All-time Heat Records Are Being Set All Over the World (washingtonpost.com) 367
As the U.K. begins a two-week heat wave, one pedestrian apparently found his leg sinking into tarmac, which had melted, requiring a call to emergency rescue services.
"All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week," reports the Washington Post, in an article titled "Red-Hot Planet," which they've updated throughout the week with new all-time heat records. From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East to Southern California, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.... The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports the heat is to blame for at least 54 deaths in southern Quebec, mostly in and near Montreal, which endured record high temperatures. In Northern Siberia, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean -- where weather observations are scarce -- model analyses showed temperatures soaring 40 degrees above normal on July 5, to over 90 degrees...
On Thursday, Africa likely witnessed its hottest temperature ever reliably measured. Ouargla, Algeria soared to 124.3 degrees (51.3 Celsius). If verified, it would surpass Africa's previous highest reliable temperature measurement of 123.3 degrees (50.7 Celsius) set July 13, 1961, in Morocco. No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.
Nasdaq Inc. even warned customers that high humidity in New Jersey was slowing the radio transmissions needed for high-speed trading, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader narcoossee. And Southern California has also experienced record-setting temperatures "well above 110 degrees across the region," sparking brush fires that burned homes in two counties.
Last July several U.S. cities experienced their hottest month ever, including Reno, Salt Lake City, and Miami. And Death Valley, California maintained an average temperature of 107.4 degrees for an entire month, the hottest month ever recorded on earth. "The temperature didn't fall below 89 degrees at any point in the month of July at Death Valley," reports the Washington Post, adding "On three nights, the 'low' temperature was 102-103 degrees."
And last month the Middle East city Quriyat (in Oman) endured more than two full days in which the temperature never dropped below 108.7 degrees.
"All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week," reports the Washington Post, in an article titled "Red-Hot Planet," which they've updated throughout the week with new all-time heat records. From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East to Southern California, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.... The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports the heat is to blame for at least 54 deaths in southern Quebec, mostly in and near Montreal, which endured record high temperatures. In Northern Siberia, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean -- where weather observations are scarce -- model analyses showed temperatures soaring 40 degrees above normal on July 5, to over 90 degrees...
On Thursday, Africa likely witnessed its hottest temperature ever reliably measured. Ouargla, Algeria soared to 124.3 degrees (51.3 Celsius). If verified, it would surpass Africa's previous highest reliable temperature measurement of 123.3 degrees (50.7 Celsius) set July 13, 1961, in Morocco. No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.
Nasdaq Inc. even warned customers that high humidity in New Jersey was slowing the radio transmissions needed for high-speed trading, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader narcoossee. And Southern California has also experienced record-setting temperatures "well above 110 degrees across the region," sparking brush fires that burned homes in two counties.
Last July several U.S. cities experienced their hottest month ever, including Reno, Salt Lake City, and Miami. And Death Valley, California maintained an average temperature of 107.4 degrees for an entire month, the hottest month ever recorded on earth. "The temperature didn't fall below 89 degrees at any point in the month of July at Death Valley," reports the Washington Post, adding "On three nights, the 'low' temperature was 102-103 degrees."
And last month the Middle East city Quriyat (in Oman) endured more than two full days in which the temperature never dropped below 108.7 degrees.
Cannot be climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
Accepted dogma says this cannot be climate change. Or if it is, it cannot be human made. Rationality is irrelevant.
Well, fuckers, it is going to kill you or at least your children just the same, no matter how much you deny it.
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Hey! McFly!... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only people I have seen deny climate change are the AGW idiots who think the climate has ever been stable, and who demand global action to try to put it into some sort of climatic stasis.
The rest of us have always accepted the SCIENTIFIC FACTS that:
(a) The Earth's climate has always changed and always will.
(b) The Earth's climate is EXTREMELY COMPLEX and cannot currently be accurately modeled in a computer.
(c) While humans, like EVERYTHING ELSE, have SOME effects on climate, there are plenty of other ca
Re: Hey! McFly!... (Score:2)
just beautiful, im keeping this comment for another day. thank you.
