Weather and global warming

[VA Maule]

Good question I had forgotten about the Ozone hole. Is it fixed? I sure do miss some of the goodies they took from us over that.

[Andy Young]

My understanding is that it's starting to show signs of recovery. That said it'll be a long time before I gets back to the pre-CFC state.

[cs409]

yep, thats what they say and by the middle of this century our ozone level should be back to normal...... that means mr. sun is making plenty of O3 in our shade tree or aka stratosphere. Now Joe Public can rest easy knowing they can save some money on sun screen.......its weird how this ozone depletion wasnt all over our stratosphere.

[Mountain Doctor]

did they ever fix the hole in the ozone? before this gets out of hand, it was a pun(a funny, etc) after all, we all know it wasnt a hole.

Another debacle. Sort of a warm up for global warming. Sorta makes me wonder what's next.

[cs409]

And to think our government warns us about snake oil salesmen!

[Andy Young]

did they ever fix the hole in the ozone? before this gets out of hand, it was a pun(a funny, etc) after all, we all know it wasnt a hole.

Another debacle. Sort of a warm up for global warming. Sorta makes me wonder what's next.

Actually, I see that one as a success story. Problem is discovered, source of problem figured out, legislation enacted to eliminate source of problem, natural system begins to go back to where it was before humans inadvertently changed it for the worse.

That, and we've figured out ways to do most of what we were doing before, but with different processes and chemicals that don't do the same harm. We still have air conditioning, aerosol cans, solvents to clean stuff, etc, but without the damage to the ozone that we had before.

[Mountain Doctor]

Yesterday I flew to the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon with Tammy for a day in Joseph.

Severe clear except for visibility down to maybe 20 miles in haze.

It looked like mid summer when smoke from wildfires obscures our view of the lovely volcanoes and snow capped mountains.

There are no forest fires in the Northwest now that I am aware of so I was puzzled. I thought it was some weird weather issue. I hear on the news today it is from a massive wildfire in SIBERIA of all places.

So, a fire more than ten thousand miles away making smoke in Washington and Oregon. All summer, all over the West, the skies have smoke in them from wildfires somewhere.

This is more smoke than all the F350's and Dodge Cummins all over the world all put together.

This does not even mention volcanoes which are erupting all over the world, undersea vents, etc.

I would expect by comparison that our contribution to smoke (let alone global warming) is not important.

[cs409]

Damn neighbors are to blame for much of our problems with the eco system.
Am not saying we(USA) are without blame. Polution by man began with Adam and then it doubled with Eve....and so on and so on. We as good stewards should work each day to clean our mess/spills etc. In the past 40 plus years
our country(USA) has made great strides to clean up our mess and has made production of products more pollution free. What ticks me off is when we have a group reporting ultimate destruction of our planet(not sure who owns planet earth) if we dont reduce carbon footprint by leaps and bounds NOW. These same groups will not bring their studies/findings to a discussion table but damn the nasayers that question them. They want their info taken as total truth and shame on anyone that questions them. Ask them how they come up with the temp change over a 100 years when 50 or so years ago they meassured temp to the tenth(0.1) now we are using to the hundredth(0.01) if not more. Then you factor in how they read the instrument of the day compared to how its done today. Mother earth is a tuff(not to be confused with tufa as in volcanic ash from erupion )old lady, she does a great job providing for us(all living anamals and plant life). She washes herself, she drys herself, and she has a way to clear her own pollution. We(humans) should be very careful when we try to play mother nature and repair what we messed up. OK am getting dizzy so i will step down from my soap box.........have a good day to all.

[DonLindsay]

I've noticed that several people used this phrase. OK, an answer.

You could begin by looking up the Heartland Institute at Wikipedia and at desmogblog.com. If you watch Fox News, you've seen Heartland's "experts" interviewed.

Also, read this http://www.wunderground.com/blog/RickyR ... trynum=219 thoughtful article, which talks about finding people who don't have a stake in the outcome.

Or find people who do have a stake, but of a different kind. For example, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10 ... -security/ the Pentagon.

