Shooting at the Holocaust Museum (Now with Global Warming)

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by GodHand Prime

This is a bit misleading. Oxygen in no way balances out CO2. There is no dichotomy there. The questions are, whether or not CO2 is a driver in climate change (it has never been shown to be so), whether mankind's emissions of CO2 are causing significant harm (in light of the previous answer, clearly not), and whether actions to counteract the release of CO2 have negative consequences (very much so).

I admit I worded it to seem like a perfect dichotomy. I could have expanded by saying the point is, we're putting out CO2 that no plant or bacteria is going to convert back to oxygen, so it's just going to sit there in the atmosphere. With natural sources of CO2, there ARE countering natural sinks.

As an illustration of just how fast the change is happening, show me shots of the polar ice caps every year, from, say, 2005 onward. Go on. The University of Illinois has them available on their site.

This University of Illinois?

Originally Posted by University of Illinois Atmospheric Sciences Department

Over the past several decades, the strongest warming in the Northern Hemisphere has indeed occurred in the Arctic, and sea ice has retreated farther than ever before in the historical record. Glaciers are retreating throughout the Arctic, and permafrost is thawing. Residents of the Arctic are experiencing shorter winters and longer summers, growing seasons are lengthening, and forest fires are becoming more widespread during drier summers.

Or this one?

Originally Posted by Again

Recent observed surface air temperature changes over the Arctic region are the largest in the world. Winter (DJF) rates of warming exceed 4 degrees C. over portions of the Arctic land areas (shown left). We provide Arctic temperature trends and changes of other primary surface variables (e.g., sea level pressure, precipitation, sea ice cover) archived in this climate summary, portions of which are published each year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

(And the several papers I skimmed on the site by Dr. John Walsh confirmed an expected warming of both the Arctic and Antartica during the 21st century.

Or maybe we should just check on the best meteorologists in the world...

Except the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology seems to focus almost all of its research efforts on the continental US, though a hundred times while browsing their website they have research focus on "effects of the US due to changing climate."


If we want to attack catastrophic effects of global warming we can just consider cloud cover. Models don't really know how clouds will react to climate change, and a few percentages extra or less clouds is enough to raise or lower the Albedo effect enough to negate/amplify CO2 effects.

EDIT:

Never mind I found the pictures at the Illinois website. The website where they catalogue the subsequent loss of Arctic sea ice every single year including 2009.