Below answer is officially by NASA climate change authority
Q. Can we stop global warming? Is it true that we have 11 years until extreme weather across the globe?
The effects of global warming on the timescale of human lifetimes are irreversible, are happening now and will continue to worsen in decades to come:
“The removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence). Depending on the RCP scenario considered, about 15 to 40% of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years. This very long time required by sinks to remove anthropogenic CO2 makes climate change caused by elevated CO2 irreversible on human time scale.
https://www.ipcc.ch/…/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter06_FINAL.pdf
But it IS stoppable. Recent public discussions of “12 years” point to having a limited window before some of the worst effects of global warming and climate change become locked-in. In reality, the effects are a continuum and many things like ice sheet mass losses and subsequent sea level rise will still occur for centuries and millennia to come, due to the human burning of fossil fuels to-date. But just as when you’re in a well that the stoppage of digging makes the well stop getting deeper, so too is it true that time yet remains to make a difference, for those generations yet to come.
NASA maintains a few resources devoted to climate change and solutions for it:
https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/adaptation-mitigation/
https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/resources/
https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/energy_innovations/
One of the most important solutions is to talk about it, to your friends and relatives.
As for why should we care, because it’s the right thing to do. Because the facts are well-known and well-established. We are the first generation to know of the detrimental effects of burning fossil fuels and the last generation capable of staving off the worst effects of the carbon emissions from burning them.
Q. why is it that some locations the only temp increase were nighttime temps. Daytime did not change ?
Does “global warming” mean it’s warming everywhere?
“No, “global warming” means Earth’s average annual air temperature is rising, but not necessarily in every single location during all seasons across the globe. It’s like your grades. If one semester you get all Bs and Cs, and the next you get all As and Cs, your grade point average rises, even though you didn’t improve in every class.
That’s the way it is with Earth’s near-surface temperature as atmospheric greenhouse gas levels climb. Temperature trends across the entire globe aren’t uniform because of the diverse geography on our planet—oceans versus continents, lowlands versus mountains, forests versus deserts versus ice sheets—as well as natural climate variability. When you’re zoomed in on a particular place, you may not be able to see the overall trend.
It is only when scientists calculate the average of temperature changes from every place on Earth over the course of a year to produce a single number, and then look at how that number has changed over time that a very clear, global warming trend emerges. In other words, it’s only when we “zoom out” to the planet-wide scale that the trend is obvious: despite a few, rare areas experiencing an overall cooling trend, the vast majority of places across the globe are warming.”
Q. Is Earth cooling ?
Last spring, a number of media outlets and websites reported on a story that looked at data acquired from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP), which estimates changes in global surface temperature. The article discussed a short-term cooling period that showed up in the data in 2017 and 2018 and correctly stated that short-term cooling cycles are “statistical noise compared to the long-term trend.”
The answer is no. It’s vital to understand that global surface temperatures are a “noisy” signal, meaning they’re always varying to some degree due to constant interactions between the various components of our complex Earth system (e.g., land, ocean, air, ice). The interplay among these components drive our weather and climate.
For example, Earth’s ocean has a much higher capacity to store heat than our atmosphere does. Thus, even relatively small exchanges of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean can result in significant changes in global surface temperatures. In fact, more than 90 percent of the extra heat from global warming is stored in the ocean. Periodically occurring ocean oscillations, such as El Niño and its cold-water counterpart, La Niña, have significant effects on global weather and can affect global temperatures for a year or two as heat is transferred between the ocean and atmosphere.
Regional-to-local trends for short time periods are generally not reflective of global trends and are examples of natural variations more properly described as weather.
Q. Can you show a chart of the actual high temperatures for each year for the past 150 years?
Here’s an independent analysis of the global temperature datasets from 1850:
http://berkeleyearth.org/…/01/ComparisonFigure_2018.png
Global warming is ‘Global‘
What’s perhaps most important to remember about global surface temperature fluctuations is that despite short-term ups and downs, the evidence shows that our planet is steadily accumulating heat. Scientists assessing global warming study Earth’s entire heat content, not just what happens in one part of the atmosphere or one component of the Earth system. And what they have found is that the balance of energy in the Earth system is out of whack: Our lower atmosphere is warming, the ocean is accumulating more energy, land surfaces are absorbing energy, and Earth’s ice is melting.
A study by Church et al. (2011) found that since 1970, Earth’s heat content has risen at a rate of 6 x 1021 Joules a year. That’s the equivalent of taking the energy output of about 190,000 nuclear power plants and dumping it into the ocean every year.
