These feasibility frontiers work similarly. Fail to make specific targets by mid-century, O'Neill said, and no amount of effort will bring long-term goals in range.
The authors preclude any pie-in-the-sky solutions such as radical behavioral change or unproven technologies such as geo-engineering and nuclear fusion.
Other scientists call the work groundbreaking for the urgency it lends to a task that has so far eluded the world's leaders: translating long-term goals into short-term action.
The discussion about near-term targets, Oppenheimer said, is the next step in both climate modeling and policy. "The policy decision has always been one step behind the reality, and what Brian's doing is really looking over the horizon."
As more countries focus on the next few decades, Oppenheimer said the task, oddly enough, becomes easier. "A lot becomes possible. The world opens up in terms of where we need to go, how ambitious we can be, how ambitious we need to be," he said. "You want to send policy makers a message that their emissions decisions really need to fit within a certain box.
"This is the next step in a longer discussion."
And it puts the cost of failure in plain language, added Yohe, who was not author of the study but is familiar with the research.
"There are thresholds here as well," he said. "You might find yourself running into a wall where you thought there was a door."
"These guys have said if you wait too long, or if you don't do 'x,' the cost of even trying to achieve 'y' is just going to go through the roof," he added.
"That's a currency that everybody talks about."
This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.
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187 Comments
Add CommentUntil there is a severe and obvious effect people will not act.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTry explaining a multi-year latency to a religious denier.
Zero...zip... de nada...nothing...rien...nyetz....nechoho...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTry explaining that to a disappointed True Believer.
candide: "Until there is a severe and obvious effect people will not act."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this----------
Yep.....and by that time it will be way too late to stop the snowball from rolling faster and faster down the mountain!
The religious DENIALISTS will continue to spew the usual fossil fuel industry propaganda, in their most anti-science rhetoric.
No, what will really happen is that if we do as they want, by the time it is found out that it is all BS, they will already have accomplished the goal of reducing the world to the equivalent of a third world country. Even if they were right, there are also a lot of good things that could come from warming things up a bit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would not be terribly surprised if we completely and utterly fail to stop climate change, and the end result is the release of methane clathrates accelerating climate change, and the eventual boiling off the oceans and all the rest of the surface water into water vapor which will trigger even more warming, eventually superheating the planet into an unlivable hell (not that it would be very livable anymore once all the surface water had boiled off or evaporated).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPresumably humanity would either flee to the stars while climate change renders the planet unlivable (as in Firefly/Serenity), or flee to mine shafts where it remains cool enough to keep liquid water, for a time (But we must not allow there to be a mine shaft gap!), or become extinct (like almost every other species of life on the planet would).
That's only the distant catastrophic possible outcome. Long before the ocean's temperature could rise high enough to begin boiling, the ocean life will begin to be disrupted and then start dying off, fresh water will become scarce, arable cropland and pasture will be reduced in area across the world, the oceans will rise, flooding coastal areas, and wars will likely erupt over the new lack of food and water and lost land (due to ocean encroachment), and due to populations wanting to get away from natural disaster zones like coastal areas.
Pardon me, dondad, but I don't seem to be seeing any of the good things that could come from warming things up a bit, unless you're thinking that mad scientists could resurrect the dinosaurs, tape cameras to some velociraptors, drop them off where terrorists are known to be located, and then broadcast the tapes on public TV.
There are so many stubborn, ignorant people like dondad around that I'm afraid our planet is doomed. It's little consolation to know that people will be gone some day and unable to continue doing harm, because all the animals and birds will probably go first.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, despite all the scientific evidence, there are still millions who prefer to believe global warming is BS. When someone who smokes refuses to acknowledge that cigarettes are hazardous to your health, there is NOTHING you can do to convince them otherwise because they do NOT want to quit smoking. Same is true of the die-hard anti-environmentalists. They want to live like pigs and treat their planet like a cesspool, so they are never going to accept that there could be dire consequences from doing that. However, let's say for just a second that global warming was not a huge threat - what would be the downside to cleaning up our planet and making our air breathable? Even if global warming were not a threat, shouldn't we have some responsibility to clean up our planet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswake up, "Geoengeneering" projects can work and are 1000 times cheaper then fighting carbon dioxide (which is not the most potent greenhose gas anyway)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat article from Burt Rutan, designer of SpaceShipOne. It's all about the data:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://rps3.com/Files/AGW/Rutan.Intro.AGW.b.pdf
Geoengineering can reduce the temperature, yes, and can be used as a last resort, but will not eliminate the CO2 from the atmosphere or the ocean - which means they will not stop the acidification of the oceans, which means they will not stop the coral reefs from being destroyed by such, which means they will not stop the extinction of most of the species in the ocean, which means they will not stop a chain reaction extinction of any species which has an important relationship with (preys on, for instance, or has a protective or symbiotic relationship with) any other species which is in some way dependant on any species in the ocean or a species which is dependant on another species etc etc etc in the ocean dependant on the coral reef...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe can wipe out ridiculous numbers of species even if we stop the temperature change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to stop it, if we can't stop the CO2 increase, of course. In fact, if we start approaching the methane clathrate release point, we had better implement a geoengineering solution fast, or the climate is screwed.
Dear global warming deniers: Let me put this in terms you should understand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh bright heavenly sun! Created by our Divine Lord and affixed in Heaven during Creation to shine down upon Creation and warm the Firmament! Thine Divine Light shines through atmosphere (including carbon dioxide), but (notably) reflecteth off clouds (and then goes right back through carbon dioxide)! As thine remaining light shines down, some reflecteth back into the heavens by the mighty fluffyness that are The Lord's mighty clouds! Of thine divine sunlight, that which striketh the surface, some becometh heat, and some is reflecteth back in amounts according to the lightness and color of what thine Divine Light striketh, and of the color of thine Light itself. But that heat does not merely do nothing! Nay! Heat spreads out and rises! Thine Divine Heat, for such it must be, for after all there couldn't possibly be such a thing as laws of thermodynamics which explain the laws which have been observed to govern its behavior in all cases, acts according to Thine Divine Will, oh Lord! And Thine Divine Will is that thine Heat shall spread out to that which is cold, including space! BUT NO! The Devil will not allow it! He hath blanketed the planet in CARBON DIOXIDE, and it HOLDS IN THE HEAT! And Man, in his Sin, has been pumping out more and more CARBON DIOXIDE, holding in more and more heat, and the Devil grows ever more gleeful by the day, as the Will of the Lord with regard to the spreading of Heat into the Heavens, is thwarted! [insert the Book of Revelations here]
(That was in case they show up eventually :P)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlobal warming has become the great secular religion. Save Mother Earth! Has SciAm investigated the total error associated with these estimates?! The error bars on any graph make all and any predictions laughable. Go ahead and buy green Al Gore is laughing his way to the bank.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLife, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thispreserved for the general citizenry,
rather than just the elites.
I don't think it is such a wise idea to attempt to engineer anthropogenic global cooling via global treaty. The validity of the data has been seriously called into question, the proposed solution is global taxation by an unelected oligarchy of the means of combustion i.e. industry and we are in the midst of epochal cold weather.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://healthjournalclub.blogspot.com/
Find yourself a secluded cave and move into it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHuman activity will cause a runaway global warming followed by a runaway global cooling.
Methane retains 28 times more heat than CO2 and the biggest contributors are oil fields, coal mines, cows and rice fields. It's kind of ominous when you look at it, cows emit a huge amount of methane into the air every day. Now go back millions of years dinosaur activity may have done the same thing, their extinction may have been caused by their over supplying the atmosphere with methane from their foraging on plant matter causing a runaway global warming causing a super volcano to go off followed by thousands of years of an ice age......
This is how I got there.
Increase global temperature will bring the magma closer to the surface in areas like Yellowstone, super volcano. Yellowstone right now is registering the most earthquakes in its recorded history, in some cases an increase in earth quakes like this is a precursor to an imminent eruption. If a super volcano goes off like Yellowstone's, then the change in global weather would be devastatingly cold for thousands of years -- a new ice age is born...
This will be mother nature's way of controlling global warming, she did it in the past she will do it again. It's the perfect way to carbon capture CO2 gas and remove it from the atmosphere and get rid of the methane problem by killing it off at the source. Because methane is a light gas the remaining methane would leak out of the atmosphere into space in about a thousand of years. The extreme cold from the ice age will tame super volcanoes by freezing the surface driving the magma back deep into the subsurface....
dondad: "No, what will really happen is that if we do as they want, by the time it is found out that it is all BS, they will already have accomplished the goal of reducing the world to the equivalent of a third world country."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs he apparently has a typical denialist mindset, dondad seems unaware of the irony in his own comment. Since the Third World countries actually are a part of the world, they obviously would not notice any (economic) change. If dondad's scenario pans out, only the fat cat nations will spot the difference. I've done my share of Internet duelling (also on SciAm) with anti-science creationists. Whether they are Darwin-loathing creationists, flat-earthists, or global-warming-is-a-big-conspiracy-ists, denialists are always hallmarked by a profound inability to grasp the lack of logic in their own stance.
I don't understand why denialists are so fervent in their beliefs. Even if global climate change were a hoax (which the data says it is not), why on Earth would they think that continuing to consume and pollute like there's no tomorrow is a good thing? My Dad has told me that in the past car companies made a big stink about the need to put catalytic converters on cars, claiming it would make cars too expensive, yet when it actually happened, prices barely moved. I'm starting to get my own conspiracy theories regarding these denialists' (and creationists') motivations, although I wouldn't go around saying them unless I had solid evidence to support my case. Also, why do they all think that going green will reduce us to a Third World country? How many people have suddenly gone from rich to poor by using less electricity, or planning activities more efficiently, or getting a better car?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdoesnt make any differance- nostradamus said the world will end in 2012 anyway
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfunny-- term lack of logic-- seems evolutionists lack logic to-- take a whole lot of nonsense on faith alone, warm earthers to
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisShoshin, you have not yet understood that in the scientific community, there is 99% consensus that global warming is real, and has been known about since the 70's?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDidn't you watch the link I sent you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
I'm still open to look at your counter claims if you care to provide any.
"True-believers", isn't a phrase that insults anyone that looks at the facts. It just makes us wonder about perspectives such as yours.
montvillian at 10:45 PM on 01/12/10
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat article from Burt Rutan, designer of SpaceShipOne. It's all about the data:
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/Rutan.Intro.AGW.b.pdf
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Montivllian,
Burt Ratan is an engineer, not a climate scientist. It's about the same difficulty if he tried to critique molecular biology and the findings on HIV.
I like Ratan, Branson, and the whole team that is working on civilian space exploration. They are experts in this field, not climatology.
Considering how complex and unpredictable climate is, it's better to work towards constraining all emissions while working towards those environmental issues where real action brings real measurable results. For instance; instead of spending 20 million on a center for climate change studies (just for the new building being created in San Francisco's economically depressed Hunter's Point area) the money would be better spent by creating the infrastructure to clean up the floating raft of plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre. Likewise, we should spend money to move international shipping fleet from burning their current fuel of choice, Bunker C fuel oil which produces enormous amounts of real pollutants like soot, heavy metals, sulfure and a rich blend of unburned and persistant carbon pollutants while out at sea but we never see it because we restrict it near land. And maybe first and foremost, we need to create an internationally managed ocean targetting the reconstruction of the ocean ecosystem so that it returns to the levels of productivity that it had several hundred years ago, particularly the North Atlantic which has been degraded far more than most realize. As for warming? Who can tell what benefit a change might produce until we watch it emerge? Flooding of low-lying nations is a serious concern, but in reality those nations should be considering moving to higher ground anyway, or taking measures to protect their low lying regions from the obvious and inevitable problems of tsunamis, super-storms, and impact generated waves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsidering how complex and unpredictable climate is, it's better to work towards constraining all emissions while working towards those environmental issues where real action brings real measurable results. For instance; instead of spending 20 million on a center for climate change studies (just for the new building being created in San Francisco's economically depressed Hunter's Point area) the money would be better spent by creating the infrastructure to clean up the floating raft of plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre. Likewise, we should spend money to move international shipping fleet from burning their current fuel of choice, Bunker C fuel oil which produces enormous amounts of real pollutants like soot, heavy metals, sulfure and a rich blend of unburned and persistant carbon pollutants while out at sea but we never see it because we restrict it near land. And maybe first and foremost, we need to create an internationally managed ocean targetting the reconstruction of the ocean ecosystem so that it returns to the levels of productivity that it had several hundred years ago, particularly the North Atlantic which has been degraded far more than most realize. As for warming? Who can tell what benefit a change might produce until we watch it emerge? Flooding of low-lying nations is a serious concern, but in reality those nations should be considering moving to higher ground anyway, or taking measures to protect their low lying regions from the obvious and inevitable problems of tsunamis, super-storms, and impact generated waves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou've got to love the arrogance of the AGW group, especially after Climate-Gate showed the top scientists in the field were driving for a predetermined result, not for the truth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen those scientists release their model parameters, when they "un-delete" the raw data that they have "massaged", when they quit conspiring to avoid "freedom of information" acts, when they cease trying to find ways to influence the peer review process - when they do all this and more, then perhaps I'll listen to what they have to say.
As it stands, they are nothing more than propagandist writing fiction to advance the agenda for a leftist/socialist movement to "spread the wealth" using Climate Change as a legislative Trojan Horse.
Those of you who call "deniers" non-thinking idiots have a lot of explaining to do if you're buying this junk science as revealed by the hacked files. And you've got to question SciAm - just one more group with an agenda that never for a moment raised any issues with the "results driven" so called science we've been privy to through the hacked files. They just prop up the sham science with articles like this and move on.
What a shame. Now I know why old people are cynics. over a lifetime you learn there is no endeavor of man that is not corrupt - be it religion, politics and now - science. And oh yeah, journalism.
Known about since the 70's? You mean back when they were predicting ice ages and glaciers in NY City? How old are you, do you even remember the 70's. I've heard it all now - revisionist history.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut wait - it's Climate Change n0w - not global warming. How convenient that was can have "snowball earth" in the 70's as it was called back then and I suppose "water world" after the polar ice caps melt just a short 35 years later. Amazing power in this Climate Change science. Capable of deluding populations with polar opposite predictions within the same direction. Or as some would call it "WRONG".
deraley: "Those of you who call "deniers" non-thinking idiots have a lot of explaining to do if you're buying this junk science as revealed by the hacked files."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDenialists are by definition non-thinking idiots. That's what denialism means. If you recognize yourself in that category, deraley, here's what to do: open up Google Earth (which I presume you have installed) and zoom in on the south coast of Alaska and the west coast of Greenland. Hey, now there's a surprise: the glaciers have retreated so far inland that they don't even reach the sea any more. But then, of course, Google must be in on the climate change conspiracy as well, and doubtless Photoshopped the satellite images before uploading them to the program. Empirical evidence is nasty stuff, derayley. A denialist such as yourself should avoid contact with it wherever possible.
You've got to love the arrogance of the AGW group, especially after Climate-Gate showed the top scientists in the field were driving for a predetermined result, not for the truth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen those scientists release their model parameters, when they "un-delete" the raw data that they have "massaged", when they quit conspiring to avoid "freedom of information" acts, when they cease trying to find ways to influence the peer review process - when they do all this and more, then perhaps I'll listen to what they have to say.
As it stands, they are nothing more than propagandist writing fiction to advance the agenda for a leftist/socialist movement to "spread the wealth" using Climate Change as a legislative Trojan Horse.
Those of you who call "deniers" non-thinking idiots have a lot of explaining to do if you're buying this junk science as revealed by the hacked files. And you've got to question SciAm - just one more group with an agenda that never for a moment raised any issues with the "results driven" so called science we've been privy to through the hacked files. They just prop up the sham science with articles like this and move on.
What a shame. Now I know why old people are cynics. over a lifetime you learn there is no endeavor of man that is not corrupt - be it religion, politics and now - science. And oh yeah, journalism.
So your reply to me is to say that those who disagree with you are idiots (did not address any points of the bad science) and note that glaciers grow and recede.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow, you've nailed me to the wall - how will I ever recover. You've tilted my earth, you've changed my world view, your logic and evidence for long term and irreversible changes in the earth's climate would stand up to the most rigorous review. <./sarcasm>
Come back when you want to address the real issues of sham science and why you so called seekers of truth are so willing to give a pass to the AGW scientists? And here's the first clue that you and your kind have no quivers in your bow - your best argument is to belittle your opponents rather than debate them. Even the "denier" label is emotionally laden with holocaust deniers, not right, not fair. And I have no idea why you guys seek to tie religion and creationism to the issue - I don't see the relationship - other than to give you one more label to dismiss the opposition rather than debate it. Not everyone who doubts this sham science believes the earth is 6,000 years old.
It is amazing how little real science is being discussed here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. CO2 only makes up .0385% of our atmosphere. What that means is that if you took a 100 ft. column of air, 78 feet of that will be N2, 21 feet will be O2, 1 foot will be H2O vapor, and less than 1/2 of one inch would be CO2. This CO2 only absorbs 3 very small bandwidths of Infrared light, so it is absolutely, physically impossibe for CO2 to raise the temperature of the earth to any significant degree.
