Interesting (anti-)global warming article...

[Terran]

Well probelm is essentially several issues: The world gets most of its drinking water from glaciers(I think the USA gets 80%) Without these glaciers how well will we be able to supply the population with a constant water supply. Raising sea levels and all the people living along coastlines and low elevation places(Thats a lot of enviromental refugees)... How the changing climate will effect agriculture (Raising food costs and availibility). So if it happens slowly we might be able to adjust to a certain degree even though it will still be very tough.....but if it happens fast your talking about a massive global disaster... Ok then but my point was it is only one of many theories, also which which has no real evidence to back it up yet it is commonly taken as fact. Another theory (personally i think is more plausible) as to why the climate is changing is that the earth is tilting as it spins, as it does very slowly taking millions of years to tilt from position to another, causing global climate change. No real evidence backing it up yet? ...... How many pages do you want?....Most of the alternative theories have thoroughly been deconstructed from recent further data and other data vectors The orbit tilt changing one would happen on a slower scale than the rapid type of changes we are seeing....

[MinionZombie]

Agreed, the money making and guilt tripping with this green movement is frightening, also how some people are completely and utterly violently opposed to questioning it, or seeking other theories/explanations/etc. Al Gore as God essentially, and Carbon Footprinting (a sickeningly trendy term I absolutely despise) is the new path to salvation. Live Earth was sickening, a bunch of pissy celebs complaining their limo's hadn't turned up, and Madonna's "carbon footprint" of 14,000 people - why don't you f*ck off and stop preaching to the little guys in little Britain, you hypocritical British-wannabe skank. I'd rather put my money on the Sun, a massive ball of fire which heats the earth, an explosive orange ball which has no political agenda, has no money invested in it ... it just is, is what it is. If there was no sun, we'd be absolutely f*cked, my point being it holds an extraordinary amount of power and control over us and our little planet ... ergo ... my money's on the big ball of flame we aren't supposed to look directly at.

[Neil]

The ice caps are going to melt now even if we magically stopped all our CO2 Emissions....Now I think its more of an issue of just how fast it is going to happen.... Why do you still have experts saying there is no unusal 'melting' happening?

[Terran]

Why do you still have experts saying there is no unusal 'melting' happening? Well I guess its important to note that these experts still acknowledge that melting is occurring....but I’m not sure how many of those experts are still saying this because the melting rate is even surprising the people who were expecting increased melting to occur....So I’m not entirely sure how an expert can say no "unusual" melting is occurring when the people predicting the rate of melting ice are constantly under estimating by large degrees....If they say no unusual melting is occurring where are their predictions? Here is a little blurb that was in new scientist that illustrates how the melting is over shooting average model predictions.... Melting away The extent of Artic melt this year has been revealed-and it is worse than anyone thought. Last month, just 4.28 million square kilometers of ice covered the Artic ocean, 23 percent less than the previous record low, set in 2005, and 39 percent less than the average annual minimum between 1979 and 2000. "It didn’t just break the record, it shattered the record. This year just obliterated everything else," says Walt Meier, a member of a team of scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado that analyzed satellite measurements of this year's melt. The remarkable decline made headlines last month when European and US space agencies announced that ice-clogged North-Passage had completely opened for the first time [in recorded history].

[Neil]

Well I guess its important to note that these experts still acknowledge that melting is occurring....but I’m not sure how many of those experts are still saying this because the melting rate is even surprising the people who were expecting increased melting to occur....So I’m not entirely sure how an expert can say no "unusual" melting is occurring when the people predicting the rate of melting ice are constantly under estimating by large degrees....If they say no unusual melting is occurring where are their predictions? Here is a little blurb that was in new scientist that illustrates how the melting is over shooting average model predictions.... http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=513 http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noe...ignore-history

[Terran]

