A question for environmentalists on this forum?

Question

We here all these reports about drastic climate change, tons of category 4 and 5 hurricanes devastating coastal areas, as well as dramatic melting of the ice-caps, causing catastrophic sea-level rise (which, actually, could never be catastrophic, because it would happen so dang slow.)
Could one of you PLEASE tell me why we aren't experiencing any of this calamity? There has not been a single hurricane to make U.S. landfall this year, or in 2006, after predictions of their increasing rate. (I would also have you notice that there was practically no media report on the unusually slow hurricane seasons.)
If the alarmists are so smart, and we have to trust them, then why are they so rarely right about anything?

Bob: I never said that global warming wasn't happening. It's just that the alarmist-dream isn't coming true.

Dana: Your statement about hurricanes still doesn't change the fact that the predictions didn't follow through.
MSNBC said the following on May 22, 2006:
"The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season will be very active with up to 10 hurricanes, although not as busy as record-breaking 2005.... NOAA is predictiong 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming huricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher."
There's a prediction proved wrong for you, but I see you gloss over that.

As for Hansen, the temperature's did indeed seem to coincide with the best-case scenario of his graph, if temperature is all you look at. But you have to take into account that the temperatures as he suggested would occur only with drastic emission reductions, and than hasn't happened. Prediction number 2 proved false.
Hindcasting and forecasting are opposites. I don't see how this is relevant.
I'll get to your claim about the Arctic in a second.

OK, so the Arctic.
In the book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism," Chris Horner say this:
"The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), which served as the basis for serial, breathless stories about a melting Arctic in recent years, chose to expand the Arctic Circle 450 miles in all directions, setting the southern limit at 60 degrees North Latitude (pity the poor residents of the Shetland Islands who suddenly became Arctic dwellers). The ACIA expanded the Arctic by about 50 percent,...(the equivalent in surface area of adding the entire U.S. plus two Frances). The Arctic as they define it is two-thirds covered with ocean, but they used land-borne measuring stations to determine temperature."
Well, seeing as so much of it is ocean now, no wonder the ice seems to be melting so fast! (FYI, Arctic temperatures have risen by about 1.25 degrees C since 1960.) Even if the whole thing did melt, it would have no affect on sea-level as it is sea ice.

qu1ck80: I'm not trying to disprove global warming. I agree that it is happening. I'm just pointing out the unreliability of climate prediction, and why we shouldn't make drastic changes to our lifestyle, when the climate alarmists are usually wrong in their predictions.

suh-MANTHA: I believe you are referring to the regional warming of your area.
Also, there is no conceivable way that any sane person could say that tsunamis are even remotely caused by global warming. Tsunamis are the result of earthquakes, which happen when tectonic plates shift suddenly. It's like saying that my glass of water will freeze because I'm licking a popsicle. It is THAT unrelated.

cbabysnugglebunny: I have absolutely no problem with the things you listed, like recycling. They are good things to do, because they are less wasteful. You, and anyone else who wants to, can do them, as long as the government doesn't start mandating that I do all of them too.

Dr. Blob: I will admit that I didn't even read half of your answer, because after the first paragraph I realized the whole thing was just more of the environmental chunter and whining that I have heard a thousand times. You act as though we are on a campaign to destroy the planet, although, much the opposite, we are constantly looking for "cleaner," and often unnecessary, means of energy, etc.

Answer 1

It should be noted that some hurricanes were counted as being tropical even though they weren't. It's the classic padding of the numbers to make things look worse.

The scare machine needs to be working to keep people in a continuing state of fear in order to get the control they desire.

Answer 2

Glaciers all over the world are melting at an accelerated rate that exceeds predictions. There are storms in places where they are unusual and dry areas are becoming even drier. Right here in the US many states in the south are experiencing drought conditions. Alarmists can be annoying but there is the possibility if we don't act NOW the warming could reach a point at which nothing we do will reverse the trend. And getting India and China to implement pollution controls is a waste of breath. They are determined to catch up to the US in just a few years when it took the US 200 years to build the economy we now have.

Answer 3

Well I'm 13 but i am a professional environmentalist...I change my community as much as i can and i hope to one day change the world i also went to a environmental school!

I live in Canada and we haven't been getting any of this either but it will eventually make its way here...Global warming is only man made to a degree its mostly the earth naturally heating and cooling (ie: Ice age,dinosaur age)
so its starting in places like the ice caps and tropical places etc.
The truth is America and Canada will not really get much changes from global warming like it wont effect us a whole lot and if it does effect us it wont be for a extremely long time!
I know we have to protect our childrens future!
But theres not a whole lot we can do to stop it!

We can reduce greenhouse gass emissions and conserve!

1)recycle -plastic,paper,metal,glass etc.
2)change r lightbulbs to flourecant from incandecant
3)keep r lights turned off when there not being used
4)walk,bike,skateboard etc. whenever possible
5)carpool whenever possible
6)dont litter
7)conserve water
8)plant trees
9)use other energy sources (ex: Solar,wind,water) rather then electicity or batteries

Theres so much more we can do too!

I hope I helped
Happy holidays
-christina xoxo

Answer 4

Well, for a hurricane to form, there are a lot of factors that need to occur. Warm ocean temps I believe is the only factor that is even related to global warming. The oceans were indeed warmer than average this year again, but apparently some of the other factors didn't pan out in order for more hurricanes to form in the Atlantic. (You may not have noticed, but there were a few big storms this year in the Pacific). I believe I heard several storms were broken apart by high wind sheer in the upper atmosphere.

I think a lot of the weather forecasters make their hurricane predictions at the beginning of the season basically to draw ratings. Hurricanes are extremely hard to predict before they form! This doesn't by any means disprove global warming, I'm sorry to tell you!

Answer 5

you actually have to take into account all of the results that global warming is causing.
i currently live in the midwest, and we've been devastated by droughts and irratic weather patterns, supposedly due to the shifting of the jetstream.
also, no one has said that the actual sea level rise would be drastic, what would be drastic about it, is the tsunamis that could result from it. such temperature change in the oceans not only will result in irratic wave patterns but also drastic effects on animal life.
you can't say that just because you're not seeing the results of global warming that it's not taking place. obviously the environment and climate aren't something that can be controlled, and predicting them on a long term basis is just as hard. but it has been PROVEN that global warming will eventually have drastic effects on the environment, as well as our daily lives if we don't buck up and make some quick changes.

Answer 6

I need to add this to my Word file, because I have to tell people so freaking often.

Scientists have concluded that global warming likely effects the intensity of hurricanes, but not the frequency with which they form.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070228123140.htm
http://www.livescience.com/environment/ap_050731_hurricanes_stronger.html
http://www.livescience.com/environment/ap_050731_hurricanes_stronger.html

Today was 1 degree warmer than the weatherman predicted in Portland. Are you going to blame climatologists for that, too?

The other things you talk about are projections of the future. The future hasn't happened yet.

As for accurate predictions, in 1988 with vastly less advanced climate models, James Hansen accurately predicted the ensuing global warming:

http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen88_forc.jpg
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/

Climate scientists have also hindcasted the climate change over the 20th century with very high accuracy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

On top of that, artic sea ice is melting at record levels, faster than even predicted (but I'm not going to count being too conservative against them, since you're calling scientists "alarmists").

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070501-arctic-ice.html

A new study just found that Greenland ice is melting at a record rate.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20071210/wl_mcclatchy/2780199

That's 4 right vs. 0 wrong. If "alarmists" are correct or too conservative 100% of the time, are they still alarmists? Do you need god to put a sign in your front yard saying "Punker, wake the hell up. Humans are causing global warming"?

Answer 7

Well, this is GLOBAL warming. Two Cat 5s made landfall this year, which has NEVER happened before.

But hurricanes are not proof of global warming, either way. They're just weather. This is proof:

Meehl, G.A., W.M. Washington, C.A. Ammann, J.M. Arblaster, T.M.L. Wigleym and C. Tebaldi (2004). "Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate". Journal of Climate 17: 3721-3727

summarized at:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

The melting of the Arctic ice cap is darn dramatic, and also proof. It responds to long term climate change, rather than short term weather.

Of course the mother of all proof is this:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html

EDIT - I quite agree that people shouldn't be alarmist about this. The reality is quite bad enough:

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL052735320070407
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM6avr07.pdf

Answer 8

I will now list some of what environmentalists consider to be the extreme, outrageous and even obscene environmental assaults that were begun in earnest at the beginning of the industrial revolution and continue to this day unabated and accelerating. In no particular order.

