Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.

Settings

Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).

Term Lookup

Settings

All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Home Arguments Software Resources Comments The Consensus Project Translations About Support

Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Mastodon MeWe

Twitter YouTube RSS Posts RSS Comments Email Subscribe


Climate's changed before
It's the sun
It's not bad
There is no consensus
It's cooling
Models are unreliable
Temp record is unreliable
Animals and plants can adapt
It hasn't warmed since 1998
Antarctica is gaining ice
View All Arguments...



Username
Password
New? Register here
Forgot your password?

Latest Posts

Archives

Recent Comments

Prev  1030  1031  1032  1033  1034  1035  1036  1037  1038  1039  1040  1041  1042  1043  1044  1045  Next

Comments 51851 to 51900:

  1. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Btw, I've asked AOML if they can update the example set with a Sandy entry.
  2. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    cynicus, you can figure it yourself here.
  3. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    Some personal notes: I'm from Germany. Interesting to get an outside view. There is a lot of fighting about these issues internally, about price of course, about speed, need, feasibility ... I would like us germans to go much faster. I do my best, to productively use every possibility I have, to bring forward the issues of climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity, fairness (both now geographically and towards future generations) and change options. There are SUV cars, holiday flights, non vegetable food, etc. in big proportions here as well. The people need to be made sensible for these issues and trained. Sks does a pretty good job in one specific area for this (I posted the escalator graphics on dozens of sites and linked to them at every possible occasion: this is the kind of thing that sticks, even with people driving an SUV: they will of course continue to do it, but it will bring a little nagging piece of science in their mind (I have seen this effect coming up in one face: since then I am sure it works to some (big) degree). We are a global community supporting the sustainability issue: fairness now and with future generations. This is not a socialist european idea, it does not oppose the american dream, it supports it: equal opportunities for all. --- Three notes on nuclear: 1) Many Germans don't like nuclear, because we were a lot nearer to Tchernobyl, than you americans, australians, british ... were: in Munich/Bavaria, where I live, you could no longer buy milk, cheese, ... because they were heavily contaminated: the cloud was raining off right here. In school, we were told not to sit in the grass (Cäsium, Strontium and the like). Lobbyists who gain millions from outdated nuclear plants lobbied to forget the threat. Fukushima brought back the frightening past. You still have to be careful with mushrooms, deer and the like in this area ... Just imagine to be next door to Fukushima, say your neighbor town (you cannot, but you may try). 2) Nuclear hinders the renewables from growing, because it has a tendency to deliver all the time and cannot be easily be turned on/off for balancing the grid. 3) We already have enough of the nuclear waste, which lasts ten thousands of years and more: in Germany, there is a nuclear dump, which is threatened by break down and severe leaking ("Asse") and costs billions in urgency redrawing of the wastes. I don't know where the deadly waste is kept elsewhere in the world. If Germany could be an example of replacing both coal and nuclear at the same time, I think it would be worth a lot of short term investment, which would pay off many times, because the oil/coal/gas bill will go away ... And it would be worth the thing: the world needs proof of concept. --- Two notes on storage: they currently start "wind gas": storing of wind electricity surplusses as methane, in the already existing gas network (you already can buy that, if you are an advanced consumer willing to pay for progress). This still needs time for scaling up. Electric vehicles (+grid) could be another surplus option: charge them only if there is surplus. This asks for consumption pattern changes however (not be able to use the car if there were no surplusses or pay a lot for charging).
  4. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    It is instructive to read the UK government's Climate Change Committee The Renewable Energy Review. Page 75 shows scenarios for decarbonized electricity supply in 2030 with a highest renewables scenario of 65% which they consider to be the limit of technical feasibility by 2030. All scenarios contain substantial amounts of nuclear generation. The required build rates for nuclear in any of the scenarios are considered feasible and less than what has previously been achieved in France. The UK has superior wind resources to Germany with on-shore wind achieving a capacity factor of 26-27% compared to about 18% in Germany. There is a very strong argument for decarbonization of electricity supply at the earliest opportunity with high priority, not only for emission reductions in that sector but as an enabler to achieve most benefit from the displacement of fossil fuels by electricity in transport and heating. Cost of electricity is important as lowest cost will provide more incentive in the displacement of fossil fuels in these sectors. In the context that full decarbonization of electricity supply by 2030 or so looks infeasible without large contributions from nuclear or hydro, current UK policy of support for new nuclear would seem to offer more potential to achieve what needs to be done. How that pans out in practice remains to be seen.
