Q: Exactly what shape is the Earth if it's flat? Square or circle?Welcome to the Flat Earth Society!
A: Circle, like in the UN logo
Q: "Why doesn't water run off the Earth?"
A: There is a vast ice wall that keeps the water where it is. The ice wall is roughly 150ft high. This also explains why you can find a vast plane of ice when you travel south.
Antarctica as a continent does not exist.
Q: "How does global warming affect the ice wall?"
A1: Global warming is melting the ice wall, but the government isn't doing anything because cutting carbon emissions would damage the economy, and they only care about making money.
A2: Global Warming doesn't happen. It and its counter-theory (Global Cooling) are effects that cancel each other out. Remember, these "greenhouse gasses" can reflect heat back out into space as well as keep it on Earth. Yes, there are recorded rises in temperature, but the only records we have go back, at most, around 150 years. This is very likely an occurrence that happens every [x>150] years, that's happened before (perhaps many times), and that the Earth has thus survived before.
Q: "What about tides?"
A: The tides exist due to a slight see-saw effect on the earth. As it goes back and forth, the water rushes to the side that is lower. Note, this is a very slight wobble. Remember, these wobbles are created by very minor earthquakes. They keep the tides in check. Notice that large earthquakes result in large tides or "tsunami".
Q : "Why is the North pole colder than the equator?"
A: The sun circles over the equator, not the North pole
“The increasing use of this term and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic,' ‘irreversible' and ‘rapid' has altered the public discourse, [which] is now characterized by phrases such as ‘irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate' and ‘we are at the point of no return.' ”I cannot understand Professor Mike Hulme's concerns.
Consider how many non-catastrophist views are available to a person who is completely, utterly convinced that the Earth is warming. He could conclude, for starters, that it is a good thing on balance; perhaps it's no coincidence that the Medieval Warm Period coincided with the intellectual and economic fertility of the High Middle Ages. He could believe that it is bad for the world as a whole, but good for his own country, adopting a posture of personal or national selfishness. He could look at the climate extremes in the European historical record, still clearly wider than those experienced by any living person, and deduce that mankind will adapt without large-scale organized effort. He could foresee significant pan-global costs from warming, but believe that the available solutions are even more expensive, or that other threats are more urgent.With that, Captain Contrarian must be off to bed. But in the morning I'm definitely getting a cape of some kind...
He could be an optimist who prefers to delay policy action and bet on the arrival of a simple, cheap technological solution to warming. He could decide, like some economists, that the costs of warming should be borne mostly by future generations, who are likely to be wealthier than us. He could even think that the damage we have already done is irreversible, or that future damage is practically unpreventable, and that nothing remains for us but to go on enjoying the final decades before the global kablooie.
None of these positions, not one, involves any "skepticism" about climate change or its causes. Most are reasonable enough to have already been espoused publicly by distinguished figures. They all share the same climatological premise, but schemes for planned economic contraction like the Kyoto Protocol are scarcely consistent with any of them. This ought to be a strong hint that climate catastrophism isn't a pure scientific point of view, but a crude world-picture, one that divides our species neatly into the damned and the elect, and bifurcates the future into heaven and hell. In short, a dogma. It is no coincidence that the dissenters are being called "heretics."
"But wait. Don't most scientists still believe in the perils of man-made global warming? "Sure," says Mr. McIntyre. "And most stockbrokers believed in Enron.
"He says that most scientists haven't analyzed the data, and that scientists, like everyone else, are subject to peer pressure and groupthink. "Just because everybody thinks something's true doesn't make it true."
-Wente from 2005, where she shows us that a mining consultant and an economist who confused degrees and radians are simply just more rigorous thinkers than all those stupid, gullible climate scientists.
"The other day, as I drove to my exercise class (yes, yes, I know there's a contradiction there), people on the radio were telling me to take the TTC. There was a smog alert, and I was contributing to the problem.
"The idea that people will use public transit to get to work ignores the fact that most people don't want to live near their work.
"The idea that public transit can replace the car in people's busy lives is a fantasy.
"As for lower-income people - supposedly the main beneficiaries of public transit - they have an alternative, too. It's called used cars.
"Mr. Bruegmann's comments about urban planners' war against sprawl are an apt description of the mindset behind Ontario's new master plan. 'Very few people believe that they themselves live in sprawl. Sprawl is where other people live, particularly people with less taste and good sense than themselves. Much anti-sprawl activism is based on a desire to reform these other people's lives.'
