“You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan sang.
Nor, apparently, do we need scientists to tell us the Earth is cooling these days. At least, it is in this part of the world, which has had its coldest winter in 10 years — and where the temperature today is about -15C.
It’s Spring, in theory, but winter in reality.
So, what happened to global warming, anyway? Did the scientists actually mean “some parts of the globe”? Which wouldn’t be global warming, would it? It would be partial global warming.
Last summer in these parts was no hotter than usual. In fact, it was as short as always and rather cool, if I recall correctly.
Is global warming a myth? Or was enough action taken that we have avoided the feared global meltdown?
Sometimes I think we overestimate man’s influence on the planet. Sure, we might wipe ourselves out with our pollution and such. But the planet will rebound afterward . . . until such time the Sun fizzles out and this planet become a barren clump of rock in the darkness of space.
Meanwhile . . . could we please have some warm weather!
— Jillian
Jillian Page 
Real California girl. But apparently it’s not so fun as they are running out of H20. Of course Beverly Hills will have to cut back on watering their estates. Meantime, up here in the Great White North Mr. Harper’s government has just given the green-light for big oil to start blowing-up the Arctic Sea bed for you know what. They are certainly appreciating the warming trend 😛
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Well, I don’t have a big estate in Beverly Hills. I’m just a struggling young actress . . . hoping to catch Chuck Lorre’s eye.
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Fair enough. You caught mine! |D
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Winks back you!
Cheers
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The more fashionable term these days is “climate change” as many of us have voiced opinions like yours on occasion.
Your bit of the world may not be warmer at the moment, and my bit isn’t either (though not as cold as yours), but the average temperature throughout the world is rising, as evidenced by the melting of more of the polar ice as the years go by.
See https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm for the distinction between the two terms.
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Thanks, Marcus. It’s what I would call today “cold comfort.”
Cheers
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Climate is not weather. Or is it the other way round?
First, you forget that in the southern hemisphere, it’s SUMMER. And they are having record high temperatures in Australia.
“February was a warm month for Australia as a whole, and for most areas of the country. Averaged nationally, maximum temperatures were the second-warmest on record for February.”(http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/summary.shtml)
“With California facing one of the most severe droughts on record, Governor Brown declared a drought State of Emergency in January and directed state officials to take all necessary actions to prepare for water shortages. The state has continued to lead the way to make sure California is able to cope with an unprecedented drought.” (http://ca.gov/drought/)
“Last week NASA and NOAA announced that 2014 topped the list of hottest years ever recorded. Yikes!
What’s worse, the ten warmest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1998. Yikes again!” (http://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2224)
A warmer planet means warmer oceans, which are the power source for hurricanes and typhoons.
“The number of storms that reached the highest categories 4 and 5, which have wind speeds of 200 kilometres per hour or more, has almost doubled over the past 35 years, the team found. In the 1970s, an average of ten category-4 and -5 storms occurred each year. The average number of such extreme storms has since risen to 18, although only a fraction of these eventually hit land.
These results agree with recent evidence that hurricanes have become significantly more destructive over the past decade.” (http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050912/full/news050912-11.html)
A warmer earth also changes the previously stable wind patterns – typically warm places will be warmer and typically cooler places will be colder.
A snowball on the floor of the Senate is not a scientific conclusion – it’s a sick demonstration of how unbelievably stupid our elected “representatives” are.
Yes, the planet will recover, but it will take centuries. If we let the climate deniers have their way, we will reach a point that even if we stop burning carbon-based fuels, the planet will continue to warm. It’s called the tipping point and we’re only 1.6°C from it.
The biggest problem with global warming is that, on human terms, it’s slow. It took us about a hundred years to get to the point we’re at now, and if we do nothing, the polar ice will melt and raise the sea level by 6 to 10 feet worldwide in about another hundred years.
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So, it’s the end of the world as we knew it, basically.
The human species will become extinct eventually. That’s part of the evolutionary process of this planet, yes?
All things must pass . . .
