Dramatic temperature increase confirmed in the Artic…

I'm all for a less efficient air conditioner if it will protect our economy.

- Bush

I think Bush's plan is to let future generations deal with the broken air conditioner while he tries to keep the economy above water while also funding an unnecessary war in Iraq.

And, to think Americans re-elected this guy. He should go around screaming: "I will not protect nature if nature is intent on destroying our economy because of our polluted ways. " . Most of the time, it doesn't seem Bush has a firm grasp of cause and effect. But, 51% of Americans voted for him. Why? Cause he comes across as your average American who we all know isn't too bright.

 

Like I said, people are OVERREACTING. Seems to be a habit for some...

From the UK:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/s...1346489,00.html

Climate change claims flawed, says study

Tim Radford, science editor
Tuesday November 9, 2004
The Guardian

A team of scientists has condemned claims of climate catastrophe as "fatally flawed" in a report released today.
The study appears on the same day that 300 climate scientists warn that winter temperatures in Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia have risen by up to 4 C in the past 50 years - and could warm by up to 7 C.

Martin Agerup, president of the Danish Academy for Future Studies and colleagues from Stockholm, Canada, Iceland and Britain say in their report that predictions of "extreme impacts" based on greenhouse emissions employed "faulty science, faulty logic and faulty economics".

Predictions of changes in sea level of a metre in the next century were overestimates: sea-level rises were likely to be only 10cm to 20cm in the next 100 years. Claims that climate change would lead to a rise in malaria were not warranted.

Extreme weather was not on the increase but more likely to be part of a natural cycle, not yet understood by climate scientists. The report says a warmer world would benefit fish stocks in the north Atlantic and reduce the incidence of temperature-related deaths in vulnerable humans.

But the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, to be presented in Reykjavik today, tells a different story.

The Arctic scientists predict that north polar summer ice may decline by at least 50% by the end of this century. Some computer models predict almost the complete disappearance of ice.

This would have a devastating impact on indigenous populations, who use the ice for hunting and fishing. Warming could also lead to a "substantial" melting of the Greenland ice sheet. If this were to disappear sea levels would rise by about seven metres.

 

From Half Breed 3:34-35

 

Agerup always leads the loud counter-claims. He is an economist, not a scientist, and he has been strongly tied to Exxon funding on numerous occasions.

What an excellent counter source. Next.

 

Everybody knows scientists are a bunch of raving loonies, Bobby. If only they had some kind of code or guidelies by which to conduct their reasearch. I dream of a world that will one day have a system that I like to call the scientific "method." In this dream world, scientists might actually be useful.

 

Exactly. I like how scientist means expert on everything in today's world. Scientists are really just a group of people who have agreed to have the same opinion on a variety of things in order to have political clout. 400+ years ago, scientists thought the world was flat. 200 years ago scientists believed the best way to cure a disease was to let the bad blood out. Science is all relative to the time, our own version of the medicine man/shaman.

 

Because of scientists, we now know the world is not flat. Because of scientists, we now know how to cure disease with vaccine and penicillin. And because of scientists, we now know the world is getting warmer and facing big time problems in the next century.

Man, I really wish pepole can just stop debating and starting repairing the environment. When it's too late, it'd be too late.

 

Uh, hate to break it to you, but that "scientists thought the world was flat" nonsense is one of the biggest fallacies around. Humans have known that the earth was a round since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. The only dispute has been the size of it. Also, in that story of people telling Columbus the world was flat, it wasn't scientists, it was christian theologists. They didn't think the world was flat, but they thought the earth was the center of the universe.

I don't understand your disdain for scientists, but it's your right to b**** about them with your COMPUTER on the INTERNET.

 

halfbreed, don't team up with rimbaud. He's, like, an art historian or some crap, and he has a nasty grudge against me that traces all the way back to a shrimp quesadilla. Anyway, he's biased.

Scientists don't agree on much, actually, but here are a few starters: modern atomic theory, evolution, the fact that our environment is undergoing a warming trend that appears to be unmatched in tens of thousands of years of earth history, and the fact that fossil fuel emissions can only serve to warm the atmosphere. Anyway, saying scientists have some clique is kind of like saying NBA players have a clique for basketball and anybody should be able to suit up. There's a process of becoming one, and even if you make it onto the floor, if you bring weak ass **** into the lane, someone rejects it into the fifth row!

If someone wants to attack the report's speculation on the next 50 years, go for it (they are just projecting the current rates of warming). But the basic data, about the temperatures and the ice melts, etc, is as plain as day and is verified by multiple sources.

 

I don't understand the idea of ignoring the environment but trying to change the constitution to "deal with" the gay/lesbian "problem"

Sadly, I think more or less the same 50+% of people who voted for Bush are just as ignorant on the importance of the environment. And of course, there are those nuts out there (no offense) who would probably destroy the earth as quickly as possible if the Bible said to do it.

 

Thanks, B-Bob, for spelling it out in the simplest terms.
My kids, and their kids, have so much to look forward to. Assuming they aren't lost in a chaotic collapse, my grandchildren, and their comtemporaries, will look back at the decades preceeding the 21st. century, and the period we're in now, as one of environmental madness. They will read the statements of our government, look at that government's actions, and wonder how we could be so blind.

they paved paradise
and put up a parking lot
with a pink hotel, a boutique
and a swinging hot spot
don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what youve got
til its gone
they paved paradise and put up a parking lot

they took all the trees
and put them in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to seem 'em
that you don't know what youve got
til its gone
they paved paradise and put up a parking lot

hey farmer farmer
put away that DDT now
give me spots on my apples
but leaves me the birds and the bees
please!
that you don't know what youve got
til its gone
they paved paradise and put up a parking lot

~Joni Mitchell




Keep D&D Civil!!

 

Nice Mitchell reference, Deck!

But you know, I don't subscribe to the madness outlook. Who can blame humans for looking only 10 to 20 years out? We just don't live very long, and there are a bunch of present-day pressures. People to feed, energy to generate, families to raise, and an economy to bolster. It's really sad, but it makes sense.

And if someone says "hey, you don't *know* exactly what will happen. maybe the earth will just warm a little bit and then stop and the oceans will only rise a little, and we'll all have more usable land in the north," you have to say "yeah, okay maybe." Nobody really knows what will happen 25 years from now. It's a very complicated, non-linear system. Most scientists say that's a good reason to quit messing with it, but it also means we're all in for surprises. The trends look alarming to most scientific observers, but then there's a non-zero chance that the oceans, for instance, start a massive uptake of CO2 if they warm a bit (random and whimsical example from B-Bob, who does *not* work in the field).

It would take a lot of difficult, unpopular guts for a government to lead the world's top polluter to sign Kyoto and then tell the nation that we're going to have to tighten our belts, drive tiny cars or ride bikes, and expect much lower GNP numbers for a long time. It's political suicide (sort of like Carter's honesty back in the day). Our system is really calibrated to short-term profits and quick growth; there's not much that's built in for sustainability, as far as I can see.

Again, I don't think the oil companies and their political representatives are stupid. I just think it's all pretty sad and scary. If it's going to change, seems to me it will have to be a grass roots level. A bold president would lose his/her job and his/her policies would be reversed after four years, assuming the policies even made it through congress. And bold earth-conscious oil companies will lose market share to oil companies who focus on the present. However, if every citizen learned more about the situation and started thinking of their grandchildren, then they could cast votes and make purchases that reflected that kind of thinking. But that's tough. I for one haven't given up my car and volunteered a pay cut in order to promote better pollution standards. Hell, I could take a bus to work now across town (takes one hour, at best) instead of my car (ten minutes), but I want to save the time. Finally, I suppose what I'd like from the president's office is a recognition of the issue and some bully pulpit support of the data; that could go a long way to raising people's awareness instead of denying the problem. Even if you don't sign Kyoto, use the office to inform people of what's happening, what may need to change in the future of our nation.

 

It's interesting living in the most environmentally "aware" area of Texas for the last 24 years, and having visited here since the mid-'60's, and seen the incredible change that has occured, despite some really serious efforts by some politically powerful local groups to do something about it. Want to build a giant Lowe's Hardware box on top of the Barton Springs recharge zone, and the hard fought for local regs won't let you? Just get a politician in the Legislature who's from an area in, say, the Panhandle, to carry a bill that exempts that bit of land from local regs. It won't mention Austin, but the way it is written, it won't apply anywhere else. This has happened here time and again.

