TheEEStory.com

Who is going to benefit the most from carbon credit trading?

hillcountry wrote:

Who is going to benefit the most from carbon credit trading?

those who clean up their act?

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Climate scientists in race to predict where natural disaster will strike next. Conference in Boulder will step up world's efforts to establish an early warning system for extreme weather events

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Nigeria flooding displaces 2 million

There's that phrase again.

Nigeria, ...[snip] has seen particularly heavy rainfall in the north that already broke a dam and flowed over levees in another northern state.

Is that the 15th or 16th 100-year flood this year? I've lost count.

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Fibb wrote:

An almost complete account of the extra severe weather this summer. Sobering to those with half a brain.

Whereas those of us with a full brain realize that increased reporting *on* severe weather does not equal increased occurrence *of* severe weather.

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Lensman wrote:

Fibb wrote:

An almost complete account of the extra severe weather this summer. Sobering to those with half a brain.

Whereas those of us with a full brain realize that increased reporting *on* severe weather does not equal increased occurrence *of* severe weather.

Right, floods and droughts and heat waves effecting 10s of millions of people occur every year.

Must be a slow news summer that we are hearing about it all this time.

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Fibb wrote:

Right, floods and droughts and heat waves effecting 10s of millions of people occur every year.

At *least* tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions in some years, scattered all over the planet in places like this one.

Welcome to the real world, Fibb.

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Lensman wrote:

Fibb wrote:

Right, floods and droughts and heat waves effecting 10s of millions of people occur every year.

At *least* tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions in some years, scattered all over the planet in places like this one.

Welcome to the real world, Fibb.

Flood stats (we can look at drought data later):

Looks like an uptrend to me. I wonder how tall the 2009 and 2010 bars will be.

hmmmmmmm.... Look at the loss in 1998, the second warmest year on record. Man that's expensive stuff. $400 billion. Ouch.

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http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63739/ti...

I traveled last week. Transportation pollution in the air sucks. This is Atlanta... you should see a few other cities... and the stuff blows and mixes with clean air...

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In May of 2009 I was traveling north in Brazil from Rio de Janeiro by motorcycle to Fortaleza, and then to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon. The flooding was so bad, I had to wait 6 weeks to make the trip. It was the worst flooding in decades with many bridges destroyed and replaced by temporary bridges not easily negotiated on a motorcycle. The rainy season normally ends in May. Going up the Amazon by boat, the degree of flooding was apparent by the number of tree tops sticking out of the river, sometimes several hundred yards offshore.

This year they are experiencing the worst drought in 47 years. The Amazon and its tributaries are the highway to cities and villages in the Amazon Jungle. Many are now cutoff from the world due to low water or no water. For anyone not familiar with the vastness of this river, the Atlantic Ocean normally contains fresh water for 200 miles out from the mouth of the river. A pattern of many years of flooding or of drought might be explained by changes in ocean currents or a shifting of the Jet Stream. But, alternating severity is unusual.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/16/3...

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A weekend deluge washed out roads and cut off several communities near Bella Coola and Port Hardy after more than 200 millimetres of rain fell on some coastal areas north of Vancouver, creating some of the worst flooding on record.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story...

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how are your insurance premiums?

2010 'exceptional year' for weather disasters: reinsurers

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Fibb wrote:

Flood stats (we can look at drought data later):



Looks like an uptrend to me. I wonder how tall the 2009 and 2010 bars will be.

Are you aware of the concept of an "artifact of observation"? The upturn probably isn't in the actual number of cases of drought and/or floods, but rather in the number of *reports* of those, as global communication improves, and as communication tech spreads to areas so remote that they previously had little or no contact with the outside world.

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Fibb wrote:

A weekend deluge washed out roads and cut off several communities near Bella Coola and Port Hardy after more than 200 millimetres of rain fell on some coastal areas north of Vancouver, creating some of the worst flooding on record.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story...

How many years again have we been keeping these records? How old is the earth again? Simmer down there Fibb, everything is going to be ooooooook.

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Fibb wrote:

What are the vertical axes measuring? The trends look far too large to be caused primarily by global warming.

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Lensman wrote:

Fibb wrote:

Flood stats (we can look at drought data later):



Looks like an uptrend to me. I wonder how tall the 2009 and 2010 bars will be.

