Greenland Temperatures Hottest In 1,000 Years, Scientists Report (cnn.com) 114
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: As humans fiddle with the planet's thermostat, scientists are piecing together Greenland's history by drilling ice cores to analyze how the climate crisis has impacted the island country over the years. The further down they drilled, the further they went back in time, allowing them to separate which temperature fluctuations were natural and which were human-caused. After years of research on the Greenland ice sheet -- which CNN visited when the cores were drilled -- scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that temperatures there have been the warmest in at least the last 1,000 years -- the longest amount of time their ice cores could be analyzed to. And they found that between 2001 and 2011, it was on average 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was during the 20th century.
The report's authors said human-caused climate change played a significant role in the dramatic rise in temperatures in the critical Arctic region, where melting ice has a considerable global impact. "Greenland is the largest contributor currently to sea level rise," Maria Horhold, lead author of the study and a glaciologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, told CNN. "And if we keep on going with the carbon emissions as we do right now, then by 2100, Greenland will have contributed up to 50 centimeters to sea level rise and this will affect millions of people who live in coastal areas." Weather stations along the edge of the Greenland ice sheet have detected that its coastal regions are warming, but scientists' understanding of the effects of rising temperatures there had been limited due to the lack of long-term observations.
The report's authors said human-caused climate change played a significant role in the dramatic rise in temperatures in the critical Arctic region, where melting ice has a considerable global impact. "Greenland is the largest contributor currently to sea level rise," Maria Horhold, lead author of the study and a glaciologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, told CNN. "And if we keep on going with the carbon emissions as we do right now, then by 2100, Greenland will have contributed up to 50 centimeters to sea level rise and this will affect millions of people who live in coastal areas." Weather stations along the edge of the Greenland ice sheet have detected that its coastal regions are warming, but scientists' understanding of the effects of rising temperatures there had been limited due to the lack of long-term observations.
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I'm not a denier, but I'm also a realist. These shock value headlines need to stop.
Which headline are you objecting to and why?
The Slashdot headline is "Greenland Temperatures Hottest In 1,000 Years, Scientists Report".
The Nature headline is "Modern temperatures in central–north Greenland warmest in past millennium"
The CNN headline is "Temperatures on Greenland haven’t been this warm in at least 1,000 years, scientists report "
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Probably all 3?
The data is a decade out of date, and contrary to the trend of the past decade.
1) False, on that basis. It is not 'modern'.
2) False, for the same reason.
3) False, because they were warmer a decade ago, and are stable and/or dropping.
It takes 30 seconds to verify this on google.
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Buddy, it's 2023. You can literally have an AI search the internet for you. A curious mind would take 2 seconds and plug a couple words into google/yanex/ddg.
Re:Pathetic escalation of language (Score:4, Insightful)
Then how else will you get people to start doing something ? Right now everyone has their head buried in the sand.
For example, due to the war, fossil fuels prices spiked. What did the politicians do ? Re-opened coal plants, released strategic reserves to get gas prices down. Why ? They were afraid they would loose their cushie jobs when people had to pay more.
Until people with real backbones are elected, young people are in for a lot of hurt.
People knew about this for almost 50 years, but the politicians kept happily taking bribes from the oil industry. One US president tried to get the conversation going in the late 70s, instead the next US president tore off solar panels installed on the US White House in 1980. So here we are, hoping things will "just go away". Well many cities will start "going away" soon enough.
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Re-opened coal plants, released strategic reserves to get gas prices down. Why ? They were afraid they would loose their cushie jobs when people had to pay more.
Politicians just do what will get them reelected. The populace doesn't want to pay higher energy prices -- for understandable reasons -- so we revert back to coal right away. It's why I'm not that hopeful about humanity avoiding the worst of climate change. We want the transition to be painless when in reality it might require significant sacrifice to be done in time.
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Then how else will you get people to start doing something ?
That you're asking that question and seeking a different solution is the problem. Terrorizing and fearmongering stops working when people decide they're not afraid of you anymore. That's what happened with COVID as well.
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Somehow not being afraid of Covid doesn't seem to be stopping people from dying from it. It's almost like it's not an imaginary closet monster and actually a real pandemic.
America tried the Green New Deal (Score:2)
There's a retirement community in Arizona that doesn't have water. Whole town, no water. It's a bunch of old, let's face it Republican voting people who moved to a suburb to avoid paying taxes for civilization. Real Leopards Eating Faces Party kind of thing. The builder easily skirted water regulations and 40+ years of tax cutting means there's no money to take care of them. The co
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Re-opened coal plants, released strategic reserves to get gas prices down. Why ? They were afraid they would loose their cushie jobs when people had to pay more.
Holy ignorant conspiracy theory batman. Now back in reality coal plants were opened due to the very real risk that Europe would run out of gas. Not pay a bit more, not a few people loose jobs, but fucking RUN OUT OF GAS. Heating, production, most of industry, farming, all of it depends heavily on natural gas.
Until people with real backbones are elected, young people are in for a lot of hurt.
We have people with backbones. The kind of people like the German politicians who after spending $150bn on CO2 reduction decided to re-open coal mines so people don't freeze to death during the winter.
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It's not only just "shock value" headlines, they're fundamentally dishonest.
Greenland has been getting colder since 2011, or at the very least been remaining stable in temperature. It just so happens they picked the only period in the past 25 years when there was any change - a period when there was an odd correlation with sunspot activity change.
https://tradingeconomics.com/greenland/temperature#:~:text=Temperature%20in%20Greenland%20averaged%20%2D19.27,of%20%2D20.80%20celsius%20in%201914.
https://www.space
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I like the part where your citation for decreasing temperature in Greenland shows an increase of almost a full degree.
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How do you figure? Did you look at the same data I did?
Greenland was -19ish in 2000/2001. The temperature then increased for a decade, to top out at around -17.4 in 2011, the warmest it's been in the past 25 years. The temperature has dropped back to the -19ish figure since then, and the trend is dropping.
This is far more evident if you zoom out to the 50 year graph where they normalize the annual temperatures.
They just picked the longest recent period of un-interrupted warming and ignored the substantial a
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>and the trend is dropping.
Click on "Chart", click on "Trend".
It very clearly is not. It is not in 10, 25, 50, or Max years.
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Don't worry, climate change deniers will be the first to say "Who could have predicted this?" when it actually comes true...
Re: Pathetic escalation of language (Score:1)
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A warmer planet is also more hospitable to vermin like tropical diseases, fungi that infect crops, bugs that now don't have to die off during the winter because it is not cold enough...they rather like getting a head start in spring.
A warmer Russia also means a stinking swamp for Siberia. And the warming planet's gifts don't stop there. It initiates feed forward loops so it isn't like we can just shut it off when we feel it gets warm enough.
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The Perma-Frost is perma frozen because it is half year in Polar Night. That does not change at all if the planet gets warmer. Nothing to farm there, unless you want to put it into a green house.
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That's the beauty of it, no matter how bad it gets, you always have a good excuse to not do jack shit.
Step 1: There is no climate change.
Step 2: There's a slight change, but the climate always changes.
Step 3: There's evidence for change, but it's not man made, it's just the climate changing.
Step 4: Ok, it is man made, but it's not really going to cause any problem.
Step 5: Ok, it's problematic, but it's too late to do anything.
The system works.
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You keep refusing to take it seriously. It's your fault the language is escalating.
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Between 2000 and ~2015 the earth grew ~15% greener, representing an area roughly the size of the United States turning green. This is especially notable in dryer areas which previously had difficulty supporting plant life.
This has also resulted in an increase in crop production without any associated increase in watering, fertilizer, etc.
This is caused by higher co2. Plants need to open up(stomata) to inhale co2, and in the process, they lose water. Due to higher concentrations of co2, plants can lose le
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the relationship between CO2 and plant growth is not linear, it tapers off. CO2's role in plant growth well understood and you'll note this in any greenhouse or closed system where you bother to measure CO2 and green biomass.
Climate change doesn't mean we'll be able to grow mangoes in Georgia. And while the greening of the Earth will taper off, the increase of desertification has been consistent year over year for decades and shows no signs of tapering off. With expansions in Africa and Asia, with the Gobi
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Between 2000 and ~2015 the earth grew ~15% greener, representing an area roughly the size of the United States turning green. This is especially notable in dryer areas which previously had difficulty supporting plant life.
Pointing out positives to climate change is verboten. Before you get modded down I'll add a couple links.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g... [nasa.gov]
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g... [nasa.gov]
They apparently just discovered dust is a feedback as well!
Re: Pathetic escalation of language (Score:4, Informative)
We basically did. One can look at the Hubbert curve [wikipedia.org] for the US, and see that the conventional oil extraction more or less matches Hubbert's prediction.
We've made up the loss through what is called "tight" oil - tar sands and oil shale.
There's also potential losses to be made up by being able to extract more oil from a given field.
On the flip side, it appears we are well past peak for oil discoveries - the big fields were discovered decades ago. And we're well past peak for energy-return-on-investment - it's requiring more energy these days than in the past to extract oil - although there's been an improvement bump as we've become more efficient at fracking, but it still pales in comparison to the peak EROI around the 1950s.
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Consequences is that prices will go up for oil and natural gas. As fewer and fewer companies and nations control the profitable sources. People will eventually quit buying gasoline and diesel in any meaningful quantity, but supply and demand is funny and people will fork over a small fortune to refill their fuel tank and heat their homes for a long time before investing in the new equipment needed to transition. It's kind of why there was so much interest in biodiesel and ethanol. Neither of these will fix
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it appears we are well past peak for oil discoveries - the big fields were discovered decades ago.
50 years ago we had 50 years of reserves. Today we still have 50 years of reserves. 50 years from now we will still have 50 years of reserves. That is the practical number to have ready to develop at any given time. Conventional oil does not really matter anymore, that is just bonus profit. Oil sands and deep sea drilling are still quite lucrative at todays prices regardless.
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US is nowhere near 70m barrels a day.
It's closer to 12m barrels a day. About two thirds of that is from non-conventional oil sources - "tight oil". When we compare conventional oil production, we peaked around 1970 at about 10m barrels a day, almost all f
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There is always going to be enough resources. They only get more and more expensive to extract. In the 70s, the stuff we pump today was not considered part of the oil reserves because it was simply completely ludicrous to consider oil shale or even fracking as a means to produce oil, that was anything but economical.
Of course, increase the price of oil and here we go.
Same for rare earths. There's plenty to go around. Sure, it's gonna cost a magnitude more and require about as much more resources to extract
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The fuck would I do with a flag in my bio?
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The Guardian shamelessly uses "Global Heating" now.
palatable reporting of facts is hard (Score:2)
It's not easy to report on something that has potentially negative consequences. I suppose if triggering an emotional response is problematic then maybe that individual should avoid all news, or digest it in smaller bites or less frequently.
Ultimately headlines were originally designed to get people to buy newspapers. Now they are designed to get people to click. It's easier to do that with some pretty strongly worded statements. And it's laudable when a journalist can manage an eye catchy headline that is
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They wouldn't have to keep changing the terminology if people wouldn't seize on simple labels and shake the shit out of them in opposition. "Global Warming" was probably the best description, but every ass-hat with an axe to grind who couldn't process "global" properly, or simply refused to understand the implications, rendered that one ineffective. Combine that with a horrible common inability to separate climate and weather, and no term is safe.
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Are you having trouble understanding causation?
Global warming causes the climate change. The climate changing causes real problem.
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Well, you can't say that. All you can say is that we don't know whether it may have been cooler or hotter 1000 years ago because we simply have no data.
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Well, you can't say that. All you can say is that we don't know whether it may have been cooler or hotter 1000 years ago because we simply have no data.
We have no data from this project / method. We have LOTS of data from other projects and methods. It might not be as precise, but this one experiment is NOT the be-all end-all of our knowledge of Greenland's thermal historical record.
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Except that isn't what it said, and you're a good example of why attempts to communicate to certain people are doomed to fail.
A warmer planet is better for humans (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so fast (Score:1)
And that's before we talk about how weather trends are going to make huge swaths of currently inhabited land uninhabitable. Say hello to climate refugees. Billions of them.
And yes, the optimal amount of CO2 has been studied. A lot. We are way, way over that. That's why we're having this conversation in the 1st place.
Somebody is tell
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Take a trip to the ocean and take a nice big long drink from that ocean. Let me know how that turns out for you.
The water needs to be where we need it when we need it and in the format we need it. You would think on a science forum people would at least know what a freaking water cycle is...
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This is also somewhat of a self limiting problem. A warmer planet means I won't have to burn as much wood in my woodstove over the winter
If the planet warms enough for this to self regulate, it's because most of the humans are dead.
Had anyone done a serious study to determine the optimal level of atmospheric CO2 which maximizes the earth's human carrying capacity, especially if water pipelines are in place to irrigate+cool dry places?
No, because such a study would be so stupid even the Ignoble awards would reject it. Literally no humans care about what min/max environmental conditions exist for the globe. Humans as well as all flora and fauna have adapted to living in their local environment. You're not going to relocate the people, animals, and infrastructure on the entire planet to match some ideal model for how well shit grows at a certain
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If the planet warms enough for this to self regulate, it's because most of the humans are dead.
Nope. Earth and its the life that it supports can happily exist within higher temperatures and with higher CO2 levels. Just look at history especially when the earth was much warmer and when CO2 levels were both above and below current levels.
No, because such a study would be so stupid even the Ignoble awards would reject it.
Why? Please elaborate.
Literally no humans care about what min/max environmental conditions exist for the globe.
Totally ridiculous and false statement.
Humans as well as all flora and fauna have adapted to living in their local environment. You're not going to relocate the people, animals, and infrastructure on the entire planet to match some ideal model for how well shit grows at a certain CO2 level.
