No, the frequency and severity of winters, and the number of record cold temperatures set, have both been down. Meanwhile, this winter’s heavy cold has to do with the polar vortex, a mass of air normally caught by high pressure systems in the arctic, which has been weakened by the rise in arctic temperatures.
Of course, global warming does not imply that everywhere in the world will warm uniformly. Or that that warming will automatically and immediately lead to loss of antarctic sea ice.
Yes. Numerous people. Because it wasn’t based on the soundest of science. It was alarmist in tone and a lot of its predictions are simply based on absolute worst-case-scenarios that aren’t particularly realistic. Of course, Al Gore is not a climatologist, and his movie was not peer-reviewed. The fact that his movie was not the most astute of documentaries does nothing to negate the absolutely massive amount of research supporting the idea that the earth is warming and humans are causing it.
Well, I guess this one is a matter of perspective. It depends which you would rather believe:
Scientists, universities, and governments are colluding world-wide, producing thousands of fraudulent papers in countless high-impact peer-reviewed journals (who are also in on the conspiracy), falsifying millions of points of data from dozens of countries, with the goal of convincing us that the earth is warming to push some unknown political agenda or trick us into buying things that they for some undisclosed reason (and with no backing evidence) have an interest in.
The earth is warming, this warming is caused primarily by human CO2 pollution, and the evidence for this is absolutely overwhelming.
You’d be surprised how many people wholeheartedly believe that there is an international conspiracy of researchers to fudge the data. The reasons they give? Mostly the goal of instituting a world Marxist government. These people are fucking deranged.
You don’t assess global average temperature by what’s happening in your back yard. As long as the global average temperature is increasing at an unnaturally rapid rate, it’s plausible that weather phenomena like the polar vortex responsible for all this Arctic air moving south and other atmosphere and ocean circulation changes are linked to climate instability.
It was early summer, when seasonal sea ice at the time was two and a half to three times greater than the seasonal minimum. Also, as discussed in another thread, there is strong evidence for mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet from warming temperatures which itself may be contributing to increased amounts of seasonal sea ice.
No. A poll conducted among prominent climate scientists at the time showed that he got most of the substantial facts right. He did get some details wrong, and made statements about links to specific events like Katrina that some interpreted as stronger than were scientifically supportable. The most important thing to remember here is that Al Gore is not climate science. The science stands on its own merits. But the movie that helped to garner Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize was indeed substantially correct.
That would have made more sense if there had actually been a clear trend of colder winters, of course. (Or if it your claim did not make a point of ignoring the fact that climate scientists have been explaining for decades that a global warming will result in changes to local weather patterns in which some regions will actually see drops in temperature.)
Simple math question: what latitude-pair represents half the earth’s surface? IOW, if you girdle S<->N from the equator, where would the edges of the girdle be to define half the surface? My uninformed guess would be somewhere around 32°.
Apparently agreeing on the Earth’s temperature is too hard. Maybe we should start small, like the length of the equator or the deepest point in the ocean.
Really, people! This thread is reserved for insults directed against science. If you have simple math questions, please take them to BBQ Pit.
Nevertheless, let’s address one hijack since it leads to an instructive point.
My uninformed guess is that 30° exactly would be the answer, if the Earth’s shape is approximated to be perfectly spherical. Note that the area of a spherical segment is proportional to its central altitude, a fact which I think was discovered by Archimedes.
But my spherical trig isn’t as good as it used to be … and it never was. Hoping not to make an utter fool of myself I went to Google Images to get diagrams of the Earth just to make sure I even knew what a latitude was! There I found several images like this one! Note that whoever produced this diagram thinks latitudes relate linearly to central altitude, rather to the arccos thereof! :smack:
What does this have to do with the thread topic? Laymen today, who feel qualified to explain latitude lines on websites, know less about trivial math than the ancient Greeks. Eavesdropping on ignorant laymen discussing climatology would be amusing if it weren’t so sad.
I posted my question in the wrong thread. I was looking at a temperature change graph from a link that fxm posted in another thread. The graph itself was presented as a flat abscissa with no compensation for latitude, it just went from 90°S->0°->90° N in a straight line, which I thought seemed a little distorted in terms of effect. There were huge dips and spikes near the ends, but the area between the thirties looked nominally positive, and it seemed to me that would be a much more significant fraction of area to consider.
:smack: