Phew. Now that Global Warming is over...

Johnny, let's set aside the messenger here for a moment and look at the actual message. Have you seen the movie or read the books, or are you just dismissing it out of hand due to the fact that it's Al Gore bringing the message?

 

I've seen the movie. Setting aside that it was Al Gore much of it seemed like alarmist crap based on scant data and observations on things we know little about.

Take Lake Chad, for example, some feel it's shrinking from being over-relyed on as a water source (being that it's in the middle of AFRICA where there's not a whole lot of water to begin with) and a number of other things, furthest of which is Global Warming.

Again, I don't think there's anything wrong in taking actions and making changes to "protect the enviroment" but I personaly disagree with the alarmist approach took, equivilant to yelling "FIRE!!!" in a crowded room where the is no fire to worry about.

Yes we could be experiencing a climate change and yes changing what we do and the types of energies we rely on could be doing it but showing us a shrinking lake that is in the middle of the desert isn't the way to do it. IMHO.

 

I think the reason he chose the more alarming (not alarmist) examples was to make the movie more interesting. He could have selected the mundane negative effects, but that would have been a little dull. As with everything, the drying of Lake Chad is caused by many factors, including a substantial increase in irrigation in recent years. However, climate variations, especially a reduction in precipitation (consistent with predictions from climate change models), have also been a major contributor.

If people are interested in learning why climate change scientists are now so certain, the most recent IPCC report can be found here. There are two short summaries as well as a bunch of chapters outlining the scientific evidence.

In a nutshell, this graph from the IPCC technical summary outlines the scale of the problem - the rate of change is hugely greater than natural changes. Radiative forcing is essentially the contribution to temperature change and panel D shows the combined effect of all greenhouse gases. For comparison, the radiative forcing of all natural factors is about 0.15 Watts per square meter.



-MEC

 

One thing I've learned about the subject of Global Warming, is you are not going to change anybody's mind with facts. It's like arguing religion. Once someone has made up their mind what they believe, nothing can be said or shown to them that would change their minds. (on either side)

 

Richard Dawkins was presenting a show last night looking at spiritualism and 'new age' beliefs.

One of the more interesting bits was a double blind experiment set up to see if dowsers (water diviners) could actually find water. None of them performed any better than guesswork according to the results.

Not one of them accepted that they were not dowsers. The excuses were varied (one of them blamed god for taking the piss) but not one of them had their belief in their ability to dowse shaken for a moment.

 

I'm sorry, Deckerd, but what do spiritualism and 'new age' beliefs have to do with the scientific evidence (or not, depending on where you stand) of global warming?

And I say that as a Wiccan who lived in Salem, MA for a year, so I've seen the 'new age' movement about as up close and personal as you can get in the continental U.S. I've also been to Glastonbury, England, which is just like Salem, only without the kitsch.

I mean, yoga is considered a 'new age' thing (even though it's been around for centuries) and scientists have studied the master yogis' abilities as well. It's also a well-known treatment suggested by both physicians and psychiatrists for people who have issues with stress and relaxation. Again, a subject I'm intimately familiar with.

If you want to get into the whole Gaia subject, that's one thing, but I fail to see how dowsers are relevant to the discussion at hand.

 

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

Fuck. Al. Gore.

 

TerriO I should have made it clearer, although it does say who I'm answering, that I was affirming Spider's conjecture that people don't change their minds no matter what persuasive arguments are put in their way. It wasn't a change of subject or at least not intended to be, just another example of how blinkered people get.

 

^Gotcha, Deckerd. I see that now. Thank you.

Are you going to actually contribute to the discussion, or just drive-by f-bomb?

We are discussing the message, not the messenger. Please remember that.

 

The problem is, Al Gore has made himself a part of the message for political gains, and it wouldn't be his first time.

I cannot take anyone seriously who has time and again claimed to be the inventor of the internet and is not named Larry Roberts.

Whatever Al Gore says must be a lie, and so therefore we are not being told the truth about global warming. Q.E.D.

Pretty simple.

 

Not this again.

 

Thank you, Manticore.

Now, 137th Gebirg, the subject is Global Warming, not Al Gore. Please keep that in mind.

 

This site has some interesting debunking of a lot of common myths concerning Global Warming.

 

Here's a little article I found via the Drudge Report:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070814/NATION02/108140063

 

Yes, Terri, but don't you think that those who are "promoting" this as a crisis should set an example, and not be hypocrits about it?

It'd be like me claiming to be a marriage councelor while having 3 extra-marrital affairs of my own in the background.

 

There are negative effects of spending money on a fruitless cause. Arguing that something should be done on the basis of possible negative consequences is unconvincing.

Arguing that something should be done on the basis of likely negative consequences is convincing.

Just like Jesus. What if it's true? Odds are it isn't, so it's not compelling.

Or put another way, I doubt "Jesus, what if it's not true?" stickers would cause a mass exodus from the Christian religion.

 

We are still in an Ice Age

 

Coming out of one, infact.

 

That sort of depends on the timescale you're looking at. At glacial-interglacial timescales it's been quite a while since the Earth came out of an "ice age". Temperature roughly stabilized after the end of the last glacial about 8000 years ago - so the current temperature increase isn't simply a continuation of that deglaciation.

However, at longer timescales and in terms of ice volume the Earth is still in a icehouse system compared to times in the past when the globe was predominantly ice-free. Although there is some evidence for ice even in the very hot Cretaceous, there were essentially no large ice sheets from the end of the late Paleozoic ice age about 265 million years ago until the start of Cenozoic cooling about 35 million years ago. But we could be back to that largely ice-free condition even within the next few thousand years, depending on how things go, which would be an amazingly fast icehouse-greenhouse transition (the late Paleozoic one took more like 10-15 million years)!

-MEC

 

First off, Global weather changes are real. Readings from ice cores and other drillings into the earth show huge global variations in the past, much larger than what we are seeing today.

So, the folks that don't believe man is doing anything to our environment have a point, as the Earth is quite capable of HUGE global shifts in weather without us being around. We've proven that with the ice and earth core samples.

On the other hand, CO2 is a known greenhouse gas and it has been shown that rises in temperatures usually are accompanied with rises in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases like methane). That being a fact, it's not to far a stretch to see that the billions of tons of CO2 man puts into the atmosphere every year is not helping matters any.

The Earth will change on it's own, but that does not mean we are not helping it along, which we are.