Additional Climate stuff, but please stay calm

[Delfin]

Originally Posted by SailOar

Referring to the above graph, which was published in the Washington Post; since it appears to be important to you, here is the NASA url for the graph. Without changing any of the default parameters click on SHOW MAP.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/time_series.html

Providing that they report from recognized scientific sources, I often prefer citing general news sources because it negates one of your other contentions, which is that “no one is paying attention.” Yes, as a matter of fact, many people are paying attention. In fact I might go so far as to say that you are the one who is not paying attention.

Oh, some people are paying attention, to be sure. Those who are paid by governments to find a really big problem that only more government can solve are paying attention. But for the average person, who vaguely recalls the predictions of doom that are clearly not coming to pass? - Those folks have tuned out, and sensibly so.

The data you referenced is contradicted by the NOAA satellite data. I don't know why GISS data is off kilter, but it is. I do know that the NOAA data is accurate, and it shows the earth has been warming about 1/10th what was projected. Sorry, but that is just the way it is, so perhaps we can now focus on real problems, of which there are quite a few.

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

Psst....it's 2013....

Psst...
Arctic Sea Ice grows 8 to 10 million sq kilometers (5-6 million sq miles) each winter, and then melts again each summer. Your 0.92 million sq miles is well within year-to-year variation.




This is what the Arctic Sea Ice looks like in the winter

[SunDevil]

Originally Posted by Delfin

Psst....it's 2013....

Attachment 66873

In addition to this comparison of ice coverage currently to that 12 months ago, a period during which CO2 continued to rise..

While it isn't as bad as last year due to the weather patterns, the trend is still going down. And yes, 2013 was a little early, but it won't take 60 years if we continue at our current pace either. There will be some acceleration once it stops getting as thick in the winter, and the clouds part and let the water warm up a few degrees.

It is a problem, but the deniers have good tactics of saying that we don't have to do anything first, and then they will say it is too late to do anything or I'm old and about to die so what do I care.

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

Oh, some people are paying attention, to be sure. Those who are paid by governments to find a really big problem that only more government can solve are paying attention. But for the average person, who vaguely recalls the predictions of doom that are clearly not coming to pass? - Those folks have tuned out, and sensibly so.

The data you referenced is contradicted by the NOAA satellite data. I don't know why GISS data is off kilter, but it is. I do know that the NOAA data is accurate, and it shows the earth has been warming about 1/10th what was projected. Sorry, but that is just the way it is, so perhaps we can now focus on real problems, of which there are quite a few.

You really ought to invest in a good history book. There were no NOAA satellites in 1880.

[jongleur]

Delfin said:

Kind of like Paul Erlich's prediction of mass famine from over population made in 1970. So wrong as to be silly.

But Ehrlich was right.

During the decades
surrounding the year 2000, approximately
20,000 to 40,000 people were dying each day
from malnutrition. Using the conservative
number, that would be 7,300,000 deaths from
malnutrition per year.

So in 20 years, that would be 146 million
people dying from malnutrition.

But according to you, that is just silly.

Please, stop.

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

…This is why no one is listening anymore, but carry on if you like.

THOSE WHO ARE LISTENING

State asks insurers: Are you ready for climate change? | STAR-TRIBUNE

Minnesota has joined four other states in requiring its insurance companies to discuss how extensively they’ve prepared for climate change. About 70 companies have until Aug. 31 to respond to an eight-question survey. The questionnaire, developed by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), focuses on the assessment of risk associated with climate change. However, it also seeks information on whether insurance companies are working to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, have altered their investment strategies in response to climate change, or have encouraged policyholders to reduce losses caused by “climate change-influenced events.”

State Insurance Commissioner Mike Rothmann said Minnesota joined California, Connecticut, New York and Washington in the survey in order to help develop a broader base of information about possible disaster coverage. While the other states face risks of coastal storms that Minnesota does not, Rothmann said Minnesota firms are vulnerable to tornadoes, severe storms and river floods, which some climate models suggest are increasing with a warming climate...

Unlike many traditional businesses, some insurance companies, particularly European “reinsurance” companies that insure insurance companies themselves, have been outspoken in putting a price tag on climate change by connecting disasters with it.

The president of the Reinsurance Association of America recently told a Senate committee that the insurance industry is “at great financial peril” if it doesn’t understand climate change science or the potential ramifications of a warming atmosphere…

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

…This is why no one is listening anymore, but carry on if you like.

