The Reference Frame: 13 °C of warming would be fine for life

Some people may be confused by the observation that the ice ages - when the globe may have been just 8 °C cooler than today - sucked. It was extremely hard for life to thrive, at least in the currently moderate latitudes. So they imagine that a world that would be warmer by 8 °C has to be equally bad.

But this is simply not true. There is no symmetry here. The ice ages are bad simply because a big portion of the Earth sinks sufficiently deeply below the freezing point so that the ice sheets survive for the whole year and they are growing. It's somewhat hard to live under a mile of thick ice.

Because the annual mean temperature in the Czech Republic is 7 °C today, temperatures that are 8 °C lower are enough to move below zero, and if some additional criteria are satisfied, the ice can grow. The life is vulnerable towards a few degrees of cooling because we are just 15 °C above a qualitative point, a phase transition - I mean the melting point of ice.

A Nuclear Critic Draws a Lesson from France’s Success - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

France has something that the American industry would like to emulate: a small number of standardized nuclear power plant designs. This makes it easier to manufacture components, build plants, exchange operators among plants, and analyze safety problems. French reactors are almost all of three designs, while in the United States has dozens. Sometimes two reactors on the same site are so different that operators can be licensed only for one or the other.

YouTube - Mann Made Global Warming Press Conference

Commonwealth Foundation press conference on Penn State professor Michael Mann, embroiled in climategate

Long Record GHCN Analysis « the Air Vent

So what story does the raw data from the 1034 long record GHCN stations tell? Shown below is the unweighted mean of the temperature anomalies for all data from those stations for each month from 1999 to 2005. The mean is slightly smoothed, hence the high Lag-1 serial correlation. The trend is fairly low, at 0.0269 Deg. C /Decade – which are the units I hereafter use for all trends. The confidence interval is over three times as high as the trend, which is accordingly far from being statistically significant. There is no pronounced peak in 1998, and the peak temperature occurred in the 1930s. As this data set largely represents temperatures in the USA, that is perhaps unsurprising.