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Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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USDA: Global Climate Change: Background

Global Climate Change: Background

The Earth's temperature is rising as a result of increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (see Basic Information on Climate Change from EPA). According to NOAA and NASA data, the Earth's average surface temperature has increased by 1.2-1.4º F over the last 100 years. If greenhouse gases continue to increase, climate models predict that the average temperature at the Earth's surface could increase 3.2-7.2º F above 1990 levels by the end of this century.

The major part of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is likely due to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report. Human activities across the globe—including fossil fuel use, land cover conversion (deforestation), and agricultural practices—are contributing to the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Over the past 1 to 2 centuries, land use and land-use change were responsible for roughly 40 percent of human emissions of carbon dioxide (IPCC Third Assessment Report, Box 3.2).

Within the United States, agriculture accounts for a relatively small share of greenhouse gas emissions, about 7 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2007.

(rest at - http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/GlobalClimate/Background.htm)

Additionally, the US department of agriculture has one of the better impact and mitigation resource setups of the various US governmental agencies.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/GlobalClimate/
 
National Institute of Health: Statement

The world's climate scientists have reached consensus that climate change is occurring around the world and at a more rapid pace than predicted even 10 years ago, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, 2007 (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm). With these changes, the planet is expected to warm, oceans are expected to become more acidic, and extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes, are expected to become more frequent and severe.

Climate change is expected to have both direct and indirect impacts on human health. At the same time, the scientific community must recognize that global climate change will occur on a backdrop of issues of land use, agricultural practices, coastal mega-cities, and changing demographics.

Our understanding of the links between climate change and adverse human health impacts is increasing, but many knowledge gaps remain. The NIEHS is engaged in multiple activities with other federal agencies, international research and policy organizations, academia, and nongovernmental organization stakeholders to identify these knowledge gaps, craft research agenda to address them, communicate findings, and work with decision makers to incorporate this information into sound health policy and actions. Our activities in this area seek to:

•Raise awareness and create new partnerships to advance key areas of health research and knowledge development
•Serve as an authoritative source of information on climate change, energy, and health, and to assist scientists, health professionals, community stakeholders, and others who wish to engage in this arena
(rest at: http://www.niehs.nih.gov/about/od/programs/climatechange/index.cfm)

In coordination with the CDC and the World Health Organization, the NIH has coordinated intensive studies and researches of the impacts and adaptation efforts required to the rapidly deterioration climatic conditions here within the US and across the globe.
 
American Association for the Advancement of Science

Communicating and Learning About Global Climate Change

An Abbreviated Guide for Teaching Climate Change,
from Project 2061 at AAAS


About AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and
publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org).
AAAS was founded in 1848, and serves 262 affiliated societies
and academies of science, reaching 10 million individuals.
Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed
general science journal in the world, with an estimated
total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS
(www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to
advance science and serve society through initiatives in
science policy, international programs, science education,
and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!,
www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site,
a service of AAAS.

Though this resource is primarily designed for educators it includes a wealth of references and guidelines to help anyone seriously interested in the science involved in climate science to located the answers and information they desire.
 
Originally Posted by macdoc
To melt 100 cu km of ice is 2000 Hiroshima thermal equivalents a day. Both Greenland and the Western Antarctic are net loss 100 + as are the mid latitude glaciers...
Giwer
Discovery Channel talk again. The point of the bomb, any explosive for that matter is the rate of release. It is nothing but "Ghee Whiz, Mr. Wizard" to pretend to use the bomb as a measure of anything.

Just what don't you understand about thermal equivalents .......
To melt 100 cuKM of ice a year requires enormous energies....- even Gavin was surprised at the scale of the energies required when put in terms people can understand.

The energies are destructive...not only to the cryosphere but to the general biome. You claim to be a physicists yet you are diverting by talking about explosive power instead of thermal equivalent....
Yes the image is polemic and meant to be so since invisible gas from a tailpipe seems harmless.
WE ARE destroying the cryosphere at a steadily increasing rate and there are consequences now and will be more severe ones later...

If people require an image to focus on as to the extent of the energies involved...too bad. ..you deal in polemics yourself with your "Discovery Channel" comments.
Perhaps if you had watched a few episodes on AGW you would not make such errors as below.

Your comments on the taiga/tundra and soils not determining arable land demonstrates how little you comprehend of the issues of rapid climate change or of the terrestrial biome.
Despite being supplied with relevant rebuttal.
 
macdoc said:
As to the land there is an asterisks load of it in Canada and Siberia that is flat and virgin.
:dl:

farming muskeg and taiga?????!!!!!!.

North American and Ukraine rich farm lands are formed of glacial debris from the last ice age pushed south by advancing glaciers....north of that line is nothing but barren waste with a few fertile riverine systems......so it's NOT temperature entirely it is primarily soil.

North of India and Bangledesh is this small problem called the Himalaya's

North American wheat

Picture150.jpg


Alaska the only remaining viable region for the US within 4 decades......some breadbasket.

To think humans can simply move towards the poles is the height of the absurd.

This is your flat land just waiting for pioneers..:rolleyes:

27 Jan 2001 ... The taiga is truly vast in extent. It makes up 27 percent of the world's total forest or 17 x 106 km2 and occupies 11 percent of the land ...

The soils of the taiga are podzolic in character and infertile, having been leached of most of their plant nutrients by the abundance of acidic groundwater. ..
 
