What can we do about Climate Change?

[Grat3fulh3ad]

AGW is undeniable to anyone with an education.
thus speaketh everyone that haveth a clue.

the jigsaw puzzle has more pieces in their proper place every day.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...a-climate-hottest-decade-science-environment/

http://www.montrealgazette.com/tech...deniable+world+report+says/3338122/story.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ten-key-indicators-global-warming


you're so good at buying into corporate sponsored denialism, you probably still think tobacco companies were right about the health benefits of tobacco smoke.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

T
We seriously need to cull ignorance

that's what i have been doing, but it seems yours won't be culled regardless of the overwhelming body of evidence demonstrating it. only the uninformed and the confused are still in denial.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

Carbon emissions raise global temperatures, coastal risks
By P. Brian Fisher
Saturday, July 31, 2010



In the last 100 years, global temperature has increased 1.3°F, and the pace of this increase in temperature is also accelerating. The year 2010 promises to be one of the hottest on record, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The world's surface temperature for January to June was the warmest on record.

It's a good time to review what we know about global warming. Direct observations, thermometer records and satellites show that the air and oceans are warming, sea ice and glaciers are melting, and sea levels are rising globally. We also know longer-term climate records from tree rings as well as ice and sediment core samples. From these, we see that current warming is inconsistent with past natural cycles.

The primary cause of this warming is from humans. We burn fossil fuels that contribute to heat-trapping gases that thicken the greenhouse gas layer of our atmosphere. As this layer thickens, it traps more heat from the sun, which warms the Earth. This warming then leads to changes in our climate.

The human contribution to climate changes is the area where many in the public have the most doubt, so let's address how we know that most of this warming is from human activities.

First, the long-term climate record, going back 650,000 years, shows natural cycles in Earth's climate. It shows three cycles (or glacial periods), each lasting approximately 200,000 years. These cycles are based on well-understood variations in the earth's orbit and show a relatively uniform and consistent pattern. These cycles oscillate between periods with low carbon dioxide concentrations and low temperature and periods with higher carbon dioxide concentrations and higher temperature.

Today, we are at the beginning of a period in this natural cycle of decreasing carbon dioxide and cooling. Yet carbon dioxide, the most prominent heat-trapping gas, is skyrocketing.

Today, we are pumping 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This increases by 2 percent a year, and doubles every 30 years. It's not surprising that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by more than one-third since the industrial revolution (280 ppm to 390 ppm today). There is far more CO2 in the atmosphere today than at any point in the last 15 million years, and back then, the temperature was 5-10°F higher and sea levels were 75-100 feet higher.

Second, while changes in solar activity drive Earth's climate, these data support the case for human-induced warming. Over the last hundred years, solar variations have been relatively small, and current trends would suggest a cooling in Earth's climate. The small changes in solar variance are unable to account for the significant changes we see in our climate.

Third, the signatures or fingerprints in the atmosphere are unmistakably human. If the warming were only from long-term natural variation or solar activity, we would see consistent warming at all levels of our atmosphere. We don't. When we look at the upper atmosphere, increasing solar energy should create a warming effect, but what we actually see is that part of our atmosphere cooling. This is consistent with the greenhouse effect, and suggests that human activities play a large role in the changes we are observing in our climate.

Fourth, there is a quickly growing record of observed climate changes by those in climate sensitive areas. Current climate impacts cannot be overstated because people in these communities have a long history of adapting to natural variations in climate. However, the difference today is that these changes are occurring much faster and in ways that these communities have never seen before.

People in the Arctic, small island nations, river deltas, and drying regions around the world have documented in very fundamental ways how their climate is changing. These communities all have in common a reliance on the environment for their daily survival.

And thus, for generations, the viability of their communities literally depended on the accuracy of climate information. So, their knowledge and direct observations of climate are critical to testing the accuracy of climate data and measurements. What we've found is that their observations of climate change impacts are consistent across extremely different geographic, social and cultural locations. These observations strongly support other climate measurements and data. In addition, understanding these climate change impacts help to illuminate what we can expect in the future in places like South Carolina.

Finally, short-term local weather variations are not necessarily always consistent with longer-term climate changes because climate is driven by different factors and based on long-term averages of weather. However, the weather experienced along the East Coast, for example, the major rain and snowstorms of recent months, is consistent with climate trends for the Eastern U.S. In general, climate change works at the extreme margins.

