"Not only are we heating up way faster than normal, we started out relatively hot-remember we are in an interglacial...Assuming even the lowest reasonable estimate (1.1C or 2F in the next century) for global warming, by 2050-you may live to witness it-Earth will be hotter than humans have ever seen it, that is, hotter than it has been in at least 160,000 years, which is the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil...by the time kids born today are grandparents, they will be living in a hothouse compared to the world in which people and many other animal species evolved.
"...Getting rid of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere is not a fast process-even if we could stop all greenhouse emissions today (not going to happen!), all else being equal, it would take centuries for the atmospheric composition to approach what was natural before the Industrial Revolution began. Even the best-case calculations, which assume major reductions in CO2 emissions within the next 100 years, show global temperatures stabilizing at about 2C (3.6F) higher than normal, with anticipated worst cases being 4-6C (7.2-10.8F) higher than normal, or more. 'Stabilizing' in this sense means global temperature staying nore or less constant for at least hundreds, probably thousands of years. In short, as far as generations are concerned, we probably never will revert back to the 'old' climate. A hot earth is here to stay...."
"Slowing global warming as fast as we can is essential because the train has already left the station: our world has warmed, and it will continue to warm for at least a couple of decades. Even if we quit increasing the amount of greenhouse gases today, Earth would continue to heat up because there is a lag time betweeen putting the greenhouse up and how long it takes for temperature to reach its maximum. The built in lag time means we would still get 0.2C (0.4F) hotter by the year 2040 if we could hold greenhouse emissions at what they were in the year 2000. It looks most likely that by 2040 we'll be around 0.4C (0.7F) hotter than today, when you factor in the lag time from greenhouse warming already in the works with the amount of greenhouse gases we're likely to continue to emit. Interestingly, it doesn't really matter which of the IPCC secenarios you use, they all come up with about that answer for 20 years down the road...."
Animal Armageddon series
Depicted end-of-Permian "Great Dying" as a greenhouse extinction.
Thought that the Siberian Traps, a sort of super volcano, caused this. Thought that the volcanos expelled carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and suphur dioxide (which blocks the sun)-resulting a seesaw effect in climate.
Alternative theory
Quoting from the index:
The Other Climate Changers
Jessica Seddon Wallack and Veerabhadran Ramanathan
Most initiatives to slow global warming involve reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Little Attention as been given to reducing emissions of the light-absorbing particles known as "black carbon" or the gases that form ozone-even though doing so would be easier and cheaper and would have a more immediate effect.
Animal Armageddon
Another greenhouse extinction depicted-the end of the Triassic.
Solar start-up squeezes more juice from silicon cells
1366 Technologies, a Massachusetts green company, is announcing progress in solar cells, but has found the current financial situation has forced a change in their projected role. They now intend to sell machines that make solar cells rather than selling solar cells. They are having problems getting the financing to scale up to full production, and see difficulties doing manufacturing in the US.
Forecast The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley by Stephan Faris
"The Atlantic hurricane season peaks in August and September because that's when the water is warmest. All else being equal, rising ocean temperatures mean fiercer winds and crueler rains. The relationship between global warming and hurricanes is one of the most hotly debated subjects in the field of climate change. Storm activity moves in cycles that take decades to run. Computer model outputs are often vague. And the data is fragmentary: advancing technology-storm-chasing aircraft and weather satellites-means we know a lot more about the recent past than we do about what happened even a few decades ago.
"Nonetheless, the science is coalescing around the conclusion that while the warming seas may not generate more storms, they have the power to transform tropical squalls into full-blown hurricanes, to pump major storms into regional cataclysm...By the end of the century, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could triple the number of hurricanes reaching category five...Regardless of climate change, hurricane experts are expecting a surge in the number of storms, the reemergence of a long-term cycle that last peaked in the 1960s. If this natural rise in frequency is coupled with warming waters, the upcoming decades could feature the beginnings of unprecedented meteorlogical violence."
Last edited by TimWalker; 09-21-2009 at 12:43 PM.
Skies Of Fury Weather Weirdness Around The World by Patricia Barnes-Svarney and Thomas E. Svarney
Colliding Storms: When Hurricanes Collide
"The oceans are huge but sometimes not large enough for two traveling typhoons or hurricans....
