climate change and how the left has been misleading public

[Super Nova]

Super Nova, Me thinks you are doing a heap of surmising... Where did you get your facts from????????

neutered (great handle) I got my information from watching a special on the discovery channel and around the web.

An extract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2 ... tion_event

The Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event, informally known as the Great Dying was an extinction event that occurred 251.4 million years ago,forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods. It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct; it is the only known mass extinction of insects. Fifty-seven percent of all families and 83% of all genera were killed. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after other extinction events.This event has been described as the "mother of all mass extinctions"

Researchers have variously suggested that there were from one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.There are several proposed mechanisms for the extinctions; the earlier phase was likely due to gradual environmental change, while the latter phase has been argued to be due to a catastrophic event. Suggested mechanisms for the latter include large or multiple bolide impact events, increased volcanism, and sudden release of methane clathrate from the sea floor; gradual changes include sea-level change, anoxia, increasing aridity, and a shift in ocean circulation driven by climate change.

Causes;

Volcanism

The world around the time of the P-Tr extinction. The Siberian Traps eruptions occurred on the eastern shore of the shallow sea (paler blue) at the north of the map. The earlier Emeishan eruptions occurred on the north edge of the almost enclosed shallow sea just north of the equator - at this time the blocks that currently form China and South-East Asia were just emerging.The final stages of the Permian saw two flood basalt events. A small one, Emeishan Traps in China, occurred at the same time as the end-Guadalupian extinction pulse, in an area which was close to the equator at the time.[88][89] The flood basalt eruptions which produced the Siberian Traps constituted one of the largest known volcanic events on Earth and covered over

Methane hydrate gasification
Scientists have found worldwide evidence of a swift decrease of about 10 ‰ (parts per thousand) in the 13C/12C isotope ratio in carbonate rocks from the end-Permian (δ13Ccarbonate of -10 ‰).[43][95] This is the first, largest and most rapid of a series of negative and positive excursions (decreases and increases in 13C/12C ratio) that continues until the isotope ratio abruptly stabilises in the middle Triassic, followed soon afterwards by the recovery of calcifying life forms (organisms that use calcium carbonate to build hard parts such as shells

However, only one sufficiently powerful cause has been proposed for the global 10 ‰ reduction in the 13C/12C ratio: the release of methane from methane clathrates;[7] and carbon-cycle models confirm that it would have been sufficient to produce the observed reduction.[96][99] Methane clathrates, also known as methane hydrates, consist of methane molecules trapped in cages of water molecules. The methane is produced by methanogens (microscopic single-celled organisms) and has a 13C/12C ratio about 60 ‰ below normal (δ13C -60 ‰). At the right combination of pressure and temperature it gets trapped in clathrates fairly close to the surface of permafrost and in much larger quantities at continental margins (continental shelves and the deeper seabed close to them). Oceanic methane hydrates are usually found buried in sediments where the seawater is at least 300 meters (984 ft) deep. They can be found up to about 2,000 meters (6,562 ft) below the sea floor, but usually only about 1,100 meters (3,609 ft) below the sea floor.[100]

The area covered by lava from the Siberian Traps eruptions is about twice as large as was originally thought, and most of the additional area was shallow sea at the time. It is very likely that the seabed contained methane hydrate deposits and that the lava caused the deposits to dissociate, releasing vast quantities of methane.[101]

One would expect a vast release of methane to cause significant global warming, since methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. A "methane burp" could have released 10,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent - twice as much as in all the fossil fuels on Earth.[36] There is strong evidence that global temperatures increased by about 6 °C (10.8 °F) near the equator and therefore by more at higher latitudes: a sharp decrease in oxygen isotope ratios (18O/16O);[102] the extinction of Glossopteris flora (Glossopteris and plants which grew in the same areas), which needed a cold climate, and its replacement by floras typical of lower paleolatitudes

For balance they state

However, the pattern of isotope shifts expected to result from a massive release of methane do not match the patterns seen throughout the early Triassic. Not only would a methane cause require the release of five times as much methane as postulated for the PETM,[11] but it would also have to be re-buried at an unrealistically high rate to account for the rapid increases in the 13C/12C ratio (episodes of high positive δ13C) throughout the early Triassic, before being released again several times.[11]

