Thread: Global Warming + Climate Change

I think it's - as with many other things - a bit of both. It is undeniable that human activity is contributing to the production of greenhouse gases and that most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures are likely due to the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Where things are not so clear is the amount of warming expected in the future or how the increasing temperatures will vary from region to region around the globe.

And then, of course there is the big debate what, if any , action should be taken to reduce or reverse future warming or to adapt to its expected consequences. And this is where the propaganda war is being waged by all sides, and where the truth is inevitable skewed and obscured.

In my mind the most virulent environmentalists are just as much a threat as are the unchecked industries that give a flying hoot about the environment. Presenting positions of extremes does nto foster dialogue and cooperaiton, the two currencies that our globe needs if we were to do anything meaningful.

One thing is for sure: Our beautiful planet will keep spinning whether we human beings skrew things up for oursleves and everyone else, and another thing is also for sure: We may not survive a climate catastrophe, but many other species will. And so life will go on.....

Remember the droughts of the 80s in souhtern Africa? It'll get worse with average temperatures expected to rise in our region. That'lll mean hotter, drier summers with less rainfall and more moderate winters. Some questions on my mind:

• Are our Governments changing their policies and strategies to take account of the changing weather patterns?
• Are they drawing up contingency plans or plodding along as usual?
• What about the polluting nations? Are they going to carry some of the burden of their polluting ways? Should they?
• Are the polluting nations going to assist nations financially and otherwise in southern Africa faced with catastrophic crop failures and droughts? Should they?

Of course these are not easy questions, but then leadership is never about easy questions, is it?

Hey Dude.

You are right. WE should check, but very often the people point-blank refuse to divulge what is really nothing but public information. What are they afraid of?

Anyway, just to add to the merry confusion, look at the following. Now it become really rather mixed-up:

Climate Figures Need Scrutiny

Originally Published in: Monterey County Herald

Every time NASA's James Hansen makes a global warming pronouncement, the press treats his words as if they were gospel. When he announced that 1998 was the warmest year on record, it was front page news. The only problem is NASA's "facts" were wrong.

Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago, NASA quietly rewrote U.S. temperature history since 1880. As it turns out, 1934 is now the warmest year on record in the U.S., dropping 1998 to second. In addition, 1921, not 2006, is the third warmest year.

According to the newly reconstructed record, three of the top five warmest years since 1880 occurred before 1940, and six of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before 85 percent of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions were put into the atmosphere.

It was a Canadian researcher and Internet blogger, Steve McIntyre, who caught the error.

McIntyre worked backward doing a regression to confirm what he suspected - NASA had not accounted for changes in the way it captured and recorded data more than a decade ago.

Hansen's press conferences make great headlines but are a poor substitute for the truth.

The corrected data doesn't mean humans are not causing global warming or that if they are, it would be dangerous.

In the future, good journalists should ask hard questions any time Hansen speaks. For instance: If the U.S. temperature system can have such errors, might not other sources of data be even more flawed?

Here's another: What caused the warming in the early part of the century, or the warming currently being experienced by Mars and other planets, since SUVs and power plants clearly aren't implicated?

Or how about this one: If climate skeptics had been arguing that the data showed the warming of the previous century had been scattered across the decades, but a minor adjustment showed almost all the warming to be clumped in just the past decade, would Hansen and his followers still be claiming the change was "insignificant"?

A few years ago, climate skeptics argued that we couldn't trust the ground-based measuring system's data because they conflicted with the temperature measurements from global satellites, which showed a modest cooling of 0.04 degrees per decade.

Scientists found that the researchers monitoring and maintaining the satellites had failed to account for orbital decay. The satellites still didn't show the earth to be warming. However, scientists within the global warming orthodoxy claimed that the satellites had now confirmed that humans were causing warming. Once again the mainstream media reported this uncritically as fact.

At the very least, Hansen should no longer be treated with deference on matters of global warming. His research should come under as much, if not more, scrutiny in the future as those who question his or other climate prophets' claims.

This is a difficult topic to argue I find. Nature has inherent fluctuations, and maybe at times these fluctuations out themselves as a seemingly continuous series of catastrophic events, such as Katrina, droughts, or floodings, heat waves or snow storms As Al Gore pointed out in his documentary, the mean global temperature is rising, probably as an effect of increased CO2 levels and the resulting green house effect, which then causes irregularities in weather patterns etc etc. So, no doubt that things are changing.

