...at present, perihelion occurs during the southern hemisphere's summer and aphelion during the southern winter. Thus the southern hemisphere seasons should tend to be somewhat more extreme than the northern hemisphere seasons. The relatively low eccentricity of the present orbit results in a 6.8% difference in the amount of solar radiation during summer in the two hemispheres.

Since orbital variations are predictable,[22] if one has a model that relates orbital variations to climate, it is possible to run such a model forward to "predict" future climate. Two caveats, however, are necessary: that anthropogenic effects may modify or even overwhelm orbital effects; and that the mechanism by which orbital forcing influences climate is not well understood. In the most prominent anthropogenic example, orbital forcing from the Milankovitch cycles has been in a cooling phase for millennia, but that cooling trend was reversed in the 20th and 21st centuries due to warming caused by increased anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.[23]

The amount of solar radiation (insolation) in the Northern Hemisphere at 65° N seems to be related to occurrence of an ice age. Astronomical calculations show that 65° N summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years.[24] A regime of eccentricity lower than the current value will last for about the next 100,000 years. Changes in northern hemisphere summer insolation will be dominated by changes in obliquity ε. No declines in 65° N summer insolation, sufficient to cause a glacial period, are expected in the next 50,000 years.

An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that, "Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend that began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years."[25]

More recent work suggests that the current warm climate may last another 50,000 years.[26][27]

read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

HANGZHOU, China — President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China formally committed the world’s two largest economies to the Paris climate agreement here on Saturday, cementing their partnership on climate change and offering a rare display of harmony in a relationship that has become increasingly discordant.

On multiple fronts, like computer hacking and maritime security, ties between China and the United States have frayed during the seven and a half years of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The friction has worsened since the ascension of Mr. Xi as a powerful nationalist leader in 2013.

Yet the fact that he and Mr. Obama could set aside those tensions to work together yet again on a joint plan to reduce greenhouse gases attests to the pragmatic personal rapport they have built, as well as to the complexity of the broader United States-China relationship, a tangle of competing and congruent interests.

At a ceremony in this picturesque lakefront city, the two leaders hailed the adoption of the Paris agreement as critical to bringing it into force worldwide. Though widely expected as the next step in the legal process, the move could provide a boost to those who want to build momentum for further climate talks by bringing the December accord into effect as soon as possible.

Countries accounting for 55 percent of the world’s emissions must present formal ratification documents for that to happen, and together, China and the United States generate nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions.

“Despite our differences on other issues, we hope our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire further ambition and further action around the world,” Mr. Obama declared.

Mr. Xi praised the Paris agreement as a milestone, adding, “It was under Chinese leadership that much of this progress was made.”

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/world/asia/obama-xi-jinping-china-climate-accord.html

MIGHTY EFFORT BUT STILL FAR FROM ENOUGH....

High-profile members of the federal government's Climate Change Authority have launched a stinging critique of their colleagues, accusing them of giving "untrue and dangerous" advice that ignores what science demands.

Board members David Karoly, an internationally recognised scientist, and Clive Hamilton, an academic and author, have self-published a dissenting report criticising the authority's advice to the government released last week.

The dissenting pair accuse the authority of failing to give independent guidance, and instead basing its report on "a reading from a political crystal ball".

Released last Wednesday, the authority's special review recommends a "toolkit" of policies – some building on the taxpayer-financed Direct Action emissions reduction fund, and some new measures –that it says could meet existing Coalition targets and be scaled up later to make deeper cuts.

It makes no new recommendation about how fast Australia should cut emissions in light of the deal reached at climate talks in Paris last year.

Professor Karoly said the authority's report failed to meet its terms of reference and was a recipe for further delay.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/untrue-and-dangerous-climate-change-authority-board-at-war-over-own-advice-20160903-gr88fl.html

Note: The "brutal" change between the last ice age and our present climate took about 2000 years to increase the temperature by 6 degrees Celsius and raise the sea level by 100 metres. In our wisdom we are inducing a similar stress on the planet by having increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere — but in a much faster way, a more brutal way, only over 250 years (100 more years to 2116) with more change beyond this. The temperature change can go as high as 6 degrees though the rise of sea level due to "having less ice to melt" could only be in a 20 metres increase range. Though we do not have noticed much change in our daily life, the present climatic change is still of the "brutal" variety. Please, do not get fooled by the idiots of the Pauline Hanson variety you have elected to the sad Australian parliament... 

