Global Warming Update
April 22nd, 2008 at 01:59am Mark Noonan
So much for global warming. Earth Day festivities went ahead despite the blast of frigid weather yesterday.
Vendors and presenters from various eco-friendly groups, including Bullfrog Power, CO2 Reduction Edmonton and the local solar energy society, crammed into a lone tent in Hawrelak Park after a blizzard forced them to abandon their original locations.
Organizers crammed over 40 groups in a space that would normally be occupied by half that number. Presenters’ booths were initially planned to have been spread out between at least five tents, with far larger displays.
“We’re normally here with a lineup of cyclists for our free bike repair service. No bikers came today. Big surprise,” said Chris Field of Mountain Equipment Co-Op.
A handful of visitors still took the time to inquire about several solar-powered products on display at the M.E.C. booth and browsed several others before running off toward the lone heater in the tent to warm up.
Weather, its just a son of a gun, ain’t it? Never seems to cooperate - you want to picnic, and it rains. You want to go sailing, and its a dead calm. You want to have a gloom-and-doom, we’re-all-gonna-die global warming scare, and you get a blizzard…
Entry Filed under: Environment
15 Comments
1. TarunKumar | April 22nd, 2008 at 2:05 am
Global warming could lead to higher rates of skin cancer by amplifying the harmful effects of the sun’s rays, scientists said.
New evidence suggests that the same amount of sunshine becomes more likely to trigger cancer as temperature rises.
2. OperationChaos | April 22nd, 2008 at 5:48 am
Guess what, TK–we’re all gonna die!
New evidence? From scientists? Hey, they’re in nobody’s pocket, huh?
“Global warming ‘could?’” “Could?” Well then, so “could” eating carrots…
3. eidos | April 22nd, 2008 at 8:16 am
So you are saying that an April blizzard in Edmonton, the most northern major city in North America, is proof that global warming is a myth?
4. Zach | April 22nd, 2008 at 10:59 am
I dont think the blizzard defeats there message, but, you have to admit, it does make one chuckle to themselves. Nature is funny like that. How ironic
5. SteaM | April 22nd, 2008 at 11:33 am
Zach,
In terms of those who are very concerned with the science of global warming or not I guess it depends on your perspective as to whether its really funny or really scary and sad.
6. Diana Powe | April 22nd, 2008 at 11:48 am
Once again, weather is confused with climate. Oh well, it’s only apples and oranges.
7. SteaM | April 22nd, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Diana,
Once again Mark is just trying to be funny. However I am sceptical as to whether he actually is funny.
I guess we can all be sceptical about something.
8. Zach | April 22nd, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Look, I’m not trying to be an ass about it. Diane makes a good point about weather and climate.
Your point is a good one as well Steam. But you guys dont think it’s just a little funny? Not one chuckle? I can see pundits all over this.
Like I said, it doens’t disprove what they stand for.
9. SteaM | April 22nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Well, of course I have a sense of humor and can see how it is funny or ironic or something.
10. FmrMarine | April 22nd, 2008 at 6:52 pm
HEEEERRRRRR WE GO….AGAIN
BWAAAA HA HA HA !!!! these guys get funnier every day.
Read this article……….
Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
Phil Chapman | April 23, 2008
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is http://www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.
There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.
For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.
We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.
We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.
The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.
All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.
It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.
In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.
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11. ViralNexus | April 22nd, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I was actually taking that article seriously until they started talking about nuking the arctic and gathering all of the bulldozers in the world in Canada. Look, I’m not a big proponent of “global warming” because it seems to be another scare tactic and it used far to much for propaganda. I think if we just discuss how much better we would be off if we took care of the planet we inhabbit, things would go over much better. There isn’t any reason why we can’t develope renewable energy resources, sustainable technologies, and adopt a consume less/conserve more ideology.
I have always thought that we are long overdue for an ice age. I am no scientist but it has always made sense to me that this planet has always undergone cycles of heating and cooling. This cycle accounts for the fact that 99.99% of all life in the last 4.5 billion years has become extinct. People have to realize that we are blip on the radar in the total history of Earth and we will go extinct. This planet will survive for billions of more years but it will do so without us.
12. congressive | April 22nd, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Barstool science rules! Can’t see anything coming out of my tailpipe… must be nothing there!