THOSE WHO ARE LISTENING

108 ski areas sign declaration calling for action on climate change | MOTHER NATURE NETWORK

Yesterday, more than 100 ski areas from all around the United States signed on to a declaration urging the federal government to take action on implementing smart climate change policy. The declaration was put together by the nonprofit organization CERES and also garnered the signatures of corporate giants like General Motors, Nike and Levi Strauss & Co.

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

…This is why no one is listening anymore, but carry on if you like.

THOSE WHO ARE LISTENING

Insurance Industry Paying Increasing Attention to Climate Change | SCIENCE DAILY

The insurance industry, the world's largest business with $4.6 trillion in revenues, is making larger efforts to manage climate change-related risks, according to a new study published December 13 in the journal Science.

"Weather- and climate-related insurance losses today average $50 billion a year. These losses have more than doubled each decade since the 1980s, adjusted for inflation," says the study's author Evan Mills, a scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)'s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. "Insurers have become quite adept at quantifying and managing the risks of climate change, and using their market presence to drive broader societal efforts at mitigation and adaptation..."

Responding to shareholder, regulatory, and market forces, three global initiatives [UN Environment Program Finance Initiative (1995), ClimateWise (2007), and the Kyoto Statement (2009)] have compelled 129 insurance firms from 29 countries to engage in activities including: supporting climate research; developing climate-responsive products and services; raising awareness; reducing in-house greenhouse gas emissions; quantifying and disclosing climate risks; incorporating climate change into investment decisions; and influencing public policy. The ultimate goal of these industry activities is reducing climate-related losses among their customers as well as reducing their own exposure to risk, which is rising in step with the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather-related events…

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

…This is why no one is listening anymore, but carry on if you like.

THOSE WHO ARE LISTENING

Major Businesses Prepare to Deal with Climate Change | NATIONAL RESOURCES DEFENCE COUNCIL

According to The Economist Intelligence Unit, nine out of ten companies have suffered weather-related disruptions in the past three years, and most of them say these impacts are becoming more intense...These are not one-off events, but a pattern of increasingly frequent extreme weather that is exactly what global warming models have predicted.

Some political leaders still seem to feel that denial is an effective strategy for dealing with global warming. But for many business leaders, denial is not an option. As Eric Roston recently wrote in Bloomberg News, "the free market has assimilated climate change risk more readily than some of the loudest free-market advocates..."

Last week, a consortium of leading companies, including Starbucks, Levi Strauss & Co, and global re-insurer Swiss Re, released a step-by-step guide for businesses on how to assess and prepare for the impacts of global warming.

The overall strategy is called "Corporate Climate Resilience," and while the term is relatively new in business-speak, the idea is slowly working its way into the fabric of the business world, as leading companies in major industries start to see the value of preparing themselves for the new business landscape of a warming planet. Businesses are not alone in this regard--the military has been preparing for climate change as well...

Utility companies are on the front lines of the climate change battle. Hurricanes, for example, cost the utility company Entergy $2 billion in 2005 alone, as the company struggled to repair infrastructure and restore power to customers in the storm-wracked Gulf...

Flooding is a major risk to the ports industry as well...

Food and beverage companies can face supply chain disruptions due to global warming. Coffee crops, for example, are highly sensitive to weather changes and rising temperatures. A study commissioned by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters suggests that some parts of Latin America will be unsuitable for coffee growing by 2050....

On the flip side, the changing climate can produce new business opportunities as well, not only in clean and energy-efficient technologies, such as renewable energy and clean cars, but products that help businesses and communities adapt to climate change...

[Andrew B.]

Had some warm, light rain off and on most of the day. And it's my fault. I polished my black pick up truck yesterday.

[SunDevil]

I breathed some of your pollution because I live down wind from you, so there is that...

[Airshac]

I fart in your general direction! ...and the methane produced causes melting in the ice caps...

[SailOar]

Originally Posted by Delfin

I have no interest in starting another mud slinging match over climate, and hope no one else wants one either. In fact, I'm not posting this to even start a conversation, since I think everyone's position on the subject is clear. However, for anyone with a genuine interest in understanding how science currently views the topic, this article is certainly worth a read, as it addresses in a sober and informed way the topic of how scientists view what is going on with the climate. It presents both sides of the argument and doesn't take sides - it just refers to all the science, pro and con that supports current AGW thinking, or refutes it.

