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50. Sun hitting ice vs. water
51. Graph… Sun hitting Artic Ice Cap – “Rays from the
sun hit ice and <90% bounce back into space. As ice cap melts <90% on thermal
energy is absorbed by the ocean, which heats up and melts the ice even more.”
BULL CRAP! OK, I wish I had time to find the illustration online, maybe I can scavenge it from the movie. These figures are if the sun is directly overhead, an angular instance of 90% like on the equator. The drawing shows the sun’s rays hitting like it’s directly OVER the North Pole! Come on! If you ever lived in Fairbanks, you could tell me when the sun was directly overhead!! NEVER!! I have never been to Fairbanks and I can tell you that NEVER in human existence has the sun been directly overhead there. Probably the highest it gets is maybe 30%. Most of the year it’s like it’s sunrise or sunset. When the angle of the sun’s radiation is lower, the figures are drastically different! Water becomes like a mirror when the sun is close to the horizon. Here’s a little thing I found at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in case you need something more authoritative than me.
Incoming solar radiation that strikes the earth's surface is partially reflected and partially absorbed, in proportion to surface reflectivity (albedo). Darker surfaces have a lower albedo and absorb more solar energy than do lighter surfaces. The albedo of a surface is also a function of the incidence angle of solar radiation (that is, the amount of solar energy a surface absorbs will depend on the solar altitude).
Newly fallen snow has an albedo of approximately 0.90, meaning that it reflects about 90 percent of incoming radiation. In contrast, melting snow has an average albedo of 0.50, meaning that it absorbs 50 percent and reflects 50 percent of the incoming radiation. Because a darker surface absorbs more solar radiation, snow covered by dust (dirty snow) melts faster than clean snow. The albedo of sea ice varies with ice age, but when snow covered is on the order of 0.70.
Open water absorbs the most radiation of all arctic surfaces. With an albedo of about 0.08, it reflects only 8 percent of the incoming radiation. However, the variation of albedo with solar altitude is especially pronounced for the surfaces of oceans and lakes. The albedo of a water surface increases with decreasing solar altitude and approaches a mirror-like 100 percent near sunrise and sunset, or when the sun is low in the arctic sky.
Important changes in surface albedo can occur seasonally. Over land, heavy winter snow cover increases surface albedo considerably. In middle and high latitudes, significant increases in surface albedo accompany the winter formation of lake and sea ice. http://nsidc.org/arcticmet/factors/radiation.html
52. Coca-Cola Polar Bears dying because of AGW
There is a huge amount on this on the internet, I’m just giving you a taste! No bit of evidence except a few photos that were taken in the summer time, and the report of 4 drowned Polar Bears apparently out in a storm. Here are the facts from the World Wildlife Fund!
Polar bears are among the few
large carnivores that are still found in roughly their original habitat and
range, and in some places in roughly their natural numbers. Now most
populations have returned to healthy numbers, though there are large
uncertainties regarding some that are still harvested quite heavily and others
for which information is lacking. There are believed to be at least 22,000
polar bears worldwide, and about 60% of these are in
Polar bear populations can be found in northern
The general status of polar bears is currently stable, though there are
differences between the populations. Some are stable, some seem to be
increasing, and some are decreasing due to various pressures. The status of
several populations is not well documented. http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/species/about_species/species_factsheets/polar_bear/pbear_population_distribution/index.cfm
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Canadian biologist the director of
wildlife research with the Arctic government of
“Of the 13 populations of polar
bears in
Dr. Susan Crockford, Evolutionary
Biologist and Paleozoologist University of Victoria
in
“Polar bears, for example, survived several episodes of much warmer climate over the last 10,000 years than exists today,” Crockford wrote. “There is no evidence to suggest that the polar bear or its food supply is in danger of disappearing entirely with increased Arctic warming, regardless of the dire fairy-tale scenarios predicted by computer models.”
http://www.rhythmsoflife.ca/pages-added/about-author.php
Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson,
a professor from the
“We have this specimen that
confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000
years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived
one interglacial period,” Ingolfsson said. “This is
telling us that despite the on-going warming in the
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7132220.stm
Dr. Scott Armstrong of the
The study analyzed the methodology behind key polar bear population prediction and found that one of the two key reports in support of listing the bears had “extrapolated nearly 100 years into the future on the basis of only five years data - and data for these years were of doubtful validity.” http://forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/PolBears.pdf
Dr. Matthew Cronin, Biologist, a research professor at the
“We don’t know what the future ice conditions will be, as there is apparently considerable uncertainty in the sea ice models regarding the timing and extent of sea ice loss. Also, polar bear populations are generally healthy and have increased worldwide over the last few decades,” http://www.aksenateminority.com/archives/date/2007/03/29/
Naturalist Nigel Marven is a trained zoologist, botanist, and a UK wildlife documentary maker who spent three months studying and filming polar bears in Canada's arctic in 2007.
