Global Warming?

[Bcrazy]

Science News Blog Cite Save Email Print Share Cooling the Warming Debate: Major New Analysis Confirms That Global Warming Is Real
ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2011) — Global warming is real, according to a major study released Oct. 20. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s.


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•Environmental Issues
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Reference
•Instrumental temperature record
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•Temperature record of the past 1000 years
Analyzing temperature data from 15 sources, in some cases going as far back as 1800, the Berkeley Earth study directly addressed scientific concerns raised by skeptics, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of data selection bias.

On the basis of its analysis, according to Berkeley Earth's founder and scientific director, Professor Richard A. Muller, the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K.," Muller said. "This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Previous studies, carried out by NOAA, NASA, and the Hadley Center, also found that land warming was approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s, and that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results. But their findings were criticized by skeptics who worried that they relied on ad-hoc techniques that meant that the findings could not be duplicated. Robert Rohde, lead scientist for Berkeley Earth, noted that "the Berkeley Earth analysis is the first study to address the issue of data selection bias, by using nearly all of the available data, which includes about 5 times as many station locations as were reviewed by prior groups."

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth, said she hopes the Berkeley Earth findings will help "cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way." This will be especially important in the run-up to the COP 17 meeting in Durban, South Africa, later this year, where participants will discuss targets for reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions for the next commitment period as well as issues such as financing, technology transfer and cooperative action.

The Berkeley Earth team includes physicists, climatologists, and statisticians from California, Oregon, and Georgia. Rohde led the development of a new statistical approach and what Richard Muller called "the Herculean labor" of merging the data sets. One member of the group, Saul Perlmutter, was recently announced as a winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (for his work in cosmology).

The Berkeley Earth study did not assess temperature changes in the oceans, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not warmed as much as land. When averaged in, they reduce the global surface temperature rise over the past 50 years -- the period during which the human effect on temperatures is discernable -- to about two thirds of one degree Centigrade.

Specifically, the Berkeley Earth study concludes that:

•The urban heat island effect is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to the average land temperature rise. That's because the urban regions of Earth amount to less than 1% of the land area.
•About 1/3 of temperature sites around the world reported global cooling over the past 70 years (including much of the United States and northern Europe). But 2/3 of the sites show warming. Individual temperature histories reported from a single location are frequently noisy and/or unreliable, and it is always necessary to compare and combine many records to understand the true pattern of global warming.
•The large number of sites reporting cooling might help explain some of the skepticism of global warming," Rohde commented. "Global warming is too slow for humans to feel directly, and if your local weather man tells you that temperatures are the same or cooler than they were a hundred years ago it is easy to believe him." In fact, it is very hard to measure weather consistently over decades and centuries, and the presence of sites reporting cooling is a symptom of the noise and local variations that can creep in. A good determination of the rise in global land temperatures can't be done with just a few stations: it takes hundreds -- or better, thousands -- of stations to detect and measure the average warming. Only when many nearby thermometers reproduce the same patterns can we know that the measurements were reliably made.
•Stations ranked as "poor" in a survey by Anthony Watts and his team of the most important temperature recording stations in the U.S., (known as the USHCN -- the US Historical Climatology Network), showed the same pattern of global warming as stations ranked "OK." Absolute temperatures of poor stations may be higher and less accurate, but the overall global warming trend is the same, and the Berkeley Earth analysis concludes that there is not any undue bias from including poor stations in the survey.
Four scientific papers setting out these conclusions have been submitted for peer review and will form part of the literature for the next IPCC report on Climate Change. They can be accessed on: www.BerkeleyEarth.org. A video animation graphically shows global warming around the world since 1800.

Berkeley Earth is making its preliminary results public, together with its programs and dataset, in order to invite additional scrutiny. Elizabeth Muller said that "one of our goals is to make the science behind global warming readily accessible to the public." Most of the data were previously available on public websites, but in so many different locations and different formats that most people could access only a small subset of the data. The merged database, which combines 1.6 billion records, is now accessible from the Berkeley Earth website: www.BerkeleyEarth.org .

