Antarctic Tree-line: Global Warming's Cold News

Sure the Antarctic only froze over 25-40 million years ago (no SUVs then) at the same time the Northern Hemisphere was warming. This year, Russia has had the coldest winter on record, while the idiots in NY thing that man can somehow overcome nature. By the time water covers NY city, a thousands of generations will pass. Check out the facts instead of the headlines and 20 second nippets.
Greenhouse gasses are emitted in China — which accounts for about a third of the world's emisssion of Greenhouse garbage. Last I heard, there weren't too many SUVs there either, though they are the largest user of coal in the world.
Tree ring studies and ice core studies (leading to the global warming thesis) leave out so many variables that it makes the whole theory almost useles. Any scientist can tell you that if you omit variables, the science may render false correlations — and they have omitted a bunch in Kyota.
Junk science is worse than no science.

I need to proof the copy next time. I would give a student an F for the errors in my comments.
Sorry.

I need to proof the copy next time. I would give a student an F for the errors in my comments. The worst error is Kyota (Kyoto)
Sorry.

Sure, the earth's climate can change naturally, but the point is that it is changing so quickly. As for the Russian winter, it's actually consistent with global warming. Climate models don't exactly predict a uniform increase of the Earth's temperature everywhere. Instead, as the voluminous amount of human-produced greenhouse gasses throw the Earth's climate out of equilibrium, the models predict an increase in "extreme" weather (like harsh winters), along with an _average_ (averaged over position, and over a few years) increase in temperature. This has been called "global weirding."

The point is that the Earth is being subjected to a huge, unprecedented new source of CO2. Yes, it's possible that the natural (i.e. non-human) feedback mechanisms (arctic and alpine trees, for example) will be able to cope with that. I think that everyone can agree that this is an important question to investigate. But it's looking unlikely that they will be able to cope; for one thing, it's clear that average global temperatures have risen significantly in the last few decades; also, we haven't found a comparable source of the heating.

Here's what an executive summary of a recently released National Academy of Sciences report says: (http://newton.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html)

It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries...
Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600 ... Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 ...

It is a valid viewpoint to be apathetic about global warming, and/or to wait until the consensus reaches 99.99999%, but I personally think we should do everything reasonably possible to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I seriously doubt that humans will be wiped out. But if the climate really does reach mean temperatures not seen for 40 million years on a timescale as short as a century, many other species will be wiped out. (Perhaps we should consider airlifting coke bottles to the refugee polar bears. The gods must be crazy, indeed.) And, even humanocentrically, it's unlikely that such mass extinctions would have no effect on our foodchain.

Now, even I am a bit dubious about the 40-million-year thing, but I think it's important to do what we can (again, within reason), even if the chance of that is small.

Super.

Well said. Well said. I was unaware that you had such an interest in the whole warming thing. Did you see the latest Doc-"Gore"-mentary? Gaddy saw it and said it was informative, yet like sitting through a lecture. Anyway, I agree that one should not be completely apathetic. There is absolutely no reason to search for cleaner solutions to the world's energy needs. Glad you had time to visti the blog,

Montey

No, I haven't watched the doc-Gormin'-tary. Aye, no one is entirely apathetic. I looked up gorm and it is sort of a real word (though it isn't in any real dictionaries). Gormless is a British word for "lacking intelligence." Thus gorm could be taken to mean intelligence, but the first entry in (the very authoritative) urbandictionary.com is actually kind of the opposite: "Shortened version of the word 'Gormless.' Used to describe a stupid individual looking seriously deprived of intelligence."

An Englishman's comment on the use of "gorm:"

True, we use gormless to describe a particular look of incomprehension, but never use 'gorm' unless it's accompanied by the negative modifier thing 'he lacks gorm.' Gorm alone is never used, except by the uninformed. Incidentally, a forerunner to 'gormless' was 'lenny' which meant someone who is gormless.