[Threshold]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ April 27 2006,21:54) If the environment isn't a good enough reason for high oil prices, how about reducing tensions that fuel the chances for war with China?

I'm all for it - for both reasons.

I caught the very end of a news report today that was talking about ethanol, and that it supposedly costs the END USER about 60 cents a gallon. Brazil has fully switched to it in order to protect themselves from being reliant upon Venezuela.

It is a testament to our worthless, totally broken, crooked two party system that Brazil is outdoing us so blatantly in a matter of technology, economics, and national security.

[Ilkidarios]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ April 27 2006,21:54) If the environment isn't a good enough reason for high oil prices, how about reducing tensions that fuel the chances for war with China?

I'm pretty sure if we got into another war, it'd be between us and Europe.  China's too smart to fight a war with their biggest market, and we're too smart to fight a war with the country we buy most of our products from.  If anything, China would be our ally.

The EU on the other hand, their view of America has constantly been falling since Vietnam.  I wouldn't be surprised if one of the Western European countries got into a war with us.  I've always figured it'd be us, China, and Japan (the two export-based countries that make most of our goods) against some EU countries.

[Spoke]

Originally Posted by (Valg @ April 26 2006,18:30) Originally Posted by Uh... yes it is. In fact, the opposite of what you say is the case. There is very little responsible science that supports global warming. Furthermore, there is an enormous amount of scientific evidence that the sun is getting hotter. Any warming that we experience is far more likely to be the result of this fact about the sun. Not only are you completely and utterly wrong, an incredibly damning link was given in this very thread. I'm not sure what Fox News broadcast or Scott McClellan soundbite you got the opposite information from, unless you're claiming that the consensus of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, the IPCC (an international panel appointed by the UN to study peer-reviewed climatology articles), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science constitutes "very little responsible science". Even the EPA, under an administration with no regard for environmental issues in the least, begins a summary of their report commissioned from the National Academy of Sciences with "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." That's the first sentence, but it gets worse from there. (This report is co-signed by the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council.) Armchair climatologists (most often politicians, pundits, etc.) may distort the facts for their own agendas, but the message from the scientific community is loud and clear. The "sun is getting hotter" theory was debunked as early as 1997. Even worst-case models demonstrated it could at most explain 1/3 of the warming, and those models are intentionally generous in order to test if it's even possible that the sun could be causative. I SciFindered up recent primary literature in major journals, and Science published an article in May 2005 (Wild, M et al.; 2005, Science 6 May 2005; 308: 847-850) illustrating that worldwide solar radiation levels have actually been dropping in recent decades, largely because our altered atmosphere scatters more light. (This is due to particulate pollutants like soot, rather than greenhouse gases.) The authors conclude that sunlight reaching the Earth's surface showed "a decline of 4% to 6% over 30 years", and warn that the phenomenon may have caused us to underestimate exactly how screwed we already are. So don't blame the sun. It's our mess, and we should clean it up.

First of all I will say that most of the sources I am going to post come from a Crichton's book (State of Fear), which he read and used to research for the writting of the book.

Now, some researchers suggest is that the global warming trend is not really global, which would explain why the water levels in the coastal regions has not increased as much as it should have, had the warming been as dramatic as suggested.

In Greenland [1]:

Originally Posted by The Greenland coastal temperatures have followed the early 20th century global warming trend. Since 1940, however, the Greenland coastal stations data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend. At the summit of the Greenland ice sheet the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2 °C per decade since the beginning of the measurements in 1987. This suggests that the Greenland ice sheet and coastal regions are not following the current global warming trend.

What about Antartica?
Check the general temperature trend in Punta Arenas
here, this is the official NASA site, which adheres to the "Global Warming" theory.

Also these publications:
[2]

Originally Posted by Although previous reports suggest slight recent continental warming, our spatial analysis of Antarctic meteorological data demonstrates a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000, particularly during summer and autumn. The McMurdo Dry Valleys have cooled by 0.7 °C per decade between 1986 and 2000, with similar pronounced seasonal trends.

[3]

Originally Posted by ... satellite trends ranges from −0.177 to 0.094°C yr−1 for the Antarctic ice sheet. Nevertheless, the observed cooling is intriguing, especially since it is compatible with the observed trend in the sea ice cover. In the sea ice regions, the northernmost positions of the ice edge are shown to be influenced by alternating warm and cold anomalies around the continent.

[4] This one is a bit more obscure as it speaks about interglacials, but mainly it points out that today's green gas levels are higher than before, that all interglacials seem to show a correlation with green gas levels and that the overall temperature today is still not as high as in previous interglacials.

[5]

Originally Posted by We find strong evidence for ice-sheet growth (+26.8 gigatons per year), in contrast to earlier estimates indicating a mass deficit (-20.9 gigatons per year). Average thickening is equal to ~25% of the accumulation rate, with most of this growth occurring on Ice Stream C. Whillans Ice Stream, which was thought to have a significantly negative mass balance, is close to balance, reflecting its continuing slowdown.

[6] The quote corresponds to actual text within the article, but I had to use school priviledges to access it, the abstract does not say much though.

Originally Posted by At the surface, the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by several K over the past several decades, while the interior of the Antarctic continent has exhibited weak cooling (10,11). Ice shelves have retreated over the peninsula and sea-ice extent has decreased over the Bellingshausen Sea (12–14), while sea-ice concentration has increased and the length of the sea-ice season has increased over much of eastern Antarctica and the Ross Sea (14–16). Here, we offer evidence that illuminates the connections between these seemingly disparate trends.

