Home

Global Warming
What Does It Mean?

Global Warming What Does It Mean? Here's Some Truth

For those people who still cling to the hope that global warming is some liberal stunt and science has yet to prove that man has induced climate change, we have this news to share:

The world's coral reefs are in danger of dying in the next 20 years unless the world drastically cuts carbon emissions. The coral reefs are a a major part of the planets delicate eco-system, without, much ocean life will not survive.

FOR EVERY HUMAN, ANIMAL AND PLANT ON EARTH, A HEALTHY OCEAN IS A MUST!! Our oceans make up 99% of the living space on earth and contains about 320,000,000 cubic miles of sea water. Over 70% of our globe is covered by water. Ninety-seven percent of all water on earth is in our oceans.

If world leaders do not immediately engage in a race against time to save the Earth's coral reefs, these vital ecosystems will not survive the global warming and acidification predicted for later this century.

We must do all that is necessary to protect the key components of the life of our planet as the consequences of decisions made now will likely be forever as far as humanity is concerned.

The kitchen is on fire and it's spreading round the house. If we act quickly and decisively we may be able to put it out before the damage becomes irreversible.

Ice melt from a warming Arctic has two major effects on the ocean. First, increased water contributes to global sea-level rise, which in turn affects coastlines across the globe. Second, fresh water from melting ice changes the salinity of the world’s oceans, which can affect ocean ecosystems and deep water mixing.

Increasing sea level rise will be a problem in the future for people living in coastal regions around the globe.

Arctic sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the polar regions cool and moderating global climate. According to scientific measurements, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically over at least the past thirty years, with the most extreme decline seen in the summer melt season. The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than expected, according to a new study led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher.

Arctic ice continued its decline, with hardy, thicker old ice increasingly being replaced with quick-to-melt, thinner young ice.

This winter's maximum Arctic sea ice extent was 5.85 million square miles (15,150,000 square kilometers)—about 278,000 square miles (720,000 square kilometers) less than the Arctic average between 1979 and 2000.

"That's a loss about the size of the state of Texas," said Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

And speaking of Texas, isn't that the home state of the guy whose followers still pretend that global warming is a liberal figment?

Apparently there are different types of arctic ice, and older ice is more resilient than younger ice. Guess which is melting faster: older ice.

Ice a year or more old—thicker, hardier, and less prone to melting than younger ice—was at an all-time low at the end of this past winter, the new report says.

Ice older than two years once accounted for some 30 to 40 percent of the Arctic's wintertime cover and made up 25 percent as recently as 2007.

But last year it represented only 14 percent of the maximum. This year the figure fell to 10 percent.

Global warming: The heat is on the U.S.

Will the U.S. and the world find the political will to limit or end creation of greenhouse gases in time to prevent future and potentially catastrophic climate change?

This week's Group of 8 summit has pretty much lived down to the low expectations it generated from the outset, yet it did produce a long-overdue agreement to fight climate change.

The club of industrialized nations agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. It was less than President Obama had hoped for -- he had aimed to get developing countries such as China and India to sign on as well -- but it represents the first time the United States has taken the international lead on climate change since the 1990s, and demonstrates to recalcitrant nations that the industrialized world is willing to take responsibility for its outsized contribution to the problem.

Such international pacts are usually meaningless without the backing of Congress; President Clinton, after all, signed the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming in 1998, but it was never ratified by the Senate.

That chamber once again finds itself in a position to overrule the president as it considers a sweeping climate-change bill that was narrowly approved last month in the House. It would fulfill Obama's G-8 promise by meeting the 2050 goal.

This is the summary of a report from a mainstream US Government research body formed by the Department of Energy.

We have examined the principal attempts to simulate the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on climate.

In doing so, we have limited our considerations to the direct climatic effects of steadily rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and have assumed a rate of CO2increase that would lead to a doubling of airborne concentrations by some time in the first half of the twenty-first century.

Such a rate is consistent with observations of CO2 increases in the recent past and with projections of its future sources and sinks. When it is assumed that the CO2 content of the atmosphere is doubled and statistical thermal equilibrium is achieved, the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2°C and 3.5°C, with greater increases at high latitudes.

So there you go. Sounds about par for the course, right? Seems to fit the predictions you see in other studies, like that MIT study published in May that predicts global warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, and so on. Probably a middle-of-the-road study from last December or so, eh?

Except in fact the above report dates from 1979.

It’s called “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,” and it’s the report of the Carbon Dioxide Effects Research and Assessment Program, formed by James Schlesinger, who became the first Secretary of Energy after President Carter created the department in 1977. This is well before James Hansen delivered his celebrated warnings to Congress in the mid-1980s.

We’ve known about all this stuff for 30 years now. Everything one might have expected to occur based on the report has, in fact, happened in the subsequent 30 years.

The scientific consensus has become overwhelming as the data and models become orders of magnitude more convincing and sophisticated.

Yet there are still people wondering around arguing it’s not happening, and it’s taken us 3 decades to even begin to do anything about it. Talk about a procrastination problem.

So again we ask, Global Warming, what does it mean?  It means something different to all of us.  The Home of Solar Energy site gives us definitions for global warming from the US National Weather Service, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Wikipedia and NASA.  Click on over and have a look, pretty interesting stuff.

Top of Global Warming What Does It Mean