Katrina

[Andromeda18_]

There is evidence that shows Global Warming is very real. No more than 2 weeks ago I watched a documentary on the subject. Global warming is altering the planet's climate in ways most people don't even imagine and what surprised me the most was that everything those scientists were talking about was what they talked about in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". Have to say the movie's producers did their homework.
Our climate depends a lot on the warm water currents that run in the ocean, I learned this back in the 9th grade. The only reason why Europe isn't a rock of ice is the Gulf of Mexico's warm current. It so happens this and other currents are regulated by specific cold water points in the northern Atlantic where water from the glaciars converges. These points work as regulating buttons. Too much or too little cold water in those points and the warm water currents will be disrupted. Once that happens bye-bye warm weather, hello ice age. The problem is that due to global warming the glaciars are melting at an incredible speed and there's already too much cold water converging into those points in the northern Atlantic. This, among other things, is causing significant changes in our climate. Scientists know for a fact that there has been an abnormal amount of storms, floods, droughts (a region in southern Portugal is already turning into a desert because of frequent and abnormal droughts), etc and that their intensity and frequency is also abnormal, studies all point to global warming as the reason. Earthquakes have nothing to do with this, eathquakes happen for completely different reasons and there hasn't been an abnormal number of earthquakes.
As far as an ice age goes scientists expect that in 100 years Europe and Northern America will be once again covered in ice, but for normal reasons. Our planet has undergone several ice ages in the past and the occurrence of another one is expected. The problem is that we're speeding things up and if we don't do something about it, it might come sooner than we expect. Studies of previous ice ages show that certain conditions can make the climate change much faster than it normaly would. Normaly, a continent such as Europe would take quite a long time to be covered in ice but, as I said before, under abnormal conditions it can happen in the space of a year, which in my opinion is scary. Call me a tree hugger but this is the only planet we have and it's a beautiful planet, if we don't take care of it nobody else will and when the time comes we'll all be going down with it.
I must say I'm glad the world's oil reserves won't be lasting much longer. Humans will then be forced to turn to more environment friendly forms of energy.


If you still don't believe in Global Warming read this:

The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first rigorous study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modelling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and another by James Hansen, at nasa?s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had considered in any detail the effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Still, the results of their work were alarming enough that President Jimmy Carter called on the academy to investigate. A nine-member panel was appointed, led by the distinguished meteorologist Jule Charney, of M.I.T.

The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, or the Charney panel, as it became known, met for five days at the National Academy of Sciences? summer study center, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its conclusions were unequivocal. Panel members had looked for flaws in the modellers? work but had been unable to find any. ?If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible,? the scientists wrote. For a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels, they put the likely global temperature rise at between two and a half and eight degrees Fahrenheit. The panel members weren?t sure how long it would take for changes already set in motion to become manifest, mainly because the climate system has a built-in time delay. It could take ?several decades,? they noted. For this reason, what might seem like the most conservative approach?waiting for evidence of warming in order to assess the models? accuracy?actually amounted to the riskiest possible strategy: ?We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.?

It is now twenty-five years since the Charney panel issued its report, and, in that period, Americans have been alerted to the dangers of global warming so many times that volumes have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem. (The National Academy of Sciences alone has issued nearly two hundred reports on global warming; the most recent, ?Radiative Forcing of Climate Change,? was published just last month.) During this same period, worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions have continued to increase, from five billion metric tons a year to seven billion, and the earth?s temperature, much as predicted by Manabe?s and Hansen?s models, has steadily risen. The year 1990 was the warmest year on record until 1991, which was equally hot. Almost every subsequent year has been warmer still. The year 1998 ranks as the hottest year since the instrumental temperature record began, but it is closely followed by 2002 and 2003, which are tied for second; 2001, which is third; and 2004, which is fourth. Since climate is innately changeable, it?s difficult to say when, exactly, in this sequence natural variation could be ruled out as the sole cause. The American Geophysical Union, one of the nation?s largest and most respected scientific organizations, decided in 2003 that the matter had been settled. At the group?s annual meeting that year, it issued a consensus statement declaring, ?Natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures.? As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking; those in Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly it has been estimated that they will vanish entirely by 2030. The oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between day and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to. These are the warning signs that the Charney panel cautioned against waiting for, and while in many parts of the globe they are still subtle enough to be overlooked, in others they can no longer be ignored. As it happens, the most dramatic changes are occurring in those places, like Shishmaref, where the fewest people tend to live. This disproportionate effect of global warming in the far north was also predicted by early climate models, which forecast, in column after column of fortran-generated figures, what today can be measured and observed directly: the Arctic is melting.

This was taken from http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050425fa_fact3 if you want you can read the whole article which is very intersting (as well as extense).