“I think climate change is happening, but as far as the polar bear disappearing is concerned, I have never been more convinced that this is just scaremongering. People are deliberately seeking out skinny bears and filming them to show they are dying out. That’s not right,” Marven said. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=500424&in_page_id=1811
Biologist Josef Reichholf, who heads the Vertebrates Department at the
National Zoological Collection in
“In warmer regions it takes far
less effort to ensure survival. How did the polar bear survive the last warm
period? … Look at the polar bear’s close relative, the brown bear. It is found
across a broad geographic region, ranging from Europe across the Near East and
North Asia, to
Polar bear expert Dennis Compayre, formerly of the conservation group Polar
Bears International, has studied the bears for almost 30 years in their
natural habitat and is working on a new
“I tell you there are as many
bears here now as there were when I was a kid,” Compayre
said. “Churchill [in
Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a
famed
“Why scare the families of the world with tales that polar bears are heading for extinction when there is good evidence that there are now twice as many of these iconic animals, most doing well in the Arctic than there were 20 years ago?” http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=1
Richard Glenn is President of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting research and local involvement in research in the Barrow area, as well as the Director of the North Slope Borough Department of Energy Management. He has worked with the North Slope Borough since 1995 on the study of Sea Ice and Polar Bear Habitat. This is a Youtube of his talk before congress. This is someone who really knows what’s going on!! He knows Polar Bears!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PddBJHE26As&feature=related
53. Average temp of earth changing
Everyone agrees that we are in a warming trend… no one is arguing otherwise! THAT’S NOT THE QUESTION! But to say that there is an “average temperature” of the earth is being ignorant of what ‘average’ means! How do you figure that out? It would have to be skewed to whoever is figuring out where to measure and how! But don’t take my word for it!
"It is impossible to talk
about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of
Earth", Bjarne Andresen, Professor of Physics at the
He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average 'global exchange rate'.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070315101129.htm
55.
Robert B. Gagosian PhD, Organic Chemistry, Columbia University, President and Director
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A marine
geochemist, has served as Chairman of the Board of Governors for the
52-institution Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education and as a
member of the Ocean Research Advisory Panel of the US National Oceanographic
Partnership Program. In 2002, he was appointed to the Science Advisory Panel of
the US Commission on Ocean Policy and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Science Advisory Board, and was elected a Fellow of the
At what threshold will the
Conveyor cease? The short answer is: We do not know. Nor have scientists
determined the relative contributions of a variety of sources that may be
adding fresh water to the
Though we have invested in, and now rely on, a global network of meteorological
stations to monitor fast-changing atmospheric conditions, at present we do not
have a system in place for monitoring slower-developing, but critical, ocean
circulation changes.
The great majority of oceanographic measurements was taken throughout the years
by research ships and ships of opportunity—especially during the Cold War era
for anti-submarine warfare purposes. Many were taken incidentally by Ocean
Weather Stations—a network of ships stationed in the ocean after World War II, whose
primary duty was to guide transoceanic airplane flights. Starting in the 1970s,
satellite technology superseded these weather ships. The demise of the OWS
network and the end of the Cold War have left oceanographers with access to far
fewer data in recent years.
Initial efforts to remedy this deficit are under way,7 but these efforts are
nascent and time is of the essence. Satellites can measure wind stress and
ocean circulation globally, but only at the ocean surface. Also recently
launched (but not nearly fully funded) is the Argo program—an international
program to seed the global ocean with an armada of some 3,000 free-floating
buoys that measure upper ocean temperature and salinity. Measuring deep ocean
currents is critical for observing Conveyor behavior, but it is more difficult.
