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Arctic Warming Drying Up Lakes
kingofalaska writes "An accelerating Arctic warming trend over the past quarter of a century has dramatically dried up more than a thousand large lakes in Siberia probably because the permafrost beneath them has begun to thaw, according to a paper to be published the journal Science." From the article at the LA Times: "About 125 of the 1,170 shrunken lakes disappeared altogether, and most are now considerably smaller than the study's baseline of 40 hectares, or about 99 acres, the researchers found. If Arctic temperatures continue to rise, the scientists said, many of the lakes in high northern latitudes, where they are ubiquitous, could eventually disappear."
the earth just sucks.
rewriting history since 2109
On the other hand, it's great that we'll all be living by the seaside with lovely warm weather. Seriously, it's so easy for people to become complacent, thinking the warmer weather's going to be lovely, and who cares if the beach moves a little closer to the fish and chips shop? Perhaps it's time to change the message to: "Just a half a degree change means that all your food will be laced with horrible poisins and chemicals and millions of less fortunate people will die" but then, so many people happily chow down on poptarts and hamburgers, and who cares what happens to a few africans? People's lack of imagination and forethought is quite frightening sometimes.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
Not only lakes, also glaciers are drying. They even pack them in foil to protect them from melting.
Glacier wrapped in foil to stop melting
Except, you know, to the extent that Archimedes Principle says that they won't. Oh, and the fact that in the last ten years we've watched some of the largest ones in existence disintegrate.
[Off to Norway tomorrow for a conference on Ice Shelf Processes]
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This must be a serious blow for the Siberian Tourist Board.
Ok, I deny it.
I'm George W. Bush, and I approved of this message.
Your tone implies a negative reply, and yet your argument agrees with me.. Perhaps you had better re-read the post? What I meant is, global warming is not the worldwide effect people shape it up to be, and further, local incidents are just that - local and individual. Antarctica goes through cycles every hundred/thousand years (I am sure you, being such the expert on ice shelves, would know this); if anything is "wrong" at all, it is yet another of these processes.
No one is claiming that sea levels have already risen masively; rather it is claimed that they will rise significantly (several meters, possibly flooding areas like Manhattan) if the Antarctic ice cap melts, which is obvious.
More important is the temperature anomaly (which is global and indisputable), the effects it is causing, such as El Nino and the slowing of the Gulf Stream (not to mention the increasingly weird weather here in Britain), and the likely effects if it continues, such as total distruption of the Gulf stream causing ice caps to form across most of Europe.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Keep sticking your head in the sand and pretending it's not happening. Of course it will go away if you ignore it long enough.
I am trolling
I find that every August it feels several degrees hotter than in January. I think this merits further data analysis to find the exact cycle of this global warming thing...
I was reading a story a few weeks ago about a lake in Russia just being sucked into a sinkhole and disappearing.
c le/2005/06/03/AR2005060301524.html
- lake04.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Russian lake disappearing into a sinkhole
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0604russia
Ah, so in your opinion we should just keep on polluting the environment, because there is no consensus on the existence, causes and effects of global warming? Pollution means profits, right?
The owls are not what they seem
The short-term concerns about global warming aren't about huge absolute increases in temperature, they are about changing weather patterns. Global warming may well mean a new ice age for Europe.
As for the rise in sea levels, so far, the main consequence of global warming seems to have been increased thawing of ice around the north pole, which will not raise sea levels. A second consequence has been thawing of glaciers, with already serious consequences.
Sea levels will rise significantly when the antarctic ice sheets thaw. We have been lucky so far that increased thawing around the edges has been balanced by increased precipitation in the interior, but that won't last forever.
People like you are about as fringe and ill-informed as the people who deny that HIV exists or that HIV causes AIDS. Unfortunately, in this case, you endanger not only your own miserable life with your hostility towards science and reason, you endanger everybody's.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's attitudes like yours that have caused this whole mess in the first place!
such as total distruption of the Gulf stream causing ice caps to form across most of Europe.
:-(
Well, for US global warming deniers, that solves two big problems: sea levels won't rise because the ice sheets will just move from the antarctic to Europe, and "old Europe" will be too busy shoveling snow to still interfere in US world domination.
Maybe that's Bush's secret master plan after all...
You got it all wrong. What he was saying, is that the absence of the sea level rise is NOT an indicative that the polar ice isn't melting away.
Gosh, he even said we were observing some of the largest floating ice formations disintegrate. What do you think made them do so? Ice drilling polar bears?
The point of this argument is that we know diddly squat about what actually goes on climatewise on this great orb of a world. Over the course of even the last few hundred years the world has been both substantially hotter and drier and substantially colder and wetter than it is now, and most of these changes occurred before our ancestors had even worked out how to poke things with pointy sticks, let alone burn large quantities of fossil fuels.
In all likelihood a climate change is coming, but how much of that climate change can actually be attributed to humanity, how much impact can we really have?
But climate scientists are covering it up because as everyone knows, there's a lot more money to be earned scaremongering in universities than reassuring multinational oil companies that everything's just dandy.
Incidentally, here's a groovy NASA animation of the Larsen B ice shelf breaking up and floating out to sea.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
And even if this was only about global warming, I think that the most prudent course of action would be to assume a worst case scenario and work based on that. There's nothing wrong with working on such assumptions instead of unobtainable "real hard facts" and erring on the side of caution - engineers and politicians do it every day.
(Off-topic: Is anyone else getting this? "Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between... It's been 13 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment". A bug or a new feature in Slashcode? Damn annoying.)
The owls are not what they seem
Come on, the story is submitted by the user "kingofalsaka". I'm sure that could be explained by coincidence. It is coincidence too that within the summary exists a link to a "blog" named "Alaskas King"? I think not.
More likely is this king of alaska has seen a quick way to make a buck for his country by blogging about some fictional or statistically normal climate change and having the gutless slashdot editors post it to the front page. For shame slashdot. I used to read this site for the technical articles by impartial experts, not sob-stories from cash-strapped monarchs. The whole damn thing reads like a nigerian 419 scam.
I propose a new section called "slashvertisements" into which the editors post all paid for articles, giving users the opportunity to filter them out. Perhaps they fear users leaving in droves once they see how few would escape this section?
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
And how do you know it's a temperature anomaly, instead of say a natural rise and fall in the planets temp? You are judging the entire planet's weather on a 100 years of data. At the last birthday party I attended for mother nature she said she was some 4 billion years old.
That's like saying you were a lean child and can't figure out why your fat now.
the earth is constantly changing. slowly over time. What happened when the asteroid took out the dinosaurs? The earth recovered from that. It will recover from us. If it has to kill us to do so then so be it. We are way over populated for this planet anyway.
