POLAR CAPS MELTING Options

[Stickman]

The fact of the matter is that the US is the only country on earth where the validity of global warming is still being hotly (hotly. lol. I'm such a wit!) debated. In the US, global warming has, somehow become a political debate; the left agrees it's a problem, and the right doesn't. The belief that global warming "hysteria" is a creation of the media seems to be a peculiarly american delusion.
Among climate scientists worldwide, the validity of global warming is not being debated. There is a virtually unamimous consensus that man made global warming is a big problem. The scientific debate these days is about how bad things will get, and how fast they'll get there. Distressingly, the reccuring theme in recent years seems to be that new research reveals that warming is accelerating faster than theory predicts.
The belief that no matter what we do, mother nature will act to maintain the status quo is simply wrong. There is NO evidence to support this view. In fact, recent research suggests, scarily, that the opposite may be true.

re: raising sea levels: true, the melting of arctic ice will not raise sea levels, as that ice is floating (though it does threaten to disrupt the gulf stream). However, the ice sheets of greenland and Antarctica are also melting. These are on land, so their melting WILL raise sea levels.

This post has been edited by Stickman: 10/07/06 12:51am

[Stickman]

There has been just as much scientific evidence against the idea of global warming as their has been for.

This is untrue. There are few peer reviewed scientific studies that refute global warming. Most research refuting global warming comes from sources that do not submit their findings to peer review.

I also don't put much emphasis on peer review. Just because someone can find other like minded people, doesn't make him right, which is exactly all peer review really is. I could do a little research and find 100's of failed scientific hypostases that passed peer review but were later proved to be completely wrong.

You misunderstand the nature and purpose of peer review.

From wikipedia:
A rationale for peer review is that it is rare for an individual author or research team to spot every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. This is not because deficiencies represent needles in a haystack, but because in a new and perhaps eclectic intellectual product, an opportunity for improvement may stand out only to someone with special expertise or experience. Therefore showing work to others increases the probability that weaknesses will be identified, and with advice and encouragement, fixed. The anonymity and independence of reviewers is intended to foster unvarnished criticism and discourage cronyism in funding and publication decisions.

In addition, since the reviewers are normally selected from experts in the fields discussed in the article, the process of peer review is considered critical to establishing a reliable body of research and knowledge. Scholars reading the published articles can only be expert in a limited area; they rely to some degree on the peer-review process to provide reliable and credible research which they can build upon for subsequent or related research.





Peer review is a credibility check, and is an absolutely essential part of the scientific process. If an individual or organization is unwilling to submit their findings to such a credibility check, their findings are, quite rightly, considered suspect in the scientific community.

This whole chicken little hysteria revolving around "global warming" to me is a farce.
Even the best projections of the alarmist puts the man-made portion of CO2 around 0.2%. This is less than their percentage of error the tempretures cited in their own predictions of global warming.
So if EVERY man-made source of C02 was stopped tomorrow, it would have less than 0.2% impact on the problem.

Uh, what's your source for this info, Druid?

according to this, CO2 levels have risen 36% since the start of the industrial revolution, and continue to rise by about 0.5% per year. This rise is virtually all due to us.

[UNDEAD 1]

good to see this post come back! i was talkin to a guy who worked for the oil companies for 30 years laying the pipe lines etc.. he said something to me that made me think a bit and now i know its all about money. as i ve said before brazil is the only country not dependent on foriegn oil as they produce fuel from sugar cane.what he told me (and i checked and hes right) was all thiis started back in the 70s when we had problems with the middle east/iran,gas lines ,jimmy carter,blah blah.all this alternative energy staring being developed such as electric cars ,solar,hydro (everything we hear about today) but as soon as they dropped the prices at the pump every one quickly forgot about alternative energy and basicly it disapeared.

except for brazil! if you go to brazil its all the same gas stations theyre shell,exxon arco etc.. so if you think,all the same companies who make/provide alternative fuels for brazil (since the 70s) provide us with oil. why not alternative fuels ? our government simply will not let it happen.

[-priority(+)target-]

Layin pipe! haha... Now thats a living! Whats happening is really scarey! I wish society would catch up to the reality of the situation and start making good decisions. Because of the economics of energy, any significant change must be made at a policy level. And with China anything we do won't matter much anyway cause they will use up whatever we don't.
Hard to see a way out of this one.

[Genocide Junkie]

I just watched a thing on TLC or Discovery where the leading expert in thes ice cores which is where lots of the warming data comes from. He said that right now we are actually in a period that is out of the norm. Meaning that we have a stable climate that has not changed much. He says the norm is constant fluctuation and that about once every 10,000 years we have a huge swing which could cause an ice age. He also said we were due for that. So no matter what we do the earth is going to be a big ball of ice in less than 10,000 yrs and we'll all kill each other over food and other necessities as we won't be able to support 10 billion people on snow cream and polar bears...... either way we're doomed to die from an ice age....

Junkie

[CommanderChoth]

To futher sticky's post. NOAA (national oceanic and atmospheric adminstration) admits that CO2 levels are the highest they have EVER been and it is "largely the result of human activity".

We see indicator species migrating poleward (nearly 300 of them), and a tripling of category 4 and 5 hurricanes over the past 30 years.

I seriously believe that it is an issue.

[UNDEAD 1]

WHAT IF HES WRONG! theyre goes my sons future!

[T/A6Pak]

Vodka on the rocks for everybody....LOL

[Stickman]

Hard to see a way out of this one.

It's even worse than you think.

At the same time that fossil fuel use is raising CO2 levels and warming the planet, all the pollution generated by the fossil fuel use is acting to cool things off, as it reflects incoming solar radiation back into space. If we don't stop burning so much fossil fuels, we're screwed. However, when/if we DO stop burning them, the smog will dissapear within a few years, while the greenhouse gasses will remain for centuries at least. The result: stopping the burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming to get WORSE for a few hundred years before it starts to get better. The longer we wait before eliminating fossil fuel use, the worse this will become.

About the only certainty in all this is that our descendants will hate us for our greed and stupidity. One thing I wonder about: who will they hate more? Those that know about the problem but keep driving their SUV's anyway, or those that refuse to acknowledge global warming despite the overwhelming evidence supporting it?