The Time to Act Is Now- A great read about Global warming

[Darius11 12]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8730988?pageid=rs.Politics&pageregion=single5&rnd=1133818303087&has-player=false

Quote

The Time to Act Is Now
The climate crisis and the need for leadership It is now clear that we face a deepening global climate crisis that requires us to act boldly, quickly and wisely. "Global warming" is the name it was given a long time ago. But it should be understood for what it is: a planetary emergency that now threatens human civilization on multiple fronts. Stronger hurricanes and typhoons represent only one of many new dangers as we begin what someone has called "a nature hike through the Book of Revelation."
As I write, my heart is heavy due to the suffering the people of the Gulf Coast have endured. In Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, and particularly in New Orleans, thousands have experienced losses beyond measure as our nation and the world witnessed scenes many of us thought we would never see in this great country. But unless we act quickly, this suffering will be but a beginning.

The science is extremely clear: Global warming may not affect the frequency of hurricanes, but it makes the average hurricane stronger, magnifying its destructive power. In the years ahead, there will be more storms like Katrina, unless we change course. Indeed, we have had two more Category 5 storms since Katrina -- including Wilma, which before landfall was the strongest hurricane ever measured in the Atlantic.

We know that hurricanes are heat engines that thrive on warm water. We know that heat-trapping gases from our industrial society are warming the oceans. We know that, in the past thirty years, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally has almost doubled. It's time to connect the dots:

Last year, the science textbooks had to be rewritten. They used to say, "It's impossible to have a hurricane in the South Atlantic." We had the first one last year, in Brazil. Japan also set an all-time record for typhoons last year: ten. The previous record was seven.

This summer, more than 200 cities in the United States broke all-time heat records. Reno, Nevada, set a new record with ten consecutive days above 100 degrees. Tucson, Arizona, tied its all-time record of thirty-nine consecutive days above 100 degrees. New Orleans -- and the surrounding waters of the Gulf -- also hit an all-time high.

This summer, parts of India received record rainfall -- thirty-seven inches fell in Mumbai in twenty-four hours, killing more than 1,000 people.

The new extremes of wind and rain are part of a larger pattern that also includes rapidly melting glaciers worldwide, increasing desertification, a global extinction crisis, the ravaging of ocean fisheries and a growing range for disease "vectors" like mosquitoes, ticks and many other carriers of viruses and bacteria harmful to people.

All of these are symptoms of a deeper crisis: the "Category 5" collision between our civilization -- as we currently pursue it -- and the Earth's environment. Sixty years ago, Winston Churchill wrote about another kind of gathering storm. When Neville Chamberlain tried to wish that threat away with appeasement, Churchill said, "This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste, of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year -- unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we rise again and take our stand for freedom."

For more than fifteen years, the international community has conducted a massive program to assemble the most accurate scientific assessment on global warming. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, have produced the most elaborate, well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind and have reached a consensus as strong as it ever gets in science. As Bill McKibben points out in "The Debate Is Over", there is no longer any credible basis to doubt that the Earth's atmosphere is warming because of human activities. There is no longer any credible basis to doubt that we face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.

Scientists around the world are sounding a clear and urgent warning. Global warming is real, it is already under way and the consequences are totally unacceptable.

Why is this happening? Because the relationship between humankind and the Earth has been utterly transformed. To begin with, we have quadrupled the population of our planet in the past hundred years. And secondly, the power of the technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world. Multiply that by six and a half billion people, and then stir into that toxic mixture a mind-set and an attitude that say it's OK to ignore scientific evidence -- that we don't have to take responsibility for the future consequences of present actions -- and you get this violent and destructive collision between our civilization and the Earth.

There are those who say that we can't solve this problem -- that it's too big or too complicated or beyond the capacity of political systems to grasp.

To those who say this problem is too difficult, I say that we have accepted and met such challenges in the past. We declared our liberty, and then won it. We designed a country that respected and safeguarded the freedom of individuals. We abolished slavery. We gave women the right to vote. We took on Jim Crow and segregation. We cured fearsome diseases, landed on the moon, won two wars simultaneously -- in the Pacific and in Europe. We brought down communism, we defeated apartheid. We have even solved a global environmental crisis before: the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer.

