Kasserine06

It is comments like this that add nothing of value to the debate and just add to the confusion. This debate will not be solved by looking at what the weather is doing right now. The trends can only be seen after years of data. If we try to see the trend by what is happening this year or last year, we will have no way of telling if we are looking at an outlier or not. Also, global warming does not mean that it gets warmer everywhere. The major weather models cannot agree how the planet will be affected if the average temperature rises, but most seem to indicate that we will see more extremes in weather. So if your comment was an attempt to disprove global warming, it can just as easily be used to prove global warming.

KC10 FATboy

Kasserine06 ...

You nor I have no idea what "most" climatologists believe or think. Those scientists forecasted lots of really nasty hurricanes and we haven't had one. Additionally, there's been no credible link to global warming and hurricanes. The facts are, for the past 9 years, there has been real and measurable cooling data for the earth.

Additionally, you are probably to young to remember when Al Gore, yes, Mr. Global Warming himself, was actually warning us of the coming ICE AGES.

By the way, the midwest is getting another blizzard, and it's only December.

DYNASTY HVY

Does this mean that Santa Claus will have to move ?


Fred

Kasserine06

I never did say what most scientists believe, and I actually would like more scientists to look for and report evidence that counters global warming. What I don’t like is when people try to prove their point by stating today’s weather. The only thing it does is oversimplify a complex process causing uninformed readers to quickly jump to one side of the debate before they know any relevant facts. Stating the today’s weather is just as annoying as saying the ice caps are smaller this year than last.

So there is a blizzard in the Midwest, up in northern Maine, it was 53 degrees when last year it was only 26 degrees. There are two weather events that lead to two different conclusions on global warming. Also, no one can agree on what weather patterns will do when the average temperature rises, so maybe another blizzard in the Midwest is a result of global warming. For me, that is the biggest argument against global warming because if scientists are going to claim that the climate is going to change drastically, they should know what that change will be.

And also, Al Gore is not a scientists, so who cares what he says or thinks. He is just a supporter of global warming who has enough money and fame to get media attention. Al Gore is responsible for spreading the fear of global warming that has created uneducated activists, I will give you that, but attacking Al Gore won’t solve this debate anymore than attacking Glenn Beck or any other conservative who thinks global warming is fake.

N2264J

We're about to get sacked again - just like Detroit in the 70s when they were building big gas guzzling cars and the industry's conventional wisdom was "little foreign cars are inferior and Americans won't buy them."

The debate overseas is: "what can we do to best mitigate global climate destabilization" while the manufactured debate in our soon-to-be backwater country is: "does global warming even exist?"

_______________________

Who’s Sleeping Now?

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
published: January 9, 2010
Hong Kong


C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: “China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.”

I’ll say. Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it. We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.

O.K., that was a cheap shot. But here’s one that isn’t: Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, liked to say that companies come to “strategic inflection points,” where the fundamentals of a business change and they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory or do nothing and wither. The same is true for countries.

The U.S. is at just such a strategic inflection point. We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.

Is President Obama going to finish health care and then put aside the pending energy legislation — and carbon pricing — that Congress has already passed in order to get through the midterms without Republicans screaming “new taxes?” Or is he going to seize this moment before the midterms — possibly his last window to put together a majority in the Senate, including some Republicans, for a price on carbon — and put in place a real U.S. engine for clean energy innovation and energy security? I’ve been stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year.

Here’s e-mail from Bill Gross, who runs eSolar, a promising California solar-thermal start-up: On Saturday, in Beijing, said Gross, he announced “the biggest solar-thermal deal ever. It’s a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build plants in China using our California-based technology. China is being even more aggressive than the U.S. We applied for a [U.S. Department of Energy] loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico, and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”

Yes, climate change is a concern for Beijing, but more immediately China’s leaders know that their country is in the midst of the biggest migration of people from the countryside to urban centers in the history of mankind. This is creating a surge in energy demand, which China is determined to meet with cleaner, homegrown sources so that its future economy will be less vulnerable to supply shocks and so it doesn’t pollute itself to death.

In the last year alone, so many new solar panel makers emerged in China that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents, according to The Times’s bureau chief here, Keith Bradsher. Meanwhile, China last week tested the fastest bullet train in the world — 217 miles per hour — from Wuhan to Guangzhou. As Bradsher noted, China “has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion. Trains will cover the 700-mile route in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today. By comparison, Amtrak trains require at least 18 hours to travel a similar distance from New York to Chicago.”

China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15.

“By the end of this decade, China will be dominating global production of the whole range of power equipment,” said Andrew Brandler, the C.E.O. of the CLP Group, Hong Kong’s largest power utility.

In the process, China is going to make clean power technologies cheaper for itself and everyone else. But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.

This is a strategic inflection point. It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.

Op-Ed Columnist - Who’s Sleeping Now? - NYTimes.com

Winged Wheeler

I don't disagree that China is a country that is serious about producing energy. China is putting 3 or 4 coal burning electrical plants on line each month. That is what we should be emulating, that and the nuclear plant construction.

WW

KC10 FATboy

Kass:

I was having a little fun with the current cold snap we've been in for the past couple of years.

The reality is, many scientists have been very vocal against Global Warming. You just haven't been paying attention.