2. Yes, we have been warming for the last 150 years. Fact is that we have just come off of a 500 year cooling trend called the "Little Ice Age". Before that we had the Mid-Eviel Warm Period, where it was warmer than it is now. Without the Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide that is being discussed now.
3. For the last 10 years we have been cooling. Despite the prognostications of AGW prophets.
4. We have often been warmer than now, and never have we had the runaway global warming that fear mongers are harping about now.
5. It has now been shown that certain persons have manipulated the data to show a warming trend that does not really exist. They also manipulated the data to erase the Little Ice Age and the Mid-Eviel Warm period. We have been lied to by people with a political agenda.
6. Even if the CO2 Content of the atmosphere went up to 550 ppm, that would make it only .055% of our atmosphere. On that 100 foot column of air it would still only make up .66 of an inch. There is no way this insignificant amount will heat up our atmosphere in any significan maner.
Now, I am not anti-enviornmental. The fact is, that if the policies that are being considered do come into effect, we will be so impoverished that many will have to go back to burning wood or coal to keep warm and cook food, let alone other industries that are needed for production and distribution of resoureces, including food. This would have a devasting effect on the atmosphere in particulate emmissions and in cutting down our forests. It is the AGW people that are being anti-enviornmental.
McM,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI happen to be a scientist and hardly any of my fellow scientists accept AGW as a proven hypothosis. Perhaps you need to read the Wegman report which demonstrates through statistical means that the climate scientists promoting the AGW hypothesis are quite insulated from other branches of science (especially from statistics, upon which much of their work rests). Perhaps after reading this, you will place less faith in your 99% agreement claim.
Continue drinking the kool-aid if you wish, or use your own mind to discern the truth. I've tried to help but the choice is yours.
The majority of people in the world today (sadly) only react to one thingmoney. When you put the impacts of climate change into the equivalent of dollar amounts, all of a sudden people start paying attention.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe other really sad thing about all of this, is that as a society, we tend to ignore warnings altogether. 'Ignore the silly scientists with their doom and gloom predictions, they don't know what they're talking about.' But then when the s--t hits the fan and ocean levels start to rise and flood our major cities, THEN we want to try to fix the problem. Guess what... the reality is, there is no fixing the problem at that point as we would've already sealed our fate.
It's so sad, and I really fear for what we are putting in the hands of our future generations. Hopefully soon something will change.
deraley: "Come back when you want to address the real issues of sham science.. Even the "denier" label is emotionally laden with holocaust deniers, not right, not fair."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd I suggest that you 'come back' when you at least have improved your vocabulary. 'Denier' is a unit of measure for the mesh of synthetics such as rayon and nylon. There is no such word as 'denyer', which I believe is the term for which you are groping. The term is 'denialist', which you seem to deny being, which is itself an act of denial.
I note that you evidently have not checked out what I suggested. Why am I not surprised? My point, which I see that I am going to have to spell out to you, is that empirical evidence is now outstripping any attempts to deny that major climatic changes are happening. But you will, of course, deny it.
" especially after Climate-Gate showed the top scientists in the field were driving for a predetermined result, not for the truth."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt did? Where? I've looked through them and saw no evidence whatsoever of a conspiracy. There were no e-mails at all that said "here's what we do next in the conspiracy" or "make sure the press never finds out about this because we'd lose our revenue". The most spectacular thing about climategate was how much of a non-event it really was...unless you're insane and ignorant of how science actually works. Oh, sorry, did I just describe you?
I'm still waiting for an answer to my question: who exactly are the people "getting rich" on climate change?
"Known about since the 70's? You mean back when they were predicting ice ages and glaciers in NY City? How old are you, do you even remember the 70's. I've heard it all now - revisionist history."
Who was predicting ice ages and glaciers in NYC? In the 1970s there were 7 papers published that could even be conceived as fitting into the "cooling" category. These suggested scenarios such as "if aeresol levels rise, it could trigger an ice age" which was taken by the media, overhyped and lied about. In that same time period, there were 42 papers documenting evidence of global WARMING. So, you and your memory fail.
BTW, I'm old enough to remember the 70s and don't remember discussions of ice ages, primarly because even at that young age I read scientific literature, not popular literature. Just because Newsweek said there was an ice age coming doesn't mean it's true.
Ambertooth -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYet another post and no mention of the sham science revealed by the hacked emails. Yet another post where you insult me by nit-picking my spelling rather than address the issues. Becoming the "grammar nazi" is not an appropriate response and the last resort of someone who can't debate the issues.
As for your glaciers, even ardent AGW supporters would agree that glaciers grow and recede as part of normal climatic cycles. It's not proof of long term climate change - and it wasn't proof of an ice age in the 70's when they were growing. I'd also like to point out the Artic sea ice is at an extremely high level - but you would appropriately point out that is part of a normal cycle - just like our current cooling trend for the past 10 to 12 years.
If you do respond again, I'd like to know how you justify the AGW sham science as proven by the hacked emails. Tell me why you are comfortable believing in climate models where the scientist will not release the modeling parameters. Tell me why you believe scientist who try to hide data from freedom of information requests. Tell me why you trust scientist who against all good practice "claim" to have destroyed the source data so all we can see is their massaged data. Tell me why you believe scientist whom have actively tried to manipulate the peer review process. Why would you trust any group that went to so much trouble to drive toward a result rather than the truth?
Tell me those things and then we can have a discussion. Whether you agree with me or not, I've addressed your "Google Glacier" issue, but you will not return the favor in kind - talking past me rather than to me. I'd appreciate the courtesy of an actual response to the points I've raised, void of insults and on topic if you have it in you.
Spoonman - if you can't see a conspiracy in the hacked emails sir - then that makes you a denier. Oh my, dirty word eh?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAfter you implied I was insane and ignorant, I stopped reading. I really don't know why you guys who seem to think the science is settled are so defensive that you have to demean and belittle anyone who cares to debate you. I'll not waste my time with your incivility.
You're responding to people who likely only ever watch Fox news, Spoonman. When you actively narrow your worldview down to a very small tunnel, you can't be blamed for not spotting the stuff that happens outside of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ Soccerdad : you're not a scientist, or you're a really bad one to be bringing up the Wegman report. The report has been widely dismissed because of it not being peer reviewed and at least a dozen other studies using completely different methodologies from those that generated the first hockey stick have all generated a near-exact copy of the graph. In other words, no matter how you crunch the numbers, temps are rising.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMight I suggest a change to "fry guy" at McDonald's? It seems to be me more fitting use of your lack of talents. As a fake scientist, you fail.
"Spoonman - if you can't see a conspiracy in the hacked emails sir - then that makes you a denier. Oh my, dirty word eh? "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisShow me the money, insane man. Seriously, show me EXACTLY where the conspiracy is mentioned.
"I really don't know why you guys who seem to think the science is settled are so defensive that you have to demean and belittle anyone who cares to debate you. I'll not waste my time with your incivility. "
I'll make it simple so you can understand: you have no interest in an actual, honest debate. You can't, as you don't have a leg to stand on. Any time someone mentions evidence, you say "no it's not". You have spurious evidence of a conspiracy because someone said they used a "trick" to "massage" some numbers. Oooooo...these scientists are all out to get you! My wife showed me a "trick" she uses to make better pancakes over the weekend. The end result was still pancakes.
As for belittling and demeaning, I'm not being defensive by doing that, I'm being belittling and demeaning. There is literally a WORLD of evidence of global warming gathered over the last 40 years by thousands of scientists and peer reviewed by thousands more, yet you choose to concentrate on things like the word "trick" in an e-mail without understanding what it means. Nothing I, or anyone who has a clue, say would make a dent in your religious beliefs. Because of that, I choose to belittle and demean you because you CHOOSE to wallow in your ignorance. Evidence doesn't matter, being nice doesn't matter...so, I'm going to have fun and make fun of you idiots every time you come on here.
The name calling and personal attacks are shocking for a group confident in their position. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for the ad hominem attacks. You belittle yourselves and betray your weak position.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell we're about to find out. Since half the people here think they're above cause & effect, because an imaginary magical being will suspend the basic laws of physics for them, so that lo, they may embrace greed, gluttony, sloth, envy, etc, and live like pigs, ignoring the intelligence they're capable of to live lives of higher purpose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere's that human-sterility virus?
This thread demonstrates very clearly that as far as AGW "science" is concerned, it, like Elvis, has left the building.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFact #1: Co2, in and of itself, is unable to explain any significant global warming or co0ling for that matter. The physics of CO2's affects are far, far to weak. (sorry everyone, it's basic tested and proven physics and this is not open to debate anymore than f=mv is)
Fact#2- Climate modelers get around this inconvenient issue by ASSUMING a positive feedback and amplification effect by water vapor.
Fact#3 - This positive feedback loop has NEVER been found in the real world; it only exists in the CRU and IPCC parallel virtual universe.
Fact #4 - If anyone can show me a relevant real world example of this positive feedback loop I will re-consider my position. Until then. I remain skeptical.
erratum:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI meant to type f=ma. My apologies.
If I was with the CRU, I would have simply created a computer program to hide my error with a fudge factor.
Shoshin at 10:13 AM on 01/13/10
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis thread demonstrates very clearly that as far as AGW "science" is concerned, it, like Elvis, has left the building.
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I guess I'll have to accept your viewpoint Shoshin: 6800 climate scientists in agreement about human global warming are simply full of it, and four politically motivated scientists creating dissension in the forum of laypeople are correct.
I beg your pardon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
Elvis has left the building alright...
To deraley: careful checking of the comments establishes that it is yourself who has used terms here such as 'Nazi' and 'holocaust'. Nowhere else but in your own comments are such emotive and distastefully hyperbolic terms mentioned. For the rest, you take the well-worn path of concentrating on one specific negative issue only (the hacked emails) while avoiding all else. As with creationists, you address yourself solely to negative arguments (those hacked emails again), rather than supplying cogent sources in support of your own position, which would be a positive application of your stance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn this way, you are no different from creationists who become fixated with the Piltdown hoax as a way of demonstrating how untrustworthy science is, while ignoring all other data. That is why I group climate-change denialists such yourself with creationists (who also love to throw around terms such as 'ad hominem'). Your debating tactics are the same. It's as simple as that.
Soccerdad at 08:49 AM on 01/13/10
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMcM,
I happen to be a scientist and hardly any of my fellow scientists accept AGW as a proven hypothosis.
Continue drinking the kool-aid if you wish, or use your own mind to discern the truth. I've tried to help but the choice is yours.
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As a scientist, you understand that hypotheses are never proven in science. Even evolution which has the fullest support of any full blown theory isn't proven, isn't that right?
Kool-aid? This comment hardly sounds like any of the scientists I know responding, but I'm always open to further evidence. Please post a link, and I'll read it. Fare enough?
Spoonman at 09:45 AM on 01/13/10
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ Soccerdad : you're not a scientist, or you're a really bad one to be bringing up the Wegman report. As a fake scientist, you fail.
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I'm afraid I have to concur with you Spoonman.
I've never once met a scientist in any field that told me I could "keep drinking Kool-aid" if something I said might have been amiss. On the contrary, if they have the time, they always try to help me to understand how things are.
Not entirely true:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
McM:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI take it from your response that you are unable or unwilling to answer my query as to where any real world data exist that prove the IPCC ASSUMPTION that water vapor has a positive feedback with CO2.
Your lack of response doesn't make my question invalid, and it still doesn't get you off the hook to respond to it.
And please don't post Youtube and Wikipedia items as your sources; it is demeaning and silly. To do otherwise risks opening the door to entering the "Hide the Decline" video into evidence, and neither of us wants to go there, even if its just for reasons of good taste.
And Spoonman:
You still miss the central issue; any rise or fall in temperature is really irrelevant unless you can unambiguously link it as an EFFECT of rising CO2. Based on the available data, I'm inclined to state that the rise in CO2 levels is an EFFECT of increasing temperature, not the CAUSE.
Correlation does not prove causality.
Awaiting your responses; and please try to stick to the topics as I will not be responding to ad hominem attacks as they are boring and lack originality.
You know what's really sad here? It's all the BS debating about who's right, who's wrong, blah, blah, blah, like a bunch of children. Why can't people look at the fact that OUR POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING? Doesn't that, in itself demonstrate that there's something odd going on here?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, I'm not a scientist, just someone who is very concerned for the future of our race. Does it really take a scientist to look around and see the obvious?
rlb2:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Increase global temperature will bring the magma closer to the surface...."
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Sorry, but that is just plain ludicrous, and I challenge you to find documentation from peer-reviewed scientists proving it!
ambertooth:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Whether they are Darwin-loathing creationists, flat-earthists, or global-warming-is-a-big-conspiracy-ists, denialists are always hallmarked by a profound inability to grasp the lack of logic in their own stance."
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Yep, and the religious DENIALISTS that keep carrying water for the fossil fuel MANUFACTURED DOUBT industry, continue to show they just worship propaganda in their most anti-science rhetoric!
brian01:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour comments prove a valuable point. They demonstrate the anthropocentric views of most people that create this type of controversy.
We have been steeped in guilt for so long, that when something outside of our perceptions of "normalcy" occurs, we automatically assume that someone is at fault.
Essentially we are no different than superstitious early sailors seeking out a "Jonah" to cast adirft when the winds trail off. We seek someone to blame and pay for the problem, real or imagined.
What may actually be at fault is our limited views of what "normal" actually is.
deraley:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"You've got to love the arrogance of the AGW group..."
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Nah....it's religious DENIALISTS like you that have the complete arrogance to post the same exact post almost an hour later than the first anti-science, manufactured doubt piece of drivel.
Obviously, you believe that repeating the same LIES and MISCONCEPTIONS over and over again so repetitiously gives you credibility and makes your propaganda true. Nah.....
Shoshin:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe you have raised a very valid point as well. If my views seem 'anthropocentric' then maybe that is the problem. This is obviously the inherent ego speaking that resides in each and every one of us. Maybe we all just need to accept the fact that what is happening right now could be, in fact 'normal.' As we know, everything operates in a cyclic manner... Perhaps this is just the 'normal' earth cycle that we are currently experiencing?
So, possibly once we drop the ego and all associated anthropocentric views, we should understand that the persistence of life is nothing but an impermanent concept.
Maybe it's just our time to move on...
The sad part of all this is there is a practical and quick way out of this crisis with nuclear power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWarmists believe we are less than ten years away from a civilization ending peak oil and climate crisis, but also believe we are too dependent on oil imports, and dirty and deadly coal power production which kills and sickens hundred's of millions of people worldwide, while deniers will only agree that imports and pollution are problems.
A worldwide investment in 10000 new nuclear reactors would be paid for by and would end fossil fuel use, eliminate most air pollution saving millions of lives, end the global warming/ peak oil problem with a 100% elimination of GHG's within a ten year time frame, is a great investment making the economy more efficient, a wonderful job producing economy boost, requires only a small part of our industrial capacity, and pays for itself in less than three years.
Deniers and Warmists both could embrace it.
With mass production nuclear power costs drop to under $1B Gw much less expensive than coal or natural gas generation and 10% the cost of the cheapest renewable. Asian reactor builds now around $1.5 B Gw are trending to the $1B level.
Nuclear fuel supply and waste issues are resolved with already operating and well understood fast reactors.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-kirsch/climate-bill-ignores-our_b_221796.html
The US with an $2500B nominal investment in nuclear power paid for by quickly weaning itself off its $1000B annual fossil fuel bill could do the same. Unfortunately it is crippled by inefficient private power companies, a biased Nuclear Rejection Commission and corrupt and litigious political and legal systems, quadrupling nuclear costs and time frames.
To get US costs in line, Obama has the authority to order a single nationwide license, replace the Nuclear Rejection Commission, and build nukes replacing coal plants without state or local review using a national public power utility like the TVA
Obama, needs to allocate $3B to build an Idaho National Laboratory designed prototype tested commercial Gen IV IFR and the $.005/Kwh thorium based LFTR reactor . IFR's at $1B/Gw could supply all the world's power for hundreds of years on existing nuclear waste. The tiny amount of low level waste from IFR's is save enough to put back in the mine. Google Kirsch 221796 for details.
Are Big Oil campaign donations so precious politicians are choosing to end civilization rather than get off Big Oil's gravy train.
CONGRATULATIONS! BOTH SIDES of this flamewar have now invoked GODWIN'S LAW! You have BOTH lost this argument! GOOD JOB!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI found the comment where one person suggested that some nations "should move to higher ground anyways!" rather arrogant and rude, considering that most of the affected nations are on small islands which will be completely submerged by the rising oceans (from melting glaciers, which you have accepted as actually happening).
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"CO2 only makes up .0385% of our atmosphere."
