h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A recession wouldn't be very much fun, that's true but there are worse things than the potential slow down in the flow of money. In fact, in parts of the world where the flow of money isn't much in evidence, they probably wouldn't notice much difference. They'll notice storms and flooding and so will the rich countries - including the US. Recessions come and go. Climate change is a different order of disaster altogether.

Do the Americans assume that they already run the world?

It would be painful but it would hurt US more than it would hurt anybody else. It is also a great deal better than becoming a bunch of extinct dinosaurs in a few years time.

Unfortunately, I cannot post the url's here, but the ice on the physical location of the pole its self has not melted. I am not trying to understate the global importance of the melting of the icepack; I would just like people to get the terminology right, just call me pedantic.

"Another scientist on the cruise, palaeontologist Dr Malcolm C McKenna, said the ship was able to sail all the way to the North Pole through only a thin crust of ice, and arrived on the spot to discover no ice at all. " Source BBC (Follow previous link...)

The "Spot" in question is the North Pole (Quite possibly the magnetic North Pole).

It is quite possible that the ice that was here has drifted south (there is no where else for it to go ) before it melted, but the point is there should be ice there 24-7-365 (even in Summer).

"But other scientists are less sure. They say movements in polar ice regularly create gaps in the ice cap - including at the North Pole itself."

That statement was a couple of lines above your quote Proper Ganda. Yes there should be ice there but "..movements in the polar ice regularly create gaps in the ice cap..."


The Dr. goes on to say:
"I don't know if anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by water, not ice,"
which is in flat out contradiction to the regular gaps indicated above.

It's a case of selecting your weapons, isn't it? If you place your selected part of the BBC News Online article in it's context it's meaning seems to be changed:

"Some experts believe the ice cap could disappear altogether by the end of the 21st Century. They point to the rapid thinning of ice in the Arctic as further evidence of global warming. But other scientists are less sure. They say movements in polar ice regularly create gaps in the ice cap - including at the North Pole itself."

Proper Ganda (put me right if I misread you PG) is saying the article states fairly unambiguously that the location of the North Pole was an ice-free zone for a period during August 2000.

You, Yowuzupman, are using a sentence from the text above PG's chosen quote, to imply that the scientists are not all convinced. But the thing the scientists are not convinced about is whether the ice cap will disappear altogether, by the end of the 21st century.

We can pit one quote against another, but without actually going there personally each summer to see what's happening, we have to take the scientists' words for what's occurring.

I'm very surprised that the actual location of the North Pole is EVER free of ice. I've NEVER heard this phenomenon reported before. I think it's probably a recent development and it's likely due to global warming.

what we need are sat. images, there have to be some seeing as some spy sats have a polar route...

Daily News
==========

News: Rise of Agriculture May Have Cooled Climate. A cooling of up to 2-degree Fahrenheit over land between 1000 and 1900 AD may have been caused by changes from natural vegetation to agriculture. Previous studies had attributed cooling to natural climate variations, but new research published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that much of this cooling could have been the result of human activity. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory release)

I had a look at some sat sites but the real problem is that we need Spy-Sat sites from 1000 AD 1500 AD and 1800 AD to compare them with. Because if we look at the last 10 years then we will find the same hole and say Oh this is just the same hole, I saw that last year.

Global Warming is an easy case to argue against.
Bush says there is a split between the scientists who believe and those who doubt. But there will always be a split in every issue, the fact that the split is 90% - 10% in favour of global warming is a minor issue to Mr Bush. The climate in the atmosphere may be warming while Europe is cooling and the Arctic is having a heat wave. It all depends on where you put the thermometer / thermal Camera.

Any one who is still unconvinced please follow the link to the BBC Web link describing an independant and very scientific description of the the problems of Global Warming. Try the Quiz (think Carefully) see the Charts & Maps,

and find out whether you should be buying Sun glasses & Beer glasses or Rubber boots & Rubber boats.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/climate_change/default.stm

Can't recomend it enough.

Well - yes - maybe. But I do feel that Bangladeshians (?) and the Dutch (as just two examples) might better survive tightening their belts somewhat than being under water...!

Well - yes - maybe. But I do feel that Bangladeshians (?) and the Dutch (as just two examples) might better survive tightening their belts somewhat better than being under water...!

Ugrh Sorry ?

Try the Link 3 Messages up.

And as long as we're going to carry on the debate, we might as well get our information from both sides...

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1017000/1017204.stm

I've just been reading one of the BBC pages giving the case against human induced global warming. At first I thought it must be out of date because it seemed to entirely overlook the current data presented in several other articles. But it was written in November of last year - so it's recent. Professor Gary says, for example:

"These small global temperature increases of the last 25 years and over the last century are likely natural changes that the globe has seen many times in the past. This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. "

It's true that a great deal is not understood about the ocean and air currents, but there's still a lot of data that's not so difficult to interpret - at least not according to what appears to be the majority of other scientists, whose work has had some connection with climate change. There's data from a whole range of areas of scientific study going back millions of years, in some cases, and most of the scientists seem convinced that the current climate changes are significant and not just a normal fluctuation.

I'd like to see figures for the numbers of scientists who do or don't subscribe to the various climate change theories and I'd like to know where they're from and who pays their salaries or provides them with grants. It's enough to make a person cynical.

I Checked out the link. Interesting but rather apathetic.

"Most mainstream scientists believe that human activity"

From then on it describes the view of sceptics only saying current models are not yet clever enough. They do not seem to be interested in working to improve them.

