Humorless Jesting

September 27, 2013

Picasso-FoolOnce again, crystal-clear skies this early Friday (whoopee!) and it’s on to the weekend — can’t come fast enough.

And if you have been aware/understand anything at all about climate change, and have some walking-around sense, the new report due today from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should come as no real surprise — the yak will be the fallout from the deniers.
The pertinent passage:

“It is extremely likely [95 percent confidence] that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951?2010.”

(Illustration found here).

Most-likely, there will be some screaming from the bat-shit crazy fringed folks all covered in oil and Koch cash, but it will be just white noise intended to sway the moron/Tea Party crowd. A lot of the stuff in the IPCC summary has already been covered, and the UN is a chickenshit organization when it comes to playing scared.
Noted meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters explains the report is not only already out of date, but projections are really, really on the low-ball side on the speed of the horror.
The big adjustment:

The lower-end emissions scenario, called RCP2.6, which assumes that CO2 concentrations will reach 421 ppm by the year 2100, is highly unlikely.
Earth reached 400 ppm of CO2 earlier this year, and CO2 has increased by over 2 ppm per year during the past decade.
CO2 emissions are accelerating, and CO2 levels will surpass 421 ppm by the year 2023 at the current rate of acceleration.
RCP2.6 requires that we slash emissions of CO2 by 50 percent, relative to 1990 levels, by 2050.
We are currently on a pace to match or exceed the worst-case scenario considered by the IPCC (RCP8.5), where CO2 levels reach 936 ppm by the year 2100.

WTF — just 10 years away is fried humanity — and the way things are going, that might be a low-ball pinpoint.
A good view of how the bullshitters will react to the IPCC report can be found at Skeptical Science, which warns “…head-vice required if you read the text…” of some of the brain-dead deniers as your own brain might explode at the foolish — and way-dangerous — concepts.
The world burns while a shitload of assholes fiddle-the-fuck-around.

Reading this shit is way depressing — mainly because humanity is apparently going to do nothing until it’s way-way-too-late.
From Real Climate:

The heat content of the oceans is growing and growing.
That means that the greenhouse effect has not taken a pause and the cold sun is not noticeably slowing global warming.

The amount of heat stored in the oceans is one of the most important diagnostics for global warming, because about 90 percent of the additional heat is stored there (you can read more about this in the last IPCC report from 2007).
The atmosphere stores only about 2 percent because of its small heat capacity.
The surface (including the continental ice masses) can only absorb heat slowly because it is a poor heat conductor.
Thus, heat absorbed by the oceans accounts for almost all of the planet’s radiative imbalance.
If the oceans are warming up, this implies that the Earth must absorb more solar energy than it emits longwave radiation into space.
This is the only possible heat source.
That’s simply the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy.
This conservation law is why physicists are so interested in looking at the energy balance of anything.
Because we understand the energy balance of our Earth, we also know that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases — which have caused the largest imbalance in the radiative energy budget over the last century.

The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to 17 x 1022 Joules over the last 30 years.
That is so much energy it is equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.

Not pretty, but not funny, either.

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