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And it's this sort of nonsense that is the reason why so many people are convinced it's a hoax. Because the factual statement is mixed with patently absurd claim.
Yes, the climate change is causing the outlier weather to increase. Yes, it is in part human made. Yes, rationality is relevant.
No it's not going to kill us, nor is it going to kill our children. Humans as species are at their best when adapting to slow, ongoing changes to their environment. Global warming is the definition of such a change. It's w
Re:Cannot be climate change (Score:4, Insightful)
There's so much rich stupidity here, it's an overwhelming choice. I'll go for this one, which other commenters have left on the table: "Humans as species are at their best when adapting to slow, ongoing changes to their environment"
What a load of drivel. Humans are particularly shit at adapting to slow, ongoing changes to their environment. Our inability in this area was the prime cause for the collapse of many human civilisations. Water sources gradually ran dry, food sources got used up, soil became unproductive, etc.
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Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
Research has shown that earth's climate isn't stable.
Correct. But also that human populations react quite drastically to changes, mostly due to whether our food can still grow.
Research can't show us what the proper climate should be.
Actually, it can. Or rather, it can show us what climate we as humans consider optimal.
Research cannot show us how much co2 and other gases affect the climate
Again, we can. We have records of CO2 levels through the ages and we also know what temperatures occurred in those times.
Research cannot even predict next day's weather.
Please, you don't have to be so blatant in your ignorance of the difference between climate and weather, we already pretty much assumed that much.
Earth is a sandbox. Everything will always be in balance. If you have a long period of high temps you'll have a period with low temps.
Now that's a great one. What makes you think that there is anything remotely resembling balance? Furthermore, yes, there have been periods when it was warmer on this planet. Unfortunately for us, those were periods when no humans had to survive on the planet.
Sometimes you get ice ages sometimes you get scorching periods with huge fauna and flora.
Again, I have no idea why you think the climate has to remain in some sort of bracket between X and Y, but you might want to ponder that during the times when it was actually warmer than today were no times when humans wanted to survive on this planet.
Oil, plastic, e.t.c. belong in the same bucket, in several thousands of years they will becone sone other material.
In several million years. Several thousand years is too short a time span to have any relevant effect on it. And oil, plastic etc. are not the problem. Actually, the very last thing you want is to burn that plastic and turn it into a much bigger problem.
The concern of many is whether we kill ourselves faster or not.
We probably will. When places become uninhabitable, we'll have quite a few people trying to survive on our hands. And, well, if my choice is only to kill you for your spot or die trying because I'll be dead anyway if I don't try...
Even if it will become 2 times hotter, the planet will cool down again, eventually and dinosaurs might come back again.
Again, I have no idea why you think that the planet must cool down again eventually, a runaway greenhouse effect is absolutely possible, though we'd probably have to really force it, but ... you might well be right. Humans won't survive in much hotter climate, but there is absolutely no reason that other lifeforms cannot.
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So where is it, greenland or morroco?
Optimal is neither. We can actually survive in a wider range of climates than most other higher animals, in part because we can adjust our surroundings to our needs. But you will notice that neither Greenland nor Morocco are very highly populated. Mostly because the area cannot feed many humans. You'll find far more people in areas that are more agreeable to our needs, and more importantly, our food's needs. Changing this is most likely not going to end well. Morocco and Greenland are certainly more prone t
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
"sock puppet". So sayeth anonymous coward....
sadly much was lost when www.creditcrunch.co.uk was deleted from the internet. still have all the original research though, just no one will pay me to publish it, not even the oil companies, and apparently anything that doesn't say agw is real wouldn't be accepted by the journals anyway. might redo it tho, just because then ac's cant claim no sources when i quote my own efforts on the topic. thing with science is its repeatable.
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https://public.wmo.int/en/medi... [wmo.int]
The last 3 years are the hottest ever recorded. Citations by many weather stations around the world, from NASA, NWS USA, NWS UK, and the Japanese Meteorological Agency.
The water is boiling sir, and you can't jump out because that would mean leaving earth.
