Tsunami

Good post. I am catholic, but I believe this statement to be completely true. Continental Drift DID happen. Its a fact. The appalachian moutain chain is made up of rocks and minerals that identically match those in Africa, which at one point was crushed up against teh east coast as we know it, push the mountain up to heights of 12,000ft+ many many years ago... After reading all about the single continent stuff, it all makes perfect sense. And yes it is gradual....


At the same time, it also talks about all the ice caps melting before, and all the gases changing. The earth has been frozen. The earth has been scorched. Life on land as we know it did not exsist. The ocean's are not even that old compared to the land.

All of these things did happen. There have always been earthquakes. There has always been climate change. ALWAYS.... human interference dose NOT melt ice caps... The sun does. Nature does... Entire species were wiped off of this earth, and since this happened before 1 A.D. then that makes all of those creatures godless, able to die for nothing. Never seeing an after life because prior to that moment, jesus, or a dinosour like creature representing god came down... Were the dinosours sinners? Did they deserve to die?

All of that leaves way more questions than answers.... And again, im catholic, but I cannot just answer every question with a simple: Because the guys who supposedly knew jesus and wrote stories about him all said this....

There have been wars CONSTANTLY from 1 a.d. until now.... There have been constant disasters... always...

Since man first was on earth, we battled one another. For food. For land. For survival.....

This is all a natural process. And to the global warming enthusiasts, I ask you, how accurately were we recording the size of the polar ice caps 600 years ago???? When the continental united states wasnt populated by cvivilized society for thousands of years, how on earth do we assume every bit of data we have innaccurately gather over a century actually holds true????

Please explain. Im not trying to question your faith, but I have asked questions about what does not make sense to me since I was a child, learning about the bible... If it doesnt add up, you can question it. The answer to everything is not always faith.

 

And again, how many of you every re-call the great tsunami of California? Me either, because there wasn't one... There have been effects of it, from the Huge 9.2 quake in Alaska in the 60s.

But there is a reason that the word Tsunami sounds Japanese. Because it is. This has been a quite common occurance since the inhabitance of Japan itself. This has happened to them all throuhout their history... So while this was by far one of the worst, it was not axactly unexpected....

So, i wouldn't go rushing to any end of the world theories just yet. Since throughout their history, tsunamis has ravaged their coast at least 9 times on record. Not to mention the hundreds of small ones. But there have been 9 catasrophic ones there...

The techonic plates do not favor that region when they shift. The have a tendency to shelf up and sent the energy right at Japan... Its just a historical fact...

not that the rest of us have nothing to worry about, but history hold this data pretty true:

Look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan

And notice how Sendai and another town were completely obliterated by a tsuanami in the year: 869... ring a bell?

Or how about the Tsunami/Quake off Japan in the year 1293: It killed over 23,000 people, in a drastically less populated area...

Im just saying. This is nothing new. It doesn't lead anyone else to believe the end is near.

But I wish there werent any nuclear reactors involved. That adds a whole new element of danger that was never there in previous disasters.

 

I have been watching the news updates and watch videos on youtube and I cant belive that I have not one person looting. Its make me ashemed and embarassed of my countries moral. After any disaster we had here in the States ( earthquakes in California, Katrina, Ect) the day after the disaters his thats all you see on the news . People in Japan have better moral and have there priorites in check compared to out culture. Even in times of great dispare they are more concerned for life and rebuilding the commuity as a whole rather than bettering ones self

 

oahu only recieved a 4 to 6 ft wave, i surfed in the afternoon that day and it was fun, some hawaiians heard the 4 to 6 ft wave and just slept through it, nothing really happened but they were on top of the evacuation warning everyone the night before and sirens morning of

 

That's just amazing, 37 Million people live in Tokyo, patiently waiting in line 10 + hours for gas and 4-8 hours at grocery stores. Kinda makes me very proud the 7th Fleet flying rescue missions as Japanese have certainly have earned great deal of respect for how as a Country dealing with this disaster.


A shame that couldn't happen here our last disaster a good bit of criminal rampage after Katrina was not reported by the National News that it was the "Wild West" on the ground until the Guard restored order since most of the cops abandoned their posts.

 

Ya but even with a large data set it would still be very difficult to predict when they would hit. Looking at where the faults are we know where they can hit, and knowing the history we know if the fault is active. Factor this with the topography and the infrastructure of the area and one can rank the relative probability of a hazard. But this would be no more useful than the homeland security national terror alert system, or any other color coded chart.

 

Winds have been NW forthe past 2 days, but Saturday the winds are suppossed to be light SW, pushing any radiation coming from the plants inland. Not going to be good...

 

Every national and international scientific agency are in agreement that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. There are multiple ways scientist can infer the Earth's ancient climate from geologic records to dendrochronology.Scientists can take ice cores using radiometric dating to obtain the age of the ice. We can also measure the amounts of snow from those cores giving a picture of the Earths climate from the last 500,000 years.

 

Good point, but to my understanding the fault where the latest Japanese earthquake occurred was ignored for the fact it had been dormant for so long. If we had larger data sets globally we could have a better understanding of the frequency/areas of concern.