HONOLULU — Robert Macfarlane, in his book “Landmarks,” about the connection between words and landscapes, tells a revealing but stunning story about how recent editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (aimed at 7-year-olds) dropped certain “nature words” that its editors deemed less relevant to the lives of modern children. These included “acorn,” “dandelion,” “fern,” “nectar,” “otter,” “pasture” and “willow.” The terms introduced in their place, he noted, included “broadband,” “blog,” “cut-and-paste,” “MP3 player” and “voice-mail.”

While this news was first disclosed in 2015, reading it in Macfarlane’s book still shocks me for what it signifies. But who can blame the Oxford editors for dumping Amazon words for Amazon.com ones? Our natural world is rapidly disappearing. Just how fast was the major topic here last week at the global conference held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which I participated in along with some 8,000 scientists, nature reserve specialists and environmentalists.

The dominant theme running through the I.U.C.N.’s seminars was the fact that we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover. When the coral and elephants are all gone, no 3-D printer will be able to recreate them.

In short, we and our kids are rapidly becoming the Noah generation, charged with saving the last pairs. (This is no time to be electing a climate-change denier like Donald Trump for president.)

Sylvia Earle, the renowned oceanographer, put it well to a sustainability conference hosted here by the East-West Center alongside the I.U.C.N. meetings. In her lifetime, said Earle, she has felt as if she’s been “witness to the greatest era of discovery and the greatest era of loss” in our planet’s history.

So now, she said, “we are at a crossroads. What we do right now or fail to do will determine the future — not just for us, but for all life on earth.”

Those really are the stakes — there is a reason nature words are being removed from children’s dictionaries. Last week, for instance, The Times reported on a study that revealed how “the African elephant population is in drastic decline, having shrunk about 30 percent from 2007 to 2014. … The deterioration is accelerating: Largely because of poaching, the population is dropping 8 percent a year, according to the Great Elephant Census. … Patricia Awori, an official with the African Elephant Coalition, said, ‘These numbers are shocking.’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/opinion/we-are-all-noah-now.html?ribbon-ad-

And then came Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Rita, which in 2005 left the N.F.I.P. with claims six times higher than it had seen in any previous year. To cover them, it borrowed $17.3 billion from the Treasury. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 meant another $6.25 billion in debt, along with allegations that insurance companies distributing FEMA funds were shorting policyholders; 2016, when there were floods in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere, managed to be the third-most-expensive year in the N.F.I.P.’s history even with no single standout catastrophe, deepening the hole further. Servicing the debt is expensive, but FEMA sees no way to repay it, Roy Wright, the N.F.I.P. administrator, told Congress last month.

More losses loom. A single major storm-and-flooding event could cause $10 billion in damage in Hampton Roads alone, according to one planning report. AIR Worldwide, which models the risks of catastrophic events for insurance companies and governments, found that $1.1 trillion in property assets along the Eastern Seaboard lie within the path of a hundred-year storm surge. “That’s a very staggering number,” says AIR’s chief research officer, Jayanta Guin — and it represents only the risk on that coast, and only under current sea levels. By the 2030s, according to a 2008 analysis by Risk Management Solutions (R.M.S.) and Lloyd’s of London, annual losses from storm surges in coastal areas around the world could double.

In 2015, the N.F.I.P. asked R.M.S. and AIR Worldwide to update its modeling by running thousands of computer simulations to show what possible storms might mean for the properties it insures, helping it to quantify its financial exposure across the country. In 2016 and 2017, the N.F.I.P. — in a first-of-its-kind action for a federal program — transferred some of its risk to large, private companies known as reinsurers, which pool risk on gigantic scales: insurance for insurance companies.

Although Katrina and Sandy “felt like once-in-a-lifetime events,” Wright wrote in a recent blog post explaining the decision, “there is actually a 50 percent chance within a 10-year period the N.F.I.P. will once again experience Hurricane Sandy-size losses.” Removing subsidies is one partial solution, he told me — “There is no greater risk-communication tool than a pricing system” — but more hard decisions are coming. The N.F.I.P. is up for a reauthorization vote in September, its first since Biggert-Waters was passed; Wright believes the time has come to start limiting coverage for properties that are flooded over and over, a significant shift from the past. Multiple losses, he told me, “should force us to shift our position where we make an offer of mitigation to a homeowner, and if they do not choose to take it, we don’t renew their policy.”

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/magazine/when-rising-seas-transform-risk-into-certainty.html

Read from top... Hopefully Donald Trump insurance premium for his Florida property and golf course will go up in relation to the certainty of global warming. His insurer should tell him so, unless Donald chooses to insure with cowboys ready to take his cash and fly away when the floods come in. 

