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New Satellite Data Confirms Global Warming
starannihilator writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have analyzed satellite data using a new and more accurate method (using channel 4 on the Microwave Sounding Unit satellite) to show that the troposphere has been warming faster than the Earth's surface for more than two decades. Nature reports that previous interpretations (using MSU channel 2) did not indicate such dramatic tropospheric warming because the data were compromised by stratospheric conditions. For years, the debate over global warming raged largely as a result of an incongruency between trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures. The new data gained by MSU channel 4 are consistent with the surface temperature's rising trends and indicate that global warming is, in fact, occuring in the troposphere. Read the full article in Nature, or similar stories in the Seattle Times and Newswise."
I've changed my view on global warming. I used to think the whole earth couldn't warm or cool, but it would stay the same over time. Now I believe that the earth does warm and cool over significant variations. So we are in a global warming phase, if the toposphere is absolute proof (which we can't be sure about.)
The question is: What can we do about it?
The answer is: Unfortunately, not much. If we cut all the world's emissions of greenhouse gasses drastically in half, that wouldn't account for the other variations responsible for global warming like a more active sun or just the phase of the weather patterns on earth or the temperature of the sea. I have to think about it this way: If humanity did all it could to cool or warm the earth, what would we accomplish? The answer is that the earth is so huge and so complicated that we can't predict whether our actions would cause havoc or remedy. I mean, we could spend trillions of dollars on a system to cool the troposphere only to find out that by doing so we are causing more hurricanes and such.
The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable. A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
By the end of the decade, the same satellite will predict a new ice age. These pie-in-the-sky baseless climate trend predictions go in cycles. Global cooling was all the rage in the 1970s, and it is due to come "in vogue" again.
By this point everybody (except some stubborn idiots) admits that the earth is getting warmer. The real question is: Why?
I'm fairly sick of new studies coming out every couple weeks proving once and for all that the earth is getting warmer. Maybe some more of those research dollars should be devoted to understanding why the warming is occuring and developing ways to cope with a warmer earth, rather than redundantly measuring the temperature via every possible method and then shouting: "GLOBAL WARMING!!!! GLOBAL WARMING!!!!"
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
Perhaps the biggest source of the problem is contrails. The study they did in the near airplane-less skies after 9/11 seems to indicate that they have quite a massive impact on weather patterns.
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This means China needs to radically boost its efficiency (not hard even with current technology), Indonesia has to prevent the drainage and burning of peat bogs, and all that. If things there continue as they have been going, the USA could cut emissions to zero and still not make things better.
This also means that the Kyoto system of quotas is fundamentally broken. It will not do to give each nation a quota; each emitter of CO2 and other climate-changing gases has to have an incentive to prevent those emissions, and the competitive advantage should go to those producers and nations which are doing it the best. This means something like a unified system of carbon taxes.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Now, the hypothosis of global warming has not been irrefutably proven and certain discrepencies have not been accounted for.
first off, very rarely does science abolutely proove anything, but you can draw very good conclusions in the face of overwealming evidence, which is what we have in this case.
For instance, A volcanic erruption can cause so much more so called "greenhouse" gasses to be released into the atmosphere than all the polutants man has expelled since the first machine of industry.
people love to throw out this crap with no citation... where are the numbers? in fact, since we started buring coal and oil and massively deforesting the world, and hence eliminating those massive carbon sinks we have increased the co2 in the atmosphere greatly:
Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil has put about twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than is naturally removed by the oceans and forests. This has resulted in carbon dioxide levels building up in the atmosphere. Today, carbon dioxide levels are 30% higher than pre-industrial levels, higher than they have been in the last 420,000 years and are probably at the highest levels in the past 20 million years. Studies of the Earth's climate history have shown that even small, natural changes in carbon dioxide levels were generally accompanied by significant shifts in the global average temperature. We have already experienced a 1F increase in global temperature in the past century, and we can expect significant warming in the next century if we fail to act to decrease greenhouse gas emissions.
[IPCC, 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, p. 39.]
Secondly, there are periodic climate changes throughout earth's history that have still yet to be explained.
yes, but none on record as dramatic as now in terms of co2 build up.
Also, the depletion of the green house gasses has not been proven to be solely the cause of the BAD human made CO/CO2 and not the GOOD naturally occuring CO2 (See eruptions)
thanks for that eruptions link as it pretty much disproves your earlier assertion that volcanos throw up more co2 than humans ever could: even that were so this study shows that the volcanic eruption will cause plants on earth to remove MORE co2 that was put up by the volcano and hence has a net negative effect on the ammountn of co2 in the atmosphere.
Since there is no explanation for the past trend nor the fact that looking even further back the entire planet had a higher median temperature. as is evident by the many hypothosis that the thunder lizards may have died due to an ice age... I don't really have to point out there weren't humans then to contribute to that natural disaster that caused a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.
well of course, there happen to be other perfectly decent explanations for previous extreme climate changes in the past, but that says nothing about the viability of the explanation of hte current climate change.
Which brings me to my next point: if you change the characteristics of the attractor, the behavior of the system can change radicaly in a very sudden fashion. I fear that this is what we are doing with climate change, and we may suffer huge damages from the results.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
everyone know that global warming is going on. the only question being aruged over is "are we to blame?" and i say no.
this is almost exactly like what happened to the climate 1000 years back. it got warm enough that Greenland was usable for farming. that just seems like to much similarity to be a coinsiance.
but still, what is causing it??
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time