The above graph compares predictions made by the IPCC (pretty much the consensus) to reality (black line).
You can see the predictions don’t match reality very well.
The reality is much, MUCH worse than the scientific consensus predicted. The arctic ice cap is melting decades faster than expected. DECADES.
The “skeptics” implied there are only two possibilities: either the scientific consensus is right, or global warming is not as bad as the scientists think.
Nature had other ideas, as She often does. In this critical area, global warming is happening far faster, and with far more severity, than most scientists had predicted.
But don’t blame the scientists. They are very much aware of the weaknesses of their models and theories. And many have highlighted the risk of the climate suddenly “lurching” to a whole new “normal” state.
Jim Hansen has repeatedly warned that the IPCC may have underestimated ice melt. Once again, he appears to have been vindicated.
Science Writer Fred Pearce wrote an excellent book about this issue: With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. Here’s a passage from the introduction, which is an excellent summary of climate scientists’ warnings about their own models.
“Nature is fragile, environmentalists often tell us. But the lesson of this book is that that it is not so. The truth is far more worrying. She is strong and packs a serious counter-punch. Global warming will very probably unleash unstoppable planetary forces. And they will not be gradual. The history of our planet’s climate shows that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure, whether from sunspots or orbital wobbles or the depredations of humans, it lurches – virtually overnight.”
And the next time someone tells you that we are not yet certain about the reality of climate change, or that the effects might not be as bad as predicted, make one simple point:
Uncertainty cuts both ways.
Update: The above image comes from University of Illinois Polar Research Group via Jeff Masters’ blog (scroll down). Greenland’s ice is shown in white (virtually no visible change, yet). Arctic ice is shown in magenta; thicker regions in darker shades (scale on left). Masters and UIUC have more discussion on their sites.
Update: Those new to all this who want to learn more are strongly encouraged to read the blog RealClimate: Climate Science from Climate Scientists. Also, you can search their archives for their older coverage of climate issues and controversies.
But read it out loud, and with the Jack Bower voice it's fricken awesome!
“The reality is much, MUCH worse” “The arctic ice cap is melting decades faster than expected. DECADES.”
that is actually kind of funny,
We are now in the warming cycle of the cycle. 800 odd years ago Greenlanders were growing vegetables and forage for cattle. They were an agrarian and sea faring society. Within three hundred years the settlements were extinguished due to the cooling of the northern hemisphere.
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What do the ice core samples indicate re climate changes in the interim? To what extent are the predictions for the warming of the northern hemisphere and by extension, I guess, the southern hemisphere? How long will this pattern remain before the cooling cycle resumes. Will Cape Cod be under water in twenty years?
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What effects this cyclical change? Sun spots? Decrease in the tilt of the earths axis? Atmospheric CO2? Ozone layers?
We should actually be cooling into the next ice age. We were already near or at the top of the typical peak for a warming period between ice ages, and what’s more, we are now far above where previous warming periods peaked already in between other ice ages (we have 750,000 years of data).
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Yes, we’re not stupid, we know that climate change can happen for many different reasons. Volcanoes have caused cooling, disrupting things enough to cause civilizations to fall.
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However, that should only actually worry us more. The history of our planet is intimately connected with global climate trends (all the way from evolutionary changes up through Rome being sacked by starving barbarians.
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Humans have now turned back the climate clock to a time before man developed as a species (we have unlocked carbon from the earth put there when dinosaurs roamed the goddamn earth) in a man-made orgy of resource development unknown to this planet, ever. And it’s become apparent that the consequences are even much more dire than the worst scientific warming doomsayers predicted.
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The fact is, this might just be worst than the stresses placed on human habitation when the Dark Ages began. We can only hope that we merely have a Dark Age, and since once you release carbon into the air as CO2 (and you have all the feedback loops associated with warming – methane, higher concentrations of water vapor, a darker sea at the North Pole), it’s up there until enough thousand or millions of years puts it back into the ground, this stress on the environment is far more permanent than a worldwide volcano-promoted temporary cooling.
