Entire Antarctic Shelf splitting away from Continent.

[RiversideGator]

Interesting article written by a geophysicist:

Year of global cooling

By David Deming
December 19, 2007

Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.

Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

Last January, $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a devastating five-day freeze. Thousands of agricultural employees were thrown out of work. At the supermarket, citrus prices soared. In the wake of the freeze, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked President Bush to issue a disaster declaration for affected counties. A few months earlier, Mr. Schwarzenegger had enthusiastically signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a law designed to cool the climate. California Sen. Barbara Boxer continues to push for similar legislation in the U.S. Senate.

In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina's peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina's apple harvest. At Charlotte, N.C., a record low temperature of 21 degrees Fahrenheit on April 8 was the coldest ever recorded for April, breaking a record set in 1923. On June 8, Denver recorded a new low of 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Denver's temperature records extend back to 1872.

Recent weeks have seen the return of unusually cold conditions to the Northern Hemisphere. On Dec. 7, St. Cloud, Minn., set a new record low of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. On the same date, record low temperatures were also recorded in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.

Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri are just emerging from a destructive ice storm that left at least 36 people dead and a million without electric power. People worldwide are being reminded of what used to be common sense: Cold temperatures are inimical to human welfare and warm weather is beneficial. Left in the dark and cold, Oklahomans rushed out to buy electric generators powered by gasoline, not solar cells. No one seemed particularly concerned about the welfare of polar bears, penguins or walruses. Fossil fuels don't seem so awful when you're in the cold and dark.

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up.

Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

David Deming is a geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis, and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071219/COMMENTARY/10575140

[spidey]

 And, ladies and gentlemen in the other corner, we have......

GISS 2007 Temperature Analysis through November
10 December 2007

James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo

Through the first 11 months, 2007 is the second warmest year in the period of
instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS) analysis. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when
solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean has entered the cool phase of
its natural El Nino â€" La Nina cycle.

Analysis of the full year will be prepared in mid-January and presented on the GISS web
site. It is likely that 2007 will remain as the second warmest year after December data is added,
but it could slip to third in our analysis if December is unusually cold. Ranking relative to other
years is likely to vary among results of different groups that make global temperature analyses,
because of differences in data sources, methods of combining data sets, and areas included in the
averaging. A difference in recent years arises from Arctic data, as our analysis extrapolates
limited data to cover the entire Arctic, a region that is important for determining the true global
temperature change because of the large temperature anomaly there. Comparison with satellite
infrared data indicates that our estimated temperature anomalies there are not excessive.

Figure 1 shows temperature anomalies during the first 11 months of 2007 relative to
1951-1980 base period mean temperatures. The global mean temperature anomaly, about 0.6°C
(about 1°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 mean, continues the strong warming trend of the past
thirty years that has been confidently attributed to the effect of increasing human-made
greenhouse gases (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_1.pdf). The six
warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 15 warmest years in the
record have all occurred since 1988.
....

Here's the link to the rest of the article:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20071210_GISTEMP.pdf

[RiversideGator]

That apparently does not take into account the fact that we all know NASA just admitted that 1934 was the warmest year on record.  The previous rankings were in error. 
http://eteam.ncpa.org/news/nasa-backtracks-on-1998-warmest-year-claim
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=ind_focus.story&STORY=/www/story/08-14-2007/0004645546&EDATE=TUE+Aug+14+2007,+04:16+PM

Clearly, Hansen is still cooking the books over there.  He really needs to work a little harder keeping his stories straight.

[Charleston native]

River, thanks for posting that article. More evidence of the sheer lunacy religion that is "global warming".

[midnightblackrx]

Hey, we all know it's a concensus tht global warming exists.  See what the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works says about it... 

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb

[Social Conservative]

Hey, we all know it's a concensus tht global warming exists.  See what the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works says about it... 

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb

We all knew that Ohio State would roll over the "overrated" Gators in last year's championship game, Y2K was going to be the end of civilization as we knew it and Jesus Christ would return in 1988.

Boy, we sure do know a lot don't we?

