Big rise in number of Atlantic storms blamed on global warming

[Basket]

Shut your computer off and throw it away. You are causing a global warming. In addition, you better not have any vehicles, electricity, etc. at your house. You are causing the global warming. How dare you! You shouldn't even breathe either. You are causing global warming. You better not give any flatulence because you are causing global warming. You better not have any children because they are contributing to global warming. You better not exist because you are causing global warming. Kneel on your knees and bow down to global warming god, you infidel.

It is true. Our way of living today has resulted in greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere. I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say, though. Are you saying that because there's no easy solution that we might as well accept that global warming is going to occur?

A portion of the carbon dioxide we release is taken back in by plant life. Plants are carbon sinks. As they grow, they absorb carbon dioxide, strip the carbon from it and retain it as part of the plant, and release the oxygen. The industrial revolution has caused a great release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels are essentially made from dead plants. Combustion converts carbon from the plants, and oxygen from the air, into carbon dioxide (or at least I'd think). We're releasing it back into the air. Make sense?

The global warming backers lost me when they claimed that flatulent farm animals are also major contributors to the problem.

Yes, that is true as well. They release methane, which has a chemical formula of CH4. One carbon and four hydrogens. But! It is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So that is why the creation of methane can increase the greenhouse effect substantially.

You may be interested to know that scientists are actually working on a solution to this problem. The methane is produced by bacteria in sheep and cows. By feeding them certain kinds of foods or whatever, they hope that less of the food is converted into methane, reducing flatulence and especially burping (which accounts for 95% of the methane) and helping keep the atmosphere stable.

The greenhouse effect is actually an essential part of life. Without it, the earth would be a much colder place. But thanks to a pinch of carbon dioxide, we have moderate temperatures to live in. We don't want to set our planet's thermostat too high, though, either!

Edit: as corrected later in this thread by marysnider, the formula for methane is CH4, not CO as I had before. And I added the thing about burping that she mentioned too.

 

[scifo]

Yes, that is true as well. They release methane, which has a chemical formula of CO. One carbon and one oxygen. But! It is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So that is why the creation of methane can increase the greenhouse effect substantially.

You may be interested to know that scientists are actually working on a solution to this problem. The methane is produced by bacteria in sheep and cows. By feeding them certain kinds of foods or whatever, they hope that less of the food is converted into methane, reducing flatulence and helping keep the atmosphere stable.

The greenhouse effect is actually an essential part of life. Without it, the earth would be a much colder place. But thanks to a pinch of carbon dioxide, we have moderate temperatures to live in. We don't want to set our planet's thermostat too high, though, either!

Yes. I know. I saw that in the articles.

Like I said, when someone starts to link the end of the world with farting cows....you know....I just don't see it.

 

[TheReasoner]

What did I say that is wrong? Aren't what I said was right? You don't think flatulence would cause global warming? You by being existing cause global warming? Etc.. I just agreeing with you and then calling me a wise guy? If you disagree with my examples, tell me the specifics. In addition, do you know what would cause global warming? Civilization. Building infrastructures such as buildings, roads, houses, etc. have contribute big time global warming if you want to go there. These absorb heat from the sun big time. That's why you usually feel cooler the country then you would in the city. Am I wrong? If I am right, what should we do about it? Paint all infrastructure materials white? You know what? That's not a bad idea.

My problem was with your attitude. I don't like the idea of just laying down and allowing things to go to heck.
No matter if the fight is hopeless - we must fight for good. In all we do. Combating GCC is fighting for good.

What you wrote seemed sarcastic at best. A jab/stab at the facts surrounding GCC, not taking it seriously but choosing to be extremely fatalistic about the issue, seemingly ridiculing the concept. And your finishing line... Ouch. "Bow to the global warming god" did not exactly finish your post off in a good manner you know.

So, I apologize if I offended you. It's just that your post came across as... Sarcastic and unkind.

 

[FilM]

From Wikipedia:

William M. Gray pioneered the concept of "seasonal" hurricane forecasting — predicting months in advance the severity of the coming hurricane season. Gray's prognostications, issued since 1983, are used by insurance companies to calculate premiums.

