Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[trish]

Hello again loveburst.

You might consider doing your experiment over the course of a decade on a daily basis (say everyday at noon) with a thermometer & a calorimeter as anyone can do and many have. The results will show you why anecdotal reports of an individuals perception of heat cannot be regarded as evidence. Perception and memory (from year to year or decade to decade) are colored by expectation, predisposition and age. The fact remains that all measurements have shown for nearly a century and continue to show that the flux of solar energy reaching Earth varies from 1321 to 1413 watts per square meter. The variation includes that due to solar activity (the Sunspot cycles, the coronal flares etc.) as well as the variation due to the varying distance from the Earth to the Sun. There is no increase in Solar luminosity that could possibly account for the current warming of our planet.

Sorry, when this is the example the snake oil salesmen set I ain't buying it.

__Faldur

Don't buy it from Al Gore then. He's just one politician. Look instead at the scientific literature. Perceptions and memory are also colored by predispositions toward political ideologies (as evidenced by your own failure to remember that global warming was the favored hypothesis in the 1970's). The science is not based on anyone's personal perception of temperature nor anyone's perception of the political winds.

[dana295]

um yeah if the climate is changing its is heading to the snow ball one the hot house version of earth .

according to my information before the last ice age summers started going it to the 90+ range and when the north atlantic convaor stopped we had ice pack formation in about ten years that would make everything north of tennisee unlivable so dun be afaid of global warming when we have the orbital decay senirio to worry about

p.s. i canna speel too gud but dat dun detract from da quality of thought

[trish]

p.s. i canna speel too gud but dat dun detract from da quality of thought

Your readers will be the judge of that.

[yosi]

The quotation marks around "scientists" is appropriate here..

in the 70's we were heading an ice age.........

these days we are heading a global warming.....

today's "scientists" will be proven wrong......again , in few years about their predictions about the global warming.

everything in this planet goes in cycles , including the weather.

[circ]

Sure, it goes in cycles. But then, so does the enormous spiral in the middle of the Pacific, filled with trash. You've got water shortages all over the world. Everything is polluted, and we have mostly capitalism to thank for it. You can ignore the biosphere changing all you want, but eventually ecology bites everyone in the ass.

[hippifried]

Science, baad.

Blind monkey following of bug-eyed Becky the new age prophet, good.

Ugh.

[Faldur]

Ya, "Science"–noun
1.
a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.

This not a scientific cause, its faith based. It is a religion like any other, with pretty pictures and stories.

[circ]

Actually that graph looks pretty much spot on. But I guess following the pretty lil' colors is a difficult task.

[Faldur]

Whats 2C amongst friends..

[trish]

This not a scientific cause

What the fuck is a "scientific cause"???? You looked up the noun form of "science" but you have no comprehension of how to use the adjectival form. Events are caused by other events. Events are physical occurrences; they are neither "scientific" nor "faith based." The current climate shift we're experiencing now is caused by a set of events which include the dumping of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere that obstruct the radiative escape of heat, thereby insulating us and raising the mean global surface temperature. You claim to have posted above (the blue curve) Hansen's 1988 prediction of that temperature rise. It doesn't come anywhere close to the sophistication climate models have achieved today. Today we have a network of satellites that continuously monitor winds speeds, pressure fronts, ocean currents, fluctuations in the jet stream, chemical concentrations, atmospheric opacity in a continuous range of wavelengths etc. etc. Today we have desktop computational power twenty times faster and with a hundred thousand times more memory than the clumsy card programmable mainframes that were available to Hansen. Hansen had the theory and he essentially had an abacus. For the very first attempt at a mathematical model of our modern climate, his doesn't to badly. But of course, no one in the field uses Hansen's model anymore. Almost as soon as it was published climatologists began to factor in the elements ignored by the Hansen model as those elements became better known (through satellite data collection) and amenable to processing (thanks to the ever growing computational power of modern technology). So hey, if you don't like the blue curve, you're not alone. It's old hat. So what's your point? That Hansen should've been able to do better with what he had at the time? Maybe you're saying that had you applied yourself in 1988 you would've produced a model more in line with the actual data, purportedly depicted by the orange curve. If so, then you would have predicted an increase in the mean temperature anomaly of half a degree centigrade over the course of half a century (see the orange curve); i.e. you would've predicted a climate shift commensurate with the greenhouse accumulation of heat over time.