Scribbler

So - can we look forward to a White Easter instead of a White Christmas? :lol: Hang on - they were forecasting a White Easter for this year not long ago! We're there already! :lol: Happy Christmas!!! :lol:

For those of you who like graphs and charts to back up their argument, try - http://www.junkscience.com Scroll down to and click on - Climate Quick Pick That will take you to Climate Proxies and to a list of charts – take your choice! :lol: Or check out the ‘Mixed Text and Thumbnail’ option - http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.htm There's over 60 climate related graphs – from Beijing Stalagmites to Burgundy Grapes - from Greenland to Tasmania. :lol: Enough evidence to prove or disprove anything about the climate!

Aaaaggghhh! You beat me to it!!! It would have to land fairly gently - not with as much impact as Pete's rocket! However......the heat in the asteroid would warm the waters; melt the ice; etc, etc. Can't win!! :blink:

If you try to blow up a huge rock (say 1 km diameter or larger) even the broken bits will be lethal. And if they're radioactive as well..........! If it just splits in half, for example, then you end up with two huge impacts. :blink: I'm not saying that reducing it to much smaller bits wouldn't be a good idea but it might not be that simple. Pushing it aside might be easier, assuming that we could get to it in time.

Rollo - click on that link and drop something on Inverness to get your own back! :blink:

To sum it up: Kaboom!!! Bye bye world as we know it! :blink:

A potentially fascinating thread, Snow-man. We know so little about such wandering lumps of rock that there is always a chance of one hitting us. People such as NASA do search (as you point out) for such hazards – but they are constantly adding new asteroids to their list of Near Earth Objects. http://www.impact.arc.nasa.gov - Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards. Their searches are certainly not all-encompassing either. Asteroids are hard to see, and detecting those as small as a hundred metres in diameter (the ones capable of levelling a city) may take time, even with a more sophisticated search effort. Nor would such a search warn us of the rarer but potentially more lethal long-period comets: an early-warning system capable of detecting those in time might require that sensors be deployed beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It has been said that a long-period cometary sun-grazing asteroid wouldn’t been seen until it was merely a few weeks away. Not a bad (fiction) book on the subject is Moonfall by Jack McDevitt - the story of such an asteroid (a large one) impacting on and shattering the moon. For a bit of fun, check out: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/ Drop your own asteroid on the earth!

I think that in retrospect my wording was somewhat ambiguous. Of course the sun is more influential overall but we at the present are causing more (influential) changes than the sun has done in many a long eon. I’m trying to imply that while the sun continues much the same for millennia, we haven’t remained the same – our energy output levels have changed enormously and have simply shot up. Still badly put but perhaps you can now see what I meant.

TAUNTON, Somerset Average Maximum Temperature = 10.4C (50.7F) Average Minimum Temperature = 1.8C (35.2F) Mean Temperature = 6.08C (43.0F) Warmest Day (31st) = 16.1C (61.0F) Coldest Day (12th) = 3.3C (37.9F) Warmest Night (25th) = 10.0C (50.0F) Coldest Night (3rd) = -6.7C (20.1F) Ground Frosts = 6 Air Frosts = 11 Days of Snow = 1 Days of Lying Snow = 0 Rainfall Total = 54.5 mm Rainy Days = 15 Highest Wind Gust = 64 kph (40 mph)

Hello ffO (and Penguin, etc ) That’s right ffO – wait until we’re all exhausted and then pop up, fresh as a daisy!! You say that the…… “Earths ecology, atmospheric composition and climate”……are all……” in critical balance but highly responsive to……the incident energy received from the Sun.” I do feel that while they may be responsive to the sun, our influence, one way or another, now considerably outweighs the sun’s influence. I obviously accept that without the sun we simply wouldn’t be here but it is us who have caused the sharp rises in CO2, pollution generally, temperatures, storms, deserts, precipitation, sea levels, etc. Equilibrium may finally arrive but in the meantime we’re doing our best to make this place totally uninhabitable. The resultant instability ISN’T going to be very nice – and IS something that we should be trying to do something about. Otherwise, as you say, “it may exceed the ability of humans……to survive.” The hockey stick blade is growing too fast – soon it will outgrow the handle.

It is not only logical but sensible to keep to calendar month periods, isn't it? :lol: I accept that extremes will often be hidden in calendar periods but if we do without that, we might as well do without the 24 hour system too. I would suppose that the CETs could be broken down into week-long periods (for extremophiles) but to do a 30 day rolling period would not only cause confusion but would open the records to many who would say....."but if you include/remove such-and-such a date then...." It takes several months for the Met Ofice to finalise the monthly CETs as it is!

lol Lots of brownie points for us from the Mods, eh?!!

Hi trevw I was looking for information regarding 'residence' of pollutants in the atmosphere and I came across http://www.ecobridge.org – click on Global Warming and explore from there. I've come across a few better sites but it has quite a number of interesting points. I rather liked (? ?) its statement as follows: "CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere can range from 50-200 years. Once it enters the atmosphere, there is very little that can be done to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." A bit presumptive? :lol: They also say: "Keep in mind that in the last 10,000 years, the earth's average temperature hasn't varied by more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit." It's sobering to think that we're only raising the temperature of the earth by tenths of degrees and yet that is enough to cause the equivalent of global panic . As you also said trevw – a super discussion – lots of biased comments but no bad language! Thanks fellas! B)

As a practicing proofreaded I should have known better too! :lol:

Hi Penguin – nice one! Pardon my repetition – I was just trying to cover all angles! Didn't Devonian's link yesterday to Wikipedia provide a suitable graph? I'm pleased to see that you've used the words SIMPLE and COMPLICATED. The whole thing is simple, I think. Simple in that we're the cause of the problem and since we won't go away, we're stuck with it. But it is also complicated in that the individual causes are very complex (as you imply) and no-one can, for certain, point a finger at any one aspect. :lol: CO2 is getting most of the blame – justifiably IMO, but, as you say, there may well be other factors that we haven't yet taken into effect. Hi Pete You say......."such miniscule amounts of the gas"...... but even 0.3% is one hell of a lot of gas. Someone will no doubt tell me just how many tonnes of CO2 that is.