So there should be no doubt that we can solve this crisis too. We must seize the opportunities presented by renewable energy, by conservation and efficiency, by some of the harder but exceedingly important challenges such as carbon capture and sequestration. The technologies to solve the global-warming problem exist, if we have the determination and wisdom to use them.

But there is no time to wait. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill also wrote of those leaders who refused to acknowledge the clear and present danger: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences."With Hurricane Katrina, the melting of the Arctic ice cap and careless ecological mayhem, we, too, are entering a period of consequences.

This is a moral moment. This is not ultimately about any scientific debate or political dialogue. Ultimately it is about who we are as human beings. It is about our capacity to transcend our own limitations.

Next artical

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8730992

Quote

The Debate Is Over
No serious scientist doubts that humans are warming up the planet We are entering the Oh shit era of global warming.
First there was the era of I wonder what will happen? It began more than 100 years ago when Svante Arrhenius, a great Swedish chemist, scrawled a few calculations on the back of the proverbial envelope. He estimated that humans, who were suddenly burning massive quantities of coal and oil to power the Industrial Revolution, could eventually release enough carbon dioxide to raise the temperature of the planet nine degrees. But it wasn't until the 1950s that someone got around to building an instrument to measure the CO2 in the atmosphere and found it to be, sure enough, steadily rising. And it wasn't until 1988 that a NASA scientist named James Hansen got the nerve to stand up in a congressional hearing and say that a complicated computer model he had devised of the world's climate showed that the extra carbon was heating up the planet.

Which inaugurated a second era: Can this really be true? For the next decade, governments and universities poured more money and effort into investigating this question than any that had come before. Researchers launched weather balloons and satellites; they drilled cores from glaciers and lake bottoms; they endlessly refined their computer models. By 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- which is to say all the world's climatologists -- issued a massive report summing up all the available research. Human beings, it stated flatly, were raising the temperature of the planet. So far we've made the world about one degree hotter. And according to the IPCC's forecasts, we're on track to raise it another three to ten degrees this century -- an increase that, in its middle and upper ranges, would make the planet warmer than any human, or indeed any of our primate ancestors, has ever seen it.

Those predictions were enough to get most of the world moving on climate change -- ratifying the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, up on the roof installing solar panels, you name it. But not us. It wasn't until this fall that Americans finally began to wake up from our denial and enter the current -- and most frightening -- era of global warming.

Katrina was the wake-up call. Hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the surface layers of the ocean, and it stood to reason that as the planet got warmer, and with it the sea, hurricanes would get stronger too. In July, MIT scientist Kerry Emanuel published a paper in Nature showing that that's just what's been happening for the past quarter century: The great storms have gotten longer (by fifty percent) and stronger (also by fifty percent). Katrina was like the Cliffs Notes version of his paper; it roared to giant life in the hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico, waters that also turned Rita into a monster a few weeks later. But the hurricanes told so many other stories too -- about governmental incompetence, about poverty and race in America -- that it was easy to lose the global-warming story in the general chaos.

Not that it mattered, because the planet was shouting the news in other ways as well. In September, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA announced what their satellites were showing: The Arctic was melting in unprecedented ways. Total sea ice this summer was almost twenty percent less than normal -- a frozen area twice the size of Texas had turned to water. That's proof of global warming, but it's also a great danger in its own right. Think about it: That massive white sheet of ice is like a mirror, bouncing many of the sun's rays straight back into outer space. The blue water that replaces it is like a giant sponge, absorbing most of that solar heat and making the whole problem worse. Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers, summed up their conclusion: "The feeling is, we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover."