He is Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU), and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Gray is noted for his forecasts of Atlantichurricane season activity.

Professor Gray served as a weather forecaster for the United States Air Force, and as a research assistant in the University of Chicago Department of Meteorology. He joined Colorado State University in 1961. He has been advisor of over 70 Ph. D. and M. Sc. students. His team has been issuing seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984.

After the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, Professor Gray announced that he was stepping back from the primary authorship of CSU's tropical cyclone probability forecasts, passing the role toPhilip J. Klotzbach. Gray indicated that he would be devoting more time to the issue of global warming.
-----
Yeah....Dr. Gray is obviously a loon.

You conveniently omitted the rest of the wikipedia article:

According to an interview reported by Joel Aschenbach, Gray believes that the current warming in the past decades is a natural cycle, driven by a global ocean circulation that manifests itself in the North Atlantic as the Gulf Stream. Warm water and cool water essentially rise and fall in a rhythm lasting decades. But when pressed on his theory of how thermohaline circulation has caused recent warming of the planet and will soon cause cooling, he concedes that he hasn't published the idea in any peer-reviewed journal.

So yet again the deniers are not willing to submit their assertions for peer review.

So who am I to believe, the climate scientists who are willing to have their scientific research scrutinised by their peers, or the deniers who are not?

Frankly the one skeptic whose opinions and research I respected was the prominent Richard Lindzen from MIT; and now even Lindzen has changed his view and states that humans are the cause of climate change.

 

[scifo]

You conveniently omitted the rest of the wikipedia article:



So yet again the deniers are not willing to submit their assertions for peer review.

So who am I to believe, the climate scientists who are willing to have their scientific research scrutinised by their peers, or the deniers who are not?

Frankly the one skeptic whose opinions and research I respected was the prominent Richard Lindzen from MIT; and now even Lindzen has changed his view and states that humans are the cause of climate change.

And don't forget the rest of the test, starting where you decided to edit; the very next sentence.


He's working on it, he says. In the same interview, Gray is reported as saying that "global warming hysteria" is motivated, in part, by the desire among scientists, government leaders and environmentalists to find a political cause that would enable them to "organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!"[3]
In 2005, Gray appeared in front of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to testify on his area of expertise, hurricane prediction. During this testimony, Gray asked:
"How can we trust climate forecasts 50 and 100 years into the future (that can’t be verified in our lifetime) when they are not able to make shorter seasonal or yearly forecasts that could be verified?"[4] Gray also asserted, "I'll take on any scientist in this field to talk about this, I predict that in 5 to 8 years the globe will begin to cool". To date, Gray has given no indication that he has agreed to such a debate.
In a December 2006 interview with David Harsanyi of the Denver Post, Gray said "They've been brainwashing us for 20 years, starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was." In this interview, Gray cites the global cooling article in Newsweek from 1975 as evidence that such a scare has happened in the past.

You have a link to Professor Lindzen's statement?

 

[FilM]

And don't forget the rest of the test, starting where you decided to edit; the very next sentence.


He's working on it, he says. In the same interview, Gray is reported as saying that "global warming hysteria" is motivated, in part, by the desire among scientists, government leaders and environmentalists to find a political cause that would enable them to "organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!"[3]
In 2005, Gray appeared in front of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to testify on his area of expertise, hurricane prediction. During this testimony, Gray asked:
"How can we trust climate forecasts 50 and 100 years into the future (that can’t be verified in our lifetime) when they are not able to make shorter seasonal or yearly forecasts that could be verified?"[4] Gray also asserted, "I'll take on any scientist in this field to talk about this, I predict that in 5 to 8 years the globe will begin to cool". To date, Gray has given no indication that he has agreed to such a debate.
In a December 2006 interview with David Harsanyi of the Denver Post, Gray said "They've been brainwashing us for 20 years, starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was." In this interview, Gray cites the global cooling article in Newsweek from 1975 as evidence that such a scare has happened in the past.

You have a link to Professor Lindzen's statement?

No, I just felt it made him look more like a fool. He is entitled to his opinion and frankly it makes him look like he has some paranoid delusions. "They're brainwashing us..."

The fact that he has to resort to quoting a journalistic piece that was written nearly 30 years ago in Newsweek, as opposed to confronting the information in the IPCC which summarises the work of thousands of climate scientists show his slant. It seems like his wife rang off with an environmentalist (low blow I know but that's how he is coming across).

Now to Professor Lindzen's statement:

There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true.

link

Ok, he goes on to say that it's probably not a big deal, but the fact that he is saying that our greenhouse gas emisions are contributing is definately a change in stance on his statements from the past 10 years where he has emphatically denied that our carbon emissions had an effect. So will it take him another 10 years before he has a change in opinion and says that it is a big deal after all?

And just to put it in perspective, Lindzen is one prominent scientist who has questioned the consensus in the past. That is compared to the thousands of other prominent climate scientists, including the rest of the MIT climate scientists (not to mention Harvard, NASA, the national science academies of the USA, Great Britain, Australia, etc) that say we are the cause of it.

 

[scifo]

And he said:

In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.



It's kind of like saying: Scientists cause cancer in laboratory rats.



I'm simply not convinced.

 

[Voegelin]

Katrina cost us $50 billion.

Katrina didn't cost me a dime. Brushed right by.

Wilma was kinda expensive but if it's not having your house trashed by a hurricane it's something else.

 

[Trogdor the Burninator]

IMO the environmental lobby is probably doing more damage to the entire pro-GW side than anything else. It's almost as if they want a catastrophe.

We keep hearing about how people wont be able to fly anywhere, about how we'll be scaling back western lifestyles to almost third world levels. Yet every time a new breakthrough, or better still, a practical suggestion to reduce CO2 without causing chaos comes up, they seem to totally ignore it.

I'd class myself as a skeptic for that very reason. Can we influence or damage our environment - sure, we've done it before. Do I believe the hysterical calls to cut global emissions by 70-90% or face catastrophe. Um - not yet.

 

[marysnider]

Hi Guys:

I stayed out of this thread because I think Global Warming is irrelevant...there are more pressing issues that will solve the problem for us anyway, regardless of what we do about it (see the other thread on oil prices).

But I do want to correct a minor misunderstanding. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, yes, and it is a normal product of animal respiration....and methane is produced by cows, but it is CH4, not CO...CO is carbon monoxide, produced by industrial processes (motors, etc). Are cows causing global warming by flatulence? Believe it or not, yes....but more by burping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle

Cattle emit a large amount of methane gas from the anaerobic digestion processes in their stomachs; 95% of this methane is produced through eructation or burping, not flatulence [9]. The carbon undergoing this digestion is obtained from photosynthesis, and normally, then, the release of carbon into the atmosphere from such a process would be considered benign [1]. But methane is a potent greenhouse gas (23 times as warming as carbon dioxide) (pie charts), and scientists researching the increase in methane gas in the atmosphere have cited cattle farming amongst other human activity as a possible problem [2]. Research is underway on dietary supplements that can reduce these releases.[10]

 

[marshlewis]

OK. You lost me on that one.

...the cute wee elephant have to find a new home?

For goodness sake. Your a republican. The elephant is the symbol. Go back read my post, join the dots.

 

[Basket]

Hi Guys:

I stayed out of this thread because I think Global Warming is irrelevant...there are more pressing issues that will solve the problem for us anyway, regardless of what we do about it (see the other thread on oil prices).

But I do want to correct a minor misunderstanding. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, yes, and it is a normal product of animal respiration....and methane is produced by cows, but it is CH4, not CO...CO is carbon monoxide, produced by industrial processes (motors, etc). Are cows causing global warming by flatulence? Believe it or not, yes....but more by burping.

etc.

Ah, okay. Thanks for the correction. Interesting to know.

 

[FilM]

Katrina didn't cost me a dime. Brushed right by.

Wilma was kinda expensive but if it's not having your house trashed by a hurricane it's something else.

So how do you avoid paying taxes or buying home insurance? I'd definately like to know.

Or did you specify when paying taxes that you don't want your money to go towards rebuilding New Orleans, just like some are trying to avoid their taxes going to the war effort?

In the end the few remaining deniers will not really matter, the world will move on. As long at the heads of state around the world listen to their science and economic advisors there will be stricter measures put in place. After all Britain and California are already introducing 60% emission reduction by 2050 targets.

And all we need is another Katrina or Oxford or two and the people will go along with it.

 

[Trogdor the Burninator]

And all we need is another Katrina or Oxford or two and the people will go along with it.

Probably quite true. The sad fact is that politicians and lobbyists will use these types of events to push an agenda, whether or not is has anything to do with global warming. Almost everything weather-related is caused by "global warming" these days, at least according to the press.

I also hope that some of these economic advisers are smart, because I'm hearing some really scary stuff being put out by some of them. We've heard about the cost of doing nothing about global warming, but I'm more worried about the cost of some of the solutions.

 

[FilM]

BTW Trogdor, is that huge tanker that got dumped halfway up the Newcastle beach by the recent storms still there?

My boss was over in Syndey and couldn't catch the ferry on account of the huge waves shutting the harbour to shipping.

 

[Trogdor the Burninator]

BTW Trogdor, is that huge tanker that got dumped halfway up the Newcastle beach by the recent storms still there?

My boss was over in Syndey and couldn't catch the ferry on account of the huge waves shutting the harbour to shipping.

No - it's been towed off.

Though those storms were pretty big, it's pretty common for the ferries to be off - OH&S and all that. Kinda sad really - there was nothing like crossing the heads during a storm in the older (and much smaller) ferries when I was a kid.

 

[scifo]

For goodness sake. Your a republican. The elephant is the symbol. Go back read my post, join the dots.

Ahh..I see. Kind of flimsy but I see it now.

I guess it didn't sink in because Fallwell pretty much said exactly that and he is much more Republican leaning than Democratic.

So...since I'm still a Republican..it apparently had no impact.

Therefore, I missed your somewhat vague, albeit witty, meaning.

 

[jsn112]

My problem was with your attitude. I don't like the idea of just laying down and allowing things to go to heck.
No matter if the fight is hopeless - we must fight for good. In all we do. Combating GCC is fighting for good.

What you wrote seemed sarcastic at best. A jab/stab at the facts surrounding GCC, not taking it seriously but choosing to be extremely fatalistic about the issue, seemingly ridiculing the concept. And your finishing line... Ouch. "Bow to the global warming god" did not exactly finish your post off in a good manner you know.

So, I apologize if I offended you. It's just that your post came across as... Sarcastic and unkind.

That's because I am sick of this scare tactic when there's no definite proof. Especially, I get nauseated when I see Al Gore uses 30 times more energy shown in his utility bill than the average household and cry about not conserving energy enough. I get upset when I see all the global warming scaring mongers owns private jets and monster gas guzzling SUVs in their driveways. Etc. Do they think I use my car because I like to throw away money on $3 per gallon of gas? I use my car because I have to. I would love to live one block away from work. If Al Gore wants me on his side, then he buy me a condo across from work. Sounds like a good deal, right? Anymore questions?

 

[FilM]

That's because I am sick of this scare tactic when there's no definite proof. Especially, I get nauseated when I see Al Gore uses 30 times more energy shown in his utility bill than the average household and cry about not conserving energy enough. I get upset when I see all the global warming scaring mongers owns private jets and monster gas guzzling SUVs in their driveways. Etc. Do they think I use my car because I like to throw away money on $3 per gallon of gas? I use my car because I have to. I would love to live one block away from work. If Al Gore wants me on his side, then he buy me a condo across from work. Sounds like a good deal, right? Anymore questions?

Can you please show me where apart from death, taxes and the sun coming up each day you have definate proof? Because you may be surprised how much you do based on less proof than that surrounding climate change.

But on your other point I fully agree with you, even to the point where I put an email to the organisers of live earth saying that they in one go did more damage to getting people to take climate change seriously then any other event. No one likes a hypocrite.