15,000 Scientists Urge Congress to Reject Global Warming Treaty - by Environment & Climate News staff - Environment & Climate News

Even the author of the IPCC is now contradicting himself.

FOXNews.com - 30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says

N2264J

Latif doesn't contradict himself when he's not misquoted.
______________________________________

Global Cooling? Tell It to the Jellyfish

Saturday 16 January 2010
by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

There are certain newspaper headlines that catch your eye and stop you in your tracks. Like the New York Post's famous "Headless Body in Topless Bar." Or such tabloid greats as "Evil Cows Ate My Garden," "Double Decker Bus Found on Moon," and my personal favorite, "Proof of Reincarnation: Baby Born with Wooden Leg."

Along similar lines, I was startled this week when London's Daily Mail published an article headlined, "Could we be in for 30 years of global COOLING?" Triggered by the unusual cold and snow in the United Kingdom over the last few weeks, the article began, "Britain's big freeze is the start of a worldwide trend towards colder weather that seriously challenges global warming theories, eminent scientists claimed yesterday."

The story went on to reference various researchers and their institutions, including the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which reported, according to the Mail, that, "The warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gases."

This was followed by an article on the Fox News Web site with the headline, "30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says."

There are only two small problems, as was pointed out by Steve Benen on Washington Monthly magazine's "Political Animal" blog: "First, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said no such thing. The director of the NSIDC said, 'This is completely false. NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail.'" (Subsequently, both Fox and the Mail removed the reference to the NSIDC in their articles.)

Second, as proof of global cooling, both stories cited research conducted by Mojib Latif, a prominent climate modeler with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Latif's response to their reporting? "I don't know what to do," he said. "They just make these things up."

Latif's work on climatology is complex and often difficult to understand, which is why the Fox and Daily Mail reporters may have his story mixed up -- it wouldn't be the first time journalists have been confused by his findings. But as cogently interpreted by the physicist and climate expert Dr. Joseph Romm of the liberal Center for American Progress, "Latif has NOT predicted a cooling trend -- or a 'decades-long deep freeze' -- but rather a short-time span where human-caused warming might be partly offset by ocean cycles, staying at current record levels, but then followed by 'accelerated' warming where you catch up to the long-term human-caused trend. He does NOT forecast 2 or 3 decades of cooling."

In fact, as Latif told the British newspaper the Guardian, "I believe in manmade global warming... There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

And if you don't believe him, ask the jellyfish.

Jellyfish don't lie. Well, sometimes they lie -- deceased and desiccated along the beach, which from strolling along various Eastern Seaboard shores is about the extent of my knowledge of them. That, and that Ogden Nash couplet, the one that goes, "Who wants my jellyfish? I am not sellyfish!"

But according to the Associated Press, the jellyfish population is rising. The news service reports, "Scientists believe climate change -- the warming of oceans -- has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes."

This has led to all manner of consequences, some you would expect, others not. A 2008 National Science Foundation study found populations growing along the East Coast -- in the Chesapeake Bay area, people are stung about half a million times a year. In the Middle East and Africa, swarms have jammed hydroelectric and desalination plants, forcing them to shut down. In Japan, the fishing industry is losing up to $332 million a year because jellyfish swarms fill the nets, crowding out mackerel, sea bass and other fish.

The AP reports that in October, off the eastern coast of Japan, "Jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued." I know this all sounds like something out of a Godzilla movie, but it's serious stuff.

And speaking of jellyfish, here's a headline you may not see anytime soon: "Senate Passes Sweeping Climate Bill."

Although in a January 14 speech to the Energy Finance Forum, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "Taking on the clean-energy challenge... may be the most important policy we will ever pass. And we cannot afford to wait any longer to act," the cap-and-trade climate bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives back in June malingers in the purgatory of the Senate.

And next week, Senator Reid will allow a vote on an amendment to the legislation lifting the Federal debt ceiling. Proposed by Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, it would block the enforcement funding of the Environmental Protection Agency, giving free rein to the coal industry and other big polluters to ignore the Clean Air Act.

The activist group Credo Action, part of the company Working Assets, warns, "You would think this would be easy to stop, but the vote is predicted to be close with many Democrats considering voting for the bill... The coal industry has been working furiously to close deals with senators across the political spectrum, including those who say they want to protect the environment."

Jellyfish.

KC10 FATboy

N2264J:

Latif was not misquoted. Apparently the Daily Mail and Fox News reported that the NSIDC said, "The warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gases." Ok, fine. The NSIDC was misquoted but the others who said what they said were not.

There have been other articles dating back to the same week of the UN's World Climate Conference in September, which quoted Latif as saying that the earth *may* be enterring a decade or two of cooling, before starting another warming trend. The Fox News article reported the same thing which was the basis of their article. I'm surprised they are just now reporting on it especially since Latif said these things back in September!

Lastly, I really do not trust articles where a reporter quotes someone quoting someone else ... reference the paragraphs with Steven Benen and Dr. Joseph Romm. Why not just quote the source itself? Very shady. If Latif and the NSIDC said it, then quote it as such! Seriously, I have a Kentuckian edumacation and the grammar slight-of-hand in that article is very suspicious. But don't trust me, ask the jellyfish.

FDXLAG

Good thing we have all those scientists at the IPCC doing hard science.

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown - Times Online