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I've changed my opinion on global warming since reading the most recent reports. I've gone from humans preventing it, to learning to adapt to the inevitable.

" The truth about global warming is that we cannot stop it. I'm fully persuaded by the evidence that climate change is real and serious. Of the 12 hottest years on record, 11 have occurred since 1995. Temperatures have risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius over the past century. (If that seems small, keep in mind that the difference in temperature between the ice age and now is about 5 degrees C.) And human activity appears to be one important cause. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has risen dramatically since the industrial revolution. Methane has doubled and carbon-dioxide levels are up 30 percent since 1750. The projections going forward are highly plausible scientific estimations. The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2100, temperatures will have risen by somewhere between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees, and as a result, sea levels will rise by 18 to 59 centimeters. The trouble is, if you accept all these facts and theories about global warming, it is difficult to see how any human response launched today can avert it.

The gases that are warming the Earth have built up over hundreds of years. They do not disappear or dissipate easily. Even if the world adopted the most far-reaching plans to combat climate change, most scientists agree that the concentration of greenhouse gases will continue to rise for the next few decades. In other words, global warming is already baked into Earth's future.

Scientists estimate that simply to keep greenhouse gases at their current levels, we would need to slash carbon-dioxide emissions by 60 percent. Given current and foreseeable technology, that would require cutting back on industrial activity across the globe on a scale that would make the Great Depression look very small. In fact, the future will almost certainly involve substantially greater emissions of CO2. Most studies predict that the world will double its consumption of energy by 2050. Since much of that growth in consumption will take place in China and India, it will involve the burning of fossil fuels.

Between them, these two countries are currently building 650 coal-fired power plants. The combined CO2 emissions of these new plants is five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords?that is, if the Kyoto targets were being adhered to by Western countries, which they are not. Even under the most optimistic scenarios the industrialized world will continue to burn substantial amounts of coal and oil."

Transtar60 wrote:

OK Cool! I'll be 144 years old in 2100, I'll bet "I" don't need to be to concerned! LOL I wonder how many brake kits I'll have sold by then! BOSEG

Jim

8 for the low tonight.. 56 on Tuesday --Shiva--

Quite true John. Climate change can affect weather patterns in different ways in different locales. This just in...

Analysis: Al Gore Ducks Northeast Blizzard Phil Brennan Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007

As a blizzard of snow and ice pummels the Northeast after trouncing the Midwest, and waves of Arctic cold fronts drop much of America below sub freezing weather, the $64,000 question is, Where is Al Gore?

Gore claims that global warming is an immediate problem facing the United States and the world, and places like New York and Chicago could feel like Caribbean haunts.

If there is any doubt that God has a sense of humor, it has to be dispelled by a headline in Wednesday's Drudge Report: "House hearing on 'warming of the planet' canceled after ice storm."

He followed up with this: "Save it for a sunny day: Maryville Univ. in St. Louis area canceling screening of Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' because of a snowstorm."

What must have evoked the loudest laugh in heaven is the notion that if global warming is really occurring, puny mankind is going to overcome it by legislation and business regulation that would strangle the U.S. economy and be overseen by the super efficient United Nations.

In a NewsMax.com column, I made a prediction that was greeted with scorn by the promoters of the global warming theory. One even called me "evil."

Here's what I wrote: "Within the next 24 months, some areas of the U.S. will have 20 feet of snow falling in just one storm." This was around the time parts of Japan got hit by a 13-foot snowfall.

Last month Colorado had about 20 feet of snow fall in little more than a week's time. Now areas of northern New York State are reeling under more than 12 feet of snow.

Picture a person 6 feet tall with 6 feet of snow above the top of his head, and you'll get an idea of what a dozen feet of snow amounts to.

My prediction was based on a very simple fact. Over the past two years, areas of the United States, including New England, had twice experienced rainfall of 20 inches in a single storm.

If 20 inches of precipitation fell as snow, it would total 20 feet. And there are solid reasons why an area that got hit with 20 inches of rain in the summer and fall would be a prime candidate to experience 20 feet of snow in the winter, especially if levels of precipitation are rising.