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Actually, it was 387 ppm in 2009, which was 36% or 103 ppm higher than just in 1832, and since CO2 absorbs and emits infared radiation at wavelengths of 4.26 µm and 14.99 µm, it plays a role in the greenhouse effect.
I suppose that since only miniscule amounts of MTBE, a known carcinogen, was found contaminating groundwater for pubic use through fossil fuel refining processes, the EPA should have just let BIG OIL continue their pollution of many groundwater systems?
That's right, you religious DENIALISTS pushing the fossil fuel manufactured doubt industry to new limits, would just let them continue polluting both the air and water...<big grin>
Burt Rutan is not a climate scientist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHe is not qualified to comment authoritatively on human caused global warming.
deraley: You must be going through life with your eyes closed if you describe yourself as someone who's been around awhile and still think there's no problem with our stewardship of the earth. In my 50+ years I've seen my favorite creek go from being a vibrant ecosystem full of fish and surrounded by forests with abundant wildlife to being a stagnant, lifeless cesspool. I used to hear a deafening chorus of birds each morning beginning at 3:45 a.m. Now there is silence or perhaps a couple sparrows at 6:00 a.m. Wildlife and t heir habitats are disappearing at an alarming rate and ignorant people say "so what, I don't like birds anyway." That attitude is such an arrogant display of ignorance. Everything is connected and someday one of the annoying species that's going to go extinct due to human activity with be us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Yes, we have been warming for the last 150 years......For the last 10 years we have been cooling."
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Unfortunately carl, it sounds like you don't know if you're coming or going with opposing statements like that! Do you have any peer-reviewed scientific evidence of global cooling in the past 10 years? I didn't think so........
Australia Records Warmest Decade After Heat Waves (Update1 ...Australia experienced the warmest decade since records started in 1910, ending the period with extreme bushfires, crop-damaging dust storms and wilting heat ...
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601130&sid=ajT5gWfgBxdo
State of the Climate | Global Analysis |
Dec 8, 2009 ... NOAA scientists project 2009 will be one of the 10 warmest years of the global ... The 2000-2009 decade will be the warmest on record, ...
www.ncdc.noaa.gov › NESDIS › NCDC
World Meteorological Organization and NOAA both report: 2000-2009 ...Dec 8, 2009 ... World Meteorological Organization and NOAA both report: 2000-2009 is the hottest decade on record. 2009 among 5 warmest years:
climateprogress.org/.../world-meteorological-organization-wmo-2000s-warmest-hottest-decade-on-record/
Trafalgar:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSea level rise caused by AGW is still conjecture. What is proveable though, is certain deltas shifting from constructive to destructive phases due to man's geo-engineering of the waterways and thereby changing the sedimentation patterns.
Other issues such as Venice, have been demonstrated to be related to, again, re-engineering of the lagoon through dregding of shipping channels and subsidence related to grounwater removal. We dunnit, but not in the AGW sense.
The Maldives are a politically charged and wonderful tale of potential urban mythology. Great story, but I've read papers that can't even agree over whether the island is sinking, the sea level is rising (different issues) or nothing is occuring at all.
And we haven't even touched on the sigificance of tectonism, which created a vast inland seaway in North America, spanning from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean in the Cretaceous, only to later retreat. Or even glacial isostatic rebound of Hudson's Bay, which could affect sea levels as Hudson's Bay rises and spills into the Atlantic.
But in following the debate, I have developed Shoshin's Rule: The more likely that an example is to create a politically expedient photo-op, the less likely that example is to be scientifically significant.
Global warming was nothing more than a normal random short term fluctuation within the sample that was observerd.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlobal warming was nothing more than a normal random short term fluctuation within the sample that was observed.
If we redirect the money that we are wasting on fighting global warming, then we could save millions each year by treating already curable diseases around the world.
It's time for this curve fitted farce called "Global Warming" to end.
sethdayal:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Are Big Oil campaign donations so precious politicians are choosing to end civilization rather than get off Big Oil's gravy train."
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Yep....BIG OIL has been greasing the skids of political discourse through our congresscritters for over 150 years!
A few posters have said if we have to clean up our environment the entire world will be like a third world country. People who go to countries such as China or Mexico are disgusted by the amount of pollution - huge smoke stacks everywhere belching out massive clouds of soot & ash, and people walking around with masks so they can breath. Is that what the anti-environmentists want for this country? A civilized, responsible country would find clean sources of energy and, since there has been very little done in that area, it would open up huge opportunities for people to build wealth and find jobs while helping make the planet livable again. THAT'S how people should be viewing this - as a cornucopia of opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs who want to get rid of that big pink elephant in the room rather than trying to convince everyone that it isn't there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould you please provide a citation to the PNAS article referred to here?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople who don't believe in global warming are probably never going to be convinced regardless of the science or other evidence. People who don't want to believe something because they would have to change their behavior if they believed it, will simply deny it. Still, it's hard to imagine how ANYONE can deny the devastation that we're causing on this planet. There are so many reasons to stop burning fossil fuels that have nothing to do with global warming - such as cleaning up our air so people can breath and eliminating billions of dollars a year from going to Arab oil producing countries that channel it directly to terrorists who want to destroy us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSoccerdad:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I happen to be a scientist...[HA! HA! HA!].....quite insulated from other branches of science (especially from statistics, upon which much of their work rests)."
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Hey, so you pseudo-scientists with math or statistics in your backgrounds, just like mcintyre and mckitrick, two partisan politicians having a need to run a kangaroo court in D.C. against 3 peer-reviewed CLIMATOLOGISTS, have proven you cannot use mounting physical evidence all over the globe pointing to extreme changes due to global warming.
Sorry, but there will always be problems with proxies and data trying to explain climate and temperatures before we even had a thermometer or temperature scales, but you certainly sound like one of the religious DENIALISTS that signed the OISM anti-science petition along with both mickey and minnie mouse!
Your undying support of the fossil fuel manufactured doubt campaign just reeks of anti-science BIG OIL dollars, especially since you fail to see the continued damage worldwide, as glaciers recede and polar areas melt!
Spoonman:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"BTW, I'm old enough to remember the 70s and don't remember discussions of ice ages, primarly because even at that young age I read scientific literature, not popular literature. Just because Newsweek said there was an ice age coming doesn't mean it's true."
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Me neither, but I certainly did hear about predictions of PEAK OIL and POLLUTION in my natural resources classes!
Funny, these religious DENIALISTS continue to attack that darn "librul" media, but can't seem to distance themselves from minority media sources back in the 1970's!! Hypocrites!
Elizabethtac123:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour comments demonstrate how "fighting AGW" has been deliberately generalized into "fighting pollution" by the politicization of the debate in the hopes of adding legitimacy to the AGW cause and marginalizing and discrediting the opposition.
AGW and pollution are completely separate items, and contrary to the propaganda that many on these boards spread, being skeptical of AGW does not mean that that you somehow "support" pollution.
Of course skeptics such as myself care about the environment and oppose pollution; to insinuate otherwise is wrong, deceptive and misleading. But my concern is about real pollution, not political agenda driven imaginary pollution, and I'm concerned that in spending money chasing fairy tales we end up not having the resources that we need to fight real problems.
Skepticism about AGW is not a vice; it is a demonstration of concern about real problems, not imaginary ones.
brian01:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Why can't people look at the fact that OUR POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING? Doesn't that, in itself demonstrate that there's something odd going on here?"
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That's because religious DENIALISTS refuse to believe physcial evidence of worldwide receding glaciers and melting polar regions, along with a rising sea level.
After we've seen worldwide glaciers receding at unprecedented speed, Arctic ice melting much faster than previously predicted and even Antarctica's net loss of snow/ice due to the warmest decade on record, these religious DENIALISTS continue to spew the same, old, tired manufactured doubt by the fossil fuel industry, that "the Earth is now cooling, and any physical evidence is only trick photography by Al Gore."
Shoshin:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The Maldives are a politically charged and wonderful tale of potential urban mythology. Great story, but I've read papers that can't even agree over whether the island is sinking, the sea level is rising (different issues) or nothing is occuring at all."
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Obviously, calling the Maldives a "politically-charged myth," proves you're guzzlin' way too much of that glenn beck Kool-aid to wash down the conspiracy theories of FAUX NoNooz!
Maldives Builds Barriers to Global Warming : NPRJan 28, 2008 ... When the 2004 tsunami hit, the Maldives islands were submerged for ... We are told that as a result of global warming and sea-level rise, ...
www.npr.org › News › Science › Climate Connections › Solutions
Shoshin: If people agree that burning fossils fuels is harming our environment, then why should it matter if it's hurting the environment by polluting the air/water/ground or if it's causing global warming? We don't need to study the problem anymore, we need to just stop burning fossil fuels because it harms the environment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiselizabettac123:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Shoshin: If people agree that burning fossils fuels is harming our environment, then why should it matter if it's hurting the environment by polluting the air/water/ground or if it's causing global warming? We don't need to study the problem anymore, we need to just stop burning fossil fuels because it harms the environment."
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But it's the threat of reduced record profits of the fossil fuel industry that has them up in arms, with their manufactured doubt campaign to fight any and all individuals or groups that would reduce their profits before the last drop of OIL or the last chunk of coal is burned!
elizabettac123:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBurning fossils fuels is no particular attractant for me, but what else do we do for energy?
Personally, I have this thing about wanting my kids to be warm, dry and fed, and being pragmatic, I don't see any other realistic way of keeping them so. Especially since the eco-romantics have effectively outlawed nuclear energy.
The central issue, as I see it, revolves around energy density. What makes fossil fuels so outrageously useful is that they pack a large amount of energy in a small volume. So called "green energy" solutions cannot at present provide the type of energy density required to allow us to feed, shelter, clothe and educate entire populations. But saying that should we stop trying to develop them? No, we need to continue, but my concern is that every $ wasted on the AGW myth is one less research dollar available to some entrepreneur who may come up with an Original Idea. And the AGW Mythmakers want to waste trillions of our $$$ (while keeping their modest vig of course)
Climate Change is a political vehicle for increased taxation. There is absolutely no Scientific proof showing a causal link between CO2 levels and temperature (Correlation does not prove causation). There are real problems on Earth that need our money and attention: Poverty, Illness, War. Lets stop kidding ourselves about "Saving the Planet." The Planet doesn't need anyone to save it, who will save us from ourselves?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the true answer is to ban oxygen as a pollutant, after all, it is just as necessary to life as co2 so it must as bad!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisShoshin:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Burning fossils fuels is no particular attractant for me, but what else do we do for energy?
So called "green energy" solutions cannot at present provide the type of energy density required to allow us to feed, shelter, clothe and educate entire populations."
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Yeah...yeah...yeah...you religious DENIALISTS continue to carry tons of water for the manufactured doubt fossil fuel industry, protecting their profits and way of life!
The fossil fuel industry is a well-entrenched, well-funded and a 150+ year old lobbyist-ridden dirty industry framing the energy argument, whereas the clean and green RENEWABLE ENERGY industry is new, and had it not been destroyed in the 1980's after the 1970's OIL embargoes, and allowed to flourish instead of the government subsidizing BIG OIL, it would be a completely different industry 30 years later!
Not to mention how much cleaner both our air and water would be, if renewable energy was embraced for the past 30 years!
I believe it is a bit silly to focus so harshly on CO2. While it may be the biggest contributing and controllable greenhouse gas, there are other damaging pollutants being spewed all over the place. Perhaps, we need not a "CO2 cap" but a comprehensive "pollutant and aerosole" cap. There are horror stories comming out all the time - lately there's been a lot in asia - about industrial sites contaminating whole villages, sickening and killing large groups of people and wildlife. As much as a future threat of global warming is scary, I think the fact that we're cool with mass polluting is even scarier.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, someone asked who's getting rich on global warming? It's easy - the people selling the goods, in this case the oil producers. Who will get rich off going green? I don't know... apparently Al Gore gets some kind of tithe when we buy slightly more expensive and eco-friendly items. If that sounds like garbage to you too, then congrats. Think about it - if a company decides to produce "green" products, they price them to still make a profit so the "going green" company makes the profits not Al Gore, not senators, and not scientists. Business men will, as business men always have (or women!).
WOW I can not belive the close mindeness of the global warming advocates in this column. You have developed your hypothesis using falsified data and controlled peer reviews. Any data you use should be fully veted from multiple sources and you need to start real debates with scientices from both sides of the argument. Until you initiate theses changes, skeptic, like me will not see any validity to your arguments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis, right here, what you are doing, is exactly why I expect us to manage to screw up so completely that we end up boiling off the oceans, even if no scientists are yet daring to say that it's even a likely possibility. Just look at you. Half of you think that CO2 doesn't do diddly squat except make happy plants, and the other half couldn't do a thing about climate change if you wanted to because of the other half.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe should be sure to throw a nice big "Goodbye, world!" party in the next couple decades, before it's too late! (for ourselves and the other species which will go extinct, not for the world, obviously, as the world will survive even if we wipe out all multicellular life on it)
A few degrees warmer would be better anyway as most of the earth's landmass is in the Northern Hemisphere and open vast swaths of land for human habitation. Lots of people freeze to death but relatively few are killed by heat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou morons still pitching Global Warming?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow 'bout the never tried, never done, never successful
CARBON CAPTURE AND SEQUESTRATION? EH?
scepticalofsciam: "Lots of people freeze to death but relatively few are killed by heat."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe European heatwave of 2003 caused over 52,000 deaths.
source: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: More than 52,000 Europeans Died from Heat in Summer 2003, Earth Policy Institute, July 28, 2006 ([http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update56_data.htm data)
Information dominance is not science. The pursuit of liberty, happiness and economic gain is one of the possible spin-offs of learning from science. Economic justification to do something the easy way doesn't mean that we must deny our addiction to oil which we shall NEVER be able to replace at the rate it is being historically extracted. Oil will come in very handy when it will be really needed for future ideas. How much will it cost to do science without affordable amounts of it then?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, are you going to deny the Little Ice Age, from which we have been warming? Are you going to deny the MWP which was warmer than we are now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince the Peer review process was hijacked by certain persons who reviewed each others works, and did not allow contrary oppinions, don't even bother using this argument.
2009 was not the hottest year, unless you use the manipulated data that is being used to push this fraud. Even the CRU scientists called the leveling off of temps a "travisity".
And, I certainly do not need a "peer review" to see M. M.'s hockey stick chart as denying history to show a trend that is not really there.
To all the AGW zealots who think anyone who does not agree with your position....I am not a religious at all, and the article below was written by a respects climate expert.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConcern over global warming has spawned such a highly charged and polarized political movement, that real science has become sidelined in favor of sound-bites and simple messages. The real science is not as ’settled’ as some politicians would have us believe.
There is a significant minority of climate scientists who look at the data and conclude that we are dealing with natural cycles that are peaking just as they have done on a regular basis over centuries.
These scientists are heavily outnumbered by the proliferation of computer specialists who have created their own virtual planet – people trained in maths and physics who may never have handled an ice-core, tree-ring apparatus, sediments or stalagmites and all of the proxy indicators of past temperature cycles.
In my view, the UN secretariat has marginalised their careful assessment and warnings about natural cycles in favour of alarming future projections generated by the computer model.
These real climate scientists know that the last major warm period was a 1,000 years ago when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland – their graves are still solid in the permafrost.
In between then and now, Europe and China experienced a Little Ice Age – with widespread famine.
There is so much spin that you have to read the small print of the UN reports where they admit to not understanding natural cycles and what drives them.
Behind the scenes they acknowledge cycles are at work and contribute to the warming and that it is only from the model that they derive the dominance of carbon dioxide.
But the model does not easily simulate the poorly understood cycles. Satellites do a better job and having spent three years studying the data I conclude global warming is real but at least 80 per cent natural cycle and 20 per cent human emissions.
My conclusions are supported by recent climate shifts that run counter to model predictions. From the data on cycles I could predict that after 2007, when Arctic summer ice reached a record low, it would start to recover.
In 2008, it came back by 10 per cent. The majority expected it to continue its decline to ice-free status by 2015. In 2009, it grew by another 10 per cent.
The models beloved of the majority also predicted that the high-level winds, known as the jet-stream, would shift north as the globe warmed.
The jet-stream directs wet weather from the Atlantic and in 2007 they shifted south, bringing widespread flooding to Western Europe.
I have seen a minority report in Nasa’s archives which shows that the jet-stream shifts south as the magnetic field of the sun falls and this was characteristic of the Little Ice Age.
In 2007, the sun’s magnetic field fell to an all time low and this repeated through 2008 and 2009, as did the floods.
Many solar scientists point to a link between this magnetic field and climate on Earth and when the field is low, the Earth cools.
During the low in the 17th century the Thames in London froze every winter for 50 years and summers were a washout.
Chinese and Russian scientists have better knowledge of these cycles, because the cold periods induce widespread famine – and some of them see all the signs of a new Little Ice Age.
Perhaps that’s why their governments’ sovereign funds are buying huge tracts of productive land in the tropics – for food.
You may ask – if this is real science, how can the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ignore it and claim the warming is caused by carbon dioxide.
