Global warming?

[cwsmith]

I wouldn't get hung-up on what it's being called... labels for any and everything change over the years. The only thing that can be certain is that whatever the facts, the trends, or rememberances and forecasts may be, there will always be naysayers.

But the point is that we can't do what we have done to the environment, for as long as we have done it, without some kind of reaction. The science of environmental study has shown indications of climate change over the centuries. Some of it is natural, as in the occurances of mini-ice ages over every three or four hundred years, or the historical change from tropic paradise to worlds largest desert as the Sahara now is. Maybe we are seeing some of that kind of change effecting us now, but then again, maybe what we are seeing is being created my things that we and previous generations have been doing.

However, we are also seeing much more carbon-dioxide creation today than in the recorded past; not only from industry output, but also from a decline in forestry areas and their carbon-dioxide absorption. Rising sea temperatures also release more CO2. The latter causes changes,not only in the jet stream, but also in ocean currents, and once the oceans reach a certain temperature level, that carbon-diozide transferance to atmosphere becomes irreversable... at least over short terms of several hundred years.

I'm almost 70 years old, and even I know that winters today are significantly less than they were in my boyhood. Yes, we may well see the occasional winter like this one, but overall the winters are far milder here in NY than they used to be. Last summer was the hottest on record, and this winter was the worst winter and lowest temperatures in over 20 years... so this current cold weather is highly unusual in the northern states for these times; BUT, it shouldn't be! Nor should Alaska be seeing such warm temperatures.

We're seeing significant loss of preciptation in California and the southwest, and actually throughout much of the south. The point is, the weather conditions are NOT as steady and annually predictable as they once were.

So, what is the point denial? Do we recognize the possibilies and make some attempt to curb pollution, or do we just say it's all a joke and continue on as usual. At what point does the "smell of smoke in your house" drive us to recognize the probabilities of fire, BEFORE such consumation is uncontrollable?

One cannot simply stop pollution in the last millenial seconds and expect everything to change back to what it should be; and we may well be speeding to that point where correction becomes too late to impact the future good.

CWS

[LCHIEN]

Global warming - my take

I have not before to my recollection posted my thoughts on so-called global warming here. Those of you who follow me here know I am very scientifically interested and follow all science and engineering news.

The first fact is that the earth is not stable although we as people would like it to be and do most of our planning based upon it staying the same. Thus changes are unwelcome. For may eons the earth has gone through periods of warmer and colder weather - periods when lush tropical climates created huge amounts of vegetation and tropical animals thrived. We have also undergone ice ages in which glaciers were primary occupants of the once tropical areas causing reformation of the earths surface. For these things we have our preset topology and buried resources of oil and gas to thank for, among other things.

Over the years the climate changed due to any number of factors - volcanoes throwing up clouds of dust or big meteor hits also throwing up clouds of dust that reflect the sun and lead to cooling. Also the solar output is not constant, the sun goes through sunspot cycles that have maxima and minima that last many years and lead to cooling and warming. We are currently entering a very deep solar minimum that will lead to some cooling it is thought based upon historical evidence. In the long term the suns output will vary even more, the earth may have magnetic pole shifts (every hundred or ten-thousands of years).

The key issue is what percentage of the warming is anthropogenic, or man-caused. I frankly have not seen convincing evidence that the human part is that high compared to natural changes... the correlation with the industrial age has no precedent and so may very likely be a coincidence - we are on a general warming trend. The models they show are by no means accurate and are in often great disagreement.

I think the reason why global warming is such a big deal:
1. very profitable for scientific and academic institutions - they have a huge amount of grants for study and its not something you can prove right or wrong right away. They have a vested interest to promote this
2. Media - they have this sensational end of the world thing and it sells a lot of papers.
3. Political - well I can't say much here but more controls fit the agenda of some political groups. WHat with carbon credits and all.

What we do to reduce carbon output is a real pickle. Here's some problems:
1. the approaches suggested are simply to reduce the rate of increase, not even decrease it. If we are really cooking in CO2 then we have to drastically cut generation of CO2 to say 25% of current annual production; we are not doing nearly enough. Doing so would literally put us back in the dark ages. It would immediately cause widespread famine, starvation, death, economic depression and diseases etc. I argue this would be more drastic than lowlands being flooded very slowly.
2. Application - developing countries want to burn lots of cheap hydrocarbon fuels, esp. coal to reach prosperity. they have a reasonable argument that control should be on the advanced nations as the less developed can't afford it and need to be able to catch up after all the developed nations polluted and carbonized for a century before they did.


The real fact is that we may get relief from mother nature in the form of the current sunspot cycle and perhaps from a large volcano or a large meteor.
Given how bad the carbon control solutions are we should make reasonable efforts to reach better efficiency and learn to live with the weather changes that are coming. All species that have ever gone extinct did that because they could not adapt to changing habitat.The rate of known extinctions may be going up but there have been thousands of extinctions and we cannot mourn them all. It's nature's way of adaptation. Man will be no different. We cannot expect that things will remain constant.

[Stytooner]

Thanks, Loring. Should be 66 F today. That is normal and expected.

[capncarl]

In the great scheme of things the report will probably read that for a brief time of only several thousand earth years this planet became infested with a repulsive creature that was very self distructed and eventually died out when it consumed all of earths resources. No advances in civilization are know to exist.