Scientists call it a positive feedback loop. And it's not the only one. Here's what a British team found in September: They'd gone back to check on nearly 6,000 little holes they'd drilled all over the U.K. since 1978. New samples from the top few inches show that as the planet has gotten warmer, the soil has become more active. Organic material is decaying and, as it does so, is giving off more carbon. A lot more carbon. Four million tons a year, to be precise -- enough heat-trapping gas to wipe out all the good work that Britain had done in the last fifteen years to stop burning coal and start building windmills. And there's no reason to suspect that the same thing isn't happening in every temperate part of the world. In the Northern Hemisphere, for instance, the growing season is about eleven days longer each year than it was in 1980 -- providing that much more time for decaying soil to leech carbon into the air. "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly," says Guy Kirk, the scientist who supervised the British study. "That's the scary thing. The amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought."

It would be easy enough to go on piling up studies like this for hours: Each issue of Science and Nature contains some terrifying new finding. Suffice it to say: It is now clear that we are changing fundamental physical systems. The progress of the seasons, the speed of the wind, the height of the oceans, a hundred other variables -- all are in flux thanks to us. Especially those of us in the United States, who with five percent of the population manage to produce twenty percent of the planet's CO2.

The worst thing about the Oh shit era is we don't know for sure exactly what will happen. Most of the changes I've been listing -- nastier storms, rising sea levels -- are pretty much linear extrapolations. If you make it hotter, they'll just keep getting worse. But researchers suspect that the world also has some trapdoors -- mechanisms that don't work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction. Melt enough of that Arctic ice, for instance, and you may alter the salinity of the North Atlantic enough to shut down the Gulf Stream. All of a sudden the rest of the world would be heating up, while northwestern Europe would be getting very cold. "Climate is an angry beast," Wallace Broecker, dean of the planet's climate scientists, said a few years ago. "And we are poking at it with sticks."

It's hard to imagine what it will feel like to live on an ever-warmer planet. But scientists are beginning to make progress there, too. As the computer models get better, predictions get easier. The Earth may well be:

Soggier As the planet warms, the sea level rises. Eventually this will be because ice over the Arctic and Greenland melts; for the moment it's mostly because warm water just takes up more space than cold water. No matter the cause, it's bad news, because an enormous number of people live near the coasts, especially in tropical Asia. You may be able to build levees strong enough to protect New Orleans or Miami or Rotterdam -- but Bangladesh? Computer models predict that midcentury may see 150 million "environmental refugees" forced from their homes by rising waters. That is to say, 150 Katrinas.

Sicker Who likes a warmer, wetter world? Mosquitoes do. Malaria is already appearing in places that it's never been before, including tropical cities that had been built high enough up the side of mountains to be beyond the disease's historical range. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that another mosquito-borne killer, dengue fever, will be the emergent disease of the century, with an estimated 2.5 billion people at risk worldwide. Cases of the virus, which has no known cure or vaccine, have spiked across Asia this fall, with alarming outbreaks sweeping through Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

Hungrier The third-hottest summer ever across North America was in 1988, and by the time it was done, corn and soybean yields had fallen by a quarter to a third. If the temperature stays hot enough for a week or two, corn can't pollinate. Rice yields start to drop. The world already struggles to produce enough grain for a growing population -- per-capita production has actually fallen in the last twenty years. Global warming will only make the situation worse. You've heard of peak oil; keep your eyes peeled for peak food.

Poorer Skeptical that this may all be some kind of tree-hugging propaganda? The insurance industry -- the part of our economy that profits by accurately calculating risks -- has been sending up storm warnings for a decade. A recent report by three insurance experts found that payouts for everything from crop losses to wildfire damage are growing exponentially as a result of climate change. "Insured and total property losses are rising faster than premiums, population or economic growth -- both globally and in the U.S.," they warn. And that was before Katrina -- the most expensive anything ever to hit anywhere -- came ashore in the Gulf.

Science can't tell us what to do about global warming, beyond the obvious: Stop burning fossil fuels and start powering our lives with something else. By various estimates, we would need to cut worldwide fossil-fuel use by seventy percent immediately in order to keep climatic disruption to current levels. That clearly isn't going to happen. China alone adds almost fifty gigawatts of coal-fired power to its grid each year -- more than all of New England uses now. (And don't try telling the Chinese not to -- they still only use about one-eighth as much energy apiece as Americans.) Skyrocketing oil prices, meanwhile, may kill off the SUV but are also likely to increase the use of coal -- which produces even more carbon dioxide per BTU.

