global warming, greenhouse effect

[TastyofHasty]

Just read An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. We are in a global emergency, he says, and our leaders are not addressing it adequately. He discusses a policy of "disinformation" with the intention of confusing Americans(!), promulgated by our national leaders.

The book is full of pictures, charts, and graphs, for instance, of glaciers that WERE and now are NOT.

He discusses 10 particular 'MISCONCEPTIONS' about global warming:

(1) "Scientists disagree about whether humans are causing the Earth's climate to change." In fact, there is strong scientific consensus that human activities are changing the Earth's climate. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that the Earth is getting warmer, that this trend is caused by people, and that if we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the warming will be increasingly harmful.

(2) "Lots of things can impact climate-- so there's no reason we should single out CO2 to worry about." Climate is sensitive to many things besides carbon dioxide--sunspots, for one, as well as water vapor. But this just proves how much we should worry about CO2, and other human-influenced greenhouse gases. The fact that the climate system has been shown to be sensitive to many sorts of natural changes throughout history should serve as a red flag. We need to pay close attention to the massive and unprecedented changes we're causing. We have become more powerful than any force of nature.

(3) "Climate naturally varies over time, so any change we're seeing now is just part of a natural cycle." Climate does naturally change. By studying tree rings, lake sediments, ice cores, and other natural features that provide a record of past climates, scientists know that changes in climate, including abrupt changes, have occurred throughout history. But these changes all took place with natural variations in carbon dioxide levels that were smaller than the ones we are now causing. Cores taken from deep in the ice of Antarctica show that carbon dioxide levels are higher now than they have been at any time in the last 650,000 years, which means we are outside the realm of natural climate variation. More CO2 in the atmosphere means warming temperatures.

(4) "The hole in the ozone layer causes global warming." There is a relationship between climate change and the ozone hole, but this isn't it. The hole in the ozone layer -- a part of the upper atmosphere that contains high concentrations of ozone gas and shields the planet from the sun's radiation -- is due to man-made chemicals called CFCs, which were banned by an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol. The hole causes extra UV radiation to reach the Earth's surface, but it does not affect the Earth's temperature.
The only connection between the ozone layer and climate change is almost the exact opposite of the myth stated above. Global warming--while not responsible for the ozone hole--could actually slow the natural repairing of the ozone layer. Global warming heats the lower atmosphere but actually cools the stratosphere, which can worsen stratospheric ozone loss.

(5) "There is nothing we can do about climate change. It is already too late." This is the worst misconception of all. If "denial ain't just a river in Egypt," despair ain't just a tire in the trunk. There are lots of things we can do -- but we need to start now. We can't ignore the causes and impacts of climate change any longer. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuels, through a combination of government initiatives, industry innovation, and individual action...

(6) "Antarctica's ice sheets are growing, so it must not be true that global warming is causing glaciers and sea ice to melt." Some ice on Antarctica may be growing--though other areas of the continent are clearly melting and a new 2006 study shows that overall the ice is shrinking in Antarctica. Even is some of the ice is getting bigger, not shrinking, this doesn't change the fact that global warming is causing glaciers and sea ice to melt around the world. Globally, more than 85% of glaciers are shrinking. And in any case, localized impacts of climate change don't cancel out the global trends that scientists are observing.
Some people also mistakenly claim (in Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear, for instance) that Greenland's ice is growing. In fact, recent satellite data from NASA shows that Greenland's ice cap is shrinking every year, causing sea levels to rise. The loss of that ice doubled from 1996 to 2005. Greenland lost 50 cubic kilometers of ice in 2005 alone.

(7) "Global warming is a good thing, because it will rid us of frigid winters and make plants grow more quickly." This myth just doesn't seem to die. Because local impacts will vary, it's true that some specific places may experience more pleasant winter weather. But the negative impact of climate change vastly outweighs any local benefits. Take the oceans, for example. Changes to the oceans caused by global warming are already causing massive die-offs of coral reefs, which are crucial sources of food and shelter for creatures at every stage of the ocean food chain, all the way up to us. Melting ice sheets are causing sea levels to rise, and if big ice sheets melt into the ocean, many coastal cities around the world will flood and millions of people will become refugees. These are just some of the consequences of global warming. Other predicted impacts include prolonged periods of drought, more severe flooding, more intense storms, soil erosion, mass species extinction, and human health risks from new diseases. The small number of people who experience better weather may be doing it in a landscape that is nearly unrecognizable.

(8) "The warming scientists are recording is just the effect of cities trapping heat, rather than anything to do with greenhouse gases." People who want to deny global warming because it's easier than dealing with it try to argue that what scientists are really observing is just the "urban heat island" effect, meaning that cities tend to trap heat because of all the buildings and asphalt. This is simply wrong. Temperature measurements are generally taken in parks, which are actually cool areas within the urban heat islands. And long-term temperature records showing just rural areas are nearly identical to long-term records that include both rural areas and cities. Most scientific research shows that "urban heat islands" have a negligible effect on the overall warming of the planet.

(9) "Global warming is the result of a meteor that crashed in Siberia in the early 20th century." This may sound absurd to some of us, but it's a real hypothesis suggested by a Russian scientist. So what's wrong with it? Basically, everything. The impact of a meteor, much like a volcanic eruption, might have immediate effects on climate if it were large enough. but there is no record of warming or cooling during the period after this meteor hit. The effects that would have been produced by the meteor would have involved water vapor, which only stays in the upper atmosphere for a few years at the most. Any effects would have been short-term, and could not be felt this far in the future.

(10) "Temperatures in some areas aren't increasing, so global warming is a myth." It is certainly true that the temperature is not rising at every point on the planet. In Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear, characters pass around graphs that show specific places around the world where temperatures are decreasing slightly or remaining the same. The graphs represent real data from real scientists. But while they may be fact, they don't prove the point. Global warming refers to the rise in the average temperature of the entire Earth's surface due to increased levels of greenhouse gases.
Because the climate is an incredibly complex system, the impacts of climate change will not be the same everywhere. Some areas of the globe -- such as northern Europe -- might actually become colder. But this does not change the fact that overall, the surface temperature of the planet is rising, as are the temperatures of our oceans. The gains have been demonstrated by several types of measurements -- including satellite data -- that all show the same general results.

He discusses a fellow named Phillip Cooney, time line regarding him:
1995-Jan. 20 2001: American Petroleum Institute lobbyist in charge of global warming disinformation.

Jan. 20 2001: Hired as chief of staff, White House Environment Office

June 14, 2005: Leaves White House to go on payroll of Exxon Mobil.

He mentions that on June 21, 2004, 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused President Bush and his administration of distorting science ... quoted:

"By ignoring scientific consensus on critical issues such as global climate change, [President Bush and his administration] are threatening the Earth's future.
Signed by:
(shows all names of 48 Nobel prize-winners)

And much more which I don't have room to discuss here... read it!

[zebraman]

Hey Guys;as to #1.If you drive you are part of the problem so if you are advocating giving up the Car you should probably start by getting rid of Your's.
As to # 4.The ozone is also depleated by Methane not only from cow's but also Termites -which actually produce the Lion's share.
#5.You can start by selling Your Car.
I personally will not be giving up driving because I live in LA.
And as Far as the Book of Revelations says Earth is Not an Infinite Project.-

[JereGettle]

Great post Tasty,

It is time for people to wake up, and stop believing everything the chemical companies tell us!

[TastyofHasty]

Thank you, Jere! ... and Z, there was a comment about methane in the book. (BTW see Misconception #4 ... biggest problem is NOT ozone layer but rather GREENHOUSE EFFECT. They are NOT the same thing.) Greenhouse effect is related to: (and this is cool 'cause I've been reading up on greenhouses & though this is about Planet Earth, the cause is the same) ...

Light travels at high frequency ... at high frequency it can go right through glass or atmosphere. Whereupon ... it hits some THERMAL MASS ... which converts it from LIGHT to HEAT. HEAT travels at lower frequency ... thus it cannot get back OUT through the glass, or atmosphere, or whatever, that it originally came through as LIGHT. Therefore HEAT is trapped INSIDE. Same effect, for greenhouses or for the earth.

So what is causing greenhouse effect is LIGHT, turned to HEAT, is stuck INSIDE (I think!) because the semi-permeable atmosphere is becoming more impermeable.

One of the worst gas contributors is methane, which is produced (amongst other things) by kitchen wastes thrown out with the rest of the garbage and being buried deep in landfills. So Mr. Gore suggests COMPOSTING kitchen wastes ... so they will not give off methane gas.

Z said
the Book of Revelations says Earth is Not an Infinite Project ... true ... but that doesn't mean we should just give up!

[zebraman]

Hey TastyofHasty;It was Also Mr.Gore who "claimed He Invented the Internet".I don't know if you watch "SouthPark" there is a great episode with him trying to warn America About "ManBearPig" which is clearly more believable than this.-

[werecat]

I just dont worry about what anyone else is doing. As long as I am doing the best I can not to make things worse then I figure I'm helping. I would love to be able to give up my nasty expensive car and take a bike to work, but the 20 mile run would kill my fat round little self. LOL

[HillsideDigger]

Human induced global warming (which should actually be called something like unguided climate alteration) seems very evident to me and I expect will magnify to the point before to long that it will be evident to almost everyone alive

but global warming is only one aspect of the real problem

namely overall environmental degradation (oceans, air, fresh water, soils, tropical forests, biodiversity - all being radically altered in a short time frame) caused by to many people conducting to much non-renewable consumption in this world.

I really see no possible human generated solutions for the masses worldwide but any individual or small group of individuals should be able to to establish for themselves a sustainable lifestyle if they are fortunate enough to be located in a survivable place.

Governments will be almost powerless in the coming decades to induce positive change and market and natural forces will rule as always likely culling human numbers and consumption to a level that the survivors and their families can survive,

better find yourselves a good location, save yours seeds and learn how to farm without oil

and for those of reproductive age, take note that worldwide NPG (negative population growth) is going to happen and I would guess within the lifetimes of some of those alive now, the choice will be

either

by enough couples deciding to not more than replace themselves

or

by famine (assuming no catastrophic military events).

[leelanau_ferg]

better find yourselves a good location, save yours seeds and learn how to farm without oil


Amen!!

(I was just thinking this exact thing last night after pondering the disasterous mess everything is coming to.)

[johno]

I can't remember the name of the scientist who figured this out (got a little word recall problem...,) but there is a graph called the population curve which applies to all animals, including us. Basically, the line goes steady near the bottom of the graph for a long time, and then rises suddenly and drastically to the top of the graph before dropping just as suddenly to a level near the bottom of the graph. After this, the line grows back up to the initial level and history repeats itself. As best as we can tell, the last century or two of human population growth represent the final drastic climb of the graph. That is to say, after eons of a world population of a couple of hundred thousand, the human race's ballooning population of several billion will soon self regulate back to a couple of hundred thousand. The means or reason for this self regulation of population is irrelevant in that if it wasn't one thing, it would be something else. The sad part is, we have the power to see problems like this ahead of time (foresight) but as a race, we do nothing about it. And in this case, not only the human race is affected, but the entire planet. This is not conjecture, it is measureable. Many species disappear from the face of the earth every day because of our rapid expansion. This has been measured. Anyone who doesn't see this isn't looking very hard.

