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Reaping the whirlwind

 
 
Quantum
08:47 / 03.07.03
"Extreme weather prompts unprecedented global warning alert" (UK Independent Thursday 3rd July)
Front page article on the severe weather we are having globally, and more to come.
"The unstable world of climate changehas long been a prediction. Now, the World Meteorological Organisation says, it is a reality"
 
 
Lurid Archive
09:01 / 03.07.03
Problem is, one can always point to uncertainty and argue specific points. So I don't believe anything will really be done about this until the odd US city becomes palpably vulnerable to destruction from flooding.

The world doesn't have to wait for the US to lead, but it probably will.
 
 
angel
14:09 / 03.07.03
Is there some kind of World Environment Day coming up? Because everywhere I look at the moment the discussion is about Global Warming (GW) and it's reality. The New Statesmtan this week was full of articles, advertisements and bits and bobs about it.

The general thread that I am receiving is that it is now only people/companies/industries with a vested interest in continuing abusive practices that continue to hold with the pretence that GW is a figment of a paranoid imagination.

What do you think?
 
 
grant
14:50 / 03.07.03
As I understand it, the problem is that you can't demonstrate that weird weather isn't just a natural, cyclic thing, and that the emissions going into the atmosphere have anything more than a minor, temporary effect. You can surmise that, CO2 and methane having the thermal properties they have, they'll collect heat at a level of the atmosphere that's usually cooler, and that the heat will affect the way storms form and so on, but it's kinda hard to do actual experiments on the process.

Basically, it's the same problem in any evolution vs. creationism debate... you can't do direct experiments, so any conclusions are going to be based on inductive logic, so a critic can always reject the initial assumptions (however reasonable they might appear to be) and thus invalidate the argument.

With global warming and climate change, there's a lot more data being collected, but the problem is that we've only been collecting data over the past 100 years or so, and we know that there have been major climate changes in the ancient past (Ice Ages and mini-Ice Ages). What we know about what led up to those climate changes is really based, again, on indirect evidence.

Personally, yeah, I think industrial technologies are changing the weather. It seems reasonable, especially given what we know about the way cities affect the production of thunderstorms (there's a thread somewhere on here about it) by altering the way heat radiates off the ground. And the circumstantial evidence continues to mount. But the only direct evidence we'll get that emissions cause major climate change will happen after it's already too late. And even then, so many things affect the climate that hard core skeptical critics could remain unconvinced.
 
 
Quantum
12:46 / 04.07.03
It seems to me the only people pretending it's not caused by human civilisation are the ones with vested monetary interests in denying it, as Angel says.
I don't think those sceptics will be buying houses in low lying coastal locations, whatever they say, and I think they know it's their fault.
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
13:31 / 04.07.03
whenever i verbally assault the corporate clowns at say the cato institute (cronies of koch industries) for their gross natural misconduct, they always say "go away and read the Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg!" has anyone read it?
 
 
grant
17:44 / 08.07.03
Here's a new study on the way cities affect storms - this time, ice storms.

I haven't read the Lomborg book, but I know that environmental science has a closer relation to public policy than most science, so it's more prone to ideological slant. Or, more precisely, it's a more tempting target for either side.
 
 
000
07:25 / 10.07.03
Apparently, not only earth is experiencing weird weather, Pluto is too.
 
 
000
07:38 / 10.07.03
& there is this from aaaaaages ago:

___________ AWESOME NEWS __________

This is the Russian perspective on earth changes. Hard facts that are going unreported in America. The atmospheres of the planets are changing. Dr. Dmitriev's work shows that the planets themselves are changing. They are undergoing changes in their atmospheres.For example the Martian atmosphere is getting sizably thicker than it was before. The Mars observer probe in 1997 lost one of its mirrors, which caused it to crash, because the atmosphere was about twice as dense as they calculated, and basically the wind on that little mirror was so high that it blew it right off the device.

Earth's moon is growing an atmosphere Also, the moon is growing an atmosphere that's made up of a compound Dmitriev refers to as ''Natrium.'' Dmitriev says that, around the moon, there is this 6,000-kilometer-deep layer of Natrium that wasn't there before.

