Global Warming....

[jackokent]

I remember a scene in the amazing Erik the VIking film where, as the whole island sinks below the waves the inhabitants stoically keep singing and maintaining that it's not happenning. Well I think that's us.

[Urien]

Hmm that's the case to a degree in the USA. Try the hysteria in the UK or other European nations, where every third story has some direct or oblique reference to global warming.

The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.

More reason and less panic.

[jackokent]

Originally Posted by andrew.v.spencer

Hmm that's the case to a degree in the USA. Try the hysteria in the UK or other European nations, where every third story has some direct or oblique reference to global warming.

The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.

More reason and less panic.

I would have agreed with you at one point but now I am firmly in the panic stage. The world is changing, water is rising. Little things like not being able to predict the weather now when I go on holiday - places that used to have fairly certain and regular climates when I was booking holidays 10 years ago. Now the travel catalogues all carry a warning that with global warming the weather is really uncertain.

Every time i travel anywhere I hear the effect of the changes. There are places like the Maldives that I am likely to never be able to visit agian if I am not quick about it.

And now, today I have a fridge freezer picked up and thrown across my garden by a gust of wind. Huge trees down all over the place. No electric for 27 hours.

We have buterflies in the garden that shouldn't be here for another 3 months. What is going to happen to our whole eco system, the insects, the birds etc.

Yes it makes me hysterical

I didn't used to mind about global warming as I thought, very selfishly, that I'd be dead before I'd be inconvenienced. Now I am not so sure.

[Urien]

The total mass of ice in Antarctica is rising. This is generally known. Though not widely disseminated. When a trend begins,or a belief is formed people look for what's known as a confirmation bias, they report, listen to, only those items that support their preconceived prejudice, that's why people generally read newspapers that agree with their political leaning.

I read in a thread earlier someone equating the storms in Europe to global warming, but choosing to ignore the huge winter storms here in the USA.

Both ice caps appear to be thickening, this is generally accepted and easily researched. the sea levels are not rising.


World Climate Report » Antarctic Ice: A Global Warming Snow Job?

News in Science - Greenland icecap thickens despite warming - 21/10/2005


The weather system is very complex. We do not understand. Saying global warming has very definite outcomes is in effect nonsense. We do not know what will or might happen.

[jackokent]

Originally Posted by andrew.v.spencer

Both ice caps appear to be thickening, this is generally accepted and easily researched. the sea levels are not rising.


World Climate Report » Antarctic Ice: A Global Warming Snow Job?

News in Science - Greenland icecap thickens despite warming - 21/10/2005

Thanks for these post AVS, it's great to have someone put my mind at rest, or try to, as I am still worried. I completely agree that once people start to panic they will attribute anything ie weather change to global warming. I hope I am doing that.

I genuinely thought the sea was rising. This has really confused me. If the sea isn't rising why are islands disapearing, are they shrinking?

[Urien]

Islands are not disappearing. Sea level where accurately measured show no significant rise.

I do not deny that there has been a warming trend on earth recently, or that it might be our fault. However, from three or four years ago we find that the ice caps are thickening (which actually could be a result fo global warming), this negates the early idea of sea levels rising.

However, this is more recent info, research triggered, naturally enough by warming trends. They were expected to be thinner, but are in fact thicker, the warmer sea causes more precipitation and snowfall. The same warmer sea breaks off the edges of the arctic and antarctic icesheets. We might actually find global warming causes sea levels to fall.

As more info becomes available the simple earlier fears change and are replaced by something else. It takes time for these to seep through to the publics consciousness, hence the public now knows about the edges of the ice sheet breaking off, but not the net ice levels rising.

Emerging now is a theory that is might not be carbon but methane. That was not the thought two years ago.

Thinking we even half understand this, the cause or the consequences is premature at best, foolish and irresponsible at worst.

[mosaix]

Originally Posted by andrew.v.spencer

Islands are not disappearing. Sea level where accurately measured show no significant rise.

I do not deny that there has been a warming trend on earth recently, or that it might be our fault. However, from three or four years ago we find that the ice caps are thickening (which actually could be a result fo global warming), this negates the early idea of sea levels rising.

However, this is more recent info, research triggered, naturally enough by warming trends. They were expected to be thinner, but are in fact thicker, the warmer sea causes more precipitation and snowfall. The same warmer sea breaks off the edges of the arctic and antarctic icesheets. We might actually find global warming causes sea levels to fall.

As more info becomes available the simple earlier fears change and are replaced by something else. It takes time for these to seep through to the publics consciousness, hence the public now knows about the edges of the ice sheet breaking off, but not the net ice levels rising.

Emerging now is a theory that is might not be carbon but methane. That was not the thought two years ago.

Thinking we even half understand this, the cause or the consequences is premature at best, foolish and irresponsible at worst.