Combination of causes
The possible causes which are supported by strong evidence (see above) appear to describe a sequence of catastrophes, each one worse than the previous: the Siberian Traps eruptions were bad enough in their own right, but because they occurred near coal beds and the continental shelf, they also triggered very large releases of carbon dioxide and methane.[54] The resultant global warming may have caused perhaps the most severe anoxic event in the oceans' history: according to this theory, the oceans became so anoxic that anaerobic sulfur-reducing organisms dominated the chemistry of the oceans and caused massive emissions of toxic hydrogen sulfide.[54]

[Super Nova]

A more recent finding found because they were testing for oil spill impacts at http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/drudg ... nts-photos

Preliminary results show concentrations at some points to be a million times higher than normal, researcher says John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University, is currently analyzing methane levels in water collected from seven miles to 500 meters from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead. …

“Methane levels ranged from 10,000 to nearly 1 million times higher in some spots than normal concentration,” Kessler said.

The 10-day cruise, which was funded by a National Science Foundation Rapid Response grant, returned June 21 with nearly 1 million data points gathered. Since that time, he and his colleagues have been analyzing the results in the shore-based lab at Texas A&M.

Ramifications are multifold, Kessler said… Naturally occurring methane seeps have been linked to rapid climate change. For instance, an event occurring 55 million years ago may have caused one of these spikes, scientists believe

When we force the temperature up to the trigger point we will unleash a run away greenhouse. Time to buy that airconditioner you have been holding off on buying.

[HIGHERBEAM]

http://www.thecommentfactory.com/media- ... dals-2715/

[HIGHERBEAM]

NOAA 5 years ago decided that it would be a good idea to monitor our oceans temperatures since the Climate Warming Modelers all predicted that our oceans would show significant warming trends even higher then land air temperatures. In order to monitor the oceans temperature, NOAA launched 3000 robots in the oceans which would monitor the oceans temperature on a continuous basis and send the information back to NOAA scientists.

Here's the link to location of those robots. http://sos.noaa.gov/videos/Buoywaterfall2.mov

So whats the outcome of this 5 year study....Ocean temperatures over the past 5 years have actually slightly decreased. That means no global warming. That means the main indicator of global warming that the IPCC has been so worried about has shown zero change in ocean temperatures.

But again when ever any information or scientific paper surfaces to contradict the myth of Global warming, the global warming alarmists squirm and actually try to find reasons why the reality does not match their predisposition to believe all things in their own flawed science.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=88520025

One can't help but smile as these two scientists squirm in this NPR interview. Notice how they talk about how much there is to learn about our climate. Do you ever hear these same scientists parse thier words when it comes to talk about how the climate is

[HIGHERBEAM]

208 YEAR SOLAR CYCLE

HERE'S A TID-BIT THAT THE IPCC FORGOT TO MENTION. IN THE EARLY PART OF THE 8TH CENTURY THE MAYA OF THE YUCATAN PENINSULA WERE AT THERE PEAK, A CIVILIZATION ESTIMATED AT 15 MILLION, THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED, THE CIVILIZATION COLLAPSED ALMOST OVERNIGHT. A PROLONGED DROUGHT DECIMATED THE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY AND CAUSED IT'S TOTAL COLLAPSE. THIS CHANGE IN RAIN PATTERNS HAS BEEN FOUND IN THE SEDIMENTATION RECORD ALL OVER THE WORLD. IT'S A WELL DOCUMENTED 208 YEAR SOLAR CYCLE. NOW DO A LITTLE MATH 925AD PLUS 5 CYCLES AT 208 YEARS AND WHAT DO YOU GET; ABOUT THE START OF OUR CURRENT GLOBAL WEATHER PATTERN CHANGES. FUNNY HOW THE IPCC WANTS TO DISCOUNT SOLAR FORCING ON CLIMATE CHANGE.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... /5520/1367
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ght_2.html

[HIGHERBEAM]

