Is Global warming real?

[Drunkskunk]

There have been posts on the subject, but not a poll.

[TylerDurden]

The poll is a bit B&W... there are no grey-shades like:

Rate (0-9) how you believe climate change is a significant issue: 0=not at all, 9=very much
Rate (0-9) how you believe human activity can influence climate change: 0=not at all, 9=very much
Rate (0-9) how you believe action on climate change is beneficial for other reasons (like ecology) , regardless of climate effects: 0=not at all, 9=very much
Rate (0-9) how you believe climate change information is based on science (as opposed to sophistry): 0=not at all, 9=very much

[EMF]

I believe in Global Warming as it is simply a scientific term that describes the presence of warmer temperatures being measured in predetermined locations in about every part of our planet at the same time for several years at a time. It is something we can and do measure with great regularity.

However, I feel we are not seeing this at the moment, (this is what I was told by those at NCAR that collect the data from the measuring 3-4 years ago) and instead are experiencing a somewhat predictable Climate Change around the world. I feel this is primarily a natural phenomena and to think that a planets entire climate could somehow remain forever static is ludicrous. Nearly as ludicrous as thinking man could cause it to change globally or turn it around once he discovered his impact.

All one has to do, to investigate this, is to inspect data taken from from ice core samples, or look to the prehistoric fossilized flora and fauna record from around the world.

This- is what we are up against- what mother nature can do to man-not what man can do to mother nature. She was here before us and will be here long after we are all gone...in one form or another.

[deronmoped]

If you think about, the climate on earth has been stable enough for life for like four billion years.

In the past fifty years, all of sudden there is a crisis?

Deron.

[Link]

$#!+, they're on to me...

[swbluto]

If you think about, the climate on earth has been stable enough for life for like four billion years.

In the past fifty years, all of sudden there is a crisis?

Deron.

How do you define life? Any collection of multicellular organisms? If I remember correctly, I do believe entire species have been erased off the earth due to temperature. But, I wouldn't suspect humans would disappear in the event of a temperature crisis given how much more adaptable they are than past extinct species. Just, possibly, a negative influence on the population growth rate.

I also vote the options are too polarized. I recognize, in particular, that temperature change is affected by many factors and proportion of change depends on the amount of change in the source in a given year/decade/whatever-time-unit but the majority of temperature increase we've seen over the past 100 years is probably attributable to human activity. That does NOT mean that any other influencing factor won't eclipse this previous factor in the next couple decades/centuries/etc. and possibly reverse the temperature increase(Including feedback affects) or it may even magnify it.

[IamIan]

I also agree... the options are too limited ... the world is not black and white.

I would say there is global warming ... and human activity has been contributing to it ... exactly what % our contribution is... and what % is natural is much more difficult to quantify.... I would also say if it is a bad thing ... and that is also subject to debate ... it might be good if ocean levels rise enough to put cities like New York under 100 feet of water ... maybe the city we build to replace it is better.... it doesn't matter if the earth quake is natural or not ... if it is bad there are still good reasons to plan for ways to lessen the damage.

Also I would say ... fundamentally it does really matter ... No one I know of is for more pollution ...

It doesn't matter if you are in favor of less pollution because of global warming ... because you love polar bears ... because you want air that is not harmful to breath ... because you want less polluted food or water... because you want more dear you like to hunt ... because you like to go camping ... because you like to work with or buy materials made from wood ... because you like eating animals ... because you like a nice beach in the summer / spring ... because you hate the smell in a congested tunnel during rush hour ... etc... etc...

As far as I am concerned ... it doesn't matter ... no one wants more pollution ... everyone wants less pollution ... I've never heard someone complain because the air or water was too clean ... so, to me nit picking about the details just seems counter productive...

no matter how you slice it we want it cleaner.

[Link]

^What he said, and, goddamn, I thought I liked ellipses...

[ElectricEd]

I noticed something was going on back in 1972 on my first bushwalk into the Australian Alps(? rounded protuberances actually). I was in Harrietville, Victoria, Australia at the general store looking at the photos from back around 1900~1920 when the snowline was a few hundred feet above the town. In 1972 it was well over 1200 feet above.

I thought "hmm, there's a trend here"
Resolution: don't by shares in a ski lodge.

I didn't give it much more thought till the 90s when the hole in the ozone layer started to give us more severe sunburns down here in Victoria. Tasmanians were developing skin cancers too and the girls were losing their beautiful complexions.

I thought "hmm, we can have an effect on our atmosphere"
Resolution: Use sunscreen and wear a hat. Don't buy any pressure packs using CFCs either.

I thought about it a bit and when returning from working in Italy in 2000 I got a window seat for the leg from Bangkok to Melbourne. Going over the Wentworth anabranch and further south (part of the Murry Darling river system) I noticed wildly coloured salt pans, dead trees and dry stretches of the rivers. This was quite different from 10 years ealier. Due to over allocation of water rights by various governments, we had gone beyond what could be safely extracted, and the increasing dryness each year had taken us over the tipping point.

