ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica reach new highs

Wow. We've had weeks of south-westerly winds in the UK bring in warm air from Africa. The result has been much higher than normal temperatures and a lot of rain. I didn't realise this was anything more than a local effect, though.
 
Punx0r said:
Wow. We've had weeks of south-westerly winds in the UK bring in warm air from Africa. The result has been much higher than normal temperatures and a lot of rain. I didn't realise this was anything more than a local effect, though.

That is the same storm system that brought major flooding to the Mississippi valley here in the US. When in moved offshore it strengthened. They were reporting winds reaching 170 kph in Iceland a few days ago. To have temperatures at the North Pole above the freezing point during the height of winter is extremely rare as it has never been observed before. 2016 could be the year when we finally achieve open ocean over the North Pole when the ice extent reaches its summer minimum in September.
 
Many people seem unconcerned, though, as they tell me El Nino is a natural cycle and a milder winter means cheaper heating and not having to scrape the car in the morning. It's a shame about the unprecedented level of flooding and the fact we've had news reports of spring before Christmas (flowers growing, birds laying eggs, lambs being born).

I was prompted earlier to look up the contribution of urban heat generation to global warming as some people think it dwarfs the effect of CO2 (and hence there's no point cutting CO2 emissions). Turns out its contribution to global heating is 2-4%. What surprised me was CO2 was stated as 79%, with the reduction in albedo due to carbon particulate emitted from burning fossil fuels contributing 18%! I had no idea soot was such an issue (another reason to dislike diesel cars).
 
Watts maybe NOT "natural" is the heat thrown off by billions burning fossilized remains... all at the same time. :?
 
Here is a very small sampling of what current and former UN scientists have to say about the UN’s climate claims and its scientific methods. Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

“Temperature measurements show that the [climate model-predicted mid-troposphere] hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them!”- UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Steven M. Japar, a PhD atmospheric chemist who was part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, and has authored 83 peer-reviewed publications and in the areas of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, air pollutions and vehicle emissions.

UN IPCC Scientist Kenneth P. Green Declares ‘A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism’ – September 30, 2009 – ‘We can expect climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority’ – Dr. Kenneth Green was a Working Group 1 expert reviewer for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001

‘The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart — Heads will roll!’ -South African UN Scientist Dr. Will Alexander, April 12, 2009 – Professor Alexander, is Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters.

“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007. – Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil… I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.” – South African Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.

“The claims of the IPCC are dangerous unscientific nonsense” – declared IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand in 2007. Gray was an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, author of more than 100 scientific publications. (LINK) & (LINK)

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

UN IPCC Lead Author Tom Tripp Dissents on man-made warming: ‘We’re not scientifically there yet’ – July 16, 2009

The UN IPCC’s Kevin Trenberth’s claim that the UN IPCC is an “very open” also needs examining. The IPCC summary for policymakers is used to scare politicians and goad the public into action. The UN is all about politics.

UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s alleged global warming “consensus,” according to a May 10, 2007 article. Sounds scientific, doesn’t it?

Dr. John Brignell, a UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton who held the Chair in Industrial Instrumentation at Southampton, accused the UN of “censorship” on July 23, 2008. “Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution. Through the power of patronage it rapidly attracted acolytes. Peer review soon rapidly evolved from the old style refereeing to a much more sinister imposition of The Censorship. As Wegman demonstrated, new circles of like-minded propagandists formed, acting as judge and jury for each other. Above all, they acted in concert to keep out alien and hostile opinion. ‘Peer review’ developed into a mantra that was picked up by political activists who clearly had no idea of the procedures of science or its learned societies. It became an imprimatur of political acceptability, whose absence was equivalent to placement on the proscribed list,” Brignell wrote.

Research by Australian climate data analyst John McLean revealed that the IPCC’s peer-review process for the Summary for Policymakers leaves much to be desired. (LINK) (LINK) (LINK) & (LINK) McLean’s research revealed that the UN IPCC peer-review process is “an illusion.” McLean’s study found that very few scientists are actively involved in the UN’s peer-review process. The report contained devastating revelations to the central IPCC assertion that ‘it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” The analysis by McLean states: “The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section. Moreover, only 62 of the IPCC’s 308 reviewers commented on this chapter at all.” Repeating: Only four UN scientists in the IPCC peer-review process explicitly endorsed the key chapter blaming mankind for warming the past 50 years, according to this recent analysis.

Here is a small sampling of what current and former UN scientists have to say about the UN IPCC’s “very open” process.

(Below are excerpts from various U.S. Senate reports which Climate Depot’s Morano authored during his years at the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.)

One former UN IPCC scientist bluntly told the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) committee how the UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers “distorted” the scientists work. “I have found examples of a Summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said,” explained South African Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.

