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mygif

The end is nigh

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mygif

Goddamn.

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lol @ MGK

Global warming doesn’t exist!

Malarky!

/McCain ’08!

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mygif

As much as I hate giving any conservatives any kind of real ammunition, the accuracy rate of these environmental scientists have been about as high as any republican think-tank regarding the Iraq War or the US economy.

Another day another fear.

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mygif

Couldn’t you just, like, you know…

Light a match?

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mygif

So it’s either this or the Hadron Collider.

I’ll take the LHC, please.

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mygif

So it’s either this or the Hadron Collider.

I’ll take the LHC, please.

Maybe the miniature black holes will suck up all the methane?

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Thomas Wilde said on September 25th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

Couldn’t you just, like, you know…

Light a match?

I’ve actually been wondering about that myself. I remember visiting a landfill as part of my biology courses in college and watching them burn off the escaping methane.

I’m sure it’s completely unworkable due to the sheer scope of it, but it’d be good if we could just collect the methane or burn it off somehow.

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@malakim2099

And in the winter, the gorillas will freeze to death!

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RockLobster said on September 25th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

The methane would be dissolved by the ocean, and then be released over a very large area. Very difficult to collect and burn off.

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mygif

I would think burning billions of tons of methane wouldn’t be very good for our climate, either.

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mygif

Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw!

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Thomas Wilde said on September 25th, 2008 at 6:57 pm

I would think burning billions of tons of methane wouldn’t be very good for our climate, either.

Nah, it burns clean. Methane is a big part of natural gas.

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mygif

So, here’s what I’m thinking.

We get some sharks, right?

And we get some lasers, you follow?

We put the lasers… on the sharks’ heads. The lasers light the gases wherever they are, and problem solved!

Amirite?

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I know! Nuclear winter! That’ll solve our global warming problem, and get rid of a bunch of pesky nukes!

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Andrew.

I really hope that the GOP trolls that occasionally show up don’t show your idea to McCain/Palin’s campaign. I think they’d be crazy enough to try if they win (though that seems a little less likely now). 😉

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Andrew.

I really hope that the GOP trolls that occasionally show up don’t show your idea to McCain/Palin’s campaign.

Given the way things have gone this week, I suspect they’d be likelier to pick Cody B.’s shark idea.

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Flusterbunny said on September 26th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

Another nerd board I’m on has a smug conservative providing this little treatise on how Global Warming is bunk. I would like to ask your well-researched help in refuting it, if possible.

“More than 31,000 scientists, including many of those that participated in the IPCC report and won Nobel Prizes right alongside Al Gore, that agree that ‘Global Warming’ is not a manmade phenomena, and that there’s no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or any other greenhouse gas that is causing or will anytime in the foreseeable future cause any kind of catastrophic heating of the Earth’s climate. (http://www.oism.org/pproject/)

Beyond that, since the IPCC report came out several years ago, that same panel had to be reconvened to figure out what was wrong with thier dire predictions when, instead of temperatures going up, temperatures began dropping. (http://epw.senate.gov/public/)

Scientists announced that the world temperature peaked in 1998 and has been dropping since. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm)

And, then the World Meteorological Organisation announced that we’d have Global Cooling throughout the year. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=557209&in_page_id=1770)

And, then they came out and announce that Global Warming had mysteriously gone ‘on hiatus’ until at least 2015. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/30/eaclimate130.xml)

3,000 robots were sent out into the oceans to measure water temperatures because the oceans are supposed to be the main indicator of global warming — mainly due to the fact that 80% to 90% of it involves warming ocean waters. There was no evidence of warming at all in the last 5 years. In fact, the robots were telling scientists that the ocean’s temperatures were dropping. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025)

We started having snow falling in places like Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Maui and India and other places that haven’t seen snow in a decades (or, in Iraq’s case, in a century) or more.

China, the Arctic, and other places throughout the Northern Hemisphere experienced an abnormally cold winter last year. Snow cover over China, North America, Siberia, and Mongolia reached a height it hadn’t seen in 40 years (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289}, with China experiencing the most brutal winter its had in centuries.

Just last month, a scientist in Mexico — looking at data that scientists in Canada (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4248062.html) and Russia also observed — declared that we’d not only not experience any more Global Warming, but that we’d likely slip into another Mini Ice Age within two years (http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milenio.com%2Fmexico%2Fmilenio%2Fnota.asp%3Fid%3D651680&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=es&tl=en), and that we should expect it to last from 60 to 80 years.

The Canadians and Russians started worrying about the ‘disturbing lack of sun spot activity’ way back in February, by the way. We haven’t had any significant sunspot activity since then, either. So, if you think it was a concern then, how much more of a concern do you think it’s becoming now?

But, hey, what do any of those guys know, right … ?”

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mygif

FB, in order:

1.) The “Oregon Petition,” as it is commonly known, only requires a science DEGREE to be considered a signer, as opposed to actually being a working scientist (much less a climatologist or any even vaguely related discipline). That means my friend Joe with a bachelor’s degree in computer science is eligible to sign the damn thing. Only about 2000 of the signees are in climate-related fields, and of those the vast majority are physicists (only tangentially related to climatology at best). Many of the more noteworthy names on the petition have since protested that they signed the petition under circumstances that were less than transparent. The petition also has numerous duplicates and fictional characters as signees, as well as noted climate scientist Geri Haliwell.
(cite: http://mediamatters.org/items/200602140013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_petition)

2.) Citing La Nina as “proof” of global cooling is retarded; it’s a climatological phenomenon that cools the planet a bit, just as El Nino warms it a bit, and the two tend to repeat in a vast cycle anyway. Climate isn’t “this year is warmer than last year” or vice versa; it’s the study of longer-term trends in weather. Ditto the BBC “global warming has stopped” article (which, incidentally, it hasn’t) – all the authors of that study argue is that there’s going to be a bit of a blip in overall global warming trends, not that global warming as a theory is incorrect. (“Global warming has momentarily paused” would be a better way of stating the point.)
(cite: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/global-cooling-wanna-bet/)

3.) The robots! (Ah, the robots.) Said study has since been revamped by the same group after finding some discrepancies in data, and… well, guess what, they *reinforce* the oceanic warming model now.
(cite: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/)

4.) Wait, the dumbass is actually going to the “it was cold last winter in some places” well? Global warming theory states that the earth as a whole is going to get warmer. The problem is that it’s not going to get warmer as a whole on a uniform basis – a three degree raise in world temperature doesn’t mean it gets warmer by three degrees in Kamchatka, Johannesburg and New York. It means that on average the world gets three degrees warmer. The problem we’re seeing right now is that the high end of that average is happening in the Arctic (where summer sea ice is disappearing at a ridiculous, terrifying rate). Most climate models worry about Greenland land ice melting because of the potential it has for disrupting the Gulf stream, which carries warm water north to Europe; no Gulf stream and England and Scandinavia would lose a lot of ambient heat and, yes, become colder (and likely largely unlivable as a result). The world, though, as a whole, would become warmer, even as those areas grew colder on the whole. Global warming is dangerous because it throws climatological systems as a WHOLE out of whack, rather than just making everything de facto warmer (which would honestly be a lot easier to deal with in some ways).

5.) Sunspot activity isn’t a forcer of warming/cooling change to any significant extent, period. The science on this is very much settled, beyond a few cranks. The idea of severely reduced solar activity periods coming forth might, if we are very very insanely lucky, bump us down a degree (which is all that we lost in the 1600s, and volcanic activity had a lot more to do with it than a solar lull). That loss of a degree wouldn’t even begin to compensate for the heat gains we’ve manufactured on our own.
(cite: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/the-lure-of-solar-forcing/)

Seriously, anybody who starts off with the Oregon Petition is a misinformed twat at best and an outright liar at worst.

(Andy, I’d also point you to this, in case he raises more bullshit:
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
It’s a handy helpmate for the most popular GW skeptic “arguments.”)

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Flusterbunny said on September 26th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

Actually, never mind. Somebody did it for me (I have no time for such things, only indignation about them). Apparently the very articles this guy linked to debunk most of the claims he made about them.

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Wow, thanks MGK. You’re awesome!

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This whole conservative effort to dismiss global warming seems rather short-sighted. Isn’t the parable of the knight and the monk relevant here? If global warming is a threat to drastically alter or extinguish life on this planet within the next century and we take serious steps to curb the problem, then we save humanity. If it isn’t a threat, then oh well, we helped conserve natural resources and made the air a little more breathable.

As always, this seems to be about money. The corporations who have money don’t want to squeeze their profit margins by investing in alternative fuel sources. The governments owned by these corporations refuse to take steps lest they lose their funding.

Nobody seems to realize the risk of doing nothing outweighs the rewards of doing anything.

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The thing is, investing in alternative fuels and energy sources often increases profits in the long run, because they come up with something more efficient.

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I’d point out one more thing, if I may:
Scientists announced that the world temperature peaked in 1998 and has been dropping since.
This may be technically true, but it’s highly misleading. Global temperature doesn’t necessarily just bump up every year–of course there are going to be variations, a miniature warming/cooling cycle. If you only look at temperatures since 1998 then yes, things are cooling down. If you look at them from a longer period you’ll see a distinct pattern of temperature increases even with fluctuations that have some years cooler than previous ones. See this blog post for a good discussion of this sort of thing: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/05/selective_data_and_global_warm.php

They also don’t mention that 1998 was an outlier because of an exceptionally strong El Nino that year–if you look at El Nino on Wikipedia, you’ll notice it says: “The El Niño of 1997-1998 was particularly strong and brought the phenomenon to worldwide attention. The event temporarily warmed air temperature by 3°F, compared to the usual increase of 0.5°F associated with El Niño events.”

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mygif

I think we’ll survive… at least, enough of us to continue the species. the cute and cuddly critters with breeding programs in zoos? most of them as well… but the rest of the species alive today? yeah, they’re all pretty fucked, unless MAJOR action at a WORLDWIDE scale happens NOW… which it won’t, but it’s nice to think that we have a slight chance to turn this clusterfuck around. 🙁

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