Filling in estuaries to make room for human activity. The cities we live in today were filled with waste from bank to shore in the late 19th century. The used anything they had as fill material; mostly debris, garbage and ash. The lowland areas near the rivers were considered to be wastelands that bred disease, were not usable or traversable, and were needed for commerce and industry to have access to river shipping. In every town and hamlet we first take the prime areas and remake them for our purposes. It turns out that estuaries are the single most important, species rich, productive and necessary habitats on the planet. Inland, lowland areas along rivers and streams serve the same purpose. In North America we filled them all in 100 years ago. The Mississippi was once miles wide. Now it’s channeled from Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico. Today in Southeast Asia , they cut down mangrove swamps to make room for shrimp farms. Speaking of shrimp farms, we are on our way to fishing out the oceans. Many formerly important fisheries including such species such as Cod have been essentially fished out. We are now into harvesting “less desirable” species which used to be considered by-catch, but are now sold as the primary catch. On the current trajectory, the estimate for total collapse is 2050. Shrimp farming is not an environmentally benign or neutral activity that extends productivity or saves the oceans. The shrimp have to be fed, and fed protein. The protein comes from ocean fisheries. But unfortunately, according to physics and thermodynamics, there are inefficiencies. You can harvest x amount of protein from the ocean. But you can only deliver a lesser percent to the shrimp. The shrimp convert the delivered protein at less than 100%, so you get even less useable protein from the shrimp for consumption. And it takes energy to harvest ocean by-catch to feed the shrimp, manage the shrimp farms and process the shrimp for sale. Meanwhile, when you created the shrimp farm by destroying the mangrove swamp, you have destroyed the ecosystem that once protected ocean species and helped clean and regenerate the ocean. You would be better off just fishing the oceans in the first place to avoid all the additional losses of habitat, protein and energy. So what ostensibly begins as an exercise to extend the productivity of the oceans ends up accelerating the decline. The same is true for land based farming. You add fertilizers and pesticides to gain productivity. It takes energy to make chemical fertilizer and pesticides. You gain productivity in the short term, but you do so at the cost of killing the soil, despoiling the watershed and wasting energy. You have to add more and more chemicals to just to maintain the same level of productivity. Eventually the soil is so depleted that there is no natural resistance present to prevent runaway pathogens. So you wind up doing what California strawberry farms do today, essentially sterilizing the soil with methyl bromide before every planting. An old golf course guy explained it to me a long time ago. They would fertilize, use pesticides and herbicides and after a number of years the soil would become sterile. No further application of any agent could get the grass to grow again. They would have to truck off the top foot of soil (to a landfill and get soil from somewhere else) and start over. He explained the only sustainable solution for a lawn is to use only lime, organic fertilizer, aerate and reseed. And accept a few weeds.

How much water can we pump out of the ground before the aquifers are dry? Evidence abounds from around the world that they are drying up now. A golf course was built next door to a personal friend of mine. His well went dry, and now he is on public water. I live in a metropolitan area and I just got a letter from the water authority. The rates are going up and one of the reasons is the “need to import from other authorities…surface supplies that are less affected by drought…due to declining yields in our township wells…” The average person won’t even read the flyer. When I read it, it was like a stake in the heart – it’s only a matter of time before my well goes dry. How much waste can we dump on the ground and in the ocean before it becomes so concentrated that we end up eating the waste in our food? We have warnings today about mercury in Tuna. Warnings are posted on rivers and streams across the country that the fish is “unfit for human consumption”. You have PCB, dioxin, PFOA, PBDE in your body fat (and breast milk) right now, as does every top-of-food-chain predator around the world. How many oil spills can we have before every beach has been fouled? Ask that question to the Inuit in Alaska who live on Prudhoe Bay . How much ocean dragnet trawling can we have before the entire bottom of the ocean is scraped off and there are no more fish spawning grounds. The Russians and others have been drag-netting off Cap Cod for since the early 70’s. Once these areas have been destroyed they are not going to regenerate in our lifetime, not in 100 years or 1000 years. These are ecosystems that were tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the making. How many millions of tons of road salt can we spread before every stream is dead? There are reports that this is happening now in the Northeast US. We exploit the Colorado so fully that it has to be desalinated at the border to make the water usable for our Mexican friends, and then it dries up in the Baja before reaching the Gulf of California. Insert names of other rivers around the world that have been treated the same way. How much untreated human waste can we dump into rivers and streams; or treated waste for that matter? Sewage plants do not treat waste water even close to restoring the water to the pristine state it was in before it was pumped out of an aquifer. Sewage treatment removes solids and fecal bacteria and breaks down detergent and some other simple contaminants. It does nothing for the decomposition products of those reactions. Treatment with chlorine introduces another whole class of halogenated organic molecules. Treatment does nothing for the thousands of other chemicals introduced from the mixing of industrial and household chemical waste with human waste. So much simple human waste is flushed down the toilet that un-metabolized pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical metabolites are now present in measurable quantities in surface water all over the US. The water pumped out of aquifers and diverted from rivers is contaminated with agricultural chemical waste, industrial chemical waste and human waste and then dumped back into the environment on an unimaginable scale every minute of every day. Huge ocean dead zones have formed where rivers empty into oceans all around the world, mainly due to agricultural fertilizer runoff. Not to mention the huge raw sewage releases that happen deliberately, accidentally, or negligently from poor maintenance, poor capacity planning and delayed replacement of obsolescent infrastructure.

