The Global Warming Thread

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LawBeefaroni
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by LawBeefaroni »

noxiousdog wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote: Carbon taxes are also a regressive tax. The bankers who make money off them and the politicians they pay to institute them will have the lowest burden. Corporations will pass the cost on to consumers.
I'm not sure I follow. Regardless of offsets, clean businesses will have lower expenses than dirty businesses. The taxes just have to be high enough to offset fuel costs.

That's a economics problem, not a scheme problem.
I'm not sure I follow what you don't follow. It is a regressive tax (and I'm pretty sure that's universally agreed upon). That has nothing to do with businesses expenses for clean vs. dirty. It has to do with how it hits consumers (of energy).
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by noxiousdog »

LawBeefaroni wrote: I'm not sure I follow what you don't follow. It is a regressive tax (and I'm pretty sure that's universally agreed upon). That has nothing to do with businesses expenses for clean vs. dirty. It has to do with how it hits consumers (of energy).
I'm pretty sure it's not. And if it is regressive, it's immaterial unless we're going to go on some method of subsidizing all energy. The costs are passed though, but should be designed that consumers can choose alternative forms of energy. Of course this isn't going to be the case in highly regulated markets where they can't choose. If you only have one electricity provider it's fairly irrelevant, though it should influence the power mix so that the populace is more in favor of clean energy units as opposed to the cheapest energy units.

And of course it's about business expenses. They are designed to raise the expenses of dirty energy such that clean energy is more competitive as well as to give the government revenue for clean up.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Combustible Lemur »

Totally anecdotal, but over the past 5 years we have supposedly been billed for renewable only, and our energy prices have dropped by 40%.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by noxiousdog »

Combustible Lemur wrote:Totally anecdotal, but over the past 5 years we have supposedly been billed for renewable only, and our energy prices have dropped by 40%.
That's mostly the natural gas market driving down electricity prices, but I'd love to see a study of how much of that is deregulation.
Black Lives Matter

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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by gbasden »

Welcome to the 332nd month of warmer than average temperatures!
The average temperature across land and ocean surfaces during October was 14.63°C (58.23°F). This is 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average and ties with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record. The record warmest October occurred in 2003 and the record coldest October occurred in 1912. This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. The last below-average month was February 1985. The last October with a below-average temperature was 1976.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by silverjon »

"There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."

― Alexander von Humboldt
wot?

To be fair, adolescent power fantasy tripe is way easier to write than absurd existential horror, and every community has got to start somewhere... right?

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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Ralph-Wiggum »

This is pretty crazy:
If you were born in or after April 1985, if you are right now 27 years old or younger, you have never lived through a month that was colder than average.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Enough »

silverjon wrote:"There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."

― Alexander von Humboldt
1) Climate change isn’t happening

2) Climate change is happening, but it’s part of the Earth’s natural cycles

3) Climate change is happening, it may well be due to human activity, but it’s generally beneficial

4) Climate change is happening, it’s probably due to human activity, but it’s not going to be as bad as the computer models suggest

5) Climate change is happening, it is caused by human activity, it’s a really bad thing, but there’s very little we can do about it and there are lots of other bad things we should attack first

-or-

5) Climate change is happening, it is caused by human activity, it's a really bad thing, it would be too costly on society to curtail human causes of climate change, thus we should spend inordinate amounts of money on large corporations to geoengineer our way out of the problem

(I slightly modified this for the above)

And of course we can include Dr. Running's five stages of climate grief:

DENIAL
ANGER
BARGAINING
DEPRESSION
ACCEPTANCE
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Smoove_B »

5 Charts About Climate Change That Should Have You Very, Very Worried
Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century's end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action by sharing devastating scenarios of flood, famine, drought and cyclones. Meanwhile, a report from the US National Research Council, commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies, says the consequences of climate change--rising sea levels, severe flooding, droughts, fires, and insect infestations--pose threats greater than those from terrorism ranging from massive food shortages to a rise in armed conflicts.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Toe »

This looks like an interesting documentary. Not sure how slanted it is, but I like the premise of their research. Seems to be getting rave reviews. Trailer at the website.

http://www.chasingice.com/" target="_blank
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

Smoove_B wrote:5 Charts About Climate Change That Should Have You Very, Very Worried
Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century's end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action by sharing devastating scenarios of flood, famine, drought and cyclones. Meanwhile, a report from the US National Research Council, commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies, says the consequences of climate change--rising sea levels, severe flooding, droughts, fires, and insect infestations--pose threats greater than those from terrorism ranging from massive food shortages to a rise in armed conflicts.
I've been very, very worried for a couple of years now, and I am not the sort of person who's given to alarmism. The Ted talk at the end explains why.

