This would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous because I’ve seen clowns across social media claiming that because America is gripped in a frozen storm that global warming isn’t happening.
Firstly, global warming caused by human pollution creates and causes extreme weather events. Most of America under a massive frozen storm is an extreme weather event.
Secondly, this is occurring because the Arctic is super heating, the polar vortex has slipped and slumped down across America, that’s why this storm is happening.
Thirdly, allowing climate change denial like this by Trump is dangerous because climate change represents an existential threat to our species and the speed of the extreme weather events is occurring faster than predicted. The danger now is that we trip feedback loops like frozen methane eruptions from Siberia or from the bottom of the ocean.
Trump’s ignorance is almost as dangerous as global warming.
Upton Sinclair nailed it decades ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Global warming is an out of date term, precisely because global change deniers will claim that every lower than average temperature proves that the science is wrong. The right terminology is climate change because it allows for extreme weather events either above or below ‘normal’.
There is also a possibility that these hot weather events may tip over into another ice age. We need to watch for that. I seem to remember that we have had 6 previous ice ages and another must be due some-when (which might mean thousands of years, of course )
What bothers me is that these recent Eastern US winter storms are occurring in the areas where the last ice age finally retreated. Has no one noticed? The great lakes were formed where the last glaciers melted as were the Niagra Falls and the Gulf of St Lawrence. I know thats not what the science is saying right now but this seems too coincidental to ignore.
If you examine the graph you will see that ice ages corresponded with much lower atmospheric CO2 (averaging 230 ppm, with the coldest periods corresponding with below 200 ppm).
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_800k.png
With CO2 is over 410 ppm and rising at 2 to 3 ppm per annum the chance of an ice age is zero. We are headed for a hothouse world, with the Earth average temperature increasing by up to 10 degrees Celsius above the 280 ppm preindustrial level. No one knows how hot or how fast because we are in uncharted territory with respect to positive feedbacks (two mentioned in the article), but ‘faster than expected’ has become the new norm in the language of reporting.
As Martyn pointed out, the thermal gradient that used to drive stable jets streams has been degraded and there is no longer stability. Hence, extremely cold air moves towards the equator, only to be replaced by warm air not long after.
Climate chaos is a suitable term to describe that but I now use the terms planetary overheating or planetary meltdown because they convey what we are witnessing.
Meh. The Jurassic Period had over 2,000 ppm CO2 and represents one the most populous and diverse ecologies ever. If we can’t be part of that, for some reason(?), so be it. The Earth will likely have a far greater capacity to support life than it does now given the positive effect of CO2 on plant/algae growth. Further, no “run away-climate change” occurred let alone an extinction event, even at CO2 levels at least 5x higher than they are now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earths-co2-could-spike-to-a-level-not-seen-since-the-dinosaurs/
https://www.quora.com/How-could-life-exist-when-there-was-a-CO2-level-of-2000-ppm-in-the-Jurassic-era
And saying that it’s “rising faster than ever now though” is a nonsense statement given the incredibly low resolution of both historical CO2 and temperature data (which at best is an average of 1,000’s of years) – indeed during super volcano events (e.g. Yellowstone) it’s highly likely that CO2 levels spiked far higher and faster than anything we pathetic humans are capable of.
Why do you want to talk about the highly irrelevant and geologically remote Jurassic Period 200 million years ago (when the earth was about 6oc warmer) rather than the highly relevant period immediately before industrial activity began to transform the atmosphere, the land and the oceans?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg
Could it be you are clutching at straws?
If you want to compare with remote geological eras, why not the Permian, which corresponds a lot more closely with
current conditions than does the Jurassic. And then you can compare the Permian mass extinction event, which industrial humans are emulating via rapid release of geologically sequestered carbon in the form of highly spectrally active CO2 -about 37 billion tonnes per annum.
Positive feedbacks could well result in 2000 ppm in a matter of decades, with the commensurate rise in sea level of over 60 metres locked in. Not that many extanct species will stand the 6oC to 10oC rise in average temperature commensurate with 2000 ppm atmospheric CO2.
Your’re way too low I think. I gather average global temperatures were 15-25 degrees higher then than they are now(!). But so what? There is such a thing as adaptation to new situations. The planet _thrived_ under these conditions before and there is no reason to think it won’t do so again. That’s a basic historical fact. Don’t fear that what you can’t change – you’ll be far less stressed out.
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
You have misread the graph you linked. Those are average temperatures, not divergences from current temperatures.
15 to 25C above current would mean an average of 30 to 40C.
@AFEWKNOWTHETRUTH
Do you then consider that CO2 is the only factor that influences or ever has influenced the earth’s temperature?
D J S
I’d say the best term is climate catastrophe or climate crises ( plural) not climate change
Agreed
Not just Trump is a denier, if we would be damned honest, most Kiwis are the same, in their own ways. We get endless reports about the heatwave, how it affects people, what people need to do to keep cool or to cool down, and protect themselves. But we get NO reports about the causes here.
