Perhaps I'm just grumpy today, I am delighted when any organisation like this manages to see the light. I'm just wondering what the F* took so long and why now? who is pulling their strings? Sorry, I just don't trust suits.
Dendrochronologists have been saying this for ages, and have had their findings supported by climatologists who can check by drilling in the Artic and sampling ice cores from even further back in time.
quote:The House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York said
"There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change."
Yeah, I guess I am being grumpy.
The planet is being turned into a sewer, and a committee of suits now decides that perhaps there is something in this planet warming malarchy after all. I wonder who gets to gain out of this report, someone will be making money out of it I'm sure. Or perhaps it is a smokescreen so the government and the money behind the government can say "Look we are doing something about it. We care."
We may even have another Committee or Academy or Society of Fat Cats, in say, ten years time, decide that perhaps we should reduce carbon emmisions! Then pat themselves on the back and award themselves a big cash bonus for all the good work.
My son lives in Prince Rupert... not far from where Lacuna lives in Alaska...anyway, when I lived there the town used to boast of 127 inches of rain a year...and was known as the city of rainbows.... now I see the annual rainfall is down to something like 95 inches a year and recently when my son & I were talking he said... '..there's no doubt in my mind the climate's changing, we had 2 weeks of straight sunshine last year... and that's never happened before.' And he's pretty much lived there for 38 years.
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You'll never have to think outside the box if you don't get in the damn box in the first place.
I live near the coast and I have not been able to enjoy a good day at the beach because of so much seaweed. Its all over the place along the coastline. And then when it sets awhile it really stinks. It just seems there is more seaweed in the last few years than most years. I wonder if this has anything to do with climate change.
Here in Houston where there is tons of refineries, its polluted all over the place. Who knows how much of these bad gases, chemicals contriube to the climate change along with fumes from our cars. As I was headed to downtown one moring there was a green mist surrounding it. I hated to get into it and breath whatever it was.
Though we may getting closer to experiencing some really warmer times ahead there are other natural forces we have to worry about like hugh asteroids.. though they may say we have nothing to worry about.. they could be lying so as not to scare us....
I was just reading this and feel it could be the coming doom for us all.
From: The Land of one Headlight on. Insane since: May 2001
posted 07-04-2006 05:24
Ya.... who knew. But fear not I'm sure monsanto or similar is working on a cure. =)
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You'll never have to think outside the box if you don't get in the damn box in the first place.
[doh] How did that "ficial" get in the link? Can't find it to edit it out. It was a long link so mayhap that's the reason, I can't make the url any shorter though can I? I bet I can, somehow. Ah well, there y'are. [/doh]
And lest we get a head of ourselves, some cooler heads must chime in that the theory of global warming (yes, it is just a thoery) is still hotly debated in the scientific community.
I'm not endorsing any of the pollution causing practices that human beings are so fond of, but letting ourselves get caught up in the mob mentality without looking at the alternatives is a bit lame.
Some links lest you think this is merely self dillusion:
Junk Science
A good summary of the whole issue, and fairly recent.
State of Fear by Michael Crichton
The story is the usual Crichton fare, but the research is well thought out and the references that I did look up checked out.
:edit:
The bottom line is that all the predictions about global warming are based on computer simulations that are vehemently defended by their relative proponents. We can't rely on a computer simulation to predict the weather more than a few days in advance due to chaos theory, so what makes us think they could accurately predict global climate changes?
:edit:
I must ask - did you read any of the posted article? This isn't a group of hippies with picket signs...this is the result of years of study, and based on measured evidence.
The 'junk science' site seems do a good job of talking in circles and getting hung up on terminology, but doesn't seem to address the kind of information presented in the 'national academies' piece.
Yes, I read the report, and I am not implying that it wasn't well researched. I am merely proposing a plausible alternative.
quote:
There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" to say with confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new National Research Council report.
Global temperature changes usually work on a timescale of thousands of years. In contrast, warmer temperatures in the last 400 years wouldn't even register on that kind of scale. Also, the industrial revolution didn't really get going until the 18th and 19th century.
quote:
The committee pointed out that surface temperature reconstructions for periods before the Industrial Revolution -- when levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases were much lower -- are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that current warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.
Let's dissect the first assumption of that qoute: that we are in a warming period. The report only stats that they can say with a high level of confidence that the "Planet Is Warmest in 400 Years". Again, this is such an insignificant period on a global scale that it really proves nothing.
quote:
The 'junk science' site seems do a good job of talking in circles and getting hung up on terminology, but doesn't seem to address the kind of information presented in the 'national academies' piece.
