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The Great Global Warming/Cooling Thread Part 2


Evil Genius

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The same view, photographed 88 years apart, affords a striking contrast -- and a much diminished glacier.

David Breashears/Royal Geographic Society

 

Before the famed English mountaineer George Mallory died on Mount Everest, he was asked why he wanted to climb it, and his response, perhaps apocryphal, would become the three most famous words in mountaineering: "Because it's there." Something like that impulse had gripped Mallory years prior, when he joined the British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Team in its mission to explore the Himalayas and map a route to the summit now widely known as The Top of the World. Standing in Tibet in 1921, Mallory photographed the north face of the mountain that would claim his life three years later, no doubt marveling at its grandeur. He could scarcely imagine how another mountaineer would use his photograph almost nine decades hence.

That mountaineer is David Breashears, who told his story Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Undaunted by the scores who've died scaling Mt. Everest across the decades, Breashears summited there five times in three decades. He got to know the sherpas that help climbers ascend its slopes. They spoke of changes -- about less snow around the mountain, and more heat.

But he didn't grasp how fast things were changing until 2007.

 

 

 

 

Trekking in Tibet that year, he took out a reproduction of the old George Mallory photograph. "It showed the ice-encrusted north face of Everest and, below it, the great river of ice known as the Main Rongbuk Glacier, flowing in a sweeping, S-shaped curve down a broad, stony valley," he wrote in a magazine article about his efforts. "Eighty-six years after Mallory took that photograph, I sat in the exact spot where he had snapped his iconic picture. Pulling out his photo, I was stunned by the changes that had swept over this region. The wide river of ice had retreated more than half a mile, leaving a field of separated ice pinnacles melting into the rocky ground. In the distance, the ice streams on Everest's flank also had shrunk, exposing more of the mountain's dark face."

The juxtaposition struck him so powerfully that he's been trying to reproduce the same experience ever since. As it turns out, a lot of early mountaineers photographed Mt. Everest, it being there and all. They took other photographs in the Himalayas too. What they captured on film are now the "before" images that The Glacier Research Imaging Project juxtaposes with "after" photos of the same spot today. Breashears helped found the project, and held forth Wednesday about the sophisticated "after" images it is producing (the one above is the Kyetrak glacier in the Cho Oyu region).

He acknowledges that two data points captured many years apart do not tell us anything conclusive. But having observed the Himalayas over many years, and after studying them intensely in recent years, he is alarmed at the loss of ice. "The loss of these frozen reservoirs of water will have a huge impact, as the glaciers provide seasonal flows to nearly every major river system in Asia. From the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra in South Asia, to the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China, hundreds of millions of people are partially dependent on this vast arc of high-altitude glaciers for water," he recently wrote. "As the glaciers recede and release stored water, flows will temporarily increase. But once these ice reservoirs are spent, the water supply for an overpopulated continent will be threatened, and the impacts on water resources and food security could be dire."

It's a warning with echoes elsewhere. As Carolyn Kormann put it in a 2009 feature on the retreat of Andean glaciers:

 

 

Bolivia's famed Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country's coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru's population. And if warming trends continue, the study concluded, many of the Andes' tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador... So far this melting has brought temporary increases in stream flow and contributed to massive Amazonian floods that forced several hundred thousand people from their homes last year.

 

But within the next decade, scientists predict that this torrent of melt-water will turn into a trickle as glaciers shrink, meaning that the age-old source of water during the dry season will steadily dwindle. Some highland farmers near La Paz already report decreased water supplies.

 

In his Wednesday talk, Breashears predicted that the images he's producing will have a huge impact on the next generation and its attitudes toward climate change. "The data doesn't resonate. There is no imagery that corresponds to what we see in the charts," he said. But detailed, high resolution imagery of faraway glaciers and the ways that they're losing ice over time?

He believes they'll prove uniquely persuasive.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/can-this-photograph-of-mt-everest-persuade-people-that-climate-change-is-happening/259080/

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Exxon Mobil’s CEO believes fossil fuels cause climate change but humans can adapt to the warmer climate

Exxon Mobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson said that fossil fuels may cause global warming, but then argued that humans can easily adapt to the warmer climate. We’re fucked. Tillerson goes on to blame a lazy press, illiterate public and fear mongering advocacy groups placed on the oil industry. Did I mention that we’re fucked? Tillerson agrees that climate change is very real, but blames advocacy groups for what exactly — making the public aware? The horror!

