Canadian Weather Community Forums

I found this to be interesting. It's hard to know who to believe anymore when it comes to this issue. I saw on ABC that the number of Americans who believe in Global Warming fell 8% in one year and now less then 50% of folks believe it.

Who knows, I wish they would be able to have a debate or something on this.

Chris, I have the same problem trying to stay neutral and digest the amount of information on Global warming.
One thing I find is that the argument has swung so far to the political side that good scientific information that has not been biased is difficult to get.
People are trying to sell books, get grants and get elected on the global warming premise, and the event itself is being pushed aside.
Not good scientific methodology and perhaps even a bit risky.

My personal opinion, and I stress only my opinion. We are experiencing the onset of anthropogenic global warming.
Having said that, I don't subscribe to the idea that every time we have a hot summer, bad hurricane, destructive tornadoes and other anomalies that they are a direct cause of Global warming.
These are things for the politicians and Media to play with.

I have my doubts on large swings based on solar activity.
I know there have been connections trying to link things like the Mauder minimum to global temperatures, but I don't
think there has been much success.
There has even been an attempt to link cosmic radiation in the high atmosphere.
I somehow don't think that high energy particles ie. neutrinos and such are responsible for atmospheric change.

Then to try and reduce climate change to a common denominator as so many do is simply ludicrous. I'm sure it will have many factors and the amplitude of each factor will play a part.

One thing I am pretty sure of, considering the Pole temperature changes, glacial melts and earth albedo, we should not have to wait too much for the jury to come in either way.

Couldn't agree more and I tend to think we are still comming out of the last ice age to some degree. I couldn't tell anybody to what extent, but this also may be a factor in what is going on with the climate.

I am still sitting on the fence with this climate change debate. The past 2 years we have not had a real spring , and the summer warmth seems as though it was late getting here. Is this due to Global Cooling ,...or Warming ? I have heard many people say "where is this Global Warming " they are talking about . Mid June last year many , myself included, were still heating our homes.
I wish I had the answer,..... if we could get politics out of it , maybe then we could have one.

I think it is clear the world is warming, but lately the warming trend has leveled off, and there are theories that some of the surface station data we use to measure the earth's temperature is being influenced by the heat island effect, perhaps skewing the data some. Also, the jet stream pattern has shifted north over the last few decades which leads me to believe this is a natural variation of the earth climate system. I don't think we know enough about the complex earth climate system and the influence of the various pollutants on the temperature of the earth to really make accurate assertions about our influence. So while the earth is warming, I can't say for sure how much influence humans are having, perhaps the way we change the landscape (i.e. altering the albedo) has more of an effect on temperatures than CO2? CO2 is the life blood of life on earth, I don't see why we demonize it so much. Methane and sulfur dioxide are much worse and we have reduced our output of these over the years. And you can notice the difference, I have noticed a decrease in thick haze over the past few summers. I just think that this is just another one of those issues that environmentalists spin out of control like they've always been doing, they thrive off of end of the world doom and gloom scenarios. I think there are far more important environmental, political and economical issues than climate change, we can adapt easily to warmer weather I don't see what the big deal is. In fact, I think that some of the solutions to the "climate crisis" are doing more harm then good. For example, you have to clear vast areas of land to set up wind turbines and we are witnessing this here in New Brunswick with the Kent Hills wind project. They are building about 30 turbines in a very environmentally sensitive area of Albert county that has remained virtually untouched for years. They are destroying a huge area of wilderness to produce a small amount of power. I still believe that species extinction is a far more serious and imminent problem on this planet, but sadly the climate change hysteria is taking the focus away from the real environmental issues. I'm sure if the politicians would spend as much money on repairing our ecosystems as they do on climate change we would have saved many species from extinction.

I believe it was Gore's spin documentary that sent everyone over the edge. Since the average Joe is too lazy to really look at the evidence themselves they rely on politicians like Gore for their data, which is truly sad. This week we now have more evidence of misinformation in the movie. The intro scene depicting the melting ice cap in Antarctica (in fact Antarctica's ice cap has been increasing over the past few decades) was in fact fake. It was the same scene used in the mockery of a science movie "The Day After Tomorrow" and it was computer generated:http://newsbusters.org/node/20680?q=blog...ient-truth.
In all honesty I think scientists/politicians are looking too much into the small variations of temperatures and not really spending enough time addressing the real issues. Back in the 70s everyone was worried about an ice age coming because of a samll dip in world temps!