And precipitation levels are rising - for a very good reason. The world's oceans are being heated by underwater tectonic activity - underwater volcanic eruptions and blisteringly hot magma seeping up from cracks in the sea floor. The heated ocean water creates high levels of CO2 that it sends aloft along with huge amounts of moisture. That moisture becomes precipitation - rain in the spring, summer, and fall, and snow in the winter. Increased amounts of moisture in the upper atmosphere equals increased amounts of precipitation. The hotter the oceans, the more water vapor sent heavenward and the heavier the precipitation. This explains the large number of record-breaking rainfalls we've been seeing in the past couple of years - with as noted above, areas of the United States getting 20 inches of rain in a day or so.

As for that dreaded greenhouse gas, CO2, atmospheric levels of which now exceed 400 parts per million (ppm), it is important to note that paleological records show that every time CO2 levels have exceeded 300 ppm there has been an ice age. Every time - without exception.

The same records show that there have been a series of ice ages over the past 5 million years, naturally occurring every 100,000 years, with about

90,000 years of glaciation followed by about 12,000 years of interglacial climate.

The last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago. Clearly we are in line for the next period of glaciation. But more about that later.

Suffice it to say that unless Al Gore has managed to repeal a demonstrated law of nature, the iceman cometh.

The befuddled Gore keeps blathering about how the oceans are being heated by global warming, instead of the warming being created by the oceans, as the facts clearly show.

On his Web site iceagenow.com, Robert W. Felix provides the following information about ocean warming as a result of hydrothermic activity under the seas.

"A new type of volcano may be heating up the floor of the western Pacific Ocean," says an article posted on National Geographic News and on Yahoo. "Scientists suspect the new volcanoes occur at cracks in tectonic plates caused by stress as the plates slide past each other. A group of small volcanoes called petit spot volcanoes has been discovered far from the tectonic-plate boundaries (like mid-oceanic ridges) that often spawn volcanoes, earthquakes, and other geologic activity.

"Geoscientist Naoto Hirano's team believes that the source of these volcanoes is melted rock from the upper mantle, which has been squeezed through cracks in the tectonic plate above. This type of [activity produces] tiny volcanoes, possibly now active, on the old, cold subducting Pacific plate,' said Hirano from his office at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. 'This petit spot volcano theory suggests that this type of eruption can occur wherever the oceanic plate is flexed. These small volcanoes may be widespread on ocean floors where the mantle just under the crust is squeezed out by tectonic forces when one plate moves under another, the researchers explained.

"'Dubbed "petit spots," these new types of volcanoes are difficult to spot using satellite technology. Specific geophysical and sampling expeditions would have to be carried out in order to locate them,' Hirano explained."

Scientists working in the southern Atlantic Ocean have found a 407 degree centigrade hydrothermal vent, the hottest yet known on an ocean floor. Expedition leader Andrea Koschinsky of International University in Bremen, Germany, and her team found the hydrothermal vent just south of the equator on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a depth of 2,990 meters. The vent is located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the African and South American continental plates are moving apart at the relatively sedate rate of 3.2 centimeter a year. In the Pacific, by comparison, the Pacific and Nazca plates are speeding apart at some 15 centimeter per year.

German-American researchers discovered more hydrothermal activity at the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean than anyone ever imagined. The Gakkel ridge is a gigantic volcanic mountain chain stretching beneath the Arctic Ocean. With its deep valleys 5,500 meters beneath the sea surface and its 5,000 meter- high summits, Gakkel ridge is far mightier than the Alps. Two research icebreakers, the USCGC Healy from the United States and the German PFS Polarstern, joined forces in the international expedition AMORE (Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge Expedition). In attendance were scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and other international institutions.

The scientists had expected that the Gakkel ridge would exhibit "anemic" magmatism. Instead, they found "surprisingly strong magmatic activity in the west and the east of the ridge and one of the strongest hydrothermal activities ever seen at mid-ocean ridges." The Gakkel ridge extends about

1,800 kilometers beneath the Arctic Ocean from north of Greenland to Siberia, and is the northernmost portion of the mid-ocean ridge system. To their surprise, the researchers found high levels of volcanic activity. Indeed, magmatism was "dramatically" higher than expected.

