Global Warming?

[MCBushbaby]

Actually, I think most have done a good job at not making it a political discussion. It's a topic that many people are passionate about - one way or the other. Believe me, if it does turn into a discussion of politics or personal attacks, the thread will be closed. After all......can't we all just get along.

**** you Crash! Just kidding
There have been some very good points made here in both directions. I've done some random google searching and various periods such and the Cretaceous had temperatures 7C higher than current. I found this graph that shows the temp cycle and it looks to be about every 54 million years (generally every two earth periods).
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Now keep in mind this goes into the millions of years. WAYYYY farther than Mr. Gore's data went back:
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Which is actually really interesting. If I can believe the first graph, we really are coming out of an ice age and we should expect temps to get warmer. co2 is not anywhere near where it was back when. And as someone pointed out before, it's a nutrient and not a pollutant.

HOWEVER

I think regardless of what people believe, we seem to be a collection of intelligent members who use evidence and research rather than personal preference and faith (sorry, for lack of a better word). So depending on what comes out, we could swing either way.

Can we agree that if this is just a natural earth cycle and the sea is bound to rise and the polar bears will die off, we can AT LEAST keep up the global effort to reduce emissions... maybe not for global warming, but for reduction of pollutants and landfills, energy wastefulness, etc.? I guess I'd rather be in a natural warming cycle where soon I'll have to fight of velociraptors on the trail where people are at least recycling and using solar/geothermal power as a standard (and not an option) than to be in the present with every river polluted, every landfill spilling over, every mountaintop mined off, even forest burned or cleared, and every animal shot to extinction.

[primeelite]

I have to agree. I can't say whether global warming is real or not and don't really care much for Mr. Gore but either way pollution is getting bad in many areas and polluting our water supplies with all kinds of chemicals that some we know of and others we don't. I would say it is better to knock down the pollution and it will make everyone healthier. I don't think too many would argue that the massive pollution is a good thing no matter what your view is on global warming. I haven't made up my mind on the whole thing yet but I am leaning towards more of its the earth's cycle but pollution is more what I am worried about.

[doug1980]

I try not to worry about things I have no control over. Life is too short already to always be worrying about the end. My mom worries about everything, health, end of days, bodily harm; she worries so much she barely has enough time to enjoy the time she has.

All this is making my brain hurt.

[Sarge47]

How can the earth be getting warmer since it's also a scientific fact that the sun is & has been shrinking 7 miles a year. (That's right, the sun is getting SMALLER). With the distance of the sun to the earth, you add that 7 miles going backwards and long before you ever hit the 54 million mark the sun would be where the earth is now. Also, many moons back I did an in-depth study on the alleged "54 million years old" earth age hoopla & found it lacking. Both methods of dating the earth that has been used are extremely suspect. (both Radon & carbon dating.) Other, more reliable methods, show an earth age of about 10,000 years. Now, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the 54 million years bit is real. Who's been alive that long to collaborate any of this? NO ONE! (Except, maybe, Brendon Fraiser, I saw him in this movie once....)

[flandersander]

Now correct me if i'm wrong, but the reason the earth got colder was because lots of organic matter was burried, and thus there was less carbon in the natural cycle, which led to a cooler earth. Now, we are releasing all that carbon, in the form of fossil fuels, warming the earth once again? Is that the big theory behind global warming in a really summed up manner?

[MCBushbaby]

Other, more reliable methods, show an earth age of about 10,000 years.

Oh Sarge, don't tell me you're one of those people

Rebuttal
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...shrinking.html
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1986/PSCF9-86VanTill.html

[Sarge47]

Oh Sarge, don't tell me you're one of those people

Rebuttal
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...shrinking.html
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1986/PSCF9-86VanTill.html

Yessir! One of those people who've examined "BOTH SIDES" of the evidence.
However, everybody will continue to believe what they want to believe. You might as well try & talk 'em out of using their favorite knife! (BTW, I've visited those sites you've posted before & they found that they are very biased with a lot of holes in their conclusions. I give them 5 raspberries!)

[MCBushbaby]

I love raspberries! lol
Oh it's late, I'm putting this thread to bed.

[klkak]

Here are a few quotes I found:

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Stephen Schneider (leading advocate of the global warming theory)
(in interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989)


"In the United States...we have to first convince the American People and the Congress that the climate problem is real."
former President Bill Clinton in a 1997 address to the United Nations

Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are...
former Vice President Al Gore
(now, chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management--
a London-based business that sells carbon credits)
(in interview with Grist Magazine May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth)

"In the long run, the replacement of the precise and disciplined language of science by the misleading language of litigation and advocacy may be one of the more important sources of damage to society incurred in the current debate over global warming."
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen
(leading climate and atmospheric science expert- MIT) (3)

"Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I've been critical of global warming and am persona non grata."
Dr. William Gray
(Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado and leading expert of hurricane prediction )
(in an interview for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, November 28, 1999)

"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are."
Petr Chylek
(Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Commenting on reports by other researchers that Greenland's glaciers are melting.
(Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001) (8)

"Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing -- in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
Tim Wirth , while U.S. Senator, Colorado.
After a short stint as United Nations Under-Secretary for Global Affairs (4)
he now serves as President, U.N. Foundation, created by Ted Turner and his $1 billion "gift"

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.... Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
Christine Stewart, Minister of the Environment of Canada
recent quote from the Calgary Herald

[klkak]

A Brief History of Ice Ages and Warming

Global warming started long before the "Industrial Revolution" and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age-- a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice.

Earth's climate and the biosphere have been in constant flux, dominated by ice ages and glaciers for the past several million years. We are currently enjoying a temporary reprieve from the deep freeze.

Approximately every 100,000 years Earth's climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning.

Global warming during Earth's current interglacial warm period has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life. For example:

Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise.

By 8,000 years ago the land bridge across the Bering Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of men and animals to North America.

Since the end of the Ice Age, Earth's temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet! Forests have returned where once there was only ice.

Over the past 750,000 years of Earth's history, Ice Ages have occurred at regular intervals, of approximately 100,000 years each.
Courtesy of Illinois State Museum

During ice ages our planet is cold, dry, and inhospitable-- supporting few forests but plenty of glaciers and deserts. Like a spread of collosal bulldozers, glaciers have scraped and pulverized vast stretches of Earth's surface and completely destroyed entire regional ecosystems not once, but several times. During Ice Ages winters were longer and more severe and ice sheets grew to tremendous size, accumulating to thicknesses of up to 8,000 feet!. They moved slowly from higher elevations to lower-- driven by gravity and their tremendous weight. They left in their wake altered river courses, flattened landscapes, and along the margins of their farthest advance, great piles of glacial debris.

During the last 3 million years glaciers have at one time or another covered about 29% of Earth's land surface or about 17.14 million square miles (44.38 million sq. km.) . What did not lay beneath ice was a largely cold and desolate desert landscape, due in large part to the colder, less-humid atmospheric conditions that prevailed.

During the Ice Age summers were short and winters were brutal. Animal life and especially plant life had a very tough time of it. Thanks to global warming, that has all now changed, at least temporarily.

Before "global warming" started 18,000 years ago most of the earth was a frozen and arid wasteland. Over half of earth 's surface was covered by glaciers or extreme desert. Forests were rare.

Not a very fun place to live.

"Global warming" over the last 15,000 years has changed our world from an ice box to a garden. Today extreme deserts and glaciers have largely given way to grasslands, woodlands, and forests.

Wish it could last forever, but . . . .

In the 1970s concerned environmentalists like Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado feared a return to another ice age due to manmade atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun.

Since about 1940 the global climate did in fact appear to be cooling. Then a funny thing happened-- sometime in the late 1970s temperature declines slowed to a halt and ground-based recording stations during the 1980s and 1990s began reading small but steady increases in near-surface temperatures. Fears of "global cooling" then changed suddenly to "global warming,"-- the cited cause: manmade atmospheric pollution causing a runaway greenhouse effect.

This is a cut and paste from: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

[red lake]

Nice idea for a thread. Could have picked something a little less controversial like abortion or the death penalty.

Been down this road before. Think Hamster. Think wheel. Think I have run far enough without getting anywhere.

[RichNH]

I'd like to make an observation or two, it's about the debate on global warming.

It seems to me that almost all of the debate I've seen on this subject contain two characteristics.

The first is that the debate revolves around not so much the facts (and by facts I mean hard data, temp readings, glacier volume,etc) but the consequences of observed fact. The conclusions that people and groups come to seem to be what is argued about, not the facts themselves.

The second characteristic of the debate is the use of emotive words, particularly when talking about the "other guys".

It seems to me that the facts speak for themselves from everything I've read or researched. The Earth is indeed warming up, slowly but surely. How much it'll warm, what the consequences are of this I don't know for certain. I used to think that interruption of the Atlantic current (and its moderating influence on polar temps) by freshwater melt from Greenland was a plausible theory for how a warming Earth could trigger an Ice Age. However I now think that because we have been adding carbon back into the carbon cycle that this may not be the case. In past Ice Ages the carbon locked in the Earth as oil and coal was not a factor to the natural cycles that occurred. I think that as a species, we seem to be adding this card to the table. So we'll see (as a species, not as individuals) what happens.

I am sure that whatever happens, our species will adapt and survive as long as the change occurs slow enough to allow us to do that (the stray asteroid/comet being a deal breaker here).

There will always be changes in our climate, sometimes these will occur on a time scale that can be observed by individuals within a given lifetime, such as the global cooling caused when Krakatoa blew up in the South Pacific. Other changes not only are outside of the individual to observe, but whole civilizations. How to predict the results of all these events and natural cycles meshing together is for someone smarter than me.

What I do know is that while I'm no clairvoyant on this subject, I can do things which would minimize my individual impact on the "ecosystem". I do what I can and wish others would do the same. Unfortunately many others either don't care, are too wrapped up in their own pleasures, are too ignorant or are unable to "contribute" because of their situation in life.

As Sonny and Cher said, the beat goes on...

Rich

[palm stalker]

the problem is over crowding of the planet..the planet has always breathed and exhaled.. too cold,too hot, too humid, too dry..we homo sapians, survived because we were separeted into small groups..at one point we were at less than 20,000 .proved with mytacondral(sp),dna// it was sickness and close breeding that brought this about.. it closness of groups that spread disease, like aids,hiv,coleria,bird flu..a pandemic will reach us..and 3/4 of mankind will die. and the world will be in balance again.. just my thoughts and feelings not meent to shove it down ur throts

[klkak]

What does geologic history have to offer in sorting through the confusion? Quite a bit, actually.

"If 'ice age' is used to refer to long, generally cool, intervals during which glaciers advance and retreat, we are still in one today. Our modern climate represents a very short, warm period between glacial advances." Illinois State Museum

Periods of Earth warming and cooling occur in cycles. This is well understood, as is the fact that small-scale cycles of about 40 years exist within larger-scale cycles of 400 years, which in turn exist inside still larger scale cycles of 20,000 years, and so on.

Example of regional variations in surface air temperature for the last 1000 years, estimated from a variety of sources, including temperature-sensitive tree growth indices and written records of various kinds, largely from western Europe and eastern North America. Shown are changes in regional temperature in ° C, from the baseline value for 1900. Compiled by R. S. Bradley and J. A. Eddy based on J. T. Houghton et al., Climate Change: The IPCC Assessment, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 1990 and published in EarthQuest, vol 5, no 1, 1991. Courtesy of Thomas Crowley, Remembrance of Things Past: Greenhouse Lessons from the Geologic Record

Earth's climate was in a cool period from A.D. 1400 to about A.D. 1860, dubbed the "Little Ice Age." This period was characterized by harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a drier climate. The decline in global temperatures was a modest 1/2° C, but the effects of this global cooling cycle were more pronounced in the higher latitudes. The Little Ice Age has been blamed for a host of human suffering including crop failures like the "Irish Potato Famine" and the demise of the medieval Viking colonies in Greenland.

Today we enjoy global temperatures which have warmed back to levels of the so called "Medieval Warm Period," which existed from approximately A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1350.

"...the Earth was evidently coming out of a relatively cold period in the 1800s so that warming in the past century may be part of this natural recovery."
Dr. John R. Christy
(leading climate and atmospheric science expert- U. of Alabama in Huntsville)

Global warming alarmists maintain that global temperatures have increased since about A.D. 1860 to the present as the result of the so-called "Industrial Revolution,"-- caused by releases of large amounts of greenhouse gases (principally carbon dioxide) from manmade sources into the atmosphere causing a runaway "Greenhouse Effect."

Was man really responsible for pulling the Earth out of the Little Ice Age with his industrial pollution? If so, this may be one of the greatest unheralded achievements of the Industrial Age!

Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate our actual impact on the planet. In this case the magnitude of the gas emissions involved, even by the most aggressive estimates of atmospheric warming by greenhouse gases, is inadequate to account for the magnitude of temperature increases. So what causes the up and down cycles of global climate change?

Causes of Global Climate Change
Climate change is controlled primarily by cyclical eccentricities in Earth's rotation and orbit, as well as variations in the sun's energy output.

"Greenhouse gases" in Earth's atmosphere also influence Earth's temperature, but in a much smaller way. Human additions to total greenhouse gases play a still smaller role, contributing about 0.2% - 0.3% to Earth's greenhouse effect.

Major Causes of Global Temperature Shifts

(1) Astronomical Causes

11 year and 206 year cycles: Cycles of solar variability (sunspot activity)
21,000 year cycle: Earth's combined tilt and elliptical orbit around the Sun ( precession of the equinoxes)
41,000 year cycle: Cycle of the +/- 1.5° wobble in Earth's orbit (tilt)
100,000 year cycle: Variations in the shape of Earth's elliptical orbit (cycle of eccentricity)

(2) Atmospheric Causes

Heat retention: Due to atmospheric gases, mostly gaseous water vapor (not droplets), also carbon dioxide, methane, and a few other miscellaneous gases-the "greenhouse effect"
Solar reflectivity: Due to white clouds, volcanic dust, polar ice caps

(3) Tectonic Causes

Landmass distribution: Shifting continents (continental drift) causing changes in circulatory patterns of ocean currents. It seems that whenever there is a large land mass at one of the Earth's poles, either the north pole or south pole, there are ice ages.
Undersea ridge activity: "Sea floor spreading" (associated with continental drift) causing variations in ocean displacement.

For more details see:

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/e...ish_233658.htm

Playing with Numbers

Global climate and temperature cycles are the result of a complex interplay between a variety of causes. Because these cycles and events overlap, sometimes compounding one another, sometimes canceling one another out, it is inaccurate to imply a statistically significant trend in climate or temperature patterns from just a few years or a few decades of data.

Unfortunately, a lot of disinformation about where Earth's climate is heading is being propagated by "scientists" who use improper statistical methods, short-term temperature trends, or faulty computer models to make analytical and anecdotal projections about the significance of man-made influences to Earth's climate.

During the last 100 years there have been two general cycles of warming and cooling recorded in the U.S. We are currently in the second warming cycle. Overall, U.S. temperatures show no significant warming trend over the last 100 years. This has been well established but not well publicized.

Each year Government press releases declare the previous year to be the "hottest year on record." The UN's executive summary on climate change, issued in January 2001, insists that the 20th century was the warmest in the last millennium. The news media distribute these stories and people generally believed them to be true. However, as most climatologists know, these reports generally are founded on ground-based temperature readings, which are misleading. The more meaningful and precise orbiting satellite data for the same period (which are generally not cited by the press) have year after year showed little or no warming.

Dr. Patrick Michaels has demonstrated this effect is a common problem with ground - based recording stations, many of which originally were located in predominantly rural areas, but over time have suffered background bias due to urban sprawl and the encroachment of concrete and asphalt (the "urban heat island effect"). The result has been an upward distortion of increases in ground temperature over time. Satellite measurements are not limited in this way, and are accurate to within 0.1° C. They are widely recognized by scientists as the most accurate data available. Significantly, global temperature readings from orbiting satellites show no significant warming in the 18 years they have been continuously recording and returning data.

A Matter of Opinion

Has manmade pollution in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases caused a runaway Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming?

Before joining the mantra, consider the following:

CO2 in our atmosphere has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years-long before humans invented smokestacks. Unless you count campfires and intestinal gas, man played no role in the pre-industrial increases.

