Well said, Mike and John.
There is a great deal of 'populist' effort to demonize climate change and, yes,
the public memory IS short. In the early 1970s, I was responsible for acquiring,
tracking and recording realtime data from NOAA-3. An officer in charge of arctic
ice conditions had me obtain as many images (day time/video and night
time/scanning infrared radiometer) as possible to monitor the ever-increasing
open water around Banks Island in the Arctic Ocean. It seems such a degree of
open, ice-free water was very unusual, but weather satellites were very new at
that point and nobody knew the phrase "global warming"... then.
All that open water went away in a few years and, soon, there were concerns in
the news that the earth may be entering a new Ice Age. Then the '90s came along
and things warmed back up up but now it was Global Warming and, although no
climate change proponent will dare to mention it, arctic ice is now back on the
increase yet again. I track it at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Here is the latest word, "Sea ice extent averaged over the month of June 2009
was 11.48 million square kilometers (4.43 million square miles). This was
420,000 square kilometers (162,000 square miles) above the record low for that
month, which occurred in June 2006,..." meaning that three years after a low
point, things are cooling off,... again.
Humans may, indeed, manage to trash the reefs of the world some day, but today
is (not yet) that day. So relax some and start asking the lawmakers just what it
is they are REALLY doing. Whatever it is, it certainly is NOT based in science.
In the world of sea shell collecting, the early 1980s in Hawaii saw many
complaints that SCUBA divers (usually armed with crowbars) were wrecking the
coral heads and reefs of Hawaii in general and Oahu in particular. Then, along
came Hurricane Iwa... In 48 hours, the leeward side of Oahu's diveable areas had
been wiped clean to a degree of completeness that all the SCUBA divers in
Hawaii, using all the crowbars in Hawaii, could not have begun to achieve.
It was shown to me (and I verfied it personally, pre-Hurricane Iwa) that a SCUBA
diver could destroy a six-foot tall, six-foot wide coral head with his bare (OK,
gloved) hands, and do it in about ten minutes. Knock a small piece loose, use it
to knock a larger piece loose, etc,... etc. That's just what Hurricane Iwa did,
a billion times over,... AND it dragged all of the coral fragments out into the
sand fields where the pieces sank out of sight and out of use.
'Nuf said?
Bob Dayle
http://cowry.org
________________________
Quoting mike gray <[log in to unmask]>:
> JOHN A CRAMER wrote:
> > This is very odd stuff considering that NOAA data shows the ocean
> > surfaces have been losing heat content since at least 2005. On the
> > average, CO2 increase lag (not lead) world temperature increase by about
> > 800 years.
>
> The human species is incapable of comprehending time spans in excess of
> roughly 72 hours. 800 years is as meaningless to a human as astrophysics
> is to a flea.
>
> Therefore, human science is populist science: it defines everything in
> terms of current events. E.G. the disappearance of the Maya and the
> Khmer are both explained today by climate change. During the cold war,
> both were explained by conflict between superpowers. Before that, both
> were Malthusian.
>
> Today, there are no phenomena that cannot be explained by climate
> change, and climate has become the de facto explanation for everything
> we observe and everything we expect to ever observe.
>
> So learn to live with it. It's only temporary.
>
> m
>
> p.s. this post is the result of the increasing narcotic effect of CO2,
> as measured by the Meyer-Overton method. As CO2 continues to increase
> over SoFla, we can expect an exponential increase in looney posts, along
> with a huge increase in demand for olive oil.
>
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