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Be sure to physically check those stations to make sure they are not in a carpark next to a running vehicle [metoffice.gov.uk] like the one reporting record breaking temperatures in Scotland.
In reality, someone did an analysis of the records, taking out those places that are now near a carpark, etc., and restricting the measurements just to rural areas. The result was an increase in the global warming trend (although my a tiny amount). This is what is called a sensitivity analysis, and shows the trend is not particularly sensitive to whether the stations are in urban areas or not. Obviously the temporary output from a car exhaust is another matter, but extreme outliers that do not match close s
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
wish i hadn't commented so i could mod you up. exactly this. i forgot how much damage being a little less hyperbolic and a little more honest can do to your karma talking climate change on the tinterweb. -1 disagree because the lady on the radio said different everywhere you look.
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
then explain why sea levels were 10 meters higher 10,000 years ago. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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Here's a more detailed graph.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
think you mean "here's a graph paid for by the alternative energy scientists that ignores sea levels being 10m higher than they are now"
just like hadly cru deleted the middle age warm period.
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Both graphs are from Wikipedia. What makes you think that yours is more reliable ? Have you looked at the sources, or do you just pick the one that you prefer ?
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Huh, you haven't paid much attention to weather forecasting recently, have you? It's downright spooky how good it is. It's not 100% accurate, sure, but if you bet against the weather report nowadays, you're much more likely to lose than win.
As for research can't show us how much CO2 and other gases affect the climate, that's not at all true. The physics aren't that complicated. It's not the effects of CO2 that's in question—it's the capacity of the rest of the system to absorb the captured hea
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There is 1 molecule of CO2 for every 2500 molecules of air at the current 400ppm concentration
Take a thin sheet of glass, and put a thin layer of paint on it. Try to look through.
Now take a 100 times thicker piece of glass, and put the same layer of paint on it. Now that the concentration of paint vs glass is much less, does that make it easier to see through ?
The absolute amount of CO2 matters, not the concentration. And we've increased the absolute amount by about 35% since the industrial revolution.
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Except it is. There is 1 molecule of CO2 for every 2500 molecules of air at the current 400ppm concentration, and yet we're supposed to accept this one molecule has the heat radiating ability to raise the temperature of 2499 other molecules by 1 degree Celsius, even though CO2 on absorbs less than 11% of reflected IR?
It has been known for 150 years that concentrations of CO2 of the level found in the atmosphere will trap heat.
If CO2 can produce that amount of heat we should be using it to power our cities.
It doesn't produce heat, it just prevents its loss to space, much as a blanket doesn't produce heat, but still keeps you warm.
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Research has shown that earth's climate isn't stable.
True
Research can't show us what the proper climate should be.
True
Research cannot show us how much co2 and other gases affect the climate
The models are pretty good.
Research cannot even predict next day's weather.
Massively false.
Everything will always be in balance. If you have a long period of high temps you'll have a period with low temps
The earth is not a closed system, so false
Sometimes you get ice ages sometimes you get scorching periods with huge fauna and flora.
The mechanisms driving the ice ages are largely known.
Even if it will become 2 times hotter, the planet will cool down again, eventually and dinosaurs might come back again.
The temperature of the earth is about 300K. Twice as hot would be about 600K, or about 327C
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The idea of balance is a philosophy not science.
We don’t have antigravity to oppose gravity.
The mass of proton is much larger then the electron. There seems to be more matter in the universe then antimatter.
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This is either world class trolling or the sign of someone demented from exposure to right-wing politics.
There is zero debate among climate scientists on this topic. The biosphere is warming and the primary cause is human-emitted greenhouse gases. It's not solar fluctuations or cosmic rays or some sort of weather cycles. It's CO2 and methane. It's a very basic mechanism we've know about for well over 100 years.
You can try to find comforting fairy tales that say the situation isn't as bad as the scientis
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:5, Informative)
Since I believe in the usually futile approach of trying to counter lies with facts...
We know very well that the current warming is caused by greenhouse gases and not by increased solar radiation. We know this because the two would produce different patterns of warming, and what we actually observe agrees in every detail with the predictions for greenhouse gases and disagrees with the predictions for increased solar radiation.
