Over a month into Spring, in a city where it hardly ever snows in the middle of Winter,
last night it snowed:



JC

I think scientists prefer to use the term "climate change," which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines as "a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer). Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use." While it often leads to warmer temperatures, climate change can also result in higher variability in weather events - like snow in spring in warm places.

I have relatives in Argentina, said that summer is coming.
I'm jealous of you.Here comes winter. Croatia (Eastern Europe).
Global warming is changing climate conditions. In the spring, with us it was the same strange cold days.

Regards, Mario

Many frog species in Europe and other places are disappearing because of a couple of degrees change in mean temperature.They are fragile and are some of the first to go when climate changes.

My son Nicolás told me he was walking around NY in a t-shirt with 20ºC weather yesterday. Go figure.

JC

I'm a little southwest of your son in N.Y. and here in southeastern Pa. the weather has been cool 30-40deg F. at night and rising into the 70's. Here in the yard still have some flowers that haven't been hit with frost yet. That will all change too soon. Keeping my fingers crossed for a mild-no snow winter. (probably shouldn't have said that.)

Global Weirding!! Local farm stand {over the PA line) set record this yr. for latest picked sweetcorn and tomatoes. Last corn was two weeks ago; still getting tomatoes as no frost.

jack

It baffles me that there are a bunch of folks who consider themselves so smart that they know that the temperatures we are experiencing now are the "right" temperatures, and that any deviations from these temps is bad. Who's to say the the "best" temperature for the earth isn't 5 degrees warmer or cooler than the levels we are now experiencing?

Temps have been going up and down for eons without human intervention.

All the rest are just scare tactics from the left. Think of Greenland now under the
snow and going back to being green again.

The late Michael Crichton's book "State of Fear" (although not very good as a novel)
is packed with scientific bibliography against global warming.

JC

I suppose the trouble is that certain life forms have adapted to a certain climate(polar bears,amphibians)and they will suffer for any drastic change,man made or not.It is hard to sit by and watch a species disappear and there is always those who want to point fingers. We haven't had the technology to monitor the climate and atmosphere for very long and who really knows how long a shift has been brewing or for what reasons.

We get a spring snow or snows every few years, seems about twenty year intervals more or less. This past year was one, so was 1989. Don't recall off-hand if we had any in between.

Pretty country where you are J.C. I'll bet the children were really thrilled. Snow is always a big deal here for the children because it is infrequent. I enjoy it myself.

Its the ice storms that I worry about; they do a lot of tree damage.

I can't remember if it's the height of arrogance to think you make the weather or to think you don't? Hard to take pride in ecocide just when our little johnny-come-lately human success story was looking so good.

jack

It is unfortunate that this has come to be perceived as a left/right issue, rather than a question of science, as it was scientists, not politicians, who first raised the concern several decades ago. When Al Gore appointed himself spokesman for this issue, he unfortunately turned an important policy issue into a political issue, and it has yet to recover. Would we be responding to this issue differently if Mother Teresa had made "An Inconvenient Truth"?

30 years ago scientists also raised concerns about the impacts of acid rain from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest on the forests in the Northeast, and after a lot of political pushing and shoving George Bush I approved a market-based solution for trading pollution credits (aka cap and trade). Several decades later, the problem has been significantly reversed without any of the predicted economic displacement. Hunters and fishers in those areas benefited as a result.

A recent poll found that a majority of those polled opposed a "cap and trade" program for carbon emissions but then admitted that they did not know what "cap and trade" meant. A pretty clear indication that this issue has totally succumbed to politics.

I don't find it hard to believe we can affect the Earth's climate - we learned to fly, escape the Earth's gravity and split atoms after all. If we were able to develop enough atomic weaponery to plunge the Earth into nuclear winter (or worse) if we used it all, why it is so far-fetched to think that all of the pollution from 6.7 billion people can't affect the Earth's climate? Keep in mind that CO2 emissions are cumulative - CO2 emitted 50 or 100 years ago remains in the atmosphere, unless and until it is taken in by plant life. Looking forward, consider that there are 7 times as many people in China and India as in the US - all of whom aspire to our lifestyle. What will things be like when they achieve that goal?

