Climate Change in the Northeast

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There IS an upshot from that article, kinda...

"The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level."

NEW, improved ENGLAND...now with less Anarchy
 
Reading suggestion

Jared Diamond has penned a number of entertaining and educational books. I highly recommend his book Collapse, which looks at a number of civilizations and their success or failure based on various factors. Environmental collapse is a big problem for many now non-existent societies, and with six billion earthlings gobbling up resources, despite advances in everything, that is pretty taxing on the little ole planet we call home.

Not to get partisan (really, I am only citing a book title now) there is another book I recommend: The Republican War On Science. There is an excellent summary of the global warming theories, as well as the detractors. The esteemed Sen. Inhofe from Oklahoma has said global warming is the biggest hoax every perpetrated by science. Which is kind of funny when you think about it. Scientists from dozens of countries coordinate their thinking in some way to perpetrate a hoax. I wonder if they are sitting in their labs, laughing up their sleeves, because they are somehow pulling off this hoax. Those tricky scientists!!

I don't want the NY/NE list of 115 to dwindle to 95 when the sea level rises 20 feet! So I'm gonna unplug that extra refrigerator when I get home. That's my energy savings for the day.

-----------

PS: Looking at my avatar, I think that is an endangered species!
 
The answer to global warming is the same answer for a lot of other problems-$$MONEY$$.
Fossil fuel is cheap and affordable-people drive big cars and SUV's-because they can afford to. Everyone wanted big cars-GM,Ford etc built 'em.
Fuel oil and Natural gas is cheap-people gotta have MacMansions-because they can afford to.

Sometime in the future(our lifetime?) the "endless" supply of fossil fuels will begin to dwindle,and when market forces kick in-prices will rise. Oil will become an expensive commodity. Our lives are such that it is a neccessity-gotta have it-no matter how much it costs-have to feed the addiction.

We had a taste of this after Katrina. $3 gas had everyone screaming,and the talk of hybrids,and conservation was all the rage. Gas is more "comfortable" now,and it's business as usual.

Now throw China and India into the mix. Oil consumption in these countries is skyrocketing as they trade bikes for BMWs,and become industrial powerhouses,producing the cheap goods that Westerners just love. As oil demand increases,so will the market price. Ironically,in the short term,China and India and the other emerging industrialized countries may be the trigger for real environmental change in the US by causing the prices of fossils fuels to soar. These won't be the short term changes we saw as in the Katrina scenario. These will be the real deal,and $3 a gallon will be "the good old days".
And then the day will come when the announcements like"Prudhoe Tapped Out" will send shock waves through the oil markets and the bidding war will begin. And the mad scramble will begin,to find a realistic way to maintain life,somewhat as we know it. Conservation will become a religious way of life,and with insane oil prices,the Wal-Mart supply boats won't have the bargains they have now. Almost all manufacturing is fuel based in some capacity,and it will be reflected in the cost. Utility companies will spend billions developing alternative power generation sources-because they have to. The demand for mass transit will force governments to invest seriously in alternate trasnsportation to avoid crashing economies. Downsizing of houses,cars,and lifestyles in general will be the norm,because you can't afford not to. And being the resilient and resouceful animals that we are-we'll adapt,and it might not even be that dismal. But all the good intentions and attempts to slow this global power consuming juggernaut won't bring the needed results. Money will.
 
whitelief said:
I don't want the NY/NE list of 115 to dwindle to 95 when the sea level rises 20 feet!

I never thought about that one! With less listable peaks, that is going to concentrate the traffic on less peaks, causing more wear and tear on some specific trails. Yikes! ;)
 
Gris said:
Thus, the predicament is not just how do we get ourselves off fossil fuel, but how do we wean ourselves off non-renewable (i.e., oil/fossil-based) products in every facet of life... :confused:

Well this might be a start:
http://www.metabolix.com/biotechnology foundation/plants.html

No doubt the earth is warming, but trying to solve future problems with current technology always seems impossible.