  5. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    I agree that ditching nuclear power on the basis of single or multiple failure modes is hasty and premature. The overarching problem with nuclear power isn't technical, it's to do with innate human nature. We're terribly fallible even when trying to do the right thing. Chernobyl failed because of a botched safety test; lousy though the particular reactor design was, no samples failed spectacularly because of a technical failure. Fukushima failed not because of a technical fault but because of human wishful thinking about construction budgets versus the odds of natural disasters. Read NRC incident reports and you'll find a litany of sloth and complacency, the same sliding habituation to compromised behavior Feynman identified at NASA. The passage of time without routinely having the holy c--p scared out of us inevitably causes this to happen. After the first shuttle loss NASA headed down the same road again, leading to a another entirely novel but in hindsight avoidable disaster. In a way the very fact that so many nuclear plants have not conspicuously failed despite being attended to by primates with a limited attention span is a tribute to their designers. However, careful attention to documentation of our many modes of monkey misbehavior clashing with the extraordinary complexity of these machines should tell us we're not quite up to snuff in their proper implementation despite being able to design and build them.
  6. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    cynicus @39 - the basis of the claim is the link embedded in the text!
  7. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    Perhaps one-off isn't the best term, but what I mean is that I think it's wrong to oppose nuclear power on the basis of an accident at a shoddily designed Soviet plant which couldn't have happened at a modern reactor, or one involving a 1-in-1000 year tsunami (or whatever it was).
  8. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    Don't get me wrong-- we're truly in "all of the above" mode when it comes to modernized post-caveman energy systems (and some of my best friends are nuclear plants)-- but virtually all accidents are "one-offs." From the paltry total collection of nuclear power generation plants on the planet we can see the emergence of a standard rate of messy failure, each failure being unique. There are many unexplored failure modes available. Scaling up nuclear deployment will result in more messes, each accompanied by acute 20-20 hindsight. Whistling past this graveyard of future demises is silly; better to confront 'em rather than pretend they won't happen.
  9. New research from last week 43/2012
    It is expected that somewhere there will be hydrate resources close to the pressure/temperature boundary. A small increase in temperature can have a large impact in such resources. But because this local section is on the threshold does not mean the rest is too. The question is whether Archer was specifically mentioning this area or that he mentioned hydrates in general (or the large Arctic continental shelf)?
  10. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    I'm curious for the basis of the "the most kinetic energy of any tropical cyclone on record" claim. Any pointers would be appreciated. The 'kinetic energy' term makes me think it is based on this, but that data goes only back to 1994. Before that the data is sporadic and missing monster hurrican's like Typhoon Tip. So is Sandy really the most energetic storm in history? Thanks.
  11. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    It's a pity Germany is so (over)sensitive to nuclear that they prefer to build new coal-fired power stations. The public don't seem to grasp that the two major nuclear accidents (Chernobyl and Fukushima) were essentially one-offs. Chernobyl was due to a combination of an inherently unsafe Soviet reactor design that was never used in the West together with reckless management. One can question the wisdom of building nuclear plants on a tsunami-prone coast, but with many thousands of people drowned and whole towns washed away the damage to the power stations seems rather small. I would suggest that if a disaster big enough to compromise a nuclear power station was to happen in Europe, the nuclear aspect would be the least of our worries.
  12. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    gws Yes, Germany is like a ship that does not easily change direction. The same can be said of the United States of America, a hot bed of global warming denial. Do you take global warming seriously or not? The notion that we have to choose between nuclear power and renewables is a straw man argument. No proponent of nuclear power is against renewables. Some question whether renewables can provide baseload power. If you can prove such concerns to be unwaranted, more power to you, no pun intended. Anyways, the question is not whether to phase out coal, but when and how fast. You can replace coal in half the time frame using both nuclear and renewables than you could using renewables alone or nuclear alone. And then, if it looks like renewables could provide all of our power needs, then we can consider phasing out nuclear power, without hoping that Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen are right.
  13. Global Surface Temperature: Going Down the Up Escalator, Part 1