Sorry to preach but like most of the issues being "debated" these days, the debate is all about politics and not the facts/science.

Yes, but, 40 years ago gobal cooling was the the supposed problem we needed to resolve, and, of course, the only way it could be done was with significant impact (read, $$$$$$ CASH) cost to the populace, first for study and then any lifestyle changes deemed prudent. The same scientists involved with that hoax, during that era, that preach warming, today, really get pissed when one brings up that "inconvenient truth".
I don't buy the notion of the "pure scientist" any more than I buy the notion of the "noble savage". The alarm bells have supposedly been ringing off the hook my whole life, and, damn, if the sun still doesn't come up in the east and set in the west every day. Hard to fathom that 99% of all life forms that ever existed on planet earth are extinct, and it all (for the very most part) happened long before humans got here. The atmospheric carbon level has changed many times, dramatically, and humans have only been implicated once, it would seem.
I'm not too worried.


Best,
Ted

Doverham,

India and China may aspire to have an American lifestyle, but that will never ever happen.

Why?

The American population is roughly 10% of the worlds population but to maintain their lifestyle, Americans consume 25% of the total worlds consumable production. Therefore no country will ever match the American lifestyle.

Harry

I disagree. The debate is over what the data means and just how much data from the initial study was altered. You have to wonder if Mother Teresa heard from both sides of the scientific community if she would have reached the same conclusions as AL Gore. She certainly could have fed and provided services for a a hell of a lot needy with the money Al's made from this issue.

If you have the time, even make some time to watch this .

JC

The global warming alarmists have set up what amounts to a new religion. What they say must be accepted on faith since there is no proof of what they claim.

I'd encourage those who might join that bandwaggon to do their own research of the literature and make up thier own minds therefrom. "Experts" in any field cannot be trusted since they are financially involved in the enterprise. Fraud is the rule rather than the exception.

I've convinced myself the human impact of climate change is exactly zero and the whole thing is simply a con game.

Start here:

http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf

Science fiction, as well as science, has an amazing prescience for prediction. I hope our children's future isn't "Silent Running." Only a remnant would be fortunate or unfortunate enuf to lock up the planet and leave. Synfood, synair, synjoy, synlife. Might not happen across another blue marble to screw with. But hey, apres moi etc.

jack

Many a truth spoken in jest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

It is fear of the unknown that they trade upon, Jack. Same as your local house of worship no matter the icon posted over the door. What if our theory is true? The stakes are too high to ignore, etc.

Where I live, 12,000 years ago there were 2 MILES of ice overhead. Geology is one of the few sciences with actual historic evidence in hand. We know this to be a fact. "Global Warming" has been in operation at least for that long here, and nobody asserts that pre-industrial revolution humans could have had any impact.

The dinosaurs lived on a tropical Earth for tens of millions of years.

This is the most successful con to come down the pike since Big Bang.

If the UN/WHO has an opinion on just about any subject, you can be assured it's on the wrong side of the truth.

All you need to do is follow the money.

As with AGW, the swine flu is a good example. The WHO tried to scare the hell out of everyone while those involved made a ton of money selling the "cure".

Now they are telling me my kid needs a $100 meningitis shot. ?WHO? is making the money in this latest scam.

I heard they took the word "gullible" out of the dictionary and replaced it with a sitting duck that just happens to be closely related to the golden goose.

While the cause of climate change is debated, no one doubts that the climate is changing, become warmer, and will continue to do so in the future.

From my perspective of nearly 80 years, from working in the Arctic particularly, temperatures are accelerating at a significant and alarming rate.

At my age. nothing scares hell out of me. I'm not going to be around to experience climate change's worst effects. Mitigating those effects, however, makes sense to me.

An analogy perhaps is our members' obligations to stop increasing erosion of what we perceive as rights or significant elements of our culture. To do nothing is to surrender and render defeat.