What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions, Richard Muller acknowledged. As a next step, Berkeley Earth plans to address the total warming of the oceans, with a view to obtaining a more accurate figure for the total amount of global warming observable.

More information about Berkeley Earth is available at www.BerkeleyEarth.org.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature.

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MLA Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (2011, October 21). Cooling the warming debate: Major new analysis confirms that global warming is real. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 30, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com* /releases/2011/10/111021144716.htm
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Comparison of data showing decadal land-surface average world temperature changes from 15 different sources, some going back as far as 1800. (Credit: Image courtesy of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature)
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It's All in a Name: 'Global Warming' Vs


Mo the microscopist

 

[Bcrazy]

So endeth the debate!

Mo

 

[Skyhook]

So endeth the debate!

Mo

 

[For want of a better word]

So endeth the debate!

Mo

What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions, Richard Muller acknowledged. As a next step, Berkeley Earth plans to address the total warming of the oceans,


Not an end... a new beginning!:

If the NAD / GYRE gets switched off due to CLIMATE CHANGES....
THE NEXT ICE AGE COMETH !

 

[JamezF]

Does it matter if it's anthropogenic or not?

If the average global temperature rises by, say, two centigrade then aren't we still up the same smelly waterway without a means of locomotion regardless of the cause?

Or will people just sit around wringing their hands if it can be "proven" that it isn't anthropogenic, and perhaps try to do something about it if it is?

James

 

[Brosville]

As I've said several times, it matters not a jot if it's rising, falling, or doing a rumba, what it does help point out is that there are too many of us doing too much stuff, we're depleting all our resources at a frightening rate, and polluting the bejaysus out of the planet - the "answer" is pretty much the same all round - we must curb population growth, and find genuinely sustainable ways to proceed in all aspects of life, so that the generations that come after us have a planet fit to live on...
I believe we are the cause of global warming (it's been far too swift to be "natural"), and that we are nearing several dangerous "tipping points" beyond which several natural systems go into "runaway" states.

I think a good illustration of that is early transistor usage - they had a nasty habit of entering a state of "thermal runaway" if pushed a little too far - up to a certain level they'd work fine, but if the temperature or power was too high they would start heating up, which made them draw more current, so they heated up some more, and drew more current, and so on until they failed or went on fire....

 

[Storm™]

Does it matter if it's anthropogenic or not?

If the average global temperature rises by, say, two centigrade then aren't we still up the same smelly waterway without a means of locomotion regardless of the cause?

Or will people just sit around wringing their hands if it can be "proven" that it isn't anthropogenic, and perhaps try to do something about it if it is?

James

Quite simply yes it does matter.

1. If it is US (and it isn't btw) then we can find ways of stopping what we are doing to make it worse.
2. And because it isn't we should not have to finance the stopping - as we do now. But till scientist sort it out and agree then governments have cart Blanche to use it as a vehicle to tax us as do businesses. And that's a good scheme cause they win funding, bonuses, income from being green.

Volcanoes erupting in no way make things worse oh no.

When the United States, china, Russia, Pakistan and a few others ignited the ionosphere with projects known as high altitude nuclear testing, that didnt hurt at all. So this was attributable to US.

But there are many natural phenomena that cause far more damage far quicker than us. Last test was china 1980/1/2/3 ish btw.

It's easy to start crumpling your plaaaaastic as it's called now and whatever else and send it to recycling but it's harder to swallow the science. Even the long post above says they have not yet looked into whether it's us. Odd that I think.
More and more scientists are distancing themselves from the man made argument and looking at solar flares - earth expanding argument. Easy to find online btw the graphs for warming versus flares. Match peak for peak - CO2 production versus flares. Peak for peak.

And hey the earth changes lots we seem to think we are it and we are a microbe on a flies poo if the fly were a midge.

 

[Skyhook]

Does it matter if it's anthropogenic or not?

If the average global temperature rises by, say, two centigrade then aren't we still up the same smelly waterway without a means of locomotion regardless of the cause?