For the Eastern U.S., this means that we can expect to see more extreme ends of the temperature and precipitation, with more days say above 100°F (than in the past), and more precipitation and intense precipitation events. Indeed, the averages of temperature and precipitation will change, but it does so through the extremes. This is one of the most important aspects of climate change, because by changing those extremes, climate change increases risk and the challenge of adapting to those changes.

So here is what we know. The world is warming. Human activities are largely the cause. It is affecting us now. It will affect your children and grandchildren, and in much more intense ways. And we will experience it largely through extremes, which intensify the risks.

What the risks are, how they can be managed effectively and efficiently, and the specific challenges they present should now be the focus of our collective discussion.

P. Brian Fisher, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of poltical science and environmental studies at the College of Charleston.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

In any debate over climate change, conventional wisdom holds that there is no reflex more absurd than invoking the local weather.
And yet this year’s wild weather fluctuations seem to have motivated people on both sides of the issue to stick a finger in the air and declare the matter resolved — in their favor.

“Within psychology, it’s called motivated reasoning, or the confirmation bias,” explained Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Project on Climate Change Communication at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “People are looking for evidence of any kind that validates or reinforces or justifies what they already believe.”

Last February, for example, as a freak winter storm paralyzed much of the East Coast, relatives of Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is a skeptic of climate change, came to Washington and erected an igloo.

They topped it with a cheeky sign asking passers-by to “Honk if you ♥ global warming.” Another sign, added later, christened the ice dome “Al Gore’s new home.”

Environmentalists roundly criticized the stunt for relying on a fact as lonely as a snowstorm. “Weather is our day-to-day experience, while climate is more static, describing a region’s typical weather conditions as established over periods of time,” explained Adrianna Quintero, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a blog post scolding the deniers.

Now, with record heat searing much of the planet from Minnesota to Moscow, people long concerned with global warming seem to be pointing out the window themselves.

“As Washington, D.C., wilts in the global heat wave gripping the planet, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has abandoned the effort to cap global warming pollution for the foreseeable future,” wrote Brad Johnson at the progressive Wonk Room blog, part of the Center for American Progress.

Of course, it’s probably not surprising that outspoken partisans sometimes use the weather as a rhetorical tool, but researchers are also learning that many less certain people unwittingly take note of temperatures, too.

Mr. Leiserowitz has identified what he and fellow researchers call “Global Warming’s Six Americas” — from people who are “alarmed,” “concerned” or merely “cautious” on climate change, to those who are “disengaged,” “doubtful” or wholly “dismissive.”

For people at either extreme — that is, those alarmed by or dismissive of climate change — the local weather isn’t going to have much influence, although they may use it conveniently to drive home a point.

But for those in the mushy middle — about a third of the overall population — the local weather, rightly or wrongly, influences their thoughts on the topic, often subconsciously.

That idea is reinforced by another study under review at the journal Psychological Science. Researchers at Columbia University found a high correlation between a participant’s stance on global warming and how he perceived the outdoor temperature on the day he was asked about it. Study subjects were also more likely to say they would donate to a global warming charity on days they perceived to be unusually warm.

For Eric J. Johnson, the director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School and a co-author of the study, the findings highlight the pitfalls of policymaking by poll, given that opinions on such a complex issue appear susceptible to highly impertinent data.

“It’s like assessing how the economy is doing by looking at the change in your pocket,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s relevant, but not that relevant.”

There is a not-insignificant caveat: Those pointing to hot weather as evidence of global warming are, in the broadest sense, more likely to be right. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado demonstrated last year that record high temperatures have occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade.

That’s in keeping with most models of global warming, which predict not a steady climb in temperature, but higher average readings over time — and more record-breaking peaks than valleys.

Whether that makes it fair to consciously lean on the weather when it’s convenient is an open question — though it appears hard for either side to resist.

 

[OrganicOzarks]

I agree that it is getting to hot. I just turned my air conditioner down a couple of degrees to fix it.

 

[BornToBeWild]

I dont mind the heat, but snow and ice oh man i dread it. Being used to Florida then living here has a hot summer day feel like it is like spring!

