As Britain told to expect snow for 'next 10 days', how is the rest of the world is coping with this Arctic weather?

[Peikko 1,575]

Yep with a copy of the Daily Mail tucked under his arm as a symbol of his intellectual prowess, magic

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

You want a six pack of beer, prove all the major bodies of science are in fact wrong.

The large text proves it must be true.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

How many people here have made it their business to read research papers on climate change?

I bet not many.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Read it for me! After all, you got the time.

Edited January 5, 2010 by ={Rogue}=

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

You failed at proving anything in that post on the scientific consensus as not factual. You fail to understand the concepts that I mentioned....like peer review. You failed at realizing that Inhofe's list of 'scientist dissenters' is a lie. How much more failure do you want to have before you walk away with your tail between your legs?

It's freaking COLD! All over the place, even in the hot places, like Florida.

when are you going to give Al Gore's movie credit for ending global warming? sheesh, I mean he won a Nobel Prize AND an Academy Award for the movie...al those people can't be wrong! He fixed it man!

Yay Al!

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

It's freaking COLD! All over the place, even in the hot places, like Florida.

when are you going to give Al Gore's movie credit for ending global warming? sheesh, I mean he won a Nobel Prize AND an Academy Award for the movie...al those people can't be wrong! He fixed it man!

Yay Al!

Ask Obama!

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

I get it! What Steve posts are facts and any dissenting facts are rubbish? :rofl: I think I will have a snow cone before they are gone!

Not sure, but I am letting the faucets drip tonight so the pipes don't freeze

[Marilyn. 340]

It's freaking COLD! All over the place, even in the hot places, like Florida.

when are you going to give Al Gore's movie credit for ending global warming? sheesh, I mean he won a Nobel Prize AND an Academy Award for the movie...al those people can't be wrong! He fixed it man!

Yay Al!

actually here in the LA area we have been getting freakishly warm weather for this time of year.. it has been in the high 70's for the last few days..

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Since we seem to need training wheels on the subject - perhaps some historical background to the actual science of Anthropogenic Climate Change is in order.

Copenhagen climate summit: gloomy Swede Svante Arrhenius saw chill wind of change

Daily Telegraph. 04 Dec 2009

The crisis that holds every nation in its thrall has the most unlikely origins, says Geoffrey Lean .

It all began with a very depressed Swede. On Christmas Eve, 1894 – devastated by the collapse of his marriage to his lovely assistant, Sophia – Svante Arrhenius, a 35-year-old physicist, decided to take his mind off his troubles by tackling a complicated mathematical problem. So he sat down to work out what the effect of different amounts of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” would have on global temperatures.

The gigantic sum took him a year – he often laboured for 14 hours a day. He worked with an obsession worthy of many of the protagonists in today’s great global warming slanging match – which reached fever pitch this week after the publication of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

By the end, Arrhenius had estimated that doubling the amount of the gas would cause global temperatures to rise by 5C-6C. Extraordinarily, that is almost exactly the conclusion reached by today’s scientists, armed with superfast supercomputers – which has led to the giant climate summit, to be attended by more than 100 heads of government, that opens in Copenhagen on Monday.

In fact, the science of global warming is even older than Arrhenius – who later won a Nobel Prize for entirely different research. It stretches back to 1824 when a French physicist, Joseph Fourier, discovered the “greenhouse effect”, whereby gases in the atmosphere trap heat like the glass in a conservatory. And 37 years later, an Irish physicist, John Tyndall, identified carbon dioxide as one of its causes.

Despite all the lurid claims that a handful of present-day scientists have contrived to hoax the world and all its governments, this basic science has not been successfully challenged in nearly 200 years. It would be surprising if it had been, for it accords with the very laws of physics.

Solar radiation passes through the atmosphere, as through glass in a greenhouse, to warm the earth. Much of it is reflected back as slow-moving infra-red radiation – and most of this gets absorbed by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, principally water and carbon dioxide, heating the world further. If it were not for this aerial duvet, the earth would be 20C colder, making it uninhabitable.

It is logical that increasing the amount of these gases will cause greater warming, like adding a blanket to the duvet. And since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has dug, squeezed and pumped half a trillion tons of carbon in coal, gas and oil from beneath the surface of the Earth, burnt it, and released it as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is inconceivable that this would not increase the warming effect and, indeed, it has done so.

All this – though you could be forgiven for not noticing amid the excitement of the last week – is accepted by all but the most extreme, or ignorant, of the sceptics. Lord Lawson, for example, told a House of Commons committee over two years ago that it was “fairly clear” that “man-made emissions, largely carbon dioxide, have almost certainly played a considerable part in the 0.7C warming over the 20th century as a whole”.

And the sceptics’ latest hero, Tony Abbott – who was this week elected to be Australia’s leader of the Opposition and then promptly torpedoed the Government’s global warming legislation – confesses: “I think climate change is real and that man does make a contribution.” He did, it seems, once call it “absolute #######”, but now entertainingly disowns this as “not my most considered opinion”.

There is also no controversy about the fact that the Earth’s climate has changed rapidly and violently in the past. The ratios of different isotopes of oxygen trapped deep in polar icecaps reveal past temperatures going back 600,000 years and show that the planet has swung abruptly between warmer and colder states.

The exception is the past 10,000 years, in which all human civilisation has developed, when temperatures have remained anomalously stable. We have flourished, in effect, in what amounts to a climatic ceasefire. And to mix metaphors, it seems unwise – when the temperature has settled at the right level for us – to fiddle with the thermostat.

Margaret Thatcher saw this 20 years ago, warning that we may have “unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself”. Though a former sceptic, she realised – unlike some now – that the fact that the climate changed for natural reasons in the past did not mean that human activities could not affect it today, any more than the fact that almost everyone dies of natural causes is a guarantee against murder.

So there is common ground between prominent sceptics and those who accept global warming that climates can change; that the world has warmed up over recent decades; and that carbon dioxide has played a part in it. What, then, is all the fuss about? Rarely can so bitter a battle have been fought over such narrow territory.

The argument ranges over what we don’t know: how fast global warming will proceed; how much carbon dioxide will be responsible for it; whether natural systems will accelerate it or slow it down; what its effects will be; and how much it will cost to bring it under control. And these issues are made much more difficult to resolve by the inconvenient fact that inertia in the world’s systems – particularly, the oceans, which are slow to heat up – means that the effects of emissions take decades to become evident. So we do not even know for certain what the results will be of today’s pollution, let alone of what we emit in future.

At its simplest, the argument boils down to one between those who are convinced that the evidence of what is already happening, and scientific projections on what is likely to take place, reveals such danger to the world that firm action must be taken; and those who believe equally strongly that this is too uncertain to justify measures that would redirect the thrust of the world economy. Again, the timelag complicates things because it rules out waiting and seeing as an option. If the situation is as grave as the scientists say, it will be too late to avert catastrophe by the time all the uncertainties are resolved.

The vast majority of the world’s climate scientists are sure that the risk is so great that immediate action is needed. The simple existence of such a consensus does not mean it is right. I have spent much of the past 40 years campaigning against similar virtual unanimity – holding, for example, that lead in petrol could not harm children’s brains, or that acid rain was not caused by pollution – where the accepted wisdom proved to be wrong and a few “rogue” scientists right.

Indeed, there was for long a similarly complacent consensus on climate change. The East Anglian unit exists because its founder, Prof Hubert Lamb, was hounded out of his job at the Met Office for propounding the now universally accepted truth that climates had changed in the past. And 30 years ago, I was told by one of Britain’s top climatologists: “Climates never change, young man, and humanity could not possibly affect them.”

This general agreement was overturned by the same force that changed the accepted view of lead and acid rain: an overwhelming accumulation of evidence. Much of it has been gathered by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which – despite its starring role in sceptics’ demonology – is cautious and slow to sound the alarm.

As might be expected from a body that operates by reaching consensus among thousands of scientists and over a hundred governments, it usually ends up by endorsing the lowest common denominator, thus often underestimating the risks and effects of climate change. An example emerged this week, when a major study reported that sea levels will rise twice as fast as the IPCC predicted only two years ago.

In fact, most of the recent evidence reported from around the world suggests that the effects of global warming are occurring much faster than forecast: Arctic sea ice, for example, has shrunk in summer to levels not expected until around 2050. There is remarkably little evidence pointing in the other direction: if it were there to be found, the enormous fossil-fuel interests that stand to lose from emission controls would surely finance research to uncover it.

Despite this week’s excited reporting of the East Anglian emails – and the unpleasantness and disgraceful approach towards opposing views revealed in some of them – it would take uncovering more than a few ambiguous comments that may show manipulation of some statistics to discredit all this science.

What the sceptics would have to reveal is a massive conspiracy involving almost all the world’s scientists in the field to invent – not just massage – data, to falsify satellite pictures, and the like. Some do suggest that has been going on, but it seems improbable. Even stranger is their claim that virtually all governments have joined in the conspiracy, even though it will ruin their economies and cause them to give up power to a “world government”.

But the reason that the debate is so heated is because it is not scientific at all, but political and economic. Combating climate change would involve guiding the world economy away from its increasing, two century-long dependence on fossil fuels. There are many reasons why this should be beneficial even economically – and why it would have to be done even in the absence of climate change – but it is not surprising that it raises high emotions.

Happily, perhaps, Arrhenius never knew what he had started. “It is unbelievable,” he later ruminated, “that so trifling a matter has cost me a full year.”

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

I didnt know you chewed!

COPENHAGEN!

Try some WINT----O____GREEN!

Edited January 5, 2010 by ={Rogue}=

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I didn't know before (but now I do) that you don't read.

Edited January 5, 2010 by Gene Hunt

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

I cant read SHITE!

Obviously you can!

Edited January 5, 2010 by ={Rogue}=

[dalegg 143]

Yesterday we had a high of 77 and a low of 42.

What are them things covering y'alls arms?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I cant read SHITE!

Obviously you can!

Evidently.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Not sure, but I am letting the faucets drip tonight so the pipes don't freeze

Slap a solar panel on it!

Evidently.

quit followin me around! Eventually you will be secure. Hopefully you have a complete supply of ice trays!