Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

It looks like Daly's article is no more than 5 years or so old, as some of the articles in the bibliography have dates in the fall of 2000. Besides, some of the arguments are reasonable and still apply.

And the junkscience link is dated April, 2006. Did you read it Parados?

I think Mr.Parados is losing his enthusiasm. Okie. I posted Eight Points( each one with considerable evidence)-NOTE NUMBER EIGHT ON YOUR SOLAR POINT, OKIE-- on this thread. Mr. Parados responds with a weak blurb about time of publication.

I am very much afraid, Okie, that he is out of ammunition.

I've noticed that too. Parados, remember the heated debates we've had. Whats happened to you? Are you okay?

Parados deserves credit. He usually brings some evidence to back his points and he does not resort to name calling. At least I don't remember anything serious. The debates we've had have been stimulating and enjoyable, and pretty much above the belt.

You are correct, Okie. I do not remember Mr. Parados calling names. However( and I am not singling Mr. Parados out on this) when I post statements with evidence concerning topics pertaining directly to global warming, I expect that people will either agree with my post, disagree with my post and bring evidence to show why my post is erroneous or, even ignore my post.

What I do not expect is that people like Plain Ol Me will attack Ad Hominem( yes,I do know what it means) without even mentioning the substance of my posts.

Earth at warmest in 400 years
There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, boreholes, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" of past surface temperatures to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new report from the National Research Council.

The report was requested by Congress after a controversy arose last year over surface temperature reconstructions published by climatologist Michael Mann and his colleagues in the late 1990s. The researchers concluded that the warming of the Northern Hemisphere in the last decades of the 20th century was unprecedented in the past thousand years. In particular, they concluded that the 1990s were the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year. Their graph depicting a rise in temperatures at the end of a long era became known as the "hockey stick."

Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (2006)

(The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. It is a private, nonprofit institution that provides science and technology advice under a congressional charter.)

In looking at things as they are, I think that it is the hight of mankinds arrogance to believe that we can be having THAT much of an effect on an ecosystem that has been churning away happily for 100's of millions of years.

The earth has ALWAYS gone through changes in climate. Hotter, colder, more or less oxygen than we have now. All these processes were humming along LONG before mankind showed up on the scene and all of them will be clicking away long after the last human has gone to dust.

Imagining that we can turn back the planet's climatological clock by carpooling and turning the thermostat down is like a flea believing that he can control the dog he is on by playing the banjo.

Get a clue people, you are insignificant in the scheme of the planet. If it heats up, it's going to heat up whether we are here or not.

Oh, and just in case we get into the 'It's all America's fault syndrome:

EU way off course for meeting Kyoto targets: latest figures
by Richard Ingham
Thu Jun 22, 9:42 AM ET

PARIS (AFP) - New data has shown that the European Union (EU) remains embarrassingly off track for meeting its pledges under the Kyoto Protocol, the UN climate-change pact it championed after a US walkout.

Instead of falling, EU greenhouse-gas pollution actually rose in the latest year of monitoring, adding to the task of meeting the Kyoto goals, according to figures released by the European Environment Agency (EAA) in Copenhagen.

"Despite the various policy initiatives, this report highlights that the trend is still going in the wrong direction," declared EAA Executive Director Jacqueline McGlade.

"Europe must implement all planned policies and measures relating to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions," said McGlade.

She warned that EU members needed to take "ambitious" steps when crafting the next phase of their Emissions Trading System (ETS), a Kyoto mechanism designed to reduce pollution by big industry.

The EU-15 has pledged to reduce emissions by eight percent by 2012 as compared with a benchmark of 1990.

But between 2003 and 2004, emissions rose by 0.3 percent, or 11.5 million tonnes, marking the second annual year of increase, the EAA said in its annual report.

Emissions in 2004 were just 0.6 percent lower than the base year of 1990 -- more than four percentage points adrift of where they should have been by that time.

For the EU-25, after the "Big Bang" membership enlargement, the increase was 0.4 percent in 2004, or 18 million tonnes, over 2003.

"An increase of 0.4 percent may appear small; however, the magnitude of GHG (greenhouse-gas emissions) is such that the actual increase is significant," said McGlade.

"(It) is comparable to the amount of CO2 emissions released by three million people if they were to drive their cars around the world."

The EU saved Kyoto from collapse after the United States abandoned the treaty, then still in draft form, in March 2001 in one of President George W. Bush's first acts in office.

The pact requires industrialised countries that have ratified it to trim outputs of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases that trap solar heat and could wreak havoc with the planet's delicate climate system.

Making these cuts can carry a significant cost, in making equipment more fuel-efficient and cleaner or in weaning an economy away from dirty fossil fuels and converting it to renewable sources, which is why Bush walked out.

The EAA report makes these points:

-- Road transport contributed most to the increase, accounting for a rise of 12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) among the EU-15. Iron and steel makers were also culprits, upping their CO2 pollution by eight million tonnes.

-- Spain and Italy had the biggest GHG rise, with 4.8 and 0.9 percent respectively. Spain switched to fossil fuels after the 2003 drought hit power from hydro. Italy emitted more through oil refining and road transport.

-- Germany, Denmark and Finland did best, seeing reductions of GHGs of 0.9 percent, 8.1 percent and 4.9 percent respectively. Germany offset a rise from the iron and steel sector by big reductions in CO2 in households and services. Denmark and Finland made further moves to switch from fossils to hydro in electricity production.

Friends of the Earth Europe reacted bitterly.

"Europes governments make grand statements about their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas pollution," it said.

"Yet economy and industry ministers continue to block or water down policy measures to switch to renewable energies, reduce energy waste or introduce fuel consumption standards for cars."

The report is the second bad jolt for the EU's Kyoto ambitions in less than two months.

In April, the ETS, a "carbon market" where companies buy and sell quotas of CO2 under the EU's cap-and-trade system, went into a tailspin. It emerged that some national governments had been hugely over-generous in allocating these firms pollution quotas in the first phase of the scheme.

The EAA report is sent to Kyoto's parent body, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under clauses requiring signatories to provide an annual inventory of man-made GHGs.

Its sources are national governments, although the data is also reviewed by the European Commission and the EAA.

LINK

You guys SIGNED the fricken thing and screamed bloody murder when the U.S. claimed that the targets were unrealistic. Yet you can't begin to meet the limits of the danged thing.

You're right - that's one of the things, this EU-agency looks at.

From the NYT:

June 23, 2006
The Not So Good Earth
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGMA HUANGTOU, China ?- When Wei Yong returned home to his ancestral village last year to visit his 77-year-old mother, he heard about the tremors. Late one night, the residents told him, the village was rocked by what everyone thought was an earthquake. The ground shook. The houses trembled. And the earth cracked open.

"Liu Run told me her walls were about to cave in," Mr. Wei said. "My sister says everywhere is sinking. She won't even let the dog roam free at night."

There was no earthquake, however. Instead, here in this small village in the central province of Shanxi, three large coal mining operations had been burrowing underground for coal ?- day and night, sometimes with dynamite. And from far below, they had cracked the earth.

The village of Shangma Huangtou is just the latest victim of a coal mining boom that is devastating large swaths of north China, where some of the nation's richest coal deposits lie. China is the world's largest producer of coal, and much of it is mined here.

While Shanxi provides the fuel that powers China's sizzling economy, thousands of acres of land are sinking because of the ravages of underground coal mining.

Moreover, coal fires are burning uncontrollably below ground here and through much of northern China, adding to global warming by releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Each year, scientists say, about 200 million tons of coal ?- more than was burned in all of Japan last year ?- are consumed by raging underground fires that are sometimes started by lightning and sometimes ignited by mining accidents.

Environmental experts call Shanxi a wasteland. The people of Shangma Huangtou call it a home they no longer cherish.

Indeed, the tremors here have not stopped, residents say. And so after years of suffering with increasingly foul air and sandstorms fed by a growing man-made mountain of coal waste, now 50 stories high, created from an open pit mine, the residents say they have had enough. They have petitioned to leave this village.

"People at my age don't like to move to a new place," said Wei Yangxian, 71, as he stood by the village road. "But we have no choice. We have no water. The earth is sinking. The air is poisoned. And there's that big man-made mountain."

The problem is that the village is surrounded. Coal mines on the north and south side have already tunneled under the village; a huge chemical factory, just 650 yards west of the village, has fouled the air; and dust from the man-made mountain on the east side slams into the village daily.

"When I cook," said Liu Runhua, 54, "I even get sand in the food."

All night long, residents here say, trucks carrying coal waste dump it off the side of the mountain. And all day long trucks overloaded with coal rumble past the village, cracking the roads and spraying coal waste on road-side homes.

Indeed, not long ago residents here grew so angry that they blocked the road that passes through town by forming huge dirt mounds as a makeshift barricade against coal-bearing trucks.

The government has done little. Xu Gang, a government spokesman, called moving the village people "impossible" and added that the complaints seemed motivated mostly by an effort to seek compensation. "I think they only do this for money," he said.

But one of the men fighting to save the village is Mr. Wei, 47, a former government official and the village's favorite son, the first to leave for college in the 1970's.

Mr. Wei, a jovial man, knows something about the environmental destruction coal mining can inflict on the land. He himself is in the coal-mining business in northern China.

"My biggest coal mine is in Inner Mongolia," he said. "But there are very few people in Inner Mongolia. Shanxi Province has people everywhere. The coal mining goes on right in the middle of a huge population. And nobody cares about the environment."

When Mr. Wei was a young boy growing up here in the 1960's, he said, Shangma Huangtou was a village of about 500 people set up against the hills, with corn and soybean farms and a stream running through the middle of the village.

"I remember you could drink from that stream," Mr. Wei said.

Everyone here talks about the stream.

"When I was young this stream was very clear," said Lin Youmao, the village's elected chief. "We could find fish and shrimp in this little river. And we could swim in it."

In the early 1980's, however, when China was just waking from its long economic slumber, the village turned into a coal mining town after rich deposits were found in the area.

Armand Hammer, the American industrialist and the founder of Occidental Petroleum, formed one of China's first joint ventures here in north China. In 1982, his company signed an agreement to create a huge open-pit coal mine in Shanxi Province, which had just been designated as the nation's new energy base.

The mine was created about a mile east of the village. And when the new project broke ground, residents recall, Mr. Hammer flew in by private jet and Prime Minister Li Peng came for the ceremony.

Years later, Mr. Hammer pulled out of the project, unhappy with its progress. But the An Tai Bao open-pit coal mine continued to grow, scooping up millions of tons of coal and piling mountains of coal waste next to the village.

Every year, residents say, the mountain grew taller. And every year it crept closer to the village. By the 1990's, the mine was operating around the clock. Today, the mountain stands about 500 feet tall and covers more than 30 square miles of land.

At the An Tai Bao Mine, hundreds of Caterpillar trucks, many of them larger than a house, line up every day to carry earth and coal waste up a winding path to the mountain top, where it is dumped onto the pile.

Complaints flow easily. Liu Runhua took a visitor to her home and pointed at the cracks in her new house. "Take a look at these gaps," she said.

Another resident, Wei Yangxian, said: "If you had come five days earlier you would have seen a sandstorm blanketing our village."

Wei Futang, 63, a former coal miner, spoke up: "Beautiful land should have two things ?- water and mountains. Without water a beautiful village can turn ugly very fast."

Today, Shangma Huangtou has no water. Villagers say the stream running through here dried up 10 years ago. Now, the wells have run dry, too. It used to be that every household had a well; now the village hires a truck to fetch water from a mile away.

But people here mostly talk about the possibility that the huge slag heap of a mountain will come crashing down and simply bury the village.

That is what happened in Wales in 1966, when a huge pile of coal waste tumbled down on the village of Aberfan, crashing into an elementary school and killing 116 schoolchildren.

And that is what happened in Richard Llewellyn's best-selling 1939 novel "How Green Was My Valley," also the story of a Welsh village destroyed by coal mining.

The people here don't know those stories. But they can sense them.

"There are three coal mines surrounding the village and only one road out," said Mr. Wei, who has pleaded with his mother to leave the village.

The village chief likes to wander the farmlands to measure the huge fissures in the earth. He says a body was buried here a few years ago, but after the ground shifted, relatives came to recover the body and move it to more stable land. They never found it.

"Look at this sinking," he said, surveying the sloping, tilted farmland. "Two years ago this land was flat. Now look at it."

At a town meeting here a year ago, the villagers gathered and decided they had to move before the village is sucked under.

Some residents later talked about the village's founding myth, an old fable about how the beautiful village was founded in ancient times with a small lake in its center. But one day, according to the fable, a smart man from southern China came and stole the village frog, bringing ruin to Shangma Huangtou.

"I don't believe this myth," Mr. Lin, the village chief, said. "I believe there's no water because of the coal mines. The earth is like the human body. And the water is like the blood in your veins. But now there's no water; no blood."

cicerone, it should be no surprise that communist countries result in more environmental destruction than in free societies.

Okie- In 1997, the Senate of the United States voted against the ratification of the Kyoto Treaty 95-0( Ninety Five to Nothing), The main reason was that although the signatories were not unwilling to destroy the economic system of the USA, they were willing to give China and India free rein. China and India did not have to sign on because they were developing countries.

I know. Kyoto is a joke. If we are truly at the "tipping point" as the great Al Gore claims, it is too little too late, and the too little that Kyoto does is more than replaced by China, India, etc. It is purely and transparently political.

The scholarly Mr. Walter Hinteler produces a post which gives a link allegedly showing a rise in the earth's temperatures.

I do not think Mr. Walter Hinteler has examined the evidence based on scholarly articles and the findings of the IPCC which I set forth previously.

It is regrettable that people do not know how to read!!

Let us begin--

NOTE: I HAVE ALREADY GIVEN EVIDENCE BUT I CAN REPOST EVIDENCE FROM SCHOLARLY ARTICLES AND THE IPCC ON ANY OF THE POINTS BELOW IF REQUESTED.


l. Mr. Walter Hinteler's post indicates that "Evidence from Proxies" show that the earth is warming.

This is incorrect. The Ipcc, in its own reports, said that it is debatable whether there is enough temperature proxy data to be representative of hemispheric, let alone global climate changes given the lack of large spatial scale coherence in the data

2. The last 400 years were mentioned, but the Medieval Warm Period seems to have been overlooked. That was the period in 700 to 900AD when Greenland and Iceland was so warm that the Vikings farmed it.
I do not believe there were any SUV's in Greenland at the time.

3. If you read Mr. Walter Hinteler's link(I DID) you will find that it says that the s u r f a c e temperatures were level from 1856 to 1910, then rose to 1945, then declined slightly to 1974, then rose to the present.

The question must be asked Why did the temperatures rise from 1910 to 1945? If CO2 is the cause, there was very little put into the air during that period. If CO2 is the cause, why was there not a larger rise beween 1945 to 1974 when industry began to boom all over the world???

4.And JUST HOW LARGE WAS THE TEMPERATURE RISE WORLD WIDE THIS LAST CENTURY?

O.6C six tenths of a degree centigrade SAYS MR. HINTLER'S LINK!!!

AND, DO NOT FORGET A MOST IMPORTANT POINT-

These were surface measurments.

5. Were they thorough surface measurements?

No, Not according to Mr. Hinteler's link which said:

QUOTE:

"The stations( those that measure temperature) are not spatially distributed to monitor all land areas with equal density. Unpopulated and undeveloped areas always tend to have poor coverage"


6. Mr.Hinterer's own link says that the stations do not monitor all land areas with equal density. Could there be a problem with S U R F A C E temperature monitoring?

Certainly-- according to the United States Climatological Network, New York City's average yearly temperature went up l degree Fahrenheit since 1930 while Albany,New York's temperature went down l degree F. since 1930.


Why? Scientists have named it the "Heat Island Effect"--Large cities generate so much of their own heat that they raise the temperature. The heat island effect is not caused by Co2.

7> Is there another way to measure Temperature changes?

Yes, a much better one. It is the measurement of temperatures from satellites which do not have the failings mentioned concerning surface measurement mentioned in No. 5 above by the IPCC themselves. IT IS VITAL TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE IPCC( THOSE WHO ARE PREDICTING GLOBAL WARMING) PREDICT THAT, ACCORDING TO THEIR COMPUTER MODELS, THE TEMPERATURE IN THE TROPOSPHERE SHOULD INCREASE AS FAST OR FASTER THAN THEIR SURFACE MEASUREMENTS.

AS A MATTER OF FACT THEY DO NOT!!!


I have provided 7 sections which show that the evidence provided in Mr. Walter Hinteler's link is not only weak but almost nonexistent.

Since this was a report done on request for the US Congress, I'm sure, you'll them about your findings .... otherwise they'll find this non-existent link by pure chance as well!

Mr. Walter Hinteler provides( thank you, Mr. Hinteler) a graph to show that, indeed, some of the pious European Countries which excoriate the USA for their alleged "pollution" have not met their Kyoto goals.

I am sure that Mr. Hinteler took a good measure of satisfaction( and he should) to report that Germany was the most "virtuous" country in the regard of compliane with Kyoto goals.

Alas, I am sad to say that Mr. Hinteler's satisfaction must have a short shelf life.

According to the New York Times< Tuesday June 20, 2006-Front Page, there is a story with the headline

FOR EUROPE, A GREEN SELF-IMAGE CLASES WITH A RELIANCE ON COAL.

The article explains that there is ONE power station that is being built in Schwarze Pumpe, Germany, which will be CARBON FREE.

The problem is that the new plant, A demonstration model, pales next to
' the EIGHT COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS GERMANY PLANS TO BUILD FOR COMMERCIAL USE BETWEEN FROM NOW TO 2001- NONE OF THEM REALLY CARBON FREE"


How Shocking!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mr. Hinteler- I respectfully request that you read my post and rebut it.

I know the report was done for the US Congress. A lot of things are done for the US Congress. That report is riddled with errors. I showed how it was riddled with errors.

Now, you show that my analysis is incorrect. If you can't, have a good evening. Drink some of that good German beer!!!

It's 7:37 in the morning here, but nevertheless thanks for your kind and friendly remarks.

Mr. Hinteler- Let me assure you that there have been times when some of my cohorts were drinking beer at 7:37 AM. However, they had still not gone to bed.

I enjoy a good German Beer. Or at least they say it is a German Beer. Is St. Pauli Girl really brewed in Germany? It is my favorite.

walter

Are you certain your time is well spent with these two?

Good essay/review here.

Thanks for the Link, Bernie.

Well, regarding your question - that keeps me fit, 'cause it stimulates the bloodpressure in the early morning.

walter

Truman Capote's technique was morning masturbation. As I include both your option and Truman's, I have to add in a cigarette to level myself out.