Drought, floods, severe winters, warm winters, more frequent storm activity, less frequent storm activity, early frost, early thaw, receding glaciers.
All have, to the best of my recollection as a news consumer, been cited by one climate research expert or another as evidence of “global warming”.
The same experts will also quickly caution that even in the midst of dramatic climate change, one should expect periods of “average” rainfall, temperature, storm activity.
With today’s addition of expanding glaciers, the list is finally complete. It’s therefore, official – climate change proponants have taken ownership of virtually every local and global weather phenomenon worthy of newspaper ink, including “average”.
One would think that more people would have noticed.
Saskboy: “Skip “Enjoy your time in the sun, for as long as it lasts. Mother Nature always compensates… ”
We may be speaking the same dialect but we’re not even in the same room. My inference originally to Kate “getting it” as a lay person (and Kate, I don’t mean that pejoratively…I’m very much aware of the work you have going on, “on the side”. Like to read about it some time – send me an email), has to do with her comprehension that nothing that man does can be “unnatural”, in nature. It may offend the sensitivities of the day, but it remains immutably “natural”.
“Mother Nature always compensates…” makes no statement about us, or rather, does not elevate us beyond the status of any other bag of semi-coherent molecules in the universe. Today, we are simply a very tiny part of a semi-entropic system whose level of homestasis is entirely relative to your point of view.
“Mother Nature always compensates…” You can tattoo that…wherever… It will do so by the most appropriate entropic or chaotic means. It don’t care about your kids. It doesn’t even care about you. It just is.
Whether or not we have had much or anything to do about it will be the reflection made in the cosmic instant before our species moves to oblivion. If you want a good future for your kids, within your frame of reference, you’d better get busy on the concept of zero population growth. The devil is indeed, us, and all the semi-science in the world isn’t going to fix that train-wreck, as long as we embrace the biological imperative. We are a true conundrum.
Which all brings me back to where I was. Enjoy your time in the sun, while you can, because Mother Nature always compensates…
One of the more interesting observations/speculations about “global warming/cooling”, has been the idea that the sun may in fact have a very small but perceptible periodicity in its energy output. Not enough to be a gross anomaly, but enough to cause cyclic energy perturbations on the earth. This was a recent observation; I have no idea whether this has gone any further than hypothesis or not.
“It may offend the sensitivities of the day, but it remains immutably “natural”.”
And when nuclear waste, PCBs, oil spills and such are concerned, that man-natural activity affects more than emotions. Organisms including humans die for needless reasons.
See, you don’t get it. You’re continuing to impose a morality on something that has none. You’re entire concern centers around a period of time spanning some 150 years. The earth’s cycles are measured in millenia, or longer. Kate’s point was about doing what is rational to make the everyday palatable: adaptation. Again, its all about scale. Your everyday concerns result in adaptations for that 150 year cycle. Genetics and the B.I. being what they are, some of those adaptations may work their way through to be biological durable.
In any event, Mother Nature doesn’t care, she has no morality; Mother Nature ALWAYS compensates…
Gord “why we oppose your dogma. Because it will limit and control the opportunites of those who will inherit our legacy.”
Politics can control, but so can environmental realities. You can’t drink sludge, and you can’t breathe smog, no matter what government you have in place. Quit assuming the only threat for life in the future is loss of the political liberty to burn 10MPG gasoline.
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Stephen “you might be onto something there…..maybe the variations in the output of “the earth’s primary source of energy..” are causes of the large warming and cooling trends.”
Of course variations could happen and cause changes, since the sun is the primary source of energy on earth. But that doesn’t mean man made pollution won’t have a negative affect on climate changes.
In any case, churning out what we do today still harms us in obvious ways even if global warming isn’t one of them.
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Skip, thanks for the clarification on your statement. As long as you didn’t mean it in a defeatist way, I’m alright with that summation of things.
Skip “See, you don’t get it. ”
Actually I think I do. You perhaps don’t see that I do, because I don’t agree that there’s nothing we can do, and that everything humans do is the best thing.
Many people have the problem of assuming that because the earth changed temperatures naturally before, that only a natural cause can trigger one in the future. Industrialization happened long after the last ice age which is the most well known significant long-term temperature change. With all of the climate change deniers out there, it’s amazing that more don’t realize that if scientists are “wrong all of the time”, that they could be very wrong about the safety of all our modern pollution levels.
Saskboy,
yes you are correct what we churn out may be harmful. All for pollution reduction/minimization or alterntively the full recognition of the costs of polluting.
