NOAA- State of the Climate

[twa]

"We haven't finished warming up from the last ice age".

How is that supposed to be comforting?

It beats the ice age began 10 yrs ago

[skinfan13]

Not having to be concerned with global climate change is a first world luxury.

Wars over water in the Trans-Sahel, etc.

[Toe Jam]

IMO, observations over a six month period, in just one country, don't really say much about the global climate.

That's all fine and dandy, but the problem is that the majority of people continue to say this every year.

"Well, it was really hot this year.. but eh, it doesn't really mean anything."
"Well, dang.. hot again.. broke last year's records... still doesn't mean anything."
"Hottest six months on record? Hmm.. still not a problem. Doesn't mean a thing."

So when does it stop? Do we finally stop saying this when lower Manhattan is six feet under water?

[Renegade7]

Anyone see the related thread at the bottom of the page saying August 2004 was the 7th coldest August on record for the lower 48? Seriously, climate change is one of those things that very well may be out of our control, but we're definitely more sensitive to given there's so many of us. We can't "fix" the climate, we must learn how to adapt...

[Tulane Skins Fan]

I am posting something a middle-of-the-road Republican friend from Colorado posted on facebook and would like to hear some opinions on it...

"I'm not convinced that we're experiencing global warming b/c technically we haven't finished thawing out from the last ice age."

I can honestly say iI've never heard this... is this the latest rhetoric making it's way through the politically slanted corners of the internet?

Your friend is not a middle of the road republican. He is a right wing nut, if he's still not convinced that climate change is real and man has influenced it.

Also, that line has been around for about 10 years.

[Mad Mike]

Even Exxon's CEO admits to global warming. But don't worry, he says it's "manageable".

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-...ing-manageable

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...nageable-.html

People will adapt to rising sea levels and changing weather patterns resulting from climate change, he said.

“Increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere will have a warming impact,” Tillerson said. “It’s an engineering problem and it has an engineering solution.”

Farmers may shift crops to new regions as temperatures rise. “As a species, that’s why we’re all still here,” he said. “We adapt.”

Exxon Mobil, under prior CEO Lee Raymond, funded groups that questioned the impact of global warming. Since Tillerson took over the company in 2006, he has spoken more openly about climate change.

[alexey]

The article is surprisingly political for PopSci, but I guess so is the topic at hand.

http://www.popsci.com/node/62795/

...“Weird” is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists’ children.
...
Those crude acts of harassment often come alongside more-sophisticated legal and political attacks. Organizations routinely file nuisance lawsuits and onerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to disrupt the work of climate scientists. In 2005, before dragging Mann and other climate researchers into congressional hearings, Texas congressman Joe Barton ordered the scientists to submit voluminous details of working procedures, computer programs and past funding—essentially demanding that they reproduce and defend their entire life’s work. In a move that hearkened back to darker times, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, released a report in 2010 that named 17 prominent climate scientists, including Mann, who, he argued, may have engaged in “potentially criminal behavior.” Inhofe outlined three laws and four regulations that he said the scientists may have violated, including the Federal False Statements Act—which, the report noted, could be punishable with imprisonment of up to five years.
...
At the time of our meeting, Mann was juggling several FOIA requests and two lawsuits—one of which would be resolved the following week, when the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the state attorney general’s demand that the University of Virginia (Mann’s former employer) turn over the researcher’s e-mails and other documents. The university spent nearly $600,000 to argue that releasing personal correspondence would chill academic research. “Yes, there’s been a toll on me and my family,” Mann says. “But it’s bigger than that. Look what it’s doing to science, when others see this and see what happens if they speak up about their research. These efforts to discredit science are well-organized. It’s not just a bunch of crazy people.”
...
The evidence to support the theory of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change has been mounting since the mid-1950s, when atmospheric models predicted that growing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would add to the natural “greenhouse effect” and lead to warming. The data was crude at first, and opinions vacillated (skeptics like to recall a 1974 Time cover story that predicted an impending ice age). But by the mid-1990s, thousands of lines of independent inquiry supported the conclusion summarized in the 1995 IPCC report: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