Are you aware of the concept of an "artifact of observation"? The upturn probably isn't in the actual number of cases of drought and/or floods, but rather in the number of *reports* of those, as global communication improves, and as communication tech spreads to areas so remote that they previously had little or no contact with the outside world.

Nice try Lens but you can't hand wave away this data.

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Colder winters possible due to climate change: study

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Rise in flood claims tied to climate change

For many years, fire damage was the most expensive cost for companies, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

But 10 years ago, water damage claims started to increase, until 2005 when they surpassed fire costs.

As for the science of climate change, the increase in the severity of extreme rain events is undeniable, environment experts say.

Steve Butler's basement was flooded twice in an 18-month period, costing him $7,000.

Climate modelling research has found that on a global scale there is a steady upward trend in heavy precipitation, according to Dr. Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, and former director of Environment Canada's climate research branch.

"That means, you know, additional flooding [and] more frequent events when people will have to mop out their basements," says Zwiers.

Last edited Mon, 06 Dec 2010, 10:46am by Fibb

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Fibb wrote:

Colder winters possible due to climate change: study

Good this will help offset all this GLOBAL WARMING.

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I liked this:

In Greenland, a giant ice floe four times the size of Manhattan broke off one of the country's two main glaciers, the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly half a century. Scientists said it's difficult to state empirically whether global warming caused the halving of the 100 square-mile ice island, since the records have been kept only since 2003.

Despite records having been kept only since 2003, these guys are confident that it's the biggest such event since 1910!

Hmmm.

My attitude is that not knowing for sure that burning fossil fuels causes global warning is a good enough reason to stop doing it until it can be shown that it really DOESN'T have an effect.

We are in any case running out of the stuff, and the sooner we get out of the habit the less of a shock it will be when it's all gone.

If you look at the Earths climate over almost any time scale, hundreds of years, thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, you will see that it is quite variable, particularly during the transition into and out of glaciations. We are nearing the end of the most recent interglacial period. The "normal" during the last 600,000 years is for there to be a 1 mile thick glacier over the cities of the northeast US for 100,000 years at a time,followed by interglacial periods lasting 20-30,000 years. It is also beyond debate and scientifically irrefutable that human activity has changed the composition of the earths atmosphere considerably. The only debate is what effect will that change have.

I have spent my career in another field of science where we have to make decisions; important decisions, without a complete understanding of the science involved. It is funny that this is where we find ourselves as a society and a species. The scientific understanding of the climate record is good. Our ability to predict the effects of our man-made changes on the climate is very poor. The computer models for global climate change are primitive.

In medicine, the first rule is "primum non nocere". First do no harm. This isn't a bad idea when you find your self playing with unforgiving natural forces that you don't fully understand. This is the best argument for doing all that we can to decrease our impacts on our atmosphere. The hardest lesson a physician will ever learn is that some things when done, can never be undone.

Last edited Mon, 06 Dec 2010, 5:12pm by DaveM

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Maybe the rise in flood insurance, has to do with more flood insurance being issued and bought??? hmmm... Maybe too many people are building closer to shore lines... hmmm... Maybe in our litigious society, you can't buy a home without proof of insurance, and maybe insurance companies looking to limit their liability are requiring flood insurance on more homes to limit variability on their profits.... hmmm....

Fibb wrote:

Rise in flood claims tied to climate change

hmmm... I'm wondering what caused an ice sheet of similar size (maybe bigger) to break away in 1910...

without having all the data, and I mean ALL the data.... These guesses amount to estimating the grains of salt in a salt shaker.... (which could probably be done with better precision....)

Tec wrote:

Despite records having been kept only since 2003, these guys are confident that it's the biggest such event since 1910!

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Fibb wrote:

'Global Weirding': Extreme Climate Events Dominate The Summer

An almost complete account of the extra severe weather this summer. Sobering to those with half a brain.

Time for DW to save us.

Politician and bureaucrats are NOT going to get it done.

It is another cold winter here in northern europe. Last was the coldest in 80 years. We are in a new manunder. The sunspots has dissappeared. New ice age is coming in fast.

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bEElzebub wrote:

Fibb wrote:

'Global Weirding': Extreme Climate Events Dominate The Summer

An almost complete account of the extra severe weather this summer. Sobering to those with half a brain.

Time for DW to save us.

