Global Warming?

[dcyates]

I am confused. What in the environmental movement threatens the Christian worldview? Not all environmentalists are Christians, of course, but that doesn't mean that they are wrong about environmental issues. I would appreciate some clarity on this.

I think what's being referred to is the fact that the environmental movement has been hi-jacked by the far left, many of whom are rather inimical to the Christian worldview.

 

[dcyates]

Yes, I remember you from before on this topic!!

However, we are talking about climate, not weather. And unfortunately, man has got clever enough to have an effect on it. And has been since he learned to burn coal, thus making the cities of the industrial revolution black, flithy and disease-ridden.

Gee, and yet it's in industrialised societies that people enjoy the greatest longevity--in fact, the greatest in history. I wonder...
Maybe things aren't as bad as all the scare-mongers and doom-sayers would have us believe.

 

[dcyates]

Can't be proved. Too many variables. No way to do double blind studies. Ask ten labs what the average mean temperature will be in five years and you will get ten answers. Too many variables we don't even know exist. Only recently have some deep ocean currents been mapped. And even if we did know man caused a change in the climate, there is no way to know what effect any action to reverse that would have. Any action could make the climate warmer. Or much, much cooler. Or have no effect at all. There is no possible way to predict. Not just on a physical basis but on an economic one. Curtail one economic activity and people will do something else. Perhaps something degrades the environment in ways far worse than anything we do today.

Gore and others are lysenkoists. They aren't scientists. They aren't concerned with the climate. They are using junk science and scare tactics to advance a political agenda.

Exactly! That al-Gore is a 'Lysenkoist' (or a Lysenko-Michurinist) is as perfectly apt a label for him as any other. Except, perhaps, 'Arrogant-hypocritical-liar-with-a-messiah-complex', but that's just too doggone long.

 

[dcyates]

here's a proof of climate change.
in my country, finland, we used to get permanent snow around early november. during the past 10-or-so years, the snow has come later and later, and this year we still have no permanent snow on the ground.
it isn't uncommon to rain in january in finland nowadays, whereas ten years back nobody would have thought it possible.

whether you like it or not, our actions have an effect on the climate. we still can't control the weather, but we are changing the climate..

I'm sorry, but for goodness' sake, you're 23!

Should we seriously implement an global, supranational environmental policy based on weather patterns spanning about two decades?!?

As I've already noted previously, Earth's climate changes all the time. About 2000 years ago, it was evidently so warm in the northern hemisphere that old Roman records indicate some of the best wine throughout the Empire came from vineyards cultivated in Britain. How many worldclass wineries are situated in England today?
About 1000 years ago, it was so warm that Viking colonists in Greenland could grow crops that would sustain them year-round. Can't do that today. According to Norse records, it wasn't until ca 1250 that Greenland ceased being green due to the increasingly cold temperatures.
Several centuries ago, Russian farmers were growing wheat across large swaths of northern Siberia, until the growing cold forced them to move their farming operations further south. I guess they adapted.

Can any of these periods of warmth be blamed on anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions? Obviously not.

 

[neilius73]

In my lifetime, frost used to appear around October time, this year, the first ground frost appeared THIS WEEK. Weather anomolies such as this are common place around the world, and it can only be down to global warming.

 

[Voegelin]

In my lifetime, frost used to appear around October time, this year, the first ground frost appeared THIS WEEK. Weather anomolies such as this are common place around the world, and it can only be down to global warming.

Variation in climate is not the question. Obviously they occur (banana fossils in Oregon and reptiles in antarctica make that clear).

The questions are: Is man responsible for any or all of it? Have the solutions proposed by Gore and others to reverse variations been scientifically proven to have a chance of working?

The answer to the last one is no. There is no scientific proof anything Gore proposes will do anything.

 

[Ino]

voegelin et al:
ok, so you don't believe in global warming. do you believe that man has any kind of negative influence on the environment?
if not, please provide proof.

again, i'm not trying to start a fight, i'm just asking for your view. based on facts, preferably.

 

[cavell]

In my lifetime, frost used to appear around October time, this year, the first ground frost appeared THIS WEEK. Weather anomolies such as this are common place around the world, and it can only be down to global warming.

I have Geraniums still flowering in my garden.. Most peculiar. Wish we could get some frost to kill them off, and all the garden pests also.

 

[Parmenio]

Who cares if the global warming issue has been hijacked, it happens, but the science supporting global warming is not, as has been said, "junk science". That there is serious debate amongst scientists cannot be disputed, but calling evidence for global warming "junk science" is just haughty name calling.

You don't need to name call to argue against a point, I accept the evidence for global warming as something that shows that humanity does have an effect upon our global climate. If you disagree, so be it, but calling things "junk science" is unacceptable, because it really isn't. It doesn't draw on astrology to come to its conclusions, and it is firmly based on accepted science.

 

[dcyates]

voegelin et al:
ok, so you don't believe in global warming. do you believe that man has any kind of negative influence on the environment?
if not, please provide proof.

again, i'm not trying to start a fight, i'm just asking for your view. based on facts, preferably.

