To those who are angry and rebellious at “the global new world order,” or even at their local governments for pushing “global warming green tax” and “fear of the future” onto the human populace, good for you! I agree with your anger, rebellion and mistrust!
Alas, just because there are all sorts of nefarious reasons for their agenda, it does not mean that radical climate change is not real! It is real.
An analogy might be that a man runs up to door shouting, “A tornado is coming!” You know that he wants to rob your house when you run to the basement, so you stay put. Alas, a tornado is coming and it hits you. The fact remains, the man did plan to rob you.
Yes, I know, that is a little corny, but hey, I used to live in Iowa in the middle of cornfields until they dried up in July. My response to Tony Elliott’s article entitled, “Simply Put, Climate Change/Global Warming Does not Exist” is included in this article which says, “Climate Change Does Too Exist!” Mr. Elliott and I might sound like two squabbling school children but I do respect Mr. Elliott’s work. I also respect Pat Regan’s work,who is a friend, but I am ringing the bell of global climate alarm.
I would like to cover three subjects which Tony Elliott uses to prove there is no radical climate change:
1. Tony says, “One of the reasons for the deadly outcome of this tornado outbreak is likely due to the fact that highly populated areas of the nation were hit. The weather pattern can explain why these highly populated areas were struck.”
Notice the steady march upward. Is this only because there are more people in what were vacant spots? This is Mr. Elliott’s argument. The Midwest has the most tornadoes, and it has not grown in population like other areas of the country have. For instance, this Iowa county had 10,000 people in 1958 and it now has a population of – 10,000 people. To say that the rise in frequency and severity of violent super-storms which happen all across the planet these days, is an illusion simply because more people are experiencing them, just makes no sense.
But you say, “These charts only go to the beginning of 2010, so here is information on 2011 and 2012:
2011 was an unusually active and deadly year for tornadoes across the U.S., with a total of 1,691 tornadoes reported across the country, more than any other year on record except for 2004, which saw 1,817 tornadoes. Several tornado records were broken in 2011, including for greatest number of tornadoes in a single month (758 in April) and the greatest daily total (200, on April 27).
2012 started off with a record number of tornadoes but then the Great Drought set in for much of the country and the resulting high pressure dome stopped the formation of tornadoes.
Now I know that we can play “statistics” and someone can come up a chart which seems to show otherwise but I would say to you, “Ask the humans, worldwide, who have been affected by super-storms. I am using the term “super-storms” to lump together cyclones, typhoons (the biggest ever recorded recently), tornadoes, hurricanes with rain which just won’t quit, flooding, torrential outbursts, and more, which keep happening from China to Bangladesh to Pakistan to New Orleans
Of course this is a huge subject for one article, but I will say, ”Yes, you have the right to dislike local and international pushers of global warming if this is how you feel. Personally, I dislike multinational corporations and their servants, the governments, for other reasons such as habitat destruction, rain forest demolition, air and water pollution of our beautiful planet.
And it’s not “global warming,” so drop that! It is global climate imbalance that is so worrisome.
2. Mr. Elliott says that while ice is melting in some places, it is being added in others. Ice is sometimes frozen into the underside of an ice sheet but though I searched, I could find no list or record of other places on the planet except for the underside of an Antarctic ice sheet, which is adding ice. I am sure someone will discredit my source as part of the New World Order (National Snow and Ice Data and NASA), but I have read several websites which champion “No Global Warming Is Occurring,” and I am not particularly impressed with them, so perhaps we are at a stalemate. But here is some in-put on the ice melt for the readers’ information:
The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its smallest point ever in a milestone that may show that worst-case forecasts on climate change are coming true, scientists say. The extent of ice observed Summer, 2012, has broken a record set in 2007 and will likely melt further with several weeks of summer still to come, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the NASA space agency.
“The sea ice fell to 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles), some 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) less than the earlier record charted on September 18, 2007, the center said. Scientists said the record was all the more striking as 2007 had near perfect climate patterns for melting ice, but that the weather this year was unremarkable other than a storm in early August.
Michael E. Mann, a lead author of a major UN report in 2001 on climate change, said the latest data reflected that scientists who were criticized as alarmists may have shown “perhaps too great a degree of reticence.”
“I think, unfortunately, this is an example that points more to the worst-case scenario side of things,” said Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. “There are a number of areas where in fact climate change seems to be proceeding faster and with a greater magnitude than what the models predicted.” The sea ice decline is perhaps the most profound of those cautionary tales because the models have basically predicted that we shouldn’t see what we’re seeing now for several decades,” he added.
Arctic ice is considered vital for the planet as it reflects heat from the sun back into space, helping keep down the planet’s temperatures. The Arctic region is now losing about 155,000 square kilometers (60,000 square miles) of ice annually, the equivalent of a US state every two years, said Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It used to be the Arctic ice cover was a kind of big block of ice. It would melt a little bit from the edges but it was pretty solid,” Meier told reporters on a conference call.
“Now it’s like crushed ice,” he said. “At least parts of the Arctic have become like a giant slushie, and that’s a lot easier to melt and melt more quickly.”
The planet has charted a slew of record temperatures in recent years, with 13 of the warmest years ever taking place in the past decade and a half, along with extreme weather ranging from severe wildfires in North America to major flooding in Asia.
