“An Italian expedition to the Antarctic,” reports today’s The Guardian, “has taken a sample of ice which is more than 900,000 years old and could give scientists evidence of past climate changes which would discredit global warming doubters.”
What would you like to do with that ice sample? I have an idea, below:
It’s completely juvenile, I admit! But I’d like to stuff it down the back of Bush’s suit, and short out his Karl Rove remote control.
Back to Bush’s BS on climate change:
He said that cutting fossil fuel use would damage the US economy and that more scientific research was needed. Since then the science has become more certain, but this latest ice core could provide evidence that even hardliners would find hard to ignore.
Au contrare, Mssr. Bush:
The new core could be enough to discredit the fast diminishing band of climate sceptics, who have the ear of the Bush administration and who say that the climate has always fluctuated and man’s destruction of forests and use of oil has nothing to do with the current rising temperatures and increased storminess across the world.
Ice cores contain layer after layer of snow which has fallen over millennia, and provide evidence of past climate in the same way as the growth rings of a tree. Once the tiny air samples trapped in the ice are analysed they will give scientists clear evidence of the volumes of gases and the temperature at the time.
Current scientific belief is that in all that time concentrations of greenhouse gases have not been as high as they are now, but the proof should be in these new ice cores. … The Guardian
Let’s gear up for the Senate fight on the House’s horrific energy bill.
I was kind of surprised that there was so little interest at Daily Kos about the House energy debate this past week. I’m not sure why that is. Is it the sense that what the House votes on doesn’t matter, because the real shot to affect the bill is in the Senate?
Well, I disagree strongly. We need to rev up the national debate earlier on these major issues, not at the last minute — as happened with bankruptcy, etc.
Jumps off soapbox. Your turn.
are not discussed enough on Daily Kos.
Meteor Blades posted a diary for Earth Day yesterday asking people what they are doing. The responses were great.
It ended with some promotion for nuclear energy. “Clean” nuclear energy, except no one discusses the waste that it produces. Or the waste from uranium mining. Waste that lasts forever.
No global warming doubters showed up.
Well it seem evident to me that the best way to protect the America I grew up in, is through the Senate. I agree that there is no reason why presure shouldn’t be applied in the house, if anything to gain publicity for future Senate debate. So thx for bringing this up.
There is only so much dKos can do. The similarities between BooMan Tribune and dKos should be in looks only, subject similarities should be by coincidence only.
Now, one to gloabal warming…
My parents had a pentagon employee and friend at their house last week. In discussion he pushed the idea that global warming and its relation to CFC’s, ect.. is circumstantial, and global warming could be caused by any number of events. He even mentioned that it could be natural, unaffected by pollution, ect..
I am – or – I will be (in May 06) graduating with a B.S. is atmospheric physics. I find that line of reasoning: one, ignorant. Two, based in a fog of retoric that doesn’t come from science, or at least any science I’ve read or science that makes it into the journals, but an opinions put forth by republicans (and most likely some Dem’s ) or energy lobbiest dependent on polution for income. These people use their power to polute (yet again) the MSM airwaves with science that is undocumented and rejected by a majority of the scientific community.
so yes Susanhbu, we need to gear up for this battle, and make this blog different that dKos, or else we look like ditto-heads over here.
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I’m impressed with your knowledge … and hope you’ll share it with us here frequently! (In simple language, please :):))
I hope to post more frequently in the summer, I’m at the eve of finals here 🙁
As far as issues go on the environment, I stay away mostly. I don’t want factual knowledge to be influenced by partisan politics. That would be a disservice to me, and bad science. By that I mean I don’t get into discussions on blogs re. the environment, I will read diaries or posts (Jerome, page and blades write excelent diaries and do a good job making it understandable). But I’ve found the thread resulting from these posts to be lively debate that often spirals into opinions that, while sounding better than repubs logic, are not based on solid facts, but taken from fringe opinions of the environmentalist left…
Would you have time to give examples of that.
Clean water and clean air are not partisan or left/right issues.
I didn’t intend for this to sound aggressive 🙂
one example may that be the rise in hurricanes is due to global warming.
There has been no alarming rise in strength or numbers. In reality the number of hurricanes is slowly returning to normal.
I hear this arguement a lot, and it is a logical opinion. But what I’ve read and been taught indicates no connection.
Thanks.
I am trying to know what I’m talkng about. For example, I have actually visited a massive pulp mill in BC, with an environmental law association, to examine what they were doing with their waste product.
Right now I am reading up on nuclear waste from nuclear power plants.
Your contribution here will be invaluable. I look forward to more of your posts.
I love BC (assuming BC = British Columbia). Might relocate there someday…
Caveat: I am not up on the latest research.
It is my understanding that the data is consistent with being in the our-lifetime-historic wing of the ‘Butterfly’ (ref: Edward Lorenz) AND with being in some other, or an oscillation of other, climatic regimes. The nub of the difficulty being not with the data set, or the data model, but the attempt of prediction of a non-linear system.
Good to see this, I hope it helps people think a bit but as to the paid shills who doubt global warming, I doubt it will do much. They’ve been playing politics with science so long that they wouldn’t know a fact if it bit them. I think that’s why the lack of discussion on line about the energy bill. It’s almost too depressing to deal with and when facts don’t matter it’s hard to make progress.
So I’m doubly glad you gave us a wake up, get up, stand up post. Giving up isn’t an option.
“What would you like to do with that ice sample?
Make a really stiff drink.
8 or 9 years ago, I spent some time cruising down the coast of Labrador in a Marshall 22 (small boat, large sea). Even on the outer islands, a two or three days’ sail from anywhere, there was evidence of human pollution in the form of beer cans, styrofoam, and six-pack plastic collars. Depressing.
But the cool thing, literally, was how we got drinking water and kept the food chilled. As the icebergs calve off the Greenland coast from glaciers, they break up into smaller bergs, then even smaller but still sizable chunks called growlers. We’d go out in the dinghy and haul in some of those chunks with a boathook, taking care not to fall overboard into 45-degree water.
Those melted bits of growler provided pure drinking water, and the taste — or absence thereof — was noticeable.
The frightening part was how fast the glaciers were calving, and how large the amounts of ice that came floating down the Labrador Sea to melt into the Gulf Stream.
C’mon, that 900,000-year-old ice could mean anything. In fact, do we even know it hasn’t been tampered with? I’d be some of them French or Germans have been messing with it, putting in some kinda chemicals or something. That’s what they do, y’see? Anything to hurt America. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past al-Qaeda to have messed with the ice in an effort to destroy the America that we all love. They hate our freedom.
Absolutely – put there by Satan to mislead us!
“What would you like to do with that ice sample?
hmmm choices – learn scientific data from within the ice or suppository for W…. damn I hate it when I have to make a choice.
What to do, what to do with the ice sample. If it’s large enough I’m opting for putting bush on ice only to be thawed out when there is enough history for him to see that he was completely savaged in all his policies. That he became a pariah to the US and the world in thousands of books, documentaries and that he was impeached and tried for his war crimes(while on ice). So not only does he get to see the outcome of his policies savaged he goes to prison for life after he’s thawed out. And the only thing he can have in his cell is the thousands of books detailing his monumental failures- and forced to read them all.
Over and over and over again.