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Earth's Temperature at Highest Levels in 400 Years
thatguywhoiam writes "Congress asked, and the scientists have answered: 'The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer. The
National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the 'recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.'"
dont blame me. i use amd.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
To: Mr. George W. Bush.
Please accept that Global Warming Exists.
Signed,
The rest of the whole damn world.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
I'll start: It was unusually warm at my locale this winter. That's proves global warming.
CNN was reporting on 2,000 years last time I checked. Sensationalism, maybe?
Study: Earth likely hottest in 2,000 years
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
And can we now please take some PRECAUTIONARY ACTIONS?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
It was this hot 400 years ago? Global warming indeed...
Czech language for absolute beginners
Can I have a pink Pony.
damaged by dogma
Merely a flesh wound.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
We-- we didn't listen!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
I'm prepared to be labeled a mindless republican bushite and modded down for this but..
If it currently the warmest it's been in 400 years (or the past few millenia) that means it was this warm 400 years (or a few mllenia) ago. Since obvioulsy it wasn't human generated greenhouse gasses that caused the previous temperature, it does call into question the certianty that human generated greenhouse gasses is causing the current warming.
Now if the scientists can come up with causality for the previous warming periods, such as volcanic or solar activity and we aren't experiencing the same now then that makes more of a case.
all those exploding Dell laptop batteries.
The overall global increase in temperature is around a degree or so.
The earth's climate is cyclical. If you place that 400 year figure next to the age of the earth (say 4+ billion years), it does not seem that significant. Even if it were the warmest the earth has ever been, it does not mean that human activity is the primary cause.
Good luck to all those people living in Arizona and Nevada - you're entering a spiraling heat wave. Once people build up the land with houses and roads, the cars, pollution, and A/C makes the air even hotter.
Oh, and with much of China and India either already a desert or turning into a desert due to deforestation thousands of years ago, it's not going to get any better for them.
The desert is actually spreading too - look at China in google earth and see how much of China is sand, and with hunter/gatherer populations foraging for food and fuel, animals eating every plant that springs up from the earth, and pavement being laid down everywhere to speed rain runoff and reduce the amount of water that saturates the soil - the situation looks bleak.
Seriously, I hate to sound like a tree hugging hippie, but if everyone in the world planted a few trees, I believe we could have a positive impact on the global climate
Thanks. What's the point of posting a story like this now, when everyone who reads slashdot has left work already? Nothing relieves the boredom of work like a good flamefest. Now I have to wait until tomorrow. (read from home? and waste MY precious time?)
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning... It smells like slashdot!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'll bet it's warmer than it was 10,000 years ago, too.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
that perhaps global warming is at least partly due to Earth's natural cycle of events?
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Just imagine being the guy in charge of manning the weather station that has been keeping track of this data for the past several centuries.... Talk about monotonous
little ice age
There was a mini-ice age in the 1700's believed to be related to lower solar activity. All this means is we have returned to pre-mini-ice-age temperatures. I don't know of anyone that does not accept global warming (as in the warming of regions of the earth). I know a lot of people which can't agree on the causes. Temperatures were warmer 1000 years ago. The reason the vikings were so active from Norway was that they had mild temperatures up there, warmer than now. Cyclical Global warming != greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases effect may play a part, but the biggest variable (the sun) is not yet being realistically tracked.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
The 1600s were smack in the middle of the little ice age. The study doesn't say it was this warm 400 years ago. It says that with 400 years worth of data, this is the hottest period observed. Proxy studies and urban heat island effects cloud the results of all such studies. Another way to look at this: The Earth has fully recovered from the Little Ice Age period. Horray! Warmer is far better than colder. The 1600s will go down in European history as among the worst times. Famine from crop failures. Diseases were epidemic.
Okay, I'm indifferent to politics but I do like life on this planet along with intellectual honesty.
How many actual "years" of data do we have? Verified, maybe the last 200-800 years? What about before that?
I don't see how we can look at 250-5000 year block and say with all certaintly what is or will happen on a > 20 million year old planet.
Would anyone accept the fact that within one day my body tempature may be >98.6 degrees? Is that enough considering I have 365 days a year along with a lifetime of >30 years of unknown data?
As a side note, I don't see how brown air is helping humans other than allowing us to travel quickly so I'm in favor of clean fuel alternatives.
The report was championed by a Republican.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That's hot!
http://www.tvacres.com/images/koolaid5b.jpg
It's nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff in this discussion since it's so politically and emotionally charged, but who is the average citizen supposed to trust if both sides are trotting out 'climate experts' to disagree?
Maybe we just have no data for years before that.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Suppose you ask the question: Is X happening?
When a scientist says that a phenomenon "X is probably happening", or "the bulk of the evidence indicates that X is happening", he means "I'm pretty damn sure about it, but because everyting in science is subject to further investigation, I'm open to hear evidence to the contrary."
When a lawyer says that "X is probably happening", or "the bulk of the evidence indicates that X is happening", he means "I haven't the foggiest idea, and I need wiggle room so I don't look like an idiot when someone who knows what he's talking about asks me."
Trouble starts when the two world views are mixed. The scientist hears the bolded words in his part of the speech -- and the politician hears precisely the opposite.
The qualifiers are necessary to the scientist, because they're part of why a theory is explanation falsifiable (and by extension, scientific). Science can't progress except for those areas in which there exists Reasonable Doubt.
The politician hears only the phrases "is probably" (as opposed to certainly), the "bulk of" (as opposed to all of the evidence), and the "indication" (as opposed to conclusive truth pounded out on the table before Judge and Jury) that something is the case. In an adversarial "justice" system, you can't use weasel words, because the holy grail is Proof Beyond A Reasonable Doubt.
And the planet burns because people who don't grok science prefer oratory.
What the hell, the dinosaurs died because they didn't understand science either.
Ok, I am not a scientist, so please bear with me (or just bear me, if need be). But how do they know what the temperature was four hundred years (or longer) ago? How long has it been possible to measure temperature with any degree (no pun intended) of accuracy?
Unprecedented high temperatures in recent history, perhaps. Unprecedented in terms of Earth's history? I'm afraid not. Notice the three sharp spikes occurring at roughly 130,000 year intervals. We started such a rise about 15,000 years ago, right at the expected time if the pattern repeats, but something levelled it off around present-day levels and has kept it there for the last 10,000 years. Whatever cause the levelling-out it wasn't humans, we weren't doing anything on a scale large enough to cause global effects 15,000 years back. If whatever it is stops, I'd expect global temperatures to spike by another 2-3 degrees C, then drop sharply to 4-6 degrees C below "normal".
As has been pointed out by other posters, we're talking about a net increase of one degree in temperature. As has also been pointed out, the earth's climate has natural cycles. The fact is: it's impossible to prove that humans are the cause of this regardless of how much deforestation and fossil-feul burning has occurred--it's basic science: correlation does not equal causation (search Google for "pirates global warming")
While I consider myself to be an environmentalist, I'm opposed to using FUD to scare people into doing the right thing. We oughta stop destroying the environment because we're poisoning ourselves at the local level (and many other valid reasons), not because of a slight warming trend which we may or may not be causing.
All the articles refer to "scientific consensus", not "conclusive proof". May I remind the Slashdot readers that, in the time of Galileo, the "scientific consensus" was that the Earth is the center of the solar system (or is that the universe?).
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
That is nothing compared to the Earth's lifespan, or 4.5 billion years.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
55 Million years ago the artic was a tropical paridise. I'm not saying that man isn't contributing to global warming but I am saying that before man this sort of thing has happend.
Check out this link: Scientists Say Arctic Once Was Tropical
Eating the brains of your enemies does not make you smarter. But it's still fun.
Gringos, sign the Kioto Protocol!
Omar
Ah yes, the infamous hockey stick (the chart). It was what convinced me that global warming was human-caused. Until of course I found that when you put random data into the analysis, you got a hockey stick.
What it comes down to is that more than 200 years ago we didn't have accurate temperature measurement. Everything before that is an educated guess. And the precision necessary to show a fractional degree of change is simply unattainable.
Where are the error bars on the hockey stick? It's shown as if we had exact data for the last 1000 years--which of course we don't.
My tendency is to ignore the guy yelling the loudest.
Meaning it was just as hot (if not more) "several millenia ago", without any help from mankind, and yet it managed to fix itself. Ya think it can do it again?
The Earth is now cooler than it was 4 billion years ago.
If only I had mod points and you weren't an AC.
:x
Okay, I've had enough of this Global Warming shit. It really REALLY just pisses me off now.
l obalwarming.htm
1 2/201235
Good Quick explanation: http://www.whatwouldronaldreagando.com/webpages/g
And I love pointing out that nay-sayers get scientifically cock-blocked: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
... the Ice Age 2 story is real ? I knew it !!!
I will fuck you dead -God
i mean if we are going for standards of proof here, why not insult everyone?
RTFA. The first sentence says 400 years or longer. If you actually read the stories you'll understand why, and get the point that it's hotter than it's been in a long time, and only getting hotter. I have no more patience for these fools who don't have an interest in science or much of anything outside their own little self serving world. They don't read scientific journals, and who hence have no idea how important the global scientific consensus for global warming is. These people don't even give a half a shit literally hundreds of millions of poor people around the world suffer and die from drought, crop failures, and many other near-apocalyptic consequences if global warming is allowed to continue. People often make crazy analogies to Nazis. But seriously, if half of what the entire global scientific community warns of comes to pass, then the ignorant and uncaring people doing nothing to prevent global warming are leading to a holocaust that will be literally tens, maybe as much as a hundred times worse than the holocaust in terms of suffering and lives lost. We're talking about tens to hundreds of millions dying due to climate change. The resistance to accepting the global warming isn't based on scientific logic, or wisdom, or conscience, or anything that could be called credible or ethical. It's just sheer intellectual laziness and choosing to let someone else die because people are unwilling to even slightly inconvenience oneself. That's shameful. The miniscule but well funded dissent is also backed by the fossil fuel industry and people who think their paychecks depend on perpetuating this tragedy so long as it falls on someone else. It's disgusting, tragic, shameful, and represents the worst in human nature.
Uhh, you are either stupidly or intentionally misinterpreting a very simple statement. You pick.
"It is the warmest it has been in the last 400 million years" does not mean "400 million years ago it was even warmer." It means exactly what it says. The report says that it is certain that the past 400 million years have all been cooler than now; before that, they were *probably* cooler for a few millenia, but it gets harder to tell. Farther back than the last few millenia, it is even harder to tell.
Please leave your particular country's ideological distinctions out of this scientific debate that they have nothing to do with. Also please acknowledge that there is more to the world than your narrow-minded battle against an ideological perspective that you happen disagree with.
Please at least learn to control your memes to the point that they no longer lead you to infer things that clearly aren't being implied. A phrase like "Please accept that Global Warming Exists." does not imply a belief that ""global warming" is conclusively linked to man [or] oil", or even a preference for left-wing politics.
Your little political campaign has taken your bigotry to the point where you sign yourself off as "The Voice of Fairness and Reason", which is so intellectually dishonest that my dog just read this page and went and took a shit on an encyclopedia in one of his usual crude but poignant symbolic gestures.
Signed,
Fuck You
PS: In case you missed it, I was implying that my dog is smarter than you.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /06/national-academies-synthesis-report/
ENOUGH! For years I have remained hidden -- For years, my love of the sword, and my love of the pancake have remained silent, brooding, simmering quietly on the griddle of my soul. But now, the edges have become bubbly, the rim, golden brown. The day of reckoning is upon us.
Yesterday, the calls two summer sparrows after my morning tea and pancake, I had discussed this very issue with my wife. "Wife!" I exclaimed, pancake in mouth, "I am tired of this 'global warming' nonsense! Do they not see it? Do they not SEE how improperly cooked pancakes are to blame? ENOUGH! ENOUGH with this asshattery and douchebaggery!"
She said nothing.
Her face, motionless, the color of faint rouge applied to alabaster skin.... her eyes, gently weeping...knowing that I, the Pancake Ninja, must once again resume my quest. The quest...for the perfect pancake.
Leaping from my chair, and shoving the table away from me, I stormed out of my dojo, sword in hand.
Today, my friends, is the day of reckoning. Soon the world will know that the rise of global temperature can be directly correlated with the expansion of IHOP restaraunts.
Shall I prepare a graph? Shall I put my quill to ink, and expose this unspeakable, unscientific douchebaggery for what it is? Will it bring me closer to karaguchi ah-nowakadesu....the perfect pancake?
I do not know when I will again see my wife, and see the cherry blossoms fall to the steps of my dojo. My sword is my guide.
Ever heard of the small state of California? And what's that software company in Redmond, WA again? Not that anybody uses a computer or reads /. in either place.
By the way, the OP must be right, it's about 100 here in Walnut Creek and in the high 90s in the South Bay.
The National Academy of Sciences panel stated that ""recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia." Moreover they have "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years." What's the cause? The panel concluded that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." This should help answer the critics that claim there is some controversy, even among scientists, that human activities affect global climate. Even more notably, this panel report appears to be endorsed by a bipartisan Congressional committee, headed by a Republican, Joe Barton, who said "There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change." It seems the scientific community has finally spoken loudly enough for the politicians to begin listening. So, Bush has always said the research is inconclusive. Will he finally allow us to act on this comprehensive report from the NAS?
400 years ago was smack in the middle of the little ice age. so are we a little warmer than a mild ice age, and why are some people aparently so obsessed with having a static gloabal climate? if you are follower of the religion of science then you need a dynamic global climate to create life. alegedly. if you follow another religion then you need Marduk or something.
lose != loose
You have as much fairness and reason as fox is fair and balanced.
Look, I have no doubt that even if you were transported in a time machine and shown all the termperatures over the millimiums and were moved into the future and new research that proved it, you would still deny it.
A simple fact check would be that the ALL of glaciers that existed before christ are now in retreat. In fact, the only one undergoing growth is the center of antartica. On the edges it is falling off at rates never documented (or shown in side research). That alone should be enough to warrent more than interest in this subject. As to a cycle, yes, it is possible that there is a cycle of more than 60K years. OTH, there is no evidence to support that at all.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Look, I DO believe in global warming. That said, crap headlines like this are, well, crap.
The fact that this point is warmer then some other point in some arbitrary number of years means nothing. There have been literally countless points in time when you can point backwards and say that it has not been so warm for 400+ years. Any idiot can see that pointing out that we are in another of such periods where the last local max with 400 years ago is thoroughly and completely normal and uninteresting.
Flouting stupid statistics like this is what makes smart people believe that global warming is a crap political ploy by environmentalist/anti-globalist/leftists/exc. If your goal is to divide, crap like this is a great idea as it assures everyone that the opposing side are idiots who couldn't tell the truth if their life depended upon it. If your goal is to build a consensus and spawn action, throwing out junk science is a waste of everyone's time.
There are a lot of good reasons to believe that the Earth is heating in an appreciable way and that humans could very well be the cause of much of that heating. We don't need to throw out junk science and sensationalist crap like "OMFG hottest year in 400 years!" as any idiot with even an ounce of grey matter is going to realize that "hottest year in 400 years" is pretty damn normal during any heating phase, especially heating phases that happen on geologic time.
How am I going to keep my beer cold? I refuse to do like the Europeans do and drink WARM beer.
Every couple months, a small group of "scientists" rushes out, states that the Earth is the warmest ever, ignoring any facts, then go back to hide for another couple months. For those that care to look for themselves, the hottest year on record was 1998, and temperature has held stable since 2001. So yeah, you've been lied to, again, by the enviro-alarmists, but that's how they get funding. A little set of facts to start off with can be found at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFiZDAyMWFhM GIxNTgwNGIyMjVkZjQ4OGFiZjFlNjc=. There is no excuse for the blatant stupidity and carping that passes itself off as science simply to scare people into giving them money. You need to go somewhere else, stop making flamewars about junk science, and go back to empirical observation and the scientific method.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Now, notice something: we're talking about a "warming trend" over the last 400 years. That would be the interval from roughly the beginning of the "Little Ice Age" to now. So, in other words, we're now substantially warmer than the low point of a historically unprecedented low temperature interval.