If the science contains any good news, it lies in the knowledge we now possess. The debate over climate change is finally over. We know that we have warmed the planet one degree so far, and we've probably already put enough carbon in the atmosphere to guarantee another couple of degrees. There is no "stopping" global warming. But we can, at last, start to take every step we can think of to slow it down. Our goal, at this late stage, is a modest but crucial one: to keep climate change from getting completely out of hand, to make it merely miserable, instead of catastrophic. If there is any hope to be had in the Oh shit era of global warming, it is that the conclusion of this story -- the greatest and most important of our time -- is still up for grabs. The ending, for better or worse, is being written now -- and we are its authors.

There is more links on the end of this artical as well.
They are all a good read

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[gemini 0]

What if...

Now I know this may be a stretch for some, but what if we are seeing a normal planetary climate change. After all the last ice age was what? 10,000 years ago and according to some scientists we are overdue.

Who's right?

If the Gulf Steam has dramatically slowed as recently announced and Europe begins to have cooler winters is it because of something man has done or a normal cyclic process?

Blue skies,

Jim

[SpeedRacer 1]

How much global warming is caused by all the hot air in Speaker's Corner?

Speed Racer
--------------------------------------------------

[Darius11 12]

By measuring the core of ice that has been around for thousands of years they can see patterns of what the weather used to be. It would be an unlikely consistence that the tempter was effected around the time the industrial revolution started.


I am no scientist but it makes since to me.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[billvon 3,111]

It is almost certainly (normally) a natural process. We are almost certainly accelerating it. The question is - is forcing what normally happens over 10,000 years to occur in 100 a good idea? Might some things be easier to deal with if they change 100 times slower?

[Amazon 7]

Global Warming is just a left wing conspripacy to mess up the economy

[ReBirth 0]

Quote

If the Gulf Steam has dramatically slowed as recently announced and Europe begins to have cooler winters is it because of something man has done or a normal cyclic process?

Does it matter?

[billvon 3,111]

>Global Warming is just a left wing conspripacy to mess up the economy . . .

Until we get a few more Katrinas, and people start voting the deniers out of office. Then it will be China's fault.

[Amazon 7]

I dont wanna bust on the Texicans tooooo much.. but when I flew into Houston the crap in the air made my eyes burn and it smelled really bad...I guess when you live in such a polluted atmosphere you want everyone else to be in the same cesspool that you are.

I like to take my air on faith... I prefer not to smell it or see it or taste it.....yuckapucka

[gemini 0]

Quote

what normally happens over 10,000 years to occur in 100 a good idea?

Ummmhh...Bill it has already been 10,000 years since the last ice age. What if we are already witnessing the natural change coupled with the CO2 hydrocarbon induced changes by man coincidentally occuring within the same era?

Maybe 100 years is all we have left regardless.

Blue skies,

Jim

[gemini 0]

Quote

...when you live in such a polluted atmosphere you want everyone else to be in the same cesspool that you are.

No we don't like it either, but unfortunately for us you use gasoline and petroleum products and won't let us move the refineries to your town!

...and there's no wink after that statement either.

Blue skies,

Jim

[ReBirth 0]

We have better technology, science, and understanding now. Even if it is a normal process, you don't think we should do anything to prevent it? We've always manipulated our surroundings to make it safe for humans, why should we stop now?

[gemini 0]

Quote

you don't think we should do anything to prevent it?

No I'm all for cleaner technology, reduced emissions, etc. I just don't think all the screaming and squaking will amount to much. We may slow down the change, but the damn change is coming.

CO2 levels are increasing, but the temperature data is far from conclusive. In a lot of geographic areas around the world, the temperature changes have been almost flat except in the major population centers.

