Is it hot where you are?

[stuckincincy]

thousands of years ago the land that my house sits on was covered in ice . man was not around for global warming. what made the ice melt ????? just a normal change in mother earth that has been going on for millions of years . you are all getting sucked in to this bull sh-- .

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The last 10,000 or so years have been notable, in that the normal tempertaure swings have been much less.

 

A remarkable geological occurance.

[mead107]

The last 10,000  or so years have been notable, in that the normal tempertaure swings have been much less.

 

A remarkable geological occurance.

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who knows what earth was like before the ice age ????

[bills_fan]

We don't use the AC. Cooler due to being closer to the beach but still hot. Love the heat. Open windows and ceiling fan at night work wonders.

 

Oh, sailing on the ocean helps too. 

 

I enjoy the heat. Doesn't bother me. 10 below, forget it.

 

But, like you, just open windows, a ceiling fan and a nice breeze off NY Harbor is usually enough.

[IDBillzFan]

my response to CTM

blop, blop, and blop (there is a googleplex of information regarding all of this)

 

Anyways...

You really feel all of that greenhouse gases buildup and such are not affecting temperature? At all?

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I loved the link to the second article from Time magazine. The headline says "Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it" and so you read the article and get to the closing section with the title "What can we do" and you figure they're going to tell us how we need to lean more toward hybrid cars, or stop sniffing glue, or something. ANYTHING. But according to Time magazine, what can we do?

 

Apparently, blame Bush.

 

WHAT WE CAN DO

 

So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions--an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.

 

The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.

 

The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."

 

Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform-- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.

 

"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.

 

That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.

 

The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.

[cromagnum]

I read somewhere that the icecaps on mars are melting and it's related to the suns solar flares? But this was coming from a person who believes that global warming is not related to mans contribution to G-W. Is it true?

[mead107]

some day i might be able to grow palm trees in my yard . that would be cool .

[IDBillzFan]

some day i might be able to grow palm trees in my yard . that would be cool .

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Palm trees of all kinds are way cool. I have a few in my yard here. Growing up in the Northeast and seeing TV images of palm tree silhouettes in front of a blazing orange sky was just too cool. And then you see it for the first time in person and it's just a beautiful image that never gets old.

 

I should add that my first run-in with cactus and tumbleweeds was pretty cool, too. Forgive me for being so naive as a kid, but I thought tumbleweeds were strictly on Roadrunner cartoons, "Kung Fu" and "Alias Smith and Jones." The first time I found one stuck to my car grill I almost wet myself.

[Crap Throwing Monkey]

my response to CTM

blop, blop, and blop (there is a googleplex of information regarding all of this)

 

Anyways...

You really feel all of that greenhouse gases buildup and such are not affecting temperature? At all?

724355[/snapback]

 

No, that's not what I said. I said a good chunk of what's presented as "science" isn't actually science, it's either marketing or policy. And too much of it is crap. Right now, for instance, I'm looking for a list of major greenhouse gasses - aside from CO2, which everyone knows about, and methane, which some do, what are the other industrial byproducts that could be responsible? So far I've discovered two things:

 

1) the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect, by far, isn't CO2, it's water vapor. Increased gasseous H2O in the atmosphere will actually have a bigger effect than increased CO2. So how, then, have water vapor levels changed over the past 150 years? And why? (Usually, the "why" is stated as "Because CO2 is making us warmer", which would lead to another unresearched question: what is the relationship between CO2 levels and water vapor levels? There's an underlying assumption that warming due to CO2 is causing increased water vapor...when it's entirely possible that increased water vapor from surface evaporation is causing the warming, and CO2 is a minor player. CO2's role as the main contributor to warming is, in fact, untested.)

 

2) it's impossible to find an honest graph of greenhouse gas emissions and levels. Generally, they're all manipulated in some way to prove some point or another. One I just found had fossil fuel consumption and "carbon flux" plotted along the same time axis...but on two different unlabelled vertical scales. It was impossible to tell if any correllation was true and accurate, or manufactured by manipulating the data. But people always trot out "evidence" like that to prove global warming does or does not exist (Gore's book, as a matter of fact, was full of that crap.)