Well, duh. Does the phrase "regression to the mean" ring any bells?
More
In other words, the conclusions of Mann et al. aren't very well supported --- and those are the ones most often used politically.
god you guys, they are pushing ipv6 which would create 60% more overhead traffic on the internet and we haven't quite exhauseted v4.... and you are worried about the warming temperature of the earth?? What the hell is wrong with you?? Get some priorities for fuck's sake!!!
jesus CHRIST WTF
Because we are talking about a global increase, the changes to the world climate from a change of a few degrees are likely to be catastrophic.
Dear Reality:
:(
You suck.
Sincerely,
The World.
This congressional inquiry dovetails nicely with the documentary that features Al Gore, An Incovenient Truth. I recently saw the movie, and while I was aware of the problem of Global Warming, I'm now truly worried that my later years (I'm currently 35) are going to be more about surviving in an even increasingly difficult environment instead of just living. Watching graphs with exponential progressions coupled with comparitive photographs taken over the last 50 years is turly sobering.
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
...or at least "Faulty Logic".
Parent post is directly contradicted by the article, and compounds that by making a logically-flawed deduction. The post is far from insightful or informative; at best, it's misleading.
For those who want to bypass the dysfunctional reporting of the MSM, you can get the full report in PDF directly from NAS.
Also available from that link: The press release, audio of the press briefing, an abbreviated report and opening statement.
Stephen McIntyre offers interesting commentary on the report here.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
don't the scientologists have in's with aliens that have been around this place for billions of years?
maybe they can use their clout to help these poor scientists support the people that funded them with the right data.
Looking back over the past 800,000 years you can see a trend towards progressively warmer interglacials. Judging from the chart at the top, we've yet to match the temperature peak around 130,000 years ago.
If we all "fucking die", as in become "extinct", who the hell will be around to give a shit ?
Ask them to do somthing about it & let me sit in my air conditioned H2 in peace.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Yes we can, here's one now:
:)
As a precaution, please stop breathing as you are exhaling CO2 which we all know to be a bad greenhouse gas. Also, stop having children as they are also going to be exhaling CO2 for some 70 years. But, before you go, plant a tree.
The population keeps growing and thus increasing the amount of CO2 we pump into the air and at the same time we keep cutting down vegetation which takes in our CO2. I have just proved that man does indeed affect the rate at which global warming occurs.
How are they differentiating between the confidence levels from the period of 1600 to 1900(prior to instruments measurement) and the pre-1600's? Isn't the same methodology, data set used for both? Or are they drawing from a variey of sources for an overall picture?
Blah Blah Tacos
If this isnt the hottest the Earth has _ever_ been, then it must have been this hot before. If it's been this hot before, then it got to these temperatures WITHOUT man-made pollution and chemicals. All this statement proves is that we arent doing anything wrong. The earth is on a cycle, we're just riding it.
According to the article "Global Warming Skeptics," there are only 12 scientists who disagree with global warming. From the discussion here, clearly there must be more disagreement. I'm sure it's not just a bunch of hacks making stuff up (this is slashdot, home of scientific minded folk), so if you folks could go over to the Wiki and list who your reputable sources for questioning the thousands of scientists who have been trying (and failing) to poke holes in global warming for the last 10 years are it would be helpful. Because from the looks of that article, the creationists have better scientific footing than folks arguing against human influenced global warming. And while consensus does not have a causative relationship with fact, it does, given enough time, seem to correlate frequently in the area of modern science (even ulcers were figured out eventually).
OK, i get it. It must be because the temperature fluctuates constantly, in somewhat of a pattern over the last few million years. Simply put, this "pattern" you speak of, looks like this: 0, 1, 3, 1, 0, 3, 4, 1, 0, 0, 3, 999999 oh, wait, what's that last number there? would you say that "fits" into the pattern of numbers before it? (consider that little mini pattern to represent the begining of earth to now, as documented)
Everyone, the earth is dying because not enough people believe in global warming! Perhaps if we all clapped real hard to show it we believe, it might survive!
Quick! If you believe in global warming, clap your hands!
[monty python foot icon]
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.h tm
We're all going to die while the people who've been listening to Rush Limbaugh for the past fifteen years just keep repeating "prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it prove it"
At least in australia there is http://www.greenfleet.com.au/ for those of us who want to do something towards the planting trees to offset car emissions.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
"For all but the most recent 150 years, the academy scientists relied on "proxy" evidence from tree rings, corals, glaciers and ice cores, cave deposits, ocean and lake sediments, boreholes and other sources. They also examined indirect records such as paintings of glaciers in the Alps." ...And determined to an accuracy of 1 degree that the earth had warmed. Even using thermometers for the last 150 years how can you expect the average to be exactly the same? We weren't even pissing indoors back then, but we had thermometers calibrated to rival those today. Not to mention the incredible increase in observations we have now. I'd be shocked if there WASN'T a drift.
Paintings of the Alps?! This just shows how confident these top experts are that their preachings to the choir will be accepted by the gullible "progressives" who really have little understanding of climate. By the way, I have 10 years of atmospheric science experience, you? I know better than to let politics make me _want to believe_ something exists.
By the way, I saw a painting of Noah's ark in a great flood, I guess I was wrong to doubt....
Saying there is a debate over whether global warming is real like saying there is a debate over whether the earth is not the center of the universe. What we really have is a debate between the interests of the special interest establishment and the interests of the environmentalists. This debate has been going on in various modes for many many hundreds of years - but science hasn't lost yet. You can't argue down evolution, and you can't argue down global warming - to scientists, these are "theories" because they pass the test for "theory" - which for them is the same test we use to determine *Facts*. IN all meaningful ways, the debate is moot - it's not about facts, it's about obsolete beliefs being replaced in the popular consciousness by newer, accurate beliefs. This needs to happen quickly because we have to start mobilizing our government to action. Data obtained by examining the layers(ice sheets and glaciers form like trees, they have lines indicating how old they are because there is a warming and cooling season *once a year*) of ice sheets which contain bubbles of air(from which we can derive the temperature they were frozen at) trapped from freezing cycles as early as 650,000 years ago reveal a very, very regular periodic cooling and warming cycle. However, it also shows what concentration of CO2 existed in the atmosphere during those cycles, and this graph is almost identical to the temperature graph during the same intervals. The correlation is so strong between CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature that it becomes very, very clear that atmospheric CO2 reflects radiation back into our atmosphere, causing global temperature to rise. . Now, it happens that the concentrations of CO2 are rising at a higher rate than they have ever been measured to rise according to the data obtained from the ice sheets. THey are also at a higher level than has ever been measured according to the ice sheets. This indicates that the global temperature is continuing to increase at a much higher rate than has ever been seen before. This trend started around the time that humans began pouring tons and tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, during the industrial revolution, and is getting worse every year. There is thus a very strong correlation between the trend of human industry and the trend of rapid global warming. Now, you might think - humans can't possibly be contributing that much gas into the atmosphere, the atmosphere is huge! That's crap. 6 billion humans contribute to our pollution, and pour gasses into the atmosphere 24 hours a day 365 days a year, and have been doing so for over a century. Moreover, the atmosphere is not very thick - it represents a sliver of earth's total diameter, equivalent to a *much* smaller volume of gasses than we intuit from looking at the sky. It's very easy to see that humans are very capable of influencing the composition of the atmosphere. The only reason there's a "Debate" over the human cause of global warming is because hack scientists(a minority of scientists) funded by energy lobbies continue to be enlisted(and paid) for their testimonies in front of Congress, which itself is heavily bankrolled by energy companies, who have a very loud voice when it comes to their own interests, and often share the interests of the very wealthy politicans whose campaigns they pay for. The vast majority of scientists believe that global warming has a significant human contribution. There is no meaningful debate over the scientific fact that humans cause global warming, just like there is no good argument against evolution. Even if there was, we should err on the side of caution and as a country(and world) change our attitudes, because this not only relates to global climate, but also the *air* we are breathing. Combustion engines and power plants emit a lot of pollutants, not just CO2. These pollutants cause health problems. BUt casting doubt over global warming undermines *all* environmental endeavors by wrongly discrediting the credible people who want to help protect our health and the earth. There are a lo
Duh. The simplest explanation is that every 130,000 years humans reach a critical level of technology. This causes massive global warming that makes the politicans scream. This in turn results in a planet-wide evacuation and removal of all "modern" technology. All they leave behind are the rejects (read: diseased, mentally ill, elderly, and the stupid). Archaeology team plants dinosaur bones, and a film crew sticks around for a couple hundred years to supply clay pots and matches.
p.s. I humbly submit that this time we should leave all the lawyers and politicians, too.
... just a bunch of hot air!
Libertas in infinitum
I think this is one of the sure-fire ways to start a flame-war on slashdot... and is ridiculous.
t ok.co2.gif [ornl.gov]0 000yrfig.htm [freeserve.co.uk] - (This is also a good read) .0055% (ppm difernce taken from NOAA site, increase of 55ppm - if you count since the industrial revolution, it might be around .01%) change in the atmosphere is going to cause a huge warming trend. It is more possible that the carbon levels are an indication of another cause, which would be a good reason why they are correlated. (If that is the case, we have contaminated our "warning sign," or indicator with the industrial revolution.) If we act before we know if these two evidences are directly related and not just correlated, we could end-up damaging the cycle/environment even further. Regardless of which camp you reside in, these questions need to be answered. (In my mind, especially the part where less than a tenth of a percent increase could trap enough energy to raise the global temperature several degrees.)
Your post may 'expose' the asinine grandparent post, but also doesn't answer the valid point it raises. The question you/ (science) needs to answer is if we (mankind) are to blame for the rise in temperature, or if we can even stop the warming trend. If we are not to blame, what evidence, (moral/ethical/scientific), is there that we should do anything to stop it, assuming we could?
When looking at temperature models, it is important to take TIME in to consideration. Yes, we are probably the warmest we have been in 400 years... possibly in over 100,000 years.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/etc/graphs.html [pbs.org] (NOVA) - Note that the pictures don't overlay the correlation, (let me say that word again; CORRELATION), between the two. Take a look at these others;
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/vos
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/40
As you can see, we are on a warming trend, and are not yet as warm as it has reached in the non-industrialized past. Either way, there seems to be a strong force in the earth to bring this heating cycle back down, and though there is a correlation in carbon and temperature, though it is debatable that
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
1) So the Earth is warming up. The consequences -- negative *and* positive -- of this are...?
2) How about some better empirics?
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
And I can, and I do! However I also travel overseas and... watching the socalled "emerging markets" raping the environment....
Anyone think Greenhouse Gases are a good idea? Anyone think that we are INCAPABLE of rapidly changing energy sources without total economic devestation? (IMHO I think it would be a major boon for the economy). All this talk about whether ONE of MANY effects of pollution is or is not in fact real is just a smoke screen, which distracts our attention from the fact that, OMG, POLLUTION IS BAD!! Is there anyone who thinks that we can continue emiting greenhouse gases along with horrible toxins for the next several decades, without major consequences? If so, please go for a walk in downtown Mexico city...
Stop commenting as AC's and then modding them up. No one likes you, the truth is not in the middle, and republicans are jokes on every level. At least you believe in God, but you manage to fuck that up too by using His name to preach hatred. Please die in no less than 3 fires.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Another excuse for the collectivist politicians to tax the crap out of anyone who dares use energy for whatever reason. Remember Al Gore's Carbon Tax...
Wow, this is on the tip of my brain right now. Great timing for once slashdot. I watched An Inconvinient Truth last night.. I highly recommend it. It's scary, and disturbing.. time to research the facts..
Or stop buying Dell's, because they explode, and as we all know, an explosion creates heat.
Look, even if humans are causing some climate change most of it is most likely because of normal cycles. So Either it's going to get a lot hotter or we are on the verge of another mini-ice-age. Either way we need to stop bickering and learn how to deal with Climate Change. We can't alter the climate so we need to stop trying. We need to adapt. That's what we are good at remember? We learn to deal with higher ocean levels or constant blizzards and we will continue to thrive. If we just continue pointing fingers then we will be caught off guard. This is not a political discussion, it is a discussion about the srvival of the human race through adapting.
This is just a bunch of sensationalist crap put out by the damn liberal hippy media
There is absolutely ZERO proof of climate change or global warming.. there never has been and there never will be.
Global Warming deniers are the new Holocaust deniers.
On the one side you have scientists with the historical and current data, and the liberals who cheer them on. On the other side you have those who say Global Warming is just made up by a conspiracy of scientists and liberals.
Discuss.
Start Running Better Polls
We have 400k years of pretty good temperature and CO2 data now from the Vostock ice cores, and it's clear that a stable climate is an illusion caused by man's relatively short lifespan.
Whatever. But there's a missing element in the middle of this - timescale. With the onset and end of ice ages, we are talking about geological timescales - minimum of thousands of years for any discernable difference. Minus global warming, the timings will be incredibly gradual - civilisation as we know it will probably be gone by then. It isn't absolutely stable, but it's stable enough. It will be the same general sort of thing in which civilisation has developed for the last 1000 years or so.
Global warming isn't like that. Not only is the temperature the highest it has been, it's been climbing at an astronomical rate. The timescale we are talking about is hundreds of years - several orders of magnitude faster. Further, increased temperature is inherently worse that decreased temperature - you are feeding more energy into the weather system, and all things being equal, that raises the incidence of more chaotic weather.
Finally, there's direct frictional costs from the rate this is all happening. As temperatures change, the bands in which certain crop can be grown will move and change. Entire agricultural zones will change. Some will be able to adapt to this, but many will not. And it will be extremely expensive in terms of lost productivity and need to retrain and so on. If you think this is a good thing, then why don't the cheerleaders for 'adaptation' help fund the efforts of the poorer nations?
Hippie Guy and Oil Guy are sleeping in a tent they built on a beach. Hippie guy wakes up as he hears the splashing waves getting closer and closer to the tent:
Hippie Guy (HG): "Hey, something's causing the water to come near the tent."
Oil Guy (OG): "Shut up man, I'm trying to sleep! I'm tired."
HG: "No man, I'm telling you after reviewing the last 400 seconds of sound (since I woke up), the waves are definitely getting really close! Maybe a boat's wake?"
OG: "Okay... maybe. It's probably just the tides. People say there's tides around here."
HG: "Oh yeah, could be, man! Was it high tide when we pitched the tent today?"
OG: "I don't know."
We've pitched out tents (e.g. cities, agricultural lands, etc.) based on the temperature s, rivers and sea-levels in the 1600's to early 1900's mostly. Our tents aren't so easy to move. Either we 1) try to move our infrastructure, or 2) try to reduce warming (if possible). I think I'd like to try #2 first. The world economy will not grind to a halt because people try to use non-petroleum fuels.
In all my years on this planet, I can't say it is the warmest year.
But if I was over 400 years old, I might be a lot wiser.
oh wait. it was! (read a geology textbook.)
Anyhow. I think we're on the wrong debate. Everyone is arguing is global warming occuring or not. And if it is agreed that it is, then the argument shifts to, are people to blame or not.
It's all entirely irrelevant. There are two things we should always be doing.
1) Trying to live responsibly on the Earth. This means, minimizing pollutions of all sorts, etc.
2) Figuring out how to adapt to changes in the Earth.
Ultimatly we WILL have an impact. It's the nature of the beast. At best we can try to minimize it, if only to have cleaner air to breath and cleaner water to drink. The Earth will under go changes. Some caused by us perhaps, many not. We simply have to adapt or die out. Short of killing every human on the Earth, we will never remove any impact that we cause. All we can do is try to minimize it.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Ok- if human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming, then we humans darn well better do something to cool things off.