[DonLindsay]

Several people have mentioned volcanoes, methane and forest fire smoke. The question was, why do all the press releases focus on carbon dioxide, aren't we off base?

Have a look at http://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/. See the row of buttons under the diagram? Try "Full Record". You can see that the CO2 level is rising. (Ask me if you'd like to hear the proof that all of that rise is due to humanity.) Now, click on the "1700-present" graph. Hmm. Then the "800,000 years" one. Hmm.

So the answer is, CO2 gets the big headlines because it's numerically dominant, so far. It's dominant because it's higher than it's been in millions of years. (I have lots of graphs, ask if you care.) Methane, it could become significant, but it isn't now. Volcanoes, well, they are responsible for the CO2 level before humanity got busy. Unless a big eruption happens, they're not very relevant.

The forest fires in Siberia are new. Siberia is having abnormally hot weather. Which worries me, because melting permafrost could release methane.

[DonLindsay]

cs409, you asked about how we read thermometers to a hundredth of a degree. The answer is, that's not quite the right question.

Those temperature numbers you're referring to, are averages over the whole planet, or over a continent or ocean or whatever. If someone averages over a big enough collection of numbers, they get a very small plus-or-minus on the average value. When a number is given to a tenth of a degree, or given to a hundredth of a degree, what they're really doing is telling you how big their plus-or-minus was. It's legit.

Sounds like you ran into someone who was short with you. Hopefully not someone I know! I'll try to do better.

[dunbarst]

I couple of posts back someone asked to look at the data.
I would suggest that you look at the data and conclusions in the IPCC report here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... AL_SPM.pdf


Full disclosure - I have made a fair amount of my living providing logistics support to scientists studying the issue over the last 20 years so you would be right to not take my word for it and do your own research by looking at the data and how the models have done over time.

My take after talking to a lot of climate scientists and looking at the source data (and participating in the collection of some of it) is that yes there are natural climate cycles and yes there is extreme local variability in the weather (in fact the models do predict more extreme local weather events). Overall however, a couple of things are clear. First the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rapidly rising and there is no precedent in the last 800,000 years. We know because the gas bubbles trapped in the deep glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland are physical samples from the whole of that time period. Air is trapped in the snow as it falls and bubbles are captured as the glacier thickens. If you drill and recover the ice you have a 10,000 ft core with 800,000 year old air bubbles that some scientists like to call a two mile time machine.

Second, while I would say there is considerable room for improvement, the models are pretty good at predicting the behavior of the climate (not the local weather as we all like to complain about). I have seen considerable amount of change in the models that the scientists present in conferences and they will be the first to admit that we can do better. Unfortunately almost all of the changes to models I have been seeing have been showing that the impacts are worse than we thought since we keep figuring out new feedback loops that make the problem worse. For instance, people had neglected to account for the amounts of methane that would be released as the permafrost thawed or for the forrest fires that would result from increased bug kill and the range of insects spreads northward.

As predicted the Arctic sea ice has set a new record minimum, and a feedback loop of warming water temps due to solar gain as the reflective ice is removed has begun. Melting of the Greenland Ice Cap, one driver of global ocean levels and currents, has accelerated dramatically. West Antarctica, the 1/3 of the continent most at risk in the short term, is melting at extraordinary rates (yes the Antarctic Sea Ice is growing for lots of reasons but the glaciers are drivers of ocean levels and currents). You can find much of this data on the National Snow and Ice Data Center site. and also here:

http://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/csb/index.php?section=234

Lastly the ocean is becoming noticeably more acidic as the increased CO2 is absorbed. There is a lot of new study on what this will do to the ocean food web how much carbon the ocean phytoplankton can absorb.

Like I said I don't expect to change anybody's mind but thought you might want to see the data that has caused 97% of the researchers in the field to concur that the rapid acceleration in warming is man made.

Nothing is certain but it seems like we have to play the odds and try to reduce our impacts .

[truthinbeer]

Well I am of the persuasion that apart from the entitled generation who maintain the right to everything, there are simply far too many people on the planet.

[Rezrider]

5 pages and counting.............
If only we could get this type of response to the 'why does my Maule do this' questions!

[cs409]

Happy Earth Day.