Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Interesting Stats


GW, the 900lb gorilla in the closet, continues to generate rather interesting stats showing why climate change will soon become the greatest challenge to the survivability of mankind, a notion deemed not acceptable to the millions of GW deniers who insist that climate change is nothing but a nefarious conspiracy peddled by inept scientist and the liberal media that supports them.

The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up 60 percent. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice.
"Simply put, we are rapidly remaking the planet and beginning to suffer the consequences," says Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

THE OCEANS
The world's oceans have risen by about 3 inches since 1992 and gotten a tad more acidic—by about half a percent—thanks to chemical reactions caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide, scientists at NOAA and the University of Colorado say.

Every year sea ice cover shrinks to a yearly minimum size in the Arctic in September—a measurement that is considered a key climate change indicator. From 1983 to 1992, the lowest it got on average was 2.62 million square miles. Now the 10-year average is down to 1.83 million square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

That loss—an average 790,000 square miles since 1992—overshadows the slight gain in sea ice in Antarctica, which has seen an average gain of 110,000 square miles of sea ice over the past 22 years.

Read the Physorg article to get the whole picture of why injecting more energy into any system makes it wilder.

No comments: