Tons of good info, and thanks for it, but unfortunately it’s best simply to not feed the trolls. They pop up in every mention of the weather on this site.

For those without a sense of humor Embiggenate (and variations thereof) is a word Phil Plait uses a lot. It is derived from the Simpsons

Springfield’s town motto is “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.”

Ms. Krabappel: “Embiggens”? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Ms. Hoover: I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

I know, right?

I could expand on how that’s enlarged my vocabulary…but I don’t think it’s legit.
I don’t want to go zooming into a blow-up.

It is only a thousand years ago that the Vikings were farming and raising cattle in Greenland. Remnants of their farming facilities are still there, and there were not below the ocean level. Neither was Florida. There also were no SUVs or other major pollutants to create a “greenhouse” effect.

Watch :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrKfz8NjEzU&list=PL029130BFDC78FA33&index=56

which deals with that or read this :

http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm

Remember here that local warming eg. in Greenland is NOT the same as Global warming just as you can heat your car up in winter but still have conditions outside freezing cold when you get out.

Again, yes, the past global climate has changed naturally but this doesn’t mean that human activity isn’t resposnsible this time. We’ve got good scientific reasons to know that this time our greenhouse gas emissions are the cause as you can see from comment #15.

There also were no non-scientific Al Gores to tell them that this was the result of a disaster. Good thing that we now have a pseudo science that knows everything.

Al Gore is irrelevant. Don’t get your info from him or fall victim to the common fallacy that he has done anything other than raise some awareness of the issue. He’s not an expert and Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating wasn’t his invention and won’t be stopped by blaming him as one of the many messengers on this issue.

The climatologists, OTOH, are experts. Climate scientists have spent their whole lives studying climate. They have immersed themselves in the science, faced peer-reviews, published real science papers in real science journals and they do know what they’re talking about – just as medical doctors know about medicine and astronomers know about astronomy.

If an astronomer tells you where to point your telescope and what you might see when you look at a planet or a nebula or when the best time to catch the International Space Station passing overhead might be; don’t you listen to her knowledge on that? If your doctor tells you that you need a certain treatment for a certain disease which could kill you if left untreated do you take her advice? Or do you reject it and prefer the words of a political commentator on a disease he knows little if anything about?

Why then would you ignore the scientific experts when it comes to climate?

The global warming that wasn’t coming now sank into the ocean (??). The rising ocean level that didn’t happen hasn’t been explained yet, just wait for another amazing logic-defying conclusion.

Actually, there’s no waiting necessary. I can direct you to a good explanation for that right here :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/26/sea-level-rise-has-slowed-temporarily/

via Dr Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog. Although it doesn’t defy logic and makes good sense and good reading. Whether you find it “amazing” or not that’s what the actual science is saying.

@21. m :

I love it when eco nazis try to argue against that. (like #12′s rantings) That somehow the Earth is retaining more energy without a shift in mass.

Were you referring to me there? What exactly did you consider to be “ranting” in comment 12 please?

The energy-retention requiring mass to shift thing is just plain wrong. Does your mass change when you stand in sunlight or turn the thermomenter up on your heating or as you sit by a campfire thats getting warmer?

@17. Me3PO :

Messier Tidy Upper, that was a whole lot to say in response to a bunch of questions and statements. Of course, all the time you put into that post will not do anything to change mememine69 views nor will it change the thoughts of other thinkers like mememine69. That said, I appreciate the thought you put into it.

No worries. It may or may not do something but y’never know. I live in hope – & I was once an adamant “climate contrarian” myself going back a few years before I found out more and changed my views to match reality.

However, I’ll keep avoiding this discussion with people who have views like mememine69 because I get too frustrated listening to the same unsupported beliefs over and over again and I need to keep my sanity for better discussions.

Fair enough. I understand where you’re coming from there. The same climate contrarian canards do seem to keep getting tediously repeated everywhere and dealing with it does get tiresoem and frustrating. Still I’d rather not let nonsense like the “arguments” posted by (#10. originally #4) “mememine69″ go unanswered but have them calmly and politely refuted
instead.

Hope you keep yours [sanity] in whatever way you choose to discuss the matter.

Thanks for that – me too! ;-)

Your post is made up of several straw-men, in that you’re representing a position of the other side that isn’t true, but that is easy to knock down, so it makes it seem like you are making a good point. You also have a pretty poor concept shift in your 3rd paragraph (that is shifting from heat/energy to mass).

When you jump up and down and get hot, is there more mass? When you turn on a light and it causes a surface to heat up, have you created more mass? When you are standing in front of a fire and it gives off heat, have you created more mass? What about sun rays? Here’s a pretty easy guide from CalTech on heat and energy: http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/light_lessons/thermal/heat.html Hint: You’re not creating more mass, instead you are heating up the mass already in existence.

But even here you made a a straw-man because the argument isn’t that there is global warming, instead it’s that the global climate is changing (hence it being called climate change).

