Global warming

thebaz

Driving around Dublin today, I noticed many folk wearing t-shirts only instead of coats ! I have'nt had my heating on for a few days , it was 21 degrees Celcius in New York last week , flowers are begining to bud ... its the middle of January ... i think Global warming has arrived early

petes

No wonder everyone is walking around with a cold/flu.

scojones

Arrived early? When did you expect it to arrive? What is it? Are these my feet?

Global warming is natural.

Nightwish

So natural that the scale of warming is unprecedented in history. The level of warming that has occured over the past 40 or so years, used to take, 100's of years.

scojones

Nightwish wrote:

So natural that the scale of warming is unprecedented in history. The level of warming that has occured over the past 40 or so years, used to take, 100's of years.

Unprecedented in history? Used to take 100's of years? Our population is massive now. This is one of the major causes of global warming - and that is natural. Scientists want us to go hide in caves, while most of the planet's governments do not give a toss about global warming.

Our records don't go back far enough for us to have an accurate overview of exactly what is happening. Who are you to say that the warming we are experiencing is not a normal occurance which happens every 8000 years?

connundrum

Nightwish wrote:

So natural that the scale of warming is unprecedented in history. The level of warming that has occured over the past 40 or so years, used to take, 100's of years.

Or so they want you to think

I wish that weather would just decide what it is though. I like winter to be cold and summer to be warm.. not all this wishy washy business inbetween

thebaz

sjones wrote:

When did you expect it to arrive?
.

ideally never

sjones wrote:

What is it? Are these my feet?

Global warming is natural.

are you drunk ?

scojones

thebaz wrote:

ideally never

Never? Are you not aware of what the Ice Age was? Was it a result of the Dinosaurs not burning fossil fuels, and the age we live in now is the exact opposite of their mistake?

connundrum wrote:

Or so they want you to think

I wish that weather would just decide what it is though. I like winter to be cold and summer to be warm.. not all this wishy washy business inbetween

I firmly believe that our summer (in Ireland) is now August and September.

Rb

So are we going to have a nice warm summer?

nobodythere

sjones wrote:

Unprecedented in history? Used to take 100's of years? Our population is massive now. This is one of the major causes of global warming - and that is natural. Scientists want us to go hide in caves, while most of the planet's governments do not give a toss about global warming.

Our records don't go back far enough for us to have an accurate overview of exactly what is happening. Who are you to say that the warming we are experiencing is not a normal occurance which happens every 8000 years?

Not exactly natural, the explosion of population came with the discovery of oil. A finite resource. As finite as the glitch in population.

Endurance Man

It only took a drop of 5-8 degrees to trigger the last ice age , what happens when we raise the temp by 5-8 degrees?

fits

sjones wrote:

Scientists want us to go hide in caves, while most of the planet's governments do not give a toss about global warming.

Our records don't go back far enough for us to have an accurate overview of exactly what is happening. Who are you to say that the warming we are experiencing is not a normal occurance which happens every 8000 years?

We have records, bore holes in polar ice give a pretty good record of our weather over the last few hundred thousand years, and yes it has always fluctuated. The current changes are definitely anthropogenically linked, 99% of the worlds scientists accept this.

Scientists dont want us to go hiding in caves, what are you like? Preparing for some of the possible impacts could be good though.

Pherekydes

grasshopa wrote:

Not exactly natural, the explosion of population came with the discovery of oil. A finite resource. As finite as the glitch in population.

Yes, natural. Populations grow. Exponentially. That's what they do. It's unnatural things that cause glitches in population growth.

Pappa-eat-peach

Endurance Man wrote:

It only took a drop of 5-8 degrees to trigger the last ice age , what happens when we raise the temp by 5-8 degrees?

It may in fact cause....another ice age.:) For instance, the melting of the Greenland ice-sheet is pumping many cubic kilometres of fresh water into the path, or adjacint to the path, of the rather saline Gulf stream. Which may, according to one theory, set the stream moving south, away from temperate Europe. Which in turn may become cooler each winter, giving rise to heavier snowfalls in higher latitudes/altitudes resulting glaciers (often quite self-propogating species of crystal which reflects sunlight away from the earth). Cooling by glaciers would then result in water condensing as snow on or near them, further expanding their mass, which in turns cools a greater amount of air...and so on.

It might be said that there could be certain self interest groups who could be propogating the idea of global warming nightmares (namely Western nations trying to hamper industrial progress in the third world/India/China by controlling emissions?). There may be other "clean fuel" advocates waiting in the sidelines trying to make their big bucks from global warming rackett?

Perhaps...:)

jimmycrackcorm

thebaz wrote:

Driving around Dublin today, I noticed many folk wearing t-shirts only instead of coats !

