Earth on Pace For Fourth-Warmest Year on Record, NOAA and NASA Say (weather.com) 310
The first nine months of 2018 was the fourth-warmest such period on Earth since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA and NASA said in their analyses this week. From a report: 2016 had the warmest January-September period, according to NOAA, followed by 2017, then 2015. NASA's analysis agreed the Earth was on pace for its fourth-warmest year. NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt said in a tweet that 2018 was "almost guaranteed" to be the fourth-warmest year in its period of record. Record or near-record warmth in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America helped propel the January-September 2018 period to the fourth-warmest on record, NOAA said.
With temperatures 3.35 degrees Fahrenheit (1.86 degrees Celsius) above average, Europe had its record-warmest first nine months of the year, exceeding the previous record set in 2014 by more than 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 degrees Celsius). Records in the continent date to 1910. Breaking it down a bit further, Africa had its fifth-warmest year-to-date temperature on record, Asia its sixth-warmest and South America its eighth-warmest, according to NOAA. North America experienced its lowest January-September temperature departure from average since 2013. The only notable pocket of cooler-than-average temperatures in 2018's first nine months was over the far North Atlantic Ocean just south of Greenland.
With temperatures 3.35 degrees Fahrenheit (1.86 degrees Celsius) above average, Europe had its record-warmest first nine months of the year, exceeding the previous record set in 2014 by more than 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 degrees Celsius). Records in the continent date to 1910. Breaking it down a bit further, Africa had its fifth-warmest year-to-date temperature on record, Asia its sixth-warmest and South America its eighth-warmest, according to NOAA. North America experienced its lowest January-September temperature departure from average since 2013. The only notable pocket of cooler-than-average temperatures in 2018's first nine months was over the far North Atlantic Ocean just south of Greenland.
Threshold (Score:4, Insightful)
We've already crossed several thresholds on the climate, the damage we've done will take hundreds of years to undo, if it's undoable at all.
Humanity just better get used to a hotter world, cuz that ship sailed a long time ago. We're fucked.
Re:Threshold (Score:4, Funny)
Getting used to is not that hard. On average, all you have to do to maintain the same temperature is to move towards the nearest pole at the rate of 5km / year. If everyone (workers, farmers, animals) does that, then we're all fine. Since you're moving, choose a new place that is also safe from sea rise, obviously.
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The actual distance (global average) is 145 km towards the pole or 150m altitude per degree C.
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Looked, can't find my source, which had weird mixed units 145 km and 500 ft per degree C (my recollection).
Looked it up less than a month ago?
Gotta say that graph is very suspicious. Is the average temp at the poles -1 degree C? Also source: 'own work'?
This: https://www.physics.byu.edu/fa... [byu.edu] puts the 90 degree range at 35+ degrees vs your sources 30.
Either way, looks like I was wrong.
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And the people already living where you're heading ...?
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Manifest domain. Or eminent destiny. Something like that.
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Climate change might cause some problems but it's the weather extreme's that'll kill you. More energy in the system, more weather extremes, can't run from them much. So yeah, you can move 3m above current sea levels but the category 6 hurricane will still totally fuck you up.
Just to make stuff even more fun, moving masses around the planet, taking ice from one place and depositing another as water, well that alters plate tectonics, so a relative stable system gets a little more unstable, so the big ones, we
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The problem with that line of thinking, while true, is it's fatalistic. If we accept we're already fucked there is no reason to try to avert disaster.
Re:Threshold (Score:5, Funny)
So. . . .
2016 was the hottest year
2017 was the third hottest year
2018 was the fourth hottest year
Shouldn't the headline be "Earth is cooling!"?
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Only if you flunked statistics.
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Your timeline is too small. 2016-2018 is still higher than everything before it, thus the trend is still upwards.
Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
This can actually be undone because we have the technology. However, it requires people to actually believe it's real, care and vote for leaders who care. There are far too many people who simply don't believe/care until it personally affects them. For proof of this, you need look no further than the newspaper.