Hydrothermal hot springs on the seafloor were also far more abundant than predicted. "We expected this to be a hydrothermally dead ridge, and almost every time our water measurement instrument came up, they showed evidence of hydrothermal activity, and once we even 'saw' an active hot spring on the sea floor," said Dr. Jonathan Snow, the leader of the research group from the Max Planck Institute.

Remember, that "magmatism" is red hot magma seeping up from the ocean floor. It's like putting a burner under a pot of water.

In short, heated oceans are warming the globe and setting up a scenario that includes among its consequences more and increasingly violent hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards.

In 1979, Genevieve Woillard, a pollen specialist in France, concluded from detailed studies that the shift from a warm, interglacial climate to ice age conditions at the beginning of the last ice age, some 100,000 years ago, took "less than 20 years." Her observations of the decline of European forests led her to conclude we may be in a similar period of rapid climatic change.

Research has shown that this 20-year period is one in which Mother Nature wreaks havoc on humanity.

If the unchallenged results of the work of Woillard and others who studied past ice ages are any indication of the pace of glaciation, once it starts, the transition period is a mere 20 years or so. And we may be well into that

20-year period now. Woillard estimated that the period before that final 20 years - when the earth began gearing up for an end to the interglacial period - could be as long as 150 years and as short as 75 years."

According to Woillard's studies and those of other paleological climate researchers, the transition between interglacial and glacial periods is one of increasing violence - more volcanic eruptions, storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

We are being bombarded with horror stories about how the arctic regions are warming and the polar bears are disappearing (actually their number numbers have increased by some 20,000) but we are not informed by Mr. Gore and his acolytes as to how a warming arctic region can continue to send more and more record breaking cold waves southward, creating the incredibly frigid weather much of the northern U.S. is shivering under.

If your refrigerator is running low on freon it will not keep its contents cold. If the arctic is our refrigerator, and the refrigerator is rapidly running out of coolant, how can it create colder and colder weather fronts?

The mechanics here are simple. The earth is getting warmer in some areas thanks to the heat being given off by the seas - picture standing next to a pot of boiling water - you'll feel the heat. Stand next to a heated ocean and you'll feel the warmth. That melting ice in part of the arctic regions is probably the result of hydrothermal activity in the Gakkel Ridge under the Arctic Ocean.

When that warm air coming north from the tropics meets the frigid air coming south from the pole, it creates violence. And the hotter the air from the south and the colder the air from the north, the more violent the collision will be. Tornadoes, violent storms, and blizzards are some of the results.

This process feeds on itself. As the amount of atmospheric moisture increases more precipitation is sent poleward, resulting in more snowfall to build heavier and heavier polar ice packs which fail to decrease in summertime because the cloud cover created by the moisture-laden air transported from the tropics prevents any thawing.

As the ice packs grow deeper and heavier, more magma is squeezed out and sent toward the equators, creating more volcanic activity, which spews more and more volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere, along with enormous quantities of greenhouse gasses. This results in greater and greater amounts of moisture-laden clouds being sent poleward. And so on.

As the glaciation process continues, winters will get longer and longer; that's colder air reaches farther and farther toward the equator. Summers will get shorter and shorter, and growing seasons will slowly vanish.

Areas previously blessed with temperate climates are transformed into subarctic regions, and the subtropics turn colder and colder.

And all this can happen in a matter of a very few years. So few, that the world may very well learn that the interglacial period has been replaced by the glaciation process before the end of the next decade - or even earlier.

On his Web site, Bob Felix cites facts ignored or lied about by the global warming alarmists. He shows that despite their claims that the worlds glaciers are melting, fully 75 percent are actually growing.

In response to claims that oceans levels are rising and threatening to drown New York City, he shows they are actually falling.

