It seems that the evidence for Global Warming just keeps slowly piling up --
the Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods being the most recent evidence
this year -- yet still, our wasteful, industrialized society continues to
pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with wild abandon.

We are slowly smothering the Earth by our own hand. It is like a person who
smokes their entire life, and then in their old age when lung cancer strikes
them down, they just shrug their shoulders and say "Oh, well" . . . or they
try to sue the tobacco company for dishonesty.  :)

It will be interesting to see what the attitude towards Global Warming will
be like ten years from now. Will there still be so much skepticism?


In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming

By JUSTIN GILLIS - NYT

August 14, 2010


The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then
Oklahoma -- and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the
lives of 20 million people.

The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and
eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat
and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical
record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question
of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.

The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a
single word: probably.

"The climate is changing," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at
the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. "Extreme events are
occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity."

He described excessive heat, in particular, as "consistent with our
understanding of how the climate responds to increasing greenhouse gases."

Theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature
heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense
droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves.
Scientists and government reports say the statistical evidence shows that
much of this is starting to happen.

But the averages do not necessarily make it easier to link specific weather
events, like a given flood or hurricane or heat wave, to climate change.
Most climate scientists are reluctant to go that far, noting that weather
was characterized by remarkable variability long before humans began burning
fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with
climate change, the answer is yes," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher
with NASA in New York. "If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved
it, the answer is no -- at least not yet."

In Russia, that kind of scientific caution might once have been embraced.
Russia has long played a reluctant, and sometimes obstructionist, role in
global negotiations over limiting climate change, perhaps in part because it
expected economic benefits from the warming of its vast Siberian hinterland.

But the extreme heat wave, and accompanying drought and wildfires, in
normally cool central Russia seems to be prompting a shift in thinking.

"Everyone is talking about climate change now," President Dmitri
A. Medvedev
told the Russian Security Council this month. "Unfortunately, what is
happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate
change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions
in the past."

Thermometer measurements show that the earth has warmed by about 1.4 degrees
Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began pumping
enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, into the
atmosphere. For this January through July, average temperatures were the
warmest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
reported Friday.

The warming has moved in fits and starts, and the cumulative increase may
sound modest. But it is an average over the entire planet, representing an
immense amount of added heat, and is only the beginning of a trend that most
experts believe will worsen substantially.

If the earth were not warming, random variations in the weather should cause
about the same number of record-breaking high temperatures and
record-breaking low temperatures over a given period. But climatologists
have long theorized that in a warming world, the added heat would cause more
record highs and fewer record lows.

The statistics suggest that is exactly what is happening. In the United
States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record
low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the
trend is toward a warmer climate.

Climate-change skeptics dispute such statistical arguments, contending that
climatologists do not know enough about long-range patterns to draw
definitive links between global warming and weather extremes. They cite
events like the heat and drought of the 1930s as evidence that extreme
weather is nothing new. Those were indeed dire heat waves, contributing to
the Dust Bowl, which dislocated millions of Americans and changed the
population structure of the United States.

But most researchers trained in climate analysis, while acknowledging that
weather data in parts of the world are not as good as they would like, offer
evidence to show that weather extremes are getting worse.

A United States government report published in 2008 noted that "in recent
decades, most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days
and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days.
Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense."

The statistics suggest that the Eastern United States may be getting wetter
as the arid West dries out further. Places that depend on the runoff from
spring snow melt appear particularly vulnerable to climate change, because
higher temperatures are making the snow melt earlier, leaving the ground
parched by midsummer. That can worsen any drought that develops.

"Global warming, ironically, can actually increase the amount of snow you
get," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "But it also means the snow
season is shorter."

In general, the research suggests that global warming will worsen climate
extremes across much of the planet. As in the United States, wet areas will
get wetter, the scientists say, while dry areas get drier.

But the patterns are not uniform; changes in wind and ocean circulation
could cause unexpected effects, with some areas even cooling down in a
warmer world. And long-established weather patterns, like the periodic
variations in the Pacific Ocean known as El Nino, will still contribute to
unusual events, like heavy rains and cool temperatures in normally arid
parts of California.

Scientists say they expect stronger storms, in winter and summer, largely
because of the physical principle that warmer air can hold more water vapor.

Typically, a storm of the sort that inundated parts of Tennessee in May,
dumping as much as 19 inches of rain over two days, draws moisture from an
area much larger than the storm itself. With temperatures rising and more
water vapor in the air, such storms can pull in more moisture and thus rain
or snow more heavily than storms of old.

It will be a year or two before climate scientists publish definitive
analyses of the Russian heat wave and the Pakistani floods, which might shed
light on the role of climate change, if any. Some scientists suspect that
they were caused or worsened by an unusual kink in the jet stream, the
high-altitude flow of air that helps determine weather patterns, though that
itself might be linked to climate change. Certain recent weather events were
so extreme that a few scientists are shedding their traditional reluctance
to ascribe specific disasters to global warming.

After a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed an estimated 50,000 people,
the worst such catastrophe for that region in the historical record,
scientists published detailed analyses suggesting that it would not have
been as severe in a climate uninfluenced by greenhouse gases.

And Dr. Trenberth has published work suggesting that Hurricane Katrina
dumped at least somewhat more rain on the Gulf Coast because the storm was
intensified by global warming.

"It's not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to
global warming, or is it natural variability," Dr. Trenberth said.
"Nowadays, there's always an element of both."



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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