| Arctic Blast Freezes Global Warming |
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| by Tom McGregor | Mon, Jan 4, 2010, 04:12 PM |
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According to the Times of London, "there were few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that killed dozens in India, paralyzed life in Beijing and threatened Florida orange crops. Chicagoans sheltered from a potentially killer freeze. Paris endured sunny Siberian cold, italy dug itelf out of snow drifts and Poland counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about minus 25C (13F)." Yesterday, the heaviest snow struck northeastern Asia that is suffering its worst winter weather for 60 years. More than 10 in. of snow covered the South Korean capital city, Seoul - the heaviest snowfall amounts since records started in 1937. In Beijing, China and the neaby port city of Tianjin had the the most snow since 1951, with falls of up to 8 in. and temperatures of minus 10C. In the far north of China, the temperatures drop to minus 32C. More than two million Biejing and Tianjin students were sent home and 1,200 flights were delayed or cancelled at Beijing International Airport. As reported by the Times, "the same far-eastern weather system took its toll of Sokholin, the Russian island off Siberia, which was hit by blizzards and avalanches. Further west in northern and eastrn India, more than 60 people, mainly homeless, died of exposure. Thousands of schools were closed. In Uttar Pradesh, the state neighboring Nepal, the authorities spent 1.3 million (British pounds) on blankets and firewood for needy households." Western Russia is suffering from a deep freeze as snow swept across the Baltic and north-central Europe, causing the worst devastation in Poland, where 13 people were killed, bringing the toll from the cold this winter to 122. To read the entire article from the Times of London, link here: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it 
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Comments (10)
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written by Charlie Linebarger , January 05, 2010 Does anybody remember that movie "The Day After Tomorrow". I know, entertaining, but dumb, real dumb. But it was based loosely on a fairly well known theory; that rising temperatures will melt ice at the poles. Big deal, I know; but the theory goes that too much fresh melt water will slow the Gulf Stream, or stop it by collapsing the rising and falling ocean columns that drive world ocean currents. These columns of water fall and rise based on temperature and salinity. Ofcourse, as any science teacher will tell you, whether you ask or not, because it's a basic weather fact; no Gulf Stream would mean the lands surrounding the North Atlantic get a lot colder than normal. Think Alaska and look at it's latitude and follow that latitude line around the northern hemisphere. A lot of places you wouldn't expect should, by their latititude, be as cold as, well, as Alaska. And the theory which has appeared in Science Magazine, sort of like the Lancet or JAMA for science folks says this could be, and may have been before, a cause of the frequent ice ages of the last few million years. Nobody is going to tell us what's going on when this begins, if it ever does, it's a theory, like relativity. No one will tell us because it would take a few harsh winters and cool summers etc before it draws attention to itself. It's not like an earthquake. It more like a decade of crazy hot summers and droughts which we've just been through - up to a year ago. The Chunnel had trains stalled by freezing weather over Christmas. It's a cold Winter all over the Northern Hemisphere this year. Maybe, probably that means nothing - I hope, but it could mean a lot. We conquered the planet now we have to learn to live with and in our conquests, whichever way we push the weather.
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written by furrpiece , January 05, 2010 Global Warming alarmists don't get to have it both ways. They cannot relegate colder temperatures and warmer temperatures to warmer temperatures, and have an iota of remaining credibility. It is at least interesting that other planets are warming and cooling with Earth on the same cycle, and in within the same relative variances, given their proximity to the Sun (and other factors). Deep ice cores from both polls indicate, for example, that CO2 had nothing to do with warming periods. In fact, more CO2 was present on Earth AFTER warming periods, indicating this particular gas has no causal relationship to warming. I still believe Milankovitch Cycles and Glaciation, along with Eccentricity and Axial Tilt are responsible for Earth's cooling and warming periods, and also are the cause of our other planets experiencing similar cycles parallel to ours.
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written by furrpiece , January 05, 2010 I left out the fact that I appreciate Charlie Linebarger's approach to this subject, and I'm not left feeling that I'm murdering Mother Earth by driving an SUV or drinking carbonated beverages.
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written by Shadrach , January 05, 2010 The evidence for global warming remains strong. While legitimate scientists can and should look for non-human inputs into the current warming cycle, and while global warming scientists must be subjected to proper scrutiny, the most scientifically reasonable source for the recent warming is human activity. Even with annual cycles, last decade was the warmest in recorded history. Global warming theory is based on decade averages, not daily highs and lows. Even more, global warming theory has never asserted a linear progession and has always admitted that weather conditions are affected by non-human issues, like El Nino, gulfstream currents, etc... A decade ago, I was a global warming skeptic. I changed my mind when both poles started shedding ice like a Persian cat sheds fur. Talk to me when the glaciers stop disappearing, when Antarctic ice shelves stop falling off, when there are no icebergs the size of Manhattan about to hit Australia, when the polar ice caps return to even close to normal, and when the snow atop Kilimanjaro stops disappearing. In the mean time, please come up with some realistic cures to Global Warming that are pro-capitalist. Can conservatives maybe use global warming to advance Nuclear Power, or the use of American natural gas to power cars, etc.... Global warming does not have to be the tool of liberals to hurt markets, it can be the tool of thoughtful conservatives to make the American Marketplace stronger.
