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

Good to know. I thought her arguments were off, but don't know enough to say where or why.

Maybe, but I never even bought into the ozone hole scare. Didn't the ozone hole exist before most of the industrialization? We know everything in nature is cyclical, and if it was truly due to CFC's, why over the pole where no industry occurs. I've heard the explanation as to why but I am still skeptical.

You have to understand my built in skepticism, having come from and practiced the field of geology, wherein I have experienced the ebb and flow of numerous ideas and theories, all of which purportedly have evidence to spur them along, until such time that more evidence debunks or refines the current theories.

okie,

I have never heard of everything in nature as being cyclical, and I am a naturalist, master gardener, and landscape designer. I know a little bit about nature.

Really? I haven't thought a lot about it, but I can't think of anything in nature that is not cyclical or that can be proved that it is not cyclical. What did you have in mind that would not be cyclical in nature?

Like Foxfyre, I am here with the news that virtually everything in nature is cyclical, from days, the moon, seasons, the weather, wildlife, etc.

I would agree that many occurances in nature are cyclical, but I've seen no evidence that the hole in the ozone layer was cyclical, and much evidence that it was due to man-made emissions.

Once those emissions were reduced, the hole appears to have reduced in size as well.

Cycloptichorn

You haven't seen any evidence at all that the thinning of the ozone is cyclical?

Mr. Walter Hinteler states that Dr. Baliunas holds positions funded by energy think tanks. If Mr. Walter Hinteler wishes to state that the fact that she holds positions invalidates her scientific findings, I will accept his position, HOWEVER,any scientist who hold positions at any organization which is funded by the Sierra Club or any Green Organization would also then be automatically discounted on the same basis.

Who does that leave, Mr. Hinteler?

I would respectfully suggest that you show that the science used by Dr., Baliunas is invalid and cease attacking messenger because you don't like the message.

Furthermore( and I am sure that if we followed the same logic adopted by Mr. Walter Hinteler) the very prestigious and most important National Academy of Scienes must also been somewhat tainted when they issued the following report. CAPITALS MINE.

quote:

"Because there is CONSIDERABLE UNCERTAINTY in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as TENTATIVE and SUBJECT TO FUTURE ADJUSTMENTS"

True Bernard. I am far more skeptical of 'science' reported from leftwing environmental wacko funded sources and I also acknowledge that the rightwing has its own biased sources as well. The person who receives his paycheck from these groups must of necessity be considered more suspect of selfpromoting bias than will be the person who is paid from more neutral sources.

But if we discount all science because the scientist or science reporter happens to belong to this group or that group, we will have little to link at all.

I ran across the following piece that contains a lot of good news re the environment, global warming, however. What do you want to bet that the doomsdayers won't want to consider whether this is really good news?

Don't Be Very Worried
The truth about "global warming" is much less dire than Al Gore wants you to think.

BY PETE DU PONT
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

When it comes to visible environmental improvements, America is also making substantial progress:

• The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

Environmentally speaking, America has had a very good third of a century; the economy has grown and pollutants and their impacts upon society are substantially down.

But now comes the carbon dioxide alarm. CO2 is not a pollutant--indeed it is vital for plant growth--but the annual amount released into the atmosphere has increased 40% since 1970. This increase is blamed by global warming alarmists for a great many evil things. The Web site for Al Gore's new film, "An Inconvenient Truth," claims that because of CO2's impact on our atmosphere, sea levels may rise by 20 feet, the Arctic and Antarctic ice will likely melt, heat waves will be "more frequent and more intense," and "deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years--to 300,000 people a year."

If it all sounds familiar, think back to the 1970s. After the first Earth Day the New York Times predicted "intolerable deterioration and possible extinction" for the human race as the result of pollution. Harvard biologist George Wald predicted that unless we took immediate action "civilization will end within 15 to 30 years," and environmental doomsayer Paul Ehrlich predicted that four billion people--including 65 million American--would perish from famine in the 1980s.

So what is the reality about global warming and its impact on the world? A new study released this week by the National Center for Policy Analysis, "Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts" (www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st285) looks at a wide variety of climate matters, from global warming and hurricanes to rain and drought, sea levels, arctic temperatures and solar radiation. It concludes that "the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21rst century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change."

There are substantial differences in climate models--some 30 of them looked at by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--but the Climate Science study concludes that "computer models consistently project a rise in temperatures over the past century that is more than twice as high as the measured increase." The National Center for Atmospheric Research's prediction of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warming is more accurate. In short, the world is not warming as much as environmentalists think it is.

What warming there is turns out to be caused by solar radiation rather than human pollution. The Climate Change study concluded "half the observed 20th century warming occurred before 1940 and cannot be attributed to human causes," and changes in solar radiation can "account for 71 percent of the variation in global surface air temperature from 1880 to 1993."

As for hurricanes, 2005 saw several severe ones--Katrina and Rita both had winds of 150 knots--hitting New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and Florida. But there is little evidence linking them to global warming. A team of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists concluded that the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995 "is not related to greenhouse warming" but instead to natural tropical climate cycles.

Regarding Arctic temperature changes, the Study found the coastal stations in Greenland had actually experienced a cooling trend: The "average summer air temperatures at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, have decreased at the rate of 4 degrees F per decade since measurements began in 1987." Add in Russian and Alaskan temperature data and "Arctic air temperatures were warmest in the 1930s and near the coolest for the period of recorded observations (since at least 1920) in the late 1980s."

