Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming: Do You Believe?
This concern about global warming is significant, especially in light of the fact that the government's existing environmental policies (along with growing perceptions of technological and cultural imperialism) are making the U.S. once again the most resented country in the world. Already high on the agenda of Western Europe and a cause on U.S. college campuses, this could be the first in a series of techno-political issues that will rise up in the 21st Century. Issues like genomics will morph from gee-whiz cover stories in Time to very real concerns for individuals.
Most Americans are now aware of global warming, says a comprehensive report cited in American Demographics magazine, even though significantly fewer express concern or understanding about its impact.
In August 2000, the Harris poll asked Americans about their beliefs concerning global warming and, more specifically, about the relationship between temperature changes and forest fires. Many more than in previous surveys said they believed that global warming exists and is a serious environmental issue, although only 35 percent believe it was directly responsible for increasing forest fires in the United States.
In l997, 67 percent of Americans surveyed believed that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to global warming and increasing average temperatures. By last year, the figure had risen to 72 per cent. Even though they weren't aware of any specific or urgent impac on their own lives, and thus weren't particularly alarmed, nearly half thought that global warming should be treated as a "very serious" problem. In fact, only 13 percent of Americans said global warming wasn't a serious problem, a record low.
But science and the environment are becoming among the planet's hottest political issues. President Bush touched off a firestorm when he refused to sign the Kyoto accord. Although the reaction in the U.S. was less pronounced, a March 2001 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans think the President should develop a plan to reduce the gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.
The U.S. has largely remained reluctant to address science through politics no matter how serious the issues. Big media political coverage tends to focus attention on scandal and confrontation, away from explanations of issues like global warming, or the equitable distribution of technology. Although they differ on certain scientific and environmental issues, neither of our two increasingly similiar dominant American political parties pay much attention to technological issues, or have anything resembling a scientific ideology or agenda.
When a serious matter like medical research involving stem cells from frozen embryos arises, politicians worry at least as much about religious support as they do about what scientists advise.
One might think members of Congress would be up in arms at the growing control of genetic research by a handful of bio-tech corporations; instead, there's hardly any debate about it at all.
My prediction: global warming will become the first issue of science and politics that captures the imagination of large numbers of American voters and becomes a national political issue (one on which the President definitely seems to have taken the unpopular side.) Why? Because it's a tactile phenomenon; people can feel that the weather is changing. They can see pictures of penguins dying in Antarctica. They read that skin cancer rates are rising.
Unlike more abstract scientific issues like genetics (which may become a highly visible political issue, but which isn't yet), or technologically-related social issues like intellectual property and copyright, even the myopic American political and media system, which focused for nearly two codependent years on Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, will have to start paying attention to global warming.
Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming. Now it is global warming. The prescription is the same though: immediate radical new government regulations, a reduction in industry, expensive new pollution control requirements, and forcing people to live lifestyles they haven't voluntarily chosen. And of course the sky is falling and if we don't do something NOW, we'll be in serious trouble.
Well, the global temperature did rise about 1 degree - in the first half of the century. The temperature of the earth and the surface climate have radically changed many times in the past, and without any any artificial greenhouse emmissions from humans. The effect of the sun's radition, volcanos, etc have long had an effect on the earth. There may also be long term cycles we know nothing about.
There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder. I honestly believe that if the temperature and precipitation came in right at normal every day, we'd be told that this was a catastrophe caused by global warming and "robbing the earth of its critical climate diversity needed to support its fragile ecology".
There may be good reasons to cut emmissions of lots of chemicals, quite apart from global warming. But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO. Let's be honest about what we really want and debate these issues through the normal political process, not as another moral crusade. We've already got too many of those.
(Subtitle: and not a diatribe on global warming like the rest of the posts.)
The reason no one cares about global warming is that it hasn't touched them directly yet. It's the inverse of the NIMBY factor: If it's not in my backyard it's irrelevant. Global warming has not yet provably hurt individual human beings; anyone they have direct contact with in their daily lives. It took a while for AIDS to catch the public eye, but once friends and celebrities started dying it became noticed, and now everyone uses condoms, or at least know it's a good idea. Wait until people start selling their coastal homes in droves, or until everyone around you has skin cancer, or until NYC becomes uninhabitable (well, more so).
