The midieval warm period was as warm if not warmer than it is today. That was just 800 years ago.
Posted on 09/27/2006 10:59:20 AM PDT by blam
'One degree and we're done for'
27 September 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Fred Pearce
Further global warming of 1 °C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know."
So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of 0.2 °C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.
Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is within 1 °C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen's team. Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from triggering runaway climate change, the study concludes (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 14288).
The analysis reinforces a series of recent findings on accelerating environmental disruption in Siberia, northern Canada and Alaska, underlining a growing scientific consensus that these regions are pivotal to climate change. Earlier this month, NASA scientists reported that climate change was speeding up the melting of Arctic sea ice. Permanent sea ice has contracted by 14 per cent in the past two years (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, L17501). However, warming and melting have been just as dramatic on land in the far north.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Were DOOOOOOMMED!
Yikes! One degree! Eeek!
Quick, under the desk, and don't forget the bourbon and cigarettes!
Nice thing about predicting something 50 years off, you can demand action and not be around to be accountable for being way, way off.
Thank goodness. The Great Lakes were a frozen glacier 10,000 years ago.
Let me be the first to say it: Fush's Bault.
Yesterday it was 89 degrees here. Today it's suppose to be 92. We're doomed.
Yea, but think of the possibilities for snowmobiling! I wonder what ice fishing would be like?
A three degree rise?????
We're not doomed.
We're BOILED!
If only these guys would lose their jobs when their predictions turn out to be utterly and completely wrong...
ok, well, i guess im dead.
The midieval warm period was as warm if not warmer than it is today. That was just 800 years ago.
For more on the esteemed Professor Hansen, see also
World Climate Report
The Web’s Longest-Running Climate Change Blog
January 30, 2006 Hansen Revisited
"... We've been getting a bunch of hits from people searching on “James Hansen” since the New York Times and Washington Post have both run articles in which Hansen claimed he was being censored by the Administration.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/02/10/a-misinformed-public/#more-138
Hey old-timer, where'd all these rocks come from?
Glacier brought 'em.
Well, where' the glacier now?
Went back for more rocks.
From the Inhofe speech on the Senate floor from 9/26/06.
The “60 Minutes” segment made no mention of Hansen’s partisan ties to former Democrat Vice President Al Gore or Hansen’s receiving of a grant of a quarter of a million dollars from the left-wing Heinz Foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry. There was also no mention of Hansen’s subsequent endorsement of her husband John Kerry for President in 2004. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/dai_complete.pdf
“60 Minutes” also did not inform viewers that Hansen appeared to concede in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of “extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public's attention to the issue. http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh6.html.
Yup. Like LBJ and the 'Great Society.'
Hansen is the Trofim Lysenko of climatology.
Same here!
Say! Wait a minute.......
We both signed up in 1998!
OMG! It's our fault!
If liberals are worried about a 1 degree temperature rise, maybe they should help us keep terrorists from getting nukes.
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