How do you know it's Global Warming?

When Air Conditioner sales are up in the UK and it's time for me to come over and open a "Snow Tire Store".

Hundreds Stuck

Coming from Canada, I can sympathise sort of..........not!(no fatalities) I used to shake my head and laugh whenever I would hear that Vancouver BC got an inch (couple of Cm's) of snow and the city would come to a screeching halt, because they had to find someone to drive their only snowplow. :D

Time was, when,.... I am sure there were hardly any snowfall in the UK, unless you lived in the mountains or Highlands, I used to live in chatham, UK and I remember (the old school uniform) going to school in the middle of winter, with shorts on, don't suppose you can do that now.

The older chaps on this site from the UK must see the difference in the seasons, I am seeing the difference here in Nova Scotia, we used to get snow in November and have it hang around until April, I can't remember the last time this happened.(over the last 30 yrs or so)

It seems our weather is becoming more and more what the weather in the UK used to be like,(temperate) just a lot of rain (easy to shovel) during the winter and spring.

So is it just me??? is it a millenium cycle sort of thing, or is the next ice age just around the corner. Or is it what a lot of people refuse to believe and that the Earth is getting it's weather patterns screwed up because of or a result of all of the pollution we are putting in the atmosphere.

That brown dot covering the most of southern asia is not the lens cap on the satellites camera, it's a cocktail of crap, and it's getting worse.

http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm...985&language=1

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2002/08/12.../pollute020812 stories are old, but what has happened since.?

Just because global warming is a threat
doesn't mean you still can't enjoy the patio. :D

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=272171

isnt this a similar thread?

Hi Tex~ I have moved the other thread into Tech Humour. dalek's post is on a more serious note.

Sure, "global warming" is happening, but I have no time for the doom and gloom bull crappers.

10,000 years ago where I am sitting was under 1,000ft of ice. The cliffs are chalk, so we had a tropical sea at one time.

I can visit the ruins of monasteries nearby and see the terraces where they had vinyards up until the 14th. Century. It got cold and the line moved about 400 miles south.

In the mid 1800's they used to have ice fairs on the river Thames in London. It froze to a depth of several feet.

It is all part of much bigger cycles?

:)

Hi nihil

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It is all part of much bigger cycles?

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I agree...it is mostly cyclic, and we are on the path of a new one, my concern is that it has been speeded up by the (is that a word?) advent of greenhouse effects and the increasing thirld world's rush to industrialization.

Where we (UK/US/Canada, and some Euro countries) are more or less, cutting back in the realm of emmissions these countries are expanding.

Also with China and India (combined Pop of 3 Billion) being on the threshold of an industrial revolution of sorts, this can only get worse. I don't think they will be so easily convinced to cut back or go green when those of us have enjoyed approx 50 yrs of unfettered production and capitalism, more or less made our pile of money and now we expect them to not make any. ;)

Hi dalek,

The real problem with emissions is pollution and health, rather than global warming.

We have way too little data to model our climate anything other than speculatively................hell we have problems with hurricanes, that only have a life of around 5 days? My current view is that compared to the magnitude of variations that cyclical factors have, humans have a very miniscule influence. We are more likely to poison the planet first?

I have posted this link before, but it is an interesting site to browse around, and give you a feel for our current technology and techniques:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

:)

We're having an influence but really human activity is only adding a little to a natural upswing in temperature. Nihil has already pointed out some good examples of odd shifts. I've read (and it makes some sense to me) that our weather for the last 100 years or so has been the weird weather because it has been so stable. The mad weather is actually closer to the norm.

We've had 10 years now of quite mild winters with low snow fall (due to global warming alledgedly) and now were being predicted a very cold winter (also blamed on global warming). IT's the weather.. sometimes it's ****, deal with it.

A lot of people these days are so bleeding soft. We had about 1/2" of snow and folk were complaining and saying there not going to work. I'm not that old but I can remember 20-25 years ago when getting 1-2 feet of snow was no big deal you just dug your way out and got on with it.

These are the same people who are terrified to drive on single carrigeway roads and can't overtake unless they have another 2 lanes to do it, and switch their fog lights on in the rain. Don't let their kids climb trees etc etc.... Thats another rant though.

Hi Aspman

I agree with the "odd"shifts, but it is the speed of which these odd shifts are happening, a good litmus test of Global warming is:

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The Arctic Meltdown

How did we reach this point? The largest contributor to recent global warming, scientists believe, is carbon dioxide (CO2), a "greenhouse gas" that allows visible light from the sun to reach the earth's surface, but then retains some of that emitted light as heat in the lower atmosphere, and hence warms it. This gas occurs naturally in the environment: we exhale it, and plants absorb it during photosynthesis, releasing oxygen. The problem is that we have been adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than can be absorbed by the biosphere and the ocean, slowly but surely, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. When fossil fuels such as oil, coal, or natural gas are burned, they release their carbon content to the atmosphere as CO2. Atmospheric concentrations of the gas are now well beyond the steady level of 280 parts per million (ppm) that persisted from a.d. 1000 until the early 1800s. Ice cores from around the globe tell most of the story, and direct measurements were added in 1958. The concentration of CO2 began increasing about 150 years ago and is now at 370 ppm, one-third higher than the historic level—and rising. Because these additions of CO2 will persist in the atmosphere for a century or more, mitigating action taken now won't reduce concentrations for generations. These actions, however, will slow the rate of greenhouse gas warming.

Surface temperature in the last thousand years (according to evidence from tree rings, corals, ice cores, and isotopes), has been variable, but if anything was decreasing slightly, on average, until about 1900. That is what might have been expected based on historic cycles of glaciation: we are at a point in the cycle where we might anticipate beginning a long period of gradual cooling. Instead, temperatures have been rising since the turn of the twentieth century. The rate of warming in the last century was probably the fastest of any hundred-year period in the last millennium, and the trend appears to be accelerating. Since 1976, the World Meteorological Organization reports, global average temperature has risen approximately three times faster than the century-long trend. Nine of the 10 warmest years in the last 140 years have occurred since 1990—and 2002 is on track to be the warmest ever.

Looking beyond instruments, scientists have found other evidence of warming. In close to 100 areas in the Northern Hemisphere, data exist covering at least a century, often based on newspaper reports of contests and wagers to guess the ice-out date of lakes and rivers. In 95 percent of these cases, the ice-free season has lengthened an average of about two and a half weeks.

Another piece of the puzzle comes from the top of the world. Nuclear submarines have been transiting the North Pole beneath the Arctic ice since the 1950s, and measuring its thickness. When the data were declassified at the end of the Cold War, they showed that thickness had decreased by 40 percent between the late 1950s and the 1990s. Satellite data show a 10 percent reduction in the extent of the icepack over the last two decades. The United States Navy, pondering the implications for national security, worries about "scientific models [that] consistently suggest seasonal sea lanes through a formerly ice-locked Arctic may appear as soon as 2015. Summertime disappearance of the ice cap could be possible by 2050 if the trend continues."

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http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/1102195.html

Being from Canada, I pay attention to what goes on up North(just in case the Americans steal it from us :p ).The news is not good, the ecosystem is changing to the point that it is affecting the very existance of the indigineous groups who inhabit the North.

Also the permafrost is steadily thawing http://www.socc.ca/permafrost/permafrost_future_e.cfm

So I believe IMHO that humans have indeed speeded up the process of Global Warming which in turn is affecting the world's weather patterns.I feel the oceans hold the answers to what is happening.The Big Chill