Global Warming????
 

Where did it go???

High Temps at least 20 degrees below normal and record lows forecasted to be in the mid 20's tonight. It's April in NC for Pete's sake. Azaleas are in for a shock tonight!!! Our turtles in our turtle farm have come out of hibernation and have a really confused look about them. Golfers at the Masters are even wearing long underwear!! Our outdoor Sunrise Service at Church in the morning should be a show of the latest in skiwear instead of Easter clothes.

C'mon Al Gore? What's up with this????

Now I have to go find all my winter riding stuff so I can go back out in the cold and 15+ mph winds.....

They are calling for sleet here in an hour or two, so I ain't riding today. I did manage to get my lawn mowed before the sleet hit.

Yeah, the weather keeps changing and is different all the time. What amazes me is that there seem to be so many sheople that don't know this and believe there's something wrong when the weather changes. Is this the result of kids growing up without ever going outdoors?

I read about the mid-1800's Franklin expedition that sailed into the arctic with the plan of freezing in, wintering over, and sailing out the next summer. Unfortunately, next summer came and the ice didn't melt, nor did it melt the summer after that. Or how about the year that it snowed every month in Northern New York - that was in the 1800's too. Of course I think the hottest and driest period on record (the record isn't that long) was during the 30's and helped spawn the dust bowl. In '66 we had a hell of a blizzard with so much snow the power lines drifted under. A couple of years later was a green Christmas. 25 years ago in NYS I rode my bike to work every day for the entire summer and didn't get rained on once. As far as Easter I remember a neighbor broke a ski on his snowmobile during an Easter egg hunt one year. What would really be reason for concern is if the weather stopped changing!

I think the last date for danger of frost in this area is May 15 so this cold weather doesn't surprise me. I just wish it didn't come in the same week that we've had temps in the high 70's:mad: It's currently 25F.

In the UK we are suffering a change in temperatures. Tomorrow is forecast to get into the low 20's. That is 20 Centigrade. Compared to what we have had- with wind and night frost- it has come as a bit of a shock.

Here in the South East, We used to expect the first frost in September when I was younger. Snow in January and the last frost around May. It is now November before the frost appears, then mild, snow might appear for a couple of days and is just a sprinkling, Jan to March is cold with wind chilling winds and last frost has long gone by the time April appears.

Thank goodness for long johns and Goretex.

I just walked out on the back deck & IT'S SLEETING! THE 8TH OF APRIL IN CENTRAL TEXAS AND IT'S SLEETING?!?

My wife was particularly skeptical when I informed her that I was considering a ride later today. After watching it sleet, I'm gonna have to seriously re-consider my bravado...:o

I've been through the fake sciences of global cooling, acid rain, nuclear winter, and now global warming. It's nothing more than attempting to scare people into paying more taxes and padding the pockets of people like Al Gore. The Earth has always had heating and cooling cycles and we might (has yet to be proven) be experiencing a slight upswing in temperatures. This gradual increase has been going on for over 75 years now (if you believe the old recorded temperatures) and has averaged about 1/2 a degree higher in that time but considering we have only been recording temperatures for about 150 years, who's to say that 1/2 degree is actual or just from inaccurate gages used in the early years of temperature measurement and recording. It has not been conclusively proven there is even a non-normal shift in global temperature so the scientists who get research money to study global warming have now started using the "consensus" word meaning that all the global warming scientists sat it's true so it must be and we all must believe them. There was also a consensus of scientist's claming the Earth was flat, the Earth was the center of the solar system and universe, global cooling was real, acid rain (which was going to kill off all the trees and oceans), and any number of hydrogen bombs starting a nuclear winter. You can tell there about to lose the argument when the "consensus" word starts getting used and that anyone making any argument ageist there consensus science makes them say they need to be disqualified and fired by not joining the consensus crowd pushing global warming. You hear nothing from the global warming crowd when record low temperatures are recorded but the first time we get even close to a hot summer day all you will hear from the pro global warming media is " Its global heating and this proves it" news report.

Well put n4zou, when you've been around awhile you've seen this all before. Remember the ban on DDT and the population bomb? What ever happened to hair spray?

I just don't get how gullible the young people are anymore. They swallow this stuff hook, line, and sinker. With what the public schools are costing us shouldn't the young be smarter than that?

Sure, the current, and well measured trend toward warmer averages could turn around anytime and prove to be just another statistical variation in overall weather patterns. There is clearly a huge amount of human-generated greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere that never existed before, and we are definitely experiencing much higher average global temperatures. And the ice coverage in Greenland and Antartica is lower and shrinking faster than ever measured before. Seems kinda stupid to me to ignore the possibility that we've actually F'ed up our own planet.

Yea. You've been around for what, maybe .0000001 percent of the total time this planet has existed. You've clearly seen it all.

I seriously hope you people are joking, --and I'm the idiot here.