CO2 concentrations in earth's atmosphere move with temperature. Both temperatures and CO2 have been steadily increasing for 18,000 years. Ignoring these 18,000 years of data "global warming activists" contend recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are unnatural and are the result of only 200 years or so of human pollution causing a runaway greenhouse effect.

Incidentally, earth's temperature and CO2 levels today have reached levels similar to a previous interglacial cycle of 120,000 - 140,000 years ago. From beginning to end this cycle lasted about 20,000 years. This is known as the Eemian Interglacial Period and the earth returned to a full-fledged ice age immediately afterward.

Total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28%of the "greenhouse effect". Anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) comprises about 0.117% of this total, and man-made sources of other gases (methane, nitrous oxide (NOX), other misc. gases) contributes another 0.163% .

Approximately 99.72% of the "greenhouse effect" is due to natural causes -- mostly water vapor and traces of other gases, which we can do nothing at all about. Eliminating human activity altogether would have little impact on climate change.

If global warming is caused by CO2 in the atmosphere then does CO2 also cause increased sun activity too?

Put another way, rising Earth temperatures and increasing CO2 may be "effects" and our own sun the "cause".

Cut and pasted for the following web-site.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

[laughing beetle]

OUCH!! My head hurts!!! Gimmie some willow bark tea!!

[wildWoman]

Just had to re-post this corrected version after noticing a very peculiar Freudian mistake in my original post.

Even if we were approaching another iceage and human activity had no impact on the climate whatsoever; what's the point in using that as an argument to thrash the planet? It is human greed and stupid mindless consumerism that has led to so much pollution and extinction of many species. It is plain stupidity to have the entire world economy dependent on a non-renewable energy source, quite apart from the "carbon footprint".
It seems to me that if all "smarts" the human race thinks it possesses were applied to living within our means, avoiding and combatting pollution and the destruction of the few last wild places that remain, we'd all be better off. I'd love to have mining and oil company CEOs required to live off the waters they pollute for the rest of their lives and live right next to their tailing ponds until they die. I suspect they might see things a little different then.

[Badawg]

More food for thought... This is fresh and pretty much kills the global cooling argument.


Study: Antarctica joins rest of globe in warming
By SETH BORENSTEIN, The Associated Press

12:35 p.m. January 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all, according to a new study. For years, Antarctica was an enigma to scientists who track the effects of global warming. Temperatures on much of the continent at the bottom of the world were staying the same or slightly cooling, previous research indicated.

The new study went back further than earlier work and filled in a massive gap in data with satellite information to find that Antarctica too is getting warmer, like the Earth's other six continents.

The findings were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming," said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. "Now we can say: no, it's not true ... It is not bucking the trend."

The study does not point to man-made climate change as the cause of the Antarctic warming – doing so is a highly intricate scientific process – but a different and smaller study out late last year did make that connection.

"We can't pin it down, but it certainly is consistent with the influence of greenhouse gases," said NASA scientist Drew Shindell, another study co-author. Some of the effects also could be natural variability, he said.

The study showed that Antarctica – about one-and-a-half times bigger than the United States – remains a complicated weather picture, especially with only a handful of monitoring stations in its vast interior.

The researchers used satellite data and mathematical formulas to fill in missing information. That made outside scientists queasy about making large conclusions with such sparse information.

"This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical," Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an e-mail. "It is hard to make data where none exist."

Shindell said it was more comprehensive than past studies and jibed with computer models.

The research found that since 1957, the annual temperature for the entire continent of Antarctica has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, but still is 50 degrees below zero. West Antarctica, which is about 20 degrees warmer than the east, has warmed nearly twice as fast, said study lead author Eric Steig of the University of Washington.

East Antarctica, which scientists had long thought to be cooling, is warming slightly when yearly averages are looked at over the past 50 years, said Steig.

However, autumn temperatures in east Antarctica are cooling over the long term. And east Antarctica from the late 1970s through the 1990s, cooled slightly, Steig said.

Some researchers skeptical about the magnitude of global warming overall said that the new study didn't match their measurements from satellites and that there appears to be no warming in Antarctica since 1980.

"It overstates what they have obtained from their analysis," said Roger Pielke Sr., a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado.

