Al Gore Created the Ozone Layer

[nacho]

Are all of you whining Gore freaks not going to talk about the new multi-million dollar book release next month?

http://www.ipcc.ch/

http://cbs3.com/topstories/topstori..._023010811.html
Report: Human-Caused Global Warming Is Here Now

(AP) WASHINGTON Human-caused global warming is here -- visible in the air, water and melting ice -- and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."

The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday.

That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming, Solomon said.

Solomon and others wouldn't go into specifics about what the report says. They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.

The full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001.

Global warming is "happening now, it's very obvious," said Mahlman, a former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in Boulder, Colo. "When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it's pretty much a no-brainer."

Look for an "iconic statement" -- a simple but strong and unequivocal summary -- on how global warming is now occurring, said one of the authors, Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder.

The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra K. Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is the head of the international climate change panel.

An early version of the ever-changing draft report said "observations of coherent warming in the global atmosphere, in the ocean, and in snow and ice now provide stronger joint evidence of warming."

And the early draft adds: "An increasing body of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and precipitation."

The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998. Last year was the hottest year on record for the United States.

The report will draw on already published peer-review science. Some recent scientific studies show that temperatures are the hottest in thousands of years, especially during the last 30 years; ice sheets in Greenland in the past couple years have shown a dramatic melting; and sea levels are rising and doing so at a faster rate in the past decade.

Also, the second part of the international climate panel's report -- to be released in April -- will for the first time feature a blockbuster chapter on how global warming is already changing health, species, engineering and food production, said NASA scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, author of that chapter.

As confident as scientists are about the global warming effects that they've already documented, they are as gloomy about the future and even hotter weather and higher sea level rises. Predictions for the future of global warming in the report are based on 19 computer models, about twice as many as in the past, Solomon said.

In 2001, the panel said the world's average temperature would increase somewhere between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit and the sea level would rise between 4 and 35 inches by the year 2100. The 2007 report will likely have a smaller range of numbers for both predictions, Pachauri and other scientists said.

The future is bleak, scientists said.

"We have barely started down this path," said chapter co-author Richard Alley of Penn State University.

[Nubbins]

The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected.

The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph. Then it hit.

"The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real."

The day after Black Sunday, an Associated Press reporter used the term "Dust Bowl" for the first time. "Three little words achingly familiar on the Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains." The term stuck and was used by radio reporters and writers, in private letters and public speeches.

In the central and northern plains, dust was everywhere.

[nacho]

Worse yet, the Dust Bowl migration led to the totally new and modern face of the west coast and the end of America's great outlaw years!  The 30's are the best part of American history.  Talk about 110% fucked up in every way.

But, come on.  The whole decade was under a freak heat wave and drought (the most severe in recorded history).  If nature had behaved herself, then mankind's horrific excesses would have been just fine.  Next you'll say we should stop clearing the rainforest.

[RottingCorpse]

Here's a list of which oil companies are the "greenest."

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/pickyourpoison/

[Nubbins]

The thing I hate about the global warming debate is that it's all or nothing on BOTH sides.  It seems that to participate in this debate, either you're a reactionary hippie who literally believes that unless we stop using absolutely everything, we're going to die in 2.5 years from *insert reactionary disaster scenario*, or you're a fundie right wing nutjob who says it's all a liberal conspiracy and there's nothing to worry about... continue driving SUV's that get 5 miles per gallon.

It's not a black and white issue, this global warming thing.  It's very, extremely grey.  Does that mean I think conservation is a hoax?  No... no way... conservation is spiffy.  Does that mean I think our actions aren't having an effect?  Also no, we certainly impact the environment, it's just that no one can seem to correlate huge factories with melting icebergs in a cohesive way... or at least a way that makes sense to me logically.  Pointing at a Weather Channel special and implying that it says something definitive about smoke belching factories is just retarded.

Looking at a warm winter or a summer with 8 different hurricanes as a telltale sign that these are the end days is a fucking ridiculous world view... that's all I'm trying to say... especially if you consider that freak weather has happened for thousands and thousands of years.

[nacho]

Thank you, nubbins.  I'm with you there.  And we have had long cycles going on:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#Climate_events

So, yes, modern industry has certainly sped up a natural event.  But nubbs has it that the direct correlation isn't there, and we have (and will, and should) focus on environmental controls (simply for our own health), but the alarmist doomsday shit is overblown.

[Nubbins]

Unfortunately, it's the doomsday shit that attracts the eyes and minds of most people.  That's why it's so prominent.

[fajwat]

who here are you saying is a gore freak?

[nacho]

RC.  And you're just a senseless granola.  Haha.

[RottingCorpse]

Al Gore will get me.

[Nubbins]

swordfight is the most hilarious emoticon, I swear.