But here’s the kicker:

 

He said that there will always be access to oil, and that it doesn’t matter where the U.S. gets oil because it is priced globally. Tillerson added that the U.S. only receiving oil from North America would still increase gas prices in the U.S. because it would cause a “disruption” in the Middle East.

 

And the other kicker:

 

Tillerson also addressed the topic of consequences related to oil/gas drilling techniques, saying that drilling will always present possible risks like spills and accidents. But he mentioned that such risks are manageable and worth the end result, which is the energy provided.

 

No biggie! The end result was worth it.

Tell that to Louisiana,Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, all whose coastlines have been affected by the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (aka: BP Oil Spill) which has turned out to be one of the worst oil disasters in history. People died. Hundreds upon hundreds of animals died as a result of the spreading oil. But, we’ll adapt, right?

http://freakoutnation.com/2012/07/01/exxon-mobils-ceo-believes-fossil-fuels-cause-climate-change-but-humans-can-adapt-to-the-warmer-climate/

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  • 2 weeks later...

Severe droughts, floods and heat waves rocked the world last year as greenhouse gas levels climbed, boosting the odds of some extreme weather events, international scientists said Tuesday.

The details are contained in the annual State of the Climate report, compiled by nearly 400 scientists from 48 countries and published in the peer-reviewed Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The report itself remains "consciously conservative" when it comes to attributing the causes of certain weather events to climate change, and instead refers only to widely understood phenomena such as La Nina.

However, it is accompanied for the first time by a separate analysis that explains how climate change may have influenced certain key events, from droughts in the US and Africa to extreme cold and warm spells in Britain.

"2011 was notable for many extreme weather and climate events. La Nina played a key role in many, but certainly not all of them," said Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s National Climatic Center. Last year was among the 15 warmest since records began in the late 1800s, and the Arctic warmed at about twice the rate of lower latitudes with sea ice at below average levels, according to the report.

Greenhouse gases from human pollution sources like coal and gas reached a new high, with carbon dioxide emissions exceeding 390 parts per million -- up 2.10 parts per million from 2010 -- for the first time since modern records began. Despite the natural cooling trend brought by back-to-back La Nina effects, which chill waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, 2011 was among the 12 highest years on record for global sea surface temperatures.

The double La Nina punch influenced many of the world's significant weather events, like historic droughts in East Africa, the southern US and northern Mexico, said the report. La Nina trends also were associated with the wettest two years on record in Australia. An accompanying analysis in the same journal, titled "Explaining Extreme Events," examined the links between human-driven climate change and six selected weather crises in 2011, including the Texas drought that lasted half the year.

The authors found that "such a heat wave is now around 20 times more likely during a La Nina year than it was during the 1960s," said Peter Stott, climate monitoring and attribution team leader at the UK Met Office. "We have shown that climate change has indeed altered the odds of some of the events that have occurred," he told reporters. "What we are saying here is we can actually quantify those changing odds."

Looking at Britain's unusually warm November 2011 and the cold snap of December 2010, scientists found that frigid Decembers are half as likely to occur now compared to 50 years ago, and hot Novembers are 62 times more likely.

However, a close look at the floods along the Chao Phraya River that swamped Thailand last year showed that climate change was not to blame, but rather human activities increased construction along the flood plain. The damage caused by the floods was unprecedented, but the amount of rain that actually fell "was not very unusual," said the analysis by experts from NOAA and Britain's Met Office along with international colleagues.

While it remains hard to link single events to human-caused climate change, "scientific thinking has moved on and now it is widely accepted that attribution statements about individual weather or climate events are possible," the report added.

The key is analyzing to what extent climate change may be boosting the odds of extreme weather, said the report, likening the phenomenon to a baseball player who takes steroids and then starts getting 20 percent more hits than before. Scientists can consider steroids as the likely cause for the increase in hits, but must still take care to account for natural variability in the player's swing.

More information: Paper: www1.ncdc.noaa.gov … on-et-al.pdf

 

http://phys.org/news...r-extremes.html

i don't like the hot weather <___base_url___>/uploads/emoticons/default_sad.png

Edited by qualia
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Brutal Bering Sea ice blocking Arctic supply ships

A relationship between Arctic sea ice melt and melting glaciers?