I've also noticed that a lot of the so called "environmentalists" are using climate change to attack capitalism. This is the main reason why the co-founder of Greenpeace left the organization and is now speaking out against it. Most of these people are young, far left politically and naive about how the economy works and will latch on to anything that attacks the corporate "empires". They are usually anti-technology and would love to see the earth slip back in to the stone age (ironically most of them use the internet and cell phones etc). Most of them don't even understand the real science behind how the climate changes - it doesn't just change overnight. If world governments were to strongly enforce draconian greenhouse gas emission restrictions, many developing countries would suffer severely. For instance some places in Africa use solar power for their power source. The panels are so ineffecient that they have to chose between running their fridge or their computer in some cases. They need to be able to use cheaper, more efficient power sources like coal to continue developing.

But I will state again: the world IS warming, I don't see any cooling happening. It is interesting how scientists can look at the same data and get completely different theories which says to me we don't have a clue what is going to happen to the climate in the years to come, heck we can't even predict with much accuracy the weather 3 days in advance, let alone 3 decades! The weather is just too chaotic.

Good post Shawn.:D
Just a few comments.

I think with an estimated global population of 6.8 billion there has to be an influence.

I don't know that they demonize it so much as worry about the atmospheric amounts.

Not totally sure here but I think the problem with an altered albedo is if the temperature rises it will release more bound CO2.
There is a lot of CO2 in the ocean and remember the the amount of gas a liquid will retain is a function of its temperature.
Not such a great while ago there was some talk of the amount of CO2 and CH4 that would be released from the artic permafrost if the temps continue to rise.

Absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more. The ratio of watts generated to ft^2 cleared is at times absolutely pathetic.
The extinction of species is extremely serious, and this includes all forms of life, plant and animal.

Again, I have to agree. I see this all the time and it's a big part of the problem

Yes, I remember see it. In fact I have a vague remembrance of commenting in a post I believe here on it.
I don't remember the exact wording but I do remember the word 'moron' creeping in there somewhere.

LOL, I guess it is Shawn.
It's almost like a quantum deal. It's at every possible state until you look at it and collapse the wave probability.


Do you think a time will come with more 'powerful' computers that climate modeling will be done with a good degree of accuracy?
I realize it will never be 100% unless you have ∞ data points, which is impossible.

Perhaps I rephrase;
Do you think climate change modeling will ever be accurate enough to make stable future predictions on it?

To be fair, the climate models don't predict the exact weather years in advance, they predict the weather patterns and trends which are somewhat more predictable, but usually only weeks or months in advance and oftentimes the prediction is no better than chance.

There is some good news on the data integrity issue; NOAA has just announced that they will be installing super accurate climate monitoring stations across the US and will be revamping over 1000 existing stations to make sure they are accurately measuring the temperature.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008...hange.html

Yes, several months ago I was reading a EC disclaimer somewhere that seasonal forecasts were running about chance (50/50).
Perhaps that may change in time with better computing power and new ideas in chaotic and nonlinear mathematics.

Was not aware of this but it certainly sounds good.

Just want to jump back to your comment here for moment.
I hear this BS all the time from the Gore types, some environmentalists and a whole gambit of people.
Save the planet , save the Planet.
But in essence we are not saving the Planet.
The Planet will be here long after we are gone.
If anything we are trying to save ourselves from ourselves.
So if and when they finally get their neural synapses firing with the idea it's our as* on the line and not the planet, things may be taken more seriously.
Having said that I am an optimist. I think they will at some point smarten up (hopefully not too late) and change things around.:D
If not, "we in deep #$%^.

Ron

Ron, believe me I know how you feel.
In fact today the 26th of April, I lit off a small wood fire to warm things up a bit.

Yet on the other hand if we were into climate change this is exactly what I would expect. Air is a fluid and acts as such.
The more heat is added to a fluid the more dynamically (fluid dynamics) active and locally unstable it gets.

Example; if you put a Pyrex container with water on a stove. The fluid is stable when you look through it, there are only micro eddy currents that determine point temperatures, but general stability.
Now turn the burner on and bring the temperature up. You will see the wavy turbulent thermodynamic motion start.
You see the same thing on a hot day in the air if you have a relatively monochromatic back light source, i.e. that air rolling motion over a hot highway asphalt.

I may be totally wrong here, but in global warming because of this atmospheric instability due to a higher temperatures, I would expect to see cooler temperatures and actually much more snow than usual in certain areas and higher temps and rain rates in others that normally do not experience such things.
Local ideas on global warming may be skewed depending what region you observe them from.

Pretty damn difficult to convince me today of global warming at an outside temp of 7.2°C, cold and damp.:D

I apologies for the oversimplification, but I am a lousy communicator.