Global dimming and warming.

[Kayenneh]

Well shit.


The Swedish version of the idiom "Out of the frying pan, into the fire" really sums this up. "Ur askan i elden" translates exactly to "out of the ashes into the fire".

[Epimethean]

More like "out of the frying pan, but still coated in grease" in this case.

[popeyespappy]

Um...no? The P-Tr extinction event was characterized by increased aridity (much like the KT) -not one of the proposed effects of our current bout of climate change alarmism. Get it together, are you calling for a global drought or a global flood? They're mutually exclusive...... The thing to remember here (I don;t know why I have to mention this) is that none of those species were H.S.S. We're a little better at this game than they were, by any metrics.

(Speaking of which, the Triassic...fucking fantastic. How anyone could imagine that the events of the P-Tr event led to a planet less friendly towards life is beyond me.....)

Sorry to be the one to inform you, but increased aridity is one of the proposed effects of AGW. Some areas are expected to get drier while others get wetter. The evidence is telling us the lower latitudes are going to get drier and the higher latitudes are going to wetter. Overall it looks like there will be more precipitation, but it won’t be falling at the same rate in the places it has for the last few thousand years. Nor are droughts and floods mutually exclusive. Even in arid regions it is going to rain. What the evidence is telling us to expect is that extreme events that lead to flooding are going to be more common than they have been in our memory.

We are already seeing an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. There have been more heat waves, more draughts and more flooding in the last 30 years than the previous 30. A lot more. While we can’t point at any single event and say global warming caused this we can we can take them as a whole and say global warming caused these. Statistics bears this out.

Can HSS adapt? Sure we can. Will we is the real question. Some of the areas that will see the worst changes are among the most densely populated. Do you think the rest of the world is going roll over when 3 billion people from the China, India and the US start migrating north looking for water? Canada may be fucked, but I’m thinking Russia isn’t going to meekly accept all those Chinese. The odds of our adaption go down considerably if we blast ourselves back into the Stone Age.

Something several of you seem to be conveniently overlooking is that indications are the climate is changing much faster than it has at any point in history. The faster it happens the harder it is going to be to adapt. Another detail you seem to be skipping over in your evaluation of the K-Tr extinction event Rhythm is it took several million years for biodiversity rebound. If we are heading into another 90 plus percent extinction event then even if HSS manages to adapt and survive what comes out the other side is liable to be very different than what went in. Of course that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

[The Grand Nudger]

There's quite a bit of difference between local aridity and the global aridity of P-Tr. One might call that the difference between climate change and the mother of all extinction events. A whole host of factors went into both the P-Tr and the KT, so, any comparison to our current situation and those two events is just bullshit, sorry to say it, flat out bullshit (we'd actually have to work incredibly hard to dump enough carbon into the atmosphere to meet those levels at P-Tr, just as one example). You'll have to forgive my hyperbole in characterizing global aridity as a "global drought" and increased precipitation as a "global flood". I figured we were all on board with hyperbole given the climate-apocalypse narrative that is developing, yet again.

Mass exodus to water? What happened, did all of the pumps in the world miraculously stop working the day after tommorrow? Are we going to wake up that morning and draw a blank on the last few thousand years of civil engineering?

[popeyespappy]

So your argument is conditions leading into the Great Dying were different than today therefore the result can’t be the same? If so then I too call bullshit. To begin with it is generally recognized already that we are now in the midst of the 6th great extinction. Estimates at the low end are that we are losing species at a rate 1000 times the normal background rate during the Holocene extinction. The current loses are mostly attributed to climate change and human activity resulting in habitat loss.

Yes it is thought that CO2 concentrations were many times higher than they are now. Never the less what killed all those species then is the same thing that is killing them now. Environmental stress. Estimates are that the temperature changed 8 degrees C during the Permian extinction. It took 100,000 years. We have changed the temperature a tenth of that amount in the last 50 years alone. Current living species are being exposed to the same type of environmental stress they were then.

Rain forests contain a large portion of Earth’s biodiversity. The current data is telling us AGW is probably going to cost us the rain forests in the geologically speaking very near future because those areas are going to become much drier. Those changes are happening so fast that most of the species living there are not going to be able to adapt to those changes, and most of those species are going to go extinct.

