Warming Stalled

[Flashermac]

Cave men caused the ice age.

[baa99]

I'm not embracing any 15 years, I merely relayed the story by others that showed an alternative to the we're gonna burn views of folks.

 

Indeed my last post had to do with thousands and millions of years.

 

 

 

Quite interesting. It raises two questions.

 

1/. If the CO2 levels are such, where's the 9 metres of sea? OK they do say it could take centuries, but that's "could".

 

2/. The chicken and the egg. There is a serious argument about whether CO2 levels (et al) is causing temperature rise, or if temperature rise is causing raised levels of CO2. The issue being that a number of factors can support the latter argument. I'll detail two: 1 Water hold less gas as temperature rises, therefore a temperature rise in the world's water (Oceans, Lakes, vast, vast, amount of CO2 in the water) would result in increased CO2 in the atmosphere. 2 Leaf litter. The world's leaf litter is a huge resource for CO2, massive. It decays, producing lots of CO2 amongst other things. As temperature rises, the rate of CO2 emission from leaf litter rises too.

 

I'm not denying that the world is getting warmer or cooler. What I'm agin is the flawed assumption that humans are the primary cause. Certainly we have an effect on the planet, but it's the height of arrogance to assume that we control our environment in any long term way. We only have to look at the Tsunamis and Earthquakes of recent times to see that we don't control much...

 

1) It takes time to reach a new dynamic balance. You take an ice cube out in 35C weather. It does not instantly melt. The hottest month in the USA is August, but the Summer Solstice is in June.

 

2) 1) The CO2 levels in the oceans are also rising. This is making the ocean more acidic. 2) Rotting leaves? That's a zero sum process. Plus it doesn't fit the facts.

 

How can we be sure that human emissions are responsible for the rising CO2 in the atmosphere? There are several lines of evidence. Fossil fuels were formed millions of years ago. They therefore contain virtually no carbon-14, because this unstable carbon isotope, formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, has a half-life of around 6000 years. So a dropping concentration of carbon-14 can be explained by the burning of fossil fuels. Studies of tree rings have shown that the proportion of carbon-14 in the atmosphere dropped by about 2% between 1850 and 1954. After this time, atmospheric nuclear bomb tests wrecked this method by releasing large amounts of carbon-14.

 

Fossil fuels also contain less carbon-13 than carbon-12, compared with the atmosphere, because the fuels derive from plants, which preferentially take up the more common carbon-12. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and ocean surface waters is steadily falling, showing that more carbon-12 is entering the atmosphere.

 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11638-climate-myths-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter.html#.Ui8IglFDsZo

 

[Coss]

More from the media:

 

 

EU policy on climate change is right even if science was wrong, says commissioner.

 

Regardless of whether or not scientists are wrong on global warming, the European Union is pursuing the correct energy policies even if they lead to higher prices, Europe’s climate commissioner has said.

 

Europe's climate action commissioner Connie Hedegaard Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Bruno Waterfield, Brussels5:07PM BST 16 Sep 2013 106 Comments

Connie Hedegaard's comments come as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is expected to admit that previous scientific predictions for global warming and the effects of carbon emissions have been proved to be inaccurate.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Europe's most senior climate change official argued that the current policies are the correct ones because a growing world population will put pressure on energy supplies regardless of the rate of global warming..... more...

 

She's ahead of the game this one, you watch, there's an impending stampede of politicians to this view... Curiously, I find that all the remedies that people are doing that fall under fighting pollution and saving forests etc etc - extremely worthwhile things to do, but not because of warming...

 

 

THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest assessment reportedly admits its computer drastically overestimated rising temperatures, and over the past 60 years the world has in fact been warming at half the rate claimed in the previous IPCC report in 2007.

 

More importantly, according to reports in British and US media, the draft report appears to suggest global temperatures were less sensitive to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than was previously thought.

 

The 2007 assessment report said the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade, but according to Britain's The Daily Mail the draft update report says the true figure since 1951 has been 0.12C. more...

 

This is a good read too

[unit731]

Nothing to do with humans.

The sun has just got hotter, that's all.

 

 

Thanks to rising average global temperatures, the North Pole is once again home to a lake in the middle of the Arctic ice cap. Just a month ago, the exact same spot was ice. While this is not unprecedented, the photograph, taken by the North Pole Environmental Observatory, provides a pretty dramatic picture of the reality of the Arctic ice cap. Slowly but surely over the past decades, the average size of the ice cap has been shrinking.

