Facts aren't always facts. Photos tell of the surface coverage. They do not tell the truth about total mass. What do you say when the edges pull in but the interior gets thicker? Also the part most likely to melt is over water. So the water has warmed. Does that mean global warming? And even if it did mean global warming where is the evidence that says man is responsible? We are supposed to assume that man did it and that man can fix it. Frankly there is no solid proof.

Land based observations have been used to try and show a global temperature increase. Using proper methods for collecting data these observations would be tossed out as being contaminated. Why? Because the conditions surrounding the observation stations have changed. The sample is bad. How has it changed? Most stations are located in/around airport and city centers. Almost without exception these locations have expanded. They have encroached on the observation stations more or in some cases completely surrounded it. The readings have been tainted severely by the urban heat island effect.

Go to the park and take two thermometers with you. Take a reading on the basketball court at the same time someone takes a reading farther away in a grassy field. I promise your readings will be several degrees different. CO2 doesn't matter in this mix. You couldn't use your reading and compare it equally to the reading your friend took in the grass. But that is what global warming supporters try and to. They try and use a cleaner sample from 20 years ago and compare it to a tainted sample from today.

Absolutely BAD science.

I have to say it. Erm, these people are qualified trained experienced scientists who do NOTHING else but study the Antarctic and the effects of the changing world due to WHATEVER cause. The bottom line is the same though: The ice is moving/melting blah blah.
For me, this isn't about WHY....its about the effects this could have on the entire world and therefore every single one of us.

There will always be those who refuse to accept responsibility. That'll never change. You can't expect to exhaust god knows how many fumes/chemicals into the air and not expect consequences. That'd be pretty ignorant in my opinion. The reasons for the earth changes are there for people to see - but many just prefer to take the easy way out and deny.

Cheers

When you want to impose your will on people its always easy to make up a boogyman. Man gets blamed for everything whether it is true or not. One person says the ice is shrinking. Another says it is getting thicker. There is no agreement. One person says the antarctic is warming. The other says it is cooling. Man is supposed to take the blame when we can't even figure out WHAT is going on let alone WHY it is going on. But we are just supposed to bend over to special interest groups that have an agenda.

BTW... did anyone read the story about the MIT pranksters that submitted a bogus paper to a conference and it was accepted? Gotta wonder how many bad papers got accepted in Kyoto. Its bad enough people accept everything they read as fact. It is worse when they accept it as fact without even reading it.

Here in BC, if you look at old photos (circa 1900 to 1950), you can clearly see that the glaciers around here have shrunk dramatically. The two exceptions are Mt. Baker, and Mt. Ranier. Theirs have grown, and that was predicted by a computer simulation of the effects of global warming. The glaciers in Europe are also much shorter than a century ago. Just recently open water was seen at the north pole for the first time in history. In the town where I live there is a small lake that used to freeze over nearly every winter, often so thickly cars could drive out on it. It has been at least a decade since the last time it froze over. I agree that warming is a fact that is impossible to refute with any solid supporting evidence, and I feel it is obvious man is the cause.
Others may claim they don't know that, and they are right, they don't. Just like many here wonder what happened to the giant salmon runs of the past. I wonder if it has anything to do with the 3 million people living on what used to be their spawning grounds......naah, its probably those pesky sealions fault.

How is it obvious that man is at fault? Go look at the temperature plots throughout history. Going back hundreds of thousands of years there have been huge temperature spikes. Not a single man was on the planet. Change has always happened. Even IF there is a warming trend would you care to show me proof that man is responsible this time when he wasn't every other time? What we are seeing is not unusual. Sounding an alarm over something normal seems a bit out of line.

Actually, throughout the history of the earth, ice covering the poles has been the exception rather than the rule. For all we know, this warming is the natural result of coming out of our present ice age. Climatology is an inexact science, and we don't have accurate enough records of past ice ages to know what to expect.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
Three-quarters of all the fresh water on Earth is locked up in ice even now, and we have ice caps at both poles - a situation that may be unique in Earth's history.* For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.

* Gribben, John, and Mary Gribben Fire on earth p. 147 , London ; Allen Lane, 2001.

I merely stated my firm conviction that the 6 billion humans' activities are the major reason for a global increase in temperature, imho. That is what I believe, and anyone is free to study the historical climatological peaks and valleys, and withhold concluding the cause. In the past, each peak and valley likely had its own unique set of circumstances that caused it. Imho, the millions/billions? of tons of fossil fuels we have burnt over the last century is bound to have an effect. Just as the eruption of Krakatoa did 120 years ago. I am comfortable with my conclusions, and also have no need to convince those who disagree. It is something we each must decide for ourselves.
Maybe I'm wrong. I will be the first to admit it if proven to be so.

Uh, facts are facts, but you can twist them to support any argument. Just ask any high-priced attorney.

The fact that is hard to twist, though, is the fact that our world goes through cycles. WE haven't been responsible for any of the other glaobal warmings or ice-ages, and it seems a bit egoentrical to think that we are doing ti this time - especially since the cycle seems to be running right on time.

i find it amuseing that an old girlfriend told me 15 years ago that we would be warming up. she was rather into envirommental sciences at the time. i had been bitching about the cold as per norm, when she laughed and said not to worry because we would be warming up in a few years. then she started to tell me that we were in a warming treand. she explained more but i have forgotten it over the years.