Finally, what mankind faces now is not glaciation burying cities under miles of ice - that's tens of thousands of years away. In our immediate future is the beginning of the process which starts with a bang - that 20-year interim period I think the record shows we are now experiencing. The effects will be more or less immediate, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. If I'm correct in all of this, we'll know it over the next couple of years.

As for the current media fed hysteria, let me finish with this: Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, told the publication "Hospodárské noviny," a Czech economics daily, that "Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution; it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor."

"Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice."

Brooksie

John, I'm not arguing that there is climate change going on and but I have to wonder why Clinton and Nicholas Stern are showing up in Canada to beat the drum for Canada to accept Kyoto as the only mechanism to make change possible. Why would Canada's 2% of emissions attract such an effort on a grand scale and yet I've not heard word #1 from Clinton, Gore, Stern, Suzuki, Greenpeace or any other environmentalist condemning the emissions now coming from China, India and Russia, all of whom are exempt from the Kyoto targets but who are free to sell carbon credits to the West. Perhaps I missed the stunning news that carbon credits can be attached to a Western smoke stack as an GHG emissions scrubber while Western money can filter the crud coming off the coal-fired power plants of the 3rd world.

The IPCC is not a climate authority; it's a political fabrication of the UN. Whose quote did you post?

I am waiting to see what Stern warnings PM Harper will get - news tonight on the CTV network should be interesting though biased as to the mounting pressure for Canada to adopt Kyoto in toto. Why? What is it that the environmental lobby finds so immediate to convince the Conservative government to export massive amounts of GDP yet avoid any pressure to have China, India, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil cleave their fortunes to the Kyoto Protocol?

Whether or not we can make a difference is not my question. It is this - why this headlong rush to buy & sell carbon credits which do absolutely nothing to reduce emissions? As Harper quite rightly said and as the liberal media so quickly condemned, it's a "money sucking socialist scheme".

Brooksie

Gez, that settles it, how can several 1000 scientists dispute Bob Felix, after all he's a former architect. I wonder if he got the 10K offered by the oil companies to dispute the science. I might like a piece of that pie.

google search on Felix.

"Is Felix a climatologist, a volcanologist or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a ?former architect?. His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to believe what he says."

Brooksie wrote:

Dark tonight. Light tomorrow. Jeff

wrote...

Goes to show what happens when unqualified people are assigned tasks of responsibility...

JT

Goes to show what happens when unqualified people are assigned tasks of responsibility...

JT

The president of the Check (sp) Republic took a very eloquent swipe at the recent European conference on GW. In an interview with an obviously biased journalist, he negated every whining question the sniveling little bastard came up with.

No! I'm not biased in the least...

JT

Brooksie wrote:

In short, the info is incomplete hence a hard decision is not possible.

JT

Now, you're showing some common sense.

No one with two brain cells are denying the fact that the planet is in a warming trend but the jury is out to as relates to the exact cause.

Trying to alter the change itself would be comparable to stopping a semi by sticking your feet out Flintstone style.

And, since the common denominator for CO2 conversion (back to O2) is accomplished by plants, (mainly trees), what has happened to the outcry as to the eradication of tropical rain forests that previously provided this service.

JT

John Poulos wrote:

Remember George Carlins line in the Hippy Dippy Weatherman: Tonight's forecast, dark, turning to widely scattered light in the morning!

Jim

Yep, That's why they wouldn't let me run the plow truck! LOL I would have probably tore up ANYTHING in my way! LOL

Jim

Paul,

There is a recent paper by a Danish space scientist in which he contends that Earth's cloud cover, and hence both precipitation and reflection of solar heat flux, is influenced to some extent by cosmic ray flux. Cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere, creating ions which serve to nucleate water molecules into water droplets, e.g. clouds. He did experimental work which shows that such nucleation does indeed occur, using natural cosmic rays. He also has correlated past climate change to cosmic ray flux changes related to the relative position of the solar system in the galaxy (which rotates itself, you know). HIs nucleation experiment is going to be repeated at CERN, the European atomic energy research establishment, with particles from their accelerator.

Needless to say, this paper has been studiously ignored by the Global Climate Change true believers.

Gord Richmond