Solar irradiance
Variations in solar irradiance are widely believed to explain climatic change on 20,000- to 100,000-year time-scales in accordance with the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, but there is no conclusive evidence that variable irradiance can be the cause of abrupt fluctuations in climate on time-scales as short as 1,000 years. We propose that such abrupt millennial changes, seen in ice and sedimentary core records, were produced in part by well characterized, almost periodic variations in the strength of the global oceanic tide-raising forces caused by resonances in the periodic motions of the earth and moon. A well defined 1,800-year tidal cycle is associated with gradually shifting lunar declination from one episode of maximum tidal forcing on the centennial time-scale to the next. An amplitude modulation of this cycle occurs with an average period of about 5,000 years, associated with gradually shifting separation-intervals between perihelion and syzygy at maxima of the 1,800-year cycle. We propose that strong tidal forcing causes cooling at the sea surface by increasing vertical mixing in the oceans. On the millennial time-scale, this tidal hypothesis is supported by findings, from sedimentary records of ice-rafting debris, that ocean waters cooled close to the times predicted for strong tidal forcing.

[TomB]

I blame fridges, there are millions of new fridges in the world every year and everyone of them is collecting coldness and keeping it inside. Common sense says that this has to make it hotter outside of fridges.

[HIGHERBEAM]

Are Himalayan glaciers beating a rapid retreat in the face of global warming? That would seem to be the case, according to a flurry of recent reports by BBC and other mass media. But the picture is more complex—and poses scientific puzzles, according to a review of satellite and ground measurements released by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests earlier this week.

The report, by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, seeks to correct a widely held misimpression based on measurements of a handful of glaciers: that India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. That’s not so, Raina says. Even if it were, other researchers argue that severe loss of ice mass would not entail drastic water shortages in the Indian heartland, as some fear. Both concerns were cited in the Asia chapter of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) 2007 Working Group II report, which asserted that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

Some glaciologists hew to IPCC’s view, disputing Raina’s conclusions. Any suggestion that the retreat of Himalayan glaciers has slowed is “unscientific,” charges Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a senior fellow at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. He says the Indian government has an “ostrichlike attitude in the face of impending apocalypse.”

However, India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, told Science, “We don’t need to write the epitaph for the glaciers, but we need a concentrated scientific and policy focus on the Himalayan ecosystem since the truth is incredibly complex.” India, he says, needs to measure and monitor Himalayan glaciers as a matter of national security.

With ice and snowfields covering more than 30,000 square kilometers, the Himalayas are often called the “third pole.” Records that began in the 19th century show that most glaciers advanced through that century as the Little Ice Age that gripped the Northern Hemisphere tapered off. Glaciers began to retreat in the early 20th century. Since 1960, almost a fifth of the Indian Himalayas’ ice coverage has disappeared, says Anil V. Kulkarni of the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, who has mapped more than 1000 glaciers using satellite data.

Raina’s report, Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change, concurs with that assessment. But it questions a link to global warming. Findings in the past few years, it states, demonstrate that “many” Himalayan glaciers are stable or have advanced and that the rate of retreat for “many others” has slowed. The report does not enumerate glaciers in either category.

The Raina report draws on published studies and unpublished findings from half a dozen Indian groups who have analyzed remote-sensing satellite data or conducted arduous surveys at remote sites often higher than 5000 meters. The report revises perceptions of a number of glaciers, including two iconic ones. For example, the 30-kilometer-long Gangotri glacier, source of the Ganges River, retreated an average of 22 meters a year and shed a total of 5% of its length from 1934 to 2003. But in 2004 and 2005, the retreat slowed to about 12 meters a year, and since September 2007 Gangotri has been “practically at a standstill,” according to Raina’s report, which cites, among other observations, field measurements by ecologist Kireet Kumar of the G. B. Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development in Almora. Even more stable is Siachin glacier in Kashmir, where Indian and Pakistani forces are stationed eyeball to eyeball at 6000 meters. Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Raina, whose report notes that the glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.”

Several Western experts who have conducted studies in the region agree with Raina’s nuanced analysis—even if it clashes with IPCC’s take on the Himalayas. The “extremely provocative” findings “are consistent with what I have learned independently,” says Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Many glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains, which straddle India and Pakistan, have “stabilized or undergone an aggressive advance,” he says, citing new evidence gathered by a team led by Michael Bishop, a mountain geomorphologist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, who just returned from an expedition to mountain K2, says he observed five glacier advances and a single retreat in the Karakoram. Such evidence “challenges the view that the upper Indus glaciers are ‘disappearing’ quickly and will be gone in 30 years,” Hewitt says. “There is no evidence to support this view and, indeed, rates of retreat have been less in the past 30 years than the previous 60 years,” he says.

Why are many Himalayan glaciers bucking the trend of rapid retreat seen in the Alps, for example, or at Mount Kilimanjaro as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week? “Glaciers at lower elevations are going to respond faster to a warming climate than those at the highest elevations,” says Richard Armstrong, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Snowfall patterns are more important to Himalayan glacier stability than temperatures, adds Rajinder Kumar Ganjoo, a glaciologist at the University of Jammu in India. “If rising temperatures were the real cause for the retreat, then all ice masses across the Himalayas should be wasting away uniformly,” he says. “At issue in scientific circles,” Kargel notes, “is how lengthy the response time is, and how it varies among glaciers.”

The bottom line is that IPCC’s Himalaya assessment got it “horribly wrong,” asserts John “Jack” Shroder, a Himalayan glacier specialist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. “They were too quick to jump to conclusions on too little data.” IPCC also erred in its forecast of the impact of glacier melting on water supply, claims Donald Alford, a Montana-based hydrologist who recently completed a water study for the World Bank. “Our data indicate the Ganges results primarily from monsoon rainfall, and until the monsoon fails completely, there will be a Ganges river, very similar to the present river.” Glacier melt contributes 3% to 4% of the Ganges’s annual flow, says Kireet Kumar.

Atmospheric scientist Murari Lal, chair of the Climate, Energy and Sustainable Development Analysis Centre in New Delhi and coordinating lead author of the 2007 IPCC report’s Asia chapter, rejects the notion that IPCC was off the mark on Himalayan glaciers. But he acknowledges that the report’s 10-author team relied on unpublished work when assessing the status of the glaciers. India’s U.N. delegation had objected to the wording, Lal recalls, but in the IPCC plenary session the analysis got wide support.

Raina’s report is by no means the last word. The surprising stability of some glaciers may be a temporary phenomenon, says Hewitt: Melting may have been reduced by a change in summer weather, such as increased cloudiness, and possibly unusually heavy snowfall, he says. “There needs to be a lot of research on [Asia's] mountain glaciers,” adds glaciologist Lonnie G. Thompson of Ohio State University, Columbus. “Truly, we know less about them than any other place on Earth.” Both sides of the debate agree on one point: Forecasts hold little water, so only a robust observation campaign will reveal whether the third pole’s resistance to climate change is durable—or ephemeral.

[Super Nova]

[urlhttp://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/sign ... 126yq.html][/url]

''I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic,'' wrote Michael Hanlon. (One commentator describes him as Britain's most influential sceptic.) ''But my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic . . .

''I still believe climate change has probably been exaggerated, but after coming here it is impossible to maintain that nothing is going on.'' It's doubt, but not as we know it.

The more I look the scarier it gets.

As veteran British climate writer Fred Pearce observes, sceptics have a valid point when they say that climate predictions are far less certain than is often claimed. But ''those sceptics are dreadfully wrong to take comfort in this . . . There is chaos out there, and we should be afraid.''

It is time to face our fears and do something.

[Outlaw Yogi]

Heretic I am impressed that you understood the subject matter let alone post,well done.

Understand the subject matter?
Well considering I've been very aware of the GHG problem for over 20 years and at least 10 years before the general public regarded the issue as a genuine concern and was a delegate to Qld Greens State Council from 2003 to 2008, not to mention alot of bloody research into factors and possibilities nobody else seems to think relevant, I should hope so.

For example, a few years back someone at a former PA incarnation posed the question "How could CO2 possibly have an affect on weather conditions?"
I replied "Consider the absorbent properties of carbon, like charcoal for example. Now isn't it likely that all that airbourne carbon would make clouds more absorbent? and so rather than reacting with land formations (eg mountain ranges ect) the clouds hold onto and keep collecting more moisture untill the weight factor becomes critical and then lets it go in a deluge.

What I forgot to mention was ocean temperatures. Apparently Pakistanis are currently learning about warmer ocean temperatures the hard way.