Let’s see, what else. Frog populations around the globe are being wiped out by a mysterious fungus. No one is sure of the origin or if it is related to stress from pollution; it may be an invader species from Africa. The Russians have been pumping millions of gallons of highly radioactive toxic waste directly into the ground in several places in the Arctic for 30 or 40 years. The environmental recklessness of the communists is legendary, their excesses legion. We got Chernobyl because they use no containment on their reactors. The world only found out about the accident because Swedish Cold War radiation monitors went off at the border. North America has been logged over at least three times since the 1700’s, but we still have to go after the last virgin two percent that’s left. Why? The dominate species of trees on the east coast of the US were once Chestnut and Elm in massive forests from Tennessee to Maine. Now they are all gone because of simple hitchhiking pests. Now we have Oak Blight and Emerald Ash Borer. I lost two 100ft, 75 year old Oaks in the last three years. One more is looking bad. The other two look ok so far, but I’m not holding my breath. One theory for the loss of conifers in the Blue Ridge is due to constant low level foliar fertilization. When fog with high levels of nitrogen oxides hangs over the forests it causes abnormal growth cycles – causing the trees to grow when they should be dormant. How long before all trees become so stressed we lose entire forests and are only left with a few hardy “weed” species? Honeybee’s, on which 30-40% of the agricultural production in the US depends, are now dying from a new unknown reason called Colony Collapse Disorder; entire apiaries of 1000 hives gone in a period of weeks. This is a new problem, possibly related to a new class of pesticides, separate from the mite infestations that have been decimating colonies for the last 10 or 20 years. In West Virginia they are now lopping the tops off of entire mountains to get at the coal. The tailings fill in entire valleys. What was once an unspoiled landscape where generations of families harvested wild North American Ginseng are now featureless mounds. And the surrounding wells produce a toxic black slurry instead of mountain spring water. So after we have used all the coal - we will have – no mountain ecosystem, no local economy, no water, millions of tons of more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, tons of mercury in the environment and last but not least, no more coal. Then what do we do? Copper is another good example. It has been calculated that 2/3 of the recoverable copper on the planet has been mined. 1/3 is in the ground, 1/3 is in use, and 1/3 is in landfills. Why would we mine out all the copper, with all the attendant degradation from mining, rather than conserve and stop putting copper in landfills? Ozone has thinned all over the world; the “holes” are areas of greater thinning at the poles. I think I read once that the guy who invented Freon would inhale the gas to prove it was harmless. Except that once the molecule reaches the stratosphere ultraviolet light splits it and frees the chlorine, each atom of which is then free to destroy a hundred thousand ozone molecules. My understanding is that the reaction is very efficient at low temperatures and when CFC’s are trapped in the circumpolar vortex the “hole” is created each winter. Climate change is beginning to change temperature ranges and precipitation bands so that populations of native plants and animals are “moved” out of their native zone too quickly for them to “move” or adapt. This manifestation of the climate change problem is not trivial. For example, migratory birds depend on food sources along the route. If food sources produce just a few days out of sequence, the birds will die of starvation. This is happening now. This has always happened, the problem now is that it is happening much too quickly for species to adapt. Read the reports about Inuit hunters who can no longer rely on stable ice and weather to hunt. Their life is changing today. I read about an Air Force pilot would take his kid out to the lake and spend the day fishing and watch the four engine jets traverse the sky. See, look, one contrail will expand and spread out to cover the sky from horizon to horizon with one thin cloud. For the three or four days after 9-11 there was an unexplained increase in solar insolation in the US. It turns out that aerosols and cloud formation from jet exhaust have been blocking sunlight. This now has to be figured in to atmospheric climate calculations. There are 10’s of thousands of flights daily around the world.

Since the advent of global transportation, plant and animal species have been transferred around the world at an increasing rate. It is estimated that a new non-native species is introduced somewhere in the world every day. An experiment in San Francisco bay showed non-natives now occupy 90% of that eco-system. The cumulative effect of this will be to co-mingle all the species of the world. The effect of this is unknown, however it is currently estimated the eventual effect will be the extinction of 70% land species the world over.

We have effects of chemical pollution, biological pollution, alien species invasion, climate change, habitat destruction, water resource destruction and not to mention direct human harvesting of species, which is using an estimated 40% of incident solar energy and 40% of land surface. How many concurrent global assaults can the ecosystem bear?

Global Warming is symptom of the overall problem, and in the first instance it’s a case of guilt by association. Even in the absence of a smoking gun, circumstantial evidence is admissible, and the case is strong indeed.

But hey, there's no problem. Go back to your life. Just please stop claiming that scientists and environmentalists are dumb, they are never right, and we have no problems.

Edit:

The thing is, we are on a campaign to destroy the planet. It's the willful ingnorance of people that make it possible.

Your response speaks volumes.

Don't look, it's too painful to bear. But if you don't, we'll never solve this.