Why would the temperature be increasing in one area, but not another when the CO2 levels are uniformly higher around the world?

Something doesn't fit scientifically.

Blue skies,

Jim

[SudsyFist 0]

Quote

Quote

If the Gulf Steam has dramatically slowed as recently announced and Europe begins to have cooler winters is it because of something man has done or a normal cyclic process?

Does it matter?

I seem to recall reading about a similar question's being raised by stakeholders in an older conservation topic: whaling. It was obvious at a time that certain whale populations were dwindling, but figures, statistics, and science were imprecise as of yet; however, it was undeniable that the populations were dwindling. The question of whether it was just a natural cycle was brought up when discussion began on curbing the hunt of these animals, sponsored by some nasty agenda-pushing tree-hugging villains seeking to prevent their extinction, damn them.

After all, as long as the whaling companies were making money, workers in the whale industry were gainfully employed, and the consumers of whale products were happy, who the fuck could give a shit?

Fact: Earth's heating up. Fact: CO2 (among other) emissions contribute to (accelerates) the warming. Fact: if we don't curb our growing emissions volume, we will accelerate our acceleration of the warming.

We don't yet know, however, exactly how much emissions are effectively accelerating warming. Some tell of doomsday scenarios, others are more moderate, and still others claim it's negligible: indeed, as it was with the whales.

The question is, how long do we wait until we do something about it?

[billvon 3,111]

>What if we are already witnessing the natural change coupled with
> the CO2 hydrocarbon induced changes by man coincidentally
> occuring within the same era?

That's like claiming that yeah, you poured gasoline on the house and struck the match, but who's to say the fire wouldn't have started at that exact time anyway?

There is no question whatsoever that we are causing the rise in CO2 concentrations, or that CO2 concentration is one of the primary heat forcing factors in the atmosphere. To assume that we have been adding CO2, and that's been causing the retention of more heat, but the rise in temperature is due to some completely different (but perfectly aligned) mechanism is not really supportable.

>Maybe 100 years is all we have left regardless.

If we keep thinking "it's not our fault!" it most certainly will be.

[Amazon 7]

Quote

No we don't like it either, but unfortunately for us you use gasoline and petroleum products and won't let us move the refineries to your town!

...and there's no wink after that statement either.

PSSST its the Oil companies blocking the building of new refineries.. to drive up prices.. not the environmentalists.

http://www.net.org/energy/bartonbill-refineries.pdf
Read the parts about the Oil Compay manipulations.

And we do have a refinery up by Anacotes WA.. and I drive up there to go fishing and sailing in the San Juan Islands from time to time.. and have yet to smell it or see brown layers of "air" as we sail up to Orcas Island.

[billvon 3,111]

>I just don't think all the screaming and squaking will amount to
>much.

Well, all that screaming and squaking (squawking?) got at least some people to start paying attention. A lot of people are aware of the issue now, and are taking at least some small steps (hybrid vehicles, more efficient appliances, solar) to help mitigate the problem. It follows that more noise will produce more results; that ends up helping us in the long run.

>CO2 levels are increasing, but the temperature data is far from
> conclusive. In a lot of geographic areas around the world, the
> temperature changes have been almost flat except in the major
> population centers.

Not true. In the great majority of areas (80% of the planet) temps are increasing, especially in vast areas of former tundra. In some areas they are _decreasing._ This is because climate change isn't always predictable. In the NW, for example, a warmer ocean means more clouds, which means less sunlight on the ground, which means lower temperatures in places like Portland.

But overall there is NO QUESTION that the planet is getting warmer. I've attached a few graphs to show this.

>Why would the temperature be increasing in one area, but not
>another when the CO2 levels are uniformly higher around the world?

Because:

a) in some places (see above) warmer ocean = more clouds.

b) in some places where the ground is reflective (like Antarctica) the effect of increased re-radiation is diminished since the ground is so reflective to start with.

c) most greenhouse effect is seen at night, since that's when the heat-trapping effect occurs. Often daytime readings (i.e. highs) don't reflect this increase.

>Something doesn't fit scientifically.