I would like to stick Al Gore,s face in the 9" of Easter Global Warming in Northern Ohio today.:(

Spry, isn't it obvious to you that you're experiencing much higher average global temperatures? Better wear extra sunscreen on today's ride. Don't worry anyway, before we fry we'll either run out of oil (notice how you don't hear much about that one anymore) or an asteroid will take us out (don't hear much about that one either).

I can't believe people keep falling for this stuff over and over again. Someone really should write a book about the pathology of a global catastrophe and the end of mankind. Has there always been a proportion of the population that is both gullible and obsessed with gloom and doom or is it a modern phenomena? It certainly seems that the political exploitation of this group is fairly recent. The history section alone would be fascinating. Maybe I could get a grant?

True!I,m just a little bitter with todays weather,then that displaced Buckeye in San Diego(name withheld) starts carping about the harsh unseasonal 59f weather.

Yeah, that's pretty tacky when he does that. I'd like to global warm HIM.

You do understand that "global warming" doesn't mean it will never snow again; don't you?

What you are might notice is more violent weather. Like the tornados we've seen ripping across the country or giant hurricanes like the one that hit New Orleans.

I think that book has been written:

http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/

Are you guys watching the US Open race on NBC? Those guys are racing through snow and cold wind. Tougher than me!

I have just by chance read that book. I had no idea what it was about when I started it though. I like to think that Crichton actually began to write a book that was going to show yet again how man's inventions were going awry and causing catastrophe, this being a common theme of his, and while doing his research he realized that this theory was really pseudoscience. Either way he certainly does a good job of painting a clear picture of what is truly known as well as why and how climate is being politically exploited. Students should be required to memorize the epilogue.

His drawing parallels with eugenics is profound, I guess gullible people have been around and manipulated for awhile. Makes me wonder if eugenics would still be popular if the second world war wouldn't have happened? Scary thought.

Well, it's up to 30 outside with some occasional sun and the winds are only gusting up to around 20. I'm tempted to go out but the roads are soaked with salt solution and I put all new components on my bike this winter. Hmmm?

"Global warming" is probably not a great term for what we are seeing and there's no guarantee that your particular neck of the woods won't in fact become cooler. If climate change affects ocean currents anywhere near what is now suspected, Northern Europe could be considerably cooler.

I still can't believe, though, that folks still refuse to believe the climate is *way* different than it was 25 years ago. There are definitely some serious side effects from this. I come from a part of Canada where a 500 year old fishery resource disappeared practically overnight. Scientists there thought over-fishing played a role, but they now also believe another factor was that changing water temperatures affected reproduction cycles. Whatever happened, the resource is gone and is not coming back anytime soon.

I guess if this was the only story about "climate change", I would be skeptical, but there seem to be quite a few others.

Canadian winner eh?Is this a first for the Great White North?

I like your post and want to add my two cents.
There is no doubt that some people use this issue to make money. While doing that they will not be intellectually honest but exaggerate or downplay what does not fit their agenda.
I make no money on this issue but like my outdoors. Mountain climbing is/was a lifelong passion. The glaciers are disappearing. It is BS to deny that.
Claiming that the human race is the cause of that is another subject, and not so obvious. There is also a question as to what reasonably we can do or not. JMHO.

I've been doing a lot of reading on this subject lately and I have to agree what you say in the last paragraph. If you watch a lot of television coverage of this issue, you get the impression that if we stopped driving gasoline-fueled cars, things would be alright...

If you read a little deeper, read some serious books on the subject, this conclusion is maybe a little optimistic. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we may not be able to do very much. I hope this is wrong, but it may be so.

About 25 years ago we had several unseasonably mild winters strung together. It devastated the snowmobile industry and ruined several cross country skiing events for me. A millennia ago Erik the Red had a thriving agricultural settlement in Greenland - it must have been a-lot warmer then. Weather is highly chaotic and unpredictable. If there's any doubt to this simply monitor the accuracy with which the heavily funded national weather service can predict the weather five or ten days from now. I'm pretty sure the hottest years this century were in the thirtys and they were also accompanied by increased tropical storm activity. Funny the media has forgotten the dust bowl years.

This is a truly clever pseudoscience in that anything that happens can be argued to support it. If it gets hotter then it must be true. If it gets colder then the cold is somehow explained to be caused by global warming so it must be true. If theres a bad storm (like there never used to be bad storms) that's a sure sign of global warming and it must be true.

The Earth is a changing place and always has been. Even the continents are on the move. Species are constantly appearing and disappearing. I'm told where I live used to be under 100 feet of ice - glad it's warmed up since then.

If my limited knowledge of the Earth is any indication we can expect the climate to change drastically from what it is today and many species to become extinct as a result. Fortunately, we can also expect the climate to continue to change drastically and many new species to appear. It happened before we were here and it will continue to happen long after we're gone.