And we're having this kind of change in Earth's atmosphere in the upper levels, where HO gas is forming that wasn't there before; it simply did not exist in the quantity that it does now. It's not related to global warming and it's not related to CFCs or fluorocarbon emissions or any of that stuff. It's just showing up.

Magnetic fields and brightness of the planets are changing. The planets are experiencing sizable changes in their overall brightness. Venus, for example, is showing us marked increases in its
overall brightness. Jupiter has gotten to have such a high energetic charge that there is actually a visible tube of ionizing radiation that's formed between its moon, Io. You can actually see the
luminous energy tube in photographs that have been taken more recently..

And the planets are having a change in their fields. The magnetic fields are becoming stronger. Jupiter's magnetic field has more than doubled. Uranus's magnetic field is changing. Neptune's magnetic field is increasing. These planets are becoming brighter. Their magnetic field strength is getting higher. Their atmospheric qualities are changing.

Uranus and Neptune appear to have had recent pole shifts. When the Voyager 2 space probe flew past Uranus and Neptune, the apparent north and south magnetic poles were sizably offset from
where the rotational pole was. In one case, it was 50 degrees off, and in the other case the difference was around 40 degrees, both of which are pretty big changes.

The overall changes could essentially be broken down intothree categories: Energy field changes, luminosity changes,and atmospheric changes.

Overall volcanic activity has increased 500 percent since 1975. On the Earth, we're seeing the changes even more completely.

For example, Michael Mandeville has done research that has shown that the overall volcanic activity on the Earth since 1875 has increased by roughly 500 percent. The overall earthquake activity has increased by 400 percent just since 1973.

Natural disasters increased 410 percent between 1963 and 1993! Dr. Dmitriev did a very elaborate calculation of natural disasters. He showed that if you compare the years 1963 through 1993, the overall amount of natural disasters of all different kinds - whether you are talking hurricanes, typhoons, mud slides, tidal waves, you name it - have increased by 410 percent.

The Sun's magnetic field increased by 230 percent since 1901.

There's a study by Dr. Mike Lockwood from Rutherford Appleton National Laboratories in California, who has been investigating the Sun. He has discovered that since 1901, the overall magnetic field of
the Sun has become 230 percent stronger than it was before.

More than just Earth Changes

So, all in all, what we're seeing is a lot more than just what they call Earth Changes. Some people get into the idea that there is an interaction between the Earth and the Sun that's going on here. Very, very few people are aware of the work that is being done in the Russian National Academy of Sciences in Siberia, specifically in Novosibirsk, where they are doing this research. They've come to the conclusion that the only possible thing that could be causing this energetic change all throughout the Solar System is that we are moving into an area of energy that is different - that is higher.

The glowing plasma at the leading edge of our Solar System has recently increased 1000 percent Now, check this out. The Sun itself has a magnetic field, of course, and that magnetic field creates an egg around the Solar System, which is known as the heliosphere. The heliosphere is shaped like a teardrop, with the long and thin end of the drop pointing in the opposite direction from the direction that we're traveling. It's just like a comet, where the tail is always pointing away from the Sun.

The Russians have looked at the leading edge of this heliosphere, and they have observed glowing, excited plasma energy there. This plasma energy used to be 10 astronomical units deep (an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 93,000,000 miles). So ten astronomical units represents the normal thickness of this glowing energy that we used to see at the front end of the Solar System.

Today, that glowing plasma has gone to 100 astronomical units deep. Although Dmitriev's paper does not give an exact timeline, we can assume that this increase happened in the same 1963 to 1993 period as the increase he found in natural disasters. Whenever it happened, that's a 1,000 percent increase in the overall brightness of the energy at the front end of the Solar System.

And this means that the Solar System itself is moving into an area where the energy is more highly charged. That higher-charged energy is in turn exciting the plasma and causing more of it to form, so you see more luminosity, more brightness. This energy is then flowing into the Sun, which in turn emits the energy and spreads it out along its equatorial plane, which is called the Ecliptic.