Efforts have just begun to measure deep ocean water properties and currents at
strategic locations with long-term moored buoy arrays, but vast ocean voids
remain unmonitored.
New ocean-based instruments also offer the potential to reveal the ocean’s
essential, but poorly understood, role in the hydrological cycle—which
establishes global rainfall and snowfall patterns. Global warming affects the
hydrological cycle because a warmer atmosphere carries more water. This, in turn,
has implications for greenhouse warming, since water vapor itself is the most
abundant, and often overlooked, greenhouse gas. http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?cid=9986&pid=12455&tid=282
56. Gore traveling on public airlines and taxi
cabs
Anyone
watching the movie was shown how Gore walked the airports and traveled by
commercial carriers – that is a lie. An
ABC News article from 2007 mainly talking about Gore’s house in
Gore is not the only environmentalist associated with "An Inconvenient Truth" who has come under fire for personal habits -- and not all the criticism has come from the Right.
Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 2004, liberal writer Eric Alterman criticized producer Laurie David for her use of private Gulfstream jets. David, he wrote "reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable." New Republic writer Gregg Easterbrook followed up, computing that "one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year." http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/national_world&id=5072659
A USA Today article from December 2006…
Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.
For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)
Public records reveal that as Gore
lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two
properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in
Gore should take the advice of Dr. John Barrett, from the
Stockholm Environment Institute at the
There is a huge irony in flying halfway across the globe in a private jet, eating up fossil fuel.
The idea that you can offset the pollution you cause is just ridiculous. What these people at Live Earth have done is defined their boundaries to suit themselves, but there is no sense in which this concert is carbon neutral.
Planting trees or investing in renewable energy does not reverse the damage of releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the environment.
It is far better not to pollute in the first place. Carbon offsetting can be a removal of guilt, but it is not an effective one.
Live Earth is encouraging 'citizens of the world' to take small steps: share a car, plant a shrub, turn off a light or hang out washing rather than use a dryer.
It would be far better for these celebrities to stay at home. Holding large concerts to highlight environmental concerns and cut carbon emissions just seems ridiculous. What planet do these people live on? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=466775&in_page_id=1879
57.
Gore used information from an article in a 2004 Scientific American by Daniel Grossman. This article describes the caterpillars and the birds called “tits” that eat them. In the same article where several natural ‘sync’ problems are discussed, Grossman write this….
Visser’s research shows that the winter moth population at De Hoge Veluweis declining, but he has not collected moth numbers long enough to be sure this is not part of a natural cycle. The gap between the schedules of the caterpillars and the birds has had no demonstrable effect so far on tit numbers. The scientist says that could be because normal year-to-year fluctuations caused by various factors such as the availability of winter food are greater so far than the impact of warming. http://www.eesi.org/briefings/2004/Energy%20&%20Climate/9.15.04%20Abrupt%20CC/early%20spring%20article.pdf
Nature responds to environmental changes by adaptation. The
serious end of
The animals are migrating, breeding or developing earlier in the spring, and research has established that this goes beyond normal variation and is influenced by genetic change.
“Over the past 40 years, animal species have been extending their range toward the poles and populations have been migrating, developing or reproducing earlier,” Dr Bradshaw says. “These expansions and changes have often been attributed to ‘phenotypic plasticity’, or the ability of individuals to modify their behavior, morphology or physiology in response to altered environmental conditions.
“However, phenotypic plasticity is not the whole story. Recent studies show that over the period of recent decades, climate change has led to heritable, genetic changes in populations of animals as diverse as birds, squirrels and mosquitoes.”
Canadian red squirrels are breeding earlier in the year, allowing them to take advantage of earlier availability of the spruce cones on which they feed.
Blackcap birds in central Europe
are increasingly migrating to spend the winter in
58. Pine beetles increase due to GW
Pine Beetle infestations have moved from Canada into Colorado and Wyoming. But human caused global warming isn’t the cause as these articles explain…
Rick Cables, the U.S. Forest Service's regional supervisor described the die-off as "a huge, unprecedented event" with major social and economic implications. Cables, however, emphasized that what is occurring is in many ways a natural event, fueled in part by uniformly older lodgepole forests and the role of the beetle in thinning.
He compared the situation to having a human population made up entirely of people in their 70s and 80s, when disease begins to affect large numbers.