Besides all of that, we will run out of fossil fuels in another hundred years anyway. After that we won't have to worry about global warming. As we won't be putting them into the air anymore.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Well I look at it this way - in 60-odd years i'll be checking out, so as long as it stays fine until then I don't give a shit.
I swear I heard that somewhere before, maybe my grandfather... oh well.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I think it is "Gaia", and if indeed pissed, Gaia will find a way to bring back a balance to the environment.
This might cause 100's of millions of humans to be wiped out, but it is a small price to pay.
Y'know just 4 or 5 degrees would do it. It'd have no effect on food, I don't know where you get that one.
The Africa problem BTW has bugger all to do with global warming. US/EU agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs are the cause and at least the EU is changing it's agricultural policies so that farmers are paid for doing nothing instead of being paid for producing. It has also pretty much zero rated African imports.
Deleted
I think there's some foil left over, how about you make a hat?
In the same vein, if a climate change that would kill us is "natural" I really don't care for natural. Better learn and figure out how to get a more unnatural but more friendly result if we at all can.
Warning
You are about to read several assinine comments made by geeks who did not get their degrees in environmental science, geology, oceanography, or evolutionary studies.
Please forgive them for their pretentiousness and understand that the various contradicting figures they offer as evidence for their claims are probably read from dirty pages left in the cache of their brain.
How long must we be a victim of fate and circumstance?
As long as it takes to change our minds.
By contrast, the scientists found that in Siberian areas where the ground below is still permanently frozen, the number of lakes actually increased by about 4% and total lake area grew by about 12% over the last three decades.
Interestingly they neglected to indicate how many hectares this 12% represented.
I guess that wasn't as dramatic a headline.
Arctic Warming Is Drying Up Lakes, Study Finds, but some lakes actually growing
Tempafrost?
You are absolutely right, go to the top of your class.
Problem is the GP said artic.
But we should certainly worry about the land locked ice in antartica.
Actually that's not true when you have a freshwater ice cube melting in saltwater and then, as others have already pointed out, Antarctic ice has formed on land.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm also waiting for the flood of global warming denial posts from people who have managed to see what all those foolish climatologists have missed - it would mean SUVs are a bad thing so cannot possible be true.
:-
c ience/
We have a similarly inspired great thinker here in Britain by the name of David Bellamy. He was a sort cuddly beardy bloke who used be on tv a lot in the 70s and 80s hiding in bushes and getting excited about birds.
Up until last year he was a well respected environmentalist having set up half a dozen environmental organisations and been invited to the board of half a dozen others. But he has a weakness.
He likes birds.
A lot.
His logic when it comes to global warming seems to be.
Global warming = must use less fossil fuel
less fossil fuel = more renewable energy
more renewable energy = more wind farms
more wind farms = more birds killed by turbines
dead birds = bad thing
Therefore global warming does not exist. QED.
So figuring that his credentials as a ornithologist made him fully qualified to dismiss any arguments put forward to the contrary by people who'd merely studied climatology he wrote piece denying global warming for the Daily Mail that was based on a load of psuedo science he'd found on random web sites.
George Monbiot did quite a nice job of demolishing him here
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-s
If you manage to find a copy of the debate that Channel 4 news ran between George and David it's well worth seeing.
Never trust anyone with an id greater than 889388
of course by 'Off-Topic' I meant 'Troll'.
I am dumb. That is all.
-knewter
Don't need life? What does your blow-up doll think about that?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"global warming is not the worldwide effect people shape it up to be"
What you are missing is that the effects of the small global rise in temperature are not evenly distributed! There are, in fact, even regions that get *colder* as a result of this worldwide increase in temperature. Global climatic conditions are complex and unified, but they are NOT uniform. Hence what *looks* like a local phenom can actually be a direct result of global conditions. Think El Nino, for example.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Please see The Arctic: Earth's Early Warning System "The Inuit are already suffering dramatic changes to their Arctic environment, warns a native leader... unpredictable weather, melting of permafrost and glaciers, decreasing sea ice, as well as the presence of new species such as barn owls, robins and mosquitoes never seen before by the Inuit people."
Except, you know, to the extent that Archimedes Principle says that they won't.
The thing is, if you've been reading scientific literature and science news sources, rather than political news sourcs, you'd know climate scientists are quite aware of this. They aren't concerned about melting ice shelves raising sea level, it's Anarctica's terrestial glaciers they're concerned with.
Oh, and the fact that in the last ten years we've watched some of the largest ones in existence disintegrate.
100% of the ice shelves could disintegrate and according to the physics of bouyancy sea level wouldn't rise one mm. While the retreat of the antarctic ice shelves may be evidence of global warming, they are not linked directly with other expected results of climate change, which, if they happen, will unfold in their own time. So you can't logically use the fact that sea level is not rising proportionally faster as the ice shelves disintegrate faster as evidence that global warming is not happening.
Sometimes I think it would be better to represent our models of this sort of thing by a Bayesian belief network. They are intrinsically honest when weighing evidence, whereas human beings tend to be dishonest with themselves. We all start with our ideas of a priori possiblity, which appriopriately affects our interpretation of evidence strongly at the initial stages. People who are convinced of global warming would need very little evidence to make them completely certain, whereas skeptics are just made a bit less certain at the outset. The thing is, as evidence mounts one way or the other, humans seldom revise their beliefs even to the point of becoming uncertain, unless there is social pressure to do so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
With Berman altering the timeline, you may even dig up a couple ice thawed Borgs. http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/ENT/e pisode/128643.html
You geeks should be praying for global warming. The warmer it gets, the more clothes females will take off. When it gets hot enough, you may just see something you've never seen - a real live naked human female!
Eat 'em fast, though; you don't want to wait until they're cooked!
More important is the temperature anomaly (which is global and indisputable), the effects it is causing, such as El Nino and the slowing of the Gulf Stream (not to mention the increasingly weird weather here in Britain), and the likely effects if it continues, such as total distruption of the Gulf stream causing ice caps to form across most of Europe.
ENSO -- the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, is probably a natural, long term feature of the current climate equillibrium and has been for probably hundreds of years if not longer. So, while it is associated with anamolous weather, the occasional appearance of anamolies is normal.
Evidence has to be weighed in the context of other evidence and a reasonable linking them. The theory of anthropogenic effects on climate stability is twice removed from any kind of measurable parameter: first the proposition of climate change has to be established (at this point the preponderance of evidence), next the link from that to human activities must be established. The theory has, in a sense, fared well thus far, in the first phase. The second phase is a still ahead, I think.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
it's just that it started 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, and not just 50 years ago.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Well, then I apologize for misreading your point.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Did you actually read some of those links ?
