Global Warming

[IQS.RLOW]

I've seen dead fish perform better flip flops than SN...

[Super Nova]

I've seen dead fish perform better flip flops than SN...

You challenge me that my confidence is science is only faith based.

If the process the IPCC is not best practice science.... which it appears to be then my scientific process takes on these new facts and adjusts. Your arguments in some way forced me to look into this in some detail. Well done.

what will be your position if/when the scientific community does provide the evidence for a projection that is devastating to mankind... are you applying scientific thought processes and can therefore adjust your view?

I seen no report at this time. Let's see the report. It is still under review.

[Super Nova]

We need to find out what is happening... that is what is required. Keep your head in the sand until we tell you what is really happening.


But the meeting must address a substantial issue, much raised by sceptics – the decreased rate of warming of temperatures taken on the surface of the Earth over the past 15 years. This has not stopped, as some attest, but it has slowed substantially, after increasing rapidly in the Nineties. Nobody knows why, but increasing evidence suggests that the heat may instead be being transferred deep into the oceans by changing natural processes.

It is important to find out, for, if that were so, it would mean that the planet is still warming rapidly, if in a different way. And that, in turn, would be bad news for the remaining Arctic ice

Few places on the planet so catch the imagination as the North West Passage. For 400 years, many of history’s greatest sailors – Cabot, Frobisher, Drake and Cook among them – failed to find a way through the 900-mile route, threading past icy Canadian islands 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Ships disappeared. Crews froze solid, to be discovered years later. In the 1840s, the biggest expedition of them all – two ships commanded by Sir John Franklin – ended with the vessels ice-bound and all 129 men dead.

Another, sent to find out what had happened, had to abandon ship itself after being locked in the ice for three years – and it was not until 1906 that the great Roald Amundsen finally conquered it in a sloop that could sail in coastal waters 3ft deep.

A few icebreakers smashed their way through over the next century. But in September 2007, the once impenetrable passage was suddenly declared “fully navigable”. Arctic sea ice had unexpectedly shrunk to just 1.6 million square miles in extent – a full 20 per cent less than its previous record low – reaching a point scientists had not expected until around 2050.

A year later, the North East Passage above Russia opened up simultaneously, making it possible to circumnavigate the Arctic for the first time in 125,000 years.

Last September set a new record low, with the ice extending just 1.32 million square miles, and some 20 ships lined up to make the journey this summer. But none has got through: the passage remained blocked, as the ice rebounded.

That has been enough to make a mockery of a much-publicised prediction, six years ago, by Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, that the Arctic would be entirely ice-free by 2013 – one of a series of alarmist forecasts that include, most notoriously, a statement deep in the last massive report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the glaciers of the Himalayas would probably melt away by 2035.

In fairness, the good professor – whose prophecy was contested by most of his peers – later revised his prediction to 2016 “plus or minus three years”, but that also looks way off-beam. Global-warming sceptics have leapt on his discomfiture – and on the ice’s return – to assert that the world is now cooling, with some even claiming that there is now “record Arctic ice”. But, in truth, they have got it just as wrong.

This year’s recovery is only partial, and looks good only because last year’s shrinkage was so great. The graph (below right) – which depicts levels in August, a month before the ice reaches its smallest extent – makes that plain. Though much more extensive than in the past two years – or in 2007, for that matter – sea ice is at about the same level as in 2008, 2009 and 2010, far beneath the average of the past three decades, and consistent with a steady decline since 1979.

When it stops melting in a few days, it will probably bottom out at the sixth or seventh lowest area ever – covering about half as much sea as in the Fifties. Some record!

In fact, many climate scientists predicted 12 months ago that just such a partial recovery would occur. A straw poll of about 100 at a conference in Bergen, Norway, on August 31 last year showed that four fifths believed that there would be more sea ice this year.

