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WoodySt
Trad climber
Riverside
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Ah, what rhe hell. No more bivies in icecaves, no more avalanches, nice clean rock to climb on. I see an upside to this.
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Majid_S
Mountain climber
Bay Area
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With this kind of weather, climbers are on the wall right now taking advantages of dry days, carrying less water.
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dank
Trad climber
the pitch above you!
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Until all the fresh water is trapped in the atmosphere or oceans.
It is all about this generation, here and now, forget the rest!
Useless wars and genocide for everyone!
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WoodySt
Trad climber
Riverside
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Well, war and genocide, lower population and less global warming. You can't please some people.
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Rocky5000
Trad climber
Falls Church, VA
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Precisely, Woody. The Big Wheel keeps on turning, and we're just ants along for the ride. Too bad the Wheel is so damned bumpy sometimes.
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Mimi
climber
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From yesterday's Economist, an excellent summary of the recent UN report on climate change. Here are the numbers, what do we do about them?
GLOBAL WARMING
Feb 2nd 2007
A gloomy UN-backed report is published.
THE fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in Paris on Friday February 2nd, is important, unsurprising and will probably be uncontroversial. It is important because the IPCC is the body set up under the auspices of the United Nations so that governments should have an agreed view of the science on which to base policy. It is unsurprising because, while some of the figures differ from those in the third assessment report published in 2001, the changes are minimal and its broad conclusion, that something serious is happening and man is in part responsible, remains the same (though the authors now say that man is "very likely" responsible, rather than just "likely"). It will probably be uncontroversial because
the few remaining climate-change sceptics prepared to speak out against the consensus argue not so much about the climate science as about its consequences. Those arguments will take place mostly around the IPCC's two follow-up reports, to be published later this year, on the impact of climate change and on what to do about it.
Part of the report's job is to consider studies of the speed of change so far. Warming seems to be accelerating somewhat. Eleven out of the dozen years from 1995-2006 were among the 12 hottest years since 1850, when temperatures were first widely recorded. So the estimate for the average increase in global temperature for the past century, which the third assessment report put at 0.6C, has now risen to 0.74C.
The sea level, which rose on average by 1.8mm a year in 1961-2003, went up by an average of 3.1mm a year between 1993-2003. The numbers are still small, but the shape of the curve is worrying. And because the deadline for scientific papers to be included in the IPCC's report was some time ago, its deliberations have excluded some alarming recent studies on the acceleration of glacier melt in Greenland.
Some trends now seem clear. North and South America and northern Europe are getting wetter; the Mediterranean and southern Africa drier. Westerly winds have strengthened since the 1960s. Droughts have got more intense and longer since the 1970s. Heavy rainfall, and thus flooding, has increased. Arctic summertime sea ice is decreasing by just over 7% a decade.
In some areas where change might be expected, however, nothing much seems to be happening. Antarctic sea ice, for instance, does not seem to be shrinking, probably because increased melting is balanced by more snow.
The other part of the report's job is to make predictions about what will happen to the climate. In this, it illustrates a curious aspect of the science of climate change. Studying the climate reveals new, little-understood, mechanisms: as temperatures warm, they set off feedback effects that may increase, or decrease, warming. So predictions may become less, rather than more, certain. Thus the IPCC's range of predictions of the rise in the temperature by 2100 has increased from 1.4-5.8C in the 2001 report to 1.1-6.4C in this report.
That the IPCC should end up with a range that vast is not surprising given the climate's complexity. But it leaves plenty of scope for argument about whether it's worth trying to do anything about climate change.
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WoodySt
Trad climber
Riverside
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If all this means is that I have to place my blanket a foot or two further up the beach at Laguna, I'll adapt.
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Mimi
climber
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Adaptation, that's likely the way it'll happen.
The UN needs to release diagrams of what sea level rise will do to the world's coastal zones over the next X years. The people need to see what will happen and decide whether they'd be willing to pay to try and stop it. It will be expensive in the short term.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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If all this means is that I have to place my blanket a foot or two further up the beach at Laguna, I'll adapt.
If that's all it means, those scientists are silly folks to get worried, eh?
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WoodySt
Trad climber
Riverside
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Damn Mimi, it's good to know someone on this site besides me reads the Economist.
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Mimi
climber
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I keep going in circles about this GW stuff. This is the story I think JDF was referring to regarding solar activity affecting Earth's temps more than CO2.
The real deal?
Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists
Lawrence Solomon, National Post
Published: Friday, February 02, 2007
Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists, describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming.
Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect.
Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the 20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human activities.
Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause.
Dr. Shariv, a prolific researcher who has made a name for himself assessing the movements of two-billion-year-old meteorites, no longer accepts this logic, or subscribes to these views. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media.
"In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."
Dr. Shariv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global warming -- is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings, man's role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been cooling, not warming, the Earth. Unfortunately, our tools are too crude to reveal what man's effect has been in the past, let alone predict how much warming or cooling we might cause in the future.