The business community would like us to put our heads in the sand and forget about all these pesky problems steamrolling our way. But the consequences of inaction could be devastating for life across the planet, and our species survival. To continue to trivialize the debate by turning the issue into one of belief instead of verifiable facts simply accepts the common US big media propaganda and spin. This is not a debate of the number of angels on the head of a pin, it's a scientific debate whereby the vast majority of academic scientists the world over have accepted a common view that global climate change is real and could be devastating to life on earth. Please also see: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development documents on the issue as well.
--Maynard
As the comments in this thread indicate, a lot of people don't believe. It may seem clear to you and I, not to mention virtually every scientist not employed by oil companies, that there's evidence that human activity affects the environment; it may further seem self-evident to you and I that if the evidence suggests it affects the environment negatively that we have sufficient grounds to modify our behavior without waiting for "proof" of the extent of damage, rate of decline, and computation of short-term economic consequences.
But the greenwashing from companies that have vested interests in the status quo is pretty effective. "Hey," they say, "the earth has gone through climate change before without our contribution, so obviously that means we're not having an effect this time--it's just a natural cycle! So keep burning fossil fuels with impunity and ignore those idiotic regulation-loving liberals who talk about how much we'd conserve if we did horrible, freedom-oppressing things like raise fuel economy standards by 50%."
See, if you believe the "chicken littles," you'll be inconvenienced. If you don't, you won't be. And, hey, who wants to be inconvenienced just on the theory, the unproven possibility, that our great-grandchildren might face mass extinction? We should at least wait for a few more decades to see if things are obviously getting worse. Sure, that means that trying to fix things then will cause orders of magnitude more hardship than they would now, if it isn't too late--but until then, check out my new Chevy Subdivision SUV!
At risk of being pedantic, this is what is known as a "hard choice." Despite all the noise about spotted owls and New Age women who live in old growth trees, by and large we've consistently been choosing to protect that GDP than protect the environment.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't take economic hardships lightly. I don't disagree that choosing to protect the environment won't have significant costs. In fact, I suspect if we put a serious effort into it, over the short term things could really suck.
What I do disagree with is the contention that "let's wait and see" is a viable alternative. One of history's clearest lessons is that as expensive as proactive approaches may be, they are consistently far cheaper than reactive approaches.
This is kind of like the "Year 2000 bug." Everyone in IT ran around frantically for two or three years fixing problems, and when the rollover finally came, the damage was virtually non-existent. And of course, everyone said, "Look, it wasn't any big deal after all." But if we hadn't proactively treated it like a big deal, it would have been. If we'd done nothing, and even a fraction of those systems that hadn't been fixed had failed, then what would the costs have been? Everything that was spent proactively, plus all the costs for cleanup. "Cleanup" would at the least involve billions, with a 'b,' in lawsuits, and might involve minor--or even major--disasters. (Some of the systems that were reported as having critical flaws were in hospitals, for instance, and in waste water treatment facilities.)
There were great strides made toward reducing auto emissions, appliance energy use, and cleaning up power plant and factory pollution made in the '70s--and gosh, things in the '90s weren't nearly as bad as people in the '70s said it was going to be. This doesn't mean the people in the '70s were right--but it hardly proves they were wrong. And if they were even partially right, we've saved a whole damn lot of money in energy costs and air and water cleanup.
...the sheer volume of nonsense and dishonesty being propagated by those who oppose the Kyoto Treaty. There are certainly questions about the scientific truth of global warming predictions. But they are not being accurately portrayed in the three posts above this one. Let's look at three posts (working downward in the current tree):
general_re started with:
Master Bait replied with:
And Golias weighed in with:
Here we see FUD of the highest order: everything from outright lies to glib irrelevancies.
Start with general_re's claim that "there is far from any consensus that this warming is the result of human activity." By any definition of "consensus" this is flatly false. There is a consensus (indeed, very close to unanimity) that global warming exists. There is a consensus (strong and widespread, verging on unanimous) that some portion of that warming is caused by humans. There is a consensus (strong and growing, but not unanimous) that the human-caused share is signficant and dangerous. There is even a consensus (much weaker, but still signficant) that most of the currently observed warming is caused by human activity. This last consensus derives primarily through negative data showing that other proposed causes are not contributing.
