etudiant

So true, but for C or CO2, the dose is immaterial. We could be eating charcoal and breathing in pure CO2, as long as we also got our wheaties and our oxygen, we'd survive. Calling them poison is just false. It really damages the credibility of the commentator to put his/her name on stuff like that.

I get what you're trying to say, but as stated it is just wrong.Carbon is not toxic, even ingested in large amounts. Neither is CO2, it is inert for mammalian metabolism, In fact, charcoal pills are still a routine standby for treating poisoning cases, because the carbon adsorbs the toxins and make them inaccessible to the body. That said, carbon compounds can be very nasty indeed, Benzene derivatives make splendid dyes for fabrics, the byproducts are long lasting carcinogens.

This Glikson piece is overwrought, starting with the 'toxic carbon' and deteriorating from there. It is not of your caliber of thoughtful postings.

Can anyone amplify on the projected well above normal temperatures anticipated by some models. All I have is the 10 day WU forecast, which seems stuck in the low 30s after the solstice rain storm.

I'd thought that NASA had concluded, on the basis of satellite measurement, that Antarctica was still gaining mass, More broadly though, the climate record laid down in the ice sheets suggests that abrupt changes are more likely than gradual shifts. This is a system with many contributing elements, some alive, some just physical. Humility seems a useful attribute when trying to understand its functioning.

Why so hard on this guy? Everyone in this business knows that the forecasts are mostly wrong. It is only rarely that the clouds part and the forecaster nails it. He could be right in this instance, if so, I hope people will step up and recognize that.

Thank you, bluewave, for this very useful presentation of the ice data. This kind of presentation helps clarify where things stand much better.

Think that you'd get 97% agreement on that score. Afaik, there is very broad agreement that global temperatures are up about 1 degree K since the 1880s. However, that warming has been in fits and starts, warm in the 1920s, colder in the early 1970s. Obviously, the issue is to untangle the natural from the human impact, no easy task. Given emissions, major changes in land use and population growth, even the details of the human impact are hard to decipher. That agreed, I do think that Snowlover91 has a good point, it is disconcerting to have above average ice growth in face of higher than normal air and ocean temperatures. Clearly there is something we do not understand about the process. It may be important or it may be trivial, but it should be investigated.

The various initiatives highlighted seem just common sense responses to current conditions. The 'climate change' driver is not so obvious. Separately, the summary speaks of 'actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions'. This is something the US has achieved, in contrast to the various Paris Accord signatories. Imho, that reduces the value of this document, as it offers neither a rallying point nor a guide to action.

Thank you, bluewave and snowlover91, for a very informative exchange. Wishing both of you and all the fellow weather lovers on this site a very happy Thanksgiving. We all have much to be thankful for.

Seen that the world has warmed close to a degree Centigrade since the 1880s, there should be solid evidence in the global weather records documenting this effect of increasing warmth. Have there been any papers published that quantify the change?

More important, the lithiums don't leak, unlike the alkalines. So your gear won't die because the battery compartment was turned into a corroded mess.

A very interesting paper, thank you for linking it. It suggests climate change is not the one way trip to hot and dry as Gov Brown had indicated while setting up water use restrictions during the drought that was ended in the 2016-17 winter. That makes it much more difficult to forecast precipitation levels, a critical issue for California especially.

Iirc, there was extensive discussion after the very wet 2016-17 winter that there would be an explosion in chaparral growth and a consequent surge in fire danger. That was apparently a correct assessment. Whether this can be linked to climate change is more uncertain.

These are historically low numbers for the NYC area. Can you please expand on the elements of your forecast?

Iirc, the 'heat'is relative, in that the subsurface water is warmer than it normally would be, but still actually colder than the surface waters. So the effect is less surface cooling than usual as the winds help the deeper water to come up.

There seems to be no visible temperature trend here over the past 8 decades, not even an urban heat island effect. Can that be correct?

I'd think backup might be less than an hour, although that is a reasonable benchmark. The object is to collect the peak data if possible, rather than to be cut off because the district power line is down.

Thank you, I knew US power standards have gone up considerably since the post WW2 40 amps, which was pre universal A/C and with smaller homes, but 200 amps is huge. Clearly, I'd not thought this instrumentation was that power hungry. Sounds like a good candidate for redesign, to take advantage of modern sensors. Maybe the shock of losing the data just when things are getting critical will kick the bureaucracy into action

That is a lot of power. Homes in the US used to have 40 amps total at the circuit breaker board. Here we're just feeding monitoring instruments, not fridges or ovens, so this is a lot for a scientific monitoring station. Perhaps it runs pen and ink recorders as part of the system. Certainly the instruments don't take anywhere near that much juice. I can't believe that it would be that difficult to add some standby power, enough to keep the essential things going for an hour after the line power dies.

Judging by the abrupt cutoff, they have very little backup indeed. Perhaps there was no requirement for it at the time. It would be an inexpensive and useful retrofit imho.

The Michael system has tracked west of the forecasts and appears to be coming up the coast rather than going out to sea. Is this something NYC area residents should be concerned about?

I'm surprised these stations don't have a cheap UPS, if only to filter the power input. That would not incur much extra cost or servicing, but would allow the station to continue to operate for perhaps an hour after the power failed. For data collection, that should cover the critical interval.

Agreed entirely. Issue is how to produce the energy without messing up the environment. Fossil fuels appear to have problems in that regard. Nuclear would be good, if the product was more trustworthy, as the waste problem is tiny compared to fossil fuel. However, with 3 major failures in about 25,000 reactor years of operation, people are reluctant to pursue that technology. Wind is too small a source to rely on and solar has not yet out of the teething stage.

Is that because there are relatively few people over 70? It is certainly true that we are doing uncontrolled experiments with our environment, the CO2 injections being the most publicized, but by no means the only one or even perhaps the most significant example. Prudent stewardship of the one planet we have would support a different approach.