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New Climate Change Warning
sebFlyte writes "A new grid computing climate research project, climateprediction.net, has come up with its first major results, and they're really not good news for the planet according to the BBC. The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought."
"Keep your military in your own damn country; no-one likes a nosy neighbour."
OK. So when the EU can take care of, say, problems a days drive from Berlin, like Kosovo or Bosnia, the United States should leave Europe, of course when the entire Red Army and Warsaw Pact was sitting on the other side of the Fulda Gap, it was alright to be nosy.
What about Korea? Ready for the DPRK to burn Seoul? Or Japan? Ready for the PRC to get back at Japan for WW2? Or Taiwan? Ready for the PRC to get back at them for having the gaul to resist the PRC?
Or how about things no one hears about, like the Green Berets demining all over the world? Or American SAR saving lives in the deep ocean? Or how about the 82nd Airborne keeping the DMZ in the Sinai since 1977?
Or what about the US military being there to assist in the Indian Ocean after the Tsuamni? Australia is the only other one in the region with any sealift or airlift and it's a fraction of what the US has.
As soon as the rest of the World shows the slightest ability to not burn itself down the moment we pull back to the US, we'll be happy to, until you all man up, you are stuck with us.
Afghanistan was fine. Noticed how the world was with you and cheering you on when you went there ? But let us cut the crap. You didn't really go there to "extend freedom and democrocy". You went there to catch terrorists who had attacked you and to topple a regime which harboured these terrorists, and world agreed that you had the right. Freedom and democracy ? Well that was incidental. You *are* supposed to clean up after the mess you cause. If you create a power vaccum you would definitely be expected to protect the innocent civilians there from anarchial looting and rioting, by helping set up a democratic government.
As for Iraq ... for the umpteenth time, how was it a problem for you ? There are hundreds of tyrannical regime. Last I checked one of them actually became an ally despite having WMDs and caught profilerating the nuke technology *and* being a dictatorial regime, which had actually toppled the previous democratic government via a military coup.
You seem to be the only one buying into your fairytales about "extending freedom and democracy", when in reality you just support dictators usually.
Nope, I recall measurements in Australia showing the same thing, and Antartica has been in a warming trend for the last 10,000 years (since the last ice age). You are correct, though that, as we understand it, the North Atlantic and Mediteranian suffered a far stronger period of warming 500-100 years ago (Egypt, as I recall, was significantly impacted).
The grand (or is that grand, grand) parent was concerned that the Bush administration didn't realize that the EPA was saying that the temperatures were rising AND were predicting further rises.
The problem here is a misunderstanding of what the point of disagreement is (and it's really not a right-left issue at all: I'm a liberal democrat myself, but agree with the White House on this). The difference is based, not on the question, "is it getting warmer?" That was a real and significant question in the 80s when there were doubts about the measurements being used. However, at this point we are fairly certain that temperatures have been rising for the last 100 years and have been rising more sharply for the last 50.
The question is: is this a natural warming trend, as observed 500-1000 years ago, is this human-induced or is it a combination of the two.
The most likely answer is that it's a combination, so the disagreement boils down to where you place the division of responsibility. If man is responsible for 0.00001% of the current warming trend then there's no point in worrying about it any more than we worry about tracking hurricanes. Do the math, warn the people, carry on.
If we're responsible for 50% of the current warming trend, then we should seriously re-think out interaction with the environment... and soon!
My personal belief is that, in the current climate of mud-slinging and political pressure, there is no reasonable way to determine the real answer, and so I am left with one overriding fact: for every form of influence man can exert on our world, nature routinely exerts far, far more influence. All of our factories, planes and cars pale in comparison to volcanoes, forest fires and various bilogical processes. The Sun's influence is still poorly understood. For example, what is the exact relationship between increases in solar output and evaporation? Since water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, knowing if evaporation is a linear, logarithmic or step function with respect to solar radiation is KEY to understanding global warming, and yet the process of evaporation is so complex that we have yet to understand it even enough to describe simple weather phenomenon, much less climactic change.
So, do we change the way we live? We should, but we didn't need a global warming debate to tell us that. We desperately need to police the most obviously damaging influences that man has on the environment. Chemical dumping kills millions every year, around the world. Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? We've been preventing forest fires the wrong way for 100 years, leading to fires that burn orders of magnitude hotter and more dangerously.
The problem I have with environmentalism is that it is mostly focused on a FEELING that humans are doing the wrong thing, and research is used as a sort of background music to the movement rather than the driving force. I want to be an environmentalist, but as long as environmentalism is defined by owl-squeezers and doom predictors I guess I'll have to just be a concerned inhabitant of planet Earth.