Ummm... lifeforms move? Especially humans. Humans (and some animals) also transport flora and fauna. Even if the animals and humans choose not to relocate to formerly frozen areas, we will make uninhab
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Fossil fuels and other sources make home wood-burning a rounding error. Home wood burning is actually close to carbon neutral (fossil sources are still used to fell, process, and deliver firewood). This topic has come up before, and I beg y'all not to conflate home wood burning with industrial wood biomass power plants, which are most definitely not carbon neutral and are the kind of "carbon scam" that accelerates deforestation and actually makes things worse--an unintended consequence of using CO2 as the
Re: A warmer planet is better for humans (Score:2)
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Had anyone done a serious study to determine the optimal level of atmospheric CO2 which maximizes the earth's human carrying capacity, especially if water pipelines are in place to irrigate+cool dry places?
This is like asking what is the optimum global temperature we should be aspiring to. You will either get "doesn't matter so long as it doesn't change much", or crickets.
They will also say the crickets are tasty, but I'm skeptical.
Re: A warmer planet is better for humans (Score:2)
Why was earth warmer 1000 years ago? (Score:1)
Vikings driving diesel VWs?
This report has to be wrong. It's never been warmer than since we ruined the atmosphere with mass burning fossil fuels.
Re: Why was earth warmer 1000 years ago? (Score:2)
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So you're using a chart that covers a zillion years to talk about something from a thousand years ago which is a few pixels on the over all chart and boldly declare "you're wrong".
Did you think no one would look at your url?
With the zillions of charts available that specifically cover the last 1000 or so years why did you decide to use one that covered the last 500 million years?
What are you trying to hide? Or do you just not understand data?
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Re:Why was earth warmer 1000 years ago? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why was earth warmer 1000 years ago? (Score:4, Informative)
So, a few random things, not all of which are a response to the parent post.
- Before the "Little Ice Age [wikipedia.org]" - the cold spell that ran from around 1500-1850, there was also the "Midieval Warm Period [wikipedia.org]" which went from around 950-1200. It actually was relatively warmer 1000 years ago.
- I was one of many people who took part in the GISP2 ice core work (1989-1993) in Greenland, which generated a central Greenland ice core which provided temperature data for the past 100000+ years. 1) There was no question the isotope record was showing warming for the most recent couple of decades. 2) Trying to determine the exact amount of warming from an ice core is fraught with problems, since the amplitude of the signal attenuates greatly as the ice compresses for numerous reasons.
- The paper points out that this warming is likely due to a combination of anthropogenic causes and natural variability. People - especially those in the news business - seem to not understand that natural variablity can be significant and often greater than the human-caused warming. That's why climate scientists keep looking at longer-term records - it's the overall trends that show you what's going on. But slower trends don't grab headlines, nor do they drive people to act.
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The Medieval Warm Period coincided with the Vikings establishing colonies in eastern Greenland and eastern Canada, I believe - so at a minimum it affected the entire north Atlantic region.
Green at last (Score:1)
What a visionary Erik the Red.
Beware the Vikings (Score:2)
Or that orange face who now wants to buy it even more.
So fun (Score:1)
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It looks like Global Warming will hit red states hardest. With luck, the result will be a net increase in America's average IQ.
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Well said. Fingers crossed we don't hit a tipping point so powerful even geoengineering and long-overdue real change won't help.
This makes sense. What's the problem? (Score:2)
Is anyone really going 'Damn it my teacher was right!' ?
Ohh, is this news because it somehow supports whatever they are calling global warming / climate change / doomsday of the week?
So what? (Score:1)
I covet their calibration certs (Score:2)
MY ice core is only calibrated to 1 degree F for measuring, with the traceability back to the 1 degree reference ice core at NIST. How did these guys get an ice core certified to be used to measure to within a tenth of a degree???
I bet they bribed somebody, and they probably have more accurate calibrated mud and tree rings too! MY tree ring temperature measurement instrument is a cross section of pine tree and it's only accurate to +/- 5 degrees. I've misplaced the trace certs for the mud pile on my desk.[/
777 (Score:1)
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Can you clarify exactly what ideas are being banned? I'd like to know what I've been missing.
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:5, Insightful)
What typically gets banned are lies Are they sometimes a bit selective about which lies are removed? Yep... otherwise far more politicians would be banned from social media.
Personally I feel religion is far more harmful than any other potential disease but we allow that to propagate without recourse all over social media.
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lol [theguardian.com]
double lol [salon.com]
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Because the far left are controlling main stream media and social networks ... they are censoring just because they can, just like everyone.
Oh ... that was not what you meant?