It's not rocket science. The earth is warming, The ice is melting faster than in all of man's history, but only in the last 200 years or so. This FACT is not disputed. What is causing it is not readily proven. I don't think we can afford to accuse "Chicken Little" faced with such uncertainty. The universe does not care if we survive, what constitutes a crime, or, whether or not your wife has a law degree. The earth is indeed warming and it is alarming the scientists, but they are scientists and generally don't get emotional. They just present the facts and like everybody else, look to government for the political help/funding to learn more.
Instead of just NASA, try the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Caltech, Scripps Institute for Oceanography, to name a few. Its not just a few scientists, it’s hundreds of top scientists in the United States. Outside the United States the numbers grow in quantum leaps.
You haven’t researched this enough to make an informed opinion.
Don Quijote
· 5 months ago
Global warming for Amateur:
The science: I am clueless... or pretty damn close...
The politics: Pretty straight forward. In one corner you have a bunch of scientist/climatologist/planetologist who work for reputable institutions and have published in peer reviewed magazines a set of theories and facts which have been reviewed and confirmed by multiple international commissions chaired by the US & EU.
In the other corner you have Big Oil & King Coal who have created & financed think-tanks whose sole purpose is to confuse the issues so that they can keep on making money hand over fist.
Now who would you trust? a bunch of scientist with reputations on the line and no great financial payoff for telling the truth, or the mouth pieces of Big Oil & king Coal.
This is just the latest replay of tobacco regulation, in the 50's scientist found a correlation between smoking and cancer, doctors then spent the next forty years swearing up and down that tobacco causing cancer while the tobacco companies spent a fortune discrediting said doctors and preventing regulation, and while they did that millions of people died from their poison.
GeorgeSorwell
· 5 months ago
I think Don Quijote's analogy to cigarettes is a good one.
And I think someone who's sources are the Weekly Standard and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ought to ask himself why he can't do better.
JSpencer
· 5 months ago
The portrayal of Hansen as an extremist only holds up if he is wrong about AGW. If he is correct, then the words and actions some view as absurd are simply evidence he has the courage of his convictions. This debate is one some treat as partisan theatre, but the stakes are very high. My own belief is that some folks feel more comfortable when they don't have to look very far down the road. Maybe environmentalists tend to look a little too far down the road at times, but how much of a sin is that compared to wishful thinking or willful ignorance? The more global warming can be separated from politics, left AND right, the better off we will all be, and the more clearly we will be able to look at the science. That said, there seems to be pattern of kicking environmental issues down the road for some other generation to deal with. If this continues, it will eventually constitute failure of a species IQ test on a huge scale, in fact we are failing already. If we aren't capable of using and allocating resources in a sane way, controlling our populations in a sane way, or living in a way that doesn't ruin oceans and entire ecosystems, then how likely is it that we will deal responsibly with something like global warming? Yes, I realize many people believe global warming is only cyclic, virtually independant of human activity, and therefore a non-issue. I don't mean to offend anyone here, but I view that as either very naive, or very incompletely informed. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong about this.
DLS
· 5 months ago
A fascinating subject, climatology, has been seized and misused by activists for their political agenda.
The similarity of the people (among the older, the same people) agitating about global warming to the "population explosion" and related (running-out-of-resources; Club of Rome; apocalypse upon us) crowd is remarkable.
So is the depth to which so many of the global-warming activists have descended while adhering to the religion they have contrived.
Global warming (which has happened many times before, to a greater extent than is happening now) and a warmer climate in our future (in ordinary human history, we have had warmer climates than now) is not anything new, nor is it a legitimate excuse as the apocalyptic religious leftists claim it is for "solutions" in the predictable form of command and control of the economy and society, and de-industrialization (as has been said correctly before, "green is the new Red").
I even roll my eyes at those who are rushing to advocate opening of the Northern Sea Route (as well as retch at the worse people who are against it not only because it's a good result of warming but because it could involve transport of nuclear materials and other hazardous items far from the reach of terrorists).