My solution: plug-in hybrids powered by next generation nuclear reactors ;)
 
forestnome said:
On the "chainsaw a new view" thread, a poster claimed that only 0.1% of climate scientists disagreed with the theory of human-caused global warming, and that the 0.1% group of scientists were bought off by the energy companies. Would the poster please site evidence of either part of that statement here on this more appropriate thread? Thanks.

My bad for not seeing this global warming thread earlier, which was established only a few minutes, I think, before I posted my comment quoted above on the "chainsaw" thread. I replied with the following to a p.m. sent asking me to cite my sources; sorry that I did not also post my reply earlier on this thread, which is excellent, as is the chainsaw thread, IMHO.

"The best on-line source for climate info is RealClimate.org; my 99% comes from the 1200+ international climate scientists who have contributed to the IPCC volumes since the early 1990s. I would rather not mention names, but I know of at least three climate warming skeptics who take all of their substantial funding from oil companies, rather from peer-reviewed grant proposals to the NSF, NOAA, NASA, etc. I put quotes around my use of the word "totally" because it is a silly word as used in the earlier reply to which I was responding."

The obvious reason that I cannot name names for those few global warming skeptics who take money from oil companies rather than competing with their peers for government and foundation grants is that I do not want to end up in libel court, and they (the skeptics and oil companies) have much deeper pockets than I.

If you are in the Boston area, Dr. Raymond S. Bradley, paleoclimatologist from UMass-Amherst, will be delivering a free slide lecture "Update on Global Warming" in the Wilder Pavilion, Adamian Academic Center, Bentley College, at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, 5 December 2006. Please check Bentley's Website for driving directions and campus maps showing buildings and parking lots. You can also research Ray Bradley's credentials as a paleoclimatologist at his UMass-Amherst Homepage.

Cheers, Dr. D.
 
Frost warnings for the San Francisco Bay area last night. Texas is getting whalloped by a winter storm. Current temperature in Dallas is 28F, Houston is a balmy 39. In October, Buffalo had a single-day record for snowfall. The remarkable part is not the extra half inch of snow that topped the record; the remarkable part is that it occurred 18 days earlier. At least we survived the killer 2006 hurricane season.

These are all anecdotes, but if we are in danger of becoming a tropical planet, how are these anecdotes so easy to find?

Just a couple winters ago, Boston harbor froze over for the first time in about 60 years. Get back to me when Back Bay is a mangrove swamp.
 
Here is a question for everyone including me... I think several have mentioned this earlier but I can't remember. As avid hikers, who travel north from CT, RI, MA etc to "our" beloved mountains, would you be willing to cut down on hiking if it meant a cleaner atmosphere and offered part of the solution to global warming? Some of us drive over 2-3 hours in our gass guzzling SUV for 8 hours of solitude because we want to enjoy nature. Then we drive back the same day. Thats a lot of fuel burned...lots of greenhouse gasses. Personally, I don't have a car and only hike via carpool, but when I do get a car I think I will definitely keep that in mind. We all want a solution, so its time to look at ourselves to work towards a goal, rather than waiting for things to happen. Its a tough pill to swallow, but very important.

grouseking
 
Barbarossa said:
Frost warnings for the San Francisco Bay area last night. Texas is getting whalloped by a winter storm. Current temperature in Dallas is 28F, Houston is a balmy 39. In October, Buffalo had a single-day record for snowfall. The remarkable part is not the extra half inch of snow that topped the record; the remarkable part is that it occurred 18 days earlier. At least we survived the killer 2006 hurricane season.

and lest we not forget the dire prediction that everyone believed in the late 70's / early 80's... "global cooling, the upcoming ice age".

(i'm not sure if this was before or after the dire prediction that we would run out of oil by the year 2000)

oh yeah, and what ever happened to that hole in the ozone?

Onestep ;)
 
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much more worried about pandemics/epidemics, bioterrorism, nuclear fallout, comet and asteroid strikes. Pretty confident one will these will get us first and then we'll really have something to worry about.
 
