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Chron.com | Congress told Earth's climate on hot streak

A global climate study commissioned by the US Congress just concluded that the mean temperature is now at its highest point in the past 400 years. Further, it might be at its hottest point in the past 1,000 years, the study said.

Chron.com | Congress told Earth's climate on hot streak: "'Let me add that we recognize the globe is warming,' [Larry] Neal said. 'And we also recognize that the hockey-stick graph asserts a cause that seems plausible and which many have found convincing."

Objections to scientific claims that global warming seem to have been collapsing in the past year.

The one set of data that indicated that temperatures were not rising over the past couple decades came from a satellite that had a technical flaw in its design.

With that discrepency removed, the picture of climate change became seriously tilted in favor of the global warming view.

There does not seem to be much support for the idea that global cooling is going on now.

If mankind were to intentionally set out to raise the temperature of the planet, the things we would probably do would be:

1. Burn a lot of stuff as fuel, releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere.
2. Destroy vast tracts of vegetation, especially trees, eliminating them as carbon-dioxide carbon scrubbers and, as a bonus, releasing their trapped carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
3. Increase the amount of animal life in the biomass of the Earth by large scale animal husbandry/farming (preferably cows, which produce lots of methane, another greenhouse gas).
4. Built vast urban structures out of concrete/stone/iron criss-crossed with black asphalt roadways to collect and trap the Sun's heat that reaches the Earth.
5. Rapidly increase the industrialization of the most populous countries on earth (India [1 billion people] and China [2 billion people]) so fuel consumption not only continues to rise - but sky rockets over just the course of a couple decades, and never abates. Societies stop using energy over their dead bodies once they start.

On the bright side, at least we are thorough.

posted by John Collins @ 6:57 AM