"During busy weather seasons, we often see the Fujiwara effect, a dance between traveling storms....when two swirling storms came together and rotated around each other, various scenarios could play out, depending on the strength, direction, and combination of spinning movements. We know today that storms will usually dance when they come within 900 miles...of each other. Locked together, both storms actually move around a central point between them, as if they were tied to the same post but were traveling separately around it."
"Climate does not typically shift from consistently warm to consistently cold. Climate transitions are typified by 'flickering,' a period when climate rapidly shifts back and forth between warm and cold, wet and dry, before settling into a new state. And if changing climate imposes hardships on a new civilization adapted to one climate state while favoring another, when climate flickers, nearly everybody loses. Rapid shifts between warm and cold throw ecosystems out of balance, unleashing peast and microbes, and ruining crops.
"'More problematic perhaps than adapting to a new global climate produced by such a reorganization will be flickers in climate that will likely punctuate the several-decade-long transition period'...."
Freaks of the Storm The World's Strangest True Weather Stories by Randy Cerveny
Re: Unusual weather phenomena
Some chapter titles:
Tornadoes
Lightning
Hail
Rain
Hurricanes
Snow
Wind
Dust Devils and Waterspouts
Last edited by TimWalker; 10-04-2009 at 12:34 PM.
With Speed And Violence by Fred Pearce
This interglacial period has been called the "Holocene."
Due to our apparent influence on the climate (since the Industrial Revolution), it has been proposed that the present be called the "Anthropocene."
That is, a two part interglacial:
A. The first part, the Holocene, featured natural climates.
B. The next part, the Anthropocene, features human influenced climate.
In different books it is pointed out that climate is very complex. It is affected by winds, ocean currents, sunshine, clouds, geography, greenhouse gasses, etc. The interactions are complicated.
It has been noted that one scheme, cooling with sprays of water, will be patchy in its effects. Will the sulphate particle scheme also be uneven in its effects?
If you try to affect climate, you can't do just one thing. You will likely encounter The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Last edited by TimWalker; 09-25-2009 at 08:49 PM.
After brutal heat waves several summers in a row, and many violent storms, the general public percieves global warming to be a real threat.
After listening to proprosals by scientists, politicians push plans to cool climate. In speeches, the talking point is a return to normalcy.
A young Civic generation goes to work. A Global Sprinkler System is constructed, with an effort similar to WWII. Sulphate particles are spread from planes over the hottest regions of continental interiors. And a new energy regime is pushed.
The efforts to directly cool the climate prevent the climate from crossing a thresh hold and tipping. The heat is ameliorated. However, there are unique interactions, in which the patchy effects of man-made air conditioning interact with a strange combination of polar ice caps and high levels of carbon dioxide. In some areas, atmospheric phenomenon that were rarely seen are now common.
The choice, it turns out, is not between an altered climate with brutal weather, on the one hand, and a normal climate on the other. The choice is between an altered climate with brutal weather, on the one hand, and an altered climate with squirrelly weather, on the other.
You know my biggest beef with the whole climate debate is that all the things perceived as necessary to solve it is good economic sense regardless of global warming. Gas and Coal are dead end resources and the end of their economic viability is coming sooner than later for certain. all the renewables have infinite capacity for viability and technology advances are bound to make then even better. It's just good economic sense if it means we are also possibly less screwed climate wise than sure I'll take that too.
Last edited by CronoKaos; 10-04-2009 at 03:16 PM.
"really good things often only happen when someone seeks for it and never takes no as an answer."
1987: Early Core Millennial
Scenario continued....
What happens if once productive farm land now has a novel climate?
Alternative crop
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
My blog: https://brianrushwriter.wordpress.com/
The Order Master (volume one of Refuge), a science fantasy. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GZZWEAS
Smashwords link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/382903
If you took a scientific poll of people in premodern times, the vast majority of them would have told you the world was flat. You'd probably be able to duplicate that research time and again, and probably get other scientists to replicate the same or similar results. You've followed the scientific method.
But you're measuring people's opinions. And the opinions themselves are not necessarily valid. It doesn't matter if people don't believe in global warming if the scientific evidence actually suggests that the warming exists. The very article you cited stated that the scientific evidence is, if anything, growing.
So, another red herring, but one that is easily refuted.