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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1114203)	1/30/2019 8:27:38 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571086

What exactly is the difference between climate change and global warming? Don’t hate, I’m new at this. Posted on January 30, 2019 \| A certain David Weissman asked a question on twitter: The first few answers (listed above) didn’t seem very helpful. Not to worry, David. I’m here for you. First, it depends on who you’re talking to and about what. If you’re discussing policy and/or politics, whether it’s with Bernie Sanders or James Inhofe or your drunk uncle, there’s little difference in what people mean by the phrases “global warming” and “climate change.” Scientifically, it’s a different matter. The overall subject is climate change: the climate is changing, the reason is us. But there’s a lot to climate. There’s temperature, and humidity, and precipitation, and windiness and storminess and cloudiness and barometric pressure … boy there’s a lot to climate. Temperature is an important part of it, but it’s only one among many. When we study how human activity (mainly: greenhouse gases) affects climate, we find that temperature should be the first climate variable to respond noticeably. We knew this well before the temperature increase was observed. Now, it’s observed. Scientifically, that’s one of the things that sets global warming apart from climate change. The latter is about how all aspects of climate are changing, the former is all about the temperature. There’s yet another difference. Temperature fluctuates all the time, just like any climate variable. Look at those temperature graphs, be they global like in news reports or local, whether it’s daily variations or monthly means or yearly averages, you’ll notice that temperature fluctuates. Here, for instance, is yearly average global temperature anomaly according to NASA, for the whole planet Earth, from 1880 through 2018: Yes, it fluctuates from year to year. It looks like it’ll never stop fluctuating. But … there’s something else going on, not just fluctuation. There’s this overall tendency for temperature to get higher as time goes on. It’s not universal, not every year is hotter than the one before, but over the long haul, that tendency is pretty clear. We might even call it a “trend.” I might even estimate it mathematically, and come up with this (the thick red line): That line is an estimate of the trend, and since it’s changing over time, we have temperature change. In fact it’s going up, and if we test it mathetmatically we find that it’s not just a false appearance, it doesn’t just “look like” it’s going up by lucky (or unlucky) accident, it’s a real trend and it’s really changing and it’s really going up. That’s the magic “warming” everybody’s talking about. Since it’s happening to the whole-world average, it’s the “global” everybody’s talking about. So, David, there you have it. GLOBAL WARMING is an upward (not downward) trend (not fluctuation) in global (not local) temperature. Climate change is any meaningful (i.e. not just fluctuations) change of any climate/weather variable. If you comprehend just that much, then you know a lot more than some people do. If you have further questions just ask. tamino.wordpress.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1114203)	1/30/2019 8:36:01 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571086

It's strange. So many conflicting reports. See this one: Amidst Global Warming Hysteria, NASA Expects Global Cooling Mish Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era. All the data in this essay come from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at data.giss.nasa.gov. This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global average temperatures. The 2016-18 Big Chill was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring global average temperatures below the 1980s average. February 2018 was colder than February 1998. If someone is tempted to argue that the reason for recent record cooling periods is that global temperatures are getting more volatile, it's not true. The volatility of monthly global average temperatures since 2000 is only two-thirds what it was from 1880 to 1999. None of this argues against global warming. The 1950s was the last decade cooler than the previous decade, the next five decades were all warmer on average than the decade before. Two year cooling cycles, even if they set records, are statistical noise compared to the long-term trend. My point is that statistical cooling outliers garner no media attention. The global average temperature numbers come out monthly. If they show a new hottest year on record, that's a big story. If they show a big increase over the previous month, or the same month in the previous year, that's a story. If they represent a sequence of warming months or years, that's a story. When they show cooling of any sort—and there have been more cooling months than warming months since anthropogenic warming began—there's no story.