Variations in the weather are, of course, responsible. Last summer, the Arctic sweltered in warm, sunny weather. This one has been cooler. Though, at one stage in July it looked as if it might be another bad year, with the ice melting twice as fast as usual, the decline slowed down in August,

Even so, the North East Passage has remained open, even while its western counterpart closed. By the end of last month, 20 ships carrying 450,000 tons of cargo had sailed through it. And only yesterday a successful test run by a Chinese merchantman was announced.

Besides, looking at the extent of the sea ice is to consider only two of three dimensions, for – as new measurements published on Wednesday show – it has also been rapidly getting thinner. It is now little more than half as thick as it was in 1980. When its shrinking extent and thinning are both taken into account, it has lost about three quarters of its total volume.

Scientists have little doubt that human-induced global warming is overwhelmingly responsible; studies suggest that only between 5 per cent and 30 per cent of the decline over the past 30 years could be due to natural weather cycles. Indeed some years, like 2009 and 2010, when these cycles should have resulted in lots of sea ice, are among those when it has been at its scarcest.

Sceptics retort that there were similar melts in the late Thirties and early Forties, before global warming took hold. And indeed sea ice did shrink then, through natural variation, but nothing like as much as now. At its lowest, in September 1940, it covered 3.8 million square miles, about three times as much as last year, before recovering for the best part of three decades.

This time, almost all scientists believe that the far greater, more sustained decline will continue until the Arctic is indeed ice-free in late summer, with most placing that epochal event between 2030 and 2050.

The Antarctic, however, is a different story. There – in the present southern winter – sea ice is at record high levels. But at the same time the land-based Antarctic ice sheets are, overall, melting disconcertingly, suggesting that warming is at work there, too: in total, though regions vary, they have lost some 1,350 billion tons over the past two decades. So – when land and sea ice are added together – the Antarctic too has been melting. Meltwater from the land runs off into the sea, causing less mixing between warm and cold layers of the sea and thus encouraging ice to form.

All of this will be discussed in a week’s time, when scientists convene in Stockholm to put the finishing touches to the next big IPCC report. Sceptics this week presented this as a “crisis” meeting “forced” to take place by recent articles questioning global warming in a British Sunday newspaper, with governments “demanding” 1,500 changes to summary of the report.

In fact, the meeting is a routine event that takes place before the launch of every major report, and was fixed years ago, under a timetable laid down in November 2009. The number of suggested amendments – 1,800 in fact – is also normal – about the same, says the IPCC, as last time it did the exercise seven years ago.

But the meeting must address a substantial issue, much raised by sceptics – the decreased rate of warming of temperatures taken on the surface of the Earth over the past 15 years. This has not stopped, as some attest, but it has slowed substantially, after increasing rapidly in the Nineties. Nobody knows why, but increasing evidence suggests that the heat may instead be being transferred deep into the oceans by changing natural processes.

It is important to find out, for, if that were so, it would mean that the planet is still warming rapidly, if in a different way. And that, in turn, would be bad news for the remaining Arctic ice

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... f-day.html

[Rorschach]

What will yours be if in time it doesn't?

The point being that through your statements you have a predetermined outcome, that the result will always be catastrophic global warming, human induced.

[IQS.RLOW]

That it required many months and years of posting before you would even think to take a second look, says more that you have not been reading any of the science. You have bought the catastrophic AGW scare campaign based entirely on your "faith" in the story...nothing to do with the actual science.

...and again, if you understood the science you would be able to immediately see that "This has not stopped, as some attest" is a lie. It has stopped scientifically and more importantly, 'significantly'

Try to keep up.

[Jovial_Monk]

AGW has not stopped. The Daily Mail said it, but had to fiddle the figures the Met Office gave them. Satellites still show more radiation hitting the surface than radiating back out into space.

[IQS.RLOW]

It has stopped. The science is settled.

[Rorschach]

pssst.... the Greenhouse effect is what keeps us alive Monkey Boy.

you do know how that works right?

[Rorschach]

we should discuss this further in another 10 years.

[Rorschach]