Damned if it isn't snowing again.

A strong bike racer won it.

STATE OF FEAR is an eye-opener. Although it is a work of fiction, the supporting data are real. The appendices are especially informative. In appendix II, sources of data for graphs, Crichton says: "Note: Shortly after the publication of the hardcover publication of this book, GISS changed its website to show less data. the station data no longer goes back before 1880, and thus heightens the appearance of a steady rise in temperature."

The author who shows up most often in the footnotes of STATE OF FEAR is Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST.

Quoting from Chricton's bibliography: "... The author, a Danish statistician and Greenpeace activist, set out to disprove the views of the late Julian Simon, an economist who claimed that dire environmental fears were wrong and that the world was actually improving. To Lomborg's surprise, he found that Simon was mostly right. ..."

I think we need to be wary of politicians (Gore, Kulongoski) who try to influence the legitimate work of real scientists. In the end, real data will tell the truth. Political posturing and pressure is only so much hot air... which is exhaled in the form of CO², a greenhouse gas.

Actually, I don't think the mainstream science communities disagree with what you say here. There have been very drastic climate swings... what seems to have happened is that over the last 10,000 years the climate has been very stable. By studying ice cores in both Greenland and Antartica, however, they have discovered that the average global temperature is now higher than it has been in a long, long time. The glaciers that provide water to so much of the planet are disappearing. Many, many communities are being affected at the current time.

Is man a major contributor to this warming? I would be inclined to think, just on the basis of world population and a quick look at Google Earth that... yes... there's a good possibility.

What this all means and how we can fix it is not at all clear. A lot of evidence points to greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide and methane. OK... maybe the evidence is insufficient for some us, but.... on the off chance that this *is* correct, shouldn't we at least admit that it might be possible? Just suspend judgment, listen to the facts, compare those facts against what we personally observe and experience.

For a long time, I agreed with you, phinney. This sounds like hogwash. But after looking into it a lot, I'm not so sure. And I'm concerned.

I rode Tour Dallas this morning and suspect at least three fourths of the 4000 or so riders were under dressed for the event. It was 39 when we left out and even colder by 10 AM with snow flurries coming doown. There was a lot of pink flesh on this ride with people complaining about frosty feet. I, on the other hand, was dressed appropriately because I watched the forecast and carried a handlebar bag with windproof clothes, in case I needed them, which I did.

I was one of only a few that had feet covers in place. What were these people thinking?

+1. FWIW I have read hundreds and hundreds of pages on the subject (just because I am interested). I'm pretty well read on both "sides" of the issue. I believe that greenhouse gases are major contributer to this warming event. I'm not sure how much we can do about it at this late date. I hope that I am proven wrong.

Do forget the pending Ice Age" CRISIS during the 1970s. What about the "holes in the ozone layer" CRISIS. And my favorite pending global crisis that took bilions out of the conomy was the "Y2K" CRISIS. Anyone consisder/discuss the huge increase in CO2 form recent volcanic releases??? Minimal or no discussion or consideration of the sun's impact on planet temperatrure resulting from increased solar activities during the past 10 to 15 years. The planet maybe warmer than..........what is the normal or ideal planet temperature???
I have not been convinced that humans are the cause of or even an influence on global climatic varaibles.
BTW....what is the unit of measurement and cost per unit to purchase carbon offsets?? I only consume about 2 tankfuls (30 gals) of fuel in my car per year....I would like sell carbon offsets.
SNOW in OKC yesterday...sunny and cold (high 30s) today.

OK, I just finished a lousy indoor trainer "ride" because the weather is so lousy out.

The biggest signal that the global warming crisis is all hot air (he-he) is that it is so highly politicized. A crisis really helps to scare the tax dollars out of us and makes us happily give up control to "save the planet". If we really had enough reliable scientific data and environmental knowledge to say for sure that within 100 years (an interval conveniently far in the future, but not too far) we were going to wipe out 1/4 of the planet there would be no significant arguments from the political front. Instead they would all be jumping on the bandwagon to get their slice of the big pie. Our data is very poor and far to coarse even in recent (present?) times to accurately define anything like a mean earth temperature - whatever that means.

I remember listening to an NPR interview of Kary Mullis (1993 Nobel prize in chemistry) and the subject of global warming was brought up like it was a fact. He laughed and said there was no such thing and that the data simply didn't and couldn't support it. The host was absolutely speechless. I never heard Mullis on NPR again!

On the other hand I'll have a good shot personally of getting a thin slice of the global warming pie. However, I could get a much bigger slice of an asteroid defense (chicken little) pie and if we don't stop the asteroid what's the point of doing anything about global warming? How about we do the asteroid defense first and then if we have any workers still dumb enough to pay for it we'll go after the global warming?

I've really enjoyed this little bit of banter and what an appropriate topic on a day that's so cold and miserable for riding.