From this link:
What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.
Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe. This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy, productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued, expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth. The reality is that global poverty and death would be the result of Kyoto's rationing of hydrocarbons.
Hardly seems a considered scientific opinion to me. You may, of course, think differently.
And considering this link:
Try reading something about the person who wrote it, in his own words, on the same site, here:
My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.
Is this really the sort of considered scientific opinion you consider valuable ?
In the same vein, if a climate change that would kill us is "natural" I really don't care for natural. Better learn and figure out how to get a more unnatural but more friendly result if we at all can. Anthropogenic climate change NOW!
" There are no solid conclusions among all scientist"
Uh-huh. This is how the wacko right pulls this off: they get a few of their idiot minions with online Ph.D.s (or some isolated rejects from the tenure pool) to call themselves scientists. Then they completely ignore scientific method and start polluting the scientific pool with untestable hypotheses. Soon, it's difficult to get a consensus "among all scientist" because a percentage of them are not even legit scientists.
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
The earth tries to change all the time, but we are in a position to do something about it. Once we know what the causes of climate change are, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. We need to maintain our food source, or get off planet and live elsewhere.
If my sun is trying to kill me, I'd like to do anything I can to survive.
We can do it, have a little more faith in the species. Look at all the other things we've done.
Doesn't Ice have a greater surface area than water anyway , so wouldn't it kind of balance out
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I quickly looked at a map and it appears that Antarctica is about the same size as the Isle Of Wight so I'd guess there is certainly not enough ice on it to cause any rises at all.
It doesn't matter. This civilization lacks the technology to reverse a century of industrial pollution. No government will act until economic pressures demands, and by then any large scale actions like seeding Antarctic waters with iron may make things worse. All you can do is let the planet heal itself and reduce the carbon burden as much as possible. I can't understand why some people get so upset when this species doesn't behave rationally. When has it ever?
I have a question since your a geoligist or whatnot. If global warming really is happening, why is it still 60 degrees in New York City on June 05? That's colder than I can remember.
i) Climate is not weather
ii) The climate is exceedingly complex, and global warming does not mean a uniform temperature increase across the globe.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Far be it for me to contract such an expert but according to The CfA Sea Level Homepage, sea level is rising at a rate of about 2mm/year. It might help your claim if you identify the sources of your "facts."
Before you go spouting off inane nonsense, this has nothing to do with rising sea levels. Nor is it mentioned.
The lakes are being absorbed by thawing soil and evaporation. The article does not say anything about sea-levels.
And for clarification, a 1cm rise in sea-level is billions of gallons of water.
~X~
~X~
"One ice cube displaced the same volume of water whether solid or liquid. " then why is it my ice cubes in the tray are larger than when i filled them with water? Although its been 30 yrs, in high school we were taught water expands when frozen, and contracts when thawed (heated).
...the SIGnificance of inSIGnificance is SIGnificant...
Wow, we have a few unverified, unpeerreviewed websites in opposition. How terrifying a display of academic disagreement!
It'll be called the "The Healthy Lakes Initiative" where by every lake in the United States* will be preserved in Dasani(TM) and Aquafina(TM) bottles. It's part of our ownership society program. * excluding Ohio, Florida, Wyoming, and California (now that it has a republican governor)
Wha?? what about ice core samples and data taken from other sources like trees? Judgement is being made on much more than a hundred years of data. The fact is that ice that is tens of thousands of years old is currently melting. It hasn't been this hot for tens of thousands of years.
u re1/
If it has to kill us to do so then so be it.
If you want to die, fine!
I am just pissed about you killing me at the same time. It is amazing that there are people who still believe nothing is wrong.
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0409/feat
> ok dumb question here; how does the arctic melting
> cause flooding?
> It's a giant chunk of ice floating in water.
Ever hear of Greenland? Its icecap is not floating on water.
(The "green" part may be old Viking propaganda, but the "land" part is true enough.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Guess all those meteorologist out there who have tracking the global temp averages moving up must be smoking crack then.
And all those glaciers that are melting in the Andes mountains, the Himalayas, and Alaska are just a coincedence.
And the rise in ocean temperatures across the globe. Guess it mus be faulty equipment.
Environmental scientist take samples from all over the globe and try to get an accurate picture of what's happening.
And the data they use go back a lot farther than 100 years.
~X~
~X~
The Barbarians of Halas are glad it's finally defrosting.
The claims of a round earth are nothing more that a main stream media hype of one guys opinion to try to invoke fear in the general population.
Anyone can single out and focus on one area of the planet and come to a conclusion that would sound devastating if it really did apply to the whole planet.
Tell that to these guys:
m l
.... it failed because the weather conditions were too cold and bitter to continue.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/531/5438282.ht
They planned a trip for more than 2.5 years to highlight global warming, and
The water level stays the same as the ice melts.
This is because the ice displaces as much water as it weighs = the amount of water it turns into when it melts
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
Last time I was there in the summer, swarms of sparrow-sized mosquitoes feasted on people and small animals. Maybe fewer of those puddles will alleviate the insect problem without using evil chemicals ;)
Look up archimedes principle or buoyancy. Im surprised you didnt learn this in school. :)
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
That link tries to make you print the article. The idiocy was on my part, not the web sites. Here is a proper link LINK
Sorry if that annoyed anybody.
The best is the enemy of the good
Maybe but studies on the Isle Of Wight glacier would seem to conclude that rather than causing water to expand upwards tiny temperature changes simply depress the sea floor more and exert a greater pressure on the water lower down.
The floating ice shelves off Antarctica and the floating Arctic ice shelf melting wouldn't raise sea levels at all. If the ice on the Antarctic land mass and Greenland were to all melt, sea levels would rise 500 feet.
Such drastic melting is a long ways away, and I think the problem will be solved long before things become critical, either by man's ingenuity if civilized progress continues, or by a nuclear winter.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Before you assert categorically that global warming is anthropogenic, you have to explain why the data that shows it's a natural phenomenon do not apply. There are ample oxygen isotope data that indicate the interglacials have had a 100,000 year cycle for at least the past million years. We weren't around in any significant numbers for the last 9 interglacials that have preceeded this one. Why is this interglacial anthropogenic when it's on the same cycle as the previous 9 interglacials?
What's truly astounding is the massively increasing level of outright propaganda on the subject. The scientists appear to be being left behind and the propagandists (sponsored by private industry) are taking over the show.
Propaganda isn't the sole province of partisan politicians. Arthur Eddington was convinced Chandra's theory that black holes could exist was wrong and he browbeat anyone who disagreed with him. It wasn't until Eddington died in 1944 that any progress on black holes was possible. There's a story about Shapely erasing data that disproved his hypothesis that the Milky Way was the whole universe. At the time, Shapely was the director of Harvard's observatory. The point is, just because some scientist believe something to be true doesn't necessarily mean it is - no matter how reputable the scientist is.
You might counter "isn't it better to act than to wait until we're sure?" The answer is "it depends on the cost of acting and being right vs. the cost of acting and being wrong." Moreover, you have to know what to do if you choose to act. Don't look to climate models for guidance - they're not worth much. The salient quote:
So, you don't trust the "MSM"
But your linkage indicates you trust "Junkscience.com" creator Steve Milloy. Tobacco lobbyist Steve Milloy.
If A is right, but we follow B, There will be some effect. Well, for argument's sake lets accept it to be bad. It will be a range, from mildly bad to fucked.
PS: No one knows how bad it will be. Theres still a range of possibilities
If A is right and we follow A, We might still be fucked. Maybe not as bad as the worst case above, but still resource constrained = less progress = bad. Also maybe its too late, and we cant avoid above possibility.
If A is right, there are other options than following either. For instance, mitigation is one of those options. Might mitigation be a better direction ?
If A is wrong and we follow B, we're ok. Yup.
If A is wrong and we follow A, we're ok. Not quite. Those who didnt follow A will have a huge economical advantage at this point.
Now, is the decision still clear ?"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
I wouldn't say the climatologists are particularly foolish. I am a meteorologist. Many aspects of meteorology are largely misunderstood by the media and general public. The concept of "global warming" is one of the most common misunderstandings.
Without a doubt, the climate of the Earth is rapidly changing. Records show this very clearly. This is not a point for debate.
Also there is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing. Once again, records of this show the change very clearly. This is not up for debate.
The problem comes up when showing a link between the two and establishing causation. It is impossible to deny that human activities change the atmosphere and have some effect on the weather and climate. The actual amount of effect, however, is unknown. There are many cycles which naturally occur in the weather and in the climate. While some of these cycles last only a few months or a few years, such as ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), some cycles may last decades or longer. We are aware of cycles such as ENSO because it only takes a few years for an El Nino to transition to a La Nina (which actually lasts longer than the El Nino phase) and back into an El Nino. There are probably many other cycles in the climate that we are not even aware of. Keeping this in mind, it is entirely possible that we are merely in one phase of a naturally occurring cycle which will reverse itself at some point.
Many factors play a role in the climate around the Earth. These include the atmospheric composition, albedo, ocean circulation, solar output, and many other things. While changes in the atmosphere can cause climate change, changes in these other factors may enhance or oppose the changes. One of the most famous climate changes of the recent past was the little ice age. This period of cooling wasn't caused by human activity. Instead, it is believed that solar output decreased and had a very significant effect on the Earth's climate.
During much of the Earth's past, the Earth has been dominated by either tropical or polar climates. The period of balance we are in right now is actually somewhat unusual. Given the history of the Earth, it is hardly unreasonable to expect the climate would once again trend toward one of the two extremes. This has occurred for many millions of years without any influence of humans. There is no reason to expect that this behavior would cease because humans now inhabit the Earth.
Global warming is a very misleading term. There are many questions about how global climate change, if caused by humans, would actually occur. People have even speculated about possible global cooling. One theory, which some evidence seems to dispute, suggests that "global warming" will cause an increase in clouds. The increased albedo from the clouds will counteract the warming and might even cause cooling. This theory is disputed, but is one of many theories about how climate change, if caused by humans, might play out.
None of these arguments are meant to say we shouldn't scale back emissions. While we don't know if human activities are a major player in global climate change, we also don't know that they aren't playing a huge role in it. Furthermore, it is in our interests to minimize our changes to the environment and to the atmosphere because the theory of humans causing global climate change is plausible. It is in everyone's interest to reduse emissions, anyways, because many of the chemicals entering our atmosphere and hydosphere are toxic. I'm all for finding cleaner sources of energy and for cutting back on human activities such as clearing forested areas.
There are plenty of good reasons to reduce emissions and protect our environment without resorting to scare tactics. While you may have found an example of a "climatologist" making fallacious arguments, many of the climatologists disputing "global warming" caused by human activities aren't all that crazy.
It certainly is happening. There are various seasonal cycles, glaciation cycles and others we dont know about because our history doesnt go back far enough. The neocene should be over by now, the next ice age is due. So we have no idea what to expect... its been 12000 years since the end of the pliestocene.
So all that means the Earth was never constant. There were forests in Saudia, a great desert where forests are currently, a lush ecosystem in the middle of the Antarctica. Surely humans didnt change that, we didnt exist. We only very recently became powerful enough to make big changes in the global system, but since its all constantly changing so much, our effected changes are lost. Think of the Tsunami. Could we do that? That was weather dear friend, it showed us how our effects are completely dwarfed by mother Natures'.
I dont think we can make lakes disappear yet. The greatest change we have been able to make is putting dams on rivers, and the heat of cities raising its temperatures by 2 celsius. Apart from that, things have always been changing, and will always be. My hometown used to get 10ft snow every winter 'back in the days', while now it didnt snow for a good 5 years straight. Legend has it that its always been getting warmer there, and such temperatures are to be expected.
Its certainly Global Warming, but not manmade.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Of course, if the swimming pool were truly empty, the sumo wrestler would simply make a large crater in the bottom, kind of analogous to an asteroid hitting Earth. ;-)
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
...global warming won't kill us. Because we'll wisen up? Nah. But there's simply not enough reserves to go around. Positive estimates suggest we have 50 years left of oil reserves, with maybe another 50 running on coal (assuming we have to replace all oil with coal). After that, we might want to polluate as much as we like, but there's simply not any left to go around. Geologically speaking, we're burning up the reserves of millions of years during a few short centuries. When that's done, you're going to want all the warmth you can get.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So, if the Greenland glaciers are melting, then there is a lot of "new" land available for use. This land is owned by the government of Denmark? Can you buy from them? Do you have to be a Danish citizen? How does one emmigrate to Denmark? How does one become a Danish Real-estate agent? How do you Market retirement homes and estates in Greenland?
Come on people, opportunity is beating down the door! Less wailing and gnashing of teeth and more ambition is what you need.
The fact that we are seeing these trends over 100 years is precisely the problem. Natural climate change doesn't happen that rapidly.