EVERYONE WITHIN THE SOUND OF MY VOICE- PLEASE SET YOUR AIR CONDITIONERS ON "MAX. COLD" AND THE HIGHEST FAN SETTING. THEN OPEN YOUR WINDOWS AND DO YOUR PART! IF YOU DON"T HAVE AN AIR CONDITIONER, START MAKING ICE IN YOUR FREEZERS AND THROW IT INTO THE NEAREST OCEAN (OR REALLY BIG LAKE- LIKE THOSE ONES NEAR CANADA). IF YOU DON'T HAVE A FREEZER, PLANT SOME TREES SO WE HAVE MORE SHADE.
There we go! Considering the efficiency of today's A/C and refrigerator/freezers (you can get an "Energy Star" unit for just a few hundred bucks) it should take much less than 400 years to reverse this disturbing trend. And we'll have so many more trees to boot. "I think that I shall never see..."
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
But I'm okay with that. Really.
With just a little luck, the other thing scientists have been saying for quite a while will happen - we'll run out of crude oil to burn. That'll at least give our planet a fighting chance at having something like an ecosystem when we're finding our next opportunity to screw the pooch.
Climate on our planet is never constant. It could be global cooling that we were bitching about instead of global warming. Obviously, it was warmer 1,000 years ago in 986 when Greenland was settled but then got a lot colder 400 years later. Think of the slashdot story that would have been.
1) When did the current warming trend start?
2) Is this the hottest the Earth's ever been?
Answers:
1) No. The current warming trend started 100,000 years ago (long before the industrial revolution and CFCs).
2) No. The hottest the Earth has ever been was about 55,000,000 years ago (near the end of the Eocene era).
Humans are not entirely responsible for global warming. To say that we are is fearmongering.
...on page 2 of the report.
More significant, I think, than the current temperature compared to previous temperature levels is the trend over the last 100-200 years. Sharp, and accelerating increase.
Let us assume for a moment that the climate change is man-made. Let us further assume that all developed nations take immediate steps to completely eliminate their CO2 emissions. What will happen?
CO2 emissions will keep rising. China is building coal-fired power stations at a tremendous rate, and will probably keep doing so for a few decades, at least; India - which will have a larger population than China in a couple of decades - will be doing exactly the same thing. They're doing this because they need electricity to modernise their economies, and coal is both plentiful and cheap. Between them, they will probably pump out enough CO2 to fully compensate for the CO2 not emitted by the developed world.
Conclusion: it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. If it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it, and if it's man-made, it isn't going to be arrested any time soon.
So we are just going to have to live with the consequences.
Here in NZ we're having some of the wrost snowstorms in 50+ years
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's certainly a lot warmer than the ice age that ended due to the industrial revolution 10,000 years ago.
That canadafreepress article was just sad. Point me at an article in Nature or SciAm and we can talk. Point me at "Canada's Number One Source For Alternative News" and I'm just gonna giggle about it.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I don't have an opinion on the causes of global warming (it seems impossible to draw correlations or causations based on such limited data), but I think the chart that you linked to contradicts your opinion. The red line representing CO2 concentration seems to correlate to the temperature variation. At the far right end of the chart (indicating the last 100 years or so), the red line spikes to around double of what it was in entire 400,000 years that are graphed. The disturbing part is, if the CO2 concentration is playing a role in the temperature variation, then the datapoints graphed over the last 100 years would create a temperature variation that is completely off of the graph.
Thanks for the link, it's nice to see some pure scientific data with respect to this issue.
Maybe it's all the MacBook Pro batteries http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/ 1828232 and Dell laptops exploding http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/ 21/1448207.
In the link you mentioned, they ask for you to look at the graphs on the next page. If you do, you'll see a sharp rise in CO2 levels unmatched in level or rate by any other point or rise in the ice core data.
Get em while they're hot.
Errors in carbon dating prove that such speculation is rubbish - there is no way the earth is 400 years old. Science is always trying to pretend that creation couldn't have happened - but the methods are fallacy oh ... wait ... oops
RTFA. Nowhere in the article does it say that 2005 was the hottest year we know of. It refers to "recent warmth". For those who care to look for themselves, the actual news release indicates (in its first sentence) that the findings are about "the last few decades of the 20th century". So, this is not "blatant stupidity and carping that passes itself off as science", it's an ambiguously-accurate digestion of real news that passes itself off as journalism, followed by your blatant stupidity and carping that passes itself off as an informative comment. Don't blame the scientists for doing research that gets ambiguously reported by the media.
I know your comment is a response to Gore's book (I read your link). But your comment is irrelevant to the story you commented on. Thanks for the knee-jerk reaction. Your comment should be modded -1 Offtopic.
Daammmmmmnnnnn.
crappy triceratops
“The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published ‘The Limits to Growth’ in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world’s population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving.”
--
The story of wheat
Ears of plenty
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
The story of man’s staple food
[Image] (Still Pictures)
IN 10,000 years, the earth’s population has doubled ten times, from less than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most of the calories that made that increase possible have come from three plants: maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until recently biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is that of humanity.
Yet today, wheat is losing its crown. The tonnage (though not the acreage) of maize harvested in the world began consistently to exceed that of wheat for the first time in 1998; rice followed suit in 1999. Genetic modification, which has transformed maize, rice and soyabeans, has largely passed wheat by--to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming an “orphan crop”. The Atkins diet and a fashion for gluten allergies have made wheat seem less wholesome. And with population growth rates falling sharply while yields continue to rise, even the acreage devoted to wheat may now begin to decline for the first time since the stone age.
It is time to pay tribute to this strange little grass that has done so much for the human race. Strange is the word, for wheat is a genetic monster. A typical wheat variety is hexaploid--it has six copies of each gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived from three wild ancestral species in two separate mergers. The first took place in the Levant 10,000 years ago, the second near the Caspian Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a plant with extra-large seeds incapable of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow them.
The story actually starts much earlier, around 12,000 years ago. At the time, after several warm millennia, a melting ice sheet in North America collapsed and a gigantic lake drained into the North Atlantic through the St Lawrence seaway. The torrent of cool, fresh water altered the climate so drastically that the ice age, which had been in full retreat, resumed for a further 11 centuries. The Scandinavian ice sheet surged south. Western Asia became not only cooler, but much drier. The Black Sea all but dried out.
People in what is now Syria had been subsisting happily on a diet of acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them to depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after 11,000 years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then einkorn and emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon cultivated grain was their staple food. It happened first in the Karacadag Mountains in south-eastern Turkey--it is only here that wild einkorn grass contains the identical genetic fingerprint of modern domesticated wheat.
Who first replanted the seeds and why? For a start, he was probably a she: women have primary responsibilities for plant gathering in hunter-gatherer societies. The time was certainly ripe for agriculture: the ability to make tools and control fire (cooking makes many plants more digestible) was already well established. But was it an act of inspiration or desperation? Did it perhaps happen by accident, as discarded grains germinated around human settlements?
The extreme centre is the paper's historical position. --Geoffrey Crowther
Anyone else notice that they only looked at data for the Northern Hemisphere? How can you say the Earth is warming if you're only looking at data from the Northern Hemisphere!
Fuck yeah. Best. Comment. Ever.
Yet another perfect example of our over-inflated sense of self-importance...
Wisest is he who knows he does not know.
More news just in: 15 billion years ago the entire universe was at a temperature of around 100 billion Kelvin
Conclusive evidence that Global Warming is just a small local variation. in fact, on that scale, you won't even notice it. here's a graph I have drawn showing the world's temperature:
|
|
|
|
______________________________________
15 billion years ago _________________ now
this clearly shows that Global Warming is a MYTH!
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
While we enjoy cooking in the desert summer heat, have fun with your tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and highly variable temperatures. Living in the desert is awesome. We have continuous temperatures of 75-80 all year. Going outside in the summer during the day sucks but that's why we have A/C, wide roads, and pools which are pretty much standard.
People building also doesn't make everything hotter in the desert. If anything, it cools the desert down because people plant and maintain grass, and trees and which help cool down the soil.
The real problems around global warming are places where high temperatures are not expected, A/C is not available, and walking is a necessity to move around. In other cities with temperate climes many people die when there is a heat wave. In Phoenix it doesn't happen as much because people know what to expect and are not crazy enough to hang out in the heat.
BTW, here is a picture of Phoenix surrounded by snow this past winter
I play Nerd-Folk!
just thinking about the level of energi involved makes me shit my pants. buckle up guys for you are in for quite a ride.
It seems FoldingAtHome has one downside...
Do not mark in this space. For official office use only.
This is a self correcting problem. There is no way you can stop this. Fossel fuels are a form of "free energy" it's there in the ground all you have to do is dig it up and set it on fire. There is such strong incentive to do this that we will work as hard as we can to do it as fast as we can. The good news is that we are good at this and have likely burned up 1/2 of what's there. All we have to do is burn up the other half and the problem will be gone forever. So the next 100 years it will be hot. But for the next one million it will not. OK maybe my numbers are wrong and we've burned up only 1/4 or whatever. Still it will all be gone very soon in relative terms. Basically the human race stumbles along with stone tools for a million years then discovers hydrocaron and burns half the hydrocarbon on earth only 400 years then the other half in 100 years but then continues on for the next millions of years without using any hydrocarbon. In the larger view of things it's a "blip".
The chart at this site's page http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html , which is becoming a bit more frequently seen, shows the graph of C02 content in the atmosphere and temperature ranges over the last 400,000 years as derived from examining core samples, up to 1950. In that graph there is a strong corellation between C02 content and temperature change (increased C02 == increased temperature, etc.) The high point on the graph happened about 325,000 years ago when C02 content hit about 300 ppm.
In 1950 C02 content was around 285 ppm.
In 2006 C02 content was 383 ppm
That's nearly 100ppm greater than 56 years ago, nearly 83 ppm greater than the greatest peak currently recorded. We've had a 35% increase in CO2 content over the last 56 years. We're 28% above the previously recorded peak level from the last 400,000 years, and we're seeing record high temperatures for increasingly large spans of time into the past.
Given the nearly lock step relationship between C02 content and temperature change, the rate of increase and the extent of the increase over the last 56 years, and the absence of any other major contributor to CO2 content in the last 56 years, I find it really difficult to think that the human activities known to increase C02 emissions we've increasingly engaged in over the last 150 years have had little to nothing to do with the obvious increase in both C02 atmospheric content and resulting temperature/climate changes. The rate and amount of change seem to indicate that we're already beyond the normal range of variation, yet people still feel comfortable saying it's just the normal fluctuation of the planet's climate. I'd sincerely like to hear other viable explanations for the facts, but there haven't been any - the most well supported hypothisis remains that humans burning fossil fuels (in ever increasing numbers do to an also alarming rate of population growth) are truly affecting the climate.
What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious, but that's a task for psychologists and philosophers I suppose.
If you are going to publish articles like this, please state the political
affiliation of the author and the scientists.
I don't care if it's true, this guy sounds smart.
Hank: Dale, we live in Texas. It's already 110 degrees in the shade. If it gets 1 degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass...
I lol'd :)
Boohoo. So what if the planet is getting warmer. If you can't stand the heat, then get off the stinkin planet.
I am tired of the 'global warming' crap. And no one really cares about 'global warming'. If people did care, they wouldn't continue to buy SUVS and Gasoline cars. Actions speak louder then words.
\
Warmer temperatures translate into more energy (Hurricanes, earthquakes) and unfortunately we are not capable of harnessing it so instead, it will destroy those closer to where such energy gets condensed which in turn will have the balancing effect of keeping population at bay on earth.
So the issue here is not to stop warming the planet, but knowing how to deal with the consequences of such transition, because, unless there is a strong and undeniable link between human activity with global warming that can give us guidelines to stop it, we are wasting time figuring out whom to blame.
It's fucking SUMMERTIME! What ever happened to common sense?
The earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling every few thousand years, quit thinking just because you live on the earth at this time that you are special.
Signed,
The smart people in the world.
Why do these "panel of scientists" people do this? The Global Climate changes. It has always changed. It has changed in historical times. It is changing again. It doesn't matter whether man's activities are playing a part in this one. For all we know we are extending our interglacial. sheesh The best times mankind has experienced historically were during warm periods. If they want to ponder a wretched future, they should hold off until Chinese container ships begin showing up in LA loaded with Soylent Green.
Can I have lube an a camera?
It's worth pointing out that ulcer's pretty much contradict your point about consensus. The consensus was that ulcers could not possibly be caused by an infection. The bitch slap it took to wake up the medical community was judged to be worth a Nobel prize. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of consensus.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
WARNING (KARMA PERIL): The following question is not bound by logic or cause-and-effect. It merely speculative.
Does anyone think it odd that the warming trend is close on the heels of what scientist feel is an impending magentic flip of the poles? It has been demonstrated that the field is weakening. Might there be, on a global scale, any correlation to warming trends? Might accelerated warming be normal for field weakening?
I do not doubt global warming. I do, however, doubt man is necessarily responsible without seeing better evidence.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
[quote]Congress asked, and the scientists have answered: 'The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer.[/quote]
So-fusking-what?
What they ARE saying, is that tt was hotter 500 years ago (or so). I don't seem to recall reading about any disasters which befell mankind because it was hotter then.
This is a complete load of shit.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002242.html
Something to consider in regards to a warming earth.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
read thisp eeches_quote04.html
Aliens Cause Global Warming - A lecture by Michael Crichton
Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/s
[-] fud, climatechange, globalwarming, notfud, duh (tagging beta)
Okay, who gave Big Oil/NeoCons the rights to post tags?
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
This debate is like many other debates in the U.S. (and elsewhere). Each side stakes out their position as religious conviction and then proceeds to refuse to consider any critical dialog. It usually ends up with people talking over one another and/or ad-hominem attacks.
The problem is people lack respect for other people's opinions. In colleges and universities there is a real pack mentality that attacks opposing viewpoints (within the University setting) as immoral and unworthy of disscussion.
Until and if we somehow get through this era so people can talk to each other rationally these types of important isses will NOT be resolved.
The only thing I hate worse than people who refuse to listen to rational argument are people who play devil's advocate to get a rise.
If anything about our real intellect, global warming can only be possible though the butterfly effect on a grand scale (thousands of years), and guess what, looking at 400 yrs of data is not going to draw any conclusion. And yes, who knows, a warm 'spike' could cause a asteroid to change trajectory towards our planet--so much of worrying about global warming!
See /. story from February
But yes, this is clearly a problem.
"Yeah man, but it's a dry heat!"
So, just to inject some 'reason' into this flamefest,
What about Mars?
It's polar icecaps are melting at about the same rate as ours, and over roughly the same time period.
Are our Greenhouse gases spreading that far?
Or maybe, the Sun warmed slightly, warming both planets at the same time, over the same period?
Flame On!!
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Quick lads, join me on me ship and we will loot an plunder. The more the better until the temperature goes down.
Arrrrrrrrr!
Yo ho, yo ho, it's a pirates life for me....
ALOT of people aren't really better off than those poor 3rd worlders, minus consumerism. They have just as much capability to fend off flooding should there be ice melts as many residents of wealthier nations do, or heck, they can control thier birthrates pre-emptively so that they can all fit into thier highlands. Lord knows us westerners aren't exactly growing our populations, infact they are shrinking alarmingly, we can feel the impending resource crunch I guess. I'm tired of self-ritious well off westerners who assume everybody in thier community is as comfy as them, and only see the suffering of outgroups. Have you ever put in volunteer hours at a homeless shelter or foodbank? I relied on a foodbank when I was growing up, while all the media messages i got told me that was evil, racist, and rich.
Why do you omit the fact that population is SHRINKING in the west, and that it is only the "developing nations" that are responsible for it? Too un-PC for you? I think it's important to point this out if only to counter the assumptions some make, that I have seen all too often, in regards to population pressures.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Eventually, we will have to use energy to lose the C part of the CO2 back to a solid form.
Otherwise, we will eventually see major effects on the population, especially people with compromised breathing, the elderly, etc.
So, what we need now is a carbon nanotube weaver that runs on atmospheric CO2, and use THAT to build our space elevator with, as well as spacecraft.
Hell, carbon nanotube fiber, held together with crystalline carbon as epoxy. (that seems like a General Products hull, doesn't it?)