Example: greenhouse gases should cause the lower atmosphere to get warmer (since they hold heat in) but the upper atmosphere to get cooler (because less heat escapes). Increased solar radiation should cause both the lower and the upper atmosphere to get warmer (because both would be getting more radiation). Sure enough, the upper atmosphere has been getting colder at exactly the same time the lower atmosphere has been getting warmer.
With greenhouse gases you expect the poles to warm faster than the tropics and winter temperatures to increase more than summer temperatures. For increased solar radiation, you expect the opposite: the tropics should warm more than the poles and summer temperatures should go up faster than winter temperatures. Here again the evidence strongly agrees with greenhouse gasses being the cause and strongly disagrees with increased solar radiation being the cause.
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Incidentally, we also have excellent measurements of solar radiation these days. That is not the cause.
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Indeed. When your will does not change reality (and with anything Physics it very much does not), then a "triumph of will" becomes terminal stupidity.
These are people that have no clue what a "fact" is and that it does not go away by ignoring it. Hopefully, when humanity starts over, it will be with a way to identify these people early on to make sure they do not get any power whatsoever to decide where things are going.
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There is no debate that it is man made. There is a lot of debate on the rate it is changing, what effects it will cause and forecast.
Climate scientists are not just sitting in a grant funded hotel. Awaiting the biggest I Told you so in History.
They are trying hard to figure out what the actual rate will be, how will it effect different areas and practices to help save the planet.
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I'm debating so that is provable false. Why were sea levels 10 meters higher than they are now 10,000 years ago.
Sea level rise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
just the graph will do. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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I'm debating so that is provable false. Why were sea levels 10 meters higher than they are now 10,000 years ago.
They weren't.
https://judithcurry.com/2011/0... [judithcurry.com]
From the IPCC AR4
Global sea level rose by about 120 m during the several millennia that followed the end of the last ice age (approximately 21,000 years ago), and stabilised between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago. Sea level indicators suggest that global sea level did not change significantly from then until the late 19th century.
Sea levels were lower 10,000 years ago, but about 40m. That is why there are (slightly younger), towns underwater across the world.
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:3)
just like the mediaval warm period never happened eh. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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How much money do you think there is in researching it? Who has more money: oil companies or environmentalists?
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
oil companies with no oil have lots of money, and they have been spending in on the likes of Hadley CRU.
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:3)
paying their salaries. Think it was BP who was one of their biggest donors (so desperate to find and switch to alternative energy sources they gave us the deepwater horizon disaster) but I forget exactly, it was a long time ago.
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
https://www.bp.com/en/global/c... [bp.com]
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zero debate among climate scientists
Zero debate among flat earth scientists as well.
One is an oxymoron. The other is not.
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:4, Funny)
So we should invest into solar energy now. Because we can get more solar energy per day because of the increase solar output.
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Unfortunately solar panels are less efficient when they're warmer. When we lived in Tucson, our panels generated more power in the shoulder seasons than in the dead of summer.
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The drop should been around 15% or so. While somewhat significant, capturing the remain 85% is still better than capturing 0% and pulling that power in from elsewhere.
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You are a fool and an ass and we are going to eat you when the food systems collapse.
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No, its bullshit conspiratorial thinking.
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And if we compare the total revenue of enterprises concerned with agriculture, of enterprises concerned with extracting and burning fossil carbon compounds and enterprises selling alternative ener
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:5, Informative)
First: The greenhouse effect itself and the contributing gasses are long known, at least for 120 years, when Svante Arrhenius first published about it. For astronomers, especially for planetologists, the greenhouse effect on other planets and their moons is an interesting field of research since the 1970ies, when the first probes were sent to Venus and Mars (spoiler: both of them have one, several hundreds of Kelvin on Venus, about 20 Kelvin on Mars). A back-of-the-envelope calculation for the Earth gives a good estimate for the size of the greenhouse effect here: We know, that each square meter on the orbit of the Earth gets about 1.4 kW from the Sun, the so called Solar constant. With the diameter of the Earth given (a little more than 12,700 km), we can calculate that the Sun delivers about 180 Exawatt of thermal power to the Earth. If the Earth would just absorb the whole energy, heat up and then radiate all power to space like a black body, it would be about 255 K warm (Stefan-Boltzmann law), quite close to 0 F. But on average, the earth's surface is about 290 K warm. So we can estimate that the Earth's atmosphere has a greenhouse effect of about 35 K.