While Master Bait's claim that only people who aren't part of this consensus get grants from big oil isn't strictly true, it is true that a disturbing number of the "skeptics" are financed by those with a financial interest in the results. Master's exaggerations are dwarfed by Golias' counter-exaggeration:
"That's fun to say, but the largest and most current study to date on the topic (a joint venture by the feds and the National Academy of Sciences done almost immediately after the final nail in the Kyoto Treaty coffin was hammered in), showed that there was, in fact, no consensus in the scientific community about this at all."
Which is also fun to say, I'm sure, but far more inaccurate than Master Bait's overstatement. Almost as fun as paraphrasing "members of the NAS" without citing references, credentials or names (or giving anyone a chance to see if they have since changed their minds -- as many skeptics have).
Picking on four of Golias' itemized points, I would say: (1) wrong or irrelevant; (4) irrelevant; (6) irrelevant and wrong; and (7) totally irrelevant (as befits all good FUD). And then he ends with a true fact which argues against everything he seems to be saying. (All of this is not to imply endorse any of the other points.)
(1) We're not very good at predicting the weather, but we're pretty good at predicting the climate. It's going to rain in the rain forest. It's going to snow in the mountains during winter. Weather is a chaotic system; climate is a thermodynamic system. Northern Europe might cool off while the rest of the world is heating up, but the average has been pretty accurately predicted (by those models Golias derides in item 2). And we're getting better. And the degree to which we aren't good at predicting climatic change is irrelevant if our best current knowledge says a disaster will come if we don't respond.
(4) Geologic temperatures are in constant flux on a geologic time scale. And that flux has often meant bad things for the creatures of earth. The fact that historically recorded fluxes have shortened people's lifetimes is an argument against a concern for global warming only for those who don't care if their lives are shortened. The fact that geologically recorded fluxes have wiped out a vast majority of all the species which have ever evolved on the planet is an argument against a concern for global warming only for those who don't care if their species is wiped out.
(6) Sun spot cycles have been long suspected as contributors to climatic change (since it was first realized that the earth could be viewed as a thermodynamic system and the numbers didn't add up). They have also been completely eliminated as the cause of the observed global warming of last 10 years (as recently confirmed by Pres. Bush's commission on which he made sure there were respected "skeptics"). To the degree that item 6 is not wrong, it is irrelevant: It would not matter to the dead people whether they were killed by sun spots or the combined neglect of two Bush administrations; they would still be dead.
(7) Upper-atmosphere clouds (and, indeed, the entire chaotic system of weather and climate) have, in fact, been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats by precisely the same kind of science which has discovered that greenhouse gases turn up that thermostat. The fact that upper-atmospheric clouds also regulate the temperature of Venus does not prevent it from being a hellish wasteland of greenhouse gas.
And, finally, the fact that trees can be used to mitigate the accumulation of CO2 says nothing about whether that accumulation should be mitigated.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Tell that to someone living in a low level country such as Bangladesh or the Netherlands, as the sea levels rise up and destroy their countries.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
I believe George Carlin said it best: the planet's doing fine, it's the people who are going to kill themselves off.
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
In 1997, 67 percent of Americans surveyed believed that
By last year, the figure had risen to 72 per cent
In fact, only 13 percent of Americans said global warming wasn't a serious problem, a record low.
... a March 2001 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans think the President should develop a plan to reduce the gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.
Now this will sound like a digression, so bear with me for a minute. There is an old story about the nose of the emperor of China. This man wanted to know how long the emperor's nose was. The problem was, that no one in China had ever seen the emperor. So he went around to many thousands of people, asking each of them how long they thought the emperor's nose was. He accumulated a large amount of data, and was able to use the latest in statistical techniques to come up with a very good number, with confidence intervals and the whole nine yards.
However, no matter how good the statistical analysis is, no one had ANY hard information at all, so all the statistical analysis means NOTHING. And this is what Jon Katz's numbers are. Asking what people think about global warming doesn't tell us anything about global warming at all.