This in turn is saturating interplanetary space, which causes the solar emissions to travel more quickly and charge up the energy on the planets.

And this is conscious energy that is changing how the planet works, how it functions, and what kind of life it supports. The harmonics of the DNA spiral itself are altering. That's the real, hidden cause of spontaneous mass evolutions in previous epochs of time.

All this is happening all at the same time, and it's all working up to a crescendo where there is going to be a sudden shift.

In other words, we will get to the point where we are so far into the new level of energy that there will be a sudden expansion of the basic harmonic wavelengths that the Sun emits as it radiates energy
out of itself. This increase in energy emission will change the basic nature of all matter in the Solar System. The planets are pushed slightly farther away from the Sun and the atoms and molecules that
make them up actually expand in terms of their physical size.

Link
 
 
Quantum
12:10 / 10.07.03
Hmmm. I'm not sure how reliable this Dmitriev is, there seem to be a lot of tenuous yet bold claims. Take for instance;
"Jupiter's magnetic field has more than doubled."
As Jupiter's core is liquid metallic helium (IIRC) it's magnetic field is already pretty hefty (remember Jupiter is only slightly less massive than a star). If it doubled that would surely have more drastic effects (like sucking it's ferrous moon into itself for example).
It strikes me that these claims are exaggerated and uncertain, but maybe I'm just skeptical of any 'Earth Change' related science...
 
 
Mirror
03:13 / 23.02.04
It's the middle of February. In Colorado. At night. And it's 50 degrees F and raining outside.

In the 20 or so years I've lived here, I've never seen anything like it. February is usually our coldest month, often with a couple of weeks where the temperature never rises above 0 F. And when I just took the trash out, it felt like our Aprils usually do.

At least where I live is high enough that if the Cretaceous seaway through the central U.S. comes back after the polar icecaps melt, I'll have property near the beach!
 
 
Perfect Tommy
05:24 / 23.02.04
Another set of liberal whackjobs has written a report claiming that the US environmental policy will lead to nuclear exchanges, mega-droughts, famine, and mass rioting. Apparently they're from some organization called 'the Pentagon.'
 
 
Perfect Tommy
15:16 / 23.02.04
Bugger, MC already posted this in Switchboard. I get no cool points.
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
15:50 / 07.12.06
Six hurt as tornado strikes in London.
Thurs Dec 7, 2006. Guardian

The tornado is the latest to hit Britain in recent months, sparking warning that such weather events are likely to increase in frequency because of global warming.

In July last year, a tornado in Birmingham damaged 1,000 buildings, causing millions of pounds of damage, while another was reported just off Brighton, on the Sussex coast, this October.

A mini tornado swept through the village of Bowstreet in Ceredigion, west Wales, last Tuesday.


So is this a result of climate change? The article does go on say that tornados are common in Britain but this frequency and severity?
 
 
Quantum
00:22 / 09.12.06
So I don't believe anything will really be done about this until the odd US city becomes palpably vulnerable to destruction from flooding. Lurid Archive, 2003

Since then Katrina struck New Orleans, and yet still the US (and the UK) fall far short of doing anything effective.
No, tornadoes and waterspouts are not usual for England, and we're in for more.
 
 
nighthawk
07:46 / 09.12.06
No, tornadoes and waterspouts are not usual for England, and we're in for more.

I think tornadoes are very common in the UK, although I'm not sure how recent a trend this is. They're just normally not very strong here.
 
 
nighthawk
08:27 / 09.12.06
So is this a result of climate change?

Also, its pretty difficult to tie any particular weather pattern to climate change. Extreme weather patterns would be more frequent statistically, but that doesn't mean that a particular storm or tornado would have been impossible without climate change. It gets even more complicated because some scientists think that we're coming out of a period of relatively stable weather patterns, which was part of much larger weather cycles. In other words, there is more than one possible reason for a statistical increase in freak weather patterns (although one reason does not cancel out the other - changes related to a weather cycle can be compounded by the results of human activity), which makes it even harder to link particular cases with broader causes.
 
  
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