I'm glad that I won't live long enough to suffer the consequences, but sad that I won't live long enough to see this science-fiction future become real.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

We are pretty definitely screwed.

Global CO2 production rose 3% last year to 2 million pounds per second. The good news: The US was one of the few countries whose emissions actually fell (by 3%), so we're on the right track although we're still the second-largest emitter. The bad news: You can pretty much forget about the goal of limiting warming to the 2 degrees C. that everybody agreed was the maximum acceptable.

The 2011 figures for the biggest polluters:

1. China, up 10 percent to 10 billion tons.

2. United States, down 2 percent to 5.9 billion tons

3. India, up 7 percent to 2.5 billion tons.

4. Russia, up 3 percent to 1.8 billion tons.

5. Japan, up 0.4 percent to 1.3 billion tons.

6. Germany, down 4 percent to 0.8 billion tons.

7. Iran, up 2 percent to 0.7 billion tons.

8. South Korea, up 4 percent to 0.6 billion tons.

9. Canada, up 2 percent to 0.6 billion tons.

10. South Africa, up 2 percent to 0.6 billion tons.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

2012 is another one for the record books
Globally, five countries this year set heat records, but none set cold records. 2012 is on track to be the warmest year on record in the United States. Worldwide, the average through November suggests it will be the eighth warmest since global record-keeping began in 1880.

July was the hottest month in record-keeping U.S. history, averaging 77.6 degrees. Over the year, more than 69,000 local heat records were set — including 356 locations in 34 states that hit their highest-ever temperature mark.

America's heartland lurched from one extreme to the other without stopping at "normal." Historic flooding in 2011 gave way to devastating drought in 2012.

"The normal has changed, I guess," said U.S. National Weather Service acting director Laura Furgione. "The normal is extreme."

While much of the U.S. struggled with drought that conjured memories of the Dust Bowl, parts of Africa, Russia, Pakistan, Colombia, Australia and China dealt with the other extreme: deadly and expensive flooding.

But the most troubling climate development this year was the melting at the top of the world, Jarraud said. Summer sea ice in the Arctic shrank to 18 percent below the previous record low. The normally ice-packed Arctic passages were open to shipping much of the summer, more than ever before, and a giant Russian tanker carrying liquefied natural gas made a delivery that way to prove how valuable this route has become, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Also in Greenland, 97 percent of the surface ice sheet had some melting. Changes in the Arctic alter the rest of the world's weather and "melting of the ice means an amplifying of the warming," Jarraud said.

...

In 2011, the United States set a record with 14 billion-dollar weather disasters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a preliminary count of 11 such disasters this year. And NOAA's official climate extreme index, which tallies disasters and rare events like super-hot days, is on pace to set its own record.

...

"Every year is bringing different types of extreme weather and climate events," NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco said. "All storms today are happening in a climate-altered world."

Not everything is connected to man-made global warming, climate scientists say. Some, like tornadoes, have no scientifically discernible connection. Others, like the East Coast superstorm, will be studied to see if climate change is a cause, although scientists say rising sea levels clearly worsened flooding. They are more convinced that the heat waves of last summer are connected to global warming.

These are "clearly not freak events," but "systemic changes," said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany. "With all the extremes that, really, every year in the last 10 years have struck different parts of the globe, more and more people absolutely realize that climate change is here and already hitting us."

...

For decades, scientists have predicted extensive droughts from global warming. This year, the drought of 2012 was so extensive that nearly 2,300 counties — in almost every state — were declared agriculture disasters. At one point this summer more than 65 percent of the Lower 48 was suffering from drought.

