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It's somewhat important to know how much is man-made vs natural (a question we are not very close to answering).

Actually, science has that one nailed .

The answers to your other perplexities are here .

Yes
Yes
Yes

It is a port town. That means it is next to (both vertically and horizontally) the ocean. It would be a pretty crappy port if it was not next to the ocean. When you live within a couple feet of the normal high tide position and you are looking at a storm surge of a couple feet, the results are pretty predictable.

They then went and dug these handy tunnels all over the city that are... below the city.

Parent post is flamebait? Really? If so, then here is some more flamebait for everyone. Read about the Long Island Express: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/

This is not the first time climatic change has had profound effects on the human race.

There will be "Population Adjustments" in the future regardless of what measures we take now. The earth can only support so many of us.

Our increasing population has been cited by some to be the cause of climate change. I think they may well be inter-connected.

Let's face it, if the uber-hard-core folks had their way, we would be living a lifestyle from the 1700s. No electricity, no cars, no burning massive amount of fossil fuels. There would be no global economy because there would be no global transportation network. In fact our population would not only have to redistribute out of the urban centres, it would have to suffer a major reduction in numbers. Without modern farming techniques, you can only feed so many mouths.

However you slice it, there will be fewer people on the planet in the future, and it won't be a pleasant transition.

Yeah, that little pink line doesn't look anything like the temperature graphs I've seen. I'm not really seeing a pattern match between actual observations and that pink line in TFA.

Climate models do a reasonable job of hindcasting already. Here's a page on the accuracy of climate models with graphs.

Sorry, but this site is misinformation mixed with a little bit of truth.

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/global_warming_misinformation_urban_heat_island.html

Yes, Rush likes to cite fictitious 'evidence' to support his moronic ramblings. Truthfully, volcanic activity pales in comparison to manmade C02 output.

http://www.frankodwyer.com/blog/?p=229

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/global_warming_misinformation_volcanoes.html

Yep, and I've seen programs touting that that area of NY is way overdue for a hurricane to hit there. You think it was bad when NOLA flooded...it will be bad there, they have the same nightmare scenario as we do down here.

Some links here and here from NYC and this one that details in 1893 where a whole island off the cost disappeared....

I do have to guess....that emergency response will be a bit better for NY than it was here...just my guess.

• Medterms.com"The uniform determination of death. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in 1980 formulated the Uniform Determination of Death Act. It states that: "An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards." This definition was approved by the American Medical Association in 1980 and by the American Bar Association in 1981."
• Another Link "In 1968 the Harvard Medical School Committee developed a definition of death. According to this definition, a person is brain dead when he or she has suffered irreversible cessation of the functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. "
• Biology, Consciousness, and the Definition of Death "Two landmark reports helped to generate a movement away from exclusive reliance on the traditional standard: the 1968 report of the Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee and a 1981 presidential commission report, Defining Death. This second document included what became the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA). Today all fifty states and the District of Columbia follow the UDDA in recognizing whole-brain death -- irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain -- as a legal standard of death. The UDDA doesn't jettison the cardiopulmonary standard, however. Instead, it holds that death occurs whenever either standard (whichever applies first) is met. One important consequence of this change is that an individual can be legally dead even if her cardiopulmonary system continues to function. If a patient's entire brain is nonfunctioning, so that breathing and heartbeat are maintained only by artificial life-supports, that patient meets the whole-brain standard of death."

I'll bet it's warmer than it was 10,000 years ago, too.

And Greenland used to be green some 900 years ago. We will adapt.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/end_of_vik ings_greenland.html

Whether or not this new finding is sound science, Europe has had a little ice age before. When is the last time you went ice skating on the Thames? Keep this in mind the next time you hear about climate change. It happens. A lot.

For instance, it was much warmer 1000 years ago, which was what allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. Hell, just look at the name. There isn't much green in Greenland these days.

From this site:
[Eric the Red] called this new land "Greenland" because he "believed more people would go thither if the country had a beautiful name," according to one of the Icelandic chronicles (Hermann, 1954) although Greenland, as a whole, could not be considered "green." Additionally, the land was not very good for farming.

this is such a bunch of tripe!

First of all.. if we were to take the encylopeadia Britannica and stack all the books up.. then the thickness of each page would represent more than 100,000 years of the earth's history. This means that the last ice age which ended about 10,000 years ago and was at peak 18,000 years ago would be within 1/5 of the thickness of the last page.

There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.

Within the last 2,000 years (2% of the thichness of the last page) there have been several warming and cooling periods denoted by such names as the little ice age and the medieval warm period . Crocs were in the themes during Roman times... (little warmer).

look here to see a chart showing global temperature over the last billion or so years. This is the paleomap project an they have done increadible work.

Check out the university of Carleton, Tim Patterson has an excellent course on climate change and this is being broadcast on TLC as well.

On Chris Scotese's web site you will see that for 90% of the history of the planet for the last 650 million years or so, the earth was about 20 degrees warmer than now. If you look at the miocene maps you will see that 14 Million years ago the planet was warmer.. and a lot wetter..

BTW... the time scale on Chris's chart is not linear. If the chart is re-scaled it tells the same story but is even more dramatic. (We leave the re-scalling to the student as an excersize).

Look here if you want to know why Britian is so keen on renewable energy and specifically look at these charts which show the decline rate of North Sea oil production. Britain will become an oil importer within 2 years. The decline rate of North Sea oil production is more than 15% per year. The chart shows how feilds deplete. You can see how the big plays are drilled first and last the longest... and thereafter smaller and smaller fields are brought online until they give up and stop drilling. This is where Britian is now. One of the stats is that Britian has about 250 barrels of oil per capita. That is it! On to renewable because the oil resource is gone.

The real issue of climate change is this. Water in the atmosphere is far more significant than CO2. Firstly H2O is at a far greater level so the question becomes... how would we express the level of H2O in the atmosphere? Secondly there is uncertainty in the measurements. Thirdly, irrigation and agriculture increase the H2O levels. Most of that water pumped onto the fields will evaporate and plants do transpire!

CO2 levels are in the range of 0.036% and this of course is a plant nutrient.

So we are left with adding 2 numbers for instance.

H2O = 0%-4.0% +/- what? a percent?
CO2 = 0.036% +/- 0.0005

You can see these numbers here in table 7a-1.

Since the warming response is most likely due to the weighted "sum" of the CO2 and H2O and all the other green house gasses of course, then we need to "add" the H2O levels to the CO2 levels. Well - the numbers are in the preceeding paragraph and I don't know how to add them. We don't even have a good handle on the uncertainty of the H2O levels... but, My guess is that irrigation and agriculture have increased the H2O substancially.

So - we end up with the anaolgy to the encyclopeadia. Almost all of the data for climate modeling has been collected in the last 100 years and this represents 1/1000'th of the thickenss of the last page of the stack of books. Meanwhile all the other pages are basically ignored. The geological history of the planet shows that the planet is usually (90% of the time) about 20 degrees warmer than now. So most likely the planet will warm back up. But we don't know when and we might get another ice age or several before this happens. Anyone for 10,000 feet of ice over Toronto? Who votes for palm trees in the artic circle?

It's not exactly carbon 14 dating; it's analysis of coral structures and related debris. Basically, it has to do with the rate of changes in coral structures over time, as well as sedimentation and things of that nature. Information about coral dating can be found here and here. Uranium/Thorium dating can be used on marine sediment (info here). Actually, the entire "Dating Exibit" site has a simplistic but good explanation of various relative and absolute dating techniques.