I regularly wear T-shirts in winter round Dublin. But then I'm from Donegal and when your next door neighbour up is Iceland, it's a good deal warmer down here.

moodyblue

thebaz wrote:

it was 21 degrees Celcius in New York last week

It ain't even close to that here anymore - wish I could go back to early balmy January

ChRoMe

In regards people saying that the human race is responsible for global warming I can only come to one response.

So what!!

The earth has been around for millions of years and has many spieces made extinct. Why would the human race be any different.

Also I think its a bit big headed of the human race to believe that we are capable of destroying the planet. The earth is capable of shaking off the human race like its a dose of the flu.

Edited: To change the question marks to exclamation marks. I wasnt asking a question

whiskeyman

ChRoMe wrote:

In regards people saying that the human race is responsible for global warming I can only come to one response.

So what??

The earth has been around for millions of years and has many spieces made extinct. Why would the human race be any different.

You actually answer your own question with the below, as it's not that big headed at all.

ChRoMe wrote:

Also I think its a bit big headed of the human race to believe that we are capable of destroying the planet. .

ChRoMe wrote:

The earth is capable of shaking off the human race like its a dose of the flu.

It sure is, but it looks very likely that we won't need any help destroying it ourselves.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6270871.stm

ChRoMe

whiskeyman wrote:

It sure is, but it looks very likely that we won't need any help destroying it ourselves.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6270871.stm

I might be being a bit thick (its late and I've had a couple of beers)

But I dont understand what your saying here.

biko

sjones wrote:

Global warming is natural.

And there you have it - sjones is GWB!
Just ratify the damn Kyoto Protocol, before it's too late for all of us.

America, the single greatest threat to the planet!
edit/or maybe China.

connundrum

I really really hate when we all appear to give out about something, but then do fook all to stop it.

Or sorry wait, I recycled my milk carton yesterday, that'll add 10 minutes to our life span.

Seriously, why are we still allowing motor sport? Millions of tonnes of fumes being released into the atmosphere for fun. Stop that and then I'll know that maybe we're thinking a bit.

We buy the right to produce more waste than other countries in the EU. How stupid is that?? I'd vote for the party who'd give me a tiny percentage of that same money as a grant to update my heating system to be energy efficiant.

It gets me going when people scream like spoilt children when a suggestion of wind farms is made. It wouldn't even put them out of their comfort zone to allow these farms to exist, but no.. again and again.

Wake me up when we decide to get serious about this apparent global warming, otherwise stop whining about it.

whiskeyman

ChRoMe wrote:

I might be being a bit thick (its late and I've had a couple of beers)

But I dont understand what your saying here.

drinking on a school night?? damn I'm jealous!!!

Anyway, I just mean that us humans are (I'd imagine) the first species in the Earths history that will probably bring about their own extinction, even though we have the ability to prevent it. I agree that many species come and go, but I doubt this is due to their own impact on the Earth.

The 'doomsday clock' is an indicator of this.

Maybe we'll just hope some massive meteorite comes and blasts us out of it so we can blame that

Black Swan

biko wrote:

And there you have it - sjones is GWB!

GWB? Global Warming Bush?

Celticfire

Nightwish wrote:

So natural that the scale of warming is unprecedented in history. The level of warming that has occured over the past 40 or so years, used to take, 100's of years.

Just how accurate do you think temperature record keeping was at the beginning of the century? Also have you heard of the urban heat island effect?
A lot of monitoring stations that have shown an increase in temp are in cities that have shown huge increases in population in the last half century.

As Junkyard posted elsewhere.........

Junkyard wrote:

