Gulf Of Thailand Won't Rise With Global Warming, Expert Claims

[brahmburgers]

I understand a little of what gulfsalior is saying. Correct me if i am wrong, In relation to gravitational pull the area around greenland has a volume of water levels greater than lets say australia.

So when the ice sheet melts it's pull on the ocean relaxes and the water moves away.

So in effect the sea level would fall and rise respectively in other places, Higher in the areas further away from it?

people, people, people. What's all this talk about gravitational effects? Global warming has as much to do with gravity as a tiger attack has to do with nose hair.

All indications from scientists, many of whom are based at these remote places, is that the earth is gradually warming. Ice is melting and not being replaced. When ice melts, water levels rise - and they rise wherever the water gets to. This happens regardless of how vast the water area or however slim the connecting channels.

Those who want to argue away the facts are within their rights to do so. However, I give credence to the folks who put on the rubber boots and trudge out to freezing lonely outposts to make the measurements. I rather doubt they're lying. And the numbers they report are sobering, to say the least.

To what extent the warming is caused by emissions from the one most harmful species on the planet (Man) is debatable, but the fact that the planet is warming and significant portions of ice are melting (and not getting replaced) is indisputable.

[jombom]

I understand a little of what gulfsalior is saying. Correct me if i am wrong, In relation to gravitational pull the area around greenland has a volume of water levels greater than lets say australia.

So when the ice sheet melts it's pull on the ocean relaxes and the water moves away.

So in effect the sea level would fall and rise respectively in other places, Higher in the areas further away from it?

people, people, people. What's all this talk about gravitational effects? Global warming has as much to do with gravity as a tiger attack has to do with nose hair.

All indications from scientists, many of whom are based at these remote places, is that the earth is gradually warming. Ice is melting and not being replaced. When ice melts, water levels rise - and they rise wherever the water gets to. This happens regardless of how vast the water area or however slim the connecting channels.

Those who want to argue away the facts are within their rights to do so. However, I give credence to the folks who put on the rubber boots and trudge out to freezing lonely outposts to make the measurements. I rather doubt they're lying. And the numbers they report are sobering, to say the least.

To what extent the warming is caused by emissions from the one most harmful species on the planet (Man) is debatable, but the fact that the planet is warming and significant portions of ice are melting (and not getting replaced) is indisputable.

Yes, I thought it was centrifugal forces caused by the rotation of the earth, which made the sealevel higher at the poles, than the tropics.

Seawater in the tropics is also more saline, with a tendency for fresh water to stay at the surface, and therefore be the ''first to evaporate''.

If this is true, the melting of the glaciers, will have little effect on the Gulf of Thailand.

[cyb]

I understand a little of what gulfsalior is saying. Correct me if i am wrong, In relation to gravitational pull the area around greenland has a volume of water levels greater than lets say australia.

So when the ice sheet melts it's pull on the ocean relaxes and the water moves away.

So in effect the sea level would fall and rise respectively in other places, Higher in the areas further away from it?

people, people, people. What's all this talk about gravitational effects? Global warming has as much to do with gravity as a tiger attack has to do with nose hair.

All indications from scientists, many of whom are based at these remote places, is that the earth is gradually warming. Ice is melting and not being replaced. When ice melts, water levels rise - and they rise wherever the water gets to. This happens regardless of how vast the water area or however slim the connecting channels.

Those who want to argue away the facts are within their rights to do so. However, I give credence to the folks who put on the rubber boots and trudge out to freezing lonely outposts to make the measurements. I rather doubt they're lying. And the numbers they report are sobering, to say the least.

To what extent the warming is caused by emissions from the one most harmful species on the planet (Man) is debatable, but the fact that the planet is warming and significant portions of ice are melting (and not getting replaced) is indisputable.

What you say is true Brahm.

What i think gulfsalior was trying to point out was how that extra water would be placed around the world and why. Not that gravity was in anyway the reason for the ice sheets melting.