[7]

Originally Posted by Our data also suggest that the ice masses that border the Weddell Sea are more extensive than they were during the previous glacial minimum.

[8] From the abstract you get this quote

Originally Posted by Over the last 24 years, a positive AAO trend and a slightly negative ENSO trend produce a spatial pattern of ice changes similar to the regional ice trends. However, the magnitude of the ice changes associated with the AAO and ENSO is much smaller than the regional ice trends.

From the article (need suscription) you get this

Originally Posted by A linear least-squares fit regression was applied to both the total Antarctic sea ice extent and area, and the Antarctic sea ice concentration anomaly time series (after removing the seasonal cycle) in each grid cell over 1979–2002 to capture the trends. Overall, the total Antarctic sea ice extent (the cumulative area of grid boxes covering at least 15% ice concentrations) has shown an increasing trend (~4,801 km2/yr). This is smaller than previous studies have suggested, and is not statistically significant. However, the total Antarctic sea ice area (the cumulative area of the ocean actually covered by at least 15% ice concentrations) has increased significantly by ~13,295 km2/yr, exceeding the 95% confidence level. The upward trends in the total ice extent and area are robust for different cutoffs of 15, 20, and 30% ice concentrations (used to define the ice extent and area). Regionally, as shown in Figure 1a, the Antarctic sea ice has exhibited a pronounced increasing trend in the central Pacific sector and a markedly decreasing trend in the Bellingshausen/western Weddell sector by ~4–10% per decade. Confidence levels for these regional trends exceed 95% [Weatherhead et al., 1998]. The maximum positive trend (+9.6% per decade, mark P in Figure 1a) arises from the trends in autumn (+15.8%), winter (+6.7%) and spring (+13.6%), since the ice is reduced to the continents in summer. By contrast, the maximum negative trend (−14.3% per decade, mark N in Figure 1a) arises from the trends in summer (−29%), autumn (−18.1%) and spring (−7.5%), since ice cover is almost complete in winter. In addition, the strong out of phase ice trends between the central Pacific sector and the Bellingshausen/western Weddell sector are persistent in seasonal analyses.

[9]

Originally Posted by The MSMR estimates of the sea ice extent over the entire Southern Ocean region, of 12.634 million km2 during 1999-2001, support the continuation of the secular increase observed during the SMMR as well as SSM/I periods. The observed increasing trend in sea ice extent derived from SMMR and MSMR data is discussed along with some more recent estimates derived from SSM/I measurements, with possible indications of an acceleration in time. In the current greenhouse induced global warming scenario, with amplified warming over the polar region, this represents an intriguing result requiring continued investigations.

[10]

Originally Posted by Overall, the area of the Southern Ocean experiencing a lengthening of the sea-ice season by at least 1 day per year over the period 1979-99 is 5.6 × 106 km2, whereas the area experiencing a shortening of the sea-ice season by at least 1 day per year is 46% less than that, at 3.0 × 106 km2.

If you are up for a fun reading regarding the doctoring of 1995's report on Global Warning by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change check this pdf.

Along with the facts, one of the proponents of global warming, James Hansen, announced before the US senate this imminent danger in 1988. He predicted about 1/3 C temperature increace over a decade, ended up being 1/9 of that. Furthermore, in his 1998 paper he says

Originally Posted by The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.

There are some other interesting statements by the IPCC
Here you can find in p 774.

Originally Posted by In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.

and though I could not find the text on the web, from IPCC. Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change, p. 330

Originally Posted by Natural climate variability on long time-scales will continue to be problematic for CO2 climate change analysis and detection.

There is yet another factor, the global warming effect is usually presented as a temperature vs time plot which seems to go up, the problem is that urban areas are warmer due to something called the Urban heat island effect, which depends among other things, on the amount of energy spent in the area. Usually, the plots used try to factor the urban heat effect in, to "fix" the data, the problem is that this "fixing" of the data is very rough and does not take into account many important factors. See [11], and from Progress in Physical Geography 27, 4 (2003) 597-606

Originally Posted by Collectively the results suggest that current recommended population-based adjustments for the UHI in the USA may be underestimating the urban effect. The wisdom of population-based adjustments is also questioned by Böhm (1998). In Vienna, population has remained stagnant from 1951 to 1995 although energy consumption has increased 2.5-fold, rural land use has changed, and living floor space has increased markedly. Consequently, despite zero-population growth the UHI has continued to increase in intensity in Vienna over the period. Furthermore, this example illustrates that the UHI is spatially complex with different parts of the city showing different trends over time.

To finish, I leave you with a quote from Crichton's book, paperback edition by Avon Fiction, p 639.

Originally Posted by The GISS station page is not easy to find from their home page, but it is found at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/station data/. Note: Shortly after the hardcover publication of this book, GISS changed its website to show less data. The station data no longer goes back before 1880, and thus heightens the appearance of a steady rise in temperature

If you read down to this point, get the book, at the very least is entertaining fiction.

Enjoy a warm summer

[Fern]

Like the shirt says >>


Save Gas - Ride a Dragon

Definitely cheaper to maintain, once you get the lair built, although changing the oil can be a pain.

[Shane]

Heh, I'd like to thank Spoke for turning me into a card carrying conspiracy theorist again, if only for a little while.

Interesting post to say the least.

[Ilkidarios]

Well, there were too many numbers there for me to understand it very well, could somebody put Spoke's post into simple terms for me?