[Island Chris]

The link is interesting. What is troubling from a science perspective is that it seemed that for years certain climate scientists did not accept that warming had leveled off. I probably posted stuff like that on Earthwaves.

We will see if I followed Brian's instructions to give a link its own line correctly:


http://nar.ucar.edu/2013/ncar/explaining...mperatures

Chris

[EQF]

That was in fact an interesting report. And as far as I could see, everything in it looked reasonable.

The thing to remember is that even if there are “pauses” in atmospheric temperature increases, the gradual buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will, I understand, trap increasing amounts of heat energy somewhere on the planet. For example, the polar icecaps are gradually melting. And in the process the melting ice is probably absorbing quite a bit of new heat energy.

Another effect the report did not mention or I did not see is that with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more gets into ocean water. When that happens it forms carbonic acid among other things if I remember the chemistry correctly, it lowers the pH of the water, and the increased acidity dissolves certain minerals and damages a variety of plants and animals living in the ocean.

Other pollutants from coal burning plants also wreck havoc on land-based systems including fresh water lakes and forests. And if I remember correctly, radioactive materials released into the atmosphere when coal is burned is our largest source of radiation contamination during years when a nuclear power plant somewhere is not suffering a meltdown.

Finally, the link color can be changed if you use a few special features.

For example, the color of that link can be changed to blue by manually specifying that color with hypertext. The following lines are separated from one another so that they can be seen.

[url=

http://

nar.ucar.edu/2013/ncar/explaining-recent-pause-rising-global-surface-temperatures

]

[color=

blue]

Global Warming Report

[/color]

[/url]

When those lines are merged into one, the displayed URL looks like:

Global Warming Report