Tuesday, January 22, 2013

BEST Study Finds Temperature Changes Explained by GHG Emissions and Volcanoes

The event in Australia broke more records than you could possible shake a stick at. Go here [climatecentral.org] for just the briefest scientific review of the incident. Here's a quote: "A relatively small change in the average temperature can easily double the frequency of extreme heat events. Australia has warmed steadily since the 1940s, and the probability of extreme heat has now increased almost five-fold compared with 50 years ago." What part of this do you not get. Globally, spring comes 3 weeks earlier than 50 years ago. The clear and unmistakable results of climate change measure in the ten of thousands of unique individual events and phenomena. Taken as a body of evidence you'd have a better chance of arguing against evolution (and the body of evidence doesn't stop ideologues from doing that either.) Why is it that I'm yelling "Hey, dummy your arse is burning!" and instead of putting it out and thanking me for saving your life, you choose instead get insulting and indignant.

I'm point at trends, when data point after data point in one direction you get a trend. The system is incredibly complex, melting in the arctic messes with the haline cycle (and recent changes in the Gulf Stream suggest global current changes may be imminent.) These changes would have profound effects on global climate particularly cutting warm currents to the extreme latitudes causing dramatically colder winters. So there are a number of possible outcomes, when you perturb a system as complex as global weather, it's like throwing dice, many possible things can happen because there are many competing feedback loops and we still can't produce predictive models with the subtlety to give us long term predictions of complex chaotic systems.

That said, we can look at more general possibilities and compare them against what has already happened, in other words if I create a model starting in 1850 and successfully predict general large scale climate features and event up until now, I have a reasonable probability of predicting some of the large scale events coming. As for pulling out a single anything, that's crap no single data point informs you of anything. Again, the only thing that matters are trends, and we have those, we have a whole bunch of trends.

And I wish for the love of Jebus you guys could have one of these conversation without blowing all kinds personal FUD, you can stick your presumptions where the sun don't shine. You haven't the foggiest idea what my political opinions are but its clear that if your as good at guessing politics as you are about noticing its getting hotter every year that it explains why you can't seem to make a cogent observation about physical reality. In the flagellating department I believe its better to give than to receive. Guilt is what nice people do to assuage their consciences for being irresponsible or committing unkind acts. I don't practice either, therefore no guilt. I never said the world was ending, not today or a week from Tuesday or in a thousand years. Humanity is extincting about a 1000 species a day now. Most are insects and various invertebrates. Still, in your and my lifetime, we'll see the last of all the big mammals in Africa, most in Asia, and nearly half of the world's rain forest will go away. The impact of the change we're perpetrating on the environment will come back to haunt us because our biology is intimately tied to the global biology... nature of ecosystems. Every human being is a river of biota, moving through us every moment are ten times as many cells without a human genome as with. Plow the ecosphere under and we're committing slow motion suicide. Life has ben here nearly 4 billion years and suffered far worse than us, it will get along fine without us. We're an apex predator, we'll be one of the first things to go. Or, we'll pull our collective heads out of our rear ends and design a global technology that supports human advance without turning the world into a toilet. Why is that

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/m7iDFllp22g/story01.htm

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