by And I won't back away from the statement that a lot of climate change proponents seem to project an image that they honestly believe that the Earth is finished with climate changes and is now a stable unchanging system.
such as? not one single climate scientist I am aware of would ever make that kind of claim so to defend your statement you must produce some evidence.
Colder areas will always be around as we live on a tilted planet and parts of it get no sun at all for a long period of time.
If a blocking high settles in - these highs are becoming more frequent as changes occur in the Arctic, then the cold deepens and may even set a record for a particular location affected. A blocking high is what steered Sandy away from the open ocean and inland.
The Southern Continent and Southern Ocean are unique weather systems and the continent generates it's own climate due to the amount of ice.
It too is being affected but slowly and in some cases the centre of the continent the ice mass is increasing due to more snow fall which is a direct result of AGW ....warmer air over a warmer ocean = more moisture to precipitate out as snow and eventually form glaciers.
But the NET mass of the continent continues to fall and the rate of falling is accelerating.
Australia will be only marginally affected by the changes in the Southern Continent but is affected by the change in winds and currents in the Southern Ocean and in fact it impacts the entire planet in some ways not fully understood and may to a degree act as a buffer to rapid change.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/new ... hern-ocean
But Australia itself is very subject to shifting climate bands as it spans temperate to tropical......dry to rain forest.
Easily seen in the record is a drying south and a wetter north and a shift in rainfall patterns even tho in some cases the rainfall may remain the same amount - it comes at a different time of year which is problematic for agriculture.
Trying to deny AGW at this point in time is simply ludicrous. You're smarter than that.....quit being so stubborn about it.
How to cope will, region by region, present many policy issues to be debated for decades to come.
Human activity both from land use and GHG has become the major driver of climate change instead of the normal slow orbital change that would have led into an ice age perhaps 10-15,000 years out.
That drift changed some 300 years back as industrialization took hold and has far out shadowed the orbital forcing towards a cooler climate regime.
The next ice age is on hold or cancelled perhaps as long as 100,000 years as that's how long it takes for our carbon emitted now to clear out of the atmosphere entirely tho the great bulk of it clears in a century or somewhat less.
Currently the greatest difficulty is in assessing the roles of other players such as S02 and carbon black and methane which are all shorter lived but in the case of methane 20 x more potent and in the case of S02 actually cools the planet.
Carbon black has a mixed role.
With the growth of industry in China and India - S02 and carbon black have soared.
With the heating of the Arctic Tundra/Taiga methane is being released more rapidly and that is the 900 lb gorilla given how much is stored there in C02 and methane.
If that feedback gains traction ...and there is evidence that it has began.
Kiss the climate humans ever knew goodbye.
This is a very conservative report
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-110
the outliers and many serious climate scientists understand how rapid and severe the shift could be.
High September 2012 methane levels
An earlier post reported average hourly methane measurements as high as 2500 ppb recorded at Barrow, Alaska. Sadly, hardly any further in situ measurements have been publicly released from Barrow since, as illustrated by the image below.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/2012/09/ ... evels.html
this charts the consequences of a large scale methane release in the Arctic.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/p/potent ... lease.html
Arctic methane sets global warming alarm bells ringing
Paul Hudson | 15:11 UK time, Friday, 25 May 2012
Research published this week which identifies thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane gas is being released into the atmosphere could have serious ramifications for global warming.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2 ... -war.shtml