Now we just have to invent something like that BEFORE we all die horribly.
Anyone know how much co2 it takes to kill you?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
totally pwns GP
Lets just do the ostrich thing and keep on polluting, the earth will kill us off if it needs to , right ? ..
Its only ourselves who will be hurt... Anyway with the state human civilization is in now who cares if we all die anyway
I did not mention ulcers by accident, but rather to point out that there is a great incentive for scientists to buck even the most solidly accepted 'fact.' Challenging consensus is very difficult, but highly valued - it won a Nobel prize. The current climate is not like the dark ages where the reward for shattering a universally held delusion was being branded a heretic.
The temperature anomaly chart in use before the 'hockeystick' chart presented in 2001, has been used to argue that the falling average temperature in the northern hemisphere had contributed to everything from the fall of Anastazi culture, to the onset of the Black Death, to the emergence of the Golden Horde. (I believe that the IPCC presented the chart I am refering to in 1990 to argue that global temperature had wide ranging impact on human society, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.)
If the chart currently in use by the IPCC is correct, then there probably wasn't a Medeival Warm Period and there probably wasn't a Little Ice Age. If these events did happen, then they were regional - perhaps even local. All of the historical evidence that global temperature has any impact on human civilization is null and void.
It's no longer possible to associate the wide-scale distruptions in human societies that happened in the 13th and 14th centuries with a drop in global temperature of several degrees C. This is encouraging, or atleast less disturbing than the theory that several degrees of temperature leads to the end of civilization as we know it.
On a side note, any distruptions in the north atlantic circulation will probably be much milder than previously thought. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/ab rupt_change.html
Whatever bush admits won't change a damn thing.
If humans are to blame for global warming, then that blame goes back at least a century.
Plenty of stuff to blame on bush, but not global warming.
Just because Al Gore whines, doesn't mean he's helping anything either. In spite of what many people think "raising awareness" is no BFD. SUV's are as popular as ever.
You notice symptoms of global warming only started getting bad in the last six years? The obvious source of the warming is all the hot air rising out of Wasington DC. It's also a likely source of greenhouse gasses. Decaying bullshit is a primary source of methane. Looks like the oil companies aren't at fault, politicians are the source of global warming.
-1 Flamebate
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
An Anonymous Coward responds to scientific evidence that it's abnormally warm by sarcastically posting that it was warm for them, so therefore it's not abnormally warm.
This thread proves nothing about the climate. It says everything about people who deny environmental science.
--
make install -not war
- global warming isn't happening
- global warming could be happening, we just don't know for sure yet
- global warming isn't caused by humans
- global warming is cyclical-- it'll cool down any minute now
- global warming can't be stopped anyway, might as well relax
- hell, global warming could be fun!
How about you all get together and settle on one line of bullshit? I suggest "cyclical". Those of you who aren't up to at least "not caused by humans" are just straggling, and personally I think anybody who's already on "could be fun" has gotten a little bit ahead of the game.my new macbook pro is burning up the planet as I write!
woo hoo!
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I'm just waiting on the temp to snap back in the other direction.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Listen, I dont condone pollution, and im all for reducing emmissions of CO2 and everything else, but I honestly dont believe the bunk science that these people keep putting out. I mean, Toxic Avengers had better arguments to stop polluting than these guys.
For starters, while Al Gores book/movie was pretty good, the science was crap. Graphs that show correlation between Temp and CO2 DONT mean that CO2 causes the temp increase (it COULD JUST AS EASILY be the temp CAUSES the CO2 increase)
Secondly, these scientists who say that "Global Warming accounted for half the increase in hurricane strength in 2005"...BS, there is no way you could accumulate evidence to prove that AT ALL, let alone to a PERCENTAGE.
Lastly, theres two terms I want these climatologists to become aware of. Precision, and Standard Deviation. Even if the climatologists were able to measure the temperature at 150 locations around the globe for 1000 years, and each 150 temperatures were assumed to be accurate for 50 km around, that still only accounts for 0.0000015% of the surface area of the Earth. Given that lack of data, I ask that you prove to me that the standard deviation for the average global temperature is LESS THAN one degree F, the amount these climatologists claim the global temperature has risen.
Oh btw, the fact that there is a "consensus" among climatologists that global warming is entirely human created is like saying theres a consensus among Vegetarians that eating meat is bad. Just because its believed by one group of trained scientists doesnt mean its completely supported by other groups of equally trained scientists
hey, everybody knows what we need! we most believe in HIM /me goes get his sacred pirate uniform
> Precisely! I was just thinking before I read your post, "They say it's
> been this hot before we even had any of the technology that's making it
> hotter. Why is it a problem?"
Well, it's not a problem for the planet. By the same token, the planet has withstood multiple impacts by miles-wide asteroids that caused mass extinctions and killed 90% of all higher life forms on its surface.
Neither is a problem for the planet; both would be pretty dang unpleasant for us humans living on it, though.
I keep hearing all of this nonsense about how scientists belive something named a 'theory' is actually what the rest of us would call a 'fact'. Here are some quotes from TFA.
The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was "likely" to be true, said John "Mike" Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member.
The conclusions from the '90s research "are very close to being right" and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.
The scientists said they had less confidence in the evidence of temperatures before 1600. But they considered it reliable enough...
Terms like 'likely', 'close to being right' and 'less confidence in the evidence' do not instill in my mind that these people think this theory is a fact. Sounds to me like they are all doing a little CYA.
Find coupons in Greeley
Odd. We're having a very cool summer where I live, compared to the last few years. If anything, I would've labeled last year "the hottest year since XXXX."
Legalize it.
The Bush administration is considering moving from Fahrenheit to Celsius. This could reduce a 4 degree long term increase in mean temperature to merely 2.5 degrees.
This would be included with the proposal to move to the Imperial Gallon to achieve as much as a 20% increase in gas mileage.
.... did they stick the thermometer?
Have gnu, will travel.
> relatively short lifespan. This fact is as clear as the fact
> that global warming is happening.
But is it happening faster than it typically does?
In many parts of the US, it's common to see temperature changes of 100 degrees over the course of a year. And it's not really a problem - plants are adapted to that cycle, animals migrate/burrow/grow or shed winter coats, people know to wear the right clothes and use the right technology, the change is gradual enough to largely avoid thermal shock to infrastructure, and so on.
If you saw a temperature change of 100 degrees over the course of an hour, though, it would be a disaster. If it happened in summer, for example, vast swathes of vegetation would freeze and die and whole populations of animals would be unprepared and freeze to death, both of which would lead to ripple effects up the food chain, including us (crop failure). Thousands of people would die as they were caught unprepared without proper clothing and heating. The immense heat differentials in the area would whip up enormous storms.
Analogous problems could happen from unusually-fast changes in global temperature -- for example, disruptions of whole ecosystems as plants and animals are unable to adjust fast enough, substantial increases in dangerous weather as energy is rapidly added to the system, flooding displacing hundreds of millions of people over the course of a few years, and so on.
Most of these problems are made worse the more rapid the change is; there's a reason flash floods are more dangerous than seepage. Add to this some of the nonlinear effects that oceanographers I know are worried about (e.g., the Gulf Stream shutting down -- which we know has happened in the past -- and drastically changing the climate of the Atlantic region), and you get the potential for immense human suffering.
Will it kill off the human species? Probably not. But using that to suggest it's "okay" is as nonsensical as saying it's "okay" to have all your limbs blown off, so long as you survive.
> trying to keep achieve stability in a chaotic system that we don't
> really understand and can barely model is probably pointless.
In your opinion, perhaps. Throwing up our hands and crying "ohh, it's all too complicated" is not the approach that has led the advance of civilization and knowledge. We control chaotic systems pretty successfully every day - the turbulence around jet engines, for example - so there's reason to believe we could usefully influence other chaotic systems.
If nothing else, the simple fact that we're already influencing this chaotic system and pushing it into a state which is worse for us makes the question somewhat moot. We're already influencing the system, so we have no choice about whether to influence it, only about how. Unless you're arguing that blindly whacking away at an incompletely-understood system is just as good as employing what knowledge we do have as best as possible.
But that would be a strange claim for you to be making, given the continued success of jet engines and our continued incomplete understanding of turbulent fluids. If that's your claim, the evidence isn't on your side.
And guilty of waxing arrogant on a subject you obviously know very little about.
5 /02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-contr oversy/
Lest I be similarly accused, I'll just link to the actual experts.
May I suggest the "Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stick" controversy" by real actual working publishing scientists.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If you'd read TFA, you'd notice that it's warmer than 100 years ago. And 200 years ago. And 300. And 400.
And probably 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000, and a wide variety of other times. From TFA:
"recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.
...
the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years
...
the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years
...
there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years."
It is the best hemisphere.
The west and front(90w to 90e) are pretty good too.
It's always interesting that much of the land is in the north and water in the south.
There probably is a significant difference between the sets of hemis.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
You should link people some of these reports to read, preferably by reputable scientists who research the subject...infact, let me clarify that last part:
Reputable as in not politically biased (ie, Al Gore would certainly not be reputable), published multiple papers on the subject and/or adjacent subjects in notable Journals (ie, Nature, Science, whatever, not "Wicca Quarterly," "The Limbaugh Letter," or other nonsense), and preferably a resident at a University (not their Mom's basement). Knowing who funds the research is a big plus.
And of course, by scientist, I mean people who actually, you know, do science. Not some quasi-science bullshit like most people injest and take as the truth, either. The person better have cited his sources, included his scientific data (and not summarized it like a fucking news paper article), and lastly, included error analysis. No PhD = not a reputable scientist. This isn't Coast to Coast.
I have not read any serious reports on the subject. I've heard PLENTY of media spin to the point where I wouldn't believe the truth if they told it to me. It's pretty easy to do a google search and find about 10^6 links from unqualified bloggers, cheesy geocities pages, and your typical array of leftist banter, all claiming the sky is falling but never citing just who determined that. Last time I checked, I'd file under the category of "ignorant" with most of the world (even if they don't believe it.)
Finally, let me say this (and recall I've already admitted my ignorance of the subject): I question just how accurately temperatures from 2000 years ago can be measured, relative to, say, satellite technology now. If the global mean temperature has increased 3C (and from I've heard it's less than that...) and your error is +/-5C then just how useful is that data?
What a bunch of hog wash. American people, you know, the one's that supposedly govern this country, your politicians are flat out lying to you for the benefit of the richest energy barons. I for one am shocked, absolutely shocked!
Hottest in 400 years, yes. In several millenia? No f&)#ing way. Past temperatures are not a mystery. See the graph in this post:
http://s405.blogspot.com/2006/03/globaloney.html
Information will free you. Stop listening to experts who make money on your fear and LOOK INTO IT FOR YOURSELF.
Global cooling as a panic was a mass media phonenomon, not a scientific one - there was never any broad acceptance of it as a theory in the scientific press. You know, as in publications that actually require inconvenient speedbumps like peer review by scientists prior to publication, instead of just needing to get something new out to press to sell to uncle Miltie.
Realclimate.org (which is run by, yes, real life practicing climatologists) has a great article debunking the whole "global cooling" bogon, here.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I have made two separate engines that do not destroy Matter, using the Matter as *energy vehicles* without destroy anything. I wrote a series of posts onto Reader's Digest board yesterday that I think you would find very much to your liking. Here's the links >
http://communitytalk.rd.com/WebX?14@254.AQqKavbAF2 z.0@.ef9f8ce/21493 2 z.0@.ef9f8ce/21496 2 z.0@.ef9f8ce/21497 2 z.0@.ef9f8ce/21498
http://communitytalk.rd.com/WebX?14@254.AQqKavbAF
http://communitytalk.rd.com/WebX?14@254.AQqKavbAF
http://communitytalk.rd.com/WebX?14@254.AQqKavbAF
On http://www.newpath4.com/ I tell of "non-destructive energy", a truly awesome concept. Nothing gets destroyed, just energies added and used and added again. But again, the people who charge you at the gasoline pump, or through the nose in wintertime (hose) have YOUR MONIES TO TELL YOU A CONTINUATION OF WHATEVER THEY WANT YOU TO THINK, brought to you through multibillion dollar TV advertising and Mass Media Marketing campaigns. Campaigns as in Hitler taking Europe. Read those posts on the Reader's Digest board then, if you want, write me at anyname@newpath4.com . You seem very upset. Don't be. My two engines are going to bring a sudden stop to global climate change.
When we bring the temperature down, earthquakes will slow dramatically. Yesterday a report on the News said "California is on the edge of a major earthquake, southern San Andreas fault eerily not moving. They said the energy is about to break out." Yet they said not to panic. You can't panic if you're living on top a earthquake zone about to shift, they know it, you know it, but do not panic? Wow. That's heavy.
Anyway friend, try not to get all bent out of shape. I've found some answers. Al Gore knows about my Weather Cycle continuous power engines, & his little joke-skit about how he "solved global warming" on Saturday Night Live well, he wasn't kidding around. He was serious. It was everyone else was laughing. You see, Al Gore is prepping the world, trying to help prepare them for my engines. Al Gore was laying the groundwork. He knows about my conclusions that Mankind has created four separate "Armageddons" which are all adding to one another. Spend a little time on http://www.newpath4.com/newplanetearth.htm and you'll get some answers to your questions and a little softening of your angst.
Um, no? Assuming you're not joking, perhaps, by the above 'logic', you believe this as well:
http://outcampaign.org/
Valid point. The insanity and their overstating the case gets to me after awhile. And it's been more than a decade.
They may be overstating things, but there are real problems at the core of their concerns.
I'm not so sure there are. I fully support efforts to keep our water clean, our air clean, and reduce the contaminants that we spew into the air. I hate seeing a brown cloud of pollution as much as the next guy. I don't litter and I don't take leaks in streams when I'm camping. These are all things that make sense.
I do take issue with placing CO2 in the category of a "pollutant." I really do. Those that wish to reduce CO2 output should feel free to stop breathing any time; their contribution to the effort will be appreciated.
My opinion is that humanity doesn't have to worry about extinction, but it definitely does have to worry about massive die-offs due to extreme resource shortages
And I find that to be overstating the case as much as the other messages I've responded to in this thread.
It's not that I'm in denial. It's that I've looked at the evidence we have so far, weighed it, and I do not reach the same dire conclusions; or I at least recognize the lack of certainty in those predictions. Sure, certain areas might become less fertile for growing food, but other places will become more fertile. The gloom and doomers have no more concrete evidence to back up the belief that this will ultimately be a net loss than I do to back up my belief that it will be a neutral change or even a net-gain. Someone may assert that I'm engaged in "wishful thinking" but it's just as valid for me to turn around and say, "Yeah, well you're engaged in pesimistic thinking."
Even if we assume that the earth is warmer and that man had something to do with it, we're far from certain that that's really a bad thing. The Little Ice Age was definitely not a good thing for humanity and I think it's definitely good that we're now living in a warmer climate.
I agree it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. But regardless, if we like people being able to live on the island of Manhattan without having to live on houseboats, we have to fight this.
Even if it is natural, we can fight this, and we can win.
China is already changing their car emissions laws. They've made a hydroelectric generator so large that people around the world are pissed off about it (Three Gorges Dam). They'll fall in line too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I'm interested to know about the 5x difference between the article and CNN's headline this evening: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/06/22/global. warming.ap/index.html?
The funny thing is you guys cherry pick the scientific results that suit your taste.
At the beginning some GW deniers tried to flatly deny the GW effect.
Then, after their arguments were deterred, they found an excellent refuge in that there is no reason that it is caused by human activity. This gives them credit by accepting scientific results.
So you accept the results that show the Earth is warming, but you don't accept the results BY THE SAME PEOPLE (here the Academy of Science, what better authority do you have ?) that say it can't be explained other than by human activity. That is cherry picking.
Wow. That's really ignorant. The cranks mentioned are certainly no Einstein or Copernicus.
First off, I hate to spell check because spelling doesn't necessarily correlate with intelligence, but you did misspell Einstein... Just a typo, I hope.
