Posted on 10/23/2005 6:45:36 AM PDT by mathprof
This time it's Wilma, howling across the Gulf of Mexico toward a predicted landfall tomorrow on the southwest Florida coast, threatening residents still rebuilding from a battering by four hurricanes last year.
Wilma is this season's 21st named tropical storm and its 12th hurricane -- tying records on both counts. And No. 22 -- Tropical Storm Alpha -- formed yesterday afternoon.
Wilma is the third storm to hit the top of the hurricane intensity scale. Katrina, Rita and Wilma all reached Category 5 at sea, each with top sustained winds of 175 mph. That, too, appears to be an Atlantic basin record for one season. And it's not all hurricanes. Just this month, record early snows covered the Northern Plains, while a week of torrential rain flooded New Hampshire towns and threatened to burst a dam in Massachusetts.
Is this the stormy fate that global warming theorists have long warned about?
Most scientists say it seems to be. They can't say any particular storm is caused by global warming. But they are beginning to see its signature in a clear trend toward more extreme weather.
"Yes, global warming is happening, and the manifestations are now large enough that they're evident," said Kevin E. Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
[snip]
Although the Bush administration campaigned to discredit the notion of global warming during its first four years, the president recently conceded that something is amiss.
"I recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem," he told reporters at a Group of Eight summit in July.
But he has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement that would limit greenhouse gas emissions.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
>>>>But he has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement that would limit greenhouse gas emissions.
WRONG! An international agreement that would hobble the US economy and do nothing about Greenhouse Gasses. That would have made that statement news, rather than propaganda.
If the 0.5 degree warming is causing a bunch of Cat 5 hurricanes, just wait until the 5 degree temperatures set in.
Under this global warming model, the top half of North America is under Ice, the bottom half is just one big Cat 5 hurricane and, in between, it is just a big desert with no rainfall.
While reading this I started the countdown before Bush was mentioned at the finger pointing began, and sure enough...5...4..3...2...1...."He rejected the Koyoto protocol..blah blah" Amazing... in billions of years of evolution without success, in a matter of only 5 years one human being comes along who is all powerful enough to control the weather! "Rain, storms, hurricanes I say!"
So how do they propose to explain past storm cycle surges of the 1930s and ALSO in the 18th century??
Any real warming effects are primarily - if not soley, the results of increased solar activity.
Experts say this is just phase II of the normal hurricane cycle. You get decades long phases ~ some with lots of storms, and some with a few storms. This is a "lots of storms" phase.
This was going on in the Ice Age itself!
I believe this was the Senate, not the President.
Currently, as we venture even further into Ice Age conditions (which are masked by human caused global warming), we are actually heating things up by blowing off vast clouds of carbon dioxide and other heat absorbing gases.
There, does that make you happy?
Oh, one more item in the current theory ~ when we run out of fossil fuels in 200 or so years, the ice comes back with a vengeance ~ instant Ice Age ~ billions of deaths ~ it's horrible ~ oh, the humanity!
Yes, here is what his EPA says:
"According to the National Academy of Sciences, the Earth's surface temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, with accelerated warming during the past two decades. There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Source: http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/content/Climate.html
Most scientists say it seems to be. They can't say any particular storm is caused by global warming. But they are beginning to see its signature in a clear trend toward more extreme weather.
"Most scientists?" Wrong. Maybe most EarthFirst "scientists," but among serious climatologists and meterologists, this is all part of a cycle. Things go up, and things go down. If a small delta in sea temps can spawn "this" then we're doomed!
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/amo_faq.php
Yeah! I seem to recall that! What was the vote? Hmmmm, nobody voted for it! What, that can't be right. It's Bushco's fault. Halliburton! chimpy!
I believe it was under another President too, but let's not confuse the issues with facts.
I've noticed that my neighborhood is actually getting cooler than it was a few months ago.
…an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem…
Most scientists say it seems to be.
Couldn't get past this statement. I'd love for the purveyors of this crap to please list all scientists in the world, then poll them and find out exactly how many "most" are. This article is complete and utter steaming BS.....
Cold earth, bigger and deeper snow storms.
In the last two years I lived in Boston, we had two bitter, incredibly bone-chilling winters. I remember visiting my ultra-lib, ecoNazi friend one day, and asking him, (admittedly, I was a bit snide when I asked this...) "I thought we were facing global warming, what IS it with this weather?"