And with lack of water, came fire, something also mentioned as more likely in scientific reports about global warming. Fire season in the United States came earlier than normal and lasted longer, officials said. Nearly 9.2 million acres — an area bigger than the state of Maryland — have been burned by wildfire, the third most since accurate recordkeeping began in 1960.

"Take any one of these events in isolation, it might be possible to yell 'fluke!' Take them collectively, it provides confirmation of precisely what climate scientists predicted would happen decades ago if we proceeded with business-as-usual fossil fuel burning, as we have," Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said in an email. "And this year especially is a cautionary tale. What we view today as unprecedented extreme weather will become the new normal in a matter of decades if we proceed with business-as-usual."
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Rip »

For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consiquent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new "science" to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservatives forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.

What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save "Gia". At the same time, they used this "science" as a new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear? Gia worship, the earth "mother", has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/column ... warming-0/
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by RunningMn9 »

It's Gaia.
And in banks across the world
Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Jews
And every other race, creed, colour, tint or hue
Get down on their knees and pray
The raccoon and the groundhog neatly
Make up bags of change
But the monkey in the corner
Well he's slowly drifting out of range
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by DOS=HIGH »

Rip wrote:
For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consiquent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new "science" to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservatives forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.

What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save "Gia". At the same time, they used this "science" as a new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear? Gia worship, the earth "mother", has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/column ... warming-0/
Seems legit.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

DOS=HIGH wrote:
Rip wrote:
For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consiquent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new "science" to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservatives forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.

What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save "Gia". At the same time, they used this "science" as a new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear? Gia worship, the earth "mother", has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/column ... warming-0/
Seems legit.
I'm just savoring the moment of Rip quoting Pravda.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Pyperkub »

Kraken wrote:
DOS=HIGH wrote:
Rip wrote:
For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consiquent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new "science" to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservatives forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.

What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save "Gia". At the same time, they used this "science" as a new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear? Gia worship, the earth "mother", has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/column ... warming-0/
Seems legit.
I'm just savoring the moment of Rip quoting Pravda.
Well, it does mean Truth...

tapatalkin'
Black Lives definitely Matter Lorini!

Also: There are three ways to not tell the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Rip »

Word.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

That's "Word" comrade.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Enough »

This is a great graphic exploring the climate change denial canard that human impacts to the climate could never even begin to compare to the massive, massive natural forces at work.. astronomy man!

Enlarge Image
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

And Mars is really cold, so I guess that settles that.

Seriously, it's an interesting perspective.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Kraken »

119 One-Line Rebuttals to Climate Skeptic Myths

...with links to science! That ought to be the end of this thread. :wink:
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Pyperkub »

In 30 or so years, the Northwest Passage may be open full time to shipping:
With Arctic sea ice reaching record lows, people have begun to explore routes through Canada's Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route above the coast of Russia. These routes have the potential to significantly shorten transit times between Asia and both Europe and North America, reducing shipping costs and fostering international trade.

At the moment there is little guarantee that the routes will be open in any given year, which is enough to keep shippers from taking full advantage of the shrinking ice
So... I guess Global Warming won't be bad for everyone... but when business starts looking at how to profit from it, you have to think that more acceptance is finally coming.
Black Lives definitely Matter Lorini!

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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Enough »

Ars also ran a piece about how climate change may have reversed an oncoming ice age. So that' something. :wink:
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Isgrimnur »

When you rely on frozen ground to do your job, warmer winters are much more pertinent to your livelihood:
Scott Lizotte was hopeful as he pulled his iPhone out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. "It's going to be six degrees tonight," he said, studying the 10-day forecast. It's mid-March, and he's standing between a skidder and a log loader in a snowy clearing of a 12,000-acre private forest near Tupper Lake, a former lumber town in New York's Adirondack Mountains.
...
"We used to go on the job when the ground was frozen, around the first of November, or around Thanksgiving," said Scott's father, Jeannel Lizotte. "Now it's going around Christmas time."

Added Scott: "This year it was New Year's before we got on the winter roads."

