"If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate. It seems that the Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our childrens' lifetimes."
Dr Serreze said that even these pessimistic predictions may have overestimated the resilience of the Arctic sea ice. He said that we may have already reached the tipping point when there is a rapid disintegration. "The big question is whether we are already there or whether the tipping point is still 10 or 20 years in the future. My guts are telling me we may well be there now," Dr Serreze said.
SOURCES:
[link:] http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_index.html
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2864214.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/04/climatechange
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=06f46e05-e399-4035-abfb-fee867e12192&k=27918 [Proofreader’s note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 6, 2007]
Stumble It!
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"George Bush has declared the war on terrorism to be the cause of his generation. The cause of Canadian sovereignty will be ours." - John Godfrey, MP for Don Va
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Expect little from life and get more from it.
First of all, despite a lot of misinformation, it is far from certain that the
medevial warming period was global. Second of all, it didn't get this warm for
this long.
Most of the mythology is based on the, "But Vikings lived in Greenland." It's
true, they did. They had to kep their animals inside for five or six months a
year even during the warmest periods though, and raising enough winter
fodder for those animals was always such a problem that they imported feed
most of the time they were there.
The archaeological record, as well as ledgers kept regarding trade etc., just
does not support the idea that Greenland was a warm, lush place where life
was much like that in continental Europe.
"Dr Dick said the research did not suggest that global warming was not a reality.
"You couldn’t say, ‘The sea ice is coming back so therefore there’s no global warming’. It’s never going to be that simple," he said. "But the question now is the extent of global warming, how fast it will happen and whether there are any surprises on the way.
"We know there is warming and that it’s caused by humans, but it will be a great relief to many people if the ice comes back as opposed to going away."
Nor the converse Dr. Dick. The fact is that no one knows for certain what's going on with our climate and your research demonstrates this rather well.
Global taxation, warfare, surrendering our individual rights, and fear mongering definitely won't solve any of our collective problems and will only make matters worse.
What we should be focusing on, is living in a sustainable and healthy manner - something that's actually very simple to do, and we have thousands of years of experience in doing so.
I've done what I can even though I personally don't buy into the "carbon mythos" in the least simply because I don't like wasting resources.
And I do not worry about it in the least.
Why?
Because as far as I am concerned we will never be able to control either the sun or water vapour levels in the atmosphere.
And don't bother going eco-postal on me either, because I've heard it all before and am quite frankly bored as can be by eco-dogmatism.
You want to go off on a rant, go bug someone else.
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If George W. Bush and Tony Blair are really Christians, then pork and shrimp are Kosher.
earth's present atmosphere, the balance between GHGs and temperature were
closely tied together. That was back in the early seventies. It had been the
prevailing scientific theory for a very long time at that point and has
remained the prevailing scientific theory through many, many challenges.
To think that pouring tonnes and tonnes of GHGs into the atmosphere for
over 150 years would have no effect on that balance is bizarre.
We're presently seeing the results of that action. There is no data showing
that energy from the sun has increased anywhere near the amount required
to push temperatures as much as we've seen. The whole thing about water
vapour is that it can cause warming by keeping heat in, but also blocks
sunlight. Whether it causes warming or cooling depends on where you live
and what season you're in.
The only thing that causes the warming we are seeing is anthropogenic ghg
release. Even if we weren't seeing any warming though, we could expect the
release of ghgs to induce warming eventually. Either that or all of the
atmospheric science done in the last 100 years or so, not to mention a whole
lot of evolutionary science, would have to be re-written. You'd also have to
change practically everything we know about planets like Venus.
Now, if you have an explanation that fits all of the data, then by all means
start re-writing all of those theories. That's how science works. Don't say
that it has to be something else and all of the science across multiple
disciplines is wrong just because you don't like the implications though.
I have no problem at all with hysterical people jumping up and down screaming about our eventual date with doom, but I do have a problem when I'm forced to eat their brand of steaming bullshit.
As I said previously, global taxation, warfare, surrendering our individual rights - all served up with heaps and mounds of fear mongering - definitely won't solve any of our collective problems and will only make matters worse.
I'll repeat: "What we should be focusing on, is living in a sustainable and healthy manner". You don't need a global warming doomsday event to understand this.
Even if a global taxation scheme manages to save us from a catastrophic global warming death, we'll just end up dying from something else anyway (albeit much poorer) unless we really change for reasons that take into consideration basic common sense.