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

One less denier... Medvedev sees the reality of the situation.


July 30, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that in 14 regions of the country, "practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot." Then, as TV cameras zoomed in on the perspiration shining on his forehead, Medvedev announced, "What's happening with the planet's climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate."

For Medvedev, such sentiments mark a striking about-face. Only last year, he announced that Russia, the world's third largest polluter after China and the U.S., would be spewing 30% more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere by 2020. "We will not cut our development potential," he said during the summer of 2009 (an unusually mild one), just a few months before attending the Copenhagen climate summit, which in December failed to reach a substantial agreement on how to limit carbon emissions.

But even that pronouncement, grim as it seemed to the organizers of the Copenhagen talks, was mild compared with the broader Russian campaign against the idea that global warming is taking place. Two months before Copenhagen, state-owned Channel One television aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which argued that the notion of man-made climate change was the result of an international media conspiracy. A month later, hackers sparked the so-called Climategate scandal by stealing e-mails from European climate researchers. The hacked e-mails, which were then used to support the arguments of global-warming skeptics, appeared to have been distributed through a server in the Siberian oil town of Tomsk, raising suspicion among some environmental activists of Russia's involvement in the leak.

"Broadly speaking, the Russian position has always been that climate change is an invention of the West to try to bring Russia to its knees," says Vladimir Chuprov, director of the Greenpeace energy department in Moscow. Case in point: when Medvedev visited Tomsk last winter, he called the global-warming debate "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects." That was two months after the Copenhagen talks. But Medvedev's climate-sensitive comments on Friday, Chuprov says, could finally mark the start of a policy shift. "You don't just throw comments like that around when you are the leader of the nation, and if you look at what is happening with this heat wave, it's horrible. It's clearly enough to shake people out of their delusions about global warming."

The heat wave first started alarming authorities in June, when local officials recorded abnormally high fatalities on Russia's beaches. At the same time, a devastating drought was withering Russia's crops. As of July 30, some 25 million acres (about 10 million hectares) of grain had been lost, an area roughly the size of Kentucky — and growing. Then last week, fires that had been ignored for days by local officials began spreading out of control. By Aug. 2, they had scorched more than 300,000 acres (121,000 hectares) and destroyed 1,500 homes in more than a dozen regions, some of which declared a state of emergency. Scores of people have been killed in the fires, and in the outskirts of Moscow, burning fields of peat, a kind of fuel made of decayed vegetation, periodically covered the city in a cloud of noxious smoke, making it painful to breathe in parts of the Russian capital.

Medvedev has not been the only person in Russia to link the ongoing heat wave to climate change. Alexei Lyakhov, head of Moscow's meteorological center, tells TIME it is "clearly part of a global phenomenon" that is hitting Russia. "We have to start taking systemic measures of adaptation. It's obvious now. Just like human beings at one point took steps to adapt to the Ice Age, we now have to adapt to this," he says, citing cuts to carbon emissions as one of the necessary adaptations.

Now that Medvedev is also acknowledging the effects of climate change, Russia's official line on the subject could start to change, Chuprov says. But he warns that convincing the public of the threat from global warming may be difficult. "The status quo can change quickly in the minds of bureaucrats if the leadership gives the signal. But in the minds of the people, myths are much more difficult to uproot," he says. As if to prove the point, Russia's largest circulation newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, ran a headline on July 31 that asked, "Is the Russian heat wave the result of the USA testing its climate weapon?" The daily's answer was "Yes, probably."

But if Medvedev stands by his pronouncements, there may turn out to be a bright side to Russia's devastating weather: one of the nations most responsible for driving climate change may finally start trying to do something about it.
.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008081,00.html?xid=rss-topstories#ixzz0vV2LNpMV

 

[SuperSizeMe]

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

the disparity in public awareness and the scientific consensus indicates the horse is very much not dead =].

 

[SuperSizeMe]

the disparity in public awareness and the scientific consensus indicates the horse is very much not dead =].

That was the point of my post, despite the veracity of the 'believers', it hasn't changed (in fact, it's has made it worse) public perception.

What does that tell you?


I already know what you're going to say

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

That scientists are not good at communicating the situation in a manner that is more engaging to the public than a potential scandal, and that the media is more interested in perpetuating the controversy that drives ratings than in reporting the truth.

