Naw - seriously - damn good objectivity by you and Seattle Husker. You too are firmly imbedded in the left, but somehow saved your rationalility. It's uncommon. I enjoy your screeds. Keep them up. This world needs more you, less me.
BGH, I think you're post hit a nerve. When I reread it myself I don't mind the last paragraph which was very satyrical. The one before though is just wrong. Some of the ice melts and refreezes every year. But the problem is the overall ice mass size and the ice thickness which has been getting thinner and thinner. There is already cause to worry, which is why I think you and many others are changing their habits. Myself included. We aren't necessarily convinced 100% but we see the changes occurring and realized we need to do something. We don't know if it is a crisis that we need to ALL walk to work or something now until someone (President) tells us to but we still make small changes but it can't hurt and it is the right thing to do to conserve....especially if you are conservative. (walk to work thing only a metaphorical example by the way). Someone correct me on my basic science here but isn't the real problem with the ice cap melting that most of the suns UV rays will not be reflected back by the ice cap but will be absorbed by the water left in its place, thus escalating the sea levels and temperatures. Oh, and something about possibly shutting off the main ocean currents similar to what happened in the last ice age. Sounds like a problem to me.
First of all, you don't know me or what I do to save money and energy and reduce waste. Calling strangers you know nothing about lazy? Hilarious. When is the last time you worked 80-90 hour weeks w/o vacation for years. I laugh a winey little ******* like you. The fact that I conserve and recycle primarily to save money rather than the planet shouldn't matter if the outcome is the same. Most of the people I know who sound like you make piddley *** sacrifices and just run their mouth (or keyboard). I watch them closely as they waste just as much as everyone else. They think that b/c they use less resources than the richest 1%, they are doing something meaningful. Your all a bunch of self righteous f***ers who like to piss in everyone else's Cheerios. And while you talk a good game about preserving this planet for future generations, few of you do didley to help alleviate misery and suffering of people who are here right now. If the business of global warming ever dried up (no pun intended), what would all of you do? Probably find some other cause and just keep on making everyone around you miserable. Let me ask you this. Are you ready to live third-world-style and receive NONE of the benefits that technology and modern society offer? Why not? I could probably spend 10 minutes with you and point out dozens of things you could do BUT DON'T that would be more eco-friendly. Biggest bunch of hypocrites in society today, in my humble opinion.
If you're not going to bother thinking, you could at least get a spell-checker. You do have the profanity down ... but then again, you just need a bunch of asterisks for most of it.
several points..... this may (?) explain some of the north pole's melting: growing north pole melting due to this? secondly.... the ice on the Antarctic has been on the rise: antarctic ice growing (the link provided earlier in this thread that claimed to show that the Antarctica was shrinking did nothing of the sort....it merely focused on two particular parts of Antarctica. overall, the south pole is gaining ice.) seriously...look up global sea ice for yourself and ask yourself....does this look alarming? scary? it looks to me like in 30 years there has been a decrease of about 1 million kilometers of global sea ice. now, perhaps that is alarming for some reason i am not aware of.....so please explain to me what i am missing. in the mean time....global temperatures continue to drop over last year in the atmosphere. check this out: atmospheric temperatures check out all of the different levels and you will find that most of them show fairly dramatic cooling over last year.......we will know more in a week or so, but it looks like june will be another cool month globally.
here is another very helpful graph to show how absurd it is to claim that Antarctica is losing ice: check this out notice that we are well ABOVE the 30 year average since we started recording data. if it has shrunk, it happened BEFORE we started collecting this data....because currently it is rising in ice levesl. in fact, if i am reading this graph correctly....if one goes back 12 months to last year at this time, it appears that there is currently 1 million more kilometers of ice than just one year ago in june. correct me if i am wrong though because i may be skewed in my reading.
to make my point rock solid (i guess i am feeling bad about flatly contradicting the earlier poster?)..... another graph to show that the general trend is upwards but to be fair....here is the northern hemisphere graph (notice the red line which shows how far off the 30 year mean the ice is). if you put that graph with the one i already showed you, it looks suspiciously like the North Pole is losing ice at about the same rate as the south pole is gaining it....... should this worry us? perhaps....but i have no idea why. northern hemisphere ice
good word lurker....i hope you are right. i think you sound awfully idealistic about motivations.....but i do agree that at some point, the "consensus" will have to be overturned if enough counter evidence comes in..... at any rate, this thread is a nice micro example of my entire point. so much made about ice melting which really looks to be nothing when you do a bit of research into the actual raw data.
The Link Article detailing how penguin species are declining, partly due to global warming which is decreasing the amount of western antarctic ice. There is some data that antartic ice is stable or slightly increasing, but this is a statistically insignificant amount of increase, so essentially nil. And the effects of global warming, according to the predictions of the theory, are expected to be felt first in the arctic, which appears to be happening. A 50% chance of complete summer melting is a scary and depressing reality, and will only accelerate global warming due to the lack of solar reflectance off that huge ice mass.