Everyone denying the existance of a greenhouse effect on Earth or the idea that carbon dioxide plays a role needs good arguments.
Second: The composition of Earth's atmosphere has interested the scientists since Joseph Priestley at the end of the 18th century discovered that air is not a single element, but a mixture of several gasses. At the end of the 19th century, the composition of Earth's atmosphere contained about 270 ppm of carbon dioxide, as we can find out if we look for instance into Anatole Leduc, Nouvelles Recherches sur les Gaz, published in 1899 or other contemporary sources. Current readings of the carbon dioxide content of the air give about 410 ppm (e.g. The Keeling Curve). We can calculate how much additional carbon dioxide has to be released to increase the carbon dioxide contents of the atmosphere by 140 ppm (700 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide), and how much carbon you have to burn to create that much carbon dioxide (200 billion metric tons). And if we look up how much coal and crude oil was mined and pumped up since 1900, and how much pure carbon they contain, we come up with an estimate of about 350 billion metric tons of oil and coal, containing about 270 billion metric tons of carbon.
Everyone denying that those amounts of coal and oil mined, pumped and for a large part burned have something to do with the increase of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has to come up with really good arguments.
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I wish I had mod points to give so you'll just have to settle for a thank you. Makes a pleasant change to read something that doesn't look like it fell off a LiveLeak thread.
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with a grant that allows them to publish without the permission of the grant donor,
I've never ever had to ask a granting agency to allow me to publish a result. Indeed, as far as I know there is not even a process to do so. I've never heard of a colleague with a public grant (EU, DFG, NSF, ERC, ...) to clear publications, either. You live in a very paranoid world.
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They'll be complaining loud and clear and demand that people responsible be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and executed, when their cities start to flood and that could happen a whole lot sooner than people think. Weather is the real threat now, that heat wave that will eliminate permafrost and release a methane generated heatwave, in the worst place imaginable, where ice turns to flooded cities and the deaths of millions. Get out your dice and start rolling them, it's only a matter of time and a ma
Re: Cannot be climate change (Score:2)
And if it does happen they'll just blame god like they did the last time it happened.
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So you plan to set up a business selling things to dead people?
Good luck with that!
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Yeah. I have confidence in human ability to adapt and survive, and meanwhile I can look forward excellent weather in my old age.
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Oh please. If a place has had reliable weather measuring equipment for just over eighty years and it took almost sixty years to hit a new high, that's evidence of cooling. That's basic statistics.
So when did you hear of the last time there was a streak of all-time low temperature records? You obviously have no idea how statistics work.
Bugger! (Score:4, Funny)
And here I am, freezing by arse off down here in New Zealand where it's cold, went and windy and I've had a cold for over a month now.
Throw some of that heat down this way guys!
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And here I am, freezing by arse off down here in New Zealand where it's cold, went and windy and I've had a cold for over a month now.
Throw some of that heat down this way guys!
Actually, New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere so it is winter now. It will be warmer in the summer months.
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Throw some of that heat down this way guys!
. . . just hitch a ride with your fellow citizen, Kim Dotcom . . . he's headed for somewhere very hot in the US.
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Sure. Let's trade including rains! So. CA had been too hot into the triple digits since its Thanksgiving 2017!
Lets Hope That Climate Is A Stable System! (Score:3)
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Well, sure .... that's ONE possible outcome (wild, random weather swings with short notice). I don't know that there's really any more evidence we'll get that than there is the climate will stabilize at a higher overall temperature?