What’s the difference between a hurricane and Alaska’s mega storm?

Arctic ‘Strait of Gibraltar’ unlikely

CBC News | Eye on the Arctic | Jul 12, 2012

http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/brutal-bering-sea-ice-blocking-arctic-supply-ships

Brutal sea ice conditions that northwest Alaska battled all winter haven’t receded in parts of northern Canada. Two resupply ships are stuck waiting at the mouth of Frobisher Bay in Iqaluit because of tough ice conditions. Frobisher Bay is an inlet of the Labrador Sea.

In June, winds and currents pushed heavy ice in to the area, CBC News reported on Wednesday.

Now, two Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers are trying to punch a path through for the resupply vessels. However, the ice is so thick that it’s closing in around the icebreakers before the other ships can follow.

“Thirty miles of heavy ice to get to Pike Risser channel. And from Iqaluit you can see out your window … basically open water, but it’s ice out of Pike Risser channel. Outside of that, that is where the heavy ice is,” said Andy Maillet of the Coast Guard’s Arctic Operations Centre.

Maillet doesn’t expect the ice conditions to improve until mid-July. Rain and drizzle have made navigation even harder, cutting visibility.

One of the sealift ships that has stalled belongs to Nunavut Sea Link and Supply. Manasie Mark, who is with the company, said people have been calling to ask where their sealift is.

“I usually answer them by letting them know the ice conditions are bad at the moment and they are trying their best,” he said.

“I know they are going to (arrive eventually).”

One of the sealift boats has been diverted to Kimmirut, a Nunavut town of 400 on Hudson Strait, a instead of waiting for the ice to go away.

The Coast Guard said they have not seen conditions like this since 2009.

Since Nunavut has no road links with the rest of Canada, all the communities depend on an annual resupply of goods and fuel from ships.

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Canberra has the coldest winter mornings in 47 years

Mornings put a shiver through the capital

July 8, 2012

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/mornings-put-a-shiver-through-the-capital-20120708-21p0j.html#ixzz206FyK0Ny

Reader Peter Richens took this photo on the way to work on Wednesday, at Telopea Park. The tree has turned into icicles. In the photo is Callum Richens. Photo: Peter Richens

Canberra has shivered through its eighth straight freezing, frosty morning, the coldest stretch of winter mornings in 47 years.

The mercury dropped to a chilly minus 4.8 degrees at 6.51am this morning, topping off eight consecutive mornings below minus 2.3 degrees.

The eight-day cold spell, with an average minimum temperature of minus 4.9, is the coldest string of July mornings since 1965. The all-time record was in July 1962, when the average temperature over an eight-day period was minus 7.

The Canberra Times Winter Photo Competition

Canberrans felt the worst of the cold on Wednesday, when temperatures fell to minus 6.1 degrees, 6 degrees colder than the long-term July average of minus 0.1.

Wednesday’s low is still far from the record July minimum of minus 10 degrees, recorded in 1971, but is just shy of the lowest temperature recorded this year, which was minus 6.3 degrees on June 20.

Despite the cold start to the month, the ACT will be given some respite from the cold over the next week, and probably won’t be breaking any records for July as a whole.

Minimum temperatures will reach a relatively warm 0 degrees tomorrow, 6 degrees on Wednesday, and 4 degrees on Thursday.

But the warmer temperatures come courtesy of two bands of wet weather that are set to hit the capital beginning tomorrow, and leaving as much as 40mm of rain in its wake by the end of the week.

“We should start getting the first of it come through around lunchtime, and it will increase quite significantly around late afternoon into early evening,” Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Ryan White said.

“Come Wednesday morning, it should ease back to showers, but a lot of it will be on the Brindabellas.

“However another trough is making its way towards Canberra, so come lunch time again on Thursday we can expect similar sort of rain again.”

While the precipitation in the capital will fall mostly as rain, with the chance of some snow on the Brindabellas, the Snowy Mountains are expecting a big dump of snow between now and Thursday, with as much as 40cm predicted to fall before the weekend.

Weatherzone meteorologist Tim Hooton said last week’s cold was caused by a low pressure system over much of southern Australia, which created a large pool of cold air.

A high pressure system followed close behind, which meant there was little cloud cover and light winds. This allowed the cold pool of air to settle and any warm air that developed during the day to escape.