As for sea ice, it is not melting excessively. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans concluded that "global warming appears to play a minor role in changes to Arctic sea ice." The U.N.'s IPCC Third Assessment Report concluded that the rate of sea level rise has not accelerated during the last century, which is supported by U.S. coastal sea level experience. In California sea levels have risen between zero and seven millimeters a year and between 2.1 and 2.8 millimeters a year in North and South Carolina.

Finally come the polar bears--a species thought by global warming proponents to be seriously at risk from the increasing temperature. According to the World Wildlife Fund, among the distinct polar bear populations, two are growing--and in areas where temperatures have risen; ten are stable; and two are decreasing. But those two are in areas such as Baffin Bay where air temperatures have actually fallen.

The Climate Science study concludes that projections of global warming over the next century "have decreased significantly since early modeling efforts," and that global air temperatures should increase by 2.5 degrees and the United States by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years. The environmental pessimists tell us, as in Time magazine's recent global warming issue, to "Be Worried. Be Very Worried," but the truth is that our environmental progress has been substantially improving, and we should be very pleased.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110008416

I've ask you a couple of times (dozens, taking you various names here) not take my link sources as my own statements.

(Especially with wiki I have quite often doubts - although in this case they give ebough references - as are in other sources - that this info is true.)

Please correct me if I am mistaken, Mr. Walter Hinteler. Did you not write on these threads somewhere that Wikipedia is not a very good source since almost anyone can add to it?

PS. You did not address my comment referencing the most prestigious US group of Scientists--The NAS.

From Foxfyre's



From the related WWF website

Again above:


What's your problem?



Why should I?

Oh, you don't have to address it, Mr. Hinteler. You are under no such compulsion. But if you don't address it, it stands!

I will repeat it--

"Because there is CONSIDERABLE UNCERTAINTY in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of future warming should be regarded as TENTATIVE and subject to future adjustments"

Sir- I can only take your unwillingness to address the quote above as your agreement with it. PS. I must agree with you about your doubts concerning Wikipedia. I am certain that you are familiar with the Latin Aphorism--"Falsus in unum, falsus in Omnia"

I repeat, no one has asserted that everything in nature is cyclical. Disease, natural disasters of various kinds, to name but two obvious areas.

I don't know what you mean by your above statement. I don't know if you mean diseases and natural disasters are cyclical or not, but I would say they are. We have dry cycles, wet cycles, 50 year floods, 100 year floods, all related to the many, many factors that control weather, many of which are cyclical. Diseases are also cyclical, either by season or over a period of years. Things come and go. By the way, cycles do not have to be exact in time elapsed. For example, geysers in Yellowstone erupt cyclically, but only a few like Old Faithful erupt on a real regular basis timewise and in intensity. Others do not erupt as regular and their intensity may vary much more. Geysers would be an excellent example of a microcosm of the cycles permeating all creation. Cycles are poorly understood along with all the factors that cause cycles, so being irregular or intermittent does not prove there is not a cycle of some kind operating the phenomena.

Growing up on a farm, I observed many cyclical things. One year, there were so many rats everywhere, in the grain bins, in the haystacks, in the ditches next to the road, everywhere. They were an epidemic. After a couple of years or so, they were hardly noticed. A few years later they were back, but perhaps not in as great of numbers. Some years, grasshoppers abounded, or greenbugs eating the wheat crop abounded, the next year hardly any. A few years later, more of a menace again. I mention only a handful of endless examples. All of these things are related to the cycles of life, the cycles of the sun, the moon, the earth, and the ecosystem as a whole.

All of this brings up an obvious observation about cycles and statistics. We now have many environmental groups attempting to identify species that are rare and then through some artificial means, attempt to bring their numbers up to what they envision they should be. Before man cared or before there was any industrial revolution, the thousands of forms of life were never uniformly plentiful. Statistically, there have always been common species, some not so common, some rare, and before we ever cared, species were going extinct. Such a statistical phenomena is as expected as cycles, yet the green crowd cannot seem to grasp this reality. Environmental groups now identify rare species and somehow assume that is unnatural and go about their crusades to save the species. When weather patterns change, it is somehow unnatural and the sky is about to fall according to them. I attribute much of this to people that grew up in the city and/or were brainwashed into this mindset by their educational background. If you were born on the land, grew up with it, coped with it, depended on it for your livelihood, and lived with it on a day to day basis, I think you are more likely to understand that it is cyclical and it is changeable in every way.

I do not think it a bad idea to identify rare species or study the cycles of weather and attempt to find the reasons. I do not oppose saving some species if it is a reasonable endeavor. However, I think these efforts are often overestimated in terms of their importance and our impact in light of the fact that rarity is part of nature, and going extinct has always been a part of nature.

The original environmentalists are those that were before the term was invented. We were called conservationists. The difference is we believed in using the land in a sane and reasonable manner, by being good stewards of the land, not by prohibiting any use of the land whatsoever.

Okie- I don't know if the following could fall under the heading of something that is cyclical, but, I do know one thing about climate(both short term and long term)--It changes.

I do hope that Sumac is familiar with what is called "the Medieval Warm Period". Then the Northern Hemisphere became so hot that the Vikings cultivated Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. By the 1300's and the 1400's a widespread cooling had begun that devestated Europe with shortened crop-growing seasons. That little Ice Age persisted until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

I worked very hard on this research, Okie and I COULD NOT find any evidence that the Vikings had SUV's in Iceland, Greenland or Newfoundland to cause the "Medieval Warm Period".

You need to catch up Bernard. The consensus is that global warming is real and it is anthropogenic.

Yeah and David Attenbrough's on the telly tonight. He's convinced, I heard him on the wireless.