In an August 13, 2007 letter, UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Madhav Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist, lashed out at those who “seem to naively believe that the climate change science espoused in the [UN’s] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documents represents ‘scientific consensus.’” Khandekar continued: “Nothing could be further from the truth! As one of the invited expert reviewers for the 2007 IPCC documents, I have pointed out the flawed review process used by the IPCC scientists in one of my letters. I have also pointed out in my letter that an increasing number of scientists are now questioning the hypothesis of Greenhouse gas induced warming of the earth’s surface and suggesting a stronger impact of solar variability and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns on the observed temperature increase than previously believed.” “Unfortunately, the IPCC climate change documents do not provide an objective assessment of the earth’s temperature trends and associated climate change,” Khandekar concluded.

Paul Reiter, a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, participated in a past UN IPCC process and now calls the concept of consensus on global warming a “sham.” Reiter, a professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, had to threaten legal action to have his name removed from the IPCC. “That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed,” he said on March 5, 2007. “It’s not true,” he added.

Hurricane expert Christopher W. Landsea of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, was both an author a reviewer for the IPCC’s 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, but resigned from the 4th Assessment Report after charging the UN with playing politics with Hurricane science. Landsea wrote a January 17, 2005 public letter detailing his experience with the UN: “I am withdrawing [from the UN] because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.” “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound,” Landsea added.

In addition, a Greenpeace activist co-authored a key economic report in 2007. Left unreported by most of the media was the fact that Bill Hare, an advisor to Greenpeace, was a lead co- author of a key economic report in the IPCC’s 4th Assessment. Not surprisingly, the Greenpeace co-authored report predicted a gloomy future for our planet unless we follow the UN’s policy prescriptions.

The UN IPCC’s own guidelines explicitly state that the scientific reports have to be “change[d]” to “ensure consistency with” the politically motivated Summary for Policymakers.

In addition, the IPCC more closely resembles a political party’s convention platform battle – not a scientific process. During an IPCC Summary for Policymakers process, political delegates and international bureaucrats squabble over the specific wording of a phrase or assertion.
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, one of the individuals responsible for debunking the infamous “Hockey Stick” temperature graph, slammed the IPCC Summary for Policymaker’s process on January 24, 2007. McIntyre wrote: “So the purpose of the three-month delay between the publication of the (IPCC) Summary for Policy-Makers and the release of the actual WG1 (Working Group 1) is to enable them to make any ‘necessary’ adjustments to the technical report to match the policy summary. Unbelievable. Can you imagine what securities commissions would say if business promoters issued a big promotion and then the promoters made the ‘necessary’ adjustments to the qualifying reports and financial statements so that they matched the promotion. Words fail me.”

Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. also detailed the corruption of the UN IPCC process on September 1, 2007: “The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow,” Pielke explained. He added: “We need recognition among the scientific community, the media, and policymakers that the IPCC process is obviously a real conflict of interest, and this has resulted in a significantly flawed report.”

Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher: “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact.”

http://www.climatedepot.com/2012/05/09/german-meteorologist-reverses-belief-in-manmade-global-warming-now-calls-idea-that-co2-can-regulate-climate-sheer-absurdity-ten-years-ago-i-simply-parroted-what-the-ipcc-told-us/

http://www.climatedepot.com/2010/10/25/high-priestess-of-global-warming-no-more-former-warmist-judith-curry-admits-to-being-duped-into-supporting-ipcc-if-the-ipcc-is-dogma-then-count-me-in-as-a-heretic/

http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/02/03/top-swedish-climate-scientist-says-warming-not-noticeable-the-warming-we-have-had-last-a-100-years-is-so-small-that-if-we-didnt-have-climatologists-to-measure-it-we-wouldnt-have-noticed-it-at-all/

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/04/03/green-guru-james-lovelock-on-climate-change-i-dont-think-anybody-really-knows-whats-happening-they-just-guess-lovelock-reverses-himself-on-global-warming/

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/04/03/another-prominent-scientist-dissents-fmr-nasa-scientist-dr-les-woodcock-laughs-at-global-warming-top-prof-declares-global-warming-is-nonsense/

http://www.climatedepot.com/2010/07/26/leftwing-env-scientist-bails-out-of-global-warming-movement-declares-it-a-corrupt-social-phenomenonstrictly-an-imaginary-problem-of-the-1st-world-middleclass/
 
Ratking. Nice cut and paste job from the climate depot website. A website dedicated to promoting the goals and media message strategy of the petroleum and petrochemical industries. Just look at the topics of their links to news articles, mostly about mining, refining, pipelines, and how climate change is not real. I don't have time to go through every single quote but a few of them leap out at me that I know for SURE are flat out wrong--especially that one about the natural CO2 cycle dwarfs human emissions. In fact, the 30 billion tons of CO2 that humans add to the atmosphere each year is more than 100 times ALL natural sources combined, including volcanoes. If the trash can stinks before you even pull the lid off, it is bound to be full of festering garbage. Meanwhile, 2015 just clocked in as the hottest global average temperature on record, coming in well above the record set last year for 2014. Melt rates on the Greenland Ice sheet keep accelerating, maximum ice extent in the Arctic ocean just reached it's lowest level ever in February 2015 and will probably break that record when maximum extent for 2016 is reached next month. So, keep on telling us how the all scientists are faking their data and the Earth hasn't warmed since your cherry-picked year of 1998.
 
