Global warming overblown?

No quarrel from me there C.I. But again, before any of us give up any of our freedoms or pleasures, let's make sure we're operating from sound scientific principles and not junk science produced by somebody who needs to find a problem in order to protect his funding.

Thank you Jim. I could just kiss your little pink piggy snout right now.

Personally, I have a big problem with fission, but fusion would be worth the risks.

According to this article, it is only 5 bn, and is going ahead in France: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3239806.stm

And I quite agree about democracies being short-sighted. I lived in Hong Kong which was an administrative bureaucracy and therefore, since the policy makers were there for the duration, they tended to make long-term decisions.

From the article linked to Clary's post:


Why isn't this getting U.S. press as well?

SQWAK! There's just lots of reasons to get past fossil fuels. Just the measureable results of polluted air are reason enough. Now, toss in a dependence on foreign oil, and we need to procede with anything with the potential of being economically practical.

Well, you didn't say there weren't, Foxfyre, you said there's no consensus. You are right.

ITER homepage




US Newswire - Press Release 7/13/04

To answer your question: it's not only by the EU, but in France ... yuck!

LOL, can we say that Germany and the U.S. are buddies when it comes to their opinion on France?

No, why?

Okay, my mistake.

Temptress!

Bromeliad - you've just made a friend for life!

Yo, Jim

Not many people in the Persian Gulf are using Latin these days, I bet.

What does your motto mean?

McTag

McTag - it's a quote from Ovid. Very roughly translated:

"Be persistent and tough; this present suffering will be of benefit to you in the future"

Well that's good: sounds a bit like "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich staerker"

Which is "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger"

Meanwhile, in the world around us: in the paper today, news that ecology change in the North Sea has already happened, apparently and almost certainly due to warming, and the vast seabird colonies are starving, and failing to reproduce.

Quote

Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds
By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor
30 July 2004
Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming.
The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.
In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.
In Orkney and Shetland, the sandeel stocks have been shrinking for several years, and this summer they have disappeared: the result for seabirds has been mass starvation. The figures for breeding failure, for Shetland in particular, almost defy belief.
More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots were recorded in the islands in the last national census, Seabird 2000, whose results were published this year; this summer the birds have produced almost no young, according to Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored Shetland seabirds for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the guillemots is unprecedented in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great skuas were recorded in Shetland in the same census; this year they have produced a handful of chicks - perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic skuas (1,120 pairs in the census) have failed to produce any surviving young.

More….. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=546138

Perhaps mentioning here catches more attention than my earlier thread:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=30117

Have you read the accounts that the sandeel is the first 'primate' link the food chain in the North Sea? And that the sandeel has been overfished to th extent that fishing has been suspended from time to time to prevent making this speciies extinct?

Would it not be worth consideration that overfishing and thereby disrupting the food chain could be a factor in stress on species in the North Sea as much or more than global warming?

Yes it could, and fishing has been suspended.

However I believe that the marine scientists have taken that factor into the reckoning.
Cod stocks, severely depleted elsewhere by fishing, have not recovered (Labrador banks) but the swift disappearance of the sandeels appears not to be due to overfishing. They were not a commercial species anyway, or a very limited one.
The article quoted above, or another one in the same edition of the paper (q.v.) mentions this point.

Indeed, Foxfyre, your response seems to be a fast and wrong one, since - as McTag already pointed at - the article(s) quoted show a different result due to the survey.

Possibly so. But my questions remain. I see so much compelling evidence that global warming may be blamed for so many things that are due to other factors. I have to get to work now, but will re-read and also follow the money funding the study. That is usually the telling factor on how credible a study may or may not be. I'm not saying McTag's take on it isn't correct. I'm just saying I don't know.

global warming?
This is my very unscientific but thought provoking idea about the cause of global warming. BLACK TOP! Black top roads , driveways and parking lots are so much hotter than the earth which absorbs the heat that in the summer time who can walk across a black top road without nearly passing out from the radiating heat. Now we are paving more and more land every day there by radiating more and more heat. If it sounds too simple to be true. It just may be the answer.

Welcome to A2K, tyra310!

What you describe, is generally called the "Urban Heat Island Effect" and the reason, why many metropolitan locations have become anomalously warm over the last 10 - 20 years.

Global warming is to be seen "more global", I think :wink: