for quite a long time.
There is much more land on earth that is uninhabited because it is too cold than too hot. For every hectare that we lose in Rajasthan or Niger, we will gain many more in Siberia, Nanavut, and Greenland.
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more in Siberia, Nanavut, and Greenland. ...
No, we won't. The fact that it might be warmer there in summer does not change anything significantly in winter, e.g. polar night
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You should look at a globe some time, rather than rectangular world maps that exaggerate the size of land masses toward the poles.
Maybe you should look at a globe. Notice how the tropics are mostly OCEAN, and the northern latitudes are mostly LAND?
Re:Refugees (Score:4, Insightful)
"I've got mine screw you"
Re:Refugees (Score:5, Insightful)
And that brings us to the inevitable large-scale consequence of climate change: war.
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Ah, I finally understand why the military-industrial complex has been denying climate change for so long now...
Uh, what? To be sure, there are some industries with a vested interest in denying climate change (Exxon and Koch are an example) but the military? Not so much:
http://www.washingtontimes.com... [washingtontimes.com]
http://www.defense.gov/News-Ar... [defense.gov]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... [forbes.com]
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Well, honestly...why should I give a fuck about them?
It's not my problem that they as a civilization picked a hard place to live even under the best of conditions. That's nature....some folks/species get fucked as time moves on.
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I think some people are actually looking forward to the chaos.
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Where will these people go?
Wherever they go. Except my lawn. No trespassing. *cocks shotgun*
Who will support them?
They will take care of themselves. Or die trying. *cocks shotgun*
How will governments deal with the crisis?
Taxation and theft. Unless. *cocks shotgun*
Did you invent a 3-barrelled shotgun or do you normally carry around 3 shotguns?
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He just doesn't understand how a shotgun works and has 2 shells laying on the ground very typical of the far right "dey comin' fer mah yobs!" type
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Hey now, that could be two shotguns. One side by side sawed off duck gun and one lever action shotgun.
Also http://chiappafirearms.com/pro... [chiappafirearms.com]
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Re:Refugees (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.
Now India is an entirely different case. It's a democracy, which is more stable than a hereditary dictatorship. It has a much larger, more robust, more diversified economy than Syria. All around it's a far more competently run society, despite the challenges it faces like endemic poverty. But it's also 50x larger in population. A much smaller relative disturbance in India can translate into a huge problem on an absolute scale. It's long-running dispute with Pakistan, and the fact that both are nuclear armed regional powers, adds quite a range of unpleasant outcomes to even a modest destabilization of India.
Syrian refugees are NOT about climate (Score:2, Troll)
Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.
No.
The protests in Syria, the rebellion, the rise of ISIS and everything else facing the Syrian people had NOTHING to do with 'climate'.
Let's start off with the reason for people to be angry and desperate, and that is squarely the brutal repression of the Assad family dictatorship.
Next up, what went wrong with the standard operating procedure of the Assad family of simply killing everyone involved with and related to the protests? For starters, Assad initially met the peaceful protesters with half-measures
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Fuck off, there is always a reason for population movements.
And yet somehow the correlation between massive crop failure due to drought leading to starvation somehow correlates strongly to dictatorships.
Like it did for Stalin.
Like it did for Mao.
Like it did for Kim.
Maybe the causation goes the other way and having a dictator crushing all independence that leads to a failed ability to properly plan and run agriculture and be prepared for droughts too. You know, on account of most of the time droughts don't impact the dictator anymore than losing some peasants, and if
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I actually agree to you that dictatorship is a significant contributor both to agricultural problems and long term instability. Dictatorships are inefficient and averse to empirically driven policies. Rewarding supporters and keeping enemies down puts massive strain on the economy.
That said, you still have to look at the specifics of what actually happened, not just appeal to your general knowledge of how these things usually go. And the Assad regime is very different from the state communist regimes you
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But if some group steals a nuclear weapon, sure as hell they won't use it against India. India is a soft target for simple crude bombs and AK47. Once you got a nuclear bomb, you go after mother of all your enemies. Israel or America.
