Global Warming Poll

[FishinCricket]

Sank into the ocean?

More like swallowed by a sea of religious nuts...

Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria:

Julius Caesar's Fire in The Alexandrian War, in 48 BCE

The attack of Aurelian in the third century CE;

The decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391 CE;

The Muslim conquest in 642 CE or thereafter.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria?wasRedirected=true

Imagine where our sciences might have been by now if not for the religion era/dark ages...

Hopefully were coming out of that...

[flytyer57]

Imagine where our sciences might have been by now if not for the religion era/dark ages...

Hopefully were coming out of that...

Not as long as there are the likes of Pat Robertson etc...

[Tim Smith]

Not as long as there are the likes of Pat Robertson etc...

Bad religion is definitely a problem in this issue, but GOOD religion...certainly good ethics....are our best hope to find out way out of this mess.

And Gary, I would have waited for your answer, but I'm sort of out of time for the short term. The quick answers to solar forcing as the source of global heating and the scientific concensus issues are:

1. The current science shows no relationship between solar radiation and global temperatures. Here's a rebuttal piece from the Stanford Solar Center They say the current increase is primarily due to greenhouse gases. Here's a review article that covers that topic in detail. The graphs in the paper you posted (did they have a citation?) are not the current understanding of that dynamic. People who subscribe to solar forcing are a tiny minority of dissenters in the field...

2. ...as is the larger list of dissenters at the end of your article. That list, like all those lists of dissenters gathered minorities from a variety of disciplines (social sciences!!?!) and is in no way the mainstream scientific view on this topic. Check the Harris poll links. We've covered this already.

I can follow up more later if you like.

...and with that, I'm going to have to pause a bit here. I have some reports due that I have neglected badly these last couple of days.

I'll leave you with a brand new video link of some people I work with in Belize, some of the things they are trying to do to adapt to climate change (i.e. create a coastal plan), and some shots of the utter devastation that climate change inflicted on their reef (more than adequate motivation to do some thing about this problem).

Enjoy.

[Gary Lange]

Very interesting Tim. It seems that the rich are taking away what the locals have relied on for food and a livelihood by filling the mangroves and polluting the reef and the Government isn't doing much to stop it.

[gotmuddy]

and it wasn't clear why Muddy raised that in the first place. I admit I'm dumber than most but he needs to make himself clear so even I can understand him.

Sorry, that is my fault. Since most people don't recycle cfls they get dumped into dumps. Unless that dump contains all water that gets into it the mercury gets into the water.

Going against my own advice, here:This was the most basic "study" I could think to give you, and this data is undeniable FACT...if you think otherwise, you are simply delusional. Never before in geologic history has average temperature changed so rapidly, aside from catastrophic events such as the asteroid impact that caused the K-T extinction.Furthermore, it occurs to me that since this data IS fact, the burden of proof is actually on your end to show that man is NOT causing climate change, since there is clearly a correlation between increasing man-made CO2 emissions and increasing temperature. No data exists to provide that evidence, but good luck anyway. You can continue to ignore the obvious connection if you want, but you're just lying to yourself for no good reason.

I like your graph. Good scare tactics. a 1.5 degree temperature shift in 130 years should alarm us. This chart is nonsense. Please explain to me how the decrease in CO2 emissions between 1939 and 1942 caused global temps to rise? burden of proof you say? What about between 1905 and 1915 when the temperature dipped well below the CO2 line and came back up? CO2 emissions were steadily rising.

[Wayne SW/MO]

I would like to see that graph with an overlay of population growth.

The temperature line doesn't seem to be behaving, kind of of erratic. some pretty significant swings actually.

[eric1978]

I like your graph. Good scare tactics. a 1.5 degree temperature shift in 130 years should alarm us. This chart is nonsense. Please explain to me how the decrease in CO2 emissions between 1939 and 1942 caused global temps to rise? burden of proof you say? What about between 1905 and 1915 when the temperature dipped well below the CO2 line and came back up? CO2 emissions were steadily rising.

Deep thoughts, by gotmuddy. I guess it's just too complex an issue for you to get your head around, so I'll go back to my usual habit of ignoring everything you say.

By the way, a 1.5 degree temperature shift in 150 years is quite significant. Just because gotmuddy believes whatever he chooses, doesn't mean the rest of us have the luxury of denying reality.

[Al Agnew]

Okay, Muddy, I'll play.

If you think 1.5 degrees is insignificant, bear in mind that a drop of 5 degrees global average from where we are right now would put us in a full blown ice age...

3.5 degrees from where we were at the beginning of the graph would put us in the deep freeze.

Still think 1.5 degrees is insignificant? We're not talking about the temp outside your door tomorrow, we're talking global average. Global average temperatures just don't change that much. Worst case scenarios under the global warming regime say that we could see 6 degrees or more rise by the end of this century...a few of them say it could be as much as 10 degrees.

As for the imperfect correlation between CO2 emissions and global temps, you're making the same mistake that people make when they say that the planet can't be warming because it's cold outside today. There are always short term factors that affect temps year to year or day to day. A major volcanic eruption can cool global temps for up to three or four years, for instance. If CO2 was the ONLY factor affecting global temps, you'd expect to see perfect correlation, but nobody is saying that. But the thing to look at is the trend. You can see that warming didn't really get started in earnest until the 1980s. Before then the rise, while generally following rise in CO2 emissions, was not very significant. But CO2 levels started rising really seriously in the early 1960s. Temps stayed pretty steady until the late 70s. Since then, both have been rising in pretty close correlation. You have to realize that effects from greenhouse gases may not happen instantaneously. Maybe it took a few years for the emissions to build up to a threshold where there was enough carbon in the atmosphere to start making a big difference. But since then, it's been making that difference. The thing to look at is that, even when some other factor causes temps to drop for a year or three, whether it be Mount Pinatubo's eruption or El Nino/La Nina cycles, it doesn't drop as far as it did before and when it recovers it goes much higher than it did before. The first scientific papers warning of global warming came out in the 1980s. Since then, it's that near perfect correlation shown on the graph that has done more than anything else to convince climate scientists that they are on the right track.

[FishinCricket]

religion is definitely a problem in this issue...certainly good ethics are our best hope to find our way out of this mess.

There, I fixed that for you..

(and if we were allowed to discuss religion in depth on this forum I would go into more detail.. Maybe..)

[Chief Grey Bear]

Oh the times I have started to post only to delete. What a waste of our educational tax dollars.

Remember Tim when I said good luck???