The certainty is that not only there will be more frequent and more powerful storms, there will be sea level rise of a big enough magnitude to make insurance not a fun game of risk any more but a sour game of loss.

See also: 

What is global warming?

But in 1993, a drastic shift occurred. From then until 2012, sea levels rose at an average rate of 3.1 a year instead. "Cities like Miami which are already impacted by sea-level rise will experience much more coastal flooding and much stronger storm surges than have been observed so far," Dangendorf said.

This trend is believed to be primarily caused by global warming. As the planet warms, cold and icy areas of the world become warmer. The ice melts and flows into the sea, causing water levels to rise. While this is not a secret to the environmental community, previous studies have not charted such a shockingly high rate of sea levels rising.

Dangendorf speculated that the intensity of the trend is a result of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, a factor he believes was understated in previous estimates. "We have always had a great uncertainty over the contribution of the large ice sheets, which store 100 times more sea-level equivalents than glaciers," he said.

The team observed data from tide gauges, devices that have been used measure changes in sea level since the 19th century. They mostly became obsolete in the 1990s, but their data is still valid today. From 1992 onwards, researchers have mostly relied on satellite data instead.

A United Nations panel on climate change warned that they expected sea levels to climb between 12 and 39 inches by the year 2100. In the worst case scenario, places like the San Jose Valley, New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, Quebec City, Vancouver, Alexandria, most of The Netherlands, Lisbon, Venice, Shenzhen, Ho Chi Minh City and others would be submerged.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/environment/201705251053959785-sea-levels-rising...

See also: 

What is global warming?

But most public opinion polls find that voters rank the environment last or nearly last among the issues that they vote on. And views are divided based on party affiliation. In 2001, 46 percent of Democrats said they worried “a great deal” about climate change, compared with 29 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup tracking poll on the issue. This year, concern among Democrats has reached 66 percent. Among Republicans, it has fallen, to 18 percent.

Until people vote on the issue, Republicans will find it politically safer to question climate science and policy than to alienate moneyed groups like Americans for Prosperity.

There will be exceptions. The 2014 National Climate Assessment, a report produced by 14 federal agencies, concluded that climate change is responsible for much of the flooding now plaguing many of the Miami area’s coastal residents, soaking homes and disrupting businesses, and Representative Curbelo is talking about it.

“This is a local issue for me,” Mr. Curbelo said. “Even conservatives in my district see the impact. It’s flooding, and it’s happening now.”

Mr. Curbelo helped create the House Climate Solutions Caucus, 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats who say they are committed to tackling climate change.

Mr. Curbelo is confident that as the impact of climate change spreads, so will the willingness of his Republican colleagues to join him.

Outside of Congress, a small number of establishment conservatives, including a handful of leaders from the Reagan administration, have begun pushing Washington to act on climate change. Earlier this year, James A. Baker III, one of the Republican Party’s more eminent senior figures, met with senior White House officials to urge them to consider incorporating a carbon tax as part of a broader tax overhaul package — a way to both pay for proposed cuts to corporate tax rates and help save the planet. A Reagan White House senior economist, Art Laffer; a former secretary of state, George P. Shultz; and Henry M. Paulson Jr., George W. Bush’s final Treasury secretary, have also pushed the idea.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html

Please note that damage from global warming will increase rapidly for a while and then plateau, when a lot of things would have been destroyed, including loss of crops and shelter in the temperate regions... with unbearable heat in the subtropics and glaciers' melt beyond imagination.

All this within the next 50 to one hundred years... Then the real trouble will start.

Note that in Australia, 99 per cent of "Liberals" (KONservatives) don't "believe" in global warming because it's not mentioned in the bible (Mind you Noah's adventures could come close to it)...

After her house flooded for the third year in a row, Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding rains and swelling seas.

Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from the last flood, local authorities agreed this historic slice of Charleston could be torn down.

“I was sloshing through the water with my puppy dog, debris was everywhere,” she said. “I feel completely sunken. It would cost me around $500,000 to raise the house, demolish the first floor. I’m going to rent a place instead, on higher ground.”

Millions of Americans will confront similarly hard choices as climate change conjures up brutal storms, flooding rains, receding coastlines and punishing heat. Many are already opting to shift to less perilous areas of the same city, or to havens in other states. Whole towns from Alaska to Louisiana are looking to relocate, in their entirety, to safer ground.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/24/americas-era-of-clim...

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