The problem in a nutshell is: Are these scientists climate scientists? You can be a professor, a Nobel Laureate, a scientists with a raft of PhDs it doesn't matter. You have to be a student of climatology and plugged into data and the climate models to grasp what is actually going on. These naysayers are biting around the edges. Some may not care if many pacific islands disappear, along with half of Florida and the flooding of many coastal cities. There will be gainers from global warming including Canada and Russia which will end up with more agriculture. All indications are that global warming is happening faster that predicted. This is largely due to climate modelers being conservative in their predictions to be more believable. Unfortunately that has come back to bite them giving credence to the naysayers that their models are not accurate.
There is one piece of the argument that has to be granted to the naysayers and that is our star, the Sun, is a variable star and we can only make an educated guess what its output will be in the future based on past performance. We have no control over the Sun but we do have control over our burning of fossil fuels and it is quite clear from the data that fossil fuel burning has had a bigger effect over time than the Sun's variability even though we haven't a reliable record of the Sun's performance in the last couple of hundred years. In the area of climate change the Earth's weather system has positive feedback so trends tend to get amplified. As the Earth heats up ice, that reflects sunlight back into space, melts and no longer serves that function, permafrost melts releasing methane, eventually oceans heat up, methane hydrate melts and more methane is released, and so on.
I'm an electrical engineer and not a climatologist so what I've said should be taken with a grain of sea salt.
Fine, burn wood from sustainable forests. It is the release of millions-of-years-worth-of-laid-down-carbon that I see as the main problem. Many places aren't getting warmer, but many are, all round the weather is getting less predictable, and pushing records. The places that are warming fastest are the places that help stabilise the weather systems ... the ice masses that don't move much, and we really don't know what the result will be. I lean to caution. I want to breath clean air, and I don't want my grandchildren to say "if only my grandparents generation had been more careful".
I live in South Texas. We pay a lot of attention to the hurricane predictions every year. It was supposed to be terrible last year and this because of global warming. Last year we Had DON (better named Dud) that hit here in Brownsville and did absolutlely nothing. Had 1 that ran up the eastern seaboard and caused a bunch of flooding. This year we had 1 hurricane hit souther Mexcco and 1 go through New Oleans and caused a little flooding. Last year ist seemed like they named every cloud and most of them were nothing. Last year was a scorcher down here, but this year the temperature didn't break 100 til after the first of september and is now peaking in the low 90's.
Previously we had lived in northern Indiana. My boss had a fruit farm. Apples and Peaches. Except the weather had been so cold for several years that he was getting no peaches. Last time thathappened was in the 1960's.
And then we hear that the winters are colder because of "global warming". But most of the conversation insisting that it is real seems to be centered on how do we use "global warming" to controls other peoples lifestyles.
Oh - and some of the brilliance of the "global warming" crowd. Can't burn wood and wood products because that will release carbon Dioxide. Yes, but the carbon dioxide from burning wood and wood products is easily recycled into more wood and wood products. The sun shines, the trees grow, we harvest them and start over again. But most of the "environmental" crowd can't see that trees are a crop just like corn and beans and cucumbers. In East Texas a few years back they had to cut pine trees and burn them because they got too old and unhealthy and the pine beetles were doing damage to the unhealthy as well as the healthy trees. Perhaps, if they had harvested the trees after growing for 25 years they could have used the wood and the trees would grow again. But no, they were cut and burned. Brilliant use of a natural resource.
Dear Jarvis. Yes I have heard of Milankovitch. So has every scientist I have read on the subject of GW. I can't say as much for the political GW side, which I mostly ignore, along with their opposite. I suspect if you think no one who is convinced of GW, in the scientific world that is, knows or is mentioning the long term solar cycles, you are not reading broadly enough. Of course I speak from 60 years of study so there may be some modern folk who are not as well studied as they should be, Milankovitch is like freshman level study now. All I can tell you for sure is that the solar insolation was very much part of the GW studies funded by NOAA back about 5 years ago that I did read. Actually with few exceptions most scientists are not idiots or easily forced to accept anything. They got to be scientists because they were rabble rousers of the first order, back in their days as students, and questioned everything they were told. Most of us still do, politics or not.