Since then, the case for anthropogenic climate change has only strengthened; 98 percent of actively publishing climate scientists now say that it is undeniable. But several finer points remain unsettled. For instance, researchers still don’t completely understand the role of aerosols in the atmosphere, the variable effects of clouds at different heights, and the influence of feedback mechanisms such as the changing reflectivity of the Earth’s surface and the release of gases from permafrost or deep seabeds. Climate-change skeptics have been keen to capitalize on those gaps in knowledge. “They play up smaller debates,” says Francesca Grifo at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “and divert the dialogue by attacking particular aspects. They represent climate science as a house of cards, where you pull out one and it all falls apart.”
...
“Now government agencies and researchers are doing anything to keep the word ‘climate’ out of their budgets and proposals,” says Rick Piltz, a former senior associate in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Office (in 2009, it was renamed the U.S. Global Change Research Program). “And this at a time when all agencies need to be thinking about how the nation will be affected by climate change and factor it into their planning.”
...
In the U.S., local climate skeptics have been advancing their agendas. In Virginia, Tea Party–inspired residents recently derailed municipal preparations for sea-level rise around Hampton Roads, the body of water that borders Norfolk-Virginia Beach. They disrupted planning meetings and disputed as a plot NOAA’s findings that the area faces the second-highest risk from sea-level rise of any region of its size in the U.S. In April, Tennessee lawmakers passed a measure that allows teachers to question accepted theories on evolution and climate change in the classroom. Science advocates were also stunned by a recently disclosed initiative to design a school curriculum that questions climate science. Science educators say they’re increasingly worried that climate could become the same kind of flash point as evolution. The question science advocates ask now is, how do they turn the conversation back to the science?
...

[Mr. Sinister]

I can't help but have an ominous feeling as to what things will be like (climate-wise) when I'm 60. That is of course moot if the earth collides with a massive asteroid,we get swallowed by a black hole, a major famine occurs, etc etc before then.

[China]

Wait, you mean climate isn't static? Whodathunkit?

[DieselPwr44]

[Ellis]

Your friend is not a middle of the road republican. He is a right wing nut,

No. He's not.
He's more than willing to talk about things and can admit he's wrong when he knows he's wrong.

[PeterMP]

I am posting something a middle-of-the-road Republican friend from Colorado posted on facebook and would like to hear some opinions on it...

"I'm not convinced that we're experiencing global warming b/c technically we haven't finished thawing out from the last ice age."

I can honestly say iI've never heard this... is this the latest rhetoric making it's way through the politically slanted corners of the internet?

Technically speaking we are in an ice age. We are in what is called an interglacial period of an ice age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial

With respect to climate change, this is essentially an irrelevant point. With respect to things like ice ages and interglacial periods temperature doesn't change on the order of decades. You need multiple centuries to see the temperature trend that drives these things.

People don't expect this particular interglacial period to end in over 30,000 years and the most recent work puts it at about 100,000 years and that assumes CO2 levels return to pre-industrial levels.

[twa]

Wait, you mean climate isn't static? Whodathunkit?

We need a big central air unit....then we can fight over the thermostat

[China]

Report: Climate change behind rise in weather disasters

2:00PM EST October 10. 2012 - The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.

The study being released today by Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.

Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you're right.

The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: "North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters," says Munich Re's Peter Hoppe.

The report focuses on weather disasters since 1980 in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Hoppe says this report represents the first finding of a climate change "footprint" in the data from natural catastrophes.

Some of the report's findings:

-- The intensities of certain weather events in North America are among the highest in the world, and the risks associated with them are changing faster than anywhere else.

-- The second costliest year of the study period, 2011, was dominated by strong storms. Insured losses in the U.S. due to thunderstorms alone was the highest on record at an estimated $26 billion, more than double the previous thunderstorm record set in 2010.

-- Insured losses from disasters averaged $9 billion a year in the 1980s. By the 2000s, the average soared to $36 billion per year.

Global warming combined with natural cycles such as the El Niño or La Niña phenomena also intensify the risk of severe weather. "This will result in higher natural peril losses and affect not only the onset of heat waves, droughts and thunderstorms but also, in the long term, the intensity of tropical cyclones," the report finds.

Click on the link for the full article

[Koolblue13]

Not surprising really.