With All-Time record lows and record highs recorded in about a week of each other does that proove Global Warming is alive or is it just typical Oklahoma weather? http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7768008/a_case_of_global_warming_oklahoma_has.html

Oklahoma colder than North Pole and NE OK with nations bullseye with top snowfall totals and within a week 70-80 degree temps?http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/45609/oklahoma-colder-than-the-south.asp?partner=accuweather&unit=f

Lifetime experience or just part of Oklahoma's weather pattern?http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358375/Temperatures-rise-100-degrees-Oklahoma-upper-Midwest-braces-flooding.html?ITO=1490

Climate is usually measured over a period of thirty years or more. I don't think you can draw much "evidence" about the climate from what the last few months have done.

No

If you're looking for the latest work on attributing individual weather oddities to climate change then you picked the right week.
http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/16/two-nature-paper-join-growing-body-of-evidence-that-human-emissions-fuel-extreme-weather-flooding-that-harm-humans-and-the-environment/

I would take climateprogress with a grain of salt, but their coverage of these papers is pretty topnotch.

^^WOW! great site!

No

What, exactly did he get wrong? There were a few points that he publicly made a couple tears ago that were in doubt, but
1: I doubt you could name them.
2: Most are now supported by the established science.

What, exactly did he get wrong? There were a few points that he publicly made a couple tears ago that were in doubt, but
1: I doubt you could name them.
2: Most are now supported by the established science.

Al Gore, along with his "few points" are wrong on so many levels, unless your a junk science follower/believer (like Dawkins).

^^WOW! great site!

Yea it's pretty nice. Again though I have to say they do make some less than defensible claims now and then, so I wouldn't just take their word as gospel.
Skepticalscience.com
Realclimate.org
Those are the two I fid most useful on the topic, short of just reading Nature or some other firsthand source.

Al Gore, along with his "few points" are wrong on so many levels, unless your a junk science follower/believer (like Dawkins).

Ok. Name one. Be specific. Direct quotes or something similar.


Woah woah woah nice edit

What is your problem with Dawkins?

OK!I'm not saying I agree with Gore but this is very freakin ridiculous even for Oklahoma weather!

We should not be worried with Global Warming. It was just his gimmick to pull himself out of debt.

...It was just his gimmick to pull himself out of debt.

Somewhere Al Gore Weeps: The CCX Carbon Trading Scheme Collapses

http://vitalsignsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/somewhere-al-gore-weeps-ccx-carbon.html

The problem is everything in Al Gore's movie became gospel so now climate scientists have to make up for Al Gore's oversimplification. Either way, Al Gore could be considered "wrong".

I look at it like this. Can human cause an impact on the global weather scheme? Sure...but it will take a ton of work. I don't think we are quite to that point yet. The planet will go through its moods and cycle through various weather patterns. We will probably eventually enter a new ice age or see things dry up. Well, the later is more likely. This rock has about a billion years of being able to support life left on it until our star gets too big and starts to dry us out. Will humans even be around by then? Not as we are now...if at all.

Worrying about global impacts to climate are important, but shouldn't trump focusing on local impacts. Polluting, reducing tree coverage, and over development of land. I'd prefer to keep drinking fairly safe (I do live in Norman and we know how well that's going right now LOL) water, seeing clear blue skies almost every day, and not smelling toxic fumes. If we handle the local/common sense stuff, the global issues would see things addressed.

My biggest gripe with all of this is that global climate change is being used as an excuse to push for new (green) technologies...so as better mileage on cars, new forms of energy, etc. When honestly...those thing should be accelerated anyways just based on our desire to better ourselves as humans and advance technology. Unfortunately special interests from big industry, energy producers, nature preservationists, and other various wackos on both sides cloud the issue with their politicized bickering that puts it all on hold. It's 2011...where the hell is my flying car already? :-P

But seriously. We have an impact, but we probably aren't to the point yet of greatly changing the planets climate. I tend to give our planet more respect than that. When we have gone too far, it will balance things back out - just like nature always does. Whether it is through more intense weather, climate changes, or whatever. Granted though, it is just going to take Yellowstone, Valles (New Mexico), Long Valley (California), or any other "supervolcano" caldera to erupt and all this is pointless. We'll be locked in a nuclear winter for a decade or so, most food supplies gone, and a majority of the population exterminated. Whatever damage we have been accused of causing will start to be reversed when our developed areas, now covered in layers of ash/soil/rock...sprout new life as nature takes things back.