[RottingCorpse]

So, the message I've got from this is, "Smoke 'em if you got 'em, because the human race will be joining dodos and the dinosaurs in about 500 years."

Warming 'likely' man-made, unstoppable

PARIS - The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is "very likely" caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, according to a report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The scientists — using their strongest language yet on the issue — said now that world has begun to warm, hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution. The report also linked the warming to the recent increase in stronger hurricanes.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

What that means in simple language is "we have this nailed," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who originated the percentage system.

The 20-page report, which was due to be officially released later in the day, represents the most authoritative science on global warming.

The new language marked an escalation from the panel's last report in 2001, which said warming was "likely" caused by human activity. There had been speculation that the participants might try to say it is "virtually certain" man causes global warming, which translates to 99 percent certainty.

The panel predicted temperature rises of 2-11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. That was a wider range than in the 2001 report.

However, the panel also said its best estimate was for temperature rises of 3.2-7.1 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2001, all the panel gave was a range of 2.5-10.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

On sea levels, the report projects rises of 7-23 inches by the end of the century. An additional 3.9-7.8 inches are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues.

But there is some cold comfort. Some, but not all, of the projected temperature and sea level rises are slightly lower than projected in a previous report in 2001. That is mostly due to use of more likely scenarios and would still result in dramatic effects across the globe, scientists said.

Many scientists had warned that this estimate was too cautious and said sea level rise could be closer to 3-5 feet because of ice sheet melt.

Nevertheless, scientists agreed the report is strong.

"There's no question that the powerful language is intimately linked to the more powerful science," said one of the study's many co-authors, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, who spoke by phone from Canada. He said the report was based on science that is rock-solid, peer-reviewed, and consensus.

"It's very conservative. Scientists by their nature are skeptics."

The scientists wrote the report based on years of peer-reviewed research and government officials edited it with an eye toward the required unanimous approval by world governments.

In the end, there was little debate on the strength of the wording about the role of man in global warming.

The panel quickly agreed Thursday on two of the most contentious issues: attributing global warming to man-made burning of fossil fuels and connecting it to a recent increase in stronger hurricanes.

Negotiations over a third and more difficult issue — how much the sea level is predicted to rise by 2100 — went into the night Thursday with a deadline approaching for the report.

While critics call the panel overly alarmist, it is by nature relatively cautious because it relies on hundreds of scientists, including skeptics.

"I hope that policymakers will be quite convinced by this message," said Riibeta Abeta, a delegate whose island nation Kiribati is threatened by rising seas. "The purpose is to get them moving."

The Chinese delegation was resistant to strong wording on global warming, said Barbados delegate Leonard Fields and others. China has increasingly turned to fossil fuels for its huge and growing energy needs.

The U.S. government delegation was not one of the more vocal groups in the debate over whether warming is man-made, said officials from other countries. And several attendees credited the head of the panel session, Susan Solomon, a top U.S. government climate scientist, with pushing through the agreement so quickly.

The Bush administration acknowledges that global warming is man-made and a problem that must be dealt with, Bush science adviser John Marburger has said. However, Bush continues to reject mandatory limits on so-called "greenhouse" gases.

But this is more than just a U.S. issue.

"What you're trying to do is get the whole planet under the proverbial tent in how to deal with this, not just the rich countries," Mahlman said Thursday. "I think we're in a different kind of game now."

The panel, created by the United Nations in 1988, releases its assessments every five or six years — although scientists have been observing aspects of climate change since as far back as the 1960s. The reports are released in phases — this is the first of four this year.

The next report is due in April and will discuss the effects of global warming. But that issue was touched upon in the current document.

The report says that global warming has made stronger hurricanes, including those on the Atlantic Ocean, such as Hurricane Katrina.

The report said that an increase in hurricane and tropical cyclone strength since 1970 "more likely than not" can be attributed to man-made global warming. The scientists said global warming's connection varies with storms in different parts of the world, but that the storms that strike the Americas are global warming-influenced.

That's a contrast from the 2001 which said there was not enough evidence to make such a conclusion. And it conflicts with a November 2006 statement by the World Meteorological Organization, which helped found the IPCC. The meteorological group said it could not link past stronger storms to global warming.

Fields — of Barbados, a country in the path of many hurricanes — said the new wording was "very important." He noted that insurance companies — which look to science to calculate storm risk — "watch the language, too."

[nacho]

The message I got was that all of this work, hype and, now, through the roof book sales are to say:  We think there's probably a 90% chance that an out of control and wildly expanding species without a predator on this planet could possibly be having an effect on the environment.

At least, that's the media soundbyte extracted from the report (with my additions to remind everyone of some other pertinent facts) and, well, I do agree with that soundbyte because, people -- DUH!

Really?  I'll be.

[RottingCorpse]

God bless oil companies.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020207K.shtml

[fajwat]

god bless and keep the oil executives.... far away from us.