The "climate change deniers" are really the least of the problem, IMO. Some people deny the Earth is round. Others deny we ever went to the moon. Doesn't really make a difference, since people holding those opinions are a minority who aren't involved in any science, engineering
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If you can't sell someone solar panels and give them a true cost savings using them,
The problem is that some of the cost of fossil fuels (i.e. climate change) is externalized, paid by everyone else, instead of just the person responsible for their use. If we put a tax on fuels depending on how much carbon they produce, we could get a fairer decision on price. That's a job for politicians.
Gulf stream is in trouble (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm Scottish and my father was, until recently retiring, a farmer. In the last decade of his farming he struggled to make any hay in the summer.
It had previously been tricky but do-able in the 4 decades prior to that. If you farm you notice climate change.
Now it's like it's "flipped" completely. Making hay this year should be easy if it hasn't dried out too much and the grass has grown.
The bit that's missing in this post is that the UK, and Scotland in particular, had one of the coldest winters on record. More snow than they've seen in decades.
It's as if the weather that north eastern Europe normally gets has shifted over west.
The gulf stream [wikipedia.org] that normally warms N.Europe in winters and keeps it wet in summer is in flux.
I fully expect the UK will get a freezing winter in return for this recording setting summer if this continues.
Take a look at the rain and flooding in France and Spain that's also going on right now. Very unusual and abnormal.
Of course it's all "fake news" to those who feel this is an Inconvenient Truth.
Sorry, flame bait (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sorry, flame bait (Score:4, Funny)
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." but at least put some F's after those numbers so we know they are USA only numbers, not international standard!
You realize forty rods per hogsheads is 0.0362 leagues per 9684 pony or roughly 3.7 microleagues/pony. You must have a ton of ponies to get mileage that bad, sounds like my kind of car.
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The technical conversion is a little daunting for the math challenged (5/9 or 9/5 +/- 32) but the back of the envelope math is easy ... double it and add 30 (or to go from F to C, subtract 30 first, then divide by 2).
So 30C is 2x 30 + 30 or 90. Actual conversion? 86F /2 = 30C. Actual conversion? 32.2C
Or 90F is 90 - 30 = 60
Close enough.
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It's a nerd site, if you're not going to use Celcius then at least use fucking Kelvin.
Not begining (Score:2)
As the U.K. begins a two-week heat wave
What are you talking about ? it's been two weeks already! and it looks to keep on going.
Nice warm sunny day here (Score:2)
The "Heat Wave" reports about "Canada" are really about Eastern Canada, where temperatures above 28C [86F] generally cause panic of sorts, and will trigger weather warnings in Toronto.
Out here in Western Canada (prairies and the coast) temperatures around that number get you a "it's warm out" and "enjoy the sunshine" from the TV weatherman. Today it was 32C [90F] with the Humidex at 40 [104F] and nobody blinked, nobody keeled over dead, and everyone just enjoyed the weather. I believe that is the same as th
waiting for GOP knees to bend backwards (Score:2)
Just What Do You Think... (Score:3, Interesting)
...you're going to do about this so-called climate change?
The answer is, "Not a damned thing." Why? Because you can't. That is, not without widespread death from the methods you would use to combat it.
Raise the price of fuels to astronomical levels? It'd just plunge the almost-poor into abject poverty, which is deadly. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but living in poverty will take about 10. Wanna kill a lotta people? Make 'em poor. That's what the normal, environmentalist-approach is to every question, "Money is no object" and then we get cars that cost twice as much as they should while chasing the goal of eliminating 0.0002% of the remainder of some imagined deadly pollutant. Eliminate the pollutant and save 27 people this year, and kill 100,000 from poverty. (F U!)
The bottom line is that there's nothing you can do about this that will come out of a Congress or a Parliament. The answer for this is going to come out of a physics lab. Walking up and down in front of some legislature with your hand-lettered sign in your father-Christmas beard and sandals isn't going to do a damned thing because all they can do is create poor people by passing some expensive law, which will kill a good percentage of those newly-minted poor people.
