The Oakland Raiders End Zone

[Billiam]

OK, Boz, do you believe one old meterologist in conservative San Diego where he can feel good being cheered (and has no science to back up his claim), or do you pay attention to the stats in this article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/12/29/national/a071645S93.DTL&tsp=1

[Boz]

I am anxiously waiting for the results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN (see my earlier post with the link). I have this sneaky suspicion that the results will be positive. But it will be too late. You guys have won the political battle and the masses have been converted (see no WMDs in Iraq, but that's irrelevant now, right?). So now you should relax and allow the remaining 10% of ``top world scientists'' to do and publish their work. (Things are getting better already, as Jan Veizer told me in October since he and his coworkers are now able to publish their review articles in top quality journals.)

Ta-ta

Boz

[Billiam]

Boz, the guy you cite as more "evidence" that GW is a hoax is a TV WEATHERMAN! He is not doing any science, then his fans write in supporting him (the purported 90% agreement with this idiot's statement).

This was not a political battle, but a scientific one that was warped by some politicians and corporate interests. That is absolutely clear. For example, the Bush Administration has been shown to over and over again suppress real science in favor of politics, including with the issue of GW. I am sure you have read about that. So, don't give me any more facts from TV reporters or retired quack professors. BTW, it's not 90% of the world's scientists, it is not more like 98%.

And, what is your reaction to the story I linked to about hotter and hotter weather all over the world, along with more extreme weather events? It happens to fit the models and predictions of legitimate scientists. But you probably will chalk it up to more "solar flare" activity.

THose who think GW is a hoax cite the fact that the polar area itself, that is, right at the top and bottom are actually getting thicker. This is because there is more snow falling at the very ends of the earth than any time in thousands of years due to climate change. Meanwhile, the ice itself, is calving off in huge chunks, never seen before by scientists or explorers.

[Billiam]

Comparing global warming information to the disinformation the Bush perpetrated about WMD in Iraq is incredible Boz. You leave me speechless.

Well, not speechless. We are talking science and fact versus propaganda and lies. But, I got it long ago. You are like Rush Limbaugh -- good at saying stuff that sounds true but isn't and that is aimed to jerk some people's chains (like mine - if I let it) or to ring the bells for those who don't like to dig too deep and paint issue into stereotypes ("environmental wackos") or cartoonish ("a tiny fish stopped all development in the state").

[Boz]

Not so fast, Billiam. As I said earlier on the Main Board, sooner or later the truth comes out: Nature blamed for melting ice. See?! . . .

[Billiam]

More real science for you Boz:

Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

THIS STORY
Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica
Monday, Noon ET: Science: Climate Change Impact on Antarctica
Thawing Antarctica
While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years -- as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

"Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it's losing more," said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking despite land temperatures for the continent remaining essentially unchanged, except for the fast-warming peninsula.

The cause, Rignot said, may be changes in the flow of the warmer water of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that circles much of the continent. Because of changed wind patterns and less-well-understood dynamics of the submerged current, its water is coming closer to land in some sectors and melting the edges of glaciers deep underwater.

"Something must be changing the ocean to trigger such changes," said Rignot, a senior scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We believe it is related to global climate forcing."

[Island]

Tad late, but just an earload from a bod who was around the Arthur Scargill and the Miner's Union troubles in Britain a generation ago and the feud with Margaret Thatcher.

Back then unions were able to strike, with no given notice, on any whim or complaint or just to support some other union's strike. It was bloody chaos. Margaret Thatcher took the bull by the horns and beat the spirit out of the union and clapped Scargill into the locker and threw away the key (Scargill is a full blooded communist, by the way). After this strike (that lasted close to a year) the Trade Union lost a lot of its powers, and strikes without ballots or in support of another union were banned.

In short, Lady Thatcher did what she had to do to bring the British economy into the 20th century. Pretty much it''s the same kettle o' fish that Sarkozy has on his hands in France.

Island
_________________
EGO sum excrement est, solus distinctus est quam profundus is est.

[Island]

I may add though, that the local bobbies had the army backing them up, beating the living lights out of the strikers... that's one of the darkest times in recent British history...

Island
_________________
EGO sum excrement est, solus distinctus est quam profundus is est.

[Boz]

Ummm . . .Island?! . . .it sounds like another thread . . .put the bottle away . . .

Russians Brace For The Big Chill:

[Billiam]

OK, Mr. Science, keep in denial. Here's the latest:

Antarctica's massive coastal glaciers are quickly melting into the sea as the oceans around the continent grow warmer - and the pace of ice loss is speeding up. An international satellite network measuring the thickness of the glaciers as they shrink year by year has found that the glaciers have melted so rapidly during the past 10 years that the continent is losing almost as much ice as Greenland, according to researchers gathering the satellite data.