What is more, nobody is looking solely at glaciers and saying the climate is changing. There’s a range of other things that science is studying / has studied.

Then of course there’s your ad hom attack… Always the indicator of someone lacking evidence for their position when they simply resort to childish name calling.

#3 – uhm…no. not a fact. rather than get into a whole slew of “link wars”, I will just say E=MC2. Because mass is constant (hmm…don’t seem to have noticed any moon sized asteroids hitting us lately. have you?)

I love it when eco nazis try to argue against that. (like #12′s rantings) That somehow the Earth is retaining more energy without a shift in mass.

Actually…I both love it and hate it. How can we, as advanced as we have become, still find ourselves succuming to what is tantamount “the world is flat” logic?

- I can see the horizon and it is flat. So the world must be flat.

- I saw a glacier melt, so the planet must be warming!

It really is sad.

18 – the seas did not rise due to Archimedes principal. enviro nazis don’t want you to know that a greek in sandals figured that part out 2 to 3 thousand years ago. Good post.

Nearing sea level,
Jeff
Daytona Beach FL

Personally I don’t care that much either way. The people recruited to be the grassroots trolling effort will most likely be the ones to suffer more while benefiting little from the status quo so schadenfreude will keep me cool and content as our world gets warmer.

Unfortunately, it seems almost pointless stating the reality of the situation or describing real evidence for it because people who don’t believe in HIRGO will likely never believe it. At least not until their house has been consumed by the ocean and they are forced to move inland and fight over decreasing land space and resources. Even then, I doubt they’d admit it was HIRGO. Instead, it would be a natural cycle (although sped up for some unknown reason). Some might even say it was God punishing us. Who knows.

Then I’m reminded that there are people who just need a bit more information to decide if they should make changes in their lives, push for change, or do nothing, so I will continue to teach about HIRGO and let them decide which view they feel has more evidence. I can hope they’ll take it seriously and make changes in their own lives and perhaps be the big pushers for change. However, I’ll keep avoiding this discussion with people who have views like mememine69 because I get too frustrated listening to the same unsupported beliefs over and over again and I need to keep my sanity for better discussions.

Hope you keep yours in whatever way you choose to discuss the matter.

Watch :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=S9ob9WdbXx0

which shows in a single clear graph in a short youtube clip by Sir David Attenborough why we know Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating is, indeed, Human induced.

Before you respond please watch the following youtube series :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo (The first in a great series.Please watch them all.)

&

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/#sense

& read the list of debunked arguments and real facts here :

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Before you make yourselves look silly and waste people’s time by posting stale old climate contararian canards that have been repeatedly conclusively debunked many times over for years.

If you really love the planet and respect science, ask yourself these questions before bowing to blind faith:
-how does “warming” prove Humanity did?

.. did what? Do you mean what evidence shows Humans have caused the current rapid Global Overheating?

Well, actually, there’s plenty of evidence for that starting with the spectroscopic fingerprint taken of the carbon dioxide showing it’s largely the product of us burning fossil fuels. Then there’s the troposphere warming faster than the stratosphere which is in line with Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating (HIRGO) and doesn’t match the idea of solar cycles.

Then there’s the difference between what the other possible causes would doing versus us adding 40% or so more CO2 to the air. Milankovitch orbital cycles should be leading us towards – in a few thousand years – another ice age but temperatures are rising fast. Solar cycles have been less active recently and while they matched the temperature records earlier they’ve diverged widely form what’s happening temps~wise since about the 1970′s or so. Cosmic rays haven’t been unusual lately or anything.

So if these natural factors are NOT causing warming and should be leading us towards cooler temps – which we’re NOT seeing as 2010 was the hottest year on record according to reliable NASA data – then what *is* behind the global Overheating?

Couldn’t it be because carbon dioxide and other greenhosue gases are at record levels? Could we really add so much extra carbon dioxide to our air, using up in centuries fossil carbon that’s been stored over hundreds of millions of years without this having any consequences? The evidence is in, and yes it is because of that.

If you think you have a better explanation then you need to write it up and have it scientifically published today! (Or point to a reliable source that has done so at minimum.)

-why are there tropical fossils under the “melting” ice and on every continent?

You’ve never heard of continental drift & plate tectonics then?

Also, yes, global climates were different in the past both colder and hotter but that doesn’t mean that we’re NOT responsible for it this time. Evidence painstakingly collected and analysed by thousands of scientists in hundreds of thousands of scientific papers shows that HIRGO is real. Are you really calling 97% of all climatologists liars?

-what has to happen now (besides “they say…”, to convince you remaining climate blamers that the voting majority called “former believers and deniers” are 100% correct?

Well seeing convincing actual scientific evidence from reliable peer-reviewed scientific papers would be the main thing.

