Who use the warming of Mars as "evidence" that the Earth's warming isn't unique in the solar system and therefore Humans are off the hook to continue consuming/polluting virally.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070404-mars-warming.html

Since the beginning of time, Mankind has strove to understand and predict or weather, with the "Holy Grail" being the ability to control the weather.

There have been many cyclical weather patterns, some being short term of a few years, others being a few decades, or even a few millennia.

You might ask why we are still finding woolly mammoths that have been trapped in glaciers for centuries.

Yet, it is also obvious that we are now making changes in our environment that we can barely comprehend.

Is global warming and "greenhouse gasses" real? I don't know. It is at least Plausible.

Is it good to take carbon & and oils that have been locked under the surface of the earth for all of eternity and blast it into the sky? Well, we can argue about that one.

What about solar Reflection vs Absorption (the point in the article). I can certainly imagine how the deep blue sea would absorb more solar energy than ice and snow. Thus, the fear of an irreversible loss of the polar ice caps.

And,
One can certainly find that in the summer, the cities are frequently several degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside, or the floor of the deep forests.

So, the question is:

Do we wish to take the role of the good shepherd of the earth?
Or do we wish to take the role of the lice infestation on the planet?

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:

quote:

Since the beginning of time, Mankind has strove to understand and predict or weather

.. and for the first time in history we can predict with certainty that global temperatures will continue to increase for the next century. Will humanity use this knowledge for good, probably not...

I'm certainly not a climate change denialist, but a prediction is just that, a prediction, a prognostication, remember back in the seventies when an iminent ice age was in the predictions?

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:
yeah sure, believe whatever...
it won't change the inevitability of global warming, even for those with their heads in the sand...

On this rock in this perverse universe there is no such thing as inevitability.

Today it is, tomorrow? Next year?

We have been cooling done for the last 8 years.

Question. The atmosphere goes 100 miles into the sky. Man makes up about 0.000001 percent of that volume. How much control of the climate/weather can we have?

CO2 makes up 0.4 percent of the atmosphere. Argon accounts for 1% and water accounts for 2%. Both Argon and Water are denser, absorb more infrared, and are better insulators. CO2 is a minor player.

Man produces just 5% of the total CO2. Our effects on the environment are equivalent to trying to push a 1000 car freight train by hand. Also of note. The earths atmosphere cleansing itself, washing CO2 out of the air. It should also be noted that excess carbon is buried on a daily basis in many of the landfills around the world.

Weather/climate are chaotic systems, best represented by fractals. Man has a hard time predicting with certainty 12 hours into the future, predicting beyond that is a best guess.

Copernicus once said that the earth was the center of the universe, and a majority of scientist agreed with him. Global Warming is based on emotion and politics and not science.

Another question. How come all of the global warming folks ignore the heat that is generated on Earth? The atmosphere starts out warm at the surface, gets colder, then gets warmer.

The science does not support the claims.

We have been cooling for 8 years?

Ya got to be kidding me right?

Nobody realy can believe that in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary,better yet post some thing that points to that assumption and don't worry about peer reviewed science publications ,there are none

I'd love to see that one

I read that we have been in a cooling period for the last 8 years. But in looking for the real answer with a source I found this food for thought

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070315101129.htm

What I do find interesting is that from the 40s to the 70s we were experiencing a general cooling trend, all of this while CO2 levels were rising.

But please, CO2 represents about 5% of all of the greenhouse gases. Man contributes about 5% of that. Our effect on the climate/weather is minuscule at best.

quote:

measurements of the so-called 'global temperature'. This is the temperature obtained by collecting measurements of air temperatures at a large number of measuring stations around the Globe, weighing them according to the area they represent , and then calculating the yearly average according to the usual method of adding all values and dividing by the number of points.

Wait...what?!? How can a single temperature point represent an area? So if there's 2 measuring stations on the entire continent of Africa, and each shows an increase of a degree or 2, then those 2 stations have a HUGE contribution in the average because each is weighted by half the land mass of Africa!

Statistics so suck...its such a black art!

OK, I've got one more addition.

Global Warming Means More Snow For Great Lakes Region

This is the first article or theory I have seen to address one of my major conflicts with the whole global warming theory, "If the globe is warming, why the h@ll is it colder and snowier every year in S. WI than it was in the previous year?" Its only mid-December, and I've already gotten and shoveled 24+ inches of snow off my driveway! In my recent memory, it has always been mid-January by the time 24" of snow had fallen.

