Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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Ouch

Major methane release is almost inevitable

19:00 21 February 2013 by Michael Marshall

We are on the cusp of a tipping point in the climate. If the global climate warms another few tenths of a degree, a large expanse of the Siberian permafrost will start to melt uncontrollably. The result: a significant amount of extra greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, and a threat – ironically – to the infrastructure that carries natural gas from Russia to Europe.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23205-major-methane-release-is-almost-inevitable.html
 
Nice bit of science

Weather Extremes Provoked by Trapping of Giant Waves in the Atmosphere
Feb. 25, 2013 — The world has suffered from severe regional weather extremes in recent years, such as the heat wave in the United States in 2011 or the one in Russia 2010 coinciding with the unprecedented Pakistan flood. Behind these devastating individual events there is a common physical cause, propose scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The study will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and suggests that man-made climate change repeatedly disturbs the patterns of atmospheric flow around the globe's Northern hemisphere through a subtle resonance mechanism.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130225153128.htm
 
New to me...

EcoAlert: 2011 Ningaloo Nino "Foreshadows Future Extreme Warming Events"


"Understanding the factors that influence the formation of events like the 2011 Ningaloo Niño is a vital first step in preparing for impacts from extreme warming events in the future," said Dr Ming Feng, from CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship. Abnormal climatic conditions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans during the 2010-2011 La Niña event combined to create the extreme marine heatwave seen off the Western Australia coast in 2011. "Nature always finds a way to surprise us and the Ningaloo Niño is just the latest episode in this continuing saga," said Dr Michael McPhaden of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, NOAA. "This is research that matters to society because it tells us that what happens in your backyard can be influenced by events happening in far away places and at times in the distant past."
Lead author Feng, says the marine heatwave was driven by unusual features in the Leeuwin Current - a warm ocean current which flows southwards near the west coast of Australia – which was affected by extreme ocean and atmospheric conditions in the Pacific and Indian Ocean during the 2010-2011 La Niña.

Record easterly wind in the eastern Pacific and record northerly wind in the southeast Indian Ocean combined to produce an unseasonable surge of the southward-flowing Leeuwin Current and extreme ocean warming off the west coast of Australia," Dr Feng said. Water temperatures were recorded by satellite, robotic Argo profilers and continental shelf moorings operated as part of Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System. During the heatwave water temperatures were more than 3ºC above long-term seasonal averages, climbing up to 5ºC above for a two-week period at the peak of the event, and causing widespread impacts on marine ecology, including fish kills and coral bleaching.
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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...o-nino-foreshadows-future-global-warming.html
 
Not to suggest that it's maxed-out yet, but is it perhaps time to start warming up the Arctic Sea-Ice 2013 thread?

Great fun to be had at Tamino's just now, http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/back-to-school followed by http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/ice-cover-is-not-stabilizing. Following the recent "record re-freeze" effort (implicitly acknowledging the record minimum of last boreal summer) this Goodman effort at a pre-emptive denier strike lays bare not only their barrel-scraping but also their fear of what the next six months will bring.

In their hearts the deniers know they're screwed, and we old-timers always knew the Arctic was where it would happen most publicly.
 
Yeah was noticing how quiet it had become...white flag of surrender perhaps.

I was stunned by the Canadian figures showing a 3.2 C increase in average winter temps over 60 years - that is a jaw dropper.

Some interesting stuff on the Antarctic as well about how vulnerable some areas are to sea water intrusion.

The geo-politics in the Arctic tho will be the decadal entertainment.
 
South East Australia, in particular Melbourne, experiencing a record heat wave that is easily smashing all the records. The recorded high temperatures are typically higher than those forecast. This after another heat wave just a month before, and what was called an 'angry summer' that saw record highs across the whole country.

Like the Russian heat wave, (IIRC, and others), this is being caused by a stationary high pressure system that is pushing away all cool changes. Are these something new? Are they related to global warming?
 
a_unique_person said:
South East Australia, in particular Melbourne, experiencing a record heat wave that is easily smashing all the records. The recorded high temperatures are typically higher than those forecast. This after another heat wave just a month before, and what was called an 'angry summer' that saw record highs across the whole country.

Like the Russian heat wave, (IIRC, and others), this is being caused by a stationary high pressure system that is pushing away all cool changes. Are these something new? Are they related to global warming?
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The UK/NE US having colder, snowier winters has been linked to the melting Arctic.

Abstract

While the Arctic region has been warming strongly in recent decades, anomalously large snowfall in recent winters has affected large parts of North America, Europe, and east Asia. Here we demonstrate that the decrease in autumn Arctic sea ice area is linked to changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation that have some resemblance to the negative phase of the winter Arctic oscillation. However, the atmospheric circulation change linked to the reduction of sea ice shows much broader meridional meanders in midlatitudes and clearly different interannual variability than the classical Arctic oscillation. This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents. Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content in the Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter and the northeastern and midwestern United States during winter. We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.
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Lennart Hyland said:
This is also interesting:
http://phys.org/news/2013-03-reconstruction-earth-climate-history-significance.html

Using data from 73 sites around the world, scientists have been able to reconstruct Earth's temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age, revealing that the planet today is warmer than it has been during 70 to 80 percent of the time over the last 11,300 years.
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I just came across the following article on this study:

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology...-years-worth-of-climate-data-prove-it/273870/

Yikes. Looks like confirmation of Prof. Mann's hockey stick.
 