 

Last summer, Arctic sea ice reached the lowest point ever recorded.

 

Things aren’t looking better in Antarctica, either. The sheets of ice covering the land in Antarctica are melting at a fast pace. Even more worrying, a study released earlier this week showed that Antarctic permafrost is melting, too. (Permafrost is soil that’s been at below freezing temperatures for several years.) Melting permafrost, even more than melting ice, is a signifier of rising average temperatures.

 

 

Permafrost is melting faster in the Arctic, too, and that’s a cause for major concern.

 

That’s because permafrost in the Arctic contains large amounts of methane. As the Arctic permafrost melts, that methane then escapes into the atmosphere. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas – it traps significantly more heat than carbon dioxide. So as more methane is released into the atmosphere, it causes temperatures to rise faster, which causes more permafrost to melt, which releases more methane, which… you get the idea.

The result of the release of methane from permafrost isn’t just an environmental catastrophe. It’s also an economic one. Researchers writing in Nature this week calculated the economic costs of Arctic permafrost melt and came up with a staggering figure – a global cost of about $60 trillion. The economic impacts are disparate, but we’re already seeing them today. Carbon dioxide emissions are leading to smaller fish – which threatens the fishing industry. Another study released this week showed that rising temperatures would reduce snow packs in Oregon by over 50%. Reduced snow in the winter means less snow melting in the spring, a situation which threatens the ability of farmers to meet ever-increasing demand for food.

 

Of course, the accelerated melting of ice on the Antarctic continent and on Greenland produces a bigger problem: rising sea levels. A group of environmental researchers earlier this month demonstrated that for every degree Celsius average global temperatures rise, we can expect there to be a 2.3 meter rise in sea levels. As that rise increases, some coastal cities may not be able to be saved and will have to be evacuated completely. Some scientists have even suggested that such a sea level rise might end up flooding Miami by the end of the century.

 

 

LINK

[unit731]

Al least Al Gore served in the military and did go to Vietnam.

 

Barack Obama skipped Vietnam.

[unit731]

And GW Bush went AWOL over the skies of Alabama.

[Flashermac]

"Barack Obama skipped Vietnam."

 

Barack Obama was less than 12 years old when the last US forces left RVN in 29 March 1973.

 

 

Who ya gonna believe...

 

Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year

 

 

 

 

http://www.dailymail...redictions.html

[unit731]

"When I heard that the Mail on Sunday ran a climate change article over the weekend, I knew it would be bad. But when I clicked the link and saw it was written by David Rose, I braced myself for the worst.

 

Man, sometimes I hate being right.

 

Rose is a guy who denies climate change in the way creationists deny evolution, and flat-Earthers deny the Earth is, well, not flat. That is to say, with claims so ridiculously wrong it’s charitable to call them "ridiculously wrong."

 

The article in the Mail bears this out. In it, Rose makes a lot of jaw-dropping statements. To pick three, he says the world is cooling, Arctic sea ice increased 60 percent over last year at this time, and the International Panel on Climate Change is under so much attack they had to hold a "crisis" meeting.

 

These claims are at best misleading. The first and third are just wrong, and the second hugely cherry-picked. I’ll debunk these briefly here, but I’ll note you can get the grim details at the Guardian in a great article by Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham and at Discover magazine. Hot Whopper has a dissection as well.

 

Rose’s first claim is that the world is cooling. This is simply wrong. There’s long been a claim that global warming has stopped, but this too is wrong. Surface temperatures haven’t increased as much as they did a decade or so ago, but we now understand that the extra heat from global warming is getting stored in the oceans. Surface temperatures are a piece of the puzzle, but like their name implies, they don’t probe the depths of the problem. Remember too that nine of the 10 hottest years since 1880 have been in the past decade.

 

The second claim that the Arctic sea ice is now 60 percent higher over August 2012 is technically true but extremely misleading. In the summer of 2012 Arctic sea ice hit a record low. Given just how extreme it was, it’s not too surprising that it would not be as extreme this year. As you can see by the graph here, the sea ice extent (which essentially represents how much area is covered by ice) was incredibly low last year and is still lower than average this year. Rose makes this seem like the ice is on a huge rebound, but it’s more like getting a D- after getting an F on a test. Sure, it’s better, but it ain’t necessarily good."