But that is a very different problem from the alleged man made cause of climate change. Different problems…Kyoto isnt an anti pollution treaty its a anti man made global warming treaty (allegedly)
Point is we dont know so I wouldnt sign on to a treaty that solves a potentially non ecxistent or non solveable problem…i.e. if this is a natural cycle then go with the flow.
The amount of energy output washes out anything we do. Once again, the dispassionate scientist needs to study potential hypothses and when they have a decent prediction model that not only explains the past but indicates the future then we will have solved that problem.
Once again lets not through virgins in volcanoes because it seems to be the right thing to do….prove it, publish it and peer review it….that hasnt happened yet. Its all speculation and politics right now, on both sides.
Acid rain and CFC’s show there are things we do to the earth that cause problems but the scientific method generates the needed consensus to drive action. Anything else leads to inaction or reaction.
So when they prove and can properly predict c02 temperature models then I will sign on.
As for reducing oil consumption….best reason right now is to stop funding Iran and Saudi, THAT is something I can buy into
I’ve not been saying that Mother Nature’s compensations might not be ugly, from our point of view. And the part of us committed to the biological imperative will attempt to ameliorate those effects, but in the end, to the extent the effects are a direct result of us, ultimately the only solution will revert to some form of population control, either voluntarily accepted by us, or imposed by Mother Nature. Whether we survive it is a craps shoot. Survival means adaptation, biologically as well as intraspecifically.
The population dynamics of most species follows generally the same basic developmental curve, and we’re right on cue. Slow start developing critical reproductive mass, sometimes explosive variable geometric growth spurt [guess what phase we’re in…], oscillatory plateau with dampening amplitude, as we achieve some level of steady-state with our local environment, followed by any combination of variable geometric declines or spurts as our necessary resources come and go. The bad news is that the first oscillation at the end of the initial spurt is frequently brutal. Pops tend to overshoot on the first hump. Along the way some of us get better at handling the local conditions, breed more efficiently and eureka, you’re now not quite what you were.
What you are seeing beginning to happen today are the external factors starting to come into play that may be a consequence of our success, or, may be Mother Nature’s compensation coming into play, or both, or neither. We don’t know, and may never know. We also may not be able to stop it. The oscillatory plateau will come at some point, because eventually, “Mother Nature always compensates… LOL!
Who knows, Pluto may go postal as a result of being demoted and carom us off into a parallel universe, before we reach that point. Enjoy your time in the sun while you can…!
Well, there is a solution for you Saskboy – move to a third world country, where a substantive amount of their daily grind involves drinking sludge (untreated water) and breathing smog (from burning of renewable fuels) and living as nature intended – with extremely high infant mortality rates and brief lifespans.
In short, living the way man did for millenia until those pcb’s and nuclear powerplants and efficiency of movement, and commerce came along to extend life beyond anything humankind has seen before.
Now, to be sure – some of those “invisible” pollutants the environazis now concentrate on (what you can’t see, you can’t refute) may indeed be promoting growth of cancers in genetically predisposed individuals (in the way that cigarettes promote lung cancer), but that’s the tradeoff.
Put it this way – in the grand scheme of things, the horrid ways of the western industrial world, with it’s greed for energy and consumer goods, have made possible the ability of at least 1/3 of us to speak with each other on the net today.
Not because of the invention of computers – but because we survived infancy.
…and live to breed about it… 🙂
“Yes, the globe has been warming since the Ice Age. All of Canada and a good portion of the US used to be under glacial ice. Yet Socialist scientists, funded by Socialist governments and cheered on by Socialist media, isolate data from the last 30 years in order to tax Socialist people.”
Mind you, those same ‘socialist’ scientists developed the networks and computers that this blog and the rest of the internet uses. The climate is extremely complex, and studying it is a new science. Scientists are too busy trying to come up with correct predictions to worry much about the politics of how they’re used … the media (both left and right) and politicians are the ones doing that. A lot of their predictions will be false – just as most of the early predictions about everything from material science to medicine were. But if you’re sure they’re purposefully obscuring obvious truths, I’d suggest you publish a paper on it … Nobel Prize’s are worth over a million now, it’d definitely be worth your time.
Stephen, not sure, but did you mean the sun’s energy output affects temperature more than anything we can do? Even with a slight incline in our angle to the sun we get a different season, so I don’t find it hard to believe that by changing the chemical composition of our atmosphere we’ll affect both/either the level of sunlight we get, or trap against the earth. It’s easy to see the change in a large city like Toronto with all of the smog, so why can’t more people comprehend that the same thing can happen globally?