Steig said a different and independent study using ice cores drilled in west Antarctica found the same thing as his paper. And recent satellite data also confirms what this paper has found, Steig added.

The study has major ramifications for sea level rise, said Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria in Canada. Most major sea level rise projections for the future counted on a cooling – not warming – Antarctica. This will make sea level rise much worse, Weaver said.

–––

On the Net

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature

[crashdive123]

I know it is difficult to sort out all of the claims - on both sides. I think for an issue like this that it is important to look at or into whom is providing the information. It's sad that we have to do that, but real journalism IMO died some time ago. Do they report fairly, or do they have an agenda? So who is Seth Borenstein?

Who is in Denial Now? AP Article Distorts Global Warming Reality as Fact
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 11:38 AM
It would seem that the AP, through Seth Borenstein, whom we have come to know as a man who like to whip up some controversy with his articles on the environment and global warming in particular, has done it again.
Not unlike his previous articles, though, he has also exposed - at the very least - as an exaggerator of the highest order.
It has been across the board been BASHED by scientists who regard this article as fear mongering of the worst kind. To me, it is just another indication of just how desperate the AGW proponents are to forward their DYING AGENDA.
Here is a littany of rebuttals I found on this site including:
UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand
Swedish Professor Wibjorn Karlen of the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Stockholm University
State of Florida Climatologist Dr. Jim O’Brien of Florida State University
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, a retired Senior Research Scientist and Coordinator for national international marine geological research at the Geological Survey of Finland
In this rebuttal in NewsBusters to his AP article, it is pointed out that the scientific ‘proof’ of this coming apocalypse is nothing of the sort, but a skewed view based on unproven computer projections. Not to mention, some of the people he purportedly gathers his backing from were grossly misquoted.
To wit:
Toward the end of the article, Borenstein wrote:
Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.
Well, I e-mailed Dr. Christy, and this was his verbatim response:
Noel:Please note that there are no quotes in the comment. In other words Bornstien [sic] is interpreting my comments because none of my quotes were evidently in concert with the them [sic] of the story. Our main discussion was about sea level rise from hurricane storm surges. I spoke about this as the real danger - not 1 inch per decade (or about 16 inches per century). My point was that since storm surges are the real problem, so being ready for 3 feet is better than nothing.
Interesting, wouldn’t you agree? According to Christy, he was speaking to Borenstein about sea level rises during hurricanes. But that’s NOT what Borenstein reported.
That’s pretty lame folks. But what else do you expect from the fear mongers? They have to basically make sh*t up to keep us in line.
Also, about those sea levels rising…apparently, according to several published scientific studies out there they have been rising for 10,000 years and have shown no marked increase in the last century, even longer.
Richard S. Courtney, a climate and atmospheric science consultant and a UN IPCC expert reviewer ridiculed the AP article goes through the list and also labels the article as such:
“Rarely have I read such a collection of unsubstantiated and scare-mongering twaddle.”
Mind you, this sh*t is making headlines all over the globe under the auspices of the Associated Press people. Yes, you are being lied to by your news agencies.

Taken from -
http://www.discussglobalwarming.com/...ality-as-fact/

[klkak]

I can see a bright side to sea levels rising. Beach front property is very expensive. If sea levels rise a bit all the current beach front property will be under water and the lesser valued property behind it will increase in value providing an opportunity for someone with a lower financial standing to have beach front property. On top of that, look at all the new artificial reefs that will be created by the submerged buildings.

Its a win win situation. The poor homeless fish get a new place to live and the poor folks that always dreamed of owning beach front property will get their wish also.

Just think if the water rises enough.

I got some ocean front property in Arizona.
From my front porch you can see the sea.
I got some ocean front property in Arizona.
If you'll buy that, I'll throw the golden gate in free.

Yeah, if you'll buy that I'll throw the golden gate in free.

Of course by then the Golden gate will be a long skinny island.

[Geronimo!]

I guess I'd rather be in a natural warming cycle where soon I'll have to fight of velociraptors on the trail where people are at least recycling and using solar/geothermal power as a standard (and not an option) than to be in the present with every river polluted, every landfill spilling over, every mountaintop mined off, even forest burned or cleared, and every animal shot to extinction.

amen brother