Al Gore

[fisher]

Well, for starters, it isn't intact:

BALI, Indonesia, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- The population of Antarctica's penguin is in danger of global warming, World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) said on Tuesday at the ongoing UN climate change conference held in Bali, a resort island of Indonesia.
Global warming is taking a way precious ground on which penguins raise their young. Food has become increasingly scarce because of warming in the conjunction with over fishing, WWF said in a press release quoting its latest research report.
The report, "Antarctic Penguins and Climate Change," said the four species of penguins that breed on the Antarctic continent are under escalating pressure. The Antarctic peninsula is warming five times faster than the average rate of global warming. The vast Southern Ocean has warmed all the way down to a depth of 3,000 meters, it said.
The report said sea ice covered 40 percent less area than it did 26 years ago off the West Antarctic Peninsula. This decrease led to reduced numbers of krill, the main source of food for the chinstrap and penguins.
Warmer temperatures and stronger winds mean the penguins had to raise their chicks on increasingly thinner sea ice. For many years, sea ice has broken off early and many eggs and chick have been blown away before they were ready to survive on their own.
"The Antarctic penguins already have a long march behind them," Anna Reynolds, deputy director of WWF's Global Climate Change Program, said in a statement at the Bali UN climate talks.
"Now it seems these icons of the Antarctic will have to face an extremely tough battle to adapt to the unprecedented rate of climate change," he said.
The number of chinstraps decreased by 30 to 66 percent in some colonies, as less food made it more difficult for the young to survive. It's the same story for Gentoo penguins, who are increasingly dependent on the declining krill stocks as overfishing kills off their usual food source, according to WWF.
The emperor penguin, the largest and the grandest in the world, has seen some of its colonies halved in size over the past half century.
In the northwestern coast of the Antarctic peninsula, where warming has been the most dramatic, populations of Adelie penguins have dropped by 65 percent over the past 25 years, WWF said.
"The food web of Antarctica, and thus the survival of penguins and many other species, is bound up in the future of the sea ice," said James P. Leape, director general of WWF International.
"After such a long march to Bali, ministers must now commit to sharp reductions in carbon emissions for industrialized countries, to protect Antarctica and safeguard the health of the planet," he said.
The two-week U.N. climate change conference is tasked with drawing up a "roadmap" for negotiations on a new climate deal in the next two years before the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.


As to why Antarctica is warming more slowly, it is a lot colder than the Arctic. Here's why: (From Woods Hole Oceanographic)


"Why is Antarctica colder than the Arctic?
There are two key reasons why Antarctica is colder than the Arctic.
First, since Antarctica is a giant landmass, it receives very little heat from the ocean. In comparison, the Arctic's icy cover is relatively thin and it has an entire ocean underneath it. While the water is anything but warm, it usually stays around 30? F, which is often significantly warmer than the air above the ice. Some of this heat makes its way through the ice to the air, moderating temperatures somewhat. Also, even in winter areas of open water are present in the pack ice, allowing more ocean heat to escape into the air.
The second reason is elevation. As you go up in altitude, the air temperature decreases (by 6.5C for each 1 km). Since the average elevation of Antarctica is 2.3 km, the air is much colder compared to the Arctic Ocean, which is at sea level. "

You may remember back in 2002 when the Larsen ice shelf collapsed. Antarctica is losing sea ice too, just at a different rate and in a different configuration from the Arctic. They are two different places, one is an ocean, the other is a continent.

Here's a link for some climate change FAQ. http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457&tid=282&cid=13366#14

And that is probably all I have to say about it. I've been staying away from this thread because it seems to me most people have made up their minds.

If you read a little deeper, you will find that the ice mass on the continent of Antarctica is actually in a state of near homeostasis. The folks at the Bali conference only focused on the West Ice Shelf. There are many, many scientific articles that say the East shelf is adding mass at about the same rate the West Shelf is shedding mass. A snippet from one such article is noted below. You've got to read both sides of the story to get balance.

