"Global warming rate discovered "

[bloom]

Tim Radford , science editor
Friday April 29, 2005
The Guardian

The world is getting warmer - and US scientists now know precisely how much warmer. They calculated the radiation from the sun, the heat reflected back into space, and the rising temperature of the seas and say the extra warmth is equivalent to a 1 watt lightbulb shining constantly over an area of 1 sq metre everywhere on the planet.

That would raise average temperatures by 0.6C before the end of the century, they report in Science today. Warming at that level, maintained over 10,000 years, would melt enough ice to raise sea levels by a kilometre.

<snip>

Most of the world - with the exception of the US and Australia - has signed up to the Kyoto protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions and further global warming. The US government has repeatedly argued that scientific opinion about global warming is divided. With this new research, US government-funded scientists have once again told the US administration that they believe global warming is real, and inexorable.

Computer models of future global warming suggest that planetary temperatures could rise by as much as 5.8C in the next century, with sea level rises of a metre. Since 1993, the world's oceans have risen at the rate of 3.2cm per decade. This is twice the sea level rise of the last 100 years. The warmer the oceans, the faster the planet's ice sheets will melt.

"We need to monitor the ice sheets and sea level precisely to be sure that the system is not running out of our control," Dr Hansen said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1472771,00.html

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" ...be sure that the system is not running out of our control..."

You mean someone is in CONTROL?! That is pretty laughable. It seems to me that people are out of control. That's the whole problem.

[mike6640]

1. that doesn't even compare to

an easy bake (tm) oven.

/end facetious comment

[bloom]

4. That does sound like what they are saying.

I think when they say that the oceans are rising by 8/100's of a something or other every year and one lightbulb per _____ that doesn't illustrate the problem nearly as well as photos of how much the Arctic has melted (before and afters) and how various glaciers have melted, etc.

Also seeing people moving from islands where the water is rising is more concrete.

[bloom]

2. From San Francisco Chronicle article:

Ocean tells the story: Earth is heating up
Human activity, not variables in nature, cited as culprit


Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer


Friday, April 29, 2005...The Earth has warmed about 1 degree Fahrenheit on average over the past century, and the researchers argue that another rise of about 1 degree is "in the pipeline" for the next 100 years -- without any further increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Hansen, who is director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the Columbia University Earth Institute, said if the trend is allowed to get out of control, there could be a 10-degree jump.

<snip>
About 10 years of ocean data helped make a compelling case, Hansen said in an e-mail exchange Thursday, that global warming is real, and allowed the scientists, for the first time, to calculate within an acceptable range of uncertainty how much the planet's retained energy balance is increasing. By their reckoning, the "net forcing" works out to mean that about 0.85 watts per square meter is being retained by the Earth -- a seemingly tiny amount compared to the nearly 250 watts per square meter coming in from the Sun.

But the small number, Hansen figures, is big trouble. He calculated the energy retention could be eliminated only by halting all human-caused emissions of methane or by somehow removing half of all the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/04/29/MNGT1CHITP1.DTL

[bonzotex]

3. Scary

This is the scariest long term problem facing all Nations and all people and the anti-science right doesn't even see it. And truly, at this point it's probably impossible to prevent, but we won't even be prepared to adapt to a warmer planet until the US Government and people can agree that global warming is even happening. We are faced with just being able to ameliorate how BAD it will be.

Here's a page with lots of good links on climate change if anybody is curious about the science behind this.

http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/links/understandinglinks.htm

[bloom]

5. Six miniature christmas lights per sq. meter.

From another article - similar analogy - only with light bulbs that people can picture...

"Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or levelling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since pre-industrial times, the concentration of CO2in the earth’s atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 parts per million to 378 p.p.m. During the same period, concentrations of methane, an even more powerful (but more short-lived) greenhouse gas, have more than doubled, from .78 p.p.m. to 1.76 p.p.m. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square metre, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts of energy have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, subtracted) for every single square metre of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square metre. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out."

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050502fa_fact3

[phantom power]

6. Lord yes, we wouldn't want it to get "out of control".

Ha.
HaHa.
Heeheehee.

Somebody shoot me.