No, the fix for this is going to come from scientists that invent the magic battery or the magic supercapacitor that will store grid electricity or electric car electricity so that we can stop using fossil fuels. Oh, BTW, wind is not gonna be the savior, since the foundation of each of these massive wind turbines takes about 250 cubic yards of concrete, which is a huge CO2 emitter during its manufacture. While a nuke plant uses maybe 400,000 cubic yards of concrete in its containment structure, our >52,000 wind turbines amount to 13,000,000 cubic yards of concrete, minimum, for their foundations. And our 52,000 wind turbines have a combined capacity of slightly less than 8 gigawatts. That compares to the largest nuclear power station in the world that has slightly more than 8 gigawatts output. Composed of multiple nuclear reactors, I believe it is 7, that would be 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete. How many such plants does it take to run the entire USA? 302,229 megawatt-hours was the April generation, so with 24 hours in a day and 30 days in April, that is about 420 megawatts continuously. 420 megawatts / 8 megawatts per 52,000 wind turbines, assuming the wind blows 24/7/365, would be 52.5 times the 52,000 or so wind turbines we have now, which would be 2,730,0000 total wind turbines, or 2,679,500 _additional_ wind turbines to be built, except the wind doesn't blow continuously so double that for backup, so we want and additional 5.4 million wind turbines. And again, at 250 cubic yards of concrete for foundation per wind turbine, that's 5.4 X 250 = 1,350 million cubic yards of CO2 producing concrete manufacturing.
And of course there's still PV, with solar farms as far as the eye can see. No big need for CO2 producing concrete with those, but the sun doesn't shine 24/7/365 either. Solar photovoltaic energy is only available for a fraction of the day, since there's that night bugaboo plus the occasional cloud, so we're going to need billions of them and we're going to need energy storage.
So... really... what's the answer? A wind turbine in the frame of absolutely every outdoor photograph anyone takes within the borders of the USA, and a country probably devoid of birds that would all be killed by the whirling blades? Or solar photovoltaic "farms" in said outdoor photographs no matter where in the USA one points the camera?
Solve those PHYSICS problems and MAYBE we could stem the production of CO2 if we can find out how to use electricity to replace a jet engine, but if we turn propellers with electric motors, we'll get propeller speeds again, back to the 1950's air travel model.
But nobody's going to solve this by whining at legislators.
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Well gee, it couldn't be that perhaps people use materials apprporiate for the expected conditions, rather than spending vast amounts on a road that can deal with Arizona's summer highs, plus snow, plus large amounts of rain.
Naw I'm sure everyone is simply stupid and chooses the wrong stuff.
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Or it's more likely it was complete garbage and the guy was standing over a sinkhole. Seriously, the grade of asphalt they use there is the same they use in southern ontario, which goes through 60C temperature swings between winter and summer. Up next, you'll believe the story where the road is melting as kids show pictures of it oozing up between their toes. It will later come out that they were standing on tar and gravel roads.
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Sometimes I seriously wonder whether those dumb comments are: a. misspelled intentionally, or b. from somebody without a decent education, or c. from a non-native troll.
Re:No way (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually he is quoting Ralph Wiggum. The original quote was "me fail English. That's unpossible."
Actually, Unpossible is the sanctioned word in Newspeak.
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Re:And yet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Yet the deniers like Trump (Score:3, Insightful)
He should do what obongo did.
Let BP ruin the gulf, then several years later let them lease areas to drill for oil like nothing happened.
Thanks obongo.
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Racist? Why is everything always racist? Just because the recent former president happens to be black, everything is now racist? We whites have been calling each other monkeys for 100's of years when we mean morons, but now all of a sudden we can't insult the president, like we've insulted all presidents throughout our entire history, just because he's black? Give it a f'n rest...
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(A tip: if you're going to measure temperature trends, don't put vehicles and buildings right next to your instruments...)
What if the objective was to create hype about record temperatures in order to advance a political agenda? Then where would we locate our instruments?
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What if the objective was to create hype about record temperatures in order to advance a political agenda? Then where would we locate our instruments?
In that case use the satellite record which shows a warming trend greater than the surface station record [woodfortrees.org].
Re:Ouargla, Algeria (Score:4, Interesting)
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https://public.wmo.int/en/medi... [wmo.int]
This is my source, with citations, although not necessarily the GP's:
(countries emphasized by me)
WMO uses datasets (based on monthly climatological data from observing sites) from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom.
