Rick Teal said:
Global warming is a big lie. There are parts of the world which are currently experiencing localized short term warming. One of these is Canada.
The world is colder now than it was in 1940, and between 1968 and 1993 all of the world's glaciers were in a constant state of advance.
Studies of "Global Warming" especially those that "prove" that its happening tend to garner large research grants for the scientific community.
I'm laughing hard here, really hard. I'm a geography major, BSc, and I haven't heard this much bullsh1t spewed in a long time... Global warming
IS occurring, and at a rate so shocking we really don't understand it.
Entire cold habitat species forests in Alaska are dying over areas so vast you'd be stunned, and examinations of tree rings from the forest (the rings show growth patterns and stress, shown to acutely correlate with cool temperatures equal a good year and warmer a poor one) have shown an abrupt and sharp increase in stress and a slowing or entire halt of growth beginning in the middle of the last century.
As well the permafrost is melting, anyone who disagrees is an asshat, just look at all the troubles we are having in the North with pipelines and roadways, ice roads are open for an entire month less time than they were even in just 1990. We are even spending enormous sums to
refrigerate ground in the North at pipeline footings and other structures, as it's turning into a bog. Pingos (ice cored hills) are collapsing at an unbelievable rate.
The worlds glaciers have sped their melting at an astonishing rate even in the last 10 years, for instance, Greenland's icecap, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, has
doubled its melt rate in the last decade, and is forecasted to double again over its
present rate by 2010.
I've climbed peaks in the Andes to get a firsthand look at the last of our equatorial glaciers, and what is happening there is even more foreboding. I visited the area of the world's highest ski hill, and it hasn't opened in a couple seasons now, it went from snow 1000m below the base of the run to a complete recession and none at all from 1950 to today. All that's left is a chairlift over barren rock as its glacier disappeared, when only 10 years ago skiers still flocked there. The glacier of the 20,000ft peak I climbed has receded a mile in the last decade, and is forecasted to be gone entirely by mid century. To understand the volume of ice that is melting and how huge this is, an entire massive hydroelectric dam runs off the daily melt water alone, with no other water source (there is little to no precipitation, the ice is 20,000+ years old).
Now here's the biggest issue; snow and ice reflect sunlight, earth and rock absorb it. When the white reflective cover is finally removed to expose dark and moist earth, surface temperatures rise exponentially, and the atmosphere is heated by radiation from the surface of energy absorbed by the sun. There is
no possible way we are not experiencing global warming, it is not something we can ignore or avoid. It is happening, and humans make it far worse.
Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are skyrocketing at rates hundreds of times faster than those in the past, this is a fact nobody debates as the measurements are taken by one of the largest emitters themselves, the US, at the Mona Loa atmospheric observatory. Another fact nobody debates is that greenhouse gases absorb light energy and diffuse it as heat. Nowhere again is this argument against global warming, and how is it justified? We KNOW that the concentration of gases we emit are increasing at a screaming rate, and we KNOW these gases absorb energy and diffuse it as heat, this is simply science and basic physics; we even rely on the processes of energy diffusion in industry with the very same gases, there's no doubt the process is occurring.
Your arguments that the earth is colder now than in 1940 hold little merit as well, as you are pointing to short-term climatic models as proof global warming is not occurring. Pro-industry and petroleum groups will often use statistics like the 1940 example you pulled up, and I recognize that very statistical choice as a tool of the industrial groups. You see, there's a problem with that stat, the Earth underwent short term warming from 1880 to 1940 (even centuries are considered short term), and the very fact the pinnacle of this heating cycle was chosen in your quote suggests you received this information from a source attempting to downplay the issue. You see, the problem is most people miss the scale of what is occurring, climatic patterns are not analyzed so much on a years, even decades scale when attempting to decipher what is occurring, geologists look at
millennia, and larger time blocks. There are always short term (20-100 years) patterns of heating and cooling occurring, but the greater slope is UP. Just like a chronic gambler, if you graphed his results over years, there'd be spikes and gullies, but the overall trend over the decades is downhill when you zoom out in scale. the reson we know our current debacle isn't just a short term flux is that ice cores, ancient tree data, and the fossil record to name a few sources corroborate that the greenhouse gas levels are skyrocketing, and that we know these gases do warm the atmosphere when present, we can test that in a flask in a lab and see firsthand. THIS is why this rise is different, and far more concerning.
I've spent several years and global travels looking at this very issue, global warming, and I can tell you with absolute confidence that to say it is not occurring is dumbfounding ignorance without peer. However, to my amazement, as we see more and more hurricanes every year due to warmer waters, fish stock die offs from high temperatures, temperature records being set worldwide, and glaciers virtually evaporating, many people choose to ignore it. Why? Simple. It's bad for business. There's too much money in our current energy sector to let it slip away due to concerns about the earth for some, and they do an amazing job of propogating some really fantastically false arguments that the public will for some reason often accept. It's also bad for our conscience, and ow we enjoy living, people don't want to change. Even our own government has extensive plans in place regarding global warming; there's no debate there either, heck, we're already even having to deal with it.
