An inconvenient truth

[xoxoxoBruce]

You mean commuters?

[tw]

From ABC News:

Global Warming: Bubbling Up From Below dated 6 Sept 2006
What they found, and report in this week's issue of NATURE, worries them.

... Katey Walter and colleagues from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, have been studying lakes in Siberia, which, historically, have spent much of the year frozen over.

When the lakes are not frozen, methane bubbles up from the bottom. Methane, you'll recall, is created as organic material decays. There's less methane than carbon dioxide--but molecule for molecule, methane is about 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Here's the problem Walter and her colleagues found: the amount of methane blubbling from those lakes may be five times as much as existing estimates--and there's likely to be more of it as the climate warms. ...

And Siberian lakes are only part of the problem. There's permafrost all over northern Canada, the northern reaches of Europe, etc., that's not so permanently frosty anymore. The northern tundra may be less diverse than, say, tropical rainforests, but scientists say there's about as much organic material there.

[BigV]

The question remains, Is the CO2 that we produce the principle culprit, or a pisshole in the snowbank of the change in climate? Just a small part of the whole boxcar load of pressure we've put on Mother Nature?

It is the pisshole compared to say watervapor. But it is the principal element that we can control.

I can't change Washington, but I can vote. Little stroke fell mighty oaks, etc etc. It's the biggest part of what I can directly influence. Saying my part doesn't count because of --------, is lazy at best.

[sproglet]

Originally Posted by BigV

I can't change Washington, but I can vote.

You can also run a more fuel efficient car or, god forbid, use public transport.

Buy local, insist on less packaging and check the air miles on the food you're buying. Why buy apples or meat that's been flown half way around the world when it can just as easily be grown locally?

Switch energy suppliers to a company that sources from renewables.

Stick it to the man, buy what you want to buy not what they want you to buy.

[Aliantha]

BigV...you may be right as far as some scientists go, but not all, and that was the general gist of my post. I have good sources for my information. In fact, I'm about to marry one in a week or so.

[Beestie]

That's it. I'm moving to Mars. Who's with me?

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Beestie

That's it. I'm moving to Mars. Who's with me?

Sure, after the terraforming we'll be in charge of the climate.

[Hippikos]

Global warming is a man made phenomena.

Where's the evidence? Earth has been warmer long time before man produced these current CO2 levels. There has been no reference to the influence of sun radiation. How can anyone neglect that phenomen?

CFC were responsible for the ozon hole. But CFC is 4-5 times heavier than air, how can they reach the stratosphere?

[barefoot serpent]

Originally Posted by Hippikos

There has been no reference to the influence of sun radiation. How can anyone neglect that phenomen?

The Sun is now off the hook...

Study acquits sun of climate change

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- The sun's energy output has barely varied over the past 1,000 years, raising chances that global warming has human rather than celestial causes, a study showed on Wednesday.

Researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United States found that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

"Our results imply that over the past century climate change due to human influences must far outweigh the effects of changes in the sun's brightness," said Tom Wigley of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Most experts say emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, are the main cause of a 0.6 Celsius (1.1 Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures over the past century.

A dwindling group of scientists says that the dominant cause of warming is a natural variation in the climate system, or a gradual rise in the sun's energy output.

"The solar contribution to warming over the past 30 years is negligible," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature of evidence about the sun from satellite observations since 1978.

They also found little sign of solar warming or cooling when they checked telescope observations of sunspots against temperature records going back to the 17th century.

They then checked more ancient evidence of rare isotopes and temperatures trapped in sea sediments and Greenland and Antarctic ice and also found no dramatic shifts in solar energy output for at least the past millennium.

"This basically rules out the sun as the cause of global warming," Henk Spruit, a co-author of the report from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, told Reuters.

Many scientists say greenhouse gases might push up world temperatures by perhaps another 3 Celsius by 2100, causing more droughts, floods, disease and rising global sea levels.

Spruit said a "Little Ice Age" around the 17th century, when London's Thames River froze, seemed limited mainly to western Europe and so was not a planet-wide cooling that might have implied a dimmer sun.

And global Ice Ages, like the last one which ended about 10,000 years ago, seem linked to cyclical shifts in the earth's orbit around the sun rather than to changes in solar output.

"Overall, we can find no evidence for solar luminosity variations of sufficient amplitude to drive significant climate variations on centennial, millennial or even million-year timescales," the report said.

Solar activity is now around a low on the 11-year cycle after a 2000 peak, when bright spots called faculae emit more heat and outweigh the heat-plugging effect of dark sunspots. Both faculae and dark sunspots are most common at the peaks.

Still, the report also said there could be other, more subtle solar effects on the climate, such as from cosmic rays or ultraviolet radiation. It said they would be hard to detect.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[Undertoad]

You can use filtered water instead of bottled

The most important things we can do about this problem:

- promote the intelligence of humanity
- promote the education of science
- preserve and protect civilization world-wide, so that productive ideas are adopted and shared by all

With a greater intelligence level on the planet, and the political ability to make changes, we can solve this and any other problem.

[Spexxvet]

It's all a repubican conspiracy. Blue states on the coasts, melt ice caps, ocean rises, no more blue states!

[Undertoad]

- promote the intelligence of humanity
- promote the education of science
- preserve and protect civilization world-wide, so that productive ideas are adopted and shared by all

That's my agenda and I'm stickin to it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's as clear as mud, but it covers the ground.

I just noticed Hippikos slipped in between UT and myself.
It was UT's credo I was referring to.

[Hippikos]

I am the same sceptical guy as Bruce here. It's not a proven fact that the current global warming is caused by man. Climate changes have been around the last 4,5 billion years. As for warming up of the Earth the last 300 years, I can remember the hysterica in the 70's about the start of a new ice age. Well there ya go.

Never the less I am in favor of conserving earth recourses as there is an end to that, and I am in favor of clean air if it was only for the health of the people.

Again, global warming statistics are mostly fed by cherry picked statistics, sensation sensitive tabloid journalists and producers of scare mongering films such as "The Day After Tomorrow". My 13 year old daughter saw this movie and is now afraid our low country will be flooded next year....

[headsplice]

Actually, I was listening to NPR the other day(On The Media's segment called, "Mad Science"[that's an audio link, btw]), and non-scientific Americans are pretty much the only folks who don't believe that global warming is a serious (EDIT) man-made problem. There's not any major scientific disagreement anymore, just industry front groups.