eerilly warm weather

[GunnedDownAtrocity]

this is starting to weird me out a little. i live in wheeling wv, just outside pittsburgh:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Wheeling,+WV (you can zoom out a bit to get an idea of where that sits if needed)

it will be january in a few days and we still havent had more than handful of days below 50. i dont mean like its been warm often ... it still feels like its september. the nights get fairly cold, but nothing like what would be normal for this time of year.

right now its 52: http://www.ohiovalleynow.com/
50s for the rest of the week. its been 50s or 60s all since september, minus a few cold days in october and a week where it dropped into the 40s while raining.

i know we had a year or two like this back in the 80s, but this seems more and more like its becoming the norm vs. the exception. when i was a kid wed get snow around thanksgiving and it seemed like it stayed on the ground until spring. im only 26 ... friends of mine in their 40s and 50s tell me i havent seen real winters. they have pictures of the snow the received which was normal for the time.

i ****ing detest fear mongering paranoia theories, but this is really begining to creep me out. i remember just 4 years ago thinking this kind of weather was out of place for october. now were getting even warmer weather in late december.

so does everyone think that this is just part of some earth cycle that we haven't been around long enough to take into full scope, or do you think we are actually baking the planet?

[Liokault]

And with China building a coal fired power station every five days, get used to warm!

[Oso]

so does everyone think that this is just part of some earth cycle that we haven't been around long enough to take into full scope, or do you think we are actually baking the planet?

the answer is both. And, hopefully, it seems as if maybe the greenies are starting to realize that part of what's happening is completely natural.

the worst thing is that if we weren't doing our part to exacerbate the natural warming trend; by the time it happened naturally we might have had the technology to deal with it better.

oh well...if the dinosaurs all had to die out due to a perfectly natural impact from a meteor...why do we have the right to persist as a species?

[wall]

Europe this year has had the warmest autumn in history (as in since any records were kept!). The alpine glaciers (the few remaining anyway, given the huge % decrease in the past 30 years) kept on melting until November (normally they should be incrementing from October) and currently it's still spookily warm (5-8 C above average for the period!) and dry too (absolutely no snow anywhere ... just 15-20 years ago there would have been over 2 meters in the mountains).
Truly bizzarre and worrying.

Wall

[rogue]

The good news as I learned this week is girls still in shorts and belly shirts after Christmas!

[Royal Dragon]

Global warming could be one cause of the break of the Ayles Ice Shelf at Ellesmere Island, which occurred in the summer of 2005 but was only detected recently by satellite photos, said Luke Copland, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa's geography department.

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/se...e+ice+shelf&c=

[Radhnoti]

The global warming scare tactics have wrung $18 billion out of recent federal budgets for climate change research. The "conspiracy" could well be researchers hoping to pay their mortgage and send their kids to college. Who here is willing to announce that their job is not needed? That's what the world is asking of these researchers.

Want to see some titles to some magazine articles? All about global COOLING?
-Science, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate," July 9, 1971
--Fortune, "Ominous Changes in the World's Weather," February 1974
--Time, "Another Ice Age?" June 24, 1974
--Newsweek, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975
--Business Week, "The world's climate is getting worse" August 2, 1976
--National Geographic, "What's Happening to Our Climate?" November 1976
--Time, "The Ice Age Cometh?" January 31, 1994
Alarmism sells papers or boosts ratings. Global warming is just the latest Chicken Little scenario the media has latched onto.

Here's a site talking about how Mars is going through "global warming" right now. Do the cars on mars cause warming in the stars?

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977


And by the way, Greenland was never green. Those vikings, with their great farming genius...

I think the world may be getting warmer, but I doubt humans have a whole lot to do with it. Warm cycles, cool cycles and humans haven't been watching these things on NEARLY the kind of time scale we'd need to give a real educated guess at what's going on.
That's my take.

[Fuzzly]

Rad, while it's true that the Earth goes through cyclic temperature changes due to the seasons, the general trend in the Earth's temperature goes up. While we haven't been around very long, scientists can study air bubbles from ice core samples that are millions of years old. We can see that in these samples that the CO2 levels are much much lower than they are now.

You can't say that humans don't have an impact on the atmosphere either. We've proven this with the hole in the ozone layer. We made it, and through our efforts (almost global-wide banning on chemicals that caused the hole), the hole has stopped growing, and it's actually shrinking at this point.