 

yes, I agree with that statement as well. I didn't mean to really counter that point at all. I understand that we are aware of the past scorching of the earth, the freezing of the earth, the melting of the ice-caps etc... But there are a ton of veriables as to why exactly that happened. And what different natural dissasters/occurances happened throughout the duration of all these periods. I mean, some people debate that carbon dating of fossils etc is not even accurate. I just don't think there are too many difinitive answers to a lot of these things. Why did the ice caps melt before? We know they did, but why? Was it meteors that once scorched the earth, or did the climate just increase to uninhabitable levels?

Im not history major, dont get me wrong, but there are a lot of questions as to why any of this ever happened, no? Scientists have a puzzle, with pieces and they have put a lot of it together... with a lot of ideas as to why, but nothing too solid.

Like, you are saying that the climate is in fact warming on earth and you are saying that all most scientific organizations agree with this... But none of them can PROVE what is causing this... I would like to see data, not from 500,000 years ago, but from 500 years ago. I want to see where the ice caps were a few hundreds years ago when we were not using fossil fuels etc... I am just "guessing" that they were melting slowly back 1000 years ago, when human involvement in the atmosphere was quite minimal in comparison to today....

Maybe there is solid data disproving that... But i have yet to see it.

 

Just consider the idea of climate change for instance. The opposite of this would be a static climate, but a static climate is an impossibility (evidenced by changes in seasons). So the idea that climate change is something new and is due to anthropogenic sources does not hold water with me. To accept this one would have to assume that climate was static prior to rises in anthropogenic pollution sources. And I think this is where a lot of people get carried away with the global warming thing. I think the fact that climate was changing long before we were contributing anthropogenic sources is lost on a lot of people.

Now to your question. Answer: read up on Milankovitch cycles if you're interested. It has been proven that anthropogenic sources have elevated carbon levels in the atmosphere and can contribute to radiative forcing (i.e. warming). However, I do not believe that anthropogenic sources are the primary driver of climate change. I think Milankovitch cycles can account for the periods of glaciation and hot-house climates that are evidenced in ice-core and deep-ocean core records. The reader's digest version of Milankovith theory is that there are 3 factors to the Earth's orbit around the sun that change over time; eccentricity, precesion, and obliquity (axial tilt). These variables operate on cycles of thousands of years, and throughout their respective cycles they are altering the the Earth's orbit around the sun. The combined effect of changes to these factors lead to points in time when there is a solar maximum (i.e. hot-house) and solar minimum (i.e. glaciation) of the Earth's orbit. Milankovitch was able to calculate the timing of these cycles. The theory was just that until evidence was put forth by Dr. Alan Imbrie in the form of deep-ocean cores in the early 80's that matched up with Milankovitch's predictions (there is a great book about this called Ice Ages, if you're interested). Obviously, this theory is much more complex than what I have mentioned, and the evidence is by no means a perfect match with the data. But the point is that Milankovitch cycles can explain climate change in Earth's history (primary driver being changes in the Earth's orbit) and there are core records to back it up.

 

Good sh** man. Thanks for the post. That is pretty much what I have been thinking, but it sounds so much better when you can cite some sources! Thanks, I am definitely interested in reading more about that.

 

Nice post Andrew. It's really important for people who are not scientist's to understand that the only reason that anthropogenic climate change is questioned today is because the very industries that are at the root of it (big oil, big coal, -those linked to burning fossil fuels-) started "think tanks" in the 80's with the sole intent of casting doubt on the findings of renowned scientists around the world. Presently, 99% of all scientists who have published in scientific journals on the topic are in agreement that climate change is being caused by human activities.

The industrial revolution was the beginning of huge changes in the way humans live on the earth, and with it, the combustion of fossil fuels has been constantly increasing year to year. It seems prudent to me to address such a monumental (potential) risk that could have profound ramifications with some degree of seriousness.

 

yeah in college I took astronomy and I was shocked to learn that during the summer in the northern hemisphere, we are furthest from the sun. It's the angle that the sun hits that makes it warmer.

During the winter we are closest to the sun but less angle.

So, what you are saying is over time these things flip flop and at some point, maybe approaching, we are closest to the sun and our axis wobbles the right way for us to have the direct angle? That would make for a HOT summer. Or vice versa and an ice age?

 

You mean those same scientists who admitted to cooking the books in favor of their theory? Or the ones who purposefully placed monitoring stations in cities knowing that the readings would be higher? That crowd? Your phony religion is unravelling every day, deal with it.

 

pump, you're republican aren't you?

 

The connection between long wave radiation and CO2 heat absorption has been proven since the 1880's. Think of what is happening when you take sequestered carbon.. ie oil and coal and release the carbon into our atmosphere. We know from isotopic data that the origin of the Carbon is from fossil fuels and is currently increasing within our atmosphere. Scientists are in agreement that humans are irreparably altering the Earths climate. Where there is disagreement is what exactly that change will produce and when. There is no planet B and we should all be aware of the damage we are causing.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/


If you want any pdf files from scientific journals regarding AGW, PM me.

 

In November 2009, the servers at the University of East Anglia in Britain were illegally hacked and emails were stolen. When a selection of emails between climate scientists were published on the internet, a few suggestive quotes were seized upon by many claiming global warming was all just a conspiracy. A number of independent enquiries have investigated the conduct of the scientists involved in the emails. All have cleared the scientists of any wrong doing:

1. In February 2010, the Pennsylvania State University released an Inquiry Report that investigated any 'Climategate' emails involving Dr Michael Mann, a Professor of Penn State's Department of Meteorology. They found that "there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data". On "Mike's Nature trick", they concluded "The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field."
2. In March 2010, the UK government's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report finding that the criticisms of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) were misplaced and that CRU’s "Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community".
3. In April 2010, the University of East Anglia set up an international Scientific Assessment Panel, in consultation with the Royal Society and chaired by Professor Ron Oxburgh. The Report of the International Panel assessed the integrity of the research published by the CRU and found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit".
4. In June 2010, the Pennsylvania State University published their Final Investigation Report, determining "there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann".
5. In July 2010, the University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report. They examined the emails to assess whether manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that "The scientists’ rigor and honesty are not in doubt".
6. In July 2010, the US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the emails and "found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets."
7. In September 2010, the UK Government responded to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report, chaired by Sir Muir Russell. On the issue of releasing data, they found "In the instance of the CRU, the scientists were not legally allowed to give out the data". On the issue of attempting to corrupt the peer-review process, they found "The evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers".
8. In February 2011, the Department of Commerce Inspector General conducted an independent review of the emails and found "no evidence in the CRU emails that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data".

Just as there are many independent lines of evidence that humans are causing global warming, similarly a number of independent investigations have found no evidence of falsification or conspiracy by climate scientists.
"Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline"

The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.

The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem...
Trenberth's "travesty we can't account for the lack of warming"

The second most cited email is from climate scientist and IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth. The highlighted quote is this: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." This has been most commonly interpreted (among skeptics) as climate scientists secretly admitting amongst themselves that global warming really has stopped. Trenberth is actually discussing a paper he'd recently published that discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going (Trenberth 2009).

In Trenberth's paper, he discusses how we know the planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, surface temperature sometimes shows short term cooling periods. This is due to internal variability and Trenberth was lamenting that our observation systems can't comprehensively track all the energy flow through the climate system. More on Trenberth's travesty...
The full body of evidence for man-made global warming

An important point to realise is that the emails involve a handful of scientists discussing a few pieces of climate data. Even without this data, there is still an overwhelming and consistent body of evidence, painstakingly compiled by independent scientific teams from institutions across the world.

What do they find? The planet is steadily accumulating heat. When you add up all the heat building in the oceans, land and atmosphere plus the energy required to melt glaciers and ice sheets, the planet has been accumulating heat at a rate of 190,260 Gigawatts over the past 40 years (Murphy 2009). Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 Gigawatt, imagine over 190,000 power plants pouring their energy output directly into heating our land and oceans, melting ice and warming the air.

This build-up of heat is causing ice loss across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at an accelerated rate (Velicogna 2009, ). Even East Antarctica, previously thought to be too cold and stable, is now losing ice mass (Chen 2009). Glacier shrinkage is accelerating. Arctic sea ice has fallen so sharply, observations exceed even the IPCC worst case scenario. The combination of warming oceans and melting ice has resulted in sea level rise tracking the upper limit of IPCC predictions.

Rising temperatures have impacted animal and plant species worldwide. The distribution of tree lines, plants and many species of animals are moving into cooler regions towards the poles. As the onset of spring is happening earlier each year, animal and plant species are responding to the shift in seasons. Scientists observe that frog breeding, bird nesting, flowering and migration patterns are all occurring earlier in the year (Parmeson 2003). There are many other physical signs of widespread warming. The height of the tropopause, a layer in our atmosphere, is rising (Santer 2003). Arctic permafrost, covering about 25% of Northern Hemisphere land, is warming and degrading (Walsh 2009). The tropical belt is widening (Seidel 2007). These results are all consistent with global warming.

What’s causing this heat build-up? Humans are emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - 29 billion tonnes in 2009 (CDIAC). Greenhouse theory predicts that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will trap heat energy as it escapes out to space. What do we observe? Carbon dioxide absorbs heat at certain wavelengths. Satellites over the past 40 years find less heat escaping to space at these wavelengths (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007). Where does the heat go? Surface measurements find more heat returning back to the Earth's surface (Philipona 2004). Tellingly, the increase occurs at those same carbon dioxide absorption wavelengths (Evans 2006). This is the human fingerprint in global warming.

There are multiple lines of empirical evidence that global warming is happening and human activity is the cause. A few suggestive emails may serve as a useful distraction for those wishing to avoid the physical realities of climate change. But they change nothing about our scientific understanding of humanity’s role in global warming.

 

wow. impressive. is this a paper YOU wrote? or is it cut and pasted from somewhere else (citation needed)?