Nature Features
Feb 3, 2008, 11:25 GMT
Global warming threatens to devastate the Mediterranean
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...we've had record cold all over the globe, record snowfalls in numerous regions and also found out Volcanism is now being studied as one possibility making glaciers in the Antarctic flow at much higher rates.
And notice, if you will, that the long litany of complaints listed in this article have little or nothing to do with 'global warming' and nearly everything to do with poor housekeeping and over-fishing.
Just for the record I will reiterate something that does not appear to sink through the thick skulls of watermelon greens. If you want to take care of the atmosphere, the very first thing you need to worry about doing is to start taking care of the water. The oceans are our only permanent carbon sink. I know that the treehuggers do not like to hear this, but it IS THE TRUTH. We will die shortly after the oceans die and that is not so terribly far off.
What 'record cold all over the globe ?'
1. There has been short term cold WEATHER (after all it is Winter) but this does not alter the trend of long-term CLIMATE warming.
2. Just how many cold records have been set ? Compare with over 1000 record high daily temperatures set in the USA in January 2008 alone. Funny how the anti-warmers only manage to see one side of the equation !
John,don't waste your breath on SP4,he is only demonstrating how stupid he is again,whenever he reads the word 'cold ' related to the weather ,he thinks climate is not changing.Apparently the word ' statistic ' wasn't taught yet in the kindergarten where he resides .As for noharness,does the fact that the article misquotes global warming as being the cause for the polution of the Mediterranean lead to conclusion that pollution or global warming are not important ?He is just being grumpy as usual.
Thanks Tonny.
Good to see Noharness has returned - I expect he has been preparing his promised apology for claiming the crashed aircraft at Heathrow was because of running out of fuel.
It was officially stated a few days ago that the engines were still running when the plane hit the ground, and as far as I know even the americans haven't managed to develop engines which run without fuel, so this is further evidence of Noharness jumping to the wrong conclusion
‘The oceans are our only permanent carbon sink. I know that the treehuggers do not like to hear this, but it IS THE TRUTH.’
Coal and fossil fuels are more permanent carbon sinks than then ocean until we started burning them on mass at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel the general theory is that it is formed from the preserved remains of prehistoric zooplankton and algae which have been settled to the sea bottom in large quantities under anoxic conditions. This is carbon that has been locked up in the under the earth in a solid form from the time of the dinosaurs.
This is has been removed from the carbon cycle for millions of years and has been released into the atmosphere and consequently it affects the way in which climate operates. You basically have had algae slowly accumulating carbon on the ocean floor, then mankind comes along collecting it up millions of years later as a concentrate. This is why it is such a good fuel source because it is very energy dense and you release it over a period of about 150 years into the air. So what you get is a situation were life has to adapt to atmosphere and ocean composition that hasn’t been seen since the Jurassic.
As mentioned the oceans represent the largest active carbon sink on Earth, The more C02 in the air and ocean means that the oceans are likely to become more acidic due to carbon dioxide forming carbonic acid which doesn’t bode well for well for corral reefs and other marine life sensitive to changes in PH.
Although generally true, the problem is that oceans are not absorbing CO2 fast enough. Since 1981, for instance, the Southern Ocean has not increased its capacity to absorb CO2, during which time atmospheric CO2 has increased 40%
Tonni, Where have you been hiding?, Gee no posts. John, Get your head out of the sand, or should I say Ice. We have been cooling since 1998. Just because the drive by media is ignoring all the record cold weather and snow doesnt mean it is not real. We are really cooling and you been duped by fake USA haters. Pretty soon with Cheney gone youll be back to terrorist attacks and you wont have to worry about bogus global warming.
OGDEN -- The snowpack in Utah's northern mountains is so heavy that state wildlife officials are taking the rare step of feeding deer.
More than 10 tons of feed have been spread over areas in Cache, Weber, Morgan and Summit counties since Saturday. A percentage of fawns die off naturally in the winter, but the snow is so deep this year that does and bucks are having a hard time getting to the foliage they need to eat.
It so happens that while we in China are mobilized to fight the worst snow disaster in memory. Snow in Bagdad,Iran, Kashmir, even Scottish ski resorts.
Rest assured, John. I will keep my word on BA038. I have bookmarked a site that should allow me to keep track of the investigation.
RE:'As mentioned the oceans represent the largest active carbon sink on Earth, The more C02 in the air and ocean means that the oceans are likely to become more acidic due to carbon dioxide forming carbonic acid which doesn’t bode well for well for coral reefs and other marine life sensitive to changes in PH.'
At about the same time that we began to industrialize, we also began inhibiting the ability of the ocean to take carbon out of the loop, starting with the decimation, perhaps near extirpation, of cetaceans. We have also polluted and otherwise destroyed littoral habitats with abandon. We are killing the ocean. Without a living ocean we WILL die. We will not bake, we will choke to death on our own breathe.
Coldest in India: January has seen 10.2 degrees Celsius twice—on January 15, 1967 and January 27, 2008. Interestingly, it's not just Santa Cruz that has sprung surprises this February. Colaba on Monday dropped to a cool 13.4 degrees Celsius.
Colaba's average in February is 20 degrees Celsius. In the last decade, the lowest that Colaba's temperature has dropped has been 15.3 degrees on February 22, 2005.