Politician and bureaucrats are NOT going to get it done.

It is another cold winter here in northern europe. Last was the coldest in 80 years. We are in a new manunder. The sunspots has dissappeared. New ice age is coming in fast.

Buuuut I thought Fibb said the earth was warming? I must be missing some of the data here because I just don't see how can the earth be warming and cooling at the same time? Oh wait I forgot. Now I remember in that treehugger movie when the head treehugger was explaining to Dick Cheney, eh I mean the actor playing the vice president, how global cooling would bring about the global weirding that consumed mankind in an ice age.

Maybe I just don't understand the meaning of the two words.

Last edited Mon, 06 Dec 2010, 5:49pm by HEEman

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Tec wrote:

I liked this:

In Greenland, a giant ice floe four times the size of Manhattan broke off one of the country's two main glaciers, the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly half a century. Scientists said it's difficult to state empirically whether global warming caused the halving of the 100 square-mile ice island, since the records have been kept only since 2003.

Despite records having been kept only since 2003, these guys are confident that it's the biggest such event since 1910!

Hmmm.

My attitude is that not knowing for sure that burning fossil fuels causes global warning is a good enough reason to stop doing it until it can be shown that it really DOESN'T have an effect.

We are in any case running out of the stuff, and the sooner we get out of the habit the less of a shock it will be when it's all gone.

LOLOLOLOLOL. This same record keeping can be applied to the treehuggers chicken little global temperature tracking fiasco. How old is the earth? How long have we been keeping track of temperature on a global scale accurately? Do we even keep accurate records today? It is no wonder they are calling it "climate change" now so they can complain no matter what is happening outside. How convenient.

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Here is some global weirding we should be able to agree on.

"We were quite surprised to find that polycarbonate plastic biodegrades in the environment," said Katsuhiko Saido, Ph.D. He reported on the discovery March 23 at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, being held in San Francisco.

Will endocrine disrupters turn your HEEman into a SHEman? What about fish and other sea life?

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I don't think anyone disputes rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Only a fool would not take this seriously I feel, although we have a plentiful supply of them worse luck.

Whatever the cause, it will indisputably cause warming, and sealevel rise is already happening. The poorer peoples of the world will be the first to suffer, but it will not be long before we see London and New York follow the route of New Orleans.

We are indeed looking at interesting times ahead.

wasmaba wrote:

Here is some global weirding we should be able to agree on.

"We were quite surprised to find that polycarbonate plastic biodegrades in the environment," said Katsuhiko Saido, Ph.D. He reported on the discovery March 23 at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, being held in San Francisco.

Will endocrine disrupters turn your HEEman into a SHEman? What about fish and other sea life?

Will the real CL please stand up. I guess we will have to add this to the list of things blamed on global warming.