But to pull the global warming card at every single catastrophic environmental event is wrong. Of course the persistence of such events strengthens the arguments used to justify actions taken to curb emission of CO2, and also to come up with all sorts of schemes to make a buck or many. But some schemes just don't add up. So the big industrial nations buy CO2 quotas from less-developed countries, making it possible for them to continue with their emission levels.

But isn't the overall idea to reduce emissions? And what happens when the lesser developed countries suddenly need to fill their own quota, as a consequence of achieving economic growth? And then, which developing country has the finances to afford high tech cleaning processes for their industry?

I read recently, that in Norway, one of the worlds most modern gas driven electric power plants is going to be build, going online in 2010. But not even a rich country like Norway can afford (or is just to greedy) to include available, but very expensive cleaning processes.

So, truth or propaganda? I think global warming is reality, but whether we can fix it - doubtful.

Climate change is occurring far faster than even the worst predictions of the UN's Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change foresaw, Al Gore warned Thursday.

New evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us," the former US vice president and climate campaigner told delegates at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.

There are now forecasts that the North Pole ice cap may disappear entirely during summer months in as little as five years, Gore said.

"This is a planetary emergency. There has never been anything remotely like it in the entire history of human civilisation. We are putting at risk all of human civilisation," he added.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report the size of three phone books on the reality and risks of climate change, its fourth assessment in 18 years.

In October both Gore and the IPCC, comprising around 3,000 experts, jointly won a Nobel prize for their roles in highlighting climate change.

Gore said a "little bit of progress" had been made at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

He added though that there was a "big, large blank spot" in the road map agreed in Bali, reserved for the United States' environmental policy once a new president is elected in November and inaugurated in January.

He said that the single most important policy that could be implemented would be a tax on carbon emissions that is applied across the whole world, "so that those who don't pay the price for carbon don't have an advantage over those who do."

"I think it is really important from a climate change point of view to move away from the idea that personal actions from each of us represents the solution to this crisis.

"These are important... but in addition to changing the light bulbs it is important to change the laws," Gore said.

He stopped short of endorsing any US presidential candidate but said that "whoever is elected will have a better position" on climate change than the current administration of US President George W. Bush.

Gore was appearing at Davos beside Africa activist and U2 frontman Bono in an effort to combine the fights against climate change and poverty.

"The brunt of this climate crisis is going to be felt in the developing world. All your work... will be undone if you don't focus on this," Bono said.

"It is clear that those people who have least created this climate crisis... are the least equipped to deal with it."

Gore added: "I want to say to everyone who wants to solve the climate crisis, they have to take Bono's agenda on extreme poverty, on fighting disease and dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis and make it an integral part of the world's effort to solve the climate crisis."
Davos/WEF

Very disheartening, Oneword. Makes me wondering whether it's all too little, too late althoguh that's not a reason not to do anything about it.

Let's emigrate to .... Mars?????

Comrade,

I get the impression that it has to be 1 minute before midnight before we as humankind wake up and start doing something. I am still optimistic .......

The tipping points include the collapse of the Indian summer monsoon.

PNAS

A number of key components of the earth's climate system could pass their 'tipping point' this century, according to new research led by a scientist at the University of East Anglia. Published by the prestigious international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the researchers have coined a new term, 'tipping elements', to describe those components of the climate system that are at risk of passing a tipping point.

The term 'tipping point' is used to describe a critical threshold at which a small change in human activity can have large, long-term consequences for the Earth's climate system.

In this new research, lead author Prof Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and colleagues at the Postdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK), Carnegie Mellon University, Newcastle University and Oxford University have drawn up a shortlist of nine tipping elements relevant to current policy-making and calculated where their tipping points could lie. All of them could be tipped within the next 100 years.

The nine tipping elements and the time it will take them to undergo a major transition are:

- Melting of Arctic sea-ice (approx 10 years)

- Decay of the Greenland ice sheet (more than 300 years)

- Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (more than 300 years)

- Collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (approx 100 years)

- Increase in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (approx 100 years)

- Collapse of the Indian summer monsoon (approx 1 year)

- Greening of the Sahara/Sahel and disruption of the West African monsoon (approx 10 years)

- Dieback of the Amazon rainforest (approx 50 years)

- Dieback of the Boreal Forest (approx 50 years)

The paper also demonstrates how, in principle, early warning systems could be established using real-time monitoring and modelling to detect the proximity of certain tipping points.

"Society must not be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change," said Prof Lenton.

"Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under human-induced climate change. The greatest threats are tipping of the Arctic sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and at least five other elements could surprise us by exhibiting a nearby tipping point."