I can see that maybe the ice cap in antarctica may be thickening as the snow falls on land and maybe the ice in Greenland would also thicken. But underneath the northern ice cap is sea and as the ice recedes the snow would, surely, just fall into warm water and melt?

[jackokent]

Originally Posted by andrew.v.spencer

Islands are not disappearing. Sea level where accurately measured show no significant rise. .

I am still confused. I've just seen something no TV news about group of south polynesian island dwellers who have to be evacuated because thier island is dsapear due, the expressly stated on the news, to the ice caps melting and the sea levels rising.

[Rane Longfox]

Ah, the media. Who have never been known to manic-monger or connect two entirely seperate events to cause a sensation...

Again, apologies for the over-acted cynisism, but there we go.

I don't know about the specific situation, but it sounds like someone on an editing desk somewhere is putting 2 and 2 together and getting 48... and probably a pay-rise.

[j. d. worthington]

Just the latest on a new report:

Report has 'smoking gun' on climate - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday.

Solomon and others wouldn't go into specifics about what the report says. They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.

The full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001.

Global warming is "happening now, it's very obvious," said Mahlman, a former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in Boulder, Colo. "When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it's pretty much a no-brainer."

The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra K. Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is the head of the international climate change panel.

An early version of the ever-changing draft report said "observations of coherent warming in the global atmosphere, in the ocean, and in snow and ice now provide stronger joint evidence of warming."

And the early draft adds: "An increasing body of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and precipitation."
The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998. Last year was the hottest year on record for the United States.

The report will draw on already published peer-review science. Some recent scientific studies show that temperatures are the hottest in thousands of years, especially during the last 30 years; ice sheets in Greenland in the past couple years have shown a dramatic melting; and sea levels are rising and doing so at a faster rate in the past decade.

Also, the second part of the international climate panel's report — to be released in April — will for the first time feature a blockbuster chapter on how global warming is already changing health, species, engineering and food production, said NASA scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, author of that chapter.

That bit about the studies showing the temperatures being the hottest in thousands of years seems to jibe with something else I saw the other day. This is from the Wikipedia article on it, so I'll try to find other sources; but looking at the graphs of the global temperatures and reconstructed temperature for the past century to thousand years, and then the carbon dioxide and temperature records for the last 650,000, it looks like this really is the warmest it's been in a very long time. And the chart of the glacier thickness change is along the same line.

This particular article is from AP, titled "Report has 'smoking gun' on climate", is by Seth Borenstein, and is datelined Mon., Jan. 22, 2007. Perhaps we'll have something coming out in the next few days from some of the scientific sites around, to give a bit more to go on.....

EDIT: Just noticed this one, as well:

Experts: Alps glaciers will melt by 2050 - Yahoo! News

Title: "Experts: Alps glaciers will melt by 2050", by William J. Kole, datelined Mon., Jan. 22, 2007:

VIENNA, Austria - Glaciers will all but disappear from the Alps by 2050, scientists warned Monday, basing their bleak outlook on mounting evidence of slow but steady melting of the continental ice sheets.

In western Austria's Alpine province of Tyrol, glaciers have been shrinking by about 3 percent a year, said Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Ecology.

And 2050 is a conservative estimate, he said: If they keep melting at that rate, most glaciers could vanish by 2037.

"The future looks rather liquid," he said.

Experts at a regional conference on the Alps, held annually in the mountain resort of Alpbach, stopped short of blaming global warming. But they called for a review of preventive measures to protect people living in valleys at risk of dangerous flooding.

Runoff from melting glaciers caused severe flooding that devastated parts of Switzerland in the summer of 2005.

Glacial melting is a global problem, according to the Zurich-based World Glacier Monitoring Service, which keeps tabs on 30 ice sheets in nine mountain ranges worldwide and says their average mass is steadily eroding.

Glaciers are the planet's largest source of fresh water after polar ice, which scientists say also is melting to 100-year lows. In Europe, they're also hugely popular with skiers and snowboarders seeking year-round thrills and help anchor a multimillion-dollar tourist industry.

In 2005, glacier thickness decreased by an average of 23 1/2 inches, and in 2004 by an average of 27 1/2 inches, the Swiss agency said, citing preliminary measurements. Since 1980, it said, Europe's glaciers have lost about 31 1/2 feet of ice. About 7 feet melted away in a single summer — 2003 — when a heat wave zapped much of Europe, said Michael Zemp, a glacier expert at the University of Zurich.

It should be noted that they are saying that this is caused by a combination of factors, from man-made emissions to naturally occurring changes; nonetheless, there is, in light of the other information, a pretty good bet that there's a significant impact at least on the rate of change here, I would think.

[bowerbird]

Originally Posted by jackokent

I am still confused. I've just seen something no TV news about group of south polynesian island dwellers who have to be evacuated because thier island is dsapear due, the expressly stated on the news, to the ice caps melting and the sea levels rising.

