This would make sense but I don’t have the evidence at hand to say other wise.
But I will say this. My father has worked for environmental engineering companies all his life and the one thing he told me about “Global Warming” was where is happening, it is incorrectly named.
This phenomenon should be called “Global Climate Change”, as there are places where the average temperature is actually dropping. Again, I don’t have the evidence at hand to back this up, but I do like to consider my father a credible source of this sort of info.
An interesting observation made by the lovely Skulldigger (my wife), who had to deal with late Pleistocene/early Recent climate shifts in her paleoanth. studies:
On a regular basis, a short period of warming causes the Arctic Ocean to thaw, becoming cold water with icebergs rather than a frozen ice sheet. This is presently happening in the Chukchi/Beaufort Sea area north of the Bering Strait.
This historically allows a great deal more moisture to be picked up by Arctic air, the tundra-frozen ocean area being climatologically a desert with fairly low humidity.
The net result is that winter snowfall exceeds summer meltoff in the areas surrounding the Arctic Ocean.
Long term (time scale on the average of a century or two) this results in continental icecaps. Which means a glacial advance and an Ice Age, or at minimum a “mini-Ice Age” of the sort that drove the Vikings out of Greenland. In more southerly areas, droughts and shifts in precipitation patterns occur.
When the Arctic Ocean freezes over again, the process reverses.
So, ironically, global warming may lead to another ice age, or at least a colder hemispheric climate.
Hello gentleman. I see Boris B and I are at odds again, though over an unrelated subject. Funny how attitudes seem to come in packages.
There are a lot of sensible attitudes in evidence here. The science of global climate is heavily politicized, and caution in digesting the conclusions is warrented. Further, the press ignores the anti-warming stance of what appears to be a majority of scientists. After the kyoto (spelling) treaty a petition denouncing the global warming “science” was circulated and now has accumulated some 30,000 signitures, including the usual collection of nobel prize winners. Not a word in the mainstream press, which continues to claim that global warming is accepted science.
Others here have observed that the earths climate has not been stable, even and especially in the pre-man era. There is no reason to expect that it will become so.
Lastly, even if there is a global warming “problem” and it is caused by man, there will undoubtedly be decades if not centuries to observe and study before we need consider ANY action. The recent UN pronouncement, as I understand it, is based upon computer models that fail miserably if used to “predict” the weather patterns of the 20th century based upon 20th century data. If a model can’t “predict” the present, it certainly can’t be relied upon to predict the future.
And, incidentally, does anyone out there recall the predictions of another ice age that were prominant in the 60s? Or Naders predictions that nuke plants would boil rivers dry and leave the planet a barren radioactive wasteland? Or that polution would leave the planet uninhabitable by the 21st century?
Agreed with some of the other posters that the subject may be too politicized to discuss sensibly, but would like to add a few thoughts:
To say that the amount of greenhouse gases added by man’s activities is insignificant because it is only 2% of the total is wrong. If this pushes the total only slightly above the amount that can be reduced by natural means for a sustained period, the result, long-term, will be increased greenhouse warming.
Global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels cannot be a long-term (geologically speaking) problem, due to the simple fact that the stocks are finite and most estimates have them running out within 50-200 years (depending on the resource type and estimates). Assuming additional time for the system to return to equilibrium, one could imagine that GW might have a term of, say, 500-750 years total.
My reading on the subject indicates that, again speaking in geologic time frames, variations in the sun’s energy output are likely to have been more significant than changes in greenhouse gases in affecting climate (except, of course, for the transition to an oxygen-rich atmosphere to begin with). That’s not to suggest that GW may not be a problem, but that it is part of a much larger system. Sorry I don’t have a cite for this view, but I believe it has been discussed in Scientific American in the past couple of years.
I personally consider global warming, if it exists, to be a sort of Indian Summer; we don’t need to work up alternative energy schemes strictly because of GW, but because we will inevitably run out of economically viable fossil energy at some point.
What Would Jesus Drive? Seems like he’d walk, frankly.
I agree with several previous posters:
(1) it is unclear that the climate is warming
(2) man’s role in global warming is likely to be minor
(3) more study is needed before we decide to spend a lot of money
Having said this, perhaps people ought to consider some positive effects:
(1) Siberia and Northern canada might well become the new breadbasket of the world
(2) New England replaces Miami Beach as the “fun/sun” spot of the Eastern USA
(3)the Peruvian coastal plain turns from desert to green
(4) less energy consumption (we have warmer winters and cooler summers)
So, global warming might not be all that bad!
A scientific possibility (yes, not a certainty) is that our global warming via CO2 production (fossil fuel burning) could result in the release of the encapsulated methane beneath the oceans (a stockpile of material larger than all fossil fuels). Supposedly, the last time there was a major release of this methane, there was a mass extinction due to the resulting atmospheric warming and dissolved oxygen depletion in the oceans.
