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Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 11:35 am
I am seriously getting tired of people throwing out information about global warming as if it were fact and then giving us a source that is simply an opinion piece from either a science pop magazine, bought-out politician, or worse, a random website claiming to be backed by some magical "study" that doesn't actually exist or hasn't been accepted by the science community.
Anyway, on day I was bored and did some research after I got into a long dbate with a friend over global warming. She shot back with a website, www.CO2science.org. Which is hilarious, because in the REAL science journal I found, they actually slammed CO2 for its bullshit science.
The science community is so tired of all this misinformation that the journal Science has endorsed www.realclimate.org, which has the real facts laid out for those who don't have access to journals.
The website claims that the ice caps are not shrinking, but actually accumulating MORE ice and snow. Which is hilarious. In the science journal I found, they said that CO2.org took scientific findings completely out of context, and that the actual studies that CO2 makes reference to actually prove global warming, not disprove it.
So if anyone is wondering about whether or not the scientific community is divided on global warming, I'm here to say that it's not. I searched my school's database for science journals--ones which are peer reviewed, which means that anything published has already gone through objective colleages who do everything they can to rip the findings apart. If the research still stands after that, it is published.
So anyway, I found about 2000 articles on global warming. Of the hundred or so I looked at, not a single one so much as doubted that global warming exists.
Oh, but don't take my word for it. Here's what the real scientists say. I edited a bit because some of these articles are loooong. I bolded the important stuff for those of you who don't wanna read the whole thing.
***
Frustrated by Web sites claiming to debunk global warming, several scientists this month launched their own blog on the evidence that humans are heating up the planet. Realclimate.org is hosted by a public relations firm called Environmental Media Services, but nine academic and government scientists write the content, says co-organizer Gavin Schmidt of NASA (speaking in a personal capacity). They hope to counter industry-supported sites such as www.CO2science.org and www.junkscience.com, where so-called experts "have a habit of seriously misquoting, distorting, and outright manipulating data," says Schmidt. So far, the site has addressed topics such as why the heat generated by large cities (above, an infrared image of Atlanta) makes only a minuscule contribution to surface warming and the flaws in Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, which dismisses global warming as hype. Visitors can chime in, but comments are screened before they're posted. www.realclimate.org
Source Citation: Leslie, Mitch. "Sifting for truth about global warming.(Web Logs)(web site launched by scientists to provide evidence of global warming)(Brief Article)." Science 306.5705 (Dec 24, 2004): 2167(1).
***
ONE of our worst fears about global warming has been confirmed. Greenland's ice is melting faster than ever. The process could reach a point of no return before the end of the century, raising the sea to catastrophic levels. Hopes that increased snowfall on Antarctica would mitigate the problem have also been dashed. Greenland hosts the second-largest icecap on Earth, holding 10 per cent of the global ice mass. If the whole thing melted, global sea level would rise by 6.5 metres. Earlier this year Eric Rignot of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his team used satellite radar interferometry to determine that Greenland's glaciers were melting more and more each year, with about 220 cubic kilometres lost in 2005. . . . Rising seas from Greenland's melt alone would be catastrophic. Huge parts of the world would be inundated, especially low-lying areas such as Bangladesh and the Nile delta. Great tracts of Florida would go underwater, and London and Manhattan would be threatened, along with the world's coastal infrastructure of ports, power plants and refineries. "The world can't afford it," says climate change scientist John Harte of the University of California, Berkeley. "Even the most outrageously high estimates of what it would cost to do something about this are way, way less than what it would cost if it happened. It's frightening."
Source Citation: Marshall, Jessica. "Glaciers heading for point of no return; if Greenland's ice carries on melting at the same rate, it could reach a critical threshold by the century's end.(This week: Greenland ice melt)." New Scientist 191.2565 (August 19, 2006): 8(2).
***
If you thought that stories about global warming and Antarctica were a lot of hot air, you'd be half right. It seems that it is not just surface temperatures that are rising and melting the Antarctic ice: temperatures in the atmosphere high above the continent are also soaring. Although rapid warming at the surface of Antarctica has been well-documented, this is the first report of climate change much higher above the continent. What's more, it is the largest warming of its kind found anywhere on Earth (Science, vol 311, p 1914). John Turner and colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, monitored the temperature of the middle troposphere, at altitudes of up to 10 kilometres. They used data from 11 weather balloons stationed around the Antarctic coast between 1971 and 2003. The balloons measured air temperature, humidity and pressure. They found that winter air temperatures over Antarctica have increased at a rate of 0.5 to 0.7 [degrees]C per decade over the past 30 years. "The warming could have implications for snowfall across the Antarctic and sea-level rise," Turner says.