True and they are trying to sue Australia for being some of the cause of the global warming!

[j. d. worthington]

Here's the latest I've seen on that new report:

World scientists meet on global warming - Yahoo! News

PARIS - The planet's temperature is rising, sea levels threaten to swallow coastlines and the world's residents want to know how much to be afraid. An authoritative answer comes this week.

Some 500 scientists and officials convened in Paris on Monday for a week of word-by-word editing of a long-awaited report on how fast the world is warming, how serious it is- and how much is the fault of humans.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be released Friday, could influence what governments and businesses do to fight global warming. It will be watched closely in the U.S., whose government stands accused by many around the world of playing down the peril.

Scientists are keeping quiet about the report's contents, but say it is both more specific and more sweeping than previous efforts to chart hotter summers, snowless ski seasons and breakaway ice sheets and what they mean for the Earth's future.

"At no time in the past has there been a greater global appetite" for reliable information on global warming, the panel's chairman, climatologist Rajendra Pachauri of India, told the conference.

The report is expected to warn of continued temperature rises through the century and reiterate that people-created pollution is partly to blame.

But debate may arise at the closed-door meetings over how much sea levels are rising.

Early drafts of the paper foresaw smaller sea level rises than the last report, in 2001. But many top scientists reject the new figures, saying they are not new enough: They do not include the recent melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations — Greenland and Antarctica.

Many fear this melt-off will mean the world's coasts will be swamped much earlier than previously thought. Others believe the ice melt is temporary and won't play such a dramatic role.

In the past, the panel did not expect a large melt of ice in west Antarctica and Greenland this century. Their forecasts were based only on how much the sea level would rise because of melting glaciers, which are different from ice sheets, and the physical expansion of water as it warms.

During the meetings, science and politics will converge as climate experts work with diplomats to finalize the wording of the panel's report, the first of four major documents on global warming it is scheduled to release this year.
This week's meetings are not addressing how to tackle global warming. That will be the subject of one of the panel's other reports later this year.

"We're hoping that it will convince people that climate change is real and that we have a responsibility for much of it, and that we really do have to make changes in how we live," said Kenneth Denman, one of the report's authors.

While critics call the panel overly alarmist, it is by nature cautious because it relies on input from hundreds of scientists, including skeptics and industry researchers. And its reports must be unanimous, approved by 154 governments — including the United States and oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia.

Pachauri said the report would make "significant advances" over the 2001 report, addressing gaps in that document, reducing uncertainties and adding new knowledge about past changes in climate.

And new data released Monday by the U.N. Environment Program said 30 reference glaciers lost about 2.2 feet in thickness on average in 2005, for a total loss of 34.6 feet on average since 1980.

The story, in this case, is through AP, by Angela Charlton, datelined Mon., Jan. 29, 2007, and titled "World scientists meet on global warming".

[j. d. worthington]

Now, here's one I'd really have to see how the question was formulated....

Survey shows 13 pct of Americans never heard of global warming - Yahoo! News

OSLO (Reuters) - Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of global warming even though their country is the world's top source of greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday.

The report, by ACNielsen of more than 25,000 Internet users, showed that 57 percent of people around the world considered global warming a "very serious problem" and a further 34 percent rated it a "serious problem."

"It has taken extreme and life-threatening weather patterns to finally drive the message home that global warming is happening and is here to stay unless a concerted, global effort is made to reverse it," said Patrick Dodd, the President of ACNielsen Europe.

People in Latin America were most worried while U.S. citizens were least concerned with just 42 percent rating global warming "very serious."

The United States emits about a quarter of all greenhouse gases, the biggest emitter ahead of China, Russia and India.

Thirteen percent of U.S. citizens said they had never heard or read anything about global warming, the survey said.

A U.N. report due on Friday is set to say it is at least 90 percent probable that human activities are the main cause of warming in the past 50 years.

People in China and Brazil were most convinced of the link to human activities and Americans least convinced.

The story is from Reuters, titled "Survey shows 13 pct of Americans never heard of global warming", datelined Mon., Jan. 29, 2007.

[BookStop]

That seems a bit farfetched -13% - although I supppose there are some folks who have never read the paper, or a book, or watched tv, or attended school. I would bet that most of those, however, are under the age of 5. Now, I could see 13% of Americans believing Global Warming is a load of hooey.

[j. d. worthington]

I admit, I find that figure ... very odd. I suppose, though, from my experience with people that, if when they did hear it, they simply discounted it and phased it out of their minds, then it never really registers again. I've known people to do that on various topics. They don't want it to be, so it simply doesn't even exist for them. Even if you ask them a few days later after a conversation about such-and-such topic, they honestly have flensed it from their short-term memory. Damned if I know how they do it, but I've seen it happen.