Climate science: A sensitive matter | The Economist

While it may irritate some because it undercuts the notion that a consensus exists with regard to AGW, it does a good job of providing the opinions of scientists trying to understand why the climate has in fact warmed over the last 150 years, and stopped warming over the last 15 years even though CO2 in the atmosphere has significantly increased. The issue at the heart of solving the question of the degree to which human activities warm the planet is the degree to which the models developed are based on the atmosphere being sensitive to CO2. Where climate scientists are skeptical about anthropogenic warming, it is usually because they don't see support for the level of CO2 sensitivity that IPCC models are based on. Other scientists suspect that solar activity has significant impact on how warm we are, while other solar scientists aren't so sure.

The good news is that we now have what I think can be relied upon as accurate data on the degree to which we are warming, and that is produced by the NOAA satellites collecting microwave radiation data from the troposphere, where we live. I'll be posting the current monthly averages as they are released by NOAA, collected from Dr. Roy Spencer's site at the University of Alabama. This isn't Dr. Spencer's data, it is NOAA's and it is accurate. So, we don't have to argue, but can all just sit back and see - how much is the earth warming, or has it stopped warming. No need for pictures of polar bears swimming around, or children playing in fire hydrants. Just good data on what is actually going on. Most climate scientists believe that the current slow down in warming can be explained, but their explanations vary from deep oceanic storage of heat to lower sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 as a result of natural feedback mechanisms, to reduced sunspot activity in the current cycle. No doubt as we study this more, we'll learn more, but currently the picture is a great deal less clear than some would like us to think.

The first graph of the NOAA temperature readings is below.

I agree with Delfin that the Economist article is a good overview of the concerns of climate scientists, both their understanding of why the world is warming, as well as their puzzlement as to why land temperatures have not climbed as sharply as was generally expected in the last decade.

However, I would disagree with Delfin on two points, the first being that the Economist article represents “current” scientific thinking. In a field with intense, on-going research, an article written even 6 months ago (March 2013) runs the risk of no longer reflecting “current” scientific understanding. More on that below.

The second point of disagreement is Delfin’s contention that temperatures are falling, or perhaps more importantly, that excess heat is not continuing to be trapped within the atmosphere. Below is a graph of the global land-ocean temperature index, as provided by NASA.



What AGW skeptics want us to notice is that the average rise in temperatures appears to have reached a plateau in the last decade. Furthermore, the skeptics say that this somehow “proves” that AGW is a hoax, and that we can now expect temperatures to fall.

There are two points to notice. The first is that even though average temperatures have not continued to rise, we are still at record high temperatures. Furthermore, the hottest years continue to be increasingly hotter (1990<1998<2002<2005<2010), and the years with the lowest temperatures also continue getting hotter (1992<1996<1999<2008<2011).

The second point is that this is not the first time that there has been an easing of the rise in temperatures. You can see there was a long period of no rise in average temperature from the 1940s through the 1970s, and before that from the 1880s through the 1910s. Until recently it hasn’t been well understood what caused these easing of temperature rises, but recent research suggests that these two previous flattenings, as well as the current flattening, are part of what is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which is also largely responsible for the better-known El Nino-La Nina cycle.

In an article written by Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientists, and recently published in the journal Nature, an atmospheric model is described which includes not only the forcing of CO2, but also takes into account the PDO. Compared to previous atmospheric models, this model much more closely matches both the current pause in temperatures as well as the one that occurred mid-century.



The bottom line from this paper is that for the last decade natural cyclical circulation patterns in the Pacific ocean have been bringing cold deep ocean water to the surface, which has been absorbing enough heat to counter the excess heat being retained by greenhouse gasses.

There has not been enough time for this paper to have been widely circulated and reviewed among the scientific community, but if this new atmospheric/oceanic model holds up to scrutiny we have good news & bad news:

The good news is that (temporarily) global surface temperatures may not rise, and could even fall some, over the next few decades.

The bad news is that:
*global warming is still happening,
*atmospheric CO2 concentrations keep rising,
*ocean temperatures continue to rise,
*sea levels continue to rise,
*ocean acidification is continuing apace,
*surface temperatures are still at record highs,
*and sooner or later that heat currently being absorbed into the deep ocean will be circulated to the ocean surface and land surface temperatures will continue rising.

NATURE paper abstract

THE GUARDIAN article on paper

SkepticalScience article on paper

CARBON BRIEF comments on paper

[conachair]

Good post SO

Some more on the Pacific paper...

http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2...om-the-hiatus/

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Delfin

Oh, some people are paying attention, to be sure. Those who are paid by governments to find a really big problem that only more government can solve are paying attention. But for the average person, who vaguely recalls the predictions of doom that are clearly not coming to pass? - Those folks have tuned out, and sensibly so.

Mud, mud, mud, mud.

Nope. You clearly don't want to get into any mudslinging in this thread.