Why Severe Winter STILL Doesn’t Disprove Global Warming

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You are correct that we are still in the warm period. What we don't know is for how long we will be in it. There have been some suggestions that the warming may be enough to extend it by thousands of years. If that happens, it will be a very good thing.

We've been in this warm period, the Holocene, for about 12,300 years. The previous warm period, the Eemian, thought to be notably warmer than this one, lasted about 15,000 years. During the Eemian, forests were found far north in areas where we only have tundra today.

As far as sea level rising, so what? It's been higher than current even in the Holocene. Any rise in sea levels will be slow enough that we can easily adapt to them. It's not like some wall of water is going to rush ashore and wash everything away. If it can hold the next glaciation away for a while, then it is an extremely small price to pay.

Stop being a Chicken Little.

I was just questioning a particular event. It's usually a good idea to question claims you know.



This seems to be a more level headed practical approach. The other comes off more as we are all doomed you unbelievers repent for the end is near.

I'm not a fanatic about this:

But why not take steps to keep our air and water clean: global warming, or no global warming.

I grew up in smog in New York City. Nowadays, the air is MUCH cleaner than it was in the 1970s. People are now successfully fishing on the Hudson River within the city limits.

^THIS



you don't need to believe in an imminent global warming catastrophe to want to work towards cleaner air, oceans and less invasive deforestation.

i know it does not disprove it but i will get to that in a minute.

i am writing this as just an armchair speculator who does not follow the politics of it, but the likely situation.

it is difficult to ignore glacial recession, and that ross ice shelf collapse in 2014 (in antarctica (the size of france)).
to see time lapse shots of glaciers in the 1950's compared to now, it's unmistakable to see the scale of recession.

so what does the potential loss of all the ice in the world mean?
well, arctica floats on the arctic ocean, and so is already displacing its mass in the water. there will be no sea level rise if arctica melts.
it is melted land based ice that will contribute to the rise.

now there is also the argument that the "whiteness" of the ice sheets as seen from space is responsible for much reflection of solar energy away from the earth, whereas the blackness of the seas absorbs the light and it results in heating.

but what is the percentage of the surface of the earth covered by glacial ice? about 10%, and that 10% is in areas of the earth that receive low solar energy due to their polar aspects. not much energy reaches polar regions obviously and that is why they are so cold.
it will not matter whether they are no longer as cold as they used to be with respect to the fact that they will always receive little solar energy.

in the process of global ice sheet melting, there will be many times more icebergs calved than there are today, and they will serve to cool the oceans, and in doing do, be able to migrate further and further away from polar regions before they melt.
this will initially cool the climate considerably, but once that process has ended and stabilized, then the real warming begins.
one has to worry about the thawing of the permafrost (tundra) that covers huge areas of sub polar regions like siberia and alaska.
if all that rots way, then there will be trouble because it will also release monumental amounts of methane which is hundreds of times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

but i do not really think humans are responsible.
in geological history, so many events have happened that are unthinkable by today's standards.

like the siberian traps cataclysm that led to the permian extinction about 450 million years ago.
it was a tectonic rip where 2 plates separated (an unusual event) which cause a massive volcanic fissure 1000km long that erupted for a million years.

even the collision of south and north america to close off the panama strait changed the global sea currents which severely reshuffled the cards of life.

that was a long time ago though obviously.

there was one time that the entire world was frozen. not much liquid water anywhere. oceans completely frozen. no clouds. "snowball earth".

the thing i am somewhat worried about are massive solar storms.
in 1859, there was a coronal mass ejection that happened to be aimed in the direction of earth.
if that happened today, it could send us back to the stone age if it was large enough.
it was reported by telegraph operators that they received severe shocks from the keys of their telegraph things they typed on, and the wires between power poles sizzled and sparked and melted.
there were sightings of the aurora borealis as far south as france, and the aurora australis as far north as queensland australia.
now this was only yesterday in the time line of possible calamities, and no CME was ever noticed as such before that because they did not have electrical instruments. who knows how big these events could be on a regular basis (every 200 years even), and a large enough one is capable of frying all the circuits of all the computers and blowing every light and just wreaking havoc on today's highly electrically dependent world.
frying the wiring in cars and appliances and everything. all the planes computers destroyed. communications satellites destroyed. everything would be f****d, and since all the most current knowledge is stored digitally, all that would be destroyed too.

anyway, that's all.

