Global Warming 2

[MrPlum]

Then explain the claim that temperatures "were higher than today by at least 12.5 F° for most of the past 550 million years"

or

"Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work... said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much “global warming” over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective."

[STEVE G]

"Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work... said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much “global warming” over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective."

If we wait another 200 or so years to construct a more accurate temperature record, it'll be too late if he's wrong.

[rikkitikki]

Global warming will probably go down in recorded history as one of the biggest hoaxes ever played on humanity. We have been cooling for over 10 years. My favorite story on the whole fiasco was when the programming for the original hockey stick modeling system was discovered. It was found that no matter how the data was structured and fed into the system, the same shaped graph was produced. If mankind had the computational capacity to create an accurate model of the entirety of Earths weather systems, then how easy would it be to accurately model a single aspect of the world economy and cash in.

[STEVE G]

Mount Everest is becoming increasingly dangerous to climb because global warming is melting glacier ice along its slopes, according to a Nepalese Sherpa who has conquered the world’s highest summit 20 times.

Rising temperatures have melted much of the ice on the steep trail to the summit and climbers are struggling to get traction on the exposed rock surface, according to the 49-year-old Sherpa, known only as Apa.

The melting ice has also exposed deep crevasses which climbers could fall into, and experts have warned that people scaling the mountain risk being swept away by “outburst floods” from rising volumes of glacial meltwater.

Apa, who grew up in the foothills to Mount Everest, reached the 29,035-foot (8,850-metre) summit on Saturday for the 20th time, breaking his own previous world record for 19 ascents.

After returning to Kathmandu on Tuesday, he said: "The rising temperature on the mountains has melted much ice and snow on the trail to the summit. It is difficult for climbers to use their crampons on the rocky surfaces.”

He said there was hardly any exposed rock on the trail to the summit when he first climbed Everest in 1989, but now the slopes are dotted with bare rocks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... climb.html

[Khundon1975]

STEVE G wrote

"Mount Everest is becoming increasingly dangerous to climb because global warming is melting glacier ice along its slopes, according to a Nepalese Sherpa who has conquered the world’s highest summit 20 times".

A 13 year old American boy has just climbed it from the Chinese side.

http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/i ... 7720100526

I read an article the other day about The Energy Technologies Institute, who are developing a system where C02 is trapped in a matrix of clay and minerals and used to make bricks. Apparently, the minerals permanently bond with the CO2 and trap it forever! Saves pumping it down old oil wells I suppose.
So we will all be able to sit in our homes, surrounded by the pollution we have created with our cars, planes and ships.

Now, what are we going to do about the belching cows?

[rikkitikki]

Yea, the cows do produce a more menacing greenhouse gas, Methane, but I read an article once about a farm where they rigged up apparatuses to the cows to "capture" the gasses they produced:

http://www.physorg.com/news135003243.html

How humiliating! Imagine walking around all day with a hefty bag full-o-fart on your back. Where is PETA on this!

[STEVE G]

YORBA LINDA, Calif. — Documents released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library show members of President Richard Nixon's inner circle discussing the possibilities of global warming more than 30 years ago.

Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public's attention.

There is widespread agreement that carbon dioxide content will rise 25 percent by 2000, Moynihan wrote in a September 1969 memo.

"This could increase the average temperature near the earth's surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit," he wrote. "This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter."

Moynihan was Nixon's counselor for urban affairs from January 1969 — when Nixon began his presidency — to December 1970. He later served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations before New York voters elected him to the Senate.

Moynihan received a response in a January 26, 1970 memo from Hubert Heffner, deputy director of the administration's Office of Science and Technology. Heffner acknowledged that atmospheric temperature rise was an issue that should be looked at.

"The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between," he wrote. "One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to the temperature rise."

Heffner wrote that he would ask the Environmental Science Services Administration to look further into the issue.

Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and had an interest in the environment. In one memo, Moynihan noted his approval of the first Earth Day, to be held April 22, 1970.

"Clearly this is an opportunity to get the President usefully and positively involved with a large student movement," he wrote to John Ehrlichman, Nixon's adviser on domestic affairs.

Moynihan's memo was among 100,000 documents released Friday.

The documents also include about 5,000 pages of now unclassified national security records on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, correspondence between Nixon and then-British Prime Minister Edward Heath and back-channel Soviet-Israeli relations.

The new material is part of the ongoing effort to move Nixon's archives from Washington to Yorba Linda since the library came under federal control in 2007.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... QD9GNB5MO0

[STEVE G]

Drought Slows Plant Growth, 2000-2009
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/v ... src=imgrss

[STEVE G]

When the future history of the Arctic will be written, 2010 will be marked off as the breakthrough year for commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
The ice is melting and the shipping is entering. The Northern Sea Route will be the new sea highway between Europe and Asia.
The first one to sail the entire Northern Sea Route, or the Northeast Passage as it was named those days, was the Finnish-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskioeld in 1878-79. He spent 15 months on the route with his vessel “Vega”. This August, the Norwegian explorer Børge Ousland sailed the same route with his little trimaran. He spent some few weeks and reported that they hardly could see any ice.
But the strongest interest for the Northern Sea Route is no longer among Arctic explorers. The Russian and international shipping industry see the ongoing climate changes and the retreating of the summer ice-cap in the Arctic as a new opportunity. The distance from Europe to Asia is much shorter when sailing north instead of using the Suez channel or sail around Africa. Shorter sailing route save time and save fuel. In other words; save money. Also, the Arctic is free of pirates.
http://www.barentsobserver.com/the-futu ... 16320.html

[barrys]

steve G wrote: "Also, the Arctic is free of pirates."


At the moment, Steve ...........

[PeteC]

Here's some dire predictions for right here in Thailand. Don't buy that condo in Bangkok just yet. Pete

THE CAPITAL
Bangkok may be uninhabitable in seven years
By Varataya Chailangka
The Nation

Dr Ajong Chumsai na Ayudhya, a Thai scientist who has worked with the US space agency Nasa in the past, said yesterday that the areas around the Gulf of Thailand would be hit by tsunamis and that Bangkok would be under water in less than seven years.

At a seminar yesterday about the impact of global warming on Chiang Mai residents, Ajong said humans were mainly to blame for such disasters because they were using up natural resources, chopping down forests and kept emitting greenhouse gases with no regard for the future.

The United States is the biggest contributor to carbon dioxide at 30.2 per cent, followed by China at 30 per cent and India at 23 per cent, he said. Thailand was at rank 22 or 23 out of the 200 biggest emitters of CO2 in the world. With the current CO2 emission rate standing at 395 parts per million (ppm) from the previous 300ppm, he warned that greenhouse gases would increase and bring about inevitable changes.

Ajong explained that over the past three decades the temperature has risen, with warmer seas killing coral reefs, glaciers melting, storms becoming stronger and earthquakes being of greater magnitude.

Warning that temperatures would rise by approximately 4 degrees Celsius, Ajong said polar bears would be extinct in less than 10 years and the seas would rise by six metres.

So far there have been two significant changes to the Earth.

Firstly, the planet's axis has shifted, changing weather patterns, and secondly, the Earth's crust has displaced, causing more frequent and more severe earthquakes and tsunami disasters.

Thailand, which is located on the Eurasian Plate, will be affected, Ajong warned, adding that the Gulf of Thailand would be hit by tsunamis and affect the South very badly.

Earthquakes within the 6-Richter scale and severe flooding would hit provinces in the North, such as Mae Hong Son, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phayao, Nan, Lampang and Uttaradit, he said.

The Central region, namely Bangkok, Samut Sakhon, Samut Songkhram, Samut Prakan, Nonthaburi and Ayutthaya, would be under seawater, he said, adding that the capital would be uninhabitable in seven years.

[MrPlum]

Wow! A prediction that can actually be checked out. Ok. Steve. I'll meet you in Bangkok in 7 years time.

You bring your inflatable and wellies and I'll bring a few friends.

[sandman67]

whilst as Steve points out we have 200 years of written weather records, through dendro...oh bugger it I cant spell it...tree ring analysis, ice core records from both poles, and the wonders of modern geology its pretty simple to map climates accurately for most of the time we've been about since falling out of the tree. Oceanic and lake bed sediment deposits and peat beds are another good source of climate info. Theres some interesting work being done now on the chaos the Romans wreaked whilst digging the silver and gold out of Spain....the gasses and particulates produced by their smelting activity are found in Antarctic ice cores.

Please peeps, dont take what a Journo writes as in any way reliable...its "headline" science and is usually badly interpreted. The BBC and UK press have been sinking their standards down down to Mail and Sun standards recently as articles in reliable science press shows....the recent "Darwin was wrong" articles in the UK press have shown up what a bunch of clueless headline grabbers they have become. Total twaddle.

If you dont think that what we do has an effect on the climate then riddle me these examples from my green and pleasant land:

London Pea Soupers

The Black Country

And anyway....theres an even better reason to cut our reliance on oil, as I have set out elsewhere:

Sending Achmed the Alluah Akbar fan and all his scruffy middle eastern chums a massive big F U !!!
No oil dollars means no bomb money. That should be reason enough.

[STEVE G]

I've seen reports that Bangkok could be flooding so often in about thirty years time that it would become uneconomically viable to base industry there.
Apparently rich Thais are buying up land in Khorat already.

[hhfarang]

Bangkok used to flood badly 30 years ago! I remember being here during the rainy season in the 80's and walking in knee deep water on parts of Sukhumvit road. Before I moved here a few years ago someone told me they had built a subway in Bangkok and I said "No way, it would be full of water all the time."