Why agriculture cannot shift poleward

Climate change and famine: II Soil
February 18, 2009 by greenfyre
PSDBAnyone who imagines that with climate change we will simply shift agriculture towards the poles probably does not even have house plants, much less a garden, and certainly knows little or nothing about agriculture or climate change.

In an earlier post I discussed some of the impacts on existing agriculture as Understanding why climate change means global famine”. Now I’d like to discuss a couple of aspects of one of the stock answers “we’ll just move our food production north.”

The reason this will not work is shown very simply with a map.
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/images/biosphere/soils/global_soils_map_USDA.jpg

source US Dept of Agriculture
Begining with the Southern Hemisphere and the obvious, there is less land area as you move towards the pole. South America narrows rapidly, Africa less rapidly but it still does, and Australia simply ends; there just isn’t the land available to sustain anything close to current levels of food production.

The Northern Hemisphere is only slightly more complicated. Looking at the soils you see that much of the north consists of Gelisols, Entisols and Spodsols.

Gelisols: “…chemically they are not highly fertile…”
Entisols “…. most are basically unaltered from their parent material …” ie lacking the organic matter, soil structure, etc that you need for agriculture.
Spodosols “…are the typical soils of coniferous, or Boreal forests.” ie shallow and acidic. “Most Spodosols are poor soils for agriculture.”
Put simply, these soils are total crap for food production. The entire region where the delusional are hoping to grow all of our food is not good for food production based on soil alone, never mind other factors.

Just to hammer this point home beyond all question here is a soil fertility map.
http://www.pvoss.de/Agro/globalfertility.jpg
continues
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/climate-change-and-famine-ii-soil/
 
Physic professor's letter to APS renouncing AGW "scam"

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=19879

The article in the link above has the full text of a letter written by Harold Lewis, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and sent to the President of the American Physical Society in which he denounces global warming as a scam. He claims that trillions of dollars in research funding has corrupted scientists into supporting the global warming scam.

I have not studied global warming well enough to refute Professor Lewis. However, if opposition to global warming is being suppressed, that needs to change right away.
 
Eek, that was pathetic. There wasn't an identifiable argument in any of it. Let me sum up the letter for those of you who don't want to read it:

"AGW is the single greatest scam in the history of science because GET OFF MY LAWN!"

Here's where my spidey-sense started tingling:

Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.)

Anyone who brings up "climategate" as somehow substantive can immediately be ignored.
 
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However, if opposition to global warming is being suppressed, that needs to change right away.

Frankly, I'm sick of hearing these people go on about how they're being silenced. I wish somebody would just shut them up.

At least this one must be pretty close to the end of his perch (as are most of them, actually). There's a reason why "gone emeritus" has entered common usage.
 
http://notrickszone.com/2010/10/15/...t-german-universities-professors-speaking-up/

More dissent from scientists. Sadly I don't speak German so I am relying on the report's interpration.

In the world of science it is unavoidable, as humans are involved, that there are always attempts to portray truths as unacceptable, or to try to suppress them using methods that have nothing to do with science, and perhaps to even slander persons in an attempt shut them up. One method used here is to claim that everything that is good must go through peer review.

Hmm.... sounds like he's describing groupthinky stuff to me. :)
 
Yeah seems there was a 1967 physics degree touted hereabouts.....and then the sad case of Feynman as well....genetic predisposition to blinkered to reality perhaps?:rolleyes:
 
Yup, it all pretty much boiled down to gibberish & conspiracy mongering in that letter. The reference to CG is a big red flag, too.

ETA: In addition, where the hell does the old fart get the "trillions of dollars" going into climate change research nonsense? As a professor of physics, one would expect him to understand numbers a bit better. By his argument the amount of money going into this research is on par with the entire annual budget of the United States! :rolleyes:
 
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Still in defending the flat earth thesis I see....
Joining the anti-evo, tin hat conspiracy cranks et al....- muttering about pseudo-psychology to sound "smart" :rolleyes:

....well deserved marginalization for the ever dwindling AGW denier cadre at this point.
The world and the science has moved on..... :garfield:
 
Yeah seems there was a 1967 physics degree touted hereabouts.....and then the sad case of Feynman as well....genetic predisposition to blinkered to reality perhaps?:rolleyes:

Uhm, are you referring to Feynman's famous Cargo Cult Speech? He never mentioned global warming in it, and that speech was mainly angled towards psychology and similar things.

As far as I know, Feynman never made any statements about global warming, and considering he died in 1988, that's not very strange.

I know he's often used by "climate change deniers", but that's just because everyone wants to have Feynman on their side.
 
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LOL
Groupthink at its finest. :D

"I don't agree - I am ignoring you".

Yes, when someone says something really stupid that betrays a lack of depth of thought, it's often very rational to ignore them. This is why I rarely respond to your statements.

But as usual, in your zeal to type the word "groupthink," you've failed to understand how and why we can dismiss the climategate nonsense. It isn't because we've ignored it, it's because we've already dealt with it. It's been investigated, scrutinized, and poured over, and there's nothing to it. THus, when anyone mentions it for any reason other than humor, it betrays quite a bit negative information about the speaker/typer.
 
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A friend sent me this letter in an email last week--in yet another attempt to persuade me that global warming is a scam. I ignored it :D.

But for clarification: the letter didn't claim that trillions had been spent on research. Rather, Hal Lewis was implying that the total cost of the "scam" reached the trillions. In his resignation letter to APS he wrote: "It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave."
 
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