In fact, the scientists only agreed the warming is “very likely not due to known natural causes acting alone” – and that is spun by the policy-makers and the world’s media.
The not-known natural causes are subject to high-level research programmes because real scientists know they exist and are powerful. And no real climate scientist ever said natural causes are acting alone.
Up until the recent ‘climate-gate’ scandal, I accepted that the objective data could be trusted.
But it now appears scientists upon whom the UN relies were busy manipulating the data to produce a warmer globe and to eradicate what they call ‘blips’ (i.e. cycles) that they cannot explain.
To compound matters, they then sought to undermine the Freedom of Information Act and delete their records in advance of requests for the data.
The issue of causation is crucial. The poorest people are already at risk whether the globe warms or cools.
We need action on the real and immediate threats facing human support systems from unavoidable natural climate change – but less than one per cent of resources devoted to climate are spent on adaptation, the rest goes on what will be ineffective attempts to ’stop climate chaos’.
First, you're doing a terrible disservice to the scientific community by claiming that the only "real" scientists are the ones that disagree with AGW.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSecond, "To all the AGW zealots who think anyone who does not agree with your position...." Sorry, but this is a religiously toned statement. Ad hominem attacks are always initiated by the party with nothing solid available to support their position, usually right off the bat. I can't help but notice that this is exactly what you have done.
Third, "From the data on cycles I could predict that after 2007, when Arctic summer ice reached a record low, it would start to recover." Have you checked a calendar lately? We're in 2010. Anyone can say they were able to make a prediction of so-and-so after the fact. Hindsight's pretty nice like that. Show me a paper (with timestamp) in a peer-reviewed journal and I'll take this statement seriously.
Fourth, I notice you are selecting very narrow data sets to provide evidence to support your claims. Anyone who practices scientific research is aware that EVERY trend possesses some degree of variation. What one must always watch out for is clues as to whether the variation outweighs the trend itself. In the case of ice cap retreat, it doesn't.
Fifth, why does everyone assume that the politicians are spouting global warming hype for money? Take a look at the last twenty years and show me exactly who made profits by supporting a cleaner, more efficient energy system. Oh wait, I forgot you're also the same people saying that converting to renewable power would cripple our economy. So which one is it, and why?
There is one party with financial motivations in this game, and it is the same party that wants everyone to continue living and consuming with a "business as usual" attitude. Big oil has every reason to be afraid of popular acceptance of AGW, and they will stop at nothing to make sure it doesn't happen. So congratulations for playing directly into their hands. You should probably ask Exxon-Mobile for a check since you've rendered such useful services to their cause.
Quinn the Eskimo,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey, shouldn't you be out clubbing seals or shooting polar bears with caribou barbi from a helicopter..... or something?
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...the article below was written by a respects climate expert."
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Thanks for another religious DENIALIST rant without even giving credit to the author, but this is exactly what I've come to expect from you -- one-sided OPINIONS with no citation!
Sisko: "..the article below was written by a respects climate expert."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI see that lakota2012 has beaten me to the punch, but indeed, Sisko, unless you actually provide specific citations for source, author and publication (as I have done in my previous comment relating to the statistics of heatwave deaths), then just spouting stuff and saying that it's by some 'respects climate expert' means nada. If you want to come onto a science site and huff and puff your opinion, then you can expect to be asked to play by the rules of science.
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"2009 was not the hottest year..."
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First off, 2005 was the hottest year on record, and 2007 & 2009 tied for second, during the warmest decade on record! The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.
Temperature rise has accelerated in recent decades. The earth’s temperature is now 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than it was in the first decade of the twentieth century, and two-thirds of that increase has taken place since 1970.
NASA: 2009 Hottest Year in Southern Hemisphere
The United States may be experiencing one of the coldest winters in decades, but things continue to heat up in the Southern Hemisphere. Science has obtained exclusive data from NASA that indicates that 2009 was the hottest year on record south of the Equator. The find adds to multiple lines of evidence showing that the 2000s were the warmest decade in the modern instrumental record.
The data come a month after announcements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and by the World Meterological Organization that the decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s. (NOAA estimates that the decade was 0.54°C warmer than the 20th century average. The 1990s, by comparison, was 0.36°C warmer by their measure.)
This is especially impressive because we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” The point is, notwithstanding the all-too-effective disinformation campaign of the antiscience crowd, it’s getting hotter — thanks primarily to human emissions — much as climate scientists warned it would
The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989).
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/113/2
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"So, are you going to deny the Little Ice Age, from which we have been warming? Are you going to deny the MWP which was warmer than we are now."
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Nah, there was definitely a MWP between the 9th and 13th centuries, where the regional North Atlantic climate was warmer during medieval times than during the cooler "Little Ice Age" of the 15th - 19th centuries. As paleoclimatic records have become more numerous, it has become apparent that "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Optimum" temperatures were warmer over the Northern Hemisphere than during the subsequent "Little Ice Age", and also comparable to temperatures during the early 20th century.
In summary, it appears that the late 20th and early 21st centuries are likely the warmest period the Earth has seen in at least 1200 years.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"From the data on cycles I could predict that after 2007, when Arctic summer ice reached a record low, it would start to recover. In 2008, it came back by 10 per cent. The majority expected it to continue its decline to ice-free status by 2015. In 2009, it grew by another 10 per cent."
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You religious DENIALISTS continue to espouse OPINION without citation or anything even resembling proof of your silly lies in your parallel universe to REALITY!
January 5, 2010
Extreme negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation yields a warm Arctic
Arctic sea ice extent at end of December 2009 remained below normal, primarily in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic. Average air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean were much higher than normal for the month, reflecting unusual atmospheric conditions.
Conditions in context
During December 2009, ice extent grew at an average of 68,000 square kilometers (26,000 square miles) per day. Sea ice extent increased at a fairly steady rate throughout the month, staying slightly above the levels observed in December 2007.
December 2009 compared to past years
December 2009 had the fourth-lowest average ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records, falling just above the extent for 2007. The linear rate of decline for December is now 3.3% per decade.
Warm air keeps ice extent low
December air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean region, eastern Siberia, and northwestern North America were warmer than normal. In contrast, temperatures in Eurasia, the United States, and southwestern Canada were below average. The strongest anomalies (more than 7 degrees Celsius/13 degrees Fahrenheit) were over the Atlantic side of the Arctic, including Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, where ice extent was below average.
2009 year in review
The minimum ice extent in September 2009 was greater than the past two Septembers, but again fell below the long-term average. The melt season began with a young, thin Arctic sea ice cover, suggesting that significant amounts of ice would be lost during the melt season. However, a cooler summer with favorable winds helped preserve the ice.
Despite the cool summer, the ice remained thin and vulnerable at the sea ice minimum, with little of the older, thicker ice that used to characterize much of the Arctic. Recently published research by Barber and colleagues shows that the ice cover was even more fragile at the end of the melt season than satellite data indicated, with regions of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas covered by small, rotten ice floes.
In the fall, the sea ice froze up in fits and starts. The Northern Sea Route opened in October, even after sea ice extent for the Arctic as a whole had begun to increase. The annual average extent for 2009 was 11.18 million square kilometers (4.32 million square miles), 970,000 square kilometers (375,000 square miles) or 8.0% below 1979 to 2000 average and 740,000 square kilometers (286,000 square miles) or 6.2% below the 1979 to 2008 average.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...having spent three years studying the data I conclude global warming is real but at least 80 per cent natural cycle and 20 per cent human emissions."
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WOW! You mean global warming is REAL, and that we're not in a global "cooling" world like the DENIALISTS always say?
Carbon dioxide is released to the atmosphere by a variety of natural sources, and over 95% of total CO2 emissions would occur even if humans were not present on Earth. In other words, your 20% human emissions causing global warming is a bit high, but even 5% has caused the steady increase in atmospheric CO2, from 284 ppm in 1832 to 387 ppm today!
Mankind's fossil fuel emissions have disrupted the delicate balance of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and even 5% rather than the 20% YOU acknowledged is a game changer!
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Many solar scientists point to a link between this magnetic field and climate on Earth and when the field is low, the Earth cools. During the low in the 17th century the Thames in London froze every winter for 50 years and summers were a washout."
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While you religious DENIALISTS might call it a "lower magnetic field" relating to a cooler climate like during the LIA, it's actually the SUNSPOT LOW of the solar cycle that produces less iradiation and less ionized particles that are attracted to the poles. It's the SOLAR HIGHS of the cycle that creates huge CME's and solar flares, where the magnetic poles attract those ionized particles creating the lightshow known as the Northern Lights.
So, what does it mean that CO2 is at 385ppm, on it's way to 550ppm?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCO2 makes up 0.0385% of our atmosphere. That's right, less than 1/400 of 1% of our atmosphere is CO2. If it went up to 550 ppm, then the percentage of CO2 would be 0.055% of the atmosphere.
Naked numbers do not mean a lot to most people, so let us put this in terms that we can visulise.
If you took a column of air 100 feet tall, and separated out the gases that make up that column, then you would have approximately 78 feet of N2, 21 feet of O2, 1 foot of H2O vapor, and 0.462 inches would be CO2. If you took away all of the gases except the CO2 you would have a very hard vacume.
Another way of looking at this is that there is 24000 times as much of the other gases in the atmosphere as there is CO2.
If the CO2 level would raise up to 550 ppm, then the amount of CO2 in our 100 foot column of air would be 0.66 inches.
Now, since CO2 only absorbs a very small amount of the Infrared light (3 small bandwidths), how does anyone reasonably expect that this insignificant amount of CO2 is going to raise the tempreture of the atmosphere any significant amount? IF they do they either do not know what they are talking about, or they are conning us.
Before anyone uses the "Can you show any peer review science" to prove this argument, let me point out that the numbers I have used were used in the original post. You can do the math yourself.
Anthropogenic Global warming is a Hoax.
Excuse me, but during the Mid-Eviel Warm Period there was little enough ice for the Norse to colonize Greenland. It was after the cooling of the Little Ice Age that the glaciers advanced to the coast, making Greenland uninhabitable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, "denier" is simply name calling. Skeptisim is the basis of real science.
Again, a super intellect who would rather name call than discuss the evidence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are comparing apples with motor cycles here. We are talking about a physical process where by the insignificant level of CO2 would heat the atmosphere. I have demonstrated where it can not do so to any significant degree. Your switch to a topic of toxicity is merely a shell game, and a very dishonest argument. The name calling shows that you really know how weak your argument is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNational Solar Observatory, NASA say no “Maunder Minimum” — sorry, deniers — Solar Cycle 24 poised to rev up
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJune 18, 2009
The sunspot cycle is about to come out of its depression, if a newly discovered mechanism for predicting solar cycles — a migrating jet stream deep inside the sun — proves accurate. And that will add a small amount of warming in the next few years, which were already predicted to be record-setting by two recent studies.
When we last looked at the sun, we were at “a 12-year low in solar ‘irradiance’.” As NASA explained in April: “the sun’s brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths” since the solar minimum of 1996, which was “not enough to reverse the course of global warming.” It’s been “the quietest sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” said sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/06/18/national-solar-observatory-nasa-say-no-maunder-minimum-sorry-deniers-solar-cycle-24-poised-to-rev-up/
Reduce carbon all you like - by the time anything is concretely done about THAT, all the permafrosted methane in Siberia and Greenland will seal the climate change forever.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe're just going to have to get used to the fact that over two billion coastal and hurrican/tsunami-vulnerable people ARE GOING TO DIE over the next thirty years.
Can the atmosphere reach 550ppm? Surely peak oil, gas, and even coal will kick in before that happens? (Peak coal between this year and 2048 people.... according to the University of Newcastle, NSW. Just google peak coal + wiki and you'll get the peak coal wiki which has the details).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSurely with peak oil and gas being soon, and then peak coal sometime before 2048, the race is on to leave fossil fuels before they leave us! So I'm also concerned about climate change but think that ultimately, peak oil in the next few years will shake our first world economies into an EMERGENCY economy to get off the fossil fuels faster than we can imagine today.
Okay clowns, so you're gonna fix it. So?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow much $$$$$ taxes do you want?
What, exactly are you going to DO?
Have you ever done it, yet?
Does it work?
and *before* you destroy the world economy...
Will it work?
Got any proof?
We're waiting for your *informed* opinion. Or, any *fact* you may be able to conjure up.
CCS has never been done. Geothermal causes earthquakes. Wind don't blow for base-load. Solar don't work at night.
Your turn, SKIPPY.
Carl Rooker repeats the Denialist myth that "Co2 is too small too matter". Hey Carl, a little injection of Ebola is a small thing too... but it can kill you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This CO2 only absorbs 3 very small bandwidths of Infrared light, so it is absolutely, physically impossibe for CO2 to raise the temperature of the earth to any significant degree."
Says who? Got a degree in atmopsheric physics and climatology? Got evidence that these 3 very small bandwidths you mention can disprove the "Radiative Forcing Equation"? Sources, please.
2. MWP warmer than today? Sources? It hasn't been as warm as it is now for about 11 million years according to the latest papers.
3. Oh far out, you went and did it... quoted the COOLING since 1998 baloney! Wow. Learn about decade long climate trends and natural variability in shorter term trends such as the WEATHER and things like, gosh darn it, that ever so confusing EL NINO effect which pushed up the 1998 temps above the normal background warming, and the LA NINA which cooled things since then. Sorry mate, but 2005 may also have been AS hot or HOTTER than 1998 anyway, according to NASA's temps. Just depends who you read... and what happens if 2010 beats 1998 as many are predicting? Will you try and distract us for a few years with other silly arguments, and then in 2015 we'll hear Denialists saying "Oh, l0ok, it's been COOLING since 2010!" You heard it here folks... it's been cooling since 2010! ;-)
"Certain persons..." Got evidence, not just allegations? You're not referring to "hide the decline" from the climategate emails are you! Pfffft. Good luck with that storm in a teacup.
Point 6 just repeats Point 1, which just shows you don't understand the mathematics behind the "Radiative Forcing Equation".
Then your last paragraph is a classic emotional appeal... where you argue we're back in the stone age without fossil fuels. What a REALLY frightening world you live in, or haven't you heard of peak oil, gas, and coal? See the thing is we're going to have to start moving into a post-fossil fuel age ANYWAY because soon fossil fuels won't be able to meet the demand. But no, we can't, we're DOOMED according to you. Get your cave fire ready!
Deraley,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe climate gate emails are a joke and don't show any conspiracy whatsoever. If you the believe science has been twisted, various scientists shut up and silenced, their job security threatened, pressure from their bosses to cast a certain message, and then the general public deceived, then you're actually talking about the BUSH ADMINISTRATION not climategate.
http://tinyurl.com/2omdpn
http://www.newsweek.com/id/32482
But as for the "hide the decline" climategate email referring to exchanging misleading tree-ring data for instrumental data to indicate what was REALLY happening in world temperatures... give me a break! Or are you talking about the "Travesty that we can't account" for the *specific* energy flows and predict *exactly* where the energy balance will go in each year and exactly how El Nino and La Nina will play out... even though that author is convinced of climate change and the *general* picture of rising temperatures? Well yeah, I'd like some more *exact* modelling on every teeny tiny climate perturbation as well, but according to the Radiative Forcing Equation the general physics of climate change is clear: warmer!
Or are you referring to that all-encompassing conspiracy to stop 1 paper being published which the climate community thought was pure rubbish? Guess what... this "all-powerful" conspiracy you're talking about isn't really successful is it? They failed to prevent just 1 paper getting published, and it was published anyway, and the scientific community reviewed it anyway, and it was found to be crapeth!
So where does that leave us? Either the science for global warming is true, or you live in a Dan Brown sized conspiracy theory novel. Except... this conspiracy... can't really do anything? Copenhagen failed to actually arrive at any real decisions?
Good luck writing Dan Brown's "Climate Control" for him, I hope you are happy together.
Quinn the Eskimo is another one suffering a far scarier world view, one where the world economy just CAN'T function without fossil fuels. You must be REALLY scared about peak oil and gas (sometime in the next 5 to 10 years), and peak coal (google Peak coal + wiki to see the Newcastle University that says WORLD peak coal will occur any-time from this year through to 2048, depending on certain data margins of error and certain economic growth assumptions).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGiven the role of oil and gas in little details like, say, GROWING OUR FOOD (at 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to 1 calorie of food energy out!), I would hope that sheer self-preservation would have you cheering on the "conspiracy" of climate change, because telling governments geological constraints are about to start running down our fossil fuel production certainly hasn't worked this far!
Im 19 and have no clue or opinion about climate change whatsoever, but stumbled on this in the search for a bit of information and was shocked to find that I am actually more mature than all of you serious debaters. Honestly, take a look at some of the hypocritical childish nonsense you people are spouting:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisgalaxy_man:
Sorry, but this is a religiously toned statement. Ad hominem attacks are always initiated by the party with nothing solid available to support their position, usually right off the bat. I can't help but notice that this is exactly what you have done.
galaxy_man:
You're responding to people who likely only ever watch Fox news, Spoonman. When you actively narrow your worldview down to a very small tunnel, you can't be blamed for not spotting the stuff that happens outside of it.
Irony?
Try:
Trafalgar:
Dear global warming deniers: Let me put this in terms you should understand.
Oh bright heavenly sun!
fisixisfun:
I don't understand why denialists are so fervent in their beliefs.
ambertooth:
denialists are by definition non-thinking idiots
lakota2012 at 12:30 PM on 01/13/10
ambertooth:
"Whether they are Darwin-loathing creationists, flat-earthists, or global-warming-is-a-big-conspiracy-ists, denialists are always hallmarked by a profound inability to grasp the lack of logic in their own stance."
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Yep, and the religious denialists that keep carrying water for the fossil fuel manufactured doubt industry, continue to show they just worship propaganda in their most anti-science rhetoric!
This is a religiously toned statement. Ad hominem attacks are always initiated by the party with nothing solid available to support their position, usually right off the bat.
(I also changed Lakota's capitalised words back into lower case in an attempt to make it readable)
An attack here from the other side of the debate:
Quinn the Eskimo
You morons still pitching Global Warming?
But then again the response from the advocates is racism, so I can ignore the morons comment:
lakota2012
Quinn the Eskimo,
Hey, shouldn't you be out clubbing seals or shooting polar bears with caribou barbi from a helicopter..... or something?
In conclusion, Im reluctant to side with hypocrites who petulantly hurl insults and racism around and UNNECESSARILY capitalise WORDS all the TIME. So, although I have no idea whether global warming is caused by humans or not, at the moment Im cheering on the deniers in this ridiculous excuse for a discussion.
When you are not able to debate with the same subject, you do not know what you are talking about. CO2 concentrations and ebola have nothing to do with each other.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou state the party line well, but still do not explain how such a small concentration of CO2 can raise the temperature of a mass 24000 times itself. Especially when the warming mechanism is also insignificanly small (those 3 small bandwidths of IR). The amount of energy available to do so is just too little.
A continuation of my earlier reply;
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you really knew what you were talking about, you would have mentioned that the AGW scientiest did not predict that CO2 alone would raise the earths temperature to a catastrophic point. They were originally saying that the very small increase in temps that CO2 would have caused would have raised the amount of H2O vapor (which is the powerful "green house gas" and that this positive feedback would have raised the temps to a catastrophic level. Since you did not, I have.
However, this positive feedback situation has not happened. And in the past when temps have been higher than today we have not had the runaway global warming that alarmists have predicted.
As far as the Mid-Eviel Warm period being warmer than it is now, I refer to this article where the author presents the IPCC 1990 report where the MWP was left in, and it was warmer than it is now. Link; http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html
Later reports used falsified data to get rid of the MWP and the LIA (Little Ice Age) in an effort to con you and I into something that was untrue.
About the last 10 years becoming cooler. Even the major AGW scientists admit that there has been no net warming since 1998. The fact is, that it has cooled about 1/2 of a degree. This may not seem like a significant decline, but the whole fuss has been about a 1 degree C rise in 150 years to begin with. If you do not believe me, then look up the temperature graph used in the IPCC report.
Don't be mad at me. Be mad at those who have falsified science to con us into a political agenda.
Lakota is one of the AGW zealots that calls anyone who does not agree with his position a "religious DENIALISTS". That in spite of my having stated repeatedly that I am personally not associated with any religion, and personally think none of them make sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe truth is the science is certainly not undeniable that carbon in the atmosphere is the primary cause of global warming or that a warmer planet would be different, but not necessarily worse for the human species.
The following is an article by Dr. Peter Taylor (a climate expert who advised the UN on climate) who also agrees that the world is warming, but not that it is primarily caused by atmospheric carbon. Reasonable people can disagree, and a longer term examination of data and not just computer models will refine positions.
Concern over global warming has spawned such a highly charged and polarized political movement, that real science has become sidelined in favor of sound-bites and simple messages. The real science is not as ’settled’ as some politicians would have us believe.
There is a significant minority of climate scientists who look at the data and conclude that we are dealing with natural cycles that are peaking just as they have done on a regular basis over centuries.
These scientists are heavily outnumbered by the proliferation of computer specialists who have created their own virtual planet – people trained in maths and physics who may never have handled an ice-core, tree-ring apparatus, sediments or stalagmites and all of the proxy indicators of past temperature cycles.
In my view, the UN secretariat has marginalised their careful assessment and warnings about natural cycles in favour of alarming future projections generated by the computer model.
These real climate scientists know that the last major warm period was a 1,000 years ago when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland – their graves are still solid in the permafrost.
In between then and now, Europe and China experienced a Little Ice Age – with widespread famine.
There is so much spin that you have to read the small print of the UN reports where they admit to not understanding natural cycles and what drives them.
Behind the scenes they acknowledge cycles are at work and contribute to the warming and that it is only from the model that they derive the dominance of carbon dioxide.
But the model does not easily simulate the poorly understood cycles. Satellites do a better job and having spent three years studying the data I conclude global warming is real but at least 80 per cent natural cycle and 20 per cent human emissions.
My conclusions are supported by recent climate shifts that run counter to model predictions. From the data on cycles I could predict that after 2007, when Arctic summer ice reached a record low, it would start to recover.
In 2008, it came back by 10 per cent. The majority expected it to continue its decline to ice-free status by 2015. In 2009, it grew by another 10 per cent.
The models beloved of the majority also predicted that the high-level winds, known as the jet-stream, would shift north as the globe warmed.
The jet-stream directs wet weather from the Atlantic and in 2007 they shifted south, bringing widespread flooding to Western Europe.
I have seen a minority report in Nasa’s archives which shows that the jet-stream shifts south as the magnetic field of the sun falls and this was characteristic of the Little Ice Age.
In 2007, the sun’s magnetic field fell to an all time low and this repeated through 2008 and 2009, as did the floods.
Many solar scientists point to a link between this magnetic field and climate on Earth and when the field is low, the Earth cools.
During the low in the 17th century the Thames in London froze every winter for 50 years and summers were a washout.
Chinese and Russian scientists have better knowledge of these cycles, because the cold periods induce widespread famine – and some of them see all the signs of a new Little Ice Age.
Perhaps that’s why their governments’ sovereign funds are buying huge tracts of productive land in the tropics – for food.
You may ask – if this is real science, how can the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ignore it and claim the warming is caused by carbon dioxide.
In fact, the scientists only agreed the warming is “very likely not due to known natural causes acting alone” – and that is spun by the policy-makers and the world’s media.
The not-known natural causes are subject to high-level research programmes because real scientists know they exist and are powerful. And no real climate scientist ever said natural causes are acting alone.
Up until the recent ‘climate-gate’ scandal, I accepted that the objective data could be trusted.
But it now appears scientists upon whom the UN relies were busy manipulating the data to produce a warmer globe and to eradicate what they call ‘blips’ (i.e. cycles) that they cannot explain.
To compound matters, they then sought to undermine the Freedom of Information Act and delete their records in advance of requests for the data.
The issue of causation is crucial. The poorest people are already at risk whether the globe warms or cools.
We need action on the real and immediate threats facing human support systems from unavoidable natural climate change – but less than one per cent of resources devoted to climate are spent on adaptation, the rest goes on what will be ineffective attempts to ’stop climate chaos’.
Lakota---So now you are calling Dr Peter Taylor a religious denialist......the article posted was written by him and not me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou name calling of everyone who does not share your partially informed position is unfortunate
Lakota stated
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou religious DENIALISTS continue to espouse OPINION without citation or anything even resembling proof of your silly lies in your parallel universe to REALITY!
In spite of what you try to spin, arctic ice did grow by 10% in '08 and '09, and that was inconsistant with the computer models predicting they would melt. ISN"T THAT A FACT?
All you did there was repeat your former post. Did you honestly think that was going to fool anybody? You don't have anything to support your case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"In spite of what you try to spin, arctic ice did grow by 10% in '08 and '09, and that was inconsistant with the computer models predicting they would melt. ISN"T THAT A FACT?"
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NO, it is NOT a FACT, and my posting from the NSIDC showed both 2008 & 2009 to be the 2nd and 3rd lowest Arctic sea ice extent -- very close to the 2007 record, and hardly 10% more in 2008 and then another 10% more in 2009.....Ludicrous!
You're the SPIN king, and again, no CITATION of your religious DENIALIST OPINION, while still trying to make others believe that this is all computer modeling. It's not -- it's satellite imaging showing exactly where the ice has melted!
I'd also be willing to go way out on that limb in predictions this year, and say that with the sunspots returning, the weak and very thin Arctic ice from both 2008 & 2009, a much warmer than normal 2009/2010 Arctic winter so far due to extreme negative Arctic oscillation, that 2010 will surpass 2007 as the record Arctic ice melt. Only time will tell.
Come back when you can offer PROOF instead of OPINION!
Maturestudent:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I'm 19 and have no clue or opinion about climate change whatsoever..."
"So, although I have no idea whether global warming is caused by humans or not, at the moment I'm cheering on the deniers in this ridiculous excuse for a discussion."
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You're correct, you have NO CLUE and NO IDEA, and just because you 'think' you're so mature at 19, it won't matter as our planet continues to grow more and more hostile, and whippersnappers like you will only look back at today as the 'good ol' days.' By 2050, when you're only 59, you'll be saying "I only wish I had done more to limit GHG emissions, instead of talking moronically about CAPITAL letters!"
Lakota- if 2007 was lower than 2008 and 2009 then ice levels did increase.....if only from the low in 2007, but an increase non the less
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have cited an article written by Dr. Peter Hill (would has studied climate for 20 years) and I also referenced both the Exxon and Hallam sea level studies which tracked ocean levels for 500 million years. These sources are not my opinion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy opinion is that humanity can and will adjust, and that a warmer planet is not bad for humanity in the long run.
Anyone....even an idiot like Lakota; should agree that the impact on humanity in the long run is a manner of opinion.
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Don't be mad at me. Be mad at those who have falsified science..."
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First off....show us PROOF of any science falsification.......I challenge you......I'm still waiting........still waiting......
Setting the record straight on stolen e-mail: Associated Press, FactCheck.org, and other sources:
A team of reporters at the Associated Press did an “exhaustive review” of the climate scientists’ e-mail stolen from the University of East Anglia in the UK and concluded that “the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked.” FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center said: “Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded….E-mails being cited as ‘smoking guns’ have been misrepresented.” Two videos by Climate Crock examine e-mails and take down some denier propaganda.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/setting_the_record_straight_ap-factcheck/
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Second...by merely posting the same garbage over and over again with your atmospheric CO2 percentages, and the same few infared wavelengths that YOU seem to 'think' matter, are you trying to disprove the fact that gases like CO2 and Methane are greenhouse gases, and that infared radiation at wavelengths of 4.26 µm and 14.99 µm are inconsequentital?
Obviously, poisons or bacteria in very minute quantities in mere nanograms can kill humans quickly, but you 'think' that raising the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by 36% since 1832 to 387 ppm, much higher than any ice core dating back to 800,000 years, simply does nothing because of YOUR IDEA that the percentage is too low to matter. FACT is, CH4 is a much more potent GHG, 20 times as potent as CO2, but at the current quantities in our atmosphere, CO2 has more than 3-times the radiative forcing that CH4 does. Likewise, CO2 lasts much longer in our atmosphere (100 years) compared to the relative short life of CH4 (8+ years).
So......after proving your first statement of "science falsification", a peer-reviewed scientific study showing your other hypothesis of 387 ppm being too low to matter, would be in order for you to have any credibility, instead of just your biased OPINION in the matter! I'm waiting.........
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Lakota---So now you are calling Dr Peter Taylor a religious denialist......the article posted was written by him and not me."
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Thanks for finally giving credit to the true author of your rant, after I and others here caught you posting without due credit.
Now.....I have never heard of Dr. Peter Taylor, and since you religious DENIALISTS continue to use pseudo-scientists and other fakes like on the OISM petition, maybe you can give us some more information on this DENIALIST. My Google search of Dr. Peter Taylor provided a cardiologist from Ocoee, FL. first, and an obstetrician/gynocologist from Portola, CA. second. Maybe you can give us a link to just whom you stole the post from, and why we should hold his views in such high regard as you do.
I'm waiting.........
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The following is an article by Dr. Peter Taylor (a climate expert who advised the UN on climate) who also agrees that the world is warming, but not that it is primarily caused by atmospheric carbon."
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First off, by posting this long-winded rant a second time hardly gives it more credibility than the first time, and I'm still trying to figure out if this Dr. Taylor is the cardiologist or the gynocologist.
Secondly, I've never once said that the current global warming is primarily caused by humans -- especially since I've already posted that 95% of the CO2 emissions are natural and will continue with or without us! As I already posted to YOU, your no-name Dr. Taylor apparently stated (you never did give us a link to the religious DENIALIST site you stole it from the frist time) that the current global warming is 20% mankind's fault.
I stated that the current global warming is 5% at most, mankind's fault, but that indeed we have tipped the balance of nature, adding 36% of the atmospheric CO2 content since 1832, going from 284 ppm to 387 ppm in 2009.
You can continue to "TRY" to stuff my mouth with all your religious DENIALIST propaganda and false lies, but your "AGW zealots" and "preconceived thoughts" only fall on deaf ears, since our human emissions has merely tipped the natural CO2 balance and we are accelerating a natural cycle.
Understand, or must I draw you a picture?
BTW, please don't post that drivel a 3rd time without at least giving credit to the website you stole it from!
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Later reports used falsified data to get rid of the MWP and the LIA...."
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GEEZ....is that what your "American Stinker" propaganda told you, while leaving out the most important part that the MWP was REGIONALIZED, and not a global phenomena?
Just like the Holocene Optimal Climate period, where the Arctic was several degrees warmer, and the warmth faded to coolness as you moved down in latitude.
Also, the best theory about the cause of the LIA, was the Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) and the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715, where solar output was reduced for many years causing a much colder Earth.
After going out on the limb already this morning and predicting another record Arctic ice melt in 2010 due to the extreme negative Arctic oscillation this winter, I'm going to also predict that now that Solar Cycle 24 has apparently started with sunspots during this extended solar LOW period, that the majority of you religious DENIALISTS will get a rude awakening during the next few years as we head to Solar Cycle 24's HIGH, with a noticable increase in solar iradiation, and possibly record solar flares and CME's.
Get ready and fasten your seat belt carl, because all the CO2 emissions footdragging is going to be quite detrimental in the present decade, which will be far warmer than the past decade which was warmer than the previous 1990's decade!
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"About the last 10 years becoming cooler. Even the major AGW scientists admit that there has been no net warming since 1998."
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YOU LIE! I've already posted several links showing that this past decade was indeed warmer than the 1990's, and that 2005 was the warmest year globally, with 2007 & 2009 tied for second!
You seem to just want to recognize the Northern Hemisphere for global temperature changes in such a regional display like during the Holocene Optimum and the MWP. The Southern Hemisphere is currently baking, and Australian meterologists have declared 2009 the warmest in their history.
Please, instead of parroting the usual conservative propaganda sources like "American Stinker," or none as you usually just post OPINION, please give us all some peer-reviewed scientific journal stating that the Earth is cooling and that the warmest year was 1998 globally! I'm waiting.....
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"You state the party line well"
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Excuse me....I belong to no party, and you're the one that used the "American Stinker" as reference -- a hard-core conservative rag! Try some peer-reviewed science for a change!
Second warmest year on record warrants action -- WWF-AustraliaJan 6, 2010 ... New figures showing that Australia experienced its second hottest year on record in 2009 should prompt politicians to take urgent action to ...
www.wwf.org.au/.../second-warmest-year-on-record-warrants-action/
**Lakota**
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit was a pleasure reading your recent posts, a real breath of fresh air to read someone that understands the basics. I think I was too cranky last night to bother replying to, yet again, reply to the anti-science Denialists as calmly and logically as you just did. It is just so tiring to hear the same top 26 myths repeated ad-infinitum. Good job!
But... (Breathes deeply) I see Carl Rooker is repeating the "CO2 is too small a percent to matter!" myth again this morning.
**Carl**
Science evolves and changes with new data, but dogma stays the same. When you Denialists repeat the same tired, boring, worn out myths again and again, aren't you getting the picture that you're just citing dogma?
Carl, the physicists tell us that Co2 affects the energy balance as depicted on this graph.
http://www.te-software.co.nz/blog/auer_files/image001.gif
This is repeatable, testable science, not some historical throwback speculation... "What if Co2 did this, let's look at the historical record..." as so many Denialists seem to think. This stuff is EMPIRICAL and MEASURABLE OK? And you're just sticking your fingers in your ears saying "No no no!"
Do you want to prove where the Radiative Forcing Equation is wrong?
The Radiative Forcing Equation counts the amount of "damage" even these tiny amounts of Co2 generate.
"
where � is the climate sensitivity, usually with units in K/(W/m2), and �F is the radiative forcing [4]. A typical value of � is 0.8 K/(W/m2), which gives a warming of 3K for doubling of CO2."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
These rough calculations for the effects of Co2 have been known since the 19th Century, when Arrhenius sorted it out in 1896!
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
(Hardly some modern day greenie conspiracy!)
This New Scientist details the top 28 myths you Denialists keep repeating.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462
It's a "Pre-emptive Strike" against most of the misinformation and lies you'll type in reply to this post!
All you've done in your post is disingeniously quote myth #9, "Human Co2 emissions are too tiny to matter".
http://tinyurl.com/yad2feb
But EVEN WORSE is the fact that Carl quotes the 'Greenland was Green myth!'
(It's so embarrassing for Carl I can't look, wait a minute, yes I can ;)
This is Australia's Dr Karl on "Greenland was Green" myth, whereas their large ice sheets are actually *very* old!
However, it turns out Eric the Red was a shonky real estate salesman! ;)
"At that time, in 985�AD, the climate in Greenland was similar to what it is today. And it wasn't particularly green� that was just creative advertising on the part of Eric the Red.
Once the colonising fleet arrived, the new home wasn't quite as lovely as Eric had told them."
and later
"The landscape is (and was then) about 80 per cent ice, 19 per cent bare rock, and just one per cent green. The little soil that was present had been built up over millions of years."
So Carl, I guess the only 2 terms that are appropriate for your "Greenland was Green" myth are either "Oh the Humanity!" or "OOOOOPS!"
http://tinyurl.com/yduudn8
http://tinyurl.com/mk5nfp
lakota2012 (to Sisko): "I'm waiting........."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo Sisko: As indeed am I. This 'Dr. Peter Taylor' might be someone working in my local health clinic, for all I know. When citing a source, and certainly one which you quote at such length and with such frequency, you need to provide sufficient information so that others are able independently to check and verify the source that you are citing. That's what 'citing' means. Name. Title of paper. Where published, and by whom. And the date of publication.
Well, Sisko?
ambertooth:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislakota2012 (to Sisko): "I'm waiting........."
To Sisko: As indeed am I. This 'Dr. Peter Taylor' might be someone working in my local health clinic, for all I know. When citing a source, and certainly one which you quote at such length and with such frequency, you need to provide sufficient information so that others are able independently to check and verify the source that you are citing. That's what 'citing' means. Name. Title of paper. Where published, and by whom. And the date of publication.
Well, Sisko?
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Thanks.......and it seems as if we're all waiting on sisko, king of the religious DENIALISTS, that continues to post stolen words from others while stuffing his own words down others' mouths.
We're all waiting for these religious DENIALISTS to finally use peer-reviewed scientific papers instead of their OPINION or like carl, using a constipated conservative source like the "American Stinker" a an "unbiased" source!
Yes, as sisko posted quite awhile ago, I'm angry........
................................but now I'm waiting........
Climatologists under pressure
Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
Nothing but a paranoid interpretation by paranoid conspiracy theorists like glenn beck and his religious DENIALIST followers! Amen!
First off, I have made no statements what so ever about religion, my own personal beliefs, or how they may or may not effect what I believe as far as AGW. Your continued statement calling me (and skeptics like me), "religious denialists" is nothing more than an irrelavant (and bigoted) statement trying to use personal insult to win an argument. Only demonstrates that you have nothing relevant to say on the subject. You are not to be taken seriously.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs far as the MWP being just regional, Europe, Greenland, and North America are a pretty big region. However, the MWP has also been linked to the success of tribes in Central and South America.
As far as the Little Ice age, the cooling started about 1300. The Maunder Minimum was one event during this time (among many) whereby there was considerable cooling, as the 1990 IPCC report shows in the temp graph.
I have pointed out that there is just too little CO2 in the atmosphere, and too little of the IR spectrum that is absorbed by CO2 to warm the rest of the atmosphere significantly. However, others here have used irrelevant arguments about the toxicity of some chemicals or the virulence of Ebola to say that it does not take much CO2. Just irrelavencies to muddy the subject and not answer the objection.
You and some others here are just demonstrating that you have fallen for a con job and not science. It is a true shame when people would rather insult than think.
You are confusing weather with Climate. As you would say to me if I pointed out the extreme cooling that the northern hemisphere is having (why I don't use that argument)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not religious but I am a "denier".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am bot convinced by the "evidence" produced by Hansen et.al
Warming was the thing the US weather service warned us about in 1922.
It has been a long time coming.
pokerplyer: "Strange--When I googled Dr Peter Taylor + climate-- I saw found the guy. ..What is the big deal about Sisko showing the link...."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEasily answered. Sisko chose specifically to quote at length from a ms. for which he initially supplied no details whatever of source, not even an author's name. Under questioning, he supplied the name of Dr. Peter Taylor, but with no further details. He was not talking ABOUT Dr. Peter Taylor in general terms. He was specifically citing a passage actually written BY Dr. Taylor. That is the difference. And that was why citation details should have been supplied. As of this comment, Sisko still has failed to supply those details of his cited source. So, that we now know from him that they were by Dr. Taylor, and that Taylor's general background can be Googled, still does not supply any independently-checkable details for where Sisko was lifting his quotes from.
Either these things matter or they do not. If anyone considers that they do not, then fine. But if they do not, then they should not expect their quoted comments to be taken seriously.
I never said Greenland was green. I said that there was enough ice free area for them to establish a colony, that was later wiped out due to the cooling trend of the later years. As a matter of fact, I was responding to a post that said that the Greenland Ice sheet was now receeding from the coast. My point was that this has happened before. Yes, the Ice Sheet over Greenland is very old. I never said that it was gone during the colonization of the Norse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am sorry, but it is you and the alarmists that keep bringing up tired old disproven science to bolster a theory that just is not supported by the facts. You have been somewhat more respectful in your response than some, but even in this thread some have postulated the disappearance of the oceans due to AGW (absolutely rediculous), claimed that my statement that "CO2 was too small a fraction of the atmosphere to have the effect postulated" was wrong and based their argument on irrevalent subjects like the toxicity of a certain poison and Ebola's virulence. I short were using silly tactics instead of facts to bulster an invalid argument.
Now, I know what you are saying about radiative forcing. This is not proven in practice. The fact is, that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is so small, and the available energy it absorbs from IR (radiated away from the earth and so called trapped) is also so small that it is not raising the temperature of the earth to any sigmificant degree. It is physically impossible for it do do so. Even the early AGW theories understood this, and claimed that the small degree that CO2 would raise the temperature would cause more H2O vapor to move into the atmosphere, and this H2O vapor is what would raise the temperature to the tipping point. This has not happened, because H2O has both a negative and a positive feedback.
One last thing. The name calling, the bullying, and the outright irrevalent comments have been typical of how thoughtfull skeptics have been treated by advocates of AGW. Those who partake in such are only demonstrating that they are proud of their ignorance, and will not give it up.
You, and millions of others have fallen for a terrible con job.
Another invalid point that some AGW alarmist make is that when a scientist that is not a climatologis makes a statement against the AGW theory, his/her oppinion is invalid because they are not a climatologist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat those who state this refuse to admit is that most sciences relate to each other. The science of Climatolgy is dependent on the sciences of physics, chemistry, astromomy, hydrology, geology, biology, micro-biology, mathematics, statistics, computer programing and technology, and many others disciplines.
My point is that when a scientist who specializes in one of these other sciences that are involved in the general sceince of Climate, the Climate scientist (and the layman for that matter) make an objection to the Climatologist theory, the wise ones will listen to them, and either strengthen the theory (if possible), modify it (to the corrected data), or dump the theory for it's weakness. This is how real science works. Those who just declaim the objections because these specialists are not part of the club show they are not real scientists.
So quit using that tired old argument, "They are not climatologists, they do not know what they are talking about." Listen to these other scientists, and learn.
It has been presumed, seemingly with good reason, that a detected increase in atmospheric CO2 is the result of the increasing rate of burning fossil fuels. However, CO2 is a trace compound in the atmosphere composed of nitrogen which may be difficult to reliably monitor, and there are other potential sources of any CO2 increase. Since the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels necessarily decreases atmospheric oxygen, there should be a proportional decrease in atmospheric oxygen. Some other sources of CO2 increase would not result in decreasing oxygen. Since we are attempting to undertake a global project intended to reduce atmospheric CO2 by reducing fossil fuel consumption, it would seem reasonable to first confirm that the CO2 increase is the result of the oxidation of carbon. Has it been determined that atmospheric oxygen is decreasing? If so, reduced oxygen should be a major concern in addition to global warming. If not, we could be wasting our time and efforts. Or we may simply not be capable of reliably monitoring atmospheric trace elements – there are an awful lot of variable factor to control…
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm really glad I'm 62 and on my way out pretty soon and that I never had children. I am always amazed at the ignorance of what science is and how it works in what is supposedly the most technologically oriented society in the world. I remember having a conversion with a history teacher whom I respected that said he didn't need to know how a light switch worked to use it. To me, that spelled out in plain English what our dilemma as a culture and possibly as a species is. The vast majority of humaity can't be bothered learning about and understanding what a few geniuses have created for us over the last 500 years through their scientific discoveries! The vast majority of us seem to have lost our natural curiosity of how the world works since everything is provided to us by the overwhelming technology that has been developed and so we don't have to go out and find sustenance ourselves the way our ancient ancestors did. Those ancestors had to have an intimate knowledge of their surroundings (what today we call the environment) if they were to make a living and survive. From my humble observations during my lifetime I have concluded that our globalized, industrialized high tech culture has destroyed that curiosity. If people really understood how the climate system works and what we have learned about it and its inherent instablity, they would all be fouling their pants in fear of what we have done with our unrestricted industrialization and subsequent overpopulation. I am a professional meteorologist and have also taught high school students in science and I have concluded that our current civilization is doomed to a catastrophic collapse simply because of the widespread ignorance of how the universe really works. The only time the current culture cares about anything is when it sees money being taken away. I feel for the young people who will undoubtedly bare the brunt of the mayhem that will steadily engulf our "civilization", but in the words of James Lovelock, Gaia is eeeking her revenge, and she won't be denied no matter what Wall Street, Exxon, or Dick Cheney thinks or wants to believe!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJudging by your overly emotional post, I doubt you are very open to thinking other than you own opinion, but please try to consider the possibilities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLikewise, anyone can also point a finger at you and say the same exact thing you posted dripping with emotion: "You, and millions of others have fallen for a terrible con job."
Water vapor is by far the most important contributor to the greenhouse effect. Pinning down its precise contribution is tricky, not least because the absorption spectra of different greenhouse gases overlap. At some of these overlaps, the atmosphere already absorbs 100% of radiation, meaning that adding more greenhouse gases cannot increase absorption at these specific frequencies. For other frequencies, only a small proportion is currently absorbed, so higher levels of greenhouse gases do make a difference. This means that when it comes to the greenhouse effect, two plus two does not equal four. If it were possible to leave the clouds but remove all other water vapour from the atmosphere, only about 40% less infrared of all frequencies would be absorbed. Take away the clouds and all other greenhouses gases, however, and the water vapor alone would still absorb about 60% of the infrared now absorbed. By contrast, if CO2 alone was removed from the atmosphere, only 15% less infrared would be absorbed. If CO2 was the only greenhouse gas, it would absorb 26% of the infrared currently absorbed by the atmosphere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder.
lots of laughs at those who said I was bad for not posting links to the climate expert I quoted and to the two curves I referenced.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGeez- Is it so difficult to go to google or yahoo and find the information with the information in my post?
Actually, the laugh is still on you, since your "expert," peter taylor has absolutely no peer-reviewed scientific articles on anything published, which is why Google lists cardiologists and gynocologists well before him! No wonder -- his latest novel, "Chill," is about the debunked "global cooling!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, your sea level charts going back hundreds of millions of years had more to do with tectonics and lithospheric plate movements causing wild fluctuations in sea level. Why did they discount the past 20,000 years after the last glacial maximum which melted and gave us a 130 meter sea level rise? Ridiculous to try to tell anyone we are at historical sea level LOWS, when the huge ice sheets melted within the past 18,000 years, and the melting continues today!
Sea Level Rise, After the Ice Melted and Today
Global sea level has fluctuated widely in the recent geologic past. It stood 4-6 meters above the present during the last interglacial period, 125,000 years ago, but was 120 m lower at the peak of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago. A study of past sea level fluctuations provides a longer-term geologic context, which can help us better anticipate future trends.
Massive ice sheets covered parts of North America, northern Europe, and several other regions during the last ice age. This huge volume of ice lowered global sea level by around 120 meters as compared to today. After the ice sheets began to melt and retreat, sea level rose rapidly, with several periods of even faster spurts. The first such spurt may have started about 19,000 years ago, at which time ocean levels rose 10-15 m in less than 500 years.
www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09
jtdwyer:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It has been presumed, seemingly with good reason, that a detected increase in atmospheric CO2 is the result of the increasing rate of burning fossil fuels."
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Nah...only assumed by YOU or other religious DENIALISTS!
Fact is, presently about 4% of annual natural emissions can be attributed to human activities, disrupting the natural balance. The destruction of natural sinks like rainforests and Indonesian peat fires, are increasing our atmospheric carbon dioxide much more than burning fossil fuels.
Lakota--once again you state a half truth. Stating Dr Peter Taylor has not had any articles reviewed is simply WRONG.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.biblio.com/Chill-by-Peter_Taylor_-_16232021.html
Here is the link to his book on climate. While you may not agree with his conclusions, you can not disagree that he is an expert in the field of climate.
Now regarding long term sea levels......have you actually looked at the data sets associated with these two curve summaries? The data is not disputed. You are absolutely wrong to state that ocean levels are not expected to rise independent of human actions. Just like your earlier, completely unsupported and stupid statement that seal levels were expected to go down over time due to a spreading of the ocean plates. Oh and your other earlier STUPID statement the millions of billions will die due to climate change. Another of your statements will not only not factual support, but without any basis in logic. The climates change will not happen in a single season, but over decades. Humanity can adjust to these changes, and must to survive a constantly evolving planet.
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...but even in this thread some have postulated the disappearance of the oceans due to AGW..."
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What? I have read every post in this thread, and have yet to see anyone say anything about disappearing oceans! That's an impossibility, although continental masses have moved due to lithospheric plate movement, and sea levels have fallen and risen due to that movement and the freezing and melting of glacial sheets.
I'm still waiting to see your peer-reviewed scientific research proving we are now experiencing "global cooling," especially after the last two decades of record warmth! Fact is, 2005 was the warmest year globally in most likely thousands of years, and 2007 & 2009 tied for second!
I'm waiting for that proof..............
Dr_Ben_Gates:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"A simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder."
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Oooops....don't let carl see that, since he's still ranting about his OPINION of infared radiation, radiative forcing and the small percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere, despite the ice core data showing that CO2 has varied from 180 to 284 ppm for the past 800,000 years -- and now is at 387 ppm, a full 103 ppm increase since 1832.
From my research, the percentage of contribution to the greenhouse effect of gases is: water vapor, 36–70%; carbon dioxide, 9–26%; methane, 4–9%; ozone, 3–7%. The major non-gas contributor to the Earth's greenhouse effect, clouds, also absorb and emit infrared radiation and thus have an effect on radiative properties of the atmosphere.
Each greenhouse gas has a spectrum of radiation frequencies it will absorb and re-radiate due to natural vibration modes of the molecules, and there is an overlap between water vapor and carbon dioxide. Until the absorption spectra of the two gases were measured accurately it was believed that carbon dioxide did not absorb any radiation that was not absorbed by water vapor. If there were complete overlap of the spectra there would be no significant role for the miniscule amount of carbon dioxide in the air to have a role in atmospheric warming. The non-overlapping spectral band for carbon dioxide was not discovered until about the early 1950's.
The importance of this non-overlapping band in the carbon dioxide spectrum depends upon what portion of the thermal radiation occurs in that band. This will depend upon the surface and atmospheric temperatures. Consider the case in which water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are the only greenhouse gases. Each absorbs radiation in two bands, one of which is a band where both absorb radiation, the overlap band. Human activities increase both CO2 and H2O. The anthropogenic effects include an increase in both CO2 and H2O.
Carbon dioxide absorbs in a band in which water vapor does not, so this band is relatively unsaturated and the impact is relatively large, especially as atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have steadily increased since 1832.
pokerplyer:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"We do not have any factual reason to believe a warmer earth will be worse for humanity in the long run"
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Besides you be unwilling to accept the fact that sea level was 130 meters LOWER during the last glacial period 22,000 years ago, and has risen due to extreme ICE MELT quite rapidly until about 6,000 years ago, why anyone would not accept the fact that a warmer planet will not only melt the remaining frozen snow and ice raising sea level further, but also help multiply disease carrying insects and increase bacterial growth and infectious disease, is beyond me!
Believe me, a warming planet will bring a whole host of nasty consequences, just like in Haiti in the coming months!
pokerplyer:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Strange--When I googled Dr Peter Taylor + climate-- I saw found the guy."