In North Carolina, hurricanes did what scientists could not: Convince Republicans that climate change is real [washingtonpost.com]
How we turn this around is actually charge corporations money to pollute and use that money to clean up the pollution. We can build the machines needed to remove CO2 from the air and the solar panels need to power them but they need to be paid for. Pushing this policy globally would make it easy to undo the atmospheric damage we've already done.
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It's all fun and games till the kids get mauled by a trash bear.
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This can actually be undone because we have the technology.
I'm sorry, I do enjoy your optimism, but it's fantasy. We do not have the technology to remove the billions of tons of CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere. We are not even slowing down on pumping ever more CO2 out. And you think we're going to be able to remove it? We can't even curtail the emissions we have now. Quite the opposite, ever since Al Gore's movie, we've done nothing. We're just making it increasingly worse. We knew about this in the late 60's early 70's. We've done nothing. What makes
Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
We do not have the technology to remove the billions of tons of CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere.
Sure we do, it's just going to take a million of CO2 capture plants and several decades.
Quite the opposite, ever since Al Gore's movie, we've done nothing. We're just making it increasingly worse. We knew about this in the late 60's early 70's. We've done nothing. What makes you so optimistic that we're suddenly going to do something?
The noose is tightening and people are beginning to feel it.
“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”
Not going to change our diesel ships and trucks. Coal is still a big deal for energy generating plants. Electric cars and such, it's a step sideways, not forward. The energy we're pumping into these electric cars is still mostly coming from dirty power generation.
Of course, there's been no incentive to even bother not polluting. When that changes, everything will change with it.
Everyone is too afraid of the actual solution: Nuclear power.
Not at all. You forget that, stars are giant nuclear reactors. U238 breeder reactors are a very expensive form of nuclear power that are a dual purpose technology. We need to invest in developing liquid fluoride thorium reactors as once developed they can be installed in nations with even the most malicious intent and not be a threat as they do not create isotopes ad infinitium.
Fantasy is all this is. Accept that we've triggered some unstoppable consequences and adapt. Or die.
Defeatism does nothing to address the issue. The only adaptation that will suffice is fixing the atmosphere.
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I like the points you make except about liquid fluoride thorium reactors.
The technology is embryonic and a lot of work remains to work out all the real issues plus the parts that are simply hypotheses.
I'm not a Debbie Downer by nature, but I'm comfortable that, for the US, LFTR will go the way of Waxahachie.
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I never claimed it would be easy of fast to turn things around and sure, maybe LFTR will be just another unfulfilled dream but wind and solar are very real and quite extant. The current problem for them is being able to generate enough batteries to meet our needs. However, we are quickly improving our battery technology and large scale production lines are being built.
I have nothing against U238 breeder reactors per se but the fact that it's a dual use technology means they aren't a practical global solut
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installed in nations with even the most malicious intent and not be a threat as they do not create isotopes ad infinitium. ... or do you think they magically vanish just because we use Thorium instead of Uranium?
Of course they do
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Seems like you don't know the difference between a breeder and burner reactor. Go read Wikipedia.
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Sure we do, it's just going to take a million of CO2 capture plants and several decades.
Except that plants need good soil with good temperature, water and nutrients. The places on Earth that are suitable, are already full of crops.
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We do not have the technology to remove the billions of tons of CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere.
Of course we have the technology.
Do we have the money, the time to install it on big scale? Probably not.
No idea why people mix up "technology" with "practically".
Re: Wrong. (Score:2)
If we reforested the globe to 2000BC levels, we'd improve the situation but not as fast as the fossil fuel industry is worsening it.
We'd also stir up a lot of violent conflicts, Amazonian loggers are already prone to mass murder - rob them of their jobs, homes and wealth and they're likely to cause trouble.
So, yes, there's potential remedies, but far too many violent/powerful interests in favour of no remedy to actually use them.
You have to solve people first and nobody has done that.
Re: He's right, this can be undone (Score:2)
That took mass cooperation and a collective desire.
Even on Slashdot, where people are better educated on the whole, you can see a great many are utterly and implacably opposed to green solutions. This isn't a function of whether they accept global warming, they don't want geoengineering or green energy on principle.
