skierinvermont

Be pretty tough to get a degree of cooling w CO2 at 400ppm. You'd have to take out a crap ton of CO2 or block a lot of sunlight....

If you read the article, it says that an organism "exists" not that said organism is widespread or actually breaks down most plastics in nature. The idea is we could breed this organism and spray it all around the world to dissolve plastics. This is easily proven by the fact that the oceans are full of plastic.

I don't think you understood him. He's saying since so much oil seeps NATURALLY it doesn't matter when humans spill a few million gallons. I'm not sure if he even read his own links though. The second one says that plastics take forever to degrade in the oceans and plastics building up in the ocean are major environmental problem...

Even if every other natural factor aligned for cooling we'd stay well above pre-industrial temperatures. The only exception would maybe be a temporary 5-10 year cold spell by a 1 in 10,000+ year volcanic eruption. Even if the earth's axis and orbit aligned for an ice age, we probably wouldn't cool very much if CO2 were pegged @400ppm. Much of the cooling in ice ages comes from a declining CO2 concentration feedback loop and without it, the cooling would be much less. It might just cause us to stop warming instead of continuing to warm. You have to understand that even if CO2 stopped rising, the earth is still gaining unimaginable quantities of thermal energy every second and surface temperatures would continue to rise for some decades (until surface temperatures are high enough that outgoing LW radiation is in balance with incoming SW radiation). But if the factors aligned strongly enough, we probably would see some cooling. But nothing like any ice age. I don't think there has ever been an ice age with CO2 at 400ppm.

While science has not, and probably will not ever, precisely pin down GHG contribution. It is very likely between 75-125%. The earth would likely have cooled due to human aerosol pollution which is literally dimming the sun (this is why some areas with high levels of pollution have seen less warming). GHG warming has more than countered this cooling and created the observed warming. The sun has had a minimal effect since the sun has always had a minimal effect and is currently in a weak period of solar output. We also know that every doubling of CO2 produces 1.1C of surface warming. The uncertainty is in the feed-backs, not CO2. The feed-backs are very likely positive. We should have seen .5C of warming based on CO2 alone without feedbacks. With feedbacks, probably .8-1.5C. The reason we have seen on the low end of that is aerosol pollution and the fact that the earth is still warming (even if we stopped emitting CO2 the earth would warm significantly more).

No it's not rare. The area around the north pole has been like soup for most of the last decade in August and early September.

As ORH said, way too early to say if minimum will be early or not. And technically temperatures are only anomalously cold compared to very recent history. Specifically, they are cooler than most of the last decade, similar to the 1981-2010 mean, and way above the 20th century average.

Yeah I was trying to decide between 30 and 40%. Hard to go higher than that given the date I think. There does seem to be a lot of persistence in the arctic with years that start out warm staying warm. But it will have to be really warm and sunny with bad winds to break 2012.

I'd give 40% chance for this year to break 2012.

Whine and groan all you want. ORH has many posts debunking the denier nonsense that you post.

Yes they are additions. That is the whole point. The free market is choosing to build solar and wind over gas and coal because it is more profitable. Again, welcome to the 21st century.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Since 2007 there has been more wind and solar installed than gas and coal in the U.S. These are free market enterprises built by companies like GE and purchased by utility companies at market prices. Again, welcome to the 21st century. Imagine what would be possible with a little government subsidy along the way to fight climate change.

As has been pointed out to you many times on this forum, wind is on par or cheaper than all fossil fuels in cost. Solar is not far behind. The free market has been choosing wind over fossil fuels for the last 5+ years. The FREE MARKET has been building more wind capacity than coal or natural gas capacity recently. Why? Because it's cheaper. Welcome to the 21st century.

As I already said, the tree rings perfectly represented the magnitude of the droughts of 1934 and 1977. It is reasonable to assume that they would represent earlier droughts as well.

Then tell me why the tree ring record represents the magnitude of previous CA droughts accurately? And lol @ the bolded .. that's because you don't remotely have the qualifications to do it yourself

False. As they point out in the first few paragraphs, the tree ring record reliably captured the extreme droughts of 1934 and 1977 demonstrating year-to-year resolution. This year is worse. Yet again you are jumping to conclusions based on what you want to believe without actually reading. It took me 20 seconds to find this information and another minute to write this post. Our reconstruction shows strong statistical skill but underestimates anomalously high snow water equivalent over the instrumental period (for example in 1952 and 1969). However, snow water equivalent lows (for example in 1934 and 1977) are reliably captured and our reconstruction reveals that the 2015 low is unprecedented in the context of the past 500 years.

OK now that that is over, we can move on to the peer-reviewed studies you posted. Again, I find this above post to be misleading as well. Fu/Randel found there were some cool biases remaining in LKS 1979-2004. First of all, RATPAC may have corrected for some of these biases since RATPAC is a bit warmer than LKS. Second, the fact that there were cool biases 1979-2004 does NOT imply there are warm biases 2004-2015. You have provided no evidence of such. Your conclusion drawn from Fu/Randel is pure assumption and quite misleading. There is considered to be moderate uncertainty associated with radiosonde data which could be in either the warm or cool direction. This does not limit the utility of radiosonde data vs MSU data, because MSU data is also considered to have comparable if not higher uncertainty.

This is progress. I'd also like an apology for all the names you called me when I pointed this out and an apology for de-railing the thread for a week because you couldn't admit this until now.

First, this is a butchering of the english language and I have a hard time that when writing the first version you could possibly have been intending the second version. Second, this is still inconsistent with previous posts which you described as mistaken. Third, this is certainly inconsistent with your statement in the same post saying it is "merely an average of 85 stations"

It's not just me - it's literally every single person that has read your posts and is asking you to stop. Most of those people don't have any bias one way or the other either. The normal thing to do at this point would be to own it and move on.

Yeah sorry I only read the first paragraph at first, and just edited my post.

Well said.

For the record, I have nothing personal against SOC and have defended him many times in the past. I just don't like deception and bad information clouding out good information from people like Don. If he wants to lampoon a peer-reviewed data source like RATPAC, then he needs to provide some solid evidence preferably peer-reviewed. Until then, he shouldn't make up lies about insufficient global coverage or there being no gridding. As many posters have pointed out, the coverage is considered sufficient, there are peer-reviewed estimates of the uncertainty related to coverage, and even John Christy has used RATPAC (even on short timescales) as verification for UAH. I do think he has shown himself in the past to be a disruptive poster (which is why he was banned) but this is not intended as a personal attack. And yes, I do think it would be a better forum if the TOS was enforced and he was not allowed back or else put on a very short leash. Also, I would think if someone is allowed back it would only be under the condition that they are responsible for not becoming disruptive again. It shouldn't be the responsibility of everybody else to handle a previously banned member with kid gloves.

How can the level of discussion improve when you quote something SOC says and he responds saying he never said that? In my last post before Mallow closed the thread I quoted him and he responded by saying "I didn't say that." Well, it's a direct quote. It's just impossible to have a discussion when even the most basic facts are denied. Literally it's impossible for anybody to interact with him unless they are just agreeing with everything he says. You pretty much have to let him have his way with the whole forum if you want to avoid conflict. Good posters come in like Don and make an informative post and SOC responds with a bunch of mis-information clogging up the forum and it's impossible to correct that because SOC will go to the end of the earth to not admit anything he said was mistaken. If he posts lies or misinformation I will continue to point it out. If that clogs up the thread, we should be looking at the source of the lies and misinformation.

I'm not assuming it. He has been demonstrably shown to be a provocative troll and liar and has been banned for it in the past. Why is he even allowed to post here at all after already being banned? He openly admits to being a banned member.