GeorgeSorwell
· 5 months ago
DLS--
The problem of overpopulation was, and still is, real.
Successful research into increasing crop yields and nutrient levels helped (and helps) to alleviate it.
It's called the Green Revolution. If you've never heard of it, you can look it up.
Not everyone looks at a problem and decides to bury their head in the sand.
DLS
· 5 months ago
"The science: I am clueless... or pretty damn close...
The politics: Pretty straight forward."
The leftists substitute politics for science and misuse science to advance their leftist political agenda.
The consequences of warming are nothing new. Climate at times in the past was warmer than it is now, and includes many times when the Arctic was ice-free (a stable or long-term state, as is an "ice age" under the right conditions; among the older works I own include discussion of complete glaciation, 20+ years before the "snowball earth" phrase began its use). The consequences of global warming were described in the 1970s in earnest, if not earlier. The "worst case" realistic scenario decades from now is an ice-free Arctic Ocean. The tropospheric temperature rise is about what Arrhenius calculated over 100 years ago. The big difference, as you might expect, is in wintertime over the Arctic, with a small but significant change in summer temperatures (and what it implies for the change in growing season and opening of northern lands to more agriculture, something the Russians have dreamed of and sought for ages). The subtropical highs you (hopefully) are familiar with off each coast will shift northward. (It's an overgeneralization, but winter in the north Pacific will be similar to summertime now. Another view from a 1969 work is that winds [implying weather, too] in winter will be like they are in May or September now.) The shifting north of climatic zones will be a benefit to much of eastern North America and Eurasia, while the Southwest is expected to suffer more. (Note the terrain effects on climate in the Southwest and east of the Rockies, even, now; the terrain isn't going away and even with a northward shift, the existing arid climate zones are the key to the prediction where more aridity will occur.) There will be winners and losers. The Intertropical Convergence Zone (equatorial wet weather belt) will shift northward and this will aridify (some would say desertify) the wet and wet-dry areas in the 0-20 S latitude region. This is where the big losers will be found in the world. Even there, with every decade except in sub-Saharan Africa, there has been progress in these nations and this reduces the effect future warming would have on them.
This was known _ages_ ago. It's just something that was hijacked by the Left and developed into a much stronger movements than most (as I've written elsewhere, it's like "'acid rain' on steroids").
We are in an integlacial and haven't yet established definitively if we're still going up or we're starting to come down (toward the next ice age in the distant future). Current evidence (such as thinning of Arctic sea ice, not just its predictable reduction of areal extent) points toward warming. Increasing CO2 should lead eventually to significant warming. A warmer climate is _better_ than a colder climate, and adapting to change is obviously superior to engaging in questionable, destructive, progress-retarding decisions that try to reduce global warming that not only is in large part out of the USA's and the West's hands, but completely out of man's hands, independent of whatever man does. (Man adds to the warming trend, and in particular to the speed of warming much more than the amount of warming.)
There is no imminent disaster. There is no established coming apocalypse. There is no excuse for silly, stupid agitation, sense of urgency, feelings of panic or hysteria, hyperbole such as "crisis" or "emergency." Especially, none of this should be accompanied by or be an excuse for self-destructive interventionist and authoritarian behavior by governments. That is truly pathological (diseased) and perverse.
New work is done all the time and it's best to constantly search on-line for the information you want, as well as visit libraries for newer works and used book stores for older books (free of excess jargon and unnecessarily details, as well as less tainted by leftist politics -- it concentrates on the subject, not on speculation and blatant political sloganeering) on climate as well as on climate change and global warming. Even if you're leftist and inhibited in distinguishing irresponsible or worse politics from plain science, try to read between the lines and glean the "pure" information from modern works from the leftist political fluff and worse.
If you want current information, here is one place you might wish to start. (It even contains a gratuitous swipe at "corporate power" ...)