Re: He's right, this can be undone (Score:2)
In order to do that shit, there needs to be concerted effort and direction of resources to it. Our dipshit politicians can't even agree it's a problem, much less starting up a Manhattan Project or Apollo program sized effort worth of resources to do something about it.
The first step to solving something is admitting the problem exists to begin with.
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One can fantasize. Me?
I'm thinking of the boiled frog.
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In a "warmer" globe, there's a high probability you will get colder in the winter. ... not 2C ... 20C, partly even more.
That is bollocks. It is actually the winters that are super warm and not the summers.
Summer temperature did not really change recent decades. The winter temperatures are up by 20C
But as soon as the great lakes have a winter that is a bit cold, but would still be considered pretty warm, 50 years ago: people panic!! Oh! There is no warming, look how cold it is!!
Re: Wrong. (Score:2)
No, warmer summers and colder winters are exactly what Britain experience now.
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It's clearly irreversible by now, but that doesn't mean all is lost. We still have an opportunity to affect the magnitude and rate of change, not only in the more optimistic models, but in the middle-of-the-road models as well.
A difference between +2C and +1.5C is the difference between coral reefs going extinct, and losing 70% of them. It's the difference between losing 8% of wild plant species and losing 16%. It's the difference between 9% reduction in wheat yield and a 16% reduction. It's the differe
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Indeed. And with the current messing around, denying and not doing anything, we probably will see enough warming that species survival becomes doubtful. As a group, extinction is probably what the human race deserves for extreme stupidity and shortsightedness.
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It's already becoming a squalid hell because of rampant, unmitigated, 3rd world invasion on the border of every western nation.
I hear Canada is ready to build a wall of empty Molson's bottles along the border to keep out the Americans who want to escape the devastation and now qualify as third-worlders.
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The U.S. is the prime example for a nation made up of people who themselves or their ancestors have flown from religiously intolerant, civil war ridden, feudal countries, seeking to escape enslavement and hunger crisis.
But suddenly, they deny the same priviledges they enjoyed to other people. I'm for the deportation of all U.S. immigrants and their locally born offspring back to the cesshole countries the
Re:Threshold (Score:4, Informative)
Are you suggesting they sue the EU?
And your problem (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got a brain and a pair of hands (assumption, I admit) so try to do something useful.
If we're all doomed in several billlion years, fine, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it a nice place til we all turn into entropy.
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If we're all doomed in several billlion years, fine
Actually, I am doomed in a few decades at best.
Re: Threshold (Score:3)
Plenty of things are permanent. Energy and information cannot be created or destroyed, and that's essentially everything.
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thanks for that ray of sunshine, bub.
I'll come back and mod this up when I get some points.
Re: Don't Worry (Score:3)
It's really is amazing people believe that. No data has been adjusted. Fantasists claim that to make observations fit their theories.
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Simple googling the title of this document leads you to multiple, convincing debunkings:
https://blog.ucsusa.org/brenda... [ucsusa.org]
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
It will change back (Score:3, Funny)
Don't laugh. It could happen, according to our big, wet, President. We just have to wait it out.
https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
And we know for sure that he knows what he's talking about, because he says he has a "natural instinct for science".
https://www.politico.com/story... [politico.com]
I don't know about the rest of you, but that's good enough for me.
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Yes, wait it out for 50 thousand years until the next ice age starts to happen.
If humanity still exists by then.
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When you cheat taxes you rely on the finance guy you hire to do the smart stuff. Or in the case of Donald Trump, you rely on the guy Fred Trump hired.
Re:Another day (Score:5, Funny)
I'm having the time of my life. My Trump posts have revitalized Slashdot's comments section and I continue to be the most popular Slashdot commenter, and it's moral soul. If you didn't have me, you'd have to invent me.
May Trump reign another 50 years. Vivat Rex!
it is still kinda hot here in germany (Score:2)
Department of superfluous redundancy department (Score:2)
WTF does the US government have *TWO* agencies giving out their own *DIFFERENT* "official global temperature anomalies"???
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If the world was truly in some kind of runaway global warming dealie, this would be the WARMEST year on record. ...