From stump to mill, some 57,000 people are employed in New York State's forest-products industry, 10 percent of them working in the woods. As much as 35 to 45 percent of the timber harvest across northern New York and New England happens in winter.
...
The Lizottes estimate they have until the end of this week to get their gear out of the woods before this road goes soft. They've already pulled equipment from plots 10 miles deeper in the forest; those stands were reached only by "winter roads," temporary routes created by earth, frost and graders. "It used to be we'd shoot for March 15," Jeannel said, "but we got caught out too many times."

Jeannel Lizotte says he has lost about a month of productive time to warmer winter weather since he started his logging business in 1970. His observations parallel those of a Wisconsin study presented last week at the Connecticut Conference on Natural Resources. "Frozen ground is starting later and it's ending earlier. A trend is evident," said Chadwick Rittenhouse, an assistant research professor at University of Connecticut.

He and Adena Rissman, an assistant professor with the University of Wisconsin's department of forest and wildlife ecology, examined historical weather information from the federal government's National Climatic Data Center for seven counties in Wisconsin. They found that the counties experienced a two- to four-week reduction of frozen ground between 1949 and 2012.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by silverjon »

Guess how much oilsands work involves traversing muskeg?

That's actually an interesting implication for the fossil fuel industry as a whole.
wot?

To be fair, adolescent power fantasy tripe is way easier to write than absurd existential horror, and every community has got to start somewhere... right?

Unless one loses a precious thing, he will never know its true value. A little light finally scratches the darkness; it lets the exhausted one face his shattered dream and realize his path cannot be walked. Can man live happily without embracing his wounded heart?
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Isgrimnur »

Lake Erie gets more algae:
In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest algae bloom in its recorded history. At its peak in October, the mat of green scum on the lake’s surface was nearly four inches thick and covered an area of almost 2,000 square miles. That’s three times larger than any other bloom in the lake, ever. Plus it was toxic. Now research shows that such an event may become increasingly common.
...
Conditions were ideal for fertilizer application in the fall before the 2011 growing season, which meant that many farmers spread it on thick. But a wet spring brought a series of major storms that washed tons of this nutrient-rich fertilizer and soil into Lake Erie. Warm weather and calm winds made it worse. The water in the lake wasn’t circulating much, which gave the algae a long, undisturbed incubation period. And after the algae bloomed, conditions stayed warm and still for most of the season, so algae stayed at the surface instead of being blown around by the wind and mixed into the water column to flush it from the system.

Unfortunately the 2011 bloom wasn’t just a fluke. The researchers say the massive bloom in 2011 will be a vision of the future unless drastic policy changes are implemented.

Nutrient loading dropped dramatically in 2012, perhaps because most of the Midwest was experiencing a drought. But the researchers say that with biofuel production on the rise, an increasing number of acres will be planted with fertilizer-intensive crops like corn in the years to come. And climate change suggests a future with warmer weather and larger, more frequent rainstorms, meaning blooms like the beast in 2011 are likely to become the norm rather than the exception.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Rip »

Tornado spike in 2011 attributed to climate change. So what to make of this year’s tornado drought?
Is the world warming? Yes. Is the warming largely due to human activity? Most likely, most scientists say. Will this warming have consequences for the planet and its residents? Without question. But we still have much work to do to fully understand those consequences. A big problem, of course, is that by the time we fully understand the consequences, it may be too late to act meaningfully.

In any case, overstating the severity of some consequences (i.e. linking the 2010-2011 tornado outbreak to climate change) only emboldens willful skeptics who would hold the very real uncertainty of some aspects of climate change science as a quarterstaff upon the credibility of its general conclusions.
http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2013/05/to ... o-drought/
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Ralph-Wiggum »

Rip wrote:Tornado spike in 2011 attributed to climate change. So what to make of this year’s tornado drought?
Is the world warming? Yes. Is the warming largely due to human activity? Most likely, most scientists say. Will this warming have consequences for the planet and its residents? Without question. But we still have much work to do to fully understand those consequences. A big problem, of course, is that by the time we fully understand the consequences, it may be too late to act meaningfully.