Over three hundred million gallons of gas burned and spewed into the skies each and every day just in the U.S. alone, and that’s only a third of total carbon emmisions in America, but since I can’t see it, it must not be there.
Five trillion cubic feet of natural gas is flared (i.e. burned) each year while extracting the oil with which we drive and generate electricity. But it only shows up in satellite photos of far off places. Once again, I can’t see it.. it must not exist.
Has there ever been a time in earth’s history where so much carbon was being released into the atmosphere?
Who cares! I wasn’t around then, so it must not have happened.
Will it disrupt continental sized weather patterns and cause famine, drought, and an increase in insect-born diseases? Who cares! I’ll be dead by 2040!
Hey, this is sooooo much easier than college climatology. Preach morality without actually practicing it, and voila, I’m a Republican!
Now that both Bush and McCain believe in global warming, does that make them the enemy, too?
13. Freedom1 | April 23rd, 2008 at 3:37 am
Global Warming Has Stopped
“Global Warming Profiteers Are Wrong” by Christopher Monkton (SPPI)
“Global warming” has stopped. For 10 years, average temperatures on earth have not risen. For seven years, the trend has been downward. The fall between January 2007 and January 2008 was the biggest since records began in 1880. [..]
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s climate panel, says it had better find out where it got its sums wrong. Lord Lawson, a former UK Treasury Secretary, says the panel should be scrapped. [..]
A favorite tactic is to blame any passing extreme-weather event on “global warming.” This just in: “A 5,282-square-mile ice shelf has begun to collapse because of rapid climate change in the Antarctic Peninsula. The Wilkins is one of a string of ice shelves that have collapsed in the past 30 years. Larsen B disappeared in one month in 2002. Six similar collapses underscore the region’s unprecedented warming.”
Blood-curdling, but false. The Wilkins Ice Shelf, like its vanished neighbors, was not there in the medieval warm period, or in the 2,000-year-long Holocene Climate Optimum, when global temperatures were above today’s.
Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who first spotted the disintegration in March, says the Wilkins has been in place for a few centuries. So it was not there before.
The Antarctic Peninsula represents just 2 percent of the continent, and still less of its ice mass. The vanished ice shelves covered a combined area just 1/55 the size of Texas. Massive chunks break away from Antarctica all the time, to re-grow in colder times. Whalers’ logs going back centuries report sightings of vast icebergs hundreds of miles long.
Since regular temperature records were first kept 50 years ago, most of the continent has been cooling. The Antarctic peninsula is an exception. Local undersea volcanic activity may be partly to blame.
Another factor is the warming effect of the recently ended 70-year Solar Grand Maximum, when the sun was more active, and for longer, than at almost any similar period in the past 11,400 years. Long-term ocean changes have also contributed.
In the Arctic, the media reported less summer sea ice than at any time since records began. Most did not report that records began only 30 years ago; that at both Poles there is more sea ice now than ever since records began; that there are five times more polar bears today than 50 years ago; that the Arctic was warmer in the 1940s than today; or that the average thickness of the vast Greenland ice sheet grew by 2 inches yearly from 1993-2003.
Even the UN’s climate panel says melting ice will not raise sea level by Al Gore’s imagined 20 feet for several millennia, largely through natural causes.
Back in the Antarctic, winter has come, so ice-shelf disintegration has stopped. Even if Wilkins collapses altogether, melting ice shelves add not a millimeter to sea level: the ice is already floating. Niklas Moerner, who has spent his entire 30-year career studying sea level, says sea level will rise this century by little more than the 8 inches observed in the 20th century. Just 3 inches of that rise will come from ice-melt. “Global warming” profiteers had better start looking for another job — or another scare.
Source: Greely Tribune
http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20080403/READERS/365808976
14. phnx | April 23rd, 2008 at 4:55 pm
And in the midst of the discussion on Global Warming…the following revealed about Algore’s Inconvenient Truth…
http://www.technorati.com/posts/jlAVdOg3rQvIJFovXE2OwaZsMVBkb0bxCi2vNwKbLCU%3D
Seems that fiction is sooo much more convincing than truth.
15. Space Star Wars Episode 3&hellip | June 5th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Space Star Wars Episode 3 Planet Mars
I didn’t agree with you first, but last paragraph makes sense for me