 

So are greenhouse gas emissions affecting climate? Yes. Exactly how, though - or even if it's a man-made or natural effect - are open to question. Hell, it could be that the increasing solar activity since the Maunder Minimum (i.e. the "Little Ice Age") is putting more water vapor into the atmosphere and warming the planet, and increased CO2 levels are conicidental (or even some sort of a byproduct of decreased glaciation and ice caps - there's a definite record between ice coverage and CO2 levels going back 400k years, but there's an untested assumption that CO2 levels caused decreased glaciation, without even considering the possibility of a mechanism by which ice cover itself might affect CO2 levels.) No one's doing the differential studies that would determine any of this...largely because the public debate is so corrupted by junk science that the scientific environment simply won't allow it. How easy do you think it is right now to get a journal paper through peer review right now that says "Gee, maybe CO2 isn't the end-all and be-all of global warming studies."

[Acantha]

I loved the link to the second article from Time magazine.

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They were all pretty entertaining. The first link tries desperately to say humans are causing global warming, while at the same time saying scientists really have no idea.

 

I didn't read the second.

 

The third isn't too bad, but I think most people won't read past the "Yes".

[Phlegm Alley]

I enjoy the heat.  Doesn't bother me.  10 below, forget it. 

 

But, like you, just open windows, a ceiling fan and a nice breeze off NY Harbor is usually enough.

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My girlfriend isn't phased by the heat at all. She actually enjoys it. I, OTOH, need an AC during heat oppressive times like these, but she gets up in the middle of the night to turn the damn thing off.

[Phlegm Alley]

What the hell is "jungle rot" ?

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Really bad swamp a$$

[erynthered]

I wish, Al Gore were President. He'd have bee able to stop Global Warming, all by himself. His plan was in the lock box, I think, damn.

[Wacka]

I live 25-30 miles inland from SF. At SF it is 70, while here it is 105. It was 103 yesterday. It is like this every July. The record highs for now are around 110-112. i've seen it get to 111 here.

[Chef Jim]

Still in all, there is just nothing about heat that is enjoyable to me

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Then move to Buffalo, I hear it's a bit chilly 10 months out of the year.

[Crap Throwing Monkey]

I didn't read the second. 

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The second was from Time Magazine.

 

And people giving a sh-- what Time Magazine thinks about global warming is part of the problem anyway.

[Zona]

Whatever happened to the flesh-eating virus?  Does anybody get that anymore?  As a fan of zombie movies, I'd like to say that was my favorite.

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Actually, a friend and co-worker of mine just passed away from that here in Phoenix about 6 weeks ago. He was 50 and healthy, got sick and died in less than a month. In ICU for 3 weeks...

 

The actual cause of death was Complications from Hepatitus, but they were treating him for and calling it Necrotizing-facitus(sic).

[IDBillzFan]

Then move to Buffalo, I hear it's a bit chilly 10 months out of the year. 

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No way, brother. I can put up with a month of heat to enjoy the other 11 months of pure tropical joy. It took a while to get used to there being no real change of seasons, to a large extent because my otherwise terrible memory is generally tied to the surrounding environment.

 

Growing up in the northeast, someone would say "Do you remember when we did this and this..." and someone else would respond to the effect of "Yeah, it was really cold and we had that snowstorm..." or "Yeah, it was October because I remember the trees..." but here the answer is "Yeah, when was that? Let's see. It was sunny, 75 degrees, everything was lush and green. That basically describes the last four years."

 

I love living here.

[stuckincincy]

No way, brother. I can put up with a month of heat to enjoy the other 11 months of pure tropical joy. It took a while to get used to there being no real change of seasons, to a large extent because my otherwise terrible memory is generally tied to the surrounding environment.

 

Growing up in the northeast, someone would say "Do you remember when we did this and this..." and someone else would respond to the effect of "Yeah, it was really cold and we had that snowstorm..." or "Yeah, it was October because I remember the trees..." but here the answer is "Yeah, when was that? Let's see. It was sunny, 75 degrees, everything was lush and green. That basically describes the last four years."

 

I love living here.

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Quite so. My oldest sister married a boy from Birmingham in 1960 and moved there, and also missed the seasonal references.

[H2o]

Today 99 with heat index of 107 in Hopewell, VA.

[inkman]

Well, inside the factory it's a chilly 92. That is bone chilling compared to the 110 we hit yesterday.