The indications are that the environmental stress current species are experiencing during the Holocene extinction are the same kind of stresses than those experienced during the Permian extinction. While the conditions may be a bit different now than they were then much is the same. We are currently seeing increased CO2 levels, temperatures and aridity where it hurts the worst. These things aren’t as bad now as they were then, but they appear to be happening faster this time around. Even though conditions are different the end result could be the same. Maybe it won’t be as bad this time. Maybe it will be worse. Maybe we lose 90% of land species and 70% of aquatic species instead of vice versa. It is impossible to predict at this point. Unfortunately are just as impossible to rule out at this point.

Mass exodus to water? What happened, did all of the pumps in the world miraculously stop working the day after tommorrow? Are we going to wake up that morning and draw a blank on the last few thousand years of civil engineering?

Are you not paying attention at all?

Aquifer Depletion

[The Grand Nudger]

The proposed cause of the release of methane hydrate was one of the largest known volcanic events to have ever occurred on this planet. Just for starters. I'd say that puts the event at a slight advantage over our current situation. The volcanic activity of the P-Tr event alone would be capable of causing extinctions, even in the absence of climate change. Pangea was forming. Permian life was by no means adaptable to fluctuations in temperature, and compared to ourselves (and all of our mammalian relatives) they were rank amatuers. A severe anoxic event could have turned the water (and the atmosphere above it) into poison, literally. Not only was there a release of toxic chemicals UV radiation damage seems to have spiked (and these two are likely related). To top it all off, there may have been an impact event. Hows about we leave a little bit of the granduer of the P-Tr event intact eh? We aren't facing a P-Tr, not by any stretch of the imagination.

So yeah Poppy, I'm fairly comfortable proposing that the scenario presented to us as the P-Tr event was considerably more horrid than anything that has us screaming about the sky falling down today. I'm comfortable mentioning that we wouldn't expect anything even approaching the devastation of P-Tr today, with our current situation. Call me fucking crazy.....lol.


As to your comments about our proposed mass exodus northward, I don't even need a link. It's called pumping, storage, and transport. We're good at it. If there is water somewhere, allow me to humbly suggest that we're probably capable of getting that water where we want it. Fun fact, the most productive area of commercial agriculture in the united states was once a desert, we "fixed" that. Our water use is wasteful, granted, but it doesn't have to be, and we don't even need to invent new technologies to shore that up. This exodus bit of yours is fantasy, plain and simple.

[KichigaiNeko]

All in all, China, India (SE Asia) and Africa are all "Developing Nations" and so get to pollute with impunity - as far as I am to understand it. Mind you having said that some of the best practices Coal fired power stations are being built there. So yes they are contributing to the lessening of CO2 out put.

So far so hoopy...

Now these anomalies of cooling. Have spurred the Climate sceptics to seriously question conclusions .... the Climate Change alarmists dismiss them .... This Dimming seems to fulfil the missing information. But as I have read some sceptics say that we might find that our pollution is what is saving us..and again this Dimming supports that opinion.

As far as I can see; we do not know enough about our climate, what drives it, how quickly it can respond, nor just what hope our species has of turning it around.

Keeping an interested eye on Climate (as always)

---

One question.

Are not the warm ocean currents responsible for the climate of Europe/ North America ?

[The Grand Nudger]

Which coast? On the east we have some cold water coming down (towards the us) and nice warm gulf water headed back up (towards the UK), for example. Call it an exchange between old friends..lol.

[KichigaiNeko]

Which coast? On the east we have some cold water coming down (towards the us) and nice warm gulf water headed back up (towards the UK), for example. Call it an exchange between old friends..lol.

That's just it Rhythm. There is much more to Climate than just atmosphere.

I like the "Climate Dogs" a govt initiative to explian what happens to our weather here in Australia.

http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/agriculture/fa...limatedogs

http://youtu.be/HUoYy5R0gi8

And this "Global-Dimming" is only part of the answer, just like C02 is only part of the Greenhouse effect.

[Epimethean]

Naples will end up on Popeye's side of the GW Risk board:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48488798/ns/...nd_energy/