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Global Cooling????

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wayneL

VIVA LA LIBERTAD, CARAJO!
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I give up!! I'm keeping my overcoat, just in case.

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/08/25/globalcooling.shtml


 
Then there are the Local theories - eg the theory that Florida will fry, and at the same time England will freeze. This theory was on TV recently. Basically the warm Gulf stream is pivotal to the climates of both. After travelling north east from the tropics, it hits the northern Atlantic where due to its high salt content it sinks, then returns at a lower level to be reheated etc. They call it "the conveyor". Trouble is the salt is being diluted by melting iceberg/ polar cap etc, and when this happens the conveyor stops. They say it will take a long time for it to restart - eg a century or two. They have found evidence in boreologs in Iceland that there have been many mini-Ice Ages in that part of the world, many more than previously thought. But apparently local in extent etc. Yet another of those finely balanced subtleties of nature that Man is bound to screw up before he fully understands what he's doing.

"If I were the Mother of Nature, and my world was a breaking shell, and someone was pouring black oil on my birds, and poisoning slowly the well. And deserts were growing like wildfire, and wildfires were burning like Hell, Id be just a tiddy wee bit concerned, - and I'd probably opt to sell." Cripes I need a beer after that.
 
wayneL said:
I give up!! I'm keeping my overcoat, just in case.
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So you'll keep your overcoat for the next 50 years eh?

Now that is value investing.

Buy WDC and hold for 50 years and you could buy a few overcoat companies instead.


 
Realist said:
So you'll keep your overcoat for the next 50 years eh?

Now that is value investing.

Buy WDC and hold for 50 years and you could buy a few overcoat companies instead.


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Really? Do you think they will survive in a post consumerist economy?
 
Global cooling eh, after all we've been hearing about global warming!
I've always questioned the theory that global warming is a product of man made emissions from factories etc. Thousands of years before industry came along, the ice age was on the way out as the planet warmed up.
The most vocal scientists are always the ones who support the theory that industry is causing global warming. And because it makes good headlines that sell newspapers and news programs, the media jump on the bandwagon and report it for all it's worth.
But not all scientists agree on the causes of global warming. Recently I saw an interview with a very highly respected scientist from James Cook University in Townsville.
His view is that the amount of factory and exhaust emissions is just a drop in the ocean, so to speak, too small in the overall context of things to significantly affect the climate.
According to him, everything the climate is throwing at us.....tsunamis, droughts, floods, cyclones, record cold snaps, record heat waves, have all occurred thousands of times over the last few million years, and quite likely with greater severity that what we're seeing today.
He says that seasonal cycles are quite normal and can last much longer than most people, including many scientists, realise. For example, we could get a run of hot summers with above average temperatures for ten years or fifty or even a hundred years. Then the seasons could go in the opposite direction....twenty or fifty or maybe even a hundred years that are cooler than usual, or wetter or drier or whatever.
Given all of the above and assuming that at least some of it is correct, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that sooner or later we could see global cooling replacing global warming. The theories of those Russian scientists might be closer to the mark than we think.

Bunyip
 
Bunyip,

I remember watching a program about the Mayan or Aztec (can't remeber which) civilization. Apparently they died out well before the Spaniards arrived. The reason they reckoned was because of climate change... and this was thew 14th century (and backed it up with science).

I saw another program where Vikings used to live and FARM in Greenland. They died out because of... you guessed it climate change. Can't farm there even today.

So it seems to be a cycle thing... lot's of scientists actually think this way. The problem is you can only get funding if you are studying global warming. So if you want to mainatain funding you have to support tjhe warming scenario.
 
Wayne/Bunyip- I do not entirely discount theories on cooling as it is stue that the Earth has gone through cooling/warming stages long before the days of coal plants and V8's. But when have a look at the RATE of change of this heating, compared with say 1,000 years ago, you'll see that it is much faster now under man's influence. (I should really post a graph illustrating this but too tired..)

Wayne you say that Global Warming paranoia sells newspapers... I would argue that the number of lobby groups/governments trying to dismiss GW theories are equally stron (and infintely better financed/resourced) than the hippies trying to fight them...

Fortunately Oil looks like it'll keep running north (surely $100 isn't out of the question?) so maybe we'll seee a few more hybrids on the road in another 5 years. Alot of Wind Farms under contruction too which is a very good thing (in my view).

P.S. I know very little of the Aztecs, but I'm pretty damn sure they were around when Cortez and his boys rocked up with Horses, Muskets, and an insatiable appetite for Gold. Find it very hard to believe that it was GW that knocked them or the Mayans (of Central America off) very hard they were quite an advance bunch all of those groups, roads, agriculture etc...
But still... they couldn't match handful of whitemen and their religon
 
It's been shown that industrial air pollution is a factor in both global warming and global cooling. More particals in the air reduce the intensity of the sun, thus acting as a kind of shade cloth. This has only recently started to gain credibility since pan evaporation rates all accross the world have indicated that pan evaporation is dropping and the primary factor in pan evaporation is the intensity of the sun. Everyone is familiar with causes of global warming. There can be no doubt that humans make an impact on the climate, you can't just say that it's completly natural for these things to be happening. It's true though that the earth does have natual cycles of warming and cooling but not to the extent that wayneL is suggesting. Significant environmental changes like that leave lasting evidence, not to mention most cultures would have recorded anything like that (convienient that it was two cultures that have left nothing readable behind). If florida suddently melts or England freezes, then that's a truely significant and unusual even. In nature, changes like that occur over gradually over thousands of years (unless it's volcanic or a meteor).

