Memorable drivel

The AP reports utter nonsense:

It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year’s Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts. Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead…all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia…

Nasheed’s tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.

The warming seas were growing more acid, too, from absorbing carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas in an overloaded atmosphere. Together, warmer waters and acidity will kill coral reefs and imperil other marine life — from plankton at the bottom of the food chain, to starfish and crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

Over the decade’s first nine years, global temperatures averaged 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, NASA reported. And temperatures rose faster in the far north than anyplace else on Earth.

The decade’s final three summers melted Arctic sea ice more than ever before in modern times. Greenland’s gargantuan ice cap was pouring 3 percent more meltwater into the sea each year. Every summer’s thaw reached deeper into the Arctic permafrost, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a global-warming gas…More methane escaping the tundra meant more warming, more thawing, more methane released.

At the bottom of the world, late in the decade, International Polar Year research found that Antarctica, too, was warming. Floating ice shelves fringing its coast weakened, some breaking away, allowing the glaciers behind them to push ice faster into the rising oceans.

On six continents the glaciers retreated through the 2000s, shrinking future water sources for countless millions of Indians, Chinese, South Americans. The great lakes of Africa were shrinking, too, from higher temperatures, evaporation and drought. Across the temperate zones, flowers bloomed earlier, lakes froze later, bark beetles bored their destructive way northward through warmer forests. In the Arctic, surprised Eskimos spotted the red breasts of southern robins. In the 2000s, all this was happening faster than anticipated

The only problem with the article is that everyone now knows that since 1998 there has been no warming at all.

2 Responses to “Memorable drivel”

  1. Canucklehead Says:

    Hanley is swinging for the fences on this one. This is the last gasp attempt at stemming the changing tide swirling around global warming/climate change. His article seems to connect with all climate environmental talking points since the 1970′s.

    Just to fact check his article, does anyone know how much carbon dioxide the oceans would need to absorb to change the water’s ph level by 0.1? By his statement that the oceans are becoming more acidic, I would assume a measureable change in water ph would be in the neighbourhood of 0.5 to 1.5. What would be the measurement error when testing ocean water’s ph level?

  2. Canucklehead Says:

    In addition to my other comment, what would the ph level be in the melt water that would raise ocean levels by a few meters? How much carbon dioxide would have to be absorbed to negate the acidic dilution effect?

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