Kiwis keep driving and polluting the atmosphere with their fossil fuel powered cars, which they love, and thus they contribute to climate change.
But instead of doing something to reduce this harmful change to the warmer climate, we carry on as usual, which is a bit like turning the heater on, when we already feel rather hot.
It is pure insanity, but we can ‘celebrate’, we are getting rid of one way plastic bags (which supermarkets replace with new plastic bags).
Yes, Marc.
Of course, Kiwis are doing what they have been carefully trained to do for decades by banks, corporations and opportunists (and most politicians) in this ‘free’ society.
You mentioned plastic bags. The saving of one plastic shopping bag equates to something like 10 metres of car driving in terms of resources; a 10 km round trip equates to something like 1000 plastic bags. And politicians expect us to take them seriously!!!
Damn, another cloudless morning portends yet another baking hot day.
According to Chomsky Trump is building a wall around a golf course he owns to keep the sea out so he it perfectly aware of the climate change.
As we know what Trump really thinks and what comes out of his mouth (or twitter account) are two quite different things.
Yes Trump thinks he’s O for awesome.
What’s the point in ordinary kiwis making substantial changes to their lives to help prevent climate change when the corporate sector and governments are doing Sweet F.A?
I bet that if the government went onto an emergency footing and started doing something real a whole lot more people would be inspired to make changes in their lives.
The people have got used to corporates and their wasteful culture, and the many goods and services they sell. It is simply stupid to expect corporates to change, when the people buying their stuff and working for them do nothing to force change.
Nobody has to buy plastic, nobody has to burn fossil fuel, people can use alternatives, but as these are often considered less convenient, people do not do what you suggest.
It is up to people to bring change, but as lazy, habitual consumerist wasters and polluters they resist change, that is a MAJOR problem.
Climate change denying is predominantly an older white man thing
..who also hold the monopoly of resource to actually make a meaningful difference.
I’ve lamented elsewhere the understanding that if every middle and working class schlub does absolutely everything possible to bring all their respective global footprints down to the absolute bare minimum, it will not be effective enough without the 100 companies causing 70% of emissions making radical adjustments to their own processes.
I suppose that might sound defeatist or like I’m passing the buck, but it is simply my honest interpretation of the statistics I have read. The crucial factor in acheiving the increasingly impossible here is to change the attitudes of the mega powerful parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
http://notrickszone.com/2019/01/30/solar-cycle-24-going-down-as-quietest-in-almost-200-years-may-put-the-brakes-on-warming/
http://notrickszone.com/skeptic-papers-2018-3/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6647309/Polar-vortex-wreaks-havoc-Midwest-causes-2-700-flight-cancellations.html
The Polar Vortex is caused bye the Magnetic North pole splitting in half, the half over Chicago is the weak half, the half over Siberia is the strong half, we are experiencing the effects of a pole shift as well as a weak solar cycle, kick back enjoy the show its a once in several lifetimes event, just remember next winter its our turn, the south magnetic pole has already left Antarctica, the jet stream is unpredictable as a result..
30 years of failed climate predictions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2u_TIWPupw&t=618s
Many years of failed commentary by Andrew, I suggest.
… and we’ve now had the hottest January on record since record-keeping began;
ref: https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/349529/january-2018-nz-s-hottest-month-on-record
As global temperatures rise; winters become harsher; storms more powerful, the cries of denial from Deniers gets more ridiculous.
…it is all about Capitalism and the Economics ethos of Growth at any cost to the environment…to get serious about climate change we have to get serious about this
…Naomi Klein nails it imo in ‘This Changes Everything:Capitalism vs the Climate’
https://thischangeseverything.org/book/
( we also have to get serious about overpopulation and the patriarchal cultures of overpopulation)
Trump could well be telling his guys to turn on the heaters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoD8RcqVKp0
The bad news about rapid melting just keeps on coming (faster than expected). The most significant aspect of the following report is ‘most of that ice melted over the last three years’.
So, we have unusually low ice cover in the Arctic region and ice around Antarctica melting. What more evidence is required?
‘Huge cavity in Antarctic glacier signals rapid decay’
‘A gigantic cavity – two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall – growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier. The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers’ undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.
Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites’ bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It’s big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.’
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2838/huge-cavity-in-antarctic-glacier-signals-rapid-decay/?fbclid=IwAR3bQntsTxV7bLvlz3Yy0XOuWzcoLvfKgKet3BbnXvcoIVF_WHavAUPGuOw
Thank goodness for trump…we can blame everything on him and ignore all the inconvenient truths about ourselves and our cousins over the ditch…
“Australian government backs coal in defiance of IPCC climate warning
Deputy PM Michael McCormack says policy will not change based on ‘some sort of report’”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/09/australian-government-backs-coal-defiance-ipcc-climate-warning?fbclid=IwAR25fCRzFHowYdHN0eXIbsVPSQnX_3q-2CeV8NSI_6xeMZKjA1aX8Wb6ft4
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