Arctic freshening not due to ice melt after all, says NASA

@silverburn

Depends which way the wind is blowing

Conclusions cannot be drawn

We don't really understand the processes involved. This might be just one point in a natural cycle, it might be the end of an unual salinity distribution that was present whilst we were measuring and decided to call 'normal' without any real idea what 'normal' actually meant.

We can't tell if the change is our fault, if it is, we can't tell what caused it, and if we change what we're doing we won't be able to tell if it has done any good for a very, very long time.

Are we screwed? Possibly. Is it our own fault? Possibly. That's about as certain as anyone can be.

100 years? Is that it?

"This long a stretch of very warm weather in December/January has never happened before, at least during the 100+ years that temperature measurements exist for."

Last time I checked, the land currently labelled "Canada" has been around rather longer than a century. Many orders of magnitude longer. Feel free to come back to us when you have a more useful dataset, rather than a snapshot of events taken over a tiny, tiny period in time.

And remember: the Earth's climate does not need "saving". If you want to preserve the Earth's *current* climate in amber, I would strongly advise against it; it would be much, much cheaper to just let it get on with itself and adapt to it, rather making blind, flailing attempts to adapt it to _us_, despite our clear lack of full understanding over how the climate's mechanism actually works.

Our species is nothing if not adaptable. If sea levels do rise, we can always move inland. If the temperatures rise or fall, we can improve our structures accordingly. If floods become more frequent, we can adapt to that—as those living along the Nile in ancient Egypt did.

Humans have built their homes on water (Venice), in mountain ranges (Switzerland and Austria), in tundra (Canada, Russia, Norway), in deserts (Africa, Australia. China. Antarctica*), on ice floes (Arctic research bases), in areas prone to tornadoes (US), floods (US and almost everywhere else), hurricanes (US, Japan), volcanoes (Italy, Hawaii, etc.), earthquakes and more.

The problem with many of the so-called ecologists and "Climate Change Fearmongers" is that they assume we're all complete and utter fucking idiots, ignorant of the sciences and the many thousands of years of our species' recorded histories. Personally, I find this attitude incredibly insulting.

Enough already. The sky is not falling. We are NOT going to be killed by "climate change", because we, as a species, have been *adapting* to changes in our planet's climate for *thousands* of years already. There are as-yet unknown tribes hidden in the Amazon rainforest that know how to adapt to changes in their environment. Life _is_ change.

* (Yes, technically Antarctica is a desert. It doesn't get a lot of rainfall.)

Anecdotes from too short of a history

Going longer back, it was generally even WARMER in AD800-1300 which gets ignored. That was a period of reasonable prosperity. It ended in the Little Ice age which technically we have almost climbed out of (FINALLY). But when the temps dropped going into the Little Ice Age, plague and famine (and wars) wiped out huge swaths of population back then. That went on into the mid 1800's. That doesn't happen when the planet heats up. The animal and plant populations prosper instead. The current planetary temp is still COLD according to the geologists who have a much longer timeframe to work with than the 100-150 years the climate guys keep banging on about... The science behind the climate still isn't well understood, so long term predictions are still near impossible to make since there are too many variables and not enough data points yet. In the late 70's we thought we were about to turn into a snowball (which would kill millions), now we think the planets heating up which will bring prosperity but few deaths. Warmth brings life, cold brings death. I don't see a problem with a warmer planet, unless getting warmer plunges us into an Ice Age again...

Beach weather in Canada -- snow closer to equator

Well, not quite the equator, but my inlaws were surprised by snow in the end of November near the Georgian-Turkish border. They saw snow fall before Oslo, Norway.

So, warmer up here, colder down there.

On average, all good then.

Begs the question: To properly measure global warming (or cooling) -- where exactly do you measure? And do we blame an increase in CO2 emissions? ('No' says http://www.forskning.no/artikler/2011/desember/306493)

ODFO

Agendas aside (and I'd say el Reg is agnostic bordering on denialist in its agenda), the people who proved the "hippies" wrong were "boffins", both terms equal in being able to take as an insult or a complement. If anything, the word hippie was self-invented by hippies for hippies. Boffins, it's less clear of the etymology, but still applied affectionately or derogatively.

If you want news stories written about scientists and Greenpeace, with measurements in yards, feet & inches, would suggest not el Reg. If you want stories about boffins, hippies and measurements in brontosauri, buses and linguine, then you're in the right place.

This is The Register.

It is not a scientific journal filled with peer-reviewed articles.

ALL words have emotional baggage attached to them. That baggage is defined not by the writer, but by the _reader_. Every article is therefore subjective. There are no exceptions.

The above is why papers submitted to science journals read as painfully as they do: they spend a big chunk of their time explaining, in anal detail, _exactly_ what the author _intended_ each term to mean, to avoid any misinterpretation. Journalists don't do that; it's not their job.

The Register is a website that has "Biting the hand that feeds IT" in its bright red masthead. This is a site that used to have "Integrity? We've heard of it," as one of its slogans, and which runs articles about home-brewed rocketry with project titles like "LOHAN" and "PARIS".

If you're taking it as seriously as a more po-faced rag like the Financial Times, you really need to work on your critical thinking skills.

Precious Bodily Fluids

enough said

@John Smith 19

Yep. Pretty cool really. Another datapoint in the overall puzzle. The problem so far has been premature conclusions keep being drawn from incomplete data. Too much money being spent to prove Global Warming, instead of to just observe/theorize, prove/disprove and not get religious about it in the process. As human knowledge grows so does our understanding of our world and universe. Much of the time, things aren't what they appear. :)

Exceptionally High Probability

if you follow ZH, somewhat less if you believe Daniel, Saul of Tarsus, and John had credible inside information, and statistically impossible if you believe it is credible and the return of The Messiah occurs while you're still converting O2 into CO2.

Or did you mean all together now?

@JeffyPooh

"Meanwhile, in many other locations, freshwater falls from the sky like rain."

Quite true. The UK being quite a good example.

I wounder how many hose pipe bans they will have this year?

"My residence consumes essentially zero water. We pull it from a deep well, annoy it for a day or two, and then return it to the forest through the on-site state-of-the-art septic system. Not quite closed loop, but effectively similar as we simply borrow the water."

Impressive, but I wonder how many houses could afford the space in a built up area?

"Many rivers are similar, with at least some water molecules passing through several citizens on their journey from the mountains to the sea."

IIRC it was said London water was clean because it had been through 7 sets of Kidneys already.

In truth I'm not sure how valuable fresh water is as a resource to that part of Russia, just that hanging onto it is usually a good idea.

Oh puh-leese...

... will you stop birching?