. The deaths of Aspen trees in the West
2. Incredible shrinking sheep
3. Caribbean coral deaths
4. Eskimos forced to leave their village
5. Disappearing lake in Chile
6. Early heat wave in Vietnam
7. Malaria and water-borne diseases in Africa
8. Invasion of jellyfish in the Mediterranean
9. Break in the Arctic Ice Shelf
10. Monsoons in India
11. Birds laying their eggs early
12. 160,000 deaths a year
13. 315,000 deaths a year
14. 300,000 deaths a year
15. Decline in snowpack in the West
16. Deaths of walruses in Alaska
17. Hunger in Nepal
18. The appearance of oxygen-starved dead zones in the oceans
19. Surge in fatal shark attacks
20. Increasing number of typhoid cases in the Philippines
21. Boy Scout tornado deaths
22. Rise in asthma and hayfever
23. Duller fall foliage in 2007
24. Floods in Jakarta
25. Radical ecological shift in the North Sea
26. Snowfall in Baghdad
27. Western tree deaths
28. Diminishing desert resources
29. Pine beetles
30. Swedish beetles
31. Severe acne
32. Global conflict
33. Crash of Air France 447
34. Black Hawk Down incident
35. Amphibians breeding earlier
36. Flesh-eating disease
37. Global cooling
38. Bird strikes on US Airways 1549
39. Beer tastes different
40. Cougar attacks in Alberta
41. Suicide of farmers in Australia
42. Squirrels reproduce earlier
43. Monkeys moving to Great Rift Valley in Kenya
44. Confusion of migrating birds
45. Bigger tuna fish
46. Water shortages in Las Vegas
47. Worldwide hunger
48. Longer days
49. Earth spinning faster
50. Gender balance of crocodiles
51. Skin cancer deaths in UK
52. Increase in kidney stones in India
53. Penguin chicks frozen by global warming
54. Deaths of Minnesota moose
55. Increased threat of HIV/AIDS in developing countries
56. Increase of wasps in Alaska
57. Killer stingrays off British coasts
58. All societal collapses since the beginning of time
59. Bigger spiders
60. Increase in size of giant squid
61. Increase of orchids in UK
62. Collapse of gingerbread houses in Sweden
63. Cow infertility
64. Conflict in Darfur
65. Bluetongue outbreak in UK cows
66. Worldwide wars
67. Insomnia of children worried about global warming
68. Anxiety problems for people worried about climate change
69. Migration of cockroaches
70. Taller mountains due to melting glaciers
71. Drowning of four polar bears
72. UFO sightings in the UK
73. Hurricane Katrina
74. Greener mountains in Sweden
75. Decreased maple in maple trees
76. Cold wave in India
77. Worse traffic in LA because immigrants moving north
78. Increase in heart attacks and strokes
79. Rise in insurance premiums
80. Invasion of European species of earthworm in UK
81. Cold spells in Australia
82. Increase in crime
83. Boiling oceans
84. Grizzly deaths
85. Dengue fever
86. Lack of monsoons
87. Caterpillars devouring 45 towns in Liberia
88. Acid rain recovery
89. Global wheat shortage; food price hikes
90. Extinction of 13 species in Bangladesh
91. Changes in swan migration patterns in Siberia
92. The early arrival of Turkey’s endangered caretta carettas
93. Radical North Sea shift
94. Heroin addiction
95. Plant species climbing up mountains
96. Deadly fires in Australia
97. Droughts in Australia
98. The demise of California’s agriculture by the end of the century
99. Tsunami in South East Asia
100. Fashion victim: the death of the winter wardrobe

Last edited Mon, 06 Dec 2010, 6:55pm by HEEman

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This is a nicely written Q&A with an answer in plain talk from a Climate Scientist. This is a long quote but is interesting and easy to read

Crikey wrote:

Crikey reader Peter asked:

While there is lots of evidence and also personal experience which strongly suggests to me that climate change is real, the place for long-cycle natural climate change never seems to be referred to. For example, there is good evidence that Greenland was indeed a green land in about 900 AD and that the Thames would experience some freezing in the late 1700’s. Could someone put this apparent long-cycle activity into a perspective for us.

Professor Jeffrey Park, from Yale University, responds:

It is easy to overinterpret terminology. The phrases “Medieval Warm Period,” “Little Ice Age,” and even “Greenland” have some history behind them. Near the year 1000AD the Norse Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. Subsistence farming would have been impossible in Greenland in 1900AD, so this is clear evidence of unusual warmth in the North Atlantic region at that time. Similarly, anecdotal evidence of unusually cold winters in the early-modern period in Northern Europe (roughly during the Protestant Reformation) and of temporary advances of glaciers in the European Alps suggested a period of cooler climate there. How large were these climate excursions? How long did they last? How widespread were they? Because we don’t have eyewitnesses at all places in all centuries, scientists have tried to answer these questions with climate-proxy data.

Climate proxies are biological, chemical or geological processes that are sensitive to temperature. The variation of climate-proxy observations can be calibrated in the last 150 years against actual temperature measurements, and only then can be applied to the centuries before 1850AD. Calibration is important because many systems are sensitive to multiple factors. For instance, tree-ring widths vary with both temperature and precipitation, because both influence tree growth. Ice cores drilled from glaciers offer yearly ice-thickness variations, and also clues to temperature in the mixture of different isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen in the ice. Ocean corals are also temperature sensitive, and have yearly growth cycles. Having a variety of climate proxies allows scientists to “spread their bets” when developing a robust temperature proxy, and also allows for the study of temperature changes in polar latitudes, temperate latitudes and tropical latitudes, and on different continents.