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=513 http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noe...ignore-history In regards to the first article…. The author of the article,Robert W. Tracinski, is clearly a skeptic…. Throughout the article he defends his position with information from a report written by a scientist with the Institute of Ocean Sciences in British a Columbia, a guy named Greg Holloway, who is not a global warming skeptic….This is what Holloway said…. The total Arctic ice loss, Holloway estimates, is closer to 12 percent, of which maybe 3 percent can be attributed to warmer global temperatures. His conclusion: This small reduction is well within the range of natural variability and may have nothing to do with global warming. Now this is the important part…. this article and Holloway’s report was written almost seven years ago!… Since then the total amount of glacier ice melted, the rate of melting, the thinness of the ice, and the speed of glacial retreat have all increased beyond most predictions…. So even Holloway, a climate scientist, who had a very moderate interpretation of the climate change back in 2001 should be very surprised over what has happened since his report. So if Robert W. Tracinski, who is neither a glacier expert nor a climate scientist, does not even have the intellectual backing of the experts he uses to support his claims why should we put any weight into an article that is essentially just a journalist’s opinion based on a gut feeling? Especially a journalist's opinion on climate change that is nearly 7 years old.... The second article is more recent but more deceptive. This was written by Noel Sheppard, who is an economist, and business owner. First off, he ignores volumes of data that addresses many of his claims especially this one How can anyone make a claim with a straight face that ice conditions in the Arctic are either historically low or grim when we've only been monitoring these levels for the last 35 years? Is everything that happened in this region - in thousands of millennia since the Big Bang occurred - totally irrelevant? How many climate recreations through mud samples and ice cores does he want....no scientist is ignoring the past He then takes a series of “successful” Northwest Passage expeditions to debunk the entire theory of Global Warming…?!…(But he was deceptive in these points as well more later) The Northwest Passage issue is just one point indicating global warming amongst scores and scores of collaborative evidence…. But more to the point he is especially deceptive about the situation surrounding these successful navigations of the passage in the past and their relation to the current conditions… The first expedition he mentions is the Roald Amundsen expedition….He selectively left this out though: Amundsen’s chose the east-west route, via the Rae Strait, which contained young ice and thus was navigable, ( Due to water as shallow as 3 feet (1 m), a larger ship could never have used the route.). So this is not even the same region being talked about being completely navigable today! And even being a completely different region it took him 3 years to complete the journey!…. And the Ship he refers to doing it in the 1940s was an "ice-fortified" schooner and it still took 86 days of cutting through ice and waiting for thaws… The author of this article seems to have missed the point in the significance of the very thing he was reporting on…. That the passage is nearly completely free of ice...not that people can or have navigated it... He was harping on this one point: "[A]nalysts at the Canadian Ice Service and the U.S. National Ice Center confirm that the passage is almost completely clear and that the region is more open than it has ever been since the advent of routine monitoring in 1972." Getting the picture? Claims of "grim consequences It wasn’t about people not being able to successfully navigate the passage….it was about it being nearly completely clear of ice: See, notice the difference? The extreme loss in 2007 rendered the passage "fully navigable". By which the ESA suggested the passage would be navigable "during reduced ice cover by multi-year ice pack" (namely sea ice surviving one or more summers) where previously any traverse of the route had to be undertaken during favorable seasonable climatic conditions or by specialist vessels or expeditions. These journalist-skeptics are always so selective in the data they refer to and really they already have their opinion and just look for something to support it…. They also tend to paint a picture that this is a highly debated area of science when it is not...

[Neil]

What I (& I believe many people) find difficult to handle is either both 'sides' seem to declare clear and definate evidence they are right... This being the case, how can we be sure which is right?

[MinionZombie]

What I (& I believe many people) find difficult to handle is either both 'sides' seem to declare clear and definate evidence they are right... This being the case, how can we be sure which is right? The key is questioning - I get the impression all the pro-theory people aren't questioning it at all, and many will be going along with it because they have deep seated guilt over their possessions, like an underlying depression about their lifestyle (think "Fight Club") ... and yes, I am being serious. Then there's all the chattering classes and champagne socialists and celebrities... Then there's researchers who are paid to conduct research which agrees with the pro-theory, it's a competitive market and some researchers have come out worriedly and stated that the way pro-theory research is conducted is at least a bit shady, not every piece, but there's definitely a rotten chunk in there. The rabidly anti-theory people are just the polar opposite and I don't sit there either. As for the anti-theory people, at least they're questioning it ... admittedly to varying degrees. To accept anything just like that *clicks fingers* is ludicrous. I remember being royally disgusted when I heard statements like "the time for debate is over" in the media - WHAT FECKIN' DEBATE?! There's been none, the media is rabidly biased in one direction, the anti-theory side that questions it all (to varying degrees) really has to struggle through the vast tide of pro-Gore propaganda and trendy catchphrases like "carbon footprinting"...and that "carbon credits" stuff, that's shady. The new-religion undertones of the pro-Gore side is terrifying to be honest. As I've no doubt said before, I question the extent of our involvement. I believe the earth and the especially the sun are far more powerful that us pesky critters scurrying around on the surface, that said, recycling and clean fuels I am all for - but not because of "my carbon footprint" or any of that cock-tugging pish-tosh - but because it's just the natural, next step in human evolution. It's that simple, but it can't be done like that *clicks fingers*, it has to take time... For an analogy, look at television sets - the industry standard used to be 4:3 sets, now the standard is 16:9 sets, but it took years and years for that to happen. Extend that analogy to a much larger issue, and that's where I rest, it's the natural next step in human evolution...and the rabid trend-slogan guilt tripping surrounding the pro-side is absolutely sickening, they might as well be screaming "THE MESSIAH! THE MESSIAH!" like in "Life of Brian".