It all fits, and it's becoming very depressingly clear how fast it's happening.

[gemini 0]

Quote

That's like claiming that yeah, you poured gasoline on the house and struck the match, but who's to say the fire wouldn't have started at that exact time anyway?

Not quite Bill. How about pouring gasoline on a house that is already burning, but you don't know it? You didn't start the fire, but you damn sure accelerated it!

Quote

There is no question whatsoever that we are causing the rise in CO2 concentrations, or that CO2 concentration is one of the primary heat forcing factors in the atmosphere.

1. True, based on fact: There is no question whatsoever that we are causing the rise in CO2 concentrations.

2. False, not yet provable: CO2 concentration is one of the primary heat forcing factors in the atmosphere.

If #2 was true temperatures would be rising more evenly over large geographic areas and it is currently not happening or there are a lot of people out there with a lot of faulty instruments.

Quote

If we keep thinking "it's not our fault!" it most certainly will be.

No disagreement there! We'll do what we can to slow down the changes, but they may happen anyway.

Blue skies,

Jim

[billvon 3,111]

>How about pouring gasoline on a house that is already burning, but
>you don't know it? You didn't start the fire, but you damn sure
> accelerated it!

Again, if you walked up to a house, threw gasoline on it, threw a match on it then claimed "it was burning before I got there; just no one knew it" - you'd get a good laugh from the judge, then get convicted of arson.

>2. False, not yet provable: CO2 concentration is one of the primary
>heat forcing factors in the atmosphere.

This phenomenon can be tested in any lab with a radiometer, a longwave light source and a transparent tank. It is certainly provable.

>If #2 was true temperatures would be rising more evenly over large
>geographic areas . . .

Nope. #2 does not equal temperatures rising; it equals increased radiative forcing. CO2 reflects (or re-radiates) longwave heat radiation back to the surface. If the surface is a perfect mirror, no heating will take place; all of that radiation will eventually be re-reflected somewhere else. Ice is a pretty good reflector. So are clouds, especially low ones. Dirt is a good absorber.

That's why it's called radiative forcing and not 'heating', and that's why things aren't heating up evenly.

>No disagreement there! We'll do what we can to slow down the
>changes, but they may happen anyway.

Well, I hope so. Here in the US we are showing few signs of 'doing what we can' - I hope that will change.

[gemini 0]

Yes I have seen those graphs Bill and they look bad. I will try to post some tonight that will make you say WTF is going on?

Even with the increase over the last 40 years the total change has been a .8 increase since the year 0.

Now with the Gulf Stream finding, Europe's avg temp is predicted to decrease by 1 degree. This will impact their growing season, cause more fuel for heating to be burned, and on and on.

Blue skies,

Jim

[gemini 0]

Quote

Again, if you walked up to a house, threw gasoline on it, threw a match on it then claimed "it was burning before I got there; just no one knew it"

Off subject. No one knows for sure that the house is burning. Is the wall hot because there is a fire inside or because it's on the West side of the house and it's August in Texas?

Quote

This phenomenon can be tested in any lab

Under controlled conditions, but no one knows all the global variables so it may not work exactly the same in the real world.

Quote

#2 does not equal temperatures rising

Technically true, but the longwave heat radiation back to the surface should be similar in large geographic regions where the surfaces are similar.

Temps in those areas should be similar or have similar changes.

Again I will try to post the graphs tonight for you to look at. I will be interested to see what you think of them.

Blue skies,

Jim

[billvon 3,111]

> No one knows for sure that the house is burning. Is the wall hot
>because there is a fire inside or because it's on the West side of the
> house and it's August in Texas?

Again, if you threw gasoline on your neighbor's house, and then flicked a burning match at it, and your excuse was "well, the wall was warm anyway, it might have been on fire already!" it wouldn't fly even one bit.

This is extending the analogy too far anyway. You are right in that we don't know exactly what the climate will do. You are also right that throwing gasoline on a burning house will make it worse. Solution - don't make the problem worse. If you have a choice (and we do) water is a better choice than gasoline on your neighbor's house. Similarly, we have a choice in global warming. Emit more CO2, or start absorbing more CO2? The answer (if you want to mitigate the damage) is pretty clear.

