Rio Tinto facing $84b shareholder backlash from membership in political lobbying over coal. Along with BHP which has also promised to change its ways relating to the role of coal in climate change it makes up a third of the MCA and could represent a turning point in how the public perception of coal is ‘groomed’ by business and politics.
Temperatures in the arctic hit 45 degrees above the long term average in places this week. This is so far off the charts that you’d need a pair of good boots and a native guide to find it.
If the consequences of AGW don’t concern you, imagine anywhere in Australia hitting 45 degrees above average, even just for a few hours…
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I’m sure that’s happened before and has nothing to do with carbon . Even if the Arctic is literally the best place in the world to work out if it has.
I’m ignoring this and going off to look for graphs on South Australian power prices
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Yet with the Beast from the East, you’ll struggle to get traction with that fact.
It’s March and you have snow in both London and Rome.
Yeah, it’s almost like AGW is causing more severe weather extremes, like every climate scientist in the fricking world has been predicting for 25 years.
Not EVERY climate scientist. There are those people that the denialists keep quoting. Wait, they are not climate scientists, though. As you were.
I’ve already highlighted just how many climate “scientists” in the “fricking world” predict doom that does not eventuate. You have twice posted abut the “cataclysmic” temperatures in a recent and “stereotypical” doomsday report.
However, what you have failed to do is show how this compares to the daily temperatures of say around 160 million years ago when the temperature increased before the next ice age. Why? because the data is only from modern times.
There is a significant number of people that should only be provided averages. Else they wet their pants with natural spikes.
Cue chorus of warmists saying the usual rhetoric.
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Oh, dear.
This should be fun.
WW posts data that reassures him. Those data show temperatures keep within a 12oC range over an 800,000 year period.
And he believes this refutes HM’s report of a recent 45oC increase (even though this has not yet fed through to annual averages).
Lol, this will be fun
Yeah, work is pretty slow tonight. Keep it coming 
HM is replying…
As I see it, people like Tim Flannery predicted climate change as global warming, and that our dams would empty.
What’s happened instead is that we have violent extremes - massive falls of rain, unseasonal snow, more hurricanes.
But the deniers just keep saying “But Flannery (and his ilk) have been proved to be wrong” as if that vindicates their own opinions.
Is this really an argument you want to have? Tell me, what were sea levels like 160 million years ago? (Hint: 100m above today’s levels - how’s it looking for human civilisation in it’s current form in those conditions?) Tell me how long it took the daily temperatures to reach that high? (Hint: millions of years, in which the ecology had time to adapt)
I’m sure that will be a great comfort to everyone who dies in a heatwave or typhoon triggered by one of your ‘natural spikes’, which are not natural at all.
Right now, due to human-caused greenhouse forcing, we are in a period of unprecedentedly rapid climate change. Probably the only comparable event in the history of life on earth that triggered such a massive global climatic shift in such a geologically short period of time was the Chicxulub meteorite impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. In times of rapid change, extreme large amounts of energy move around a system and extreme events happen, whereas the same magnitude of change over a greater period of time is relatively uneventful. That’s why decelerating from 100 to 0 using over a period of 20 seconds as you touche the brakes and coast into a red light is relatively routine, but decelerating from 100 to 0 in 0.1 seconds as you impact a brick wall is catastrophic.
Humanity is currently busily ensuring that more and more energy is trapped in the earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere. When you inject energy into a fluid system that system becomes more turbulent. This is as basic as fluid physics gets (and everyone of my generation would have seen it at high school, putting a couple of drops of food colouring into a beaker of water and watching the colour move around under convection faster and faster as the water heats). And the faster youheat the fluid, the more pronounced this is. A more turbulent system has more extremes of pressure and of the local speed of movement of the fluid medium. In weather terms, that means more extremes of weather (in damn near all possible ways)
If you want to talk science on this, I’m very happy to listen. Give me a scientific explanation why CO2 and methane and the like don’t trap heat in the atmosphere (contrary to what has been known by basic physics for 100 years). Give me an explanation why human burning of vast amounts of coal doesn’t result in massive quantities of CO2 and methane and sulphur dioxide etc being released into the atmosphere (contrary to what has been known by basic chemistry for over 100 years). Explain to me why, when every single one of the hottest years in recorded history has been in the past 20 years, and that anyone born in the last 35 years has NEVER lived though a year that’s cooler than the long term average. Explain to me why the Great Barrier Reef is all of a sudden 1/3 dead from heat-stress related bleaching after living for thousands of years, and why the russians were cheerfully able to sail a tanker through the north west passage last year when even 200 years ago it never thawed.
