Global warming?

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

No. and I won't lower myself to either.

I cant steer the thread. I can only watch it drift.

[xoxoxoBruce]

And don't forget it.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

And don't forget it.

At least, if I drift north, there wont be as many icebergs to bump into.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

From Monkey's pdf;

Under the header "Perpetuating the Myth".

The actual paper punctures that myth.

[xoxoxoBruce]

But it points out the politics involved and the importance of being on the right team for funding, as well.

[jinx]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

I'm not sure when I'll manage to watch an hour and a half video, but page one of a Google search isn't promising.

Ha, I lol'd until I realized you're serious.

[Happy Monkey]

Huh?

[glatt]

This: "I'm not sure when I'll manage to watch an hour and a half video"
is funny. Who's going to watch a long video just for an argument on the internet? But then she thought you were probably serious, and would watch it. So she stopped laughing.

Were you serious? I kind of doubt it. Who's gonna watch a long video just because of an argument on the internet?

[Shawnee123]

Oh, yeah. Huh?

[Happy Monkey]

Not particularly serious, and less so after a quick Google.

I've flipped through long videos, to get the gist, but an hour and a half is a bit over the top.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Oh, yeah. Huh?

that has to be the funniest popcorn eating gif I have seen.

[Shawnee123]

I know, it cracked me up!

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by classicman

I'm not sure that tree rings are going to be as accurate as we may need. When I think about the mechanical instruments we were using just 40 or 50 years ago, I start to scratch my head about the fractions of a degree raise. Just sayin'

You would be amazed. I took a graduate course in forest ecology once and the professor used us students as unpaid labor looking at tree rings in 100's of cores that we went out and collected. You could tell from the width of the ring if it had been a dry or wet year, if a forest fire had gone through at some point, if a nearby tree had been cut down or fallen. It was very fascinating, although I got a couple of headaches counting all those rings under the scope.

[Undertoad]

I would think global tree data would be immensely useful. Not to figure out, say, the low temperature in November in 1831, but to show the long-term trends. The trees can see back a few centuries, so they have a unique undeniable perspective on things.

For example, as you go up the mountain, there are trees which start to fail from not surviving the conditions. You could work out long-term averages really well there: the tree at 6000' had no winters above 10 degrees until the 1940s. You could compare the trees of 100 years ago to the trees today, and say, half a century ago this ridge could not support trees, now it does. An overall increase of one degree in temperature in this location could cause this.

Imagine a forest succeeding or failing. It's massive, long term change on the order of the appearance or disappearance of deserts. You could figure out which trees get flooded in coastal flood zones, to figure out ocean depth changes. You could say whether el nino/la nina effects were routine over large areas of the continent and how long the cycles are. You could determine to the year when an ocean current appeared, based on the areas that were affected and not affected.

[classicman]

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.
Raj Pachauri

Forced to apologize: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri

‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

Link
I dunno.