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Global warming again....

DrVolkl

DrVolkl

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Joined
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Seattle, WA
Sept. 20, 2006 — European scientists voiced shock over pictures showing Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.

The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice — thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer — had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.

"This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record low-ice seasons," said Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit.

"It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from Spitzbergen or Northern Siberia through what is normally pack ice to reach the North Pole without difficulty."

Spitzbergen is one of the Svalbard islands, which are Norwegian.

Drinkwater added: "If this anomaly continues, the Northeast Passage, or 'Northern Sea Route,' between Europe and Asia will be open over longer intervals of time, and it is conceivable we might see attempts at sailing around the world directly across the summer Arctic Ocean within the next 10 to 20 years."


- I still think you're an idiot if you don't think we're affecting the earth's climate...but whatever, at least we can sail around the world easier. :smile:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/09/20/arcticroute_pla.html?category=earth&guid=20060920100030&dcitc=w01-101-ae-0000
 
johnny010 said:
I don't think global warming is real, but I do agree we are affecting our climate.
Click to expand...

I highly recommend watching Gores "A convenient truth". He makes a pretty compelling case, and certainly convinced me. The scary part is not that it's happening, but how soon it will impact us directly, and not just generations down the road.
 
Wake up people.. Lets talk facts, not emotions and pseudo science...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/

Atmospheric physicist Dr. Fred Singer:
"Whether or not human beings can produce a global climate change is an important question. This question is not at all settled. It can only be settled by actual measurements, data. And the data are ambiguous. For example, the data show that the climate warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before humanity used much energy. But then the climate cooled between 1940 and 1975. Then it warmed again for a very short period of time, for about five years. But since 1979, our best measurements show that the climate has been cooling just slightly. Certainly, it has not been warming. "

al_poster600x889.jpg
 
"junkscience".com is a right winged website with a bunch of B.S.

It's like people trying to convince you the earth is still flat....
 
Did anyone ever think up a good reason to think that the scientific community generally supports the global warming thesis? Only decent point I heard was to maintain grant research funding for PhDs -- pretty weak IMO, but it was something.
 
We do not inherit the land, we borrow it from our children.

I should know better than to engage in these types of threads, but here it goes. :)

In response to the nice fellow who "[does not] think global warming is real, but [does] agree we are affecting our climate": No offense is intended, but this statement clearly illustrates a poor understanding of the matter. Climate change is one of the effects of global warming. Furthermore, climate change would have a much greater effect on life on this planet than what's commonly considered global warming (warmer worldwide, melting of ice caps, increased sea levels).

I'm surprised it's well into the 21st century and this is still being debated. Actually, the fact that it's debated is more disturbing to me than global warming, itself. I'm not sure what it says about us / Americans...

  • Maybe it just says we have a hard time with data, numbers, and scientific reports. After all it's a very complex stuff. Maybe it's just easier for many to believe whatever makes us feel good, whether that be a political party or industry that supports a hobby and style of life we like.
  • Maybe part of the problem is the layman's poor understand of cause-effect relationships. Perhaps the layman accepts that CO2 can affect climate but incorrectly assumes that a 0.0x% increase in CO2 level would result in a 0.0x% change in temperature. Of course, the layman does not get that our universe is a bit more complex than that.

In the pursuit of understanding why there is still a debate, I have a few questions to those who don't accept global warming/climate change and our role in it:

Why do we discount what the entire scientific community has been telling us for decades?
All the data irrefutably shows A) there is a direct relation between CO2 level and temperature, B) change in temperatures result in changes in many aspects of climate (not just temperature), C) humans are responsible for increased CO2 levels since the industrial revolution. If all those reports are too much to handle, there are hundreds of graphs that distill this information such that the average person can clearly see the relation.

We know what CO2 levels and temperature levels were for the hundreds of thousands of years in the past. While it's true the margin of error in measurement increases as we go further back, I don't see how this could be used to refute global warming since the amount of change in the last 100 years is much greater than the greatest margin of error (regardless of how far back you go).

Since I've been born, I can't think of a single time when an overwhelming consensus of scientists have been wrong, but I can't even begin to count the number of times those in positions of power (politicians, lobbists, CEOs, etc.) have been less than truthful. So who believes global warming and climate change does not exist? The same people who believed Campbell and six other tobacco company CEOs in 1994 when they testified "nicotine is not addictive"?

Remember earlier this year: Censorship of NASA climatologists...

Why can't we accept what we can directly observe?
Hang out on the side of a freeway during rush our and smell the air. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of the internal combustion engine knows that there is besides the nauseating half-spent gas and diesel in the air, there must be a lot of CO2. It's pumped out every day (by human activity) and there are nearly no human activities that recover the CO2 we put out.

The questions those who insist humans don't affect climate should ask themselves are: Where does the CO2 go? Isn't there more out there on day(x) than there was on day(x-1)? When does it end? In other words: There's been a relatively stable equilibrium for millions of years, when do we hit the new equilibrium?

Scenerio: Hypothetical dumbass ruler of the world...
Let's say I'm a complete dumbass, in charge of the whole world, and can't understand any numbers, graphs, much less complicated reports: What should I do regarding acceptance of this global warming "theory"?

Since I'm a complete idiot who can't look at real data and there are two possibilities, I'll just say that there's a 50% chance of global warming existing and 50% of it not. I'd then ask what are the cost and consquences of each? Pretty quickly, I'd realize that by claiming it does not exist, it would not cost me anything (don't need to change the way I do anything), but there's a 50% chance things could be really bad down the road. If I claimed it does it exist, it might cost me a little upfront (to curb CO2 production and invest in new technologies), but I could ensure there would be almost no chance of the bad stuff happening down the road. The default position to take (the position to take even without any the scientific to support it) is clear.

What are we afraid of?
This is the biggest thing I don't get. It's not as if we won't be able to drive sports cars, hop on intercontinental flights, and have air-conditioning in our homes if everyone in the world suddenly woke up and realized something needs to be done. The economy and our comfortable way of life won't come to a halt - new technologies will emerge as market forces necessitate them. There will be tons of opportunities for innovative companies to come up with new solutions and this will drive the economy. This is good news to all of us. I can understand if oil and other energy companies would be a bit scared, but that is truly their problem, not ours.

Is there something else I just don't get? :confused:

Anyway, related news from today:

Ski_Banker, I know you're just joking, but quite funny. Talk about conspiracy theories! :D Or maybe the first scientific application of underpants plan:
  1. Invent global warming
  2. Collect PhDs
  3. ?
  4. Profits!
 
Last edited:
Ojas: AWESOME post. Thanks for spending the time putting together such a great response.

I'll be the first to admit that I never really gave global warming much thought and even though I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, had never spent much time reading up on the topic or understanding the implications. Sadly, it took Gore's movie to wake me up. I highly recommend everyone watch it.

What's alarming is that those with other interests spend so much time trying to create doubt and discredit the abundant evidence. If the average person understood how great the impact to our daily lives would be (in our lifetime), I think there would be incredible political pressure to do something about it.

Kudo's to Branson for taking such decisive action. It's not like he is giving up a small portion of his wealth -- he's giving up the next 10 years of profits from his operations. He has my utmost admiration.
 
Here we go again...........

Global Warming is about as real as the tooth fairy.

My comments from a previous thread.

Hugh said:
It's all a bunch of crap. Even if they had daily temperature records going back 400 years it still doesn't prove squat. 400 years in the life of a planet that's existed for 4.5 Billion years is an insignificant amount of time. They used "proxy" evidence from coral, caves and glaciers. What the hell does that mean? In other words, they guessed.

What affects the planet's temperature is largely guesswork and there are numerous theories on the topic. Unfortunately these days we have to suffer through the "greenhouse gas" nonsense. Our parents had to deal with the "nuclear testing" theory back in the 50s as an explanation for the rise in temperature.

One theory postulates that the orbit of the Earth around the Sun is affected by the gravitational forces of our sister planets resulting in an "imperfect" ellipse which changes the Earth's distance from the Sun enough to cause minute temp changes.

Things take a long ling time to happen on a planet, a really long time. The continents are still shifting. An example is that India is still nudging northward into Asia causing the Himalayan mountains to continue to gain altitude. These changes occur over millions of years. To suggest that events over a one or two hundred year period have made profound changes to a planet's status is arrogant, unethical, imbecilic and just plain wrong.
Click to expand...

Then there's more debate about this nonsensical topic in this thread.

Is the planet going through a period of warming temperatures? Yes it is and has had long term temperature fluctuations before there was even life on it. Are humans the cause of this phenomenon? Absolutely not.
I'll bet you people still believe that petroleum is from decomposed dinosaurs too.

Check out this group of Bozos that want to create artifical volcanos to combat global warming. I tell you this planet is mostly populated by idiots.
 
I believe the most important concept to get is how fragile human civilization really is and how depend it is on our present-day climate. Naysayers always either state .... well the earth was much warmer or colder in the past when humans were not on the earth and experienced transitions of rapid cooling and warming --- without human influence. Or they will give examples of warming and cooling trends within the various periods of recorded human history (ie the little ice age, the younger Dryas, etc).

The mistake people make is to make up their minds first and then find evidence to support that supposition. Given something as vast as the climate you can find evidence to support whatever you want.

However these are the facts:

From about 100,000 years ago to 10,000 years earth's climate was not like it is now. The climate was unstable and unpredictable. Average climate changed from year to year (in the same location) and could differ by 40 degrees F or more and have rainfall from none to rain forest levels. Now this takes some analytical skills but DNA evidence proves that humans were fully Homo-sapiens 100,000 years ago .... we are not smarter from a biological stand-point.

Then (and I don't know how) the climate stabilized itself approximately 10,000 years ago. What do we know happen 10,000 years ago? Let's see, the domestication of animals, corn, ie the agricultural revolution ---the path to civilization. And wait it gets better... there is evidence to suggest the climate still was not perfectly stable just yet... Egypt experience periods of torrential rains about 8,000 to 6,000 years until the climate became the desert it is today. So how is the 4000 BC timeframe relevant ---- well evidence of culture in Mesopotamia (Sumer) begins, and the earliest evidence of pre-dynasty Egyptian culture dates to this time period. The beginnings of true civilizations - the stone age.

Without this relative calm in global climate we would have never progress past the hunter gather stage. Why? Simple. If you can't predict the seasons or weather (to know when to plant and harvest) ... you can't est permant settlements, or build communities and everyday life becomes a struggle to survive not thrive. (Ex. present-day hunter-gathers, nomads in the African Sahara). True culture is a luxury that is not afforded to you and your tribe and the only dependable food stock is hunting animals -- if you can catch it.

So what does this mean to us. Well just like a basketball player "in the zone" the earth's climate is in a perfect zone for civilization. Will it stay in this zone if we live the Native American way and est balance with nature? No. Just like that player in the zone; it can't last forever. However can we prematurely upset that balance (to continue the example -- take the player out or never pass him the ball)? Yes. We can and that is exactly what we are doing.

When scientist study the climate and build the supercomputer models they are trying to simulate what will happen if we continue on our present-day path (and with the Chinese and India coming on board -- we are accelerating that course) and reach that point of no return (or if you will a return to the unpredictable climate our ancestors inhabited where our crowning achievement was to kill a wooly mammoth).

Make no mistake there have been various times that life has only existed deep within the earth due to the surface of the earth being 200 degrees F at one time and frozen solid the next --- all without man's influence. But just as we will all die one day, if we do drugs, have unprotected sex, get drunk everyday, or walk through bad neighborhoods with enough bling to put Mr. T to shame, whatever lifespan we were blessed with via genetics won't matter and we can accelerate our demise.

That's why this version of global warming is so important (not even getting into the moral implications of the animals that will be become extinct due to the rapid climate destabilization) but because of the massive human starvation and the inevitable wars for survival that will follow. We need time to better understand what caused this period of stability so we can influence it in a positive way because whether you believe in global warming or not, whether humans influence it or not, this stability period will end and all the computer models suggest that unless we do something NOW (change what we have been doing if our fault or find a way to reverse the earth's nature process if not our fault) we only have about 50 to 100 years before that happens. Either way the earth's environment should be the number one priority for everyone, especially world governments.
 
an interesting topic that, ahem, warms my heart to see being discussed.

i'm always leery when people post "facts" but it does seem the scientific community is in general agreement that the planet's climate is changing yet again.

doesn't is just make sense to limit our emissions whenever possible?
 
