A new paper that recently replaced the old paper that settled the science of global warming is now out - and not a moment too soon, either.
Because the new paper essentially says: “Um, guys? Never mind.” :/).
Ok, they don't really say that, but actually they really do.
“Sea level rise is one of the big issues of global warming. It could potentially swamp coastal cities or make them far more vulnerable to storms, such as Hurricane Katrina,” says Science World Report, apparently a wholly owned division of Wayne’s World Publishing, operating under the motto “It Certainly Does Suck.”
“Now, though, a study has revealed that it's possible to greatly slow the rate of sea level rise by cutting ‘short-lived climate pollutants,’” continues Science World, “as opposed to more long-lived greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.”
If you’re like me you are wondering how they greatly slow the rate of sea level rise by cutting these short-lived climate pollutants.
The answer: The short-lived climate pollutants seem to have an outsized influence on global warming when compared to carbon.
Oh my.
I’m glad that they finally, absolutely, 100-percent and finally- did I say finally?- understand ALL the mechanisms behind global warming.
To think all this time they were blaming carbon when it was actually these Johnny-come-lately short-lived-climate pollutants, that we’ll now call Teenage Mutant Short-Term Pollutants for marketing and branding purposes.
If I were carbon, I’d be pissed. Or at least half pissed.
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“Mitigation of the four short-lived climate pollutants (Teenage Mutant Short-Term Pollutants),” writes Nature Climate Change, “methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons and black carbon, has been shown to reduce the warming trend by about 50% by 2050.”
Carbon alone isn’t responsible for so-called global warming, say these federally funded international scientists. They don’t say it, but really, that’s what they are saying.
For federal funding purposes, however, the scientists say that we must act now against these new threats or risk…you know it’s coming… even bigger temperature increases later that could possible result in even more federal funding!
“If the [Teenage Mutant Short-Term Pollutants] mitigation is delayed by 25 years,” says Nature, “the warming from pre-industrial temperature exceeds 2 °C by 2050,” exceeding current estimates…somehow.
But that’s not the only settled science that has been revised by the April edition of Nature Climate Change.
In the April edition, Nature acknowledges that global warming has been paused, at least between the period from 2000 to 2010. This time the culprit is much more insidious- and wet.
It seem the “ocean”- that is the body of water that makes up 70 percent of the globe and acts as an ideal energy absorption mechanism- has been slowing down the increase in temperatures. Its almost as if nature designed it that way.
To think! The largest energy absorption mechanism in the world is responsible for sucking up excess energy?
No way!
Quick: Ban all high-capacity bodies of water over 16 oz.
And we all thought Mayor Bloomberg was an idiot for trying to ban Big Gulps. Ok, he is an idiot, but he’s also a scientific trendsetter.
Coincidence?
No, as we will see shortly, being an idiot and a scientific trendsetter isn’t mutually exclusive.
“Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases,” writes Virginie Guemas, Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes, Isabel Andreu-Burill, and Muhammad Asif, in Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade, “the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage. …Here we show successful retrospective predictions of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead, the analysis of which allows us to attribute the onset of this slowdown to an increase in ocean heat uptake.”
To those of us who lack both the federal training and the federal funding that these scientists have, it might seem like this study “proves” that previous global warming models, which failed to predict this pause in warming, could be flawed in their ability to predict the future.
But that’s where federal scientists come in and deploy massive funding that you and I frankly just won’t ever have access to.
Because with that funding they find: “Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown. The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.”
See? Nothing to worry about.
Being wrong, in retrospect, just proves how right they were all along.
Glad they settled that bit of science for us.
Otherwise us non-scientists might get the impression that they were, well, wrong.
And just think of all the federal funding that would go to waste, retrospectively.
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