I agree that we tend to look just a little ways down the road, but even when we try to look farther, someone puts up a roadblock. The political problem isn't just in Washington, it's on every level of government in this country. When "we" elect those who clamor for states rights and local control, and then those people usurp those state and local rights on the federal level, or the local rights on the state level, it gets frustrating. The consequence, here, in any case, is looking around and seeing an Austin harder and harder to recognize. Put that on a state, national, and international level, and you have a runaway train of exploitation and development that is leading to something we can get a wiff of now, but is just amorphous enough for politicians to claim, "there is no need to worry, all this is overblown."

We need to elect people who will take some risk with their political capitol to enact real change to protect the environment we have left. Instead, we seem to be going 2 steps backwards for every step forwards.




Keep D&D Civil!!

 

The water on earth is in one of three states at all times. Some liquid, some solid, some vapor. But the SUM is still the same. No one is "making water from scratch" since creation... or the big bang process if that's your speed.

These states, and cycles of their respective ratios, will fluctuate, but will generally stay in the same proportions to each other.

If ice recedes, it will not make the water levels increase... it will just displace itself.

Look at a glass of ice water. If the ice, solid water, all melts, (ice just displaces liquid water) it will just replace it's occupied space as liquid.

9th grade physical science would help dispell most of the chicken little theories out there.

These patterns (warming vs. cooling) also change over a 50 year period. In the course of recorded weather history, man never made an impact before... why think we make such a huge one now? We've been "industrialized" since the 18th century - with FAR, FAR worse emissions throughout most of the 1800-1940's...

so... back to our little lesson.

Water evaporates (from the process of melting from a solid, turning to a liquid) into vapor... condensation occurs... precipitation occurs, either as solid or liquid... repeat.

Duh.

Dramatic, in real terms, to me, would be a 40 degree shift from -20 to +20... in a matter of a decade.

Furthermore if an iceberg the "size of Connecticut" melts, or more appropriately the "volume" of Connecticut... then there will still be the same volume of water total... some will evap to become rain or snow eventually. - which is how the earth "waters" those other areas of the planet in need of it, in the long term... and it is cyclical.

Environmentalist nuts glory in the wonders of the earth's natural weather patterns... and yet somehow forget that they did not EVER control them, and they freak out for some reason when they begin to see that they still CANNOT control them.

The truth is in simple high school science.

 

IROC it, you leave me speechless. I retreat in awe and humiliation.




Keep D&D Civil!!

 

Iroc it,
To take your post respectfully.

1. Yes, *floating* ice can melt and not raise the water level (your analogy to the ice water glass). However, have you ever poured melted water from a land-locked glacier into the glass? (You can pour water from a nearby faucet into your glass of icewater to accurately simulate this). You will see a startling effect! All the estimates of rising oceans are from glacial melt, not the floating ice melt.

2. The current trend, if you study the ice core data, started its strange deviation from the earth's temperature history in the late 1800's -- oh, that's right, after the industrial revolution had really started churning. You should have a look at the data; tens of thousands of years of noisy fluctuation and then this spike over the last hundred years or so. Have humans definitely contributed to this weird spike? Can't say for certain. Will smoking give you cancer? Not necessarily. Very similar argument at this point.

3. Your data on emissions are interesting. Urban areas were worse, yes, in times past, but we're talking total volume of CO2 and others. If you have data showing that we've lowered the total volume of CO2 emissions per year, world wide, I'd like to see them.

4. I agree that a 40 degree shift (F or C) in one decade would bring the entire world to absolute agreement. (!) But the job of scientists is not to wait for such an event and then report the obvious; it's to tell people about important trends that they *measure*. Again, the report has a few predictions, but it is full of *measurements*. Would you want to hear that astronomers had detected an asteroid, a year away, with the hope that we might figure out a way to destroy it? Or would you rather wait until everyone could see the asteroid overhead?

 

Ice is less dense than water. It floats on top of water. When they melt, water level rises. This is beyond basic high school science. This is obvious to every five year old who's ever looked into their cup of Coke.

Worse yet, melted glacier, instead of being a supply of freshwater, turn into unuseable salt water. The problem with all of this is that your grandchildren deserve every poisonous fruit that you sow now, but mine don't.