I sincerely ho
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My point in all of this is that if you make a solvable issue sound insurmountable because you want to make a political point you weaken you position. Once they see you exaggerate in one area they assume you exaggerate (or make stuff up) in all areas because of your agenda. Be honest about the positive effects along with the negative and you won't have so many deniers.
Perhaps you could use some critical thinking skills when reading my post.
The scientific consensus about climate is that there will be places on the Earth that have traditionally supported human habitation that will be adversely impacted in the future. We are already seeing this happen. [time.com]
The places that will be impacted, in all likelihood, will have population movements(migrations) away from them, to, somewhere else that has a climate that more easily supports human life.
As I pointed out, technology c
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There are plenty of negative results due to a warming planet. Ice caps may melt changing the ocean levels and salinity, animals in areas may lose habitat. But it also means that crops can grow further north and those areas become more habitable. Of course migration does become a political issue but it seems to me that the migration issues that are extent today, caused by geopolitical reasons, are substantially worse than moving due to temperature change.
They may not be unrelated: Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria [religioner.no]
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Global temperatures have been gradually falling for the last 8000 years or so... until about 100 years ago when they started to shoot straight up: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap... [github.io]
It's hard to imagine that the global climate could be considered 'stable' over the last 200 years when compared to the last 8000.
Holocene interglacial [Re:Refugees] (Score:3, Informative)
the trend is sure to continue because we're coming out of an ice age.
Nope. The ice age ended ten thousand years ago, and the hottest years of the post-ice-age holocene was eight thousand years ago. So, no, we're not warming due to coming out a glaciation, because that warming already finished eight thousand years ago.
the stability of the global climate in the last 200 years or so is an exception, not the rule.
Nope. The current warming is exceptional: warmer than it's been over the last 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What's more important, though, is that the cause is well understood. We know why the climate is warming, because we have very good meas
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There is so much wrong with your post its not even funny.
#1 being that you dont know what an ice age is, the fact that we are currently IN an ice age and what an interglacial period is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Paragraph one. Start your education before making statements.
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There is so much wrong with your post its not even funny >#1 being that you dont know what an ice age is, the fact that we are currently IN an ice age and what an interglacial period is.
Was your comment directed at me, or the person I was quoting? The text I was referring to is this:
the trend is sure to continue because we're coming out of an ice age.
I apologize for using the terminology of the person to whom I was responding in the way that they used it, and going on actually discuss facts, rather than spending my time correcting their usage.
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That's the pedantic answer. Scientists consider it an ice age whenever there have been significant ice fields at the poles. By that measure we've been in an ice age for the last 2.6 million years at least.
But common usage for most people is that "ice age" refers to a period when the glaciers and ice sheets advance from the poles toward the equator and "not an ice age" refers to an interglacial period when the glaciers and ice sheet retreat back toward the poles.
So by the common usage the "ice age" did end
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The #1 thing is reduce our human population.. or the earth will do it for us.
There's a lot of truth in that statement.
Today's weather report: (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing to see here (Score:3)
The rising sea levels will soon put a soothing cool around their ankles, nothing to worry about.
Good news! (Score:3, Insightful)
Now the PHB's won't have to even bother with H1B paperwork...the new hires can just claim climate-change refugee status.
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You jest (I think), but you just know there are cynical politicians willing to take payoffs from cheap-labor demanding businesses while claiming we need to accept all these climate change refugees because it's the humane thing to do.
So I guess weather is climate now? (Score:2)
Will remember that next winter when people are talking about global warming.
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Will remember that next winter when people are talking about global warming.
There are plenty of idiots on both sides of the issue who want to make a big deal about singular events but since climate is a statistical analysis of average weather and the variability of weather the only real measure of global warming is in the long term statistics. And they say the Earth is warming despite the occasional record cold (or heat for that matter).
Kinda surprised their record high is only 51C (Score:2)
Earth Record: 58 (136F) (Score:2)
Google tells me that the highest recorded temperature on Earth is 58C, recorded in the Libyan desert in 1922, but that was later disqualified, leaving the record at 56.7 (134F) in Death Vally in 1913.