I do believe in global warming. The whole point of my previous post was that our planet has already experienced periods of greater warmth, even than what we're experiencing today! I don't believe in anthropogenic global warming. Experts on both sides of the debate agree that Earth has seen a general warming trend over the past century of about 0.6 degrees Celsius. Whether or not just over half-a-degree increase is in fact substantial, most of this warming happened in the first half of the century. Considering the post-WW II explosion of industrialization all over the world, if global warming is man-made, this is the exact opposite of what should have occurred.

Additionally, as I've already asked earlier on another related thread, who says that the climate as we've been experiencing it over the past 50-odd years is the ideal? Again, in my previous post, I note how, at one time or another, it used to be so much warmer in at least the northern hemisphere that large areas of Siberia and Greenland--and one would presume, Canada--were then available for growing crops that are not now. As well, those nothern regions where crops are grown will, in a warmer climate, experience longer growing seasons. Wouldn't this be regarded as a good development?

Finally, in answer to your question: Yes, I do believe humanity is capable of thoroughly despoiling the environment on a localized level. But no, not THE environment on a global scale (at least, not at present). We're simply too small to cause such extensive damage. Contrary to the song, it's a big world, after all. And the atmosphere that surrounds us is truly massive. For instance, all of human civilization accounts for about 3 billion tonnes (or gigatonnes, GT) of CO2 emissions each year. (And this the highest amount I've come across; I've seen as low as 2 GT, but for the sake of argument I'll go with the higher figure.) This may seem like a lot on a human scale, but there is anywhere from 750 GT to 830 GT of CO2 in the atmosphere at any one time; it fluctuates that much. The Earth's land and oceans emit about 210 GT of CO2 into our atmosphere each year. In comparison, and given the spread of 80 GT that exists in the atmosphere, humanity's 3 GT barely registers as a pittance.

Besides all this, CO2 isn't a pollutant to begin with! We breathe it out all the time and plantlife breathes it in. And of all the greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, CO2 only accounts for about 2% of it. The real culprit in global warming is water vapour. Yup, good ol' H2O, which makes up a full 97% of all GHGs.

All of which begs the question: Who's going to tell the planet to simmer down on the hydrological cycle? Al Gore? Robert Kennedy, Jr? A Gulfstream liberal like Laurie David? (Who has publicly confronted people she finds driving SUVs--and has even issued them 'tickets' with 'fines'--meanwhile, she flies across the continent from LA to NY and back on a regular basis in a private Gulfstream jet. Those things burn more fuel on take-off than the average SUV will in an entire year!)

 

[Voegelin]

voegelin et al:
ok, so you don't believe in global warming.

And how did you get that? I never said there isn't global warming.

All my replies deal with the lack of proof of causation and the junk science (or really no science) Gore and others use to defend the solutions they offer . . .i.e. where is the science which proves Kyoto will have any beneficial effect at all?

There isn't any.

 

[dcyates]

Who cares if the global warming issue has been hijacked, it happens, but the science supporting global warming is not, as has been said, "junk science". That there is serious debate amongst scientists cannot be disputed, but calling evidence for global warming "junk science" is just haughty name calling.

You don't need to name call to argue against a point, I accept the evidence for global warming as something that shows that humanity does have an effect upon our global climate. If you disagree, so be it, but calling things "junk science" is unacceptable, because it really isn't. It doesn't draw on astrology to come to its conclusions, and it is firmly based on accepted science.

For my part, I don't have a problem with much of the science, but--as the part of your post that I've highlighted above illustrates--the crux of the matter is how that science is interpreted. It is here where human error can creep in. Science is supposed to deal exclusively with empirical facts, and the facts are the facts no matter how they're interpreted. The fact is, the 'crisis' of global warming is based almost entirely on computer models. These are not science. With computer models, what goes in, comes out. That is to say, the results one gets are entirely dependent on the information put in. As Voegelin has already more than adequately pointed out, there are simply too many variables that computer programmers and their resultant models cannot account for, in order to conclude with any appreciable degree of certainty just what the future holds concerning the planet's climate. Heck, meteorology is definitely a science, and yet, half the time the weatherman can't accurately tell us what it's going to be like tomorrow, nevermind what's going to happen in the distant future.

 

[Ino]

Cool, I apologise to voegelin, I have misunderstood (again).

 

[Voegelin]

Nice of you Ino...easy assumption to make (I do it too. I get yelled at regularly by my friends for skimming what they send me).

Article by Jeff Jacoby at Townhall today:

. . . former vice president Al Gore in 2006, on the threat posed by global warming: "Our ability to live is what is at stake." It doesn't get much more dire than that.

Yet here is climatologist Reid Bryson in Fortune magazine's award-winning analysis of global *cooling* in 1974:: "There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest. . . . It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth -- like a billion people starving." . . .

"Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again," asserted a New York Times headline in February 1895. Worrisome if true, but just seven years later, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures worldwide. By 1923, though, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada," the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.

