Warmest Winter on Record

pat · April 16, 2007, 3:54pm

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Prof. Richard Lindzen from MIT has a good article in Newsweek on this:

EXCERPT:

[i]Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down?not up?the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere.

Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise?a dubious proposition?future increases wouldn’t be as steep as the climb in emissions.

Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world’s average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees.

The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its “forcing”?its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn’t been uniform?warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.

Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don’t explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998.

Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn’t account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record?an effort that is now generally discredited.

The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Ni?o and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.

Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly.

Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.[/i][/quote]

Yup, he has it on the money. Those “models” they use are so inaccurate they are virtually useless. Besides if current weather is an indicator, I am freezing my ass off.

I believe current spike is an abberation will likely cycle in the opposite direction or level off in the next year or two.

Headhunter · April 16, 2007, 5:21pm

Global warming…one of the greatest practical jokes ever played on humanity.

“The bottom line, however, is that the IPCC estimates a trivial 0.6 ?C ? 0.2 ?C warming during the Twentieth Century and both the GHCN-ERSST Data Set and the HadCRUT2v Data Set record the period of the 19-teens through mid-1940s as having a global trend of +0.13 ?C/decade for a net warming of 0.45 ?C – leaving a mere 0.15 ?C ? 0.2 ?C net warming potential for the post-WWII period of significant carbon emission from fossil fuel use. It is evident, to us at least, that if positive feedback mechanisms exist (entirely plausible) then their effect is negligible or mitigated by negative feedback mechanisms (equally plausible). Unlike modelers, who alter their virtual worlds at whim, we can only measure what the world actually does, and there simply isn’t room in the measured change for the existence of significant unmitigated positive feedbacks.”

— from the junkscience site above.

lucasa · April 16, 2007, 10:00pm

Hurricane predictions for those who aren’t keeping track at home;

http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2007/april2007/

Section 12 has a recap of the predictions since 2001.

Also;

http://tsr.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/

Oddly enough, being a leader of the tropical storm prognostication industry, their numbers jive nicely with Gray’s (above), which is eerily similar to his 2006 forecast.

DS_007 · April 17, 2007, 4:54pm

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Marmadogg wrote:
I don’t know where FI has been hanging out but this has been the coldest winter in NJ since I moved here in 1998.

First of all, in December there were days where it was in the 50s and 60s.

We got one storm all year that was bad, and that was last week- all winter.

Now besides that, New Jersey is not the world… just because local temperatures are not rising doesn’t mean that the world’s temperature is not rising… you know this, don’t be an ass. [/quote]

global warming is a joke. if it’s a warm winter they warming freaks tell us it’s because we humans have caused global warming. cold winter? global warming. weather is local, douchebag. this winter, like every 4th or 5th winter was because of el nino.

we KNEW it was going to be warm…because of el nino and it was forecast to be warm…because of el nino. and when it was predicted that el nino would stop influencing the weather pattern and it would turn COLD…it did. that happened in mid/late-january. some parts of the country have been hit with snow ever since. maybe not new jersey. just go hide under your table you dumb liberal fuck.

anon31651765 · April 17, 2007, 11:28pm

[quote]DS 007 wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Marmadogg wrote:
I don’t know where FI has been hanging out but this has been the coldest winter in NJ since I moved here in 1998.

First of all, in December there were days where it was in the 50s and 60s.

We got one storm all year that was bad, and that was last week- all winter.

Now besides that, New Jersey is not the world… just because local temperatures are not rising doesn’t mean that the world’s temperature is not rising… you know this, don’t be an ass.

global warming is a joke. if it’s a warm winter they warming freaks tell us it’s because we humans have caused global warming. cold winter? global warming. weather is local, douchebag. this winter, like every 4th or 5th winter was because of el nino.

we KNEW it was going to be warm…because of el nino and it was forecast to be warm…because of el nino. and when it was predicted that el nino would stop influencing the weather pattern and it would turn COLD…it did. that happened in mid/late-january. some parts of the country have been hit with snow ever since. maybe not new jersey. just go hide under your table you dumb liberal fuck.[/quote]

You are a complete idiot.

The last ten years have seen the warmest winters in the last hundred and fifteen.

The ice caps are melting, the Greenland ice sheet is receding… why don’t you read the article before you respond next time you piece of shit.

I can deal with people who have valid points or wish to argue… not invalids who can barely punctuate sentences, much less comprehend an article. Go back to your cave bud, and save me the headache of trying to read your jibberish.

Try finger painting first, it might help the process along.

DS_007 · April 18, 2007, 11:56am

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
DS 007 wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Marmadogg wrote:
I don’t know where FI has been hanging out but this has been the coldest winter in NJ since I moved here in 1998.

First of all, in December there were days where it was in the 50s and 60s.

We got one storm all year that was bad, and that was last week- all winter.

