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Climate change ?

With the Climate Change conference concluding in Paris, I caught the photograph with Al Gore sitting in the front, just beaming. Sure he is, he's thinking of all the millions he is going to add to fortune he has already amassed in his "global warming" campaign.
 
2016 was the hottest summer on record, with July being the hottest month ever. Now, one month or one year doesn't prove anything, but you have to be blind not to see the trend.


BY SETH BORENSTEIN
AP SCIENCE WRITER
Long, hot summer is one for records
2016 weather disasters caused $50B in losses
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press

Article Last Updated: Tuesday, September 20, 2016 7:48pm

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    Noah Berger/Associated Press file

    This summer’s, hot weather created havoc around the world, including a raging wildfire near Keenbrook, Calif. This summer, which ends Wednesday, featured floods that killed hundreds of people and caused more than $50 billion in losses around the globe.

    WASHINGTON – This summer’s weather was relentless and hellish, crowded with the type of record-smashing extremes that scientists have long warned about.

    The season ends Wednesday, and not a moment too soon. Summer featured floods that killed hundreds of people and caused more than $50 billion in losses around the globe, from Louisiana and West Virginia to China, India, Europe and the Sudan. Meanwhile, droughts parched croplands and wildfires burned from California to Canada to China and India. Toss in unrelenting record heat.

    From June to August, there were at least 10 different weather disasters that each caused more than $1 billion in losses, according to insurance industry tallies. With summer weather now seemingly stretching from May to September, extreme weather in that span killed well more than 2,000 people. And that’s without a major hurricane hitting a big U.S. city, although the Pacific had its share of deadly and costly storms, among them Typhoon Nepartak, which killed 111 people in Asia.

    “It is representing I think a notch up for the impacts we have had to deal with,” U.S. National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini said. “We’ve experienced an increasing number and a disturbing number of weather extremes this summer.”

    While flooding made the news, the “sneaky” thing about the summer was heat that did not even ease at night, said Deke Arndt, climate monitoring chief at the federal National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. When temperatures drop to below 72 (22.22 Celsius) at night it allows the body to recharge, plants to grow and air conditioners to be shut off. But this year that didn’t happen enough.

    The U.S. as a nation set a record for the hottest nighttime temperatures on average this summer, Arndt said. Tallahassee, Florida, for example, went 74 consecutive days where the nighttime temperature didn’t dip below 72.

    From May 1 to Sept. 12, nearly 15,000 daily records for warmest nighttime lows were set in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data .

    “This is one of the clearest signals we expect for climate change,” said Mark Bove, a New Jersey-based senior research meteorologist for re-insurance giant Munich RE, which tracks natural disasters. “It keeps a blanket on you particularly at night. We cannot radiate the heat away at night as the planet used to.”

    While records were broken, the summer has “been more notable for the consistency of the heat than individual high-impact heatwaves,” said Blair Trewin of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the World Meteorological Organization.

    For example, Savannah, Georgia, had a record 69 days in a row of 90 degrees (32.22 Celsius) or higher.

    Twelve U.S. cities had their warmest summers ever, including Las Vegas, New Orleans, Cleveland and Detroit. The globe had its hottest month on record (July) and hottest summer on record. August was the 16th consecutive month Earth set a monthly heat record, according to NOAA.

    Temperatures of 129 degrees (54 degrees Celsius) were recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait, and Basra, Iraq. If verified, these would be not only the hottest temperatures recorded for Asia, but the hottest recorded outside a much-debated record in Death Valley, according to weather historians.

    The extra heat – both in the air and oceans – puts significantly extra moisture in the air, which then comes down as more extreme downpours, said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And when an area is already dry, droughts worsen because warmer air takes more water out of the ground, like “levying a larger tax on the plants and soil moisture,” Arndt said.

    Baton Rouge and South Bend had their wettest summers, while Boston and Jacksonville had their driest summers.

    Climate scientists say what’s happened pretty much fits with what they’ve been saying would occur as the world warms. For most of the extreme events, they haven’t done the precise and detailed studies that can show that man-made climate change is to blame for certain extreme weather events. But they did do that for the Louisiana flooding, which NOAA said had its chances boosted by 40 percent because of heat-trapping gasses.

    NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the records keep showing the planet warming and “since we kind of predicted these things we know what we’re talking about.”

    Perhaps the most noticeable case of this being predicted was in a 1988 study by James Hansen, Schmidt’s predecessor as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies .

    In that study, using what scientists now call a crude computer model, Hansen forecast what would likely happen to Earth’s climate. With one of his scenarios, Hansen not only got the global temperature rise about right, he forecast big changes in the number of days when the overnight temperatures would not go below 75 and the daytime highs would exceed 95 in four cities by the 2010s.

    He was right – or underestimated how hot it would be – in six of eight categories.

    “The fact it’s come out with more or less around what was predicted is not surprising,” Hansen said. “The summer is when things show up easiest because the natural variability is the least in the summer. You notice the change more readily in the warm season.”
 
Want to Slow Climate Change? Stop Having Babies

Carbon dioxide doesn't kill climates; people do. And the world would be better off with fewer of them.

That's a glib summary of a serious and seriously provocative book by Travis Rieder, a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University.

When economists write about climate change, they'll often bring up something called the Kaya identity—basically a multiplication problem (not an espionage novel) that helps economists estimate how much carbon dioxide may be heading into the atmosphere. The Kaya identity says the pace of climate pollution is more or less the product four things:

How carbon-heavy fuels are
How much energy the economy needs to produce GDP
GDP per capita
Population

After years of policymakers' yammering about carbon-light or carbon-free this-or-that, Rieder basically zeroes in on the fact nobody wants to acknowledge: The number of people in the world—particularly in affluent countries—is literally a part of the equation.​
 
dan330 said:
and Trump .. wants to ignore it.....
Click to expand...
It's not just Trump, it's the entire Republican party, and "ignore" is far too kind a word for what they are doing. They actively seek to undermine the legitimate science by spreading crackpot conspiracy theories and denying common sense, all because big energy and their lobbyists have them in their pocket.
 
over population...
so.. you want to kill off billions of people.. who have as much right to life as YOU!

rather than stop mass fossil fuel consumption with better energy solutions..
reduce pollution around the world...
stop chemically killing off our planet...

lets look away from a good viable solutions...
come up with TRUMP -like BS.. to confuse the masses.

you are awesome!!!
 
dan330 said:
over population...
so.. you want to kill off billions of people.. who have as much right to life as YOU!
Click to expand...

1. I was only quoting a linked article, not expressing myself.
2. I believe that article refers to aborting the 'unborn,' not murdering 'existing' babies.
3. What you said there sounds very right-to-life, like someone who votes republican. Kudos.
 
dan330 said:
rather than stop mass fossil fuel consumption with better energy solutions..
Click to expand...

We will continue to burn off fossil fuel as long as it's economically the cheapest option. Look at the rate that China is building coal-fired power stations.

And for some crazy reason, the UK govt have decided to perpetuate the nuclear option, with a bizarre Chinese funded new nuclear reactor, rather than utilise greener alternatives. But that's a different issue.

reduce pollution around the world...
stop chemically killing off our planet...
Click to expand...

Great idea, but in reality, I can't see it happening any time soon, if at all. Although as food becomes more scarce/expensive, then this will probably force us to be less wasteful.
 
With her and Al pushing this, I'm convinced! :eek:

Speaking to supporters in Tampa, Hillary Clinton says climate change is “wreaking havoc on communities across America.” Clinton warns that Hurricane Hermine “is not the last one that’s going to hit Florida given what’s happening in the climate.” She says, “When it comes to protecting our country against natural disasters and the threat of climate change, once again, Donald Trump is totally unfit and unqualified”.​
 
LV426 said:
Great idea, but in reality, I can't see it happening any time soon, if at all. Although as food becomes more scarce/expensive, then this will probably force us to be less wasteful.
Click to expand...

I somehow doubt that's going to happen any time soon.