Researchers have also reported a dramatic melt this summer on the ice sheet in Greenland, which could have major consequences for the planet by raising sea levels.
Scientists believe that climate change is caused by human emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. But efforts to regulate emissions have faced strong political resistance in several nations including the United States, where industry groups have said that regulations would be too costly for the economy.
Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace who on Monday intercepted a Russian ship in the Arctic, said the ice melt showed that the planet was “warming up at a rate that puts billions of people’s future in jeopardy. These figures are not the result of some freak of nature but the effects of man-made global warming caused by our reliance on dirty fossil fuels,” he said in a statement.
Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity pressure group called the record ice melt “a profound — and profoundly depressing — moment in the history of our planet.”
The melt has rapidly changed the politics and economics of the Arctic region, with shipping companies increasingly eager to save time by sailing through the once-forbidding waters.
Data released Monday by the Washington-based Center for Global Development found that nations including China, India, and the United States were reducing the intensity of their carbon emissions but that the effort was overwhelmed by the surge in power consumption in developing nations.
And here’s another morsel: Sea ice will lead to the rapid release of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, de-stabilizing the climate. The Arctic summer sea ice is in a rapid, extremely dangerous meltdown process, leading to an accelerated rate of Arctic carbon feedback emissions of methane from warming wetland peat bogs and thawing permafrost.”
So with sea ice shrinking, is an Arctic methane bomb the next big story?
Here is more proof of global melting: The Earth is getting thicker around the middle due to ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, says a new study by researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“If you imagine the Earth is like a soccer ball and you push down on the North Pole it would bulge out at its ‘equator’,” said CIRES Fellow Steve Nerem, coauthor of the study with CIRES Fellow John Wahr. “That’s what it looks like —a bit like a slightly squished ball.” We refer to the size of that bulge as the Earth’s ‘oblateness.’”
As the Earth’s shape changes so does its gravity field, a variable that can be measured from satellites, Nerem said. Data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)—twin satellites launched in 2002 that make detailed measurements of Earth’s gravity field to monitor changes in ice mass, the amount of water in the ocean and losses in continental water —enabled Nerem and Wahr to test a theory that the ice loss was changing the oblateness.
Using the GRACE values for ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica, the scientists predicted how that ice loss has changed the Earth’s oblateness since 2002, and their calculations agreed with the changes recorded by laser ranging measurements from a variety of different satellites. “We found that Greenland and Antarctica cause most of this change,” Nerem said. Their results are currently in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
From the time scientists first began measuring the Earth’s shape, they’ve noted it’s not a perfect sphere, Nerem said. The spinning of the planet means, just like any non-rigid spinning object, material tends to move out to the equator. “There is more mass along the equator than there is at the poles.”
Most of the time the scientists have been taking measurements of its shape the Earth has been changing from this eliptical, or oblate shape, to a rounder one as it readjusts to the end of the ice age 20,000 years ago, Nerem said. Since the downward pressure of land-based ice has reduced as the ice melted, the land underneath has “rebounded” causing the Earth to become more spherical, he said.
In the mid-1990s that trend changed, however, as the planet appeared to start flattening out again, Nerem said. Puzzled by this observation, the scientific community came up with theories as to why this might be the case. “But a lot of it was speculation, albeit informed speculation,” he said.
That was until the launching of the GRACE satellite mission. Using the high-resolution GRACE dataset Nerem and Wahr were able to conduct their experiment confirming the relationship between ice mass loss and the shape of the Earth. But this Nerem says is only a starting point.
“People have started to suggest that the melting in Greenland and Antarctica have started to affect the Earth’s rotation,” Nerem said. “That is another thing to think about.”
The study was supported by two separate National Aeronautics and Space Administration GRACE Science Team investigations and a Jet Propulsion Laboratory GRACE MEASURES contract. It will be published online in a future edition of Geophysical Research Letters.
3. Mr. Elliott says, “States such as Kansas are always in drought based on water needs for human consumption and raising crops, not because of actual rainfall. Most of Kansas is scrub brush country and this didn’t happen by accident just normal climate conditions for the area.”
Tony, I think Kansas people would disagree with you that Kansas is “scrub brush” but I can assure you, North Iowa is not scrub brush. It normally has a vibrant temperate rainforest-like growing pace in the Spring and Summer months. It is downright magical in what it creates, springing out of its rich black soil; each season brings new delights. It and other Midwestern states have nearly single-handedly given the entire world corn and soybeans for decades. That’s how fertile the Midwest is!
“Scrub brush” is insulting to Kansas which is also a farming state unless it is in the grips of the Great Drought of 2012. You are reaching for an argument here, it is simply not true.There is and has been NO RAIN FOR MONTHS.
Now, due to the Great Drought, we have parched, cracked ground, trees are dead or dying in many cases. Wells are going dry, there are no butterflies, no bees, no wasps, almost no birds. Need I go on? So don’t tell me it is just natural for Iowa to be “scrub brush like Kansas.”
And don’t tell me that global climate change has nothing to do with this drought. With the same absoluteness with which you say, “Simply put, global warming does not exist,” I say to you, “Simply put, global climate imbalance does exist and the imbalance is growing all too rapidly!”
Maybe when the methane bomb goes off, we can stop debating this. Or, let’s just stop now and let readers make up their minds (they are probably already made up), because neither of us is going to change.