Standard Slashdot reaction: (Score:2, Insightful)
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If it snows too much, or rains too much, that's also climate change. (no really, it's a serious problem)
Come on, Pakistan. Beat this. You can do it. (Score:2)
Oddly (Score:3)
Unfortunately the record is invalid because at teh time everyone there was pretending to be from Birmingham.
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That only means that Birmingham has had its hottest summer on record.
Exponents are Real (Score:2)
FYI. It's been calculated that at our current rate of growth, the oceans will all evaporate in less than 500 years. Obviously something has to give eventually.
nuclear winter (Score:3)
nuclear winter will do that + cool us down for some time.
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Don't eat the green glowing snow.
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The only way to make progress is to start with yourself....I think I learned that from a self-help book.
The man in the mirror (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personal change is of course an important place to start, butwhat we seem to have forgotten since the civil rights movements of the 60's and 70's is that systematic change at the level which is needed to address the causes and effects of climate change can only come about through an organized movement.
The Bill Moyers interview linked below discusses the difference between consumer focused change where we can "go green" by changing our own habits and citizen focused change which involves exercising our colle
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Re:The man in the mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
Well we still have to figure out an effective strategy to deal with the sociopathic douchebags.
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They all go on the B-Ark.
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Well, you can call me names...but really, give me a compelling reason to change my mind.
How would changing my opinion stated above, benefit me more...?
Again, I'm on the earth for a very short time, why should I give up and not live life to the fullest of may capability?
Re:The man in the mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that's the point of calling you sociopathic. You shouldn't need a reason, because the empathy present in most humans would be enough.
I can't give you a personal reason, but I can give you one that applies to people as a collective: I live the full live I have now because of the sacrifices made by the generations that came before. People who put off their own happiness to improve the world in some way. It's a form of paying it forward, and I have a huge debt. I'll never be able compensate those countless generations who got the world to where it is now, but I can do my part to improve upon their work.
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How would changing my opinion stated above, benefit me more...?
If you where a Hindu or Buddhist, you knew.
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If you had any brains you'd realize that functioning sociopaths know how to hide their sociopath tendencies and pretend to care when it benefits them.
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Anything with the global warming consequences, or other nature disasters will come LONG after I'm cold and dead i the ground, and no one will in that time even know my name to curse it....so, really what do I care and why should I put myself out or deny myself the pleasures of this modern world since I'm here such a short time?
Unless you plan to die in the next few years I wouldn't count on that. The consequences are already happening and will only continue to get worse as time goes on. It may be that your remaining lifetime is short enough that you won't be much affected by the consequences but if you expect to live more than 10 or 20 more years I doubt it.
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One might wonder how ultimately successful the civil rights movement would have been if the black panthers took the lead (vs the Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent civil disobedience approach). Although I think both elements are important, I doubt "militant movements" can generally succeed alone at organizing a movement on the scale necessary to move the needle w/o totally overthrowing the status quo (basically a coup d'etat) because they generally lack a way generate a big enough tent for people to join
Re: The Planet Has a Fever (Score:5, Funny)
The only cure is more cowbell...
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I disagree on the terrorism part when looked at over a longer period of time. It's only currently that a lot of terrorist are muslims, most likely due to the wars we're fighting in the middle east.
But what the hell's up with the greenhouse gas argument? Do you get gassy from schawarma or something?
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I'm not sure you really looked into Christian history. It's rife with war and slavery, and not just the crusades.
Substitute "Christian" for "viking", "Roman", "Greek", "American" etc. etc.
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Indeed. 75C would be shattering the record.
But still far too cold for a decent sauna.
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Surely that's an increase by a factor of 10?!
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The old record was getting a bit brittle after 60 years. Indeed brittle enough to shatter.
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They don't even account for improvements in measuring devices.
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The improvements in measuring devices are not that significant. There has been an improvement in the number of significant digits you can measure but very accurate thermometers have been available for over 200 years.
Re:Wait 'til temps are 150 F (Score:4, Insightful)
Facts will never get in the way of ideology...
