What else, Global Warming

[Uncle Flo (imported)]

This is just another theory just like those spouted by Karl Marx and the rest.

HEY, HEY, HEY! You just leave my boy Karl alone! --FLO--

[Riverwind (imported)]

Yes it is true that polar bears are becoming threathened by extinction in an area of Alaska were they have never really been, but on the other side of Canada they are doing just fine.

Its like back in the bay area when the tree huggers stopped the removal of an on-ramp damaged in the 1989 quake, there was a weed that was endangered in San Francisco, the fact that it covers most of northern California has nothing to do with the Facts.

So is there global warming? I don't know,

Is it our fault and can we do anything about it? I don't think so.

River

[Slammr (imported)]

PARIS, Jan. 29 — Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

Scientists involved in writing or reviewing the report say it is nearly certain to conclude that there is at least a 90 percent chance that human-caused emissions are the main factor in warming since 1950. The report is the fourth since 1990 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is overseen by the United Nations.

The report, several of the authors said, will describe a growing body of evidence that warming is likely to cause a profound transformation of the planet.

Three large sections of the report will be forthcoming during the year. The first will be a summary for policy makers and information on basic climate science, which is expected to be issued on Friday.

Among the findings in recent drafts:

The Arctic Ocean could largely be devoid of sea ice during summer later in the century.

Europe’s Mediterranean shores could become barely habitable in summers, while the Alps could shift from snowy winter destinations to summer havens from the heat.

Growing seasons in temperate regions will expand, while droughts are likely to ravage further the semiarid regions of Africa and southern Asia.

“Concerns about climate change and public awareness on the subject are at an all-time high,” the chairman of the panel, Rajendra Pachauri, told delegates on Monday.

But scientists involved in the effort warned that squabbling among teams and government representatives from more than 100 countries — over how to portray the probable amount of sea-level rise during the 21st century — could distract from the basic finding that a warming world will be one in which shrinking coastlines are the new normal for centuries to come.

Jerry Mahlman, an emeritus researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was a reviewer of the report’s single-spaced, 1,644-page summary of climate science, said most of the leaks to the news media so far were from people eager to find elements that were the most frightening or the most reassuring.

He added in an interview that such efforts distracted from the basic, undisputed findings, saying that those point to trends that are very disturbing.

He noted recent disclosures that there is still uncertainty about the pace at which seas will rise because of warming and the melting of terrestrial ice over the next 100 years. That span, he said, is just the start of a rise in sea levels that will almost certainly continue for 1,000 years or so.

Many economists and energy experts long ago abandoned any expectation that it would be possible to avoid a doubling of preindustrial carbon dioxide concentrations, given the growth of human populations, use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, and destruction of forests in the tropics.

The report is likely to highlight the hazardous consequences of that shift by finding that reaching twice the preindustrial concentration of carbon dioxide will probably warm climate between 3.5 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit and by highlighting that there is a small but significant risk that such a buildup can produce even more warming.

One major point of debate in early drafts of the report is the projection of a smaller rise in sea level than the last report as scientists relying on computer models and field observations struggle to find a consensus. Some scientists say that the figures used in the coming report are not recent enough because they leave out recent observations of instability in some ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

Another possible point of contention during the four days of closed sessions in Paris this week may be assertions in early drafts of the report that the recent warming rate was blunted by particle pollution and volcanic eruptions.

Some scientists say the final report should reflect the assumption that the rate of warming in coming years is likely to be more pronounced than that of previous decades.

Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said the findings presented Friday should lead decision makers to accelerate efforts to slash carbon emissions and to help people in vulnerable parts of the world prepare for climate change.

“These findings should strengthen the resolve of governments to act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put in place the medium- to longer-term strategies necessary to avert dangerous climate change,” Mr. Steiner said.

In a new report issued Monday, his agency said the most recent evidence from mountain glaciers showed that they were melting faster than before.

In the past year, international concern over what to do about global warming has grown along with concrete signs of climate change. Even so, political leaders are still groping for ways to tackle the phenomenon. Europe has adopted a program that caps the amount of emissions from industrial plants.

But the world’s largest emitter, the United States, still is debating whether to adopt a similar policy, while developing countries like China are resisting caps on the ground that the industrialized countries contributed about 75 percent of the current volume of greenhouse gases and should make the deepest cuts.

Many experts involved in the intergovernmental panel’s process said there was hope that with a prompt start on slowing emissions, the chances of seeing much greater warmth and widespread disruption of ecosystems and societies could be reduced.

Outside experts agreed.

“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering,” said John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an energy and climate expert at Harvard. “We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”

[A-1 (imported)]

O.K.,

Again, where is the link?

Just because two events have happened simultaneously does NOT prove that they are linked.

90% chance? Where does that come from? Statistically, to prove a link in a piece of sceintific research you have to PROVE a correlation of greater than 95%, that is 1 chance in 20 that you are wrong and that the correlation does not actually exist. To prove that two events are linked a correlation is not good enough. Even if the events approach 100% correlation they have not been linked by correlation. You have merely pointed out that they happened at the same time. You must COMPLETELY discount the other explainations for the correlation before you can ASSUME that there is a link. Other explainations have NOT been researched. They ASSUME that there is not other possible explaination.