Despite short-term decreases in global temperature, the long-term trend shows that Earth continues to warm.
No sun is not responsible
While sun does influence the Earth’s climate, it isn’t responsible for the warming trend we’ve seen over the past few decades. Over the longer period of the past few centuries, the output from the sun has varied from a low during the Maunder Minimum to a peak during 1960s. While the relative increase in solar output during the first half of the 20th Century played a role in the warming that occurred then, it has played virtually no role in the observed warming since 1970.
While the sun is not irrelevant in the habitability of the Earth, the role it plays in the recent warming trend is quite small, especially compared to the role of human activities, primarily the human burning of fossil fuels.
In the early 20th century humans caused about one-third of the observed warming and most of the rest was due to low volcanic activity. Since 1950 it’s all humans.
Q. Testing atom bombs in the 50’s
That had no significant impacts on global temperatures. It’s a tiny fraction of the anthropogenic forcing.
From 1945-2009 there were 2,402 surface and underground nuclear weapon tests. Of those, 527 were conducted above-ground. Of those, some 458 were conducted in the first 20 years of nuclear weapons testing.
Looking at those peak years of testing, the forcing from those 20 years of peak tests of the nuclear weapons on the Earth came to about one eight-millionth of a Watt per square meter (8 x 10-6 W m-2) of power.
Q. Could you show me a graph of the ocean’s temperature over the last 30/40 years? If there is any…
The oceans are warming, top-down. Per Cheng et al 2017:
“OHC has increased fairly steadily and, since 1990, has increasingly involved deeper layers of the ocean. In addition, OHC changes in six major oceans are reliable on decadal timescales.
All ocean basins examined have experienced significant warming since 1998, with the greatest warming in the southern oceans, the tropical/subtropical Pacific Ocean, and the tropical/subtropical Atlantic Ocean.”
And:
“The new result (Fig. 6) suggests a total full-depth ocean warming of 33.5 ± 7.0 × 1022 J (equal to a net heating of 0.37 ± 0.08W/m2 over the global surface and over the 56-year period) from 1960 to 2015, with 36.5, 20.4, 30.3, and 12.8% contributions from the 0- to 300-m, 300-to 700-m, 700- to 2000-m, and below 2000-m layers, respectively.”
https://advances.sciencemag.org/…/3/e1601545/F5.large.jpg
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/3/e1601545
https://www.climate.gov/…/climate-change-ocean-heat…
Which dovetails nicely with the results from Rosenthal et al 2013:
“It is clear that much of the heat that humans have put into the atmosphere through greenhouse gas emissions will be absorbed by the ocean. But the absorption time takes hundreds of years, much longer than the current rate of warming and the planet will keep warming.
Our study puts the modern observations into a long-term context. Our reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures suggests that in the last 10,000 years, the Pacific mid-depths have generally been cooling by about 2 degrees centigrade until a minimum about 300 years during the period known as the Little Ice Age.
After that, mid-depth temperatures started warming but at a very slow rate. Then, since about 1950, temperatures from just below the sea surface to ~1000 meter, increased by 0.18 degrees C. This seemingly small increase occurred an order of magnitude faster than suggested by the gradual change during the last 10,000 years thereby providing another indication for global warming. But our results also show the temperature of the ocean interior is still much colder than at any time in the past 10,000 years thus, lagging the changes we see at the ocean surface.”
https://science.sciencemag.org/…/342/6158/617/F2.large.jpg
Timeline of temperature change observations
Some may think that climate science is a relatively youthful field, but in actuality the field dates back many centuries (even millennia) as Aristotle divided the world into torrid, temperate, and frigid zones, c. 300 BC and Shen Kuo discovered long-term climate change in 1080 AD:
• 1686 – Halley maps the trade winds.
• 1789 – Lelande calculates Earth-Sun distance to within 97% of correct value.
• 1824 – Fourier calculates that an Earth-sized planet, at our distance from the Sun, ought to be much colder than it actually is. He suggests something in the atmosphere must act like an insulating blanket.
• 1856 – Eunice Foote discovers that blanket, showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere trap escaping infrared (heat) radiation. John Tyndall independently confirms the discovery a few years later.
• 1896 – Arrhenius calculates the temperature increase that would occur on Earth, with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels.
• 1965 – The first scientific report on global warming was made to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson.
Suggested reading on the history of AGW:
https://history.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm
Temperature measurements began in 1659. Stations were added throughout the centuries since then, becoming a truly global network beginning in 1850. Proxy records extend that record literally hundreds of millions of years into the past.
Scitech Labs 