OnlyM3: Lots of "variation". Especially a lot of variation between claims by "sky is falling, don't stop my funding" quacks and that pesky thing called reality

The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows

Quoting that article:
""Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."

His team's study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world's oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean."

Julie Cochrane: That's all fine and good, but what about that great big stone foot with four toes that they found in that weird electromagnetic area at the bottom of the South Pacific?

citation gleefully requested

/loves huge stone feet at bottoms of oceans

grinding_journalist: I was going to put together a rational, link filled counter argument

Yeah, right.

but I'll just mention that you should probably read their sections on methodology and review, and the site's disclaimer before trumpeting them as the end point of human knowledge about global climates.

If you read their report, you'll see it's far from your "we know nothing" initial post here. There is a hell of a lot we do know about the climate and the influence of humans on it.

Frederf: It's hard to believe that the only effect is you'll have to build your house a mile up the road, not that moving whole cities isn't insignificant. It seems like people confronted with the dustbowl scenario would just claim they can plant their crops on the dirt under that.

Also, a 1m increase doesn't mean the water monotonically rises by exactly 1m everywhere, all the time. Coastlines have a lot of height variability, and even seasonal/tidal/periodic intrusion of seawater into a low point can cause issues. If the extra seawater causes a lot of erosion in areas that haven't seen seawater in a very long time, that's bad. If the extra seawater changes an aquifer or a lake, that's bad for what lives there. Etc.

Well I'm standing on the beach right now and I can tell you the ocean is ris-- wait. No it's going down. The level is going down! Hold on. Here it comes, it's coming up. It's definitely rising! And now it's going back down again.

This is confusing.

A link to this thread ought to be put in the Wikipedia article as "classic Fark discussion." This is what I come here for, the Internet at its finest. I visit Fark once a day to remind me that "Attempting serious discussion on the Internet is like trying to win the Olympic 100m freestyle in a wading pool."

FTFA:
Greenland's glaciers hold enough water to raise sea level by 20 feet, and they are melting as the planet warms, so there's a lot at stake.

What warming? But hey, it's only 15 years.

Cue the idiots to come tell us that because it's warmer than 1881 it must therefore still be warming.

Erix: Doesn't it get boring recycling the same old tired material?

You want I should use different years when I describe the last 15 years next time?

SevenizGud: What warming? But hey, it's only 15 years.

Statistical significance is not your friend. What happens if you use 14 or 16?

SevenizGud: FTFA:
Greenland's glaciers hold enough water to raise sea level by 20 feet, and they are melting as the planet warms, so there's a lot at stake.

[www.woodfortrees.org image 640x480]

What warming? But hey, it's only 15 years.

Cue the idiots to come tell us that because it's warmer than 1881 it must therefore still be warming.

Jesus Christ, man. The trend is global across a span of time that dwarfs a 15-year sample. It's been warming for 13,000 years. Humans didn't cause it to begin and they won't cause it to stop.

/Derpity, derp.

SevenizGud: You want I should use different years when I describe the last 15 years next time?

15 years is an insufficient period to look at temp trends.

But since you seem to believe 15 years is meaningful, but apparently don't know how to count and are using an obsolete temperature series, here you go:



I believe this is the part where you say "LOL!".

Erix: I haven't figured out your fascination with the Chesapeake Bay. Yes, it's there because sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. The last ice age ended when the eccentricity of earth's orbiatchanged as it does every 100kyr, leading to a slight increase in insolation, which caused a small amount of warming, which led to the release of CO2 and CH4 from frozen and marine deposits, which greatly amplified the warming and led to the interglacial period. Do we disagree on any part of that?

Nope. Humans didn't do any of that.
No causality where humans are concerned.
How do we propose that humans can STOP this process?

I'll wait for my answer off the air.

Corvus: Scientists around the world have said they are pretty sure that humans are the main contributors to climate change.

Humans are a the center of all human-manufactured schemas of superstition, religion, or science. We are the alpha and the omega, dude. The bible tells you so. Have you read it? We are God's representatives on Earth. How can anything not be caused by the noble human race?