The scientists who collected the NASA data don't say their data contradict global warming. On the contrary, they say that global warming is expected to have different impacts in the southern polar regions than they do in the northern. No one (well, nearly no one) expects the effects of climate change to be simple. The best models suggest that some regions will become drier while others become wetter. Some areas become warmer while others become cooler. In some areas ice increases, in others ice decreases. The overall global trend is towards warmer climate, but that doesn't mean every place on Earth will be warmer. As for the gain in Antarctic ice balancing the loss in Arctic, even if true that doesn't do the Inuit or the polar bears much good. The other links compare 2008 with 2007. Some science-deniers think that one anomalous data point disproves a trend.
Mop, you have brought up an interesting topic of Antarctic ice size that is worth discussing as a part of a larger discussion on global warming and the effect that this may/may not have. But that is for another thread. This thread was started by myself specificially seeking input from you regarding the melting of the north pole ice. You have claimed on another thread that there is nothing to worry about and dismissed my earlier claim of north pole ice melting by saying it had simply "refrozen over the winter". Let's leave Antarctica alone and for another thread. What have you say about the decline of ice thickness on the north pole and the possibility of it melting away much sooner than previously estimated? It may be from natural causes or being escalated by man made global warming....that is another discussion as well. This is a micro topic on the north pole ice thickness and whether or not it is happening and whether or not it is a concern.
some of you make interesting points....steinbeck.....you are just silly. why not give a concrete example (as i have done) of where i posted something specifically misleading? is that too tall of an order for you? i posted from a website that is friendly to the global warming consensus....i showed graphs of the ice and pictures as well. i am not alarmed at all......why should i be? in 30 years it looks like very little of significance has happened in terms of total global ice and even in the north pole the ice melts are not so bad......particularly when they are followed by much freezing as this last winter. mop ps i will await something concrete from you rather than mere handwaving and pontification. you may hate my points, but at least i make them concrete and EASY to refute if i am saying something false. you on the other hand use vague critiques.
by the way....to answer hornpharned (misspelled i know)....i am not terribly concerned with melting in general. who is to say that things are supposed to remain as they are? as i have argued before.....we are coming out of a small ice age and have been for 400 years. climate has always changed and always will.....so the real question would be what is the cause of this slight increase arctic ice melting? to that...i would point to several things.....a general trend of warming temperatures over the past few centuries.....possibly a band of underwater volcanoes and maybe dark soot from coal (this was largely the cause of Kilimanjaro's melt off according to one study.)
pretty accurate there bluegrass.....but shh....he doesn't understand. as for the rest....the antartica IS growing. heck, i just found this Pro-Global Warming (meaning they believe in the anthropogenic causes) article talking about how terrible it is that the arctic is melting that even reports that the Antarctica is growing.... oh no! the north pole is melting (but the south pole is growing at about the same speed)
by the way...this is a hilarious graph displaying how much the earth has warmed in the past 20 years since James Hansen made his historic announcement..... funny graph admittedly this is from icecap.....but this is based upon UAH data. if you don't believe that....then just check out the raw data yourself (now this is where steinbeck, Texoz or Bierce claim that i am twisting things somehow even though they refuse to show me any raw data): UAH raw data simply read the leftmost column.....check out the first 5 months of 1988 and then check out the first 5 months of 2008. you will find that indeed, it has been much cooler this year than 20 years ago when Hansen made his announcement.
The article mop links shows that increased artic ice melting leads to increased precipitation in the southern hemisphere, which leads to more snow and ice in the antarctic, since it is winter there during the arctic summer. When you disturb one area of the global climate, another may react in unanticipated ways, but this is just another item that will be incorporated in the increasingly sophisticated computer models used by climatologists to predict the effects of global warming. Many facets of world climate are unexpected and unknown, but that doesn't mean the effects are not caused by human produced global warming. The article clearly states the effect is caused by global warming, whereas mop interprets the effect as disproof of global warming. I suppose he feels no one will follow up by reading the links, or that if he proposes enough contrarian theories, that the casual reader will determine the truth must be half way between the two competing views, instead of with the preponderance of scientific evidence.
That was truly witty, blueglasshorse. "Liar, liar, you didn't really look at the links!" I am overcome with shame and remorse. I recant all my views on climate change in the face of your scathing critique and withering intellectual attack. At least you spared me your prodigious capability to generate asterisk-filled curse words this time, which I don't believe I would have been able to survive. Clearly, any melting ice at the North Pole is due only to the tremendous heat generated by the combined brainpower of you and mop, set off by Antartic ice growth resulting from your ultra-cool rebuttals of climate pseudo-science. I'm sure mop will provide us a link soon to prove it.
