Save The Alaskans!

[Blisspath]

Anchorage is having to endure their coolest summer ever and it is all our fault. We did a great job of raising awareness and fighting global warming, but swung the pendulum too far in saving CO2. The consensus is in and the debate is over MAC(manmade Alaskan cooling) is a serious threat and we have only ten years to save our fellow citizens from being encapsulated by giant glaciers. There is a brave soul that has taken it upon himself to pump extra CO2 back into the atmosphere. For every page hit to his website, he promises to use his CO2 generator to bring balance back to the Earth. Please add the link to your page, and tell all of your friends.

(Sounds silly doesn't it..but yet people believe it when celebrities and Owlgore say the same thing about global warming without any science to back it up)


http://carbonreset.com/


http://www.adn.com/life/story/473786.html

[Beldaran]

If you really think there is "no science" behind global warming, you have your head in your colon.

[Blisspath]

Do you know the mechanism between CO2 and manmade global warming? Because they can't seem to find the link.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm

[Beldaran]

I suppose if I wasn't busy studying for a differential equations test, I could consult one of the peer reviewed papers written by one of the 2000 research scientists from 150 different countries and be a little more precise.

Or I could douse my brain with novacaine and trust your political article from the political newspaper written by a person with political interests and motivations.

HMMMMM. WHAT TO DO?

[rock_nog]

Blisspath, what is your deal? Global warming is very much a scientific issue. The scientists may be wrong, but it's being investigated scientifically. Quit spreading this crap about how celebrities and politicians just made it all up. And the link you posted really didn't have your case. His entire argument is that global warming isn't scientific, based solely on the fact that some people use it to scare other the people.

Anyway, the mechanism is really quite simple. Wait, scratch that, it's incredibly complex. But the mechanism of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas is very well understood by those who understand those sorts of things better than myself. Basically, CO2 has an absorption spectrum on the infrared level. Thus... Okay, it gets really complex, but the end result is that infrared rays are absorbed by CO2, and then later re-emitted, some of which go back down toward Earth. The real question, and the reason we have such difficulty saying whether global warming is real or not, is that the Earth's climate is just such an incredibly complex system to model, that it's nigh impossible to make sure that you're taking all the right variables into account. This becomes especially complex because the variables themselves interact with each other, creating all sorts of complicated problems. You get all sorts of feedback effects, and things canceling each other out, and in the end, it basically takes years and years before you can even see how well your climate model worked out.

[Beldaran]

nuh uh, rock_nog.

Everything is simple and can be understood by a 2000 year old manuscript written by people who thought the earth was flat. Anything complicated is a bunch of lies invented by Owl Gore. Scientists are just atheists, and therefore not to be trusted. Evolution is a gay conspiracy.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/Ted_Nugent_in_concert.jpg/450px-Ted_Nugent_in_concert.jpg

[Cloral]

Actually, believe it or not, cooler weather in Alaska is the result of global warming. Confused? Let met explain:

In each of the major oceans is a large vortex of water known as a gyre. Ths gyre rotates the water in the ocean clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere. This rotation is a result of the Coriolis Effect (i.e. caused by the spinning of the earth). The most famous part of an ocean gyre is the gulf stream, which takes warm water from the gulf of mexico up the east coast of the us. This water then travels across the ocean to northern europe, and is responsible for the mild winters experienced in places like england. The same thing happens in the pacific ocean, helping to keep the temperatures in coastal alaska more mild. The thing is, global warming causes the gyres to not work so well, slowing the delivery of warm water to the higher latitudes. Therefore, global warming actually causes the coastal, high-latitude locations to become colder and less hospitable.

Suck it.

[rock_nog]

There you go, Cloral, weren't you paying attention to Beldaran? Nothing ever has a complex explanation. Clearly anyone who thinks that the Earth's climate is any more complicated than it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter is an idiot.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/conspiracy_theories.png

[The_Amaster]

(@ Cloral's post)
...yeah, yeah, that's not really suprising. I've never thought that Global Warming was going to doom the planet by making everything hotter. I just always thought that it would screw with the enviorment in ways like that.

Earth is a complex, chaotic, ever changing system. Raising the temperature does not equate to "everything is hotter". It equates too "a hundred different processes are subtley influenced out of wack"

[Blisspath]

Blisspath, what is your deal? Global warming is very much a scientific issue. The scientists may be wrong, but it's being investigated scientifically. Quit spreading this crap about how celebrities and politicians just made it all up. And the link you posted really didn't have your case. His entire argument is that global warming isn't scientific, based solely on the fact that some people use it to scare other the people.

Anyway, the mechanism is really quite simple. Wait, scratch that, it's incredibly complex. But the mechanism of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas is very well understood by those who understand those sorts of things better than myself. Basically, CO2 has an absorption spectrum on the infrared level. Thus... Okay, it gets really complex, but the end result is that infrared rays are absorbed by CO2, and then later re-emitted, some of which go back down toward Earth. The real question, and the reason we have such difficulty saying whether global warming is real or not, is that the Earth's climate is just such an incredibly complex system to model, that it's nigh impossible to make sure that you're taking all the right variables into account. This becomes especially complex because the variables themselves interact with each other, creating all sorts of complicated problems. You get all sorts of feedback effects, and things canceling each other out, and in the end, it basically takes years and years before you can even see how well your climate model worked out.


I never said that I didn't believe in climate change..the climate of the Earth is always changing..its been much cooler and much hotter. My deal is with politicians and celebrities screaming how we have "10 years to save the planet" and not letting scientists debate the issue. I don't think that man made CO2 has that much of an effect on climate...but I know that we have done things to hurt the climate.. pumping CFCs into the air was a really bad idea and should have been discontinued earlier. The problem is that everything seems like an emergency and when it turns out to be false then the activists move on to the next crisis. In the 70s it was thought that pollution was blocking the rays from the sun and we were heading to an ice age.(Google Time 1974 ice age) then in the 80s it was acid rain that would destroy the forests...the 90s brought doom talk from a widening ozone hole..and now global warming and greenhouse gasses...after a while you just have to become skeptical

No prob though..good people can disagree on this one...It's noble that you care about the planet for future generations.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

[AtmaWeapon]

Honestly I can't take anyone seriously when they use "cute" wordplay like "Owlgore". It reminds me of M$, $ony, and all the other "clever" alphabet games people play when all other forms of discussion have failed them and they have to appeal to some kind of wacky out-there argument.

People who think I need to live in a treehouse and eat nothing but bird nests so that my carbon footprint prevents Earth from becoming the 2nd sun of the Solar System are so far removed from reality it's like they don't exist. People who think I shouldn't bother conserving gas or using cloth bags instead of plastic are equally removed from reality. Could we stop this stupid war of us vs. them and agree that somewhere between the prophecies of doom and the promises that everything is A-OK there is a truth and that truth is that no one in the world understands the climate but we have some concerns that seem to correlate with the data we've collected?

What's it mean when there's a conspiracy theory to prove something and a conspiracy theory to disprove it?

[rock_nog]

It means that people simply can't handle unknowns. "I don't know" is perhaps the most hated phrase in the English language. No one ever wants to admit to not having the answers. This is, in part, why we have religion.

My advice - ignore anyone who claims they've worked out a simple answer to an incredibly complex problem. Like global warming - there are always people convinced that one little bit of data they've discovered completely wraps up the whole thing. Whatever the eventual answer will be regarding global warming, the truth will be discovered only through years of hard work and analysis.