Barbarossa said:
These are all anecdotes, but if we are in danger of becoming a tropical planet, how are these anecdotes so easy to find?
Individual anecdotes are rather meaningless.
Eg: I drove my car today and didn't have an accident. Thus driving must be 100% safe.

And as warming progresses, the climate modeling suggests that the changes will differ with location, but the overall planetary average temp will go up.

Doug
 
giggy said:
much more worried about pandemics/epidemics, bioterrorism, nuclear fallout, comet and asteroid strikes. Pretty confident one will these will get us first and then we'll really have something to worry about.
There is an article in the latest issue of Time Magazine on the psychology of risk--how we mostly worry about the wrong things... http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562978,00.html

Doug
 
I'm more worried about the increased traffic on my street, where the stupid leak in my roof is coming from, and the horrible clicking sound in my knee. Everything else....blaaaaaahhhh.
 
Skeptics

Some skeptics are listed in articles in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Gray
Note that Dr. Gray was also featured in an interview in Outside Magazine earlier this year. Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Global_warming_skeptics
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus

Another observation about man's response to natural phenomena:

Observed effect -------> Man's response

Solar Eclipse -----------> Human Sacrifice
Winter Solstice ---------> Dances to bring the sun back
Global Warming --------> Kyoto Protocol
 
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Dr. Dasypodidae said:
My bad for not seeing this global warming thread earlier, which was established only a few minutes, I think, before I posted my comment quoted above on the "chainsaw" thread. I replied with the following to a p.m. sent asking me to cite my sources; sorry that I did not also post my reply earlier on this thread, which is excellent, as is the chainsaw thread, IMHO.

"The best on-line source for climate info is RealClimate.org; my 99% comes from the 1200+ international climate scientists who have contributed to the IPCC volumes since the early 1990s. I would rather not mention names, but I know of at least three climate warming skeptics who take all of their substantial funding from oil companies, rather from peer-reviewed grant proposals to the NSF, NOAA, NASA, etc. I put quotes around my use of the word "totally" because it is a silly word as used in the earlier reply to which I was responding."

The obvious reason that I cannot name names for those few global warming skeptics who take money from oil companies rather than competing with their peers for government and foundation grants is that I do not want to end up in libel court, and they (the skeptics and oil companies) have much deeper pockets than I.

If you are in the Boston area, Dr. Raymond S. Bradley, paleoclimatologist from UMass-Amherst, will be delivering a free slide lecture "Update on Global Warming" in the Wilder Pavilion, Adamian Academic Center, Bentley College, at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, 5 December 2006. Please check Bentley's Website for driving directions and campus maps showing buildings and parking lots. You can also research Ray Bradley's credentials as a paleoclimatologist at his UMass-Amherst Homepage.

Cheers, Dr. D.

Thanks, but you haven't yet cited your source that proves that 99.9% of climate scientists believe the theory. I thought it was closer to 50/50.
 
onestep said:
and lest we not forget the dire prediction that everyone believed in the late 70's / early 80's... "global cooling, the upcoming ice age".

(i'm not sure if this was before or after the dire prediction that we would run out of oil by the year 2000)

oh yeah, and what ever happened to that hole in the ozone?

Onestep ;)


My guess is that Onestep is pulling our legs on these three items.

Yes, there was some talk in the 1970s about the Little Ice Age (about 1450-1850 A.D.) being a precursor for the next full glaciation, as our current interglacial epoch (named the Holocene) is due to end in the next few millennia, if not few hundred years (based on astronomical cycles related to the Earth's position relative to the Sun). However, based on deep-sea sediment core and Antarctic ice core records of paleotemperatures spanning the past three+ million and 850,000 years, respectively, we know that full Northern Hemispheric glaciations take hundreds to thousands of years to build up (past rapid climate change events such as the Younger Dryas cold event of 13000 to 11700 years ago aside), or much longer than human time scales, which are now so vulnerable to current global warming and sea-level rise. Dr. Bill Ruddiman has proposed a really neat hypothesis that humans have been impacting climate for the past 8000 years (not just the past 150 years), and are probably responsible for delaying the next glaciation cycle, summarized in his 2005 book at the link below (which is very readable). Ruddiman also suggests in this book that pandemics over the past millennia have periodically cooled global temperature, so bring on the bird flu!