    Markx - you might ask the same question of the surface temperature record. Surely we arent measuring temperatures back a century to 0.01C? No, the instuments are not. However, the precision of the average is not the same as the precision of an individual measurement. This is fundamental statistics. For detailed discussion about how accurately can you measure anything from Argo, see Von Schuckmann and Le Traen 2011 .
  14. The View from Germany: Tackling the real questions
    Germany is phasing out nuclear power because while coal kills you continually, nuclear plants are perfectly fine until they melt down and you have to evacuate a small city for a century or two. The tradeoff sucks, and we can argue which way it goes, but both technologies are very dirty.
  15. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Thanks for the rapid response, Dana! Chris Colose has a technical discussion of the climate connection behind Sandy and megastorms in general.
  16. Global Surface Temperature: Going Down the Up Escalator, Part 1
    Markx - what makes you think the extra heat, which has accumulated in the top 2000 metres of ocean, has been evenly distributed? The flaw in your argument is rather easy to spot, but I'd be genuinely interested in your justification for making this claim. And on the buckets & ropes comment, maybe you're thinking of something else. How do you measure ocean temperature down hundreds of metres with a bucket?
  17. Global Surface Temperature: Going Down the Up Escalator, Part 1
    Markx, the short answer is yes; statistically reliable, useful and significant measurements can be assembled from the plethora of data sources available to oceanographers. A longer answer-- typical and one of many describing specific methods-- can be found here: Improved Analyses of Changes and Uncertainties in Sea Surface Temperature Measured In Situ since the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The HadSST2 Dataset As always, follow references to drill into the whole story. These people have really powerful senses of curiosity and are extremely stubborn in their pursuit. Same deal as with many other amazing human endeavors.
  18. Global Surface Temperature: Going Down the Up Escalator, Part 1
    What intrigues me about Levitus et al: Levitus etal show a dramatic chart of escalating oceanic heat content. But water has a huge heat holding capacity. If converted to the units measured (heat increment, in degrees centigrade) we find the top 2000 meters of the entire world’s oceans has risen 0.09 degrees C over a period of 55 years. 0.09 degrees C over 55 years? Can they really measure the temperature of the whole world's ocean to that degree of accuracy even now, with the Argo floats? And could they measure to that level of accuracy 55 years ago, with buckets and ropes?
  19. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    FYI, the Pielke Jr. response blog post is now drafted up and undergoing internal review. Look for it around Tuesday of next week.
  20. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    But it's not a "classic and unambiguous case of financial conflict of interest" for Pat Michaels and some of the other climate change troglodytes to take money from the fossil fuel industry? I know it's been a tough week for them....too bad, they've earned it.
  21. Pete Dunkelberg at 13:01 PM on 2 November 2012
    Climate of Doubt Strategy #1: Deny the Consensus
    My attention has been on elections, not climate, for a while. I just want to show you denial. And I do mean show. http://johnsvor.blogspot.com/2012/11/heckler-interrupts-romney-with-question.html
  22. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Thank you OregonStream. I really don't understand Trenberth taking this line. There's no need to claim that the whole SST anomaly was due to warming. Equally, there's no basis to claim that 0.6C was the warming ocean's only contribution. This should have been a teaching moment about averages. If the average warming is 0.6, then there must be, by definition, areas of water both above and below that average. Therefore a good starting point for an area that is way, way over its 'normal' temperature for a specified period could be to consider that this particular part of the ocean is one of those above average areas.
  23. Hurricane Sandy: Neither weather nor tide nor sea level can be legislated
    Paul Magnus, If links to such information are easy to come by, and plentiful, it would be tremendously useful if you could post two or three, since you have already vetted them. Once I see one article, I would have some better idea what kind of search words and phrases to use, to find more. But it is not helpful when you offer a whole book, and slam the person who asked for references. This is science, why ask others to reinvent a wheel that you have at your fingertips? Just post links, make it easy for others to see what you see.
    Moderator Response: There does not seem to be an appropriate topic at SkS connecting SLR with seismic activity, this thread included. Please arrange another location for continued discussion of the topic.
  24. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    "However, note that during the hurricane event, SSTs along the coast were approximately 3°C above average, whereas global warming has increased SSTs by closer to 0.6°C. Thus as Kevin Trenberth notes, while global warming contributed to the hurricane intensity, so did natural variability". And can't natural variability regionally amplify a forcing? That 0.6 C isn't exactly evenly distributed, and future warming won't be either. As the NERC/Met office/Royal society statement put it, "We expect some of the most significant impacts of climate change to occur when natural variability is exacerbated by long-term global warming, so that even small changes in global temperatures can produce damaging local and regional effects".