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But it is simple math, something I just can’t fathom people don’t understand…we have dug up locked carbon, and reset the earth’s atmosphere as a result. Math. Carbon in the air got locked in the earth. Then we dug it up and burned it back into the air. We have disrupted and likely supplanted the natural solar/volcanic rhythms and the long, slow general trend towards cooling that locking carbon into the ground over eons has brought us. We have undone the earth’s millions of years of process.
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And the earth is responding accordingly.
We should actually be cooling into the next ice age.
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One, get thee to a library and search through the Scientifican Americans over the past few years. There was one article that hypothesized (with some supporting evidence) that humans began affecting the climate as long ago as 7000 years, largely because of agricultural development. The author hypothesized that that interrupted the usual cooling/warming cycles, which hypothesis correlates pretty much with the fact that we haven’t seen an ice age, which would have been expected, in the meantime.
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Two, it was hypotheized in the early 1970s that we were heading into another cooling period. That was based on temperature measurements in the 1945-1975 time frame. The problem is that, it has subsequently been discovered that the cooling was due to the injection of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere during the same time period. The sulfate aerosols would reflect sunlight, reducing insolation. The problem is that the sulfate aerosols increase the amount of acid rain. Then the injection of sulfate aerosols were reduced, the acid rain was also reduced, but the insolation increased.
we haven’t seen an ice age, which would have been expected, in the [last 7000 years]
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Not so. No reason to expect an ice age in the last 7000 years. The most recent ice age ended only 11,000 years ago, and in the recent past (1,000,000 years or so) they’ve been coming about once every 100,000 years or so.
…And I did not write the article.
we should really worry about what we can do.
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Lets see: Sunspots? Can’t change that. Earth’s axis? You got a remote control?
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I don’t care if the driving force is sunspots or moon rays (though I doubt either). You worry about what you can control.
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Similarly it’s irrelevant what the Earth’s temperature used to be back in the Cretaceous Age.
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There is a preponderance of evidence–heck, I’d say it’s beyond reasonable doubt–that human air emissions are a significant contributing factor and that by changing our behavior we can make a significant difference in the degree and rate of change.
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If I’m crossing the street and a truck is bearing down on me, I don’t say, Hey, it’s not my fault. I move.
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You?
one can’t expect much from the average American Charolette Iserbytian citizen retard. His electronic leash repeatedly tells him how wonderful it is to get cable,TV and phone service all on one bill.
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High tech torture methods include either sensory depravation or on the other side of the spectrum sensory overload.
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” and all that.
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Actually, I think quite a bit CAN be expected of our generation of Americans. So many previous generations rose to the challenges of their times (WW II, civil war, depression, etc.)
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Learn more. Spread the word. Get involved.
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It beats cursing the darkness.
No seriously – what can we do?
At the personal level, you can do an awful lot to conserve. Forgive the self-promotion, but I have several suggestions here. (Although the server is down at the moment.)
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At the local level, find your chapter of MCAN. Give them a call, and see what needs to be done. If you don’t have a local chapter, go to the next town over or consider starting one.
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Call your utility and bug them to give you the opportunity to buy clean energy. Better yet, have a couple of dozen friends and neighbors do the same.
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Then there’s working with the political system.. calling your Rep, getting involved with campaigns of those with decent policies, learning more and getting involved.
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Daily Kos Envirornmentalists is a google group which, collectively, writes 10-20 diaries a day on environmental issues; many of these have suggestions for action items. Subscribe to this group, read a few of the more interesting-looking diaries, and you’ll likely find something that interests you where you can help.
get rid of an antique steam heating system which gobbled $600 dollars of oil every TEN days. But see this however is not enough in their/your eyes, it will never be “enough”.