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Global Warming is FUD.
It is FUD perpetrated on us for the purpose of increasing the power of the Imperial Federal Government and the United Nations over the Evil American Capitalistas.Now, before you hit the "flame" button, think about this: I believe in saving the earth just as much as Greenpeace does. However, I believe in doing so sanely. I don't believe in shutting down the American industrial complex; I believe in transforming it so that it works with nature, rather than against it. Organic farming. Biodiesel. Composting. Recycling. Well-thought-out mass transit. Telecommuting. Reducing government and spreading what's left throughout the land, rather than concentrating it in smoggy cities, and linking them all with the Internet. Good Honest Hemp for paper and clothes and plastic and pig food. Wind farms. Houses made of rammed earth or straw bales or dug into the side of a hill. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The current crisis in California is the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if the eco-radicals get their way. California hasn't built a power plant of any kind in ten years. It Wasn't Allowed. And now, basically, they're screwed. And so are we, if we don't perform a crano-rectal reinversion and figure out that what's going on is that a very small, vocal bunch is trying to shut down America.
Let me repeat myself here in case somebody doesn't get it. I believe in saving the planet too, for all the animals. Including the big semi-furless funny-looking mammals that have a real serious tool codependence. I believe that, instead of looking for things we should not do to the planet, we should look for things we can do to save both the whales and our civilization. I think we can be both high-tech and high-touch, green and gold, work with nature rather than either against it or abandoning it. When I see things like Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone, I am reminded that the Earth has done far more terrible things to itself than we do, and recovers beautifully... and while I still feel physically ill every time I head down towards Mt. Ranier and see what Weyrhauser has done to our forests (Good, Honest HEMP!) I think the time and effort we spend beating down the timber companies would be far better spent promoting alternate solutions rather than simply trying to shut them down....
If you tell a man "stop what you're doing, you're naughty-bad-evil-wicked" he's as liable to flip you the bird as anything. If you tell him "hey, there's a much easier, better way to do that" and even give him a business case including his conversion costs.... he might just take you up on it.
This is what we need to be about. Global warming, global schmarming. Just find ways to sustainably do things cleaner and better, and let the Earth worry about the rest. It'll do just fine, and has for years. <carl_sagan> Billions and billions of them. </carl_sagan>
P.S. Fallen Angels kicked ass.
Theories dont get proven, only disproven. (newton's gravity is an unproven theory. As is elecromagnetism). An unsubstansiated idea is called a "hypothesis" in science lingo, once sufficient tests have been made that doesnt disprove the idea the hypotheis is elevated to a theory. A theory is acctually the most "certain" form of a scientific knowledge, usually backed up with a lot of observations that agree with the theory and none that contradict it.
Unfortunately, many people mistake the word "theory" as meaning a "wild idea" and request that "the theory is proven" before they do anything. Repeat after me: Nothing is ever proven in science, only disproven. A scientific theory is backed up by loads of evidence and has next to nothing to do with the every day meaning of the word. Or, from a dictionary: "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena"
-henrik
The modern study of climate encompasses maybe 50 years. Oldest reliable weather obs date back about 400 years (and at a precious few locations), and older data are deduced from ice cores and such making assumptions which could be wrong and which yield less-than-finely-grained data. With an enormous and enormously complex system involved, and with the physics and chemistry incompletely understood, not to mention extremely challenging to model, and assuming infinite computational power (which is not as bad as you might think, since climate and nuke modelling are #s 1 and 2 on CPU use over most supercomputing facilities), we can't possibly venture more than barely educated guesses.
Scientists are pretty evenly split on whether global warming even exists, though neither the press nor the politicians are clever enough to convey this to the public, who are probably not interested or educated enough to understand even that. Read this by a scientist involved in evalutaing claims used to support Kyoto. There is ample evidence to support claims on both sides, and only the most zealous and those with agendas will claim irrefutable proof.
Do people affect the environment they live in? Sure. Do greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere? Of course, that's why they're called that. Can these effects really overwhelm the huge natural processes and cycles of the planet to modify it enough for us to notice? We don't know.