Anyway, I understand your point about Kyoto, and it doesn’t focus on pollution control as much as carbon in the air. But what is the alternative plan? Where is the Made in Canada solution, and why are we waiting for it when alternative plans are already available around the world, and in fact in other parties like the Greens?
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“Well, there is a solution for you Saskboy – move to a third world country, where a substantive amount of their daily grind involves drinking sludge (untreated water) and breathing smog (from burning of renewable fuels) and living as nature intended – with extremely high infant mortality rates and brief lifespans.”
Come on now Kate. I’m not talking about rejecting technology to regress, I’m talking about PROgress. Switching city dwellers driving 10km/day to electric engines is progress. Burning food or trees at a low temperature and high carbon output to heat our homes… regress.
It’s undeniable that pollution like carbon oxides, lead, PCBs, and radiation will create a ceiling in our lifespan and quality of life that need not exist. They got us here, but that doesn’t mean they can KEEP us here. That’s why you hear environmentalists talking about “sustainability”. We’re not trying to take away things and leave people with nothing, we’re trying to replace unsustainable activities and products with ones that will keep us all going and give room for the other 2/3rd to join the modern age of technology.
Infant mortality and birth defects will and I’d surmise ARE rising due to pollution. If anyone has stats to the contrary I welcome seeing them.
Saskboy,
Yes you get local effects, always will. But we are allegedly discussing GLOBAL warming.
Point is, there has yet to be any decent proof put forward that there is man made global warming. There are all kinds of possibilities, once again we use to believe there was a rain god, a sun god etc etc…that didnt make it true.
All we know is that climate changes. The simplest explaination is that variations in energy inputs cause these long cyles, as opposed to potential chemical changes that we have yet to explain. There are other potential explainations but until there is a good model for them it would be folly to invest major dollars, especially in a flawed treaty, to attack what may be a non existent problem.
Shouldn’t take action on things we dont understand. As discussed here before, Kyoto was essentially a wealth transfer protocol not a pollution reducing or greenhouse gas reducing protocol. Even if there was a problem caused by humanity Kyoto wouldnt solve it.
Just need GOOD science to keep at it so we can understand, then we can take action if it is necessary and appropriate. For the moment, I remain a skeptic but put the proof out there and I’ll be on board.
The “climate change” scam being perpetrated by the statist authoritarians is a ponzi-scheme protection racket. I’d tell you what I think of Mr. Strong & Mr. Suzuki, but I don’t want to get Small Dead Animals into trouble.
Any chance, George, you could explain to us why you think that it is the case that, as you put it, “socialist scientists developed the networks and computers that this blog and the rest of the internet uses”? I don’t think that conjecture holds water.
Vitruvius,
Any chance, George, you could explain to us why you think that it is the case that, as you put it, “socialist scientists developed the networks and computers that this blog and the rest of the internet uses”? I don’t think that conjecture holds water.
Never heard about Al Gore?
Social Scientists developed the networks…..?
News flash……technologists like me developed the networks pal!
Get back on your meds……get professional help…..get a freekin life.
Well, in terms of who really brought us the computers and networks we are using, I was thinking more along the lines of James Clerk Maxwell, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, John von Neumann, Calude Shannon, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Tim Berners-Lee.
There’s some background information on them here – tinyurl.com/ozn46 – scroll down to 1931 and following. I don’t see a lot of socialism going on there.
Found poetry:
his reindeer now graze
on wild thyme
amid the purple blooms
of Niviarsiaq flowers. H/T Lauren Etter …-
All Magnusson sees is the reindeers harnessing the hydro by the cusp where the boons grow amid the foot of the genesis brink reindeer a gripping story, eh, Eve? …-
Where global warming’s welcome Some Greenlanders see boon in milder temperatures
The Pittsburg Post-Gazette ^ | August 26, 2006 | Lauren Etter
Stefan Magnusson lives at the foot of a giant, melting glacier. Some think he’s living on the brink of a cataclysm. He believes he’s on the cusp of creation.
The 49-year-old reindeer rancher says a warming trend in Greenland over the past decade has caused the glacier on his farm to retreat 300 feet, revealing land that hasn’t seen the light of day for hundreds of years, if not more. Where ice once gripped the earth, he says, his reindeer now graze on wild thyme amid the purple blooms of Niviarsiaq flowers.
The melting glacier near Mr. Magnusson’s home is pouring more water into the river, which he hopes soon to harness for hydroelectricity.
