Geezer

Regardless of the causes, whether we are causing it or whether it natural and cyclical, it is undeniable that the earth is heating up, according to this, it may accelerate.

But why the big concern? Earth was a much hotter place in the past, and life flourished, (indeed the dinosaurs came about when the earth was a much hotter place) so why is everyone so worried about it this time round?

Just a thought

Geezer

davegtt

hotter? how many days of summer sun has Briton had this year???? pi55ing it down here. middle of august aswell

Flatcapdriver

I don't know where you live been the weather has been great down here - for England that is.

The main worry is that there are about 5 billion more humans on the planet than during the last warm period.

dpb

Pretty serious if you happen to live at sea-level.


HTH

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Undeniably a bad thing - but probably not as bad (at least for us!) as the changes we'd have to make to our way of life and standard of living in order to stop it from happening.

Regardless of what we may do in the UK or Europe, we can rest assured that the USA (with the highest energy consumption per person anywhere in the world and no obvious downward trend) will force global warming on us all.

TonyG

It's not that the planet was hotter in the past - it's the rate of change that's worrying. The speed of it means that life just hasn't the time to adapt.

TonyG

Hmmm...
Extreme weather becoming more common - hotter, drier sunmmers, heavier/missing rainfall, potentially much colder winters if the Gulf stream stops, stronger winds/more common tornadoes/hurricanes...

Geezer

I don't think the rate of change from past warming coolings is really known.

But whatever, life will adapt I'm sure. The conditions immediately after some of the great extinctions have been far more severe and sudden than anything happeneing now, and there has been an evolutionary explosion at those times.

All I'm saying is that, us aside, will the world really suffer?

Geezer

StickyMicky

might be good for the uk as a tourist attraction
will be to hot to go anywhere else

suprabeast

well said hutton, and also the fact that the atmosphere has already changed to suit the warmer conditions as we now receive less sunlight than we did before.

Its a big polical thing to scam more money from us

Geezer

But it is undeniable, the only thing you can refute is that we are causing. Whether computers are good at building models for climate change or not, the fact that sea and air temperatures ahve risen over the past 30 years is taken from readings, not models, so the data is undeniable.

If you re read my inital post, I actually stated it was regardless of the cause, my question is is it a bad thing or not?

Stay on topic!

Geezer

OllyK

Some people actually argue that things are not warming overall, they are in some places but cooling in others. Many of the sites used for taking readings are close to cities which are warmer than the surrounding areas.

In answer to your original question, asuming it is happening, some good and some bad will come out of it, it is not black or white.

hedgehog

In fact the data from surface recordings indicates a small increase in temperatures. However data from balloons and satellites gives no indication of anything but a very, very small increase.

The reason for this is microclimate at weather stations which is why you hear things like "Rapid warming in London" etc. Of course the weather station is showing a warming trend in London as a high rise building has been built 3 feet from it.

You are not hearing reports of warming in northern Scotland, for example, because it is a rural area and has had an extremely cold year this year with many farmers having no sheep to sell because the cold killed both sheep and lambs.

The following bulleting of the American Metrological Society details the problem of microclimate at weather stations:

http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publ.../pdf/R-274.pdf

You should also note that our civilisation developed during what is refered to as the "climate optimum" this is when stonehenge, newgrange, callanish and the pyramids were built. The reason that ancient man had the resources to construct these monuments was because the climate was approximately 3 degress warmer than it is today and so life in the UK, as one example, was more bearable for a less advanced society than we have today. The living was sufficiently easy for them to be able to afford the resources to construct large monuments. Since then, despite the cooling, sea level has risen at a fairly steady rate of about 10 - 20cm per hundred years.

Did you ever wonder why Greenland, which is currently covered with ice, was called Greenland? Well, it is because the Vikings had settlements there about 1,000 years ago. At that time it was green because there was no ice and the Vikings were able to farm, grow crops and live a comfortable life.

Currently the best estimate is that the temperature has risen by about 0.6 degrees since 1850, approximately the end of the "Little Ice Age," there was a recent period of cooling in the 1960s and 1970s and we are currently recovering from that. To give some perspective to this the last ice age, which ended about 10,000 years ago melted in 50 years.