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Yes, the species will go extinct eventually, but not likely because of mankind, but in spite of it. Even in the worst-case nuclear scenario, many millions would survive and the species would continue. Our science and technology would set us back to the 17th century Muslim idea of perfection, or the 19th century “christian” idea of perfection, but we would survive as a species.
Even as we survive everything else, in about 2.8 Billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen and swell into a red giant, swallowing the Earth. But considering the planet is about 4.5 Billion years old and humans have only been around for about 50,000 years, that is so far off in the future that predicting what the it holds for mankind is like asking a Neandertal to describe a multi-processor computer. The best guess is that by then humans will have migrated to other planets and solar systems.
In the short run, about 10,000 years or so – a blink in cosmological time – the Earth will see three natural disasters. One that we can do something about would be a planet-killing asteroid. Something big enough to detect and plot a course will give us years of advance warning that a mission or two to deflect the asteroid is well within our technological capabilities. NASA recently intercepted a comet (Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko) with the Rosetta spacecraft. The comet is only 4 km wide so intercepting an asteroid would be no impossible challenge. The political challenge would be something else.
The next big bad thing would be an earthquake at the Cumbre Vieja volcano that is the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. During an eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in 1949 part of the island slipped a few meters into the Atlantic before stopping. Another eruption could cause the western flank of the island to collapse completely into the Ocean which would generate a kilometer-high tidal wave that, in a few hours, would completely erase the east coast of the US, Mexico and South America. Cuba, the Bermuda and other Atlantic islands would cease to exist. It is estimated that ten million would die. Geologists aren’t completely in agreement to the size of the fault line and how big the tsunami would be, maybe only 25-meters. But there is no disagreement that in the next 10,000 years, an earthquake there will generate a tsunami that will devastate the US east coast.
The next big bad thing would be a super volcano eruption. Yellowstone National Park is sitting in a caldera of a super volcano that has historically erupted about every 600,000 years. the last one was 640,000 years ago. It will kill about 10 billion in the first few hours and another ten billion as world-wide ash clouds will wipe out most agriculture for five to ten years.
And you worry about a few religious fanatics with the education of a chimpanzee (with apologies to chimps)?
I worry about the interest rates going up like they did in St. Regan’s reign that would wipe out my retirement savings. I worry about the right-wing morons in our political system succeeding in privatizing social Security.
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But the cockroaches and microbes will survive. Next, Mars!! |D
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It must be so comforting for the global warming crowd to have all those studies to quote from. Why do we need all those studies? Who is paying for them? Follow the money.
Facts: Carbon dioxide is not a dangerous gas. Carbon dioxide levels were much higher in our atmosphere millennia ago. It helped create all the vegetation transformed into the fuels we use today. Carbon dioxide is pumped into greenhouses to promote growth. Increased carbon dioxide will make our planet greener. That used to be a good thing.
Temperature readings have been proven to be falsified. Previous predictions have not come to fruition. But the quotable studies will never cease. BTW. Whatever happened to the ozone layer? I gave up my spray deodorant for that.
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Cruiser:
“Facts: Carbon dioxide is not a dangerous gas. Carbon dioxide levels were much higher in our atmosphere millennia ago. ”
If CO2 is not harmful, then close yourself in a room with a CO2 generator, we will add your quote to your epitaph.
YES – carbon levels millions of years ago were higher, and the average planet-wide temperature was much higher. Greenland was, in fact, green and covered with forests. There was also little polar ice and sea levels were about 100 ft higher than today. This is what the deniers want to go back to. We are approaching the CO2 levels of your eden, so in a century or two, the earth will once again be a steaming sauna. Or, we will go over the tipping point and in a thousand years, earth will start to look like Venus.
Cruiser:
“Temperature readings have been proven to be falsified. Previous predictions have not come to fruition.”
Really? CITE ONE! Show me one peer-reviewed study to back up this fact-free quote from Faux News. just one.
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Fact. Homo-sapien has an abysmal record of ignoring the “canary-in-the-coal-mine”. Of course, we do this “at your own risk”. Avalanche season is upon us %@
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