This is going to happen as you say global warming, or no global warming. People are going to want state of the art self driving electric vehicles etc. The more technologically modernized things continue becoming the cleaner they'll become. It won't happen overnight, but it's inevitable.

It may very well be that the only cost effective means we have to reduce Global Warming is by more atmospheric pollution to try to reflect more sunlight back into space. I'm obviously far from convinced that we need to do anything about it.

You make some good points with maybe the exception of snowball Earth -- has anyone ever actually proven that it happened?

As for glacial melting, the last I heard, at the current rate of warming it will take about 20,000 years to melt the ice cap over Greenland, and far, far longer to melt the ice cap over Antarctica.

Figure about a foot of sea level rise per century. We can deal with that.

But that's not going to happen. We're going to run low on carbon based fuels and when we do the warming will naturally begin to slow down. We very well could be at Peak Coal, the worst offender, before the middle of the century. And with more and more advanced CO2 scrubbing, the CO2 put out by coal will be less and less. We could easily reach our peak CO2 in the atmosphere within a hundred years or so. It will take quite a while for the CO2 to be taken out of the atmosphere, but it will happen and in the meantime, without adding much more CO2 and starting to lose some of it, the temperatures aren't going to be climbing.

Plenty of people seem to be scared of CO2 levels in the atmosphere "spiralling out of control", but that is just plain silly. There isn't enough readily available carbon for that to happen.

So we'll see some warming, but it isn't going to go out of control. In the meantime, that warming will bring plenty of benefits to mankind. It will mean more food and that will reduce the amount of hunger.

For everyone worried about sea level rise -- we can't eat steady sea levels. That's just not possible. But we can eat the greater amounts of vegetation that warming will bring and we can feed more vegetation to animals such as cattle, pigs, and sheep. When it comes down between losing some beachfront land and feeding the hungry, I'll go with feeding the hungry every single time.

That's an excellent point. I think that Global Warming will slow down and disappear long before it becomes a net negative to mankind.

That's why i said that the solutions are what are important. The current ones are a joke.

What part of the word permafrost do you not understand?

Permafrost is frozen all year long. That's why it's called permafrost.

If permafrost melts, this is proof that the average temperature is rising.

The answer is simple. Almost all politicians see the short term economic benefits of supporting the petrochemical, mining, coal industries while paying lip service to clean energy. It doesn't bode well that even supporters of reducing global emissions like Al Gore have shares in the petroleum industry.

Trump has recently pulled out of the Paris accord which is in accordance with his own philosophy about emission controls. He is on the record for rolling back Obama-era policies that aimed to curb climate change and limit environmental pollution, while others threaten to limit federal funding for science and the environment.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/201 ... vironment/

First thing is to tackle political barriers before tackling clean water, air and land. Here in Australia more money should be spent auditing and fining polluters who currently self-assess their emissions using dodgy estimates which they self-report to the Australian EPA

Not quite.

It means that the temperature of a subsurface layer of the ground has risen.

I wonder if people were in a panic about the permafrost melting at the start of the Holocene. At that time, permafrost extended far south from where it is now. I would bet that they didn't get upset about the permafrost that covered much of northern Europe melting. If they thought about it at all, they probably saw it as what it was -- a very good thing.

I understand the definition of permafrost which is, a thick subsurface layer of soil that remains frozen throughout the year, occurring chiefly in polar regions.

China isn't a polar region. And therefore I think it's possible this has happened before there or in similar climates.

Going with what kokopelli is saying, I'm wondering if there's magma activity taking place below the permafrost.

That's why I want to know if there's a history of this type of occurrence, before I push the panic button.

That's reasoning vs emotions.