253 replies to this topic

[platypus]

I'm pessimistic. The fossil fuels will be burned. Perhaps geoengineering can help but still we need to kiss the current climate status quo goodbye...

There is no such thing as a "climate status quo".

Not in a longer timeframe, you're right. It's just that we kind of need the current weather patterns to sustain current levels of farming. The missing Arctic ice is changing the weather and we don't have much margin for feeding the planet.

[JLL]

Warmer climate = more farming, not less.

Edited by JLL, 26 August 2012 - 05:35 PM.

[platypus]

Warmer climate = more farming, not less.

Not really. More precipitation at the right times over fertile lands = more farming. How do you fight prolonged droughts and dust-bowl like conditions without dropping the yields?

[johnross47]

The daily updating graph of polar ice extent crossed the line into new record low territory today, and it doesn't look like changing direction soon. It normally reaches it lowest point around the first week of September.http://www.realclimate.org/

[platypus]

The daily updating graph of polar ice extent crossed the line into new record low territory today, and it doesn't look like changing direction soon. It normally reaches it lowest point around the first week of September.http://www.realclimate.org/

Yes, and the low area is a symptom caused by the low sea ice volume. I have a feeling the August PIOMAS-number will be less than stellar..

[maxwatt]

the desert of central mexico is green this year from monsoon-like rains where normally the summer is totally dry.
the North American grain belt is a sun-baked desert,
what else is new?
no guarantee this will become a stable climate, change is unpredictable.

[johnross47]

Normal variability in weather is the reason they use ten year rolling averages for plotting long term trends, so it takes a long time for any new pattern to be recognised. Among the prediction concerning warming, however, are increasing instability and variability. There should be more extreme deviations from the long term mean, more bigger storms, bigger droughts, more rain in other places etc. The popular perception of the state of the climate tends to be local; it's hot here so it's heating up, or we've just had our fourth monsoon like summer so its going to rain for ever. On a global scale however there is the same amount of energy in the total system as there was the year before (apart from any long term steady change) and the location of events just moves around. The problem is to isolate the long term subtle warming signal from the local variations. Not so easy to get the man in the street to see.

[robomoon]

---(quote shortened)---
... I've only been designing advanced dirigibles for 40 years to deaf ears.

Feel free to join my Yahoo group "Bouyant Sky" and we can have a a discussion on dirigible tech there. It is a private group so...

Regarding airship design, most people got a natural propensity for the mono hull with its outstanding phallic shape. It could be the rounding of tandem shaped blimps disturbing the people's inner peace. Two protruding hulls from tandem blimps as a new form secretly emphasizes the dominating power of huge female breasts. They could only hurt anyone's undying believe in the absolute superiority of manhood.

However, those blimps must expose a thin - and therefore quite damageable texture of their two hulls getting formed by the pressure of lifting gas. These two hulls are loosing their buxom shape after getting punctured by nothing more powerful but only a pocket knife or the arrow from an ordinary bow. The thin texture making two hulls so fragile works like mockery for the vulnerability of the skin covering a tandem shaped organ as one bedrock of manhood per se.

Therefore, those lighter-than-air blimps might not be more supported to hover very often in the sky for lower fuel consumption within climate research.

[JLL]

Warmer climate = more farming, not less.

Not really. More precipitation at the right times over fertile lands = more farming. How do you fight prolonged droughts and dust-bowl like conditions without dropping the yields?

Inevitably some areas will be dryer and result in lower yields, but when you think of the whole planet, warmer is better -- up to a point (which we'll never reach) of course.

[platypus]

Warmer climate = more farming, not less.

Not really. More precipitation at the right times over fertile lands = more farming. How do you fight prolonged droughts and dust-bowl like conditions without dropping the yields?

Inevitably some areas will be dryer and result in lower yields, but when you think of the whole planet, warmer is better -- up to a point (which we'll never reach) of course.

Why is it "better"? I live 40 degrees North and it gets pretty damn hot in August already. How about the latitudes closer to the equator?

Edited by platypus, 18 September 2012 - 02:56 PM.

[platypus]

Greenland is losing mass five times faster than in the early 1990's.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-20543483

https://www.sciencem...t/338/6111/1183

Edited by platypus, 29 November 2012 - 11:35 PM.

[Mind]

There are certainly a lot of data points showing a warming world. People still remain skeptical of the "doom-n-gloom" prophecies, because everything is still pretty good. In the last 20 some odd years of AGW hysteria, everything has remained relatively "good" for most people of the world. We are passing many milestones of temperature, ice-melting, what-not, and the world has not ended, so people will remain skeptical.

It probably mostly boils down to food. If people have enough to eat, they will be ok with AGW. If the drought in the U.S. continues and/or affects more productive farming areas of the world simultaneously, then people will start to react more, aiming for lower carbon strategies.