With the notable exception that not very many climatologists think global warming is detached from human activities.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Antarctica goes through cycles every 100,000 years
This is the worst argument I've ever heard, and opponents of global warming just keep citing it, over and over, often associated with the Vostok ice core data
The resolution on that graph is a little over a thousand years. The most dramatic change on the graph is 20 degrees over 10,000 years. The arctic and antarctic have changed 5-7 degrees in the past *200 years*, and the rate seems to be accelerating. Of this 5-7 degrees, about half of it has occurred in the past 50 years alone. At the current rate (ignoring things like the rapidly expanding industrialization of China), it would implement that fast 10,000 year change in 250 years.
Furthermore, the Vostok cores drive home an additional point: The temperature is almost always correlated with CO2 concentraions. CO2 concetrations are rising rapidly, and completely predictably. We consume >80bbl per day; that's 12.72 trillion liters, which is about 10 trillion kilograms. Assuming heptane as the average length, that's 7 carbons and 16 hydrogens, about 63% carbon, so 6.3 trillion kilograms of carbon per day (i.e., 6.3e12 kg CO2). In 50 years, that's 1.15e17 kg CO2. The mass of the entire atmosphere is 5.3e18kg, and a current (already high) 0.0353 percent CO2, that's 1.87e15 kg CO2. I.e., at our current rate alone, we would put *61 times* more CO2 from oil alone into our atmosphere in the next 50 years then are in our atmosphere currently.
Now, if you want to look at the balance of how quickly that CO2 will get eaten up and compares to natural generation, we can do that calculation, too - I just wanted to point out the fact that the amount of CO2 we're adding is really quite huge in comparison to what's in our atmosphere.
Ok, well, what if there's some rapid changes in historic temperature that are too high resolution to show up on the Vostok cores? We have much more detailed methods for the past two thousand years - here's the graph for that period
Any questions?
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
Um No. You have misread your map.
The Antarctic icecap is in two pieces: East and West. The West is much warmer,
and does seem to be melting faster in recent years. If it melts completely sea levels rise by about 6 metres (20 feet). Melting the East antarctic icecap would eb a lot harder -- it's much colder and higher and further from the sea -- but if it happened sea levels rise about 60m (200 feet).
junkscience.com is run by steven milloy. Steven milloy was a lobbyist who was paid by Phillip Morris to create a similar "group" to put forth the idea that second hand smoke is harmless.
Now he has this site up, and though he refuses to disclose his funding, he has in the past received money from oil company interests to lobby for them and do PR for them.
This space available.
Now imagine this happening over a large period of time... we have these things called ice ages which punctuate the normal warmer periods.
Imagine if the dinosaurs had had knee-jerk media, they would have been spazzing about global cooling as the ice ages approached. (You'll also note that the prevailing theories on the dinosaur extinction do not concern themselves with ice ages as a cause, anymore).
I'm too lazy to look up references, but I recall reading that the average temperature over the lifetime of the Earth is significantly warmer than it is now, and that we are currently in a "little" ice age.
All that said, I'm all for clean, efficient, and renewable energy, not dumping toxins into the environment, and so on, but the alarmist media is sort of annoying... all creatures change the environment around them (hell, beavers have a dramatic impact on their ecosystems!), species of plants come and go, and everything adapts. If mother nature doesn't like what we're doing, eventually humanity will die out, and other creatures that are more adapted to the new landscape will take our place. This doesn't really bother me terribly.
I truly believe it is arrogent to think we understand the natural world so fully based on such a short record of observation. People need to learn to be responsible with the environment based on the merits, not based on knee-jerk reactionism in the media.
<end-rant>That means more rain for the rest of us....
Sure, the CO2 might rize some, but then our trees will grow faster and we'll have more big ones...and then they'll be fussing about not enough C02 in the atmosphere and how we're all going to freeze in 100 years.
I think its just a cycle, we have no evidence to conclusively say "this trend will continue".
Trying to increase energy efficiency has the negative effect of taking more energy. I still think we need to be energy efficient, but we need to find a cheaper way to conserve energy. It shouldn't take more energy to save more energy...that defeats the whole purpose.
Fuck water and life, but dude, weed is necessary to "have a good time".
Its good to see someone else slag off this idiot. Some people think because he has a beard and is a tv celeb he is somehow the definitive voice on the environment, even when miost of his ideas (like backing nuclear power as i recall) just show he is losing the plot bigtime.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Everytime something changes on the earth somebody's trying to blame humans -- the green-house effect, acid rain, etc. etc. Even without humans on it the earth would continue to change. I think environmentalism has become too much of a religion today.
We humans are adaptable. Let's work with the earth, for the better, and not get all bent out of shape about everything the earth does.
I'm a skeptic of man-made global warming, but I'm willing to listen to evidence of anything, and then weigh the evidence myself. We have fairly precise global data going back only a couple of decades. We have reasonably precise data going back less than 50 years. We have some data from scattered weather stations going back perhaps a century before that. And most of the data relied upon has been from very regional items like ice and tree cores. Different teams have reported different results for the data; Mann, et al, is the most famous, but von Storch, et al, and Moberg, et al, have both produced results with much more variability.
The trouble is that we simply don't have clear ideas of the climate over much of the world for the past 1000 years in precise terms. Satellites are just now getting the capability to accurately measure atmospheric temps at different altitudes.
I'm all for making changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as long as they are not induced by panic (such as requiring massive cuts to emissions in too short a feasible time), and they are not sending the entire world economy into a downward spiral. Nuclear power is the most promising method right now IMHO, but if you can get wind or tidal or solar to be as inexpensive, reliable, and long-term, then by all means implement it. I, for one, think the massive wind farms that I periodically see off the highways look majestic.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If all of the ice melted, it would cause a rise in sea level of only about 250 feet, so please stop spreading your FUD. :)
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.
Sounds like half of Slashdot.
My point wasn't to say that humans aren't causing climate change. I believe they are, too. There is, however, quite a bit of uncertainty about how much of an effect human activities have on the climate. There's a lot of reports coming out of imminent doom because of "global warming," and that's what I'm arguing against.
There's a lot of possible effects of global climate change due to an increased greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect works because carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and radiates it out. Some of this radiation is radiated back toward the surface. There are many other greenhouse gases in play, too. Carbon dioxide isn't a particularly potent greenhouse gas compared to water vapor. The reason a big deal is made about carbon dioxide, however, is because it has a much longer residency time in the atmosphere than water vapor. A warmer Earth due to an increased greenhouse effect may, however, lead to greater evaporation and a greater amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. This is one concern that's worth mentioning.