The Easter Islanders' civilisation was completely dependent on trees. They used the trees for things like firewood and building materials. They used so many trees, they cut them down faster than the trees grew. One day, there were no more trees. Their civilisation died. I bet there was a bunch of morons there claiming that there was no tree problem and that it was all because of sunspots or some other ridiculous nonsense right up until that last tree was hacked down.

The evidence for Climate Change is indisputable.

Our modern morons block efforts to do anything about Climate Change because initially, it'll cost money (totally ignoring the fact that it's also an opportunity to make bucket loads of money building an entirely new industry the size of all of the old energy markets combined). Those morons will continue to stop us doing anything about it until our civilisation goes the way of the Easter Islanders'.

Not sure what the morons will do with all that money they saved then.

You have to wonder why we have these huge brains when we so adamantly refuse to use them.
 
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Widespread blast of cold air plunges from Alaska to the western US early next week and then expands into the eastern US

While we end November on a warm note here in the eastern US, there are changes unfolding across the Northern Hemisphere that will likely bring a widespread very cold air mass into the US next week. This cold air mass is first going to arrive in Alaska this upcoming weekend with some spots in that state plunging to 40 degrees below zero and way below normal for early December. After that, the cold air dives into the western US during the first half of next week and then it’ll likely blast into the eastern US late next week. In fact, by the time Saturday, December 10th rolls around, there may be colder-than-normal conditions all the way from Alaska to the southeastern US. Beyond that, it looks like this colder pattern will indeed have some staying power as we move deeper into the month of December.​
 
Frigid air mass building in Alaska, poised to spill into Lower 48 next week

Alaska is witnessing its coldest air in almost two years, and some of the biting chill is forecast to plunge into the western United States in about a week’s time.

In Fairbanks on Tuesday morning, the temperature tanked to minus-31 degrees, ending a 624-day stretch in which it was warmer than that — the second longest on record. Tuesday afternoon, the mercury only recovered to minus-21, ending a record-long 658-day stretch with highs above minus-10.​
 
'Polar Plunge' ushers in coldest air of the season

Record-breaking wintry temperatures are gripping the eastern two-thirds of the country, signaling that this could be one of the coldest seasons in years.
Across the United States, 76 locations have shattered their daily record cold high temperatures for December since the beginning of the month. That means some towns saw their coldest December day ever.

The bad news is that it's going to get even colder for the rest of the week. Below-freezing temperatures are expected for 7 percent of the country -- in fact, most of the country will see the coldest air since last winter.​
 
U.S average temperature 16°F – colder than any time last winter, and winter hasn’t started yet!

If you think it is colder than you remember last year, your’e right. Winter hasn’t officially started yet, it begins on Wednesday, December 21st. But the numbers tell a cold hard fact: as of 7 a.m. EST this morning, Sunday, Dec. 18, the average temperature across the Lower 48 states of the U.S. is colder than any time all last winter.

As this plot of hourly temperatures shows, the average temperature is 16 degrees. F, which is 4 degrees colder than any time last winter. What’s worse, the coldest part of winter is still six weeks away.

upload_2016-12-18_18-2-40.png
 
I live in the mountains of Arizona. Each year, the lowest the temperature gets is about zero degrees fahrenheit, the highest about one hundred. It has been this way for over twenty years – nothing has changed, except for people like you and Al Gore telling me it has.
 
@jefboyardee Dude that last tax lowering by Republicans put me out of a job. Financial people (take that anyway you please) benefited, not for profit educational institutions suffered.

Personally I find it hard to believe that Earth's climate doesn't change. Could you imagine dinosaurs thriving in the cold?
 
the earth is a pretty bigly planet... with many climate areas...
as Global Warming continues.. it will change these climate areas...
some colder .. most warmer....
the aggregate temperature of the Earth will.. is getting warmer...

biggest evidence... are both North and South poles and the ice glaciers .. are melting... less land in both.
more water in the oceans of the world... moving more warm waters around...
eroding and eating up lands on all continents.

but.. yeah.. it was colder in a few places...
i guess we can ignore the rest!!!!
 
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