Man has made the best of the climate optimum to develop sophisticated society, has abandoned Greenland because it is no longer green and survived the end of the last ice age and took advantage of the new possibilities it opened up for us. If you think the hot air coming from politicians is going to change this, unless of course you are sucked in to taking rash action to destroy society because of fear, then you have very little grasp of the climate history of even the last 10,000 years never mind of the whole life of the earth.

There is absolutely no scientific basis for man made global warming but there is a huge amount of political pressure to convince the public that it is happening and, therefore, that they need to submit to a wide range of control policies implemented by our administration. I have posted the references to peer reviewed scientific documents which debunk all the doom stories on previous occasions and so am not going to do it all again as i am knackered and need to sleep but i am sure a search would turn them up. Man made global warming is a lie. Apart from anything else the main greenhouse gas is a thing called water vapour, clouds to you and me. You can clearly demonstrate this by going out on a cold and frosty night and looking at the stars while if you go out on a mild night at the same time of year you wil find the stars obscured by clouds which are, of course, holding the heat in. The CO2 in the air hasn't changed, but the water vapour has. The one thing that science admits that it can't model in its computer models of our climate is, wait for it, clouds. So clouds are the major greenhouse gas and yet all the models which predict doom for the planet either ignore them totally or just guess at their effect.

Geezer

Hmmm, it seems that everyone is hung up on how much warmer it is, or whether global warming exist or if we are causing it. Tha is not the discussion point!

Oh foolish me for ever thinking a SN thread could stay on topic!

Geezer

Leslie

You'd find that the dinosaurs would cause even more traffic jams!

Les

Brit_in_Japan

hedgehog, you have raised some interesting points, but I have to debunk some of them.

Global warming is a clearly observed phenomena. It is has been recorded in remote places such as Alaska, Sibera http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4141348.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/h...ing/html/1.stm, so it's not something just related to measurements taken at inner city weather stations.

There is always variation about a mean value. So a colder than average winter in Scotland is frankly insignificant when it comes to looking at the overall picture. Virtually the whole scientific community now agree that global warming is taken place. They may differ about the degree to which it's happening or the root causes, but it is happening. And they have verified the phenomena by a variety of different methods.



The concensus is that the rate of change is way beyond measurable historical prescedence. So whilst the earth has been both warmer and colder historically, fast changes to the current climate has the potential to cause huge disruption to weather patterns, rainfall and food production. The problems created by these changes should not be underestimated.

Greenland used to be green? Did you ever research why Greenland was called Greenland? Erik Thorvaldson (Erik the Red), an Icelandic guy banished from Iceland for killing 2 men spent 3 years touring around the sourthern end of Greenland. On returning to Iceland after his banishment ended he saw a business opportunity to get families to move there and start up new communities. But as no-one would want to move to a place covered by ice he gave it the name "Greenland". It was the biggest piece of marketing spin in medievil times and in c986 25 ships left Iceland to create new settlements in Greenland.

The north Atlantic drift keeps the coast free of ice. At the margins near the coast it is possible to grow a limited amount of crops and raise animals. But to suggest Greenland was "green" about 1000 years ago and abandoned because it was no longer green is a serious twisting of the facts.

To get back to the original question, good or bad?
It's an ill defined-question. Good or bad for whom and in what respect? If you want your own vineyard in the UK it's a good thing. If you are a farmer in southern Europe and your fertile soil is being turned to desert then it's bad.

Geezer

So really, it's a bad thing then. If you are saying that people in Southern Europe will have their soil turned to desert, then the hotter parts of the world will become even more so. The majority of the population of Earth lives in the hotter parts of the world, so we are talking about alot of disruption, famine etc.

Surely there is nothing good to come of this for humanity then, as a temperature rise, apart from rendering large tracts of the earth uninhabitable (or at least unable to support the huge numbers of humand they currently do) would result in a sea level rise which will effectively remove large amounts of low lying areas in the now temperate northern regions for habitation?

But from a more generalistic point of view, for the planet as a whole, I don't really see it as a bad thing at all, unless we were actually to go in to a runaway phase of heating as some of the more paranoid have suggested.

Geezer

Iain Young

Actually, I read in National Geographic a while ago that if the UK was to warm up a bit, it would likely disturb the flow of the Gulf stream. This is the only thing keeping us nice and warm with relatively mild winters. Without it, we'd likely have the same weather as Moscow / Siberia, so in fact global warming will likely cause the UK to get a good deal colder in the long run.