"Mountain pine beetles are an agent of regeneration," Cables said.
He said the die-off is a reminder for forest managers of the need to use controlled fire and other means to create a "diversity of age classes" so that "one insect or one pathogen cannot destroy an entire forest at once."
Indeed, even as the outbreak moves
into the
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jan/15/beetle-infestation-get-much-worse/
Mike
Wagner, PhD University of Wisconsin at Madison, an entomologist at the School
of Forestry, Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, estimates that bark
beetles killed 20 million ponderosa pines and 50 million piñon
pines in
"We’re seeing entire
watersheds — blocks in excess of several thousand acres — where 80 to 90
percent of the trees have been killed," says Wagner. In the Southwest, the
mountain pine beetle gets help from related species such as the Mexican pine
beetle, the roundheaded pine beetle, and several
types of ips beetle. The extent of the recent beetle
attack is "unprecedented," says Wagner, but he warns there’s no solid
evidence that the region’s warming temperatures are behind the outbreaks. The
pine forests of the Southwest are weak from years of drought; the area has been
drier than normal for eight of the past 10 years, and tree-ring scientists say
2002 was the driest single year in northern
59. Mosquitoes moving to higher altitudes
60. 30 new diseases –
Gore really stepped in this one showing once again that he absolutely doesn’t know what he’s talking about and deliberately lying to whoever wants to listen. Information for these diseases is very accessible to medical students or any who care to take a bit of time and check out. Gore says that mosquitoes can now move into higher altitudes BECAUSE of AGW????
Dr. Paul
Reiter, Professor - Institut Pasteur, Unit of
Insects and Infectious Diseases,
"Gore is completely wrong
here - malaria has been documented at an altitude 2500 m
-
Gore also says that the spread of 15 diseases are directly tied to AGW: Ebola, Arena virus, Hanta virus, SARS, multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR TB), E. coli 0157:H7, Lyme disease, legionnaire's disease, Vibrio Cholerae 0139, Nipah virus, malaria, dengue fever, leptospirosis, West Nile virus, and Avian flu.
With a little research, we find in fact that 4 of the 15 -
only Lyme, malaria, dengue and
Lyme disease is definitely NOT a
tropical disease spreading northward.
The first case was discovered in
Malaria is a disease confined to the tropics more for socioeconomic reasons than climatologic ones, and it was once prevalent in Siberia and Canada until the 1950’s, even in the US from the colonial times up to the 20th century. http://www.malaria.org/factpack.html
The Malaria Foundation lists these as the reasons for the resurgence in Malaria. Only one mentions climate change, and then it is only to introduce people that have no previous immunity…
*Drug resistance is a problem, chloroquine is an extremely safe and cheap drug, but in
Asia and an increasing area of Africa and
*Mosquitos are developing resistance to the major classes of insecticide which have been used to control the disease.
*Population and demographic changes have resulted in more people moving into densely populated areas, thereby increasing transmission.
*Human environmental changes such as road building, mining, deforestation, and new agricultural and irrigation projects have created new breeding sites.
*Migration, climatic change and the creation of new habitats have all resulted in people who have no natural immunity to the disease being exposed. This results in much higher rates of disease and death.
*In many regions, malaria control programs have deteriorated or been abandoned.
*Over the last decades control of malaria has been neglected and under-funded. Until the 1990s major agencies were wary at taking up the challenges posed by malaria because they are difficult.
*Many national health ministries need increased technical capacity and financial resources if they are to tackle infectious diseases effectively.
*Basic health services, which have been characterized by declining levels of funding, low staff morale and inadequate drug supplies, have been unable to address the challenges of effective diagnosis and prompt treatment.
*Pharmaceutical companies have spent relatively little on research.
http://www.malaria.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=130&Itemid=32
Dr. Paul
Reiter, Professor - Institut Pasteur, Unit of
Insects and Infectious Diseases,
To the Editor: The two reports
from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (1,2) cited in the letter
by Pim Martens (3) are widely regarded as "the
standard scientific reference for all concerned with climate change and its
consequences," yet the contents of these reports are often misleading. The
quoted passage does not acknowledge the devastation caused by malaria in
temperate regions. The reassurance that "existing public health resources"
would "make reemergent malaria unlikely"
ignores the nonclimatic factors that led to its
disappearance and continued absence. Moreover, although malaria/climate models
are not meant to predict future worlds, the IPCC chapter (1) on human
health--one-third of which is devoted to vector-borne disease--makes extensive
use of such models to warn of substantial "actual climate-related
increases in malaria incidence" and "highly likely" extensions
of its distribution. The chapter does include statements that the
"predictions" of such models should be viewed cautiously "until
they have been validated against historical data sets," and "malaria
is most likely to extend its spread ... in tropical countries." The past
presence of malaria in "southern
West Nile Virus is the one disease that is most often
connected to GW. But once again, the
basic science doesn't hold up. The carrier mosquito, Culex
pipiens (also responsible for transmitting St. Louis
encephalitis), is the most widely distributed mosquito in the world, found on
every continent but Antarctica, but not so much in TROPICAL climates. This
mosquito is found as far north as
In a study Climate Change and Mosquito-Borne Disease by Paul
Reiter Dengue Branch, Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases,
Global atmospheric temperatures are presently in a warming phase that began
250-300 years ago. Speculations on the potential impact of continued warming on
human health often focus on mosquito-borne diseases. Elementary models suggest
that higher global temperatures will enhance their transmission rates and
extend their geographic ranges. However, the histories of three such
diseases--malaria, yellow fever, and dengue--reveal that climate has rarely
been the principal determinant of their prevalence or range ; human activities
and their impact on local ecology have generally been much more significant. It
is therefore inappropriate to use climate-based models to predict future
prevalence. http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2001/suppl-1/141-161reiter/abstract.html
61. Coral Reef bleaching
It looks to be true that a great deal of the world’s coral reefs are being destroyed through warming sea temperatures. What still is in question is why the sea surface temperatures are warming, and if man is responsible. This is an introduction from the Australian Institute of Marine Science on the status of coral reefs where the El Niño events of 1998 show to hold the most blame…
Coral reefs of the world have continued to decline since the previous GCRMN report in 1998. Assessments to late 2000 are that 27% of the world’s reefs have been effectively lost, with the largest single cause being the massive climate-related coral bleaching event of 1998. This destroyed about 16% of the coral reefs of the world in 9 months during the largest El Niño and La Niña climate changes ever recorded. While there is a good chance that many of the 16% of damaged reefs will recover slowly, probably half of these reefs will never adequately recover. These will add to the 11% of the world’s reefs already lost due to human impacts such as sediment and nutrient pollution, over-exploitation and mining of sand and rock and development on, and ‘reclamation’ of, coral reefs.
These new assessments show that the problems are most severe in:
Wider
Southeast and
Caribbean/Atlantic Region – 22% lost due mostly to previous human stresses, hurricanes, bleaching and coral diseases.
In contrast, the extensive reefs
in the Pacific and off
62. Species loss around the world – 1,000 greater
than normal
The now deceased Julian Simon, PhD University of
Chicago, Professor Business Administration,
There is now no prima facie case for any expensive species-safeguarding policy without more extensive analysis than has been done heretofore. The existing data on the observed rates of species extinction are almost ludicrously inconsistent with the doomsters' claims of rapid disappearance, and they do not support the various extensive and expensive programs they call for.
Furthermore, recent scientific and technical advances -- especially seed banks and genetic engineering -- have diminished the importance of maintaining species in their natural habitat. But the question deserves deeper thought, and more careful and wide ranging analysis, than has been given it until now. http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Norton/NORTON03.txt
From a New York Times article written by Nicholas Wade about Bjorn Lomborg, PhD University of Copenhagen, Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen.
Given that the forests are not
doing that badly, he is skeptical of claims that the world is about to lose
half or more of its species. The often quoted figure that 40,000 species are
lost every year comes from a 1979 article by Dr. Norman Myers, an ecologist at
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which maintains the Red Book of endangered species, concluded in 1992 that the extinction figures for mammals and birds were ''very small'' and that the total extinction rate, assuming 30 million species, was probably 2,300 species a year.
Nonetheless, Dr. Lomborg says, Dr. Myers repeated his estimate in 1999 with a warning that ''we are into the opening stages of a human-caused biotic holocaust.''
Dr. Myers confirmed in an interview that the figure of 40,000 extinctions a year had come from his estimate. He said that it was an illustration used to make his argument clear and that he gave figures only ''when I am speaking to a political leader or policy maker who says that in order to sell his message, he absolutely must have some number.''
