May We Discuss Something Else?

[_Brackite]

Greetings all here,

May we discuss something else here instead of that case and trial that ended over a week ago in Florida?

How about we discuss climate change/global warming like we used to do here.

Here are the latest news stories that I found about climate change/global warming.


Climate change's heat intensifies drought in the USA

SPICEWOOD, Texas — In this browning patch of land in central Texas, C.J. Teare could be fined for using fresh water to keep her decades-old oak trees alive so she relies on soapy water left over from washing clothes.

"I've never seen it like this before," says Teare, a grandmother who has lived in her modest Lakeside Beach ranch for 20 years. Her community has been under emergency water restrictions since January 2012, when it became the first to run dry during Texas' ongoing three-year drought. It stays afloat with six daily truckloads of water.

Seas may rise 2.3 meters per degree of global warming: report

(Reuters) - Sea levels could rise by 2.3 meters for each degree Celsius that global temperatures increase and they will remain high for centuries to come, according to a new study by the leading climate research institute, released on Monday.

Why has global warming stalled?

With Britain's heatwave reaching a peak, there could be no better moment to talk about why global warming has slowed to a standstill.

It reminds me of reporting on a drought a few years ago: while filming interviews with people about the impact, the heavens opened and rainwater was soon flowing down my neck.

So as journalists were invited to the Science Media Centre in London to hear how the worldwide rise in temperatures has stalled, the mercury shot up as if on cue to record the hottest day of the year so far.

In many ways, this event was long overdue: climate sceptics have for years pointed out that the world is not warming as rapidly as once forecast.

A lot depends on how you do the measurements, of course.

There are plenty of possible explanations but none of them adds up to a definitive smoking gun.”

Each of the last few decades has been warmer than the last. But start your graph in 1998 - which happened to be an exceptionally warm year - and there hasn't been much global warming at all.

Gradually the words 'pause' and 'hiatus' which first featured in the blogs have crossed to the media and then to the scientists professionally engaged in researching the global climate.

The headline - which the scientists will not thank me for - is that no one is really sure why the rate of warming has stumbled.

You can’t deny global warming after seeing this graph

Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. But forget individual years. That data is noisy. A single year can see its temperatures rocket for reasons having little to do with climate change.

Look, instead, at decades. There, the data is a little clearer, as the idiosyncrasies of any one year are balanced by its nine compatriots.

I know that I have been somewhat of a climate change/global warmer denier and doubter in the past, but I am now willing to change my beliefs on this important topic if I need to.

[_ajax18]

Is there really more drought or is it just that there are more people and thus a higher demand for fresh water?

[_Brackite]

Is there really more drought or is it just that there are more people and thus a higher demand for fresh water?

I believe that it is a combination of both. Some States such as Arizona and Nevada have experienced population growth rates more than double the National average.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impact ... hwest.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/29 ... y-20130329

[_ldsfaqs]

Yet other areas of the world are colder than normal.....

People also forget that Greenland used to be "green" not very long ago, and now it's mostly frozen wasteland. People also forget that warmer means more green historically speaking.

People also forget that many of the same ideological people were stating there was going to be an Ice Age 40 years ago. More so, many of the people who have predicted "Global Warming", predicted that the world was supposed to end already. Yet ZERO of the predictions have come true.

[_Brackite]

The Hot Summer of 2010!!

What caused the hot summer of 2010 in Eastern Europe and Russia?

Was the hot summer of 2010 in Eastern Europe and Russia evidence of climate change/global warming?


From ScienceDaily.com:

Record-Breaking 2010 Eastern European/Russian Heatwave

Mar. 18, 2011 — An international research team involving ETH Zurich has compared the hot summers of 2003 and 2010 in detail for the first time. Last year's heatwave across Eastern Europe and Russia was unprecedented in every respect: Europe has never experienced so large summer temperature anomalies in the last 500 years.

The summer of 2010 was extreme. Russia was especially hard hit by the extraordinary heat: in Moscow, daytime temperatures of 38.2°C were recorded and it didn't get much cooler at night. Devastating fires caused by the dry conditions covered an area of 1 million hectares, causing crop failures of around 25%; the total damage ran to about USD 15 billion. Even though passengers were also collapsing on trains in Germany in 2010 because the air-con units had failed in the heat, the general perception is still that the summer of 2003 was the most extreme -- among Western Europeans at least. An international research team involving ETH Zurich has now compared the two heatwaves and just published their findings in Science.

Area fifty times bigger than Switzerland

The 2010 heatwave shattered all the records both in terms of the deviation from the average temperatures and its spatial extent. The temperatures -- depending on the time period considered -- were between 6.7°C and 13.3°C above the average. The heatwave covered around 2 million km2 -- an area fifty times the size of Switzerland. On average, the summer of 2010 was 0.2°C warmer in the whole of Europe than in 2003. Although it might not sound like much, it's actually a lot when calculated over the vast area and the whole season. "The reason we felt 2003 was more extreme is that Western Europe was more affected by the 2003 heatwave and it stayed warm for a long period of time," explains Erich Fischer, a postdoc at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich.

The reason for the heatwaves in both 2003 and 2010 was a large, persistent high-pressure system associated by areas of low pressure in the east and west. In 2010 the heart of this high-pressure anomaly, often referred to as blocking, was above Russia. The low pressure system to the east was partly responsible for the floods in Pakistan. But the blocking was not the only reason for the extraordinary heat between July and mid-August; on top of that, there was little rainfall and an early snow melt, which dried out the soil and aggravated the situation. "Such prolonged blockings in the summertime are rare, but they may occur through natural variability. Therefore, it's interesting for us to put the two heatwaves in a wider temporal perspective," explains Fischer.

500-year-old temperature record broken

With this in mind, the researchers compared the latest heatwaves with data from previous centuries. Average daily temperatures are available back as far as 1871. For any earlier than that, the researchers used seasonal reconstructions derived from tree rings, ice cores and historical documents from archives. The summers of 2003 and 2010 broke 500-year-old records across half of Europe. Fischer stresses: "You can't attribute isolated events like the heatwaves of 2003 or 2010 to climate change. That said, it's remarkable that these two record summers and three more very hot ones all happened in the last decade. The clustering of record heatwaves within a single decade does make you stop and think."

[_moksha]

The Penguins are discussing the possibility of an IPO for a new luxury resort at the soon to be uncovered Ross Beach.

[_MeDotOrg]

The Penguins are discussing the possibility of an IPO for a new luxury resort at the soon to be uncovered Ross Beach.

Happy Feet 3: The Long Walk Home

[_ludwigm]

May we discuss something else here

Thank You...

There are Hungarian sayings for this type behaviour:

1. My snow boot is full of [anything mentioned more and more and more]
2. The same as 1, with prick instead of snowboot
3. [something] runs out from every tap

What is the proper English expression?

[_Brackite]

The Penguins are discussing the possibility of an IPO for a new luxury resort at the soon to be uncovered Ross Beach.

Moksha, I thought that Antarctica is one of the few places on the globe that has been getting colder during the last several years.

[_Analytics]

Yet other areas of the world are colder than normal.....

People also forget that Greenland used to be "green" not very long ago, and now it's mostly frozen wasteland.

Interesting fact about Greenland:

The Greeland Ice Sheet is a key piece of evidence regarding the history of climate change over the last several dozen millennia. Scientists can drill down into the ice and compare the layers to see what was happening in the weather for each year.

The ice sheet has about 110,000 layers and is two miles deep at its thickest point. Thus, we see that the last time it was green in the summer was right around 108,000 B.C.

Another interesting fact is that a major worry of climatologists is that global warming will trigger an ice age. If too much ice melts, it could change the level of salt in the ocean to the point where it disrupts the North Atlantic Current. If the North Atlantic Current were to stop, Northern Europe would turn into a frozen tundra as cold as Northern Canada. The result of that could be that in 100,000 years, they'll be drilling core samples of the European Ice Sheet.

Climate change is scary.