 

[SuperSizeMe]

It's not the scientists doing all the shouting.

 

[hoosierdaddy]

P. Brian Fisher, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of poltical science and environmental studies

asst. prof...which means the ink on his thesis is still wet, as it is behind his over zealous ears. Let's quote some more kids! Yea!
And just what is a prof. of environmental studies? The answer is, a political sciences prof that specializes in global warming and the funds it generates.
And if this kid stays true to form, he will have a great future...or at least until real credibility enters the fray.

...explained Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Project on Climate Change Communication at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Climate change communication...wonder how much grant money those fucks got?

...explained Adrianna Quintero, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a blog post scolding the deniers.

Scold your mother, fuckwad. I don't need some lawyer telling me anything at all, let alone scolding me. I got something for your ass though. (lol now they are citing lawyers).

wrote Brad Johnson at the progressive Wonk Room blog, part of the Center for American Progress.

Another heavily funded gang of goons.

That idea is reinforced by another study under review at the journal Psychological Science. Researchers at Columbia University found a high correlation between a participant’s stance on global warming and how he perceived the outdoor temperature on the day he was asked about it. Study subjects were also more likely to say they would donate to a global warming charity on days they perceived to be unusually warm.

Ah, now we see a credible study of how to get more dollars so as to fund this debacle!

The heat wave first started alarming authorities in June, when local officials recorded abnormally high fatalities on Russia's beaches.

Oh my, global warming is already taking it's tole and killing people right on the beach! Oh my God, we need to do something NOW!
Or, do we suspect something up with people just dying on a beach? Wait...isn't the effect of AGW a projected increase of like 1.3 degrees in so many decades? How is this killing people on the beach? Well, I'm certain I just don't understand things well enough to be able to understand this...but I am sure many of you understand it quite well. It is easy to see how warming is just killing people on the beach, isn't it?

the disparity in public awareness and the scientific consensus indicates the horse is very much not dead

The consensus only exists within groups like shown above, and with fuckwads. There is no scientific consensus on the issue.

 

[maryj315]

The consensus only exists within groups like shown above, and with fuckwads. There is no scientific consensus on the issue.

I find statements as this interesting as the poster is trying to leave the impression that there is some other legitimate alternative answer.

Please inform us of all your peer reviewed literature and scientist who claim otherwise.



Mj

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

It's not the scientists doing all the shouting.

No, all the shouting is done by the deniers...
and that is why the public is so confused.
The noisy minority of ignorance, the sensationalism driven media, and the easily duped public.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

CO2 driven global warming is undeniable.
anyone denying it is either ignorant, stupid, or evil.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

There is absolutely scientific consensus.
97% of scientists who work in related fields agreeing is a consensus.

anyone who says there is no consensus is a liar.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

Hoosierdaddy is confused... he thinks the jigsaw puzzle being solidly put together using verifiable pieces by science which clearly shows the picture of AGW, is a house of cards to be toppled by nitpicking irrelevant details...

No worries... the more time passes, and the more pieces of the picture we put into place... the more foolish one must be to remain in denial...

Russia's denial propaganda machine is even finding it hard to continue denial in the face of an increasingly obvious truth, and Russia is a major exporter of climate change denial... When it becomes SO BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that russia can no longer call it a western tactic to attack their economy, and has to admit it is a real issue, maintaining a denialist stance is a fool's errand.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100802/wl_time/08599200808100

July 30, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that in 14 regions of the country, "practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot." Then, as TV cameras zoomed in on the perspiration shining on his forehead, Medvedev announced, "What's happening with the planet's climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate."

For Medvedev, such sentiments mark a striking about-face.

http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/08/02/14235906.html


http://theweek.com/article/index/205580/is-global-warming-undeniable

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/07/29/climate-change-study-noaa.html

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/hottest_decade_makes_global_warming_undeniable_20100728/



http://theweek.com/article/index/205580/is-global-warming-undeniable

 

[THC123]

The consensus only exists within groups like shown above, and with fuckwads. There is no scientific consensus on the issue.

LOL maybhe not in Kentucky , ,just what shit hole do you live in hoosier? a cave totally disconnected from the rest of the world?