http://www.amazon.com/Plows-Plagues...ef=sr_1_1/105-1210301-9362847?ie=UTF8&s=books


In the late 1950s, Dr. M. King Hubbert, one of the most famous geologists of the past 100 years, predicted that oil and gas production in the United States would peak (not run out, but peak) in the late 1970s, which turned out to be right on the mark. More recently, Dr. Ken Deffeyes (the geologist who accompanied John McPhee on a road trip across I-80 westward from Salt Lake City leading to McPhee's classic book "Basin and Range") used the same methodologies as Hubbert to predict that global oil production would peak (again not run out, but peak) between 2005 and 2010, which certainly looks like it could become true. So, in the best case scenarios, we probably have less than 50 to 100 years of oil and gas reserves remaining, with few viable economic alternatives at the moment (link to Deffeyes' fine book below).

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Oil-Vi..._bbs_sr_1/105-1210301-9362847?ie=UTF8&s=books


And, finally, the holes in the stratospheric ozone layer are still there, the one over the high latitudes of Southern Hemisphere more severe than the one in the North. However, thanks to the Montreal Protocol in 1987, an international treaty signed even by the U.S., we have sharply reduced the global production and release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the main culprit in stratospheric ozone production (CFCs are also greenhouse gases, albeit never as big a player as carbon dioxide and methane), and at least the ozone holes are not becoming appreciably larger (it will take another few decades for stratospheric ozone to recover completely). Atmospheric chemists Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland won a Nobel Prize for their scientific discovery of stratospheric ozone destruction, and fortunately we listened to them and responded, without any major disturbance to the global economy. For those of us who enjoy hiking outside (most on this board?), we should be happy that our chances of getting skin cancer are now less than they would have been without the Montreal Protocol. The same is now true with our response to the warning about global warming, but will we listen and respond?

Dr. D.
 
El Nino

Since we are in a mild/moderate El Nino year, there will be lots of wild anecdotes to yak about this year.

One of the things the skeptics on this thread might consider is the actual rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (it's way up, no numbers at my finger tips, I'm too lazy at the moment to check, but the data is out there).

And then you can add the obvious factor: Carbon dioxide reflects infrared radiation back to the earth. I think that anybody (except perhaps a creation-oriented "scientist") would agree with that.

Those are two pretty strong ingredients for global warming right there.

Giggy, as far as asteroids and comets, things are not looking good. There is another gang of annoying scientists who think the big strikes are much more frequent than assumed. So get out the hard hat!

On a related note: What do people think the rate of ultra clear days in the mountains is at the moment? Once a week in summer? more/less? My index is a drive down Route 22 in NY, where the view opens up over Lake Champlain over towards Camel's Hump. I think super clear days occur less than 50% compared to 25 years ago.

Cheers.
 
whitelief said:
Since we are in a mild/moderate El Nino year, there will be lots of wild anecdotes to yak about this year.

Speaking of El Nino, NHPR did a quick blurb that this was one of the three warmest Novembers of the last 110 years, and that only 1 ski area was open over Thanksgiving (Bretton Woods) compared to 8 last year. No inference was made or implied (by them or by me.)

Surely all the winter enthusiasts around here have noticed this anyway.

Tim
 
Dr. Dasypodidae said:
Yes, there was some talk in the 1970s about the Little Ice Age (about 1450-1850 A.D.) being a precursor for the next full glaciation, as our current interglacial epoch (named the Holocene) is due to end in the next few millennia, if not few hundred years (based on astronomical cycles related to the Earth's position relative to the Sun). Dr. D.

Global Cooling Theory was not based on the idea that we'd eventually cool down due to cycles, but due to the same human activity that is now blamed for theorized unnatural warming. Combustion of fossil feuls was theorized to lead to blocking of solar heat, causing the planet to freeze.

Dr. D, you still have not cited your source of data that shows 99.9% of the relavent scientific community believes the theory.
 
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