Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums  

I have no idea why the new Mustangs weigh as much as my 20+ year old Cougar, but clearly they're not trying very hard to put new materials & technologies to work (other than to sell more vehicles to the reptile brained people). Well, unless the concept of peak oil production and the plot below have no meaning:

Yeah, well, he got some facts dead wrong in that book too...

He wasn't trying to argue that Global Warming isn't happening (really, all of page four explains this), just what the causes really are

If so, what is causing it? The list of potential culprits begins with the Sun and includes water vapor (the major "greenhouse" gas), ozone, bacteria, insects, forest fires and, yes, CO2. But while CO2 in the last half-century has increased 19 percent from 316 to 376 parts per million, it still amounts to less than one three-thousandth of one percent (.000333 percent) of the total atmosphere. And when CO2 was increasing dramatically between 1945 and 1977, says Western Washington University geologist Don J. Easterbrook, the Earth was cooling.

He wasn't trying to argue that Global Warming isn't happening ...

where the increase in "greenhouse gases" will actually plunge the Earth into another Ice Age.

Is the sun getting hotter? That's news to me.

That said, I don't think we need a BS fear tactic to get us to change the way we treat our planet and our own health. Our own dwindling pockets are more than enough reason to drop our fuel usage, and politics is a close second. Global Warming aside, we do need to curb our severe air pollution if only to get rid of acid rain and lung cancer.

What sells more magazines; "Global Warming Doomsday Imminent", or "False Alarm, Everything Is Going To Be OK"?

But the question is whether the greenhouse gasses cause that melting or simply a rise in temperature.

"The Year Without a Summer" occurred in 1816 (known in Jefferson County by the saying "1800-and-froze-to-death"), and was caused by the fall-out from a monstrous volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sambawa in Indonesia the previous year.  A billion cubic yards of dust was ejected over fifteen miles high into the atmosphere and continued far into the stratosphere where winds distributed it all over the world.  This volcanic ash high in the atmosphere caused a shielding of the earth from the heat of the sun (basically what would happen in a "nuclear winter") and much lower temperatures worldwide.  New England saw a heavy and crippling snowfall between June 6 and June 11, 1816 and frost for every month of the year in 1816.  Crops failed in the New England regions as well as the Ohio River Valley, Western Europe, and Canada.  By 1817 most of the dust had settled and conditions had returned to almost-normal.

Cities in peril as Andean glaciers melt

Ice sheets expected to last centuries could disappear in 25 years, threatening water supplies



View from the top ... Two images of the Upsala glacier in Argentina show the retreat of the ice (top: 1928; bottom: 2004).

Andean glaciers are melting so fast that some are expected to disappear within 15-25 years, denying major cities water supplies and putting populations and food supplies at risk in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.

The Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia, the source of fresh water for the cities of La Paz and El Alto, is expected to completely melt within 15 years if present trends continue. Mount Huascarán, Peru's most famous mountain, has lost 1,280 hectares (3,163 acres) of ice, around 40% of the area it covered only 30 years ago. The O'Higgins glacier in Chile has shrunk by nine miles in 100 years and Argentina's Upsala glacier is losing 14 metres (46ft) a year.

Although a few glaciers in southern Patagonia are increasing in size, almost all near the tropics are in rapid retreat. Some glaciers in Colombia are now less than 20% of the mass recorded in 1850 and Ecuador could lose half its most important glaciers within 20 years.
...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/aug/29/glaciers.climatechange

As arctic ice melts, South Pole ice grows

Scientists are puzzled, but the phenomenon seems to fit the latest global-warming models.

For decades, the vast expanse of sea ice that surrounds Antarctica each winter, and all but vanishes each austral summer, has languished as the Rodney Dangerfield of Earth's cryosphere.

Antarctic sea ice has gotten little respect, especially compared with its top-of-the-world cousin, or with the enormous ice sheets on Greenland and the Antarctic continent. The sea ice is hard to reach. It has little direct effect on people. And the Southern Ocean was not a cold-war playground for US and Soviet submarines, which amassed a wealth of information on changes in Arctic sea ice before the era of long-term satellite observations.

But as a research target, southern sea ice's stock appears to be rising.

Over the past 20 years, southern sea ice has expanded, in contrast to the Arctic's decline, and researchers want to understand why. Many climate-model experiments show the Arctic responding more rapidly than Antarctica as global warming kicks in. But after looking at the latest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Arctic sea ice is well ahead of the models, and Antarctic sea ice is well behind what the models project," says Stephen Ackley, a polar scientist at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0110/p14s01-sten.html?page=1

The old Farmers' Almanac is a better predictor and averages over 80% accuracy 1 year out.  Why don't the scientists use the Almanac?

Is the sun getting hotter? That's news to me.

how many cars it would take running at the same time to compare to the pollution a 747 makes during take off only.

sick thinking i know but still,, it makes you wonder based on how many aircraft are taking off in the world each hour.

According to the 2003 Sierra Club Article: "Flying creates 13 percent of transportation-generated carbon dioxide worldwide, accounting for 3.5 percent of all global warming emissions. Other aviation gases include hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide, which contribute to acid rain. EPA estimates that commercial aircraft will generate as much as 10 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions from mobile sources in cities with heavy air traffic by 2010. And in an odd twist, some of today's quieter, more fuel-efficient aircraft engines generate an average of 40 percent more smog-forming nitrogen oxides than the engines they replaced.