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written by Paul Barnes , January 05, 2010 Wow. Dallasblog reports on cold weather in January. In the Northern Hemisphere. Meanwhile, in the Southern Hemisphere: Australia experienced its hottest decade on record from 2000 to 2009 due to global warming, the nation's bureau of meteorology said today. The average temperature in Australia over the past 10 years was 0.48 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 average, the Bureau of Meteorology said in its annual climate statement. And 2010 is forecast to be even hotter, with temperatures likely to be between 0.5 and 1 degrees above average. "We're getting these increasingly warm temperatures, not just for Australia but globally. Climate change, global warming is clearly continuing," said bureau climatologist David Jones.
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written by Stupid SecurityProcess , January 05, 2010 Someone please explain to Tom what the definition of the word AVERAGE might be. He seems to think today's weather represents decadal averages. Kind of embarrassing this late in the game don't you think.
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written by martin , January 05, 2010 Yeah what about Peru? people dying from the cold last 3-4 years. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/03/peru-mountain-farmers-winter-cold And how does Australia represent the entire hemisphere? the current Winter cold as reported by Times is everywhere from US to China, Europe...
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written by furrpiece , January 05, 2010 I worry when the same people who believe CO2 is lighter than air and also a dangerous gas tell me it's getting colder because of Global Warming. It's also a fact that Australia has had droughts before, and they had nothing to do with greenhouse gases or the industrial age. They had to do with the Sun. Surely the honest scientists on both sides can set Gore-ish politics aside and come to a rational conclusion about all of this.
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written by Charlie Linebarger , January 05, 2010 The notion that warming the Earth could cause an ice age sounds counter-intuitive but it's been around for about a decade, I'm not scientist. That overblown movie The Day After Tomorrow came out early in the last decade. The theory, not the movie, has been the topic of an hour long documentary on the Discovery Channel on Cable that came out several years ago. And being the Google research geek I am. I immediately looked it up today to see where I got my "facts". Right away I found something I'd read before. It came out in September from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They are the people with those ocean science ships and deep submersibles. The article has a catchy title, Are We on the Brink of a 'New Little Ice Age?' But it's not popular science. It's heavy going but not long. The main point is not what we're talking about here but the theory that climate changes happen much, much faster than we thought based on looking at tens of thousands of years of stored ice records drilled up out of the Antarctic. Looking at real old ice gives clues only a scientist would think of, like how much of different atmospheric gases are trapped in different years in those frozen snow flakes. Pollen and a lot of stuff gives clues to what was in the air with and in those snow flakes when they fell on the mammoths, all those years ago. Ice from a certain year 100,000 years ago can show volcanic dust that doesn't appear in other years frozen in time by the ice. It's easy for me to yap in print but trying to understand the theories the yapping is based on is way harder. I'll quote one paragraph of science from the middle of this paper and then the conclusion. "In addition, recent evidence shows that the high latitude oceans have freshened while the subtropics and tropics have become saltier. These possible changes in the hydrological cycle have not been limited to the North Atlantic, but have been seen in all major oceans. Yet it is the N. Atlantic where these changes can act to disrupt the overturning circulation and cause a rapid climate transition." I recommend anyone the least bit curious, and hopefully a little geeky, who is curious as to how CO2 in the air could cause an ice age instead of palm trees in Anchorage to read the original one page paper at the Woods Hole site. Here's the link; http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pi...&cid=10046 The paper's summation is this; " Our main message is not just that, however. It is that global climate is moving in a direction that makes abrupt climate change more probable, that these dynamics lie beyond the capability of many of the models used in IPCC reports, and the consequences of ignoring this may be large. For those of us living around the edge of the N. Atlantic Ocean, we may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur." Of course what happens is going to happen but the reason we're at the top of the food chain is because we use our noggins and depend on and hopefully listen to those of us with the sharpest noggins in their area of study. It took a couple of smart foreign brains, Einstein and Oppenheimer (I'm not an expert on nuclear history) to invent the A-bomb and one man smart enough to listen to them and give them what they needed to create the first A-bomb. Truman couldn't have made sense of Einstein's theories, besides he had more important things to do. But thank God back then we didn't politicize science, otherwise, we would have won that war but who knows who would have put together the first nuclear technology.
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written by Yeti , January 08, 2010 - NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS - Washington, D.C. - Abrupt Climate Change - Inevitable Surprises (2002)... This public report, fully entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security," was prepared by GBN for the Department of Defense... - PENTAGON: GLOBAL WARMING might suddenly trigger a massive GLOBAL COOLING... THE PENTAGON WARNS CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BRING GLOBAL CATASTROPHE... Now the PENTAGON TELLS BUSH (Guardian.co.uk., 22 February 2004): climate change will destroy us... BRITAIN WILL BE 'SIBERIAN' in less than 20 years: http://cristiannegureanu.blogspot.com/2009/07/pentagonnasa-global-warmingglobal_14.html Write comment
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Across the planet, an arctic freeze and snow create havoc. Today, the northern hemisphere has been gripped by Arcic air and record snow falls, which is inflicting hardship and havoc from China, across Russia to Western Europe and over the U.S. plains.
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