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WOW! Aren't you the clever one?
Now, Google peter taylor, the author of "chill," a global cooling work of fiction, to find all those missing peer-reviewed scientific papers that don't exist.
Almost as hilarious as the OISM petition, which is always dragged-out by the religious DENIALISTS!
Lakota
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHave you ever researched Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change? http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/climate-change/ He is another scientist (often quoted as the most knowledgeable on sea levels) who does not believe that CO2 levels are driving a sea level rise.
Additionally, your link to the NASA page clearly explains that much of their reported sea levels are based upon computer modelling and NOT actual measurements. The quote from the article:
Although the meltwater was previously believed to have come chiefly from Antarctica, a recent reconstruction by Tarasov and Peltier of ice sheet retreat using a glacial model calibrated by a variety of data points instead to a largely North American source.
This is consistent with what Dr. Taylor wrote when he said much of the current AGW alarm is due to immature computer modelling.
You pitiful moron! If you had read more than the opening sentence of my comment before becoming enraged, you might have discovered that I was simply restating the public perception in order to suggest a test to determine its validity. I suspect humanity has the capacity to survive, but not if you keep screaming!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLakota- There you go again.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou wrote: why anyone would not accept the fact that a warmer planet will not only melt the remaining frozen snow and ice raising sea level further, but also help multiply disease carrying insects and increase bacterial growth and infectious disease, is beyond me!
Believe me, a warming planet will bring a whole host of nasty consequences, just like in Haiti in the coming months!
Do you have any data to support your statement....NO. LOL So you are stating that a warmer planet would have more area for insects to breed??? So you do finally agree that it would not be a dryer planet as you previously claimed? If land previously covered with ice would support insects, it would also support farming then wouldn't it???
Or are you now claiming that the entire planet would turn into Haiti. More of your stupid AGW alarmist nonsense
Carl Rooker:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"About the last 10 years becoming cooler. Even the major AGW scientists admit that there has been no net warming since 1998."
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Still waiting for proof of that absurd statement!
I'm still waiting..........
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Lakota--once again you state a half truth. Stating Dr Peter Taylor has not had any articles reviewed is simply WRONG."
"Here is the link to his book on climate."
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Hey....thanks so much for that, since this idiotic link says:
"No summary of this book is available at this time."
So, not only is there nothing about his fictional novel at your provided LINK, but you have still been unable to provide any source for ANY peer-reviewed scientific papers by this "great" weatherman that seems just like the bozos that started weather.com.
Half-truths........hardly.......you still failed the test, but continue to push the religious DENIALIST propaganda of putting this little guy on a pedestal. He's a NOBODY with NO peer-reviewed scientific publishings.....only a fictional novel.
So, I'll ask you just like I asked carl, where's your PROOF of this non-reality-based "global cooling" like taylor wrote?
And please.....not another link for advertising a novel.
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The data is not disputed."
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Sure it is, by almost all scientists knowing that at the end of the last glacial maximum, we began warming and sea level has RISEN 130 meters due to the rapid melting into the Holocene.
I refuse to debate this any longer, since you obviously fail to recognize that the last glacial maximum about 22,000 years ago was when the Earth experienced the LOWEST sea level in more than 100,000 years -- NOT NOW like you keep parroting!
Sea level has RISEN 130 meters in the past 18,000 years, and continues to rise -- that's a fact that you find hard to swallow!
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"You are absolutely wrong to state that ocean levels are not expected to rise independent of human actions."
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I never said that even once, and your ability to keep trying to stuff YOUR WORDS in others' mouths is disgusting and very juvenile, just like your childish need to call people STUPID, while never providing any proof of anything to dispute their posts -- just your preconceived OPINION from novels.
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Have you ever researched Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner..."
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Thanks for more religious DENIALIST propaganda, linking to the U.K. Telegraph comment page and tony watts page.
Do you ever read anything but religious DENIALIST pages?
I keep looking at all the links you provide, and 99% of them are political commentaries, and the other 1% seem to be from discredited pseudo-scientists with no peer-reviewed publications. You're a waste of everybody's time here, just spewing more and more religious DENIALIST propaganda!
Lakota
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRegarding Dr Peter Taylor climatologist
http://www.yorku.ca/pat/research/peter.html climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3661 www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/un-climate-change.htm www.whale.to/b/chill.html
Those links should prove to all that the guy is a climatologist in spite of you stating otherwise.
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Have you ever researched Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner..."
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Why? This is just another crackpot, who's views have been thoroughly debunked by his former INQUA, and his Maldive's conclusions were not supported by follow-up studies.
Morner's opinions are certainly not part of the scientific mainstream. He's a retired professor with ties to industry lobby groups and published by Lyndon LaRouche, a political crank and far-out conspiracy theorist.
What do you have against peer-reviewed scientific publishing?
Sisko:.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Additionally, your link to the NASA page clearly explains that much of their reported sea levels are based upon computer modelling..."
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Hardly.....how about tide gauges in coastal harbors, coastal sediments from a number of localities as well as the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite altimeter. Apparently you just hate science and scientific evidence, and would rather use commentaries by crackpots in tabloids and conspiracy theories!
Twentieth century sea level trends, however, are substantially higher that those of the last few thousand years. The current phase of accelerated sea level rise appears to have begun in the mid/late 19th century to early 20th century, based on coastal sediments from a number of localities. Twentieth century global sea level, as determined from tide gauges in coastal harbors, has been increasing by 1.7-1.8 mm/yr, apparently related to the recent climatic warming trend. Most of this rise comes from warming of the world's oceans and melting of mountain glaciers, which have receded dramatically in many places especially during the last few decades. Since 1993, an even higher sea level trend of about 2.8 mm/yr has been measured from the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite altimeter. Analysis of longer tide-gauge records (1870-2004) also suggests a possible late 20th century acceleration in global sea level.
Recent observations of Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet raise concerns for the future. Satellites detect a thinning of parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet at lower elevations, and glaciers are disgorging ice into the ocean more rapidly, adding 0.23 to 0.57 mm/yr to the sea within the last decade.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/
jtdwyer:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It has been presumed, seemingly with good reason, that a detected increase in atmospheric CO2 is the result of the increasing rate of burning fossil fuels."
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Seems as if it is YOU that is screaming obscenities to your fellow human beings for quoting you word for word. You might do better looking in a mirror while toning-down your incessant attacks and name-calling when somebody disagrees with you. Seems as if YOU are very enraged that public perception is different than your convoluted view.
Thanks for proving my point about religious DENIALISTS!
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"So you do finally agree that it would not be a dryer planet as you previously claimed?"
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There you go yet again.......twisting others' words as you so commonly do on a daily basis.
I never said that, and now I challenge you to PROVE that I said any of the many things you try to stuff in my mouth.
Just because arid areas will expand as the planet warms, it certainly doesn't mean that there will not be wetter areas as well. You have no scientific evaluation of anything and you let your imagination run wild from all the conspiracy theories and tabloid writings you quote. Give it a rest!
Where exactly did West Nile virus originate, before it expanded all over the U.S.?
Everyone knows Aliens cause global warming...just ask Michael Chriton (well if he was alive you could ask him). http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html a timeless piece about how science really works today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislakota – I’ve include below the entirety of my 2 postings, since you either must have never read beyond the first sentence of posting 1 or are incapable of comprehending complex reasoning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimply put, my assertion was that an increase in CO2 without a commensurate decrease in oxygen would provide direct evidence that burning fossil fuels is not the primary cause of the CO2 increase.
jtdwyer:
It has been presumed, seemingly with good reason, that a detected increase in atmospheric CO2 is the result of the increasing rate of burning fossil fuels. However, CO2 is a trace compound in the atmosphere composed of nitrogen which may be difficult to reliably monitor, and there are other potential sources of any CO2 increase. Since the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels necessarily decreases atmospheric oxygen, there should be a proportional decrease in atmospheric oxygen. Some other sources of CO2 increase would not result in decreasing oxygen. Since we are attempting to undertake a global project intended to reduce atmospheric CO2 by reducing fossil fuel consumption, it would seem reasonable to first confirm that the CO2 increase is the result of the oxidation of carbon. Has it been determined that atmospheric oxygen is decreasing? If so, reduced oxygen should be a major concern in addition to global warming. If not, we could be wasting our time and efforts. Or we may simply not be capable of reliably monitoring atmospheric trace elements – there are an awful lot of variable factor to control…
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You pitiful moron! If you had read more than the opening sentence of my comment before becoming enraged, you might have discovered that I was simply stating the public perception in order to suggest a test to determine its validity. I suspect humanity has the capacity to
survive, but not if you keep screaming!
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Lakota –
Your responses absurdly accused me of being a religious denialist (whatever that means to you), but I neither mentioned religious principals nor denied anything. In fact this is the very first time in my 59 years that I’ve ever been accused of being religious by anyone!
While I responded to your completely unwarranted attack in kind, with an intentional personal insult (pitiful moron, screaming) none qualify as an obscenity, as you moronically assert. Moreover, it is you who originally attacked me, even though I did not disagree with you. Scanning through the entire blog, it seems that you are the incessant attacker and name-caller.
Do you suffer from some delusion that your activities are making a constructive contribution to furthering the positions you vehemently promote, or promoting your status in some way? Good luck with all of that…
And what evidence would that be Elizabettac? The evidence that shows CO2 lagging not leading global warming? The evidence that shows the MWP being warmer than the current period?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI respect your wording of evidence instead of the oft mis-used proof. But the science is not settled yet. We should do something about polution, but perhaps before throwing the baby out with the bath water, we should understand better what global warming is about, and if it is natural or not.
"@ Soccerdad : you're not a scientist, or you're a really bad one to be bringing up the Wegman report. The report has been widely dismissed because of it not being peer reviewed and at least a dozen other studies using completely different methodologies from those that generated the first hockey stick have all generated a near-exact copy of the graph. In other words, no matter how you crunch the numbers, temps are rising. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhoa! I have heard of hiding the decline, but then denying the facts? Wegman was the peer review of the McIntyre and McKittrik analysis of the problems with the Mann/Briffa Hockey Sticks! So you are now insisting on a peer review of a peer review?
And you had best put your money where your mouth is because Wegman has not been rebutted. If you can prove otherwise, link to it.
Brian01 - "Why can't people look at the fact that OUR POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING? "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut it is not - http://www.news.com.au/antarctic-ice-is-growing-not-melting-away/story-0-1225700043191
Brian01 - "Why can't people look at the fact that OUR POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING? "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPhilJourdan:
"But it is not"
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Simply DELUSIONAL, and always makes me laugh as the religious DENIALISTS continue to trot out the same ONE story to back their rants, while disclaiming dozens of others showing a NET LOSS of snow/ice in the Antarctic!
Obviously, it is summer now in the Antarctic, but I'll be curious to see the results of the NSIDC scientist's expedition happening right now in the deep south.
NSIDC scientists on expedition to an Antarctic ice shelf
From December 2009 to March 2010, NSIDC Lead Scientist and Antarctic expert Ted Scambos will travel to the Larsen Ice Shelf region in Antarctica to study the effect of ice shelf collapse on Antarctic glaciers. The expedition is part of the National Science Foundation-funded Larsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica (LARISSA) Project, which aims to explore the causes and impacts of ice shelf collapse in a fast-warming region of Antarctica.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20091119_scambos.html
Major Antarctic glacier is 'past its tipping point'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this13 January 2010
A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.
Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In 2004, satellite observations showed that it had started to thin, and that ice was flowing into the Amundsen Sea 25 per cent faster than it had 30 years before.
Now, the first study to model changes in an ice sheet in three dimensions shows that PIG has probably passed a critical "tipping point" and is irreversibly on track to lose 50 per cent of its ice in as little as 100 years, significantly raising global sea levels.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18383-major-antarctic-glacier-is-past-its-tipping-point.html
lakota - learn to read:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBrian01 - "Why can't people look at the fact that OUR POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING? "
From your link: "In 2002, a huge section of the Larsen Ice Shelf disintegrated "
1. An "ice shelf" is not an "ice cap"
2. Your source is from 2002, mine is from 2009.
Clearly you are in denial and must be a denialist. The ice caps are not melting, a portion of an ice shelf (one small part of antartica) broke apart. 8 years ago! What has happened since?
Read my link for the answer.
One more for the road. It is not "one article", it is the University of Illinois's Ice Cap tracking - the foremost authority on the polar ice caps in the world. According to them, "Ice Caps Getting Bigger".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisread it for yourself: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
For the english version, try this one: http://www.ecoworld.com/global-warming/the-real-facts-on-increasing-antarctic-ice.html
PhilJourdan:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Wegman was the peer review of the McIntyre and McKittrik analysis..."
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Come now philly, even you should know that scientific peer-review should be done by scientists and not politicians!
During the republican majority in Washington, an investigation was performed at the behest of Congressman Joe Barton by a panel of three statisticians, chaired by Edward Wegman specifically addressing the MBH work. It was none other than a witch hunt and circus by the GOP, because stephen mcintyre (a mathematician) and ross mckitrick (a statistician) had published "corrections" to the work of 3 peer-reviewed climatologists: Mann, Bradley and Hughes.
This was nothing short of GOP political grandstanding in their long line of global warming DENIALISM,
In 2006 Joe Barton, chairman of the United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and Ed Whitfield, the chairman of the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, requested that Dr. Wegman prepare a report on the statistical validity of Michael E. Mann's "Hockey Stick graph". At the hearing, Dr. Wegman indicated that the report had only been peer-reviewed by those he selected.
The highly-partisan GOP Wegman report has itself been criticized on several grounds:
1.) The report was not subject to formal peer review by paleoclimatologists. At the hearing, Wegman listed 6 people that participated in his own informal peer review process via email after the report was finalized and said they had no objection to the subcommittee submitting it.
2.) The result of fixing some of the alleged errors in the overall reconstruction does not change the general shape of the most recent part of the reconstruction.
3.) Similarly, studies that use completely different methodologies also yield very similar reconstructions.
4.) The social network analysis is not based on meaningful criteria, does not prove a conflict of interest and did not apply at the time of the 1998 and 1999 publications. Such a network of co-authorship is not unusual in narrowly defined areas of science. During the hearing, Wegman defined the social network as peer reviewers that had "actively collaborated with him in writing research papers" and answered that none of his peer reviewers had.
5.) Gerald North, chairman of the National Research Council panel that studied the hockey-stick issue and produced the report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, stated the politicians at the hearing at which the Wegman report was presented "were twisting the scientific information for their own propaganda purposes. The hearing was not an information gathering operation, but rather a spin machine."
Dr. Michael Mann has himself said that the report "uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and a mineral-exploration consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton's 'panel' and the Wegman Report. These claims were specifically dismissed by the National Academy in their report just weeks ago."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a paper on 9 September 2008, Mann and colleagues published an updated reconstruction of Earth surface temperature for the past two millennia. This reconstruction used a more diverse dataset that was significantly larger than the original tree-ring study. In this work, they again claimed that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years, and that this result is robust to the inclusion or exclusion of the tree-ring dataset. In a PNAS response, McIntyre and McKitrick point out a number of perceived problems, including that Mann et al. used some data with the axes upside down. Mann et al. in reply assert that McIntyre and McKitrick "raise no valid issues regarding our paper" and the "claim that “upside down” data were used is bizarre".
Furthermore, Hans von Storch, a German climate scientist, Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, and (since 2001) Director of the Institute of Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, and a member of the advisory boards of the journals Journal of Climate and Annals of Geophysics, said
"we do not think that McIntyre has substantially contributed in the published peer-reviewed literature to the debate about the statistical merits of the MBH and related method. They have published one peer-reviewed article on a statistical aspect, and we have published a response – acknowledging that they would have a valid point in principle, but the critique would not matter in the case of the hockey-stick ... we see in principle two scientific inputs of McIntyre into the general debate – one valid point, which is however probably not relevant in this context, and another which has not been properly documented."
jtdwyer:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Simply put, my assertion was that an increase in CO2 without a commensurate decrease in oxygen would provide direct evidence that burning fossil fuels is not the primary cause of the CO2 increase."
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Your constant juvenile attacks are ludicrous, so please leave the schoolyard bullying behind.
Let's take a closer look at your HYPOTHESIS, "that burning fossil fuels is not the primary cause of the CO2 increase."
This seems to be a fact already proven, as I pointed out in my first reply to your original post. Seems that you needed to take offense in my statement saying that carbon sink destruction through deforestation was by far a larger cause of CO2 increase in our atmosphere than burning fossil fuels.
Now, it is also a fact that CO2 levels have been rising steadily since 1832, a 36% increase from 284 ppm to 387 ppm in 2009.
That's a fact!
Since your HYPOTHESIS involved oxygen levels in our atmosphere, in order to compare with the steadily rising CO2 level, why haven't you been researching the O2 side of your HYPOTHESIS instead of trying to start a pissing contest?
The Oxygen Crisis
Could the decline of oxygen in the atmosphere undermine our health and threaten human survival?
