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7954. robertjayb - 9/20/2012 6:17:06 AM Arctic Ice Shrinks
7955. concerned - 9/21/2012 8:31:09 PM I believe that 'all time low' for arctic sea ice is "zero", achieved on at least two years in the 1930's and 1940's, when no arctic sea ice at all was noted by exploratory vessels. 7956. concerned - 9/21/2012 8:33:54 PM Meanwhile, antarctic sea ice is breaking records for there being *more* of it than ever seen before. 7957. judithathome - 11/2/2012 7:58:11 PM Ideas On How To Avoid Another "Sandy" Disaster 7958. concerned - 11/2/2012 8:39:51 PM That's fine for NYC, but as another poster commented, it still leaves New Joisey, Long Island and Connecticut floating around.
I'm all for requiring a minimum construction height above maximum flood level. If a potential homebuilder doesn't want to deal with the backfilling and design modification aspects of that, tough. Many existing houses can also be put on higher foundations for a not excessive amount of money. 7959. arkymalarky - 11/2/2012 11:37:29 PM Wow. Con'ds and I agree. I'm frightened. 7960. concerned - 11/3/2012 12:38:12 AM Well, they made me build my house at a certain minimum height for the basement floor because I'm near a flood zone. Fortunately, I had selected a house plan that works with a partially above ground basement. 7961. iiibbb - 11/6/2012 6:51:02 PM So I just read a news article that attributes 1 foot of the 13 foot storm surge from Sandy to climate change --- and therefore "Climate Change Partly To Blame For Hurricane Damage".
I'm sorry. There not a lot of functional difference between a 12 foot and 13 foot storm surge. It is at best a gross oversimplification.
The primary contributors to storm damage was the same as it was for Katrina. Population density in areas that are at risk to events like this. Construction and infrastructure that are not up to the task of enduring the worst-case scenarios. 7962. alistairconnor - 11/6/2012 11:24:42 PM Attribution of a discrete event to something as diffuse as global warming is nonsensical.
What can reasonably be said is this : Global warming increases sea temperatures. Higher sea temperatures favour intensification of cyclones. The North Atlantic exhibited "unusually" high surface temperatures in October. The formation of a storm is a random event, and its path is pretty random too, but any storm which happened to form and wander up from the Caribbean to New York in October 2012 was likely to grow bigger and/or intensify and become a Sandy-like superstorm...
...because of global warming. 7963. iiibbb - 11/6/2012 11:52:33 PM data
In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic. A new modeling study projects a large (~100%) increase in Atlantic category 4-5 hurricanes over the 21st century, but we estimate that this increase may not be detectable until the latter half of the century.
Therefore, I conclude that despite statistical correlations between SST and Atlantic hurricane activity in recent decades, it is premature to conclude that human activity--and particularly greenhouse warming--has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity. ("Detectable" here means the change is large enough to be distinguishable from the variability due to natural causes.) However, human activity may have already caused some some changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observation limitations, or are not yet properly modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
I also conclude that it is likely that climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes. In my view, there are better than even odds that the numbers of very intense (category 4 and 5) hurricanes will increase by a substantial fraction in some basins, while it is likely that the annual number of tropical storms globally will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged. These assessment statements are intended to apply to climate warming of the type projected for the 21st century by IPCC AR4 scenarios, such as A1B.
The relatively conservative confidence levels attached to these projections, and the lack of a claim of detectable anthropogenic influence at this time contrasts with the situation for other climate metrics, such as global mean temperature. In the case of global mean surface temperature, the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007) presents a strong body of scientific evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past half century is very likely due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
7964. iiibbb - 11/6/2012 11:53:08 PM The "I" in the case is not me, but the author of the linked site. 7965. alistairconnor - 11/7/2012 12:02:45 AM Good, the author concurs with my analysis. I especially liked the bit about "The relatively conservative confidence levels attached to these projections".
Major storms are few in number, and very variable from year to year. An increase would have to be huge to be statistically significant: think of the standard deviation.
That certainly doesn't contradict a causal relationship. But as I said, any claim of attribution is necessarily flaky. 7966. concerned - 11/7/2012 7:37:53 PM Re. 7961 -
Doubtful, since not even an inch of sea level increase has been verified over the last century. 7967. concerned - 11/7/2012 7:40:25 PM I'll stay with my prediction of the last couple decades: 3"-9" of sea level increase by 2100AD. 7968. concerned - 11/7/2012 7:41:15 PM I suspect now that I'm erring on the high side. 7969. alistairconnor - 11/12/2012 12:37:46 PM Poles apart: satellites reveal why Antarctic sea ice grows as Arctic melts | Environment | guardian.co.uk The mystery of the expansion of sea ice around Antarctica, at the same time as global warming is melting swaths of Arctic sea ice, has been solved using data from US military satellites. Two decades of measurements show that changing wind patterns around Antarctica have caused a small increase in sea ice, the result of cold winds off the continent blowing ice away from the coastline. "Until now these changes in ice drift were only speculated upon using computer models," said Paul Holland at the British Antarctic Survey. "Our study of direct satellite observations shows the complexity of climate change. "The Arctic is losing sea ice five times faster than the Antarctic is gaining it, so, on average, the Earth is losing sea ice very quickly. There is no inconsistency between our results and global warming."
But then again, this is the US military, so they're probably lying...7970. arkymalarky - 12/31/2012 7:59:02 PM I use my phone for almost everything. I changed from a droid to an iPhone, And I may be about to switch back. I am doing voice to text right now on the iPhone, But when I type it's a huge pain. The droid gives you options to choose, unobtrusively above your keypad. With iPhone, you either have to type it out or use AutoCorrect. There are other things I don't like about the iPhone, but there are things I love about it. I'll probably just use it as an iPod and go back to droid for my main phone. If anyone else has experience along that line, I love to hear it.
Stan asked me to interject that he thinks androids suck. 7971. iiibbb - 12/31/2012 8:27:03 PM Having just read the post above; I don't think the US military has a reason to lie about that. I can tell you from direct experience that they are actually quite concerned about climate change. Many bases would be affected by sea level rise, the US Navy is a significant source of funds for alternative energy technologies. 7972. iiibbb - 12/31/2012 8:33:55 PM If you switch back to Android, try SwiftKey 3. I have chose no auto-correction prior to this keyboard because my typos are less of a problem than the auto-correct auto-complete choices.
Swiftkey also analyzes your facebook and gmail accounts to help it's prediction. It even correctly predicts both of my Son's semi-unusual names. My only gripe is that in certain apps, using punctuation automatically causes an auto-complete, which has cause a few classic auto-complete errors. 7973. arkymalarky - 12/31/2012 9:26:06 PM Thanks for the suggestion!
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