Climate Change

[ssullivan]

I'll throw my hat it the ring:

I have a few items that I see surrounding the current state of affairs with human-driven global warming:

1) As was already stated the planet has been much hotter and much cooler in the past (ie: Wikipedia link way back in thread). If you are indeed a scientist trained in the Scientific Method, you know that looking at the historical data, then taking the single point of data we have (or very small series of data we have now), you cannot logically say that humans are responsible for the latest increase in temperatures.

2) Humans are full of themselves. We are not as significant as we like to think. We could all die tomorrow from the plague and the Earth would continue merilly along, probably continuing to warm (although the ozone hole issue would drop)

3) "Green" products are just the latest craze to sell more things to people. You must upgrade this, you have to buy that... just to keep you working at your desk longer and sailing less. The capitalist machine has no mercy.

[Benny]

Sean - those hot and cold periods occurred over many hundreds and thousands of years- NOT 50!

Apart from the opportunists selling all the green paraphenalia, the pollution problem and global warming still exist - what are we all willing to do to stop it or slow it down? It will mean sacrifices and a change of attitudes and some of our lifestyles but if we do so, hopefully we and future generations will not have to deal with the greater fallout of not doing anything or enough about pollutioon. How many more species have to become extinct, how many more of us need to develop diseases related to pollution and more intense sun exposure, how many more egos need to be deflated before we as a species will do the proper things to improve our stewardship of this planet. It's up to all of us.

[Capct]

The nature of the dis-information put forth by misguided people is only eclipsed by the number of fools that believe it.

The fundamental line of ******** is the fact that global warming causes increased levels of CO2 not the other way around... increased levels of CO2 do not cause the temperature of the planet to increase.

The historical record is clear on this
Increases of CO2 are caused by increases in temperatures....period.
There is no other way to twist the carbon cycle to fit the foolishness being presented.
98% of all CO2 is still naturally produced.
2% is what man contributes.
...CANADA for example produces .02% of 2%

[ssullivan]

Ahhhh... nuts! I forgot the most important point I was going to list!

4) Chaotic systems behave in interesting ways. They can acommodate great magnitudes of input(s) and change relatively little. Then... just a tiny little input and BAM. You have a complete chance of state/system.

I don't disagree with you, Benny. I see common pollution as one of the greatest threats to life as we know it. I just can't extend the argument into the heating of the planet, because I'm a trained scientist. It goes against every fiber of my being to draw a conclusion without data to support it - especially when the historical data does show we have been much hotter and colder.

But I'll agree to disagree with that little bit since you're a great guy I wouldn't want to disagree with.

Originally Posted by Benny

Sean - those hot and cold periods occurred over many hundreds and thousands of years- NOT 50!

Apart from the opportunists selling all the green paraphenalia, the pollution problem and global warming still exist - what are we all willing to do to stop it or slow it down? It will mean sacrifices and a change of attitudes and some of our lifestyles but if we do so, hopefully we and future generations will not have to deal with the greater fallout of not doing anything or enough about pollutioon. How many more species have to become extinct, how many more of us need to develop diseases related to pollution and more intense sun exposure, how many more egos need to be deflated before we as a species will do the proper things to improve our stewardship of this planet. It's up to all of us.

[shellback]

Climate changes, ..warming....cooling..ice ages and what-not.
From all the scientific folks, and those accute to historical facts of this world, yes it's always in flux. Always getting hotter and cooler. The poles will flip, the ice packs will expand and retreat.

As for myself, I don't abuse the environment nor do I keep a collection of spotted owl facts either, but I do know this. After having crossed every ocean and seeing as much as I have, I look at life pretty simply:

Us human's, we are a mere blink of an eye , a micro-second of space and time amid the earth's entire life-span. We're renting LOL and no, given how human behavior has expressed itself throughout our history, mother nature definitely won't give back the security deposit ! So , just respect this place we float on as best as we can.

[camaraderie]

Benny...lets not confuse pollution with global warming. CO2 is not pollution.
I'm all for gtting rid of pullution in a responsible manner but global warming is NOT a pollution issue.

