Nice video from 1978! Luckily, there has been some new climate science done in the last 48 years. To start with, let's look at some glaciers.
Are glaciers shrinking? What does the photographic evidence say?
Muir Glacier, Alaska
Muir Glacier and Inlet, Alaska, 1880s and 2005
Carroll Glacier, Alaska, 1906 and 2004
Grinnell Glacier, Montana, 1926 and 2008
Bear Glacier from space 1986, 2024
Trift Glacier, Switzerland, has retreated by 1.17 km from 2006 to 2015
Glacier shrinkage driving global changes in downstream systems https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619807114
Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z
Using largely untapped satellite archives, we chart surface elevation changes at a high spatiotemporal resolution over all of Earth’s glaciers. We extensively validate our estimates against independent, high-precision measurements and present a globally complete and consistent estimate of glacier mass change. We show that during 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 ± 16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21 ± 3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise6. We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48 ± 16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 to 19 per cent of the observed acceleration of sea-level rise.
@ElwoodBlues All the melting documented above has resulted in sea level rise.
Sea level rise, mm/year, as measured by GPS
In fact, sea levels have risen 6 to 8 inches in the past 100 years. And unfortunately the process continues long after the warming stops.
Between about 21,000 years and about 11,700 years ago, Earth warmed about 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F), and the oceans rose (with a slight lag after the onset of warming) about 85 meters, or about 280 feet. However, sea levels continued to rise another 45 meters (about 150 feet) after the warming ended, to a total of 130 meters (from its initial level, before warming began), or about 430 feet, reaching its modern level about 3,000 years ago.
This means that, even after temperatures reached their maximum and leveled off, the ice sheets continued to melt for another 8,000 years until they reached an equilibrium with temperatures.
Stated another way, the ice sheets’ response to warming continued for 8,000 years after warming had already ended, with the meltwater contribution to global sea levels totaling 45 additional meters of sea-level rise.
From about 3,000 years ago to about 100 years ago, sea levels naturally rose and declined slightly, with little change in the overall trend. Over the past 100 years, global temperatures have risen about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F), with sea level response to that warming totaling about 160 to 210 mm (with about half of that amount occurring since 1993), or about 6 to 8 inches. And the current rate of sea-level rise is unprecedented over the past several millennia.
Recent sea level rise
8000 years of sea levels
Sea levels have been quite stable for the last 2000 years while humans built coastal cities. Climate change now threatens to raise sea levels and swamp those cities.
Hi 👋🏻 I’m certainly no scientist, but I can say with 100% certainty that the climate where I live has changed significantly in my lifetime - no more ice cold winters (just wet, windy and mild) and consistently record breaking summers for heat. Hosepipe bans every year now 😞.
@Oneofthestormboys Right, because never in the entire history of Earth has that ever happened before. You do of course realise don't you, that the ice sheets naturally expand and contract over time. That's nothing new, nor uncommon.
@DLight Yes, the earth's surface has heated and cooled before, yes, ice ages have come and gone.
We now have data covering about the last seven ice ages, 800,000 years, and we've never had changes this rapid in that period.
The global warming / climate change we're seeing in the last 100 or so years is MUCH different from anything measured in the glacial & sea sediment records covering the last 800,000 years. CO2 is rising 100x faster, and temps 10x faster.
"How is Today’s Warming Different from the Past?" https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php "As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming."
How is today's CO2 increase different? https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide "The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago."
Fact is, anthropogenic global warming is accepted by a YUGE segment of the scientific community. Would you accept the consensus opinion of the American Physical Society AND the American Chemical Society? How about the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and at least 15 other national organizations of publishing scientists? See https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Climate change is definitely a proven fact. The debate remains what caused it, is it a natural progression or man made due to carbon emissions? Those on the right mistakenly deny there IS climate change occurring, but they've misunderstood the central point. There's no denying the climate is changing and temperatures are getting warmer. The debate surrounds the cause of that rise in temperature.
@Richard65 no, people on the right don’t deny that temps are getting warmer, they believe what you said… is it caused by man or not. also, temperature has not been recorded for all of humanity, so we don’t know what the temps were even just a few hundred years ago. and the accuracy of measured temps are much better now than they were years ago.
@boudinMan try talking to the usual right wing suspects on here, just for starters. They crack on that they're waiting for icebergs to appear in California. I've spoken to enough folks on the right in both the UK and the US to gauge a consensus and it's clear many think it's a hoax dreamed up to profit from green taxes.
temperature has not been recorded for all of humanity,
Temperature and CO2 levels have been recorded in glacial ice bubbles (isotopes of H & O) and sea sediments (same isotopes plus trace elements (Mg/Ca ratios)) for at least 800,000 years.
CO2 & methane & temp data
Here's where the various data sets were collected:
The most salient thing about the 800,000 years of climate data is the rate of change during those previous 7 ice ages compared to the current rate of change this century.
The closing words are still relevant: we all need to work together beyond national boundaries as the climate changes. Of course, since this was made there's is another 30years of Climate Science to be taken into consideration.
Anthropogenic climate change is upon us: nations and individuals may choose to pretend otherwise, but it won't help future generations to do so,
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It's been upon us since we started burning coal in industrial quantities. Svante August Arrhenius calculated this well over a hundred years ago. But his calculations were based on CO2 emissions that seemed reasonable at the time and predicted that it would take centuries for the effects to be important and also that it would help stave off another ice age.
So no one worried, those who read his paper just assumed that humanity would figure out what to do long before it was necessary or that an increase in CO2 would be beneficial and increase crop yields.
But then we started a second industrial revolution fired by oil and dramatic population growth and it has happened much faster.
this entire series (not just this one episode) was purely entertainment, not rigorous science ... it frequently covered urban legend and pseudoscience, and each epsiode in fact began with the following disclaimer of using conjecture:
@SnickersDOM "This person" - oh, you mean me? No, I don't post "fake quotes", and YES, Victoria (the Australian state of) is getting COLDER. I should know, I bloody live here, and have my entire life.