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When Kyoto named China and India carbon exempt the industries of the world flocked to these places in nothing short of the 21st century gold rush. These are consortiums financed by the west, the technology is given by the west, organized by the west. A larger percentage of the world population oppressed by the west. How long do you think this will last? The newest business buzzword sustainability? That bastion of “freedom”, the western world now complains about lead paint in toys imported from a nation whose industrial capacity to make said toys begat.
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God, I can’t even coherently explain the galactic stupidity of it all driven soley by profit margins of the ruling .000001% of the world’s population.
I cannot understand the relationship between the following two sentences from the post
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The reality is much, MUCH worse than the scientific consensus predicted. The arctic ice cap is melting decades faster than expected. DECADES.
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and
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…global warming is not as bad as the scientists think
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Unless I am reading the graph wrong, the satellite observations are showing that the melting of the Arctic ice cap is occurring at a faster rate than the computer models would suggest. And it is likely that that increased rate is probably due to global warming.
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From MCRD @ Thu Oct 11, 2007 at 22:16:08 PM EDT
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What effects this cyclical change? Sun spots? Decrease in the tilt of the earths axis?
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It’s doubtful that either of these would cause the cyclical change. Sunspots operated on an approximately 11 year cycle. While an increase in sunspots would reduce insolation on the earth slightly, as far as I can tell 11 year cyclical climate change has not been observed. Regarding change in axis tilt, the earth’s axis does precess slightly because of the sun’s gravity (much like the precession of a top in the earth’s gravitation field), it is doubtful that there would be enough of a precession to cause much of a climate change that quickly.
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It has been hypothesized that so-called Milankovitch cycles can also effect climate change, but they operate on tens of thousands of years, not the radical change over the last 150 or so years shown here.
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Regarding Lynne @ Thu Oct 11, 2007 at 23:00:13 PM EDT
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Volcanoes have caused cooling, disrupting things enough to cause civilizations to fall.
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I would be skeptical of the theory that volcanic-induced cooling disrupte things enough, for long enough, to cause civilizations to fall. For one thing, volcanic-induced cooling lasts only for a year or two, until the particulate matter has been substantially washed out of the atmosphere via rainfall.
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For a second thing, by your reference to “Dark Ages,” I presume that you are refering to the economic dislocations in the former Western Roman Empire. There is no particular indication that the Krakatau eruption in 535 CE caused a similar economic dislocation in the Eastern Empire, or in China (which was much closer to the eruption and would be expected to have suffered more).
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For a last thing, the Dark Ages in the former Western Empire did not begin in the 6th century. They began in the 7th century, which correlates perfectly with the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of much of northern Africa and portions of southern Spain. The entire region was a mercantile society based on trade that was mostly carried over the Mediterranean. The Muslims were anathema to the Roman Catholics of the Western Empire (wrong religion, you know) and, after the Muslims conquered Northern Africa, the RCs largely withdrew from the Mediterranean. It wasn’t until the former states of the Western Empire found trade routes that would allow them to avoid contact with the Muslims that there was a rebirth. Reference here
… a program in 89 that explored climate change to migration patters of various European tribes. The historians of the time indicated that there was evidence that major reason for the German migration that eventually did in Rome was weather related crop failure.
…Although his TV show and his book were entertaining.
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Several points. One, the German invasion of the Western Roman Empire from the east was probably more do to their relatively high birth rate, in comparison to the relatively low birth rate of the Romans–particularly among the nobility. Lebensraum
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Two, according to what I have read, there was significant influx of Germans into the territory controlled by Rome, and which was allowed by Rome, in at least the 4th and 5th centuries CE (even before 476) and possibly earlier. They were integrated into Roman society, which is probably why there was no substantial economic discontinuity resulting from 476.
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Three, the German influx into the Western Empire occurred much earlier than 535 CE, which is when Krakatau erupted.
If you look again at the paragraph that second line comes from, you’ll see that chapter1 is describing a mistaken position, not putting forth that claim.