Yesterday, it was 72. Today is was 68. Tomorow they’re expecting 70’s again.
I went camping last weekend, and it was great. I saw an otter catch and eat a carp. I saw bald eagles and golden eagles. Two owls maintained an hours-long, late night conversation. A woodpecker chose a hollow, dead tree near our campsite to rap out reveille. I cooked breakfast, and the aroma of bacon sizzling over a campfire still makes my mouth water like nothing else. The water was icy cold and a great medium for chilling beer and Mountain Dew. My sleeping bag kept me nice and warm, but the tip of my nose got cold.
And, what’s better for reflection than sitting around a campfire at night? It seems like your “soul” is closer to the surface at times like that.
So, if this beautiful weather is the result of global warming, then all I can say is…
I once was not worried about g.w. because I figured since the CO2 was once in the air, trapped by plants and burried, we are just putting it back. but lately I have been hearing about the non biological orgin of oil, and if true, this CO2 was never in the atmosphere, so what will happen if we keep adding new CO2?
well maby we will soon launch a solar shade to cool things back down.
I’ll let the climatologists argue about whether or not global warming is real – but what happened to the Great Big Nasty Incipient Ice Age of the late Seventies? By now Angelenos were supposed to be learning how to use snowshoes…
Or maybe, perhaps, we just like playing Find The Bogeyman with every imaginable future event. Humans. Go figure.
Thank you, CG, for proving that I’m not the only one in the world who remembers this. For a while, I was having doubts about my sanity.
I recommend to you all here P.J. O’Rourke’s book, All the Trouble in the World, or, The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty. Among other things, there are a number of sections which suggest the need to take the global-warming panic with a grain of salt. Mr. O’Rourke writes with a wry style that I like quite a bit, and quotes some interesting numbers to back up his viewpoints. Of course, my cynicism demands that I take his cynicism with a grain of salt, too. No wonder my blood pressure is so high.
A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain.
As I sit here watching the snow fall to a height taller than me I’m sooooooooo jealous you got to go camping sigh… we were having beautiful spring weather until today… now mr. winter has decided to find us. Want me to knit you a nose warmer LOL
We are, each of us angels with only one wing,and we can only fly by embracing one another
Yea, funny thing about that whole ‘Coming Ice Age’, eh? At University we were doing design charrettes predicated on the ‘evidence’ that humanity would need to radically alter the built environment in the face of ‘Global Cooling’.
I can’t help but notice that a bunch of the same folks what authored the global cooling ‘studies’ twenty years ago are now making their money authoring global warming ‘studies’. Maybe we can merge the whole of their work and balance things out . . .
Dr. Watson
“We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” – Thomas Edison
Just a moment of seriousness… (Good grief, I’ve been doing this alarmingly often lately, haven’t I?)
Way back in the seventies, the processes governing the planet’s periodic heating and cooling were not nearly so well understood. Nobody had thought to examine polar ice for the prehistoric CO2 record, the connection between ocean temperatures and weather patterns were still rather murky, stuff like that. Jumping to the wrong conclusion was hideously easy to do. Now, it’s the nineties (or rather, it was), we’ve got advanced spectrography, satellite-mounted infrared cameras, measuring buoys scattered hither and yon over the bounding main, and we’ve got long-term weather prediction down to a science.
We think.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled wise-ass remarks.
Heck is where you go when you don’t believe in Gosh.
So, what’s the big worry? I, for one, feel we could all use a change. Post-apocalyptic society looks so interesting! Now, I just have to figure out how to combat the mutants that will inevitably rise up out of the ensuing turmoils…
Oh yeah, easy to say now until you’re reduced to wearing cow skulls for hats and dressing like Fred Flintstone. Having to take the family M-16 out to hunt breakfast can get real old.
Hey, Dr. Watson, everyone knows that becoming a scientist is the way to become rich. :rolleyes:
BTW, the discussion about future cooling hasn’t died out, although it has certainly been swamped by the global warming debate. Please take a look here for a “cool” vision of the future.
There is a general misunderstanding about what global warming really means. Yes, the mean annual temperature of the planet increases. No, warming is not ubiqitous but regional (some areas will experience cooler temps than normal). A key difference in temperature patterns is that night-time temperatures remain higher than normal.
neuro-trash grrl said:
Despite all the modern technology, coming up with the wrong prediction is still hideously easy to do, simply because there’s so much about weather and climate processes that we understand poorly or not at all.
Greater numbers of observations can help immensely (which is why stormchasers looking for tornados are not out of a job). However, the distribution of reliable weather observations on the planet as a whole is pretty patchy. Weather can be more difficult to forecast for the southwestern US and Europe, for example, because there are far fewer observations in the wide expanse of the oceans to the west of those areas.
Looking back in time, we are forced to rely on proxies in lieu of direct instrument measurements. Reliability of proxies and the completeness of the geologic record examined have a lot to do with whether we are getting an accurate portrait of past climate.
Future climate prediction is difficult because: a) we don’t fully understand how climate processes combined to create past climates, and b) the computer models used to make predictions have to be parameterized in order to compensate for the dearth of knowledge and computing power. It doesn’t mean that we can’t make reasonable estimates, but one has to acknowledge that multiple possibilities for future climate exist.
k2dave said:
Nearly all the world’s CO2 - approx. 60,000,000 billion metric tons (BMT) - is locked up in carbonate rocks and organic-rich sediments. The next largest reservoir is the ocean (38,000 BMT), followed by terrestrial biota + soil (2400 BMT), then the atmosphere (748 BMT). The amount of CO2 in fossil fuel is about 5000 BMT. The high levels of atmospheric CO2 early in Earth’s history are probably now contained largely within the carbonates.
If we add CO2 to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, then we increase the amount of one of nature’s better greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. What’s not clear is exactly how the Earth will respond to an anthropogenic influx - not all the sinks for atmospheric CO2 are known.
Thomas Gold is pretty much a maverick when it comes to believing in the non-biological origins of oil & natural gas. If he is ever proven correct, we would have to add this additional carbon to the current carbon cycle. I would guess that if it existed, and showed any signs of wanting to seep into the atmosphere on a timescale that would affect humans, we would have found them.
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Gosh, I love it when it’s warm enough to sleep with the windows wide open…
