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NASA Snaps Mysterious "Night-Shining" Clouds
coondoggie writes to tell us that NASA has captured some pretty impressive images of the Alluring noctilucent (or "night-shining") clouds. These clouds are made up of ice crystals and dust and are formed at high altitudes near the poles. "Very little is known about how these clouds form over the poles, why they are being seen more frequently and at lower latitudes than ever before, or why they have been growing brighter. AIM will observe two complete cloud seasons over both poles, documenting an entire life cycle of the shiny clouds for the first time. 'It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means,' stated AIM principal investigator James Russell III of Hampton University, Hampton, Va. 'These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed.'"
It is clear that they are caused by global warming.
Evidence? You mean like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Warming_Map.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr-2.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar-cycle-data.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ice_Age_Temperature.png http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Glacier_Mass_Balance.png
Now, here's the ONE part that's in doubt: the exact predictions of future change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Warming_Predictions.png http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Warming_Predictions_Map.jpg -- a map showing what the HadCM3 model predicts on a worldwide scale, if we continue with "business as usual".
Global warming is real, the evidence is out there. It's a question of how much we're willing to cut back on CO2 and slow it down/stop it.
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Screw the we. How much are you willing to do? What have you done, aside from preach on the resource hogging internet?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I drive a car that gets upwards of 30 miles to the gallon when I have to make trips, and I ride public transportation quite often. I've also worked at a company that designed "green" buildings.
Just because the mouth-breathing Freeptards can smear Al Gore with hypocrisy doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem. The thing to note is that the impact of any one person is vanishingly small compared to the impact of a lot of the infrastructure we have no control over, the impact of large corporations, the impact of our dependency on fossil fuel for electric power, and so forth.
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I think we're in the late warning category at this point, don't you?
Oh, Gore's movie (which I saw for the first time this week) was full of sensationalism. And yes, to some extent, there is a natural CO2 cycle. On the other hand, we've also reached the highest CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that we've ever recorded (and we can't even find one that high in the ice cores) and there's over 7 billion humans on the planet. There's no reason to doubt that we're affecting the natural cycle and pushing it above where it's "supposed" to be.
Furthermore, even if it were a 100% natural cycle, the direction we're headed could have disastrous risks to humanity- simultaneous worldwide coastal flooding would cost millions of lives. Consider the alternative, that we all of a sudden plunge into another ice age as part of the "natural" cycle. Wouldn't we want to prevent or minimize the effects EVEN THOUGH it's natural, to save the lives of the people in the northern cities?
Why not do the same thing with warming, to protect those in the coastal cities?
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