Citrate1007: I've read that if all the ice melts on the planet it will only raise the ocean level 36 feet. This would mean that parts of the coast would be underwater as well as the entire state of Florida.

Actually, if it all melted, both Antarctica and Greenland, sea level would rise about 215 feet. The highest spot in Florida would be there (unless wave action eroded it away) but most of the state would be gone.

And corals wouldn't do so well; assuming the grew at a particular depth for a reason, they would now by 215 feet too deep. Plus, the local water temperatures and currents would be all different.

HotIgneous Intruder: Nope. Humans didn't do any of that.
No causality where humans are concerned.
How do we propose that humans can STOP this process?

During the last seven or eight glaciations, the amount of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has repeatedly cycled between just under 200ppm and a maximum of 300ppm, over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years, until this last time. This March, it was 394ppm. If humans didn't raise the CO2 concentration 31% above the previous maximum, then we had better damn well find out who did, and what they are up to. It probably isn't very nice.

STFU

You Deny-ists are messing with this man's lavish income and lifestyle

Global warming with oceans rising up to the Fall Line in the Southern U.S. will leave me with potential beachfront property. I'm prepping the boat, warming up the grill and finding my tackle box tonight!

schattenteufel: [healthculturesociety.wikispaces.com image 500x334]
Oblig?

Its not creating a better world for anyone but animals/nature. Want to know why the economy sucks balls? Corporations/companies' hands are tied and there's no more room to expand, because it impacts the environment. No more expansion in the economy + ever-increasing population = job shortage. I guarantee that opening up new resources to exploit will stimulate the economy.

/my car lacks emissions equipment
//making a big enough carbon footprint to offset 100 Priuses

FTA"- "He isn't breathing a sigh of relief, though. Three feet of sea level rise would still threaten millions of people around the world who live near sea level."

Hey ignorant asshole submitter - if you're falling 1000 meters off a cliff onto a pile of jagged rocks, does it matter if you're falling at 9.81 m/s² or 8.81m/s²? The result will be the same when you hit the bottom.

Yet another article the deniers cling to so they can excuse their piggish, wasteful habits. No, we don't have to go back to the stone age and wear furs and sh*t, but we have the technology to continue a 21st century lifestyle in much more efficient and less wasteful ways than we do now. Do what you do, but do it SMARTER.

I was just looking around today at all the huge rooftops on strip malls and places like WalMart sucking up millions of kilowatts of free energy and radiating it back as heat, wasted. Put solar panels on all of them for hot water and electricity, and watch power usage drop by half or more when the only time the grid is needed is at night, and not even as much then. Do the same for houses and cut that in half again.

Jimmy Carter was right, and 30+ years later we are reaping the rewards of our ignorance and sloth and handing the crop to our children and grandchildren.

/deniers piss me off royally

chimp_ninja: SevenizGud: What warming? But hey, it's only 15 years.

Statistical significance is not your friend. What happens if you use 14 or 16?

i39.tinypic.com


THAT ^ is remarkable!

Wish I knew how to do that. . .

/daughter and I are trying to get an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) Event Preparedness website out of the "planning stage"
//the goal is to make it "fun", visually interesting and involve kids
///currently at the overwhelmed stage

Jon Snow: I believe this is the part where you say "LOL!".

No, this is where I say "look at how much 1998 has cooled over the years...this is the real trend, 1998-cooling...by the end of the century, 1998 will have a NEGATIVE temp anomaly".

Funny how that doesn't come through in ANY of the other temperature representations.

I got a kick out of this one.

Seems some disgruntled exemployees has sent a letter to their former company, asking them to knock it off.

At first I thought it was Enron.

Hey there, Hi there, Ho there, bet you want the linky thingy.

http://www.livescience.com/19643-nasa-astronauts-letter-global-warmin g .html

Mr. Right: In the dim recesses of my memory, I seem to recall something the Soviets did years ago where they sprinkled something like volcanic ash on some glaciers in the hope of melting them. IIRC, the theory was that the dust would collect more energy from the sun, thus increasing the heating factor of the sun. Given that there was significant volcanic activity within the past decade, could that be a contributing factor to the glaciers' increased melting?

