[Island Chris]

ID (island daughter) and I walked out to a view of the House on the rocks and Newport across Narragansett Bay (R.I.). There was arctic sea smoke. Temperature may have been +10 deg F.

The high temperature for downtown Chicago on Monday is forecast to be -8 F (which may break an all time record for coldest high temperature for Chicago).

Yesterday, I walked to the local hardware store to buy a snow shovel and walking back, some geezer was walking down my street the other way and made some crack about Al Gore.

Look, global temperatures are only up 0.8 deg C or about 1.5 deg F. A lot of that is in the Arctic and sub-arctic, and Antarctic Peninsula. I don't know which parts of the 48 contiguous states have been warmer than the long-term record over the last decade, which have been cooler, etc.

None of this changes the scientific fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that increases the temperature of earth's lower atmosphere. The CO2 levels are simply a set of scientific measurements: are just fact. This is just not worth debating. What is worth debating is what the effects will be over the next few decades, for different regions, and also to global sea level.

The one thing that was misleading about Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore's film), is it was implied, although not quite stated (I think), that sea level would rise 20 feet (6 m) by 2100. That is not going to happen that fast. But I saw a scientific talk a month ago that talked of various peer-reviewed publications for 3 to 6 foot (1 to 2 m) sea level rises by 2100. Much higher than the (2007?) International report, which did not attempt to deal with glacier melt and ice sheet melt.

Chris

[Skywise]

(01-03-2014, 05:37 PM)Island Chris Wrote: Yesterday, I walked to the local hardware store to buy a snow shovel and walking back, some geezer was walking down my street the other way and made some crack about Al Gore.

There is a LOT of misunderstanding of what the effects of global warming are. People don't understand that this temperature rise is for the overall average temperature of the earth. They don't understand that adding that energy causes the climate system to become more vigorous, kind of like (but not exactly) turning up the heat on a pot of water causes it to boil. There will be areas that get hotter and/or drier. But there will also be areas that get colder and/or wetter.

I've been re-reading a book on chaos (Chaos by James Gleick) and one of the first people to discover chaos was a meteorologist trying to model weather on a computer.

BTW, I had not heard the term "arctic sea smoke" before so had to look it up. It's what I thought it might be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_smoke

Brian