All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr. Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of fingerprints." Circumstantial evidence might be a fine basis on which to justify reducing greenhouse gases, he adds, "without other 'suspects.' "However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible "other suspects," he believes that at least one provides a superior explanation for the 20th century's warming.
"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist."
The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.
Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."
The evidence from astrophysicists and cosmologists in laboratories around the world, on the other hand, could well be significant. In his study of meteorites, published in the prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters, Dr. Shaviv found that the meteorites that Earth collected during its passage through the arms of the Milky Way sustained up to 10% more cosmic ray damage than others. That kind of cosmic ray variation, Dr. Shaviv believes, could alter global temperatures by as much as 15% --sufficient to turn the ice ages on or off and evidence of the extent to which cosmic forces influence Earth's climate.
In another study, directly relevant to today's climate controversy, Dr. Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550 million years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more than two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most dominant climate driver over geological time scales. The study also found that an upper limit can be placed on the relative role of CO2 as a climate driver, meaning that a large fraction of the global warming witnessed over the past century could not be due to CO2 -- instead it is attributable to the increased solar activity.
CO2 does play a role in climate, Dr. Shaviv believes, but a secondary role, one too small to preoccupy policymakers. Yet Dr. Shaviv also believes fossil fuels should be controlled, not because of their adverse affects on climate but to curb pollution.
"I am therefore in favour of developing cheap alternatives such as solar power, wind, and of course fusion reactors (converting Deuterium into Helium), which we should have in a few decades, but this is an altogether different issue." His conclusion: "I am quite sure Kyoto is not the right way to go."
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WoodySt
Trad climber
Riverside
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Okay, someone's got to shut this defector up. He's going to sleep with the seaslugs.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I'd like to go on record that I am now a true believer in the fact that global warming is largely the result of industrial emissions. It's hard to argue with the consensus of climate specialists. When I'd last gone out of my way to look into this a few years ago, the data (and consensus) was not nearly what it is today.
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Darnell
Big Wall climber
Chicago
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Looks like Gale got a new job at another brothel.
Shell hires Bush's environmental adviser
Terry Macalister
Monday February 5, 2007
The Guardian
Gale Norton, a former interior secretary for the Bush administration and a supporter of opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other sensitive environmental landscapes for oil production, has taken up a senior legal post at Shell.
The 52-year-old's arrival is the latest in a series of controversial US appointments at the company which has been trying to increase output of carbon-intensive shale and oil sands schemes from places such as Colorado while also arguing it wants a key role in the fight against climate change.
Ms Norton has joined as a general counsel for Shell's exploration and production business in the US and will be based primarily in Colorado, where she was once state attorney general.
Shell confirmed she would concentrate on "unconventional" resources, meaning shale. "Ms Norton will provide and coordinate legal services for Shell," said a company spokeswoman.
Critics in the local environment movement believe it was Ms Norton's advice that led President Bush to open up the sensitive Bristol Bay area of Alaska to oil and gas development.
Shell, which reported record profits last week, has also recently appointed another perceived enemy of the green lobby, Cam Toohey, to work in Alaska.
Mr Toohey used to work for Ms Norton in the interior department having moved from a post as head of Arctic Power, a group which lobbied for oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
When he was taken on by Ms Norton, one Democrat critic described the move as an "ethical oil spill".
In addition, Shell has taken on Elizabeth Stolpe, a Bush environment adviser and former oil industry lobbyist.
She previously worked for a former Republican senator and governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski. In an address to the Alaska state legislature in January 2003, Mr Murkowski said he was doing all he could to "open the coastal plain of ANWR".
Also involved in Shell's government affairs team is Brian Malnak, who worked at the interior department and was a chief of staff for Mr Murkowski at the influential senate energy committee, where he too tried to push forward drilling in the Alaskan wildlife sanctuary.
Another former government official involved in developing Shell's policy work in the US is Kevin O'Donovan, a former domestic policy adviser to vice president Dick Cheney who was responsible for his climate change and energy policy.
In an article written for the FT last week, Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer outlined the different steps his company was taking to help tackle CO2 emissions and therefore global warming.
"Companies such as Shell clearly have an important role to play. Our own energy efficiency improvements are already delivering CO2 savings of about 1m tonnes a year. We are already one of the world's largest distributors of biofuels," he argued.
Friends of the Earth said it was time Shell stopped saying one thing and doing another. "The PR department is always talking about Shell's work on the environment while the rest of the business is working hard on producing as much oil as it can," said its corporate campaigner, Hannah Griffiths.
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dirtbag
climber
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I was wondering what happened to that f*#ker.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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JacksColdSweat, yep, I read that article too. He's already being attacked for what he's saying. He's actually sued several people for libel. I'm not sure if he's won them. It's hard to find a reliable (unbiased) source to see who's won the lawsuits. Here's a link I found;
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3d2d2672-3b1a-47c7-8324-3e35efee1763
It goes into more depth regarding the attacks back and forth. Desmogblog is a site that really goes after him, as well as SourceWatch. They have links to the lawsuit but when you try to see them...nada. Interesting stuff.
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