I don't have time to refute all of the nonsense posted here, but this is really absurd? "Warm enough to make a lot of the Saharan desert green?" Common sense: Lack of water makes a desert, not cold temperature. Sahara desert was green when the Atlantic was cool, not warm.
I'd suggest you look again at his credentials. The theory of man-induced global warming is nothing more than speculation on the part of weather men. Any thinking, rational, moral human being would opt for the least invasive, destructive, polluting energy source. Any thinking, rationale human being is aware that a non-polluting energy source is right around the corner. Consider the energy expended as the Earth moves an inch in its orbit, not to mention the trillion dollar market awaiting an alternative. As for the chicken littles, looking for funding and/or political office, and/or civil lawsuit dollars, etc, etc, etc ... I have nothing more to say about them ...
"According to Rahmstorf, Shaviv and Veizer's analyses--and especially their conclusions--are scientifically ill-founded. The data on cosmic rays and temperature so far in the past are extremely uncertain, he says. Further, their reconstruction of ancient cosmic rays is based on only 50 meteorites, and most other experts interpret their significance in a very different way, he says. He adds that two curves presented in the article show an apparent statistical correlation only because the authors adjusted the data, in one case by 40 million years. In short, say the authors of the Eos article, Shaviv and Veizer have not shown that there is any correlation between cosmic rays and climate." http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0405.html Seems the science is a wee bit wobbly, including fiddling with the data, and questionable statistical significance of the sample size.
Is there anything to suggest, severe global warming couldnt cause an ice age? Even vise versa? In any thermic reaction, significant energy is released, heating or cooling. That energy goes somewhere, be it stored or released-given the earth is a spinning ball, theres no reason to think an ice age wouldn't produce hotter, wetter equatorial climates, nor in fact, a "hot age" producing generally more variable , arid conditions , (consistent with very varied tropical rainfall patterns, extending to the tropic of capricorn/cancer etc) given geomorphology of various regions. In the last 200 years, humans have wiped out-just a ridiculous proportion of world forests; planted stuff, eaten it, then farted it back to the atmosphere, or pumped those nutrients into the oceans. Im not up with the carbon fixing idea, but as you know, a fallow feild will be doing nothing in those terms, for most of its productive life. Forests on the other hand, do this stuff all year, every year.......what's important, in those terms is these changes may or may not be carbon neutral, but it doesnt HAVE to be, to effect a local microclimate-maybe im looking at a butterfly effect of some sort, but i think the theory is valid. Before the usual "but the ocean, the amazon do most of the worlds carbon fixing", firstly, look how well thats working out, and how much is left, and then tell me how you might grow anything in soil that is dead from intensive agriculture and saliniity. Those are the stats you should be worried about, its my contention they are very much one and the same problem-climate change, if its occuring, and in my opinion probably is, then its sort of an "add on" to the bigger issues.
It's interesting to me that the Chicken Little crowd is so quick to go for marxists political tactics. If anyone doesn't agree with them, they are attacked as corporate lackeys. Scientists who are skeptical or who point out holes in the theory are labeled "deniers", a clear attempt to smear them as being no different than Holocaust deniers. Some poster here even refers to the Flat Earth Society. News flash, we can see the earth is round. That is called evidence. All we have to support the greenhouse gas hysteria is a very rough correlation and some theories. It is basic Stat 101 that correlation does not establish causation, but the Al Gores routinely make that basic error. They seem to willfully turn a blind eye to contradictory evidence. Mankind is a minor producer of CO2, compared to animals, volcanoes, etc. Their response: ignore it. Clearly sunspot activity is at least as plausible a cause of warming. the response: ignore it. Savagely attack any scientist who raises alternative theories. That reminds me more of the defenders of the flat earth "consensus" than those who questioned it. The bottom line, which any rational person has to acknowledge, is that we simply can't say with any certainly what , if any, impact man is making. That is not to say we should ignore the whole topic, but what we are seeing now is not scientific inquiry. It is an attempt at creating a political stampede. It's not like this is the first time liberals have discovered a "crisis" that requires immediate action, huge new programs, increased regulation, etc. After all, it's for the children. I thought we had gotten slightly more sophisticated than that, but apparently not.