Maybe we're staving off the now-overdue ice age. Perhaps we're experiencing a regular or otherwise cycle of climatic oscillation. Maybe we're screwing ourselves. Who knows? It is relatively certain that curtailing our emissions would have smaller impact on the environment, but that impact might already be much smaller than we think.
Certainly it couldn't hurt, but Kyoto could, and a decision to support it or not should be based on solid environmental, economic and political considerations. Kyoto not only radically reduced limits on pollution in the US and other 1st world nations, but guaranteed the right of 3rd world nations to continue to pollute indefinitely. There were many other difficulties as well, many of which reflect the USA's decreasing involvement in international affairs (W can't even spell UN, so we shouldn't be surprised), and the diplomatic Napoleon complex being expressed by the EU, trying to throw it's new, generally left-leaning politcal weight around.
The world is likely to be severely impacted by an asteroid large enough to cause catastrophic climate change, and will without doubt suffer even worse damage as our sun ages in a billion years or so. Politicians pay no atention to these issues, which would be easy to mitigate given the time until their effects will be felt. Any time they spend on Global Warming is to garner public accolades for their "green" side. Maybe this cancels out drilling in ANWAR.
Sure, I BELIEVED, then I researched paleoclimatology untill I got the facts, now I KNOW most of what they tell me is wrong, half assed, and for political reasons. Don't listen to me, go out there and look up the OPPOSIE of what youve been told, and see if there is more information and if their side makes more sense. Ever heard of the little ice age 200 years ago? Most people havent. Puts a new slant on the warming trend of the last 100 years when you realise we are coming out of a minor FSCKING ICE AGE. Mideveal england was 1-3 degrees warmer than it is now, which is why there were colonies on greenland which died off when the climate GOT COLDER!! Don't believe me, do your own research. Look at the ice core data, listen to that crackpot opposed to the Microsoft, I mean popular view.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The motion you are thinking of is the motion to reconsider. Although one has to have voted on the winning side to make a motion to reconsider, one need not have voted on the winning side to vote for a motion to reconsider. Thus, it is wholly unnecessary (and highly irregular) for the entire support base for a measure to vote against it just to leave open the possibility of a motion to reconsider. Traditionally the party leadership takes on this duty. Furthermore, even if for some odd reason all the hypothetical Kyoto supporters in the Senate did vote against the treaty for the purpose of reconsidering, why didn't they do so?
Your misunderstanding goes even deeper, however, because you don't seem to realize that the Kyoto treaty was never sent to the Senate for ratification. The 96-0 vote people keep referring to was for Senate Resolution 98, which was passed before the Kyoto treaty was signed. The resolution laid out the conditions any treaty would have to fulfill in order for the Senate to ratify it. Many analysts feel that the Kyoto treaty fails to meet these criteria, and thus would be disapproved by the Senate, were it to be submitted. Since SR-98 is nonbinding, it's entirely possible that the current Senate would ratify it, but the chances of mustering the required 2/3 vote are basically nil (and that, by the way, is why if Gore had been elected the Kyoto treaty would still not be law in the United States).
All of that brings us to the final point, which is that whether or not you believe that climatic change is human caused (a whole debate unto itself), the Kyoto treaty is a bad treaty. There are plenty of analyses of the technical flaws of the treaty out there, but the most damning thing in my opinion is that it places responsibility for controlling CO2 emissions squarely on the shoulders of the industrialized nations. While that seems like a reasonable thing if you consider only that the (currently) industrialized nations have historically dominated world CO2 output. However, many developing nations have a tremendous rate of growth in their CO2 emissions, and when you take that into account, exempting them from emission limits will completely hamstring efforts to reduce global emissions. Advocates of Kyoto say that it isn't fair that industrialized nations have been emitting for years, and it isn't fair to ask developing nations to stop now that they are starting to ramp up their economies. They may have a point; it probably isn't fair, but the question you have to ask yourself is do you want to put a dent in global CO2 emissions or don't you? If the answer is yes, you do, then Kyoto isn't going to get you there. Controlling global emissions requires a global effort, not just effort from the nations the world loves to hate.
-rpl
Hold on there cowboy... First of all, the mechanics of climate change are very poorly understood (by any scientists).