[cyb]

Just found this makes interesting reading.

http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcglo...thaicapi10.html

[Gulfsailor]

Cyb, you understood correct. Brahm saying that global warming has nothing to do with the gravitational pull is true. However, the gravitational pull does have something to do with how the sealevel resulting from that global warming will rise on different places.

This pic displays the Antarctic, but the effect that Greenland has is the same.

Plus please do not forget that the ice melting on the northpole has nearly no sealevel rising effect as a whole, since it is floating ice. It does pull water towards it though due to its great mass. So a melting Northpole will directly result in lower sea levels on the northern hemisphere and just as much rise on the southern hemisphere and around the equator. Only Greenland and the Southpole have icesheets that are on land. Whereas there is ample proof that Greenland is melting, there is not much proof that the Southpole is. Only the antarctic peninsula is melting, which accounts for around 2% of the entire antarctic. Western antarctic does see some retreating glaciers (please see link below for some worries), but the thicknes is stable, wheras the ice on eastern antarctic is actually gaining thickness.

So if global warming continues and ice on the Northpole and Greenland continues to melt, the global sealevel will see a significant rise on average. But the local sealevels around Northern Europe and North America will actually only rise a small bit or even get less, whereas the levels around the equator and the Southern hemisphere will see a very big rise. This is information that has been known since the late nineties. But better keep it away from mainstream media as the people responsible for the global warming and thus the ones who can stop it, have least to fear from it. It is the poorer coastal nations around the equator and on South America and Africa that are doomed.

Here a link to a Nasa's Earth Obervatory item: earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=21457 with the the melting of Greenland made as an example

Here a very recent link to a doomscenaria when the Western antarctic icesheet does collapse: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090205142132.htm

No matter where the ice melts, most scenario's predict the biggest sealevel rise exactly around Thailand....

[teatree]

Actually Plachon here is a classic example of a scientist refusing to let the truth get in the way of the ACC mantra. When you read this segment:

He added that the current slight dimming of the Sun is not going to reverse the rise in global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

"What we are seeing is consistent with a global temperature rise, not that the Sun is coming to our aid."

Data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows global average temperatures have risen by about 0.7C since the beginning of the 20th Century.

And the IPCC projects that the world will continue to warm, with temperatures expected to rise between 1.8C and 4C by the end of the century.

You can clearly see the smoke and mirrors effect. Up until this point he has been using facts from his own studies, but then, when it is time to push the ACC spin. He uses 1900 as his watermark, even though the cooling should have began some time in the 1990's after the the high activity of the 1980's. And then he refers back to theoretical (much disputed) models of the IPCC to confirm his illogical conclusion. Think about it! A 0.7 degree increase during a century where the sun had been increasing in activity for 80% of the time confirms the role of the sun in heating, not the other way around.

If he was being scientific he would have given us the global temperature difference of the last 20 years which would be more in line with the observed decline in solar activity. But if he had done that, his evidence would have either proved nothing, or gone against ACC, and that is career suicide in today's science community. Without the ACC distraction these findings actually confirm what many are saying: That we have begun the slide towards a protracted cooling period, and probably this will continue for the next 200 years.

And of course you know "the truth" better than the experts who study the data day in, day out of their lives?

And of course, you can prove that the eminent astronomists quoted here are not "scientific" as you claim, and your "facts" are more trustworthy than theirs?

And your qualifications in this field are?

I can certainly question the way he uses data from a 110 year period to make a conclusion about the last 20. Especially when he arrived at a nonsensical and illogical deduction.

It's only nonsensical and illogical to those that refuse to accept that climate change is occurring; the earth is getting warmer; that it is being exacerbated by human activity; and that changes in solar activity is not as dominant an influence as some of the sceptics have been maintaining.

And by the way, sorry to be pedantic, but the word you are looking for above was "benchmark" and not "watermark". I understood with what you meant though, but disagreed with your conclusion that there is anything amiss in the astonomer's analysis. You must also bear in mind that this is only a soundbite news article and you should go to the source, before you make any hard and fast conclusions about the overall study findings. At the moment you are complaining that it does not fit in with your beliefs, not that you can prove anything wrong with the conclusions of the study.