Or will people just sit around wringing their hands if it can be "proven" that it isn't anthropogenic, and perhaps try to do something about it if it is?

James

It is quite possibly a mixture of natural and man-made.

1) We know that CO2 is an insulator- fact. You can try this in test tubes until you're blue in the face, and it works every time.

2) We know that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the better it insulates- fact. See point 1.

3) We know that fossil fuels contain large amounts of carbon, which when burned, release large amounts of CO2. Fact.

4) We know that trees take in carbon. If you cut them down and burn them or let them rot eg deforestation due to population growth, the carbon is released as CO2. Fact.

5) Yes, volcanos also release CO2. We can't do anything about that. Fact.

But given that the climate we've enjoyed suits us really well, and that it's change is partly due to one factor that we can't effect, doesn't that make it more imperative that we do as much as we can on thoses elements that we can change?

 

[Bcrazy]

Keep going members i find this fasinating.

Mo

 

[Storm™]

Yes fossil fuels release CO2 when burned. But it absorbed it in the first place before it was burnt/crushed/transformed. So presumably drove it down before nature - not man - nature trashed it. So the earth survived that.

Volcanoes do produce HUGE HUGE HUGE amounts of the stuff. In fact cataclysmic amounts of the stuff. To say "yes well we can't do anything about that" and try and reduce it's importance is wrong. It's HUGE continuous and it seems ever growing lately.

Thousand upon millions upon billions of trees are planted every single year - world wide. Not to satisfy people's need for fire. For construction. Billions of acres of CO2 absorbing beautiful trees.

No one has mentioned the single largest absorber of CO2. Which is doing very nicely thank you - the algea floating in our seas. I believe that's a fact but I'll happily be corrected. Which grows at a horrendously frightening rate.

And then you fail to mention glaciers which have billions of tonnes of CO2 locked up in them seeping away. As well as the polar caps. Think I'm right in that.

Cattle - "mans keeping of cattle produces huge amounts of gas and is dooming us all" except that through mans greed and hungar for riches we have been responsible for making thousands of animals extinct. On ballance we have probably managed to get our world animal population up to about a third of what it was until we happened along to shag it all up. Though it's a total guess I feel fairly confident in making that assumption.

And suddenly since the 50's it's all our fault. Nah sorry dont buy it.

 

[Storm™]

Mauna Loa - eruption 1950

Santorini - 1925 to 1926 and, 1926 to 1928 and, *1939 to 1941 and of course 1950 for a few months.*

To name but two amongst hundreds over many years. The world changes and it's got bugger all to do with what we do. It's just a very hot chemical rock that will do whatever it's going to do regardless of what we try and do about it. Besides if we do have a massive eruption that will cool us all down lol. The ash cloud will limit the suns power. Then it will rain and snow lots. Which will aborbe the CO2 produced by the volcano. Then it will settle and get deeper and deeper and crush and compact and store all that CO2. Just like it has for millennia. And we will all be better off. Unless of course we get wiped right out except in the warmest areas where the snow could not settle - like Africa. But it's not like that's ever happened before is it.*

 

[Brosville]

"And suddenly since the 50's it's all our fault" - since then, the population of the earth has increased to THREE times what it was....

There's the simple maths thing about population to consider -
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdOk521m9WA"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdOk521m9WA[/ame]

and more food for thought

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ[/ame]

 

[For want of a better word]

Keep going members i find this fasinating.

Mo

Why did I suffer years of a degree in Environmental Science....???

Because this forum was not set up then!!!

 

[Drew]

Why did I suffer years of a degree in Environmental Science....???

Because you didn't get the grades to study a real science?

Only kidding!

 

[Skyhook]

Yes fossil fuels release CO2 when burned. But it absorbed it in the first place before it was burnt/crushed/transformed. So presumably drove it down before nature - not man - nature trashed it. So the earth survived that.

Well of course the earth survived it. But it was a totally different place, and probably not somewhere that could support the human race in the manner we're accustomed to. If we carry on as we are, lots of species will go extinct, and we will be seriously inconvenienced eg drought, famine, war. But yes, the earth will carry on spinning around the sun, and no doubt some species will do very well out of it. So is that OK then?