But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of researchers traveled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona'nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting. Mountain glaciers have been receding all over the world since the 1990's and there was no reason this one, which provides water to the mighty Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra Rivers, should be any different.
But when the team analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them. Glaciers around the planet are usually dated by looking for two pulses pulse of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from American and Russian atomic bomb testing in the 1950's and 1960's.
In the Naimona'nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests. In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944.
"We were very surprised not to find the 1962-1963 horizon, and even more surprised not to find the 1951-1952 signal," Thompson said. In more than twenty years of sampling glaciers all over the world, this was the first time both markers were missing.
"The rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers, causing widespread flooding," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.
"But in a few decades this situation will change and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India."
'Catastrophe'
The glaciers, which regulate the water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and Yellow rivers are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 10-15m (33-49ft) each year.
Hundreds of millions of people throughout China and the Indian subcontinent - most of whom live far from the Himalayas - rely on water supplied from these rivers.
Yeah, the good clean wholesome fun of watching a billion brown people scramble to survive, it'll do wonders for peace & global security. What could be more stabilizing than a few million refugees looking for a clean glass of water & a decent meal?
Don Quijote
· 5 months ago
You haven’t researched this enough to make an informed opinion.
DLS, like most conservatives doesn't need to do research, he/she knows that if a position is taken by the Democratic Party & it's evil environmental supporters, it is obviously an evil plot by those fancy pants elitist and their dupes to take over the government to bring about a one world government under the aegis of the Euro-weenies and the Chinese.
If the Democratic and the Left came out in favor of motherhood and apple pie, he/she would start encouraging abortions and attempt to pass laws banning child-birth, firebombing apple orchards if she/he was unable to get a law that made apples a class 1 drug.
ReaganiteRepublican
· 5 months ago
Obama claimed that the average American would not bear the brunt of this historic tax-increase: he stated that instead ““It is paid for by the polluters who currently emit dangerous carbon emissions.”
Just compare this outrageous falsehood to Ronald Reagans’ famous quote:
“The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us.
Business doesn’t pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business.”
And after the way the rammed this through the House with little debate, without legislators even reading it… and while quarantining the GOP from any meaningful input whatsoever, any foolhardy individuals who still believe Obama’s threadbare “bipartisanship” spiel ought to have their head examined.
George -- I have known for decades about the Green Revolution. The "population explosion" hype (aimed by activists toward the _West_ as the culprit as well as the site for "solutions") was just an excuse for the same kind of "solutions" we see now for global warming. Fertility has substantially declined since the early 1960s(!). (Don't you know something else so long-known and obvious?) Your mistaken statements about the population were odd and illogical.
Then we have something even more typical from someone who has never been moderate:
"DLS, like most conservatives doesn't need to do research"
Aside from your dishonest fiction created out of thin air, did you even bother to read what I wrote, including the link to get you started (for once, possibly in your life) on research? (No.)
The suffrage needs to be qualified and weighted... [sigh]
Don Quijote
· 5 months ago
The suffrage needs to be qualified and weighted...
By whom? You?
Amazing how fast the undemocratic nature of the Conservatives come out when they can't get their way...
DLS
· 5 months ago
"And after the way the rammed this through the House with little debate"
The final insult to injury related to this pile of garbage bill was as I wrote before: 3:09 AM before the vote, another 300 pages were introduced by the morally dim Demmies.
And yes, Obama has been manipulating public opinion and engaging in demagoguery (Chrysler-GM bondholders cheated by Washington are called "speculator" troublemakers; appeals to such people about offshore tax havens and making threats toward them that appeal to such low-quality people) and exploiting the (often-too-easily) exploitable people, which obviously seem to include some on this Web site and on this thread. [scowl]
All Comments
Instead of just NASA, try the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Caltech, Scripps Institute for Oceanography, to name a few. Its not just a few scientists, it’s hundreds of top scientists in the United States. Outside the United States the numbers grow in quantum leaps.
You haven’t researched this enough to make an informed opinion.
The science:
I am clueless... or pretty damn close...
The politics:
Pretty straight forward.
In one corner you have a bunch of scientist/climatologist/planetologist who work for reputable institutions and have published in peer reviewed magazines a set of theories and facts which have been reviewed and confirmed by multiple international commissions chaired by the US & EU.
In the other corner you have Big Oil & King Coal who have created & financed think-tanks whose sole purpose is to confuse the issues so that they can keep on making money hand over fist.
Now who would you trust? a bunch of scientist with reputations on the line and no great financial payoff for telling the truth, or the mouth pieces of Big Oil & king Coal.
This is just the latest replay of tobacco regulation, in the 50's scientist found a correlation between smoking and cancer, doctors then spent the next forty years swearing up and down that tobacco causing cancer while the tobacco companies spent a fortune discrediting said doctors and preventing regulation, and while they did that millions of people died from their poison.
And I think someone who's sources are the Weekly Standard and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ought to ask himself why he can't do better.
The similarity of the people (among the older, the same people) agitating about global warming to the "population explosion" and related (running-out-of-resources; Club of Rome; apocalypse upon us) crowd is remarkable.
So is the depth to which so many of the global-warming activists have descended while adhering to the religion they have contrived.
Global warming (which has happened many times before, to a greater extent than is happening now) and a warmer climate in our future (in ordinary human history, we have had warmer climates than now) is not anything new, nor is it a legitimate excuse as the apocalyptic religious leftists claim it is for "solutions" in the predictable form of command and control of the economy and society, and de-industrialization (as has been said correctly before, "green is the new Red").
I even roll my eyes at those who are rushing to advocate opening of the Northern Sea Route (as well as retch at the worse people who are against it not only because it's a good result of warming but because it could involve transport of nuclear materials and other hazardous items far from the reach of terrorists).
The problem of overpopulation was, and still is, real.
Successful research into increasing crop yields and nutrient levels helped (and helps) to alleviate it.
It's called the Green Revolution. If you've never heard of it, you can look it up.
Not everyone looks at a problem and decides to bury their head in the sand.
I am clueless... or pretty damn close...
The politics:
Pretty straight forward."
The leftists substitute politics for science and misuse science to advance their leftist political agenda.
The consequences of warming are nothing new. Climate at times in the past was warmer than it is now, and includes many times when the Arctic was ice-free (a stable or long-term state, as is an "ice age" under the right conditions; among the older works I own include discussion of complete glaciation, 20+ years before the "snowball earth" phrase began its use). The consequences of global warming were described in the 1970s in earnest, if not earlier. The "worst case" realistic scenario decades from now is an ice-free Arctic Ocean. The tropospheric temperature rise is about what Arrhenius calculated over 100 years ago. The big difference, as you might expect, is in wintertime over the Arctic, with a small but significant change in summer temperatures (and what it implies for the change in growing season and opening of northern lands to more agriculture, something the Russians have dreamed of and sought for ages). The subtropical highs you (hopefully) are familiar with off each coast will shift northward. (It's an overgeneralization, but winter in the north Pacific will be similar to summertime now. Another view from a 1969 work is that winds [implying weather, too] in winter will be like they are in May or September now.) The shifting north of climatic zones will be a benefit to much of eastern North America and Eurasia, while the Southwest is expected to suffer more. (Note the terrain effects on climate in the Southwest and east of the Rockies, even, now; the terrain isn't going away and even with a northward shift, the existing arid climate zones are the key to the prediction where more aridity will occur.) There will be winners and losers. The Intertropical Convergence Zone (equatorial wet weather belt) will shift northward and this will aridify (some would say desertify) the wet and wet-dry areas in the 0-20 S latitude region. This is where the big losers will be found in the world. Even there, with every decade except in sub-Saharan Africa, there has been progress in these nations and this reduces the effect future warming would have on them.
This was known _ages_ ago. It's just something that was hijacked by the Left and developed into a much stronger movements than most (as I've written elsewhere, it's like "'acid rain' on steroids").
We are in an integlacial and haven't yet established definitively if we're still going up or we're starting to come down (toward the next ice age in the distant future). Current evidence (such as thinning of Arctic sea ice, not just its predictable reduction of areal extent) points toward warming. Increasing CO2 should lead eventually to significant warming. A warmer climate is _better_ than a colder climate, and adapting to change is obviously superior to engaging in questionable, destructive, progress-retarding decisions that try to reduce global warming that not only is in large part out of the USA's and the West's hands, but completely out of man's hands, independent of whatever man does. (Man adds to the warming trend, and in particular to the speed of warming much more than the amount of warming.)
There is no imminent disaster. There is no established coming apocalypse. There is no excuse for silly, stupid agitation, sense of urgency, feelings of panic or hysteria, hyperbole such as "crisis" or "emergency." Especially, none of this should be accompanied by or be an excuse for self-destructive interventionist and authoritarian behavior by governments. That is truly pathological (diseased) and perverse.
New work is done all the time and it's best to constantly search on-line for the information you want, as well as visit libraries for newer works and used book stores for older books (free of excess jargon and unnecessarily details, as well as less tainted by leftist politics -- it concentrates on the subject, not on speculation and blatant political sloganeering) on climate as well as on climate change and global warming. Even if you're leftist and inhibited in distinguishing irresponsible or worse politics from plain science, try to read between the lines and glean the "pure" information from modern works from the leftist political fluff and worse.
If you want current information, here is one place you might wish to start. (It even contains a gratuitous swipe at "corporate power" ...)
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
Science Daily - Himalayan Glacier Melting Observed From Space
Discovery News- Tibetan Glaciers Melting at Stunning Rate
Himalayan glaciers 'melting fast'
Yeah, the good clean wholesome fun of watching a billion brown people scramble to survive, it'll do wonders for peace & global security. What could be more stabilizing than a few million refugees looking for a clean glass of water & a decent meal?
DLS, like most conservatives doesn't need to do research, he/she knows that if a position is taken by the Democratic Party & it's evil environmental supporters, it is obviously an evil plot by those fancy pants elitist and their dupes to take over the government to bring about a one world government under the aegis of the Euro-weenies and the Chinese.
If the Democratic and the Left came out in favor of motherhood and apple pie, he/she would start encouraging abortions and attempt to pass laws banning child-birth, firebombing apple orchards if she/he was unable to get a law that made apples a class 1 drug.
Just compare this outrageous falsehood to Ronald Reagans’ famous quote:
“The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us.
Business doesn’t pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business.”
And after the way the rammed this through the House with little debate, without legislators even reading it… and while quarantining the GOP from any meaningful input whatsoever, any foolhardy individuals who still believe Obama’s threadbare “bipartisanship” spiel ought to have their head examined.
http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/
Then we have something even more typical from someone who has never been moderate:
"DLS, like most conservatives doesn't need to do research"
Aside from your dishonest fiction created out of thin air, did you even bother to read what I wrote, including the link to get you started (for once, possibly in your life) on research? (No.)
The suffrage needs to be qualified and weighted... [sigh]
By whom? You?
Amazing how fast the undemocratic nature of the Conservatives come out when they can't get their way...
The final insult to injury related to this pile of garbage bill was as I wrote before: 3:09 AM before the vote, another 300 pages were introduced by the morally dim Demmies.
And yes, Obama has been manipulating public opinion and engaging in demagoguery (Chrysler-GM bondholders cheated by Washington are called "speculator" troublemakers; appeals to such people about offshore tax havens and making threats toward them that appeal to such low-quality people) and exploiting the (often-too-easily) exploitable people, which obviously seem to include some on this Web site and on this thread. [scowl]