Slashdot Mirror
Warm Water Squid Reported Off Alaskan Coast
fenris_23 writes "The associated press is reporting Humboldt Squid - a species that lives in the warm waters off the Baja coast - have recently been observed off the coast of Alaska. 'A large Humboldt squid caught offshore from Sitka is among numerous sightings of a species seen for the first time in waters of the Far North, and the first of the species recovered from British Columbia waters.' This may help corroborate a similar slashdot story covering rising CO2 levels measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory where the possibility was raised that rising sea temperatures are reducing the Earth's ability to manage greenhouse gases."
Do you think scientists are lying about the oceans warming up? Do you think they're lying about global warming? Do you think that liberals (which I am not one, but I am a scientist) have hijacked science to perpetuate some global warming myth... just for the sake of perpetuating some global warming agenda? Why? Because they like to scare people? Because they want to stifle business? I'll tell you why... it's because that's what they're observing.
I realize there is some debate as to WHY global warming appears to be happening. I don't think there is much legitimate debate on IF it is happening though. The debate, now, seems centered on how severe it is, and how severe the impact will be.
I don't really think the issue of the environment and global warming should be a liberal or conservative issue. It's a rational issue. It doesn't make any sense to politicize it.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
Here's another plausible expanation, from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. The gist is that long term measurements of solar activity (going back thousands of years) show that the sun's output varies in cycles, and that those cycles coorelate very closely with average temperature measurements over the same period.
This seems much more plausible to me, since it explains global warming and cooling that we know occurred well before the industrial revolution.
Also I remember seeing an article recently... Ah here it is: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/200409 17/sc_nm/environment_mussels_dc_2
about warm water mussels migrating north. So there at least seems to be a very consistent trend going on here, whether due to emissions or natural cycles or both.
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
In case you still do not realize it the analysis of said data is the starting point for the majority of science on global warming, and used as scientific proof for it
The paper in question has indeed been cited over 300 times, so it is important, but it contains several results. We don't now which of those results (if any) citing papers rely on and if the conclusions of those papers would be affected if the McIntyre and McKitrick criticism is accurate. Muller fails to make that analysis in his paper, and he also is not an expert on statistical data analysis.
What we are left with is that both points of view have been published, people have had the opportunity to make up their minds, and it is pretty clear what the mainstream scientific opinion on the matter is, at least for now.
"in linking sundry phenomenon as part of a poorly understood hypothesis"
One of the key determinants of the range of a species is temperature. So, observing changes in the range of species is one way in which one can determine whether there have been long-term changes in temperature.
"The jump in CO2 may be real but the presumed jump in temps may be more illusory than previously supposed"
Or it may not be, we just don't know. The way to gain more certainty is to get more data from different sources than we have used before. Observing the range and distribution of species over time is such a data source.
I didn't see any peer reviewed publications by Art Robinson; where are they?
And, yes, solar variation has an influence on temperatures, and climatologists are aware of it. See Solar variation accounts for less than half of global warming in 20th Century, UA geoscientist finds, for example. And here.