If I remember the name I'll post it so you can look it up for yourselves. Sorry, but we are doomed. Well, most of us anyway... Negative population growth is the only solution at this point.

[johno]

Well it took me a while, but I remembered the name(s.) Do a search on the Malthus-Verhulst equation to see the math.

What it boils down to is the human population will reach the top of the curve sometime between 2008 and 2011, at about eight billion. The worldwide birthrate is already dropping...

So, being the self sufficency minded people we are, I suggest we all develop a two year plan and eat lots of garlic. I'd love to inherit the earth with the good people of this forum. Who knows what form this catastrophe will take, but use your imaginations. My prediction is disease due to the effects of global warming (higher water levels and heat combined with increased orgainic matter in coastal waters.)

Remember, you (probably) heard it here first!

Happy surviving,
johno

[boston]

I agree we need to take care of the earth but I am not a doom & gloomer thinking the world is coming to an end.

Somethin to think about........How old is the earth? According to scientists how many ice ages and warm ups has the earth had over its existance? Supposidly man was not around yet so what caused that to happen? I can remember back in the late 70s early 80s we had some very cold winters followed by cool summers and these same "experts" were saying we were going into another ice age, now they are saying the exact opposite so what do you believe???

[lovetogarden]

I don't know if the world is doomed, but I think its a good idea to save seeds and try to be more self sufficient. No one thought the Titanic would sink so there were not enought life boats. Not many people planned on the great depression so a lot of people starved and loss everything. It makes sense to be prepared
no matter what happens in life.

[zebraman]

Hey Guys:I too am a strong proponant of saving seed and practising a self-sufficent lifestyle however the amount of people on the planet that think this way is extremely small.In order to make the type of changes that would make a difference requires Huge # of people to shift their lifestyles.
Oil and Big buiseness is what makes the "Machine of Progress"work.I am just being realistic.If you shop at WalMart you are $upporting GMO proliferation.You simly can't have it both ways.
CNN and MSNBC get better ratings and More Money by reporting Doom and Gloom,but yet there is a lot of Beauty in the World.Life in 2006 is Really Exciting.
The End of the World is in 5 minutes!Do You have Film In Your Camera?-

[Cricket]

Wait a minute, Johno, global warming is something that can make us all quite miserable before we die of something related to overpopulation of Homo sapiens on this planet. Trying to get our federal government to address the warming problem as Al Gore has been doing is a good approach regardless of the Malthus-Verhulst equation. As for whether it's happening or not, right now I'm carrying water from a neighbor's system who has two creeks running through her property. We live on the top of a foothill of the Selkirk Mountains and our water table has dropped below anything we have ever experienced before in the 24 years we have been on this land.

Peak oil is part of this and it's really important for the government to address it. I'm not for building any new nuclear power plants because we haven't solved the nuclear waste disposal problem except to put it into weapons. The government could do a lot about vehicle manufacturing by raising the law concerning gas mileage a car must get. Our American culture based on cheap oil has to change and we can conceptualize and organize to do this. Just having a garden and raising one's own food can lower the number of trips to the grocery store in the summer. I know that's a very small thing compared to the seriousness of the problem, but it's better than being cynical or giving up. Making national policy decisions about the environment based on a religious belief in Armegeddon is not the approach I want my government to have. I'm not unpatriotic and don't tell me to move to another country.

[HillsideDigger]

"... global warming is something that can make us all quite miserable before we die of something related to overpopulation..."

Not really, global warming (unguided human caused climate alteration) = overpopulation or at least is one of the many symptoms of overpopulation, the world is already well beyond a sustainable number of people at even the barest level of existence. There was a thread about this before and many seem to think otherwise, that we can squeeze many more people onto planet Earth, well obviously, we can, but only temporarily and at a compounding cost, the higher the numbers go before NPG sets in, the fewer the Earth will be able to sustain afterward because of the deteriorated life systems (which would take eons of natural action to restore) from the brief period of overpopulation.

The really bad effects of climate change (which ultimately might be severe cooling, in any case will be erratic and unpredictable, I think) may take several more decades to set in, but any of a number of conditions resulting from the current overpopulation (most notably is resource depletion) may well cause a considerable die-off and soon.

I saw the presentation by Al Gore on TV which he then made into the movie and if anything, I would say he is to optimistic.

[johno]

I guess I do sound a little gloomy relaying this information, but doom and gloom was not the point.

I reiterate to you: look it up for yourself. This equation has been monitored for decades, and despite some miniscule variations along the way, the data supports the theory regardless of what you would like to believe.

[TastyofHasty]

I'm posting some pictures from the book ... (had to keep size down so as to be able to upload)

first one is about precipitation. From previous page,

... Paradoxically, however, global warming causes not only more flooding, but also more drought. ... One of the reasons for this paradox has to do with the fact that global warming not only increases precipitation world-wide but at the same time causes some of it to relocate.

Next page is picture about precipitation showing blue dots for places that have been receiving MORE precipitation (bigger dot = bigger increase)

... the effects of climate change on precipitation are not uniform. Precipitation in the 20th century increased overall, as expected with global warming, but in some regions precipitation actually decreased. The blue dots mark the areas with increased precipitation--the larger the dot, the larger the increase. The orange dots show the places and amounts of decreased precipitation. Sometimes the effects of such a large shift can be devastating. For example, focus on the part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara.

(entire map is the pic labelled "worldprecipitationdots.jpg", unfortunately not big or high resolution.) (just the US page is the pic labelled "precipitationdots.jpg.")

He then goes on to show incredible pics of how Lake Chad, formerly the sixth largest lake in the world, in Darfur, Africa, shrank ... with explanation of how it has shrunk to 1/20th of its original size (original size was similar to Lake Erie) in a period of only the last 40 years.

He goes on to say that while global warming

produces more evaporation from the oceans to fill the warmer atmosphere with increased moisture, it sucks more moisture out of the soil. Partly as a consequence, desertification has been increasing in the world decade by decade.

Then on next page, he shows a picture of

what is projected to happen to soil moisture in the United States with the doubling of CO2, which would happen in less than 50 years if we continue business as usual. According to scientists, it will lead, among other things, to a loss in soil moisture of up to 35% in vast growing areas of our country.

(this is pic titled "ProjectedSoilMoistureReduction" ... it's sideways so as to have been able to upload it at the size it is! :p )

Hope the pics come out okay.

[HillsideDigger]

Amazing TOH, because I am located right at, in fact underneath, that orange dot (first picture, WNC), surrounded by many blue dots in your photo

and for 10 years running here, soil moisture has decreased in a formerly very wet place.

[Cricket]

Johno, your theory could well be true, but I still laud any attempt by a politician to make the environment a part of governmental planning. Right now, ecology is being ignored. I think as conscious citizens of this planet, no matter what the future will bring for me as an individual, I deeply desire that governments all over the world give our planet the care it needs to sustain all the wonderful things we take for granted like purity of water, air, and soil and our temperate climate. I also hate to see the diversity of plants and animals so grossly devasted. Our country which has the dominant currency now is shamefully setting a bad example. It's hard to recover from such an onslaught and it's ethically indefensible. It makes me angry and then depressed because there's nothing I can do about it since I live in a very red state and my vote in a national election doesn't count. Furthermore, the other political party makes a lot of mistakes too, like NAFTA, for instance. I feel that our whole American culture is sadly lacking in values for the environment. We are so urbanized that we think nature is a tree planted in a hole in the pavement.

[johno]

Amen, cricket.

[GrowTheSeeds]

I think good stewardship is good for the garden and for the Earth.

Not sure what can be done about it but as the Oceans heat up what will happen with the Methane Hydrates?

If you are interested in Methane Hydrates (sometimes called fire and ice) try a google search kinda interesting.

[TastyofHasty]

Hillside (& everybody) I wish I could say ... "Go ye and getteth this book at your library immediately & NOW!!" and Cricket, amen, indeed.

It's so full of big pics and graphs and stuff ... you can read it VERY FAST. It is most excellently done.

It's worth getting just to see the pictures of the glaciers ... from earlier 20th century ... that are now gone ... the book has many, many BEFORE and AFTER pictures ... like these of Glacier National Park (1st pic taken 1932; 2nd pic taken 1988)

[HillsideDigger]

For those who are comforted by the fact that polar ice-cap melting has been observed to be occurring on Mars (and so the Sun must be hotter of late which would make the warming that is happening on Earth natural, not human caused, right?)

Consider why the ice-caps of Mars actually grow and shrink over fairly long cycles (not necassarily due to a warmer Sun):


"The Martian climate is more influenced by the shape of the Martian orbit than the climate of the Earth is influenced by the shape of the Earth's orbit. The orbit of Mars is more oval-shaped than that of the Earth. The difference between the oval shape of the Martian orbit and a perfect circle is called the *eccentricity* of the orbit.

Because the Martian orbit has large differences in the distance from the sun, the surface of Mars can experience larger changes in temperature than does the Earth.

Changes in the inclination of the axis of revolution of Mars is also much more extreme than that of the Earth. This means that differences between summer and winter of Mars can be more extreme than on Earth.

The high eccentricity of the Martian orbit, combined with the high inclination of the axis of revolution, means that, if conditions are just right, there are times when Mars can experience a great deal more warming than normal. These extremes in the warming of the surface of Mars means that Mars has more potential for climate change brought about by orbit conditions than does the Earth."


http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mars/interior/Mars_climate_history.html

[TastyofHasty]

Hillside Digger, have you ever heard of a fellow name of Mike Oehler? He wrote The $50 & Up Underground House Book back in the late 70's. You and he oughtta GET ALONG!!!! :D

Actually I was looking for him on the internet a couple days ago 'cause we're thinking of actually ... um ... digging ... an underground house. So then not only will I "dig my garden," I will even "dig my house!!" :D 'Course, we will actually do digging with a bulldozer I suppose. :eek: You would probably think we're just plain effete about that! But I think Mr. Oehler did HIS underground house digging by shovel.

I for one truly believe we are experiencing global warming due to what we humans are doing on earth ... not 'cause "the Sun must be hotter of late". But I also sincerely doubt that politicians and lawyers who run our country are going to change anything ... or the ones in Brazil either ... or anywhere else ... so the rainforest will continue to be chopped down ... people will continue burning oil & gas ... only thing to do is "dig in." Might be smart to move NORTH, for maybe the next 30 years. It's gonna be SOMEthin' to weather.

[mrtomatoexpres]

hi did anyone watch the show on discoverych. the show was about globalwarming if you want a copy on vhs only i will make its pretty scary how big bus. and the goverment do not care about it chine is the worst usa right behind them ny has one of the best fleets of electric buses,taxes and some buildings made from recycled stuff :) the show was sunday nite

[HillsideDigger]

I watched that 2 hour show on Discovery Channel Sunday night about Global Warming hosted by Tom Brokaw

quite convincing, although I already was.