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Ever notice how high temps are "proof of AGW", but low temps are "just weather"?
Well, hate to tell you this, but one day's high temps are "just weather" too.
Is AGW happening? Probably. Is THIS proof? Nope, it's just weather. Local weather, at that....
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That's why it's preferred to call it climate change.
Because "global warming" implies that extreme cold is impossible, when in fact, AGW actually means you not only get extreme heat, but extreme cold (polar vortex? That's balmy).
Basically weather gets more extre
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It's called "climate change" because the climate is becoming more extreme, not just warmer.
For instance, it could cause the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift to shut down and stop carrying warm water to Northern Europe, which would cause our local climate to change, bringing it much close to what it should be at our latitude, without those warm currents. Loot at a map how northerly Scandinavia is compared to northern US (even Alaska) and Canada, and then compare our climates.
Should the currents stop,
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In general I wouldn't bet on such a short period as a month. But I'd happily bet a substantial amount ($10,000) that the next 10 years will be on average warmer than the last 10 years.
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Betting on a month, a year or even 2 or 3 years is betting on the weather, not the climate. Even 10 years is kind of short for betting on the climate but it's a bet I would have won every decade since the 1970s and there are plenty of scientific reasons to think that trend will continue. The only think likely to stop it is a really huge volcanic eruption.
If you don't have a solution, deny the problem (Score:2)
I guess I'm a Climate Change "Denier". But what I'm denying is that taxes and more government is going to solve anything. Which is ultimately what any "solution" is all about.
If you don't believe that taxes and government intervention are going to solve climate problems, that's not "denier." You are a denier if you believe that taxes and government intervention are bad, and therefore you attack the climate science (not the politics, the science) because it's a soft target.
The science is correct, or incorrect, regardless of your views on the desirability of particular solutions.
What I have seen, however, is that people who advocate a libertarian philosophy tend to attack the sc
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What I have seen, however, is that people who advocate a libertarian philosophy tend to attack the science because if the science actually were correct, they don't have any solutions to offer. Since they don't have any solutions, they deny the problem.
If I hadn't already commented I'd give you a +1 Insightful. Too many people allow their ideology to override what the science it telling us. In the end they'll find out how big a mistake that was but unfortunately they're taking the rest of us with them.
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You mean the fact that a temp within the margin of error of standard liquid in glass thermometers when perfectly calibrated and positioned is not in fact any sort of record shattering event as described by the article?
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Look at how many temperature records have been broken over the last 20-25 years.
http://imgur.com/gallery/5IbCK... [imgur.com]
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You would expect that most records would be broken in the early years of registration. You have less historic data to compare to, so it's more likely that a freak heatwave or something breaks a record. But as time goes on, you gather more and more data, from a longer period of time, so the record-breaking tends to taper off gradually.
Over the last 20-25 years, we've seen a disproportionate amounts of records being broken, which is very unusual. We're seeing the records for highest average temperature being
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And, maybe, they were — but no one would profit from emphasizing the fact, so we do not know about it.
We have also seen a large number of people profiting from the idea of AGW during the same period.
We don't even know, if that's true — for example, satellite o [skepticalscience.com]
Re:Hide the decline (Score:4, Informative)
Who is doing the weighting (adjusting) and how? What #define-s do they use in their code? Would they not stop "adjusting" before the results show the trend, which they sincerely believe must be there? See, what is "sold" to the public as objective recordings of scientific instruments are, in fact, results of "adjustments" by unknown programs using unspecified parameters...
How would you know? I'll bet you've never even tried looking for those "unknown programs" and "unspecified parameters".
You can start looking here. [noaa.gov] There are lots of links to NOAA's methods and reasons for adjusting temperatures and even a couple of graphs that compare adjusted to raw temperatures.
Or you can check out the BEST temperature record which is not funded by the government. This page [berkeleyearth.org] describes how they process the data set and this page [berkeleyearth.org] contains links to the code they use to process the data.
No one has destroyed any of the raw data. Some have deleted their copies of the data when they no longer need it.
