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| 11/22 |
| 2009/11/23-30 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:53539 Activity:high |
11/22 What no chatter about the Climate Hack? MOTD, I'm so diappointed
\_ What is impressive about breaking onto an academic server? I
broke onto the Astronomy machines when I was a sophmore.
\_ Way to miss the point. The hack itself was not impressive.
The information that was exposed, however, make the above
thread kind of moot.
\_ No, it did not. Global warming is becoming more and more
obviously a real problem. There are still a few nutters
that claim that it isn't happening, but there are people
who don't believe in evolution either.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1125/p02s01-usgn.html
\_ Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better.
I'm going to continue eating imported wagyu beef and
leaving my PC on 24/7. I'm thinking about buying an SUV
next year.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/25/nigel_lawson
\_ You don't even have to be a scientist to see the obvious
effects of global warming anymore. Just look at the
rising sea levels, the shrinking polar ice caps, etc.
\_ Except that none of this is new. The poles
have been completely free of ice in the past,
for instance. I was reading an article about
icebergs as far north as New Zealand intended
to serve as a data point about global warming,
except that the article said that this last
happened in the 1920s. Was it global warming
then, too? I personally believe humans are
affecting the environment in a big way -
probably not a way that benefits us, but I am not
sure we can make that claim definitively as it's a
complicated system (maybe we are preventing the
Earth from cooling off too much). However, the
Earth has been warming and cooling for millions
of years and it's hard to separate the natural
effects from those we caused let alone predict the
consequences.
\_ Global warming is undeniable, and though there are
still many of people like you who try to deny
still many people like you who try to deny
the fact that the earth is warming, the
evidence is pretty overwhelming. It seems from
your statements above that you are backtracking
on your earlier insistence that those who see
this for what it is are blind zealots. The exact
causes are open for debate, though it seems
like human beings have at the very least some
impace on the climate.
impact on the climate. |
| 11/22 |
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| www.csmonitor.com/2009/1125/p02s01-usgn.html RSS Amid charges of global warming hoax, new warning on climate change A report Tuesday on the latest climate-change research shows emissions rising quickly and ice caps melting faster than projected. The report comes amid a controversy over hacked scientists' e-mails that some say point to a global warming hoax. RSS Global carbon-dioxide emissions are rising fast, global temperatures continue to climb at a pace in line with projections, and polar regions are losing ice faster than climate models have projected. The purpose of the effort, say researchers from eight countries, including the US, is to update policymakers and the public about the pulse of the planet ahead of the climate-treaty negotiations scheduled to begin in the Danish capital Dec. To stabilize the climate around that 2-degree goal, the global economy needs to reduce average carbon-dioxide emissions to less than 1 metric ton per person per year by 2050, the group adds. This is equivalent to cutting per capita emissions by 80 to 95 percent below 2000 levels in developed countries by 2050. The report highlights results from some 200 recent studies in hopes of influencing upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the researchers say. The benchmarks it sets out for reaching the 2-degree neighborhood aren't significantly different from those the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set out two years ago. Still, "we felt that we needed to call attention of the delegates to the scientific case for urgent action," says Richard Somerville, professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, a lead author of the IPCC's 2007 volume on climate science, and a contributor to this report. "If you want to stabilize the climate at a reasonable amount of global warming, then you cannot delay indefinitely." The group's effort is independent of the UN-sponsored IPCC, which publishes reports on global warming roughly every five years, the last one in 2007. The Copenhagen Diagnosis aims to fill the gap on research since mid-2006 - the deadline for the 2007 IPCC report. "There's new science and there's also three more years of data. In many instance, the observations show that climate change has accelerated," Dr. Controversy over hacked e-mails The report is being released against the backdrop of the more than 1,000 e-mails pilfered from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK's University of East Anglia. Some, however, give the appearance of scientists - including some involved in the Copenhagen Diagnosis - introducing fudge factors in presenting results. Others scoff at their colleagues' work and at critics outside the climate community who question approaches used by the e-mails' authors to process or interpret data. And they sometimes reveal a strong undercurrent of angst over what skeptics may make of their results. The e-mails have generated a outcry among conservative commentators over the credibility of climate science. Many climate researchers say the e-mails do nothing to undercut the science behind global warming, which has been building for more than 100 years. What the controversy really shows is a desire on all sides to maintain a myth about how science is conducted, says Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes. "Both sides want to maintain this idea that science is this pure thing, this source of clarity, exactness, and truth. None of that undercuts the weight of evidence on global warming, he adds. Ice caps melting faster Among the climate-related observations the Copenhagen Diagnosis makes: Carbon-dioxide emissions: In 2008, emissions were almost 40 percent above 1990 levels. Even if emissions peaked today, by 2020 temperatures would stand a 25 percent chance of exceeding 2 degrees C - even if emissions fell to zero in 2030. Ice caps at both poles are melting faster than models have projected. Moreover, a study published this week and not part of the Copenhagen Diagnosis suggests that the loss of ice is now extending to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, not just the west Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has long been a focus of concern. In the Arctic, the average melt-back of summer sea ice was 40 percent larger for the 2007 to 2009 period than predicted in 2007's IPCC reports. Rates of sea-level rise from thermal expansion and melting land-based ice - about 34 millimeters a year during the last 15 years - are about 80 percent above those projected in IPCC. |
| www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/25/nigel_lawson -> www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/25/nigel_lawson/ Free whitepaper - Power distribution systems for the Dell PowerEdge M1000e Modular Server Enclosure Interview One thing is missing from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, launched at Westminster on Monday, chairman Lord Lawson admitted. Mrs Thatcher's Chancellor for six years acknowledged that there aren't many young people on board. You could almost say it pits the Old Aged vs the New Agers. We got a brief opportunity to talk to Lawson at the launch event - more below. policy academic, widely known for founding the CCNet mailing list, is the Foundation's director. The body may disappoint people who want the scientific controversies tackled head on. It's not going to look for the scientific 'smoking pistol' that skeptics crave. As with Lawson's book An Appeal To Reason, which dissected the Stern report, it is going to take a look at the policies - and ask whether they're worth it. Lawson resents the assumption, which he said was expressed by state broadcaster the BBC, that if you accepted the majority view of scientists in the field then you had to accept the policies they proposed, too. But speaking to Lawson later, it was clear he didn't think some of the wilder predictions made for man-made global warming had any rational basis. Lawson "There is no scientific basis for some of the alarmism. I'm talking about the predictions of warming, and the measurement of the impacts. He referred to what he called a "a disgraceful television advertisement" from the Department of Energy and Climate Change. "We will certainly be actively involved in monitoring what is being said, in correcting errors where the are errors. The only thing we will not be actively engaged in is what are the causes of the temperature changes on the planet: how much is CO2, how much is solar radiation, how much is cosmic rays. Lawson was Chancellor when Crispin Tickell, then British Ambassador to the UN, convinced Prime Minister Thatcher that man-made global warming was a problem. Despite Tickell lacking any scientific background (he read history at university) Mrs Thatcher took the population campaigner's views seriously enough to make a landmark speech on global warming. This led to the foundation of a branch of the Met Office, the Hadley Centre at Exeter, to study the issue. |