George Will on global warming

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

 

Bohemians, actually.

 

old tony --

An honest question: You think nine paragraphs in Newsweek in 1975 are roughly equivalent to the amount of evidence amassed now?

 

I guess it explains why Julia Butterfly Hill is the new CEO of General Electric.

 

Gpod point, Ragu. So in the end, the global warming that all the alarmists are so worried about was actually caused by them after they banned aerosol sprays. How poetic.

 

How completely stupid.
From the link provided and, apparently, unread:
George Will asserts that Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.". The quote is from Hays et al. But the quote is taken grossly out of context. Here, in full, is the small section dealing with prediction:

Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth's orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.

One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in the exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar's (39) astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate (80).

The point about timescales is worth noticing: predicting an ice age (even in the absence of human forcing) is almost impossible within a timescale that you could call "imminent" (perhaps a century: comparable to the scales typically used in global warming projections) because ice ages are slow, when caused by orbital forcing type mechanisms.

 

Well, Fenian, I'm now convinced. There is global warming.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/07aug_southpole.htm

Problem is, this is a story about the polar ice cap melting ON MARS!!

Who knew SUVs could have an effect all the way to Mars?

Since there are no human beings on Mars, do you suppose it might be the sun or some other natural event that causes "global warming"? Or are we responsible for that, too. In fact, how about we blame man for the global temperatures on Mercury, too?

 

Jesus, can you get any dumber than you already are?

Read the article which doesn't make any link to this natural phenomena on Mars and climate change on earth.

Like Earth, Mars has seasons that cause its polar caps to wax and wane. "It's late spring at the south pole of Mars," says planetary scientist Dave Smith of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "The polar cap is receding because the springtime sun is shining on it."

Unbelievable.

 

You know how I know you're a troll?

Because you bring back a dead thread by posting something that has nothing to do with the conversation.

 

You know what, Inky? I was thinking the same thing

This thread was kaput a couple of days ago.

 

Annoying Questions for Mrs. Snodgrass (or any other science teacher who buy’s Al Gore’s line on global warming.)


*Why did the glaciers melt?

*Why were the Vikings once able to farm in Greenland? (Could it be that the climate has gone through warming and cooling cycles before... without human involvement/)

*Why were the Middle Ages warmer than the global temperature now? Why did it cool off during the “Little Ice Age” (from 1600 to 1900)? And what warmed us up after that?

*Why are global temperatures now cooler than in the 1930s?

*Why is the polar ice cap on Mars melting? (Are SUVs really THAT evil?)

(Mrs. Snodgrass, are you all right? Why are you getting so red? Is it hot in here?)

*Why are temperatures at the South Pole going down?

*You said that there’s a “consensus,” that man causes global warming, Mrs. Snodgrass. So how do you explain Richard Lindzen? (He's the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.)

*Why have the “experts” been wrong so often? (When they predicted global freezing? , or Hurricanes? Or when they all embraced the bogus hockey stick model of global warming until it was discredited?) So why should we believe them now?

*If we adopted the Kyoto treaty how much would the temperatures actually go down, especially if it doesn’t cover countries like China?

*Every 10 days China fires up a coal-fueled generating plant big enough to power a mid-sized city. According to George Will, China will construct 2,200 new coal plants by 2030. Should we shut down one our own plants every time China opens another one, Mrs. Snodgrass? And if we did, would that mean we wouldn’t have to come to school during the winter anymore?

Mrs. Snodgrass?