Source Citation: "Antarctic warming: hot air.(Upfront: News in perspective)(Brief article)." New Scientist 190.2546 (April 8, 2006): 7(1).
***
THE waters around Antarctica are filling up with ice. Despite recent well-publicised collapses in the ice shelves, there are over 200,000 more square kilometres of the white stuff floating in the Southern Ocean than 20 years ago. This doesn't mean the climate change sceptics are right though. Strangely, the phenomenon is actually further proof of global warming. The ice build-up is probably caused mainly by greater snowfall, which in turn is a result of higher humidity. And that's because warmer temperatures have increased evaporation, says Jay Zwally of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. His findings, based on 20 years of satellite images, contradict predictions that up to half of Antarctica's sea ice could disappear within the next century. "I think Antarctic sea ice will continue to increase over the next decade, at least," Zwally told New Scientist. "After that maybe, maybe not."
More at: Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (DOI: 10.1026/2000JC000733)
Source Citation: Pearce, Fred. "The icehouse effect: it's warmer but there's more ice, what's going on in the Antarctic? (This Week).(Brief Article)." New Scientist 174.2345 (June 1, 2002): 6(1).
***
Using satellites, data from buoys, and computer models to study Earth's oceans, scientists have concluded that more energy is being absorbed from the Sun than is emitted back to space, throwing Earth's energy "out of balance" and warming the planet. Scientists from NASA, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have confirmed the energy imbalance by precisely measuring ocean heat content occurring over the past decade. The study, which appears in Science, reveals that Earth's current energy imbalance is large by standards of Earth's history. Earth's energy imbalance is an expected consequence of increasing atmospheric pollution, which blocks Earth's radiant heat from escaping into space, increasing absorption of sunlight, and trapping heat within the atmosphere. "It shows that our estimates of the human-made and natural climate forcing agents are about right, and they are driving the Earth toward a warmer climate," says James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Scientists know that increased radiation takes longer to manifest in the world's oceans than it does on land; the ocean, instead of showing an immediate temperature increase, holds the heat in storage within its depths, thus delaying a response to human-induced, or anthropogenic, climate change. The building heat within the ocean's depths is called thermal inertia. The lag in the ocean's response means that there is additional global warming that has not yet manifested in overall ambient temperatures. (The Earth Institute at Columbia University) www.earth.columbia.edu/news/2005/story04-28-05.html
Source Citation: "Earth out of balance.(The latest news in science research)(Brief Article)." The Science Teacher 72.5 (July 2005): 14(2).
***
Edit: There is no source more credible than a peer-reviewed journal. So don't bother throwing me some piddly personal website with no science to back it up. The only website I've used so far is the one from above which was endorsed by said journals.
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 2:59 pm
Wow, That's Alot! O.O Luckily I Read The Bold. (:
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 7:18 pm
Ok, i read the first half and then skimmed, BUT
You failed to mention that you seem to be VERY pro-global warming. I am not saying that CO2science is the best site. But with relatives in the meteorlogical field, i would like to say that there are a lot of RESPECTABLE anti-global warming sites, and groups(may or may not be internet oriented) that have proof that can kick your science journal in the butt.
Also when you are against the topic, you are MUCH more likely to pick out wrong things on a said site.
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 7:25 pm
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/coldscience/avolcano.htmguess what great news! there is a Volcano under Antarctica, for those who won't read the article, (it is short, i promise) there is a volcano that even if it erupts, the ice will not melt because of the mass of ice above it. Now i was in earth science once, and i learned that lava/magma is pretty hot. Hotter than it is outside, and it cannot melt the ice caps? Well that almost sub-conciously shows that the ice caps are pretty solid.
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 8:34 pm
Since you like to use logic instead of proof, I'll give you this: Put a match in a glass of ice water. It didn't melt the ice, did it? Maybe caused slight damage, like in the article you brought up (read the whole thing--the ice underneath DID melt somewhat).
Now put your little glass in the microwave. The ice WILL melt, albeit slowly. It makes complete sense.