And the planet is getting hotter.
But you are absolutely correct, the earth has been warming up. Never mind that its been cooling off for the last 1000 years.
Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening.
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
These are scientific facts that no amount of bullshit rhetoric will change.
You're not much of a scientist if you can't distinguish between facts and conclusions. Just because the planet is warming up doesn't mean that human activity has anything to do with it. (It doesn't mean that it doesn't have anything to do with it either) Any correlation between particular types of human activity and global warming is just that, correlation, which proves NOTHING, and certainly isn't a fact.
If you would like to read more about the kind of fallacious argument you are making, read "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" by Kary Mullis. He's a real scientist, and has a Nobel Prize. And he's not a conservative, nor is he bought by industry. Nor does he engage in "Bullshit rhetoric".
--Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
Having personally launched and tracked balloons (with scientists from the University of Wyoming) to sample the ozone layer over Antarctica and worked with NASA scientists on the retrieval and processing of the data from TOMS-EP (a satellite that uses reflected sunlight to indirectly measure column ozone over any lit spot on the earth), I think can respond to this.
Ozone is created and destroyed constantly all over the earth. It's how we are protected from UV radiation from the Sun. What occurs over Antarctica, the "Ozone Hole", is a case where under certain conditions, more ozone is destroyed than created, disrupting the equilbrium. You need three things in proximity to shift the balance - temperatures around -80C at about 100km altitude (30,000 ft.), a depletion agent (chlorine, bromine, etc.) and sunlight (energy). If you don't have the right temperatures, ice particles of the proper size can't form, eliminating the site where depletion happens. If you have no agent, there's nothing to catalyze the reaction. If you have no energy, there is no way to sever the O3 bonds.
All winter long, ozone forms over the South Pole as the air gets colder and colder due to radiation cooling in the absence of sunlight. The cold air can't mix with warmer air from temperate latitudes because of the circumpolar winds which corral-in the air over the polar plateau (which is two miles tall, exascerbating the heat loss). By the time the first rays of sunlight hit in late August, the ozone concentration at 100km is at its annual peak. Over the next few days, the concentration of ozone plummets dramatically. By the first week of October, the air has warmed up enough that there are no ice crystals of the appropriate size for further loss to occur. There's still chlorine and energy, but no site for depletion to take place. A few weeks later, the upper atmosphere, now heated 24/7, is energetic enough to disrupt the circumpolar current and ozone poor air from above Antarctica mixes with ordinary air from the South Pacific and South Atlantic, diluting the concentration of ozone over the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Perhaps you have missed the warnings issued to southern Chile over the past couple of years about particularly dilute patches passing overhead and the risk of skin and eye damage from as little as 15 minutes exposure if unprotected? New Zealand (occupying from approximately 43 degrees S to 48 degrees S) is at similar risk.
Yes, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere make more ozone, but it's not a uniform process. It's a seasonal process. This detail does not often make it into the popular press because it's a) not sensational enough and b) too complicated to fit into a sound bite. What scientists currently study is not the percentage of ozone in the stratosphere (at the right altitudes to form the right kind of ice crystals, it's 0% by the start of Summer), it's not the physical size of the hole (which is determined by the shape of Antarctica and the circumpolar current), it's how fast the hole appears as compared to the winter-time minimum and the spring-time maximum extent.
As to the impact of human activity, the documented trends are that chlorine at 100km parallels (with a 18-month lag) the amount of release at ground level, and the more chlorine that's up there, the higher the rate of formation of the hole. It's not a straight uphill line; it has its minor variations up and down like a stock market graph. The overall trend, from decade to decade is up and up and up.
-ethan
http://penguincentral.com/ozone.html
Learn to read. The climatic changes over the last 50 - 100 years are perfectly consistent with climatic changes that happen over such timespans. What we have is approximately a 1 1/2 degree temperature difference from ~100 years ago, which is perfectly consistent. What's got people worried is the fact that it coincides with the tremendous burning of fossil fuels. Creating CO2 SHOULD increase the temperature, that's a fact, but no one knows how much. We have NOT seen any changes that are undeniably the result of increased CO2.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I'm glad Hollywood has finally gotten around to recognizing global warming. It's about time.
