The majority of the American population now thinks that global warming probably doesn't exist. Part of that is the huge amount of money which has been spent on propaganda, but part of it is that the only continent which is not experiencing increased temperatures right now--is the continental USA*. If you want to be a climate change denialist, America is a great place to live.
It is also true that the speed of global warming has slowed down. This is primarily due to two factors:
1) The sunspot cycle. Solar radiation is currently at its lowest level in some time. Less heat equals, well, less heat.
2) The icecap and glacial dump. The polar icepack being dumped into the oceans has had a cooling effect.
The sunspot cycle can change pretty much any time it wants. Probably we've got a decade or so at lower heat levels, but that's not a sure thing. As for the icecap and glacier dump: well, once the ice is gone, it's gone.
The bottom line is that we are going to see things get worse, more slowly, in terms of temperature rises. We will, however, keep getting crazy weather, changes to weather patterns are an early sign of climate change.
Once the mitigating factors are gone the pace of global warming will pick up again, and it will pick up fiercely.
Now, as for fixing it--there are two main problems. The first is the will to do something. While there may be technical solutions which would reduce the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, there is no will to deploy them on a wide enough scale to matter. This is as true in China as it in the US, and without China and the developing world coming on board, what the US does, assuming it does anything, will not be sufficient (and the US will not do anything, the propaganda campaign claiming there is no global warming has been successful.)
The second is that there will come a point where global warming becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. With no glacial caps and with the methane released from Siberia, even radical decreases in human CO2 dumping will probably not be sufficient to stop the cycle.
Add to this the severe water shortages we can expect, which will hit large parts of Africa, a huge swathe of China, much of India and a big chunk of the US, as aquifers are drained down to effectively zero, and you have a recipe for huge loss of life and destabilizing migratory movements.
It is also entirely possible that large parts of the tropics will become effectively uninhabitable, the combination of humidity and temperature will be so high that it will literally be lethal to be outside air conditioningfor any length of time for much of the year.
If world population is only reduced by a billion, I will be amazed. I also expect some serious wars. Our civilization will not go quietly into that long long night.
(*corrected from North America, to continental USA.)
Follow Ian Welsh on Twitter: www.twitter.com/iwelsh
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When Al Gore was in kindergart
Physicist Gilbert N. Plass had just completed some calculatio
For the links to the articles read:
Al Gore was 5 Years Old at the Time
http://har
Furthermor
Climatolog
http://har
Speaking of gas giants and gas holes who sell advertisin
Hunh? Excuse me, bud, but it's happened before. I saw the evidence of this in Norway when it was once tropical. What we call the arctic now had palm trees.
So ice comes and goes.
A worldwide investment in 10000 mass produced nuclear reactors paid for by ending expensive fossil fuel use, would eliminate most air pollution saving millions of lives annually, end the global warming/ peak oil problem within a ten year time frame, provide a huge job producing boost to the economy, and require only a small part of our industrial capacity with a four year investment payback.
With mass production nuclear power costs drop to under $1B/Gw much less expensive than coal or natural gas generation and 10% the cost of the cheapest renewable. Asian reactor builds now around $1.5B/Gw are trending to that $1B level - plenty of cash to convert the US off fossil fuel with 2500 gigawatts of nukes at $2500B financed by the $800B paid Big Oil for their deadly product.
Nuclear fuel supply and waste issues are resolved with already operating and well understood fast reactors.
The 75% of the population that doesn't believe in global warming wanting to to end the deaths of millions from coal are pollution could embrace it. It is politicall
We don't have time to wait.
But your claim that 'fuel supply and waste issues are resolved with already operating and well understood fast reactors' is a dramatic oversimpli
Also, the claim that renewables are 'too expensive, too little and too late' is simply incorrect. Wind energy is already on par, if not cheaper, in many cases, than our traditiona
Someone is going to have to do a lot more than 30 years of research to prove to me that .03% of the earth's atmosphere -— which is what CO2 is — is responsibl
I bought Al Gore's findings 1000% until I began the laborious process of checking them one by one.
Then on November 11, 2009, when he claimed on the last days of the old tonight show that the interior of the Earth's temperatur
The video isn't available anymore, but sometime else found this guy incredible as well and provided a transcript
http://new
(Just for comparison
"If world population is only reduced by a billion, I will be amazed. I also expect some serious wars. Our civilizati
Sigh.
Prediction is a heinously tricky and temperamen
Doomers, being the fatalists they are, only add to the problem.
Wake up, folks. And next time you see such idiocy, discount it immediatel
Got it?
Good.
It's refreshing to hear this argument.
lol.. i'm afraid we really are doomed on that level!
So far, the only group of people in the world to display such grotesque arrogance and lack of respect for scientific organizati
Also, the New York Times ran an article about the American Petroleum Institute in April of 1998. It outlines a very specific and detailed plan to invest millions of dollars in an effort to undermine and discredit the scientific consensus opinion that greenhouse gases are causing the planet to warm.
http://www
The draft plan, titled “Global Climate Science Communicat
Read: Global Climate Science Communicat
http://har
Sunspots are not a driver of "weather". Using global warming, I showed a significan
http://www
Predicting a new spot on Jupiter in the Economist became reality in
http://blo
See: http://www
NIce, thanks. I also composed a post regarding the article's assertion that "large parts of the tropics will become effectivel
BTW, I've spent some time analyzing GHCN V2 as well--amaz
wham!
Some good reading on the "drop" in stations.
http://www
Prominent skeptic Roy Spencer's take on the temp records compared to satellite data.
Revolution
Moving Beyond Oil, Hard to Believe Alternativ
There are astonishin
The science is new and difficult to accept.
However, National as well as independen
As we can see in the Gulf, fossil fuels threaten to sharply impact life on earth much more quickly than is generally realized.
Another hit will be oil prices, which could exceed $100 per barrel in a matter of months. That can abort economic recovery.
A barrel of ordinary water can replace 200 barrels of oil. One gallon might power a hybrid car 1,000 miles.
The oil catastroph
The time has arrived to accelerate the developmen
24/7 developmen
The report (Technical
Garret Moddel from colorado.e
As I said before, I emailed Rowan. The faculty at Rowan were tight-mout
On March 7, 2010, a person emailed me with some questions about the ZPE patent. In his email, he misunderst
I did not and do not believe that our patent was a mistake. Stop misquoting me!
Black Light Power submitted 4 patent applicatio
His patents follow the paper by D. C. Cole and H. E. Puthoff:
"Extractin
which claimed to show that one can extract energy from zero point fluctuatio
Citation please? I'm not sure what you're saying here--the southern pole has not lost significan