It’s just one more report to throw on the pyre of reports to be burned if it ever turns out as skeptics say and others hope, global climate change is just a momentary trend: From 1999 to 2006, the pace of glacier melting worldwide picked up.
We had a cold winter; skeptics will argue that the winter of 2007-2008 was not included, and it reverses the trend.
If only that were so.
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(The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense)
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
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Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control. My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it. BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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Those that rewrite the past to fit their views have no clue of reality and will stumble through the future blindly led by others.
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Given that Antarctica receives the least amount of precipitation of all the continents, with some places receiving less then 10cm per decade(!) any scant amount is going to be a extraordinary increase. The snowfall is hardly enough to cause the glaciers to move, it’s akin to a bird feather setting off an avalanche.
My how the cherries seemed to come in early. Do you have any other scientific studies that you don’t understand from which to quote mine?
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Increased snow in the Antarctic as a result of the lake effect — that is, the warmer atmosphere puts more water vapor in the air, and when that air moves over land, you get more snow. More snow in the Antarctic as a result of global warming.
Similarly, global warming would cause colder winters. Dead cows in China? Yep, another effect of global warming.
That’s why we’re calling it climate change, now, so skeptics who don’t bother to check what the predicted effects would be will stop saying “hey, it’s cold here today, so there’s no global warming.”
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Glacier melting may have sped up, but we have also seen an increase in snowfall in the Antarctic
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/01/21/antarctica-snowfall-increase/. The increased weight of the snowpack will cause the glaciers to move faster.
Global Climate Change is a natural consequence of living on a planet that has a dynamic atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and crust; that has an inclined axis of rotation, and has an elliptical and variable orbit around a variable star in a dusty galaxy. We will have to get used to it.
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Oh boy….I’m not touching this one.
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The term “climate change” is more accurate than “global warming” as it describes the events in terms of what will occur. The extremes in temperature – coldest winter ever – hottest summer ever – are well modeled in the climate theory. These are to be expected and will continue to occur if change is ongoing. The real problem will be the when the droughts start as the wind patterns shift. Should ocean currents also be affected, things will definitely change in unexpected manner.
As a geographer, I will agree it is correct to think of some things in terms of centuries and millennium. However, we also know that sometimes events happen in blinks. We geographers can shift scales, and the key is to know when to shift your scale. What we are seeing is a change that can be compared to the change of course of a river. Take for example the Nile and Mississippi, both changed their channels in a matter of days after following the original one for centuries. The second intermediate period of Egyptian dynasty is hypothesized to be the result of such a change. A civilization that stood for a 1000 years was thrown into turmoil and upheaval in a matter of decades.
As for the comment about dilution, try ingesting 500 micrograms of ricin, (about the size of a grain of salt) and let me know how you fare. What CO2 does is capture radiant energy. Not insolation either, rather it captures outgoing thermal radiation. Since that energy is in the lower spectrum of IR it distributes itself as any thermal energy does, as evenly as possible. The tipping of the equilibrium is more noticeable at the poles, which is why the effects are most easily observed there.
Remember that CO2 we are pumping into the air was locked up in coal and oil for millions and millions of years. First law of thermodynamics is that matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed. We aren’t making new C02, we’re releasing stuff that hasn’t been in the atmosphere since the Jurassic period. We’re conducting an uncontrolled experiment in Venusian atmosphere physics.
I don’t expect this to change your minds. However, your misunderstanding and lack of knowledge on the dynamics involved indicate what I call the Jacobian principle. Susan Jacoby describes Americans to be gripped by willful ignorance with the tendency to hold fast to ideas they have no basis. I do not discuss Chinese social systems with authority (despite my long studies of silk road geography) because I know the limits of my knowledge. You would do well to adopt the same practice and defer to those who understand the science.
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My wonderful geography professor taught me to evaluate the natural world’s “trends” with the timescale of 1000s of years instead of decades and so I think that the climate changing is natural.
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thanks .. hope with all no PROBLEM happen in future in climates
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The word’s ‘climate change’ are meaningless. Just as ‘wet water’ or ‘hot fire’ would be. It’s a restatement of the obvious. The NATURE of climate is CHANGE. There has never been an unchanging climate. Today’s Telegraph reports that China, Russia and North America have just suffered their coldest winter in 50 years. Over 500,000 farm animals have frozen to death in China and millions could not get home for New Year due to deep snow drifts.
Interesting how ‘Global Warming’ has slowly been dropped from the hysteria agenda. Now it’s ‘climate change’. Meanwhile nobody has even attempted to explain how carbopn dioxide – which only exists in our atmosphere as a TRACE GAS at just 400 parts per million – is supposed to be warming the planet. How do 400 molecules per million affect the other 999,600 molecules which AREN’T carbon dioxide?
And how is global warming maximised at the poles, which have very low concentrations of CO2 (no plants there ) but is relatively benign at the Equator – which has relatively high levels of CO2?
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