ScareCrow57

I've read that report before and while it's interesting and may have some merit it's one mans opinion and has yet to be backed up by science.

I agree with the thermodynamic flow of weather around the world and the difficulty of coming up with an accurate mean temperature but the large number of stations as well as the 3000 or so sea temp recording equipment does give a good idea of the temp rise over the last 30 years. take a look at all the other science articles that show the evidence for global warming. Over the last year I would say they outnumber the naysayers by about 100 to 1. check them out here

http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/earth_climate/

and here

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/

and here
http://space.physorg.com/sub_Environment/

the evidence is unequivocal and overwhelmingly in support of global warming. The debate is over and the time to act is now or face serious consequences,maybe not for me so much but for my kids who will witness it

Ryan P.

There a hell of a lot more than a couple of stations here and there as well as the aforementioned sea temp recorders any one trying that kind of statistical presentation would be laughed out of the scientific community.

There are about 2500 scientists world wide working the numbers that come in via a multitude of ways from land sea and space and they are convinced as well as a lot of others not directly involved. If there is one mistake it's the speed of witch they are working. This latest report was based on the scientific data from no later than 2005 and some was based on 2001. the polar caps are melting way faster than the models suggest so the mistake is in how much time we have to not reverse this trend because it can't be stopped now but to only mediate the rise by 2 degrees C by the end of the century

And apparently we have 10 years to get going or forget about only a 2 degree rise (witch will avoid the worst of global warming) and enter into catastrophic events such as a 1/3 extinction of all plant life with a similar extinction pattern in animal species

just for starters

it's that thermodynamic thing that changes the weather pattern and gives you more snow but take heart, I'm on the other side of the Great Lakes and I'm getting buried as well in this white s***

The norths becoming open to shipping as well as exploration so it's not hard to see why everyone's getting their slice mapped out to the pole. that could get interesting when the squabbles start Canada ,USA ,Russia,Denmark and a few others are staking claims in anticipation of this event

quote:

"If the globe is warming, why the h@ll is it colder and snowier every year in S. WI than it was in the previous year?"

You can't judge global climate by regional weather.

quote:

remember back in the seventies when an iminent ice age was in the predictions?

Where are all our ancient glaciers going if the globe isn't warming?

quote:

Originally posted by -wewantutopia-:

quote:

"If the globe is warming, why the h@ll is it colder and snowier every year in S. WI than it was in the previous year?"

You can't judge global climate by regional weather.

So true, to get at least a good quality measure of the earth's surface temperature one would need millions of measuring stations. And then to know it the environment is warming one would need an equal number of measuring points all the way up through the atmosphere. The earth has two sources of heat, the sun, and itself. Could it be that the atmosphere acts as an insulation barrier thus keeping the earths own heat in? How else can one explain the fact that the atmosphere is warmest at the surface, decreases in temperature by from 17c at the surface until -52c then increase in temperature through the stratosphere to about -3 c?

One other comment about the measurements. We have only recently been able to get accurate measurements about temperatures. It is really tough to compare the measurements of today with the measurements from 100 years ago.

Also, in the total picture, one must look back 2 billion years to see what the temperatures do. The temperature of the earth goes up and down throughout it's life just like the temperature of your body changes throughout the day and throughout your life. A similar analogy would be your blood pressure. As long as those things remain within the norm there is no problem. And so it is for the earth.

What is so confusing to me is that the by product of burning fossil fuels is CO, and too a much lesser extent CO2. I know that CO is deadly and not very good for the body. CO2 is generated by every living being and is necessary for the survival of plant life and is not as dangerous. Since the CO2 is beneficial to the plants is it really all that bad? Especially since it accounts for only 0.038% of the air in the atmosphere.

Bottom line is, we are just experiencing the way the earth lives and there is nothing mankind can do to change it or effect it.

quote:

You can't judge global climate by regional weather.

I've thought about this for a few days, and I think you're wrong. And its probably my biggest b!tch with the phrase "global warming." If my regional weather is colder, its not "global warming".

Even if its colder here by a 2 degree average and warmer somewhere else by a 3 degree average, so the average-average is warmer overall, its still not "global warming" unless its warmer everywhere globally.

Now, if you want to say man's action's over the last 200 years have resulted in the creation of global weather extremes, call it "global changes" or "a global climate equilibrium shift", I could be persuaded to agree with that. You would still have to convince me it was a BAD thing, and that there was anything that us few billion little peon ants on the surface could do to slow or change it, but I could be persuaded to agree with the basic premise.

Has anybody looked at the comparison between tillable land loss at the equator to desertification to the new land now tillable in northern Canada and northern Europe to thawing of the permafrost? because that to me would be really interesting. If you look at a global map, it would seem there is far more land in Russia and northern Europe that could thaw and be till able than what can be lost everywhere else...unless the image is do to round-to-flat-mapping distortion.

OK, I got curious and bopped around the www for a few minutes and gathered some facts.

quote:

6,592,800 sq miles in Russia

7.22% tillable (http://www.eastagri.org/country_detail.asp?id=37)

6,116,800 sq miles un-tillable land in Russia

57,490,000 sq miles on earth: 1/5 desert

11,498,000 sq miles desert

3.5% new desertification / yr (http://na.unep.net/des/uncedp1.php3)

Add 402,430 sq miles / yr new desert

So "global warming (misnomer)" could open up 6,116,800 sq mi of new farmable land in northern Russia at some rate I couldn't find, while farmable land is lost at a global rate of 402,430 sq mi/yr. If the rate of new land thawing for JUST Russia (ignoring Canada, Greenland, and other northern permafrost regions ) is 6.6%, it would be perfectly balanced with NO loss of farmable land. If the rate was higher, "global warming (misnomer)" would lead to MORE tillable land, more food, less starvation, more space for human habitation, more space to grow biofuels, etc.

So who can argue that "global warming (misnomer)" is solely a bad thing?

Sounds like ideal conditions to grow cranberries.

quote:

Because the lake beds isolate peat bogs from groundwater, the soil contains few nutrients and is very acidic. In addition, the temperature in these areas can be quite low, even during summer. Few plants could survive such adverse conditions, but the hardy cranberry vine thrives!

Lets not forget the millions of tons of methane that is and will be released as Siberia warms and it's twenty times more potent a green house gas than co2


ScareCrow57

quote:

What is so confusing to me is that the by product of burning fossil fuels is CO, and too a much lesser extent CO2.

A lesser extent? Co2 is by far more abundant as a product of burning fossil fuel than co. and as for going back 2 billion years, why not just go back a million or so. you will be able to see the carbon cycle through the last 8 or ten ice ages and pick up the relatively stable pattern it shows.

bottom line is this : we are experiencing more than just how the earth lives and Mankind has been the result of this, that part has been established with over a 90% probability by more than enough data to satisfy the overwhelming majority of scientists

You have been watching those commercials funded by the oil companies,right?

quote:

Humans didn't make it get warmer, it was getting warmer on a normal cycle and would have been this warm in a few hundred years if humans hadn't contributed.

really? The Earth is in a period when natural cycles suggest we should be cooling down.That much is a fact. read it here

There is no confusion on the issue of human contribution. WE ARE CAUSING IT

Read that here
The feedback loops could cause the warming to run wild but the fact is we (by that I mean all of us) started this

And the fact is we do have a chance to mediate it as well.What we do with that chance remains to be seen,It's in the hands of the Governments now (God help us )

quote:

It's in the hands of the Governments now

It's not just the governments that need to change.

IT IS THE PEOPLE

I drive a 40 - yr old "two-banger" car, that got pretty good gas mileage for the time, and could really hold it's own for mileage up to this last half decade. I'm also working on restoring a 30 yr old Electric Car.

I've been running my entire house off of solar for 2 years now. I've even welded off of Solar power, but unfortunately I currently don't have enough power for my Electric Cars

I have one of the shortest commutes to work, and Off and on I've bicycle commuted.

And, now I'm working on converting a truck to SVO/WVO.

I'd love to go to a debate next spring and ask the candidates what they've PERSONALLY DONE to reduce their energy footprint & impact on Greenhouse Gasses.

------
One of Hilary's answers would be that she and President Clinton put solar panels up onto the Whitehouse.

And, of course, Mr. Bush's answer is that he had them removed.

But...
Truly, what are the people in our government doing? What about in their personal lives outside the government?