“climate change delivered by the postmanâ€

If Greenland melts and turns green, ie. grows a lot of vegetation, will that help reverse the carbon trend?

 

We are now raising a whole generation that will have every single weather excursion being caused by global warming.....according to the media. (Are there no more natural fluctuations left?)

It reminds me of TV reporting of the stock market, every jitter has an explanation that can be easily stated and understood.

 

In a single word.... No

FL_Prius_Driver, while I like that people are becoming more aware of their environment, I dislike how everything gets blamed on or attributed to one thing like global warming. IE, I agree with you.

 

Didn't sound like weather to me. Look at the passage about winter rain. In health care, the term of art is "never events". A "never event" is something you shouldn't ever see. Not rare, not sometimes, but never. The discussion looks very much to me as if winter rain has not happened within living memory. That would make it climate change.

Realclimate has a nice discussion of the statistics of (potentially recurring) record-breaking events. The gist of it is that "the weather is hot" is not the same as "the weather is hotter than it has been since we have been keeping records". Not in a loosy-goosy sense, but in a strict statistical sense. Unprecedented happenings tend to be more significant than others.

But my main takeaway is that the mainstream climate models predict (and temperature observations confirm) that the arctic (but not the antarctic) will show much faster warming than elsewhere on the globe. So, in that context, what was described in the article was consistent with what the models predict. While I usually dislike Friedman's columns, I though this was a nice alignment of science and reporting. If the models are right, it should be the case that populations in the far northern reaches see the most rapid encroachment of global warming. The models say they are the canaries in the coal mine in this context.

Edit: Plus, the "borrowing from the future" thing is spot on.

 

What is being observed is climate change, but it is not historically unusual. What is unusual, as FL_Prius_Driver notes, is our hypersensitivity to every swing in temperatures. There is a reason it is call "Greenland", after all:

"Data from ice cores indicate that from AD 800 to 1300 the regions around the fjords of southern Greenland experienced a relatively mild climate, with temperatures similar to today.[citation needed] Trees and herbaceous plants grew there, and the climate initially allowed farming of livestock as in Norway.[4] These remote communities thrived on farming, hunting ...

...Around the 14th and 15th centuries, the Norwegian settlements vanished, likely due to famine and increasing conflicts with the Inuit.[5] The condition of human bones from this period indicates the Norse population was malnourished. The main reasons appear to have been soil erosion due to destruction of the natural vegetation for farming, turf, and wood by the Norse, a decline in temperatures during the Little Ice Age..."

 

Let me just add the more relevant graph showing temperature changes in the last two thousand years. What should worry you is the hockey stick at the end...

 

So then Greenland turning from ice to vegetation will then either be carbon neutral or create a net carbon producing system? I don't know. That's why I ask.

One would think in a closed system, that the greening of Greenland would create a ecological carbon sink. However, we'll lose the great sun reflector that Greenland is, thus inevitably causing the warming of the earth, which may cause mass desertification of other parts of the earth negating the newly net carbon sink effect of the greening of Greenland. Right or wrong? Or as a amateur ecologist, just on the wrong track?

 

I think I read that what is happening in the Russian steppes is that they are thawing and are releasing carbon instead of sequestering it when they were frozen. This may happen in Greenland too.

 

Global Warming Could Release Trillions Of Pounds Of Carbon Annually From East Siberia's Vast Frozen Soils

I think you're right. Wow 500 gigatons. Maybe if I added a few more solar panels, that'd help.

 

Ah, your favorite chart, Alric. The famously debunked "hockey stick". As the article in MIT Technology Review states "A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics."

 

It looks more like a 5-iron than a hockey stick.

Wasn't the name "Greenland" just a Norse marketing gimmick?

 

The "hockey stick" has not been debunked.
See: Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick"

 

I'm pretty sure the loss of low-lying land., as the oceans rise, will far more than outweigh the greening of Greenland.

 

I found the OP article just a little irritating, not because I have a problem with the facts stated, but with the unquestioned logic of the "evil consumers" that created this "devastating" problem. Please fire back where you think I am faulty.
1) I am not going to blame earlier generations and I do not like it when other do. People are biologically wired to condition the environment to serve them. The more impressive thing is that many can morally wire themselves to figure out how to achieve a high standard of living and align with the environment. I would rather spend 100% of the time working on the education that can help achieve the later and 0% blaming the former. With Ozone depletion, the right thing happened once the mechanism was discovered. We need to do the same again using education and planning.
2) The effects of global climate change on the economy are one thing, but the economic effects of diminishing gas are going to be much larger, much sooner. It would be much better to focus on lifestyle changes that are sustainable without fossil fuel and not overdo the "carbon footprint/fight global warming" as motivation. If you do the former, the later takes care of itself. (This is NOT a statement that global warming is/is not a big factor. It is an approach that allows for direct actions without needing climate models to provide the motivation.)

 

Well, tell it to the National Academy of Sciences panel that found the "hockey stick" analysis fundamentally flawed and its conclusion that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming to be unsupportable.

And as Pielke notes here, the "pasting togther of proxy data with the instrument data for the last few decades is scientifically flawed".

 

How to you successfully educate to achieve change without getting people to recognize that what has been done is responsible for what is and what is going to be? The most difficult part of achieving recognition isn't the disagreements about cause or even effect. It's the fact that it is all so gradual that that breeds complaisance. People don't see a need to change because the change is so gradual they don't see it and don't experience. Very few people are going to live in Greenland or visit long enough for the changes there to impact them personally. And they don't think long term. So if you talk about 2030 or 2050 or 2100, they just tune out. Some will think "I don't care, I'll be dead by then". Others just can't visualize *that* world when they're 80 when right now they're only 30. Add in the difficulty of people more focused on their personal problems of job, home, family, bills as a priority over the world in 50 years. They don't connect it with their grocery bills going up.

 

Richard - of the "hockey stick", the National Academy of Sciences report states:

"Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

The ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics’ prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of [principal components analysis] puts Dr. Mann and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position."


Of the multiple temperature proxies Scott / Real Climate refers to, the NAS goes on to say:


"It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications"


As for Pielke - I agree with his conclusion and I have stated so previously that I believe that CO2 probably contributes at MOST to around 28% of human caused warming. Not surprisingly, the balance (72%) of human caused warming is caused by -- humans.



Pielke is not saying all warming is caused by humans or even that 28% of all warming is caused by CO2. See the difference?