No, I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely asking a question. Hopefully, someone can also shed some light on my memory or lack thereof. There has to be some Fark scientist who can give me an honest answer without the snark.

That was the US Navy, and icebergs, around 1950 IIRC.scottnance: You know what's really sad about this whole debate? It didn't have to be a debate in the first place. The minute climate science was co-opted by a bunch of narcissistic environmentalists it was destined for this.

US environmentalists don't want to save the planet, they want to tell other people what to do. It's like they invented a religion based on science: there are purity tests, initiation rituals, and shunning techniques for anyone who doesn't agree with their very, very narrow way of thinking. And guess what? No one likes a fundamentalist, and that's all you people are.

It really farking pisses me off because it's a wasted opportunity. The science is sound. The US environmental movement jumps from one bullshiat panic situation to the next. They can't exist outside of crisis mode, so every solution they propose is drastic, off-putting, and ridiculous sounding to everyone else. They've been doing this since the 70's. It's like working with a woman who cries at work all the time. Eventually you stop feeling sorry for her and instead want to give her something to really cry about.

Human Resources really frowns on that last valid point.

SevenizGud: No, this is where I say "look at how much 1998 has cooled over the years...this is the real trend, 1998-cooling...by the end of the century, 1998 will have a NEGATIVE temp anomaly".

Awwww. Wook at the sad wittle "skeptic". Need to move the goalposts? Remember what your original claim was?

SevenizGud: 15 years.

SevenizGud: the last 15 years

Even though 15 years is a physically and statistically unsupportable period over which to evaluate claims about climate trends, you repeatedly used it to claim that we weren't warming.

When it's pointed out that (even though 15 years is a physically and statistically unsupportable period over which to evaluate claims about climate trends) the 15 year temp tend is positive:



You move the goalposts and try to cherry pick the '98 El Niño.

I believe this is where- Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I?

What about your cherry picked, goalpost moving bullshiat?

SevenizGud: No, this is where I say "look at how much 1998 has cooled over the years...this is the real trend, 1998-cooling...by the end of the century, 1998 will have a NEGATIVE temp anomaly".




SevenizGud: Funny how that doesn't come through in ANY of the other temperature representations.


I believe this is where you say, "LOL!"

WorthNoting: Julie Cochrane: That's all fine and good, but what about that great big stone foot with four toes that they found in that weird electromagnetic area at the bottom of the South Pacific?

citation gleefully requested

/loves huge stone feet at bottoms of oceans

Journal of Oceanic Studies: Shepherd, Jacob, Locke, Hatch et al.
vols 4, 8 pp 15, 16, 23, 42.

Julie Cochrane: WorthNoting: Julie Cochrane: That's all fine and good, but what about that great big stone foot with four toes that they found in that weird electromagnetic area at the bottom of the South Pacific?

citation gleefully requested

/loves huge stone feet at bottoms of oceans

Journal of Oceanic Studies: Shepherd, Jacob, Locke, Hatch et al.
vols 4, 8 pp 15, 16, 23, 42.

Annals of the Bullshiat Artist: Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe et al., ibid.

2wolves: Let's keep collecting and refining data.

Subby apparently thinks that's asinine.

CitizenTed: If anyone reads that article and walks away with "HA! There's no problem with Greenland's ice! It's all hippie talk!", that person is a retard. As in 'bike helmet and drool cup' retard.

Yep...pretty sure the tag is for submitter.

dillengest: Citrate1007: I've read that if all the ice melts on the planet it will only raise the ocean level 36 feet. This would mean that parts of the coast would be underwater as well as the entire state of Florida.

/We could only be so lucky.

It's actually closer to 70 metres (220 feet). Of course, there's no chance of this happening within the next couple of hundred years.

phamwaa: Julie Cochrane: WorthNoting: Julie Cochrane: That's all fine and good, but what about that great big stone foot with four toes that they found in that weird electromagnetic area at the bottom of the South Pacific?

citation gleefully requested

/loves huge stone feet at bottoms of oceans

Journal of Oceanic Studies: Shepherd, Jacob, Locke, Hatch et al.
vols 4, 8 pp 15, 16, 23, 42.