The team from Chile, England and the Netherlands is led by Eric Rignot, a radar engineer and glacier specialist at UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has watched the shrinking glaciers and gathered data for the past 15 years from Canadian, Japanese and European polar-orbiting satellites. Those satellites carry radar instruments that can measure the thickness of each glacier with remarkable accuracy, and they have now mapped more than 85 percent of the entire coastline of Antarctica, covering all the continent's major glaciers.

Unlike Greenland's coastal glaciers, where meltwater from the ice on the surface seeps down to the base of each glacier and lubricates it to speed its flow to the sea, the glaciers on Antarctica move down from the land as huge ice sheets and spread out over the ocean, where the thick glaciers are known as ice shelves. For many years, scientists have watched some of these giant ice shelves breaking apart and crashing into the sea, and now more and more of them are melting as they move out over the ocean. The cause: Antarctic waters like the Bellingshausen and Amundsen seas are warming, and as their water temperatures rise they melt the undersides of the ice sheets so the sheets become thinner and the seas intrude farther and farther inland - to melt still more of the ice, Rignot explained in a phone interview.
Although the effect of all this ice loss on global sea levels is still small - measured in a rise of only a few thousands of an inch each year so far from the melting in Antarctica - that increase has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, he estimated.
"We're concerned that the rate of glacier melting will double rapidly," Rignot said.
Ice loss is most pronounced in Antarctica's Pine Island Bay region, where three major glaciers are losing ice fast, and on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, Rignot and his colleagues reported.
Glaciers in those two regions alone lost about 212 billion tons of ice from 1996 to 2006 - an amount very similar to the total loss of ice on Greenland, Rignot and his team calculated. The east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula is where two major ice shelves - called Larsen A and Larsen B - disintegrated in 1995 and 2002. Those immense events were among the most convincing early signals that global warming is real and dangerous. The researchers calculated the increase in mass of the glaciers as snow has piled up on them, and compared those numbers with the losses due to melting into the sea. The calculations yield what Rignot and his colleagues term the "ice sheet mass balance," and the overall result is increasingly negative, they report.

"Large uncertainties remain in predicting Antarctica's future contribution to sea level rise," Rignot said. "The ice sheets are responding faster to climate change than (anyone) anticipated," he said.

[Boz]

Yeah, but that's not because of the man-made CO_2. Remember: when the temperature goes up, the CO_2 is released from the oceans and when the temperature goes down the oceans absorb CO_2. If the greenhouse effect was responsible for the warming at the surface then the troposphere should be warmer than what the satellite and the weather balloon data show. Sorry, but the facts point in different direction . . .

[Boz]

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling: Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.

[Boz]

THE IPCC: ON THE RUN AT LAST

[Joe M.]

Honestly, you can find a crazy scientist who will support any claim you want. What I take note of is the almost complete agreement in the scientific community with regard to what we're doing to our planet.

Go beyond arguing every minor point, about what's news this month or this year, and take a look at what we're doing to our oceans and on a more personal scale, what we are doing to our communities. Our oceans are an unprecedented disaster because of the shit we've dumped in them for centuries. Sea life is dying, whether it be fish or the plant life -- which, by the way, supplies 75% of the oxygen we breathe!

Whether or not global warming is the looming armageddon we think it is is besides the point. We have companies paying off our politicians so they can "develop" land, poisoning our rivers creeks and eventually the ground water with their cancer-causing chemicals. We have government "oversight" agencies run by fatcat executives and their lackies who have essentially written their own regulations for the past two decades. Did you know nearly every time you touch a sheet of paper, eat food treated with pesticides, don your dry-cleaned clothes, change your child's diapers, or any number of things, you're absorbing organochlorines that lead to such amazing things as cancer, liver damage and birth defects, among (many) other things.

The best part about all this is we are dumping this shit into our water supply, in the millions of gallons per year. The government knows about it, but of course the government is virtually run by the corporations who do the dumping. We have only begun to see the effect it has because our country is now run by people who are a.) on the corporate welfare dole, or b.) would rather stick their fucking heads in the sand than live by the very sound "better safe than sorry" credo. Thousands if not millions of people have to die, and it has to be 100% irrefutable and their politicians and loudmouth blowhards in the media have to agree before they'll say hey maybe there's something to this.

Yes, global warming is a problem but it's just the most visible symptom to this terminal disease. The past two presidencies in particular have thrown open their doors to corporations whose only motive is profit, the world be damned. They can, after all, pick up and move wherever the hell they like when the US becomes a little too warm to live.

/rant

[Boz]

Plants turn CO2 into FOOD . . .