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Climate Change(d)?

TSwizzle said:
For more than a decade, signs at Glacier National Park warned visitors that the glaciers would be gone by the year 2020 - now those signs are being changed. They were originally added to the park to reflect climate change predictions by the U.S. Geological Survey. Glacier National Park spokeswoman Gina Kerzman explained that the latest research shows shrinking of some glaciers, but in ways much more complex than what was predicted. Because of this, the park must update all signs around the park which state that all glaciers will be melted by 2020.
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News
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The Artic ice caps are thawing out and you are bloviating about a fucking glacier in a US park. The Artic and Greenland melting will cause much larger concerns as the lack of white (which reflects the energy) will mean more energy is absorbed into Earth's atmosphere.

 
This storm is going to be loopy.

So 8 to 12 inches in central MN, WI, MI. Ice in Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse (potentially over 0.25 inches of ice). And 60+ degrees and windy in Cleveland! Same storm event.
 
Ice is still holding in the forecast, with Buffalo possibly in line for a quarter inch of it. This is making for one of the worst winters in Buffalo history.

Cleveland, forecasted to be upper 60s, near 70, same event.
 
TSwizzle; you can roll your eyes but I will note that you haven’t answered the simple question.
 
Up to half an inch of ice in lower central Michigan and Buffalo area. 72 now forecast high in Cleveland area.
 
OMG!!! It is a catastrophic 53 degrees in Santa Monica today !!111!!!!1!!!!!

And... and.... *gasp* there is rain in the forecast!!!1!!!11!!!!!! :help:
 
From the latest NWS Forecast Discussion for NE Ohio.
NWS said:
So, a deep low pressure tapping a plume of 1.00-1.25" precipitable water values over the Ohio Valley (which is 2-3 standard deviations above average for this time of year) is quite likely.
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This coming storm has about one zillion variables, so we could get all rain, all snow, a mix of the two. The thing of interest thought is the moisture for the event. Rain, snow aren't unusual for NE in February. This February in NE Ohio has gone from warmer than average to much warmer than average. Two days for the entire month that didn't reach the average high. About one-third of the days with the low reaching the average high. And in part, we see the next issue, these temps lead to more moisture. In this case, a lot more moisture than average.
 
It's very difficult to remember which month it is, if you go by the weather. The temperatures have been in the low 80s and mid to upper 70s here for a few weeks. Things that usually bloom in late March or April have been blooming since early to mid February, so I think this is the first day of March, but it feels like late April. I guess, the climate has changed, since the normal high for this time of year is in the upper 50s or low 60s. I just hope we don't get a hard freeze before spring is really here, as it will mess up farmers, birds, insects etc. I've even seen butterflies yesterday, that I've never seen this time of year. Thomas Friedman said many years ago, that instead of calling the climate change, global warming, we should call it global weirding. He had it right.

What a certain person doesn't seem to understand is that while the climate always changes, it usually takes thousands of years for it to change as much as it has in the past hundred years or so. The evidence strongly suggests that human activity has influenced this rapid change. Why is that so hard for some to understand? Why are they all politically conservative? My brother in law once said that he refused to believe in climate change because he has grandchildren. Despite having a doctoral degree, he voted for Trump. We would probably be better off is we had listened to the wise Jimmy Carter.
 
Agreed. Up here it has been generally early April to May... or at least what May used to be.

We were 9.1 degrees (prelim) above what the average temperature was for February. That is 9.1 degrees above the average 24 hrs a day for 28 days temp. After the 11th, we had three days in February where the high didn't cross 50 degrees. We had more inches of rain than snow.
 
159 Cooling degrees days here for February. 16 heating degree days. If it were a once in a while thing for a month to be that far off the average and it was balance by departures in the other direction then I don't reckon I'd think that the climate changed. I removed my peach and plum trees last year. In ten years we failed to every hit the 150 chill hours needed for them to set fruit. Other than blueberries we have entirely tropical fruit now. For the whole of the 20th century we were USDA zone 9B. You didn't just plop tropical fruit trees in 9B without some serious gymnastics every couple of winters around here and peaches and plums did okay in more years than not. We have a couple of large Melochia tomentosa that are thriving. We love them and the attract every nectar loving polinator you could think of. But we don't live in south Florida so it is kind of odd that they are thriving without any kind of active frost/freeze protection.

I am a fish ecologist. I could ramble on quite awhile about the range expansion of tropical exotic species or the march of snook up both coasts mirroring the range expansion of mangroves...
 
Upthread Steve mentioned that the waste heat from human-produced energy is only a tiny fraction of greenhouse heat from human-produced CO2.

But in this video, Sabine Hossenfelder tells us "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years." If trends continue the waste heat will dwarf the greenhouse heat! Is this correct? What assumptions are involved?

She does say that wind- and solar-produced power do not generate new waste heat: They harness energy that would otherwise have been "wasted" (turned to heat) anyway.
 
Swammerdami said:
Upthread Steve mentioned that the waste heat from human-produced energy is only a tiny fraction of greenhouse heat from human-produced CO2.

But in this video, Sabine Hossenfelder tells us "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years." If trends continue the waste heat will dwarf the greenhouse heat! Is this correct?
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No.*
What assumptions are involved?
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Dunno, haven't watched. Do you have a link to a transcript of what she says in the video?
She does say that wind- and solar-produced power do not generate new waste heat: They harness energy that would otherwise have been "wasted" (turned to heat) anyway.
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Well that's certainly not true of solar power, which converts light into heat (mostly via electricity and whatever we use that electricity for).

If it hadn't encountered a solar panel, some of that light would have been reflected back into space.

Every solar panel on Earth reduces the planet's albedo, and causes some conversion of incident sunlight into heat.

I haven't done the maths, but I would bet dollars to donuts that this albedo effect is utterly minuscule - as is the effect of waste heat vs. heating due to atmospheric changes.

Waste heat isn't anywhere close to sufficient to boil even a small ocean in only a few centuries. She's dropped a significant number of zeros in whatever calculations misled her to that conclusion. Or perhaps has assumed that waste heat is somehow completely 100% contained by the atmosphere and cannot radiate out into the cold of space. Perhaps the atmosphere knows the difference between nasty artificial waste heat, and nice, natural, solar heat?






*Back of the envelope - solar irradiance is around 1.3kW per m2. If we aren't generating over a W of power per m2, we aren't adding as much as 0.1% to that heating.

US land area is ~10 million km2, at 1W per m2 that's 1012W, or 10TW of power generation required to produce 0.1% of additional heating. US power generation is around 0.45TW, so to add 0.1% to the heat delivered by the sun, the entire surface of the world, including the oceans, would need to generate electricity at more than twenty times the rate that the USA currently does.
 
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