http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WEATHER/01/24/hot.year.ap/index.html
That’s sayin’ sump’n.
http://edition.CNN.com/2006/WEATHER/01/24/hot.year.ap/index.html
That’s sayin’ sump’n.[/quote]
Let’s bring out the sunscreen and find a beach… 
No expert by any means, but there was a documentary on BBC a couple of years ago - Horizon - called, if I remember, “The Big Chill”. As I understood it, global wrming melts polar ice and this dilutes salt water. This less salty water stops the gulf stream from working properly (or might even close it down completely) Result: the northern hemisphere has much less heat carried up to it from way down south and freezes. Meanwhile the tropics bake. So the temperature you experience at any one place or time tells you nothing about which way the earth’s climate is changing. And apparently the gulf stream is slowing down.
the Gulf stream didn’t exist a few thousand years ago.
And was that good or bad for the people living there at the time?
I don’t think they cared and they certainly didn’t know any better. Eskimos don’t.
I’m just saying that the Gulf Stream is also a product of global climate change. When it disappears or changes course the energy will be transferred to other parts of the world, but won’t be lost.
Right, transfer of energy - one part of the world gets warmer, another part gets colder. So maybe we do have a problem. We aren’t Inuit so will we be able to adapt? Well perhaps we’ll see in a hundred years (or less).
I still think that global warming is only a problem if you are a human.
How old is the earth? This little warming is just a bump on a log.
There’s an old saying: Don’t kill the goose that lays your golden egg. In this case, dont fuck with nature cuz you don’t know if it will come back and bite you in the ass. the last time i checked, we need things like clean air and clean water.
Really? Been to Mexico City or Athens lately? Drank the water in the Philipines? The amount of garbage that a human being’s system can endure is amazing.
NOT to say that we shouldn’t do our best to keep the place clean. We should. I’m just saying millions of people drink dirty water and breath filthy air and don’t drop dead because of it. Not to say that they don’tlive shorter lives.
Is there a Guiness record for world’s worst analogy I wonder cuz if there is I think we have one to nominate. God damn that’s bad.
[quote=“belgian pie”]All over the north the temperature went down to extreme cold, so now what about global warming?
Extreme snowfall to …[/quote]
Global warming deals with average global temperatures. In fact, extreme regional cold is to be expected as global warming changes weather patterns.
[quote=“Chris”][quote=“belgian pie”]All over the north the temperature went down to extreme cold, so now what about global warming?
Extreme snowfall to …[/quote]
Global warming deals with average global temperatures. In fact, extreme regional cold is to be expected as global warming changes weather patterns.[/quote]
Exactly. As that left wing rag the Economist explains:
[quote]THOSE who worry about climate change worry about many things: rising temperatures, rising sea levels, changes in rainfall and stronger storms, for example. One of the things they worry about most, though, is changes in the circulation of the ocean’s currents. That is because these currents are the main way that heat is redistributed from the tropics, where there is a lot of it, to the polar regions, where there is not. If the currents shifted, it would mean that temperatures in some parts of the world changed much more than they would merely as a result of the local atmosphere warming up as heat-trapping greenhouse gases accumulate. Indeed, it could mean that in some places temperatures fell, rather than rising.
One of the places that both history, in the form of sediment records and ice cores, and computer models suggest is vulnerable to such a fall is north-west Europe. And a paper in this week’s Nature, by Harry Bryden and his colleagues at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Britain, suggests that history may be about to repeat itself. [/quote]
They key words there: “history is about to repeat itself.”
No. My post was in response to the absurb claim that because temps may be dropping in localized areas global warming is bogus. We all know that the earth’s temp rises and drops. The issue for our times is our we pushing a climate change to a unprecedented degree, one that we may not be able to respond to adquately.
There was a recent feature story in Time about the Gulf Stream disruptions. It was pretty scary. If someone wants to pay a few bucks to read it, here’s the link: Time Story
It contains really scary data. The US government paid for an extensive network of sampling bueys (sp?) that cross the Atlantic and sample all kinds of data from the bottom up to the surface. (Robots climb up and down the cables.)
The data were terrifying. It seems that the Gulf Stream has lost something like 30% of it’s deep water return flow, thus it is transferring less and less heat to Europe at an accellerating rate of decline. It’s basically the same thing that was described in The Day After Tomorrow, except that movie exaggerated the abruptness of the impact - at least we hope so. That movie was applauded by most climatologists I heard.