I thought "hmm, it's about time we started cutting back on water allocations"
Resolution: Get a water tank and use my own collected water. It's gonna get expensive.

Then in 2002 the Larsen B ice shelf broke up.

I thought "Holy !@#$%!, there's something really going on here"
Resolution: Read up on the science of this, try to find out what is really going on.
I started to get a bit vocal about this, bitching about the denial of our government to accept what the CSIRO scientists were telling them. The government eventually put a gag on the scientists, threating their tenure if they spoke against the government position.

Then in early 2007 I had the chance to help a friend fly a Piper Warrior from Perth back to Melbourne. Part of the route went over the Southern part of Western Australia. We flew over dead trees and salt pans for hundreds of miles where 100 years ago there were ideal wheat growing areas that provided an enormous export income for Australia. The weather systems have moved South and the rain now falls over the ocean. Later on in South Australia we went across the Murray which had stopped flowing. We couldn't see it, but the river mouth was closed and the lakes of the Coorong were drying out.

Researching more, found that by isotopic analysis it had bean found what part of CO2 in the atmosphere was natural and what was anthropogenic. This scotched one argument of the climate change deniers.
Then I noticed that people were saying things like "I believe" or "I don't believe" in climate change. AARRGH! It's not a religion! It's not a matter of faith! It's not like that invisible man in the sky!
You read the science, you analyse it and you decide wether to agree or not!
I joined the Victorian Humanists. The first meeting I attended had 2 CSIRO scientist and 2 other scientists from a river system and and climate related organisation in Australia. They spelled it out in no uncertain terms, climate change, over-population and future mass movents of people will make the 21st century a very "interesting" time to live.
Now we are looking at an ice-free Summer at the North Pole, probably within the next decade.
You've probably heard about global dimming due to aeroplane contrails and other particulates. Well it's accepted within scientific circles.
We should be up to 0.5 degrees warmer. What's going to happen with reduced aviation due to increasing fuel costs?
Have you seen the melting permafrost in the Arctic and that a fair bit of it in Canada and Siberia is within one degree of melting? It hasn't been this close for a very long time. This is currently releasing and will in the future release an enormous amount of methane.

Now another ice shelf in Antactica is breaking up.

The rate of change is much greater than any time in the past except for the few great extinction events.

How many more serious events that are unprecedented within the period of human existance have to occur before it's so obvious that the climate-change deniers cannot keep a straight face any more?

stupid, Stupid, STUPID PEOPLE!

[TPA]

The department of propaganda has released another memo for those of you believers who need the latest semantics update:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/po ... .html?_r=1

[EMF]

[nutsandvolts]

.

[swbluto]

Is it possible for someone who is short sighted to be more long sighted?

It appears not. I suppose humans were born with the attention span of a ... human.

[TPA]

The density of air is about 1200 g/m3 at 20C and 101kPa. Assume it has no CO2 content.

A standard CO2 cartridge is 12g of CO2.

Normal CO2 content of air is .03%. so there is 0.36g of CO2 in 1 m3 air at the above conditions.

So, if you had 100m3 of co2 free air, you would have to release 3 standard co2 cartridges into that volume to simulate real air.

So the question is....would 3 co2 cartridges in a volume of 100m3 effect the greenhouse effect of that large a volume of air?

If you buy into radiative forcing, about one of those cartridges would hold around one square meter of co2. The radiative forcing of co2 is 1.46 W/m2, so releasing those 3 cartridges would increase the solar heating ability of the air by roughly 4.5W/100m3, which is standard for normal air.

So how much more are humans adding, and what does it contribute heat wise?

[Lock]

Where's the poll about whether pollution and environmental degradation are real?

[julesa]

Where's the poll about whether pollution and environmental degradation are real?

Yes, and make sure it looks something like this:

It's not real
It's real, and 100% caused by aliens
It's real, and 100% caused by sasquatches
It's real, and 100% caused by the Illuminati
It's real, and 100% caused by the mole men
It's real, and caused by the war between the Illuminati and the mole men

Edit:
'Cause you have to make sure you cover all the possible options when you create a poll.

[Gregory]

I believe the correct term these days is Climate Change rather than Global warming.

It's amazing to see so many people respond who think "global warming" is a natural phenomenon. I personally think it is better to be safe than sorry and err on the side of caution and am trying to cut my carbon footprint.

However the media certainly do have issues with their shock and awe style of reporting the issue.

I don't want to leave my kids a huge mess to clean up.

Greg

[Lessss]

The problem is there is so much deliberate misinformation being pput out by industry and by political activists.
Al Gore is WRONG. Co2 does not cause increases in temperature but FOLLOWS a rise in temperature.
Look at Al Gore's an inconvienient truth data. The CO2 increase follows the temperature increase disproving his own theory.
However if you overlap sunspot activity you see that sunspot activity DOES occur BEFORE the temperature increase.
The Earth has historically been much much warmer.
The problem is that high CO2 levels will actually mean starvation for humanity because food has less than half it's nutrient value when grown in a high CO2 atmosphere.
Not to mention that CO2 is a marker gas for real pollution of the kind that directly impacts human health. The higher the CO2 level the higher the level of the real pollutants.