His response was a dead-panned, ultra serious, "Well, global cooling is the first sign of global warming..."
D'oh!
Bush wasn't even President when the Senate said no way. If Bush can't even get a Supreme Court nominee through what makes anyone believe he can override a unanimous Senate?
Is there ANY evidence on record that anyone was exposed to greenhouse gases during a hurricane?
I call bull****.
Global warming is caused by the sun. Duh. Not by "man". Duh.
But the leftist moronic media will say this winter is colder than normal, in order to jibe with their stories about the high cost of heating oil, natural gas and electricity.
One Mount St. Helens eruption (nature doing its thing) is more significant than all the cars in LA for 50 years.
Not to mention the numerous, periodic ice ages. I imagine that a couple of thousand feet of ice covering Canada down through New York, northern Eurasia, etc. would make these environmental nuts blow a cork. The earth is marked with huge features that inform anyone who cares to look that it is a dynamic place with massive and often violent upheavals in climate, terrain, species, atmosphere, etc. We as a species grew up in an ice age. Some scientists say that if not for global warming from whatever, we would be in another ice age - maybe it is a good thing, duh?
Perhaps we should think about engineering our world to be more habitable. How about digging a broad canal through Panama and letting the Pacific ocean dilute the salty Atlantic. That would stop the periodic ice ages, warm the polar regions, and cool the tropics, and maybe reduce the fury of typhoons and hurricanes.
Democrat Senate under Clinton wasn't it?
If we just repeal the law of gravity the "Global Warming" should all go away. That will cut the pressure in the interior of the sun which powers its radiation and it will reduce the pressure at the core of the earth which heats and spits up hot lava. But, there may be some side effects!
His principal interest area academically is potential earth impactors, astroblemes, past impact events, paleocatastrophism, climatology, and paleoclimatology. And, of course, environmental "policy", so-called. He has a minor planetoid, or planetesimal, named for him.
One of his articles has been posted to FR in the recent past.
As a side note, Peiser has recently come to the conclusion that recent announcements and press releases by the British Government indicate that, as far as HM Gov't. are concerned,
Kyoto is dead!
That appreciation is beginning to become apparent among the green community as well.
The evidence is very powerful that we're still in the Pleistocene.
The long Milankovich Cycles related to planetary movements around the sun and slight irregularities therein that produce small temperature variations (which are nevertheless big enough to spell the difference between an ice-free Arctic and continental glaciation) produce long warm cycles, called interglacials, that are about 12,000 years long, and episodes of heavy glaciation, called pleniglacials ("full icing").
We are deep into the current interglacial and have about 800-1200 years left, before temperatures roll off radically and we go back to pleniglacial climatic conditions. Some paleoclimatologists have estimated the transition periods between full glacial and full warm climates to have been as short as 20 years, with occasional oscillations back from one to the other: at the end of the last pleniglacial, the climate suddenly reverted, in a phase called the Younger Dryas, to roughly full-glacial conditions for a period of centuries, before the warming resumed.
When the transition to full glaciation occurs, we'll wish we had burned every pound of soft coal in China. Humanity will be crying for a "greenhouse" then.
The talk about "runaway greenhouse" effects was begun by the information from various Venus probes, which show that such a greenhouse appears to exist there, with surface temperatures about 700 degrees F.
If we blew away most of Venus's (sulfur-rich, unbreatheable) atmosphere, we might be able to alleviate those high temps -- get them all the way down to, say, 200 degrees! If we could get the sulfur gases to drop out (or blow them away from the planet and into the sun), that would be even better. But file that under "future projects" for now.
That's where most of the "greenhouse" worry and chitchat came from. The idea is that, with CO2 in the atmosphere, one could plausibly hypothecate that atmospheric temperatures would begin to spiral upward toward Venerean levels. Never mind that we're 27,000,000 miles farther away from the sun and receive half the solar energy Venus's atmosphere does. Never mind, likewise, that the sort of temperatures recorded on Venus would turn Earth's seas to water vapor, something that has never happened in geological history, including the early Cambrian and Ordovician Periods of 400-500 million years ago, when the atmosphere was mostly C02 and methane anyway.
Trying to have an intelligent conversation with a liberal about anything is becoming more and more like talking to a fence post.
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