In other words, the ice DID melt...just underneath. And sorry, but there's already proof that Antarctica IS melting, so your logic may make sense to the ignorant, but it does not undermine years of actual evidence.
Oh....and I took a college course in geology. We studied volcanoes. So I know a little bit about this myself, too. dramallama
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 9:59 pm
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 10:17 pm
Seriously....some piddly paper in the UK throwing out baseless accusations on a science journal isn't exactly evidence. This could easily just be some scientist who went crying to the media because his research didn't hold water. The people who wrote that article have no way of knowing the truth; it's a he-said she-said situation.
So who would I believe? I'd believe the journal, which is recognized worldwide as being credible and unbiased.
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 11:06 am
Here are some more recent articles and findings from various journals.
Some of them are very technical and hard to understand, so I just used the abstract (for those of you who aren't complete nerds, an abstract is basically a summary of the thing that's written in mostly plain English).
If you wanna read these in full, you can look them up at your local college or library. I'm pretty sure I could get in trouble by posting any of them in full, so that's why I'm only giving snippets. sweatdrop
Again, I bolded the important parts in these.
***
THE EVIDENCE IS OVERWHELMING that the Earth's surface is warmer today than it was a century ago. As for why this is so, research by thousands of scientists strongly suggests that the cause is the largely uncontrolled and still increasing release of anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases.
Source Citation: The global warming crisis. Stuart Jordan. The Humanist 65.6 (Nov-Dec 2005): p23(7).Â
***
The mountainous regions of the world are estimated to harbor approximately 160,000 glaciers. They are recognized as being sensitive indicators of global warming, and, if they were to melt, the sea level would rise significantly. Because of their remote location or large size, it has been difficult to accurately measure many of these glaciers and hence hard to say how fast they may be receding.
Using digitized glacier outlines inferred from satellite data from 1985 to 1999, Paul et al. circumvent these difficulties and calculate the change in area of about 930 glaciers in the Swiss Glacier Inventory 2000. They find that these glaciers have lost about 18% of their cumulative area during that period, which means that they disappeared at a rate seven times higher than the averaged rate from 1850 to 1973. The variety in the patterns of glacier disintegration observed indicates that massive downwasting (thinning) has been the major mechanism of loss, rather than a dynamic response to climate warming. Even faster rates of loss in the future are forecast, due in part to a delayed response of glaciers to the extraordinarily warm years during the 1990s and the early 2000s.
Source Citation: "Wasting away.(Earth Science)(Brief Article)." Science 306.5701 (Nov 26, 2004): 1441(1).
***
THE EARTH'S TEMPERATURE, WITH RAPID GLOBAL WARMING OVER THE past 30 years, is now passing through the peak level of the Holocene, a period of relatively stable climate that has existed for more than 10,000 years. Further warming of more than 1[degrees]C will make the earth warmer than it has been in a million years. "Business-as-usual" scenarios, with fossil fuel C[O.sub.2] emissions continuing to increase approximately 2 percent annually for several more decades, yield additional warming of 2[degrees] to 3[degrees]C this century and imply changes that constitute practically a different planet.
Source Citation: Can we still avoid dangerous human-made climate change?. James E. Hansen. Social Research 73.3 (Fall 2006): p949(23).Â
***
Perennial sea ice is the ice that survives at least one summer, and is usually more than 3 metres thick. Son Nghiem of the let Propulsion Laboratory. in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues used NASA's QSCAT satellite to measure the changes in Arctic perennial ice from 2004 to 2005, by comparing ice cover averaged over November and December in each year, the team reports in Geophysicnl Research Letters (vol 33, p L17501).
They found that perennial ice cover decreased by 720,000 square kilometres--a 14 per cent drop in one year. This is a dramatic change compared with the 7.8 per cent reduction per decade that has been recorded since the 1970s.
The changes were not evenly spread. Perennial ice made some gains in the west Arctic Ocean, but nearly half was lost in the east. If the trend continues, it could open a vast ice-free region in the east Arctic Ocean, the team says.
Source Citation: 'Texas' melts.(Arctic ice cover has shrunk by the size of Texas in one year)(Brief article). New Scientist 191.2570 (Sept 23, 2006): p5(1).Â
***
Polar bears depend on sea ice for survival. Climate warming in the Arctic has caused significant declines in total cover and thickness of sea ice in the polar basin and progressively earlier breakup in some areas. . . . While the ecological details vary in the regions occupied by the five different populations discussed in this paper, analysis of passive-microwave satellite imagery beginning in the late 1970s indicates that the sea ice is breaking up at progressively earlier dates, so that bears must fast for longer periods during the open-water season.