I suspect it will be rerun frequently.

[mrtomatoexpres]

you are right hill :)

[finnteara]

A few quick points. At no time in earth's history has any geological or climatic event or event's had the same effect as the human element. Changing the direction of Governments with its special interest groups (and politicians special interests in their power base) is like sticking your finger in the dike with a tital wave on the other side. Before the governments change policy they will need a body count or that great beast of a consumer will have to one day look in their wallet and say "F--k this S--t". As has been pointed out there a many different effects taking place, causing many different side effects, which are creating a massive change. Which is one of the main reason so many people turn their back on the problem. Too Big to deal with. You need a rifle, not a shotgun solution. Lastly, Al Gore did not invent the internet, but few people have done as much to bring it in to being. Al lost being president because of his own stupidy, and therefor the enviroment lost a potentially great advocate for change.

[Joan]

I think we need to believe global warming is a true problem and we need to do what we can to alleviate the problems as small or large a help as we can be. I would gladly use my car 90% less if we had public transportation. I think to not acknowledge it is rather foolish on our parts. It downright scares me.

[HillsideDigger]

Here's a link to recent statements by the man who discovered the hole in the ozone:

"Within the next decade or two, Lovelock
forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at
least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be
hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55
million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the
Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and
irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock
says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate
close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we
took extraordinary steps, it would take the world
1,000 years to recover."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/94111

So, is he saying the world is now 30 times overpopulated with people? I think so. Bear in mind, the carrying capacity of only 200 million would be after considerable biosphere degradation caused by the ongoing overpopulation event. Had the population not grown to this level of biosphere degradation, the long term carrying capacity of the world may have been 2 to 3 times the 200 million.

I read a link the other day that said in the earlier millenia of civilization, at least in certain societies, that procreation was considered a privilege for the chosen few, not an unlimited right granted to everyone, and strictly regulated by those in power.

[johno]

Those boxes of Al Gore ballots floating off the Florida coast may have had something to do with his "losing" the election, too... :mad:

The Earth's cimate swings are recorded in the ice... never been like this before. :(

So, I guess I can start growing those Olive trees and not worry about zone 6 being too cold in a few years, huh? :D

[G. Gordon Gumbo]

"Hey Guys;as to #1.If you drive you are part of the problem so if you are advocating giving up the Car you should probably start by getting rid of Your's.
As to # 4.The ozone is also depleated by Methane not only from cow's but also Termites -which actually produce the Lion's share.
#5.You can start by selling Your Car.
I personally will not be giving up driving because I live in LA.
And as Far as the Book of Revelations says Earth is Not an Infinite Project.-" [Zebraman]

It absolutely amazes me that someone can disregard the scientifically documented current upswing in the earth's average temperature, along with all the documented climatic phenomena and the pending ecological and cultural disasters associated with real global warming, and then turn around and represent the Book of Revelation as relevant to today's reality ... truly mindbogglin'.

GGG

[TastyofHasty]

I still think the maps about increased and decreased rainfall and drying of the earth are mind-blowers. Was just on thread "Re: 9 year drought in Georgia?" and made me think of those maps.

G. Gordon, I have to agree with what you said:
It absolutely amazes me that someone can disregard the scientifically documented current upswing in the earth's average temperature, along with all the documented climatic phenomena and the pending ecological and cultural disasters associated with real global warming, and then turn around and represent the Book of Revelation as relevant to today's reality ... truly mindbogglin'.

It is also mindbogglin' that our GOVERNMENT hired somebody to spread DISINFORMATION. (Clooney, see post #1, this thread) WHY???

[TastyofHasty]

... our current temps have got me wondering and worrying AGAIN ... did more googling on subject of "climate change" misinformation & came up with:
http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/archive/climate-misinformation.html

most pertinent quote from it:
This advice of the scientific community has been systematically challenged by a number of vested interests, including some who fear a threat to the continued use of fossil fuels to power industrial development.

Found something called the "hockeystick graph," on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_Stick_graph
which is a simple graph of the temps from the past 1000 years
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bb/1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png/300px-1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

and another of the past 150 years (based on direct thermometer readings)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f4/Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png/300px-Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png

MY questions are: how fast is climate really changing? What can we expect for the next 30 years? What is going to happen to the people of the world?

And a comment: those who misinform are working for corporations, or parties, whose "bottom line" has all the "heart" of Lotus 1-2-3; in other words, No Heart at All. Sometimes the "bottom line" is NOT what should be motivating people, but other things in our heads that perceive better than a program.

[johno]

:mad: SHAME on those who have more regard for the "bottom line" than they do for their children's children!

[Lilypon]

Living up North the effects of global warming are very difficult to ignore. My winter usually has 2 1/2 months of -20 F temps and one month of -30 F to -40 F.......... last winter the average winter temperature for 3 months was +32F with only 2 weeks of -20 F. The northern ice roads never froze enough for the natives to get supplies http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/01/13/winter-roads060113.html and the Polar Bears aren't probably going to be around in 30 more years.

As far as summers go we used to average around 75F to 80F.........last summer our average temperatures were in the 90's.

Neither an El Nino or La Nina influenced the weather here last year.

88888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 88888888



'One degree and we're done for': the vast sub-Arctic forests and bogs may be just 1[degrees]C away from a disastrous and unstoppable thaw.(This week: Boreal meltdown). Fred Pearce.
New Scientist 191.2571 (Sept 30, 2006): p8(2).


Subjects

Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2006 For more science news and comments see [HYPERLINK@www.newscientist.com.]

"FURTHER global warming of 1[degrees]C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know."

So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of 0.2[degrees]C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.

Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is within 1[degrees]C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen's team. Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from triggering runaway climate change, the study concludes (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 14288).

The analysis reinforces a series of recent findings on accelerating environmental disruption in Siberia, northern Canada and Alaska, underlining a growing scientific consensus that these regions are pivotal to climate change. Earlier this month, NASA scientists reported that climate change was speeding up the melting of Arctic sea ice. Permanent sea ice has contracted by 14 per cent in the past two years (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, L17501). However, warming and melting have been just as dramatic on land in the far north.

A meeting on Siberian climate change held in Leicester, UK, last week confirmed that Siberia has become a hotspot of global climate change. Geographer Heiko Balzter, of the University of Leicester, said central Siberia has warmed by almost 2[degrees]C since 1970--that's three times the global average.

Meanwhile, Stuart Chapin of the University of Alaska Fairbanks this week reported that air temperatures in the Alaskan interior have risen by 2[degrees]C since 1950, and permafrost temperatures have risen by 2.5[degrees]C (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0606955103).

In Siberia the warming is especially pronounced in winter. "It has caused the onset of spring to advance by as much as one day a year since satellite observations began in 1982," says Balzter. Similarly, Alaskan springs now arrive two weeks earlier than in 1950, according to Chapin.

The Leicester meeting heard that the rising temperatures are causing ecological changes in the forests that ratchet up the warming still further. Vladimir Petko from the Russian Academy of Sciences Forest Research Institute in Krasnoyarsk says warm springs are triggering plagues of moths. "They can eat the needles of entire forest regions in one summer," he says. The trees die and then usually succumb to forest fires that in turn destroy soft vegetation and accelerate the melting of permafrost, Petko says.

In 2003 Siberia saw a record number of forest fires, losing 40,000 square kilometres according to Balzter, who has analysed remote sensing images of the region. Similar changes are occurring in Alaska. According to Chapin, warming there has shortened the life cycle of the bark beetle from two years to one, causing huge infestations and subsequent fires, which destroyed huge areas of forest in 2004. "The current boreal forest zone could be so dried out by 2090 that the trees will die off and be replaced by steppe," says Nadezhda Tchebakova, also at the institute in Krasnoyarsk.

Melting permafrost in the boreal forests and further north in the Arctic tundra is also triggering the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from thick layers of thawing peat. First reports published exclusively in New Scientist last year (13 August 2005, p 12) were recently confirmed by US scientists (Nature, vol 443, p71).

"Large amounts of greenhouse gases are currently locked in the permafrost and if released could accelerate the greenhouse effect," says Balzter. Hansen's paper concludes that the effects of this positive feedback could be huge. "In past eras, the release of methane from melting permafrost and destabilised sediments on continental shelves has probably been responsible for some of the largest warmings in the Earth's history," he says.

We could be close to unleashing similar events in the 21st century, Hansen argues. Although the feedbacks should remain modest as long as global temperatures remain within the range of recent interglacial periods of the past million years, outside that range--beyond a further warming of about 1 [degrees]C--the feedbacks could accelerate. Such changes may become inevitable if the world does not begin to curb greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, Hansen says.

Meanwhile, another new study underlines that the boreal peat bogs, permafrost and pine forests are not just vital to the planet as a whole, they are major economic assets for the countries that host them. A detailed study of the northern boreal forests by environmental consultant Mark Anielski of Edmonton, Canada, puts the value of their "ecosystem services" at $250 billion a year, or $160 per hectare.

These benefits include flood control, water purification and pest control provided by forest birds, plus income from wilderness tourism and meat from wildlife such as caribou. Anielski presented his findings to Canada's National Forest Congress in Gatineau-Ottawa earlier this week.

The value of these ecosystem services is more than twice that of conventional resources taken from the region each year, such as timber, minerals, oil and hydroelectricity, Anielski says. "If they were counted in Canadian inventories of assets, they would amount to roughly 9 per cent of our gross domestic product--similar in value to our health and social services."

You can add to that figure the value of having such a huge volmne of carbon locked away. "The boreal region is like a giant carbon bank account," he says. "At current prices in the European carbon emissions trading system, Canada's stored carbon alone would be worth $3.7 trillion."

And if Hansen is right that the carbon and methane stored in the boreal regions has the potential to transform the world into "another planet", then the boreal region may be worth a great deal more than that.

Source Citation: Pearce, Fred. "'One degree and we're done for': the vast sub-Arctic forests and bogs may be just 1[degrees]C away from a disastrous and unstoppable thaw.(This week: Boreal meltdown)." New Scientist 191.2571 (Sept 30, 2006): 8(2). Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. SASKATCHEWAN PROVINCIAL LIBRARY. 26 Nov. 2006
.Thomson Gale Document Number: A152327213

Plant lots of trees folks...................and I don't drive a car I walk to work.

[Lilypon]

Here's a fascinating link re where is our bread going to come from?
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/americas-breadbasket-moves-to-canada/

The postings below it are an interesting read.

[windsng225]

I agree with everyone here. I do however get really upset with people that absolutely do nothing at all. They don't believe in what they hear or even see and go along their merry way, doing nothing. They are like living veg's. We here are doing something, even the little things like composting, recycling, growing our own veg's, cutting down on and combining our trips in the car, walking or using the bike instead of the car when we can. Using the new light bulbs that conserve (and may I add, last longer). We do so much, and we are in tune with what is going on and are looking for more ways to conserve and better the planet. Keep it going folks! I just wish there was a way to reach these other morons.
joyce

[G. Gordon Gumbo]

:mad: SHAME on those who have more regard for the "bottom line" than they do for their children's children!

And it's not just the bottom line feeders who are shameful ... sometimes it's folks who fear to challenge the status quo.

For an example of each, consider slaveholders and white politicians of in 18th and 19th century America who fathered children who remained in bondage. One in particular I'm thinking of was Thomas Jefferson, who after challenging the might of the British Empire on behalf of colonial landholders and merchants, then left his illitimate children to live as slaves.

I guess you're right, JohnO ... it's all about the BUCK.

GGG

[windsng225]

Isn't it pathetic!
joyce

[Lilypon]

Time could also be running out faster than they predict. 10 years ago the Government of Canada released an information package on climate change (I work on reference desk at our local library). Included was a poster showing what they believed would happen to Saskatchewan at some point in the future. Well the higher temps are here now (I post at another forum and I often record higher spring/summer temperatures earlier than Florida), the stronger/violent storm cells, that the predicted, are now occuring more often here, as well as warmer winters. Humidity, unknown here until recently, usually pushes 3 weeks of our summer temperatures into unbearable temps (many here still don't have AC and two years ago we recorded 114.5 degrees F (in June)...the only other place in North America that shared those temperatures that day was Savanah Georgia).

What was just being recorded in Alaska/Finland has certainly moved down here quickly.

[Lilypon]

I spoke to a man in Kansas who told me they are now growing cotton there (he was shocked and said it used to be a deep south crop). I told him it may be growing up here soon too.


Excerpts from
Climate Change And The Rate Of Change

We once thought that climate change was gradual, but it turns out that's wrong. When, for example, we drilled two miles deep in Greenland from the top of the ice cap to bedrock and looked at core samples, we saw evidence that demonstrated that temperatures did fast jumps, methane levels shifted, and wind strengths changed dramatically. We found out the climate displayed a certain level of "flipness," a kind of dramatic alteration that we had not suspected before.

The surprises research revealed were, first, that you could have worldwide climate that changed dramatically within five to ten years, and, second, that gradual changes like an increase in greenhouse warming are quite capable of triggering rapid flips. That isn't typically what has happened in the past, but to the extent we understand the mechanism, it is clear that global warming can do that--a gradual change can produce dramatic climate shifts.

I suppose the other surprise is that even after 40 years of greenhouse warnings from scientists, we still have political denial in high places.

Most people think of global warming as a change in the thermostat. And you can see signs of that. Indeed Alaska, for example, has been experiencing warming: trees are getting rot and other diseases they had not been susceptible to in the past when the weather was cooler; shorelines are being eroded because there is no longer enough pack ice to protect them from waves. There are, in short, various indicators of change and, in fact, all the climate models have said for a long time that the high Canadian latitudes and Alaska were going to be the first places to get hit by global warming.

We blame global warming on greenhouse gases, but there is one gas you've probably never thought of in that context: water vapor or humidity. It's about 60% of the total greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide makes up a good part of the rest along with methane and others). Well, if something changes the average humidity, you get fairly rapid results from that. On a local scale, the difference between a clear and a cloudy night is something you immediately know because the cloudy night, in effect, forms something of a blanket that holds the heat in; when you don't have all that near-ground humidity, you can lose a lot of heat. So things that change water vapor are something to worry about because it's potentially so fast acting.

A gradual change will sometimes produce gradual results but sometimes things can get to a point where they tip over. I mean, if you're starting to pick up the edge of a table and you pick it up a little more, and a little more, and a little more--at some point everything slides off the table. And if you keep going, at some point the table flips.

Drought is the most familiar kind of climate change. You've had some around here. There is a sort of "slippery slope" involved in getting into a drought. More often than not, you get a drought through a series of events best explained as just random chance: the storm tracks just don't get into your area for a couple of years in a row, then a few hot weeks in summer really bake the topsoil that doesn't have too much moisture left in it to begin with, and the plants droop. The way you get out of it is chance again: a few years of rain restarts the vegetation but it can be a long time before you get kicked out of it; you need to have enough rain, more than average rainfall, at the right time.

There is a rather substantial problem related to drought that no one seems to be thinking of. It's a particular problem because in the last century our dependencies have changed. It used to be that about 38% of the people lived on farms and they knew how to grow food; and if there were a few bad years, there was a lot of slack in the system in the form of stockpiles and so on. Now we have an urban civilization where only 1.4% of the people live on farms--highly efficient farms, true, but their concentration actually makes the system more prone to collapse than it was a century ago. We have, for example, people living in cities at the end of a "just in time" supply line; they don't have much extra in terms of stockpiles. If anything severely disrupts the system, disrupts the transportation system, disrupts production itself as a result of drought for example, it is capable of causing mischief on a scale that just wasn't possible a century ago.

Are more droughts possible? Based on historic trends, if you were trying to do a little planning for what the 21st century may be like, you'd have to concede that there is a one in four chance of getting hit with a bad drought sometime in the next century. And if you relax the criteria--it doesn't have to be a century long, it doesn't have to be as widespread geographically--the chances are one in two.

And, of course, human behavior is making them even more probable. Consider the problem in terms of global warming. Basically, the rising temperatures have a critical impact on tropical waters which evaporate more as they get hotter and hotter. That means more humidity in the atmosphere, more greenhouse cover, more temperature spikes, and more evaporation. But what goes up as evaporation/humidity must come down, and it does come down in the form of rainfall, particularly as heavy rainfall concentrated in the higher latitudes. You might not think that rain over the oceans as a problem, and in 98% of the ocean surface it isn't, but at the higher latitudes heavy rainfall changes ocean currents and disrupts the Gulf Stream as well as altering wind circulation. The net effect is that as the North Atlantic currents fail and winds change, we flip from our present warm and wet mode to a cool, dry, windy, and dusty climate.

Europe will be the first to feel the effects of these changes because its climate is most directly influenced by the Atlantic currents and winds. Rough calculations suggest that 22 out of 23 Europeans will feel the effects directly and substantially. They will probably try to move elsewhere, but elsewhere will already be in trouble. The whole situation is a setup for the kind of drastic reduction in population which we have had via the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You can have a series of rippling resource wars as nations try to take over the food supplies and resources of their neighbors. You can also have widespread disease and, as we now know from history, genocide has also been very common in such situations.

Unfortunately, self-insurance doesn't work in a situation like this. Normally, the West coast bails out the East coast for hurricanes, the East coast bails out the West for earthquakes, and the "cataclysmic" event is over in a day--recovery can start tomorrow. But these flips can happen quickly; they are worldwide, and since people everywhere are getting hit, you can't count on anyone bailing you out.

But this situation, while seemingly stark, depends on the speed of transition. A flip can take place in five to ten years, but suppose it takes 500 years? There is no doubt we could do all kinds of things in response: reduce population perhaps, make agriculture very much more efficient, build new roads and irrigation canals in places that get increased rainfall. But in a decline that takes just a decade, there isn't time to do any of those things. And while humanity, I think, would survive, the population that survived would probably be in a group of very small, authoritarian nations that hate their neighbors for very good reasons. This is the sort of situation that would take a very long time to recover from.

The main thing, then, is to avoid a lurch, a quick flip. The relative speed always counts. We can't do enough to compensate for a flip that takes place in five or ten years, which is where we are heading. We can, however, respond to and minimize the effects of a flip that takes place over a 500-year period.

Stuart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalogue had this wonderful phrase back in the ''60s: "We may not be gods, but it is as if we were in terms of our impact on the world." So maybe we had better get good at this god business and adopt the kind of long-term responsibility needed to keep this show going. Certainly it is juvenile to assume someone else is going to pick up after us.

We have the ability to imagine the future, and imagine it in some detail with working computer models of oceanic and atmospheric circulation and the like. We have an ability to see further ahead, to see what is down the road. In terms of our ability to see trouble coming at us, we have a lot more going for us than the society of 100 years ago. We have gotten ourselves out of a lot of trouble because we saw where we were going. And if we can find decent ways to slow down a lot of these changes so we have 500 years instead of five years to deal with it, we might just be OK. But that depends on a lot of things that haven't happened...yet.
__________________________________________________ _

Dr. William H. Calvin is affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. . Dr. Calvin's lecture at Westminster was based on his book A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate change (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

We still get some cooler summers but they are getting fewer and farther between.

[Lilypon]

An Ominous Current Event
London, Matthew Hart

In southern England, on the latitude of Labrador, the grass is green. The landlord's cats are padding along a flagstone border by the garden, and morning sun is striking sparks from the spikes of a little palm.

That this scene is possible in January at a point on the globe 800 km farther north than Toronto is because of a trillion kilowatts of heat released into the air by a limb of the Gulf Stream flowing northward west of Ireland. This great ocean current is now in danger of collapse. If the Gulf Stream goes, so does the heat. Things very quickly will get harder for the palms, the landlord's cats and, I guess, the landlord too.

Six weeks ago, researchers announced that a summer program of ocean monitoring had revealed a weakening of the Gulf Stream by six million tonnes of water per second-something like 30 per cent. If the heat from the current is equivalent to the output of a million power stations (apparently someone has worked it out), then if looked as if a few hundred thousand of them were going to shut down.

The forces of climate change deal their cards with disdain for the intuitive. Canada faces a future in which rising temperatures will rewrite the environment of the North and a navigable Northwest Passage will challenge Arctic sovereignty.

The United Kingdom, on the other hand, may find itself confronting not a rise but a drop in temperature. There could be snow cover in England for several months of the year, and a slump in net primary production--the sum of things that grow.

When the Gulf Stream story broke, the British press fell on it with relish, dealing out such headlines as: Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows; Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream; Weaker Gulf Stream threatens Britain's climate.

It's not hard to imagine what might happen.

"Thys yere was the grete frost and ise,:" a Londoner wrote in 1410, "and the most sharpest wenter that ever man sawe, and it duryd fourteen wekes so that men might in divers places goo and ryde over the Temse."

In the Little Ice Age, which lasted for at least 300 years until the mid-19th century, people often skated on the Thames. In the hard winters of 1855, 1861, 1869, 1879 and 1886, a collapse in food production triggered bread riots in London.

In my first winter here, 2002-03, torrential rains flooded the southeast, and then turned to snow. Traffic ground to a halt. The Automobile Association scrambled hopelessly to respond to 2,000 accidents in an hour. Some train lines closed, stranding commuters.

The London Underground started grinding to a halt, line by line. I was riding home when my train came into Baker Street Station, where five lines meet. The conductor announced that the train could go no further, and we poured out onto a dangerously crowded platform. Then they announced that the station itself was closing. Police enforced the evacuation. Outside, I saw young women dressed in light coats and shoes weeping as the struggled into the blizzard.

Unable to find a taxi, I walked south to Bond Street station to see if I could board there. There were already guards posted at the entrance, and a scuffle had broken out between them and incensed Londoners. I got home five hours later, walking. The next day, stories erupted in the press about the ice age headed Britain's way.

It was just before Christmas, three years ago, that I first flew north to Aberdeen to investigate the apocalypse, and boarded a large blue-and-white vessel with the flag of St. Andrew snapping at her bow. This was the Scotia, a Scottish research ship, bound for a cruise into the seas from whose frigid depths the Gulf Stream draws much of its strength.

The Gulf Stream is the north-bound surface expression of a system that returns cold water at depth back south--usually called the "overturning circulation" of the Atlantic. The warm surface water flows north to Greenland Sea. There, for the past 10,000 years, it has cooled, sunk and displaced the water below it, driving the now frigid water southward into the abyss.

This cooling and sinking is the key driver of the whole Gulf Stream system, apparently pulling the water northward behind it as it sinks. Scientists sometimes describe this action as a pump, and that particular site as the Greenland pump. At the Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, researchers had begun to suspect that the pump was failing.

One source of this suspicion was the fortunes of a tiny animal called Calanus finmarchicus, a translucent crustacean smaller than a grain of rice. Forty years ago, Calanus made up half the supply of zoo-plankton in the North Sea; by the time I arrived in Aberdeen, that population had collapsed by half. Since fish eat zooplankton, and Scotland had an important fishery, scientists wanted to discover what had happened. Mike Heath, a researcher in the field of mathematical biology, thought he knew.

The diet of Calanus is phytoplankton, the green matter of the sea. Because there is less phytoplankton in winter than in summer, Calanus goes into a kind of winter hibernation, drifting with the currents into deep, cold-water pockets. Mr. Heath believed that those pockets lay in the Faro-Shetland Channel, and in 1993 he sailed out into the strait and dropped a plankton net.

"It was very exciting," he said, "because we thought that's where they wintered, but you never know until you find them."

Perhaps it is a rarefied passion, the study of a minuscule shrimp, but it has it's moments. Take the way they mate. After sleeping through the winter at a depth of 800 metes, they begin to stir.

"The first ones to wake," Mr. Heath said, "moult (physically alter) to adult males and start to swim upwards, but they stop at around 400 metres below the surface and sit there in a layer. As time progresses, an increasing number of the animals that wake up moult into females, and these swim right on up to the surface--through the layer of males. We assume that the males are lying in wait for the females and ambush them on their way to the surface."

Their Saturnalia done, the sated zooplankters drift on currents that carry them back to the North Sea to get eaten.

[Lilypon]

Having located Calanus's wintering ground, Mr. Heath moved to the second part of his hypothesis; Since fewer numbers were showing up in the North Sea, correspondingly fewer should be found upstream in the Faro-Shetland Channel. This also proved true, prompting a further supposition that the number of Calanus had declined because their habitat had shrunk. In other words, there was less cold, deep water in the channel than there had been before. Since the Greenland pump was the source of that water, the decline of Calanus reinforced an idea already taking root in researcher's minds. The pump itself was failing.

"Pump" means not a single site, but a whole series of sites where cold water forms from the warmer water of the Gulf Stream. Some call them "chimneys", but the action is the same: cold water forming, sinking and flushing deep water below it southward into the Atlantic.

A line of sills rises from the seabed between Scotland and Greenland, forming a impediment to the flow of bottom water south. The greatest volume of this southward flowing water takes the channel between the Faros and Shetland, where a gap in the sills at Faro Bank provides the widest opening into the abyss.

And so on a bright December day, with a sparkling sea and a spanking breeze, Scotia came into the strait and began a sampling run that would carry her back across the seaway towards Shetland.

Taking a census of Calaus is an exacting task. It is crucial to know not only the depth at which you catch them, but also that you are catching all of them at that point. The number of ways to do this is stupefying: If you type "plankton net" into google you will get more that 800,000 results.

Generally one should tiptoe around such exotica, but in the person of John Dunn, chief scientist of the cruise, Scotia carried a man so besotted by plankton nets that only a few words about them seems polite.

Mr. Dunn is a tall, grey-bearded Scott with piercing blue eyes and a pleasant growl. The contraption he hoisted overboard, which sampled the salinity and temperature of the water as well as capturing Calanus, was called ARIES, an acronym for Auto-Recording Instrumented Environmental sampler. It was his own invention, and the latest chapter in an eye-crossing saga of net evolution, a tale made dizzying by drop gates and bridles and slings.

First to Scotia came the Isaacs-Kidd net, an European contraption with an aquaplane depressor for taking it down. It was a troublesome device, and nothing more need be said about it.

Next came the English-made RMT 1+8. RMT stands for Rectangular Mouth Trawl, and 1+8 meant that there were eight smaller nets contained within the one larger net. The eight smaller nets were opened and closed acoustically from the surface and the whole things was, in Mr. Dunn's assessment, "bloody awful."

An American then developed MOCNESS, for Multiple Opening and Closing Net Environmental Sampling System. Dunn did not buy it, nor the next in this catchy vein, a Canadian offering called BIONESS. Instead, Scottish heart aflame, he seized the gauntlet and cam up with LOCHNESS-- Large Opening Closing High-Speed Net Environmental Sampling System--"possibly." Mr. Dunn averred, "the largest plankton sampler ever built."

LOCHNESS weighed 4 1/2 tons, stood 21 feet high and had five separate nets, each with a mouth measuring six feet square, and each mouth opening into its own 45-foot-long net. It took a flatbed truck to move it to the ship.

"It was a fairly large piece of steel to take charge of," Mr. Dunn admits. It had what seamen call a good grip on the water."

Too good a grip, alas. LOCHNESS, too went by the board.

Taking the pulse of a patient the size of the Greenland Sea requires more than counting plankton. Multiple measurements of temperature and salinity at various depths in the water column were scrupulously taken as the ship steamed back and forth across the Faro-Shetland Channel.

One of the crucial indicators of the state of the pump is salinity. To sink, a mass of water must not only cool, it must be salty too. Water sinks when it becomes denser than the water below it. Density is a function of both temperature and salinity.

Oceanographers Bill Turrell, from the Aberdeen lab, and Bogi Hansen, a Faroese, have scrutinized for years the water that pours down the strait at depth and funnels through the gap at Faro Bank, When they begun their study in 1990, they found that the pump was sending about 1.5 million cubic metres per second of cold, salty water through the lower stratum of the gap. Five years later, that flow had dropped by 5 per cent. In ocean terms, a swift plunge. But was it a blip, or a longer trend?

[johno]

If you live on the coast, sell while you still have something to sell...

[Lilypon]

The scientists had a context to help answer this: 50 years of measurements from Ocean Weather Station Mike, a weather ship at the edge of the Norweigian Basin. Mr. Hansen developed a model based on Mike's salinity measurements from 1950 to 1990, and asked the model for a forecast of the next five years. The forecast matched exactly what the oceanographers had found themselves from sea measurements, inviting the conclusion that the decline in the pump's production was part of a longer trend, and not a hiccup. Moreover, the model revealed that a measurement of the decline since 1950 showed a drop of 25 per cent. Now, in the latest reports last month, the Gulf Stream System seems to have weakened a further five percentage points. Why?

The evidence points to global warming. Greenland's icecap has been shredding itself into the northern seas at an accelerated clip, and ice is fresh water. The top 1.5 kilometers of the Greenland Sea have rapidly freshened. This robs the pump of it's salty power, and it is a fresher, weaker current that it now sends south.

From Faro Bank, the water follows a snaking route until at last it descends the Greenland slope into the abyssal reaches of the Labrador Sea, another pump whose deep water has also been freshened.

"Other observations confirm," Mr. Turrell and five other oceanographers wrote in an earlier edition of Nature, :that the deep and abyssal freshening we describe has already passed equatorward along the North American seaboard in the Deep Western Boundary Current.

With 'new and stronger' evidence of anthropogenic warming, coupled climate models seem to be reaching some kind of consensus that a slowdown of North Atlantic Deep Water production and of the" ...overturning circulation will be one outcome"

They appear to have been right. Peter Wadhams, an ocean physicist at Cambridge University, checks the state of the pump on voyages through it in Royal Navy submarines.

"Until recently," he said, "we would find giant chimneys in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared."

A feature Mr. Wadhams used to look for was the Odden Ice Shelf, which formed in the Greenland Sea in winter. It has not done so since 1997. "In the past, we could see nine to 12 giant columns forming under the shelf each year. In our latest cruise, we found only two, and they were so weak that the sinking water could not reach the seabed."

Scientist do not all agree about what is happening, or how fast. Peter Killworth, a theorist at Britian's National Oceanographic Centre in Southhampton, said, :When Iheard them release their numbers (In Nature, in November), I kept my mouth shut. They said there was an error factor of plus or munus 30 percent, but it could be more."

Mr. Killworth wonders if a Rossby wave might have distorted the findings. A Rossby wave is an enormous submarine formation, from trough to peak the height of a 15-storey building that moves at caterpillar speed through the ocean, from east to west, taking years to cross. Sometimes they are called "planetary waves," they are thought to be generated by a combination of forces, including winds and certain effects from solar heating. The waves are a mechanism for stirring local climate evens into the broad ocean, and a wave's passage could have an impact on sea temperature.

Mr. Killworth insists that years-long monitoring is the only way to understand exactly what is happening to the Atlantic's overturning circulation.

As to timelines, no one delivers ironclad predictions. Mr. Wadhams, who did the submarine surveys, and Richard Wood, a climate modeller, envisage global warming eventually compensating for the loss of heat from a failure of the overturning circulation.

The problem is that no one can say when this balance would be reached, any more than they know when, or absolutely if, the stream will stop. There could well be a gap of decades between one effect and the other, and if there where, Britain would be devasted.

Mr. Wood runs one of the world's three or four most sophisticated climate models at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire. He has modelled a shutdown of the Gulf Stream, and said temperatures would fall by 5 degrees Celcius--the steepest plunge in temperature in 8,000 years. For comparison, the difference between the medieval warm period, when vines grew in England, and the Little Ice Age of the 1600s, was not much more than one degree.

"A small temperature fall," Mr. Wood said, "would have huge consequences. You would have severe winters and the summers would be significantly cooler. The knock-on effect would be felt in agriculture, and rainforests (north of the Amazon River) would become shrub land."

In the Hollywood disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow a failure of the Gulf Stream plunges the world into catastrophe. Suddenly Manhatten is encased in ice and the Royal family freezes to deathin London. Although the scenario was fanciful, some scientists welcomed the movie for attracting attention to the climate. "There is one scene where Hall [the scientist played by Dennis Quaid] stands up at a conference to express his concerns," oceanographer Meric Srokosz said, "but says he cannot guarantee what will happen. That is the sort of thing I would do."

It is the sort of thing most of them would do. The ocean is so vast and the forces acting on it so profuse that auguries are hedged. This proper scientific caution can promote a feeling in the wider community that, whatever happens, it won't happen now.