Now besides that, New Jersey is not the world… just because local temperatures are not rising doesn’t mean that the world’s temperature is not rising… you know this, don’t be an ass.

global warming is a joke. if it’s a warm winter they warming freaks tell us it’s because we humans have caused global warming. cold winter? global warming. weather is local, douchebag. this winter, like every 4th or 5th winter was because of el nino.

we KNEW it was going to be warm…because of el nino and it was forecast to be warm…because of el nino. and when it was predicted that el nino would stop influencing the weather pattern and it would turn COLD…it did. that happened in mid/late-january. some parts of the country have been hit with snow ever since. maybe not new jersey. just go hide under your table you dumb liberal fuck.

You are a complete idiot.

The last ten years have seen the warmest winters in the last hundred and fifteen.

The ice caps are melting, the Greenland ice sheet is receding… why don’t you read the article before you respond next time you piece of shit.

I can deal with people who have valid points or wish to argue… not invalids who can barely punctuate sentences, much less comprehend an article. Go back to your cave bud, and save me the headache of trying to read your jibberish.

Try finger painting first, it might help the process along.[/quote]

you really told me there, bud! nice work. problem is all of your ‘facts’ are wrong. PARTS of the ‘greenland icesheet’ are receding. overall the icecaps are actually expanding.

the warmest year on record in the last 100 years was in the 1930s. go figure, huh? that little nugget has been a hurdle for your global warming, greenhouse gas, man is killing the planet scientists. they overcome it by just ignoring it.

i’m and idiot? at least i’m bright enough to research this ‘science’, not follow it blindly because it fits my skewed world view. not sure what your’s is en totale. but chances are your under 25. lazy. probably have an idiotic website on which you further embarrass yourself with ravings you call poetry. po-et-ry? brilliant.

anon31651765 · April 18, 2007, 12:58pm

[quote]DS 007 wrote:

you really told me there, bud! nice work. problem is all of your ‘facts’ are wrong. PARTS of the ‘greenland icesheet’ are receding. overall the icecaps are actually expanding.

the warmest year on record in the last 100 years was in the 1930s. go figure, huh? that little nugget has been a hurdle for your global warming, greenhouse gas, man is killing the planet scientists. they overcome it by just ignoring it.

i’m and idiot? at least i’m bright enough to research this ‘science’, not follow it blindly because it fits my skewed world view. not sure what your’s is en totale. but chances are your under 25. lazy. probably have an idiotic website on which you further embarrass yourself with ravings you call poetry. po-et-ry? brilliant. [/quote]

Ah… no, they’re not.

"The Greenland ice sheet occupies about 82% of the surface of Greenland, and if melted would cause sea levels to rise by 7.2 metres[3]. Estimated changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet suggest it is melting at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometres (57.3 cubic miles) per year [1].

These measurements came from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, launched in 2002, as reported by BBC News, 11 August 2006."

The IPCC projects that ice mass loss from melting of the Greenland ice sheet will continue to outpace accumulation from snowfall. Accumulation from snowfall on the Antarctic ice sheet is projected to outpace losses from melting.

However, loss of ice mass on the Antarctic ice sheet may continue, if there is sufficient loss of ice mass via outlet glaciers. According to the IPCC, scientific understanding of dynamical ice flow processes is currently “limited”.

The Greenland ice sheet is melting three times faster today than it was five years ago, according to a new study.

The finding adds to evidence of increased global warming in recent years and indicates that melting polar ice sheets are pushing sea levels higher, the authors report.

According to the study, Greenland ice loss now amounts to more than 48 cubic miles (200 cubic kilometers) each year.

“Significant melting has a significant impact on sea level rise,” said Jianli Chen, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who led the study.

The finding, reported today by the online edition of the journal Science, closely agrees with another study on the rapid wasting of Greenland’s glaciers published in the journal in February.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-greenland.html

Should I keep going fucknut? Cause I can.

A new study of the mass of ice capping Greenland reveals that the giant ice sheet burying the island has rapidly lost mass in recent years due to melting and iceberg calving. Between 2003 and 2005, the island?s low coastal areas shed 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice per year, while snow accumulation in the interior of the ice sheet was only 54 gigatons per year.

The amount of ice lost in two years is roughly the same as the amount of water that flows through the Colorado River in 12 years. ?In the 1990s, the ice was very close to balance with gains at about the same level as losses. That situation has now changed significantly,? said lead researcher Scott Luthcke of the Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory at NASA?s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Science Daily ? For the first time NASA scientists have analyzed data from direct, detailed satellite measurements to show that ice losses now far surpass ice gains in the shrinking Greenland ice sheet.

The seasonal cycle of increased mass loss during the summer melt season and growth during winter is clearly captured," said co-author Jay Zwally, ICESat project scientist. The new results also capture more precisely where changes are taking place, showing that the losses of ice mass are occurring in the same three drainage systems where other studies have reported increased glacier flow and ice-quakes in outlet glaciers.

The new results show a dramatic speed up in the rate of ice mass loss since the late 1990’s that is nearly identical to reports earlier this year based on radar measurements of glacier acceleration.

Although the ice mass loss observed in the new study is less than half of what other recent research has reported, the results show that Greenland is now losing 20% more mass than it receives from new snowfall each year. “This is a very large change in a very short time,” said Zwally.

“In the 1990’s, the ice sheet was growing inland and shrinking significantly at the edges, which is what climate models predicted as a result of global warming. Now the processes of mass loss are clearly beginning to dominate the inland growth, and we are only in the early stages of the climate warming predicted for this century.”

