1-2 degrees F over the next 100 years?!? I think life can adapt to that. We have -60F wind chill right now. And checking weather patterns I have seen both higher highs and lower lows recorded BEFORE the Industrial Revolution. It ain’t carbon pollution, folks. Nature doesn’t operate at Cable-Modem speeds. Nature runs in cycles, like everything else. And our paltry 60-90 years is less than a blip on ole Ma Earth’s schedule. You know the “mom” I’m talking about. The one that has vastly underused deposits of natural gas my furnace runs on. (In fact, running too much the last few days) Anyone heating with gas will know how much we’re spending to keep the place friendly to penguins.
This rant was concocted when I heard yet another dipshit New York reporter whining about the +20 F weather being “frigid”. Shit, I thought NY/NJ folks were tough. Guess it’s just in movies. What set me over the top was…you guessed it. AlGore in New York during one of the coldest snaps in the city’s history giving a speech on…hold on to your hats…global warming!
Hey Junior (yes, he is legally Abert Gore, Jr…while the prez is G. W. Bush…no Junior)explain how we just set a new record LOW when the Earth is warming. I can find a cite if needed, I heard about one “study” saying the UK will be in the Ice Age again in a decade or 3.
Kyoto? Sure, I’ll sign on as I hate depending on other countries for our energy. With one qualification. Get the BILLIONS (as opposed to our 300 million) people living in China and India to sign up as well. Pollution has as much respect for American shores as the millions of…well, you know. (Trying to keep this vitriol civil)
This went much further than I intended, but had to get it out of my system. Did I mention how Friggin COLD it is?
It’s nice that you got your little political rant in, because that’s the whole substance of your complaint.
To put it simply, global warming is NOT a mild change in temperature of a degree or so. Global warming is the average temperature of Earth rising, and Earth is a big place. Ironically, it is possible to have colder weather because of this- the weather patterns are disrupted by the increase in heat and storms are more prevalent. Storms are one method of dissipating heat.
Global warming threatens to change processes that we don’t fully understand, with results that can’t be forecast reliably. It has been said that on the average summers will be hotter, winters will be colder and storm seasons more active.
The best part of the opinion page in my local newspaper when i was young was readng a diatribe on how global warming is a fraud whenever there was cold weather. It was fun going over how the neanderthal brain tried to use a local weather pattern to justify throwing out decades of research because their feeble mind couldn’t comprehend the big picture. I see they have now graduated to this site as well. Good Times!
Could the site possibly be influenced by their bias? Hmmm.
If I point you to a site talking about the myriad health benefits of tofu, and you discover that the site is run by the National Soybean Farmer Association, you might be a wee bit suspicious, right? Especially if the American Dietetic Association is warning about the perils of tofu consumption?
For that analogy to work, of course, there would need to be a reputable group of scientists (not pundits, not idealogues, but scientists) who warned that global warming was real.
Now, you may point to alternate studies elsewhere. My question is this: are you a qualified climatologist? If you are, then you may have the expertise to analyze the science offered by each side. If not, then I no more trust your opinion on who’s right than I trust your opinion on whether echinacea is effective at preventing colds: you lack the training and knowledge.
Obviously, look at the research yourself; and if you see obvious frauds being perpetrated, be suspicious. But if you don’t see frauds, then try to figure out whether one side has an ax to grind.
In this case, we have the vast majority of the trained climatologist community on one side of the debate, and a handful of industry-hired scientists on the other side.
duffer, you cracked the case. Scientists and most non-stupid people are all concerned about global warming solely because we think we’ll be too hot once the average temperature of the Earth goes up a few degrees. It’s pretty much just a comfort issue, which we’re getting all hysterical about because we like to complain about made-up things. Really, I can’t believe it took this long for someone to put two and two together.
:rolleyes:
Oy. Either educate yourself with actual facts and science or accept your ignorance and stop assuming you understand a complex issue after skimming a single article.
