Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Climate Change and Environmental Issues Far north feels worst effects of warming

oh s***

"Mammoth dung, prehistoric goo may speed warming

DUVANNY YAR, Russia (Reuters) - Sergei Zimov bends down, picks up a handful of treacly mud and holds it up to his nose. It smells like a cow pat, but he knows better.

"It smells like mammoth dung," he says.

This is more than just another symptom of global warming.

For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation.
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Holy $HIT Batman!

ahem

they even do it in texas!

you were saying ROG?

Remarkable post that. I could not have dreamed up a better example demonstrating the misapprehension of "weather" versus "climate", nor the rank ignorance and hubris of rank-and-file Global Warming deniers, nor the necessity of a collectivist approach to addressing the Global Warming crisis, nor the futility of hoping that such a collectivist approach will ever emerge in a nation dominated by so many Rigid Ignoramuses Rugged Individualists.

I have every confidence that the Earth will survive. The rest of us, and our children and grandchildren, will be facing some challenges.


Reuters: Arctic Thaw may be at Tipping Point

Here's a great example demonstrating why so many lay people have the wrong ideas about Global Climate Change. Taken from the front page of the Washington Post "Outlook" section of 10/7/2007, Climate Change maverick Bjorn Lomborg weighs in with a raft of disinformation.

He starts by "informing" his readers that "temperatures in Greenland are no higher today than they were in 1941," a classic example of misrepresenting weather as climate. He uses the term "inconveniently" to describe one glacier in Greenland that is "growing", a subtle dig at the title of the most popular documentary of all time, and then inconveniently fails to explain what "growth" means in the case of this glacier.

But, hahaha, that's all just to show what a dither everyone is in, hahaha, he says, hahaha. He begins his essay with three paragraphs of misdirection, then tells his readers it's just to show them how other scientists misinform.

Not that he's a "scientist". At least, not a climate scientist.

Why should we be in a dither over Greenland's melting ice sheets causing rising oceans, he asks, when "the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [concludes that] ocean levels will rise between half a foot and two feet, with the best expectation being about one foot, in this century"? Why indeed. They've even taken Greenland's melting glaciers into account with that estimate, he claims.

What a clever mistruth! The IPCC has indeed taken Greenland's meltoff into account - but only the amount that has melted so far. The IPCC, as Al Gore stated in his documentary, calculates that meltoff of Greenlands glaciers will raise the sea level by far more than one foot. Not only does Lomborg not bother to tell his readers this, he misleads them into thinking otherwise.

Lomborg's offers the laughable conclusion that if we try to address Global Warming, "everyone will be poorer by 2100". By offering this conclusion in a paragraph beginning with "[t]he IPCC tells us two things." Is this one of the two things?

Who could expect the lay person not to be confused?

Not a bad idea to get folks to refocus their attention to the North -- what with all those global warmning spawned hurricanes reaping havoc along our costs for the last couple of yea -- er -- never mind.;-)
Yours,
Issodhos

Another excellent example of how confused the general public is about the identified effects of Global Warming. Thanks iss.

No problem, Stereoman. Just repeating some of the "global-warming-is-here-and-we-are-all-going-to-die-unless-we-repent-and-return-to-Gaia's-embrass!" stuff being said and projected annually after Katrina.:-)
Yours,
Issodhos

Hey, it's not the end of the world if all the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves melt and raise sea level by a couple hundred feet: The world will get along just fine. It's done it before and it's also had ice ages during which sea level was much lower.

Of course, the human race might not like it much at either of those extremes. But as long as we can hold off killing ourselves en masse for a couple hundred years, we should have lots of other places to live. Then we can just visit earth for vacations. Like sun & surf on the North Slope of the Brooks Range. Or maybe a ski weekend on Haleakala, if the climate tips back the other way once the thermo-haline circulation stops.

Heck. A couple of decades ago we were being warned that we would soon be up to our asses in snow and ice and snow-sking down Mt. Pele-ackawakamuuwakapuu to Wakiki beach -- or whatever the name of that mountain is in the Hawaii Islands.:-)

But seriously, are you staying put in anticipation of shortly having beach front property without having had to move, or are you preparing to move further up Rte 76 -- just in case?;-)
Yours,
Issodhos