- We have a thoroughly uncontroversial knowledge of how greenhouse gases, IR radiation, and heat interact, it’s all about EM absorption/emission spectra, electron shell structure and the like.
- We have verified this knowledge under lab conditions.
- We know that the concentrations of these compounds in the atmosphere are increasing.
- We are seeing exactly what theory predicts - increased global temperatures, increasing and unpredictable weather extremes, and ecosystems failing to cope with temperature changes that are occurring way the hell faster than almost anything in the fossil record.
You want to argue science - fine. Science is my turf and I’ll happily talk to anyone about it. but science is about more than chucking carefully selected graphs (that don’t address the argument at hand) around. You want to discuss climate science, you’ve got to address … y’know … the actual science. Which is basically my four points above, plus the paragraphs further up where i was talking about fluid system behaviours and the like. Get serious and learn the science before you try to argue about it. Otherwise, you’re not arguing in good faith.
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I’m not reassured at all. There are others that need reassuring.
Let’s bow.
I’ve got mixed feelings about Flannery tbh. He’s a brilliant scientist in his field (but by all reports he’s a bit of a prick), but he was really handed a ■■■■ sandwich by whoever it was appointed him head of the climate council or whatever it was (i sometimes wonder if this wasn’t Howard’s plan in the first place)
Thing is, Flannery is a paleontologist and paleoecologist. He specialises in prehistoric ecosystems, prehistoric animals, and their interactions with prehistoric environments. Which makes his knowledge valueable in a climate change context because he’s got a great knowledge of how ecosystems have, in the past, coped with changes in climate.
However, he’s NOT a climate scientist or a oceanographer or hydrographer or atmospheric chemist or even an economist, and he’s often been unfairly targeted for his faulty knowledge of those fields (and more fairly, for his willingness to comment on them when he probably should have deferred to experts) which has tended to hand vested interests ammunition to try to discredit everything he says and the whole fact of AGW by extension.
Have to say though, if I hear the HAHA TIM FLANNERY BOUGHT A BEACH HOUSE SO MUCH FOR RISING SEA LEVELS LOLZ thing again I’ll probably start beating my head against a wall. He bought a place on the coast sure - on top of a massive cliff, waaay the hell away from the water. But everyone of good faith has known that for decades…
I have provided evidence that what is predicted is plainly wrong and embarrassingly so.
One again you are fixate on recent times and ignoring an ancient history of vast changes that don’t adequately account for daily or even yearly spikes. You keep harping on the same recent stats whilst ignoring that this stuff has been happening for thousands/millions of years. Anyone looking at a simple chart would guess it’s likely going to get warmer. Just as it has several times in the past before humans and their nasty fossil fuels.
If science is your turf I hope that you are able to moonlight.
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Moonlighting?
What do you do with your time when you are not moroning around here?
It is inexplicably retarded that you think that graph covers this discussion point.
Even more inexplicable that Albert Thurgood points out exactly why it doesn’t and you continue to argue that it does.
Did you find them?
You’ve explained nothing, and you’ve proved nothing except that you don’t understand your own graph.
My original post talked about unprecedented local temperature extremes, which are predicted by sane, mainstream climate science in a warming scenario, and which are way way waaayyy the hell more extreme than anything we’ve recorded in modern history. You posted a graph of … long term temperature averages over the past <1 million years? there’s no relevance there at all.
If you’re trying to prove that the climate has changed naturally in the past, well, congratulations on proving something so utterly uncontroversial. But using this as any sort of evidence in the AGW debate is like saying “sometimes bushfires are caused naturally by lightning, therefore it’s fine to go wild with a flamethrower on a total fire ban day”
Edit: if you DO want to argue that my original post about the 45C above average temperature is nothing much to worry about because it’s pretty routine from a historical point of view, you need to argue like vs like. So I’d actually accept it if you gave me something like “but HM, here’s some arctic climate data that says this sort of temperature discrepancy happens fairly frequently up there, and that it’s not been happening any more often in recent years as compared to when measurements started back in 1823” or similar. Or else you can try “but HM, here’s some paleoclimate data that proves that in the million-odd years of history represented in my graph, the max/min temperature extremes were roughly the same as what we’re seeing now, and also, here’s some more data that shows even in the periods of greatest temperature change, there was no major impact to the ecosystem at all” FWIW as far as I know there’s no such data for the latter one way or another, but you get what I’m trying to say, right?
Like i said, I’m happy to argue science. But science has rules.
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