Originally published in Science Express on 19 May 2005
Science 24 June 2005:
Vol. 308. no. 5730, pp. 1898 - 1901
DOI: 10.1126/science.1110662
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Reports
Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise
Curt H. Davis,1* Yonghong Li,1 Joseph R. McConnell,2 Markus M. Frey,3 Edward Hanna4
Satellite radar altimetry measurements indicate that the East Antarctic ice-sheet interior north of 81.6?S increased in mass by 45 ? 7 billion metric tons per year from 1992 to 2003. Comparisons with contemporaneous meteorological model snowfall estimates suggest that the gain in mass was associated with increased precipitation. A gain of this magnitude is enough to slow sea-level rise by 0.12 ? 0.02 millimeters per year.

1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Missouri?Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
2 Desert Research Institute, University and Community College System of Nevada, Reno, NV 89512, USA.
3 Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
4 Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.

 

[Gypsea]

Scientists doubt link for global warming, big hurricanes

By Ken Kaye
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
December 13, 2007

Everyone from atmosphere experts to Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore warn that global warming eventually will spawn super-strong storms. The warmer the oceans, the more powerful the hurricanes, they say.

But a couple of noted scientists are throwing cold water on that concept.

They have found that as the Atlantic basin becomes hotter, hurricane intensity likely won't increase ? and might even deflate somewhat. The reason: The ocean's heat acts to stabilize the upper atmosphere, which, in turn, hurts a storm's ability to build.

"When you warm the upper atmosphere, you make storm formation less efficient," said Gabriel Vecchi, a research oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The findings of Vecchi and Brian Soden, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Miami, are to be published today in Nature, a prominent science journal.

They found that natural factors, such as El Ni?o and wind patterns, had a greater influence on boosting storm intensity than global warming resulting from human activity.

"Even though we know oceans will warm, that doesn't mean hurricanes will intensify over the next 50 to 100 years," Soden, of UM's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, said.

That assertion doesn't exactly wash with a large segment of the scientific community, as a growing number of studies hold that global warming is steadily increasing the intensity, duration and number of tropical systems.

Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, found the combined power of Atlantic hurricanes has more than doubled since 1970.

On Wednesday, Emanuel said Vecchi and Soden's findings might be valid over a short-term period, but his studies show a clear "upward trend" in hurricane intensity.

"I don't really agree with their conclusions," Emanuel said.

Another study also maintains that global warming is supercharging hurricane intensity. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Georgia Tech, including Peter Webster and Judith Curry, found that in the past 35 years, the number of Category 4 or 5 hurricanes has almost doubled.

Soden acknowledges that oceans are indeed heating up to record high temperatures.

But he said warm water alone does not stoke hurricane intensity and likely wasn't the sole culprit in making the 2004 and 2005 seasons so active. Other factors, such as light wind shear, also contribute to hurricane power, he said.

Since 1970, when global warming is thought to have taken effect, the most powerful Atlantic systems have included Hurricane Rita, which had sustained winds of 180 mph in September 2005, and Hurricane Wilma, which registered sustained winds of 185 mph the next month.

In the future, some hurricanes might grow just as strong. But there should be no noticeable trend of storms continually becoming stronger, Vecchi, of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, N.J., and Soden said.

Kyle Swanson, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, agrees. Swanson conducted a similar study, focusing on the Pacific Ocean, and found that hurricanes in that basin likely will increase in intensity by 5 percent to 10 percent in the future.

"In the Atlantic, it doesn't appear intensity is going to go up," he said. "It might fluctuate, but there doesn't appear to be a climate change trend."

 

[LightWorker]

"The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,"
New Warning On Arctic Ice Cap Melting, Satellite Images Show Volume Of Sea Ice At Summer's End Was Half That Of 2003 - CBS New​

 

[fisher]

The reconstruction of Earth’s climate history is important because it contextualizes the recent global climate for which we have direct evidence through instrumental observation. Therefore, reconstructions are an important component of the climate change debate, as they speak to alarmists’ claims that Earth’s climate has warmed to a level that is unprecedented within the last two millennia, and therefore unnatural. The natural proxies used for reconstructing climate (e.g., ice and sediment cores) must be verified through comparison with an overlapping instrumental record, and obviously, the longer the instrumental record, the better.

