Posted on 05/15/2008 10:18:53 AM PDT by PROCON
Global warming is causing significant changes to the Earth's natural systems and it is highly unlikely that any force but man-made climate change can be blamed . Researchers who analysed 30,000 academic studies dating back to 1970 said man was responsible for changes that ranged from the loss of ice sheets to the collapse in numbers of many species of wildlife.
"Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The effects on living things include the earlier appearance of leaves on trees and plants; the movement of animals and birds to more northerly latitudes and to higher altitudes in the northern hemisphere; rapid advances in flowering time and earlier egg-laying in Britain; and changes in bird migrations in Europe, North America and Australia.
On a planetary scale the changes include the melting of glaciers on all continents; earlier spring river run-off; and the warming of oceans, lakes and rivers.
The study's conclusions go further than the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded last year that man-made climate change was "likely" to have had a discernible effect on the planet.
It says natural climate variations cannot explain the changes to the Earth's natural systems.
In the study, published in the journal Nature, Miss Rosenzweig and researchers from 10 institutions across the world analysed data from published papers on 829 physical systems – such as glaciers and ice sheets – and 28,800 plant and animal systems. They produced a picture of the changes to each continent. The changes were most marked in North America, Asia and Europe but mainly because far more studies had been carried out there.
The authors said there was an urgent need to study environmental systems in South America, Australia and Africa, especially in tropical and subtropical areas.
In North America, the researchers found that 89 species of plants were flowering earlier, such as the American holly and box elder maple; a decline in the population of polar bears; and the rapid melting of Alaskan glaciers.
In Europe, they found evidence of glaciers melting in the Alps; earlier pollen release in the Netherlands; and apple trees producing leaves 35 days earlier in Spain.
In Asia they reported a change in the freeze depth of permafrost in Russia; and the earlier flowering of ginkgo in Japan.
In Antarctica, the population of emperor penguins had declined by 50 per cent. In South America, the melting of the Patagonia ice-fields were contributing to a rise in sea levels.
Prof Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide, described the evidence that mankind was altering the world as "overwhelming".
He said: "These changes are only a minor portent of what is likely to come."
Well let the global suicides begin!!!
Ping
Ted Turner is always calling for a cull. I say let him go first.
ROTFL .. yeah the barf alert is appropriate. This is really heavy duty industrial chunk hurl pretending to be science.
These people should show some leadership and volunteer.
“Mankind is the ‘Earth’s biggest threat”
Agreed.
I have carefully constructed and tested a hypothesis which shows that cowardly, liberal British science writers are the worst threat by far to Mother Gaia.
Help to eliminate the egregious effects on Earth’s papier mache fragile “natural systems and kindly snuff yourself immediately, Mr Highfield.
Actually, biological systems on Earth have had a huge impact on its physical systems (its atmosphere, its surface, its oceans). By their logic, total sterilization of the planet would be required to return it to its “natural” state.
al Qaeda and gang have dropped off the top spot.
what a waste fo educations and doctorates.. idiots. the earth is a living breathing planet, it changes over time whether man is present or not.. Good God, these people are dense.
Aren’t these the same clowns who warned us about “global cooling” in the 1970’s...
ABSTRACT:
"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well-known but under-appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2-rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere. Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation. Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase. If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere."
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
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The graph above represents temperature and CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. It is the same exact data Al Gore and the rest of the man-made global warmers refer to. The blue line is temps, the red CO2 levels. The deep valleys represent 4 separate glaciation periods. Now look very carefully at this relationship between temps and CO2 levels and keep in mind that Gore claims this data is the 'proof' that CO2 has warmed the earth in the past. But does the graph indeed show this? Nope. In fact, rising CO2 levels all throughout this 400,000 year period actually lagged behind temperature increases --by an average of 800 years! So it couldn't have been CO2 that got Earth out of these 4 past glaciations. Yet Gore dishonestly and continually claims otherwise.-Eye On The Left
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"The above chart shows the range of global temperature through the last 500 million years. There is no statistical correlation between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the last 500 million years and the temperature record in this interval. In fact, one of the highest levels of carbon dioxide concentration occurred during a major ice age that occurred about 450 million years ago. Carbon dioxide concentrations at that time were about 15 times higher than at present.":
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M
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FWD:
So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right?
Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.
In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).
The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
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Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
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I'd say mankind is a distant second.
From BBC News [yr: 2004]:
"A new [2004] analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past. They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer."..."In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface. This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. Ice core disc, Epica Ice cores record climate trends back beyond human measurements It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3869753.stm
It's really hard to imagine how this little ball of fire could have any impact on our climate at all.
But the main arguments being made for a solar-climate connection is not so much to do with the heat of the Sun but rather with its magnetic cycles. When the Sun is more magnetically active (typically around the peak of the 11 year sunspot cycle --we are a few yrs away at the moment), the Sun's magnetic field is better able to deflect away incoming galactic cosmic rays (highly energetic charged particles coming from outside the solar system). The GCRs are thought to help in the formation of low-level cumulus clouds -the type of clouds that BLOCK sunlight and help cool the Earth. So when the Sun's MF is acting up (not like now), less GCRs reach the Earth's atmosphere, less low level sunlight-blocking clouds form, and more sunlight gets through to warm the Earth's surface...naturally. Clouds are basically made up of tiny water droplets. When dust particles in the atmosphere become ionized by incoming GCRs they become very 'attractive' to water molecules, in a purely chemical sense of the word.-Eye On The Left
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There's a relatively new book out on the subject titled The Chilling Stars. It's written by one of the top scientists advancing the theory (Henrik Svensmark).
And here is the website for the place where he does his research:
2008: "The Center for Sun-Climate Research at the DNSC investigates the connection between variations in the intensity of cosmic rays and climatic changes on Earth. This field of research has been given the name 'cosmoclimatology'"..."Cosmic ray intensities – and therefore cloudiness – keep changing because the Sun's magnetic field varies in its ability to repel cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy, before they can reach the Earth." :
http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate
We urgently need to return Earth to its original state as a chunk of molten rock without an atmosphere, water or any organic life.
The authors said there was an urgent need to study environmental systems in South America, Australia and Africa, especially in tropical and subtropical areas.
Ah, there's the rub! It's the Scientist Full-Employment Act. Welfare for scientists! Couldn't get it through the legislature, so make up a scare story and try again! Brilliant!
"Take us to DEFCON 5......and get me the president on the horn."
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
This link is an excellent source for comparison of man-made vs. natural green house gas and water vapor effects on the earth.
Really puts it in perspective over what we are going to trash our economy over.
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