The China Meteorological Administration said the weather was the coldest in 100 years in central Hubei and Hunan provinces, going by the total number of consecutive days of average temperature less than 1 degree Celsius (33.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
Meanwhile, over 1000 record high daily temperatures were set throughout the USA during January 2008.
As predicted for advancing global warming, the extremes - hot and cold - of weather are getting larger
And todays forecast for part of the US -
'Providing the fuel for the severe thunderstorm threat will be UNUSUALLY WARM, moist air ahead of the cold front. Record highs will likely be reached across the Mid-Atlantic before the cold front sweeps through in the evening hours'.
If any anti-warmers want to try and link weather to climate, why pick a cold event - why not pick this hot event and claim global warming IS happening ?
Oh, I forgot, when limited to making political statements about global warming you have to ignore facts
Why publish studies to change and adjust to current weather to somehow prove global warming caused by man is real?...IE Hurricanes. Why only focus on droughts while many places are at 150% of snowfall already?Why no reports on snow in iran ,india, 100 year cold and snow in china?...Why are heat events and drought warming but cold and snow is not cooling just weather?...Why did Glaciers grow during the last warming phase but not this one?
There was some coverage of the chaos caused in central and southern China by their heaviest snowfalls for decades - but little attention was paid to the snow that last week carpeted Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman, none of them exactly used to Dickensian Christmas card weather.
Similarly, Saudis last month expressed amazement at their heaviest snow for many years, in Afghanistan snow and freezing weather killed 120 people and large parts of the United States and Canada have been swept by unusually fierce blizzards.
The biologist who took this picture says this pair were within easy swimming distance of the Alaskan coast
If the northern hemisphere's chilliest winter in a long time was bad news for the propagandists of global warming, they also had to face serious questions about some of the most iconic images used to support the claims that the world is hotting up towards disaster.
Last autumn the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic ice was melting so fast there would soon be none left.
Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois.
This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km.
A second graph, 'Global Ice Area', shows a similar pattern repeated every year since satellite records began in 1979; while a third, 'Southern Hemisphere Ice', shows that sea ice has actually expanded in recent years, well above its 30-year mean.
Still more inconvenient was the truth about an image that has been relentlessly exploited to promote this panic over the 'vanishing' Arctic ice. It is the photograph of two polar bears standing forlornly on the fast-melting remains of an iceberg which has been reproduced thousands of times to show that there will soon be no bears left (ignoring evidence that their numbers have risen recently).
Now, thanks to a Canadian journalist, Carole Williams the story behind this picture, which was taken in 2004 just off Alaska by a marine biologist, Amanda Byrd. As Ms Byrd is happy to point out, the bears were in no danger so close to the coast (they can swim 100 miles). She wanted a photograph more of the 'wind-sculpted ice' than of the bears.
The image was copied by another member of the crew and passed on to Environment Canada. Then it was eagerly adopted by the warmist propaganda machine - above all by Al Gore, who used it to powerful effect as an emotive backdrop to his highly lucrative lectures.
'Their habitat is melting,' he likes to declaim, 'beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet.'
As the old joke has it, it seems those famous bears were not drowning after all, they were just waving. But the BBC is no more likely to tell us that than it was to lead the news
Madison,WI If it pans out as predicted, the near-blizzard will push the seasonal snowfall total for Madison,WI into the top 10 for that city, exceeding the 66.2 inches recorded in 1922-'23.
Ottawa,CA It was another day of hard winter labour for Ottawans yesterday, as they shovelled their way out of the heaviest Feb. 1 snowfall on record.
When the snow stopped swirling at 3 a.m yesterday, 31 centimetres had fallen on the capital, with enough -- 27 centimetres -- piling up before midnight to best the previous record of 18.5 centimetres, which was set in 1951.
Vail,CO NEWS: Vail had another record month for snowfall in January — hey, where do they put all that white stuff?
Prospect,OR
All those storms have brought abundant snow all over the Southern Oregon Cascades and Siskiyous. The snow depth at the Siskiyou Summit (elevation 4,600 feet) on Jan. 31 was 65 inches, more than three times the average depth of 19 inches for the end of January, and the most ever measured at that site since record-keeping began in 1935. The water content of the snow (18.4 inches) also set a record: It was 347 percent of the end-of-January average.
Two other sites within a mile of the Mount Ashland summit had about 160 percent of average snow depth for the end of January and 140 percent of average water content, said Steve Johnson of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.
Johnson worked in blizzard conditions Thursday to measure the snow.
'It was quite a day, with snow falling at two inches per hour,' Johnson said. 'The road was like coming west in 1840.'
As of Friday, Crater Lake National Park had received a total of 348 inches of snow since October, 65 inches more than the average, and 127 inches of snow were on the ground at park headquarters.
On Sunday, the Rogue and Umpqua basins had a combined average snow water content of 152 percent of normal, and every basin in Oregon had at least 100 percent of average snow water content.
By Sunday morning, the Mount Ashland ski area had received more than 240 inches of snow for the winter, 80 percent of its annual average of about 300 inches, and there are 10 weeks of skiing still to come.
Global warming means that we have a more active atmosphere and that means more storms. If these storms arrive in winter that means more snow.
The UK and possibly Europe as well is having the mildest winter that I can remember. If it is extra cold in one place it is highly likely that it will be hotter somewhere else, it all depends on how the wind blows.
The most significant thing about global warming is that the Oceans are warming. This causes more evaporation which is causing more rain, more snow and disrupting weather patterns that are incidently causing more deserts as well.
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