In any case, overstating the severity of some consequences (i.e. linking the 2010-2011 tornado outbreak to climate change) only emboldens willful skeptics who would hold the very real uncertainty of some aspects of climate change science as a quarterstaff upon the credibility of its general conclusions.
http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2013/05/to ... o-drought/
Who attributed the tornado spike to climate change? If the media (which the article seems to be mainly talking about), then that's a problem with the media, not the science.
Black Lives Matter
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by msduncan »

We (at my company) had the Chief Scientist from the local National Weather Service come in and give a presentation.

There is no tornado spike. The tornado spike that many media members are talking about over the past 15 years, as well as some flawed studies looking at skewed data, doesn't exist. Here is how he presented it:

He broke down the supposed 15 year tornado spike beginning in the 1990's by category of tornados. F3-F5 was represented separately on the same graph, with F2 and below broken out.

Beginning in the 1990s there was a massive spike of F0, F1, and F2 tornado's. There was no spike of F3-F5 tornado's. Why the massive spike of F0-F2 tornado's? He challenged us to think about why there would be a huge spike of F0 - F2 tornado's beginning in the 1990's through present while no spike of the larger tornado's.

The answer? Doppler Radar. Doppler Radar was introduced in the 1990's and revolutionized the ability to detect and spot smaller tornado's which until that point had largely gone undetected. Everyone knows when an F3-F5 goes through...and those numbers remained within the standard deviation numbers throughout the 15 year period.

So according to the Chief Scientist at the NWS in my area -- there has been no spike of tornado activity over the past 15 years. He said 2011 was a anomaly attributed mostly to 1 single day where the atmospheric conditions all lined up for a historic outbreak.

Edit to add: It would be cool to have a title of 'Chief Scientist'. 8-)
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by RunningMn9 »

msduncan wrote:Doppler Radar was introduced in the 1990's and revolutionized the ability to detect and spot smaller tornado's which until that point had largely gone undetected.
Hopefully someone at your company asked a question along the lines of "if you didn't have the ability to detect and spot smaller tornadoes before the 1990s, isn't the appropriate conclusion that you don't know whether there is a spike in F0 - F2 tornadoes?"

NOTE: I'm not saying that the chief scientist is wrong, I just would have liked to see his answer to that question. Along with the input from some relevant authority that holds that there *is* a spike (should such a person exist). This wouldn't be the first time someone pitched an explanation that sounds plausible to people that don't know any better ("it's cyclical sun spot activity!!").
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by msduncan »

RunningMn9 wrote:
msduncan wrote:Doppler Radar was introduced in the 1990's and revolutionized the ability to detect and spot smaller tornado's which until that point had largely gone undetected.
Hopefully someone at your company asked a question along the lines of "if you didn't have the ability to detect and spot smaller tornadoes before the 1990s, isn't the appropriate conclusion that you don't know whether there is a spike in F0 - F2 tornadoes?"

NOTE: I'm not saying that the chief scientist is wrong, I just would have liked to see his answer to that question. Along with the input from some relevant authority that holds that there *is* a spike (should such a person exist). This wouldn't be the first time someone pitched an explanation that sounds plausible to people that don't know any better ("it's cyclical sun spot activity!!").

He also had data representing why some counties/cities are reported to have higher number of tornado's than others. He tied it directly to 1) population clusters (thus bodies available to spot tornados) and 2) presence of doppler radar sites nearby

He did admit that there are some areas that seem to legitimately have higher number of severe storms, and specifically named a triangle area in Alabama. He said they don't fully understand why you have some areas like that other than the fact that they think it is tied to terrain in some way.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by RunningMn9 »

I guess I'm curious about where the notion that the alleged spike in tornadoes was the result of global warming was coming from. A few seconds of searching, yielded this 2011 article asking the question "Is Climate Change Causing the Record-Breaking Tornadoes & Floods?"

The GW alarmists at the NOAA responded:
article wrote:Several studies have investigated the relationship between global warming and the vicious tornado outbreaks. They've all given the same answer: "The data is inconclusive."