Hopefully they can make a movie about a time in the near future, when we've destroyed almost all plant and animal life on the planet, even exausting the supply of plankton in the ocean, and the only thing humans have left to eat are other humans. But most people wouldn't know that their food is people -- it would be kept a secret from the population. And then, in the last scene, the truth should be revealed! That would be a cool movie. Why hasn't hollywood made something like that yet? What a bunch of lame asses.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I read a report from two members of NAS which raised several issues:
1. There is no certainty about any of this. We are very bad at predicting weather, and still understand very little of it.
2. The computer models that people keep talking about don't work. If you give them data up to 1970 and ask them to predict 1990, they are way off. Not even close. This gives one reason to believe that we should not trust what it says about 2020 when we give it current data.
3. The land measurement records show a warmer earth now than 120 years ago... but most of the warming took place prior to 1940. This was followed by a couple decades of cooling! Then it started warming up again. The net change for those 120 years? Less than 2 degrees F.
4. Geological temeratures are in constant flux. From about 800 to 1300 AD there was successful agriculture in Greenland. The cold period of the centuries that followed forced the Vikings to abandon their settlements in North America, and shortened average human life spans in Europe by 10 years.
5. The only readings we have of the entire troposphere (from the Earth's surface to 30 miles up, measured everywhere, including over oceans), which have been gathered with the help of NASA and confirmed by balloon measurements, show absolutely no global warming over the last twenty years or so.
6. The sun spot cycles seem to have a much bigger impact on global climate than we once suspected. When your main source of heat is a massive, chaotic, uncontrolled fusion reaction, change is something you need to learn to expect.
7. Over the short term (less than a century or two), upper-atmosphere clouds have been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats for the Earth. When the ammount of heat coming from the sun changes, the clouds get bigger or smaller to compensate, regulating the climate.
Some people feel that the best way to counter all this carbon going into the air (mostly in the form of CO2) is to use some kind of machine to extract atmospheric carbon. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called trees. It appears that John Denver had the solution to global warming figured out before anybody ever heard of it.
One last point. AI was not a bomb at the box office because interest in science is on the decline. Apollo 13 was a huge hit. AI was a bomb at the box office because it was a bad movie. Simple as that.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I agree with nearly all of what you've said.
However I think Jon Katz actually raising the issue of belief is a key one. Until people believe the problem is real they won't be motivated to make the changes, or influence their governments to make the changes.
Katz' argument that people can "feel the weather has changed" has nothing to do with Global Warming. Earths climate has regular cycles. There are periods of particularly mild climactic change, usually lasting about 100 years. We exited one of those periods in the mid 1990s. As predicted, the weather has become more volatile. This has nothing to do with global warming, and everything to do with normal variations in the Earths climate (probably caused by orbital changes). People, especially uneducated people, base their opinions on what they know and what they are told by the media. Since none of them were alive before we entered the period of mild climactic change, that period seems "normal" to them, rather than the abnormality it really was. We'll have a few thousand years of rougher weather, whether we drive SUVs, or were huddling around a campfire in a cave.
Will it be a couple degrees warmer? Possibly. But Mt Pinatubo threw up enough dust to cool the average temperature 1 full degree for several years (reducing average global temperatures to roughly a half degree higher than before the Industrial Revolution). Averages, people, are averages. If we are 2 degrees higher for a few years, and a few degrees lower a few years, guess what? We are average.
I agree that scientists should study these things. I don't agree that the time has come to worry about the sky falling.
Maybe Global Climate Change is a better term. Even as the earth does get warmer, a degree or so either way isn't something we're really going to notice - daily variations tend to be much greater anyway. What we do notice is the weather systems getting screwed up as a result of the small rises knocking the established systems out of whack.
Over the last year or so, we've had the atlantic weather systems reverse themselves; a weather front set itself up over Europe, all summer long, so the north didn't get a summer and the south stayed in the 100s (40s in C); the Mississippi has taken to flooding regularly; Southern California, as opposed to its usual 5 days of rain hardly stopped raining from January through March; and then there's South America that seems to go from one weather related disaster to another.
I'm sure a load of people who know the subject far better than I [or at the very least are convinced they do] can offer other explanations. All I'm attempting to show is that Global Warming [assuming it exists] wouldn't be something that's visible by "Oh cool, extra beach days," but by that extra degree or two screwing up the weather in general.
"[R]eal scientists displaying real data..." I guess in your little fantasy world this doesn't include the World Meteorological Organization or it's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes scientists from a hundred countries, and has been developing the evidence that global warming is real since the 80's. I guees it doesn't include the National Acedemy of Science, which concluded last year that:
"The warming trend in global-mean surface temperature observations during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real and is substantially greater than the average rate of warming during the twentieth century. The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusions that surface temperature has been rising."
I guess it doesn't include such publications as Science, Nature, Scientific American and Chemical & Engineering News (and literally hundreds of others which have all repeated the same conclusion: that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is real.
The alternate opinion that you express is so phenomenally unsupported, so completely discredited by the overwhelming burden of valid scientific evidence, that it is espoused only by vested interests like power generation and conservative wackos like yourself. Practice what you preach and leave science to the scientists: you don't know what you're talking about.
Evidence: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/globalwarming. html#Q9
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0800issue/0800epstein.ht ml
http://www.ucsusa.org/environment/0warming.html
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/faq/index.html
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/
Educate yourself. Sea levels are rising. The permafrost is melting. Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening. And the planet is getting hotter. These are scientific facts that no amount of bullshit rhetoric will change. And it will affect us in purely negative ways in our lifetimes and in our children's lifetimes.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
First of all, nice article. I am a newbiew around here (two days :-)) and this is the best I have seen so far.
Second, I am not from USA. I may have a different perspective from the average american, altought it is obvious that I do not have from who wrote this text.
That said, I think the weather challenge cannot be won without the USA.
That's quite obvious analizing the reasons that lead to the Kyoto protocol, which may fall without USA support.
The United States is responsible for much of the pollution that goes to our air, land and water. There's no doubt about this, numbers everywhere to confirm.
Per person, it is the country that produces more pollution.
But at the same time, I believe a lot more is going on. USA has taken in the past years a role of technological leader in the world. Most research breakthroughs (spelling?) come from there. So much ahead of other countries, that the other countries are fighting back with more 'humanitary' global actions.
ONU's chair in human rights was the 'concrete' action of something bigger. Slodoban's and Pinochet's happening on Europe enlarge that continent's role of 'social', 'humanitary' leader. What we have now are two sides of serious future consequences that need to develop and unfold together.
In one corner you have tech development. On the other human society. Body and mind, matter and spirit if you wish. You cannot separate them, cannot only concentrate on one side. They must grow together for a better future.
But, a historial view of the last years, after the Industrial Revolution, will make you think that we as humans have pend much more to the tech side than the spiritual one.
Antique societies, old religions, they all got weaker since the beggining of the century. I am not talking about christianins (again, sorry for the misspelling, english is not my primarly languague), but instead, almost every other religion on the world, that takes the perception of life after dead very different than our ocidental way.
To simplify, west tries to enjoy life at maximum because we all gonna die, so do it quickly and do it now. East, on the contrary, have a vision more like "we all gonna die anyway, why do it?".
But, tech improvement is changing this. We don't die at 30 now, like 150 years ago. Most people that are 20 years old nowadays with go beyond 100, easy, easy.
This perception that life has increased, that we really don't have to do it fast and do it now, the 'eastern' life and death vision, is losing its forces.
With this in mind, you can justify people's concern with the weather. At the same time we are taking care of our lives, improving it, we are taking away the force of who gave us life, 'Mother Nature'.
Prodigal sons, we are now taking the harder route to the 'eco growth', an economy based on the principles that we must take care of the enviroment.
Earth has been around for billions of years with or without us, and will probaly be after we are gone from here to other planets. What we say now, is a 'rearrange' of forces, like a system where it must balance what is inside. There's no weather problem for Earth. Our planet is what it is. There is weather problem for ourselves, for our future as a race.
I hope as soon as is possible we learn how to balance matter and spirit, tech and religion inside us, so we can exist in union with our planet.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite