Global Warming

hubertusgreen02 asked:


While the scientific community has a very high confidence that global warming is real and caused by human activities, the lay press has apparently identified no one group that has actually done the most to reduce greenhouse gases. If such a group exists, who are they? What specific steps have they taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Approximately how many tons of carbon dioxide (or equivalent greenhouse gases) emissions have they prevented, captured, or “sequestered?” And what objective sources can you cite to support your conclusions?

A related question is, what are the major barriers–social, political, economic, technological–holding back countries, non-governmental organizations, and other groups (and individuals) from achieving large-scale reductions and mitigations of greenhouse gases and related global warming effects?

Hannah

Sir Nigel asked:


There was a report on our news stations that cow farts and moose belches are a contributor to global warming. No kidding. They said that large amounts of methane are in it and it is a contributor to global warming. Is it really true?

Finally and most importantly, does this mean when I eat beans, global warming strengthens?

“A falsehood repeated many times becomes a truth”- Winston Churchill

Ariana

Christophe Catesson asked:


When you hear about the effects of global warming it is important to understand that the effects we are experiencing today are moderate compared to what the future will see if we do not take preventative action. Over the next century researchers and environmental professionals are stating that the effects of global warming will continue on a constant inclined curve. Temperatures heating up a little bit each decade until the earth’s temperatures reach the sweltering levels that we experienced in history. Scientists believe that the earth’s temperatures will rise between 2-9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.

The Arctic and the earth’s northern latitudes will feel the most of the effects of global warming as they continue to escalate. As the Arctic packs and glaciers begin to melt from the increased temperatures the tundra and seas surrounding the areas will continue to absorb the warmth which was once reflected back into space. Climate models show that if temperatures throughout the rest of the world rise to 3 degrees Fahrenheit they will more than likely rise to at least 7 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic. From this the oceans throughout the world will become full with melting glaciers and ice from the Arctic likely to rise by at least 3ft.

As the temperatures continue to rise this will force the ocean to evaporate quicker and therefore more rainfall will be experienced. The problem with this effect is that the rainfall may hit areas of the world which do not need it at all causing massive floods and monsoons. Subtropical areas like India are expected to be the target of this particular effect of global warming. On the other hand it is safe to say that droughts are going to be more of a problem than flooding.

There are predictions that the future effects of global warming may have its benefits as well. In the northern part of the world such as Canada, the warmer temperatures will mean longer growing seasons and more rainfall. This of course then will put an end to any food shortage that may be occurring and provide a new sense of prosperity to countries throughout the world which have been struggling to survive.

Many of the changes and effects listed above are already taking place today on a smaller scale of course. Sea levels are rising due to thermal expansion of the ocean, in addition to melting of land ice. Amounts and patterns of precipitation are changing as well but only slightly in comparison to what has been predicted for the future. Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns increase the frequency and intensity of other extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and tornadoes.

Other effects of global warming include higher or lower agricultural yields, further glacial retreat, reduced summer stream flows and species extinctions. As a further effect of global warming, diseases like malaria are returning into areas where they have been extinguished earlier. This is only the beginning of the effects global warming can have on our earth. As the greenhouse gases continue to increase and enter the atmosphere these effects are only going to increase in severity making it harder and harder to maintain our quality of life.

Many people find it hard to believe that the effects of global warming can become as severe as scientists are predicting but the patterns support these theories. When you read studies comparing today’s weather to weather 20years ago there are already signs proving the effects of global warming. Pay attention to the weather today and the severe weather being reported from all over the world and you will begin to see the effects within your own life as well.

We can all do our part to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases within our atmosphere. No matter how small the act might be (saving electricity, conserving fuels, etc) every action makes a difference when we are all making these eco-smart decisions. There are no doubts that the effects of global warming are only going to persist and increase if we do not do something today. The fact is that even if greenhouse emission gases were completely eliminated today it will still take years to eliminate the threats of global warming. This is why it is so important to do what we can today!



Chase

James William Smith asked:


Global warming research has become a very big business throughout the world. Each year billions of dollars are spent studying climate change. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), now has an annual budget that has reached more than $136 million. The Bush Administration has spent more than thirty billion dollars on federal programs involved in global warming in the last six years. In total, global warming proponents are estimated to have been funded by more than fifty billion dollars during the last decade.

This huge money stream is flowing directly into the pockets of the advocates of man-made global warming. It is a river of money that can only be shut off if it is discovered that man does not cause global warming and that climate change is really out of our control. In effect, the same people that benefit from the huge research funding pool would have to be motivated to shut it off.