Also having a genuine, accepted alternative causation that explains why our climate is getting hotter despite having solar cycles that should be moving us towards cooler conditions and an explanation for why the most basic and well-established physics of how carbon dioxide works is supposedly wrong and the climate contrarians right.

Plus say an observed long term trend towards stable or cooling temperatures and advancing rather than globally retreating ice sheets and glaciers.

-all the scientists study “effects” not causes so why would they say it’s not happening?

Eh? Citations please.

Actually, I think you’ll find a vast number of scientists do focus more on cause than effect. Examples : medical doctors studying the cause of disease, astronomers the cause of Gamma ray Bursts and supernova and planetary systems forming as they are, zoologists studying the evolutionary causes of animal physiology and behaviour, et cetera..

-is exaggerating a worst case scenario a crime?

Not necessarily, no. For one thing, its a good way of generating SF or crime novels! ;-)

Is that what you think the scientists are doing regarding HIRGO though?

Because, if anything, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been conservative and underestimated the effects of HIRGO.

-wouldn’t real planet lovers do everything they could to make sure the greatest emergency ever (catastrophic CO2 crisis), in the history of the planet is actually true?

They’ve done that checking already – & yes it is actually true.

If you have real evidence to the contrary then please produce it but please first check your information and sources and make sure that what you *think* is evidence against the HIRGO theory is actually saying what you think it is and is actually as relevant as you think it is. Because, sadly and tediously, a lot of the “arguments” put forward by the climate Contrarians are very old errors, cherry-picked info, misunderstandings and misquotings and otherwise easily debunkable.

-why should we trust science and scientists when it was they who denied that their toxic chemicals and pesticides were not safe?

Because science works. You owe science your microwave oven, your mobile phone, your computer and so much else.

Is science perfect and are scientists all noble saints? Of course not. But the scientific method works to correct itself and constantly improve our understanding of reality. It is the best method humans have yet devised through of our reasoning minds to approach the truth of the cosmos.

-can you explain why if the majority of scientists DO agree, why are they not acting like it’s a real climate crisis from Human CO2? Don’t they have children too? Why are they not marching in the streets and acting like the end is near (catastrophic climate crisis).

Some of them are doing so – leading NASA climatologist Jim Hansen for instance has been arrested at protests against new coal mines.

Scientists are people and people respond in many different ways but many scientists do speak out on this issue and have been for decades including some prominent names such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov and, in Australia, Tim Flannery.

Unfortunately, politicians don’t listen to scientists enough and in many cases, scientists who do speak out get derided and devalued for doing so – getting accused of being too “activist” and not “objective” enough as though speaking publicly makes your scientific analysis less valid. (Hint : It doesn’t.) So in some ways they’re dammed if they do, dammned if they don’t.

-is a comet hit as bad as unstoppable warming?

Irrelevant non-sequiteur.

However, the answer is actually that truly unstoppable warming will be worse – our earth will eventually be destroyed in fire when our Sun turns into a Red giant in a few billion years time from now. Our planet has survived comet and meteorite impacts in the past -and the consequences of these vary depending on the size of the impacting body.

If the warming were “unstoppable” then it would literally never end and be far worse – taking a literal view of your words, you could be meaning something like the Big Rip theory of the end of the universe caused by Dark Energy but that’s another story again.

Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating isn’t “unstoppable” although it will take a very long time and major effort to stop.

-if you were told to study the consequences of climate change, why would you deny climate change?

In theory you’d deny it if theer was good evidence leading you to think it wasn’t real – and you’d most likely win a Nobel prize and overwhelming global adulation plus major wealth if you could prove HIRGO wasn’t real.

Another possible reason you’d deny HIRGO’s reality is if you are being commissioned to do so and rewarded for doing so, say by Big Oil companies and Right Wing lobby groups.

-look for yourself, almost none of the climate change research is in causes.

Take your own advice there please, mememine69!

Look for yourself. Look at the evidence presented by the scientists and decide based on that.

Consider this too : If not much research is being done on the cause of HIRGO maybe its because that question was scientifically conclusively settled a long time ago?

-scientists say this climate has never happened like this before.Is that good enough to look you kids in the eyes and tell them they will suffer a CO2 death from catastrophic climate change crisis if they don’t start turning the lights out more often?

That’s called a “strawman” argument because it has the same structural integrity and metaphorical tensile strength as rotten strands of hay.

No one is telling kids what you seem to think they’re telling them.

Even if they were, its actually not relevant to the reality or otherwise
of HIRGO.

What matters is the scientific evidence and that has shown that Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating is happening.

What we choose to do about it – or refuse to do about it – is up to us.

But the longer we take to act on this very real issue – which is as well established as the theory of gravity and evolution – the harder and more costly it will be to turn things around and the worse the amount of human suffering will be.

Of course, the shrinking Aral Sea and some of the mega-dams are other examples of how humanity has literally changed the map of the world.

Glaciers are melting, and Greenland is changing. But let’s get the correct order of magnitude!