It's all a cycle. When it is our time, its our time.

Alright Venture. And why does every climate scientist in the world disagree? You seem like a fairly bright guy, but you should do some reading on this topic.

Venture, thanks for an articulate post that was respectful and intelligent.

No, it wasn't lol. Every single climate study from the last fifteen years says we ARE having a detectable impact. You can't explain the energy transfer deficit and the pattern of earning with anything but our CO2, and you cant explain the CO2 with anything but us. His post is the opposite of reality.

Advising people to sit around waiting on a future event that may or may not happen in the next 10,000 years because it might undo the damage we've done isn't very solid. And in the meantime, he is right that nature will probably realign itself around our new manufactured reality. There have a been a lot of these realignments in the past.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Extinction_intensity.svg
They are usually best identified by mass extinctions and decreased biological diversity for millions of years.

No, it wasn't lol. Every single climate study from the last fifteen years says we ARE having a detectable impact. You can't explain the energy transfer deficit and the pattern of earning with anything but our CO2, and you cant explain the CO2 with anything but us. His post is the opposite of reality.

Advising people to sit around waiting on a future event that may or may not happen in the next 10,000 years because it might undo the damage we've done isn't very solid. And in the meantime, he is right that nature will probably realign itself around our new manufactured reality. There have a been a lot of these realignments in the past.

They are usually best identified by mass extinctions and decreased biological diversity for millions of years.

I understand you are passionate about this subject, so let me try to word things a bit better this time around. When I stated "Can human cause an impact on the global weather scheme? Sure...but it will take a ton of work..." my intent was large, radical global weather changes. Obviously, any development we do will have an impact on the environment. It is pretty common sense that as the population of mammals increase on the planet, and their bi-products (for us would be manufacturing/technology) that CO2 levels would go up. Especially if we reduce the overall coverage of plants that are there to counter it. What I am more or less speaking to, is that our impact isn't to the point of causing global impacts with major weather pattern shifts. So we had a 100 degree temperature swing over a week here in Oklahoma. People automatically try to tie it to some other situation or scenario. However, no data was provided on how many other times such a temperature swing has taken place. The low temperature data is also something that could easily be disputed, so marrying that event to global climate change is a very slippery slope. We have an ever growing saturation of weather measuring devices, especially in Oklahoma, that provide more data than we have ever had before. Who is to say it never happened before? Or...who is to say that if the thermometer was actually 2 feet higher, that it would have yielded the same result? Temp measuring can be quite finicky. Everything is set at a set height above the ground surface. The event that caused the -31 degree reading is a situation where that height was altered thanks to over 2 feet of snow pact under it. We might have had that extreme cooling very close to the ground and near the surface of the snow, but maybe at 4 or 5 feet above it it was only -10 or -15. Taking away a 100 degree swing makes for a less sexy headline. Also considering that during the spring/fall and storm season...a 50+ degree difference in a single day seems to happen at least a couple times a year.

Am I advising that we don't need to change what we are doing today? Not at all. If you read my post through it clearly hit on two subjects, which I guess is my fault for blending them. You latched on to my statement of natural correction, which probably will happen in the distance future once we push things enough. More importantly I (thought I) made it clear that we still have environmental impacts locally, that can ripple, that should take priority and notice. Cleaning up our act locally to avoid another dust bowl (over farming), keeping water clean (restrict waste disposal by industry and farmers), and maintain great air quality (reduce air pollution) should all be major initiatives everyone gets behind for the simply purpose of improving our quality of life. If everyone targets these items locally, they won't compound and impact things globally. Now granted if we say forget that and just go to town and ruin our natural resources, then the ripple effect will get worse and we will start seeing some apparent global changes.

I don't think we are really that far apart on our view of things, it is just a matter of wording it. Are increased CO2 levels due to us? I'm sure we aren't helping. Our population is growing, and our bi-product is CO2. Logic would state as our population grows, and development continues at the same rate, CO2 levels will increase. Higher CO2 would logically cause the planets temperature to begin to go up some.

