Divers Take Note

[Chief Grey Bear]

armadillos used to only live in the South,

Not exactly. The 9-banded armadillo has actually been on the move north for a few thousand years.

And the Beautiful Armadillo (I didn't name it) used to inhabit North America until about 10,000 years ago.

[Justin Spencer]

, here's a commentary on my own experience in Belize

Thanks for the commentary Tim. For many people (me included at times) these first hand accounts of drastic changes are the most powerful proof that something bad is going on. I think those of us that have experienced the loss or degradation of something natural we once enjoyed take the issue more personally and therefore are more passionate about our position.

Thank you for adding to this topic by talking about the reefs, which (believe it or not) was all I was trying to bring to the attention of the readers at the beginning of this thread.

Glad the poll hasn't led to anymore discussion

[Al Agnew]

Yeah, if we can keep this to the science (whether good or bad), and our own experiences, and not descend into the whole political/ideological swamp, I think we can discuss without getting nasty.

Armadillos...while they've been expanding their range for quite a while, seems to me the expansion has really gone into a higher gear in the last decade or so. Coincidence?

One of the places I saw the most obvious and alarming evidence of warming was in north central Alaska, north of Fairbanks. Was driving up the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay, passing large areas of wet, puddled, ponded bog...that was permafrost just a couple years before. Obvious evidence of massive permafrost melting. Remember that permafrost is called that because the frost never melts below just a few inches under the surface during the summer, and summers in the Fairbanks area have always been surprisingly warm, if short. But once it melts the land sinks and the water pools, and this was the first time in the recorded history of central Alaska that the permafrost in that area had melted.

Got up to the Inuit village of Kaktovik, on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, northern edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. End of August. The sea in that area is normally still liquid for another few weeks, even though autumn is pretty far along and there is usually snow on the ground by then. No snow. Okay, not that unusual. But there were more polar bears than usual, roaming around the village and into the village...one of them broke into the church and tore up the church kitchen. They were tearing through the dumpsters. Fine for me, because that's what I was there for, to photograph polar bears. But the villagers said that as the autumns had gotten warmer and the ice was much farther away, more polar bears were hanging around the village instead of being out on the ice where they should be living. They said it wasn't a year to year thing, that it had taken several years of warmer than usual autumns to move a lot of polar bears off the Arctic Ocean and onto land. There had always been a few hanging around, who had learned that during the autumn the Inuit went whale hunting and brought back whale carcasses. But now there were way more of them than there had ever been before. The Inuit are in tune with the ocean (a lot more so than the land...most of their subsistence came from the ocean), and I believe them when they said the bears were being forced onto land during that time because the ice was shrinking.

[Tim Smith]

Yeah, if we can keep this to the science (whether good or bad), and our own experiences, and not descend into the whole political/ideological swamp, I think we can discuss without getting nasty.

Unfortunately, Al, until you confront the politics you'll be stuck here forever.

The same way Mr. Morris can still get away with saying that humans and dinosaurs lived together, the denial crowd will insist that your polar bears are just fine, and climatologists can't measure temperature, and 20 other kinds of nonsense that must be true because scientists are liars and "our side" has to be right.

The climate debate splits along almost exactly the same lines.

...here's an experience for you.

I once went to a conference on "Intelligent Design". Being a good Southern Christian and also a scientist, these kinds of issues have always been imporant to me. So when my dad, who was both a protein chemist and a church elder asked me if I wanted to go, I was glad to make the trip.

We sat through the conference and listened to the talks. At the end of the day it was apparent that this group was simply repackaging a lot bad science into a molecular format. The basis of the "Intelligent Design" premise was that complex systems can't work if any one part of them is removed. From this they concluded that dynamic systems (like cells) had to be created all at once (by something intelligent, i.e. God). They used examples like the function of actin and myosin and the movement of flagella to say that if even one part of those protiens in those fibers wasn't formed in exactly the right way, then the whole system couldn't work. Therefore flagella (and implicity most other things) had to be created (implicity by God) all at once (without natural selection).

This Intelligent Design/Dembske/Behe molecular biology shtick was pretty fancy on the surface. However there are many forms of primitive flagella and plenty of evidence that systems of protiens gradually shift from one function to another with slight modifications over time (i.e. they evolve). The whole dog and pony show of Intelligent Design was nothing more than molecular repackaging of the same old "there aren't any intermediate forms" rhetorical dodge (that argument basically demands that biologists produce every last biological form that ever lived over the entire history of evolution before accepting that any evolution has occurred at all). My dad was appalled.

So we were sitting in the audience at the end of a talk by a Mr. Wells (I think it was Wells) when dad raised his hand. Several other people had already pointed out some of these problems in the theory, when dad asked "Do you believe it is morally repugant for humans to have descended from apes." Mr. Wells blinked a bit. And stared at him. And then said, "Yes."

It was an honest answer, but it was not a scientific one. Whether Mr. Wells would admit it or not, his feelings on that topic were also the real reason that conference and the intelligent design theory ever existed at all. This group had built their science from their fear they were somehow connected to animals, and from a particular interpretation of the Bible that limited their ability to deal with those implications. That dynamic has barely changed over the last 150 years.

The climate change debate is rapidly moving in the same direction. The denial argument is building backward from a distrust of science and a moral assertion that nobody should tell them what to do (if you can call that morality). Certainly oil companies will twist facts (I was talking to one oil man precently who put forward the idea that the Macando spill was probably good for fisheries in the Gulf...shameless). Their skepticism comes from their economic interets and none of that is especially surprising.

What is vastly more concerning is how the churches, who are the only real effective moral arbiters in this country, are following suit. The climate change debates seem to be playing out along some of the same fault lines as the evolution debate. The same predjudices leveled against scientists are being leveled using the same kinds of rhetoic, often spoken by the same players to the same audiences. It is as if the possibility that we might act cooperatively to address the problem is some kind of insidious moral threat.

There is still room for honest skepticsm about the particulars of climate change, and certainly the policy issues are entirely up for grabs. But this is not the level this issue is being debated in most public places. Scientists haven't found out everything about climate change, but they know a lot. They know global climatic temperatures are rising. They know we are liberating CO2 at an unprecidented rate from unprecidented sources. They know greenhouse gases can account for the kinds of increases we see. They know that no other driver has accounted for the rise. They know we are facing increasing levels of disruption if the current trends hold.

Sure. We can hack through the details of the science for now, but we don't have 150+ years to wait for this thing to play out.

For many of the deniers, the real issue is that they think mainstream science is out to get them. That's a moral/political issue that no amount of logic can cure.

[Justin Spencer]

I am interested from those who think that the science of global warming is being made up, who is benefitting from this percieved false information. No one demographic (that I'm aware of) is getting rich from the attempted proof that global warming is related to human activities. Everyone understands that the other side stands to benefit if we can prove that it is not man made. Believe me I would love to believe that it is not man made and that the burning of fossil fuels does not hurt the planet. Who wouldn't! I would say most of us started out thinking this problem was being exaggerated and no big deal, but slowly have been convinced that we do play a role, and for me I'm afraid we play a major role in the climate changes we are seeing.

[podum]

Tim, I don't know where to start with your comparison of man-made warming skeptics to creationists. It's offensive. What you are calling "the science" is really your (and others') conclusion about the data. There would be no argument about what "the science" is if the conclusion that man is the driver of climate change IF that conclusion was a scientific proof. It is not a provable hypothesis right now. Maybe in the future it will be. Consensus is not a scientific proof. Arguably, your consensus argument for man-made warming (which is all over this thread) is much more like the flat earth and earth as the center of the universe arguments of the 14th and 16th centuries than my dissenter argument is like your creationist comparison.

[Chief Grey Bear]

Armadillos...while they've been expanding their range for quite a while, seems to me the expansion has really gone into a higher gear in the last decade or so. Coincidence?

They hit the US about 1850. That I believe was when the first documented armadillo was north of the Rio Grande. And it took them about 125 years or so to get to the SW corner of Missouri. But you are right, they have expanded very rapidly since then. And the warm winters are very condusive to that. They don't have the ability to store fat so they must eat almost daily. And sice insect are the main diet, winter is not very kind to them. It is my and biologist hope that the harsher winters will return and stop and maybe even reverse their progession.

[Mitch f]

I believe in global warming but I also believe Smallie was right, I wouldn't believe anything that Al Gore says.

[Al Agnew]

Come on, Mitch, we can play that game all night...there are a whole bunch of politicians and public figures that I tend to distrust, but when they say something that interests me I step back and check the facts. Gore is just a messenger. In this case, from everything I've read on the subject, and I'm obviously interested in it, he was mainly condensing the science, in a few cases distorting it, in a few cases exaggerating it, in a few cases oversimplifying it, but in the main just popularizing it.

Podum, like I said somewhere before, the only way we'll find out if the science is right is by waiting to see what happens, and then it'll be too late if it turns out to be right. This is not something with which you can have a scientific proof. And "provable hypothesis" is kind of an oxymoron, since if it's a hypothesis it's by definition unproven. You can also turn it all around, too. The hypothesis that climate change is NOT caused by human activities is just as unproven and just as unprovable.

And your comparison of climate science to flat earth and earth as the center of the universe doesn't wash, either. There was never any scientific evidence that the earth was flat or that it was the center of the universe, just the "common sense" (and to an extent the religious views in the case of earth being the center of the universe) of the time. When people of a scientific bent actually started finding evidence that it was otherwise, the flat earth and center of the universe views were quickly proven to be wrong. I agree with Tim's analogy in this way: People have an emotional stake in continuing to deny anthropogenic climate change, the same as they have a stake in continuing to believe in creationism. In the one case it's religious, in the other ideological. If you are a dyed in the wool conservative, it smacks of disloyalty to believe in ACC. It's your team and your team has to be right. If science says otherwise, even hypothesizes otherwise, science has to be wrong. And yes, liberals are just as likely to operate that way, but not all of us are rabid liberals or rabid conservatives, and neither are all scientists.

Tim stated the most important circumstantial evidence...there are lots of indications in the real world, not just in the world of data, that says the earth is warming and climate is getting more unstable. Nobody argues that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas. Nobody argues that there aren't other greenhouse gases. Nobody argues that burning fossil fuels doesn't produce CO2. Nobody argues that we are not liberating carbon in unprecedented levels, carbon that has been sequestered in the ground for millions of years and that took millions of years to build up there. And nobody has found evidence that anything else, any "natural" occurrence, is happening right now that can account for whatever warming is taking place. Put that all together, and it makes a pretty good case.

[flytyer57]

I think the debate on "global warming" is useless.

Some of us believe the science and some of us believe Fox News.

And that is not likely to change anytime soon.