Changing the climate TODAY'S EDITORIAL February 2, 2007 Today, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its long-awaited Fourth Assessment Report. Well, not quite. Actually, the U.N. panel releases just the 12-page Summary for Policymakers -- and, of course, a press release for those too busy to read the summary. The rest of the report, about 1,600 pages, will be available in May. Why the long delay? As the panel so charmingly explains: It's to permit adjustments to the scientific report -- to make it consistent with its Summary, a document severely edited by some 150 government delegations that met last week in Paris. In other words, the panel, which prides itself on being strictly scientific and policy-neutral, wants to be sure that its report is politically correct. We think this procedure by the panel is a little strange -- reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland: summary first, report later. It will undoubtedly raise some doubts about the scientific credibility of the panel's conclusions. Will the U.N. panel fully document the post-summary "adjustments" to the report? We are not holding our breath. We wonder also if Rep. Henry Waxman will hold hearings on the panel's efforts to cleanse its scientific report of anything that might contradict the summary. Mr. Waxman's Jan. 30 hearing on government interference with science delved into allegations that the White House modified an EPA document. Actually, an Al Gore clone in EPA had put words into a U.S. report to the United Nations that would have distorted administration policy positions. The policy people in the White House, quite properly it seems to us, changed the offending phrases. The cleansing of the U.N. report -- and delay in publication -- is leading to wild speculations about climate catastrophes, with many leaks to compliant newspapers. We already have the remarkable statement (reported by Reuters on Jan. 25) of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. panel: "I hope this report will shock people, governments, into taking more serious action... as you really can't get a more authentic and a more credible piece of scientific work." And he helpfully added: "So I hope this will be taken for what it's worth." Indeed. Compared to earlier reports, the Fourth Assessment Report is really quite restrained, perhaps because the effort is chaired by a real scientist, less given to ideology. For example, the last report (in 2001) featured the "Hockeystick," a graph that claimed the 20th century was "unusually warm." Hearings last year before Rep. Joe Barton established that the underlying science was flawed, based on incorrect statistics. The new report agrees implicitly; the Hockeystick no longer appears in the summary. But the panel still fails to provide real proof for its key conclusion: "It is very likely that anthropogenic greenhouse-gas increases caused most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century." (The emphasis is in the original.) The evidence they present is not at all convincing -- and indeed, there is contrary evidence that's been ignored by the U.N. panel. The whole question of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is of obvious importance and is key to any policy of climate mitigation. It warrants closer examination of the arguments, which unfortunately must await publication of the full report.
Sunspots!? Political Stampede? Sir, I'm afraid that you have lost the use of your last working brain cell.
I'm not so sure about that: Siberian thaw to speed up global warming The release of trapped greenhouse gases is pushing the world past the point of no return on climate change Robin McKie and Nick Christian Sunday September 10, 2006 The Observer The frozen bogs of Siberia are melting, and the thaw could have devastating consequences for the planet, scientists have discovered. They have found that Arctic permafrost, which is starting to melt due to global warming, is releasing five times more methane gas than their calculations had predicted. That level of emission is alarming because methane itself is a greenhouse gas. Increased amounts will therefore accelerate warming, cause more melting of Siberian bogs and Arctic wasteland, and so release even more. 'It's a slow-motion time bomb,' said climate expert Professor Ted Schuur, of the University of Florida. Article continues -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The discovery of these levels of methane release, revealed in a report in Nature last week, suggests that the planet is rapidly approaching a critical tipping point at which global warming could trigger an irreversible acceleration in climate change. 'The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it has to become a more vicious cycle,' said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. 'That's the thing that is scary about this.' The news of the danger posed by rising methane levels comes after a week in which scientists outlined a series of disturbing developments in climate research. These disclosures included news that nearly every wild animal in Britain has extended its range northwards as the country heats up; ice cores from the Antarctic have revealed that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising at an unprecedented rate; and analysis suggesting that the world has less than a decade in which to halt global warming before it reaches a point of no return. The revelations about Siberia's methane add to these worries. Methane is produced in soil by bacterial decomposition and normally released into the air. However, in the permafrost regions of Siberia and the Arctic the gas gets locked into the frozen soil, and over the millennia this has built up to create a vast reservoir of the gas. In addition to the methane built up, it is also known that vast amounts of carbon dioxide are locked in the planet's frozen zones. In total, it is estimated there could be as much as 450 billion tonnes of methane and carbon dioxide trapped in the world's permafrost. A team led by Katey Walter of the University of Alaska decided to investigate the rate at which methane is being released as the world succumbs to the effects of climate change. She chose an area along the Kolyma river near Cherskii in Russia for the study. The results revealed levels of discharge that were five times higher than previous estimates. The results, echoed by studies at 100 other sites in the north Siberia region, are alarming because methane is far more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide and is therefore potentially much more dangerous to the planet. Scientists have calculated that methane has a global warming potential that is 23 times that of carbon dioxide. This means that a kilogram of methane warms the planet's atmosphere 23 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide. 'The effects can be huge,' admitted Walter, adding: 'I don't think it can be easily stopped - we would have to have major cooling. It's coming out and there is a lot more to come out.' Not just a wasteland http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869000,00.html