I'm inclined to agree with SGJ on the "instrumentalities" of religion, but, as for those pesky ice ages, think we should save a bit of fossil fuel to burn a hole or two in the ozone. But I don't want to be a worrywort particularly since I've already outlived Carlin.

jack

Jaycee - thanks for that link. I look forward to listening to it in its entirey. That is the kind of rational debate we need on this issue, not accusations that one side or the other is engaged in hoaxes or religion.

What seems prudent to some may seem like scare tactics to others. Were the arguments in support of invading Iraq scare tactics by those seeking increase their power and profits or a defensible case for risk mitigation? You can have a pretty animated debate on that point.

It is informative to me to look at how companies are responding to this issue. Holcim and Lafarge are two of the largest cement manufacturers in the world, and cement manufacturing is one largest industrial sources of carbon dioxide. These companies are spending many millions of dollars to reduce their direct and indirect carbon emissions, and they are doing so not because they have bought into some religion. Their institutional shareholders would not tolerate those kind expenditures without a defensible business reason to do so.

50+ years ago, it was common practice to land-dispose industrial wastes. There was no scientific basis to confirm whether these wastes would come into contact with the groundwater and if it did what would happen to people drinking the contaminated groundwater. Ultimately, we ended up with Superfund and whole new industries - environmental engineering and toxicology - had to created to deal with the problem. It has been a monsterously inefficient cleanup process, and will cost taxpayers and shareholders hundreds of billions of dollars before it is completed. God save us all if we end up taking a similar approach to human carbon emissions. If we do, tell your grandchildren to become environmental attorneys, because there is going to be a whole lot of litigating going on for a long time!

So the Big Bank theory is a hoax? Hmm. Who knew. So what is the current scientific (as opposed to mythical) theory about the origin of the universe? I missed the update.

I dunno much about the big bank theory except the present one & can't say that I'm real impressed. I'd personally like to see the liquidity figures raised well above their present levels & also see losses recognised and taken in a reasonable time frame rather than set aside as they have been, particularly in the commercial sector. Its yet another 800 pound gorilla, ya know.

As to the big bang theory, I would only ask which one. One might even assert that this one is the seventh, but I could be wrong, as Russ always said.

Does anyone think desertification is a hoax or Henny-Penny alarmism? Anyone think there's not an Antarctic area of ozone depletion which grows and shrinks and has moved over the southern tip of one inhabited continent to include South Georgia and, I hear at some time in the not too distant past, Chile? Anyone think rising sea levels won't remodel the eastern coast of North America? Will I be able to justify "data's not all in" skepticism when the Piedmont "heights" my patch is located on is an island? Hypothesis can become hyperthesis in a hurry, baby! You can have all the pieces of the puzzle and choose not to put them together.

jack

Yes, Big Bang has been falsified many times over.

It still hangs on because the scientific community makes it's living on it. Any objections are dealt with by adding an additional variable paramater.

Since you asked, start here:

http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/BB-top-30.asp

Seek the works of Hilton Ratcliffe, Halton Arp, and Tom VanFlandern. Avoid Stephen Hawking, unless you think mathematics IS reality.

All the attention on Global Warming has taken attention away from a far more devestating phenom, Plate Tectonics.

Seriously, think about the changes the Earth has undergone. We humans try to put things in a perspective of our own lifetime. The earth is billions of years old and has undergone significant life altering changes without human input.

Single volcano's such as Mt. Pinatubo have put more so called green house gases into the atmosphere than man has done since the dawn of the industrial age. How are we going to stop those?

We are indeed arrogant (or gullible) if we think we are anything more than simply along for the ride.

I think humans just hate to think that they cannot control/change as they see fit.I know we have to try but some things are beyond our abilities as far as climate and extinctions go. We can take better control of the deforestation and pollution of our planet.

It's one group of people attempting to control another. Again.

This is a favorite passtime of mankind.

Those who perceive their own rights and freedoms trod upon by their self proclaimed saviors tend to object.

Careful or you might scare the golden goose away with those pesky facts.

What ever happened to those glaciers that covered much of the upper Midwest?

Where did Greenland get it's name?

Science is not supposed to be agenda driven. These crack-pots that call them selves climate scientists are nothing more than 2 bit fortune tellers at a local carnival. Unless... They have unlimited funding. (golden goose)

Now cement companies are lobbying for our taxs $ to help "save the world"
Cemex captures carbon abatement grant

When the poison spaghetti light bulbs that are polluting our landfills (just upstream from where I fish for walleye with my kids) are the only bulb that's available to buy then OSHA is going to tell me I can't run my lathe, milling machine, surface grinder, duplicator & drill press to build guns anymore.

Maybe that's just part of their plan.

It is not arrogant to think that humans can fundamentally affect the Earth's environment. We have already burned a hole in the ozone layer, sulfur dioxide from midwest power plants nearly destroyed northeastern forests, and now mercury from Chinese power plants is being deposited in Nova Scotia. More importantly, solutions were found for the first two of these problems - despite their complexity and the same challenges that are now being leveled at the climate change issue. We certainly have no control over plate tectonics, Mt. Pinatubo or long-term climate change, but we do have the ability to mitigate the impacts that we create - which is what is the fundamental issue.

We are always eager to rush to the ramparts to defend our rights against the scrouge of self-appointed world saviors and the like. Too bad we aren't as willing to discuss whether we are responsibly exercising those rights. I don't pretend to know enough of the science to say with conviction that human carbon emissions are contributing to climate change, and I spend most of my professional life on the other side of the table from environmental regulators, so I am no fan of environmental regulations. But from my perspective, I owe it to my grandchildren to take the prudent course until science can give us a more certain answer. If that means I have to use CFLs and drive a car with 25% less horsepower, so be it - that does not strike me as an intrusion into my rights, constitutional or otherwise. (Plus the CFLs in my house actually cut my electricity bill by 30%). I can't on the one hand make a lot of happy talk about the shotguns I hope to pass down to my grandkids, and then summarily dismiss an issue that could so fundamentally affect their lives as simply a hoax or a conspiracy or a problem beyound our control.

Just my two cents - others here and elswhere obviously take a different view.

it was so cold in Georgia last winter i am hoping for global warming this winter! Bobby

I do not put that much stock into anything which has been accurately measured for only a very short time. If tempatures are tracked for 50 or 100 years you get a upward swing that everyone worries about but this is like looking at one thousandth second and thinking that you understand the entire day. Snap shots are a poor substitute to the complete picture of time.

Trends are more important than instant perspective but it is a major mistake to jump at each trend. When I was growing up we were being told that global cooling was a certain fact and a few told us we were doomed. Now a few tell us that global warming will result in our total demise. I suspect that the truth will disappoint them.

More important will be how we adapt to the changes that are coming. Many seem fixed on limiting use of resources when you would be better off thing about ways to be more efficient. Instead of gun control I think we need population control in many areas. If the world population goes from six to ten billion in the next 30 years, as many predict, we will have a lot more problems than just global warming/cooling. Fresh water and food will be stretched to the max. And history shows that basic needs of food and water will be met or any government will fail in short order.

The lack of water is going to be the deciding factor in a lot of decisions concerning the future of mankind and how he lives in the near future. Clean water is already scarce in many parts of the world and growing scarcer. The disappearance of the glaciers in central asia is going to be more than just an inconvenience for millions and will have far reaching political consequences.

Follow the money...
Dupont's patent concerning manufacturing R-12 #3258500 ran out in 1979. R-12 is heavier than air by the way. Eco-mental scientists will tell you you're too stupid to understand.
Dupont just happened to have the "cure" with R134A.
That's about when chicken little started squaking about the hole in the ozone. Legislation helped Dupont make millions.

Think it's just a coincidence?
I don't.

Yes it is arrogant and naive. We are not God. The complex systems on this little blue ball are beyond our understanding.

We burned a hole in the Ozone? We have no idea what the Ozone layer looked like before 1985. Oh and by the way, it turns out we need a hole in the ozone layer to fight global warming http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8210 Oh my another crisis that needs study and government funding!

Almost destroyed northeastern forests? I live in the northeast, our land in this state is currently 89% forested and was throughout the 20th century. It was never even close to being destroyed. Alarmist language on your part.

Politics seeks power and control, science seeks money for studies. Global warming has made them bedfellows as it serves the purposes of both to create greater alarm than there needs to be.

Remember in 1975 many of these same scientists were warning of us the next ice age was coming. http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

Computer models can not consistently predict weather accurately 24 hours in advance yet we are to believe it is easier to model the global climate and predict the weather 50 to 100 years from now. Sorry to say but one has to be quite gullible to swallow that one.

I would offer the following report as evidence of what I was talking about with respect to acid rain, but since it was written by scientists, it apparently lacks any credibility:

[url=www.esf.edu/efb/mitchell/class%20readings%5Cbiosci.51.180.198.pdf]Acid Rain Study 2001[/url]

It strikes me as a very dangerous marketing strategy for Dupont to falsely contend that one of its products was damaging the ozone layer just to sell a new product. It seems a little more plausible that they knew well before the public about the link between their product and the ozone hole and began developing a replacement product in case the word got out.

Follow this conspirancy logic far enough, and you would have to conclude that tobacco companies fabricated the lung cancer scare in order to sell nicotine gum and ammo manufacturers are behind the effort to ban lead shot because they can make money on Hevi-Shot, etc. And of course Salk fabricated that whole polio thing just so he could invent the vaccine.

The rocket scientists who first hypothesized that we could escape earth's gravity had nothing to go on but calculations and predictions. If we had run them off as a bunch of self-interested academics in search of grant money, we would have a lot poorer understanding of this little blue ball - in fact we would not even know this was a little blue ball that we are sitting on.

Typical moonbat thinking from a mass liberal (ala "bwany fwank")

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/10/longdisproven-h.html

"Just when you thought you finally saw the last of that silly, disproven "hockey-stick" model of global warming, it rears it's silly little head again. Two sensible
scientists discuss the background of the infamous graph that supposedly portrayed global temperature fluctuations over the last millennium as having been basically flat until the last 100 years, when "Evil Mankind" started that "Evil Industrial Revolution" thing, which has now doomed our planet. Only problem: the hockey stick was a fabrication. And yet, these scientists have found this bit of revisionist history in a new college climatology textbook.

The infamous hockey stick has been known to be a fallacious statistical manipulation for four years. And yet, faced with actual facts, the "academic" climate change alarmists who write our textbooks prefer lies to scientific evidence. The only way to push their agenda is to obscure, confuse, and infuse a new generation of innocents with the ludicrous impression that mankind is to blame for some nonexistent trend toward unending global warming.

Following formation of our dense atmospherre (from, yes, greenhouse gases), for most of the historical global temperature fluctuation, and that ultimate barbecue-esque end of our planet, we have largely the Sun to blame.

Global warming myths:

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2005/10/global_warming.html

Thank you for your example.

The rocket scientists who first developed missiles that could reach space did so at the point of a gun, it was the Nazi's who developed the V2 ballistic missile, a weapon of war. The first rocket scientists to use a missile to put a satellite in orbit were Soviet Communists led by Krushnev. Sputnik was launched into orbit to embarass the USA, to demonstrate the Soviets led the space race (an element of the cold war) and further development of Soviet ICBMS. The desire to escape gravity was fueled by greed and war ("war is politics by other means" Clausewitz). Global Warming just like rocket science is fueled by greed and politics.

Actually I was referring to Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), the American who has been called the father of modern rocketry. Goddard

More to the point, just because the Nazis later used rocket science to develop V2 rockets does not invalidate Goodard'e earlier theories of rocket science. Would anyone question that Columbus was motivated in large part by "greed and politics" when he set out to prove the theory that world was round, not flat? Whatever his motiviations, he and the scientists who came up with the theory were right, notwithstanding popular opinion to the contrary at the time.