You should really watch "An Inconvenient Truth." Yes, the Earth has natural cycles in temperature, but to say that humans are not having a huge impact is insane.


Also, I can't believe you are comparing Earth to Mars. I mean, really.

[Royal Dragon]

How many cars are on the road in the us alone? Now what about world wide?

How can you put that much *daily* emmissions in the air, and not change the balance of the atmosphere?

[Li Kao]

Tom Waits once voiced this universal truism in a song "And all over the world, strangers talk only about the weather. All over the world it's the same."

I am a science student myself (though in the medical sector) and so I'm all for the scientific method. I don't think there's anything wrong with caring about the world we live in, I just think we overestimate our influence sometimes and we have to be careful about the conclusions we derive from the data that is available. Also, I don't think we know enough to get alarmed yet -- the time span that global climate changes are vast, so I think that trying to subjectively measure changes from memory in one's own lifetime are meaningless. My basic opinion is the same as George Carlin as seen in this clip -- *language warning* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kOCv-yfhTc -- I realize this is just a comedy bit, meant for entertainment, but I relate to his outlook on the subject (and have a healthy sense of humor).

I have seen An Inconvenient Truth -- it presents a compelling argument, but like many issues, there are contrary or divergent data and arguments -- see http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/f...9b1b3542ef&p=1 and http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/. It would seem that with a topic like this, you could rely on cold hard facts, but it's an issue that is steeped in politics and business as well, which makes it that more cloudy and biased, depending on who is making the argument.

Everyone has to come to their own conclusions on matters like these, and decide how it will affect their life.

[5Animals1Path]

Everyone's worried? I just figured this was "normal" Jersey weather, aka, around the end of January to the beginning of April, I'm gonna get covered in more white stuff then John Belushi at Scarface's house.

But if it's happenin everywhere, maybe I'm wrong.

[Fuzzly]

Li Kao, the first article has nothing to do with science and all about semantics. The second one dosn't make much sense at all, and has almost nothing to do with science as welll. The second article claims that C02 can't possibly cause the Earth to heat because it is such a tiny percentage of the total atmosphere. It does admit, however, that humans have increased the percentage by quite a bit. The fact that CO2 currently makes up a small portion of the atmosphere seems to be the second article's biggest argument. Even though CO2 makes up less than %1 of the atmosphere, there are 2.97 × 10 to the 12th metric tons of it in our atmosphere. That is 2.97 X 10,000,000,000,000 metric tonnes. A metric ton is equal to a thousand Kg.

The second website gives us a conservative estimate saying that we have increased the total CO2 in an atmosphere by .01 of a percent since the industrial revolution. %.038 from %.028. The amount sure looks small when we look at percentages, but when you are dealing with that much gas, an increase of %.01 is a lot.



I'm a science student as well, in Ecology, and I say that we humans can not possibly underestimate our influence on the Earth. I go back to my example of the hole in the Ozone layer. We caused it. And, we are actually in the process of healing it.


It's not about politics, it's about taking responsibility for where we live and not messing it up.

[Royal Dragon]

You want to see how much we have effected our planet? Anyone can do it.

Get on a plane, and fly from NY to LA. As you fly, look out the window. You are only allowed ro stop looking when you are flying over undamaged natural terrain.

You will notice that except for a few minutes over mountians, every inch of this country is carved up for farms, towns, cities,or paved over for roads.

150 years ago it was all natural praries, forests with nothing but green as far as can be seen, except for small pockets of civilisation.

Now, except for small pockets of wilderness, that is all gone, and civilisation is over the *Entire* continent.

Don't belive me? Go buy a plane ticket and see for yourself....

[Ray Pina]

I get the opposite impression flying across the country. You fly out from Las Vegas at night and by the time you hit 15,000 feet there are no lights to be seen anywhere. Maybe a little rinky-dinky city here and there but really nothing until you hit North New Jersey, right outside of NYC. The Rockies, the badlans, Montana, Wyoming, forget Alaska... even New Jersey has a lot of Pine Barren land. Up state New York.

There's still lots of land out there.

As for China. When we went industrial we built. Now we're going to tell everyone else they can't?

As for cold, it's freaking freezing today. 29 days and I'm in Puerto Rico! Can't wait.

[mantiskilla]

70 year old women are having babies, FDA approves genetically modified meat for human consumption, large chunks of the North Pole are breaking off and floating away, increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes?and perhaps most importantly the coral reefs and oceans are dying. On the up-side Miss Universe got to keep her crown after re-hab.
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