That’s pretty much the minimum rise shown by any of the climate models. Others predict a 5 F rise, some as much as 10 F. You really want to see your summer temperatures go up an average of 10 degrees?
But, based on your rant, you probably don’t understand what an “average” actually means, or have the foggiest understanding of statistics or scientific analysis.
Cripes, even Bush admits Global Warming is a reality, even if he refuses to do anything significant about it. At this point, those who don’t recognize the seriousness of the issue are just sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “LA LA LA I CAN"T HEAR YOU LA LA LA . . .”
Giraffe, my opinions on this is in no way based on scanning one article. Just thought I’d offer up something before the “cite” bomb was lobbed. What I was trying to point out (obviously inadequately) is that over 6 billion years of the Earth being here, we cannot destroy the entire ecosystem in a century. Again, with the tech we have today, a month seems long, but just a few decades ago it took up to a week to get a letter from Bangor, ME to Tempe, AZ. Today, it takes microseconds. I’m talking perspective here.
Here’s a real life example. In 1986 I was but a 7th grader in the geology/Earth sciences class of a hippie.
Yes, he was a hippie. He told us he was, and made no bones about it. It’s not name-calling.
In '86 he showed us how the Earth was still in the tail end of the Ice Age. (See, eras don’t happen in a half hour format, they take time) How many of you had heard of Global Warming in 1986? Part of it the natural cycle of cooling and warming trends. Trends, of course, being longer than a 6 week run of a popular song.
I wish I could say I’m fearful of trashing the planet. I just don’t have the hubris to think I can. And as much as I love debating firend and foe, I’m not putting any money on anyone else being important enough to kill the planet. Nature takes care of itself. If we screw it up, we’re doomed. Kinda makes me think that maybe it’s not the planet eco’s want to save, but rather themselves. Selfish or hypocritical?
So Duffer, you’re effectively saying because you can grasp the idea of ** Geologic time** it’s an effective excuse which shields you from the fact that Global Warming exists. Oh, and because a “hippie” taught you that we were still in an ice age in 1986(it actually ended in the early 1900’s, and was called the “Little Ice Age”).
Convenient.
No, of course we’re not going to “kill the planet.” Not even the asteroid that hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous was able to do that. But it took life many millions of years to recover after that event. And humans are well on the way to having a worse impact on the diversity of life than anything else that has happened to the planet since then. It’s clearly you that lack perspective. The current global warming going on is much much more rapid than any other increase that has taken place over the past several million years.
Global warming will very seriously fuck up a lot of ecosystems much worse than we already have, and kill thousands, possibly millions, of species that are unable to adapt. This is even beyond the species we are already killing off due to deforestation, pollution, etc. I am not speaking out of my hat. I am a professional scientist who has been involved in this issue for decades.
We are not going to kill ourselves off by any means, but we are going to make things much less pleasant for a good percentage of the human population. It seems to me to be common sense, rather than selfish and hypocritical, to try to prevent this from happening.
I convinced myself of the reality of global warming very simply. I went to a site that swore it wasn’t happening, but that also linked to a database of weather stations around the US (possibly around the world, I don’t remember) and that ran an instant trend analysis on the historical observations of a given weather station.
Good stuff, thought I, so given that the arguments I’d recently been reading were along the lines that the observed warming was a part of the “urban heat island” effect (urbanized places being warmer than the surrounding countryside), I decided to take two rural states and compare them: Oklahoma and Montana.
Oklahoma actually did show gradual cooling over time in the majority, but not an overwhelming majority, of its weather stations. Montana, OTOH, showed major heating in the overwhelming majority of its weather stations. This is significant, because the theory predicts that the areas closer to the respective poles, North and South, will heat up more quickly than the middle latitudes. And that’s precisely what my little run of tests showed, to a startling degree, I might add.
Ok, I guess I need help on how to think about this.