Annals of the Bullshiat Artist: Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe et al., ibid.

Is it still bullshiat artistry if you're practically jumping up and down, waving your arms, and saying in a heavy Foghorn Leghorn imitation voice, "It was a joke, ah say, ah say, a joke, son"?

Seriously, I finally bought into the notion of anthropogenic global warming when the temperature kept climbing more or less evenly even though the sunspot cycle stayed unusually weak. It was that final little bit of "show me" that I found sufficient.

However, I still don't buy that a lot of the political prescriptions are necessarily the most workable things in the world. I'm on board with nuclear. I'd be a lot more on board with electric vehicles if they'd fix the "brick" problem with the Volt and if they'd make a policy of getting behind the products instead of leaving the early adopters to eat the costs of any problems with the tech.

I still see a lot of "Go Green" that is faddish in a way that reminds me of the girls in the old Peanuts comics going up to Charlie Brown and asking him, "How do you like my new HiFi bracelet, Charlie Brown?" and then after the girls walk on, CB asks, "How can a bracelet be HiFi?"

A lot of so-called "Green" stuff is simply faddish, slap a label on it, follow the leader crap that really leaves a lot of unanswered questions: "Good" for the environment? In what way? Who says so? What kind of "good"? At what relative cost--what are the trade-offs? Who gets hurt by it, and how much? To what extent is a competing product or an alternative choice as good or better? In what other ways that you're not telling me about is it bad for the environment? By whose standards?

So yeah, I'm on board with nuclear as a general reducer of carbon emissions. But I'm not convinced that enough of mankind's carbon emissions are discretionary to make a difference, short of killing about 4 billion people. And frankly, I'd rather see the oceans rise.

Also, I have a certain sense of cosmic irony reminding me that global warming could be made moot instantaneously, at any time, if Yellowstone or one of its other supervolcano cousins decides to blow. And there's not a damn thing any of us could do about that.

Daraymann

We've been hearing this for, what, forty years...and...no flooding!

(Except NOLA and that's happened before)

and that flooding was 100% preventable if the democrats in LA hadn't redirected funds that were supposed to be to repair/shore up Levees.

But protecting blacks and the poor has never been a goal of democrats. Keeping them victims on the other hand. THAT is a profitable biz to be in.

Keigh:

Coral reefs are already dying in great quantities from bleaching, which may or may not be due to rising temperatures, but in regards to the rise of ocean levels; Reefs live in a certain range of depth. If they are suddenly (you know, suddenly, over 100 years) much deeper where the sun can't reach them, they're pretty much toast.

No. They grow, and can grow at a MUCH higher rate than even the 6 foot / century panic figure.

Corvus:

No one has said climate change can't be cause by other methods. There is just no proof that non-human methods is causing the current climate change.

Right... And there's no proof it was not caused by aliens. Therefore, we should spend trillions of dollars on developing space warfare techniques to fight off the aliens warming the planet. You know, just in case.

/ Sadly, makes as much sense as sending industry and money to the third world as a solution.

Julie Cochrane:

That's all fine and good, but what about that great big stone foot with four toes that they found in that weird electromagnetic area at the bottom of the South Pacific?

Wat? Are you talking about Lost?

HotIgneous Intruder:

Jesus Christ, man. The trend is global across a span of time that dwarfs a 15-year sample. It's been warming for 13,000 years. Humans didn't cause it to begin and they won't cause it to stop.

No, not really. Temperatures peaked somewhere around 8,000 years ago, and have been steadily trending DOWN since then.



Of course, any time there are ice caps, that is an ice age, so we are in an ice age, a very cold one, and ice ages last millions of years. The trend has been downward for a very long time.

pciszek:

During the last seven or eight glaciations, the amount of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has repeatedly cycled between just under 200ppm and a maximum of 300ppm, over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years, until this last time. This March, it was 394ppm. If humans didn't raise the CO2 concentration 31% above the previous maximum, then we had better damn well find out who did, and what they are up to. It probably isn't very nice.