Puppycow said:
I just came across the following article on this study:

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology...-years-worth-of-climate-data-prove-it/273870/

Yikes. Looks like yet another confirmation of Prof. Mann's hockey stick.
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Fixed that for you :). Mann's hockey stick has been confirmed at least dozen times already this is just the latest episode.

The interesting things in this one are that:
1) It’s a new path/method that gets the same results as previous techniques
2) Current temperatures are as warm or warmer than any time since the last ice age
3) 5000 years of cooling have been undone in 100 years
4) Warming that took thousands of years to reach the Holocene maximum has been matched in 100 years
 
macdoc said:
Yeah was noticing how quiet it had become...white flag of surrender perhaps.
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As if ;). What I've noticed is that the anti-AGW loonies have been left to their own devices while the vested interests are focusing on the real objective - delaying the transition from fossil-fuels to renewable energy. This is true in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and includes not talking about AGW at all if possible.

I was stunned by the Canadian figures showing a 3.2 C increase in average winter temps over 60 years - that is a jaw dropper.
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And hard to deny while remaining credible.

The geo-politics in the Arctic tho will be the decadal entertainment.
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I agree. We've already seen outbreaks of flag-planting in a 21stCE equivalent of the 19thCE Scramble for Africa (which was one of the causes of the First World War). Can the First Russo-Canadian War be far off?
 
lomiller said:
Fixed that for you :). Mann's hockey stick has been confirmed at least dozen times already this is just the latest episode.

The interesting things in this one are that:
1) It’s a new path/method that gets the same results as previous techniques
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And so must be a product of the same conspiracy.

2) Current temperatures are as warm or warmer than any time since the last ice age
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Which you're obviously part of.

3) 5000 years of cooling have been undone in 100 years
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Wrong :rolleyes:. There's been no warming for 17 years so it was only 83 years, not 100.

4) Warming that took thousands of years to reach the Holocene maximum has been matched in 100 years
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It's called progress, look it up. We were living in caves back then, which is what you want to return us to.

(Since we don't get many loonies here these days I thought I'd weigh in for them :).)
 
Lennart Hyland said:
Is that the famouse hockey stick you talking about? The one people claimd was wrong tuned (or something like that)?

Could you guys enlighten me on this?
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There was some idiocy about how it was supposedly the same result you'd get processing noise, but it was just some mumbo-jumbo propaganda to impress the scientifically illiterate, and forestall the day when coal stocks plummet.
 
Grrrr god damn anti-nuke propaganda.
This Fukishima docu that is on is just so full of lies.
They flat out claimed that pilots flying water over Chernobyl died of cancer related to those flights.

1125 pilots did 1812 flights dumping water.
The earliest pilots received 260 millisieverts of radiation. - the same increase in cancer risk as a single cigarette.
In the 20 years studied by the UN Commission...one pilot died of leukemia out of the 1125
The normal distribution of leukemia for that group would be 1 in 93.

Pissed me off to no end the lies and distortions...where are the special on the 140,000 that die from coal use every year.......grrrrrrrrr :mad:

meanwhile we cook the planet with coal and these idiots spread crap about the one proven technology that is safe and can mitigate C02 increases. :boggled:

One good piece of news tho is solar is now competitive without subsidies.

http://lake.typepad.com/on-the-lake...ity-without-subsidies-in-india-and-italy.html
 
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Lennart Hyland said:
Is that the famouse hockey stick you talking about? The one people claimd was wrong tuned (or something like that)?

Could you guys enlighten me on this?
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The Hockey-Stick is one of the founding themes of AGW denial, along with Watts's Urban Heat Island and Lindzen's negative cloud feedback riding to the rescue. It's what Steve McIntyre slimed his way out of well-deserved obscurity on, and the refutation of the Mann et al historical reconstruction has become an end in itself for deniers. Almost all the current action in the weirdsphere is directed towards refuting yet another confirmation - which is to say, refuting that which refutes McIntyre's refutation (which was utter crap to start with, of course, and shot to pieces in very short order).

This is where AGW denial is now, disappearing up its own fundament. What remains of the movement is no longer stand-alone but has been subsumed into the greater One World Gummint Conspiracy camp where it joins hands with the likes of birthers and Area 51 freaks.
 
macdoc said:
Grrrr god damn anti-nuke propaganda.
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Here's some more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324731304578193880676864240.html

"The first newly licensed nuclear-power plant to be built in the U.S. in decades, the Vogtle project in Georgia, has run into construction problems and may be falling years behind schedule, according to an engineering expert advising the state."
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On the plus side (for some) :

"The delays and cost pressures have created friction between the construction partners and utility companies that will serve as the plant's owners, escalating into a series of lawsuits totaling more than $900 million."
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No doubt the shareholders will be bleating about the cost overruns and crappy returns on capital which stopped the last nuclear power thrust back in the 80's. The good news is that China's programme doesn't suffer from the same constraints and is going ahead. The UK programme is stymied by the lack of government guarantees.

Nuclear power has not been stifled by "anti-nuke propaganda"; if it ever had any potential it's been stifled by the nuclear industry itself, through over-selling, mismanagement, and shoddy construction.

I've stated my positon, you've stated yours, let's now leave the thread to Climate.

Damn' quiet, isn't it? I sense an air of hushed anticipation of the coming boreal summer and what it will bring to the Arctic Ocean and the US Mid-West. What we won't be getting, sadly, is another Shell Oil comedy turn off Alaska.
 
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It's more likely most people are sick and tired of the snow and cold, and with more to come this weekend, it's hard to be that concerned over the imagined disaster coming.
 
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