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Originally posted by loam
.................
Whatever you believe about how we got to this point, the situation does not look good for the near term. Is there any question humanity is in for some very difficult times?
Originally posted by ZombieOctopus
Haven't you heard? The Americans have decided global warming is a hoax and the Earth is actually cooling. If the American public has something to say about science, surely it must be true!
If all the ice on the planet disappeared over night, global warming would still be viewed as a leftist conspiracy in the only country that can lead the rest of the developed world by example.
Take a good look at those glaciers, or what's left of them, we're the last generation to lay eyes on them.
Sigh
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Humanity has been on similar situations hundreds of times.... This is neither the warmest, nor the worse, and as we know winter has been setting earlier in many parts of the world, and lasting longer...
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Perhaps some people also are forgetting that China has been seeing some very bad, and snowy winters, and the one in 2006 was the worse in 50-100 years...
Originally posted by loam
reply to post by ElectricUniverse
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Humanity has been on similar situations hundreds of times.... This is neither the warmest, nor the worse, and as we know winter has been setting earlier in many parts of the world, and lasting longer...
Can you point to any previous example where the water supply on one billion people was in peril? I'd like to review that information with more specificity.
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Perhaps some people also are forgetting that China has been seeing some very bad, and snowy winters, and the one in 2006 was the worse in 50-100 years...
So significant snowfall in one place solves its absence in another place?
Are you people for real?
[edit on 9-11-2009 by loam]
Originally posted by loam
reply to post by ElectricUniverse
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Humanity has been on similar situations hundreds of times.... This is neither the warmest, nor the worse, and as we know winter has been setting earlier in many parts of the world, and lasting longer...
Can you point to any previous example where the water supply on one billion people was in peril? I'd like to review that information with more specificity.
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Perhaps some people also are forgetting that China has been seeing some very bad, and snowy winters, and the one in 2006 was the worse in 50-100 years...
So significant snowfall in one place solves its absence in another place?
Are you people for real?
[edit on 9-11-2009 by loam]
Originally posted by ViewFromTheStars
Good point Loam but the million dollar question is what can we do to help these billion people and what can these billion people do to work around this problem, the cause of which humans really have no control over?
Are we going to sit around and bicker, penalize, greedily capitalize/feed off each other, etc.. ad nauseum..???
I guess everyone has 'their' priorities.
Originally posted by loam
Can you point to any previous example where the water supply on one billion people was in peril? I'd like to review that information with more specificity.
Originally posted by loam
So significant snowfall in one place solves its absence in another place?
Are you people for real?
Originally posted by loamThis thread's initial post provides three primary 'facts' deserving of most of the discussion:
1) Tibetan Glaciers are disappearing,
2) More than 1 billion people will likely be affected,
3) The global ramifications could be significant.
Dispute, please, the fact of the ice's disappearance and it's significance to anyone in terms of scale and consequence.
In a new research, scientists in India and China have determined that glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau that feed the river systems of almost half the world's people are melting faster because of the effects of clouds of soot from diesel fumes and wood fires.
According to a report in the Guardian, the results of the research, to be announced this month in Kashmir, show for the first time that clouds of soot - made up of tiny particles of "black carbon " emitted from old diesel engines and from cooking with wood, crop waste or cow dung - are "unequivocally having an impact on glacial melting" in the Himalayas.
Once the black carbon lands on glaciers, it absorbs sunlight that would otherwise be reflected by the snow, leading to melting. "This is a huge problem which we are ignoring," said Professor Syed Hasnain of the Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) in Delhi. "We are finding concentrations of black carbon in the Himalayas in what are supposed to be pristine, untouched environments," he added. The institute has set up two sensors in the Himalayas, one on the Kholai glacier that sits on the mountain range's western flank in Kashmir and the other flowing through the eastern reaches in Sikkim.