Contextualizing the recent climate in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere is especially important, as it is across this region that the largest increase in surface air temperature has been both observed during the 20th century and predicted for the 21st century. These ideas highlight the importance of snow cover, its sensitivity to temperature, and its positive feedback to the overlying atmosphere. Higher temperatures in typically snow covered regions may lead to a reduction in snow cover, and in turn, a reduction in the refrigeration of Earth’s atmosphere from beneath, and even greater atmospheric warming. The vision of out-of-control warming in Earth’s frozen regions makes the leap toward a breakdown of the global oceanic circulation system and global sea level rise an easy one.

Until recently, the instrumental air temperature record for Greenland, an epicenter of glacial study and climate reconstruction, was confined to the period 1873 to present. However, recent collaboration between the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom) has resulted in the compilation of instrumental data for 13 stations along the southern and western coasts of Greenland that date back to 1784. The data represent the addition of 74 complete winters and 52 complete summers to the previous record along roughly the southern two-thirds of the western Greenland coastline.


The extended surface air temperature record was constructed and analyzed by a group of researchers from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and the aforementioned CRU (United Kingdom) and DMI (Denmark) (Vinther et al. 2006). In satisfying a major priority of the work, the temperature record clearly verifies ice core records for Greenland. A second priority of contextualizing the recent climate of Greenland has resulted in further complication of the global warming debate. As the popularized side of the debate has led us to expect, the authors found that the coldest year (1863) and the coldest decade (1810s) are early in the record, well before the ballyhooed warming of the 20th century. Problematic from a climate change standpoint is the fact that the two distinct cold periods that made the 1810s the coldest decade followed an 1809 “unidentified” volcanic eruption and the eruption of Tambora in 1815 – unusual geologic events that defined the climate. However, of greater importance is the fact that the researchers found the warmest year on record to be 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades on record. This represents very bad news for climate change alarmists, since the warmest period was NOT the last quarter of the 20th century. In fact, the last two decades of the 20th century (1981-1990 and 1991-2000) were colder across the study area than any of the previous six decades, dating back to the 1900s and 1910s (Table 1). When examining the instrumental records of the stations it is apparent that no net warming has occurred since the warm period of the 1930s and 1940s (Figure 1).


Table 1. Decadal merged Greenland temperatures. Values in parentheses are based on at least 8 or 9 years/seasons. (Taken from Vinther et al. 2006)

NOTE--the chart would not paste into this message but the numbers show that the temperatures in greenland were colder in the 1980's and 1990's than they had been since the 1910's. These facts certainly don't align with the CO2 global warming theory that ever increasing levels of CO2 have been resulting in ever increasing global temperatures.

Figure 1. The historical record of seasonal and annual Greenland surface air temperatures after merging data from three stations with long instrumental records. The thick lines represent decadally filtered data, where grey lines indicate filtering based on incomplete data. The thin, horizontal grey lines represent the 20th century average temperatures. Data coverage for each of the three stations is indicated by the horizontal bars at the bottom, for which black bars indicate complete observations and grey bars indicate incomplete observation years. (Taken from Vinther et al. 2006)

In a region of the world where climate models indicate that the greatest impacts of CO2-induced global warming will be most rapid and most evident, this recent extension of instrumental surface air temperature records produces a climate history that seems to suggest otherwise. If global climate models are correct, the increase in CO2 concentration since 1930 should be evidenced rather dramatically in air temperature across a high-latitude region of the Northern Hemisphere such as Greenland. The evidence provided by the instrumental record of air temperature along the western and southern coasts of Greenland produces doubt in the degree to which increased CO2 concentrations impact high latitude climate as represented by the climate models upon which climate change alarmists are hanging their hats.

Reference:

Vinther, B.M., K.K. Andersen, P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, and J. Cappelen. 2006. Extending
Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century. Journal of Geophysical Research, 111, 10.1029/2005JD006810.

 

[Andy A]

When I landed in Thule, Greenland in March of 1953, the tempertature was -23 degrees F. It warmed up enough due I'm sure to "Global Warming", which we hadn't heard of at that time, to go out once in awhile to play football. The APs always ruined it, though, by coming around and telling us to put on our gloves so we wouldn't get "frost bite". Ah, those were the good ol' days.