The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects.
Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis.
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Around 10,000 years ago, the planet's forest cover was at least twice what it is today, which means that forests are now emitting only half the amount of oxygen.
Desertification and deforestation are rapidly accelerating this long-term loss of oxygen sources.
The story at sea is much the same. Nasa reports that in the north Pacific ocean oxygen-producing phytoplankton concentrations are 30% lower today, compared to the 1980s. This is a huge drop in just three decades.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/13/carbonemissions.climatechange
Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall As Carbon Dioxide Rises
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that 20 year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing.
Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change.
In order to make sure that I was interpreting the data correctly I asked Dr. Keeling to clarify a few points. I asked him if the rise in carbon dioxide levels and the decrease in oxygen levels were proportional to each other in the sense that this would indicate that the decrease in atmospheric oxygen was a direct result of the buildup of carbon dioxide. His response:
It is roughly true that the oxygen depletion is equivalent to a displacement by carbon dioxide. But it is not exactly true. First, some of the carbon dioxide produced has been absorbed by the oceans. This process involves inorganic chemical reactions which have no effect on O2. Second, the O2:C combustion ratio of a fossil-fuel depends on the hydrogen content. The ratio varies from about 1.2 for coal, 1.45 for liquid fuels, and 2.0 for natural gas. Taking these factors together, we are losing nearly three O2 molecules for each CO2 molecule that accumulates in the air.
We are losing three oxygen molecules in our atmosphere for each carbon dioxide molecule that is produced when we burn fossil fuels. Studies of ice cores and recent data from direct atmospheric sampling have shown that there has been a 30% increase in carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial age. With that in mind I asked Dr. Keeling how much oxygen has been depleted from the atmosphere in that same time frame. He responded that, "A reasonable estimate for how much O2 has been lost since the beginning of the industrial revolution can be based on the estimated loss due to fossil-fuel emissions, which can be calculated from records of the amount of each fuel type burnt and its combustion ratio. Such records are not readily available online, but I have figures handy:
Total loss since start of industrial revolution
O2 depletion from fossil-fuel burning through 2004: 35.2 Pmol
CO2 depletion from fossil-fuel burning through 2004: 26.3 Pmol
Estimated O2 content of preindustrial atmosphere: 37050 Pmol
1 Pmol = 10^15 mol
"So the total estimated industrial O2 depletion on Jan 1, 2005 would have been (35.3)/(37050)x100 = 0.095% of the preindustrial amount."
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/
Sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Do you have any data to support your statement....NO. LOL "
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From Medscape Medical News
Pollution and Malnutrition to Increase Disease Worldwide
New York (MedscapeWire) Feb 23 — Coroners won't write "death by global warming," but that could be an ultimate cause as millions succumb to disease in an increasingly unhealthy environment, a Cornell University ecologist warns.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in a session on "Human Health and Climate Change," David Pimentel said global warming will create a favorable climate for disease-causing organisms and food-plant pests — but a much more challenging planet for humans struggling to survive.
"Right now the evidence of significant global climate change is minimal,but there are already noticeable increases in human diseases worldwide,"said Pimentel, a professor of ecology and of entomology in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "Most of the increase in disease is due to numerous environmental factors — including infectious microbes,pollution by chemicals and biological wastes, and shortages of food and nutrients — and global warming will only make matters worse."
Pimentel was the co-organizer, with Laura Westra of Sarah Lawrence College,of the human health session. Also speaking were Rita R. Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation; Jonathan Patz, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; and Paul R. Epstein, Harvard Medical School. The Cornelle cologist pointed to 7 ominous trends:
Today, infectious diseases cause approximately 37% of all deaths worldwide, but the estimated number of deaths due to a variety of environmental factors is higher and still growing. "Environmental diseases," he said, are attributed especially to organic and chemical pollutants, including smoke from various sources such as tobacco and wood fuels.
More than 3 billion people currently are malnourished — the largest number and proportion of humans in desperate need of food and nutrients inhuman history — and that number increases every year. Malnutrition increases susceptibility to infectious and environmental diseases, such as diarrhea and pollution-related illnesses, Pimentel observed.
A population increase to 12 billion in the next 50 years (based on current growth rates) will exacerbate the spread of disease globally, the Cornell ecologist said. Densely crowded urban environments, especially those without adequate sanitation and nutrition, should be of great public-health concern because they are sources of disease epidemics. Dengue fever, spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito breeding in old tires and other water-holding containers, is expanding rapidly in crowded tropical cities. With global warming, this mosquito and others will spread north, transporting dengue and other diseases from the tropics.
Waterborne diseases — already accounting for 9 of every 10 deaths from infectious disease in developing countries — will become more prevalent in a warmer, more polluted, and crowded planet. For example, only 8 of India's 3120 towns and cities have full wastewater treatment facilities. Hundreds of millions of people in India and other developing countries are forced to use untreated water for drinking, bathing, and cooking.
Today, air pollutants adversely affect the health of more than 4 billion people worldwide, and air quality in many places is getting worse. The number of automobiles worldwide is growing approximately 3 times faster than the world population. Meanwhile, an expanding world population is burning more fossil fuels for domestic and industrial purposes. The grim history of lung cancer — a 3-fold increase from 1950 to 1986 — could be repeated, Pimentel predicted, in developing countries. About 4 billion people in developing countries who cook with wood and coal over open fires suffer continuous exposure to smoke. Wood smoke is estimated to cause the death of 4 million children each year.
The more than 3 billion of the world's people who are malnourished increasingly are susceptible to infectious and environmental diseases, the Cornell ecologist said, noting that cropland has been diminished by 20% in the last decade, per capita fertilizer production has fallen by 23%, and per capita irrigation water supplies have dropped by 12%.
Increasing global climate change will result in a net loss of available food, the ecologist said. "Although there may be some benefits in crop production from warmer climates, these beneficial effects will be more than offset by the projected decline in rainfall in critical crop-growing regions like the US Corn Belt," he said. Crop losses from pest insects, plant diseases, and weeds will increase in a warmer climate,Pimentel suggested. As it is, insect pests, plant pathogens, and weeds cause the loss of more than 40% of the world's food — despite the application of 5 billion pounds of pesticides each year.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/411665
sisko:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Do you have any data to support your statement....NO. LOL"
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ALWAYS....especially for anti-science, religious DENIALISTS!
Climate change and insect-borne disease: Facts and figures
Sept. 9, 2009
Some researchers have called climate change the biggest health threat the world has ever faced. With good reason — it is now an unavoidable truth that the health of the planet is linked to the health of its people.
As the world heats up, ecosystems are visibly struggling to cope with the rapid ecological changes. Global warming has already triggered weather changes — from flooding and storms to heatwaves and drought — that are taking a heavy toll on people's health around the world.
In high-level meetings, developed and developing country governments are busy battling over emission targets. Meanwhile, the world's poor, who bear the biggest disease burdens, can expect soaring rates of ill health.
This increase will come partly from shifting population dynamics, as people flee flooded coasts or searing deserts for more habitable areas. A rise in diseases carried by insects, such as mosquitoes or ticks, could be a key factor. Climate influences these 'vectors' in many ways — from controlling the length of their life cycle to influencing breeding conditions.
Scientists broadly agree that climate change will affect insect-borne diseases, but the exact consequences remain uncertain. Whether warmer, wetter conditions make it easier for vectors such as mosquitoes to multiply and spread disease will depend on a much broader range of ecological and societal factors than just rainfall or temperature.
http://www.scidev.net/en/sub-suharan-africa/features/climate-change-and-insect-borne-disease-facts-and--1.html
Lakota - "Come now philly, even you should know that scientific peer-review should be done by scientists and not politicians!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. I am not your horse, so get off of it.
2. Wegman is not a politician.
3. Please research before sticking your foot in your mouth.
4. No thanks for the interaction. I deal with closeminded people daily. I dont have to read the rantings of some juvenile on a supposed science site who does not know how to follow a link or read.
Science News for anti-science, religious DENIALISTS
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPredicting Future Spread Of Infectious-Disease Vectors
ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — As global warming raises concerns about potential spread of infectious diseases, a team of researchers has demonstrated a way to predict the expanding range of human disease vectors in a changing world.
Researchers from Australia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have identified the key biological and environmental factors constraining a population of the dengue fever vector, the mosquito Aedes aegypti. In a study publishing online Jan. 28 in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, they report that climate changes in Australia during the next 40 years and the insect's ability to adapt to new conditions may allow the mosquitoes to expand into several populated regions of the continent, increasing the risk of disease transmission.
While the current study focuses on the Australian population of the dengue mosquito, these mosquitoes live around the world and present a global threat similar in scope to malaria, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Study author and UW-Madison zoologist Warren Porter says that the Australian findings are likely to apply to other worldwide mosquito populations as well.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127202042.htm
Lakota - "Come now philly, even you should know that scientific peer-review should be done by scientists and not politicians!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPhilJourdan:
"Wegman is not a politician."
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Yep....dealing with close-minded, anti-science, religious DENIALISTS on a daily basis gets old, but I keep trying!
Wegman, a statistics professor, was bought-and-paid-for by the republican congresscritters, during their anti-science witch hunt in 2006, where they had a need to support claims by two Canadians (an economist and a mineral-exploration consultant), with absolutely no paleclimatology experience.
Gerald North, chairman of the National Research Council panel that studied the hockey-stick issue and produced the report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, stated the politicians at the hearing at which the Wegman report was presented "were twisting the scientific information for their own propaganda purposes. The hearing was not an information gathering operation, but rather a spin machine."
The wegman report was not subject to formal peer review by paleoclimatologists. At the hearing, Dr. Wegman indicated that the report had only been peer-reviewed by those he selected.
Lakota- Your continually stupid statements combined with half credible science is damaging to your own case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. You continually call anyone who does not agree with AGW a religious denialist. WHY???? The generalization is obviously incorrect, offensive and does nothing to support your perspective. Many people of different religious perspectives and many who think religion is superstition do not believe the dire future you and other AGW zealots predict.
2. Quoting people's opinions about a future "dire situation" is not science. Even the quote you posed states there is minimal evidence.
"Right now the evidence of significant global climate change is minimal, said Pimentel, a professor of ecology and of entomology in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
So in spite of virtually no evidence to support some the quotes you post.....you continue to post them
3. The website you like to quote from Columbia University absolutely did use modelling for the estimated sea levels they assumed. The following are quotes from that site:
11,500-11,000 years ago, when sea level may have jumped by 28 m according to Fairbanks, although subsequent studies indicate it may have been much less.
Although the meltwater was previously believed to have come chiefly from Antarctica, a recent reconstruction by Tarasov and Peltier of ice sheet retreat using a glacial model calibrated by a variety of data points instead to a largely North American source.
The sea level data I posted was not based upon computer modelling and was from two independent sources. The Exxon sea level curve (which you prejudicially reject because Exxon is in the name (although it has more data supporting some of your claims), and the Hallam Curve. Both of these curves show that we are near to all time low sea levels. Both sets of data have been extensively reviewed and accepted based upon actual measurements.
http://jgs.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/138/6/735
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/272/5265/1097
What is unfortunate is that on many of the related issues on energy production I would agree you have some vaild points, but those get lost due to your rants.
Good comments!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for the links on the Sea Level. I was just commenting to someone on that point, and the links are very helpful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs to lakota, I think he does not know how to read (he cant seem to read any links you give him), but like the good sheep in Animal farm he can spout talking points.
WOW sports type betting on the environment. That has potential. Can you picture a betting line on how much sea level will rise by a certain date. I wonder if any AGW "experts" will offer up bets...LOL
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLakota----- Must Read!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 — the same year it shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore — that it was “very likely” that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 if current warming trends continued. The panel, the United Nations’ scientific advisory body on climate change, ranks its conclusions using a probability scale in which “very likely” means there is greater than 90 percent chance that an event will occur.
But it now appears that the estimate about Himalayan glacial melt was based on a decade-old interview of one climate scientist in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific evidence to support that figure is lacking.
Geez and anyone who doubts that AGW is a proven pending disaster for humanity is accused of being a religious denier by some people. LOL
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/science/earth/19climate.html?ref=science
I don't have time to read 186 comments so I'll just cast my vote. This is what happens when briliant but narrow-visioned scientists do not see the big picture; and the big picture is that we are about to run out of oil and the CO2 production problem (for those of you who still think it is a problem) will thereby take care of itself. You don't have to do a THING but pray we don't enter an overdue ice age when the CO2 starts to dwindle (along with fossil fuel).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real "tipping point" seems to be billions of dollars of left-wing money invested in this gamble and the investors want the payback to start flowing before people change their mind about this whole thing.
"However, let's say for just a second that global warming was not a huge threat - what would be the downside to cleaning up our planet and making our air breathable?" How about the price tag? 100 billion dollars per year given to AFRICA. Does nothing to actually "clean up" the environment and impoverishes the western world, the only societies that have these strange self-destructive thoughts in the first place.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, I ought to be terrified of the "Trafalgar's" of the world whose knowledge of science is so scant that he actually believes his own fearful stories and thus believe, as religiously as they claim otherwise, in any "FUD" given to them about global warming.
There is no "tipping point". Increased evaporation will produce clouds which reflect incoming solar energy stabilizing the system. Very likely that 2 degree rise y'all are so afraid of is probably just reaching stability for a while. You may also realize we are overdue for an ice age. I'll agree that the "Eocene Optimum" would be an unpleasant climate for humans and I am waiting for anyone to claim that this is even possible.
"I don't understand why denialists are so fervent in their beliefs. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not understand why warmists are so fervent in their beliefs.
I don't understand why I need to comment on what I do not understand! The realm of things I do not understand is VAST and I could easily fill thousands of SciAm messages commenting on things I do not understand.
Anyway, I'm being facetious. I *do* understand. We are being asked to pay 100 billion dollars to Africa on what looks a lot like a fraud. Nay, not "asked", there will be no asking. It will be a telling. The science is contaminated. Thumbs down!
Well now there's a shoe that fits many feet: "Nothing I, or anyone who has a clue, say would make a dent in your religious beliefs. Because of that, I choose to belittle and demean you because you CHOOSE to wallow in your ignorance. Evidence doesn't matter, being nice doesn't matter...so, I'm going to have fun and make fun of you idiots every time you come on here."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is the warmists that seem to be the most rude, most personal, most "ad hominem" and by so doing, reveal themselves to be LEAST SCIENTIFIC. It is the warmists who deny the impact of Climategate; your faith in Mann and Jones would make a priest blush with envy. "Denier" is no longer a measure of threads-per-inch on a bed sheet, no longer someone who has a doubt about global warming -- the "new" denier is someone that is still on the UEA warming train even after it has run over a cliff of its own making.
WAY more dangerous than global warming is food riots, fuel shortages, transportation failures, civil and global warfare long before the sea has risen so much as one meter.
Anyway, I'll heed good science. In the case of inductive science, it must acknowledge contrary points of view and acknowledge uncertainties where such things exist.
Example: November 1991 issue of SciAm and gun control. The incompleteness is that it fails to identify "homicide" is not synonymous with "murder" -- instead pushing a leftist political agenda and denying that some of those "homicides" are frightened women shooting their attackers. It also ignores up to 800,000 times per year that no crime is committed at all because the victim had a weapon. THAT makes it complete and it also changes the emotional impact of "gun" from a bad ugly thing to a defender of homes and nations. Same old gun, different point of view depending how you spin the "science."
For global warming, what makes it complete is the uncertainty, and the revelation of mines and mountain passes being uncovered by receding glaciers. We are returning to a previous state! NOW we are starting to get some good science and the smart people will wait and see, taking no side at all until we are more certain. You may say you dare not wait; so YOU give Al Gore and George Soros your money -- I choose not to do so right now. What will you do when the real problem comes and you have no money?
2 millimeters per year. That's incredible. Just in case a reader is unfamiliar, think the thickness of two dimes. How many billions of dollars of my money are you willing to spend to avoid it -- only then to discover you were wrong and we should have spend those billions on something else?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmong the good things are: 1) more and healthier plants (they breath CO2), and 2) more and healthier animals (they depend on the plants).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are mountains of scientific data that, when not denied by skeptics, demonstrate that warmth is good for biodiversity - for life. Go to the North Pole and count the number of plants and animal species. Then go the equator and do the same thing. Where is there more life?
The core assumption of the alarmists is incorrect. It's cold that's lethal. Ice Ages wiped out life several times in Earth's history. The Jurassic extinction was due to the cold caused by dust in the atmosphere that was kicked up by an asteroid collision. Cold killed the animals. Warmth has never done that, nor has CO2.
What's does a "Tree Line" tell us? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_line
It says that cold is inhospitable. Again, warmth is good for life. It's cold that threatens life.
A glacier is not a life form. It's retreat just means there's more warm habitat in which plants and animals can thrive. What is it exactly that we're missing when the glaciers shrink? Less barren acreage? We would like to have less habitat?
A warmer Earth means a healthier biosphere.