The Earth's temperature has been stable for the past decade and has recently started to drop.

Climate change has ALWAYS been occurring.

Edited September 24, 2009 by teatree

[JR Texas]

Climate change has ALWAYS been occurring.

The Thai scientist who started all this (see http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=218735)

did not say the Gulf of Thailand will not rise under any conditions.

He did say it was either dropping slightly or not at all.

This was a curious finding but it was from data taken over the past 59 years (I think, not totally sure).

In short, what he was saying is that climate change is complex.

I am certain that if you ask him what will happen if both polar ice caps melt, he will have a different answer with regard to sea level rise in Thailand.

The entire topic is complex and is no doubt why the skeptics want to focus on it (easy to manipulate and confuse).......but here is something that might help to clarify things: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/sealevel.html

And here are is a good link for those who want to understand what real scientists are saying and doing about climate change:

http://www.realclimate.org/

Actually, a rise in sea level is serious for Thailand, but it is only one problem......there are other serious issues related to climate change that will impact food production, mass migration, the economy, etc.

[teatree]

The Mainstream media is slowly waking up:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips...-scam-ctd.thtml

Yet another scientific scandal has come to light which knocks another whopping crater in the already shattered theory of anthropogenic global warming. Eight peer-reviewed studies, which for years have played a significant supporting role behind the IPPC’s claims of AGW, have been shown to be fraudulent.

As Andrew Orlowski reports in The Register, the issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy in order to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures. The papers in question incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia:

This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret -- failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open -- and Yamal's mystery is no more. From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

A small ‘but closely knit’ number of scientists all used the misleading Yamal data to claim that today’s temperatures were unprecedentedly hot. Orlowski notes:

Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper by Keith Briffa at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia asserted that that the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa relied on just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.

Three years later Nature published a paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes based on temperature reconstructions which showed something similar: warmer now, cooler then. With Briffa and Mann as chapter editors of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this distinctive pattern became emblematic - the ‘Logo of Global Warming’.

But as the heroic mathematician Steve McIntyre – who helped demonstrate the fraudulence of the even more seminal AGW claim of the ‘hockey-stick curve’ of historic global temperatures – has finally managed to winkle out, their premise was false and their claim was untrue.

Ross McKitrick, who worked with McIntyre in exposing the ‘hockey-stick’ fraud, here emphasises the way in which the AGW industry concealed the truth about the tree-ring data:

Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in prominent journals using Briffa's Yamal composite to support a hockey stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend the Hockey Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would question the Yamal data.

Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre's repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored...Whatever is going on here, it is not science.

And yet:

When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails -- as it did here?

Indeed. What price any ‘scientific’ assertions, such as anthropogenic global warming, when the system of peer-review on which it rests its authority is as bent as a corkscrew? The scandal not only shows once again that AGW is a fraud but shoots to pieces the integrity of scientific peer-review. In other words, a huge story. So huge that, as far as I can see, not one mainstream UK media outlet has touched it – and according to blogger Bishop Hill:

The reaction of the Guardian - to delete any mention of the affair from their comment threads - has been extraordinary.

It’s no use. The seas are rising over their heads.

[JR Texas]

Any person wanting scientific info. on the relationship between tree ring observations and past climate change can go here (for starters):

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...vities-updated/

The number of studies using tree rings to reconstruct past climate conditions is immense.......even if one is not correct, that does not mean all are incorrect.

And there is also a huge volume of ice core data..........the peer review process works.......it is the best system we have.

Corrections are often made.........science moves forward based on reason and not emotion.

Rarely does any scientist deliberately mislead........why?

Because the peer review system is constructed to detect that type of research and presenting misleading data--doing so deliberately--is a career ending act.

Now........what is the topic?

[RubbaJohnny]

Thank you JR

peer review and the scientific method is why we all admire Texas

However the land of the free will rise above such problems with a combination of insouciance,hyperbole and the last minute fix,perhaps aline of used plastcic or ejaculted tourists across the Gulf.

Should 14m rise occur the Lopburi marina will hove into view and the full 70m contour will allow Esan babes to bathe on their own beaches.

For a more thorough and detailed analysis there are real scientists at work see for instancelike the hadley centre

Met office research

While the rate and place of change is debateable like the dendrochronology cited above the methodologies are there.

[RubbaJohnny]

You may also subscribe to the UK Ministry of Defence newsletter on climate change

Updates

[teatree]

The great global warming scare is over — sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end'

By Lawrence Solomon

National Post

The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. You may not know this yet. Or rather, you may know it but don’t want to acknowledge it until every one else does, and that won’t happen until the press, much of which also knows it, formally acknowledges it.

I know that the global warming scare is over but for the shouting because that’s what the polls show, at least those in the U.S., where unlike Canada the public is polled extensively on global warming. Most Americans don’t blame humans for climate change — they consider global warming to be a natural phenomenon. Even when the polls showed the public believed man was responsible for global warming, the public didn’t take the scare seriously. When asked to rank global warming’s importance compared to numerous other concerns — unemployment, trade, health care, poverty, crime, and education among them — global warming came in dead last. Fewer than 1% chose global warming as scare-worthy.

The informed members of the media read those polls and know the global warming scare is over, too. Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.” His colleague at The Washington Post, Andrew Freedman, does his best to revive public fear, and to get politicians to act, by urging experts to up their hype so that the press will have scarier material to run with.

The experts do their best to give us the willies. This week they offered up plagues of locusts in China and a warning that the 2016 Olympics “could be the last for mankind” because “the earth has passed the point of no return.” But the press has also begun to tire of Armageddon All-The-Time, and (I believe) to position itself for its inevitable attack on the doomsters. In an online article in June entitled “Massive Estimates of Death are in Vogue for Copenhagen,” Richard Cable of the BBC, until then the most stalwart of scare-mongers, rattled off the global warnings du jour – they included a comparison of global warming to nuclear war and a report from the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, to the effect that “every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325-million people seriously affected, and economic losses of US $125-billion.” Cable’s conclusion: “The problem is that once you’ve sat up and paid attention enough to examine them a bit more closely, you find that the means by which the figures were arrived at isn’t very compelling… The report contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data.”

The scientist-scare-mongers, seeing the diminishing returns that come of their escalating claims of catastrophe, also know their stock is falling. Until now, they have all toughed it out when the data disagreed with their findings – as it does on every major climate issue, without exception. Some scientists, like Germany’s Mojib Latif, have begun to break ranks. Frustrated by embarrassing questions about why the world hasn’t seen any warming over the last decade, Latif, a tireless veteran of the public speaking circuits, now explains that global warming has paused, to resume in 2020 or perhaps 2030. “People understand what I’m saying but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’” he told The New York Times this week.

And why should they believe anything that comes from the global warming camp? Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme. The only thing that’s scary about the science is the frequency with which doomsayer data is hidden from public scrutiny, manipulated to mislead, or simply made up.

None of this matters anymore, I recently heard at the Global Business Forum in Banff, where a fellow panelist from the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change told the audience that, while she couldn’t dispute the claims I had made about the science being dubious, the rights and wrongs in the global warming debate are no longer relevant. “The train has left the station,” she cheerily told the business audience, meaning that the debate is over, global warming regulations are coming in, and everyone in the room — primarily business movers and shakers from Western Canada — had better learn to adapt.

Her advice was well accepted, chiefly because most in the room had already adapted — they are busy trying to cash in by obtaining carbon subsidies, building nuclear plants, or providing services to the new carbon economy.

My assessment for those wondering where we’re at: Yes, the train left the station some time ago. And it is now off the rails.

Financial Post

[email protected]

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...nd-is-near.aspx

[teatree]

Thank you JR

peer review and the scientific method is why we all admire Texas

However the land of the free will rise above such problems with a combination of insouciance,hyperbole and the last minute fix,perhaps aline of used plastcic or ejaculted tourists across the Gulf.

Should 14m rise occur the Lopburi marina will hove into view and the full 70m contour will allow Esan babes to bathe on their own beaches.

For a more thorough and detailed analysis there are real scientists at work see for instancelike the hadley centre

Met office research

While the rate and place of change is debateable like the dendrochronology cited above the methodologies are there.

Is this the same Met Office that predicted a 'BBQ summer' in the UK this year? Anyone who spent the summer in the UK will probably find that quite funny.

This organisation boldly said in a recent statement that a 4c rise would occur in the coming decades.

They can barely predict more than three days in advance let alone 50 years. Utterly ridiculous. How anyone can give any credence to a group that is so wrong so often is beyond me.

[JR Texas]

The great global warming scare is over — sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end'

By Lawrence Solomon

National Post

The nonsense just posted by Lawrence Solomon is just that......nonsense. He is known for misleading the public and has been exposed as doing so........another non-scientist posing as a scientist.......and TC keeps posting comments from these psychos........this is getting boring.

Try reading the scientific literature on the subject instead of getting crap off the internet and posting it.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lawrence_Solomon

Now, once again........what is the subject of this thread? Oh.........the debate is about whether or not the water in the Gulf of Thailand will rise or not due to climate change.

Where did this come from? From this man: Suphat Vongvisessomjai

What did he actually say as opposed to what most of the posters think he said: http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=218735%29

[swifty5x5]

whatever sound logic seems to be applied here is flawed. the seas are indeed not level. differences up to two meters exist... that is a fact whether you believe it or not.

The fact is that when you have a rise in sea level the sea rises all the same. It doesn't matter if the sea is not level.

[animatic]

Centrifugal force...

uh isn't it stronger toward the center,

and farther out from the center of a spinning ob?

Which would be the oceans at the equator, more than at the poles...

The only times when Science was driven by polls it has been wrong.

Science is either :

well done and correct, or not enough is not known

and based on what IS known, considered correct for the moment,

Or badly done and plain old WRONG.

Politician's are poll driving and alternately lobbyist drive,

and are usually wrong for both those reasons.

Edited October 4, 2009 by animatic

[hhgz]

"the seas are indeed not level. differences up to two meters exist... that is a fact whether you believe it or not."

Oh, please. No one seems to have considered the Panama Canal, which has a body of water on either side - and the differences in the water height is considerably more than 2 meters, believe it or not. Perhaps the gravitational forces on one side of the canal are greater than the other, and that's why the water depth is greater on one side. Yeah, sure. Oh, I know, the centripetal - or is it centrifugal - force on one side is causing...

[teatree]

Alarming Advance Continues – Artic Sea Ice

According to models Arctic sea ice will consume Washington, D.C. in only 89 years.

http://hypsithermal.wordpress.com/2009/10/...-artic-sea-ice/

Great parody of the scare tactics used by the AGW doomsayers.

[teatree]

Cooling off: time to take a different look at global warming

by Tom Russell chief meteorologist at CBS

Hey, the weather is changing! Somehow, just in the last week or two, things have gotten rap idly cooler.

Oh wait, it’s called fall. Seems to happen every year around this time. Funny how weather seems to work in cycles.

We know we had a cooler and wet ter than average summer. But did you know the June-August 2009 tempera ture for the whole U.S. was below av erage?

Yeah, despite the heat waves in the West and Southwest, the North east had its eighth wettest June-to-August on record.

Does this prove there is no global warming? Of course not, no more than melting ice caps prove it does exist.

Weather changes. It fluctuates minute by minute, hour by hour, weekly, yearly, by decade and by century. Those of us forecasting the stuff daily know what a fickle mistress Mother Nature can be.

So, when I see humans trying to blame weather cycles on something other than nature, I get incensed. I don’t know what’s more arrogant: Saying we caused it or saying we can stop it.

Truth is, we can’t keep a stray shower from ruining your picnic, so how are we going to stop global weather patterns?

Ironically, the same people who tease me about not getting the seven-day forecast correct totally believe in the faulty science that says we can predict the weather 100 years from now.