Anyway, my point is that we are not limited by our standard fossil fuels. We will likely begin mining these methane resources someday.
I think there is a pretty reasonable chain of evidence that the Earth is warming to some degree due to the influence of mankind. The big questions are:
[ul]
[li]Is mankind’s effect on global temperature significant? Does the Earth have a compensating mechanism?[/li][li]What are the costs to humans if it turns out that the[/li]models are correct and the Earth warms 10 degrees in the next 150 years?
[li]What will it cost to prevent this?[/li][/ul]
None of these are easy questions, but the one I want to focus on is the cost of prevention, both in terms of money and human life. Far too many environmentalists adopt the precautionary principle, which basically says, “We don’t know, but let’s not take any chances.” The problem with this is that environmental regulation has costs, both in human lives and in money.
Banning CFC’s has led to a sharp spike in food poisoning and stomach cancer deaths in the 3rd world, because the price of refrigeration has gone up to the point where some areas who could once afford it no longer can. Banning DDT has caused millions of deaths from Malaria. Before you can make a rational judgement about which action you should take, you have to consider BOTH the costs and benefits. Since the environmental movement typically only looks at the benefits, it tends to be extreme in its advocacy of pro-environment lawmaking.
Meeting the requirements of the Kyoto accords will be fiendishly expensive. That means less money for cancer research, other environmental programs, etc. And wealth will ultimately be the saviour of the environment - with enough money, we can clean up anything, and we can offload ‘dirty’ industries into space or other locations. Any environmental law that makes us poorer does some damage to the long-term environment. The question is whether the gains from that law outweigh the liabilities. Again, environmentalists rarely consider this.
I’ve heard about sudden releases of CO2 from African lakes which have asphyxiated large numbers of people, but I’m not sure what you are referring to here, nor how burning of fossil fuels would result in a methane release from the oceans. Could you expand on this a bit?
I unfortunately do not have a lot of time today to discuss some of the above posts point for point, so for those interested I’d like to direct your attention to a discussion of global warming we had in GQ not too long ago.
Sam Stone said:
I’d really be interested in seeing cites for the two assertions you make in that paragraph, especially the one regarding deaths owing to increased price of refrigeration.
I would agree that cost do need to be taken into consideration when considering environmental issues. However, most of the measures that could be taken to reduce anthropogenic contributions to global warming have other benefits (often human-health related) that also should be factored into your cost-benefit anaylsis, and it’s been my experience that conservative folk do not include such benefits in THEIR analyses.
Rocket88 said:
In the last couple of decades, scientists have become aware of the fact that potentially huge amounts of methane (estimates are on the order of 10[sup]15[/sup] gigatons) are locked up in gas hydrates (frozen gas and ice molecules) in some parts of the ocean floor, as well as in regions with permafrost. Gas hydrates remain stable in seafloor sediments under a certain range of temperature and pressure conditions. If global warming trends continue, the increase in seawater temperature can cause destabilization of the gas hydrates, resulting sudden and massive methane release. Methane is a more efficient greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide (as much as 32X more powerful than CO2 under certain circumstances), so global temperatures could increase significantly beyond any level predicted by computer models looking only at the effects of CO2 increase.
There is precedent for this sort of warming in the geologic past. Probable examples of methane-related global warming include Holocene warming circa 8000 years ago, caused by a large methane release off the coast of Norway.
I’ve always thought that if humans die out because of a) some idiot thing we did to ourselves, b) because of a perfectly natural event beyond anybody’s control, or c) Hi Opal, then what’s the big deal? I reckon nature is infinitely resilient, and a race of beings dying out, especially irritants like humanity, is just the way things go sometimes.
We currently have permanent ice caps. That means we are living in an ice age. Through most of the Earth’s history there were no permanent ice caps at the poles. So if temperatures rise and the ice caps melt, we are just getting back to normal.
Global warming would cause far less loss of life than global cooling. A good portion of farmland is north of where the glaciers stopped during the last ice age - if we had glaciers in Kansas again, there would be a LOT of starvation, I’d think…
Jeepers, another thing to worry about. Now I gotta find out how high the ocean temp has to rise before the whole planet cuts the cheese, if I want to sleep tonight.
Wait a minute? What are we at odds over? My first post was mainly questions; my next post was debunking griffey’s urban legend that Mt. Pinatubo created CFCs, and ripping up griffey’s website for making a lot of misleading statistics; my third post was a link; my fourth post was me wondering aloud if griffey was a troll. Which part do you disagree with?
I agree with you that more study is needed, and I agree that claims of super-rapid catastrophic global change need to be treated with skepticism. I haven’t noticed the press ignoring evidence against global warming, since I’ve seen more than one article talking about that very evidence. On the whole, it seems like we agree more than we disagree. I’m still not going to give people like griffey, who doesn’t know the difference between an element and a compound, a free ride to dole out misinformation.