Humans are the worst of evolution. We exploit everything we see as an advancement to our own comfort. It’s -30F here now, but I’m pretty cozy in my home thanks to the overworked furnace. The wood for the rough finish and the joists may well have come from NW Canada. (Beleive it or not, Americans do like Canadians.) They grow some good trees up there, when I drove a flatbed, I made a lot of money. If a housing development goes up to the inconveniance (sp?) of a species of mice, they will evolve. That’s nature, survival of the fittest. If they can thrive where my theoretical house is being built, they sure as shit can thrive 100 yards away. If not in the basement.
We suck. Kill us all.
-OR-
We bipeds have become the most advanced species the planet has ever seen, (Note that I am NOT taking potshots at anyone by giving exclusions). In the 6 billion years the planet has been circling the Sun, we somehow found a way to destroy it in less than 100 years. Man, that proves our awesome power! Now c’mon, if we can raise the ave temp by 5 or 10 degrees, let’s do it. Let’s go here! Gimme something to work with! First area to be affected by the naturally occuring warming trend is equatorial areas? My wife and I are in line for adopting 2 brothers in Brazil. (How dedicated are you to helping people while flaming me?) I just don’t see how anyone can think the ecosystem can be destroyed in a matter of a few decades.
Now, back to duffer bashing.
BTW, it’s still really cold. North Dakota cold. Can’t you warm us up by idling your cars? We need some greenhouse gasses. Remove the catalytic converter if you can.
duffer, your argument is completely circular. The fact that the global climate up until now has changed on very slow timescales does not mean that it can’t change faster. Quite the opposite: it is a system which needs a great deal of time to respond to incremental changes – abruptly changing the temperature can in fact break it, or severely damage it.
One example: we’re putting a lot of carbon dioxide into the air. It’s heating things up. When water warms up, it can’t absorb carbon dioxide nearly as efficiently. So we have more CO[sub]2[/sub] in the air and the planet heats up more. Repeat. This is what is known as a positive feedback cycle. It is bad. Similarly, the oceanic phytoplankton which are responsible for half the photosynthesis on the planet are adapted to the average water temperatures that have been around for the last million years or so. Kill them off and we have even more carbon dioxide heating things up.
Ignorance like yours is dangerous. Refusing to do anything about the problem when we’re the number one producer of greenhouse gases is idiotic.
I realize you are really just ranting about the weather and not looking for more facts about global warming. But what the hell…
One consequence of the warming will almost certainly be the disruption of ocean currents. The Gulf Stream is responsible for the relatively warm climate of Europe (considering its far north latitude), as well as much of the climate of the US Eastern Seaboard. The lack of this warm current would result in those climates getting colder as other regions get hotter.
Well it wasn’t intended to be a rant on the current weather today. I seem to have a 3 to 4 post Bell-Curve on getting to what I meant. The sub-sub-zero temps we have are part of nature. We get some chilly -30 days with a wind chill of -60. (BTW, all schools were open and we don’t have the ususal school busses, kids walk to school) Hey, we’re Nort Dakoatan’s!
Humans have been around for approx 50,000 years. Can anyone with a degree in geology (preferably a PHD) tell me how you figure the temps from a million years ago? How about 3 million?
Here’s the breakdown of why I say the last century is irrelevant.
Earth has been here for 6,000,000,000 years. Humans 50,000 years.
This means for every year humans have been here there are 12,000 years we haven’t been. Now let’s take 1900 as the the milestone of modern tech. i.e. coal, oil, etc.
Each year equates to 60,000,000 years in real time. Are you starting to see how truly insignificant we are when we speak of being the party responsible for “climate change”?
Again, I’m not so arrogant to think that we mortals have more than a miniscule impact on what happens to our blue heaven. Natural law doesn’t follow our “gimme now” culture. Some things take a loooonnnggggg time. And anyone who has studied physical science knows that major changes to anything as old as 6,000,000,000 years doesn’t happen in even a few generations.
We may just be in a warming trend.
BTW: It’s still really cold. Please fire up all cylinders you have.