Hi Tim. GW does not have two sides. There is fact, as poorly as we may understand it, and all else is false. I do observe that many of the Pro side (in the political argument that is) overstate the effects, the rates of onset, and the likely consequences of our inaction, and our action, and way understate the ability we have to amelorate the effects. On the other side, however, is a lot of absurd shouting and downright silly positions. There is no question at all that we are warming, slowly so far, and that human action is impacting that substantially. It is very unclear how much simply reducing a bit the rate of increase in combustion of fossile fuels could even slow down the rate of change over the next 20 years or so. And there are 3-4 major tripping points that could make abrupt changes with very challenging impacts to everyone, whether they believe in GW or not. Right now, all I can hope for is that the US wide (except the west coast) drought and super hot summer is not becoming the new norm. Wringing our hands and saying "It's not my fault." won't cool us off one little bit. Nor improve the skiing. Practice eating less and change to water sports I guess.
Over a hundred years ago, Milutin Milankovitch calculated the occultation of the earth's orbit around the sun. It has a 70,000 year cycle. To think that we are on a stable planet is foolishness.
Yet not one of the environmental activists ... not ONE ... has mentioned the Milankovitch cycles, or seems willing to admit that there may be something greater than man at work, here.
If one refers to first principals...(and to paraphrase a former president):
It's the SUN, stupid!
I would submit that this entire debate is over the wrong thing. Whatever the climate is doing, we still need to be good stewards of the environment. And we can do that by adopting serious policies with respect to energy, waste, and water. The focus needs to be there, not on the level of an atmospheric trace gas.
And by the way, fully 1/3 of atmospheric CO2, net of plant uptake, is generated by commercial aviation, and directly injected in the stratosphere every day. This isn't generally discussed, why? Perhaps because environmental activists are busy flying to conferences? Or maybe they're too busy to run the numbers. The data was available at the time of the Tokyo accords.
can always argue whether co2 is good or bad for the earth but these scientists must like the oceans to be more on the acidic side and hate polar bears.
Atlantic Conveyor not yet broken. Maybe the Brits will be affected, and so if it gets broken, try to fix it. My guess is the Gulf of Mexico, the GOM puts out so much
hot salty water into the Gulf Stream and so the shape of the ocean floor combines with the bulge of North Africa to keep the North Atlantic stable.
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is a different matter.
That one already had a major anomaly this past year and knocked a few microseconds off the clock here and there. When the rotational momentum from the ACC Antarctic Circumpolar Current gets knocked into the west coast of South Africa, the continent gets pushed faster.
Whole earth spins a bit faster. This is fun. Just like being on a merry-go-round.
People hop on and fall off. Ocean currents are the same.
Arctic Circumpolar Current spins then goes off track.
Even Magellan could notice the current as we go past Good Hope and
Tierra del Fuego. And when that current breaks into the South Atlantic,
that is measurable and real. So the air and the oceans do interact.
Only the people are too slow to understand what is happening.
The Eureka ALERT is a good post. Hot parched areas can trigger both dust storms and rain and lightning storms. The heat from sunlight can dry wet ground and also the negative feedback, when that system snaps back, will bring rain.
I think of the earth as a big boiling pot. Phase One and Phase Two types of boiling sure do happen. And the transition between Phase One and Phase Two can be truly explosive. Water has a surface tension. When that tension snaps, watch out.
We live in interesting times. The carbon is changing faster in the air during my lifetime than ever before in history. And the truly amazing thing is, we can sit under a tree and watch the clouds build up in the sky.
I love to sit under a tree and watch the seasons change - snow and rain, then sunny and hot and dry. Each year the fruit trees are a bit different.
That reminds me - many pears are ripe now. Apples and peaches had a rough year. Even the blueberries were a bit off and the black berries did better than the
many shades of red, gold and black raspberries. Even many varieties of seedless and seeded grapes tell a story.
Global Warming happens, and methane and carbon dioxide is really building up fast. We can see it in our lifetimes. Sure hope the heat does not make the Arab States restless. They live in a difficult part of the world - the Marsh Arabs and the Nomads in the Desert. Read Kalil Gibran...
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