  25. Antarctica is gaining ice
    While not directly related to this article, it is always worth keeping in mind that the loss of Arctic sea ice is far bigger than the gain of Antarctic sea ice.
  26. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Pielke's the same fellow down on record claiming the head of the IPCC is corrupt. Pielke was wrong but I don't recall him public retracting his remark that Pachauri was guilty of "a classic and unambiguous case of financial conflict of interest." Why would anybody listen to somebody so gullible as to repeat fabrications and also so sloppy as to not apologize when it turned out he was spreading slander? Is Pielke only imagining what he says in this op-ed? How are we to know, without diligently verifying his claims? If we have to double-check what Pielke says, of what use is he as a thought leader?
  27. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Well, RP JR has posted the WSJ editorial on his blog, along with a follow-up post, and unlike his dad, comments are open if anyone wants to pursue the generally fruitless diversion of rebutting him in the commetns ...
  28. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    When asked by people I've been summing up the influence of climate change on Sandy with the following analogy. It's like rain on the highway: it might not actually cause an accident but it 1) reduces visibility, 2) reduces grip, and 3) will likely mean that any accident that does occur will have a greater impact.
  29. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Wow, that WSJ opinion piece by Pielke Jr. is quite the exercise in cherry picking and spin, not to mention ignoring inconvenient facts. But I suppose one should not expect much from an opinion piece in the opinion pages of the WSJ, the same section that people like Lindzen and deniers have used to spread their ideology and pseudo-science. Roger Pielke Jr. is now playing the same game as the other contrarians and obfuscators and delayers who have exploited the very same opinion pages of the WSJ-- a paper that sadly seems only too happy to uncritically promulgate misinformation. Ultimately it boils down to this, Roger Pielke Jr. is entitled to his misguided opinions, but he is not entitled to his own facts. In this case, as in many others, the facts do not agree with his (overvalued) opinion.
  30. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Addicted @24, the recent sea level rise began about 1800, based on data from Jevrejevya: The initial increase was due to the end of the Little Ice Age, brought about by a period with unusually few large equatorial volcanoes, a slight increase in solar radiation, and (almost certainly) a reduction in the Earth's albedo due to black carbon from the rapidly ongoing industrialization of Europe and America. (It must be remembered that in the 19th and early 20th century, trees in Europe and the NE US were so blackened with soot that the normal light form of the Peppered Moth was almost entirely replaced by the black form.) However, the ongoing rise in sea temperatures is undoubtedly due to the onging rise in temperatures which is almost entirely due to anthropogenic factors.
  31. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Dana @25, the mid-century cooling is distinctly a NH phenomenon. Except for a slight blip coinciding with WW2, the SH warming has been continuous since 1920: As most of the Earth's ocean surface lies in the Southern Hemisphere, SH temperatures would be a better predictor of sea level rise due to thermal expansion. SH temperatures would also be a better predictor of glacial retreat in the Andies, NZ and or course Antarctica as well. Having said that, the rate of sea level did peak during the warm years of of the 30s and 40s, indicating that the NH roller coaster in temperature did have some impact.
  32. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Dana @25 - Thanks for your response. Regarding your point about the lack of decline in the mid 20th century, as far as I can tell, local warming should not have made a difference to sea levels. Or am I wrong there?
  33. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Re: the BW article, Ive not checked yet but the mention of "climate deniers" in the *first* 'graph, of this *particular* publication, must be making spleens hemorrhage on WUWT et al, ad nauseum. Appreciate the link and as I stated before, we in the rationalist camp have a huge job ahead and this gift of time (the silver lining of the dark cloud that is Sandy's dire effects) to reframe the conversdation is short. I know it must be doing a little something, because some who I've contacted over the past few months are now asking me about this issue, in the new light in which it exists. Keep up the unending and largely thankless job, SkSers! We've got a biosphere to save!
  34. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Addicted @24 - there was both global and local warming in the early 20th Century. I'd be more curious as to why local sea level rise continued during the mid-century 'cooling', though looking at local temp data, the mid-century cooling isn't easy to spot in the NY area.
  35. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    In fig 1, could someone explain what explained the sea level rise in the early part of the 20th century (although it does appear that the trend line is slightly misleading, in that, the real rise only seems to have begun in the 1930s). Is this just because of local factors (being Manhattan, there was probably some reclamation work being done in the early 20th century) or just random variation?
