Climate Change and Canada

[Procrastinational]

Originally Posted by Migs

Remain calm, the earth will heal itself.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe...service=mobile

Interesting perspective. It kind of misses the point though. In the grand scheme of things, sure we are incapable of permanently damaging the earth. We are just insignificant blips in time. But within the timeframe of human lifetimes, we are capable of harming our own species by damaging the environment. So just because the longterm effects are insignificant, that doesn't mean we get a free pass.

[middeljohn]

Wikipedia article for Tecumseh Ontario classifies it as humid subtropical using the -3C isotherm. This is only using 2001-2012 data. I'd expect for mor Southern Ontario locations to exhibit non-persistant snow cover in the winters over the next few years.

[north 42]

Originally Posted by middeljohn

Wikipedia article for Tecumseh Ontario classifies it as humid subtropical using the -3C isotherm. This is only using 2001-2012 data. I'd expect for mor Southern Ontario locations to exhibit non-persistant snow cover in the winters over the next few years.

Amherstburg, in the southern section of Windsor's metro has had this classification for a while, using 1981 - 2010 data. I'm pretty sure most of Windsor and Essx County fall into this category, since Windsor airport is always the coldest reading in the city. Seems silly that our suburbs are but not the city!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amherstburg#Climate

[Glacier]

Originally Posted by middeljohn

Wikipedia article for Tecumseh Ontario classifies it as humid subtropical using the -3C isotherm. This is only using 2001-2012 data. I'd expect for mor Southern Ontario locations to exhibit non-persistant snow cover in the winters over the next few years.

According to climate change believers, England was not going to be getting snow anymore, and yet it does; Arctic sea ice was going to totally disappear in the summer, and yet it doesn't; temperatures would rise exponentially, and yet they aren't.

Despite what the rabid climate change believers say, Southern Ontario will continue to get lots of snow. Windsor has already had more snow than average this year, and December has just started. 2014 and 2013 were also snowier than average.

[CanSpice]

Originally Posted by Glacier

According to climate change believers, England was not going to be getting snow anymore, and yet it does;

Wrong.

Arctic sea ice was going to totally disappear in the summer, and yet it doesn't;

Not yet wrong, but getting there.

temperatures would rise exponentially, and yet they aren't.

Kind of wrong. They're not rising exponentially, but they're definitely rising.

Please, keep up the Gish Gallop with such provably false statements.

[north 42]

Originally Posted by Glacier

According to climate change believers, England was not going to be getting snow anymore, and yet it does; Arctic sea ice was going to totally disappear in the summer, and yet it doesn't; temperatures would rise exponentially, and yet they aren't.

Despite what the rabid climate change believers say, Southern Ontario will continue to get lots of snow. Windsor has already had more snow than average this year, and December has just started. 2014 and 2013 were also snowier than average.

That's a very simplistic way to look at it though, there will always be warmer and colder than normal years, but over time, average temperatures will continue to rise, as they have done in England as well as in Windsor.

[Loco101]

Originally Posted by Glacier

According to climate change believers, England was not going to be getting snow anymore, and yet it does; Arctic sea ice was going to totally disappear in the summer, and yet it doesn't; temperatures would rise exponentially, and yet they aren't.

Despite what the rabid climate change believers say, Southern Ontario will continue to get lots of snow. Windsor has already had more snow than average this year, and December has just started. 2014 and 2013 were also snowier than average.

Living in Timmins I can tell you that we definitely have been noticing the effects of climate change over the last 20 years. We have much less snow on average this year much like most years in the last two decades and temperatures are warmer on average.

[Migs]

Originally Posted by Loco101

Living in Timmins I can tell you that we definitely have been noticing the effects of climate change over the last 20 years. We have much less snow on average this year much like most years in the last two decades and temperatures are warmer on average.

You do realize the earth is over 4 billion years old correct? Quite the sample size you got going there.

[Infrequent Poster]

Originally Posted by Loco101

Living in Timmins I can tell you that we definitely have been noticing the effects of climate change over the last 20 years. We have much less snow on average this year much like most years in the last two decades and temperatures are warmer on average.

I sometimes feel like when I read comments like this, or even when I hear people make comments like this in my day to day life. That it can almost entirely be linked to confirmation bias.

http://climateontario.ca/doc/publica...t_timmins2.pdf if you read this pdf you will see in 54 years the avg temp has risen 1.5 degrees. So yes it has gone up. You are correct. You will also see in 54 years the avg amount of winter precipitation has decreased a whopping 5 mm on avg.

So yes you are right on both accounts. Its just it is such a miniscule amount I really cant in good faith say I believe you (sorry) when you say you have noticed such and such.

I mean I hear it at least a couple of times a month in day to day conversations. "oh I remember we used to get 10 feet of snow by this time of year" etc so forth...and I just dont feel people live long enough to be able to truthfully say (or even notice any sort of trend) they can notice 5 mm of difference on avg over 54 years (or whatever the number is).

To me thats just being realistic. I'm not trying to deny that changes are happening. Just tired of hearing the same anecdotal claims. (thats directed at people in general)

[Loco101]

Originally Posted by Infrequent Poster

I sometimes feel like when I read comments like this, or even when I hear people make comments like this in my day to day life. That it can almost entirely be linked to confirmation bias.

http://climateontario.ca/doc/publica...t_timmins2.pdf if you read this pdf you will see in 54 years the avg temp has risen 1.5 degrees. So yes it has gone up. You are correct. You will also see in 54 years the avg amount of winter precipitation has decreased a whopping 5 mm on avg.

So yes you are right on both accounts. Its just it is such a miniscule amount I really cant in good faith say I believe you (sorry) when you say you have noticed such and such.

I mean I hear it at least a couple of times a month in day to day conversations. "oh I remember we used to get 10 feet of snow by this time of year" etc so forth...and I just dont feel people live long enough to be able to truthfully say (or even notice any sort of trend) they can notice 5 mm of difference on avg over 54 years (or whatever the number is).

To me thats just being realistic. I'm not trying to deny that changes are happening. Just tired of hearing the same anecdotal claims. (thats directed at people in general)

About that data link:
When it comes to Winter precipitation it does not specify how much is RAIN or SNOW!!! The amount will be higher if it falls as rain which is why that chart doesn't show a big difference. Look at data for snowfall in Timmins and you'll see a decrease for sure.

[Infrequent Poster]

Originally Posted by Loco101

About that data link:
When it comes to Winter precipitation it does not specify how much is RAIN or SNOW!!! The amount will be higher if it falls as rain which is why that chart doesn't show a big difference. Look at data for snowfall in Timmins and you'll see a decrease for sure.

do you have a link? I spent probably 15 mins looking (and i'm really not that invested in this lol)....cant find anywhere that gives historic snowfall amounts for timmins...was actually kind of hard to find any historic data for climate in general...broken down for each year anyhow.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Migs

You do realize the earth is over 4 billion years old correct? Quite the sample size you got going there.

Straw man extraordinaire.

The reliable instrumental record only goes back 150 years in the CRU analysis [http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/documents/4...-124ac76680c5], 125 in the NASA analysis [http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/]. This is a simple fact that we are stuck with. 2005 was the warmest year recorded in that period according to NASA, a very close second according to CRU. Because of this limit, it is not enough to say today that these are the warmest years since 150 years ago, rather one should say ‘at least’:



1998 and 2005 are the warmest two years in at least the last 150.

But there is another direct measurement record available that can tell us things about temperature over the last 500 years, and that is borehole measurements. This involves drilling a deep hole and measuring the temperature of the earth at various depths. It gives us information about century-scale temperature trends, as warmer or cooler pulses from long term surface changes propagate down through the crust.

Using this method we can see that temperatures have not been consistently this high as far back as this method allows us to look. This way of inferring surface temperatures does smooth out yearly fluctuations and even short term trends, so we can not know anything directly about individual years. But given the observable range of inter-annual variations recorded over the last century, it is quite reasonable to rule out single years or even decades being far enough above the baseline to rival today.



Using this record, we can reasonably conclude that it is warmer now than any time in at least the last 500 years.

It is possible to make reconstructions of temperature much further back, using what are called proxy data. These include things like tree rings, ocean sediment, coral growth, layers in stalagmites, and others. The reconstructions available are all slightly different and provide sometimes more and sometimes less global versus regional coverage over the last one or two thousand years. Note: this covers what is often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period. As noted, all these reconstructions are different, but …

… they all show some similar patterns of temperature change over the last several centuries. Most striking is the fact that each record reveals that the 20th century is the warmest of the entire record, and that warming was most dramatic after 1920.



Thus, we can reasonably say it is warmer now than any other time in at least the last 1,000 years.


NOAA 1000 yr

The only other candidate for a higher temperature period — going back through the entire Holocene (~10,000bp to now) — is called the Holocene Climatic Optimum some 6,000 years ago. It is not known exactly what the temperatures were then; the farther back in time we try to look, the greater the uncertainties. Even so, the Holocene Climatic Optimum has long been cautiously thought to be almost as warm or even warmer than now.

That conclusion is starting to look less likely, as it has been determined that the anomalous warmth of that time was actually confined to the northern hemisphere and occurred only in the summer months.

Robert Rohde’s website, Global Warming Art, has a nice graph of many reconstructions of Holocene temperature, regional and global, all super-imposed with an average of all of them combined, shown below. This represents the best estimate available of global temperatures in the Holocene.



Thus, we can reasonably believe it is warmer now than at any other time in at least the last 10,000 years.

Holocene Temperature Variation

Before the current interglacial, the planet was in the grip of a much colder glacial period with ice sheets well down into the continental U.S. This period ended just some 11,000 years ago. The record of glacial-interglacial cycles can be read in Antarctic ice core analysis, and it shows these cycles over many 100Kyr periods. The IPCC offers a good version of this graph.



If our reading of the Holocene is correct, it is warmer now than at any other time in over the last 100,000 years.

And that is a bit more than 100 years. It is, in fact, the entire history of our species.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/one-...is-not-enough/


Apparently nothing will change your ideological conviction. You've conveyed your viewpoint ad nauseam: endlessly repeating the same discredited arguments.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Migs

Remain calm, the earth will heal itself.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe...service=mobile

wait a minute; so you are acknowledging climate change?

[Migs]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

wait a minute; so you are acknowledging climate change?

I've always acknowledged climate change, it's been happening for 4 billion years.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Migs

I've always acknowledged climate change, it's been happening for 4 billion years.

this is your answer?

wow, that's beyond lame. beyond pathetic.

[Glacier]

Originally Posted by CanSpice

Wrong.



Not yet wrong, but getting there.



Kind of wrong. They're not rising exponentially, but they're definitely rising.

Please, keep up the Gish Gallop with such provably false statements.

I don't know what a Gish Gallop is, but rationalwiki is a far left group of radicals. Not that that matters too much.

The problem with AGW is that if the conditions change, you can simply pretend like you were predicting it all along. For example, they predicted in 2004 they predicted that snow would soon be gone at ski hills in the UK, and since they didn't happen, they are predicting more snow.

Similarly, they were predicting that Antarctic sea ice would be decreasing, then once they noticed that it wasn't, they jigged their computer models again until they "predicted" all along that AGW would cause increased ice. It's the falsifiable hypothesis.

The problem with making stupid alarmist predicts that turn out to be false is that it busts the theory, not the theory that humans are causing warming (which we are), but the theory that the results are going to be catastrophic. Alarmists predicted Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2013, and yet it's still here. That's a fact. Yes, it's decreasing, but if the decrease is slow, it won't be catastrophic (just like the last time the Arctic was ice-free), and that's the whole point.

[geotag277]

Originally Posted by Glacier

The problem with making stupid alarmist predicts that turn out to be false is that it busts the theory, not the theory that humans are causing warming (which we are), but the theory that the results are going to be catastrophic. Alarmists predicted Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2013, and yet it's still here. That's a fact. Yes, it's decreasing, but if the decrease is slow, it won't be catastrophic (just like the last time the Arctic was ice-free), and that's the whole point.

Just going to post this again, the big list of failed predictions.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/0...e-predictions/

Again, it's important to note that science is never perfect. The point is not to "throw out the baby with the bath water" and fully deny climate change because the science isn't perfect, but rather to understand the limitations of current models and results and to keep trying to research and develop better science.

Like Tropics said ages ago, actual climate change science is quite boring, and as expected, no one here is really interested in talking about it.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by Glacier

The problem with making stupid alarmist predicts that turn out to be false is that it busts the theory, not the theory that humans are causing warming (which we are), but the theory that the results are going to be catastrophic. Alarmists predicted Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2013, and yet it's still here. That's a fact. Yes, it's decreasing, but if the decrease is slow, it won't be catastrophic (just like the last time the Arctic was ice-free), and that's the whole point.

Who predicted that it would be gone by 2013? I've never heard anything like that. The most "alarmist" thing I've seen us a US Navy report suggesting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2020; most other models show this happening in the 2030s or beyond.

It's not happening slowly, either, but at an increasing rate. There are also concerns about the effect of melting on the stability of the ice sheet in the Arctic and in Greenland (i.e., as the ice melts it becomes more porous, letting more seawater in, accelerating thawing, and so on and so on).

I'm not sure why so many climate skeptics are so thick on this point, but the problem is not that the climate is changing, but that's it's changing too fast for us, or natural ecosystems, to adapt without the potential for catastrophic effects.

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

Who predicted that it would be gone by 2013? I've never heard anything like that. The most "alarmist" thing I've seen us a US Navy report suggesting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2020; most other models show this happening in the 2030s or beyond.

It's not happening slowly, either, but at an increasing rate. There are also concerns about the effect of melting on the stability of the ice sheet in the Arctic and in Greenland (i.e., as the ice melts it becomes more porous, letting more seawater in, accelerating thawing, and so on and so on).

I'm not sure why so many climate skeptics are so thick on this point, but the problem is not that the climate is changing, but that's it's changing too fast for us, or natural ecosystems, to adapt without the potential for catastrophic effects.

Bingo! But hey, the winter will be milder in Canada so the skeptics won't mind.

[Glacier]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

Who predicted that it would be gone by 2013? I've never heard anything like that. The most "alarmist" thing I've seen us a US Navy report suggesting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2020; most other models show this happening in the 2030s or beyond.

It's not happening slowly, either, but at an increasing rate. There are also concerns about the effect of melting on the stability of the ice sheet in the Arctic and in Greenland (i.e., as the ice melts it becomes more porous, letting more seawater in, accelerating thawing, and so on and so on).

I'm not sure why so many climate skeptics are so thick on this point, but the problem is not that the climate is changing, but that's it's changing too fast for us, or natural ecosystems, to adapt without the potential for catastrophic effects.

That's factually and scientifically incorrect. It's a lie, and you should know it. Exaggerations don't help. As for the sea ice gone by 2013, here is one such article.

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