Climate change hits Mars!!, What? No humans on mars! How can this be? Options

[Cpt. Snot Rocket]

What is the coincidence that both Mars and the earth are showing an increase in surface temperature at the same time? Maybe it has something to do with nature, or solar waves from the sun? Maybe more research is needed here afterall?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece



Or maybe there is a Martian invasion fleet taking off for earth right now!

[Blitz]

As for your claim that there are "huge ties with this movement to the environment," I would agree. Most climate scientists were drawn to their profession because they had a natural love of the outdoors. Are they really any different from someone who loves to hunt and fish and spends as much time outside as possible. In reality, they are not any different. I know a limnologist (they study lakes and ponds) who got into his profession because he wanted a job where he could fish whenever he wanted. A couple of biologists I photographed spent a part of their day seining for fish to measure mercury content, but they had their fly rods tucked on board so they could do some catch and release on their own.

I agree exactly on this point, I myself love the outdoors, grew up in the country with a stream 3/4 mile walk thru our woods. Spent a lot of my mis-spent youth, fishing for salmon and steelhead on that river (was recently declared scenic and wild by the state of Ohio)

My best friend went to college and recieved an environmental sciences degree from Ohio State. He spent his summers doing disolved oxygen, water quality and invertabrate studies in lakes and absolutly loved it.

He went on to start his carear and after 5 years had to leave it, because it was way to political. It did not fit with the rest of his believes, and the environmental causes were used as a political tool.

I grew up in the Cleveland area in the 70's and saw what bad environmental policy does. We are light years away from there, and we still have a long way to go to get better.

I spend 6 months of the year fly fishing for steelhead trout From Ohio to Pa, to NY and have strong beliefs in good environmental stewardship. I long for the day, when there are setbacks from streams allowing the natural wetlands to come back, limiting the ag runoff and hopefully bringing back cool water streams. (Ohio has only a couple small streams left)

I just think it could be done without the political knives being weilded around.
New technologies, grants, incentives, and other options could solve the problem and maket the envrioment and economy better global warming or not.

Maybe it's not always the data, it's the political hack solutions of restriction is the only answer that piss me off. I'm no scientist and this is all over my head, but the solutions scare me, and there are other options



This is where I spent my childhood....

[HammaTime]

Wow, now that is spectacularly beautiful!

I have a different picture of Ohio in my mind. Over a decade ago I traveled to Columbus to meet with the heads of American Power (this was an Enron company). They gave me a tour of one of their coal fired power plants. I was mightily impressed with their operation and will never forget the experience of taking an outside elevator halfway up a smoke stack, before climbing the rest of the way to the very top where I could poke my head through a small doorway and watch the smoke race for the sky. They had to build incredibly high smoke stacks to meet local environmental regulations.

What disturbed me on that trip was sitting in their boardroom and hearing them claim that mercury from their coal wasn't reaching Maine waters. At the time, fish advisories had been posted on all the freshwater lakes and streams in Maine due to mercury pollution. These powerful industry executives looked me in the eye, and told me a baldfaced lie.

Research has now proven that their mercury has been spread far and wide, and through bio-accumulation has been working its way up through the food chain. They subsequently were forced to install expensive scrubbers to remove as much mercury from their stacks as technically feasible. We still can't safely eat the fish we pull from crystal clear waters in Maine, and I doubt you can do the same in Ohio.

Of course, it isn't just the power plants, mercury pollution comes from trash incinerators and other sources, but that experience taught me that dirty coal pollutes in many ways beyond the obvious CO2. It also taught me that left to their own devices, industry will always work to improve their bottom line. Maine politicians were powerless to stop the pollution that was falling on their pristine waters. It was up to the Federal Government to regulate that pollution.

Today, our country is like those local Maine politicians. Pollution is impacting us from China and India. We need to figure out a way to accurately measure the impacts and costs of that pollution. We have to find an international regulatory mechanism for ensuring that China's tall smokestacks don't just push more pollution in our direction. The challenge is how to get all of the countries to recognize that they have to take action for the public good. We can't do that if we don't have scientists measuring impacts.

If you can think of a better process than the IPCC, I'd love to hear it.

This post has been edited by HammaTime: 10/03/08 11:46am

[HammaTime]

ABC news reports that Arctic sea ice has hit a record low.

The money quote:

"Five years ago, if you'd gone to a conference of scientists and said, 'by 2013 the Arctic sea ice in summertime is going to be gone,' you might have been laughed out of the room," he said.

"No one is laughing now."