"global warming" seems to me to be just another scare tactic like the ozone layer hole, that the enviro natzies use to try to force their ideals on everyone else. not that i think that we could not do better with polution. as we do need to treat the enviroment better.

as a side note we are closeing a coal power plant in 10 days. well this may seem a good thing in regaurds to polution, we have not built anything to replace it. so since we have been told the last few years that we need to cut back on power use, i can't help but to wonder about blackouts that may be caused because of this. especialy since we are probably looking at a hot summer this year. if we were short on power before, how much shorter will we be this year.

Originally posted by BlackGuardXIII
I am comfortable with my conclusions, and also have no need to convince those who disagree. It is something we each must decide for ourselves.

I completely respect that. As long as you are comfortable with your own conclusions no one could ask anything more.

Originally posted by Thomas Crowne
The fact that is hard to twist, though, is the fact that our world goes through cycles. WE haven't been responsible for any of the other glaobal warmings or ice-ages, and it seems a bit egoentrical to think that we are doing ti this time - especially since the cycle seems to be running right on time.

First, you are making a big, and imho likely incorrect assumption that humanity has not been the source of any previous global warmings or ice ages. I feel that there is a good chance we were partly to blame for some of it. As far as saying that just cuz we may not have been the reason in the past, we aren't now.... that is akin to saying that the extinctions of the great auk, steller's sea cow, passenger pigeon, and dodo bird can't be our fault cuz we weren't to blame for the trilobyte or archeopteryx extinctions. Maybe the cycle appears on time cuz twelve millenia is about the average time that we take to go from one population crash to the next? I am not saying this is so, just that it is very possible, and to me just as likely as your stated 'facts'.

personaly i have wondered if dianasours were hunted to extinction. we have such a great track record of killing off things that we fear or fear will harm our lifestyles, like wolves killing livestock so lets all hunt wolves.

i don't buy into the overpopulatoun, causeing problems theory. the wold has cycles naturaly. we are currantly in a warm cycle. eventualy we will hit another ice age. the cycle of life just marching keeps on. we haven't been keeping weather records near long to make such sweeping generalizations that we are negitively affecting things. give us another few thousand years and perhapse we might see how big a cycle it is.

You have got to be kidding me? I have heard some wild things blamed on man before but that scrapes the bottom of the barrel. IF man even existed it would have been at the very end of that state and in a VERY primitive form. He would have been greatly outnumbered and outsized. There have been massive dinosaur graves found and the one thing NOT in the equation was man. You probably thing man caused the tsunami as well.

There is no doubt man does dome dumb things. But give me a break.

Originally posted by drogo

"global warming" seems to me to be just another scare tactic like the ozone layer hole, that the enviro natzies use to try to force their ideals on everyone else. not that i think that we could not do better with polution. as we do need to treat the enviroment better.

So what are these oh so terrible ideals the "enviro natzies"(sic) have?
Trying to get us Humans to treat our environment better so our children might have an Earth that's livable in the future?
Wow, yeah they are some bad people

[edit on 22/4/2005 by ANOK]

HBA, thank you for pointing out thefirst thing I wanted to say, and that was in reference to us being the cause of past climate changes. It'd be pretty hard for us to do that since the preindustrial and industrial ages have only been around for what, 12 decades or so? Not thousands of years, but decades.

As you pointed out, HBA, people much smarter than us lowly slobs here at this board (Hi, I'm TC and I spend my time drooling and staring at shiny objects. What's your name?) have come to the opposite conclusion, which is that this is cyclic, and that we don't have the ability to alter the climate so drastically.

In my 4 decades on this planet, I spent several being an eco-nut and listening to the wild-eyed doomsdayers. The fact that they couldn't get it straight for years (is it global warming, or is it going to be the next ice-age...) started me to figuring I'd better read more than just the usual sources.

By the way, you know that Florida is supposed to be a desert now, right? Yup, Jacques Cousteau said that back in the 70's. Said it would've been a done deal by the mid-nineties.

I think the thing that bothers many people is that, if it is cyclic, what're we going to do? Nothing? Darn, their human egos will never tolerate that!


I wasn't able to click through with that link, HBA; it isn't working. I was intersted in reading it. It started out just like that stuff I used to read - fanatical. It attacked Christianity and even seemed to compare those who do not agree with their editorial with Hitler. It wouldv'e been great!

HBA... these smart types are also the same type that approve a paper for a conference that was absolutely meaningless. It is the same type that also alter a document for presentation at a conference after it has completed the peer review process. It shows you that these smart people can be not only lazy but unethical as well. And when money and power is involved the truth often becomes a stranger.

When Brian's friends hear he is about to be crucified they convene a meeting and vote on setting up a commission to look into the options they have for dealing with it. Meanwhile one astute fellow is clearly agitated by the lack of urgency shown, knowing that while they hash out an agenda and set up a commission, Brian will be getting nailed to the cross ... literally. Maybe in a thousand years we will know more, but my view is that the evidence is already excessive that we are far beyond a sustainable consumption level now. In fact, I did a paper on this subject in 1980 which quoted numerous scientists who had solid cases for our major part in the warming trend. In the computer simulation of the effects this would have, it showed my region warming and getting wetter winters, both of which have since clearly occured. We are still consuming more every year, though our rate of acceleration has slowed. We are nowhere near stabilizing, let alone returning to a sustainable level. Imho, this means something will have to give. Call me a nut, doomsayer, whatever, I don't care. I know I am no nut, and though it may seem like doomsday to some, it is just a natural, predictable correction that is coming up.