You see, this is the kind of "Science" that the "Social Sciences" use to "Prove" events are linked. Correlation is a BIG research tool of social sciences. However, to use it you must PROVE that no other explaination exists that could cause the correlation. That can be done statistically, but it is an exhaustive statistical proof and your research must be CONTROLLED scientifically to do it.

This "PROOF" for man causing Global Warming is not even rising to that level because it IGNORES other explainations.

Ever hear of "reasonable doubt"? You could NOT convict mankind of causing Global Warming in a court of law. Unless, of course, you did it in some Middle Eastern country with Shariah Law where he would have to PROVE that he was innocent. The way that you could do this is by restricting CO-2 emissions...get it? What do you call this, anyway? How about calling it FUNDAMENTALIST SCIENCE!??!

The left ignores other explainations completely when it comes to the cause of Global warming and ASSUMES that man is the ONLY reason possible for Global Warming. Well, it IS NOT so because it has not yet been PROVEN that man is the only reason. There is merely the ASSUMPTION that that there is no other reason OR explaination but man causing this. This is ARROGANCE, not science...

This is abuse of the scientific method and it is what makes the Social Sciences "SOFT SCIENCE". You see, in social science it is NOT POSSIBLE to exhaust the possibility of other explaination because there may be some that you do not know. In hard science you control ALL factors and therefore there can be NO other explaination.

Now, how in the HELL can you expect to put controls on the Weather?

That's right, you cannot!

This is SOFT Science. IT is worse than that, however, because it uses flawed logic to justify its conclusions. Here's why the logic is flawed in such conclusions.

IT's like saying "Gerald Ford died last month."

Last month was the warmest December on record.

The heat MUST HAVE killed him.

The two facts cannot prove the conclusion.

Logic like this is NOT scientific. No one has proved a thing...yet...

If the Greenland ice cores from 10,000 years ago show an increase in Greenhouse gases after the last ice age does that PROVE that it was from Neanderthal Man's fires roasting Wolly Mammoths and Sabretoothed Tigers into extinction?

Even though there might be 100% correlation with the rise in Greenhouse Gases and the extinction of these species and you can correlate these statistically, you have not linked them scientifically and PROVED that one caused the other to occur.

As with Chaos theory, if a butterfly flaps it's wings in Africa and there is a Blizzard in Minnesota you can look at mathematics to link them, but it is still JUST A THEORY called CHAOS. You have merely linked them mathematically and you have NOT shown that your mathematics represents what is happening in the real world.

In Physics, a beautiful mathematically sound proof MUST be irrefutably linked with the real world before you have a scientific law.

If you find one archelogical site with primitive arrowheads in a Wolly Mammoth skeleton that does not prove that man hunted the species into extinction, either...

This Global Warming stuff is pesudoscience at its worst... Science with a political motive...

Now, can we STOP accepting the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" as a belief system? The world has enough religions.

What we need is more GOOD SCIENCE...

P.S. Don't you just love arguments that cite "THE EXPERTS"? I know that I do ---- NOT!

P.P.S. Isn't Jerry Falwell an "expert" on religion and salvation, too?

[n3rf (imported)]

Dear A-1. fantastic - thinking - and writing - You do.

So what is the PROPAILITY that external PLANETAREY objects somewhere in our UNIVERSE is affecting our SUN and casusing electrical - gravitational - etc - and our GLOBAL WARMING and do we do RIGHT or WRONG by pushing phoney concepts like this ?? I think so .. N3RF

[Christina (imported)]

Global warming is nothing new. It's happened before and it will happen again. Mankinds role in all this may be insignificant.

Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.

Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earthvs climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.

In all this little has been said about earths largest climate control, the ocean currents.

This oceanic heat pump is an important mechanism for reducing equator-to-pole temperature differences. It moderates Earth’s climate, particularly in the North Atlantic region. Conveyor circulation increases the northward transport of warmer waters in the Gulf Stream by about 50 percent. At colder northern latitudes, the ocean releases this heat to the atmosphere—especially in winter when the atmosphere is colder than the ocean and ocean-atmosphere temperature gradients increase. The Conveyor warms North Atlantic regions by as much as 5° Celsius and significantly tempers average winter temperatures.

But records of past climates—from a variety of sources such as deep-sea sediments and ice-sheet cores—show that the Conveyor has slowed and shut down several times in the past. This shutdown curtailed heat delivery to the North Atlantic and caused substantial cooling throughout the region. One earth scientist has called the Conveyor “the Achilles’ heel of our climate system.”

Short term global warming and melting ice caps could be the precurser to an ice age.

It is crucial to remember two points: 1) If thermohaline circulation shuts down and induces a climate transition, severe winters in the North Atlantic region would likely persist for decades to centuries—until conditions reached another threshold at which thermohaline circulation might resume. 2) Abrupt regional cooling may occur even as the earth, on average, continues to warm.

Read more about how the oceans play a major part in global climate here (http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/vie ... do?id=9986).

[A-1 (imported)]

Dear A-1. fantastic - thinking - and writing - You do.

