If predictions hold, the world could be hotter in 2040 than at any time since humans have inhabited the Earth, he said. Global warming will force wildlife species to move around the globe to find habitat that suits them.
The San Francisco Bay will be infested with Crocodiles and Wildebeest will roam the streets of Oakland.
Probably the most seductive form of climate-change denial has to be the snowstorm in Florida argument. It goes like this: If the climate is warming how come I’m f-in freezing?
We had another weird winter in North America and it’s not over yet: snow on palm trees, snowpocalypse in Chicago, Snowmaggedon in Washington. On Jan. 11, every state in the U.S. had snow except for Florida. However, Florida itself has had unusual cold snaps and snow this year. In December, there was a snowstorm in Israel that dropped two metres of snowCounterintuitive though it may be, “heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground, the private weather monitoring agency, stated in a press release from the aptly named Union of Concerned Scientists.
“In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere,” he said. “We are steadily loading the dice in favour of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.”
To me, the simple common-sense explanation actually goes further. According to many studies across scientific disciplines, the Arctic is melting due to climate change. Now, if you’re close to something big that is melting, you are probably going to feel wet and cold, not hot. If you got on a warm bus and sat down next to a large melting block of ice, you would feel cold and even wet.
Because the Arctic ice cap is melting and we’re closer to it, we feel its effects. Our weather often comes from the north. The atmosphere is heating up. It can hold and drop more moisture, more rain and more intense storms of all kinds, a trend that is being borne out around the planet.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/
The 350 target is based not on climate modelling, but on past climate change (“paleoclimate”). Hansen looked at the highly accurate ice core record of the last few hundred thousand years, sediment core data going back 65 million years, and the changes currently unfolding. He discovered that, in the long term, climate is twice as sensitive in the real world as it is in the models used by the IPCC.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/climate-change-emergency-time-to-slam-on-brakes.php
Instead of making clueless interpretations of ice cores, maybe he could try reading the newspaper?
Could the earthquake that triggered Japan’s devastating tsunami be linked to climate change?
While it’s unlikely that scientists will be able to provide a definitive answer anytime soon and Japan has long been a hotbed of seismic activity, past research suggests there may indeed be a link between climate change and earthquakes in some parts of the world.
http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0311-japan_tsunami_climate.html
Even less likely is that the global warming community will raise their collective IQ above 50 anytime soon.
“Non-peer-reviewed scientists” threaten the survival of the planet.
Professor Ross Garnaut pointed out an interesting inverse relationship this week. Over the past three years the science of global warming has become more clear and more alarming, but in that same period, fewer Australians believed it was true.
Most Australians accept the climate is warming but the public has become somewhat less confident about the proposition even as the evidence has become more certain.
It is a shaky foundation for a rational policy debate about the best policy solution. It might be one reason why we are not having one.
But why is it so? Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies with the enormous publicity given to the so-called ”climategate” emails. Subsequent reviews cleared the scientists involved of deliberately manipulating results but the saga remains contentious and it forced a reanalysis of data and more transparency. According to Garnaut none of the findings is ”material to the reliability of the main propositions of the mainstream science”. That message has been lost on the public.
Another explanation may lie in the fact that Kevin Rudd told everyone global warming was the ”greatest moral challenge of our time” but then he and Julia Gillard decided it was not great enough to stop them deferring the emissions trading scheme.
Garnaut reckons the disconnect is in part caused by the fact that newspapers and blogs give the same credence to mainstream peer-reviewed scientists as they do to anyone else who has a strong opinion, might have written a book or is willing to fill in some airtime on radio or television.
In fact sometimes they elevated non-mainstream and non-peer-reviewed scientists in order to provide ”balance”, which was a funny way to define the term, he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/little-logic-to-heated-debate-20110311-1br8z.html