When this global warming debate comes up, I always start with the premise “What is the ideal global temperature?” We only have 120 years of accurate records to tell us what “normal” is. We’ve been warmer in the past and we’ve been cooler in the past.

In his book “Climate Confusion,” Dr. Roy Spencer says attributing most or all of the current warmth to mankind is a statement of faith, because it assumes something we don’t know: How much natural climate variability has there been during the same period of time?

And then I continue with the basics. Despite what you’ve heard, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It’s kind of important to our survival. Research now shows that CO2 does not drive temperature but rather temperature drives CO2. Adding twice the CO2 does not double the effect. The initial tons of CO2 matter, but adding more has less and less effect. Imagine painting a window with black paint: The first coat does most of the work, the extra coats don’t matter much.

And even though I’m a big skeptic of anyone who says they can give you an accurate global temperature, satellite data show the world has not warmed since 2001, even though carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased.

The biggest change in this debate over the last 10 years isn’t temperature. It’s the change in the marketing from global warming to climate change. Climate change is a much better moniker, but for what? An agenda, of course.

So get ready, after the politicians put health care to bed, cap and trade is next up on the agenda. Imagine, making carbon a currency. That’s pretty ingenious, but it has nothing to do with the climate.

http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.s...take_a_dif.html

[JR Texas]

Found this and it looks relevant to the subject:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4555709,00.html

How will natural gyres impact the Gulf of Thailand? No idea.

Will these natural gyres change due to climate change........no doubt they will.

So, what we are experiencing now will likely change in the future if we don't do something to correct this global challenge to the quality of life on the planet.

It is a very dangerous game we are playing.....nature seems to find a way to fight back (six major extinction events already..........maybe one more to come if we don't change our behavior).

Addressing something off topic that one poster just said...........looked at over geological time (millions/billions of years), the earth has been warmer (oceans levels much higher and less snow/ice and more tropical climates) and cooler (ocean levels lower, more snow/ice, and less tropical climates)........in terms of geological time, we are in the middle of these two extremes but closer to a cooling period.

In fact, in about 50,000 years we should be in another Ice Age (under normal circumstances). So what? By then who knows where are species will be or what we will be like.

What matters is what is happening NOW. What is happening now is that in spite of approaching a natural cooling cycle we are warming up.

Why? Because of human activities.......largely the result of embracing the philosophy of BIG OIL.

[churchill]

Thai villagers in bid to halt disappearing coast

BANG KHUN THIEN, Thailand (Reuters) - Some villagers use bamboo fencing. Others plant mangroves. And some do both to fight back against erosion transforming centuries-old communities on the Gulf of Thailand.

Only a half hour drive south of Bangkok, coastal regions already show alarming signs of erosion: electricity poles, once on land, are submerged in parts of Bang Khun Thien, a district on the outskirts of Bangkok.

Kongsak Lerkngam, who lives in Bang Khun Thien and works on an erosion protection initiative in six coastal provinces, said about 1,140 acres of village land have disappeared in the past 30 years at a rate of between 1.2-4.6 meters a year.

Caused by a combination of expanding fishing industries such as shrimp farms and global warming that has raised sea levels, the erosion has wiped out many of the mangrove forests that once offered a natural buffer on the Gulf of Thailand coast.

"The forest is gone," Kongsak said of the mangroves.

"In the past, erosion was not this intense but now the erosion is very intense," he added.

Most of the affected regions were cleared of mangroves by shrimp farms, a big business in Thailand that brings in $2 billion in exports a year.

Some villagers are fighting back with varying degrees of success. In 1999, about 46 villages began planting mangroves in an attempt to revive the ecosystem of trees and shrubs which once formed a coastal barrier to protect their communities.

Their goal: stop the ripples caused mostly by fishing boats from reaching the water's edge where many homes are built

continued at http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMo...0091006?sp=true

[JR Texas]

Thai villagers in bid to halt disappearing coast

BANG KHUN THIEN, Thailand (Reuters) - Some villagers use bamboo fencing. Others plant mangroves. And some do both to fight back against erosion transforming centuries-old communities on the Gulf of Thailand.

