mildhorror:

(via How a 3-Ton Mess of Dead Pigs Transformed This Landscape)

mediamattersforamerica:

Climate change is not that complicated! (h/t)

mediamattersforamerica:

Climate change is not that complicated! (h/t)

descentintotyranny:

The atmosphere has hit a grim milestone — and scientists say we’ll never go back ‘within our lifetimes’

June 13 2016

Scientists who measure and forecast the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere said Monday that we may have passed a key turning point. Humans walking the Earth today will probably never live to see carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere once again fall below a level of 400 parts per million (ppm), at least when measured at the iconic Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where the longest global record of Co2 has been compiled.

“Our forecast supports the suggestion that the Mauna Loa record will never again show CO2 concentrations below the symbolic 400 ppm within our lifetimes,” write the researchers, led by Richard Betts of the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Center, in Nature Climate Change. The study was conducted with colleagues from the Hadley Centre and Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the pre-industrial atmosphere were around 280 parts per million. But concentrations began to rise with the early growth of industry and continually climbed throughout the 20th century, as documented by the famous Keeling curve, based on observations taken at Mauna Loa dating back to the late 1950s.

This record is referred to often as a “saw-toothed curve,” because every year, concentrations go up and down somewhat (because of the life cycles of plants across the globe, which draw in carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis). But nonetheless, the long-term trend is steadily upward because humans are putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than plants and other natural “sinks” can pull back out again. 

Concentrations have crossed 400 parts per million on a temporary basis. It began as brief excursions, and last year the annual average concentration at Mauna Loa was more than 400 parts per million for the first time (it was 400.9). Nonetheless, during the course of the yearly cycle in carbon dioxide concentrations, there were still some parts of the year last year when they remained below that level. 

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npr:

For the past quarter-century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been gathering data from more than 400 scientists around the world on climate trends.

The report on 2014 from these international researchers? On average, it was the hottest year ever — in the ocean, as well as on land.

Deke Arndt is a climate scientist with the agency and an author of the State of the Climate in 2014 report, released Thursday. It’s the lower atmosphere that’s warming, not the upper atmosphere, he points out — just as the total of greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere continues to increase. That’s not a coincidence.

Science Confirms 2014 Was Hottest Yet Recorded, On Land And Sea

Photo credit: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
Caption: Floodwaters from rising sea levels have submerged and killed trees in Bedono village in Demak, Central Java, Indonesia. 

mediamattersforamerica:

It’s that simple.

mindblowingscience:

Study: 99.999% Certainty Humans Are Contributing To Global Warming

There is less than 1 chance in 100,000 that global average temperature over the past 60 years would have been as high without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, new research shows.

Published in the journal Climate Risk Management today, our research is the first to quantify the probability of historical changes in global temperatures and examines the links to greenhouse gas emissions using rigorous statistical techniques.

Our new CSIRO work provides an objective assessment linking global temperature increases to human activity, which points to a close to certain probability exceeding 99.999%.

Our work extends existing approaches undertaken internationally to detect climate change and attribute it to human or natural causes. The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report provided an expert consensus that:

It is extremely likely [defined as 95-100% certainty] that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [human-caused] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.

Decades of Extraordinary Temperatures

July 2014 was the 353rd consecutive month in which global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th-century monthly average. The last time the global average surface temperature fell below that 20th-century monthly average was in February 1985, as reported by the US-based National Climate Data Center.

This means that anyone born after February 1985 has not lived a single month where the global temperature was below the long-term average for that month.

Continue Reading.