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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.
I blame the sun!
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
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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Rush said that global warming was a communist plot of the liberal hegemony, backed by anti-NRA and pro-ACLU supporters, in an attempt to get a feminist abortion doctor elected to the presidency thereby preventing the birth of the Anti-christ, thwarting Jimmy Swaggart's and Jerry Falwell's predictions of the second coming of Christ and the fall of Israel.
I think he's exagerrating.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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!!!!"
Similar in concept to women learning to cope with rape rather than shouting about it, right? Rather than trying to "cope" with global warming, why not try to exert some control over man-made atmospheric changes that have a strong likelihood of contributing to it? What's the worst thing that happens? We reduce pollution and it doesn't solve the global warming problem? That seems a lot more desirable than assuming that pollution is not the cause of global warming, in which case being wrong could mean an ecological disaster.
Who the hell cares if we have to pay a few cents more for a banana or stack of CD-ROMs due to costs associated with reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (in manufacturing and/or transportation)? It beats the hell out of mass extinctions and ecological disaster.
Really. Does it now.
Because you just said that a "new ice age fad" is starting, and you're claiming it has something to do with global cooling. And now you're refering to a story about a thaw in Greenland threatens a new ice age, and you're saying this is about global cooling. Whereas the story is actually only about Global Warming. "Global Cooling" isn't mentioned - probably because no serious scientist believes it exists.
"Global cooling", in the sense of the temperature of the Earth lowering on average across the planet, is distinct from the idea of an "ice" age, at least in terms of the one you quoted. The Guardian is reporting, correctly, that one effect of a global shift in climate, even one that warms the Earth on average, can be that ice forms in areas where currently it doesn't. That's because warming can effect sea currents and other weather patterns, changing systems that usually bring warmth to areas of the planet that would normally freeze.
Try, for example, comparing London with Moscow. Compare how far North either one is, then ask yourself why London is usually temperate and Moscow is usually covered in snow. A brief look at other areas of the world level with London will tell you that there's something wierd about the weather in Britain (I mean, other than the rain, five year hurricane-strength storm cycle, etc): it's far warmer than it should be. That's because there's a weather system that actively moves heat from the Gulf of Mexico up to the British Isles (and thereabouts.)
Now, the evidence that global warming may cause Britain to turn into some icy wasteland isn't exactly scientific (not because it's impossible, but because right now they're trying to predict a chaotic system and simply assuming a change in the weather system will almost certainly have the worst result - nobody however really knows what the results will be), but it's being talked about as a possibility. It's a possibility because if you shove a huge amount of water into the ocean, it's not likely to act the same way as it did previously. The media, not the scientists, are raging about ice coming to currently unusually temperate parts of the world as some kind of inevitability. Do yourself a favour and don't pretend the rash harping of the media and the current scientific consensus are the same.
Utterly meaningless. This was a fad, a real fad, that lasted a few months. No serious scientists hung their hat on it. Scientists investigated it, but the ultimate conclusion was that the phenomena was bunk, and the reverse was, if anything, more likely.
The scientific community has been concerned about global warming since the mid eighties, if not earlier. They've been largely consistant. They've investigated trend after trend, and everything found has pointed in one direction.
The latest evidence is right at the top of this article. You see the headline "New Satellite Data Confirms Global Warming"? It's because, well, basically, there's this satellite data, it's just come out, and, erm, it also shows the globe has warmed.
The underlying concerns have a firm foundation. There's a lot of money being poured into discrediting it because, well, there's a lot of money to be lost if, say, we switch from oil to something more sane; because there are a lot of businesses that stand to see their costs skyrocket if their CO2 emissions are regulated; because there are ideologically swivel-eyed psuedo-libertarians who find it hard to comprehend that we might, as a group, need to do something. We rarely if ever see credible reports that GW isn't an issue. We regularly see well researched
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
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
If any actual research backs up your claim in any way, please share it with the rest of us.
What "dramatic shift" are you talking about? The dinosaur article mentions a temperature change of 10C over a period of 7 million years. That's a shift of a little over one millionth of a degree per year - not very dramatic if you ask me. Current climate research predicts the same amount of change over a period of several hundred to a few thousand years. Taking the more mild predictions, that means our climate is changing about 2000 times faster than the "dramatic shift" you refer to.
Here is an article about a National Academy of Sciences' report provided at the request of the Bush administration. It states plainly that "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise."
Here is a paper from the American Geophysical Union stating that "human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate... scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century."
Anyway, I could go on with pages of links from universities and scientific organizations who are increasingly making unqualified statements that, yes, the tons of pollution we pump into the air, water, and soil on a daily basis are having negative effects - including global warming. Most of the opposition to these views can be found on the websites of right-wing political think tanks, individual right wing politicians, and in "opinion" pieces with no links to actual scientific research.
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.
That is, quite simply, crap. You're wrong and embarassingly so.
"There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity." - Scientific American
Moderators, please don't mod up silly statements like these where sources aren't cited.