“We are seeing genesis by the edge of the glacier,” he says. …-
free republic
“Switching city dwellers driving 10km/day to electric engines is progress. ”
Oh, yeah. Those spent batteries are sure to be great for the enviroment.
Wonderful progress.
Is Anyone Else Keeping Track?
As a matter of fact, yes and with links to:
Agricultural land increase, Africa devastated, African aid threatened, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), ancient forests dramatically changed, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety, algal blooms, Arctic bogs melt, Asthma, atmospheric defiance, atmospheric circulation modified, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased
and that’s just the “A”s. There’s hundreds of them.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Good News, Folks….just vote Liberal and the world is saved
Antarctic grass flourishes? Mabel, round up the herd, we’re goin’ south!
Vitruvius,
Thank you for the link – irrelevant. I think what George was saying is:
“in the future socialist scientists developed the networks and computers that this blog and the rest of the internet uses”
Deal with it.
You’re welcome, Ural. Yes I knew you were kidding in the AG post. Still, I don’t think that tinyurl.com/ozn46 is irrelevant to the nature of who really brought us the computers and networks we are using.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic, so I’ll leave it at that. The more important matter is surely that computer climate models are, to the best of our knowledge, completely untrustworthy.
Forget about global warming – it’s pretty smug to think that humans could be possible for such a huge alteration to the world. Mother Nature is much more powerful than the human race. What I worry about is water pollution and nobody seems to give a rat’s ass about that. Untreated sewage goes into our oceans from Canadian cities and wasn’t it reported somewhere that Paul Martin’s own Steam Ship Lines was found dumping waste into the St. Lawrence or the Great Lakes? He said it was ok because every other shipping line did it – great. I detest seeing our sources of water polluted. It aught to be a huge crime against nature and the rest of humanity and there should be consequences for those who do it.
Saskboy,
It seems you haven’t heard yet that it’s acknowledged even by Kyoto proponents that full implementation of the Kyoto accord will have no effect on climate change.
So why bother?
And for a comprehensive analysis of CO2 and global warming, here’s an excellent website:
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
“Oh, yeah. Those spent batteries are sure to be great for the enviroment.”
Then don’t throw the batteries into the ground. You know we stopped doing that with spent motor oil? The chemicals in used batteries are the same as they ever were, they don’t change nuclearly.
And just to remind you, there are batteries in standard vehicles today.
Social Scientists developed the networks…..?
I think the US military had a huge hand in it not some commie “scientists”. How the left lies.
JR, I’m with you on your last point – Victoria, Halifax, and St. John’s all dump sewage into the oceans without treatment. They did it during the Liberals, and are doing it now under the Conservatives. The Sierra Club is suing Victoria I believe to put treatment in place since it’s a federal crime to pollute in that manner – it’s just not being enforced.
You first point doesn’t count though. Smugness is when we think we have no impact on the world around us, despite there being billions of humans. Look at your ocean example for in-your-face evidence of the affect a group of humans has on environment quality. There are other ways to affect biome changes too, including clear cutting/burning, tilling, mining, nuking, and the list goes on.
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dirtman “So why bother?”
Because what other plan has the world or Canada’s government come up with to deal with air pollution. Some of the solutions to reduce CO2 for Kyoto also reduce other air pollutants, like the windfarms can. Until there’s something better, we should be doing something to reduce carbon emissions and increase natural carbon sinks we’ve previously removed. Maybe we shouldn’t trade “credits”, but nothing’s stopping us from making other changes besides laziness and a lack of will from the Conservatives and Liberals to enact environmental changes that will benefit nearly everyone.
saskboy said: “Look at your ocean example for in-your-face evidence of the affect (sic) a group of humans has on environment quality. There are other ways to affect biome changes too, including clear cutting/burning, tilling, mining, nuking, and the list goes on”. Sure, humans can certainly make a mess, but I really don’t think you can extrapolate that to ‘credit’ us with changing the planet’s weather.
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So sorry Nemo2 – effect.
We change the environment in local regions, it’s not so hard to fathom that we could have a global effect too. Forest fire smoke from hundreds of kilometers away is visible and smog creating in other parts of the planet. That’s an easy to see example of pollution in one region affecting another. Anti-environmentalists routinely say that if a few volcanos erupt, they will change the weather, so why worry about climate change when it happens naturally. To that I say, “Why are we pushing down the path to mimic volcanoes when we know the damage they can do to life globally?”