Every chance! We're just at the end of 10 (well, nine actually) days of depressions coming from the West. I was always led to understand that our weather tends to come in approximately 10 day cycles – 10 days of westerlies followed by an anticyclone for another 10 days. Old folklore/wives tale, etc. :lol: Sometimes the pattern is broken when one system overcomes the other and so we can get longer periods of settled or unsettled weather. Regardless of high-tech forecasts I am therefore quite confident that, since we've just had the weasterlies, the next 10 days or so will be dominated by anticyclonic weather which will encourage frosts and northerly or easterly winds – which are inevitably cold at this time of year. So I'm with you Mr Data – cold start – warmer later. The question is – will it warm up in time for Easter?

Oops! :lol: You're totally right. It felt odd when I typed it - but my spellchecker didn't complain!

Look at the causes – why have CO2 levels risen by so much and so quickly? What do the following have in common? CO2 emission. Massive worldwide population increase. Greater worldwide industrialisation. More (mis)use of energy. Burning-off of tropical forests. Pollution generally – atmospheric and oceanic. Massive use of fossil fuels. Destruction of natural environmental CO2 sinks. And others……….etc. All these things are virtually new to the last hundred years or so and they have all been accelerating. It’s a bit like compound interest – the increase is on top of last years increase, etc, etc. One way or another production of CO2 is being increased by mankind and that in turn boosts the level of CO2 because the natural environment just can’t absorb the overdose. CO2 isn’t the cause of global warming – it’s the result of man’s abuse of the planet. There will soon come a point at which things begin to fail – the only real question IMO is - when?

This is part of this thread – so please don’t move this post! I am currently deciphering and writing up old diaries that my mother (who was one of the original Met Office WAAF girls during the war) kept. The earliest diary is 1935 and they make for fascinating reading – but that’s another story! To the point………… My ancient mother (born in 1923) still has an extremely good long-term memory and she said yesterday that this year reminds her of when she was at school and soon after she had started work – when she seemed to remember spring being very late. I checked back through the records last night and found 1936 and 1940 – two years that seemed to match her thoughts. Those years started: 1936 – 3.7, 2.6 and 7.2 followed by 6.3 for April 1940 – minus 1.4, 2.6 and 6.0 followed by 8.7 for April The final year CETs were 9.32 and 9.05. What I am therefore implying is that a cold first few months followed by a “less than” average April tends to lead to a below average year. Perhaps that is a logical deduction but it doesn't seem to hold true if April is warmer than average. No doubt the likes of Mr Data will now come up with a string of evidence to refute my claim! Mind you I haven't yet gone through all the last century with a fine toothcomb!

April in Taunton last year was warmish and wet. I recorded 160 mm of rain and despite a daytime average of 16.6C, I only recorded two days over 20C with three frosts. My local CET equivalent was 10.45. I can’t see this April being so benign, so, allowing for regional adjustments, I’m going for a National CET for April 2006 of 8.4

Wall-to-wall with daffodils here. Guess what flowers the kids will give on Mother's Day? Was Mother's Day timed to match the daffs or is it the other way round?

Yup! All that CO2 was sequestered in coal, oil, timber, etc, quite safe and sound and out of the way. Now we've changed it's location and pumped it into the atmosphere.

You’ve taken me back a few years! As a teenager I used to play village cricket for Blackheath, not far south of Guildford in Surrey. Somewhere around 1959, 1960 or 1961 our Sunday afternoon match in June was interrupted by a genuine blizzard. It snowed real snow for an hour or more until there was sufficient lying snow to cover a cricket ball – I know because we lost one until it melted later that day! We threw snowballs and made several snowmen and the match was abandoned. The following weekend we played cricket again and cooked in the hot sun – we all commented on the change. I don’t remember if it was warm beforehand – but looking at the historical records I can’t find a particularly cold June around then - although I stand to be corrected if my dates are wrong. A ‘switch around’ of the first order.

Hi BFTP It’s not just CO2, is it? CO2 levels were quite a lot lower before the Industrial Revolution. Nature managed quite well then. Then we started adding some CO2 – and nature still coped ok. But nowadays our output has increased at a rate and to the point that nature just can’t manage. AND…..we’ve also added in a whole load of other pollutants and GW factors. But I don’t think that the world’s CO2 would have stayed constant without out interference. There’ll always be natural ups and downs – many of them possibly as a result of cycles and causes that we’re still not aware of. I guess that I’m simplifying things too much, but it just feels that way to me. We (the world as a whole) were going along alright – until (as usual) we started to overdo things!

I think that it's done the damage because we're adding to the CO2 at too fast a rate. A gradual increase might be absorbed by natural processes but they can't handle our extreme rate of output.