The truth is that the business objective of the man-made global warming bandwagon is an increasing flow of scientific research grants and bureaucratic jobs. The worse the man- made global crisis, the better for the global warming business. In addition, the news media loves stories of fear. This makes man-made global warming a big business for television, magazines, and books as well.

Various “experts” on man-made global warming appear regularly on television to remind everyone of the upcoming global climate catastrophe in the next century. Unfortunately, its not in the interest of the media to cast doubt on man-made global warming. It is a very good business for them. The fact is that very little news media coverage is given to research that brings into doubt the so-called scientific man-made global warming consensus.

Therefore, it is not surprising that we have not heard much from the news media on the recent blockbuster report (December 2007) in the prestigious International Journal of Climatology (Royal Meteorological Society), of professors: David H. Douglass (of the University of Rochester), professor John R. Christy (of the University of Alabama), Benjamin D. Pearson and professor S. Fred Singer (of the University of Virginia). In this report the scientists found: “that observed patterns of temperature changes over the last 30 years disagree with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability”. Their conclusion was that climate change is “unstoppable” and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, said: “The current warming trend is simply part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that has been seen in ice cores, deep-sea sediments, stalagmites, etc., and published in hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals. “Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric CO2 has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective and pointless — but very costly.”

The news media has also not made us aware that data (2005) from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’ south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. This means that both the Earth and Mars have been experiencing similar degrees of global warming. Of course, the problem for the man-made global warming crowd is that there are no humans on Mars for them to blame for that planet’s warming.

In a National Geographic story on February 2007, Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the Sun. He reasons that “The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars.”

The man-made global warming industry should remind us of the tulip bulb mania in Holland in 1636. The history books tell us that in 1593 tulips were brought from Turkey and introduced to the Dutch. The novelty of the new flower made it widely sought after. After a time, the tulips contracted a non-fatal virus known as mosaic, which altered them causing different colors to appear on the petals. The color patterns came in a wide variety and increased the popularity of the flower.

The increase in popularity of the tulip led to a rise in its price. Soon everyone began to deal in tulip bulbs. It became a very big business. Eventually things became so crazy that people were selling everything they owned, including their homes and livestock, to buy tulip bulbs. At the time, the consensus expectation was that the tulip bulb would continue to grow in value forever.

In 1636, tulips were listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange which further accommodated the tulip speculators who had become the primary market for tulip bulbs. The price of a tulip bulb at the height of this mania was $76,000. In the next six weeks tulip bulbs would drop in value to less than one dollar.

Today, man-made global warming is similar to the tulip bulb mania in Holland in 1636. It is an issue that has been hyped into a huge business. The absurd consensus in Holland in 1636 was that tulips were so unique that they would continue to increase in value forever. The current global warming crowd wants us to believe that global warming is controllable and man-made. There is no conclusive evidence that global warming is man-made and all contrary evidence is dismissed and ridiculed. We are told that we must act now to save the planet or our world will be lost to a multitude of catastrophic events in the future.

The inconvenient truth of all this is that, like the Holland tulip bulb in 1636, man-made global warming hype has entered the world of the absurd. We may think the price of $76,000 for a tulip bulb in Holland was silly. However, how silly is it when compared to the global warming hype of today? Indeed in the future people will look back with humor on a decade when tens of billions of dollars were spent in an attempt to convince society that the warming of Earth was due to man and not a function of the Sun.



Dominick

Sarah asked:


I’m writing an essay on global warming, and I’ve heard more than once that certain areas are getting colder from it. Like, a cooler summer and a hotter winter? Also, my friend from Europe says that winters there are getting even colder. How is this possible?

Aaron

Dana1981, Master of Science asked:


It seems like half the questions in the global warming section these days are ‘if global warming is true why is it snowing today?’.

What percentage of global warming deniers do you think don’t know the difference between weather and climate, local and global, or past and present?

Considering this figure and the small minority of people who continue to deny anthropogenic global warming (AGW), what does this tell you about the AGW denial movement?

Emma

~Surprise~ (Cheese whiz) asked:


Also, try to answer what I can do contribute to prevention of global warming.
Try to name all of the ways it affect the planet (e.g.: cars).

Kylie

James Nash asked:


A recent poll of 530 climatologists in 27 countries showed 34.7 percent of interviewees endorsed the notion that a substantial part of the current global warming trend - which might see temperatures rise by a degree or two, on average, by century’s end - is caused by man’s industrial activities: driving cars and the like.

More than a fifth - 20.5 percent - rejected this “anthropogenic hypothesis.” Half were undecided. The skeptics now include the 85 climate experts who signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration; the 4,000 scientists from around the world (including 70 Nobel laureates) who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, and the 17,000 American scientists who signed the Oregon Petition.