Source Citation: Possible effects of climate warming on selected populations of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in the Canadian Arctic. Ian Stirling and Claire L. Parkinson. Arctic 59.3 (Sept 2006): p261(15).Â
***
Erosion along the West Coast of the United States is affected by climate controls that include a trend of increasing wave heights during at least the past 25 years that might be related to global warming and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) range between El Ninos and La Ninas that affects both annual wave conditions and monthly mean water levels that raise tidal elevations.
Climate controls on US West Coast erosion processes. Jonathan C. Allan and Paul D. Komar. Journal of Coastal Research 22.3 (May 2006): p511(19).Â
***
***
The threat of global warming calls for a major transformation of the energy system in the coming century. The treatment of technological change in energy system models is a critical challenge. Technological change may be treated as induced by climate policy or as exogenous. We investigate the importance of induced technological change (ITC) in GET-LFL, an iterative optimization model with Limited Foresight that incorporates Learning-by-doing. Scenarios for stabilization of atmospheric C[O.sub.2] concentrations at 400, 450, 500 and 550 ppm are studied. We find that the introduction of ITC reduces the total net present value of the abatement cost over this century by 3-9% compared to a case where technological learning is exogenous. Technology specific policies which force the introduction of fuel cell cars and solar PV in combination with ITC reduce the costs further by 4-7% and lead to significantly different technological solutions, primarily in the transport sector. Source Citation: Induced technological change in a limited foresight optimization model.Â
Source Citation: Fredrik Hedenus, Christian Azar and Kristian Lindgren. The Energy Journal 27.(March 2006): p109(14).Â
***
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 12:46 pm
Here's what NASA has to say about global warming. You can read the whole thing here: NASA on Global Warming*** The main human activities that contribute to global warming are the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and the clearing of land. Most of the burning occurs in automobiles, in factories, and in electric power plants that provide energy for houses and office buildings. The burning of fossil fuels creates carbon dioxide, whose chemical formula is CO2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that slows the escape of heat into space. Trees and other plants remove CO2 from the air during photosynthesis, the process they use to produce food. The clearing of land contributes to the buildup of CO2 by reducing the rate at which the gas is removed from the atmosphere or by the decomposition of dead vegetation. A small number of scientists argue that the increase in greenhouse gases has not made a measurable difference in the temperature. They say that natural processes could have caused global warming. Those processes include increases in the energy emitted (given off) by the sun. But the vast majority of climatologists believe that increases in the sun's energy have contributed only slightly to recent warming.***
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 12:56 pm
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 1:02 pm
That's all good and fine, but the article is not actually the opinion of NASA. In the first paragraph they mention that the skeptics are few and far between, and the whole thing is written as the opinion of the skeptics.
I think that article is up because NASA wanted to try to present both sides of the issue equally, which is very cool of them. It IS a good article, and hopefully those skeptics can go on to prove/disprove their theories as some point. 3nodding
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 1:06 pm
Knola That's all good and fine, but the article is not actually the opinion of NASA. In the first paragraph they mention that the skeptics are few and far between, and the whole thing is written as the opinion of the skeptics. I think that article is up because NASA wanted to try to present both sides of the issue equally, which is very cool of them. It IS a good article, and hopefully those skeptics can go on to prove/disprove their theories as some point. 3nodding Hopefully, but I doubt it. IF they were on to something, then the media won't do anything, becase then they would almost be admiting that they are wrong, and if the media doesn't say anything, then no one will ever know.
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 1:07 pm
Oh, I know. I don't trust the media that much. xd Sometimes you just have to go and find out the truth yourself. But it's more fun that way I think.
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 1:11 pm
Knola Oh, I know. I don't trust the media that much. xd Sometimes you just have to go and find out the truth yourself. But it's more fun that way I think. Yeah, but half the time you don't even know there is news at all because all you hear are murders and death and depression on the news
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 1:13 pm
Oh yeah. I know a couple of sayings about that, One is, "If it bleeds, it leads," and the other is "no news is good news." They're very obsessed with violence and bad news, because they like to scare people into watching. rolleyes
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