You assert: the scientific community is "in general totally wrong"
I do know you're science illiterate and trying to fake it though. Your comment is so goofy, it's empirical evidence of that.
Why do we accept today that Copernicus was correct? Because his theory was accepted by the scientific community consensus of course. To make that perfectly clear, we know it's true because the scientific consensus tells us so and because they've proven it with telescopes and space exploration, which btw only came as a result of the scientific consensus accepting the Copernicus theory on its merits long before space exploration or modern telescopes were possible or even conceived.
Actually, it was the Church that stifled Copernicus because it was resistant to science informing them and replacing mysticism. Today the anti-science mystics would be Big Oil, and some fundamentalists spreading ignorance to protect themselves and resist the well founded science establishing man made global climate change.
Einstein's theories were taken up very quickly on their merits despite him being somewhat of an unknown outsider. In fact, based on the merits of his work, he went from being an unknown to revolutionizing some areas if physics in about a year, and building on that a decade later. His work was rapidly embraced on its merits, and he quickly came to personify the merits of the peer review system and scientific consensus.
The idea that you'd attempt to portray him as evidence that the scientific consensus is "generally
The critics of global warming have had their chances, and continue to have the opportunity, to prove the scientific community wrong. They have failed, and their shifting theories are continually debunked and even regarded with ridicule for being so laughably specious and designed to prey on the public's scientific illiteracy. They are regarded as cranks in the scientific community.
The notion you'd compare those cranks to Einstein or Copernicus... amazing. You must either be a silly troll, an incredibly ignorant person, or someone paid to spread BS on the web.
This has to be the most ideologically biased piece of crap I've read in /. so far.
"Whatever actions we take are normal, natural, and probably expected for a species at our level of technological development"
What a joke.
What about the arrogance of NOT being concerned about our environment ?
What about the arrogance of thinking you can fuck up the planet in your lifetime ?
What about the arrogance of those who promote the distrust of Science and knowledge when it goes against their beliefs ?
What about the arrogance of a very minor group of ideological people who, for the sake of their dollar and oil religion, block the application of the Tokyo treaty that has been ratified by the rest of the world ?
If there is arrogance beyond belief, it's the arrogance shown by the conservatist sympathizers who think the Earth is theirs and hide behind excuses in order to do nothing.
Let me cite again one of their Talibans, Mrs Ann Coulter, to show what their true nature is :
"The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet -- it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that's the Biblical view."
Population growth is shrinking (in the west). Population is still increasing (in the west).
I've had this sig for three days.
Ever heard of the tiny freakin' rest of the world? No, of course not. You're all Americans.
(You want flamebait, you got flamebait!)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Massive global warming is usually caused by a chain reaction of phenomena. Some 55 million years ago, a volcano erupted in what's now known as Indonesia; the carbon dioxide from the eruption raised the earth temp just 2 degrees. Soon after, a methane gas (another greenhouse gas) build up under the Greenland ice sheet was released due to glacial melting. This resulted in a runaway global warming of 10 degrees, spawning an evolutionary bottleneck. It is not wrong to assume that dumping literally millions of years of trapped C02 into the atmosphere in a span of 100 years can set off rapid global warming. Granted, these time scales are larger that a human's life, but we do have offspring... cite (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNew s/2001/200112106303.html)
People with that attitude must all be 800 pound fatsos.
I'm consuming more calories than I sweat off, maybe that's why I'm getting fatter. It'll be hard to change my ways and maybe I'm getting fatter for other reasons (genetics!? aliens!?), so why do anything?
There's a huge difference between being 30 pounds overweight and being 500 pounds overweight. There's a huge difference in future climate between 380 ppmv CO2 and CO2 levels busting through to 400, 450, 500?? Every person, every company, every nation, needs to do a hell of a lot, IMMEDIATELY.
=S
It's true that there is a lot of disingenuity on the warming-is-fake side, but some of it is caused by disingenuity and outright stupidity on the warming-is-real side.
If you look at places like dailykos.com and other political proponents of "we need to do something", even mainstream ones like Al Gore, they're at huge odds with the scientific literature. For example, you now hear all sorts of nonsense about how increased hurricane frequency proves we need to do something, even though there is no evidence at all of a relationship (some scientists have hypothesized a relationship between warming and hurricane intensity---not frequency---but even that is highly speculative and not generally accepted).
In addition, I've heard claims that severe winters also support global warming, but the UN's general reports on the subject dispel that as a myth, and claim that global warming would result in, on average, slightly less severe winters. (Of course, severe winters don't *disprove* globl warming either---there are still plenty of year-to-year fluctuations even if the average is getting warmer.)
People are also conflating multiple trends. The important issue from a human-change point of view is the extent to which greenhouse gases and other human creations are changing climate. That's a separate question from the *aggregate* climate change. There *is* indeed good evidence for human-caused climate change, but it is still a separate question. For example, glacier retreat is often cited, but is largely a different phenomenon---Canadian glaciers have been retreating since about 1842, long before significant human-caused global warming. Current glacier retreat does appear to be caused or accelerated by global warming, but showing a picture of "glacier in 1840" and "glacier now" is just shady politics, when most of that recession happened from 1840-1930. And, of course, we should also take into account the estimates that about 30% of current warming is caused by an odd increase in solar output.
I think on the whole shoddy pro-global-warming argument is hurting the case. When the facts are on your side, there's no need to embellish them, and it damages credibility. This is why Real Scientists tend not to do it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You know if excess CO2 caused global cooling we would all ride on bio-fule powered public transport/telecommute, however seeing as most of us would like a warmer summer (In the South of England this is a very real desire) we are not as worried.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
But doesn't the fact that we're admitting it has happened before only further give proof to it being a natural cycle, and has little or nothing to do with "global warming" ?
Noone cares about Australia, we are the second most arid continent in the entire world (Antartica being the most, only because of how freaking cold it is), and you cant even bother mentioning that we almost all already live on the coast to escape the desert and the extreme heats.
Boy, there sure is a lot of heated debate going on around here!
Warmest in 400 years? 400 years ago was the Little Ice Age (LIA). So things have been slowly warming up since then. What's the news?
Sorry, can't put a signature on a Protocol for a place that doesn't exist. There is no Kioto Protocol. Except maybe in your imagination (see "doesn't exist").
Now, as for the KYOTO Protocol, there's exactly ZERO proof that the changes it induces will actually have a real effect on the environment. It's more along the lines of "pie in the sky".
MOREOVER, there's significant evidence that a large number of signatory nations on the Kyoto Protocol are NOT abiding by it. Can we say "useless gesture?" I thought you could.
Now, nobody is saying we shouldn't do SOMETHING about the trends in our environment. But nobody who is anything CLOSE to honest knows what effect, if any, any of these steps would have. Maybe some, maybe nothing, maybe something bad.
Seriously, we're talking about 5 QUADRILLION (5,000 Trillion, 5,000,000 Billion) tons of gaseous mass here.
Every year we supposedly pump a few million tons of CO2 and other waste products into the air. Much of it settles out immediately, some doesn't.
However, even assuming we pumped as much as 100 million tons of waste and it ALL stayed up, we're talking about exactly 0.000002 (2/10,000ths) of the total mass of the atmosphere.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's more of a climate change, but calling it "global warming" is a bit of a problem, since we also have some areas of the world becoming much colder. Changing climate is a natural thing. Just labeling it "global warming" makes you think it's "oh no, horrible!"
Come on.
o hai
I don't know... the sand in the shade of my H2 is pretty cool...I have my whole head buried in it.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Populations may be shinking in the developed world, but it is the opposite in the developing world. The world population is continuing to decrease. All indications are that the problems of pollution, deforestation, desertification ect ect is accelerating.
Global warming doesn't exist.
These are just stupid scare tactics. There is no evidence, just these rediculus computer models... last i checked, humans write computer models, so that only means that their predictions are wrong by a factor of COMPUTER-to-the-HUMAN-power.
The primary impact to most folks will be the economic impacts in relocating 40%-60% of the planet's population in about a century as the coastal regions get flooded or wiped out. Those folks will need food, water, shelter, and law they move into undesirable areas like deserts. Lots of opportunity for problems as we discuss future needs for military or virus inoculation infrastucture...
The sea level changes won't be like a smooth tide rising, rather more like repeating Katrinas as we squander resources in the lulls trying to rebuild infrastructure to lost causes, in addition to the humanitarian assists and relocation support.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
But of course. Year 2000 was a giant leap year.
Every 400 years or so the planet's surface of intersecting strip malls grow into a single hot spot. Comprised of Little people molecules, helium and shelium, carouse on its surface, binding with each other, singing those silly molecule songs, trying to be cool, tossing excess heat at their gentle Neighbors to the North when they think no one is watching. A level of excitation not just outrageous but embarassing. Stable molecules feel stable in their shells, the heat does not bother them but are soon caught in the fracas, rudely knocked about, rock back and forth by shifting mass above, lots of giggles. Stable molecules have no windows and prefer it that way. Champaigne bottles are broken over them.
Within the dainty fundament of the universe Brawlian Motion is tolerated for its own brutish sake, to a point. The boiling point.
As the boiling point approaches, some molecules -- who promised money or left dents in heavier molecules early on -- may detach and drift into the ether. But now an awesome principle of nature suddenly reveals itself. In flux you can never be sure who made the call, but a call is made, even before the party begins. It is not wise to trifle with an awesome principle of nature. The party is OVER, time to grab your cups and move along.
A few sullen parting kicks sending heavy molecules skidding around. A quark is squeezed, emitting that field effect so tragically cute even the glum dissolve into helpless fits of laughter. Or perhaps... something else completely that merely resembles it, to us.
This crowd is not dispersing and nature's princple -- perhaps its finest -- realizes it has made a blunder: to reveal only impresses the scientific observer; but what is being shown could't possibly be anything not seen around here countless times before. The nervous principle tucks in its fanfare without fanfare and boldly asserts itself in a way that, while small, is terrifying and morbidly fascinating. This might have changed everything -- but the amazing Event has just been unobserved by Science, its gaze is elsewhere.
And so they leap! Up they leap! For the leap year! And you thought I'd forgotten.
MEET THE PROBLEM: What was done was to resolve a locally insane yet globally complacent thermodynamic difference of potential. Since what is described took place on the surface of an oblate spheroid, which has no beginning and end... don't ask me where to begin, anyway it must still be going on.
MEET THE PLAYERS: They are the PROBLEM's 'cause', and also the ones who 'addressed' it. There was this wild party of crazy little things that couldn't possibly have known what they were doing at the time, they were so kineticly ferneticaly wasted... when they awoke the next morning, they couldn't have known where they'd end up; by the time figured out where they were, by that time even if they still remembered, they couldn't possibly know when. Forget it! Is it any wonder these jittery dudes party hearty? They have nothing to worry about, what ever they do they'll make out: they cannot be unmade! Which as it turns out, is only possibly so. A modern mystic (I thought, cold have been 'fish stick') said 'Tampering' is in, then booked without explaining it all, probably just someone tampering with me. There a bit of winking and blinking, and interdementional whoopee that makes transition between several states, at least one a Muppet state [obscene, big bird, hotnerd] And then: stand still while the whole freaking Universe moves round and round? Maybe a theory developed by the adorably cute kind of kids who covers their eyes so you can't see them. I could stand still that long, even longer, but no way if I was surrounded by that much.
SUMMARY: If left unresolved it might have mattered to us a great deal: things matter to us, we are the ones w
How long as population shrinkage been happening?
How much CO2/CHx is emitted by the developed nations, as opposed to developing countries?
How much heat is being emitted by developed countries? How much by the developing world?
Would the US be willing to give up the automobile? Keep in mind that people in developing countries want the same class of life as the people in the US, so if the US standard of living is 2 hour car commutes, lousy mass transit and lots of oil burning, that is what the people in the devloping world will want too.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Given that vineyards used to grow all over the UK during the Roman period - it doesn't seem exactly credible that these people can claim that the World is now far warmer than it has been for millenia. (Vineyards most defintely do not grow all across the UK today; during the Summer, the climate is still too cold to support this crop - except in the southern part of England). Perhaps rather than pushing an unsound eco-agenda, these people should pick up a history book and discover that it was the Romans who first suggested using records of patterns of plant growth as a way of calibrating flunctuations in planetary temperature over long periods.
e rts/2004/2004052717073.html
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAl
If the Roman theory is right, then the Earth has a bit to go, before the average global temperature climbs back to where it was in Medieval times, let alone Roman times.
Gee...only one storm. That proves global warming is true! ;)
Assignment: Please link these historical events to an overly-warm climate.
1606
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Events
January 27 - Gunpowder Plot: The trial of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators begins.
January 31 - Guy Fawkes is executed for his plotting against Parliament and James I of England.
April 12 - The Union Jack is adopted as the national flag of Great Britain.
May 17 - Supporters of Vasili Shusky invade the Kremlin and kill Premier Dmitri.
December 26 - Shakespeare's King Lear performed in court.
Storm buries a village of St Ishmail near modern-day Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, Britain.
The Treaty of Zsitva-Torok ends the Long War between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in Hungary. The independence of Transylvania is recognized by both sides and Austria's annual tribute to the Ottoman Empire is abolished.
First Union Flag created.
The Jesuit Joannis Stribingius visits Latvia, describes Latvian mythology.
The people who respond to these articles with "...but we don't know what's causing it; It may be part of normal variation." miss the point. The question is not whether it has been hotter in the past but:
1) Will climate changes significantly affect the carrying capacity of our biosphere/economy/ecology?
2) Is there anything we can do to mitigate such affects, if any?
3) At what point do we lose the ability to make such an impact?
Scientific opinion seems to be crystalizing on at least the first two items. Yes, the Vikings may have thrived in warmer temperatures, but the entire population of the planet in 1000 A.D. was less than the U.S.'s today (about 265 million). There was more resilience in the system to accept large migrations and crop/prey shifts. I think that's not so true today.
We also seem to be reaching agreement that yes, mankind does have an effect of some kind on world climate. How much of an effect is difficult to define.
In the end, it becomes a question of risk mitigation: If we can take action that might make the affects of climate change less, and the actions would have low enough impact on worldwide standards of living, we should take those actions. The debate seems to come down to this: What level of impact on current living conditions are we willing to accept, given what we know, and our confidence in the information. The answer will be different in Washington, Beijing, Paris, Islamabad, and the Kalihari desert.
... welcome global warming. It's bloody freezing here in the UK.
That 400 years or so ago it may have been hotter?
It's shit like this that has people ignoring all this crap. Civilization has been around for a few thousand years. There is history of extreme and far spread droughts, some of which wiped out entire flourishing civilizations.
I guess it was because they had too much of an industrial base 4,000 yrs ago.
Breathing! all this oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, isn't it obvious to all these so-called scientists? Perhaps we could lose a few degrees overall if everyone just stopped all this incessant breathing! ok people, seriously, the air comes in at room temp and leaves at 98F~ish...this whole "global warming" epidemic could be alleviated with a little less breathing on our parts? try maybe only taking half as many breathes in a day... if everyone would just hold their breath for an hour or so, the world would be a better/cooler place in my opinion...
Eat less chili - save the planet!
So on one hand we have a single graph of a temperature proxy in the Sargasso sea, which may indicate a temperature change. On the other hand we have a several, independant, large studies of different proxies from different locations which show the warming stated in the article. Do you understand even the basics of the scientific process? Do you understand - at any level - that just picking out the one result that you want to be correct is wrong, or will you lie and deny doing that?
...what made it so hot 400 years ago?
Was it all those sailing ships the European explorers used to exploit the world? Maybe they trapped the winds and caused a shift in global air currents!
For that matter, what was up with the Cambrian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous eras, when it was as much as 10 degrees C hotter than today (global average). Was that due to flatulent herbivorous dinosaurs?
The entire "global warming" sham is the most egregious abuse of science for political benefit since eugenics.
