"Global warming."

[American Voice]

This is my first original thread.

I have lived in the same place, mostly, since 1955. "Normal weather" is the average occurrence over the preceding thirty years. I have been an avid gardener here since about 1981, which means I have been particularly attentive to weather patterns. Add this to relatively passive awareness--will we play baseball today, and I delivered newspapers for four years--and I have some credible knowledge of weather patterns, where I live. Urban sprawl (with all of the heat-absorbing concrete that entails) might account for local pattern changes I have registered. But, I know it's bigger than that. It's not about some few degrees of higher ambient temperatures during hot-periods in the summer. What happens when you substantially increase the energy within a closed system? You get significantly altered weather patterns, in this case. Does anyone else here see this. I'm probably older than most of you, but I can clearly see it. I took Dr. Arnfield's climatology course in college. Am I alone with my concern?

 

[Andem]

You are not alone with your concerns, American Voice. The people who see the biggest and most noticable changes in the planet's weather patterns is those who live in the north. Lakes and rivers that were one major passageways are not freezing anymore, and it's even leaving some people in Canada's north stranded, since it's a very sparsely habitated area.

There is major ice meltage in the northern part of the hemisphere, and it doesn't end there. Just the melting of ice in the north creates a shockwave effect throughout the world. California will see mudslides, there will be more hurricanes, and just more unstable weather.

I have noticed the milder winters in my area, and also experienced the smog of the great lakes regions, which makes for very unbarable summers.. SMOG + HUMIDITY + HEAT + ALLERGIES = No good.

It's happening all over the world, and I can name more changes in the weather systems if I had more time! But you get the idea.

 

[Andem]

By the way, welcome to the forums

 

[LuShes]

Oh my, don't even get me into weather right now.

Western Canada here, is just crazy. Usually every spring we would be near floods, from winter melt offs in the mountains. But now the river is almost all dried up. (I already live in a semi-desert climate)

Last year and this this year, we have been getting alot of light showers, but alot of lightning storms, and starting incredible forest fires here. Usually we never have storms here...but wow last year, I have never seen such a site in my life.

Now that my job consists of talking to people all over the Unites States on a daily basis. (their weather also effects my job, ie: fried NICS/modems from tornadoes/lightning storms) And I do hear alot of concern from Customers over the phone on how much the weather has been changing in the just past couple years.

American Voice: your not alone, and also I welcome you to the forums as well.

 

[Dingbat]

I guess we could be thankful that oil prices are going up in a way. It will push the market to produce more environmentally friendly products which will save us. Unless you believe global warming is a natural phenomenon

 

[Reverend Blair]

You certainly aren't the only one, American Voice. I'm pushing forty and this is not the weather I knew as a kid. I get sunburns more easily now, bad ones. It's either too wet or too dry, too hot or too cold.

I grew up going to one of two farms almost every weekend. When I talk to the farmers and retired farmers in those areas now, they have no doubt that it has never been like this in their memories. Some of them are in their eighties. Very few are younger than fifty.

Global warming is very real and what we are experiencing now is just the beginning of its effects. This is going to hurt us very badly.

 

[vista]

I am surfing through the back pages and saw this thread.

I have been following this subject as well - it is all interelated. FWIW, here is a page of articles on climate change...

http://www.newsgateway.ca/by_topic_climate_change.htm

"Earlier hopes of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 are simply untenable, given the current rate of growth in emissions and the lack of a concerted international climate policy.

In fact, many climate experts have begun to argue a more realistic approach might focus less on trying to mitigate climate change and more on simply adapting to it. Some adaptation is inevitable, given that warming is already occurring and won't stop for decades, no matter what we do. Low-lying and coastal areas will suffer some degree of flooding. Disease will spread, crops will fail, forests will burn, and to pretend otherwise is foolish. In the short term, we have no choice but to adapt.

In short, our energy technology is being outpaced by the very economic success it engendered, and the ramifications are alarming. Gerry Stokes, the director of the U.S. Joint Global Change Research Institute, "we're going to need a set of energy-related technologies that basically emit nothing into the atmosphere" -- technologies that, Stokes and his colleagues readily admit, are nowhere near becoming feasible and to all intents and purposes haven't even been imagined.

Stokes continues: "Most of the people who worry about the climate problem have seriously underestimated how hard it will be. We are going down a path that, if we stay on [it], will see us triple the amount of CO2 that we emit by 2100. If we're going to avoid that, we need to have a set of energy technologies in place, and these are technologies that are not going to just magically appear. We need to start working on them now."

To put this in perspective, by 2050, assuming that we have managed to keep concentrations of CO2 below 550ppm, more that half our emission reductions will be coming from energy technologies that do not yet exist."

Paul Roberts, The END of OIL: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
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"It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the atmosphere and sending quantities of greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate change hasn't been increased in the past century.''

John Christy, director of the University of Alabama's Earth Systems Science Center, former climate change skeptic