  36. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    See Tamino's newest post for an alternate view from the business world!
    Moderator Response: I linked directly to the Business Week article that Tamino highlights.
  37. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Pielke ignores that-- as with all adaptation-- accommodating ourselves to the mess we're creating will largely be an iterative process of mayhem at all scales. The larger a single destructive event, the fewer will successfully adapt. Collectively we behave with little more intelligence than does evolution, as the very fact of continuing burgeoning C02 emissions concisely tells us. Cases in point for illustration are photos of some portions of the New Jersey shoreline where the vague outlines of street grids can be seen below water, many yards out from a new shoreline. Those streets couldn't adapt quickly enough and they certainly were not planned intelligently.
  38. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Annoying, yes; but I posit we (rational, fact-based reserchers/scientists) only have a very limited window to 'trimtab' the conversation towards reality; as sure as, within a couple of weeks, folks exogenous to the 'Sandy zone' will tend to forget the enormity of it, and the MSM will, move onto the next "is the head dead yet?" meme. This is an issue that we need to hammer on, to take a perfect opportunity (unfortunate to those who suffered through it, and will continue to do so) moment offered to us by Sandy, to counteract the superior (in its ability to "Tannoy" its disinforamtion) to a gullible populace. This is indeed the tactic we need to utilize, and I believe we have had to use it for quite a long while, certainly since AR4 came out.
  39. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Dana, I was hoping someone would write a response. I want to post it in some places where Pielke's piece has been cited. Thanks in advance!
  40. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Tom @16 - this isn't the first time we've seen Pielke Jr.'s extreme weather obfuscation. If you boil it down, his argument is basically that we've been able to adapt to hurricane changes so far (i.e. better building engineering and better model predictions), therefore there's nothing to worry about. I'm not really sure how you adapt to New York being regularly underwater though. I'll probably have to put together a response post. Annoying.
  41. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    adelady, my ex was from the Woodford area: even in 'normal' flood events, the Stanley River would often flood, downstream of Somerset reservoir, to an extent that she was literally an island, unable to get to either Woodford or Kilcoy. she learned early on to lay in a stock of provisions and water. IIRC, Woodford is only about 40 clicks away from the coast. Assuming flooding events might get more frequent there, that would put real kibosh on not only property values in that region, but its habitability. And that's just a *teensy* slice of an area that would be affected, just in Qld.
  42. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Tom Dayton, re: 16... (Mods, please allow me this one time...) ARRRRRRGH! I hope someone will point out Nuccitelli (2012) and other recent works to RPJr, and soon, showing how erroneous his claims are. Time to put feet to (robust research fire). We really only have a small gap of time to do so, before the populace (outside NJ and NY, mainly) forget Sandy. And they *will*.
  43. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Pielke Jr. says in the Wall Street Journal today: "Humans do affect the climate system, and it is indeed important to take action on energy policy—but to connect energy policy and disasters makes little scientific or policy sense. There are no signs that human-caused climate change has increased the toll of recent disasters, as even the most recent extreme-event report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds. And even under the assumptions of the IPCC, changes to energy policies wouldn't have a discernible impact on future disasters for the better part of a century or more."
  44. Hurricane Sandy: Neither weather nor tide nor sea level can be legislated
    Paul Magnus, perhaps you should reliquish your preconcived notions of where my *question* (not a declarative statement about what you referenced, just a *question*) was going. I reiterate.. "As a geologist, I find this *fascinating*: are you saying ...that GW ~drives~ seismic and volcanic activity? *Really*? Please cite the sources of that data, given you assert "...it has been noted in the geological record...." And this, for fairness, "I remain *extremely* skeptical of the claim that storms lead temblors and/or vulcanism." So you responded with a link to a book, by Bill McGuire, with whom I'm not terribly familiar. I have heard of his work and he seems well-regarded and well-published. https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=WJMCG95 Now, again, I ask, it was you asserted that storms like Sandy "...could be one mechanism which is involved when we get sudden climate change like GW as it has been noted in the geological record that earthquakes, volcanoes and seismic activity does increase with the changing climate." This could well be and as a scientist, I *still* regard this with some skepticism, as it should be. "I might end up being wrong about that, but in the scheme of being a scientist, it would be a position we all are used to! We fail a lot more on early hypotheses, leading