The hottest temperature in 400 years does NOT imply that it was this hot 400 years ago. It simply means that if we look at the records of the last 400 years, the hottest temperatures are right now. Furthermore, if we look at the records of the last 1000 years (which are a little harder to read since there are fewer means of cross-correlation), the hottest temperatures are right now. Please try to understand that these two statements do not, in any way, contradict each other.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
In short, studies have proven that the heat island effect is not as significant as Crichton supposes (by measuring temps on windy days, where the heat island effect is known to be less significant). Also sea level is going down in some areas b/c areas like Scandanavia are still rebounding from the last ice age. The ground is rising as the weight of the glaciers is taking off of it.
Whether or not this is real is not the issue here. I mean let think about it for a minute.
1. I have lived in the mid-west my whole life.
2. The summers have gradually been getting longer and warmer.
3. The winters have been gradually getting shorter and not as cold.
It is quite obvious that it is real. My senses tell me that. I don't need some freaking scientist to tell me that. The problem is that there are to many people in this country, and other countries, that make thier living off of fosil fuels. (i.e. Oil) There will be a debate over this forever until these people find a way to get rich, with little overhead, off of some other type of fuel.
Really there are several, less polluting / non-polluting, alternatives already.
1. Hydrogen
2. Soy
3. Salt Water
The problem is the distribution chains for fossil fuels are already there and making the people in power money. There would be to much overhead in getting one of these fuels into use. Lets see we would only have to convert every single gas station over to the new fuel. Everyone would have to turn in their vehicle for a new less polluting one. Plus, all the production facilities would have to be retooled to make the new vehicles, and all of the fuel production facilities would have to be retooled as well. It is so much easier for all of these businesses to say, global warming, Oh well I will be dead by the time it really matters anyway. (Make a billion dollars selling fossil fuels / fossil fueled cars or save the planet. I think ill make a billion have my fun and die happy) You know that is what they are thinking.
But sure, let's sit back and watch what happens. Big experiment in social restructuring, could be fun. Could be hard for someone, but that's the breaks. And maybe in 100 years, after the migrations have started in earnest and whole continents empty into whole other continents, rivers of human flesh and misery passing each other in hopeless crawls from one ecological disaster area to another, maybe our grandchildren won't be digging up and violating our corpses in blind rage at how stupid and cynical we were at the very moment in 400 years of screwing up when we could have turned this ship around and saved them a lot of human misery.
That is one dim view. We might also be celebrating and feasting in peace and harmony due to dumper crop yields that a milder climate with elevated CO2 concentrations would bring.
an ill wind that blows no good
Replace "Texaco Scientist" and "Shell Scientist" with "ExxonMobil Scientist". As far as I know, they are the only company actively trying to distort the facts. Please correct me if I'm wrong as this affects my gas-purchasing decisions. I refuse to buy gas from any ExxonMobil affiliated station.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Reporter - "..Whats your stance on Global Warming??.."
George Bush - "Well.... ugh ogh The Globe is Warming!!.."
Is global warming bad? Probably not for everybody. On the other hand, the USA has one of the most temperate climates on the globe, which has a lot to do with our high food production. We are the last ones who should be wanting to role the climate dice again.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192 However, you'll find that the warming on Mars is a natural part of its cycle and is related to the eccentricity of its orbit. That is not the case for Earth.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
George W. Bush himself doesn't "question the gospel that global warming is caused by human generated greenhouse gas emissions." It's ExxonMobil, their "think tanks", and (some of) the ill-informed that do.
Of course, like you, I'm not fan of Dubya, but I do feel the need to defend his "honor" on this matter.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Here you want a negative theory that disproves global warming?
400 hundred years ago it the earth was hotter than today!!!!!!! Like the story says!!!!! So without my SUV or polluting factories it was hotter 400 years ago. Therefore, those things do not contribute to global warming.
Kthxbye
Mars is also hotter than it has been for 500 years. Not to mention we have not been collecting accurate climate information for 400 years and the means by which to collect that data accurately has only existed for the last hundred or hundred and fifty years. Damn humans we are just not satisfied with screwing up our climate, but even teh climate of planets we don't even exist on... I am sooo ashamed :P,
Ray
You mean one that you hypothesized, and is not supported by any scientists that I'm aware of. This isn't the best answer to global warming deniers, but it does capture the flavor of their debating style.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The earth is billions of years old. Lets put things in perspective. If you put it on the scale of a human life, the last thousand years corrosponds to 1 second of an average lifespan. Who cares if its the hottest in 400 years - does it really mean anything in the scope of billions of years? We simply freak out if there is any change whatsoever - it scares us - but it is the only certainty. Unfortunately there will always be those who think that 1) they can somehow stop change from occuring 2) think that anything that is foreign to what they are used to is bad and 3) will miss the point that while we should understand our environment, maintaining it just as it is now is simply never going to be a possibility no matter what we do.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
They might have data from only 4 or 5 sources instead of the 6 or 7 they'd like to have, but there are multiple sources of data going back thousands of years. There are sources for CO2 levels, and different sources for temperatures. I'm sure if you wanted to, you could find these sources. A place to start might be http://www.realclimate.org/.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Green Freaks are worried that end is near!
Rest of world yawns and continues on with life.
First of all, citing Canada Free Press is not much better than citing the Institute for Creation Research. Look at the other stories they post there.
Now, the good news. My Republican leaning father, who voted for Bush in '00 AND '04, has read the Crichton novel and seen the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" (in that order). Prior to the movie, he was a skeptic (but not a denier), but he is now convinced that global warming is real and anthropogenic. He told me that he's still no fan of Al Gore, but that he was convinced. He just wished that more time was spent on what to do about it.
As for global warming being used by the "powers that be", how does this work? Is it easier for you to believe that somehow someone benefits from stopping you from polluting, but that surely ExxonMobil has no interest in lying to you? Sure, you might claim that scientists benefit from receiving grant money (as Crichton claims), but who benefits from giving them that money? With ExxonMobil, it's easy to see who benefits, and how.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Dang, I'm glad we didn't believe the scientists in the 1970's who said the Earth was cooling off. We'd have thrown another log on the fire to warm things up, and, next thing you know, 90% of Slashdotters would be wearing shorts to work!
I read elsewhere that it's the warmest in 2000 years. You global warming nuts need to get your facts straight.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
What do you mean by sudden jumps in temperature? As far as I know there has never been such a sudden jump in temperature (and definitely not in CO2 concentrations) reflected in any of our measurements that matches the current jump. Yes, it has been hotter than it is now - and many areas that are now inhabited were underwater then.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Haven't we only been measuring temperatures for 130 years?
At school, I've heard more than a few professors comment about how the data used to estimate the historical temperatures on Earth is very poor.
/. had a comment about the data they use for these studies.
I haven't spent too much time reading on this subject, but I wondered if perhaps someone on
Any idea how accurate it is?
SIGFAULT
I won't get into the longer term, as that may be a legitimate debate. However, this "warmest in the last 400 years" crap is misleading rhetoric. The reason the earth is warmer now is that the earth has been in an "Ice Age" for the last 400 years and is now starting to come out of it.
Before you read this article, you should first read up on the "Mini Ice Age": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age. After you read it, you will see that articles like this are just unethical media outlets attempting to conjure up a story by preying on the stupid and uninformed.
This type of comparison is exactly the same as comparing a car going 10 mph to a car going 1 mph by saying "That 10mph car can go REALLY fast. It is 10x faster than other cars."
Here are the key points from the above article:
"The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling lasting approximately from the 14th to the mid-19th centuries, although there is no generally agreed start or end date: some confine the period to 1550-1850. This cooler period occurs after a warmer era known as the Medieval climate optimum. There were three minima, beginning about 1650, about 1770, and 1850, each separated by slight warming intervals."
"There is no agreed beginning year to the Little Ice Age, although there are a frequently referenced series of events preceding the known climatic minima. Starting in the 13th century, pack ice began advancing southwards in the North Atlantic, as well as glaciers in Greenland. The three years of torrential rains beginning in 1315 ushered in an era of unpredictable weather in Northern Europe which did not lift until the 19th century. There is anecdotal evidence of expanding glaciers almost worldwide, but a climate reconstruction based on glacial length shows no great variation from 1600 to 1850, though it shows strong retreat thereafter. For this reason, scholars tend to use any of several dates ranging over 400 years for the beginning of the Little Ice Age:
1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
1650 for the first climatic minimum."
"Causes: Scientists have identified two causes of the Little Ice Age from outside the ocean/atmosphere/land systems: decreased solar activity and increased volcanic activity. Research is ongoing on more ambiguous influences such as internal variability of the climate system, and anthropogenic influence (Ruddiman). Ruddiman has speculated that depopulation of Europe during the Black Death, with the resulting decrease in agricultural output and reforestation taking up more carbon from the atmosphere, may have prolonged the Little Ice Age."
In relation to what you said, something else often quoted is the loss of ice in Antarctica (Ross Ice Shelf). But ice in some areas of Antarctica is actually increasing.
Michael Crichton's recent novel "State of Fear" is a good read concerning global warming. Skipping the actual plot of the story, let me get to the point he's trying to make - he isn't saying global warming isn't happening. He isn't saying it is.
The fact is we don't know for sure. Some things seem to show that it is, while others show. There is no conclusive evidence.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
You mean one that you hypothesized, and is not supported by any scientists that I'm aware of. This isn't the best answer to global warming deniers, but it does capture the flavor of their debating style.
Ofcourse you haven't heard it from scientists. The 50% chance that warming will be beneficial does not help them extort funding.
As for a disingenuous debating style, ever tried to get a straight answer from the Kyotoists what exactly the $1 trillion "investment" will get us? I've heard 0.02 deg C temperature decrease in a century! Is it worth destroying the world economy over the whim of a few greenies who claim that you can favorably manipulate climate by hobbling growth? I call Kyoto "economic Jonestown". Bring on the heat!
an ill wind that blows no good
The reason is pretty simple: we take the plants, or the animals which eat the plants; we then eat them, use some of their mass for energy and building our bodies, then excrete the remainder. Which we then drop into perfectly good drinking water and ship off to a sewage plant, where the water is repurified, the wastes removed and then dumped into a landfill. Millions of tons of perfectly good organic mass dumped into landfills every year.
If we composted all the human wastes produced and used them as fertiliser, we'd go a good way towards replenishing the soil. We should also not be burning our dead, or burying them in concreate vaults--bury them in the earth, and let their bodies rot naturally and return to the soil.
>... we have a single graph of a temperature proxy in the Sargasso sea, which may indicate a temperature change. On the other hand we have a several, independant, large studies of different proxies
:) ) 500 years ago. Another quirk of our complex global environment? Get a life.
Where is your data, schmuck? I put some out there and it is damn good data. Certainly, I don't claim that the surface temperature of the Sargasso sea is a perfect proxy for average global temperatures. But, it is an excellent indicator. You, on the other hand, want to claim that it means nothing and is -- what? -- a freak accident? Just like all of those Vikings farming in Greenland (in shorts!
Albedo is a term indicating how reflective something is. Reflection is not absorbtion. Completely the opposite, actually. So as the ice melts, just the opposite of what you predict will happen. Ice reflects a great deal of heat. Without the ice, more heat will be absorbed.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They certainly loaded the dice. 400 years ago we were in the middle of an abnormally cold period called The Little Ice Age.
Well, at least you warned me that you were going to use a disingenuous debating style. I can only hope you're being funny, but I fear that you are not. This is typical conspiracy theory fare - the fact that you haven't heard about it only proves that there's a conspiracy! Seriously, do you not think that there would be all kinds of money coming out of the woodwork to support this kind of research. ExxonMobil already does fund any research that might possibly shed any doubt on any aspect about global warming. Decades ago, big tobacco was doing the same thing with tobacco, and I'm sure there were people claiming that non-tobacco scientists were just extorting funding then, too. I'm grateful that many oil companies are not following ExxonMobil's example. As far as I know, they are singular in their attempts to distort the facts, and you should be embarassed that you believe them over scientists who are being funded by a Republican adminstration (as well as scientists who were funded by a Democratic administration and scientists who are being funded by other countries and non-profit organizations).
As for Kyoto, I'll admit ignorance. Do you deny there's a problem, or are you only claiming that Kyoto's no solution? If the latter, what do you recommend? Personally, I'm in favor of incentives to reduce pollution and encourage efficiency. I think nuclear power (fusion and fission) can be part of the solution, especially (with respect to fission) in the short term.
After writing that last paragraph, I decided to eliminate some of my ignorance, so I searched on "Kyoto 0.02" and found a Wikipedia article on the Kyoto Protocol. You've really distorted this, too, haven't you? It's 0.02-0.28 degrees Celsius in 50 years. So, not only did you choose the lower bound, you also changed it from 50 years to 100. Again, I'm not claiming that Kyoto is the solution (and nor are those who are pushing Kyoto - they merely claim that it's a good first step). Rather, I'm claiming that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and harmful. If you think otherwise, the benefits/dangers of Kyoto don't really factor into it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Imagine I see a line of people going on and on, until that line bends around a corner. Now, let's say I tell you that I'm taller than everyone in that line until it bends around that corner. Would you necessarily conclude that immediately after it bends around that corner you'll find someone taller? Because that's the kind of logic you're applying here.
Now, let's imagine that you do claim that. I now find a way to see around that corner and find tham I'm taller than everyone I can see there until it bends around yet another corner. Will you know claim that this claim means that there's someone taller right around the next corner?
Has it ever been hotter than it is now? Absolutely. Were we here to suffer the consequences? No. Has it ever heated up this quickly before? Probably not since the Earth first coalesced.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Wasnt the last 300 years a mini-ice age?
And several thousand millenia ago the actual ice age.
Would that make it pretty easy to obtain a "highest temperature in ages"?
Try doing a risk analysis instead. A real, on-paper one, not a discussion with some partisan. Something like this maybe:
1) If global climate destabilization is occurring (that's what so-called "global warming" is supposedly measuring, after all) and we do nothing about it, our economy gets trashed and our species might even be wiped out. That's leaving aside the political repercussions of the destruction of our water and air commons.
2) If the climate does not need to be remediated by humans (or cannot be manipulated by us) but we try to do something about it anyway, we generate work for little reason other than to employ people in unnecessary industrial cleanups and restructuring. And of course we'd stimulate scientific research since large capital holders (mostly corporations) will have to sink money in R & D to save their businesses when heavily polluting processes are outlawed. Where's the downside? A bunch of megabillionares become infinitesimally less rich? You won't lose your job or your life.
There are lots of other ways to logically explore the problem without sucking up party memes. Does it make sense to purposely take all the geologically sequestered carbon out of the earth and pump it directly into the air you breathe? Assuming you can see the basic difference between geologically sequestered carbon (oil) and biologically sequestered carbon (wood, meat, grain), and that you understand the carbon cycle that powers life on this planet, how can we balance our carbon budget? What are loggers' jobs worth, and what options and responsibilities do we have as a society have towards loggers and their families? How about our responsibility to blue-collar oilmen and Texas oil megamillionaires?
Don't take my word for it, though - think for yourself. Nearly everyone is smart enough to work this one out from base principles.
It is often that I have a similar debate with a close friend of mine. Basic Economics, doing what you can with what you got, drives everyone.
Example: I am not going to put all of my electronics that have a clock or stantby features and put them on some master switch so that they don't drain energy and cost me $5 a year. Might I save a fingerling? NOPE. Not at that level. But more importantly becuase when I turn on my stereo and have to re-program all my channels, I'll have spent 10 minutes every time I use it just setting stations. (my radio is a B**h to tune, but once stations are set, it rocks! Go ONKYO)
Time is money, friend.
When talking to that same person about an electric car, I was saying that I wanted my current cars performance (0-60 6 seconds), and at least half of the range (~ 150-175 miles) He said why do you need that kind of range? "Just plug it in when you stop. it wouldn't even cost someone a dollar" Do you think my parents want to pay for my electricity usage? Probably not. $1 maybe, but over the course of a year, thats $50. That is "wasted" e- because my parents would be paying for something they didn't use.
e- isn't free & cash don't grow on trees (although it is made from plant materials..)