[maxwatt]

...and a happy New Year.
Climate Story Of The Year: Extreme Weather From Superstorms To Drought Emerges As Political, Scientific Gamechanger
Posted: 21 Dec 2012 09:30 AM PST
Global Warming, Record Arctic Ice Loss Create Deadly ‘New Normal’ With Twenty-Five Billion-Dollar U.S. Weather Disasters In 2 Years

This year brought staggering weather extremes, record loss of Arctic ice and a growing body of scientific analysis linking the two. Those extremes, plus Superstorm Sandy, raised public concern about the immediate threat posed by climate change, providing a palpable debunking of the (mistaken) belief that climate change will impact only future generations or people in faraway lands.
The superstorm — which scientists explained was made far more destructive by manmade climate change – hit the media where it lives and may have been a game changer for many of them, as the Bloomberg Businessweek cover suggests.
Sandy “may have also reset the politics of climate change,” as the UK Guardian noted today (see, for instance, “Michael Bloomberg Endorses Obama, Citing Climate Change As Main Reason“). The official nomination today of climate hawk John Kerry for Secretary of State is a hopeful sign that the president will (finally) raise the salience of this most preventable of existential threats to modern human civilization.
The AP year-end wrap up explained that 2012 should not have been a surprise to anyone who has been listening to climate scientists:

In 2012 many of the warnings scientists have made about global warming went from dry studies in scientific journals to real-life video played before our eyes: Record melting of the ice in the Arctic Ocean. U.S. cities baking at 95 degrees or hotter. Widespread drought. Flooding. Storm surge inundating swaths of New York City.
All of that was predicted years ago by climate scientists and all of that happened in 2012.

Indeed, 2012 showed that the record-smashing weather extremes of 2011 weren’t a fluke, they were a pattern.

America’s heartland lurched from one extreme to the other without stopping at “normal.” Historic flooding in 2011 gave way to devastating drought in 2012.
“The normal has changed, I guess,” said U.S. National Weather Service acting director Laura Furgione. “The normal is extreme.”

Here is how meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters put it in his 2012 sum up:

It was another year of incredible weather extremes unparalleled in American history during 2012. Eleven billion-dollar weather disasters hit the U.S., a figure exceeded only by the fourteen such disasters during the equally insane weather year of 2011.

Even without including the 2012 disasters, Munich Re, a top reinsurer, found for the first time a “climate-change footprint” in the rapid rise of North American extreme weather catastrophes:

“Climate­-driven changes are already evident over the last few decades for severe thunderstorms, for heavy precipitation and flash flood­ing, for hurricane activity, and for heatwave, drought and wild­-fire dynamics in parts of North America.”

Many top climatologists agree with that assessment. Dr. Kevin Trenberth explained in his must-read 2012 paper “How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change“:

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be….

A growing number of climatologists are warning that we have undergone a “systemic change”:

These are “clearly not freak events,” but “systemic changes,” said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany. “With all the extremes that, really, every year in the last 10 years have struck different parts of the globe, more and more people absolutely realize that climate change is here and already hitting us.”

A growing body of scientific research links this systemic change to global warming, in particular to loss of Arctic ice far more rapid than any climate model had predicted:

• NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather
• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events “Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves“
• Must-See Video: Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?

Human activity is utterly reshaping the Arctic as this remarkable figure makes clear:

Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected (actual observations in red). The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks. The image (from Climate Crocks via Arctic Sea Ice Blog) comes from a 2007 GRL research paper by Stroeve et al.

And much more change is yet to come, as a dire new report from NOAA warns (see “NOAA: Climate Change Driving Arctic Into A ‘New State’ With Rapid Ice Loss And Record Permafrost Warming“). Two of the most worrisome highlights are:

• Below the tundra, record high permafrost temperatures occurred in northernmost Alaska.
• Duration of melting was the longest observed yet on the Greenland ice sheet, and a rare, nearly ice sheet-wide melt event occurred in July.

If — or apparently when — the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, sea levels will rise 20 feet. The process is accelerating to a critical “tipping point” (see also “Science Stunner: Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s”). The tundra is a frozen locker of carbon whose defrosting will further accelerate warming (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100).”
More and more cryoscientists are warning of a death spiral, with “Near Ice-Free Arctic In Summer” In A Decade If Volume Trends Continue. Such a dramatic change to the northern hemisphere would inevitably have an even more extreme impact on our weather — and on all of humanity.
Indeed, in 2011, the climate story of the year was “Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security.”
Oxfam had warned last year that corn or maize would see a 177% rise in price by 2030 due to climate change and other factors (see Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World).

Further modeling this year of the impact of warming-driven extreme weather shocks leads Oxfam to conclude corn prices could increase a staggering 500% by 2030.

Note: The “additional price increase” percentage is calculated off the original price increase.

So perhaps the climate story of the year is that homo sapiens (aka the slowly boiling brainless frog) let another year go by without serious action to reverse carbon pollution trends, moving us ever closer to irreversible tipping points that would cause widespread harm to hundreds of millions if not billions. When will the madness stop?
Related 2012 Posts:

• Shocking World Bank Climate Report: ‘A 4°C [7°F] World Can, And Must, Be Avoided’ To Avert ‘Devastating’ Impacts
• Study: We’re Headed To 11°F Warming And Even 7°F Requires ‘Nearly Quadrupling The Current Rate Of Decarbonisation’
• NY Times Warns On Climate Change: ‘Fear Death By Water’, Rising Seas Likely To Swallow Up City If We Don’t Act Soon
• Scientific American: ‘Loss of Ice, Melting Of Permafrost And Other Climate Effects Are Occurring At An Alarming Pace’
• New Scientist Special Report: 7 Reasons Climate Change Is ‘Even Worse Than We Thought’
• An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces

[robosapiens]

And now, something completely different
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