Submitted by John on Thu, 02/09/2012 - 11:42
A news report yesterday in NATURE that the Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing as anticipated has caused a flurry of discussion in the scientific community -- and also fueled those that want to assert global warming is not happening.
My take is that while interesting, and good science, it is not that surprising, nor does it in any way contradict the larger climate change scenario. Consider:
Submitted by John on Tue, 01/17/2012 - 16:57
The chart below is adapted from a similar graph in Dr. Peter Ward's book, "Under a Green Sky." It plots all the mass extinction events of the last 500 million years against the best estimate of carbon dioxide levels (CO2) at the time. According to his analysis, all major extinctions occured when CO2 levels exceeded a thousand parts per million (ppm).
Submitted by John on Fri, 12/09/2011 - 13:09
Amid the politics and disappointment from the climate talks this week in Durban South Africa, there has been a little trickle of insight into the real story about sea level rise; one that even good journalists missed. The last major IPCC report on climate change was easily mis-read to say the the forecast for sea level rise this century was only about 7 - 17 inches (18 - 59 cm). Those are the numbers they put in a table; what nearly everyone overlooked was the explanation of what was NOT included in that forecast.
Submitted by John on Thu, 10/27/2011 - 11:13
Japan is still struggling to cope with the aftermath of the major tsunami that hit March 11 this year. The destruction ranges from people, homes and entire communities, to wider damage from the nuclear power plant catastrophe, damage to their electric power system, and their economy. It will be a long time before they fully recover from this disaster. And it should be remembered that as tsunamis are produced by undersea earthquakes, that the cause of this problem is geologic, with essentially no connection to the current concern about changing climate.
Submitted by John on Sun, 10/23/2011 - 01:11
The Day After Tomorrow was a good sci-fi film about the shut down of the gulf stream causing Manhattan to go into a deep freeze, within days. It pretended to be a glimpse into what could happen with climate change. Absolute Nonsense! It was believable only because we have such terrible understanding of geologic timescale. With increased frequency I hear or read such things as:
"Climate Change? Of course, it's happened before."
Submitted by John on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 00:56
This chart shows the relative changes in global average temperature, CO2 (carbon dioxide), and sea level over the last 420,000 years. The data is derived from different sources that corroborate and confirm the findings. Data sources include air bubbles trapped in layers of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica; isotopes of oxygen that are temperature markers; isotope markers of diverse elements in layers of deep ocean sediments; ancient coral reefs and speleothems; salt marsh core samples; and physical evidence of ancient shorelines, above and below the present.
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