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature's estimate was too low, Dr. Myers said, because it considered a species extinct only after none of its members had been sighted for 50 years. ''All I am trying to do is to demonstrate that we are in the opening phase of a mass extinction,'' he said.
Though no longer a member of Greenpeace, Dr. Lomborg still counts himself as an environmentalist and portrays his critique as based on the outlook of a leftist. ''I'm a left-wing guy,'' he says, ''and a vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals -- you can't play the 'he's right-wing so he's wrong' argument.'' http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E3D6113CF934A3575BC0A9679C8B63&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=3
Robert
Balling,
From these two studies, we learn that increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations will cause
a) wildflowers and fescue to grow bigger and healthier,
b) beneficial butterflies to grow bigger, more quickly, with lower mortality rates, and
c) the number of rose-ruining aphids to decrease. These hard facts come from reproducible studies that have survived the peer-review process.
It’s as simple as the birds and the bees—increased CO2 will strengthen the biosphere and make the Earth a better place.
When I see a picture of the Earth from space, I do not see a fragile world with its climate system hanging on a thread. I see a global ecosystem crying out for higher levels of CO2. http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=9713
63. Larson B break up due to GW
64. Astonished scientists 30 breakup
OK, the Larson B breakup was a really big deal around the
world to scientists. While the media
immediately painted it as the result of human caused GHG, others began to study
it. It is agreed that the earth is
warming, so where there is ice, it may melt.
The problem is when the warmth is attributed to manmade greenhouse
gasses, or is it just a natural cycle that has happened before and will happen
again? We have heard that the Larson B
shelf had been around wince the last ice age, some 40,000 years. But recent scientific studies have concluded
otherwise. The Larson B broke up before
the Little Ice Age (LIA) and reformed then.
That means that the shelf was totally absent some 2,000 years ago, and
reformed around 700 years ago. Here is the abstract from the study Ice Shelf
History from Petrographic and Foraminiferal
Evidence,
A detailed record of late
Pleistocene deglaciation followed by mid-Holocene ice
shelf breakup and late Holocene re-growth is contained in continental shelf
sediments in the northern Larsen area, northeast
Dr. Wibjorn Karlen,
emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology,
66.
In the early 1990s, scientists forecast that the coral atoll of nine islands - which is only 12ft above sea level at its highest point - would vanish within decades because the sea was rising by up to 1.5in a year. However, a new study has found that sea levels have since fallen by nearly 2.5in and experts at Tuvalu's Meteorological Service in Funafuti, the islands' administrative centre, said this meant they would survive for another 100 years.
They said similar sea level falls
had been recorded in
Hilia Vavae, the Metereological
Service's director, said: "This is certainly a bit of a shock for us
because we have been experiencing the effect of rising oceans for a long
time." Although their country has been saved from imminent engulfment, not
all islanders are happy about the change in
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/global/sea_level.html
Nils-Axel Mörner is the
former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics
department at
When we were coming out of the
last ice age, huge ice sheets were melting rapidly and the sea level rose at an
average of 1 metre per century. If the
This ought to be of relevance to New Zealanders in view of the false claims by Al Gore in his film 'An Inconvenient Truth' that South Pacific islands are 'sinking' and their in habitants have had to flee to your very own country. You know there has been no such evacuation. I can assure you there have been no rises in sea levels, so you should ask yourselves how much else of what Gore says is similarly false.
There have been some problems with
erosion from recent cyclones and salt water intrusion on
What we found was that sea levels were relatively stable between 1790 and 1970, but that around 1970 there was a fall in sea levels of 20 to 30 cm, and since then the levels have remained stable.
Right now, we are at a peak of the current sunspot cycle, and so there is more risk of cooling of the earth's atmosphere than there is of any warming, let alone catastrophic warming. There is absolutely no justification for burdening people with the huge financial costs of sea level rises that cannot happen, carbon taxes or emission charges, or for placing unwarranted restrictions on the way we live our lives.
Instead, people in positions of political authority should be paying greater and more urgent attention to clear and present problems such as earthquakes, tsunamis, clean air, clean water and the elimination of diseases such as malaria and AIDs. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0708/S00012.htm
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