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, who bought the sky-is-falling scenario until he bothered to check some of the numbers, which led him to do his own research, at which point he wrote the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and became the Man The Greens Love to Hate, reminded the folks at Tech Central Atation last November that most economists believe the projected level of warming would either have no effect or be beneficial.

Cold weather kills people, Lomborg reminded us. “It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.” And that’s before we even get around to increased food production. (If you want a real climate catastrophe, let’s talk about the next Ice Age, which is due relatively soon.)

What’s more, scientists at Ohio State University announced Feb. 12 that Antarctic “temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.” In fact, they went down. So why would one get the sense from the daily barrage of electronic news that “all experts now agree” the earth is heating catastrophically, and that mankind’s use of fossil fuels is at fault?

First, pay attention to the wording. Just as many who want American taxpayers to provide welfare schooling and welfare health care for everyone who can walk here from Mexico and points south blithely lie and say their opponents “oppose immigration” - rather than acknowledging the debate is about “illegal immigration” - so are those who aim to cripple the industrial economies of the Western world careful to ridicule those who “deny global warming,” instead of acknowledging that most skeptics agree there is indeed some minor warming going on, only objecting to the notion that this is a crisis and that mankind’s activities are primarily “at fault” - along with the corollary nutty prescription that destroying every power plant and automobile in America and Western Europe would make much difference.

As demonstrated in the book “Unstoppable Global Warming - Every 1,500 Years,” by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, based on the climate cycle discovered by Dansgaar, Oeschger, and Lorius (who received the Tyler Prize - the “environmental Nobel” - in 1996), those who attribute the bulk of the warming cycle to man’s modern technology willfully ignore the similar fluctuations known to history as the medieval warming period (when Greenland supported Viking farms), the Roman warming period, and the Holocene Climatic Optimum, when SUVs and coal-fired electric plants were notably thin on the ground.

But the second reason a casual viewer could conclude the skeptics have disappeared is that “Spreading the global warming gospel with unified voice are 12,000 environmental groups controlling about $20 billion in assets,” the Tucson-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness reported last month. In comparison, “Truth seekers have at most a few million, lack the support of the press or Hollywood, and are generally shut out of government-funded schools and universities.”

Which is where the foulest and most inexcusable abuses occur, of course. In direct contravention of the First Amendment guarantee that our tax dollars will never be spent to impose any “establishment of religion,” our children are in fact being spoon-fed the Green doctrine of global warming - memory bytes in doggerel and song - when they’re far too young to bring any critical faculties to bear on this hypothesis.

And some critical perspective sure is needed. Spiralling energy costs fueled by green hysteria “have caused the loss of 100,000 jobs in the UK over 18 months,” report Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, again citing Tech Central Station. Al Gore’s anti-global warming plan would leave the average person 30 percent poorer by 2100, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Singer & Avery book points out that scrapping every car, truck and SUV in America would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only about 2 percent. Meantime, merely extinguishing all the coal deposit fires that continue to burn unchecked around the world would reduce those emissions by 2 to 3 percent. Which is a more sensible thing to try?

Clearly, those who want to cripple our industrial economy have some other motive. And maybe that explains how shrill they can get in their attempt to silence the hated “climate deniers,” who they now liken to “Holocaust deniers.”

According to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s own Web site, she and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, sent a letter to ExxonMobil chairman Rex Tillerson in October of last year, demanding the firm stop funding “a small cadre of scientists” who question global warming dogma, instead insisting the heavily regulated oil company “publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it.”

ExxonMobil, whose executives presumably know where gas taxes and offshore oil leases come from, cut off its funding for the Competitive Enterprise Institute last year.

Viscount Monckton, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, in a Dec. 11 letter to the senators protested this heavy-handed attempt to silence critics, lauding the courage of the “free-thinking scientists who continue to research climate change independently - despite the likelihood of refusal of publication in journals that have taken a preconceived position; the hate mail and vilification from ignorant environmentalists; and the threat of loss of tenure in institutions of learning which no longer make any pretense to uphold or cherish academic freedom.”

But when it comes to intimidating the opposition, the senators are pikers.

The British foreign secretary “has said that skeptics should be treated like advocates of Islamic terror and denied access to the media,” Doctors for Disaster Preparedness report in their January newsletter. George Monbiot wrote in England’s “Guardian” that “Every time someone drowns as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.”

Grist magazine has called for Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for those who deny the internal combustion engine is about to cause a global climate disaster. Heidi Cullen, host of the weekly global warming TV show “Climate Code,” has called for the American Meteorological Society to strip its certification from any weatherman (or gal) who publicly questions anthropogenic global warming.

