Intersting News Regarding the Global Warming Debate

Have some more Cool Aid... I remember the 70s and 80s and the air was considerably worse. There where times as a kid I couldn't even move because the air was so thick with polution that all I could do is lay on the couch and weeze. You couldn't even see a 1/4 mile because of the smog and at that time the scientists were claiming we were going into global cooling. So now that our air quality is much better we have "Global Warming"? Just look at who's profiting of of this. Carbon Credits? Aw come on, That's a bunch of bull crap!!! So in other words you can polute as much as you want as long as you pay Al Gore for the air that a tree produces.
BTW, Gray skys or haze is not smog. Smog is a Golden Brown. Gray is a marine layer.

 

Aren't these the same geniuses that said the world is flat?

Just because they say it's so, it doesn't make it a fact. There's just so much underlying political bs trying to get everyone to believe in this. I choose not to. I do believe the emails though.

 

A few things. The air used to be much worse if your talking about air pollutants that cause smog; Nitrous Oxides, Ozone, VOCs. Those are what caused the wheezing and sore eyes that many of us remember so fondly. Global climate change, primarily, is not caused by these pollutants. They are two unrelated pollution issues, except that they take place in the atmosphere.
From my understanding the forcast that were developed in the 70s for a colder atmosphere were using data from air temps before were started regulate air pollutants. Many of these pollutants, especailly particulate pollutants reflect sunlight causing a net cooling of the atmosphere. Once we regulated many of these carcinogenic pollutants the atmosphere started warming in correlation to the carbon dioxide being released.

There once was a debate about the ozone layer. Some people thought it was scientific fiction. Luckily we have taken steps to diminish the use of the ozone depleting compounds and the ozone layer has started to repair itself.

I also remember people getting all pissy because we all had the get smog checks. I heard: "Its my car I'll do what I want". "It'll drive jobs away from Ca." I sure wouldn't want to go back to the air we used to have.

 

that would be sweet. alot less climbing

 

Except for the crazy fact that the earth's temperature has been rising ever since the Ice Ages. Those damn dinosaurs and their hot rods!

 

Yeah- Probably nothin' to worry about...

SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer – Sun Nov 22, 2:54 pm ET
WASHINGTON – Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:
_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.
_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.
"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent. Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."
The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.
From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters — the U.S., China and India — were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.
And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.
"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.
That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.
"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.
In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.
"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.
The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.
Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.
Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves — adding up to the size of Delaware — came off the Antarctic peninsula.
While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.
Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.
Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.
"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."
Also, permafrost — the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane — is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.
Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.
More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.
In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.
More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.
The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.
Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

EDIT: for what's it worth, i've been a vegetarian for 25 years. actually, i'm more of a vag-etarian...

send in the clowns...vvv

 

fine. all you guys that claim global warming as fact, should put your money where your mouth is and stop eating beef because methane is ten times more effective at global warming than co2. stop buying a prius so you can show everyone how green you are.

 

Wow, an "AP Science Writer" - it MUST be true if it came from the AP! They've NEVER been wrong or misrepresent anything.

What a bunch of clowns to buy into this crap.

I feel sorry for my kids, because by the time they are my age the incompetent government will have taken over everything. It's called incrementalism...little by little...seat belts, helmets, junk food...last week it was TV's, who knows what's next. And you clowns who feed them by buying into this GW, end-of-the-world crap make it easier for them to pry into YOUR life.

 

If co2 causes global warming lets all stop breathing and make sure all those pesky trees have nothing to breath. Oh, and no farting either...

 

Figures Lie And Liars Figure!

Funny thing, you can get statistics to say what the hell you want them to say. If you want to read into something to support your views/beliefs then go ahead, but if you think posting a bunch of gibberish is going to make you sound smart/well informed then think again! These people may be able to con you, but you, will not be able to con me! Unless you're a Scientist involved in the middle of all this, what do you really know about it? He said/She said/They said? Please! Don't be that gullible! Don't just blindly jump onto the G/W bandwagon.

I can't wait till the Sierra Club Bastids find a way to tie G/W into MTBing somehow, don't think they haven't thought about it! 8-[

 

Wow!.... it is a religion!

Strong Koolaid!

So let's see here...... for the next 100 billion years if we listen and send all of our money to AL Gore and the like then they'll make everything okay again and save our planet? Never mind China, India along with other up and coming countries which are and will be the biggest polluters for decades to come while we get buried and left behind economically in our clean carbon footprint.

You seem to focus a lot of attention on melting ice and such, do you know what scientist are finding beneath all that melting ice up in the north pole????....... "Friking jungles" that existed many million year ago, where was Al Gore to keep the ice from forming on top of those beautiful jungles back then? Are we really that naive to think we can stop planetary cycles from happening?
I know, I know all these 'pure as snow' scientist with no alternative motives have models... OMG, they have models, models that continue to be proven wrong. How do you think most scientist make a living, it's not by working like you and me, they have to get funded by someone mostly government entities. It's just like expert witnesses in a court murder trial, both sides have them and both sides say they have the science to prove their case, i.e., number, models can be manipulated to prove anything.

Dirtvert,
I don't dislike you for having an opposing view but so far, science has not been on your side, for the last ten years..... we've been on a cooling cycle along with the Sun's low output. I know, I know it's just a cooling trend.

 

all imma gonna say is Co2 cartridges and post ride beer farts

lock me up

 

Can we all agree that our presence on this planet has an effect?

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html

Big surprise who benefits from "global warming"?

 

Think again!

Once again, who is profiting from all the fear?

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: November 2, 2009
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a winner last year when a small California firm sought financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture capital firm where Mr. Gore is a partner.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

 

One More Thing.

I meant to post this earlier...

"The World's Oceans have risen by about an inch and a half."

In how much of a time period?

Do you think that with all the increased amount of Ships being built and used to ship products all over the World that the Gross Tonnage of these Ships could displace the water in the Oceans a little bit. What happens when you get into a Bathtub full of water? Does the water level go up? I sure hope so! So there is one myth proven wrong! Next!

 

Even ants have an effect, the real question should be how detrimental of an effect (if any) and how can you measure it? In my opinion we put way to much faith in the scientific community.

 

Yeh, but some believe the earth is here to promote and enhance our lives while others look at humans as parasites destroying the planet. Which one are you?

I believe in homeostasis in all maters including our planet and in my heart believe things will be alright. Besides I am OK with my great great grandchildren being green in color and breathing carbon dioxide. Can we move on and now talk about 2012.

Dean

 

But Dean............the sky is falling, the sky is falling!

 

We also have to be careful of being so gullible as to believe we've got it all figured out and the "white as snow" scientist are coming up with this stuff for purely personal profit. If you were a Climatologist or an Atmospheric Chemist and you wanted to make tons of money you'd work for one of the petrol companies talking about how global climate change is totally wrong.