It's probably incorrect to refer to this form of global climate change as global warming. What it is doing, instead, is unmoderating the Earth's climate.
It's a fact that the north atlantic drift is slowing. That's an ocean current that is a branch of the gulf stream. This current keeps the British Isles warmer than they would otherwise be for the latitude they are at. It is believed that the melting of some of the ice caps will release large amounts of fresh water into the ocean, changing its composition, and slowing or cutting off the north atlantic drift. This means that instead of warming, that part of Europe will become cooler.
On the other hand, many people believe (with some uncertainty here) that the center of some continents will become drier. I live on the central plains of the USA, which is already arid. Should climate change occur quickly, it may have a significant effect on agriculture in this part of the USA.
My two points here, and in my previous comment, were not to say global climate change isn't occuring or that humans aren't causing some of it. My point was to say that the rate of climate change caused by human activity isn't really known and to refer to the climate change as "global warming" isn't really correct.
More important is the temperature anomaly (which is global and indisputable)
No it is not indisputable. God, this is so tiresome having to show the same points over and over again. When you actually look at the evidence for global warming it is not very convincing, at least to an unbiased rational observer only concerned with facts. A global tempurature rise of 1 deg celsius over an entire century is nothing. Maybe next century we will have Global cooling of 1 degree based on the same kinds of measurements. Also, the temperature measuring stations around the world are not accurate enough to show such a small temperature change. And when you consider the modern urban heat island effect everything just falls apart. Which is why for many years during my lifetime Global Cooling is what we worried about. A lot of people thought we were headed toward another ice age. And no, it's not because the whole world was stupid at the that time. BTW, if this anomaly were due to global warming, then why haven't all lakes dried up? Although I am not certain how a infinitesimally higher than "average" temperature can cause lakes to dry up anywhere. Wouldn't lack of rain cause that?
While I do think Global Warming would be great (I live in a cold climate), and much better than Global Cooling, there isn't much that can be deduced from our very shaky evidence. I am no more convinced by said evidence (and yes I have actually looked at the data offered as proof) than by the evidence that was presented for Global Cooling. Perhaps 25 years from now everyone will be laughing about our silly belief in Global Warming since it is so obvious (except to rich oil comany executives of course) to everyone that we are on our way to another ice age.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Ah, but those things normally happen over geological timeframes (tens of thousands of years), not decades.
Jeremy
Uh-huh. This is how the wacko left pulls this off: they get a few of their idiot minions with online Ph.D.s (or some isolated rejects from the tenure pool) to call themselves scientists. Then they completely ignore scientific method and start polluting the scientific pool with untestable hypotheses. Soon, it's difficult to get a consensus "among all scientist" because a percentage of them are not even legit scientists.
Oh, almost forgot; they have almost no original thoughts, preferring to copy from others. :o)
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
The Africa problem BTW has bugger all to do with global warming. US/EU agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs are the cause and at least the EU is changing it's agricultural policies so that farmers are paid for doing nothing instead of being paid for producing. It has also pretty much zero rated African imports.
Some of Africa's problems of growing enough food is due to climate changes though not all. Ethiopia for instance used to be a breadbasket producing more than enough food to feed the population and thus were net exporters. But draughts the last few years have decimated farms and they are now net food importers. One place climate change wasn't responsible for a decrease in food production though is Zimbabwe. Like Ethiopia, Zimbabwe used to be a net food exporter and was also considered a breadbasket. When President Robert Mugabe forced mostly white farmers off their farms and gave farms to his supporters, the farms went to waste and now the land won't produce nearly as much food as it used to if the farms are even farmed. But many have been left to fallow.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm usually not one to comment on people's grammar
And I'm not usually one to feed a troll. However, a search will show that I have, in fact, never before used that expression on slashdot, present case excepted. Perhaps you have confused me for one of the billy goats gruff.
Clouds over sunny places! SoCal has never had this many clouds in a summer in all of history. Just this week we've averaged less than 5 days of full sun, which is abnormal for the season. Californians like their sun? Well then stop driving Hummers and prevent global warming!
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Oh, almost forgot; they have almost no original thoughts, preferring to copy from others. :o)
Zimbabwe's agricultural production has plummeted since the farms were "reclaimed" from their white owners, because they knew how to handle crop rotations, plan the planting, irrigation, and harvest, and how to deal with various pests that would invade.
Blame President Robert Mugabe for Zimbabwe's problems, going from a net food exporter to an importer. I agree more land should be in the hands of Blacks but forcing White farmers off their land isn't/wasn't the way to do it. Instead what could of been done was to have the government buy any farm being sold by Whites then allow Blacks to homestead, perhaps those who worked on the farms. On top of this the former White farmers could be hired to train new farmers. Instead what Mugabe did was force Whiter farmers out then gave the land to his supporters who didn't know how to farm.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Regardless of global warming or not, you wouldn't sit in your closed garage with the car running for any length of time, would you? For the time being we are living in this enclosed atmosphere with million and millions of vehicle motors filling our breathing space with the same pollution that would kill you in your garage, plus all the idustrial pollution. It's only a matter of time before this catches up with us, one way or another. Even if the globe isn't warming, something still needs to be done about it. These lakes disappearing may only be an early indication of something far worse to come.
And sea levels rising because of ice cap and glacier melting isn't a problem, the problem is the massive amount of fresh water released into the polar areas and disrupting ocean currents that have a great impact on weather patterns. I'm sure things woould be much different in the NE US and Europe if the Gulf Stream slowed to a stop, or even reversed itself.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
Ok that's it. I'm buying myself an aircar
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
It seems I was over by a factor of 3. I remembered the number of feet and reported it as metres. A quick google for "icecap volume" found this in a course handout from a course at UIUC.
Most of Earth's ice is found in Antarctica, where permanent ice caps cover approximately 0.5% of Earth's total surface area and are 3km thick, on average.
[ Earth's oceans cover roughly 70% of our planet, to an average depth of 4.0km. Assuming that water and ice have roughly the same density, estimate by how much sea level would rise if global warming were to cause the Antarctic ice caps to melt. Comment on the effects the melting of the Arctic ice cap (which floats upon the Arctic ocean) would have on sea level (hint: you do not need to know how large the Arctic ice cap is to answer this question). ]
The calculation is then easy. If you melt this icecap it is spread 140 times thinner, so will be about 20m thick,
I should remark that no one expects significant melting of the East Antarctic icecap in the forseeable future.
How long will the water needed to irrigate the Mojave last? Aquifers throughout the world are being pumped dry as it is, water is withdrawn faster than it is being replaced. The "Wall Street Journal" among others are calling water "blue gold".