No, it doesn't. As the answer to another "AC", to understand difference between long term and short term changes draw a sinusoidal curve at e.g. 45 degrees angle. Then look at the global average temperatures plot available online, compare it with CO2 levels.
As a bonus you can learn something about how the data are acquired, and how scientists forecast weather in short term and long term, also other things. Take yourself out of your comfort place and when questioning - first question yourself.
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The fact that it's the 4th warmest means we are making progress and the problem is not intensifying - nay, it is healing.
That's a little shortsighted. It's a bit like saying that because an alcoholic hasn't had a drink in the last week that they're well on their way to being cured.
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That's one spectacularly weak straw man. I wonder if you can really understand that little about statistics or even basic weather.
It's like claiming that in order for a team to improve its record, it has to win every single game. It's normal even for winning teams to have streaks one way or the other.
In the case of climate "streaks" are called "weather", and the 800 pound gorilla of inter-year variation is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which send the entire planet's temperature careening back and
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and the 800 pound gorilla of inter-year variation is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which send the entire planet's temperature careening back and forth by 2/10 of a degree one way or the other (against the projected 2 degree/century, .02 degree background rise).
No, it does not.
El Niño and La Nina only shuffle the warm and cold patches on the planet around. The average temperature is just the same.
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ENSO moves heat between atmosphere and ocean, so it influences average temperature of the surface air which is what we usually talk about when discussing temperature.
Re: Progress (Score:3)
No. Just... no.
For further explanation of why, I suggest reading Gleik's Chaos and looking up papers by Edward Lorenz. Even looking up
Climate isn't a one-dimensional function, it is a series of trillions of non-linear feedback loops with non-linear changes to components.
That is why increase is turbulent, not smooth.
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The EU emissions aren "going up", asshole. ... that is not a trend. And if you did not pay attention: the winter 2016/2017 was unusually hard. Obviously people heated more than the years before.
There was a 1.3% fluke in 2017 versus 2016
So if you want to make a smart argument it would be: "The EU did not reduce CO2 emissions by itself so much as people might believe, but benefitted from extremely mild winters in the previous years. The mild winters contributed quite a lot to the CO2 reduction efforts".
But th
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It is not in the article that they will again go up in 2018 ... and most likely they will drop by a record mark ... because the summer brought lots of wind and solar power and the winter will most likely be very mild.
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if it is the FOURTH warmest... does that mean it is getting cooler now?
No, it doesn't. From the article: January-September period for years 2015,2016,2017 and 2018 are four the warmest since data started to be recorded (1880).
2018 was not the warmest of the four, to better understand it draw a sinusoidal line at lets say 45 degree angle, you will see the difference between long term trend and short term fluctuations.
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So, if it is the FOURTH warmest... does that mean it is getting cooler now?
If by "now" you mean the period of time between last year and this year, sure.
But climate is naturally noisy. Even without any climate change, average temperature isn't the same from year to year; in roughly half of all years, the average temperature will be lower than the year before, and in the other half it will be higher than the year before. If climate change adds a small increase to every year, then you end up with, for example, 75% of all years with an increase and 25% with a decrease. In such a s
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Oh, we'll be hearing about the "pause since 2016", like the so-called pause after 1998. 2016 was, like 1998, a massive outlier, which means they'll be using it for their basis of comparison.
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Your eyeball is being misled by ENSO events, which obscure the underlying trend. Yes, *what is physically happening* is actually important, not just what your eyeballs tell you. You can smooth out the weather events by taking a moving average.
Oh, and why we're at it, why leave out 1940-1970, during which the globe actually cooled on the instrumental record. Here's a hint about why you don't want to go there: what physically happened actually matters.
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Re: I can hear the conservatives now... (Score:2)
Except that no climate scientists has ever used faked data. Only the critics have.
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And they will do it again next year, maybe sooner.
The fact that you seem unconcerned with that is very telling.
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Look up "boiled frog syndrome".
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So when you yell at the kids for leaving the front door open in the winter, they'll say: "it's only been cold for 10 minutes out of 5 billion years... meaningless drivel".
Re: They Say This Every Year (Score:2)
The key is 10,000 years out of 4.5 billion.
If you're going to use numbers, use the right ones.