Here's another little article...
The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough
to love it, and then there's Reid Bryson. At age 86, he's still hard at
it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.
Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history
of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the
University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology-now the Department of
Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences-in the 1970s he became the first
director of what's now the UW's Gaylord Nelson Institute of
Environmental Studies. He's a member of the United Nations Global 500
Roll of Honor-created, the U.N. says, to recognize "outstanding
achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment." He
has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was
identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most
frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the
aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by
a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect
westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out
from a general-and the general's apology the next day when he learned
they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three
years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he
prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in
Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that's trained some of the
nation's leading climatologists.
How Little We Know
Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he's as quick as anyone
to acknowledge that Earth's climate has done nothing but change
throughout the planet's existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big
step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago,
Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.
"I was laughed off the platform for saying that," he told Wisconsin
Energy Cooperative News.
In the 1960s, Bryson's idea was widely considered a radical proposition.
But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly
a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the
climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the
explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional
wisdom.
"Climate's always been changing and it's been changing rapidly at
various times, and so something was making it change in the past," he
told us in an interview this past winter. "Before there were enough
people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was
changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?"
"All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it's absurd,"
Bryson continues. "Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the
early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out
of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide
into the air."
Little Ice Age? That's what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after
they'd farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm
Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very
likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity
in making it that way. What's called "proxy evidence"-assorted clues
extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring
data-helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental
temperature records existed.
We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it's second-tier stuff.
"Don't talk about proxies," he says. "We have written evidence, eyeball
evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there?
It's all written down."
Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse
mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland.
The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th
century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has
existed. But around 1200 the mariners' instructions changed in a big
way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking
farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current
headlines. "What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?"
We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and
agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging
from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years.
Bryson interrupts excitedly.
"A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were
going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow
never went," he says. "There used to be less ice than now. It's just
getting back to normal."
What Leads, What Follows?
What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that
qualifies. There's been warming over the past 150 years and even though
it's less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual
suspect is the "greenhouse effect," various atmospheric gases trapping
solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and
where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the
atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is
what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is
absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed
in the first 30 feet by water vapor...
A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one
percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go
outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models
researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50
or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers
overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of
clouds-water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models' long-range predictive
ability, he answers with another question: "Do you believe a five-day
forecast?"
Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate
conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach
in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News
soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies,
published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006.
The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate
changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with
temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather
than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up-or
down-and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few
thousand years.
Renaissance Man, Marathon Man
When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the
ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate.
We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist,
about the significance of Bryson's work in advancing the science he's
now practiced for six decades.
"His contributions are manifold," Hopkins said. "He wrote Climates of
Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last
several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures."
This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson's high-school interest in
archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology,
and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. "He's
looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on
human societies," Hopkins says. "He's one of those people I would say is
a Renaissance person."
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years
after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson's work
today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being
outpaced by an octogenarian.
Without addressing-or being asked-that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus
Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as "the father of
the science of modern climatology."
"In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the
present state of climatology," Moran says, adding, "We're going to see
his legacy with us for many generations to come."
Holding bachelor's and master's degrees from Boston College, Moran
became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early
'70s. "I came to Wisconsin because he was there," Moran told us.
With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin's Weather and Climate, a book
aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a
need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface
for the book but Hopkins told us the editors "couldn't fathom" certain
comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that
"Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather."
Clearly what those editors couldn't fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys
mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what
might make them-and consequently us-behave differently. This was
immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing
up for work at a job he's no longer paid to do.
"It's fun!" he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.
"I think that's one of the reasons for his longevity," Moran says. "He's
so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes
people don't react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but
that's how real science takes place."-Dave Hoopman

[delmarrey]

Originally Posted by Benny

The crux of the question is this - Are YOU willing to stop polluting our planet - yes or no. Natural long cycles have little to do with recent temperature increases due to the junk we put into the atmosphere that traps heat and rays and is causing a climatic warming phenomenom not heretofor seen in historical data. This is what we are trying to deal with - stopping pollution that is fueling that phenomenom and may cause drastic changes to our world - some are already occuring and they are NOT a natural consequence of a long term trend. Time to wake up and decide if you want to do something about the problem.

Us Westerners or First World People ARE doing our part to control pollution. It's the under-developed countries that are un-controlled pollutants. Have you ever been to Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Bangkok, Madras and so on? It's hard to breath in some of these places.

What do you propose we can do about them? We Westerners are already considered aggressive enough as it is, forcing our way on the rest of the world. Education is the only thing that I can think of! But scare tactics just puts us back in the aggressive mode again. Teach FACTS not theory like I stated earlier. All theses theories is BS!!!! No one can predict the outcome of the climate any more then the weather atop a mountain. One meteor, volcano, earthquake or tsunami can change everything. Just wait, in time! There is no advantage to being a doomsdayist!!!

[TaoJones]

Originally Posted by delmarrey

There is no advantage to being a doomsdayist!!!

And what, precisely, is the advantage in being a head-in-the-sand-ist?

TaoJones

[Capct]

The Global Warming Test

Try this test...check out your knowledge

[Pura Vida]

Originally Posted by Capct

The Global Warming Test

Try this test...check out your knowledge

I successfully chose each answer to their test, even when the correct answer was not offered! Before you take this test and use it as way to make up your mind, please find out who made it and what their credentials are.

It is great to see some one finally quoteing a climate scientist. Personally I don't attribute the current change in the climate to any one thing. But I will suggest that man makes a significant impact on the world we live in and while we can't kill it, we can sure make it a less desirable place to be.

[Capct]

Originally Posted by Pura Vida

I successfully chose each answer to their test, even when the correct answer was not offered! Before you take this test and use it as way to make up your mind, please find out who made it and what their credentials are.

Yeah those Virginia plant fossil collectors are a dangerous lot.What is important is who is telling the truth.....and who is likely spinning a yarn.
The global warmites [warmongers] have yet to produce any conclusive scientific evidence that proves man is guilty of warming much of anything.Let alone an atmosphere.

While all along there is a historical record that shows us cyclical heating and cooling coresponding directly to levels of C02 in the atmosphere.
The hotter the planet has gotton over eons of time the higher levels of C02 are found in the fossil record...and in ice cores..... and tree rings....both living and petrofied.

[delmarrey]

Originally Posted by TaoJones

And what, precisely, is the advantage in being a head-in-the-sand-ist?
TaoJones

Better to have a head-in-the-sand then to be a chicken with it's head cut off.

BTW "head-in-the-sand" = "The notion is that the supposedly dumb ostrich believes that if it can't see its attacker then the attacker can't see it."

[TaoJones]

And while the poor, misguided ostrich has his head safely buried in the sand, what part of his anatomy will bear the brunt of the attack that he can't even see coming?

TaoJones

[Viking Sailor]

Originally Posted by Capct

The hotter the planet has gotton over eons of time the higher levels of C02 are found in the fossil record...and in ice cores..... and tree rings....both living and petrofied.

Correct!

And what produced all that CO2? LIFE

Come on baby light my fire!!!!

[never monday]

Have ya'll heard about the problem with dihydrogen monoxide in the oceans? It's killing people all over the world.