Keep making pussy attempts to attack me…but it’s pretty damn clear you don’t know what you’re talking about, and haven’t backed yourself with anything but ridiculous ramblings that make you seem like an illiterate dipshit (probably not far off). I mean, damn man, the website even gives you a spell check…

DS_007 · April 18, 2007, 2:45pm

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:

[/quote]

i can find as much info refuting your info…such as:

Global Warming, Melting Ice Caps and Rising Sea Levels
by Patrick Michaels (November 12, 2005)

One of the great fears generated by global warming is that the ocean is about to rise and swallow our coasts. These concerns have been heightened by the substantial uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity that began in 1995.

The frequency of really strong storms striking the U.S now resembles what it was in the 1940s and 50s, which few people (aging climatologists excepted) remember.

Those arguing that global warming is an overblown issue have been claiming for years that “consensus” forecasts of sea-level are equally overwrought. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a global average rise of from 3.5 to 34 inches by 2100, with a central estimate of 19 inches. Depending upon how you slice or dice the data, the last century saw maybe six inches.

Critics have long argued that these changes require a substantial net melting of some combination of the world’s two largest masses of land-based ice, Antarctica and Greenland. In addition, they note that observed global warming is right near the low end of the U.N.'s projections, which means that realized sea level rise should be similarly modest.

Over 15 years ago, John Sansom published a paper in Journal of Climate that showed no net warming of Antarctica. While it was widely cited by critics of global warming doom, no one seemed to take notice. After all, it relied on only a handful of stations. Then, in 2002, Peter Doran published a more comprehensive analysis in Nature and found a cooling trend.

At the same time, a deluge of stories appeared, paradoxically, about Antarctic warming. These studies concentrated on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the narrow strip of land that juts out towards South America. That region, which comprises less than one-half of one percent of Antarctica, is warming because the surrounding ocean has warmed.

Warmer water evaporates more moisture. The colder the land surface over which that moisture passes, the more it snows. So, Antarctica as a whole should gain snow and ice. Last year, C.H. Davis published a paper in Science about how this accumulating snowfall over East Antarctica was reducing sea level rise. This year, Duncan Wingham, at the 2005 Earth Observations summit in Brussels, demonstrated the phenomenon is observed all over Antarctica.

Greenland is more complex. In 2000, William Krabill estimated the contribution of Greenland to sea level rise of 0.13 mm per year, or a half an inch per century. That’s not very much different than zero. Just last month, using satellite altimetry, O.M. Johannessen published a remarkable finding in Science that the trend in Greenland ice is a gain of 5.4 cm (two inches) per year.

Almost all of the gain in Greenland is for areas greater than 5000 feet in elevation (which is most of the place). Below that, there is glacial recession. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that because no one ventures into the hostile interior of Greenland, all we see are pictures of the receding glaciers near the coast!

The temperature situation in Greenland is more mixed than in Antarctica. Over the last 75 years, there’s been cooling in the southern portion (where the recession is greatest) and some warming in the North.

The only other masses of ice on the planet that can contribute to sea level rise are the non-polar glaciers, but they are very few and far between. The biggest is the Himalayan ice cap, but it’s so high that a substantial portion will always remain. Most of the rest are teeny objects tucked away in high elevation nooks and crannies, like our Glacier National Park.

If all these glaciers melted completely – including the Himalayan ice cap – sea level could rise no more than five to seven inches, because there’s just not that much mass of ice, compared to Antarctica and Greenland.

It is simply impossible for the scientific community to ignore what is going on, even as prone to exaggeration of threats as it has grown to be. The planet is warming at the low end of projections. Antarctica is undoubtedly gaining, not losing ice. Greenland appears to either lose a little ice, or, in the recent study of Johannessen, gain dramatically. It’s going to take some time for it to contribute much to rising oceans.

Meanwhile, Antarctica grows. Computer models, while still shaky, are now encountering reality, and every one of them now says that Antarctica contributes negatively to sea level rise in the next century, while almost every model now has Greenland’s contribution as a few inches, at best.

It is inevitable that one of tomorrow’s headlines will be that scientists have dramatically scaled back their projections of sea level rise associated with global warming. Had they paid attention to data (and snow) that began accumulating as long as fifteen years ago, they would have never made such outlandish forecasts to begin with.

This article first appeared in Tech Central Station.

References:

Davis, C.H., et al., 2005. Snowfall-driven growth in East Antarctic ice sheet mitigates recent sea-level rise. SciencExpress, May 19, 2005.

Doran, P.T., et al., 2002. Antarctic climate cooling and terrestrial ecosystem response. Nature, 415, 517-520.

Johannessen, O.M., et al., 2005. Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland, Sciencexpress, October 20.

Krabill, W., et al., 2005. Greenland Ice Sheet: High-Elevation Balance and Peripheral Thinning, Science, 289, 428-430.

Sansom, J., 1989. Antarctic Surface Temperature Time Series. Journal of Climate, 2, 1164-1172.

DS_007 · April 18, 2007, 2:48pm

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
DS 007 wrote: