Vocal Voices

In fact 2014 was the hottest year in modern records. The trend shows that 14 of the last 15 years have been the hottest on record. The averge temperature is now 0.8ºC warmer than 1880, when records began. And 2014 was 0.69ºC higher than the C20th average.

These are not mathematical models or best guesses: they are fact. The numbers were crunched from the global databases held by NASA, NOAA and the UK Met Office.

In addition to the above a team at Harvard University has been looking at the records for sea level rise dating back to 1900. Their revised figures show that the rise in sea level has been at 3mm/year since 1990, way above the estimate of 1.5 - 1.8mm/year made by the IPCC. If we do nothing that rate will keep increasing.

Today we have had lovely blue skies and sunshine, hailstones, snow and rain.
Would like to see how that is included in the weather statistics.

Those figures should cause us humans to look seriously at how we are
causing these changes, but I doubt if they will. I see no answer to the
problem.

When at last it is realised that we are facing a global catastrophe it
will then be too late.

Not my idea of hot. All I can say is that it was not a scold as it could have been.

Ped, I was being a tad sarcastic with the thread title.

When I am your age my children will be the age I am now. Their children will be a similar age to theirs of today. Unfortunately neither of those generations will have not the same lives to look forward to as we have had. Either fossil fuels will have run, or be running, out, or we will have burned so much of them that the atmosphere will be screwed.

From what I observe we are doing nothing meaningful to mitigate either of those scenarios.

This current winter is one of the warmest I can remember in my lifetime. Snow in winter OMG amazement..... Those of us who are older know different. No Snow in winter OMG what changed.

The issue is that average temperatures, globally, always look so ridiculously small in the rise (0.8c over a century), that people simply dismiss it. What they don't realise is that 0.8C average rise over a century can mean 20C hotspots for extended periods of time. So events like Bordeaux and south west France in 2003 (where some 14,000 people died in one summer), will become events seen every other decade, then every decade then every 5 years.

Most of the real rises are being seen in the winter in cold places. Average 24C increase in temperature around the Arctic circle in Winter. You might not think it is much when it's still -20C, but it is an absolutely HUGE heat influx into that area. Allowing truly warm events to become something much more with, perhaps, melting ice and >0C temperatures in the middle of winter.

This is the greatest challenge mankind has to face in the next century. The problem is that people don't even understand the problem, so they are incapable of even taking sensible decisions as to what to do about it. Leaving them at the mercy of governments who wish to either make money out of the problem or suppress our freedoms because of the problem.

Plus we are still learning what we don't know. For the last 20 years it has been believed that the tide gauge readings of the last 150 years were accurate. Now we understand so much more, we find we have to add statistical analysis to the gauges to actually get a real read. At which point we suddenly find that much of the 20th century sea level rise we thought we'd monitored didn't happen. In fact it all happened in the latter part of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Meaning things are much worse than we originally thought.

However the press will continue as the press does. 10 years warming and it's "normal". 1 year partial cooling and all the warming stuff is "bunk"....

We're too stupid to survive as we are. Something different will have to replace us..

Suff wrote:We're too stupid to survive as we are. Something different will have to replace us.

That's exactly what I think.