Water, water everywhere -- but will there be enough to drink?
Falcon FalconShould there be a Law?
unpredictable weather,
LOL. What a hoot. Damn this Global Warming! Isn't someone going to think of the children?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Reliable? Are you kidding? Those russians had super-thermometers that were accurate to +/- .01 degrees celsius even back in 1892. They were digital too and hooked up to fancy computers with dual core processors so that the data could be automatically logged. It's not like we were relying on some guy to actually have to check the meniscus in a fluid filled glass cylinder everyday, making sure that his results were accurate to .01 degrees so that people a hundred years hence would not see his errors as some kind of subtle climate change that would eventually destroy all life on the planet.
BTW, can anyone point me to some atmospheric thermometers that are accurate enough to show me temperature trends of less than 1 degree celsius in my own house? I have been looking for one for years. Seems like the most accurate ones are total immersion glass-mercury ones in long graduated cylinders that only measure in a 20 degree range or so. Hardly practical.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Glaciers or the tops of ice caps...
They're finding permafrost is melting. What's usually all year round ice beneath the lakes is melting. Lakes are getting bigger because of other areas of ice melting, and it might be the cause of the warming of permafrost. They at least appear to be symptoms of the same overall problem, a change in climate.
To quote from this article.
"As temperatures rise, ice and snow melt and put more water into Arctic lakes." and "They now believe additional lake surface brought on by melting is just the first part of the process. In the southern parts of the Siberia study area, the permafrost itself is believed to be melting."
So perhaps an accurate headline might have been Arctic Warming Is Causing Lakes To Grow Bigger, And The Drying Up Of Lakes Due To The Melting Of Permafrost. The Former May Be Causing The Latter.
Their original headline still appears perfectly accurate to me though and, while I'm no journalist, it also seems more effective.
Slashdot is propigating the lies of the left now... Proof? When I opened up the "read more", I got an add before the comments saying that Microsoft Windows had a lower "Total cost to operate" Than Linux...
I'm all for competative advertising, etc, BUT...
Personally, whoever is in the marketing department that selects the ads to run, should be fired.
Just my $.02 worth...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
The primitive man who first discovered fire could not have known that his discovery would eventually destroy all life on the planet. Or did he? Was there someone else with him?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Of course, as a counterpoint, cattle rangeland, as opposed to plowed wheatfields, can help slow global warming [meristem.com]. Plowed lands can send stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while well-grazed lands can actually help return carbon dioxide to the ground. Balance is the key here. So help save the earth, eat a steak every once in a while.
The problem with this is that cattle emit a lot of methane, CH4, which is a greater greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, CO2. So while grasslands used for a range for cattle may soak up or store more CO2 the cattle will be releasing more methane.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's real funny. I laugh. But anyway if we don't have the water any more to save LA from certain destruction, myabe they won't care so much.
To be ignored by the yanks is bliss.
Now if only we can directly pipeline all our oil to China they'll get off our backs once and for all.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Also we've got plenty of water and unused land. Though the land and water that's convient for mankind's use is rapidly being rendered unusable in many areas.
Yes, there's plenty of water but only a small part of that is fresh water. What sources there are of fresh water are rapidly being depleted. And with global warming some places will loose their fresh water. For instance those living on or near Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa depend on a glacier there for their water and the same is true in Peru, yet when global warming has melted those glaciers there goes these people's fresh water.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I prefer to get my vitamin b complex from yeast, especially in a bottle of beer or wine. Gosh I need to start brewing again.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I don't know about any proteins, but I'm about 90% sure the amino acid lyseine doesn't occur outside of animals.
According to this, L-Lysine vegetables do contain L-Lysine.
I noticed the "L" and am wondering if Lysine comes in "L"efthanded and Righthanded versions... I guess not, I first googled "L-Lysine" and got a bunch of results then I tried "r-Lysine" and didn't get any.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The Inuits are suffering from more than just Global Warming, they also suffer from PCB and other toxins:
Consensus Statement: Atlantic Coast Contaminants Workshop 2000
Participants reported on potential endocrine-related effects and impacts in wildlife and humans resulting from contaminant- and noncontaminant-related factors. Natural ecologic influences such as marine mammal strandings were discussed. Methods and biomarkers of endocrine-related impacts were presented including those based on inducible genes; clinical parameters and population monitoring of bottlenose dolphins; probable risk assessment of reproductive effects; comparative biochemistry of species-dependent, Ah receptor-based assays; and contaminant interaction and mechanisms of thyroid hormone-dependent processes. Possible contaminant-mediated impacts on alterations in population health, reproduction, steroid hormone homeostasis and/or immunologic alterations were outlined for cetaceans from the Atlantic Ocean; native Inuit peoples from northern Quebec, Canada; bald eagles from the northeastern United States; St. Lawrence beluga whales; polar bears from Svalbard, Norway; scaup ducks from Alaska or Canada wintering in the northeastern United States; and a variety of birds, fish, and aquatic mammals from Arctic, Atlantic, and other marine ecosystems. The utility of humans and aquatic wildlife as sentinels and surrogates of endocrine-related effects resulting from contaminant exposure was also discussed.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Now that Inuits finally get Nunavut they're in danger of loosing it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's real funny. I laugh. But anyway if we don't have the water any more to save LA from certain destruction, myabe they won't care so much.
Didn't you know Big Water wants to build pipelines from British Columbia to California?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Thanks, though I knew it dealt with handedness I didn't know Latin was used for it. I googled "D-lysine" as you recommended and got two results, though I didn't find it on either page, and while it was there on the cached version of the second page it wasn't on the first. Unfortunately it's in French and it's been way too long since I've used French as well as didn't learn enough when I did learn it to understand the webpage.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There has only been a small (0.5, 1cm) rise in seawater levels
Damn, if the floating ice shelves really were melting, surely the sea-levels would rocket!
You know of course water takes more volumn when solid than when liquid don't you? If not take a glass of water, freeze it and watch what happens. The reason sealevel would rise is because of melting glaciers.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I have a question since your a geoligist or whatnot. If global warming really is happening, why is it still 60 degrees in New York City on June 05? That's colder than I can remember.
While the global average temperature can and is rising that doesn't mean it will rise everywhere. An area may have a microclimate where it's cooler instead of warmer.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
for many years during my lifetime Global Cooling is what we worried about. A lot of people thought we were headed toward another ice age.
I'd say much of the worry or concern about global cooling was because of the Nuclear Winter.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. Climatologists accurately accounted for the effect of urban heat islands on temperature data more than a decade ago. Mean global temperature still shows substantial increases. In fact, the urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology.
