global dimming is not a plague of stupidity: Goodbye sunshine Each year less light reaches the surface of the Earth. No one is sure what's causing 'global dimming' - or what it means for the future. In fact most scientists have never heard of it. By David Adam David Adam Thursday December 18, 2003 The Guardian In 1985, a geography researcher called Atsumu Ohmura at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology got the shock of his life. As part of his studies into climate and atmospheric radiation, Ohmura was checking levels of sunlight recorded around Europe when he made an astonishing discovery. It was too dark. Compared to similar measurements recorded by his predecessors in the 1960s, Ohmura's results suggested that levels of solar radiation striking the Earth's surface had declined by more than 10% in three decades. Sunshine, it seemed, was on the way out. The finding went against all scientific thinking. By the mid-80s there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter, so the idea of reduced solar radiation - the Earth's only external source of heat - just didn't fit. And a massive 10% shift in only 30 years? Ohmura himself had a hard time accepting it. "I was shocked. The difference was so big that I just could not believe it," he says. Neither could anyone else. When Ohmura eventually published his discovery in 1989 the science world was distinctly unimpressed. "It was ignored," he says. It turns out that Ohmura was the first to document a dramatic effect that scientists are now calling "global dimming". Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis. In fact, global dimming seems to be so important that you're probably wondering why you've never heard of it before. Well don't worry, you're in good company. Many climate experts haven't heard of it either, the media has not picked up on it, and it doesn't even appear in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "It's an extraordinary thing that for some reason this hasn't penetrated even into the thinking of the people looking at global climate change," says Graham Farquhar, a climate scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "It's actually quite a big deal and I think you'll see a lot more people referring to it." .... " continued at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4821493-111414,00.html

I still don't drive nor do I smoke,and I am freezing at the moment. Hmmm. It is not as easily solved as most think, and we are very tiny beings on avery big planet. I suspect we will do eachother in before we kill the climate.

Even if we do "kill the climate" we basically only suceed in killing ourselves, or at least many of us, off. The Earth will survive. We may not be able to survive the consequences of our actions, but the Earth will survive.

Precisely!

NPR's "Morning Edition" interviewed three climate scientists about their views on global warming. This page contains links to all three interviews: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1893089

In today's paper it says global warming is approaching the point of no return. After which occurs widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea levels which will be irreversible. From an international climate change task force. Just an insignificant little article on page 2 of the paper.

Global warming might be twice as catastrophic as previously thought, flooding settlements on the British coast and turning the interior into an unrecognisable tropical landscape ... http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=604955

Collapse of Antarctic ice shelf linked to global warming The collapse of a huge ice shelf in Antarctica in 2002 has no precedent in the past 11 000 years, according to a study to be published on Thursday that points the finger at global warming. Measuring about 3 250 square kilometres in area and 220m thick, the Larsen B iceshelf broke away from the eastern Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, eventually disintegrating into giant icebergs. By chance, a United States-led team of geologists had gathered a rich harvest of data around the iceshelf just before the spectacular collapse, including six cores that had been drilled into marine sediment. The cores contain the remains of plankton and algae imbedded in layers of minerals, and their radiocarbon and oxygen isotopes provide clues about ice cover and climate change over the millennia. The researchers, reporting in Nature, the British science weekly, say that since the end of the last Ice Age, about 11 000 years ago, the iceshelf had been intact but had slowly thinned, by several dozen metres. Its coup de grace came from a recent but decades-long rise in air temperature, they say. "The modern collapse of the LIS-B [Larsen B iceshelf] is a unique event within the Holocene," they write. "The LIS-B eventually thinned to the point where it succumbed to the prolonged period of regional warming now affecting the entire Antarctic Peninsula region." The Holocene is the period of relatively balmy weather that followed the last Ice Age. The research is the latest in a series of studies to sound the alarm about the effects of climate change in Antarctica, where the bulk of the world's freshwater is locked up. The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts northwards out of West Antarctica, is considered a warming hot-spot. Over the past half century, temperatures in the peninsula have risen by around 2C. In recent years, the peninsula has lost ice shelves totalling more than 12 500 sq km, equivalent to four times the area of Luxembourg. Of the 244 glaciers that drain inland ice and feed these shelves, 87% have fallen back since the mid-1950s, according to a British study published in April. Global warming, also called the greenhouse effect, is caused by carbon gases mostly discharged by burning oil, gas and coal, that trap the Sun's heat. But Earth's climate also goes through natural oscillations of warming and cooling, resulting in Ice Ages and the milder interglacial periods in-between. The new study does not say that man-made global warming was responsible for the Larsen B's demise. However, it refers to a steep rise in the temperatures over the past several decades, a phenomenon that climatologists concur was unleashed by fossil fuels. - Sapa-AFP http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/&articleid=247148

I have no idea why this past summer has been so hot, but I am heartily glad to see it go. Give me 10 overcoats. I can keep warm. When I get down to skin and am still way too hot, there is a problem. I know the Gulf of Mexico's wanter has gotten quite warm. Happy hurricanes!

What website is best for Gulf water temp and weather?

can you use NOAA?

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

The mission of The Canary Project is to photograph landscapes around the world that are exhibiting dramatic transformation due to global warming and to use these photographs to persuade as many people as possible that global warming is already underway and of immediate concern. To compile a persuasive body of images, we will be photographing at least 16 landscapes throughout the world. These images will show that global warming: (1) is affecting the world in a variety of ways (melting, sea-level rise, drought, extreme weather events, dying habitats, etc.); (2) is affecting every place on earth. (See map) In addition to providing visual evidence of the changing climate, we also hope to address something more fundamental that possibly lies behind apathy towards the issue in the U.S.: people's sense of remove from the forces of nature. http://www.canary-project.org/mission.html

Very interesting quotes from the New Yorker on the current thinking on global warming: But where there�s a will there is, indeed, always a way. The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn�t matter�let�s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal laid out the logic as follows: �The problems associated with climate change (whether man-made or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms, and droughts.� Therefore �money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don�t understand.� Sounding an eerily similar note, a column published a few days later in the National Review Online stated, � We can do more to help the poor by combating these problems now than we would by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.� The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this, of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas�it lasts for about a century�and once released into the atmosphere it is, for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes with doughnuts. The climate isn�t going to change just once, and then settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on changing, producing, in addition to the �same old problems,� an ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an earth so warm as to be �practically a differe t planet.� In a world thus transformed, the only sure bet is that there will be no sure bets. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060320ta_talk_kolbert

On YouTube there is an amazing death of a glacier and at the rate it appears to be happening, it is a wonder there is a glacier there at all. Of course there is global warming. Just get the science right before you commit my tax dollars (and I pay plenty!) to the "fix" which seems ultimately to be a planetary problem not a human one.

Do you have a youtube link?

Let me hunt for it. There are also amaszing movies of Kilauea eruptions and of other volcanoes as well. That place is very bad. I can spend all kinds of time there just enjoying being elsewhere.

Thanks for looking for that link. Al Gore just came and spoke at the Austin NetRootsNation about global warming. Obama has hinted at making him VP or Energy Czar, or both.