Meantime, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas tells the BBC that people should view the battle against climate change as a war - accepting the privations of a wartime economy and expecting millions of casualties.

And we were wondering why we only seem to hear one side of the story, these days? Isn’t that kind of like asking why no one ever stood up in church in early 16th century Europe and started explaining how unlikely it was that these witches were really flying around at night, causing other people’s cows to go dry?



Trent

Glenn Freiboth asked:


If you watch the History channel and watch the top 10 disasters that will befall the world, the number one prediction that is actual happening today is Global Warming.

We begin this article with a brief explanation of Global Warming and it’s impact on life on earth and then move on to the worlds first and only command and control system that will help first responders help save lives when disaster strikes.

Global warming is the increase in the earth’s average temperature due to the buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities.

Global climate changes were due to many factors, including massive volcanic eruptions, which increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; changes in the intensity of energy emitted by the Sun; and variations in Earth’s position relative to the Sun, both in its orbit and in the inclination of its spin axis. Global Warming: Early Warning Signs Illustrates observed consequences, as indicated by periods of unusually warm weather, coastal flooding, and changes in glaciers and polar regions.

If there is coastal flooding in coming years due to melting ice caps, it won’t happen suddenly and give you a tidal wave effect.

Scientists all over the world are making predictions about the ill effects of Global warming and connecting some of the events that have taken place in the pat few decades as an alarm of global warming.

They also report of extreme weather events, long-term droughts, and rising sea levels. Warmer temperatures will alter weather patterns, making it likely that there will be more intense droughts and more intense rain events. Most scientists also agree extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina or Los Angeles’ July record 119-degree Fahrenheit temperature are directly attributed to global warming.

Moreover, extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts and floods, are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity, causing loss of lives and property and throwing agriculture into turmoil.

And the science tells us that human activity has made enormous impacts to our planet that affect our well-being and even our survival as a species. Many are agreed that climate change may be one of the greatest threats facing the planet.

Scientists have linked even this amount of warming to numerous changes taking place around the world, including melting mountain glaciers and polar ice, rising sea level, more intense and longer droughts, more intense storms, more frequent heat waves, and changes in the life cycles of many plants and animals.

Glaciers are melting, plants and animals are being forced from their habitat, and the number of severe storms and droughts is increasing.

In the next few years we will see great disasters happening right before our eyes in every corner of the world as man made gases continue to be spewed into the atmosphere causing death and pestilence.

Mankind however will not be extinct. People will survive only if there are systems in place that will aid the successful rescue and evacuation of people on a global scale.

A company called Ordia Solutions that had just released a Mobile Tactical Collaboration System (MCTS) interoperability / communication solution for law enforcement, fire/EMS, and search and rescue agencies. The MTCS is the first of a new generation of intuitive, easy-to-use browser-based solutions that addresses improved interoperability for first responders. The MTCS can be securely hosted inside an agency’s firewall and can be delivered to desktop PCs and laptops, and requires no client installation.

Ordia Solutions MTCS is built around the concept of shared workspaces. Multiple authorized user’s can simultaneously browse to a shared workspace to access the same dynamic operating picture. Each user sees identical data displayed on the map, including incident reports, infrastructure, operations, photographs, drawings, and streamed videos.

Any change to the operating picture by a user with editing access is immediately reflected on every other user’s display. Unlike traditional collaboration tools, MTCS facilitates seamless scaling of the user base during multi-agency operations. Because the system is entirely web browser-based, new task force members can be integrated quickly and begin collaborating by simply sharing a secure hyperlink.

The MTSC system use GPS Tracking called AdvanTraq GPS through a collaboration with GLC Enterprises, Inc. This uses an advanced tracking solutions for personnel, vehicle, K9, and cargo that operate as standalone solutions or integrated with and traceable through a Mobile Tactical Collaboration System workspace. Applications range from tactical operations and border/perimeter security to coordinating multi-jurisdictional and multidisciplinary critical incident response.

The MTCS system allows for real time GPS Tracking with shared workspaces to allow first responders to save lives during the upcoming disasters caused by Global Warming. The system is currently in trials with many governmental agencies including the FBI!

All trials to date have exceeded expectations and will be deployed throughout the world in the coming months.

The bad news is that the impacts from Global Warming cannot be stopped! It’s already a runaway train.

Massive disasters and death will continue to take the toll on the human race. How rescue personnel and first responders respond to the upcoming disasters will no doubt determine how many people can be saved now and in the future.



Moises