It's interesting seeing someone take so much pride in being on the wrong side of history on, um, pretty much everything. Ya know, even the anti-intellectual science deniers are coming around to admitting that something is happening with the climate, and they are arguing about what we should do about it. That's a useful political argument. Denying climate change is increasingly looking as ridiculous as denying that cigarettes cause lung cancer. You are out on an increasingly lonely limb.
I didn't say anything about climate change in the thread. Neither did anyone else, though slskipper made general comments about the effects of climate change, But now that you brought it up, yes, the expected results of climate change will be more frequent and more intense heat waves, among other things. Utah and most of the southwest are in "exceptional" drought, the most severe rating. We just had the hottest day (3 way tie) in 50,000 days of temperature records, over a month early from when the hottest weather usually strikes.
Both climate and weather are a lot like baseball, in that they are all games of statistics. One hot day doesn't prove the climate is heating up. Nor does one hot month or one hot year.
On the other hand, one or even a few cooler years don't prove it is not happening either.
One of the most glaring examples of deliberate dishonesty was the claim that "there has been no global warming since 1998." Why 1998? Because there was a spectacular climb in temperature from 1996 to 1998. '98 was an el nino year, and apparently other conditions coincided to make 1998 a particularly hot year.
The net result was that the next few years after 1998 were cooler than 1998. The average temperature was still increasing, if you did a 5 year running average to flatten out spikes, like 1998, but yes, 1999 and 2000 were significantly cooler than 1998, so climate deniers started claiming global warming had stopped.
They or course neglected to point out that the climb in temperature from 1996 to 1998 was the steepest climb on record.
The deniers kept up this ridiculous claim that warming had stopped for about ten years, until it because so clear that it had not stopped, that they were embarrassed to make the claim, In point of fact, 19 of the 20 hottest years on record have all happened in the 21st century, and it is only 2021. If you go back and include 1998, then 20 of the 20 hottest years have happened since 1998. 1999 and 2000 are the only years that didn't make the list, and they would be included in the top 25 hottest years.
Here's the graph. You can see 1998 sticking way up by itself.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202013>And yet you use computers and electricity which take burning of fossil fuels to produce and transport, leading to certain death.
I had to look up what my computer burns per hour: 71W when idle, 260W when all CPUs and all GPUs are fired up. Just reading text on the internet or typing like what I am doing now is basically idle.
I am on a screen 10 hours a day. That's a lot. I have all Apple products, and my phone gives me a report every Sunday of my total usage on all screens (except tv) for the week, and it is very consistently ten hours. Yeah, I don't have a life, but let's see how much electricity that is.
The hourly wattage burn for my tablet is quite small, ditto the phone. The computer is probably in the range of 100W per hour on average. Let's for ease of calculation assume that all my devices average 100W for 10 hours a day. That's one kWH per day, and I pay $0.10 per kWH. Whoop-de-doo. My computers cost me ten cents a day.
My car burns about ten cents worth of gas to drive a half mile away from home and back. I don't even drive for half mile trips unless I need to pick up something heavy. It's easier to walk that far than to deal with parking.
Plus some of my electricity is generated from renewables and that is likely to increase rapidly in coming years. None of my gasoline is, unless you count whatever ethanol is in it, which I wouldn't bother to count.
>While the earth is warming generally (as it has many times before), I find it amusing to see any hot day used as proof of global warming.
>Then when it is extremely cold, crickets.
Again, I didn't claim the recent hot day was proof of global warming.
Yes, the earth has warmed and cooled over time. This is natural. Houses are warmer and cooler at different times of the year. While that is true, it in no way proves that your house is not on fire. Good grief.
The global CO2 concentration has bounced between 170 and 270 ppm for the last 800K years of so. We know this from glacial ice cores, where we can directly sample trapped air, so those are "hard" numbers (i.e. we are highly confident that they are accurate). The low range corresponds to glacial periods, the high range corresponds to interglacial periods. The cycle time from high to low and back again has been on the order of 100,000 years.
OK. The change from low (170) to high (270) took several thousand years, and the global CO2 level went up about 1 ppm every 50 to 100 years, very roughly. Some changes were slower, some were faster. Right now we are going up 1 ppm every 8 months or so, on average. This is neck-snapping fast, compared to the geologic record.
BTW, the last time CO2 levels were above 400 ppm was about 3 million years ago, and the sea level was 78 feet higher than it is now. We have jacked the CO2 level up so fast that the sea level has not caught up yet, and it probably won't for centuries. We don't know that the sea levels will go up the same amount, but if they do, a lot of very large cities will have to be abandoned.
We do know that all of us reading this will never see CO2 below 400 ppm again. I fully expect we will hit 600 ppm in the next two centuries. The earth has actually had higher levels of CO2 than even 600 ppm in the geologic past. It was an ice-free planet during those periods. Sea levels 200 feet higher.
CO2 was discovered and isolated from air about 1800. It was found to be a heat-trapping gas almost immediately, in 1804 by Joseph Fourier. It was another half century before scientists first asked if our industrial production of CO2 might be enough to change the climate. It was yet another half century before the name "greenhouse gas" was attached to it, and another half century again (1960s) before a consensus started forming that yes, it was in fact changing the climate.
BTW, the denier claim that scientists during the 1970s were claiming that the world was in danger of cooling is nonsense. Yes, there were a couple (I think literally two) of magazine articles. And there may be some localized cooling. If fresh water streaming off Greenland blocks the Gulf Stream, Europe, which is at the same latitude as Canada and the northern US and Russia, will get considerably colder. That will be a local event, albeit a large local event.
As for Texas, yeah, they had a cold week. The more instructive take-away from Texas is that they decided that they were big enough, they could ignore the rest of the country, and blow off federal regulations on how to run a power grid. They would not connect to other state grids, so they could ignore the interstate regulations.
The net result was that their system failed in cold weather, though all the states north of them that had even colder weather were just fine.
Now, half a year later, Texas is telling people to set their thermostats to 78, because the TX power grid is again overwhelmed. Maybe those federal requirements weren't so stupid after all. Texas is swimming in oil and natural gas, and they can't keep their grid running?? That's rich.