Volcanoes do produce HUGE HUGE HUGE amounts of the stuff. In fact cataclysmic amounts of the stuff. To say "yes well we can't do anything about that" and try and reduce it's importance is wrong. It's HUGE continuous and it seems ever growing lately.

Yes, they produce vast amounts of CO2. But when you say I'm reducing it's importance, you don't actually offer any solutions. If you're right that they produce 'cataclysmic' amounts, then surely we should be trying to mitigate that, not add to it. Interesting to note that when Eyjafjallajökull erupted, the net effect was actually a reduction in CO2 due to all the cancelled flights- which was probably about a 10% reduction in global air traffic for a couple of weeks.

Thousand upon millions upon billions of trees are planted every single year - world wide. Not to satisfy people's need for fire. For construction. Billions of acres of CO2 absorbing beautiful trees.

Certainly many thousands are planted- but only a small fraction of those which are felled for timber or cleared to expose land for mining and agriculture. Thye aren't burnt as firewood, just to get rid of them. The mainstay of 21st century construction is concrete, which takes huge amounts of energy to produce, most of which comes from fossil fuels.

No one has mentioned the single largest absorber of CO2. Which is doing very nicely thank you - the algea floating in our seas. I believe that's a fact but I'll happily be corrected. Which grows at a horrendously frightening rate.

Nice to have something going our way. The problem is, it's only those algae which setle into the ocean trenches which stand a chance of sequestering any carbon- the rest will just be re-released as the algae dies and rots at the end of the season. Add to that the fact that CO2 acidifies water, making it less condusive to growth for most species, and any gain is likely to be minimal.

And then you fail to mention glaciers which have billions of tonnes of CO2 locked up in them seeping away. As well as the polar caps. Think I'm right in that.

No, you're not. What you may be thinking of is that scientists drill cores from the ice caps so they can study the air bubbles trapped in the ice, and compare the co2 levels. Such as this study, showing that CO2 levels are at their highest for 800,000 years.

And just supposing that you had been correct, the answer would be much the same as for fossil fuels (first point and answer in this post).

Cattle - "mans keeping of cattle produces huge amounts of gas and is dooming us all" except that through mans greed and hungar for riches we have been responsible for making thousands of animals extinct. On ballance we have probably managed to get our world animal population up to about a third of what it was until we happened along to shag it all up. Though it's a total guess I feel fairly confident in making that assumption.

So one cow equals one bush baby? So much wrong with that I hardly know where to start. Suffice to say that bush babies don't each require the clearance of an acre of forest to provide grazing, and they don't have bellies full of bacteria producing methane in huge quantities- a greenhouse gas far worse than CO2.

And suddenly since the 50's it's all our fault. Nah sorry dont buy it.

No, this started with the industrial revolution. It's just that recently it's got a lot worse because of increases in population and the spread of technology.

Don't get me wrong, we can do nothing and the earth will be just fine. It was fine when it was tropical to the poles, and it was fine when it was a solid lump of ice. It just wouldn't suit us very well.

 

[The Cumbrian]

Yes fossil fuels release CO2 when burned. But it absorbed it in the first place before it was burnt/crushed/transformed. So presumably drove it down before nature - not man - nature trashed it. So the earth survived that.

Is there any evidence that it was all in the atmosphere at once? With fossil fuels running out there may be a time when more of it is in the atmosphere than ever before.

Volcanoes do produce HUGE HUGE HUGE amounts of the stuff. In fact cataclysmic amounts of the stuff. To say "yes well we can't do anything about that" and try and reduce it's importance is wrong. It's HUGE continuous and it seems ever growing lately.

Do you have a reference please for the composition of gas from a volcano? I was under the impression that much of it was sulpherous.

Thousand upon millions upon billions of trees are planted every single year - world wide. Not to satisfy people's need for fire. For construction. Billions of acres of CO2 absorbing beautiful trees.