"If we really wanted to tackle smog and congestion, we wouldn't be fantasizing about massive new investments in public transit. We'd be investing in transportation infrastructure, less polluting fuels, more intelligent roads and vehicles with sensors to control traffic flows, peak-time user fees and more flexible forms of public and private transport, such as group taxis.
-Wente defending the poor, defenceless automobile against the transitistas.
"A few years ago, cities trucked their stuff to the nearby landfill and dumped it in. That was practical and cheap. In Toronto, it cost $12 a tonne. But then people got hysterical about landfills. Nobody wanted to live next to one. Environmentalists started warning that dumps were toxic. And so Canada, one of the emptiest nations on the planet, with millions of square miles of uninhabited wilderness, suddenly found it had a garbage crisis. How would we solve it? We would eliminate our garbage. We would recycle.The theme of all of Wente's environmental writing is pretty much the same. It's all just an elaborate justification to asuage any guilt she might otherwise feel about the profligate waste she is accustomed to. She has as much credibility on climate change as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
"If the garbage Nazis (oops, waste-management engineers) don’t like the way I’ve sorted our trash, they reject it. This is not only humiliating, but deeply inconvenient. Pickup for everything but organic waste has been cut back to every other week, which means that if we miss a day or flunk the garbage test, our porch looks like the village dump.
-Wente bravely confronting the recycling Nazi con artists that force her to recycle (or take her garbage to the transfer station herself, which I assume she also considers "humilliating" and "deeply inconvenient").
Can you guarantee that the climate will not change catastrophically? We, as a civilization, generally go to great lengths to forestall potential catastrophe. We build earthquake-resistant buildings, we engage in military and political posturing to forestall nuclear war, we search every person who gets on a plane to prevent a few thousand people from being killed. We're even taking steps to avert asteroid collisions. If there is even one hundredth of a percent of a chance that carbon emissions will lead to catastrophic climate change, isn't it absolutely worth it to spend the effort to prevent it?posted by breath at 4:54 PM on February 2, 2007
U.S. government scientists Friday said the long-term outlook for global warming may be more dire than suggested by this week's United Nations' report, which they say doesn't fully address the impact of clouds and melting glaciers.Global-Warming Report Gets U.S. Emphasis
Recent evidence of accelerated melting of glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic ice cap came too late to be included in the report released Thursday by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Glaciers are among the largest sources of fresh water in the world and are contributing to rising ocean levels. Rising sea levels could expose population centers bordering the ocean to more storm damage and could require evacuation in some areas. But the computer models used for the IPCC report based their predictions only on the results of heating of the existing water in the world's oceans, causing the oceans to expand and sea levels to rise, said Tom Delworth, a climate modeler for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency in charge of climate science and weather service.
The IPCC report predicts sea levels will rise by between one to two feet over the next 100 years. Mr. Delworth said there remains "much more uncertainty" over how much accelerated melting of glaciers might add to that.
A second area of continuing uncertainty has to do with the impact of clouds on climate change. Warming the ocean sends more water vapor into the air, and the resulting clouds accelerate global warming by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere and further warm the ocean. Jim Butler, deputy director of NOAA's global monitoring division, called this "a very scary feedback mechanism."
U.S. government scientists Friday said the long-term outlook for global warming may be more dire than suggested by this week's United Nations' report, which they say doesn't fully address the impact of clouds and melting glaciers.
Recent evidence of accelerated melting of glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic ice cap came too late to be included in the report released Thursday by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Glaciers are among the largest sources of fresh water in the world and are contributing to rising ocean levels. Rising sea levels could expose population centers bordering the ocean to more storm damage and could require evacuation in some areas. But the computer models used for the IPCC report based their predictions only on the results of heating of the existing water in the world's oceans, causing the oceans to expand and sea levels to rise, said Tom Delworth, a climate modeler for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency in charge of climate science and weather service.
The IPCC report predicts sea levels will rise by between one to two feet over the next 100 years. Mr. Delworth said there remains "much more uncertainty" over how much accelerated melting of glaciers might add to that.
A second area of continuing uncertainty has to do with the impact of clouds on climate change. Warming the ocean sends more water vapor into the air, and the resulting clouds accelerate global warming by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere and further warm the ocean. Jim Butler, deputy director of NOAA's global monitoring division, called this "a very scary feedback mechanism."...
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Prof. Hulme is no climate skeptic. He was the co-ordinating lead author of the chapter on “climate-change scenarios” for the last IPCC report in 2001.
posted by loquax at 7:56 PM on January 31, 2007 [1 favorite]