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This is not a subject that you should feel free to spread lies about. Climate change denial is dumber and more harmful than Holocaust denial.
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Well, aside from both of those numbers being inaccurate, it's not a valid criticism of AGW, and you have no idea why, and refuse to learn. Any other questions?
Re: totally meaningless statistic (Score:2)
Both.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, temp records go back 10,000 years.
Next.
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I'm not sure what you think is important about these graphs. You seem confused.
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if you don't want to accept data that may be a bit contrary to your chosen world-view...
You have just described yourself.
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We did not have such warmings as you claim. ...
1945 and the surrounding years where extremely cold. At least in Europe
How much of the rise we've seen post-WWII was natural, and how much was man-made?
Pretty stupid question. Everything is man made. There is no natural effect that can increase the temperature on the planet that much over a course of 100 years.
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We had the same heating [wordpress.com]from ~1915 to ~1945 as we saw from ~1970 to 2000
Looking at GISS LOTI numbers directly, I see about 0.3 degrees heating from 1915-1945, and about 0.5 degrees between 1970 and 2000, and about 0.75 degrees between 1975 and 2015.
I recommend you do the same, instead of relying on Bob Tisdale's graphs.
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No, this is what you've been *told* that they've done.
The ClimateGate thing was the University of East Anglesey dealing with a problematic proxy dataset. It has no effect on the global instrumental record, just on estimates of temperatures in the pre-industrial era.
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Both versions show a robust warming effect, so even though the difference is mathematically significant, it's not practically so. Also note the high degree of correlation between versions.
The reason for the revising an aggregate data set is to correct systematic errors in aggregation, and you can read about the reasons in the scientific literature. Some of the adjustments are due to better calibration of remote sensing readings. Others are due to accounting for instrument biases -- for example one chang
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Re: It's easy to make the current year ... (Score:3)
Like I said, read the paper; everything's there. Calling the conclusions "magical" isn't an argument, it's just posturing when you haven't done the work.
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Re: It's easy to make the current year ... (Score:2)
When did they edit this data, exactly?
The hokey stick graph has been around since the 60s.
Global warming has been described by science since 1890.
So when did the data get faked?
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They have 'doctorates' hence they are qualified to 'doctor data'.
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Under which category does a nuclear winter fall? Engineered or political?
Re: STFU and give us an engineering solution. (Score:2)
No problem.
Give fusion researchers the subsidy currently given to fossil fuels.
They've just cracked a major problem, but could have done so decades ago if they had the resources.
No impact for next ten years, then essentially unlimited power and superior access to resources.
That work for you? Engineering at its finest.
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We have engineering solutions. Unfortunately they all either fall into cateogories that include "politically unacceptable" or "socially unacceptable".
Pretending that you can magically fix this with technology without involving politics or society is just (I refuse to be polite here) sheer stupidity.
I refuse to go back to digging up grubs and eating grass while shivering in a cave.
See: You are part of the social problem because you think the current solutions require you to do this. Stop being part of the social problem.
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Exactly.
But the second you bring up this particular "n-word", people start screeching and spewing bullshit left, right and center.
Too expensive! If it reduces our carbon output by all the coal, oil and natural gas in the world, WHO CARES?
They cite safety record. Again, how many people have died due to nuclear in the history of nuclear POWER? Not nuclear WEAPONS.
How many have died with coal, oil and gas?
Also, these idiots think we're going to keep building reactors with tech from the 50's.
But these half-w
Re: Fake news! (Score:2)
Ah, yes.
Which explains why global warming was first reported by British scientists in 1890.
Re: It is still the sun (Score:2)
No, it really didn't. There's no evidence Earth's temperatures are impacted beyond background noise by sunspots.
And good on the freemasons to keep this secret for 128 years, the time global warming has been studied. I'm impressed. That shows serious skill.
Re: On Record? (Score:2)
More like 10,000 out of 4.5 billion.
And yes, that's good enough to build models you can test.
Re: Cattle Wheat and Barley (Score:2)
So if an ice cube on a glacier melted, by being crushed under the weight for example, you'd conclude the whole glacier had melted?
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