I think the root of the problem with global warming is the fact the the so called "experts" are tweaking their figures and basing their figures on wrong information to start with. There was a warm period from AD 950 to 1450 approx. and this has been omitted from the research the UN would have us believe. This warm period was warmer than the warmer period by up to 3 degrees C. From the year 1000, ships were recorded as having sailed in parts of the Arctic where there is a permanent ice-pack now. In 1421, a Chinese Imperial Navy squadron sailed right round the Arctic and found no ice anywhere. It is possible that at that time there was less of an icecap at the North Pole than there is now, particularly in summer and the polar bears survived. Even though there has been a lot of talk about the supposed threat posed by the warmer Arctic, the polar bears are thriving in the current warm period. 11 of the 13 principle known families are prospering as never before.
Greenland was actually green at one time, Eric the red named Greenland "Greenland" to encourage Danish settlers, because in his time south-western Greenland was in fact green, no ice whatsoever. Until 1425 it was extensively cultivated when farms were suddenly overrun by permafrost. The Viking agricultural settlements are still under permafrost to this day, a very good indicator that the middle ages were warmer than the present, and that there is little cause for alarm at the current melting of Greenland glaciers because they are very likely to have melted to more than their present extent during the medieval warm period. This medieval warm period was followed by a 300 year little ice age until 1750. At the start of this period the mean temperatures dropped by 1.5 degrees C in 100 years. The coldest period was from 1550 to 1700. Frost fairs were held on the River Thames in London. Not only is this warm period not shown up on the UN's graph of temperature over the past 1000 years, the little ice age is also missing. From 1750, temperatures rose and held steady until the late Victorian era. These temperature fluctuations were not caused by humankind's activities. The 1996 report included a graph illustrating them. By the time of the 2001 report, the UN had eradicated the medieval warm period.The UN's 2001 graph, also know as the "hockey stick" showed that the erasure of the medieval warm period in the 2001 graph had been caused by inappropriate data selection and the incorrect use of statistical methods.
The big problem with science is that they are generally funded by governments, and this is world-wide by the way. Its generally agreed that the fundamental equation of State-subsidised science is "No problem equals no funding" The UN's documents occasionally acknowledge the British government's funding. The fact that the central graph of the UN's 2001 report was defective has not had anything like as much attention from the media as the stories of impending disaster which politicians and the UN itself have derived from it.
An independent report by statisticians, probably the most devastating scientific criticism yet leveled at the UN on climate change, concluded not only that the UN's 2001 temperature reconstruction had used inappropriate statistical methods and data but also that many of the supporting scientific papers, both before and after the 2001 report, had been written by a small and closely connected group of palaeoclimatologists who effectively dominated their field worldwide and were all intimately linked to the principle author of the UN's 2001 graph.
The temperatures we're experiencing at the moment are not exceptional and that the medieval warm period was at least as warm as the present and probably up to 3 degrees C warmer.
There's some further info at www.co2science.org and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/grap.../warm-refs.pdf.

ScumLord

I don't think we'll wipe ourselves out, we are great survivers, we're on every continent (hot or cold) and we've already done the ice age thing all that will happen is we'll loose the ideal eutopian enviorment that we have now and billions will die. Not the end of the world.

There's probably damn all we can do about it now the damage is done.

Terry

Endurance Man wrote:

It only took a drop of 5-8 degrees to trigger the last ice age , what happens when we raise the temp by 5-8 degrees?

Steam age?
That or a Kevin Costner movie.

Blue_Lagoon wrote:

GWB? Global Warming Bush?

Add that to the story of the burning bush in the bible and you get...






nothing really.
where are the conspiracy theorists when you need them?

Speaking of the bible, one theory about Jesus walking on water suggests that the dead sea was prone to freezing over 2,000 years ago and that Jesus was just walking on ice. I think that's where the BBC got the idea for that great TV show.

ScumLord

Lol, And lo and behold Jesus did walk across water but had to cut it short as the bethlehem giants hockey team had booked the water for the next hour. I wonder how many more of his where like that. Did he turn water into wine? Well he watered the vineyard so "technically".

User45701

I thought i understood global warming but i am confused now because there are so many conflicting reports i don't know these scientists personly so i cant make an informed decision

One of these is a report that is being published in two days (1st FEB)

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1959556,00.html

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=20505

humanji

ChRoMe wrote:

Also I think its a bit big headed of the human race to believe that we are capable of destroying the planet. The earth is capable of shaking off the human race like its a dose of the flu.

Sounds like a challenge to me!

ScumLord

that heartland site looks very biased towards the American view that global warming isn't happening and we can continue poluting.

Celticfire

ScumLord wrote:

that heartland site looks very biased towards the American view that global warming isn't happening and we can continue poluting.

I guess China will be happy with that....

Tar.Aldarion

Global warming does not simply mean that it will get hotter, it means weather will become more random
frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and tornados will increase.

It does not matter if it is natural or not, it is being accelerated by humans hugely.
Since 1850 our records are reliablefor those that want to know when we started measuring.
Here is the graph.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png

As for whether this process is a recurring one and how do we know what temperature was like back then, we probably do.
The techniques used take assumptions yes, but they are most likely true, it would take a lot for them not to be.
If these hold, ours is the highest climb on record.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/recons.html
It does not matter if our records 'don't go back far enough' if we can measure tehm with our technology, now.
Warming is both natural and internal, ie, us.
It is taught in chemistry in university that we are causing global warming, and why.
In the next 90 years global climate will probably rise between 1.4 and 6 degrees.
It could and most likely is natural but we are accelerating it massively. Why not cut back and prevent an iceage happening in possibly one hundred years?

Celticfire

There are over 6 billion humans on this planet and with all our cities,industry,plane flights and mobile phone chargers we create 3% of the co2 created every day.

Co2 makes up approx 0.037% of the atmosphere and of that huge percentage we make up 3%.

How come no-one mentions water vapor when they bring up global warming?
It is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and yet gets no mention.
Is that because you can't bring in taxes on water vapor?

brianthebard

Celticfire wrote:

There are over 6 billion humans on this planet and with all our cities,industry,plane flights and mobile phone chargers we create 3% of the co2 created every day.

Co2 makes up approx 0.037% of the atmosphere and of that huge percentage we make up 3%.

How come no-one mentions water vapor when they bring up global warming?
It is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and yet gets no mention.
Is that because you can't bring in taxes on water vapor?

theindependent.co.uk wrote:

A warmer world is increasing evaporation from the oceans causing atmospheric concentrations of water vapour, a powerful greenhouse agent, to have increased by 4 per cent over the sea since 1970. Water vapour in the atmosphere exacerbates the greenhouse effect. This is the largest positive feedback identified in the report, which details for the first time the IPCC's concern over the uncertainties - and dangers - of feedback cycles that may quickly accelerate climate change.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2193672.ece

From yesterdays independent. Happy now?

shamblertine

ChRoMe wrote:

In regards people saying that the human race is responsible for global warming I can only come to one response.

So what!!

The earth has been around for millions of years and has many spieces made extinct. Why would the human race be any different.

Also I think its a bit big headed of the human race to believe that we are capable of destroying the planet. The earth is capable of shaking off the human race like its a dose of the flu.

Thats not true, the earth has tried time and time again to kill off the human race but has failed on every ocasion. We survived 1 ice age we can survive another or whatever the earth decides to throw at us next.

Terry

Natural selection for the win.

biko

Global warning v number Pirates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pchart.jpg

Terry

We didn't listen.

monkeyfudge

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that it is at least 90% likely that humans are responsible for climate change.

Climate Report.pdf

They're a UN organisation and have a history of understating the dangers.

Tar.Aldarion

Saw it on the news last night all right.
'well duh'.

monkeyfudge

Still... I guess it can't hurt to become a pirate... just to play it safe, you know?

Tar.Aldarion

Hmm, it can't hurt, therefore it can only help.

\m/_(>_<)_\m/

sure back in the roman days. it has been well proven and documented that it was warm enough to grow grapes and produce wines from their vineyards. it hasn't been done since,
I think some UK farmers are setting up trial vineyards at the moment in the anticipation that the temperature may rise to similar to the days of the Romans

Black Swan

Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum! Edit: Glass of wine?

Celticfire

The Little Ice Age brought bitterly cold winters to many parts of the world, but is most thoroughly documented in Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames freeze was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and and depth, hence the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. The winter of 1794/95 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island's harbors to shipping.

The severe winters affected human life in ways large and small. The population of Iceland fell by half, but this was perhaps also due to fluorosis caused by the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783 [4]. The Viking colonies in Greenland, however, clearly died out (in the 1400s) because they could no longer grow enough food there. In North America, American Indians formed leagues in response to food shortages [5].

"In many years, snowfall was much heavier than recorded before or since, and the snow lay on the ground for many months longer than it does today [6]." Many springs and summers were outstandingly cold and wet, although there was great variability between years and groups of years. Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of death and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315-1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper). Viticulture entirely disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused massive flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent losses of large tracts of land from the Danish, German, and Dutch coasts [7].

The extent of mountain glaciers had been mapped by the late 1800s. In both the north and the south temperate zones of our planet, snowlines (the boundaries separating zones of net accumulation from those of net ablation) were about 100 m lower than they were in 1975 [8]. In Glacier National Park, the last episode of glacier advance came in the late 18th and early 19th century [9]. In Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, large temperature excursions during the Little Ice Age (~1400-1900 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (~800-1300 AD) possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation [10].

For this reason, any of several dates ranging over 400 years may indicate the beginning of the Little Ice Age:

* 1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
* 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
* 1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
* 1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
* 1650 for the first climatic minimum

In contrast to its uncertain beginning, there is a consensus that the Little Ice Age ended in the mid-19th century.

Beginning around 1850, the world's climate began warming again and the Little Ice Age may be said to have come to an end at that time. Some global warming critics believe that the Earth's climate is still recovering from the Little Ice Age and that human activity is not the decisive factor in present temperature trends.

\m/_(>_<)_\m/ wrote:

sure back in the roman days. it has been well proven and documented that it was warm enough to grow grapes and produce wines from their vineyards. it hasn't been done since,
I think some UK farmers are setting up trial vineyards at the moment in the anticipation that the temperature may rise to similar to the days of the Romans

Why is it so hard to see that the world has and will continue to change?