 

LINK

file:///C:\Users\SYSTEM~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtml1\01\clip_image001.jpg

[Coss]

"Other admission in the latest document include that forecast computers may not have taken enough notice of natural variability in the climate, therefore exaggerating the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures."

 

This is my concern, exaggeration...

 

Telegraph

[Coss]

From Telegraph.co.uk

 

Row over IPCC report as nations 'try to hide lack of climate change’

 

Scientists working on a landmark UN report on climate change to be published this week are at loggerheads over their explanation for why the earth’s surface temperature has stopped rising as rapidly as they previously predicted.

 

 

The behind-the-scenes wrangling is likely to cast a shadow over the publication on Friday of the 2,000-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

 

The report is still in a draft version and will be finalised over the next five days with heated discussion centring on how to explain the fact that since 1998 the earth’s temperature has barely risen.

 

It is claimed some governments have even tried to intervene to remove references to the 15 year climate change 'hiatus’ or 'pause’.

 

The report - the fifth report by the IPCC and the first in five years - is hugely influential because its conclusions serve as the scientific basis for UN negotiations on curbing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A global climate treaty is supposed to be adopted in 2015.

 

A leaked copy of an earlier draft of the report, seen by The Telegraph, will insist that the likelihood that global warming exists and that its cause is man-made has risen from 90 per cent certainty to 95 per cent certainty.

 

The study will also make predictions for rises in the earth’s temperature and sea levels to the end of the century.

 

One scenario suggests an average temperature rise of as little as 1.8 F by 2100 while at the most alarming end of the scale temperatures may rise by as much as 8.6 F, according to the draft version.

In the worst case scenario, the sea level could rise by as much as 3ft by the end of the century, the final report is expected to say.

The report will also touch upon solutions to global warming, including a hugely controversial and expensive proposal to put giant mirrors in space which can deflect the sun’s rays in order to cool the earth down.

The report, co-authored by 257 scientists, will be finalised this week ahead of its publication in Stockholm on Friday.

But scientists are “struggling†to explain the slowdown in global warming since 1998, it is being claimed.

Documents seen by the Associated Press (AP) show attempts at political interference in the final report, and that “several governments that reviewed the draft objected to how the issue was tackledâ€.

In a leaked draft, dating from June, the IPCC said that the rate of warming between 1998 and 2012 was about half the average rate since 1951.

The draft report blames the slowdown on the “natural variability†in the climate system, as well as cooling effects from volcanic eruptions and a change in solar activity.

The draft says that a reduction in warming for 1998 to 2012 compared to 1951 to 2012 is “due in roughly equal measure†to natural variations in the climate and factors such as “volcanic eruptions and the downward phase of the current solar cycle.â€

But the documents, according to AP, show Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted while the US urged scientists to include as its “leading hypothesis†that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean. Both countries’ governments have policies which state their belief in man-made climate change.

Belgium meanwhile objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics because it claimed it was a particularly warm year.

The row will fuel claims by global warming sceptics that the issue has become too political and that governments are now spending vast sums of money on policies to combat a phenomenon that may not exist and may not be man-made. The effect of those policies, claim sceptics, is to increase global poverty because the policies are expensive to implement.

The draft report states: “It is extremely likely that human activities have caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature since the 1950s.â€

It goes on to claim with “high confidence†that the likely increase in surface temperature will “eventually lead to a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in late summerâ€.

The IPCC report will be scrutinised for errors and exaggerations when it is finally released.

The previous report in 2007 - for which the IPCC was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with former US vice president Al Gore - came in for serious criticism after a number of flaws were uncovered in its analysis, most notably over claims that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The final version will come under serious criticism if it is shown political interference led to changes since the draft versions which have been circulating.

The ramifications of the fifth IPCC report will be felt when governments meet in Poland later this year to discuss its conclusions and how to respond to them.

The report will include solutions to global warming although a more extensive analysis of how to tackle the problem will be dealt with in a later report due in 2014.

Wilder ideas expected to be contained in Friday’s report include proposals to put giant mirrors in space that would deflect the solar rays and cool the earth down. Another method is to inject aerosols into clouds that make them whiter and brighter and again deflect the sun’s rays. The techniques - called geo-engineering - are controversial in themselves because they can have “unintended side-effects and long-term consequences on a global scaleâ€, the draft report warns.

Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the IPCC, declined to comment on the content of the report because it is still to be finalised but insisted it would provide “a comprehensive picture of all the science relevant to climate changeâ€.