Carbon dioxide levels have risen lately mostly because of mankind. There's no doubt that. The doubt is about how much carbon dioxide effects climate. Probably the best answer is "Not enough. We're STILL going to have an 'ice age' (major glaciation) within a couple thousand years."

And, going back, carbon dioxide levels have been falling for a VERY long time. If levels of carbon dioxide fell to about half of their pre-industrial levels, the process of photosynthesis itself would be in jeopardy. We need several TIMES the carbon dioxide levels we have now to get back to the zero line on the carbon dioxide anomaly, measured over a hundred million years.

Jon Snow:

Even though 15 years is a physically and statistically unsupportable period over which to evaluate claims about climate trends, you repeatedly used it to claim that we weren't warming.

Don't be such a tool. The REASON everyone is using 15 years is that 15 years is the NOAA standard for a trend. We are now in a cooling TREND, by NOAA definitions.

Until now, it was "STFU, it doesn't count until it's 15 years, and warming will surely kick back in." Now, it's "PFFT. What's 15 years?" And, you conveniently forget this in the same post in which you criticize someone for moving the goalposts? Doupleplusgood duckspeaker, indeed.

This cooling trend, by the way, was said to be impossible by the models. There has been continuous, serious failure to predict by the models. At this point, an honest scientist would be looking at the assumptions made by the models to see if they could deduce which ones are erroneous. But instead of discarding the hypothesis, it has been re-branded, and the historical data is being altered to more closely fit it.

GeneralJim: The REASON everyone is using 15 years is that 15 years is the NOAA standard for a trend. We are now in a cooling TREND, by NOAA definitions.

Until now, it was "STFU, it doesn't count until it's 15 years, and warming will surely kick back in."

[citation needed]

Now, it's "PFFT. What's 15 years?"

Back in reality. I have been pointing out for years that you need 20-30 years or more to make climatologically meaningful statements about temp trends.

Here is me saying just that months ago:

Even when you use data where the outcome is predetermined ahead of time, it takes ~20-30 years for the signal of the trend to emerge from the noise of natural variability. That is assuming you look only at global mean data and don't attempt to remove signals from ENSO, solar irriadiance, volcanism, etc.

Here is me saying it several years ago:

You need 20-30 years of temp data to make climatologically meaningful statements about warming or cooling trend

This cooling trend, by the way, was said to be impossible by the models.

Back in reality, such apparent pauses are in fact well-captured by climate models[1].



Back in reality, when you filter out the effect of ENSO, solar, and volcanism, the underlying warming trend continues apace[2]:



There has been continuous, serious failure to predict by the models.

Back in reality, the temperature record is completely consistent with the projected trend:



Back in reality, GeneralJim is wrong about everything.

[1] Easterling, D. R., and M. F. Wehner (2009): Is the climate warming or cooling? Geophysical Research Letters, 36, 3 PP., doi:200910.1029/2009GL037810.
[2] Foster, G., and S. Rahmstorf (2011): Global temperature evolution 1979-2010. Environmental Research Letters, 6(4), 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022.

Ol' Jimbo claims:

GeneralJim: Temperatures peaked somewhere around 8,000 years ago, and have been steadily trending DOWN since then.

Ol' Jimbo then posts this pic:



Ol' Jim apparently can't read, and doesn't notice that back in reality there's a "2004" on the graph, illustrating how anthropogenic warming has reversed the long-term, Milankovitch-driven cooling. Back in reality. this has also been documented in high latitude lake sediments[1]:



Back in reality, GeneralJim is wrong about everything.

[1] Kaufman, D. S., et al. (2009): Recent warming reverses long-term arctic cooling. Science 325, 1236-1239, doi:10.1126/science.1173983.

GeneralJim: Julie Cochrane: That's all fine and good, but what about that great big stone foot with four toes that they found in that weird electromagnetic area at the bottom of the South Pacific?
Wat? Are you talking about Lost?

With all the talk about catastrophically sinking islands, it seemed appropriate. ;-D