US investor drumbeat grows loud on global warming
US Features
By Pat Reber Apr 6, 2007, 7:30 GMT
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'A combination of factors has generated the belated US interest in clean technology. In the Mid-West, winters are getting shorter, temperatures warmer, snow storms more disastrous, and summers more drought-plagued'
Is the message about global warming finally sinking in to Americans ?? The rest of the world has known this for years
Most Americans aren't quite sure what to believe. It looks as though a lot of politics has crept into the science and they are right--it has. As for me personally, I think that we ARE experiencing a warming period. What I do NOT believe is that it has an anthropogenic origin. To me, the evidence suggests that the sun has warmed up a bit and THAT is why we are warmer now than when I was a child.
This is not the first time we have experienced a cooler-to-warmer cycle. When my grandfather was in his twenties, oranges were a reliable crop in South Texas and even New Orleans. When I was growing up, the orange growers in Texas were wiped out by freezes. Now it is becoming warm enough to grow oranges in Texas again.
Absent conclusive proof that this warming period is caused by humans, I ain't buyin' the politics.
....In Investing:
Fear
Greed
Impatience
It is true the sun has warmed up marginally over the past 2 or 3 decades - and interestingly, the effect has been masked to some extent by the amount of pollution in the atmosphere and/or additional cloud cover which prevented some of the extra radiation reaching the earth's surface. I read about this a few months back, where measurements of evaporation rates at salt pans in Australia provided the data. Unfortunately I can't now find the reference.
This means, perversely, that as we clean up the atmosphere by reducing carbon particle and similar emissions, this shielding will diminish and the rate of energy impact will increase. (One interesting subsidiary piece of information here - immediately after 9/11, when all flights were stopped for a couple of days, the reduction in particle emissions from aircraft in the upper atmosphere was sufficient to provide a measureable increase in radiation reaching the ground - after only this short period of cessation !)
However, on top of this is the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, which by the so-called greenhouse effect, reduces the amount of heat radiated back into space, which thus leads to further energy retention and consequently heating
Certainly the sun's energy reaching the earth varies over time and may well account for warming/freezing effects in the past, but the additional effect of CO2 can be measured on top of this longer term trait and is producing temperature changes over a very short time scale
Unfortunately a lot of people were misled by the 'global warming swindle' programme which claimed that the CO2 increase was a result, rather than a cause, of warming, and also which claimed that there had been a cooling effect in the 1950s - 70's just at the point when pollution was increasing. Since being broadcast in the UK (I don't know the situation elsewhere), several of the scientists featured in the programme have withdrawn their support because they were misled or misquoted by the programme makers. Furthermore, the producers themselves have admitted that some of the graphs they used were incorrect and it has also been shown that the supposed cooling in 1950+ was from wrong interpretation of data.
In conclusion we may not know precisely which effect - sun or CO2 - is having the most effect or the precise scale of each, but we do know that the increasing temperatures in the past 2 decades are far more rapid than at any time in several million years and it is a very real threat to mankind's continmuing existence. We may be lucky and the sun will suddenly decline slightly in intensity, but I wouldn't bet on it. What we can do is have some marginal influence by trying to mitigate the CO2 effect with as many measures as possible to reduce these emissions
Al: Good morning folks
staff: good moring sir
Al: great news moneys coming in for global heat control
staffer: sir, isn't this kind of misleading?
Al; How so, tommy?
Tommy: well sir, we don't actually know if these measures will have any effect, after all, it takes 50 years to establish any realizable trend.
Al: Tommy, you're new here, so let me explain:
I know this is all crap, but, sheit boy, I need a f--kin power base. I can't run again for office on the up-and-up, because that boob Bush actually beat me!
Tommy, I need an edge and god handed me this lemon to sell. It's a great deal.
Tommy, I 'll be dead when any real science can prove itself either way. By doing this, I have given the Trial Lawyers a grub stake for the nex 100 years! They'll owe me big!
Tommy: but sir, what about the emissons credits?
Al: Tom, that's the best part! We create an invisible tax.
Tom: But sir, industry will jst pass it on, like with cigarettes.
AL; Sure! But the government gets the money, and I'm a big hero!
Tom: But the pollution never stops...
Al: Sheeit no! How will we ever stay in power if the problem goes away?
Tom: oh...I think I see it now.
Al: That's it! You're getting it now, right?
'Is the message about global warming finally sinking in to Americans ?? The rest of the world has known this for years'
Go watch 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' on Google video.
I haven't seen the video you mentioned, Fred. What I noticed is that the polar caps of Mars have been shrinking for about the same length of time that we have been seeing our glaciers retreat.
We have absolutely no impact whatsoever on the climate of Mars and Mars is quite bit farther out from the sun than Earth is. Given the inverse square law, this says that we are getting quite a bit more heat here on Earth than Mars is.
Since I am already on the subject, I will elaborate on my opinion. I think for it to have any serious impact on global climate, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have to be high enough to cause other rather more acute problems for us. The lower atmosphere is rather like the water in a heated kettle. When you add heat, it becomes more active and the convection cells become more vigorous. That added vigor dumps billions of extra BTU's of heat back into space on a daily basis. Sooner or later, we'll have a cooling trend and everyone will start worry about another ice age.
We may well get another ice age. The cool periods tend to be longer than the warm periods.
To: What the rest of the world knows is BS -- If you had bothered to read my item above, you would have seen that the Great Global Warming Swindle programme has been shown as a false analysis - not, I might add, by any particular group of people opposed to the findings but by the programme makers themselves. I am sorry that you appear to be one of the people taken in by the programme, but you can now start looking at the actual situation
Hi Noharness - I accept the Mars also warming argument, and this does support the increased warming affect of the sun on both planets. I do not dispute that the sun my well responsible for some of the Earth's warming through its increased output, but I am also saying that there are other effects on top of this.
The convection argument is fine, but convection needs a medium in which to operate - so it works to move heat around within the atmosphere of Earth but cannot act as a mechanism for transfering heat from the atmosphere to a non-medium. i.e the vacuum of Space
it has been between 0 and 12 degrees here in mich.and we got all our snow back.
we have over 2 feet now.and these idiots are going to tell us there is global warming.when we normaly are in the 50's and 60.s this time of year .i think they fell on their heads .to that i say b.s. just another way to screw the american people over
Hank - if you did just the minimum of research you would find that all the predictions are that fluctuations from 'normal' patterns of weather will become wider and more marked. The snow that you are currently experiencing is an example of these predictions, so instead of calling others idiots, you have shown yourself to be an idiot by not understanding that what you are experiencing is actually clear evidence that global warming IS happening
Fred,
If convection had not been pumping heat back into space all along, we would already be baked like potatoes. I assume the heat is irradiated back into space, through the stratosphere where CO2 blocks it very little simply because the air so thin. Barring a sudden increase in density in at the stratosphere level, there is no reason that mechanism should not continue working.
What it does mean, of course, is that the troposphere must become quite a bit more active to dump the heat, and that activity is a negative feedback mechanism. I think that by the time we get enough CO2 in the atmosphere to cause that feedback mechanism to fail, we'll have other rather more acute problems.
Now, no one should construe this to mean that I think we should continue to burn coal at the rate we are burning it, or that we should be happy with current vehicle designs, we should not. Burning the quantities of hydrocarbons we do just for transport puts us at an extreme strategic disadvantage. Burning coal dumps dangerous quantities of mercury into the environment.
What worries me is that this stuff about 'global warming' is going to lead to an avalanche of unnecessary and obtrusive legislation that will give governments entirely too much control over people's lives. Governments already do too much of that.
For what it is worth, folks, I am just a few miles north of Houston, Texas and it just started snowing this morning at 1114 hours.
Noharness - basically yes - the incoming radiation from the sun is ultra violet (as in tanning danger) which isn't stopped by very much except the ozone layer (hence danger from ozone holes over antarctica/arctic caused by CFCs) or lots of dust etc as when a volcano goes off.
When this ultra violet reaches the earth's surface, some is reflected (now decreasing as ice caps get smaller and are replaced by dark, good absorbing, sea)and the remainder warms whatever it hits. Then the new radiation to consider is infra-red (as in heat). [And other heat, of course, comes from man made sources, natural fires, colcanoes etc]
This infra red tries to radiate heat back into space but is blocked to some extent by the atmosphere. The degree of this blockage is dependent on CO2 to a surprising extent (so I understand) even though CO2 is a pretty small part of the total atmosphere. The convection of heat into the upper atmosphere doesn't make that much difference since the atmosphere is relatively low density (thus heat capacity)compared with rocks and water radiating heat.
I'm only a scientist in the sense that I studied it about 50 years ago and vaguely kept up to date, but I hope this helps
I note your snow - I'm afraid I have no idea whether this is unusual, extremely unusual or what ?
so we all burn up from the heat or freeze to death from the cold.
better that way than at the hands of geo.w. bush
wake up people ...this is another bully bush scare tactic
hey pete .here's whising your family burns up in a house fire ...lol
Fred,
Here is the problem I have with the greenhouse gas theory. Heat is damnably difficult to hang onto by any means. The best you can do is to slow down its dissipation. What happened in Kuwait when all those oil wells were set on fire? The smoke shaded the ground and the temperature fell into the fifties. Without a source of heat, things cool down very rapidly despite the greenhouse gas claims.
The heat escapes at the top of the troposphere, perhaps not as quickly as it would if the atmosphere were at sea level pressure right out to its edge, but it still escapes and it escapes at a prodigious rate despite what is postulated by the greenhouse gas theory. Now, it may be leaving the troposphere as infrared or microwave or something in between, but you can bet it is leaving.
Remember the big problem aboard Apollo 13 once the fuel cells died? Loss of heat. Vacuum does NOT stop infrared or other types of radiative energy from departing the system.
Helen - frankly I am puzzled - I was exchanging factual information with another person, I am not an american nor would I want to be quite honestly. So why introduce your political ramblings. Bush will be gone in another couple of years, some other dumbo politician will doubtless be elected, and the world will continue with very liitle interest in your political events. Global warming will however be a reality. Get real and face up to the problems
Hank - thank you for the obvious intellectual effort which has gone into composing you succinct and erudite replies. (Thats irony by the way - something which I understand americans have difficulty in recognising).
When someone has to resort to personal abuse rather that facts, one can be sure they have lost the argument, so I'm glad you now agree with my earlier points)
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