The proxy data sets are still growing as scientists collect data from more locations, but the overall pattern strongly supports some general statements. First, neither the Medieval Warm Period, nor the Little Ice Age, were uniformly warm or uniformly cool. If these climate anomalies had been based originally on historical records from the tropical Pacific, the Medieval period would have been called a “cooling” and the Little Ice Age might have been called a “warm period.” Historical documents from the tropical Pacific don’t exist, so we are stuck with nicknames that describe the climates of Northern Europe at roughly 1000AD and 1500AD.

Second, the proxy data tell us that the “Medieval Warm Period” is accurate terminology, because the global and Northern-Hemisphere temperatures from proxy data during roughly 950-1250AD are warmer than all centuries before the 20th century, just not uniformly so. The geographical variations of proxy-data suggest a climate process that resembles a very slow El Nino, with temperatures in the tropical Pacific trending one way, temperatures in the northern continents trending the opposite way.

Third, the “Little Ice Age” is an exaggeration, because the Little Ice Age compares with the most-recent real Ice Age (100000-20000 years ago) as a snowflake compares with a blizzard. In the Little Ice Age (roughly 1450-1750AD) we have reports of Dutchmen ice-skating on frozen canals, but in the real Ice Age all of Sweden was buried beneath a kilometer-thick sheet of ice. A careful examination of the historical data in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire suggests that the climate extremes that characterize the Little Ice Age rarely persisted for more than a decade, suggesting an amplification of one of the natural cycles of atmosphere-ocean heat exchange that can be detected with careful statistical analysis of 20th-century temperature data.

The fourth general observation from proxy data is that the global-average temperature variations experienced in the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were smaller deviations from the norm than we are experiencing in the 21st century. The 21st-century pattern of global warming does not look like a natural climate cycle, because there is scarcely anywhere on the globe where a cooling trend counter-balances the warming. Also, typical “natural climate variability” involves a heat exchange between the atmosphere and ocean: the atmosphere warms by extracting heat from the ocean, or cools when the ocean extracts heat from the atmosphere. “El Nino” and “La Nina” represent a cyclic exchange of heat between atmosphere and ocean in the tropics, for instance. In the second half of the 20th century, historical measurements tell us that both the ocean and atmosphere experienced warming. Heat is still being exchanges between atmosphere and ocean (we still have El Nino events!), but these are wiggles on an upward trend.

The fifth general observation we get from the proxy data is that natural temperature variations that were smaller that those we are experiencing in the 21st century affected human civilization greatly. The expansion of the Vikings would have been impossible without the Medieval Warm Period. The climate extremes of the Little Ice Age caused famine in Europe and nearly caused the Ottoman Empire to collapse. For the Ottomans, see the webpage of the historian Sam White of Oberlin College.

Also, the name of “Greenland” was essentially a real-estate scam, similar to calling a housing subdivision in the Australian outback “Verdant Groves.” Even the Vikings were guilty of false advertising! Joking aside, around 1000AD when the Viking explorers visited and settled in Greenland, the climate along certain portions of the coast was warm enough to support a marginal agriculture, similar to the lifestyle of a Norwegian farmer, based on grains and cattle. Almost all of “Greenland” was covered by a kilometer-thick (or more) ice sheet, even when the Vikings first arrived. Drill cores from the ice sheet have yearly layers going back hundreds of thousands of years, so the green part of Greenland has not reached far inland during the last few 100 kyr. The Vikings would not have been frightened away from establishing farms within sight of the ice sheets, because that situation was common in Norway, though the glaciers in Norway are/were not as extensive.

A good reference for the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet (and Antarctica) is The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard B. Alley.

The climate in the Northern Atlantic was relatively warm at the turn of the previous millenium (1000AD), but cooled gradually in the centuries afterward. It took until 1400AD or so before agriculture failed and the Norse Greenlanders starved. The paradox is that Eskimo villages were founded in the neighborhood of the declining Norse settlements, with an economy based on fishing. Archeologists argue over why the Norse failed to copy the eskimos and survive.

Dr Stephen Mulkey from the University of Idaho reviewed this answer.

Source is from

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/rooted/2010/12/03/as...

By Amber Jamieson

_Eeexpired wrote:

This is a nicely written Q&A with an answer in plain talk from a Climate Scientist. This is a long quote but is interesting and easy to read

That *is* an interesting read. Very clear but subtle details explaining why this time it's different.

Subtle, detailed information like that doesn't carry through very well in a sound-bite news culture.

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