Speculating about peoples' motivations is part of the political debate - we need to resolve the climate change question through scientific, not policticial, debate. The link that JayCee posted earlier is a great example of the kind of discussion this issue needs.

Sorry to mess with your pigeonholes, but not everyone in MA is a liberal or is a Barney Frank supporter, or appreciates being labeled as such simply based on our zip code.

You got that right. Ask any global warming fanatic and they will recite chapter and verse as to the exact temperatures that suit their template. Mention Montana in the "70s" and, assuming you meant 1970s, they draw a blank in respect to the decade when the scientific jive-jobbers had their love affair with global cooling. But correct yourself and say, "I meant the 1870s..." and they are quick to recite "data" from a time when the only thermometer in the whole territory was aboard one steamboat on the Yellowstone River, and Col.Custer had not a clue even as to how many Indians there were at the Little Big Horn, much less the high and low and mean temperatures for the day, week, month, or year. But I'll bet that today, the jive-jobbers can give you all the daily 1870s Montana temps to the third decimal point, based on their interpretations of the half-life of carbon-molecules of dandruff found on scalps scattered around old Indian camp fires.

Just remember, "Figures lie and Liars Figure," and "This too shall pass...." EDM

The fact is the glaciers are still melting,the amphibians are disappearing,the rain forest is being destroyed and the oceans big predator fish,sharks,tuna,etc., are at an all time low and we need to do something or the planet will be a place where our grandchildren will always wonder why we allowed these things to happen.There used to be 50,000 tigers in India and now there are around 2500 or so.Many of the songbirds are at 20-50% of their former abundance in the 60's and 70's.Too many people is the biggest problem but the idea of culling humans hasn't caught on yet.

Its not your zip code its your global warming views that win the title !

here is a guy with a mass zip code who get the global warming scam (not for the sensitive)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjrMDNpODOc

Correction:There are probably less than 1200 tigers left in India.Maybe,a lot less.

Lessee - a gun owner who votes Republican most of this time (and hopefully just voted Frank out of office) - I think you have the wrong guy.

Then again it was another nonliberal (a Republican senator) who said the following in the past year:



My "global warming views" are simply that we need more scientific debate on this issue without all the political labeling and diatribe. (The foregoing quote is a pretty good example of what happens when politics takes the place of science).

Michael Savage is indeed correct, liberalism is a mental disorder.

I am anything but a liberal,but too many people are at the very center of our problems.We are going to be talking about our survival as a species one of these days and then grim reality may see us talking about solutions that no one wants to implement.The elephant is the grandest land animal on the planet but he is capable of destroying his environment to where it will not support his numbers and then the cullers are called in as a humanitarian act. Who or what will do the same for humans?

Depends on who is doing the cullling. Where do you want to start?

I suppose anyone with aids in Africa,all the communist leaders,gang bangers,child molesters,anyone hopelessly addicted to drugs....I'm sure a lot of people have a list of who they think would be better off dead.We tend to put a high value on every human life and I am here to tell you that not every human alive wants to be or should be.Think of what the world would be like if we had a population of about half of what it is now.

You'll get no quarrel from me.

Adolph Hitler had a similiar view. Good company you keep.

I can't thing of one thing that a child molester or drug addict does that helps society,except make work for law enforcement and funeral parlors.

Just some weeks ago Chilean geologists and paleontologists discovered some tree trunks lying under a glacier that had recently melted. They dated the trees with C14 and to their surprise they found that those dead trees were only 400-500 years old!; not 20000 years old as they suspected. We have to get a broader perspective on our concept of "global warming" and what are their long term causes and consequences.

Iran is about to stone an adultress. How's your fastball?

If she's good looking and likes to dance I would like to meet her....if she's a member of the communist party I'll have to pass.

I rest my case.

I guess I just don't see the value of every human life the way you do.

I like Birdog's proof of global warming.

