Initial surface temperatures estimates too low. An assumed pause in their rise is debunked.

The following post was prompted by the Forbes article linked below.

A new study by NOAA indicates that official surface temperature numbers were too low. A careful review by the authors of the study of all of the temperature data available indicates that temperature rise continues unabated.

As the article makes clear, temperature data can be the subject to a lot of confusion; especially surface temperatures. Past analysis has suggested that a pause may have been in affect for the last couple of years, but that is now no longer in question.

As I have indicated before this sort of thing gets tricky when all you focus on is how hot things may, may not, be at any given moment. The real issue is total system input, ongoing translations, and net dissipation.

The fact of the matter is that the overall system cannot dissipate radiant energy back into space (as infrared energy) because several types of gas block that transfer, just like the glass in a green house.

The tricky part in this is the fact that, with more energy in the system to work translations with, the more chaotic and severe those translations become. And in this context translations are all of the aspects of heat flow: convection, evaporation, condensation, and changes in pressure.

The bottom line then is vastly more amounts of ocean and lake water being sucked up into the atmosphere. Which then, eventually, allows for more condensation and localized heating of the air somewhere else as rain falls out of the sky. Heated ocean water also means more current flow from the depths to the surface, as well as from higher and lower latitudes to the middle, with water convection doing is own translating. And with the air doing the same thing those flows, and the resulting pressure changes, create even more translation.

What you are left with is more storms, more droughts, and more flooding; in short, more wild extremes all over the map, both in terms of geography, temperature, and a feast or famine in terms of water.

What we are heading for are extremes of such translation that not even Hollywood special effects can adequately portray. A kind of ugly that might temp the wrong people into pushing all of the launch buttons because even a Nuclear Winter would be preferable in their view.

The primary problem here, in my view, is that, when you get right down to it, nothing much is getting done to address the threat because the powers that be see everything in terms of cost as a purely monetary question. Costs in capital they do not want to bear. And since the rest of us are too poor already to pay for much of anything we have gridlock.

If that is indeed the case then the only way out is to change the mindset of cost completely. To move away from cost as an abstract of counters, as well as from whose pile it comes from, and to put it into the more direct terms of actual effort. Effort directed by, and formulated entirely of, a Federated group of like minded citizens. Something that cannot be done within the current economic operating model.

Business as usual is clearly not capable of addressing this problem. Its really that simple. We must find an alternative or die out as a species. Think about it. Find a way to take action.



New Analysis Shows Earth Is Warming Faster Than We Thought