>Under controlled conditions, but no one knows all the global
>variables so it may not work exactly the same in the real world.

Of course. But we know it DOES work, so unless you postulate a linked process that exactly counters it, it is a very real (and provable) phenomenon.

>Technically true, but the longwave heat radiation back to the surface
> should be similar in large geographic regions where the surfaces are
> similar.

Again, no. See the Portland example.

It seems you believe that the climate is quite complex, which I agree with. Increases in temperatures due to greenhouse effects are also complex.

[lawrocket 3]

The Hadley graph you attached was interesting. Note that the graph shows temperature variations as constructed by different researchers. The Hadley Center, in England, is the black line. It's the only one that shows rising temperatures towards the end of the 1900s. The others indicate a decline since the 1950s.

Also important is that the baseline of zero. It seems to be operating under a fundamental assumption that the earth has been cooler than normal for most of the last 2000 years - as much as 1 degree lower in than normal 400 years ago. What does that mean?

I think it means that the earth is warming up due to natural fluctuations. My personal opinion is that human activity is a factor, but not the leading factor, of this activity. It is A factor. One. Not the biggie. Just a factor.

Bill, you also mention abotu doing in 100 years what it takes 10,000 to do. The historical record seems to indicate global temperature swings of 1.5-2 degrees celsius every couple of thousand years, and swings of 1 degree or so every few hundred years, as is seen on your graph between about 1100 and 1800. Maybe with human activity it would have been a .2 degree difference instead of a .8.

If then was now, would the same talk about global cooling and human activity be present? WOuld we be blaming ourselves for causing global cooling? Would there be people saying, "Actually, folks, we'd be cooling a lot faster without all of that CO2 y'all are pumping into the atmosphere."

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[billvon 3,111]

>The Hadley graph you attached was interesting. Note that the graph
> shows temperature variations as constructed by different
> researchers. The Hadley Center, in England, is the black line.

?? There's only one line (an average) in the Hadley graph. Did you mean the reconstructed temperature graph?

>It is A factor. One. Not the biggie. Just a factor.

That might be a valid approach, if the rate of change did not speed up dramatically at the same time CO2 concentrations started increasing dramatically. If you could plot temperatures for the past few thousand years and show other, more rapid changes due to natural causes we see operating now, then you could with some authority say "see, we're just this little blip; the blip back here was larger." But our rate of change is considerably higher than anything we've seen back a few thousand years at least.

>If then was now, would the same talk about global cooling and
>human activity be present?

I suspect that 'little ice age' would have delayed any anthropogenic warming by a few years. But even now we have increased overall temps by more than the temperature drop during that period.

The earth has been heating and cooling itself for millions of years. It does this by juggling a great many variables, including snow and ice coverage, clouds, CO2 and methane content, and wind/ocean currents. We know that it sometimes maintains a more or less level keel, and sometimes it goes wildly out of whack (i.e. ice ages.) So it can regulate itself to a degree, but it isn't great at maintaining any one environment, and sometimes things get so bad that the planet changes drastically in a way that would be nasty to us. Given all that, it seems like a very, very bad idea to mess with that system as much as possible, which is what we are doing now.

[rushmc 23]

Second sentence starts..."It is now clear......"

It is not clear.

All of this is based on flawed computer models adjusted to raise the issue (IMHO)

The stories about the cycles of the sun and that relationship to the warming of the earth are just coming around now and they are still being ignored by the global warming gloom and doomers

Also, those same gloom and doomers keep trying to get somebody, hell anybody to say the hurricanes are caused by global warming and most say it is not related, that it is just the natural cycle (as is the suns cycles) but who is reported about? Ya, you get it...........someone that says hell yes the change in the hurricanes is caused by global warming

Anyway, I fully expect to get flames here because I do not have the "politically correct" position on the issue.

....well, fire away................

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln