Comments k8tea has made

  • global?

    "Answer: There is no good evidence that the MWP was a globally warm period comparable to today. Regionally, there may have been places that exhibited notable warmth -- Europe, for example -- but all global proxy reconstructions agree it is warmer now, and the temperature is rising faster now, than at any time in the last one or even two thousand years."

    Well of course there's"no good evidence" of global warming during the Midevil warm period. Humans didn't have a thermometer at every port, or satelites. In fact world wide surface temperatures have only been recorded with the MOST accuracy since ~2001.
    I got this off the NASA web site
     "Analyses of global temperature change by different groups, particularly, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC), and the combination of the British Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia (BMO/UEA), are generally in close agreement. The ranking of individual years, however, often depends upon differences of only several hundredths of a degree, which is finer than the accuracy that any method can claim given observational limitations.
     Additional Sea Surface Temperature Data. Fig. 3 shows an absence of warming of 2001-2005 relative to 1870-1900 in the equatorial region of upwelling off the coast of South America. Fig. 7 shows that the same conclusion holds for linear trends of SSTs. Alternative choices for the beginning date, e.g., 1880 or 1900, do not alter this conclusion qualitatively. Maps of the temperature change for arbitrary choices of the beginning and ending dates are available at www.giss.nasa.gov/data/gistemp.

    Fig. 8 shows annual mean SSTs in the WEP and EEP based on ship and buoy data (6) for 1870-1981 and satellite data (5) for subsequent years. The satellite data are adjusted by a small constant, as shown in Fig. 8A, such that the mean 1982-1992 temperature matches the in situ data (6) for that 11-year period. The 1983 and 1998 El Niños stand out in these annual mean plots as well as in the 12-month running means shown in Fig. 3B.

    Fig. 5, using the same data source as Fig. 4A, extends the paleoclimate data for the WEP back to 1.35 million years before present. At least several interglacials in this longer period were warmer than the Holocene. As discussed in the text, alignment of the paleo temperatures and the modern instrumental data are uncertain by up to 1°C. If the paleo temperatures are shifted upward (by about one-half degree Celsius) such that the temperature in the late 1800s is near the lowest value in the Holocene, the current temperature is still within »1°C of the warmest interglacials."

    1. Hansen J, Lebedeff S (1987) J Geophys Res 92:13345-13372.

    2. Hansen J, Ruedy R, Glascoe J, Sato M (1999) J Geophys Res 104:30997-31022.

    3. Peterson TC, Vose R, Schmoyer R, Razuvev V (1998) Int J Climatol 18:1169-1179.

    4. Hansen J, Ruedy R, Sato M, Imhoff M, Lawrence W, Easterling D, Peterson T, Karl T (2001) J Geophys Res 106:23947-23963.

    5. Reynolds RW, Smith TM (1994) J Clim 7: 929-948.

    6. Rayner N, Parker D, Horton E, Folland C, Alexander L, Rowell D, Kent E, Kaplan A (2003) J Geophys Res 108:10.1029/2002JD002670.

    7. Medina-Elizade M, Lea DW (2005) Science 310:1009-1012.
    On 'The Medieval Warm Period was just as warm as today'--Repeating this point does not make it true posted 2 years, 7 months ago 216 Responses

  • volcanoes

    Just wanted to make a correction (well I guess you could call it an update) that was cited on Gristmill's how to argue with skeptics.  Perhaps it was a modest mistake, but research is key when making an argument.     It says,
              "But, OK, let's throw out Mauna Loa. There are dozens of other sampling stations scattered all over the globe, including one in the Antarctic, far from cities, SUVs, cement plants, and active volcanoes. It also shows the same rise [PDF], though the southern hemisphere tends to lag a few years behind the northern hemisphere, where the majority of the CO2 is produced. Here are eight others -- same results. "

    There have been active underwater valcanoes found in the artic ocean, on Greenland, Atlantic Ocean, and on Antartica.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060727180622 ...   and
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/040527235943 ...
    "The international science team from the United States and Canada mapped and sampled the ocean floor and collected video and data that indicate a major volcano exists on the Antarctic continental shelf, they announced on May 5 in a dispatch from the research vessel Laurence M. Gould, which is operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF)... Domack said the volcano lies in an area known as Antarctic Sound, at the northernmost tip of Antarctica. He noted that there has been 'no previous scientific record of active volcanoes in the region' where the new peak was discovered and that it is north of an existing boundary where volcanic activity is known to occur in the region. "  
    and
     http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725133.800
    "The two vent fields are located at latitude 71 degrees north on Mohns Ridge, between Iceland and the island of Spitsbergen. Lying between 500 and 700 metres beneath the surface, they are shallow for vents, says Rolf Pedersen, a marine geologist from the University of Bergen, Norway, whose team has been exploring the area since 1999.

    Using methane sensors and a robotic submarine, Pedersen's team found around 50 chimney vents and recorded temperatures of over 250 °C. Then the sensor melted."

    and
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4861170.stm
    "Researchers have found traces of a heat-loving bacterium that may live beneath a frozen lake in Antarctica. ... The bacteria appeared in sediment mixed with a core of ice drilled by Russian and French researchers.

    The heat-loving, or thermophilic, bacterium may suggest that hydrothermal vents exist on the lake floor.

    Meanwhile, a new ice core drilled this season may reveal whether there is also life in the lake itself. In the sediment, the team found genetic traces of a bacterium that usually lives in temperatures of 50-60C.

    'We expected to find life adapted to a cold environment but instead we found exactly the opposite,' said Jean-Robert Petit of the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics of the Environment in Grenoble, France."
    and
    http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_051205_hot_spring ...
    "SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ Scientists exploring the world's sea floor have discovered new super-hot, mineral-rich geysers belching from the southern Atlantic, Arctic and Indian oceans. "
    and
    http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/051123_island_g ...
    "Smellie studies Antarctic rock formations to find out how ancient eruptions affected the growth and retreat of ice sheets over the past 30 million years. The research helps climate scientists put modern atmospheric changes into perspective and predict future climate change.

    "This opportunity to monitor a live eruption and see how it affects ice cover is priceless," he said.

    Researchers thought volcanic activity on Montagu Island, which started in 2001, was winding down. This is the first eruption on the island to be observed as it occurs.

    The South Sandwich Island chain is an arc of 11 volcanoes 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) from the Antarctic continent. This remoteness means they are relatively pristine, unaffected by continental contamination."
    I'll stop here to give everyone a rest. hehehe On 'Mauna Loa is a volcano' -- CO2 rise is measured on top of a volcano! posted 2 years, 7 months ago 8 Responses