Sigh...

Can't win the argument. Stays away from a forum that challenges her.

I know!  I know!!

I see my messages piling up!

I'll try to get through some today.

If it's any consolation, your forum is not the only one I'm neglecting these days!

I understand. One can quickly spread oneself too thin in this environment. No worries.

Oh, yeah.

I remember Matt Stone and Trey Parker talking about being at a dinner party with some high end Hollywood types all talking about their hybrid cars and patting themselves on the back for being so environmentally fantastic. 

So Matt asked "But don't you all fly around in private jets?"

Hybrid cars don't cause smog, but they are the leading cause of smug.

Mysteries of Southern Ocean air on the radar of landmark atmospheric study

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A crack team of US climate researchers have gathered in Hobart to unlock the mysteries of the air above the Southern Ocean.

To help them, they have control of a state-of-the-art Gulfstream V aircraft, packed full of cutting-edge climate reading machines and instruments.

They'll be embarking on dozens of day-long flights south of Tasmania during their stay, with a focus on clouds, radiation and aerosols.

"This is a very important region. The Southern Ocean is the interface between the Antarctic ice shelves and the entire southern hemisphere," said Principal Investigator and Director, Professor Greg McFarquhar from the University of Oklahoma.

"If you want to understand global climate, you really need to understand what is happening here can even have influence on things like the location of the tropical rainfall belts."

Professor McFarquhar said one of the biggest uncertainties looking at simulations of climate change was understanding how man-made aerosols have impacted on the climate.

"In order to enhance our understanding of that, one of the biggest uncertainties we have is a knowledge of what pre-industrial aerosols are," he said.

"Of course we can't measure that anymore, but the closest thing we can get to that is the very pristine environment over the Southern Ocean."

Hundreds of atmospheric measuring devices would be dropped from the sky and parachuted to the ocean's surface, similar to those used by hurricane hunters and storm chasers in the United States.

The devices send back live data to the aircraft as they make their descent.

A special laser telescope in the centre of the plane was working alongside wing-tip radars to gain a complete picture of the atmosphere.

Many of the instruments on board the plane are so complex they required years of fine tuning.

The mission is being supported by Australian scientists at the weather bureau and the CSIRO.

It'll conclude at the end of the month, but the results from the vast amounts of data being gathered will be studied for a long time after that.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-11/flying-lab-to-examine-clouds-aerosol-over-southern-ocean/9418854

Jenifer (Zarknorph) said:

Average surface temperatures in 2017 were 1.1 degree above pre-industrial times, creeping towards 1.5C, the most ambitious limit for global warming set by almost 200 nations under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Just curious, where do they stick the thermometer in the earth to get the "average temperature".

Literally impossible to determine the "average temperature".

They use more than one thermometer.

However if you need to check the prostate, the finger goes in the north pole.

Global sea level rise rate speeding up, 25 years of satellite data confirms

The rate of global sea level rise is accelerating as ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland melt, an analysis of the first 25 years of satellite data confirms.

The study, by US scientists, has calculated the rate of global mean sea level rise is not just going up at a steady rate of 3mm a year, but has been increasing by an additional 0.08mm a year, every year since 1993.

If the rate of change continues at this pace, global mean sea levels will rise 61 centimetres between now and 2100, they report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"That's basically double the amount you would get if you only had 3 mm a year with no acceleration," said the study's lead author Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado.

But that figure, which is broadly in line with climate modelling, is likely to be a conservative estimate of global mean sea level rise in the future, said Professor Nerem.

"When you try to extrapolate numbers like this you're assuming sea level change and acceleration are going to be the same as they've been over the past 25 years.

"But that's probably not going to be the case.

Putting a number on sea level rise

Global warming drives sea level rises in two ways: by melting land-based ice sheets, and heating up ocean water causing it to expand.

Sea levels have been recorded by a series of four satellites, starting with the 1992 launch of the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite, in addition to long-term data captured by tidal gauges.

Professor Nerem said analysis of tidal gauge records and decadal changes in satellite data in the past had indicated global mean sea level rise was accelerating, but it had been hard to pin down a number.