So what is the PROPAILITY that external PLANETAREY objects somewhere in our UNIVERSE is affecting our SUN and casusing electrical - gravitational - etc - and our GLOBAL WARMING and do we do RIGHT or WRONG by pushing phoney concepts like this ?? I think so .. N3RF

N3rf,

Thank you for the compliment!

There is no way to calculate such a probability. Certainly, that means that there is no way to completely rule it out, either. But to accept something as a fact because you cannot disprove it is beyond the pale (http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/pale.html), so to speak.

It is easy to make up explainations and/or to accept them upon faith. This is what religion is all about. There is also much to be said for faith when you are using it in a positive manner. I cannot accept that forcing restrictions of CO-2 emissions upon the industrial countries of the world is positive. In fact, if such restrictions were to reduce the output of those industrial nations that produce food, mass starvation could result.

Want to know what scientists say (http://www.sitewave.net/news/s49p725.htm)? Well, how about some facts. (http://www.nationalcenter.org/TSR032204.html)

Quote 1: The AP said: "Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year..."

Facts: Carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas (water vapor is).2

Carbon dioxide accounts for less than ten percent of the greenhouse effect, as carbon dioxide's ability to absorb heat is quite limited.3

Only about 0.03 percent of the Earth's atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide (nitrogen, oxygen, and argon constitute about 78 percent, 20 percent, and 0.93 percent of the atmosphere, respectively).4

The sun, not a gas, is primarily to "blame" for global warming -- and plays a very key role in global temperature variations as well.

Quote 2: The AP said: "Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space."

Fact: Most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not come from the burning of fossil fuels. Only about 14 percent of it does.5

Quote 3: The AP said: "Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases."

Facts: Most of 20th Century global warming occurred in the first few decades of that century,6 before the widespread burning of fossil fuels (and before 82 percent of the increase in atmospheric CO2 observed in the 20th Century7).

The Earth does not have "world governments." It doesn't even have even one, as the United Nations is not a government, but an association of nations.

If the AP is referring to the United Nations'

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

the AP should become aware that the IPCC report itself (the part written by scientists) reached no consensus on climate change. What did reach a conclusion was an IPCC "summary for policymakers" prepared by political appointees.8 Most reporters quote only the summary, being either too lazy or too undereducated to understand the actual report. This does not explain, however, why reporters don't more frequently interview scientists who helped prepare it -- scientists such as IPCC participant Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, who says the IPCC report is typically "presented as a consensus that involves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scientists... and none of them was asked if they agreed with anything in the report except for the one or two pages they worked on." Lindzen also draws a sharp distinction between the scientists' document and its politicized summary: "the document itself is informative; the summary is not."9

A quick, thoughtful look at the Kyoto Accords (http://unfccc.int/essential_background/ ... s/1351.php) will reveal that development is to be encouraged in third world countries and restricted in the major industrial countries of the world.

This, in itself, would make for a mass exodus of business and industry from the major industrial nations of the world to third world countries. Want to worry? Jobs are already leaving these 'targetted' countries at an alarming rate. Somebody better get a reality check here. This whole damned thing is political.

So who do you want to believe? The SCIENCE that human activity contributes only a small amount to greenhouse gases? (Click here) (http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html)

Or, do you want to believe the EPA distortions? (Click here) (http://epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/co2_human.html) Keep in mind that the Science of the situation PROVES this EPA statement...

The largest source of CO2 emissions globally is the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas in power plants, automobiles, industrial facilities and other sources. is nothing but a lie. Imagine a branch of our government lying to us. Can you fathom that? heh heh heh...

Neverthless, it is prudent to constantly monitor the human hand in all of this and to keep a close eye on what humanity can do to help itself.

T

his site (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200

7/01/the-human-hand-in-climate-change/) has a good discussion and recommends reading this essay (http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/emanuel.html) on the subject.

One of the arguments that I brought up in an earlier post on this thread asked how could you prove that a correlation between increases in greenhouse gases and human activities actually had a relationship tht caused a correlation. T

his site (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?

p=81) attempts to do this by using Carbon-14 increases in the environment today as compared to earlier times.

Again, all that this proves is an increase in life on our planet. The population of the world is increasing as this site (http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html) illustrates so very well.

How might this be affecting the carbon-14 content of the world environment?

There are so many factors to control for in a study of this sort. Making a case for a hard scientific proof for man causing any global warming is problematic at best. At worst, it is impossible to do conclusively.

[Riverwind (imported)]

You know, Global Warming is not new. It has happened in the past several times. Remember, there is really nothing we can do to hurt the planet. We can cause our own extinction but not the planet, it always renews its self, every 60 million years or so.

River

[A-1 (imported)]

You know, Global Warming is not new. It has happened in the past several times. Remember, there is really nothing we can do to hurt the planet. We can cause our own extinction but not the planet, it always renews its self, every 60 million years or so.

River

River,

That is EXACTLY what native Americans say.

I believe it to be correct. However, only time will tell...

[Riverwind (imported)]

Yes only time will tell and I hope you and I are there to see it, in about 10,000

years.

River