contrails

On Dec 23, 6:41*pm, T8 wrote:
On Dec 23, 6:11*pm, bildan wrote:



So, do I 'believe' in global warming? *It's not a matter of belief -
it's a matter of what the data is saying. *What is available now is
extremely alarming.

I regard that point as honestly debatable. *And all the hot air out of
Al Gore to the contrary, I do not think we've really had that debate.
I'd like to see this chap (Richard Lindzen, MIT prof.)http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...57456742391702...
get a little more airplay as I think he's done some excellent work and
tough luck that the results don't play well with the current political
agenda. *You can hardly call this "sniping at the edges".

Don't doubt for a moment that NCAR is full of earnest, smart, hard
working guys. *And I think that if pressed over a couple of beers that
they will probably admit that their models are full of problems.
That's part of what Lindzen's work is all about: getting the
atmospheric data that will validate (or not) these models. *Mostly
"not" at the moment, it appears. *And until they *are* validated, the
models are not useful for prediction, full stop.

One thing I've wondered about rather idly, that I have not seen come
up in discussions on the topic of AGW, is what the AGW proponents
think about the cycle of the ice ages, and if these cycles are
supposed to have become irrelevant. *My home has spent the majority of
the last million years under a *lot* of ice and snow. *In fact, that
should probably be regarded as the normal condition here in what we
now call New Hampshire, USA. *Do these guys *really* believe that the
cycle of the ice ages has been broken? *If so, does their model
predict the end of the Holocene and a return to an ice age in the
absence of anthropogenic CO2? *If not... pray tell, *why* not?

I don't work in this area. *I have a business, well two of 'em
actually, to run, a family to take care of and a sweetheart of a curvy
beautiful 24 year old glider to fly in such spare time as I have, so
about all *I* have time to do on AGW is "snipe at the edges". *In so
doing, I hope to plant seeds of rational thought in others' minds such
that we become as a whole a bit more resistant to being hearded about
like so many sheep.

-Evan Ludeman / T8

New data doesn't 'validate' the models, they just get incorporated
into the next run. Validation would take the next hundred years of
data and by then it will be too late. Climate models are like huge,
incredibly complicated spreadsheets - so big that it takes the fastest
computers in the world months to run them. Climate models will never
be "validated". The newest data trends seem to be pushing the models
toward even more extreme outcomes.

Ice ages do seem to be cyclic. If so, the current epoch should have
us easing into an ice age. That the reverse is happening is even more
worrying.

A warming Earth would probably improve thermal soaring by expanding
the Troposphere - thermals would be taller and stronger. However, if
any of the proposed "geo-engeneering" ideas are ever tried, it would
be the end of thermal soaring as we know it.

Could it get worse? Unfortunately, yes.

If you want to see real terror on the face of a climatologist, mention
"methane clathrates" - methane trapped in ice formations. Methane is
a far more powerful "greenhouse gas" than CO2. Truly vast amounts of
it are in extremely unstable submarine ice deposits on continental
shelves. Even without much warming at all, they are known to erupt
with enough power to sink ships.

Even more methane is trapped in melting permafrost. In the last
decade and for the first time in human memory, large lakes of
mel****er circle the shores of the Arctic Ocean in summer - each
boiling violently with escaping methane. Large releases of methane is
the first and most important "trigger point" that could cause runaway
greenhouse warming.

Are there any natural events that might stop global warming? Yes, a
supervolcano eruption would do it - temporarily. Other events might
slow it like vast expansions of northern forests 'fertilized' by extra
CO2. In fact, brush lands are expanding northward. Others suggest
that algae blooms will eat the CO2. From the geologic record, it
appears that CO2 buildups get sucked out of the atmosphere after a
long warm period by some as yet unknown process - leading to a global
freeze-up in less than 50 years.

Bill Daniels