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Nasa: Earth is Warming at a Pace 'Unprecedented in 1,000 Years'

posted by martyb on Friday September 02 2016, @07:42PM   
from the looking-for-the-thermostat dept.

Zz9zZ writes:

From The Guardian :

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it "very unlikely" that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa's top climate scientist.

[...] But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

[...] [Director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin] Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.

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Original Submission

• Re:It's a Chinese Conspiracy! Re:It's a Chinese Conspiracy! (Score: 2) by Snow on Friday September 02 2016, @09:10PM

  by Snow (1601) on Friday September 02 2016, @09:10PM (#396786) Journal

  I know you are poking fun, but I believe that chem-trails might actually be what ends up saving (or at least delaying) this planet. It has been speculated that contrails (not the mind controlling ones, but the normal ones) are causing a non-insignificant amount of cooling that could be counteracting some of the warming that we have been seeing from CO2.

  I don't see our CO2 usage stopping in the very near future, so we will need to come up with some other way. Humans are tinkerers, and before long we will see major weather modification happening. Maybe we will have huge sun-shades installed between earth and the sun. Maybe ships that spray sea water in the air to encourage cloud growth. I don't know, but I think it's far more likely that humans will take the climate into their own hands than actually do something about it before it's too late.

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• Re:It's a Chinese Conspiracy! (Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Friday September 02 2016, @10:10PM

  by zocalo (302) on Friday September 02 2016, @10:10PM (#396800)

  If you're referring to the idea that contrails might form cirrus clouds that can trap a significant amount of outbound heat energy then you've actually got it backward, but it's kind of moot because the theory was actually discredited - and that's before you take into account the net warming effect introducing all that CO2 into the atmosphere might have. While it's true that in the wake of 9/11 when flights were grounded there was a few percentage points of cloud cover reduction across the US measured by the University of Wisconsin and correlated with variation in the daily temperature range (DTR), which is the difference between the peak temperature during the day and the minimum at night, of approx 1C for the three days of the grounding compared to those either side, the finding was in favour of the idea that contrails are a contributor to global warming.
  
  Unfortunately for the theory (and the AGW proponents who latched onto it) Texas A&M took another look at the data and validated the temperature variations, but also found that the ranges observed by UWisc. were within the bounds of potential normal DTR variations for September. That finding was also supported by a team at Leeds University & the Met Office in the UK that showed you'd need an increase of approx. 200 times the number of flights over the US to actually have a measurable effect on the DTR.

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  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

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