2005 hottest year on record (in Australia)

I think there isn't much dispute that global warming due to greenhouse gasses is real. What is debatable is when and whether it becomes a runaway condition, and its significance for particular locations.

There may be paradoxical effects in some areas, such as cooling throughout Europe. But the continuing stream of reports are hard to ignore: Alaska temps up 2C or more, Greenland glaciers melting several times faster than expected, Arctic ice coverage shrinking fast, North Atlantic deepwater circulation down by 25+%, etc., etc. All these are consistent with scientists' predictions, and on the higher ends of the range. The Amazon just got some rains to lessen a catastrophic drought, but many scientists see a link with higher Atlantic Ocean temperatures. The destruction of a large portion of the South American rainforests could be an impetus toward a runaway condition. I sure don't want to leave that for future generations!

More drought in the Great Plains, more tropical storms, more heat in Australia? The jury is still out on these, from what I read and understand.
 
I kinda agree with Shane on this one.

Granted, I am no climate expert. But I think it is a bit debatable what we are seeing. Sure, I recognize that there can flucuations in average temperture around the world. And I think one could definately make the claim that we have seen a small rise over the past 100 years in average global temperture.

But after that, things kind of become cloudy to me and some of the other stuff I take with a grain of salt. For example, I am not sure that human activity is to blame for the warming at all. It could be. It could not be. But it could just as easily be related to some natural cycle that would have occurred even without humans occupying this planet. Afterall, looking back at this planet's history, we know that this did happen, numerous times. And many of those warming/cooling events were far more drastic than anything we have experienced since occupying planet earth.

And even worse, this has now become a big political issue. We all know any time something enters political discussion, it always becomes one great big brouhaha and it's sometimes hard to seperate the fact from the fiction which is so common to politics.

So where does that leave me? I don't deny that we are seeing a very recent trend of earth warming (and some other odd patterns that may somehow be connected). But am I ready to say that this is entirely or even partly to blame on human activity? No. I think we still have far too much to learn about what we are seeing before we can come to any real conclusions about the causes and corrective measures (providing we as humans can correct it). Humans have been studying tornadoes for hundreds of years and we still don't know how they form. And we have some of the brightest minds in the world working to find those answers. So am I to believe that we can truly understand global warming, something that we have really only been heavily studying for about 30 years, when it is a far more broad and complicated issue? I have a hard time accepting some of the claims I have heard as "fact" considering these truths. For example, some of our efforts that were iniated 20 or more years ago to provide better air quality have recently been determined by some scientists to actually worsen global warming. It's a very complicated issue.

Rather than jumping to any conclusions either way, dismissing anything or denying anything, or turning it into a political matter (which is sure to kill any beneficial progress), I am for a reasonable, methodical approach to first trying to learn everything we can about this pattern. Unfortunately, that does take time. But if we wish to do more good than harm, we need to make sure we know what we are doing before trying to do much, too soon. In fact, 100 years is not even long enough to be scientically relevant in terms of establishing that a true change is taking place, considering the time scale of the earth. This is a very, very complicated thing, with many interactions we may not even yet fully be aware of. So I think a common sense approach is the only way to deal with this, rather than emotional panick or completely dismissing global warming as garbage. That's the only way we will ever get to the bottom of this or make any meaningful progress. The problem didn't manifest itself overnight, it won't be corrected overnight and I don't think we are all going to be doomed by it within the next 20-30 years either. But if global warming is truly a part of a natural cycle, there may or may not be anything we can do to change it anyway. As crafty as we humans are, sometimes nature is even more crafty and there may very well come a day when earth decides it has had enough of us and shakes us off as a dog would shake off fleas. Hey, it happened to the dinosaurs. We could be next.
 
More drought in the Great Plains, more tropical storms, more heat in Australia? The jury is still out on these, from what I read and understand.
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The jury most certainly is still out regarding an ultimate cause, which is the main question reagarding "new heat".

Pat
 
Although the summer of 2005 wasn't exactly the hottest (but 2002 was, though), this winter's been mostly very mild. Try +14°C (57°F to you Americans!) This was how warm it's gotten in Calgary! Edmonton was up to near +10°C (50°F) over the Christmas holidays.

It would certainly not surprise me if this really is an El Nino year, though maybe not as nasty was the case in 1997 (?) and 1982. In fact, I can see the planet going into a permanent El Nino.

There's already increasing evidence that a permanent El Nino was exactly what happened during the late Miocene* (roughly 10-7 million years ago) and Pliocene (7-2.7 million years ago) epochs before the Pleistocene (within the last 2.7 million years) glaciation began.

*The entire Miocene epoch spanned from 20 to 7 million years ago. This was when grasslands became truly widespread for the first time and near the end, that Greenland started to have widespread ice for the first time. Humans have only been around since the latest Pliocene.
 
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