What's Your Stance?

[Louby]

Ok yes we have contributed to it and there isn't any harm in trying to reduce it but I do believe it's the earth natural cycle, we have been on the warm up from the last ice age and wont be long before we start to cool again.

[BUSHY]

I do not believe that man has any real influence on climate change and that this is driven primarily by variation in solar activity. We have been experiencing very low solar activity for some time now and this is already having noticeable effects. I predict that the lag period is now over and we will see this trend accelerate rapidly in the short term IE. next few years.

[BLAST FROM THE PAST]

14 months late and still we have this

here

a dead sun....where is this strongest ever solar cycle going to come from? Gleissberg deep minima beckons and one to watch.

BFTP

[Methuselah]

What I don't quite understand about the 'skeptics'' reasoning, is that they all readily accept that there are 'natural' forcing agents - changes in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, CH4, H20 et al...

But when we add to those, somehow there's little or no effect?? Yet the moon, which has been merrily doing what moons do for millions of years, is a factor to be reckoned with???

[Devonian]

What I don't quite understand about the 'skeptics'' reasoning, is that they all readily accept that there are 'natural' forcing agents - changes in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, CH4, H20 et al...

But when we add to those, somehow there's little or no effect?? Yet the moon, which has been merrily doing what moons do for millions of years, is a factor to be reckoned with???

'Manifestos only' Pete

Edited February 16, 2008 by Devonian

[Methuselah]

'Manifestos only' Pete

Quite right, Dev. My manifesto is to do something positve...Now that diesel is so expensive, maye we should all fill our 4x4s with smoked salmon...Only an idea...

PS: don't mention Marine Harvest!

[Mark Bayley]

My view is where in a natural cycle and where contributing to it

[Roger J Smith]

The aggravating part about this whole question is that no outcome will absolutely prove anything. Without human beings even being present on the earth, the current climate could have developed out of the previous climate by entirely natural means. My hunch is that this more or less describes the situation except for the fact that we have probably added about a half degree C to the overall situation. Whether we have also thrown off any of the interactions or feedback processes as a result, is a really thorny question and one could postulate that natural variability has ways of dealing with our little warming efforts in ways that we won't necessarily be able to model, predict or even recognize necessarily.

What has just taken place in the Canadian arctic is one case in point. A large segment of the arctic ice pack disappeared last autumn, snowfall increased around the region, and now it seems to have turned a lot colder than previous seasons. Whether that was all some predictable complex cycle (you may recall that I speculated this might be the case), and furthermore whether we had anything to do with it happening, are difficult questions, and I don't know where a definitive answer lies.

If this little episode is any indication of how human activity and natural variability interact, then we should be wary of any theories that assume that our activities will only have warming or melting effects. We could actually manage to trigger an opposite reaction through some complex feedback mechanisms. This is especially true, I think, if one realizes that our interference with the system is not only greenhouse gases -- we are also dropping soot onto the arctic basin at an accelerating rate and this does have more predictable consequences, I feel, than greenhouse gas emissions. I feel more comfortable with the idea that reduced albedo will lead to melting than I do with expecting the melting to come from raised atmospheric temperatures (especially when you look at where the raise has to start from, around -35 to -40 C over a large part of the arctic basin for months on end).

And meanwhile, I am fairly convinced that the hemispheric circulation patterns are caoable of shifting around so that climate change would not necessarily be a uniform process, it could just as easily involve a shifting of zones of snowfall or ice cover frequencies. And that would apply to the southern hemisphere as well.

So I would conclude by saying that I think the climate machine if you want to use that term, is in a particularly vulnerable situation for any number of reasons, one being our possible interference with its natural workings, but also two others come to mind at this point, the possibility of an impending solar flux reduction, and the evident shifting and weakening of the magnetic field which would tend to shift the odds in favour of milder winters and warmer weather in general for Europe more than any other part of the hemisphere. By the way, whether it was meant as a serious or facetious comment earlier, I don't think that the Moon is involved with large-scale climate changes on these time scales, and have never meant to suggest that, nor do I think others believe this either. For the record there, I just think that lunar energy does get involved in the complexities of weather and climate but in the sense that it has to work with conditions that are generated by other factors, so in other words it is a factor in how the climate regime plays out in detail, but it does not create that regime. Variations in solar activity and volcanic activity are clearly more important to that question, and I would add several other factors that I discuss in my research thread.

As to how it all comes together and what we can expect, that is a very big ask, and I am currently pleased if I can get a month to work out reasonably well, let alone a year or a decade or longer. I have to say that I am much more skeptical than some here about predictions that the warming will just continue uninterrupted, because I suspect that natural variability has many surprises in store and has just been ignoring Europe for a longer time than usual, but nobody should be surprised if global warming fades out and people talk about some entirely different concept in ten or twenty years time. Of course "climate change" covers a lot of bases, I am not so cynical that I think climate change was invented as a term to deflect any criticism of global warming but some in the media have a propensity for falling into the trap laid by this shift in emphasis. I do think that the period from now to about 2015 will be fairly critical for the future course of this theory in what you mighht call real-politik terms, because if there were to be any large surges of climate change in various directions during this near future, then I think public opinion would probably firm up in one direction or the other. A lot of people especially outside of Europe, I would say, are genuinely confused by all of what they are hearing about the issue, because they can see some evidence for it and yet the weather just continues to do more or less what it has always done (especially in North America) and so there is a fairly deep skepticism that changes will be as large or disruptive as some are predicting. There is also a lot of reluctance to assume that we are responsible or that realistically we can do anything about it.

I have to mention in that regard that we have had the experience of the dust bowl period of the 1930s coming and going, entirely without our intervention, so people may tend to assume that this is another natural cycle of warmth and drought that will also reverse eventually. And in fact conditions have never become anywhere near as bad as they were in that decade, in part due to better conservation, but also because the weather has not become as extreme.

[Stu_London]

We have warmed and almost certainly a significant proportion of that warming (if not all) is man-made. The warming however, does seem to be concentrated and more pronounced to the higher latitude locations of the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere with less land mass may not be affected so much.

Although an AGW element is extremely likely, as the climate is so complex and our knowledge of it so young and still developing, would it not be prudent to allow for the possibility that an equally significant part of the warming may be related to natural forcing factors.

I am not inclined to totally accept modelling that predicts the next 100 years, when modelling from the same computers can be so utterly wrong over the course of 100 hours.

I don't think we can stop the emissions explosion from China, India and other deveoping countries without compromising their sovereign existance, so the onus probably lies with technology to clean up, although we may be in need of a 'Eureka' discovery very soon, otherwise it will be too late and we will have to live with whatever damage we do.

As for the future, barring cataclysmic forcing the world will probably be progressive warmer in 20, 50 and 100 years time, although I would be suprised if it is quite as bad as predicted. The warming will not be consistent world wide and we may even see locally some areas stablise or start to cool as new climate paradigms are reached.

I also think too much time on the atmosphere is spent and not enough on the oceans, which are a great influence on the surface temperature.