The environmentalists don't care about CO2 sequestering etc.. because the agenda they are pushing is de-industrialization.
Industry is fighting with it's own propoganda with unrealistic CO2 sequestering et al because they don't want to put in place REAL pollution controls.

All I can say is that more and more industrialization means more and more power into the hands of fewer and fewer people (like the morrally corrupt and pure evil Monsanto Corporation), the permanent destruction of natural habitat, spoiling of watershed and fresh water drinking supplies.



Why put up with a car that falls apart in 15 years, when we can build one that last 200 that would provide real employment for skilled workers?? Becasue it feeds the consumption industial complex. Now CO2 levels are now at levels never seen before and there is no real way of knowing what effect that will have in a higher temperature atmosphere. We shouldn't risk finding out.

[julesa]

The problem is there is so much deliberate misinformation being pput out by industry and by political activists. Al Gore is WRONG. Co2 does not cause increases in temperature but FOLLOWS a rise in temperature. Look at Al Gore's an inconvienient truth data. The CO2 increase follows the temperature increase disproving his own theory.

The fact that CO2 followed temperature in past events only suggests there's a mechanism by which increased temperature releases more CO2. Like for instance, more rotting of vegetative matter closer to the poles. Atmospheric CO2 rise followed temperature rise in past warming events, but there's no reason to assume CO2 MUST follow temperature, and certainly no reason to assume it can't precede temperature since that's what's happening today. So it doesn't prove Gore wrong.

Suppose the last temperature increases were caused by something external to the Earth. The Earth warms up, triggering the release of more CO2. But suppose this time the temperature increase is caused by pumping megatons of new CO2 into what used to be a relatively closed system. This could trigger a release of even more CO2 from whatever mechanism caused the CO2 rise in past warming events. That's why people are concerned about climate feedback loops.

[Lapwing]

To all you doubters that "believe" this is a natural, and I am shocked that the survey suggestests a large portion of humanity, lets spell it out.


Back in May 1959 John Tyndall figured out and demonstrated the physicas that explains why earth is is not a frosty snow-cone. Please read the new Scientist article. below.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227081.500-the-man-who-discovered-greenhouse-gases.html

Now with this new insight into the actual science, consider that CO2 levels have been recorded for a very long time and we can infer from the increases over the last 100 years, coinsides with industrialisation and our use of coal and then oil & having lived 35 years in the third world, massive changes in vegetation coverage.

ElectricEd is right on in his analysis,

Researching more, found that by isotopic analysis it had bean found what part of CO2 in the atmosphere was natural and what was anthropogenic

. Thank God for intellect way sharper than mine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

As an aside, my father was a civil engineer, and traveled all over africa surveying and photgraphing in the 1960's. I visited many of the places he camped out in the bush. When I look at his old photo's and what I found, the changes are a stark testement to how profoundly man can change a landscape.[url][/url]

[deronmoped]

This GW thread has been closed.

You can now post your vote and comments to the GC poll.

Deron.

[Lock]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg&feature=PlayList&p=92EE5DBE2987982F&index=0&playnext=1
tks
Lock

[Capo_au]

Wow I must say, I find that poll result a little disturbing..

Having studied the topic both formally and informally I guess its easy to become disconnect with public opinion at large.

Or maybe its just that the public opinion in the US is a lot different to that here in Australia.

[liveforphysics]

The cows in India alone are a larger greenhouse gas contributer than all of the gas burning transportation in the USA.

The greenhouse gas emissions from the rainforests and wetlands make all the carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions released by humans look pretty tiny.

If someone was serious about slowing global warming, they would quit playing around with the tiny slice of the global warming gas production (all of humanity), and focus on the giant remainder of the pie (rainforests, wetlands, etc).

Slash and burn the rainforests and drain wetlands if you actually give a damn about lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Napalm bombs could actually make it a realistic change on the earth that humans could influence. The carbon released in burning it is so minor compared to the natural methane production of the rainforest, the complete burning is offset in just a few years, then a few years later we have compensated for all carbon/greenhouse gas emissions released over the history of humanity, and then rapidly start dropping below.

However, I personally would rather live on a planet that averages a surface temp 0.6degF warmer by the year 2,100 (according to NASA data), than to live on a planet with no rainforests and wetlands, because I think biodiversity is worth the trouble.

[liveforphysics]

For the folks observing changes in flora and fauna in the environment. Good observational power.

Don't forget that the Sahara desert was once a thick rainforest.
The mid-western area of the united states was the bottom of an ocean.
The lush areas of South America were desert.
There are marine fossils at 20,000ft in the Himalayas.

Things change on the earth.

In the world, there are places where plains turn to deserts, and other places where deserts turn into plains. Places where plains turn to forests, and others where forest encroach onto plains. Areas were land become flooded wetlands, and other areas wetlands dry to become forest or plains.

Things change.

When you happen to have a seat in front of an area shifting towards desert, it's an ugly change to watch. The only option is to change your seat.