I read Crichton's book debunking warning and decided that I needed to make up my own mind on this issue by getting back to the basics. I started with two questions and researched the evidence for each. Are we in a global warming phase and what known factors account for global warming and cooling? Sunspot cycles, the wobble in the earths spin, the changing shape of our orbit around the sun from slight ellipse to circular define interacting long term cycles. Then volcanism, and asteroid impact randomizes the picture somewhat. Greenhouse gases follow the rise and fall and normally amplify the temperature flux.

I found the evidence of overall warming sound and that none of the so-called natural factors explain it. The factor supporting the current warming is most likely to be the extra greenhouse gases from fossil fuels we have added to our atmosphere. Personally, I have concluded that we have a enormous problem which is only compounded by misinformation.

At least you've done a search of the literature, most don't. You are free to believe as you wish, just be advised that the IPCC theory (used to make public policy) has been debunked.

See the link posted on page 2.

Myth 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.

Fact: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.

Average ground station readings do show a mild warming over the last 100 years, but well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands") which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").

Myth 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature increase for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.

Fact: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average" global temperature has been rising at a rate of 0.6 to 0.8 degrees Celsius per 100 years; although from 1940–1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well.

Myth 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.

Fact: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. The CO2 increase was only 0.4% over the last 50 years, rather than the 5% per 100 years quoted by Kyoto. However, as measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this. There is solid evidence that as temperatures rise naturally and cyclically, the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

Myth 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.

Fact: Water vapour or clouds, which makes up on average about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and — according to several researchers — about 60% by effect, is the major greenhouse gas. 97% of greenhouse gases are water vapour by volume. Moreover, because of its molecular weight and absorptive capacity, water vapour is 3000 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.

Myth 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.

Fact: Unfortunately, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of including the effects of the sun and the clouds. Further, the main cause of temperature variation is the sun. Its radiation changes all the time, partly in cyclical fashion. The number of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which is CO2.

Myth 6: The UN proved that man-made CO2 causes global warming.

Fact: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:

1) "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases."

2) "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to....man-made causes."

There is simply no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

Myth 7: CO2 is a pollutant.

Fact: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. However, CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously.

Myth 8: Global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.

Fact: There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports such claims. Growing insurance and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal areas, are sometimes claimed to be the result of increasing frequency and severity of storms, whereas in reality they are a function of increasing population density, escalating development value, and ever more media reporting.

Myth 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.

Fact: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating.

It's normal.

Myth 10: The earth's poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.

Fact: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling.

Does anyone know of any study which attempts to calculate the effect of an additional 3 or 4 billion persons exhaling 98.6 degree carbon dioxide?

We are supposed to take Global Warming science seriously when they use taxpayer funds to study what they think is a serious threat to the planet, Cow Burps.

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?...8a-0b5b87880d6e

The melting of the glaciers may be normal but it going to put a big hurt on anything that depended on the glaciers for water. Probably didn't mean squat when the human population numbered in the 10's of millions but will be a major factor now that we number in the billions,especially in asia.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0804.1126v3

Thanks Birdog. The paper's particulars are somewhat beyond me but the message is clear. Anyone have a newer citation of research that is as definitive in an opposite conclusion?

If you follow scientific developments as I have done for years as a biology teacher, you have to be ready to scrap your beliefs and lean you understandings toward the best evidence available.

Check the references on Birddogs paper, they start with the UN and and IPCC, the latter is the one that was exposed for commiting scientific fraud in regard to their global warming theorys. Remember the old Nazi axiom, tell a big lie long enough and people will come to believe it's the truth.



Where Kansas is today was once an ocean with all kinds of sea life. When that ocean dried up it put a big hurt on what depended on that water too. Maybe the dinosaur burps caused the changes? We are just along for the ride on an ever changing planet.

http://www.oceansofkansas.com/

RHD45: It's refreshing to see someone talk sense on this forum about an important issue, but don't hope that an opinion based on facts and data will penetrate the leather heads among us. They probably agreed with Reagan that trees cause pollution and that ketchup is a vegtable.

Thanks to nhcrowshooter, it couldn't be said better

"We are just along for the ride on an ever changing planet."

Jolly

Interesting for the open minded: Global Warming, R.I.P

JC