 

[Smiling JOe]

a couple of comments on the article below, which I think are spot on:

I don't think either Al Gore or Judge Burton are particularly qualified to make conclusions regarding global warming. How does Judge Burton know how many polar bears died, and how they died? Sounds like a lot of speculation going both ways.

- Matt Rogers, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Right on! If Gore, and all the others really wants to end carbon pollution and clean up the air, he need only shut their own mouth and practice what they preach. Politicians are the worst polluters of them all, especially around election time. What's worse is that they don't really understand or even care about half of what they're talking about. They only want votes and to do or say anything they can to get them. Too bad the air in Washington D.C. can't be be filtered before it leaves Congress. That would cut 95% of CO2 emissions by itself!

- Clark, Little Rock, AR, USA

Judge attacks nine errors in Al Gore's 'alarmist' climate change film
11.10.07

(full article)
A controversial documentary on climate change which has been sent to thousands of schools has been criticised by a High Court judge for being 'alarmist' and 'exaggerated'.

Mr Justice Burton said former US vice-president Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, was 'one-sided' and would breach education rules unless accompanied by a warning.

Despite winning lavish praise from the environmental lobby and an Oscar from the film industry, Mr Gore's documentary was found to contain 'nine scientific errors' by the judge.

...Ruling that the film could be shown in schools as part of the climate change resource pack, Mr Justice Burton warned it must be accompanied by new guidance notes to balance Mr Gore's partisan views....

 

[LightWorker]

​

What Part of Yes Doesn't Bush Understand?
Thursday, December 13, 2007​

Nusa Dua, Bali -- It's vital, whatever the final outcome of this conference, to understand what happened. For the first time, every major third-world carbon emitter -- China, India, South Africa -- came to the table offering firm, verifiable, meaningful action to reduce their long-range carbon footprints. This is precisely what the U.S. -- and the Congress -- has been asking for since the Kyoto conference. China was particularly helpful, but yesterday, in a surprise, the Indian delegation weighed in to support a South African draft that called for "national mitigation actions by developing country Parties, in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner..."

And what was the U.S. response? It was to repeatedly rebuff these efforts and to engage in last-minute brinksmanship. At 1 AM on Friday morning, the U.S. delegation proposed to completely eliminate the distinction between the obligations of the rich countries and the poor, and to return to an entirely voluntary global scheme -- not only going back on the Kyoto principles, but actually backsliding on the existing, legally binding U.S. commitment under Rio. Here's a sample excerpt from the U.S. language: "including, as appropriate, domestic plans that MAY include binding, market-based and sectoral programs."

And how does the U.S. delegation characterize this behavior? In an interview with Reuters, James Connaughton, the chairman of the Whitehouse Council on Environmental Quality and head of the U.S. delegation, said, "We will lead, we will continue to lead. But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow." That statement may sum up, in a few short words, what is wrong with America's standing in the world.

 

[30A Skunkape]

Notdeadyet-thanks for the woodshole link, that is a pretty good website. I understand now why there is a different climate at the north and sounth poles. I am still curious though, if the air temperature is warming, why is the ice at the southern hemisphere increasing? I can understand an ice field that shrinks slower than that of the north, and I can understand an ice field that stays stable, but the fact is...the southern hemisphere ice is increasing.
Look again at this graph: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg

To my eye there has been a gain of roughly 1.5 million square kilometers since 1979!

As far as the penguins, I don't know anything about bird populations. Just remember though, the WWF is a charity that depends on donations to keep afloat and are more likely to put a dire spin on population changes.

 

[LightWorker]

WASHINGTON (AP) ​

It's shaping up to be one of the warmest years on record.​

Scientists take 2007's temperature - CNN.com​

 

[30A Skunkape]

WASHINGTON (AP) ​

It's shaping up to be one of the warmest years on record.​

Scientists take 2007's temperature - CNN.com​

I'm sure that is comforting to our friends in the midwest and northeast.