to credible and robust theories. Have you read McGuire's book? If you did, does it credibly demonstrate that in the geological record, large storm activity drives seismological/volcanic events, and how? That would be the question wrt Sandy, and I'm not entirely tossing it out as as a *possible* option, wrt changes sudden CC could induce. I have not read the book, but will give it a read and look into other "listings of reputable ilk" to see what is being said by others in my field who are more connencted to the hypothesis than I. I put a *whooole* lotta research into this subject, and your assertion was the first time I'd heard it floated as a possible consequence for the damage caused by Sandy: a stormn surge of 13-ish feet is a large amount of water, no doubt; I still don't see credible data that that *very* local, and *very* time-restricted event, resulted in greater flood damage than otherwise it would have caused, due to land subsidence. As data is collected, we shall see. Please do not *assume* I don't do "a bit of research" into this subject, and thanks for the tip about McGuire's book.
  45. 2012 SkS News Bulletin #1: Hurricane Sandy & Climate Change
    "Now, with a week to go until polling, the elephant in the room farted. Our discussions here won't affect it either. It's about pictures, not words." One of the first, and funniest (to those of us who think farts are funny!) vids I ever saw on UT...fits the occasion and gosh knows we all need some humor! Let's just label the pig "Sandy", and the dinosaurs as "WUWT" and "Jo Nova." The climate just farted. Tee hee...;)
  46. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    Lambda: I just tried a very crude calc of temperatures in coastal cells vs all cells for HadSST3. There are differences in the resulting temperature record, but the warming since 1950 still looks like ~0.6C.
  47. 2012 SkS News Bulletin #1: Hurricane Sandy & Climate Change
    "It seems to me that the whole climate of debate now shifts. For one thing, AFAICT, Obama has now won the US election. Governor Romney is now unelectable." From your lips to YHWH's ears.....:( Let's revisit this thread in, oh say...120 hours? We'll see. I sincerely hope you are correct, for then, as a progressive, I can begin to *really* kicks this Administrations a-double Q about doing something towards solving this critcally important issue. As someone else said, upthread, thank God this wasn't a *serious* storm. It was "just a sloshing."
  48. 2012 SkS News Bulletin #1: Hurricane Sandy & Climate Change
    Significant signs of some exasperation from "Big Money": http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/01/1122241/bloomberg-businessweek-its-global-warming-stupid/
  49. Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection
    I made a list of papers on hurricanes and global warming: http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/papers-on-hurricanes-and-global-warming/
  50. 2012 SkS News Bulletin #1: Hurricane Sandy & Climate Change
    Hurricane Sandy and Change of Climate It seems to me that the whole climate of debate now shifts. For one thing, AFAICT, Obama has now won the US election. Governor Romney is now unelectable. For this, I think we have to thank WUWT, Jo Nova, the Heartland Foundation and the huge political campaign donations of Big Oil, and yes, the little guys like Dale, too. They have made it absolutely impossible for the GOP to field a candidate with any position on climate change that is not firmly based on utter gibberish. That really didn't matter, so long as AGW was never debated. Now, with a week to go until polling, the elephant in the room farted. Our discussions here won't affect it either. It's about pictures, not words. There are pictures of luxury cars bobbing about in flood water in Manhattan. It takes a thousand words to even discuss whether climate change has caused this. Then here's a picture of the Jersey Shore pummelled to hell. Explaining that this isn't necessarily climate change takes another thousand words. Do you give up yet? No, well sorry, but your audience is now watching the baseball, and Obama has won the election. Those of you who visit WUWT may have noticed Tony's sudden aversion to tabloid climatology? (What he going to do? Launch a campaign to have the web's biggest climate tabloid - WUWT - closed down?) This should now provoke some interesting discussions. Governor Romney was backed not only by Big Oil, but also, and much more significantly, by Big Money. In the aftermath of the coming election, Big Money is going to have some Big Questions for Big Oil to answer. I would like to suggest that soon would be a good time for SkS to examine again the costs/benefits of Climate Action/Inaction, in the light of the damage caused by Sandy, and the clearly increasing danger of such damage being repeated in future. Heck! This was a local, temporary storm surge of 13 feet. Hansens's latest discusses the possibility of a global, permanent sea level rise of more like 20 feet (5 metres) by 2100. Still the damage caused by Sandy is going to cost a lot of money. I believe I read that NYC has an official report from last year, which estimated that if two significant tunnels flooded, that would cost US$55billion. They flooded. An update on the latest Monckton "adaptation will cost too much" stand up routine might be in order, as long as I can volunteer somebody else to write it...

Prev  1030  1031  1032  1033  1034  1035  1036  1037  1038  1039  1040  1041  1042  1043  1044  1045  Next


The Consensus Project Website

THE ESCALATOR

(free to republish)


© Copyright 2024 John Cook
Home | Translations | About Us | Privacy | Contact Us