True but I am not sure they even equal the rate at which the Amazonian rainforest is being destroyed let alone make up for those already lost.

No one has mentioned the single largest absorber of CO2. Which is doing very nicely thank you - the algea floating in our seas. I believe that's a fact but I'll happily be corrected. Which grows at a horrendously frightening rate.

This puzzles me as again I seem to have got the wrong impression I was sure that many marine areas are doing badly due to loss of Algae and Diatoms in sea water. You seem to suggest the opposite. I need to read up more - do you have any references you would recommend. As you seem to have investigated this it would save me a lot of googleing and time reading "false starts".

And then you fail to mention glaciers which have billions of tonnes of CO2 locked up in them seeping away. As well as the polar caps. Think I'm right in that.

How is the CO2 locked up in the ice? Surely if there is CO" locked up in ice we need to be concerned that more is being released as they melt.

Cattle - "mans keeping of cattle produces huge amounts of gas and is dooming us all" except that through mans greed and hungar for riches we have been responsible for making thousands of animals extinct. On ballance we have probably managed to get our world animal population up to about a third of what it was until we happened along to shag it all up. Though it's a total guess I feel fairly confident in making that assumption.

I am afraid that I wouldn't be as confident as you. To take one example I doubt that the American Bison was every roaming the plains at the current stocking rates of the cattle that have replaced them. Man may have made many species of animal extinct but we have replaced them with generally larger animals stocked at higher density. Again hectare for hectare I suspect the mass of animal on grazing which has replaced the rainforest is far greater than in the virgin forest.

[/QUOTE}
And suddenly since the 50's it's all our fault. Nah sorry dont buy it.[/QUOTE]

I don't think it is since the 50s it is just that we have become aware of the changes since then. Partly because they are speeding up and partly because of the awareness of the situation. When I was at school my biology master a graduate in biology admitted to not really understanding what was meant by ecology.

 

[Storm™]

Skyhook you are waffling. One bush baby = one cow - sigh. Of course not but that said you do not know what equals one cow do you. And you do not know exactly how much life there is compared to what man has produced do you. So your argument whilst looking plausible is guesswork.

I'm sorry about the glaciers/polar caps CO2 storage point I made. I know they measure it using cores but in order to measure it, it has to be there doesn't it?

The algae I was correct about I see. Thankfully my entire knowledge isn't made up of urban myth it seems. But the aglae grows at a very fast rate and so it would be hard to say I suppose (though you may know the exact answer for us) what amount it is able to absorb - no? Before it dies horribly in acidic seas - no? Minimal you say?

Well of course the earth survived it. But it was a totally different place, and probably not somewhere that could support the human race in the manner we're accustomed to. If we carry on as we are, lots of species will go extinct, and we will be seriously inconvenienced eg drought, famine, war. But yes, the earth will carry on spinning around the sun, and no doubt some species will do very well out of it. So is that OK then?

That is a silly statement and quite arrogant lol. A rant almost. I don't see your point. When a volcano erupts, a forest fire burns or the earth opens up and swallows everything whole I don't think it's all right - it just is. I cannot stop it I cannot prevent it I cannot mend it. It is just a natural part of what our earth does. I would not be arrogant enough to assume I could. Or should try. There are things I can effect, heal someone with medicine, save a life or buy something from someone to help them earn a crust, I cannot prevent the earth from doing what it does. Go through various cycles year in year out FOR EVER .... Until it doesn't. Sorry but if you don't get that I can't help you. Man meddles and it very rarely does anything but makes matters worse.

And i see this thread is deteriorating into frustrated digs and snipes as per usual so I'll abstain. I am obviously lacking in the correct knowledge to offer an opinion and have not a clue about the mechanics of our atmosphere and how it works. I offer my apologies for my posts as they are obviously disinformation.

 

[Skyhook]

Skyhook you are waffling. One bush baby = one cow - sigh. Of course not but that said you do not know what equals one cow do you. And you do not know exactly how much life there is compared to what man has produced do you. So your argument whilst looking plausible is guesswork.