So it was curtains for the Canadians? Er, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times reported that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat." Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren't off the hook after all: "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in The Cooling, his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union." And now? "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the Times reported in 2002 . . .
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/JeffJacoby/2006/12/25/climate_of_fear

Now just because a prediction was wrong in the past, doesn't mean a prediction today will not turn out to be correct (It annoys me no end when people say H5N1 is not a threat because SARS and Swine Flu had low mortality rates).

But a string of grossly incorrect predictions going back a century (probably going back to the first person who could talk) concerning climate does indicate there are psychological reasons why these predictions receive the attention they do.

 

[geetrue]

"He Who Controls the Weather ... Controls What Men Think"

I'm not asking or condoning that you believe in the works of Edgar Cayce "The sleeping prophet", but I have often wondered that if he was right about one dream or vision ... perhaps he was right about other dreams and visions he had.

This is a reading he had in 1936 pointing to the magnectic fields of the earth changing to cause strange weather patterns to form.

It is a thought and a thought worth considering ... The devil must have been very mad at Mr. Cayce to have side tracked his son and grandson into the "New Age" greedy people they have become, but Mr. Cayce was a strong believer in our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Read it for yourselves ... He said these strange weather events would start in 1997, due to worlds axis changing.

I laughed at first, but I'm not laughing anymore:

Here is the article in part:

The Shifting of the Earth's Poles Has Begun,
as predicted by Edgar Cayce in 1936
The reason this is of interest to us is that Edgar Cayce predicted that the beginning of the New Age would coincide with a pole shift.

In this NOVA show, scientists explained: “2,000 miles beneath our feet is the Earth’s molten core. Here a vast ocean of liquid iron generates an invisible force, the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s what makes our compasses point north. But it does a lot more: it helps to keep the Earth a living planet. Our neighbors, Venus and Mars, have only weak magnetic fields, which means they’re unprotected from the deadly radiation sweeping through the solar system. The Earth, on the other hand, exists within a vast magnetic cocoon, a force-field that for billions of years has sheltered us on our journey through space.”

But now scientists have made a startling discovery: it seems there’s a storm brewing deep within the Earth, a storm that is weakening our vital magnetic shield. Peter Olson at Johns Hopkins University explained that “the Earth’s magnetic field has been our protector for millennia, and now, it appears, it’s about to go away.”

Cayce indicated that the pole shift would become apparent in 2000 to 2001. The NOVA show revealed that the shift has indeed begun in the South Atlantic Ocean region, between Africa and South America. Here the north-south polarity is fluctuating back and forth, weakening the shield against solar radiation. During the pole shift process, the planet’s electromagnetic shield will no longer channel the solar winds to our current poles, where few people live. The Northern and Southern lights are a result of radiation moving to the poles. Since radiation causes many problems, the weakening of the shield is a concern. A weak magnetic shield also means that the Northern and Southern lights will be seen all around the planet, even along the equator. It may be a beautiful, wondrous, visionary time for Earth but not a healthy time for many of its inhabitants

Isaiah 26:3 "I will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Me: because he trust in Me"

 

[Carey]

Can't be proved. Too many variables. No way to do double blind studies. Ask ten labs what the average mean temperature will be in five years and you will get ten answers. Too many variables we don't even know exist. Only recently have some deep ocean currents been mapped. And even if we did know man caused a change in the climate, there is no way to know what effect any action to reverse that would have. Any action could make the climate warmer. Or much, much cooler. Or have no effect at all. There is no possible way to predict. Not just on a physical basis but on an economic one. Curtail one economic activity and people will do something else. Perhaps something degrades the environment in ways far worse than anything we do today.

Gore and others are lysenkoists. They aren't scientists. They aren't concerned with the climate. They are using junk science and scare tactics to advance a political agenda.

100% coreect you are.

Actually scientist have found that if we rapidly decreased the amount of smog in the earths environement it would increase global warming because smog has a reflective effect on the suns rays.

SUV's actually are protecting the earth....LOL

 

[jad123]

100% coreect you are.

Actually scientist have found that if we rapidly decreased the amount of smog in the earths environement it would increase global warming because smog has a reflective effect on the suns rays.

SUV's actually are protecting the earth....LOL

I knew their was a reason I drove a Tahoe!!!

 

[Voegelin]

I knew their was a reason I drove a Tahoe!!!

But I bet you only got one.

If you were an environmentalist like Al Gore and John Kerry everyone in your family would have one. Plus spare ones to keep at your second, third and fourth homes (homes to which you fly on private jets).

 

[Dragoon]

To geetrue:

Well, actually no one knows for sure what will happen when the magnetic poles shift. However, the poles have already made some progress in their shift and so far minimal changes have occured. But again, no one knows. I, however, don't see anything horrible taking place, considering that it is natural for the poles to shift as they have done so many times in Earth's history.

 

[jad123]

But I bet you only got one.

If you were an environmentalist like Al Gore and John Kerry everyone in your family would have one. Plus spare ones to keep at your second, third and fourth homes (homes to which you fly on private jets).

You just ruined my thought that I was a true environmentalist. I am going out today to buy another SUV, a motocycle, a couple of boats and a plane. Will that make a green enough???