Here's an expert with current knowledge maybe...
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/ne...-predator-gyrfalcon-spotted-in-ontario/61992/
thumb
 
Hillhater said:
LockH said:
Watts maybe NOT "natural" is the heat thrown off by billions burning fossilized remains... all at the same time. :?
Why?...
That implies that you do not consider humans to be part of the "natural" earth environment.

BURP... So. There has been as many of the human species on this earth before now? And all busy burning fossilized remains to produce "greenhouse" gases? Huh. Did not know. Sorry!
 
Numbers are irrelavent,
Whatever we are, everything we do , fire flood, volcano, desease, wars, etc , is all a part of the "natural" evolution of this planet of ours.
We humans are just part of the random progress of this globes history.
Oh , yes, and it's natural for us to want to try to control our future destiny also
 
It's just that terms like "mass die-off" may be... unsettling to some.
 
Having the intelligence to do something about it before it is too late could also be part of the natural evolution. Sadly, that probably won't happen and the Earth will kill us off in a mass extinction just like has happened three times before, take a few thousand years to heal the scars we caused until the next dominant species emerges.
 
Hehe... Thousands of years from now some species will discover etched drawings on a wall depicting these strange two-wheeled contraptions...
Might remind of the H.G.Wells story about a "time machine" maybe? Hehe
[youtube]y_OnyQAFr2M[/youtube]
 
"As far as the human power is concerned, the main lesson is that by burning fossil fuel over just one century we will affect climate for at least 100,000 years or even more," lead researcher Andrey Ganopolski tells CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/14/world/ice-age-postponed/index.html

. . . .we owe our fertile soil to the last ice age that also carved out today's landscapes, leaving glaciers and rivers behind, forming fjords, moraines [soil and rock deposits] and lakes. However, today it is humankind with its emissions from burning fossil fuels that determines the future development of the planet."
 
I just did a quick calculation using Ideal Gas Law to figure out about how much volume one metric ton (1000 kg) of CO2 would occupy. I come up with around 56 cubic meters at room temperature and surface pressure. That is approximately enough to fill a 200 sq.ft. room with 10 ft ceilings with pure CO2 gas. Now multiply that by 30 billion and that is how much pure CO2 we pump into the atmosphere each year. Now multiply that by the number of years we have been burning fossil fuels and another 100 years or so into the future. Kind of boggles the mind that anyone can still think this would not affect the climate significantly. Anybody care to check my math?

PV = nRT
n = 1,000 kg / .044 kg/mol = 2,272 mol
R = 8.314 m^3 Pa/K/mol
T = ~300 K
P = 101,300 Pa
 
Plus maybe compare size and quantity CO2 versus methane gas molecules.
onefivetwothree_NitrogenCarbonDioxideMethane.ashx


:?
 
Size of the individual molecules doesn't really affect the volume that the gas will occupy. The atomic mass of the molecule does, though. Methane is a much stronger GHG, but it decays over time through reactions with sunlight and other molecules. CO2 is very stable and will stay in the atmosphere essentially forever, unless it is either taken up by plants or dissolves in the ocean. Since the Earth is undergoing net deforestation, the plant uptake of CO2 for the planet is a net negative. A lot of it does end up dissolving in the oceans where it dissociates into carbonic acid and increases the pH of of ocean water, which is very bad for coral reefs. We're pretty much frocked in about 100 years, but I guess on the bright side, I will be long dead before things get really bad.
 
(Re methane) "The study's authors estimate 143 billion cubic metres of gas flared globally in 2012, roughly 3.5% of total production for the year.

Flaring is a waste disposal process and there is no "systemic reporting" of flaring locations and gas volumes, the paper notes.

Satellites located more than 7,000 flare sites. Russia flared the largest volume of gas at 25 billion cubic metres. While Canada's flares were smaller in volume, the country had 332 flares in 2012, the third-highest in the world behind the U.S. (2,399) and Russia (1053)."
methane%20-%20011816_zps8fxgxo7c.png


Seen here:
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/ne...-only-place-leaking-toxic-methane-gas-/62516/

... and this bit:
"In 2012, a chimney used to burn off excess natural gas at oil wells and energy sites created the largest gas flare on the planet.

Located in Punta de Mata, Venezuela, the flare burned up about 768,000 metric tonnes of natural gas, close to 10 times what's been leaked into the atmosphere in California, National Geographic reports."
 
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