As is yours. but you're missing the key points- even supposing there is the same tonnage of animals on the planet, cows are particularly bad due to the unusual nature of their digestive system, ie extra stomachs full of methane-producing bacteria; and other animals don't get forests cleared to create grazing for them.

I'm sorry about the glaciers/polar caps CO2 storage point I made. I know they measure it using cores but in order to measure it, it has to be there doesn't it?

Had it been correct, it would have been evidence for my argument, not yours- an even greater quantity of carbon sequestered to achieve the balance we currently enjoy.

The algae I was correct about I see. Thankfully my entire knowledge isn't made up of urban myth it seems. But the aglae grows at a very fast rate and so it would be hard to say I suppose (though you may know the exact answer for us) what amount it is able to absorb - no? Before it dies horribly in acidic seas - no? Minimal you say?

Yes, minimal. Algal blooms will absorb huge amounts of CO2 as they grow- but as most of this will be re-released within a few months as the short-lived plants reach the end of their season that's not very useful. As I said before, it's only what falls into the ocean deeps that stands a chance of becoming a long-term part of the sediment.

Well of course the earth survived it. But it was a totally different place, and probably not somewhere that could support the human race in the manner we're accustomed to. If we carry on as we are, lots of species will go extinct, and we will be seriously inconvenienced eg drought, famine, war. But yes, the earth will carry on spinning around the sun, and no doubt some species will do very well out of it. So is that OK then?


That is a silly statement and quite arrogant lol. A rant almost. I don't see your point. When a volcano erupts, a forest fire burns or the earth opens up and swallows everything whole I don't think it's all right - it just is. I cannot stop it I cannot prevent it I cannot mend it. It is just a natural part of what our earth does. I would not be arrogant enough to assume I could. Or should try. There are things I can effect, heal someone with medicine, save a life or buy something from someone to help them earn a crust, I cannot prevent the earth from doing what it does. Go through various cycles year in year out FOR EVER .... Until it doesn't. Sorry but if you don't get that I can't help you. Man meddles and it very rarely does anything but makes matters worse.

Maybe this is the root of the problem- a disbelief that mankind is capable of having an effect. The same used to be thought about extinctions. The fact is that we have been changing the landscape and the ecosystem since the neolithic era. The maths says that if you add x amount of CO2 to the atmosphere it will warm up by y amount. We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, and -guess what? It's warming up by roughly the predicted amount, once you allow for all the other factors, various cycles etc. We know that the climate is capable of huge changes, but that it has in recent millenia been in a phase that particularly suits us. When you say 'I cannot prevent the earth from doing what it does' you're WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. We ARE preventing the earth from doing what it does by cutting down the forests, releasing the sequestered carbon, and a hundred other things. You say man meddles as if that is what I want. we ARE meddling, what I am after is for us to meddle less, not more. And if what I said was a rant, I'm sorry but I find it very difficult to be dispassionate about this, it's too important. And as for it being silly- what I said was factually correct and a response to your statement that the earth had survived the amount of CO2 that used to be in the atmosphere before the carboniferous era, and it's reduction.

And i see this thread is deteriorating into frustrated digs and snipes as per usual so I'll abstain. I am obviously lacking in the correct knowledge to offer an opinion and have not a clue about the mechanics of our atmosphere and how it works. I offer my apologies for my posts as they are obviously disinformation.

I'm sorry you feel like that- I have attempted to 'play the ball not the man' to the best of my ability; but this is such an important topic that I can't bring myself to ignore-I won't say disinformation as I'm sure your posts were genuine- but such misinformation being stood up against the facts.

 

[luckydunny]

Not sure if I have inadvertently stumbled onto National Geaographic.... Am certain I am lost!!!
No hope for me then.. now know should never have left school at 16 and undertaken a 3 year apprenticeship and then seven more years of night school.

 

[For want of a better word]

Because you didn't get the grades to study a real science?

Only kidding!

by that do you mean a reductionist science? astro physics, mathematics?


ONLY KIDDING