Hugh said:
Is the planet going through a period of warming temperatures? Yes it is and has had long term temperature fluctuations before there was even life on it. Are humans the cause of this phenomenon? Absolutely not.
I'll bet you people still believe that petroleum is from decomposed dinosaurs too.

.
Click to expand...

Hugh, the major point that you're missing is that the these "temperature fluctuations" have never happened as quickly as they're happening now. We're not talking thousands of years, we're talking tens.

Wake up buddy, there's a hole in the ozone layer as well, perhaps you don't think we did that either?

I think we should probably (as a nation) at least try to get our waste down a little.
 
Stop arguing with Hugh. He thinks a Ford F150 handles better than a McLaren F1. :tongue: Hugh dances to his own tune.
 
Ojas - Very nicely done.

cptnsx - Well said.

DrVolkl - That's just what I was thinking. The analogy is perfect.

It's sad to think that so many people have their heads in the sand on this topic. But most unfortunately, it will be their children that will suffer the most from their ignorance.
 
:rolleyes: Global warming is just a liberal conspiracy propagated against the establishment.

Conspiracies, of course, are MUCH EASIER to coordinate across thousands of weakly connected, educated people (scientists) around the world.

Conspiracies, of course, could NEVER be coordinated amongst a tight-knit political crony circle in Washington.

Hmmmm.... :rolleyes:
 
DrVolkl said:
Hugh, the major point that you're missing is that the these "temperature fluctuations" have never happened as quickly as they're happening now. We're not talking thousands of years, we're talking tens.
Click to expand...

How do you know that? How does anyone? Accurate temperature measurements have only been recorded for the past hundred or so years. Wake up! This is a damn planet that's been around for about 4 Billion years. It will be around long after we're extinct. Or are you too arrogant to realize that extinction is a probable outcome for the human race? Hell, dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years. Humans have only been a round for a tiny fraction of that amount of time. In the grand scheme of things, we have no clue. None whatsoever.
 
TURBO2GO said:
Stop arguing with Hugh. He thinks a Ford F150 handles better than a McLaren F1. :tongue: Hugh dances to his own tune.
Click to expand...

The skidpad doesn't lie. I for one would feel like a damn fool if I spent $1 Million+ for a car that had lower skidpad numbers than a damn Neon SRT-4. The F1 is gorgeous though but I don't buy cars to impress my message board buddies and the neighbors, I buy them to drive. I can only imagine the countless horrors I'd experience if I had an F1 and drove it as much as I did Charlotte.

Would my tune change if I was a Billionaire? I doubt it. I'd probably buy one and then have a raffle for the car with the proceeds going to animal and battered women's shelters. These high HP pseudo kit cars just aren't my cup of tea.
 
Hugh said:
Would my tune change if I was a Billionaire? I doubt it. I'd probably buy one and then have a raffle for the car with the proceeds going to animal and battered women's shelters. These high HP pseudo kit cars just aren't my cup of tea.
Click to expand...

That's just precious.

I'd rather have a fuckin' McLaren.
 
Hugh no offense man, I am really asking because I am trying to understand the rationale as I know many everyday people share your viewpoint...

do you see yourself as an authority on this subject?

I realize there are two sides, yours and the other side. But the other side is supported by scientists who analyze data and look at things for a living. This is their job, their education, their life.

I am not saying they are FOR SURE right, but isn't it prudent to take some precautions just in case these people, who really know more than probably any of us, ARE right?

Please explain to me... because I do not understand... why are you so adamantly resistant to the acceptance of this as at least a possibility?

How is it that you know FOR SURE that so many scientists are wrong?
 
this has been discussed a number of times - usually with each side basically calling the other one an idiot.

each person's views are set so there really doesn't need to be ANOTHER discussion.

I believe global warming real... I'm one of those energy conservation/recycling/all that green stuff is good people. Some people don't think that way. It's a shame. Oh well.
 

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