The message seems to be that nothing is hot enough to worry about yet and even then it is probably only because of the sun. Lets wait and see what happens.

I imagine the vast majority of scientists are straight and honest - even the ones who say humans are probably not causing climate change. It just seems such a shame that we might even need to consider whether some of them might push a particular view for any reason other than that it happens to be the truth. And, unfortunately, we do need to consider that possibility.

I remember scientists in the pay of the tobacco industry assuring the public that smoking would not cause lung cancer or heart disease and there was no scientific evidence to suggest that it could damage your health.

I also remember government representatives saying they were taking the advice of their scientific advisers on BSE and the scientists were assuring them that our beef was safe and it definitely could not cause vCJD. Then, when the truth came out, the scientists said, we tried to tell the government and MAFF, but they didn't want to hear any bad news and instructed us to keep quiet.

So, of course, we have to question everything we hear. We know different interest groups have their own agendas and some of them serve only the short term interests of a greedy and uncaring few.

Hi Salamander,

From articles i've read and documenturies i've watched i've picked up the facts that Nasa within the last 15 years has actually had the technology to measure the overall temperature of the planet. Fifteen years in making exact and accurate temperature readings and some scienctists claim they can somehow detect a trend! Weather trends change over tens of millenia - not the last decades or centuries!! The proof is in geology - ancient sea beds, cliffs, huge rock formations have all the secrets and answers. That is how we decipher and calculate that earth is on the lip of an ice age which will take thousands of years to creep apon us.

Carbon dioxide in nature is released in sudden gigantic blasts and like we saw with Chernobyl when poisons are thrown into the air the simple and marvelous creations of Clouds, rain and plants (including algae and seaweed) absorb it and prosper. The toxic fumes from Chernobyl, scientists said would completely cover the earth and poison billons but instead all the crap was quickly rained down and although caused devastation to thousands, we didn't kill the world!

You'll have to take my word about the mutilation of an African countries women - I think it was South Africa. I saw a horrifying documentary about it. It was heartbreaking. You saw lots of adverts for Coke drink and other American products around this poor run down town, then we were shown these persuasive flyers urging women to have the chop. These ladies sat in a run-down waiting room - some with tears in there eyes and by an American sponsored project they were being paid to lose there wombs!

I am not implying a conspiracty theory, I am positive it is a fact. All about the mighty buck. Come on it's simple economics, why help one group of people to do for themselves when the alternative is to get them in great high interest debt paying for you to do it for them. It's one tribe - First world, making sure they out do and continue to be stronger than the other tribe - Third world.

Initially America knowingly sold GM seeds that would prosper and produce a great yield on very poor soil throughout developed countries. These seeds cost an extortionate amount, tieing the farmers into rediculous debt, and the crops would last a set time - ie had a life span which within 2 seasons would leave the land ravished and the crops dead. Therefore the pattern would begin again- the poorest people owing millons more.

Salamander there are alot of crap things happening out there, I question things all the time. It is right that most people are good but big business has no feelings. It does stuff for shareholders, executives, money money money.

Tell me who funds Green Peace, who pays the scientists to come up with there doom and gloom theories? How would scienctists be funded if there wasn't enormous profits to be made? Who makes money from the depressing scenarios? Bangladesh, Malawi, Yugoslavia, Spain... they don't make money out of all this, so who are funding all this research - and who is raking in the profits - First World, First World, First World!

Hi Wandawoman

If you read back through this thread you'll find that we're not just assuming the past 15 years has yielded the sum total of scientific knowledge on global climate change. We've talked about data from (as far as I remember without ploughing back through over 250 posts) dendrochronology, oceanography, palaeobotany, geology. We've talked about fish numbers and migration, phytoplankton, algal blooms - data that tells a story about this planet's climate going back millions of years.

I remember some years back there was talk of an ice age starting slowly and taking a long time to roll in. I haven't heard of any scientists who still subscribe to that view now though. There's a lot of new data flowing from a variety of earth sciences and there's more co-operation and information sharing between different fields of study than was the case a few years ago. All the convincing data and argument I've heard indicate that the climate is warming relatively rapidly. Scientists working in areas that involve climate, do know about volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar activity and the rest. Those things have to be factored into their calculations. The work's ongoing and adjustments are constantly being made. As Shorn mentioned a few posts back, recent data about ocean currents, temperature and salinity point to the possible sudden onset of an ice age if the planet continues to warm, causing the oceanic conveyor stop.

I have no doubt that the scientists are mostly honest people. They're working on the cutting edge. They would be the first to admit that climate is so complex that they may never be able to predict it's behaviour with a high degree of certainty. But I think it's paranoid delusion to believe they're all fantasists - in the pocket of some demon state whose only ambition is to keep poor countries in poverty by cooking up imaginary global catastrophes. The current American government certainly doesn't seem to be in on the climate 'conspiracy', does it? I'm not doubting that some governments may be rotten to the core and businesses and a few scientists too, but to believe that all those perfectly decent individual scientists are a bunch of liars - interested only in money and power, seems very unfair. What would they need to say for you to believe or respect them? Do you think that all scientists are bad by definition or are they ok if their views coincide with your own?

Green Peace is funded by its members - people who care about the environment. In my experience they're the same people who care about injustice in all its forms.

News from :NASA's Earth Observatory
Most-Serious Greenhouse Gas Is Increasing

An international study reports a surprising and dramatic increase in the most important greenhouse gas - water vapor - during the last half-century. The study by the World Climate Research Programme indicates that the water vapor increase can be traced in part to human influences but other causes not directly related to humans must also be at work. (University of Washington release)