‘‘Historically, there’s been a few weeks of five days below minus 4 degrees, but it hasn’t been six days since 1976,’’ Mr Hooton said.

‘‘There was a cold front which passed over the south of the country late last week, but when a high moved over fairly soon after that, it cleared all the skies and allowed the cold pool to sit around leaving skies clear overnight,’’ he said.

The other states and territories had avoided the freezing minimum temperatures experienced in the ACT.

‘‘No one’s been hit as hard as Canberra has,’’ Mr Hooton said.

‘‘Most other states have had cloud cover, which has let them stay warmer overnight.’’

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Anchorage has a record year for snowfall

Anchorage still shoveling snow after record year

By Robert On July 6, 2012 · 12 Comments

http://iceagenow.info/2012/07/anchorage-shoveling-snow-record-year/

“We’ll be lucky if it’s gone by October or November,” said Glenn Ball, owner of American Landscaping.

Three bulldozer operators worked on the 4th of July trying to break down mountains of snow still towering over parts of Anchorage after the city broke its annual snowfall record of 132.6 inches.

Their job is to scrape off a top layer of gravel on the pile every day or so, because the gravel can insulate the snow and slow its melt.

“I don’t know how high it is now, looks like about 80 feet,” said Ball, as he looked up at what he estimated to be about 280,000 cubic yards of leftovers.

Eighty feet! That’s eight stories deep!

Cloudy skies and temperatures in the 50s mean it could be at least a few more months before the pile disappears.

“We’ll be lucky if it’s gone by October or November,” he said.

Which means they’ll be lucky if it’s gone before the winter snowstorms begin again.

Here’s a video of one of the bulldozers working on Alaska’s newest glacier:

http://www.ktuu.com/videogallery/70884255/Environment/Snow-Piles-Tower-Over-Anchorage-in-July

Thanks to Clay Olson and Jonathan Friend for this link

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not exactly sure what your weather reports are supposed to indicate slybacon? you could post stories of the record heat and droughts in US/UK as well.

Edited by qualia
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Slybacon you can't keep posting random weather events and expect us to believe that they are evidence for whatever conspiracy you think it is. You need to look at the overall picture - the scientific evidence - and for a start the science says global warming will induce increased precipitation - which will fall as snow in colder areas! It doesn't say there will be no snow at all. That's just daft.

Weather patterns get adjusted - there were a lot of broken records for cold in the US this last year - and yet they were dwarfed 7 to 1 by the number of hot weather records broken. Once again, cherry picking a cold weather event does not say anything about global temperatures.

The Coast Guard said they have not seen conditions like this since 2009.

 

Wow. I mean, wow. Since 2009. Wow. Are you saying the winter weather in Canada means climate change isn't happening?

This is a thread about CLIMATE CHANGE not RANDOM COLD WEATHER EVENTS and if you keep posting this stuff I will have to report you to EG for spam / trolling.

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This is a thread about CLIMATE CHANGE not RANDOM COLD WEATHER EVENTS and if you keep posting this stuff I will have to report you to EG for spam / trolling.

 

Hope u report everyone who posts news articles about climate change. You sound like a tool. Look at the first post on this page. Get over yourself

Seems only news in "support" of your story is acceptable.

Edited by Slybacon
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Slybacon, look at it this way. Just supposing you wrote a trip report about your Ayahuasca experience, and someone kept on coming along and claiming that "Ayahuasca doesn't work, it's all just a pack of lies, a conspiracy by shamans to make you buy in to their religion" and did that incessantly, every time you wanted to write anything at all about Aya, in fact every time you wrote anything at all about psychedelics they popped their head up and claimed that psychedelics don't work, it's a major conspiracy by druggies to take over the world and impose a fascist hippy government, and that bath salts are the same as Ayahuasca and anyone who smokes a bit of pot will bite people's face off and that you are a nazi who needs to get over yourself and that the science is all fucked up and no-one really knows anything about chemistry or psychology anyway and that they're only in it for the money .

You might just think they were weird, or annoying, and you might want them to go away and leave you alone to discuss your favourite subject in peace. I do believe there should be places for people knew to the science of climate change or drug chemistry to discuss their views, but there should also be places for people to discuss their experience - and maturely discuss how to deal with the science, how it is affecting people, and the way it all works without screaming conspiracy and calling each other nazi's. You can't do this on any of the mainstream media outlets (where it might be most useful) because they are completely clogged up with spammers none of whom give a shit about the science and prevent any sensible, mature discussion about something which is very real and potentially quite devastating to our planet and our species - and we can't even discuss it. We couldn't even use these forums if Torsten allowed Christian fundamentalists to spam religious anti-drug rage at us every time we started a new topic.