Now don't get me wrong. I want electric cars bad. Better acceleration, better longevity with maintenance. Lighter cars would cause less damage in accidents as well as to roads. I would buy one in a heartbeat if it met my 2 measly performance requirements, and was street legal. I pray for better capacitor tech, and lighter, more efficient batteries.
But if a change is going to happen on a societal scale it has to be waranted by these things:
1. It can't take much extra effort on the end user
2. It has to cost roughly within 5-10% of current method unless it is cheaper than current method
3. It has to make a significant differance to both the end user, and the society to warrant manufacturing changes.
4. It has to perform the same or better.
Nobody is going to pay morer for something that does less.
Heres an example.
Recycling.
curb side recycling is way more successful than a recycling bin 2 miles away.
Yes there is some selfishness there, but it would take more time and energy to load up your stuff, sort it, and dispose of properly 2 miles away than it is to toss that glass into the container marked "GLASS" that sits right next to your garbage, or just outside the door.
The public has proved though, time and time again, that if you give them a "reasonable" (in their eyes) alternative, they will take it. Nobody wants to have to say to their neighbor in a curbside neighborhood "uhm.. no, I don't recycle.. it's too much effort to put the can in the right bin" How effing lazy is that?
My neighbors know I recycle because I usually have to fill two bins with glass from beer & wine bottles
I played a game, a first person shooter...which obviously involved a lot of use of the mouse, hence of my right hand. I played on, and derived great pleasure in it. One day I felt a little pain in my hand, I dismissed it...after all it was just a little silly pain...everyone else plays it, and nothing happens...I played on...got better... An year later, I couldn't play as well...my hand hurt a little. So I tried harder...and got better...I played on. Another year after, my hand started hurting, even when I wasn't playing. It hurt while typing, playing my guitar, using my cellphone and what not. Sometimes I felt, it was trying to tell me something...heck...who cares. It will be fine...NO IT WON'T BE FINE. If we think we can go on ignoring the signals nature is patiently been giving us for so many years, and nothing will happen...WE ARE DEAD WRONG! She has her bounds...if we ignore her calls (which we are doing) she will use other, more drastic ways (of which she has no dearth) to break the mould of our flippancy and inertia.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Oil dependence is a fact of modern life. Its derivatives power our cars, serve as raw materials to our plastic products, and serve a multitude of other uses. This resource is nonrenewable; there is undeniably only so much. At the moment there are only a few viable alternatives that MIGHT replace oil. Conservation of this resource is a sensible precaution in the vested practical interests of virtually everyone.
Given this basic starting point, all this hoopla about global warming is almost irrelevant. The recent precedent is what happened to New Orleans. Engineers and scientists knew a hurricane would eventually breach the levies; it was just a matter of time. The community in New Orleans bet the breach would not be in their lifetime and, anyway, would do nothing unless the Federal Government paid the bill. Nothing was done. When the event happened the politicians just ducked their heads and the community paid the consequences.
There are basic things we need to do to secure the future for our race. That we do little or nothing to actually address these issues is a sign of poor thinking on the part of the community as a whole.
http://www.scotese.com/images/globaltemp.jpg
from the http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
I know lots of disreputable PhDs, and Nikola Tesla's doctorates were all honorary, granted after he made his reputation.
Anyone can be a scientist by practicing the scientific method, and scientists gain reputation from the value of their results and not from sheepskins or licenses.
If you don't understand how we can know the carbon content of the atmosphere for the last 65,000 years, or you believe that you can't easily find real, verifiable, well-documented climate science with full cites and independent skeptical verification, you are woefully misinformed. And may I say that anybody who would bring the phrase "leftist banter" to a conversation about science has already been infected with anti-science memes.
Go read the report this discussion is about. See if you can evaluate it without even thinking about Wicca, Gore, Limbaugh, Nick Berg, or "media spin". Political memes will only impede your understanding; liberals happen to have the science on their side this time around, but that's NOT why you should believe it.
You might also visit realclimate.org, if you really believe what you wrote about wanting to see real science from PhDs.
I fear that my post will sound like flamebait, or that I will seem to be an industrial apologist. Let me start by stating that I simply wish to play the skeptic for a second.
The highest temperatures in 400+ years seems to imply that in a period before the industrial revolution that the temperature was at least this high. Should one not wonder if atmospheric pollutants are simply accelorating a natural, cyclical swing in temperature? Clearly things have been heating since the last ice age, and prior to that they had cooled. There are at least grounds for wondering if changes (albeit different ones) in atmoshperic composition don't happen naturally in a way that affects temperature. Personally, I'm inclined to think that we shouldn't change the air we breath, especially since the prospects for improving on the naturally occurring mix aren't great, but a statement saying something along the lines of 'it hasn't been this dark since last night', makes me wonder if people are selling a mechanism for the change and correlation as causality to forward their political agendas. Showing that a thing may occur under current circumstances, and that it is happening is not causality.
I am skeptical that either side is presenting all of the possible evidence, and that what they say comes to us without bias; everybody knows that in politics you put forth the evidence which best frames you position, exageration does occur. Is it impossible that environmentalists have done the same thing here?
Certainly we should abide by things like Kyoto Protocol, or perhaps even more stringant standards, but some questions have to be answered before we go cannonizing global warming via industrialization. Why was the temperature as hot as it was 1000 years ago? Why did it cool? Doesn't the 400 year window that they mention at first put the point of comparison in the "Little Ice Age" and shouldn't we expect the temperature to be higher in a non-ice age than in an ice age? Did these scientist actually use paintings of glaciars and other similar "proxy evidence" to determine previous temperatures as the article claims? If there have been such previous heatings and "Little Ice Age[s]", is there some sort of periodcity to this sort of thing, or at the very least a precedent? Assuming global warming via industrialization is undeniable fact, would we be better off having not made that trade, being serfs and peasants, having none of the simple wonders which make life pleasant, which reduce infant mortality, which make simple diseases survivable, not having the knowledge that has come from that advancement?
Whenever someone like you brings up big tobacco they are imagining $$$ coming from the courts for climate change. It is the only practical avenue for the greenies to circumvent the will of the electorate.
As for Kyoto, I'll admit ignorance. Do you deny there's a problem, or are you only claiming that Kyoto's no solution? If the latter, what do you recommend?
I deny there is a problem. Kyoto is madness. I recommend continuing on the environmental path established 50 years ago. To reduce harmful pollutants. That is President Bush's policy. CO2 is not a pollutant, it is plant food.
Personally, I'm in favor of incentives to reduce pollution and encourage efficiency. I think nuclear power (fusion and fission) can be part of the solution, especially (with respect to fission) in the short term.
Efficiency will get you 20-40% reduction in usage. Energy usage grows at 5% per year. Ding. Next. Nuclear power is great. Unfortunately the greenies have hobbled reactor research since 3 mile island. Now we need the Japanese to construct them. I would like to see large ones dedicated to producing hydrogen. Don't waste your breath about fusion. After decades of hearing it is only a decade away, it is tiresome.
Again, I'm not claiming that Kyoto is the solution (and nor are those who are pushing Kyoto - they merely claim that it's a good first step). Rather, I'm claiming that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and harmful. If you think otherwise, the benefits/dangers of Kyoto don't really factor into it.
Don't you think it is a bit unrealistic to ask for $1 trillion in worldwide economic devastation and offer nothing in return? Some first step. Do you really have confidence in the Kyoto architects? Are they really credible? Your last declarations are particularly amusing. Repeating them over and over does not make it true. Climate has been warming for 12000 years. What was the result? The ascent of man. I fear the day when the warming stops.
an ill wind that blows no good
So pray tell, what media distortion am I talking about? Well, the first media reports that the hockey stick was "confirmed" which is only partially correct. The media says it's likely that there was significant warming prior to the last 400 years. The words "likely" and "plausible" have completely different meanings. But the AP takes the cake. The AP doesn't hedge it's bet at all and go for the full panic attack headline of, "Earth hottest it's been in 2000 years". What?! The study does none of these things. Drudge takes that to the Nth degree and claims, "Earth at it's hottest point since Jesus walked the Earth". Passion is a poison to science and it's no wonder the public is totally confused about the facts of climate change. It's clear that we are in a current warming trend and we need public policy based on accurate scienfic data. Those making political hay on either side of the equation need to be tossed to the curb. It makes me sick that a carefully worded study that's been worked on so hard gets mutated in to such garbage that it means nothing more than Drudge headline to public perception.
Do you know any of the people you are slandering? I do. I once met the guy who discovered "global warming" (stupid name - he agrees).
"Eco-terrorist lobbyists" and "terror campaign". Pfft. Aren't you tired of pushing that button yet? It won't work forever.
You, promoting a political agenda in a public forum, calling a bunch of scientists who are almost entirely apolitical but simply happen to have found data that contradicts your propaganda, saying they are "activists". What a farce.
People usually misunderstand global warming: it only means more energy is stored in Earth's atmosphere because the average temperature rises. It does not mean you will feel this 0.6 deg. Celsius heat every day on your skin. Rather you feel the harsher weather caused by the more energy: more tornadoes, more flooding, extreme drough at some places etc.
So, here I'm a "greenie" because I recognize that ExxonMobil is distorting the facts much as Big Tobacco did decades ago. I never mentioned $$$, but you did - probably in an effort to create a straw man, since you can't deny the original premise. (I.e., that ExxonMobil is spending big money to fund bogus research denying global warming.)
And here I'm fighting the "greenies". Did you consider that maybe, just maybe, that's because I can think for myself? Also, I'd always heard that fusion is 3 decades away, and has been since the 1950's, but that's just nitpicking. ;)
Although the figure you cite might qualify as nothing, the upper bound, IMO, does not. Further more, if successful, we will also learn more about what we're capable of doing, and what the effect will be on the environment. Some economists (as opposed to us on the sidelines) actually speculate that measures to help the environment might actually stimulate the economy. Granted, this is speculation. It might stress the economy some. Not as much as global warming will, but some.
The drastic climate change has only come in the last 100 or so years. The next 50 years will likely result in more drastic changes.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
So 400 years ago it was just as warm as it is now?
Working on carbon emissions, regardless of cause, will be a net positive. Not just cleaner air and water but, economic development and new technology.
They won't be a net positive if they piss away the resources and inestment needed to solve the ACTUAL problem - whatever it is.
And you're falling into the Keynsian falacy that government spending - especially on research - is a net gain. Those bucks get ripped from somewhere else. Even if they do end up providing a benefit, they lose the benefit they would have provided had they been applied their owner's intended purpose - whose spending has at least as much "muitiplier effect" as the government's. And when ripped off there's plenty of inefficiency in the process, so far more needs to be lifted than is actually spent "for good cause". The losses can far exceed the gains. (In fact, that's the typical case.)
Meanwhile, the costs of fossil-carbon fuels are rising as they are consumed. This is already bringing plenty of investment to bear in the private sector.
Wind generators are cost-effective in large instalations and being deployed. Photovoltaic is now a better buy than grid power in many places. (Capital cost less than stringing lines and mantainence costs less than fuel cost are a hard combo to beat.) Small outdoor loads (electronics, road-signs, lighting, emergency phones) and remote residences are two major examples. (Wind works for residences, too.)
Who did much of the research on designing and manufacturing practical solar panels? Arco. (Now merged with BP and still one of the biggest suppliers of solar.) They realized that they were an ENERGY company. (If there were places where people would switch from fuel to something made out of sand, Arco would be perfectly happy to stay in the game by processing the sand and selling them the panels.)
As they have in the past, the customers and the auto companies are responding to the rising fuel prices by buying and building more fuel efficient vehicles. Already we have hybrids that get far higher mileage than most people thought possible a couple decades ago. With higher production, deployment of better battery technologies, their prices will drop, and with further fuel price rises more customers will switch. Meanwhile, burning fuel is SO much more efficient in a big stationary plant than a small self-propelled one (and accellerating from stop on stored power rather than toting an engine big enough to do the job is SO much lighter) that grid-charged vehicles can be run for about the equivalent of 75 cents/galon (with a roughly corresponding reduction in carbon emissions). Watch for "multifuel" hybrids with higher-capacity batteries and a grid-charge connection, so commutes can be mainly grid-powered and the engine used mainly for long trips and as a safety backup against running out of juice. Meanwhile, fast-charge batteries and supercapacitors are coming out of labs over then next few years which can capture even the energy from a panic stop to recycle it for accelleration, making a mile of stop-and-go almost as efficient as one of go-and-go.
These technologies are already deploying with negligible "help" from government. And they'll continue to do so, and to put downward pressure on carbon emissions, as long as we can afford them better than we can afford gas.
But that's exactly the sort of investment that would be hit by both government taxes to "fund energy research" and government restrictions to implement something like the Kyoto treaty (even if it DIDN'T bring on an economic crash to make the Great Depression look like a "slight readjustment").
So there's some shining examples of how "(government-mandated) working to reduce carbon emissions" would be a net COST, even for reducing carbon emissions.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
.... but your per capita CO2 production is worrisome.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As a rule of thumb any person dealing with measurable events is thought that a margin of error of 10% is the maximum acceptable to consider something accurate enough for most purposes.
When scientists talk about something being probably true, they refer to this margins, not to 50%+1 scenario you are painting.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The 'report' in this article is an unreviewed publication from an organisation controlled by the government for the purposes of telling them what they want to hear. As such it has no more validity than any other political statement on the matter. This is not a peer-reviewed paper, so it's not 'real' science.
Wow. Wrong in almost every particular. The National Academy of Sciences is not controlled by the government and in fact is completely independent. It doesn't even get any money from the government. Members are elected based on demonstrated scientific achievement and excellence and receive no compensation for their service--it is probably the single most respected organization of scientists in the entire world. Membership is so highly regarded that universities brag about how many NAS members they have, and are proud if they are able to claim even one. To say that "this is not a peer-reviewed paper" is particularly stupid, because the report in question is itself a peer review of the validity of the "hockey stick graph" and its conclusions by the ultimate scientific peer review committee. And if any thing, validation of a human role in global warming is probably the last thing the current administration wants to hear. Indeed, the NAS review was requested by a Congressional critic of global warming in response to questions that had been raised about the validity of its methodology.
Big Chett Chet Chuck Huck Dave Bill Bob Michael Rosa Thingy Grouch Fonda Moore Kennedy Kerry Murtha Reid Pelosi Dead Man Waking Moonbat Meathead Emanymton Ema-Nincompoop Regina Daddy, is that you?
So what do you do? Do you think "Hmm, this is an rare scenario. The truck could exist, but I also have to consider that I may in fact be still asleep and dreaming this encounter. What data can I collect to determine if actiion is truly warranted in this case?"
Do you do all that, or do you get out of the frigging way first and then run your analysis? I bet I know what most of your ancestors did in analagous situations.
It's an interesting analogy but not an apt one. The cost of jumping out of the way is almost zero. There's an odd chance you'll break your leg doing so but it's really unlikely that this will happen.
Moving to a zero-Carbon economy is hugely expensive. I'm all for it, let's get 3000 fission then fusion reactors online by 2050 and as many wind mills as we can crank out (put tall spires on them to protect the birds). But realize this isn't free. It is a worthwhile investment, but no politician is willing to invest beyond 8 years. Figure out some way to deal with that problem and you've solved the whole mess.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> We can all clearly that noxious emissions are a problem.
:/
Umm, noxious? It's caused by CO2, which the Kyoto protocol you mention is intended to regulate. Do you even know what CO2 *is*!? Noxious implies that you'd be poisoned by exposure to it. Yes, in a pure CO2 environment, you'd suffocate, but that's due to lack of oxygen, not due to the CO2. You exhale CO2 with every breath. Conversely, plants take in CO2 during photosynthesis and expel O2 (AKA oxygen--there's also more to the process than just that).
Does no one stay awake in chemistry & biology any more?
Actually, my beliefs are somewhere in the middle on this one. My point was that the original poster was not making rational arguments to prove his claim. Instead he was relying on groupthink, fear mongering, and ad hominem attacks.
Note that you found my message unsupportable - yet I assume you found his completely justified? That is the symptom of hypocracy and politics - using the same words to defend your cause has a different effect than using the same words to attack it.
It would be nice to have a rational discourse on this topic - unfortunately, everyone seems to let their emotions sway. Personally, I know lots of scientists - and most of them work for corporations. They do not alter facts to suit the funding source - if they did they would not be useful workers very long. The fact is that this is a complex issue, and people like you are arguing it as if it is simple. That just makes the people that can really change things discount your belief even more strongly.
Which do you want more? To be proven right or to be correct, even if that means admitting you are wrong? What disconfirming evidence have you looked at, and why did you discount it?
My simple questions are: 1) How much damage will global warming cause if we do nothing more than we are currently doing, and with what error bars? 2) How much damage would it cause to fix it, and with what error bars on the fix working and the damage level?
Can you present your arguments in a way that can be tested, or are your arguments just emotional "if we save even one child we should burn all technology" crap?
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www.savetheglaciers.org
Excerpt
Ice Kills
Every year, thousands of people die from winter weather and storms. Glaciers kill hundreds of people each year in a frozen slow moving death march. Exposure to the bitter cold of the arctic and Antarctic can kill a man faster than even the hottest deserts on the planet. The frozen wastelands that make up the poles of this planet are the most inhospitable places on the earth. Nearly devoid of life and remote.
Every year, billions of dollars are spent dealing with winter and cold weather problems. Ice storms cost power companies millions of dollars in repairs to power lines breaking under the weight of ice. Thousands of people die in automobile accidents, costing millions of dollars. Blizzards and winter storms that rival hurricanes batter and beat against houses, ships, and the fragile eco system of the northern and southern latitudes.
Millions of miles of land are covered in a suffocating layer of ice several miles thick. Land that could be used for farming to feed the hungry. Land that could house the homeless. Land that could provide new industry and natural resources. This land sits un-used, in a frozen wasteland utterly devoid of life.
So remind me again why we want to keep the planets thermostat set at frigid?
Al Gore is telling us that the world is going to end for us in 10 years and we are going to live like cavemen because the snow caps will melt. Al Gore says we should cut back our emissions and live life as a "carbon neutral" society.
Well I say we shouldn't be trying to prevent the planet from warming, we should be encouraging it. Plants LOVE greenhouses and thrive in high CO2 environments. Everybody is always talking about feeding the world and ending world hunger and poverty. And I think global warming can help accomplish those goals
I'll certainly be suprised if either one will be "proven" in my lifetime. I'm old enough that it's unlikely I'll be alive to see empirical results. I'm also old enough to have admitted being wrong hundreds if not thousands of times - and while I don't like finding out I've made a mistake, it certainly doesn't bother me at all to tell other people about it when I do find out. If you don't leap at the chance to redress any errors you have created or disseminated, people stop considering you a worthwhile source of information, which limits what you can do in cooperation with others.
All the dozens of claims to "disconfirming evidence" that I have investigated turned out to be nothing of the sort; when I consulted the actual data (such as the Mauna Loa Co2 readings and the the Greenland ice core data) and, in some cases, spoke to scientists involved in the data gathering, I found scientifically rigorous proceedings run by non-political academics, but when I attempted to find the supposedly "scientific" dissenters I found gross misrepresentations of fact pushed by political hacks without field qualifications.
I'm not going to address the rest of your propaganda, except to mention that equating corporations with scientists is novel. I haven't noticed a lot of corporations funding cross-correlation of historical documents with carbon logging, dendrochronology, or coral reef data.
Your time would be better spent learning how to analyze data than arguing with me.
How on earth do we know what the tempetures were 400 years ago? Records weren't even started until about 80-100 years ago, the rest is pure speculation. Even the early records aren't going to be very accurate, as measuring devices weren't super accurate. And according to them, we have wamred 1 degree over 400 years, which the allowance in variation for themometers is usuall 2-10 degrees. I mean you read 10 themometers you will get 10 different readings, nothing is accurate to within one degree. Really, we are doing a lot, but bottom line is the human race is growing and will produce more emissions as a result, this is not a bad thing, we will just have to adapt to changes as they come and they will come, but not for quite some time.
If it makes any difference, truly I meant no animus at the time. This is the problem with online forums, all subtlety is lost. That's what I get for posting after long board meetings.
So: I apologize. I hope you see what I was getting at, but its my fault if my snark obscured the greater message.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
You, sir, have your tin-foil hat wound WAY too tight.
All scientists are controlled by the evil gub'mint, yessirree. If that's the case, can you explain why a vehemently PRO-business, ANTI-environment gub'mint would tether together a bunch of highly-respected experts, bought and paid for every one, your tingling tin-foil tells you, and have them trot out a report that says "holy fuck, anthropogenic CO2 is a really big problem"?
Instead of peering at the messenger's paystub could you take a moment to read the message before shooting said messenger? Or is your cynical posture just an excuse so you don't have to THINK about stuff?
While there is undoubtedly a warming trend in the solar system evidence attributing a large part to human activity is not conclusive.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We are in a frequent hurricane period and will be for some time to come.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Increased energy dispersion in the Gulf does not automatically mean more intense hurricanes; there's a very tenuous causal link there, and the processes are not well understood.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with that hypothesis is that hurricane frequency currently is still below what it was in the early 20th century, when the world was apparently cooler. Hurricane formation isn't a simple relationship between ocean temperature and storm outcome.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Your sources on air gas levels is interesting, but not really what I am interested in. According to those sources, the air will be breathable long after we use up all the carbon sources on the planet - so that is kind of irrelevant to me. I believe you are trying to convince me that humans are contributing to air chemical change - which I would totally, 100% agree with. What I am trying to understand is the probable effects of that change - and the best ways to deal with it. Most of the studies I have heard of only give doomsday scenarios, which are totally unrealistic.
In order to make informed decisions, I need to know what is likely to really happen - for example, people often talk about New York flooding... we haven't moved New Orleans or Amsterdam yet, we just deal with the problems. These problems provide a data point for how expensive a version of Global Warming might be - probably in the tens of billions of dollars per year. That means that things like Kyoto that cost (or cause lost growth) in excess of that amount should not be considered. To put this in perspective, the New Orleans disaster amounted to less than 1% of GDP. Do you believe that Global Warming will cost more?
Looking at actual Earth temperatures, it looks like the temperature almost never goes above a few degrees more than were we are now - implying the Earth's weather efficiently gets rid of excess heat introduced into the system through various means. Do you have any data on temperatures (or other effects) that may be expected?
Really, all I hear about is the moral equivalent of "change is bad". Change isn't bad - Humans are great at handling changes. And really, I'd be glad to know that we humans can change the environment enough to avoid the next return to an ice age - we know that is coming, and really that sounds far worse than global warming.
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Whether or not we should get out of the way is another matter. Science might be able to provide us with predictions about how fast we might have to move to get out of the way, how far away might be a safe distance, and other such things.
Am I wrong here?
Note: You'll notice that I didn't make any judgements about what we should do, either.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Scientists are like other people: they seek the good opinion of their peers. It seems unlikely to me that scientists are more immune than I am to the desire to be thought smart.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
This is precisely why Kyotoists will fail in America, Australia, India, China... You have no significant justification for a brazen seizure of unprecidented wealth. So it will continue to be rejected.
Personally, I have no reason to trust "experts" in the area of climate change. There are none. If you are refering to the so called "carbon market", the Europeans came up with that term. Their growth levels are so enemic they might actually consider it stimulus. Consider the source. It is a standard misguided rationing program. Such constructs have never built wealth for anyone other than a few insiders who can sell the initial issues. I'm surprised they suggest such a discredited vehicle.
I look at the greenies own data and I see a blip of an increase since 1980. Most of the 20th century was pretty flat. Wouldn't CO2 emissions have started affecting climate hundreds of years earlier if the climate was as sensative anthrogenic changes as you suggest? Or is that a discussion you are uncomfortable with?
an ill wind that blows no good
Interesting enough I just wrapped up a year-long project on the effects of ultra-violent radiation on evolution, and I did a crap-ton of research on global warming/global climate change. What all these doom-sayers fail to acknowledge is the relative resilience of life on earth. Compare the theorectical enviornment of the cambian period to that of modern day earth - none of us would survive in that world, and most likely, out ansestors would not survive in modern conditions. Conditions are constantly fulxuating - and life adjusts to it. Global climate change is not the end of life . . . it is simply the end of life as we know it. I have full confidence that whatever changes the human race inflicts upon the earth will be absorbed and over-run by the sheer momentum of Evolution. I admitt, humans seem to be a particularly delicate species, and we might not do too well in the comming changes . . . but that's no reflection on all the other species, lmao.
Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement? - SMAC
I'm saddened that the moderators lacked the intelligence and/or sense of humor necessary to mod the parent funny. :(
First of all, I've never advocated seizure. Merely making the market cost of production match its actual cost. This is not seizure, this is common sense. If I find a way to make product X cheaply by dumping the by-products in the municipal water supply, then it makes sense for the government to charge me for the cost of cleaning up the municipal water supply. Replace "water supply" with "air supply" and you begin to understand the ideas involved in legislating cleaner technologies.
Somehow, I suspect you'll object even to that little bit of common sense legislation. If it makes it easier for you to sympathize with, imagine that instead of dumping the by-products into the municipal water supply, it's even cheaper to dump them straight into your veins. Surely that shouldn't be legal. Where do you draw the line? Polluters need to be responsible for the cost of cleaning up their pollution. If you're going to argue that CO2 isn't pollution, fine. The same argument applies regardless of what you label it.
First, of all I was referring to economists, not climatologists. Secondly, I'm not surprised. It seems the only expert you trust are those funded by oil companies.
Really? You don't notice that it started off quite negative, rose to an average of 0 between 1960 and 1990 (which is how 0 is defined on that graph) and then became quite positive? No wonder you have a hard time believing the experts, when you can't notice what's in front of your own eyes. And yes, as you yourself mentioned in the GGP post, CO2 emissions did start climbing hundreds of years earlier. However, the most drastic changes in temperature not surprisingly coincide with the most drastic increases in production of CO2.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If you were looking for a balanced view point on the dangers of tobacco smoking 30 years ago, would you have gone to the cigarette companies or the think tanks they supported? If not, why would you go to the think tanks of oil companies (mainly, if not exclusively, funded by ExxonMobil) today? This is, of course, in reference to climateaudit.org, which seems to be mainly written by Stephen McIntyre, who is funded (albeit indirectly through the George Marshall Institute) by ExxonMobil. If you doubt the veracity of ExxonSecrets.org, feel free to verify it against Exxon's own "giving report".
With regards to Climate Science and Roger Pielke, if you actually look at his publications, you'll find that he does believe that CO2 contributes to significant climate change. He is just a little more agnostic than many of his fellow researchers as to the nature of that climate change. I'm not sure if you want to count him as your ally.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
You're using the usual points of the global warming denying crowd.
By now, this is almost formulaic. Not all posts contain all of these features, and some post contain additional features, but this is fairly common fare from people who pretend not to be global warming deniers.
However, I will address your issues, one by one.
McIntyre's site is not an opposing site. Pielke's site is an opposing site (and hence is not middle of the road). McIntyre's site is that of someone whose hands are in the till of ExxonMobil.
No, there is not. However, you do strongly imply that it is a minor factor by bringing up the warming of Mars (which is actually due, in large part at least, to the precession of its apogee), and trying to claim that CO2 forcing was invented after the fact to explain the heating, when in fact CO2 forcing was addressed during the time when Time magazine was worried about global cooling. (Note: climatologists were NOT worried about global cooling in the 70's.)
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists know that global warming is due primarily to anthropogenic causes. Not some, but primarily.
I have read McIntyre's criticisms, and understand them fairly well. Basically, he's picking out a few suspect points and claiming that those suspect points invalidate the whole hockey stick. The reality is that the hockey stick survives even in the absence of the points that McIntyre finds suspect.
So, this is your ad hominem attack. I do have religious convictions at stake here. I believe in the scientific process. What's more, I believe in the integrity of the majority of the scientific community. I do not believe the majority is infallible, but I do believe they follow the scientific process. I do know that CO2 levels in the seas are actually changing the seas' pH level (CO2 + H20 = carbonic acid). I do know that CO2 has a forcing effect on the Earth's temperature (because it absorbs infrared radiation). I believe that ExxonMobil is deliberately spreading falsehoods, and that McIntyre is part of their technique. I came to that belief after reading what McIntyre wrote.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I know what ad hominem means, and I'm definitely no child. I've published several articles in peer-reviewed journals (although climatology is not even close to my area of expertise), so I understand statistics and the scientific process just fine.
I don't consider McIntyre's site an "opposing" site to this discussion because he is out of his area of expertise and is being paid by ExxonMobil. For the same reasons, I wouldn't expect you to consider a site I created as an opposing site to Pielke's research.
Not that I expect you will believe Wikipedia (and I don't consider them to be the ultimate arbiter myself), but they do agree with my assessment that the NAS report supports the position that majority of global warming in the last 50 years is due to anthropogenic factors. The nice thing about that article is that it links to other sites where you can verify what they're saying.
And no, you never state that CO2 is not responsible for forcing. But you imply it in very many ways. A couple of those I documented in my previous post, and a new one is found in what you just said when you claimed that humans were responsible for 0-30 percent of global warming. Again, implied, but not directly stated.
And yes, I am quite aware of the Apostle's Creed, and it was my attempt to create a similar sounding statement since you were claiming I had a "religious" issues. I don't know why you thought it would be insulting to me to point this out, but clearly you do since you tell me I should change my statements in the future.
And with respect to approaching this with methods of science and not faith, some faith is required. I must believe that there is not a vast conspiracy by climatologists to distort the facts. I do not have the resources to attempt to prove that using some form of the scientific process.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No, actually, those were thinly veiled insults. Really, look up ad hominem. You don't actually know what it means.
As far as CO2 being "not responsible for forcing" I said it looked like it might be, and stated exactly and quantitatively what my reasons for uncertainty were. That's science.
Not that I expect you will believe Wikipedia (and I don't consider them to be the ultimate arbiter myself), but they do agree with my assessment that the NAS report supports the position that majority of global warming in the last 50 years is due to anthropogenic factors. The nice thing about that article is that it links to other sites where you can verify what they're saying.
But then, I've actually read the NAS report, and don't agree it says that. Read it yourself, and make your own decision. Don't take it on faith.
I don't like citing wikipedia but it is the closest thing to what I am looking for. Can you really make such dramatic conclusions about the last 20 years worth of data? I wish they would show the standard deviation for the averaged points. The measurement variation is huge! I find the 2004 annotation amusing. It looks to me like the temperature trend is down. Climate scientists have no shame! Isn't it irresponsible to cry wolf and ruin the world economy when so many are poised to reap its benefits?
an ill wind that blows no good
They're not really that dramatic of conclusions. Theory predicted that CO2 should contribute to global warming and observation revealed that the extreme amounts of CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere have correlated with global warming.
So, you admit that you believe there is some kind of global climatology conspiracy involved here? I see no other way to interpret your postings.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I find it amusing how you choose your the correlations that strengthen your argument and ignore the ones that weaken it.
Absolutely! I have already commented extensively about the feeding frenzy for funding that apocalyptic climate research has generated. I don't believe it is centrally organised. Do you not see that there are multitude vested political interests stoking the hysteria?
an ill wind that blows no good
Is it such a surprise that conservatives (and even libertarians, which used to be a staple!!!!) on Slashdot post anon when almost all the responses they get show the general intellect of your own post? Slashdot has become a farm of sheep, with your own voice an example of the familiar bleating we always hear. There is no real debate here after all so why bother responding with a proper username? Instead conservatives and libertarians hold forth a candle against the raging storm, in case someone may see the light and come inside until the storm passes and sanity reigns once more.
Respond as you will; rather than posting AC I instead simply delete messages from posters I know to be vapid such as yourself. I mod up an read liberals and conservatives and libertarians alike who denote respect to those on the opposite side of a debate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley