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

I'm showing An Inconvenient Truth at the library next week and rec'd this in response on an art list-service where I commonly advertise. I wondered if any of you here would like to comment on what I have missed in my response. Thanks, Piffka

Blatham - if George OB shows up he'll explain the math to you; I really have to disappear again, but here's a funny site for you in the meantime:

Quote:

......The truth is, no one has a clue.

To be P or not to be P, that is NP's question. A million-dollar question, in fact. That's how much prize money the Clay Mathematics Institute will award Alice if she resolves the tractability of library splitting. (She will also be shipped to Guantánamo by the CIA, but that's a different essay.)

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/algorithm.html

Hardiman, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class.

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardiman wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012401807.html

His angry e-mail (along with complaints from a few other parents) stopped the film from being shown to Hardiman's daughter.

Nairobi? Apparently you haven't seen the film, miniTax, or you'd know that Nairobi is not featured. I honestly don't remember this quote "above the mosquito line."

Nairobi is having a terrible malaria problem.

george and I are no longer speaking. I've been informed via a third party that he remains a Republican. I have standards.

blatham wrote:

george and I are no longer speaking. I've been informed via a third party that he remains a Republican. I have standards.

Knowing that even a conservative Canadian is considered a liberal in the US, I understand :wink:

george and I are no longer speaking. I've been informed via a third party that he remains a Republican. I have standards.

blatham wrote:

george and I are no longer speaking. I've been informed via a third party that he remains a Republican. I have standards.

Don't you think this belongs into your "Orwellian government" thread? "Blatham has always been at war with georgeob1."

Our data confirm significant surges in malaria cases, requiring intensive clinical management during specific years of the 1990s because of substantial overall increases in the number of cases at each hospital. To provide a series of explanations for these increases is tempting, invoking arguments for and against climate change, drug resistance, and land use changes; various authors discuss these arguments elsewhere (16-18,20,23-26,30,45-48).

The distribution of malaria is not uniform, because of geographical differences in altitude, rainfall
and humidity. ... 4) malaria free (Nairobi and some parts of Central Province).

I've spent the last several minutes trying to work up a "Eurasia" term which adapts the Irish element.

You relied on only the statements of a single Professor that haven't been peer reviewed.

"Climatologists are like Cassandra, cursed to tell the future but not to be believed."

"The science is strong... 'This much I can say (says Solomon), "The climate is changing and quite noticably."

....'The effects will vary from region to region, and the challenge that society will face is to get people to think beyond their own backyards and to make judgements about the risks they're willing to take.'"

"Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"

parados wrote:

You relied on only the statements of a single Professor that haven't been peer reviewed.

"Peer reviewed" statements ??? You must be kidding right ?
I don't know if you do have a rational mode on your thinking machine or if it is dead locked on the emotional mode. Anyway, I 'm not in the mood to spend time debunking your claims after being accused of talking without having viewed Al Gore's film or lying as much if not more as Gore.

So if you want to believe that Nairobi is NOT malaria free even if the WHO or travel agencies say it's free, if you want to believe Gore instead of a malaria specialist who cites many verifiable scientific and historical facts when talking about malaria, so be it.

Gore's claim is deceitful on four counts. Nairobi was dangerously infested when it was founded; it was founded for a railway, not for health reasons; it is now fairly clear of malaria; and it has not become warmer.

At the 53rd minute of his film, Gore said "some towns have been founded ABOVE the mosquito line, Nairobi, Harar" and shows a drawing of the putative "mosquitos line before 1970".
He continues: "now, with global warming, mosquitos migrate to higher altitudes".

blatham wrote:

I've spent the last several minutes trying to work up a "Eurasia" term which adapts the Irish element.

You talk to George, the IRA terrorists win. It endangers America that we even discuss the matter here.

Global Warming: The vicious circle

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 29 January 2007

The effects of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are being felt on every inhabited continent in the world with very different parts of the climate now visibly responding to human activity.

These are among the main findings of the most intensive study of climate change by 2,000 of the world's leading climate scientists. They conclude that there is now little doubt that human activity is changing the face of the planet.

In addition to rising surface temperatures around the world, scientists have now linked man-made emissions of greenhouse gases to significant increases in ocean temperatures, rises in sea levels and the dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice over the past 35 years.

A draft copy of the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that global temperature rises this century of between 2C and 4.5C are almost inevitable. Ominously, however, it also says that much higher increases of 6C "or more" cannot be ruled out.

The final version of the IPCC's latest report is to be published on Friday but a draft copy, seen by The Independent, makes it clear that climate change could be far worse than previously thought because of potentially disastrous "positive" feedbacks which could accelerate rising temperatures.

A warmer world is increasing evaporation from the oceans causing atmospheric concentrations of water vapour, a powerful greenhouse agent, to have increased by 4 per cent over the sea since 1970. Water vapour in the atmosphere exacerbates the greenhouse effect. This is the largest positive feedback identified in the report, which details for the first time the IPCC's concern over the uncertainties - and dangers - of feedback cycles that may quickly accelerate climate change.

All the climate models used by the IPCC also found that rising global temperatures will erode the planet's natural ability to absorb man-made CO2. This could lead to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere rising by a further 44 per cent, causing global average temperatures to increase by an additional 1.2C by 2100.

The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report will go further than any of its three previous reports in linking the clear signs of global climate change with increases in man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

"Confidence in the assessment of the human contributions to recent climate change has increased considerably since the TAR [Third Assessment Report]," says the draft report. This is due to the stronger signs of climate change emerging from longer and more detailed records and scientific observations, it says.

The "anthropogenic signal" - the visible signs of human influence on the climate - has now emerged not just in global average surface temperatures, but in global ocean temperatures and ocean heat content, temperature extremes on the land and the rapidly diminishing Arctic sea ice. "Anthropogenic warming of the climate system is widespread and can be detected in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the free atmosphere and in the oceans," the draft report says. "It is highly likely [greater than 95 per cent probability] that the warming observed during the past half century cannot be explained without external forcing [human activity]."

The report adds that global warming over the past 50 years would have been worse had it not been for the counterbalancing influence of man-made emissions of aerosol pollutants, tiny airborne particles that reflect sunlight to cause atmospheric cooling. "Without the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols, it is likely that greenhouse gases alone would have caused more global mean temperature rise than that observed during the last 50 years," the draft report says.

"The hypothetical removal from the atmosphere of the entire current burden of anthropogenic sulphate aerosol particles would produce a rapid increase of about 0.8C within a decade or two in the globally averaged temperature."

The IPCC says that over the coming century we are likely to see big changes to the Earth's climate system. These include:

* Heat waves, such as the one that affected southern Europe in summer 2003, are expected to be more intense, longer-lasting and more frequent.

* Tropical storms and hurricanes are likely to be stronger, with increased rainfall and higher storm surges flooding coastlines.

* The Arctic is likely to become ice free in the summer, and there will be continued melting of mountain glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.

* Sea levels will rise significantly even if levels of CO2 are stabilised. By 2100 sea levels could be 0.43 metres higher on average than present, and by 2300 they could be up to 0.8 metres higher.

The IPCC also finally nails the canard of the climate sceptics who argue that global warming is a myth or the result of natural climate variability; natural factors alone cannot account for the observed warming, the IPCC says. "These changes took place at a time when non-anthropogenic forcing factors (i.e. the sum of solar and volcanic forcing) would be expected to have produced cooling, not warming.

"There is increased confidence that natural internal variability cannot account for the observed changes, due in part to improved studies demonstrating that the warming occurred in both oceans and atmosphere, together with observed ice mass losses."

The report, the first draft of which was formulated last year, will be made public on Friday in Paris.

Key findings of the IPCC's fourth assessment report

* Global temperatures continue to rise with 11 of the 12 warmest years since 1850 occurring since 1995. Computer models suggest a further rise of about 3C by 2100, with a 6C rise a distant possibility

* It is virtually certain (there is more than a 99 per cent probability) that carbon dioxide levels and global warming is far above the range of natural variability over the past 650,000 years

* It is virtually certain that human activity has played the dominant role in causing the increase of greenhouse gases over the past 250 years

* Man-made emissions of atmospheric aerosol pollutants have tended to counteract global warming, which otherwise would have been significantly worse

* The net effect of human activities over the past 250 years has very likely exerted a warming influence on the climate

* It is likely that human activity is also responsible for other observed changes to the Earth's climate system, such as ocean warming and the melting of the Arctic sea ice

* Sea levels will continue to rise in the 21st Century because of the thermal expansion of the oceans and loss of land ice

* The projected warming of the climate due to increases in carbon dioxide during the 21st Century is likely to cause the total melting of the Greenland ice sheet during the next 1,000 years, according to some computer forecasting models

* The warm Gulf Stream of the North Atlantic is likely to slow down during the 21st Century because of global warming and the melting of the freshwater locked up in the Greenland ice sheet. But no models predict the collapse of that warm current by 2100.

The IPCC recognises that there are many "positive feedbacks" in the climate system - more apparently than the negative feedbacks that tend to modulate climate change - which could make matters worse as levels of carbon dioxide and global temperatures continue to rise. Some of these feedbacks are pretty well understood, but many are not. And there may even be some that we don't even know about. This is one of the reasons why there are still many levels of uncertainty when it comes to the future. The IPCC recognises this in the terminology of probability - "virtually certain" for instance means 99 per cent probability, while "likely" means 66 per cent probability.