I think the reason that the "Junk Science" site reads like this is because that is the state of current research on global warming. When all the rhetoric and politics has been stripped away, there just isn't much hard evidence to go on. This is all addressed in the first few paragraphs of that article which I will quote here:
quote:
Given the number of JunkScience.com readers expressing some confusion over the "greenhouse effect," carbon dioxide, global warming and climate change, we thought it might be a good idea to pull together a page of questions-and-answers, complete with a few nice little graphics explaining the facts.
We thought that since there is long-standing, intense public interest in these topics and that vast sums of public and private monies are being thrown at the much-dreaded "problem" of "global warming," there should be a wealth of quality explanations and graphics to which we can point readers to alleviate their confusion.
That was about the time that our quick project and quiet weekend went awry very quickly.
Who would have thought so many "issue" sites, environment sites and, yes, government sites, could be hosting so much utter garbage on a topic subject to such intense scrutiny? Who could have imagined having to spend several hours wading through searches to find a few simple graphics correctly expressing the greenhouse effect? Who knew that so many blowhards are out there pontificating from complete ignorance?
Some of the bad descriptions appear to be poor efforts at simplifying the material to suit grade school course work and the like, but that does not make them any more acceptable. Obviously a slight rethink of this project was necessary. We will now try to deliver an extremely simplified version of how this greenhouse thing actually works and some indication of what might be expected from what is known about the Earth and what has been measured, rather than simply guessed about.
quote:Global temperature changes usually work on a timescale of thousands of years. In contrast, warmer temperatures in the last 400 years wouldn't even register on that kind of scale.
And in the bigger picture, human existence isn't very big on the scale.
But I'm fairly interested in our little slice of the time scale
Global temperature changes happen for thousands of years, but they still start somewhere.
Given the evidence out there I don't think it is remotely plausible to deny that we have had an impact, and that it is not going to be a positive one.
Also note: they are not saying that temperatures over the last 400 years have been warmer - they are saying that the last few decades have been warmer than any time in the last 400 years.
quote:Also, the industrial revolution didn't really get going until the 18th and 19th century.
quote:DL-44 said:Given the evidence out there I don't think it is remotely plausible to deny that we have had an impact, and that it is not going to be a positive one.
I disagree in part. While now or lately the proof may show something happened or is happeneing, I don't believe it to guarantee that it will be any sort of starting point for anything permanently done to the Planet. In the entire scope of this planets age, this might be a sudden increase in temperature for reasons we don't know, and no I don't mean religious reasons. What it might simply be is that the temperature has rose, we have noticed it, but it might be a regular occurance that we don't really quite understand. Not unlike a womans period.
quote:DL-44 said:Also note: they are not saying that temperatures over the last 400 years have been warmer - they are saying that the last few decades have been warmer than any time in the last 400 years.
Yet isn't that also an average of temperatures based on several different readings from different altitudes or underground temperatures, and NOT from everywhere in the world? I mean when do averages of averages become such an agreed upon fact? Where are the variances?
" But it is not clear that human activity is wholly responsible. The Washington Policy Center reports that Mount Rainier in Washington state grew cooler each year from 1960 to 2003, warming only in 2004. And Mars is warming significantly. NASA reported last September that the red planet's south polar ice cap has been shrinking for six years. As far as we know few Martians drive SUVs or heat their homes with coal, so its ice caps are being melted by the sun--just as our Earth's are. "
Not to mention the almost impossible goals of the Kyoto protocal. Sure the US is out but we still have our own rules to follow, and those ain't half bad compared to some existing countries standards.
" As The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, almost none of the nations that signed on are meeting Kyoto's requirements. Thirteen of the original 15 European signatories will likely miss the 2010 emission reduction targets. Spain will miss its target by 33 percentage points and Denmark by 25 points. Targets aside, Greece and Canada have seen their emissions rise by 23% and 24%, respectively, since 1990. As for America, our emissions have increased 16%, so we are doing better than many of the Kyoto nations. "
And still after all that I do want to conserve and do whatever I can to help stop whatever I might be doing to add to this warming. It hit 100 here for a new record. Of course that's just one day of 365 of over 100 hundred years since they began keeping records, but of course it's still a fact.
posted 06-22-2006 20:36
::cell::