But I seriously doubt you'll take the time to look into it for yourself and you will continue to gullibily believe the people who tell you those things. Unfortunately for you the real world will continue to respond to anthropogenic influences and if you live long enough you will find many of the things scientists are predicting will come to pass.
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Gee, yeah. "A recent study by NOAA found no evidence of mistakes by NOAA". Right. The NSA would totally exonerate themselves too, as would Enron.
Sorry, hon, if 89% of your data-collection stations aren't positioned right, your results are junk no matter, how you "adjust" them. Turning a turd into chicken salad has a better chance of succeeding.
Sure, there are. And they may even be perfectly reasonable. The point was,
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And, maybe, they were — but no one would profit from emphasizing the fact, so we do not know about it.
We can say with quite high certainty that they were, because right at the beginning you hit a new record every time you see a temperature increase, but as the observation period becomes longer, the amount of record-breaking temperatures lessen, because they have more previous records to be compared against.
But the last 20-25 years, there has been a enormous increase in temperature records being broken, completely disproportionate to how the distribution has been before. And you're saying all of this has bee
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I'm sure, there was a shaman in Tasmania 10 thousand years ago, who blamed the sins of his fellow tribesmen for the rising seas cutting them off the mainland.
Your proclamations today are about as credible as his were then.
Duck and Dodge (Score:2)
So it might be inaccurate. What's wrong with the theory, though? Remember, if you can't identify what part of the theory is wrong, then you're spending an awful lot of time arguing against something you agree with.
Does CO2 not absorb IR? Does it not accumulate in the atmosphere? Have you discovered another way for the planet to lose heat? How about massive undetected orbital changes?
AGW is a scientific theory because we haven't been able to falsify it yet. We need only a single contradictory fact. We've bee
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Darling, try marketing a pancake-making machine, that makes no pancakes. I assure you, that demanding from other people to identify, just which part of the machine is responsible for there being no edible output, is not going to help your sales.
I don't know, what's wrong with your theory. But I do see, that it is remarkably short on successful predictions to its name. So short, you can't name any. Or, maybe, you can name 1 or 2, but nothing a major scientific discipline
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No idea where you get that nonsense from.
The word 'margin of error' should probably be removed from the dictionariees that idiots like you stop using it.
The last centuries water froze and boiled at the exact same temperatures that it does right now.
Crafting a termomether is close to trivial. Calibrating it: is trivial.
The gab for your eye to measure between to marks of one degree difference away is about half an inch!!!
So 0.4C on a typical thermometer is something like a quarter of an inch, and you must be
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Please don't hate, asshole.
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And yet according to NIST the accepted margin of error for LiG thermometers is +-0.5 degrees F when recorded perfectly. Which means that the difference is in fact within the margin of error. Not to mention the calibration procedures are not TRIVIAL. Relatively simple, yes, but they still take a significant chunk of time. As well human error is a very common thing, and temperature recording stations are regularly misplaced.
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Weather isn't climate when it doesn't fit the narrative. Weather is climate when it does. Cue the armchair scientists.
Meanwhile, I don't think anyone really gives a crap if it's man made climate change or not. We need to treat the planet better either way.
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It appears that it has been quite warm in India, at least since 1897 (when Mark Twain published "Following the Equator"):
"In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy."
But of course, Twain was speaking of weather, not climate.
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Despite the obvious evidence that this record high is due to man made global warming, the deniers will be out in force. It's a shame that there are so many people here who reject science.
One individual record is not evidence of much but simply just another piece of data in a record that is collecting thousands of pieces of data every day. The temperature record is made statistically more likely by anthropogenic global warming but can't be attributed directly to it. However most of SE Asia has been suffering heatwaves since April and it may be possible with analysis to attribute some of it to AGW in a few years.
It is a shame that so many people let their ideology get in the way of understa
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Re:I love the hypocrisy... (Score:5, Funny)
OB xkcd [xkcd.com].
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I find it hard for you to imagine anything when that temperature (in Celsius) would be much higher than your IQ.