[jaxnative]

January 3, 2008

More Inconvenient Truths
By Jack Ward
Despite Al Gore’s contention that the CO2 in the atmosphere is approaching dangerous levels, scientists tell us that CO2 levels have been as high as 15 times the current level of about 380 parts per million (ppm) and levels of about 5 times the current level were common.


In Al Gore’s environmental tome and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he claims that anthropogenic (human-caused) activity will cause irreversible damage to the planet. The basis of this claim is that by using carbon-based fuels (oil, gas, coal, wood) to produce energy, we will increase the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and cause global warming. According to Gore, this global warming will cause glaciers to melt, causing the oceans to rise thereby flooding all the coastal communities. Of course, the poor, minorities, women, and children will die first.

Gore erroneously assumes that current conditions on earth are the natural state. Even a cursory study of the earth would reveal that nothing related to the earth is constant. Continents move, the oceans rise and fall, glaciers advance and retreat, the magnetic poles have moved and reversed, the composition of the atmosphere has varied and the earth’s temperature has warmed and cooled. All of these events occurred without any human influence.     

The earth’s tectonic plates constantly move. The continents have moved thousands of miles. The clash of these tectonic plates has created massive mountain ranges. Earthquakes are the result of the movement of these tectonic plates. 

Fossilized kelp and fossils of ocean creatures have been found at altitudes over 5,000 feet above the current sea level. We know the kelp and sea creatures lived in the oceans so either the land was pushed up or the oceans receded. Either scenario makes the global warming doomsday predictions laughable. The sea level changes predicted by these global warming zealots are dwarfed by previous variations of sea level changes.

Ice cores have established the existence of at least 17 Ice Age Cycles in just the past 2 million years. During those Ice Ages Cycles, glaciers several thousand feet thick came as far south as the mid-U.S. Each Ice Age Cycle lasted about 100,000 years separated by an interglacial warming period of about 10,000 years. We are in an interglacial period now, so another Ice Age is a safe bet.

The north and south magnetic poles wander independently and it been theorized that the north and south magnetic poles have reversed numerous times. The last reversal occurred about 740,000 years ago. Evidence of these reversals is recorded in the magnetism of ancient rocks. The sun also reverses poles but on a more predictable cycle. The next reversal of the sun’s magnetic poles will be in 2012. The earth’s pole reversals are unpredictable and many scientists feel another magnetic pole reversal is overdue. A reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles would be far more serious than the predicted rise in the earth's temperature of 2 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years.

Despite Al Gore’s contention that the CO2 in the atmosphere is approaching dangerous levels, scientists tell us that CO2 levels have been as high as 15 times the current level of about 380 parts per million (ppm) and levels of about 5 times the current level were common. The current level of 380 ppm is like comparing the contents of an eye dropper to a swimming pool. Plants thrived at the higher CO2 levels and varying CO2 levels aren’t harmful to plants, animals, or humans.

Dr. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist from the University of Virginia, summed up these Inconvenient Truths this way. Singer said, “We have to remember that the climate has always been changing ever since we have records, and we have geologic records going back millions and millions of years. We know that there have been huge climate changes on the earth long before human beings actually came into existence.”

On December 13th, over 100 prominent international scientists released an open letter to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The letter in part states, “Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.” An analogy for this futile effort could be draining the ocean with a spoon. The Washington Post also noted that the number of global warming skeptics “appear to be expanding rather than shrinking. Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears bite the dust.”

Will Al Gore and fellow Gorons recognize these Inconvenient Truths or will they continue to perpetuate this global warming fraud?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.intellectualconservative.com

[Social Conservative]

We know the kelp and sea creatures lived in the oceans so either the land was pushed up or the oceans receded.

Or there could have been a global flood in which all of the earth's land masses were covered with water.  If this was the case I sure am glad someone had the revelation to build a giant boat and preserve the wonderful creatures we have here on earth.

Ice cores have established the existence of at least 17 Ice Age Cycles in just the past 2 million years.

Considering the earth is only about 6,000 years old I have to disagree with this "fact" and all of the other "facts" that rely on the earth being older than it is.

Other than that, I agree.

[Lunican]

How do you calculate 6,000 years?

[jaxnative]

scientists tell us that CO2 levels have been as high as 15 times the current level of about 380 parts per million (ppm) and levels of about 5 times the current level were common. The current level of 380 ppm is like comparing the contents of an eye dropper to a swimming pool. Plants thrived at the higher CO2 levels and varying CO2 levels aren’t harmful to plants, animals, or humans.

According to the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists(ACGIH), a professional society devoted to the development of administrative and technical aspects of worker protection in my particular industry, the Threshold Limit Value(TLV), which measures of toxicity of a substance and refers to , in general, the airborne concentrations at or below which nearly all workers may be repeatedly exposed without adverse effect, has set the TLV of Carbon Dioxide at 5000 ppm.

[jaxnative]

Considering the earth is only about 6,000 years old

Considering that belief, I guess there's no room for a scientific discussion of the matter.

[second_pancake]

RG - Let's see, David Deming has a PHd in geophysics and has never worked in the field.  He is quoted as saying that science has no place in a "moral crusade" (regarding global climate change), and apparantly believes men to be superior to women.  Here is his response to a student after reading her paper on gun-control laws:  "I just want to point out that Kletter's 'easy access' to a vagina enables her to 'quickly and easily' have sex with 'as many random people' as she wants. Her possession of an unregistered vagina also equips her to work as a prostitute and spread venereal diseases. Let's hope Kletter is as responsible with her equipment as most gun owners are with theirs."

JaxNative - Jack Ward is an independent columnist for conservative publications.  I would stick to a more scientific approach (as you did with the Co2 level post), or at least reference an unbiased source. 

We all knew that Ohio State would roll over the "overrated" Gators in last year's championship game, Y2K was going to be the end of civilization as we knew it and Jesus Christ would return in 1988.

Boy, we sure do know a lot don't we?

It's funny really.  From one persepctive, we seem to know anything and everything about the world we live in and we're so small in comparison to our environment that we couldn't possibly have any impact.  From another perspective, our 'intelligence' gets the better of us and we impact our surroundings so much so that we endanger our very being.

I found an interesting calculator created by a University of Maryland professor along with his students in partnership with NASA (I haven't validated the exact science of this, but it's interesting nonetheless), that allows you to calculate where man first appears on the planet on a year, week, or 24 hour clock.  Of course, this is a scientific approach to the creation of man (based on astronomy) and not the faith-based religious approach, so this may be moot for many of you to begin with.  Regardless, let's pretend that everyone here has an open mind to science. 

In a 24 hour time period, with the universe's creation occuring at 12:00 midnight, and earth's creation at 4:38pm,  man appears at 11:59:56pm, just under 24 hours from the universe being created.  By condensing the time in which our world was formed, it really makes one think about how little we actually do know.  How can we claim to be all-knowing when it comes to the power of nature, when nature has been around so much longer than we have been?  I read in some science journal (wish I could remember the name or provide a link), that if man were to dissapear today, it would only take 5 days for nature to take over, i.e. weeds overtaking concrete sidewalks/roads, animals reclaiming once noisy and populated housing subdivisions, etc.  And, that I can prove.  Just take a look at my yard.  It's like the ruins of Pompei, lol, and it's only been a week!

Here's the calculator link if you want to have some fun:  http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/times.html

[Jason]

According to the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists(ACGIH), a professional society devoted to the development of administrative and technical aspects of worker protection in my particular industry, the Threshold Limit Value(TLV), which measures of toxicity of a substance and refers to , in general, the airborne concentrations at or below which nearly all workers may be repeatedly exposed without adverse effect, has set the TLV of Carbon Dioxide at 5000 ppm.

That's a lot higher than I would have thought.  Are you aware of the side effects of extended exposure to levels that high?

[Social Conservative]

How do you calculate 6,000 years?

Based on Geneological Records in the Bible the earth is about 6,000 years old.

[downtownparks]

And you believe that?