Glaciers in this region feed most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of substantial melting is severe flooding downstream. Hasnain said that India and China produce about a third of the world's black carbon, and both countries have been slow to act. "India is the worst. At least in China, the state has moved to measure the problem. In Delhi. no government agency has put any sensors on the ground. Teri is doing it by ourselves," he said.
Decreasing black carbon emissions should be a relatively cheap way to significantly curb global warming. Black carbon falls from the atmosphere after just a couple of weeks, and replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could quickly end the problem. Controlling traffic in the Himalayan region should help ease the harm done by emissions from diesel engines.
Black carbon, a form of particulate air pollution most often produced from biomass burning, cooking with solid fuels and diesel exhaust, has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates, according to scientists in an upcoming review article in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego atmospheric scientist V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2. The researchers also noted, however, that mitigation would have immediate societal benefits in addition to the long term effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"Observationally based studies such as ours are converging on the same large magnitude of black carbon heating as modeling studies from Stanford, Caltech and NASA," said Ramanathan. "We now have to examine if black carbon is also having a large role in the retreat of arctic sea ice and Himalayan glaciers as suggested by recent studies."
New research based on NASA satellite data and a multinational field experiment shows that black carbon aerosol pollution produced by humans can impact global climate as well as seasonal cycles of rainfall. Because aerosols that contain black carbon both absorb and reflect incoming sunlight, these particles can exert a regional cooling influence on Earth's surface that is about 3 times greater than the warming effect of greenhouse gases. But even as these aerosols reduce by as much as 10 percent the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, they increase the solar energy absorbed in the atmosphere by 50 percent -- thus making it possible to both cool the surface and warm the atmosphere.
Scientists are concerned that this heating may perturb atmospheric circulation and rainfall patterns. Averaged over the entire northern Indian Ocean, the man-made pollutants reflected more solar radiation back to space (than pristine skies), but they absorbed up to twice as much radiation in the atmosphere. Data for their investigation were collected during the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) -- an international multi-agency measurement campaign conducted from January through March in the years 1997, 1998 and 1999. As a result of human industry -- automobiles, factories and burning vegetation -- particles build up in the atmosphere where they are blown southward over most of the tropical Indian Ocean. The Indo-Asian haze covered an area larger than that of the United States.
Originally posted by ViewFromTheStars
Soft dull stupor huh?
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
How do people like you like to forget that, for example, the Nile USED to be a lush region for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and for the most part it has become almost a barren desert.
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Wow...so tell us Loam, exactly what are you proposing. Do tell us please.... What can we do to please you?....
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Because it is apparent to people like you that the Climate Change which is affecting ALL PLANETS and moons with an atmosphere in the Solar System has nothing to do with Climate Change on Earth..
It is very clear, apparently, to some people that the fact that the Earth's magnetic field being weaker, and having large fluctuations now than it has been for tens of thousands of years has NOTHING to do with the Climate Change we are experiencin...
Not to mention that we know for a fact that the Sun's activity is now weaker than it has been for at least 100 years, and instead the entire Solar System is receiving more high charged particles, and the energy levels of cosmic rays is at an all time high, or at least since we started observing space weather for at least 50 years... But that also has nothing to do with Climate Change...right?...
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
Loam is saying more than that.
Originally posted by ElectricUniverse
But, I have have many discussions with Loam regarding this issue.
He, like some others, like to blame mankind and agrees with the fearmongering that the IPCC and others partake in.
Originally posted by j2000
Here is another one for you Libs.
Originally posted by jdub297
1. The ice IS disappearing.
2. Its significance is that
a. China and India are poisoning themselves, while;
b. everyone wants to blame the West and CO2 emissions.
3. That has direct impact on the US and its citizens as we are being asked to pay for South Asian ignorance and indifference.
...
Thus, you see that China and India are destroying their local environs.
They are responsible for altering the lives and welfare of their own populations.
The US,and the West generally, are being asked to pay for it.
...
So give credit where credit is due: China and India are destroying their own people and landscapes ( at OUR expense).
Deny ignorance.
If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion lbs annually. This is almost 5% of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.