Sorry if it's upsetting to you, but this thread was specifically started to discuss the effects of climate change NOT to discuss conspiracy theories.

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20.9 Trillion is the number of pounds of CO2 that humans sent into the atmosphere in the last 12 months.

(Source: http://www.zerohedge...-start-argument )

Total atmospheric mass is 1.135×10^19 lb = 11 350 000 Trillion

(Source: http://en.wikipedia....sphere_of_Earth )

so that's...

21 Trillion pounds of CO2 that humans sent into

11 350 000 Trillion

A circular swimming pool 3.40m in diameter and 1.25m deep = 11 349.400 litres

(Source: http://www.poolandsp....uk/volcalc.htm )

So how much fluid would I have to add to this pool to get this 21 Trillion into perspective?

0.021 Litres (an aussie shot glass is 0.030 l) into

11 349.400 Litres

Isn't CO2 heavier than air? So you would have to pour the shot glass worth of plant nutrient/greenhouse gas onto the bottom of the pool.

And then what happens?

(I ain't no scientist or math genius. Might be worth checking the numbers yourself)

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How much cyanide would you need to disrupt the system of a human being so that it dies? Would it stay in a discrete form and not disperse throughout the system?

Just to get things in perspective.

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How much CO2 that's not attributed to humans goes into the atmosphere every year, just to see if the 21 trillion is even statistically relevant?

Do human being have cyanide as part of their systems already? They don't have depleted uranium. Perhaps a tax on that?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Koch-funded climate scientist: I was wrong, humans are to blame

July 29, 2012

The founder and director of a climate change study project funded heavily by the Koch brothers, who last year reversed course and said he believed global warming was real, has gone one step further, writing in a weekend op-ed in the New York Times that he is now convinced the phenomenon is caused by humans.

The BEST study, he wrote, found that the Earth had warmed by about two and a half degrees over the past 250 years, with the bulk of that spike occurring in the past 50 years. Moreover, he found that, “essentially all of this increase” was likely due to greenhouse gas emissions, a point climate change believers have accepted as fact for years.

To arrive at that conclusion, the group mapped the past two and a half centuries of global temperatures against various events, like solar flares and volcanic eruptions, and found that the temperature swings most closely corresponded to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide whose historical levels could be measured in arctic ice. Further, they also examined possible methodological problems skeptics cite about past studies, such as questions about the scope and selectivity of data, ultimately determining that those questions did not impact their finding.

“These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does,” Muller wrote.

Muller’s conversion is particularly notable because his research had been heavily bankrolled by the Koch’s, who have a well-documented history of financing climate change denial. A Greenpeace report earlier this year found that the Koch’s had given nearly $61.5 million since 1997 to groups denying climate change. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation donated $150,000 to the BEST study, more than any other single organization.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/29/koch-funded-climate-scientist-i-was-wrong-humans-are-to-blame/

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It's very surprising to hear that a paid skeptic would give up the easy money, just like that. Maybe he could no longer keep a straight face, or just felt super guilty for cashing in at the expense of the planet.

I guess it takes a looooooot of guts to do what he did especially since he'll be out of a job now.

meet... THE KOCH BROTHERS!!! <___base_url___>/uploads/emoticons/default_sad.png

 

 

Edited by Halcyon Daze
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"I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago." - Ken Caldeira

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I would expect the last three posters to print retractions....all sucked in again.

do you know something we don't?

did RICHARD A. MULLER not write the op.ed. piece in the NY Times?

http://www.nytimes.c...&pagewanted=all

was that written by someone else?

you'll have to explain how posting what appears to be a factual story about a sceptic changing his mind requires a retraction or constitutes being

"sucked in", otherwise i have no clue what you're on about, except to think you're just being a troll.

Edited by nabraxas
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I personally would expect Dolos to print their apology.

This is the final "nail in the coffin" for climate change denial.

Only the most extreme will be able to continue their ravings; anyone sane and sensible is now forced to accept the reality.

Time to move on.

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