It's now the wettest February-to-April on record in Seattle, with 19.33" as of Thursday and more is on the way. The old record was 18.97 inches set in 1972. @ http://www.komonews.com/weather/blo...-Seattle-sets-rainfall-record--256562931.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...-years-20140425,0,6033776.story#ixzz2zzi2o3Sc with video What difference does it make whether you call it Global Warming or Climate Change? Weather is taking charge of things and, in spite of all the rhetoric, there doesn't seem a whole lot that we Humans can do to stop it in the short run.
symptoms consistent with climate change... because they are different...Climate Change can be either warmer or cooler, wetter or dryer...Global warming or global cooling both can change climate ...if we caused CC we can reverse it...unfortunately because of the long lifespan of CO2 in the atmosphere it will take longer to undo the damage then it did to cause it...the longer we take to come to grips with CO2 emissions the more extensive the change/damage and the more expensive it will be to undo the damage...
And even if we can never reverse it - Knowing how deep the poo is going to get will help us know how big a snorkel we are going to need
I have a gut feeling we are past the tipping point already. Rather than spending money trying to stop it, I think we need to be spending money figuring out how to survive it
Humans are fairly well adapting creatures. The greater danger is for the left-toed, three handed owls and stuff if AGW does exist (which it doesn't)
seems as if humans have been pretty flexible in the past when warming occurred. It's those nasty cold spells that wreck havoc on human civilizations
I'm in the northern central valley here in CA, ad we have 50% of our rainfall, so it's not that bad, and the extreme northern California has been getting plenty of rain.
Andrew Revkin of the NYT had a good piece on the California drought this pretty much sums it up http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2...s-extreme-drought/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 A way of integrating the effects of temperature on drought is to examine soil moisture time series. These have been assessed (based on simulations with sophisticated land models), the results of which are summarized by the IPCC (2012) report on extreme events (for which this drought qualifies). The Palmer Drought index and simple counts of consecutive dry days have also been diagnosed. That latest 2012 report, (the so-called SREX report) in their Table 3-2 examines the evidence for regional changes since 1950, and makes the following assessment of these various indicators for western North America: No overall or slight decrease in dryness since 1950; large variability; large drought of the 1930s dominate. The team of 42 authors assigned a Medium Confidence to that assessment. The reports team in Table 3-3 then goes on to assess the scientific evidence for how drought in this region will change in the 21st century. They write: Inconsistent signal in consecutive dry days and soil moisture changes, to which they assign a low confidence. It is quite clear that the scientific evidence does not support an argument that this current California drought is appreciably, if at all, linked to human-induced climate change.
People forget that during the early years of Canada and the USA, we were in an extended Mini Ice Age where major rivers and lakes iced over solid. The same in Europe. We survived then and will survive whatever else Ma Nature brings us.
I think we've passed that point as well but part of me wants to be optimistic and not believe it as I don't there is any hope of surviving what's coming...
in the past we were adaptive flexible hunter gathers and had a near extinction event then not 7 billion highly specialized agriculturally dependent society we have become.... humanity will has never experienced anything of the sort that's coming our way...
a full on ice age is only 5c colder from where we are now, go 5c the other direction and we're headed into a world of discomfort...some assume "warmer" is a nice comfortable feeling way better than colder,brrrr....they have little awareness of the bigger picture of what a few degrees difference means to survival...warmer may sound more pleasant but it's every bit as deadly... life as we know it evolved very slowly to fit into a temperature sweet spot, a rapid change of even a couple degrees and a lot of specie will not make the transition, many did not make through the end of the ice age even though that was a glacially slow process compared to what is we now going through, speed kills....
so... in the history of the planet, this is the first time Seattle has had a lot of rain, and CA has had a drought. What a news flash!!
It is a news flash when we understand the unusual conditions that caused it. It could have been a freak set of circumstances or a fundamental change in the climate - Time is going to tell
depends, something as drastic as the Youger Dryas event would knock civilization down to it's knees. Another Maunder minimum can easily be adapted to. If you believe in the cyclic theories we should have at least another 15 to 20 years of cold and then hopefully the warming will start again and we wont have to suffer long. However if the green politicians and corporation have their way a few million may freeze to death
So one city has a record amount of rainfall for a 3-month period and this is indicative of something? How many cities set 3-month rainfall records across the globe every year and is that number increasing or decreasing?
With these nuts hot or cold, wet or dry. there isn't any kind of weather could ever exist for which humans wouldn't automatically be held culpable. With the more nebulous catch all term ' climate change' as opposed to 'global warming' they now have all the bases covered so just hand over your cash without question and stop complaining
yeah the end is near. I would hate to live inside some peoples heads. Now for reality instead of chicken little alarmism If you think the 1930s drought that caused The Dust Bowl was rough, new research looking at tree rings in the Rocky Mountains has news for you: Things can get much worse in the West. In fact the worst drought of this century barely makes the top 10 of a study that extended Utah’s climate record back to the year 1429. With sandpaper and microscopes, Brigham Young University professor Matthew Bekker analyzed rings from drought-sensitive tree species. He found several types of scenarios that could make life uncomfortable in what is now the nation’s third-fastest-growing state: - Long droughts: The year 1703 kicked off 16 years in a row with below average stream flow. - Intense droughts: The Weber River flowed at just 13 percent of normal in 1580 and dropped below 20 percent in three other periods. - Consecutive worst-case scenarios: The most severe drought in the record began in 1492, and four of the five worst droughts all happened during Christopher Columbus’ lifetime. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/02/worst-drought-of-this-century-barely-makes-the-top-10/