Global warming is melting the ice caps, especially in the Arctic. This dilutes the salinity of the North Sea area, so the water is not as heavy. It doesn’t sink like it used to, so it doesn’t enter the deep water return current that flows opposite to the Gulf Stream. The water just drifts further north melting more ice. So the far north gets warmer, but Europe in general gets colder because the overall energy in the Gulf Stream cycle is declining.
Anyone who generalizes about climate based on their local opinion of the weather is an idiot.
Also, it is worth noting that the data described in the Time story are some of the best ever gathered to support the global warming hypothesis, and they were paid for by the US government that Kyoto signees so love to bash. Surely, the US should have signed Kyoto, but most of the countries that did are actually doing less than the US to learn more about the problem. They’re mostly not meeting their CO2 reduction quotas either. To pretend that things are okay because everyone signs Kyoto is exceedingly dangerous.
Awhile ago Salvator Armani sent me a PM asking me to re-join this discussion. I appreciated the invitation but it seemed that: 1) Others were much better qualified to discusss the science. 2) It doesn’t make that much difference how well the science is discussed anyway. People like to over produce, over consume and over dispose and that is about all there is to it. Governments could push societies in the right direction, especially with oil and gas, by taxing gas at the pump and using the proceeds to fund mass transit developments. Such a move would also encourage more research into renewable energy but oh no…
From todays New York Times
[quote]Royalty-Free Oil and Gas New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.
Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
“We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given,” said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. “It’s not to make more money, necessarily. It’s to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people.”
But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.
Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.
Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.
Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.
“It’s one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world,” said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
Republican lawmakers are also concerned about how the royalty relief program is working out.
“I don’t think there is a single member of Congress who thinks you should get royalty relief at $70 a barrel” for oil, said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee.
The government does not disclose how much individual companies benefit from the incentives, and most companies refuse to disclose either how much they pay in royalties or how much they are allowed to avoid.[/quote]
I have read this report in a different publication and on the face of it it is quite worrying.
However, independant experiments published in (other) scientific journals seem to offer different conclusions and in some cases, offer entirely different sets of data which conflict with the data offered by the US government and peer organisations.
(It is worth noting that other nations have long had bouys positioned over the Atlantic which have been measuring depth altitude temperatures, the results of which are constantly being reported).
[quote]The data were terrifying. It seems that the Gulf Stream has lost something like 30% of it’s deep water return flow, thus it is transferring less and less heat to Europe at an accellerating rate of decline. It’s basically the same thing that was described in The Day After Tomorrow, except that movie exaggerated the abruptness of the impact - at least we hope so. That movie was applauded by most climatologists I heard.
[/quote]
This is quite probably the case, but is it really something that humankind has caused by itself or merely something that we have accelerated to a certain degree?
It is interesting that the USG’vt stated that the Gulf stream has lost 30% of its return flow. But compared to when? 1994? 1968? 1435?
How do they know this? How do they know how much flow has been lost because the technology to accurately measure temperatures at depth, the salinity of water at depth and the actual movements, speed and locations of ocean currents has merely been around for 20 years.
Even now we know so little about the behaviour of ocean currents and their past tendencies that most of what we predict is surely that : Guesswork.
What we can say is that climate change will happen. It happened before humans set foot upon this earth and no doubt will happen when we leave. Our involvement and effect on climate change is merely a hinderance to what is already happening.
A good look at soil core samples, ice core samples, geological formations (especially sediment laying), river course and sea bed sampling and even pre-historic tree ring examination provide adequate evidence that global warming and coolong has happened in the past on hundreds - no thousands of occasions and will happen again - with or without us being present.
Unfortunately, some periods of global warming have happened relatively quickly - others over tens of thousands of years.
The only thing we can say is that climate does change - it’s happened before and it will happen again.
As with all science - what we think we know and what we actually do know are worlds apart.
Ahh the great philosphical perspective on things…
In the millions of years of eath’s evolutionary history we have seen vast changes resulting in the emergence and extinction of species blah blah blah…
Look, we (at least some of us) are interested in a least maintaining this earth long enough to see our grandchildren enjoy a little of the natural world that we inherited. Perhaps some of us think a few more generations down the road.
No sincere person who has travelled a bit, read a little, looked at a few maps would question that mankinds activities are having a profoundly negative influence on the health of the planet in general or the weather in particular.