NASA Predicts Warmer Eastern States in Future
Heck, we already get these temperatures in the south. Welcome to our world.
C&P:
May 11, 2007, 12:48AM
Hotter days ahead for next generation, NASA predicts
A new NASA study offers a dire forecast for 2080s
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
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WASHINGTON - Future eastern U.S. summers look much hotter than originally predicted, with daily highs about 10 degrees warmer by the mid-2080s, a new NASA study says.
Previous and widely used global warming computer estimates predict too many rainy days, the study says. Because drier weather is hotter, they underestimate how warm it will be east of the Mississippi River, said atmospheric scientists Barry Lynn and Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
"Unless we take some strong action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, it's going to get a lot hotter," said Lynn, now a scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It's going to be a lot more dangerous for people who are not in the best of health."
The study got mixed reviews from other climate scientists, in part because the Eastern U.S. has recently been wetter and cooler than forecast.
Instead of daily summer highs in the 1990s that averaged in the low- to mid-80s, the Eastern U.S. is in for daily summer highs in the low- to mid-90s, the study found. The study only looked at that region because that was the focus of the funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lynn said.
For individual cities, the future looks even hotter.
A painful sizzle
In the 2080s, the average summer high probably will be 102 degrees in Jacksonville, 100 degrees in Memphis, 96 degrees in Atlanta, and 91 degreesin Chicago and Washington, according to the study published in the April edition of the peer-reviewed journal Climate and posted on the NASA Web site Thursday.
But every now and then a summer will be drier than normal and that means even hotter days, Lynn said.
So when Lynn's computer models spit out simulated results for July 2085 the forecast temperatures sizzled past uncomfortable into painful. The study showed a map where the average high in the Southeast neared 115 and pushed 100 in the Northeast. Even Canada flirted with the low- to mid-90s.
Many politicians and climate skeptics have criticized computer models as erring on the side of predicting temperatures that are too high and outcomes that are too apocalyptic with global warming.
But Druyan said the problem is that most computer models, especially when compared to their predictions of past observations, underestimate global warming.
That's because they see too many rainy days, which tends to cool temperatures off, he said.
There is an established link between rainy and cooler weather and hot and drier weather, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Rainy days mean more clouds blocking the sun and more solar heat used to evaporate water, Druyan said.
"I'm sorry for the bad news," Druyan said. "It gets worse everywhere."
Trenberth said the link between dryness and heat works, but he is a little troubled by the computer modeling done by Lynn and Druyan and points out that recently the eastern United States has been wetter and cooler than expected.
A top U.S. climate modeler, Jerry Mahlman, criticized the study as not matching models up correctly and "just sort of whistling in the dark a little bit."
But Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, editor of the journal Climate but not of this study, praised the paper, saying "it makes perfect sense."
He said it shows yet another "positive feedback" in global warming, where one aspect of climate change makes something else worse and it works like a loop.
"The more we start to understand of the science, the more positive feedbacks we start to find," Weaver said.
Weaver said looking at the map of a hotter eastern United States he can think of one thing: "I like living in Canada."
C&P:
May 11, 2007, 12:48AM
Hotter days ahead for next generation, NASA predicts
A new NASA study offers a dire forecast for 2080s
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
TOOLS
Email Get section feed
Print Subscribe NOW
Comments Recommend
WASHINGTON - Future eastern U.S. summers look much hotter than originally predicted, with daily highs about 10 degrees warmer by the mid-2080s, a new NASA study says.
Previous and widely used global warming computer estimates predict too many rainy days, the study says. Because drier weather is hotter, they underestimate how warm it will be east of the Mississippi River, said atmospheric scientists Barry Lynn and Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
"Unless we take some strong action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, it's going to get a lot hotter," said Lynn, now a scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It's going to be a lot more dangerous for people who are not in the best of health."
The study got mixed reviews from other climate scientists, in part because the Eastern U.S. has recently been wetter and cooler than forecast.
Instead of daily summer highs in the 1990s that averaged in the low- to mid-80s, the Eastern U.S. is in for daily summer highs in the low- to mid-90s, the study found. The study only looked at that region because that was the focus of the funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lynn said.
For individual cities, the future looks even hotter.
A painful sizzle
In the 2080s, the average summer high probably will be 102 degrees in Jacksonville, 100 degrees in Memphis, 96 degrees in Atlanta, and 91 degreesin Chicago and Washington, according to the study published in the April edition of the peer-reviewed journal Climate and posted on the NASA Web site Thursday.
But every now and then a summer will be drier than normal and that means even hotter days, Lynn said.
So when Lynn's computer models spit out simulated results for July 2085 the forecast temperatures sizzled past uncomfortable into painful. The study showed a map where the average high in the Southeast neared 115 and pushed 100 in the Northeast. Even Canada flirted with the low- to mid-90s.
Many politicians and climate skeptics have criticized computer models as erring on the side of predicting temperatures that are too high and outcomes that are too apocalyptic with global warming.
But Druyan said the problem is that most computer models, especially when compared to their predictions of past observations, underestimate global warming.
That's because they see too many rainy days, which tends to cool temperatures off, he said.
There is an established link between rainy and cooler weather and hot and drier weather, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Rainy days mean more clouds blocking the sun and more solar heat used to evaporate water, Druyan said.
"I'm sorry for the bad news," Druyan said. "It gets worse everywhere."
Trenberth said the link between dryness and heat works, but he is a little troubled by the computer modeling done by Lynn and Druyan and points out that recently the eastern United States has been wetter and cooler than expected.
A top U.S. climate modeler, Jerry Mahlman, criticized the study as not matching models up correctly and "just sort of whistling in the dark a little bit."
But Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, editor of the journal Climate but not of this study, praised the paper, saying "it makes perfect sense."
He said it shows yet another "positive feedback" in global warming, where one aspect of climate change makes something else worse and it works like a loop.
"The more we start to understand of the science, the more positive feedbacks we start to find," Weaver said.
Weaver said looking at the map of a hotter eastern United States he can think of one thing: "I like living in Canada."
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That should boost swimming pool sales. 0 -
they already have brownouts because their electrical grid can't handle ACs all coming on at once, now what? 0 -
This is no more than a guess, based on innacurate data.
They just keep trying to do it to us.
Doug0 -
quote:Originally posted by Doug Wilson
This is no more than a guess, based on innacurate data.
Doug, I'm not vouching for the validity of this article, nor am I attempting to start an argument.
I would like to know how you came to the conclusion that the data used is inaccurate. Have you looked over the data used by the researcher? Are you citing another expert who has?0 -
quote:I would like to know how you came to the conclusion that the data used is inaccurate. Have you looked over the data used by the researcher? Are you citing another expert who has?
Here is a bit of reading for you on the topic:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=11548
Eight Reasons Why `Global Warming' Is a Scam
Written By: Joseph L. Bast
Published In: Heartlander
Publication Date: February 1, 2003
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
When Al Gore lost his bid to become the country's first "Environment President," many of us thought the "global warming" scare would finally come to a well-deserved end. That hasn't happened, despite eight good reasons this scam should finally be put to rest.
It's B-a-a-ck!
Similar scares orchestrated by radical environmentalists in the past--such as Alar, global cooling, the "population bomb," and electromagnetic fields--were eventually debunked by scientists and no longer appear in the speeches or platforms of public officials. The New York Times recently endorsed more widespread use of DDT to combat malaria, proving Rachel Carson's anti-pesticide gospel is no longer sacrosanct even with the liberal elite.
The scientific case against catastrophic global warming is at least as strong as the case for DDT, but the global warming scare hasn't gone away. President Bush is waffling on the issue, rightly opposing the Kyoto Protocol and focusing on research and voluntary projects, but wrongly allowing his administration to support calls for creating "transferrable emission credits" for greenhouse gas reductions. Such credits would build political and economic support for a Kyoto-like cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
At the state level, some 23 states have already adopted caps on greenhouse gas emissions or goals for replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources. These efforts are doomed to be costly failures, as a new Heartland Policy Study by Dr. Jay Lehr and James Taylor documents. Instead of concentrating on balancing state budgets, some legislators will be working to pass their own "mini-Kyotos."
Eight Reasons to End the Scam
Concern over "global warming" is overblown and misdirected. What follows are eight reasons why we should pull the plug on this scam before it destroys billions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs.
1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth's climate. More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." (Go to www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.
2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to within 0.01?C, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.
3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers' expectations, modelers resort to "flux adjustments" that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says "climate modelers have been `cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable."
4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming. Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC's latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about predicting the future climate: "The Earth's atmosphere-ocean dynamics is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes."
5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization. Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD), which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland, were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the "climatic optimum," was even warmer and marked "a time when mankind began to build its first civilizations," observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study for Consumer Alert. "There is good reason to believe that a warmer climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today."
6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth's climate from changing. Reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990's levels by the year 2012--the target set by the Kyoto Protocol--would require higher energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales, and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year 2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.
7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets. After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s, states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90 billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs and waste money.
8. The best strategy to pursue is "no regrets." The alternative to demands for immediate action to "stop global warming" is not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right.
This strategy is called "no regrets," and it is roughly what the Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined, and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.
Time for Common Sense
The global warming scare has enabled environmental advocacy groups to raise billions of dollars in contributions and government grants. It has given politicians (from Al Gore down) opportunities to pose as prophets of doom and slayers of evil corporations. And it has given bureaucrats at all levels of government, from the United Nations to city councils, powers that threaten our jobs and individual liberty.
It is time for common sense to return to the debate over protecting the environment. An excellent first step would be to end the "global warming" scam.0 -
Well, I had to go to town & I left the computer for awhile, intending to respond when I got back.
Imagine my surprise when I saw that Bryant (Mk 19) quoted the very same argument that I was going to !!
He, by the way, is correct, as is his source.
Doug
P.S. This is another "here we go again" subject.0 -
Your very welcome Doug, anything to help[8D] 0 -
Today is warm. 0 -
thanks for the link
I'll have some time later to look at it0 -
we cannot bury our heads in the sand and say "there's nothing we can do about it"
There's plenty we can do, like beef up the power grid, so it does not go down when more people have to use their ACs longer.
I don't know about the rest of you but I WILL NOT sit around in 100 degree heat without my AC!0 -
Tonight is cold.
Doug Doug0 -
Sorry it took me so long to read up on Mk19's source article....It took a spat in politics to get me back into the debate
Mk19, I hate to tell you this....but your source has been debunked rather soundly.
"When questioned in 1998, OISM's Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, "and of those the greatest number are physicists." This grouping of fields concealed the fact that only a few dozen, at most, of the signatories were drawn from the core disciplines of climate science - such as meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology - and almost none were climate specialists. The names of the signers are available on the OISM's website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of "Dr. Red Wine," and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell's field of scientific specialization was listed as "biology." Even in 2003, the list was loaded with misspellings, duplications, name and title fragments, and names of non-persons, such as company names."
You can read the whole article here
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine0 -
beef up the power grid...ha!
if we take any more coal out of w.va., it'll collapse.
simple solution...stop consuming![:o)]0
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