2. Climate change isn't just evident in increasing temperatures. If it were an isolated record like that then, yeah, I might be skeptical too. However, record after record from biological, atmospheric, hydrologic, oceonographic, and cryospheric sources show effects consistent with increased temperatures, particularly in the Arctic.
3. The lakes discussed in this article, on which my advisor is lead author, have very little to do with precipitation. They are maintained by underlying permafrost which prevents the water from infiltrating beyond the active layer. When this permafrost melts, the lake goes away. You might want to note that increased permafrost temperatures and decreased extent are two of the records I mentioned above.
4. However poor you think the state of climatology is right now, you have to admit that we know a whole lot more than we did in the 50's and 60's when global cooling was de rigueur. We have vastly more data from both observed and proxy records as well as much more accurate climate models. Not perfect, but a whole heck of a lot better.
Look, you'd be hard pressed to find a reputable climatologist anywhere in the world who will say that global temperature increases aren't pretty ironclad. And don't give me any conspiracy theory bs. If a scientist found credible evidence that global warming was not, in fact, occurring it would be published and he or she would become a scientific rockstar.
When the Dubya regime rejects the science behind global warming in order to justify rejection of the Kyoto
In no way, shape or form am I a supporter of him, but when Dubya rejected Kyoto it wasn't because he rejected the science behind it. Instead he said it would put the US at a disadvantage with India and China, so I did some research and found out he was right. Kyoto puts no emissions limits on either country. The US puts out about 22 tons of CO2 per person whereas both China and India are closer to 2 tons per person. With a population of 300M the US puts out about 6.6B tons of CO2. With more than 2B people together if both China and India tripled their emissions to 6 tons, the US would have to eliminate all emissions just to stay at the same level of emission globally.
Now as for nuclear power, while I am against them, if a way could be found so storage of nuclear wastes like Dubya is trying to do at Yucca Mt isn't needed I might go along with nuclear power, oh I'd also demand that government NOT subsidize the industry which it currently does. Instead I'd rather see government push for conservation and alternative energy sources like PV and wind, and let the free market work.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The average temp in the arctic has risen 1.2 degress per DECADE. Truly ignorance is bliss. Its people like yourself who make excuses like, you don't understand climate change and you think the instruments scientists are using aren't accurate. Burry your head in the sand like most people do. :::rolls eyes:::
Whatever you do, don't buy coastal property ;/
So, all that CO2 in the atmosphere may be saving our butts from getting frozen off.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
Water dripping on a stone. We may not be able to make as big individual dramatic events as the tsunami (though I think the world's nuclear weapons put together could cause a far bigger one quite easily, if we were willing to) but humans clearly have the ability to change climates on a dramatic scale over time. Most of Europe was covered with forest, in a matter of centuries humans transformed it completely into a landscape of grasslands, bogs etc.
I am trolling
Now, everyone knows there's no polar bears in Antarctica, so _that_ must have been caused by ice-drilling Emperor penguins ...
What a long, strange trip it's been.
It still hasn't rained a significant amount in South Australia this year, and it's now winter. Fuck! I'm still wandering around in shorts and a T-shirt.
...
But of course, this has nothing to do with global climate change
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I've been to Australia (NSW/Queensland border) a few times in the last few years as I have relatives there, and I second the claim that the weather is now extremely weird there, including lack of rain in the wet areas (Australia has rainforest as well as desert).
Not good for a country that depends partly on agriculture. IIRC there was a farmer being interviewed on ABC news who commented that his three year old son had never seen rain.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Have a look at the link.
Having 4 times the carbon output of Russia surely means they have the ability to have the most profound effect - and can _lead_ by example. It is only an ignorant person who cannot see the sheer insanity of the pollution the US is creating in comparison to all other countries. Surely being a free democratic nation full of intelligent people, it makes it obvious to try and curb waste and pollution?
If you look at any pollution statistics on the US (even plain garbage) there is no justification for _not_ doing something to reduce it.. and make for a good example..
1. Climatologists accurately accounted for the effect of urban heat islands on temperature data more than a decade ago.
No. They inaccurately accounted for the effect in their favor.
In fact, the urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology.
Argument from Authority. What method is used to alter the raw data to account for an increasing heat island effect over time. How is the ratio of change calculated. I am suspicious of curve fitting. What is the algorithm? I'll take that in C code or psuedo code if you've got it. I've read that it was just by population. Ahem. I hope that is not actually true.
Climate change isn't just evident in increasing temperatures.
Well thank god for that because at some weather stations for some time periods the temperatures actually decreased by quite a bit. I know because as you might have guessed, I browsed through online weather station data for hours. Just for fun. The results are not exactly convincing to a non-believer.
However, record after record from biological, atmospheric, hydrologic, oceonographic, and cryospheric sources show effects consistent with increased temperatures, particularly in the Arctic.
So they were doing these measurements in the 19th century as well? Again, you are not presenting any real falsifiable data. You are just saying that the evidence from all these sources is convincing TO YOU. Forgive me if I am not immediately converted from heretic to believer. How about citing some actual evidence. And not just of Arctic warming. Although that would be a start.
We have vastly more data from both observed and proxy records
Can't disagree with that can I?
as well as much more accurate climate models.
More accurate? How do you test for that exactly? Are the models better at predicting... well something. I guess you would have to recalculate global warming annually from all the available weather station data and see whether the computer model accurately predicts the changes. No matter how accurate the models they still don't prove that human combustion was the cause.
Look, you'd be hard pressed to find a reputable climatologist anywhere in the world who will say that global temperature increases aren't pretty ironclad.
I agree with you. By definition. Any scientist who criticizes the Global Warming religion would be labeled a crank and would soon lose their job. They would no longer be "reputable". It wasn't always that way. Now critics of Global Warming are hard to find. And yet the temperature records have not changed. And there really is no better way to measure temperature changes over hundreds of years. Melting permafrost doesn't prove it anymore than any other local temperature variation would.
While there may be some evidence that is suggestive of a global warming effect in the past century, it is anything but irrefutable. It is anything but ironclad. The debate has been politicized. It isn't even about science anymore. Because most climatologists believe in it does not make it true. Because most people believe in it does not make it true. The case for Global Warming has yet to be proven. The case for Global Warming caused by human combustion and leading to major catastrophy has yet to be proven. And it will never be because it doesn't need to be. Nearly everyone is already convinced of it without evidence. Based merely on a scientific consensus. Why bother gathering more evidence when you can just take a poll?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.