Your questions are good ones. I definitely agree about not cutting down huge swaths of forest. And by huge I mean the kind of view you get from on high. Flying home last night I saw an unending sea of man made lights and thought, "how overbuilt this country is getting."
where i live millions of acres of forest have died and are dying due to the mountian pine beetle. whole sections of colorado and wyoming forests are already dead. we have an epidemic and only two things can stop it. fire burning the whole forest or a week of -40 degree temps will also kill them. due to global warming the temps dont get that cold any more so there was no way to stop the damage. in many places its already too late. http://colofe.com/MountainPineBeetleDevastation.aspx http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hffga5gUHh8&feature=fvwrel here is an areial view. its worse now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdK-B8N4SLc&feature=related
Wow, this thread has been an interesting read actually. I've silently disagreed with Jem on countless occasions, but I've gotta say that IMO he is spot on correct on this topic. I've spent far more time than it was worth researching global warming data because I live in an area with horrible air pollution. In short, I wanted man to realize that we were the cause of warming. I analyze data for a living, so things like this are right up my alley. After much eye strain and far too many headaches, the conclusion was obvious. The earth is simply in a warming cycle that could've actually been predicted with fair accuracy if modern technology existed 1,000 years ago. It became obvious that this warming process is completely outside of man's current ability to control either for the better or for the worse. Dcraig, you need to realize that in order for your chart to be taken seriously it needs to go back further than 10,000 years. If you take it back hundreds of thousands of years you'll realize that the age of modern man is a very coincidental situation. Carbon/Oxygen ratios and temperature have varied wildly over the millennia, until coincidentally about 10,000 years ago. Suddenly the earth went quiet and things have been unusually constant. Your chart is much like the hedge fund that skews the range on performance charts to make gains or losses appear more favorable. To anyone here who might be interested in spending many hours compiling data and running correlation tests, look up "Milankovitch Theory". Use the eccentricity, obliquity, and precession data and combine it with a concept that Milankovitch didn't seem to study much, that is earth's orbital inclination. After doing this it is nearly impossible to come to any other conclusion than that the earth is warming now and will continue to warm into the foreseeable future, and there is really nothing we can do about it to either speed it up or slow it down much. In a nutshell, there are gravitational (and other physical) conditions in our solar system that create a situation where the earth's northern hemisphere would receive up to 30% more solar radiation, simply due to proximity and tilt. That isn't even counting solar flares and other sun variability. Eccentricity currently allows for a 6-ish% increase in radiation during the winter of the northern hemisphere. This kind of stuff is critical as 2/3 of our land mass is in the northern hemi and land has a much lower specific heat than water. At least in the short-term this means that polar caps will continue to recede as oceanic temps climb, and strangely the northern parts of the globe will theoretically see abnormally high amounts of snow.
+1 nicely said Its about projecting control onto other peoples lives. Liberals can't be happy unless they are manipulating others. It has little to do with science or weather. Its a religion and these people are religious zealots. Like all religious zealots they will eventually kill to achieve their goals. So twisting the meaning of some graphs and distorting scientific results is perfectly acceptable and indeed minor compared to what they are prepared to do.
Hey 377Ohms, Is this how you would like graphs presented for you. Clearly no sea level rise in this one.
Falling sea levels for the past 100 million years. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articlePictures/fulton2.png And people out in the real world that are fighting the horrors of bogus warming: "Residents who once worried about their homes being flooded are now complaining that the lower tides are disrupting their fishing expeditions, making it difficult to moor their boats and navigate low-lying reefs." http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/global/sea_level.html
Dcraig, Your rebuttal simply proves the point. Your most recent chart is certainly ridiculous, but the one just prior to that is similarly misleading, for the same reasons. Nobody is arguing that sea levels aren't rising. They most certainly are. But the rise is happening as a result of a much longer term drop in sea levels. We are just barely getting back to the sea level of about 100,000 years ago. Mean sea levels have been rising sharply for about 18,000 years. And actually at a much faster rate than they are currently. During the most recent 18,000 years the level has risen an average of 7.5mm annually. Toward the end of this rise period, Greenland was settled by the Vikings. Suddenly, about 1000 years ago there was a sharp drop of about 10 meters during a cold spell of about a hundred years. These Viking towns were subsequently buried by ice. During the most recent 150 years the ice has been melting again and these towns are uncovered. Current sea level rise is approximately 3mm annually. In the cycle we are actually at the tail end of the rise. We are almost at peak sea levels. Coincidentally, eccentricity cycles are approximately 100,000 years peak to peak. Also, the earth's orbital inclination cycle is roughly 100,000 years. Ice ages also occur in roughly 100,000 year intervals. What a coincidence. hmmm. Like I said before, don't just take other people's word for it. Do the math on the Milankovitch cycles and the conclusion is obvious.
The most interesting part of all the research says that there is technically a point in time where all cycles match and the earth's total axial tilt would be about 55* relative to the sun's equator. This would mean that during the summer the sun would never set in any location north of Portland, which includes almost all of Europe. Obviously, that would only happen something like every 100 trillion years. But still interesting to think about the long term dynamics of our world that are never realized as we think of our immediate surroundings as being so static and immovable.
Cache Landing, Do you really think that climate scientists are not aware of the Milankovitch Cycles? Do you think the American Geophysical Union is not aware of Milankovitch Cycles? The AGU is by far the biggest association of scientists in the physical earth sciences in the world. Do you think the National Science Academies of many nations are not aware of Milankovitch Cycles? Do you think NASA is not aware Milankovitch Cycles? And this is just a small part of the list of scientific organizations of international standing that do NOT attribute the current warming to Milankovitch Cycles. In fact there are no credible scientific authorities that make that attribution. Furthermore all credible scientific authorities that have issued a public statement attribute the current warming to an enhanced greenhouse effect due to human activities. Now, this leads us to one of two conclusions. Either you are a previously undiscovered scientific genius, or you are in fact a crank. Any climate forcing due to the Milankovitch cycle is far too small to account for the rapid increase in global temperature. If as you claim, you have investigated this issue, you would already known this. And where did that huge pulse of atmospheric CO2 come from? Leprechauns?