When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind's use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true to the faithful. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather. Not the sun, or sunspots, or El Nino, or la Nina or any of that other natural stuff. Just man-made carbon.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present. Why only sixty years, Doc? I see a lot of records were set in the 1930's.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe. Little Ice Age? Never heard of it. Medieval Warm Period? Nope. Fortunately for Doc Hansen, much of the younger generation has never heard of it, either.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution. And vote for Obama, because the other guy is only gonna make it worse!
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/04/2012 10:23 ||
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#2
Running a bit below normal in the UK. That's the problem with modern communications, as millions tune in they actually see other 'weather'. Over the month as a whole temperatures were over 1C below average, despite the very warm last week. The Central England Temperature (CET) was 15.5C which is 1.2C below the mean for 1981-2010, the lowest in July only since 2011 with a run of cool Julys recently. - from the MMGW obsessed Weather Channel.
#4
Doom is always upon us, but it never quite gets to the point of being beyond the ability of wealth transfers to reverse. That's know as the "climatology sweet spot."
Posted by: Matt ||
08/04/2012 11:18 Comments ||
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#5
Here's an offer for Mr. Hansen. He predicts climate over the next 5 years. If he's right, we'll do whatever he says. If he's wrong, we flay him and feed him to the dolphins.
Of course, if he predicts no significant change over 5 years, we just flay him now. It's called having skin in the game :-)
Since V isn't bounded, and thus pressure is going to merely mix, and R is just a constant, then it all boils down to
T=N which makes sense as the more molecules there are the more they can hold energy which is measured as heat. Which we then measure as the increase over the black body temp.
Intercepting solar energy higher in the atmosphere will make it colder not warmer.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