“Any chance, George, you could explain to us why you think that it is the case that, as you put it, “socialist scientists developed the networks and computers that this blog and the rest of the internet uses”? I don’t think that conjecture holds water.”
Well, the ‘socialist’ was ironic, a comment on another poster who said ‘socialist scientists’ were behind the environmentalist claims. As a group, scientists aren’t socialist, despite that poster’s claims. In fact, we tend to be fairly a-political, especially professionally. There are individual scientists who get involved in politics, but very few … who has the time?
But if you’re going to blame science for the concept of global warming (which is a scientific theory rather than a political agenda, and like all good science, makes testable predictions, many of which might turn out to be false and so lead to an improved theory), it seems only fair to give scientists credit for the good we do as well. There’s a lot of science bashing out there … more from the left than the right, but the right has its hobby horses too.
Whenever anyone dislikes a scientific theory, they attack scientists (left wingers call us nazi’s, right wingers call us socialists … funny that). Fine, everyone has a right to their own opinion. It’s just particularly ironic to see people use high tech to complain about scientists. The universe is a very complex place, and probably every theory we have will later turn out to be mistaken. For instance, quantum mechanics and our current theory of gravity – general relativity – cannot both be true … they are fundamentally contradictory so at least one of them will turn out to be false.
But the same people who complain about scientists drive cars, use computers, modern medicine etc. Its frustrating sometimes … how can a society which enjoys so many benefits of science be so anti-science?
Saskboy said: dirtman “So why bother?”
Because what other plan has the world or Canada’s government come up with to deal with air pollution. Some of the solutions to reduce CO2 for Kyoto also reduce other air pollutants, like the windfarms can. End quote.
There are many plans that have successfully reduced air pollution. Scrubbers, catalytic converters etc. Kyoto does nothing to reduce air pollution. Wind farms only reduce air pollution if they replace burner type generators. But they don’t. Wind farms are just NEW generation, and the old burners keep on burning. Get it through your head that Kyoto is a wealth transfer from the capitalist west by leftists who are outraged that capitalism produces wealth, and socialism doesn’t.
Actually, Kyoto isn’t about capitalism vs socialism at all. Its simply about buying your way out of a political problem for which you have neither the will nor the technology to fix, and for which the political solution will get you punched out of power.
Global warming isn’t yet a scientific theory. It remains yet merely a hypothesis. Causation has not been determined, nor in fact has the event itself been confirmed. There are apparent energy shifts underway, but there is no concrete evidence that a net gain is taking place.
(Scientifc)Theories are a summation of provable facts leading to a repeatably demonstable cause and effect. Hyypotheses are a summation of (sometime) educated guesses that hint to a possible cause and effect.
The public doesn’t understand what a “theory” is. Don’t be careless with the terminology. People can learn to spell “hypothesis”. Even say it. (hi- POTH-ess-iss) 🙂
Saskboy quoted me::
” The main greenhouse gas is water vapour. Of the CO2 in the atmosphere, human production is at best 10%.How much should we reduce these gases – to zero? Then all life on the planet will die.”
And you completely missed the point with:
“You didn’t very reasonably argue it. Who would argue that CO2 in the atmosphere should be reduced to 0, duh? Clearly the lower we can make human controlled contributions to the atmosphere, the more NATURAL the earth’s climate will be. It’s just straight forward reasoning.
”
Of course I wouldn’t argue zero CO2, but what would you argue? The whole point is the “correct” or “natural” level of CO2 is unknown, and it has varied immensely over the planet’s history
Stephen:
You were right about the quote the first time:
“There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who ‘love nature’ while deploring the ‘artificialities’ with which ‘Man has spoiled Nature’. The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of ‘Nature” – but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the ‘Naturist’ reveals his hatred for his own race – i.e., his own self-hatred…”
-Robert A. Heinlein- (circa 1973)
Further, worrying about man-made climate change is a fools game, IMHO. Sure, lets not shit in our own sandbox, but climate is a huge and chaotic system, and thinking we can affect it, positively or negatively, is insufferably arrogant.
We don’t know exactly how it works, it’s way to big to model in any way, we don’t know if we’re affecting change or not, and we don’t know whether the potential change is good or bad.
Tilting at windmills doesn’t affect the windmill, it just gives you a sore neck.
So, what to do? Back to Kates’ original post…
Adaptation is always the answer, it’s really the only thing we humans KNOW we can successfully DO.
😉
.
If adaptation is the answer, why is Kate ignoring the value of this research in helping 50 million people in Pakistan anticipate changes in their water supply? (More about this at my place.)