It also uses reanalysis datasets from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts and its Copernicus Climate Change Service, and the Japan Meteorological Agency. This method combines millions of meteorological and marine observations, including from satellites, with models to produce a complete reanalysis of the atmosphere. The combination of observations with models makes it possible to estimate temperatures at any time and in any place across the globe, even in data-sparse areas such as the polar regions.
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Re: Ouargla, Algeria (Score:5, Insightful)
Rogue ice cream truck engines next to measurement stations doesn't convincingly explain the sudden two weeks of consistently higher-than-average temperature all across the UK, nor the deluge of heat records specifically during May in Fennoscandia [www.smhi.se] (in Swedish, but you can still get the gist from the pretty pictures).
You can't dismiss all ground weather stations' data because of a few anomalies when that data is still corroborated by other sources, such as satellite measurements -- It's not intellectually honest. Find an alternative theory that can explain all the previous data and predict future trends better than anthropogenic climate change.
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Actually, "normal climate variability" or "a heat wave" explains it nicely.
High daytime temps are NOT part of the catastrophic AGW prediction set, you know. The theory is that NIGHTTIME temps will increase, not daytime, so the overall average goes up.
And when they talk about "consistently higher" temps, they're literally talking about fractions of a degree in most cases.
By the way - there have been a few surveys of weather stations, and the vast majority of them have problems, mostly caused by either encroa
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Actually, "normal climate variability" or "a heat wave" explains it nicely.
That's very unspecific, and goes against climate scientists' overwhelming consensus, specifically that recent calculations [newscientist.com] concludes that the Earth is warming orders of magnitude faster than from natural forces. Neither "normal climate variability" nor "heat waves" seems to account for past data, nor is able to predict future trends better than AGW.
High daytime temps are NOT part of the catastrophic AGW prediction set, you know. The theory is that NIGHTTIME temps will increase, not daytime, so the overall average goes up.
And when they talk about "consistently higher" temps, they're literally talking about fractions of a degree in most cases.
I couldn't find a source that only night temperatures will increase -- what's yours? The closest I could find was this article [bjerknes.uib.no] explaining why night-time temperat
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Dr. Muller began the instrument record reconstruction project as a climate skeptic and as a result of his own research, changed his mind about AGW.
That's not quite the case. He was on board with AGW, but then when Climategate hit he saw some shoddy science that gave him pause for concern.
I was initially hopeful when he started his project, but I became soured when it became a giant fund-raising effort as well as involving nepotism (his daughter [berkeleyearth.org]).
Also, glancing at the paper, is there an explanation that explains the temperature rise from the 1750-1850 temperature average to the higher temps in 1850-1950? Is that from carbon dioxide? If not, what is the
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And the guy who sunk into the tarmac just happened to be carelessly testing his now flamethrower at the time. And clearly the highs in Ireland are nothinb more than the result of pranking leprechauns running around sticking all the thermometers in buckets of hot water. As they are known to do.
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There may have been a void under the tarmac, but it still had to be pretty damned soft for him to step through it. Likewise in the Queensland incident, there's only so faulty tarmac can be. Again, it had to be pretty damned hot for that to happen.
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Well, yes, they put the sensors right outside the White House, oblivious to the effect all the hot air produced there would have.
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Freedom Air! I like that. I recommend we start calling all ACs "Freedom Airs"!
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Probably cold patch asphalt.
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Todos seremos morenos bajo el Sol.
(there is not english-translation of the above phrase)
Google translate says it means "We will all be dark under the Sun."
Seems to me that a creepy irony survived the translation.
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This must have been posted by the EPA as proof that global warming/climate change is a hoax.
Erstwhile EPA head Scott Pruitt could freeze hell over by admitting climate change is real. Maybe there'd be a spillover? Hey, I can hope.
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Former oil industry lobbying Scott Pruitt has had to resign following a series of scandals. His replacement is former coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler. Their political stances are identical though.
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That's a strange expression, Bruce.