"So far, we have not been able to link any of the major causes of the tornado outbreak to global warming," Martin Hoerling, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research meteorologist, and his research team recently announced.
Further, they take away some of the Chief Scientist's thunder:
article wrote:Where tornadoes are concerned, inconsistent record keeping — made more difficult by the fact that the storms are relatively small and often last for only minutes — makes it hard to say whether there are more of them now than there used to be. In recent years, the use of radar tracking , spotter networks and higher populations "all contribute to an artificial upward trend in tornado data, especially for smaller tornadoes," Hoerling, who works at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., told Life's Little Mysteries. "Those are becoming more frequently reported not because there are more of them but because there are more eyes looking for them. That creates some complications in doing a historical analysis."
I should note that I know nothing about the site hosting the article. I was more interested in the quotes from the NOAA and ESRL dude than anything else.

One other trip I made was here, to see if there was another side to this (some presumed authority alleging that the alleged spike in tornadoes is due to climate change) - but noted in their 174 climate myths, none of them deal with tornado frequency (there is one on hurricanes though).

One thing that I would accept is that even a cursory look at google would suggest that the frequency of times that media outlets asked the question about whether the spike was due to global warming could certainly give rise to the perception that this was something that was being pushed. I still haven't found scientific articles suggesting that this was the case (there was one research paper looking at the increase in tornadoes since 1950, but that looked like a college project, not legit research).
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by msduncan »

Another cool/devastating thing he showed us was a before and after photo of the same spot in Hackleburg, Alabama. This was the path of the monster F5 that moved through.

Before:

Image

After:

Image
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Alefroth »

msduncan wrote:We (at my company) had the Chief Scientist from the local National Weather Service come in and give a presentation.

There is no tornado spike. The tornado spike that many media members are talking about over the past 15 years, as well as some flawed studies looking at skewed data, doesn't exist. Here is how he presented it:

He broke down the supposed 15 year tornado spike beginning in the 1990's by category of tornados. F3-F5 was represented separately on the same graph, with F2 and below broken out.

Beginning in the 1990s there was a massive spike of F0, F1, and F2 tornado's. There was no spike of F3-F5 tornado's. Why the massive spike of F0-F2 tornado's? He challenged us to think about why there would be a huge spike of F0 - F2 tornado's beginning in the 1990's through present while no spike of the larger tornado's.

The answer? Doppler Radar. Doppler Radar was introduced in the 1990's and revolutionized the ability to detect and spot smaller tornado's which until that point had largely gone undetected. Everyone knows when an F3-F5 goes through...and those numbers remained within the standard deviation numbers throughout the 15 year period.

So according to the Chief Scientist at the NWS in my area -- there has been no spike of tornado activity over the past 15 years. He said 2011 was a anomaly attributed mostly to 1 single day where the atmospheric conditions all lined up for a historic outbreak.

Edit to add: It would be cool to have a title of 'Chief Scientist'. 8-)
Do you believe him?

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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by RunningMn9 »

Alefroth wrote:Do you believe him?
Aside from the obvious question - which is why you would bother to ask that question - do you not believe him?
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Alefroth »

RunningMn9 wrote:
Alefroth wrote:Do you believe him?
Aside from the obvious question - which is why you would bother to ask that question - do you not believe him?
I've got no reason not to believe him. It's a plausible explanation, but like you brought up, it's hard to tell what was going on before detection improved.

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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by RunningMn9 »

I was more interested to find out whether science was telling us that there was a spike, and that it's related to CC. I couldn't find evidence of that. Hurricanes, yes. Tornados, no.
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Re: The Global Warming Thread

Post by Pyperkub »

Not a good milestone to hit:
NOAA reported that the average of its Arctic measurements had exceeded 400 ppm for the entire month of May, not just for a single day....

...In a way, 400 ppm is an arbitrary milestone, like a .400 batting average in baseball. But the fact that no one has batted .400 since Ted Williams in 1941 still says something important about baseball. The same goes for CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.

Policymakers worldwide have been stymied in their effort to reach a global agreement on reducing fossil fuel emissions. Many scientists argue that the CO2 concentration must be stabilized at 450 ppm to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
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