Um, the Mayan's weren't around in the 14th century, and it's pretty well accepted by the people who have all the available facts that most of the Aztec cities were wiped out by disease after first contact with the spanish. For instance, the second bunch of Spanish dudes to sail down the Amazon couldn't believe that there were supposed to be all these huge cities along the banks, because by the time they got there most of them had been decimated by disease. The accounts of the first discoveries were assumed to be false for hundreds of years. But recent investigation around the areas were those cities were reported to be showed evidence of large scale agricultural civilization inhabiting those areas in about the same places as was originally reported by Spanish eye witnesses.

It's likely that Aztecs had the largest agricultural system in the world just before they got wiped out. Arial photography of the savana grass lands show distinct lines were irrigation systems used to be in place. I don't know what science could possibly be backing up claims of global warming there.

From my understanding of the situation, either there was global warming at the exact same time as everyone was also dying of disease and the Spanish just didn't bother to mention in their reports that the people were all dying of starvation, or it was not a factor here. Since you claim that they died out before the spanish arrived (which in order to be true means that there is some huge ancient Spanish conspiracy going on), I'm just going to stick with the latter conclusion in order to preserve my sanity.
 

Just looked it up.. it was the Mayans that disappeared from Guatemala around 900 AD. It wasn't GW as such, but it was climate change. The band of reliable rains had shifted north for a few decades.. long enough for them to abandon their city because of lack of water. It is only a theory, but it does seem like a good one.

Whether we are heating up or cooling, I am certainly for a reduction of pollution, which to me is a bigger problem than CO2.
 
wayneL said:
Really? Do you think they will survive in a post consumerist economy?
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No.

But I said 50 years, not 10,000 years.
 
Agreed about the rate of change issue. It does suggest human influence and in theory at least (and in the lab) the global warming (GW) argument stacks up.

That said, there is a HUGE amount of money riding on it so don't for a minute expect science to prevail. On one side is the fossil fuel industry and on the other is the green / nuclear lobby. Both are very well resourced in every way, although the green / nuclear side does seem better at public relations / media.

It is no secret in the power industry that the Kyoto Protocol would be better described as the Nuclear Protocol for the simple reason that its design effectively ensures new nuclear generation gets built. Kyoto's timeframes work very strongly against a shift to renewables with tight timelines necessitating large scale "quick fix" options of which nuclear is the only serious contender in most industrialised countries. Hardly surprising for an agreement backed by the nuclear industry from day one. The pro-GW lobby is very well resourced...

Certainly, I support reducing greenhouse gas emissions where it is reasonable to do so. You'll be hard pressed to find a stronger advocate of renewable energy than myself. But Kyoto belongs in the bin as the biggest environmental charade yet devised. Kyoyo doesn't stop rising greenhouse gas emissions which makes it pointless. In practice, it leads to an expansion of non-fossil energy in the West and the diversion of fossil fuel supplies to the likes of China. No reduction in emissions, indeed they continue to rise under Kyoto, but the facilitation of even more energy use globally (from all sources) as the West gives up a portion of fossil fuel consumption. End result - pointless as far as GW is concerned but a bonanza for the nuclear industry with a few scraps left over for renewables.

A more realistic solution IMO would be to ignore actual emissions and focus on their source. Progressively limit the % of commercial energy that is supplied by fossil fuels falling to zero around 2100. That avoids the "quick fix" rush and allows market forces to largely prevail when it comes to actual technology. Also, if avoids the sole focus on emissions and encompasses the problems of oil/gas depletion etc too (whereas a focus solely on emissions encourages the use of more gas with all that entails - essentially the same issues as oil with global supply security etc).
 

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Two more photos. You decide which ones are messing up the planet...

As far as I'm concerned, it's not those that get all the complaints about spoiling the scenery etc (hydro and wind).
 

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I don't know which 'experts' to believe anymore in the global warming debate. What I do know is that they can't even get a weather forecast for the next 12 hours right for Sydney. Not exactly a vote of confidence if the same experts are in charge of predicting what is going to happen 25+ years from now.
 

Good point.

Weather forecasters, and scientists and so called experts are much like stock analysts.

They get their forecasts right about half the time.

In other words, they are wrong half the time and should mostly be ignored.
 
Realist said:
Good point.

Weather forecasters, and scientists and so called experts are much like stock analysts.

They get their forecasts right about half the time.

In other words, they are wrong half the time and should mostly be ignored.
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Weather Forecasters get it wrong due to the "butterfly effect" (chaos theory) not due to errors in their theory. The greenhouse effect is real and the vast majority of scientists believe it to be so. The balance does not look that way because most of us read the popular press and not the original scientific papers. And the popular press loves controversy and giving a "balanced" view.

The people who push Greenhouse gas denial/HIV Denial/Holocaust Denial/Intelligent Design know this and have been successful in casting doubt on work by people who spend their lives studying the science.

I currently have a simple test. Find out what the majority of scientists believe in a subject and trust that this is what best fits the current data.

A good book about vested interests warping real science is "The Republican War on Science" by Chris Mooney
 

Surely the butterly effect will have an exponential effect on the longer term predictions as well. If they can't account for that in their theories, then that is a flaw in their theory. Real scientists don't believe. They have hypotheses and try to test them. Currently there is insufficient data, and the models are primitive and inclonclusive at best.
 




So why is weather affected by chaos theory and not climate?
 
Without a greenhouse effect, there would be no life on earth as we know it. A greenhouse effect is a good thing. Sea levels may not rise with global warming because when ice melts is contracts in size (shrinks) i.e. frozen water expands.

I have read about some theories on global cooling, and it seems possible. It had something to do with dark matter (trees) being removed from the earth's surface, reduces the earth's ability to absurb and trap heat.
 
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