After two weeks at sea, three years ago, Scotia ran a last pattern of sampling lines off Shetland and then turned her bow for home. I had made friends with a young oceanographer , Sarah Hughes, a woman of indelible ferocity. We were standing together on the last day at sea, watching the grey coast of Scotland harden into sight.

"What amazes me," she said, "is, I give a talk to the Salmon Trust, and they have hopes that they can make things go back to the way they were. They own Salmon Rivers. They have memories of their youth, when they could go out and catch big salmon. They remember what things were like when they were young, and they want them that way again."

"And I try to say, our climate is going to change. amd rapid change, one way or another, and human influence has caused the change to happen faster. There were other speakers, and they were telling them how everything was going to be okay. I was last, and I said, everything's not going to be okay."

Matthew Hart is a Canadian writer based in London. His latest book is The Irish Game.

The Globe and Mail
Saturday, January 14, 2006.

[Lilypon]

Core Library reading list (books strongly suggested for libraries to have in their collections):

Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming (Paperback)
by Gale E. Christianson

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (Paperback - Dec 27, 2005)

The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold by Gretel Ehrlich (Paperback - Nov 8, 2005)

The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery (Hardcover - Feb 28, 2006)

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore (Paperback - May 26, 2006)

The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations by Eugene Linden (Hardcover - Feb 7, 2006)

End of the Earth: Voyaging to Antarctica by Peter Matthiessen and Kenneth Garrett (Paperback - Sep 1, 2004)

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change by Fred Pearce (Hardcover - Mar 7, 2007)

Hell and High Water: Global Warming--the Solution and the Politics--and What We Should Do Romm, Joseph. (Jan, 2007)

Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (Yale Nota Bene) by James Gustave Speth (Paperback - Mar 11, 2005)

Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Paperback)
by David Steinman

Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season by Bruce Stutz (Hardcover - Jan 3, 2006)

The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)

The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine) by Spencer R. Weart (Paperback - Sep 30, 2004)

[TastyofHasty]

Lilypon, thank you!

I am going to say, from my mid-range method of figgerin' ... looks like things are either going to heat up, or cool down! Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhhh. If change is fast and drastic (w'in 10 years or so) ... there ain't much we can do to change it now!:eek: As far as us being more godlike now ... if we take a quick peek at the beings runnin' things ... um ... well ... :(

There were a lot of quotable bits in the long quotes you posted. To me, this seems to be one of the most important:

Six weeks ago, researchers announced that a summer program of ocean monitoring had revealed a weakening of the Gulf Stream by six million tonnes of water per second-something like 30 per cent. If the heat from the current is equivalent to the output of a million power stations (apparently someone has worked it out), then if looked as if a few hundred thousand of them were going to shut down.

The Gulf Stream is already 30% weakened????? :eek:

There is a rather substantial problem related to drought that no one seems to be thinking of. It's a particular problem because in the last century our dependencies have changed. It used to be that about 38% of the people lived on farms and they knew how to grow food; and if there were a few bad years, there was a lot of slack in the system in the form of stockpiles and so on. Now we have an urban civilization where only 1.4% of the people live on farms--highly efficient farms, true, but their concentration actually makes the system more prone to collapse than it was a century ago. We have, for example, people living in cities at the end of a "just in time" supply line; they don't have much extra in terms of stockpiles. If anything severely disrupts the system, disrupts the transportation system, disrupts production itself as a result of drought for example, it is capable of causing mischief on a scale that just wasn't possible a century ago.

"Mischief" is a EUPHEMISM. If I start starving, it will be much more than "mischief."

Europe will be the first to feel the effects of these changes because its climate is most directly influenced by the Atlantic currents and winds. Rough calculations suggest that 22 out of 23 Europeans will feel the effects directly and substantially. They will probably try to move elsewhere, but elsewhere will already be in trouble. The whole situation is a setup for the kind of drastic reduction in population which we have had via the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You can have a series of rippling resource wars as nations try to take over the food supplies and resources of their neighbors. You can also have widespread disease and, as we now know from history, genocide has also been very common in such situations.

Holy Moses. Well, I'm gettin' on with learning to garden & saving seed.

[johno]

If the supply line fails, we might have to worry about more than deer in our gardens...

[Lilypon]

When a certain person was given the power to run the United States my father looked ill and said "that's not good for Canada." He foreshadowed that more accurately then he realized (and of course he missed just how bad it would be for the States as well). I belong to another website and noticed that when people in Alaska posted that Global Warming was happening in their locations (the posts happened in 2001/02) others much further south would jump on them.....I was shocked but at that time I was unaware of how little information was being released south of the border (and how much the oil companies were spending to cover it up).

In 2004/5 Eskimos had to be relocated, off an island in Alaska, because there is no longer ice to protect it and the Arctic waves are quickly pulling it back into the ocean.

On December 1st, 2006 I posted this:


"-16°C
Partly cloudy. Light snow and blowing snow.


FEELS LIKE -29°C
WIND NW 41 km/h
GUSTS 50 km/h
RELATIVE HUMIDITY 84% :(
DEWPOINT -18°C
PRESSURE 102.39 kPa
VISIBILITY 3.2 km
CEILING 7500 ft

Now I could understand 84% if I was in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver (or near any large body of water) but given the extreme cold that we've been through it should be at 20% right now. They say the Jet Stream, that's dropped down to the Gulf of Mexico, is drawing it northwards ( I still can't believe the extreme prairie cold hasn't sucked it up). The one blessing is my skin hasn't dried out and I'm not financing a hand cream factory (yet)."


I'm still going to check our little lakes (ie. Buffalo Pound and Old Wives) and see if the Bearpaw Sea is trying to make a comeback.


Regarding the above it was just for a short while we hit an actual reading of -32°C earlier this fall. It last about 2 weeks and since then we have been around 0°C (or 32°F). We have never had high humidity in winter on the Canadian prairies. It too is a sign of Global Warming. :(

[Lilypon]

TastyofHasty truly when one sees so many changes occurring all at once that my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, never saw (4 generations of my family have lived at this location) it really scares me.

[Lilypon]

What Saskatchewan used to be like (the cold lasted much, much longer then)
"The photograph on the right, shows Halvor Ausland with his dog team on the Mudjatik River trapline in the winter of 1923. Notice the frost on his whiskers, the winters are very cold in that part of the country. It is not uncommon for the temperatures to dip to -50 or -60 degrees Fahrenheit or more. Many a night was spent sleeping around campfires with only his sleeping bag to keep him warm while he slept. He remarked in later years about waking up in the morning, very uncomfortable, with snow down the back of his neck.
In later years, Halvor Ausland was to recall a journey he made from his trapline in the north, out to civilization. His toboggan was filled with furs, and the weather was extremely cold. During that trip, his dogs froze to death one after the other. He started the trip with twelve dogs and ended up with three. This was during the worst years of the depression and the fur provided him with good money at a time when people in the cities had no work and went hungry. Dog Team on Trap-line. The poor northern trapper, was frozen in the winter and eaten to death by mosquitoes and black-flies in the summer."

When my Great-Grandfather settled here in 1881 (the first winter in a tent) the actual temperature was in the -60's (F) for a couple of months. Now we can still hit the minus 40's (but it's only for a very short time) and it's only with windchill that we will record the above temps.

[Lilypon]

Two interesting articles in the news today........

Ancient ice shelf snaps and breaks free from Canadian Arctic
The Associated Press
Published: December 28, 2006

TORONTO: A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event.

The Ayles Ice Shelf — 66 square kilometers (41 square miles) of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and was amazed at the sight.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years," Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."


The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. They are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old. They float on the sea but are connected to land.

Some scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and that climate change was a major element.

"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. "We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.

Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as seismic data — the event registered on earthquake monitors 250 kilometers (155 miles) away — Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.

"Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly," he said.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker as temperatures rise. He visited Ellesmere Island in 2002 and noticed that another ice shelf had cracked in half.

"We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said.

Within days of breaking free, the Ayles Ice Shelf drifted about 30 miles (50 kilometers) offshore before freezing into the sea ice. A spring thaw may bring another concern: that warm temperatures will release the new ice island from its Arctic grip, making it an enormous hazard for ships.

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said.

[Lilypon]

and ........

Polar bears must be listed endangered: US
Associated Press

Friday, December 29, 2006 (Washington):

The United States administration under President George W Bush is proposing that polar bears be added to the most endangered species list.

Polar bears have dwindled in numbers and are in a serious fight for survival due to Arctic ice melt from global warming.

The proposal would list the polar bear as "threatened" with extinction under the US Endangered Species Act.

Environmental groups have fought for years to protect the bear from the impacts of global warming in the Arctic, including the rapid disappearance of the polar bear's sea-ice habitat.

"It is a big deal today to have the Bush administration recognise that global warming is threatening the existence of the polar bear," said David Doniger, Climate Policy Director of the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC).

"Now it's up to the administration, with the Congress, to do something to stop the global warming that's threatening the polar bear," he added.

Pollution and over-hunting also threaten the existence of the bears.

Greenland and Norway have the most polar bears, but almost five thousand live mainly in Alaska and travel to Canada and Russia.

Fear of extinction

The "endangered" category is reserved for species most likely to become extinct.

Such a decision would require all US federal agencies to ensure that anything they authorise that might affect polar bears will not jeopardise their survival or the sea ice where they live.

That could include oil and gas exploration, commercial shipping or even releases of toxic contaminants or climate-affecting pollution throughout the country.

Environmentalists hope that invoking the Endangered Species Act protections might eventually provide impetus for the government to cut back on its emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases that are warming the atmosphere.

"What's driving the global warming is pollution from down here where we are, the pollution from our power plants and our cars and our other factories, the carbon monoxide that drives global warming."

"So now we action from the Congress and from the president to curb global warming. That's what it would take to save the polar bear," said Doniger.

In the past, President Bush has refused to go along with the United Nations position of mandatory controls on carbon dioxide causing international tension between the United States and other nations.

[johno]

I just read in an aol news story that a 41 square mile ice shelf broke loose and may be in shipping lanes in the next couple of years...

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/giant-ice-shelf-snaps-free-near-north/20061229064309990001?ncid=nws001

[finnteara]

johno, that the Ayles Ice Shelf Lilypon is talking about. It broke off from the land and refroze in the sea. In spring they think it will be free floating.

[TastyofHasty]

Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.

That's what I'm wondering about, too. If only 1 degree Celsius (or Centigrade?) has been added to mean temp worldwide in the last 100 years, then how come we are seeing these rather extreme effects? (for instance, "new zones" for gardening ... I am now in New Zone 7 rather than 6b!) And polar ice melting ... either something else is going on, or it is not true that only 1 degree C. has been added to mean temp worldwide in the last 100 years. Wondering whether it is NOT TRUE is thanks to "disinformation" campaign ... (shades of ... propaganda campaign similar to those of many rotten governments of the past not concerned with the good of their citizens ...)

Another question: this is NORTH polar ice, eh? Didn't I hear or read somewhere the SOUTH pole is not changing??

But like the rest of the world, I s'pose, I am wondering WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE FUTURE? And, how NEAR in the future? What does this mean for my little slice of the planet ...

[windsng225]

TOH, maybe 50 years ago the temps were changing, but 50 years ago we weren't paying attention to that kind of stuff. They were more worried about the A bomb. I can remember that because my dad built a bomb shelter in the back yard under the ground. I just believe it's been happening all along, just we are noticing the changes now, drastic as they seem, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Fact of life. Scarey, isn't it?
joyce

[Orgarden]

TOH, I think it's more like the wildlife ecosystem where you disrupt one species and others are donimo-like effected in different ways. I guess it's a weather ecosystem and you have the slightly warmer temps changing the water temps that effect the ice and weather, that effect the temp, that effect the water temp that effects the ice and weather. We started a chain reaction.

Now from what I can understand of this (and that could be very little), the overall world temp will not change drastically. It's how the temp is distributed that will (and has) change.

[Lilypon]

TOH it's happening in Antarctica too :( .......the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in 2002 (due to climate warming): http://nsidc.org/iceshelves/larsenb2002/

[Lilypon]

Environment Canada just released it's report on 2006:

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Top weather stories of 2006
By ALAN BLACK

TORONTO (CP) - The drenching rain, destructive wind and deep snow that pummeled British Columbia in November and December took the first and second spots on Environment Canada's list of the top weather stories of 2006.

Nine destructive storms battered Canada's West Coast since the beginning of November, three times the norm for the autumn period, the agency says in its annual report on the country's weather.

Stormy weather is not uncommon in B.C. at the end of the year, but the "ferocity and frequency of the storms this year is unprecedented," said Environment Canada senior climatologist Dave Phillips, the report's author.

November blew in with fury as the West Coast was hit hard and often by drenching rain, howling winds and high tides that even prompted a rare tsunami warning.

The month ended in bitter cold and deep snow, again leaving thousands of people without electricity. Forty centimetres of snow gave the province its second deepest November snowfall in B.C. in 66 years of weather-keeping, while the month's rainfall broke or tied several rainfall records.

Then, just as storm-weary B.C. residents were recovering from November's wrath, three ferocious wind storms in mid-December caused more damage, toppling more than one thousand trees in Vancouver's picturesque Stanley Park.

Phillips said there were no mysterious forces at work and discounts the possibility that the assault was a product of global warming or an El Nino current.

"They may be factors," he said, "but even with an unusual number of storms, "sometimes, it just comes down to bad luck."

Still, there's hope for the new year - B.C. residents might well see a reversal of weather fortunes to start 2007, Phillips said.

"In an average year, storms on the Pacific coast tend to peter out come January and February," he said.

"One would think nature's got nothing left to punish the west coast."

Number three on the list was a series of powerful storms that marched across central and northeast Ontario and into western Quebec on July 17 and the weekend of Aug. 2-3.

The July storms caused a swath of damage about 400 kilometers long, with the North Bay, Callander and Mattawa areas of northeastern Ontario taking the hardest punch. Many communities along the storm path declared states of emergency as Hydro One tried to repair the worst damage to the Ontario power grid since the 1998 ice storm.

The same weather system also caused major flooding and significant damage in Quebec from the Abitibi region to Quebec City.

The August storm triggered 10 tornadoes as it hop-scotched through cottage country north of Toronto - the highest number of tornadoes on a single day in Ontario since 13 tornadoes were tracked on May 31, 1985. The same storm also left 450,000 people in Quebec without power, some for more than four days.

:( Number four on the list was the summer heat wave of 2006. It was the second warmest summer on record with temperatures 1.4 degrees above normal, eclipsed only slightly by the summer of 1998. Newfoundland and Labrador boasted the warmest June and July ever recorded.

Hail "events" on the Prairies came in fifth, setting a record in all three prairie provinces with 221 in total, breaking the record of 179 set just last year. The most destructive air assault was on Aug. 10 in central Alberta when snowplows were taken out of storage to clear hail the size of tennis balls from highways and runways.

:( A coast-to-coast January heat wave was sixth on the list, followed by an unusually active forest fire season. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre in Winnipeg recorded 9,482 fires over more than two million hectares of land - numbers not seen since the late 1980s.

With B.C. experiencing savage year-end weather and eastern Canada baking under oppressive summer heat, Phillips said it appeared as though "Canada has flipped around."

"But I don't think I'd read too much into it," he added. "I think this is just weather on steroids - not necessarily a permanent change to the Canadian climate."

However, Phillips said he has no doubt global warming is now a fact of life in Canada after the country recorded the warmest winter and spring on record and the second-warmest summer.

:( If fall had been a little warmer instead of being the 13th warmest, it would have been the warmest year on record, he noted.

"Are there any doubting Thomases any more?" Phillips asked.

"The evidence is irrefutable that Canada is warming up, the world is warming up and the evidence just keeps pouring in. It's likely sooner rather than later we'll see the ice disappear in summertime in the Arctic and that'll be the first time in a million years."

[winter_unfazed]

I heard Calvin Baisner on the POV Show last night and he is "full of it." Baisner thinks we should all just keep burning fossil fuels and not try to develop clean fuels yet because of the cost to our economy. I guess he only sees $$$.

[GreenZone]

It would seem to me that any old environmental catastrophe would pretty much have to be bad for the economy...

Randel

[Lavandula Girl]

Maybe this Calvin Baisner guy will make money when the rest of the world goes to Hades - he'll be the guy fleecing the rest of us. After all, even a bad economy is good for a few people... wait, is this Calvin Beisner - the guy who tries to tie all economics to the Bible? He's a fruitcake. Forget what I said, he won't make money either, he'll just tell us it's armageddon.

[Contra]

Hey Guys;as to #1.If you drive you are part of the problem so if you are advocating giving up the Car you should probably start by getting rid of Your's.
As to # 4.The ozone is also depleated by Methane not only from cow's but also Termites -which actually produce the Lion's share.
#5.You can start by selling Your Car.
I personally will not be giving up driving because I live in LA.
And as Far as the Book of Revelations says Earth is Not an Infinite Project.-
wetlands produce 5 1/2 times more methane than termites. http://www.igac.noaa.gov/newsletter/22/natural.php

[Contra]

I was waiting for the "hockey stick graph" to rear its ugly head. It "conveniently" leaves out the medieval warm period which was every bit as warm as it is today. See the medieval warm period, when there were vineyards in england, is very inconvenient for the Gore camp and Mann who constructed the hockey stick graph. Yes we are warmer but why it is happening is exactly known. What we do know (facts) is that we are in an interglacial period experiencing warmth that is not unprecedented.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2006/07/29/hockey-stick-gets-checked/

http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/mayews01/node5.html

[windsng225]

Large cars, SUV's, anything over 4 cylinders should be banned and heavely fined for driving in this country. If we want to reverse what is happening, that is the only way that we will be able to see improvement. These people that drive these big cars that are gas guzzliers, if fined very heavely will get rid of them. The reason why, is you got to hit them where it hurts in the wallet. You want to drive these things, then your going to be double taxed and fined. Let's see how long they hold on to those gas guzzlers!
joyce

[Lavandula Girl]

I was waiting for the "hockey stick graph" to rear its ugly head. It "conveniently" leaves out the medieval warm period which was every bit as warm as it is today.

I read the link, but I missed where the polar bears went extinct, and then the medieval people reincarnated them. How did they do it? I hope the monks wrote it down, so we can do it again! :D

[johno]

My father was a monk in his youth. I'll ask him where they keep that book...

So, is anyone planning for the future by planting 'above their zone?' In other words, are you planting things that should only be hardy in a more southern zone?

I have considered olive trees for some time, for example. I would have to heat them artificially a few times each winter, but maybe in a few years that wouldn't be necessary?..

[Journey]

First of all, for doomsday activists. In 1850 we came out of what is known as the "little ice age". So naturally temperatures are going to increase. It is also WIDELY known that the constant increase of temperatures is cause by a not so surprising phenomenon that is known as URBANIZATION. Global warming is a myth. Whenever you take science and try to meld it with politics you get disaster. On the other hand, to even rebut myself, ALL statistics are skewed, that is a fact. It depends on who you ask. Global warming itself is not a Global phenomenon. Temperature in just the US alone has only raised 3/10 of 1 degree since 1900. So what it comes down to is this, who do you want to believe? :rolleyes:

[Lavandula Girl]

Holy smokes! Here I thought I was an apathetic do-nothing, and I'm really a doomsday activist! All because I chose to recognize that 95% of the scientific community believes that we can slow the rate of global warming through policy change and regulation. So Journey, tell us, which studies did you read, the ones funded by Exxon, or the ones funded by BP? Yes urbanization is a problem, but it is the use of fuels in these urbanized areas, and the use of fuels that makes these areas even possible that exascerbates the issue of global warming. I agree that the earth goes through climate changes naturally. I also believe that we are speeding up that process, and that every time the planet goes through an accelerated change, it is harder for it to recover. Explain, please, why we shouldn't make the changes that are possible. It seems to me that if we can put billions of dollars into developing viagra and baldness cures, we can maybe put some money into alternative fuels and policy change for pollutants.

[finnteara]

You go girl!

[johno]

I heard the FDA is approving a weight-loss drug for dogs. If we spent money on something as trivial as the survival of all life on Earth, just think how many fat dogs would continue to suffer needlessly due to lack of funding. You doomsday activists need to get your priorities in order!

[Lavandula Girl]

Sorry, Johno, I won't change my opinion until those dogs are fat and bald! I won't wait til they need doggie viagra, since that would obviously be needless cruelty... :D

[johno]

;)

[msbaker]

Hey TastyofHasty;It was Also Mr.Gore who "claimed He Invented the Internet".I don't know if you watch "SouthPark" there is a great episode with him trying to warn America About "ManBearPig" which is clearly more believable than this.-
zebra, Al NEVER said he invented the internet, the sound byte soooo obviously cut off a phrase that included the word internet. Oppose who you may, but don't be a complete dupe.

[msbaker]

yep, johno, the problem isn't that the WORLD will end;It's that the human race might. Or at least decline sharply. Thank God for birth control. We've been fruitful, multiplied and covered the earth alreadt. We can stop now...

[Lilypon]

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/03/13/warm-winter060313.html

Posted in the above link......
Winter temperatures have been above normal across Canada, the report says, with most of the country at least 2 C above normal and with Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories all experiencing temperatures <b>greater than 6 C above normal.</b>

here's a conversion chart: http://www.onlineconversion.com/temperature.htm

:mad:

[Lilypon]

That would be for the winter of 2005/2006. I wonder how this winter will compare? :eek:

[Lavandula Girl]

So, is anyone planning for the future by planting 'above their zone?' In other words, are you planting things that should only be hardy in a more southern zone?


Johno - I routinely try to grow stuff that doesn't belong in my zone, but I hedge my bets by digging some stuff up and storing it, and leaving the rest. For example, pulling some agapanthus out of the ground, and leaving some to overwinter. What have you grown that belonged further south? Were you successful? My agapanthus came back....

[Sandbar]

zebra, Al NEVER said he invented the internet, the sound byte soooo obviously cut off a phrase that included the word internet. Al said he "created the Internet" by promoting technology that would fuel the growth of the Internet.

See this link on Snopes.com:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

It remains unclear just how much Al "really" helped the Internet develop. I'm of the opinion that he wanted to appear "hip and in-sync" with young voters, thus the genesis of his vague claim. While there is some truth to Al's claim (see link to Vint Cerf's defense of Al in the Snopes article), I'm sure Al wishes he'd have worded it differently. He seemed to be claiming an *awful* lot of primary responsibility for the "creation of the Internet" with his statement.

He's paid dearly for that one unclear statement.

[Eric]

Be careful when arguing with an idiot, others might not be able to tell the difference.

I think on that salient bit of wisdom everytime I hear the words "global warming is a myth". Of course its made much easier online when I see things like Posts: 2.

[Journey]

re: Lavandula
I actually got those stats from Stanford Univ. I am pro-alt fuel. I also make my living from state and federal grants, so I know what is up with other NPO's. Environmental groups are the last people I am going to believe. If I cannot prove to you tax-payers and to the State that there is something to fear, I cannot get the grants that I desire. I feel that listening to these companies you mentioned like BP and Exxon are probably going to be the most believable due to the fact that they have the most to lose if they are wrong. I am totally with you, your opinion is valid. We do need more people like you that will stand up for what they believe. I only suggest that persons with interests in these issues start reading more science journals, and stop getting their info from newspapers and Time magazine.

[Lavandula Girl]

Journey - I'd have to say that I am as skeptical of the results that would come from a study done by big oil as I would be of the results found by a group like the ELF. BP cannot possibly have anyone but BP's best interests in mind. Their first and foremost interest is to sell more fossil fuel. Saying we should trust their (or any other big oil companies') studies above all others is like saying we should trust the tobacco giant studies from the 1960's regarding the dangers of smoking. I would appreciate a link to the full Stanford study that you cite, purporting to debunk global warming.

[Journey]

Actually I can do better than that. First of all, here is a link to a powerpoint presentation that uses ALL the data that you support. With active links to all data in my above posts. I was wrong it wasn't Stanford, it was UC Berkley. It is included in the powerpoint with active links.
http://www.stopdumbingdown.com/GWP.ppt
Next, here is a video presentation using that very same data. Now remember it goes off all the media/Government supported charts, graphs, data, and so on of this crisis you are talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjczyA75jU
NASA disputes global warming and says the data is unfounded. Just google NASA with global warming, pretty easy. Nasa claims temperatures have decreased by 20 degrees in the last 18+ years. Satellite data, the most accurate we have today. Direct measure, not proxy measure.

Case Closed.

[Lavandula Girl]

Here's what I got when I went to Nasa's site and searched for global warming. Seems they do think it's real, and that we have some control. I don't use Youtube as a source, except when I'm trying to duplicate the diet coke/mentos thing. I tried to get the powerpoint link to come up, but it wouldn't. I did find the second link, a study from UC Berkeley, which indicates that global warming will have an adverse effect on US agriculture. If you want to skim, I direct you to start reading about 1/2 way through page 25, where they conclude that the reduction in agricultural profitability will be near 7.9 billion dollars (in 2002 dollars) for dryland agriculture. A few pages later they make a similar assertaion regarding irrigated land. The third link is a letter dated just a few months ago from a whole lot of those vaunted UC Berkeley PhDs.

http://eobglossary.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarming/printall.php

http://calclimate.berkeley.edu/15%20The%20impact%20of%20global%20warming%20on%20U S%20ag.pdf

http://calclimate.berkeley.edu/CA_Economists_Letter.pdf
I agree, case closed.

[Journey]

I read both of yours and they don't actually say anything. The letter is to urge California lawmakers of a possibility, and the NASA document is uncertain at the very beginning. However, my 2 links actually provide an answer and not open questions. Soooo I guess I don't get it.

So to anyone else who is tired of phony policies and lawmakers passing bogus laws for a "critical situation that can't be supported by anything other than cherry-picked data", click the links on my last post and form your own opinion. You can throw all my posts in the trash on your way out the door. Just look at all the data before buying into nonsense.

I actually did like that one from Nasa.
I promise I am done....and you can have the last word.

[TastyofHasty]

Anybody read The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis? The last of the Chronicles of Narnia ... about the end of the world. Y'all might like 'em. But part of what went on ... was "disinformation." Ya know, when I was growing up (in 50's, 60's) ... that word "disinformation" wasn't even a word yet as far as I know. Now EVERYBODY knows what it is. The confusion Mr. Lewis describes in The Last Battle is what I think of. And "the dwarfs are for the dwarfs" ... and that you couldn't fight 'cause whatever happened, it could be twisted and lied about.

[Ohiorganic]

how about this article about how Exxon is using the same tactics to disprove Global warming big tobacco used to use to say their product was healthy?
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2007/2007-01-05-02.asp

[Lilypon]

The Global Warming Debate

By James Hansen — January 1999

The only way to have real success in science ... is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good about it and what's bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. — Richard Feynman

In my view, we are not doing as well as we could in the global warming debate. For one thing, we have failed to use the opportunity to help teach the public about how science research works. On the contrary, we often appear to the public to be advocates of fixed adversarial positions. Of course, we can try to blame this on the media and politicians, with their proclivities to focus on antagonistic extremes. But that doesn't really help.

*************************************


4. CO2 contribution to the ~33°C natural greenhouse effect

Lindzen: "Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect." Cato Review, Spring issue, 87-98, 1992; "If all CO2 were removed from the atmosphere, water vapor and clouds would still provide almost all of the present greenhouse effect." Res. Explor. 9, 191-200, 1993.

Lacis and Hansen: removing CO2, with water vapor kept fixed, would cool the Earth 5-10°C; removing CO2 and trace gases with water vapor allowed to respond would remove most of the natural greenhouse effect.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

[windsng225]

You are absolutely correct! Complete denial!
joyce

[Giraffe]

Human population is already crashing in large areas of Africa because of aids, malaria and starvation from drought. Drug-resistent strains of malaria and TB are showing up again in the U.S. and there is spread into temperate areas of tropical diseases from Global Warming.

Personally, I'm doing all I can do by living a healthy lifestyle off the grid, raising as much as I can of my own food organically, trying to use less resources on all fronts--recycling everything from clothing to cars, trying to preserve our natural resources and water supply from the chemical contamination of herbicide. Last summer our county put 400,000 lbs of herbicide into our lake for Eurasian Watermilfoil at a cost of $17,000,000.00. Many people just aren't aware of the water crisis that is coming.

Our county has formed a milfoil task force of one representative from all the community organizations who have an interest in the lake to decide what to do next. I'm part of a group that has done the research on alternative methods--education of boaters and boat wash stations, biocontrol weevils, SolarBee, diver dredging, bottom barrier--. We're hoping that the disparate groups can communicate and compromise enough to balance out the impacts on the environment that have already occurred. We would wish that the "eradication" paradigm that inform the personalities of people who gravitate toware weed committees (which didn't eradicate, by the way), could be replaced by a "control" paradigm with diverse methods being tried. On top of this, the county won't really know what the outcome of the 2006 deployment of 2,4-D, Triclopyr and Sonar (floridone) will be until ~July, but the grant application to the state for this season must be in by March.

This county also has a very active grassroots group working on publicizing how we as individuals can contribute by our personal lives to the slow down Global Warming. Al Gore's movie was shown to large audiences. It's too late to avoid catastrophe now but we can try not to make things worse. It's going to affect the whole biosphere. The temperature will continue to rise for the next 100 years to that of the age of the dinosaurs.

[Brenda]

I firmly believe that there are BAD TIMES a coming. I also believe that those who are not prepared for this will die. I cannot understand why alledgedly smart people continue to live as if there is nothing wrong with this world. Never a thought for tomorrow.

[Ohiorganic]

Survey shows 13 pct of Americans never heard of global warming Mon Jan
29, 3:03 PM ET

OSLO (Reuters) - Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of
global warming even though their country is the world's top source of
greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday.

ADVERTISEMENT

The report, by ACNielsen of more than 25,000 Internet users, showed
that 57 percent of people around the world considered global warming a
"very serious problem" and a further 34 percent rated it a "serious
problem."

"It has taken extreme and life-threatening weather patterns to finally
drive the message home that global warming is happening and is here to
stay unless a concerted, global effort is made to reverse it," said
Patrick Dodd, the President of ACNielsen Europe.

People in Latin America were most worried while U.S. citizens were
least concerned with just 42 percent rating global warming "very
serious."

The United States emits about a quarter of all greenhouse gases, the
biggest emitter ahead of China, Russia and India.

Thirteen percent of U.S. citizens said they had never heard or read
anything about global warming, the survey said.

Almost all climate scientists say that temperatures are creeping
higher because of heat-trapping greenhouse gases released by burning
fossil fuels.

The study also found that 91 percent of people had heard about global
warming and 50 percent reckoned it was caused by human activities.

A U.N. report due on Friday is set to say it is at least 90 percent
probable that human activities are the main cause of warming in the
past 50 years.

People in China and Brazil were most convinced of the link to human
activities and Americans least convinced.

The survey said that people living in regions vulnerable to natural
disasters seemed most concerned -- ranging from Latin Americans
worried by damage to coffee or banana crops to people in the Czech
Republic whose country was hit by 2002 floods.

In Latin America, 96 percent of respondents said they had heard of
global warming and 75 percent rated it "very serious."

Most industrial nations have signed up for the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol,
which imposed caps on emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from
factories, power plants and vehicles.

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto
in 2001, but said last week that climate change was a "serious
challenge."

[Cliff Timmons]

I just want to know how this will effect my tomato plants.

[johno]

We don't want you to know that...

[Cliff Timmons]

Ah HA!
Therein lies the conspiricy!! <grin>

[Giraffe]

My apologies for an error in my previous post. My math skills with decimal places are less than desired. The county spent $1.7 million. That's $1,700,000.

[TastyofHasty]

Giraffe, that seems like a LOT of herbicide!(?) ... how big is your lake?

[Giraffe]

Hi Tasty,

It is 43 miles long, irregular shaped and 2 to 6 miles wide. The deepest part is 1400 ft. It was formed first by glaciers in the ice age then by a double fault that dropped the middle down. It has a river that runs through it that has filled it in on the north end where our town is and the Eurasian milfoil is along this shallow part where people have property along the shore.

Tomorrow the Milfoil Task Force will hear Dr. Michael Smart, Ecologist from the Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi, present a holistic approach to the management and control of non-native aquatic plants. This organization bid on the 2006 program and our county chose instead an all herbicide approach. I don't know what their proposal was. I wish I could be there, but I have a class in a city that's an hour's drive away exactly at the same time as his presentation. We're going to videotape the presentation and discussion afterward and I'll get to watch that.