Finally to the comment on the environment realigning itself to us, and linking it to mass extinctions, that's pretty much what I was getting to. :-) It will say enough is enough, get rid of us, and move on to the next dominate species.

That's a very good answer, Venture. I knew, as soon as I saw your previous post, that HewenttoJared would be all over you. He and I went through a lengthy discussion previously when I questioned his statement that the future of the earth's environment was totally up to us. I tried to point out natural occurances that might be out of our control and he pooh poohed that possibility. Like you, I also agree with him on many issues but not everything.

I did not poo poo the possibility(except for volcanoes, an event that size is even less likely than a meteor strike big enough), just the probability and it's relevance. Do you stop changing the oil on your car just because wrecks might happen? In the next few centuries the temperature will rise(2-6C, most likely), the air and water currents that give us our ways of life will dramatically shift(they already have, this is not speculation, but it could get a lot worse), around 45-80% of vertebrates will probably cease to survive in the wild, and the degree of those terrifying effects is up to us. We decide how far down that rabbit-hole we go. That was my point the entire time. As I said when you stopped talking on it, we only disagreed on the stuff where you changed your mind, like the LIA.

my intent was large, radical global weather changes. Obviously, any development we do will have an impact on the environment. It is pretty common sense that as the population of mammals increase on the planet, and their bi-products (for us would be manufacturing/technology) that CO2 levels would go up....
... Are increased CO2 levels due to us? I'm sure we aren't helping. Our population is growing, and our bi-product is CO2.

But the impact is already a large and unprecedented one. We have temp and atmospheric composition records going back very, very far. Those records are constantly being refined, but to assume that we don't know how to separate normal from abnormal is to ignore the whole field of paleoclimatology. We have the largest imbalance in energy that has existed since the PETM at least, we have the most rapid upward swing in global ocean and air temps since the KT boundary, and we have the most rapid acidification of the oceans since one of those two same events(the science does disagree here, but not in a way that says the CO2 isn't a problem). The events we are replicating wiped out the existing ecology of this world so completely that it would be unrecognizable at ground level in most locales as even being the same planet.

And no, measuring temp isn't that complicated. You just need large data sets and you need to run the anomaly, not the actual temps. And filter the extreme outliers. I saw a paper once where a guy wrote his own code for graphing world temperature from the raw data in just one day. Its not rocket science.

And are you suggesting that our exhalation of CO2 is part of the problem? Most terrestrial mammalian exhalation is carbon-neutral.


You are right about blaming any single incident on climate change, and especially using such a thing as evidence of climate change. And you are right about this being somewhat normal Oklahoma weather. But the likelihood of extreme events like the recent Brisbane floods goes up in a warming world. The ocean around Australia is the warmest that has ever been recorded. Anything that happens is definitely influenced by this fact.

What, exactly did he get wrong? There were a few points that he publicly made a couple tears ago that were in doubt, but
1: I doubt you could name them.
2: Most are now supported by the established science.

"Now he tells us. Al Gore says his support for corn-based ethanol subsidies while serving as vice president was a mistake that had more to do with his desire to cultivate farm votes in the 2000 presidential election than with what was good for the environment."

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/23/al-gore-mea-culpa-support-for-corn-based-ethanol-was-a-mistake/

Yes, he was wrong on ethanol. A lot of us were. But that is not what he was referring to.

I did not poo poo the possibility(except for volcanoes, an event that size is even less likely than a meteor strike big enough), just the probability and it's relevance. Do you stop changing the oil on your car just because wrecks might happen? In the next few centuries the temperature will rise(2-6C, most likely), the air and water currents that give us our ways of life will dramatically shift(they already have, this is not speculation, but it could get a lot worse), around 45-80% of vertebrates will probably cease to survive in the wild, and the degree of those terrifying effects is up to us. We decide how far down that rabbit-hole we go. That was my point the entire time. As I said when you stopped talking on it, we only disagreed on the stuff where you changed your mind, like the LIA.

As I said before, get back to me in 200 years and we'll discuss how that worked out and see who's right.