Only a half hour drive south of Bangkok, coastal regions already show alarming signs of erosion: electricity poles, once on land, are submerged in parts of Bang Khun Thien, a district on the outskirts of Bangkok.

Kongsak Lerkngam, who lives in Bang Khun Thien and works on an erosion protection initiative in six coastal provinces, said about 1,140 acres of village land have disappeared in the past 30 years at a rate of between 1.2-4.6 meters a year.

Caused by a combination of expanding fishing industries such as shrimp farms and global warming that has raised sea levels, the erosion has wiped out many of the mangrove forests that once offered a natural buffer on the Gulf of Thailand coast.

"The forest is gone," Kongsak said of the mangroves.

"In the past, erosion was not this intense but now the erosion is very intense," he added.

Most of the affected regions were cleared of mangroves by shrimp farms, a big business in Thailand that brings in $2 billion in exports a year.

Some villagers are fighting back with varying degrees of success. In 1999, about 46 villages began planting mangroves in an attempt to revive the ecosystem of trees and shrubs which once formed a coastal barrier to protect their communities.

Their goal: stop the ripples caused mostly by fishing boats from reaching the water's edge where many homes are built

continued at http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMo...0091006?sp=true

Interesting post that also reveals another major problem: overpopulation and the need to increase food reserves...............cutting down forests to raise shrimp.....we are on a collision course with nature.........climate change plus overpopulation = disaster (or at least massive social conflict between rich and poor)

[teatree]

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/an-inc...f-1225783524958

THIS mad global warming scare could at last be over. And all thanks to just 10 trees in Siberia.

Unreported in any newspaper here - and how typical that is - is a startling challenge to the central claim underpinning this greatest scare of our lifetime.

That claim is that not for 1000 years and more has it been this hot - and, of course, it's all man's fault.

So unprecedented is this heat said to be, and so dangerous, that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says it threatens to destroy the ancient Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu.

Never mind that the world has cooled, not warmed, these past eight years.

Never mind that the predictions of doom by professional alarmists such as Al Gore have also gone bung. Total hurricane energy has fallen, not risen. Sea ice has increased, not decreased. Arctic ice has grown these past two years, not shrunk.

Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.

End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.

In the face of all this counter-evidence, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong responds that even so: "What we do know is that 11 of the hottest years in history have been in the last 12 (years)."

But Wong's never-hotter claim is based on the "hockey stick" developed by a tight group of about 50 climate scientists, mostly in Britain and the United States.

"Hockey stick" refers to the shape of the trend lines they produce on graphs, showing world temperatures flat for up to 2000 years before a sharp lift last century to give the hockey stick its blade.

How did they figure the globe's rising temperature for those centuries before the invention of the thermometer?

One of the two main ways has been by checking the growth rings of bristlecone trees. Wide growth rings were generally taken to mean warm years, and narrow ones cold and thus bad for growth.

American climatologist Michael Mann ran this data through a mathematical formula and voila: the hockey stick.

How influential his stick was. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ran it big, and got Mann to help write a scare chapter of its third report.

Small problem. A retired statistician, Stephen McIntyre, and Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics, proved that Mann's maths was so dodgy that you could feed in almost any data and still produce his hockey stick.

Their findings were confirmed by the Wegmen report, written by mathematicians and scientists for the US Congress, noting also that bristlecones weren't good at measuring temperatures anyway.

Climate alarmists refused to give in, arguing that other reconstructions of past climate still showed this "hockey stick".

This time their most influential "proof" came from Ken Briffa of the University of East Anglia, who used tree ring data taken from Russia's Yamal Peninsula.

Briffa, too, was made an IPCC Lead Author, and in the past nine years at least eight other scientific papers used his work.

McIntyre, puzzled, asked Briffa to release his raw data for checking. Briffa refused. Top scientific journals such as Science and Nature, which had cited his work, failed to uphold their own rules to make him do so.

B UT last year Briffa and colleague Fritz Schweingruber again published a paper with the Yamal data, this time in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. And this time, when McIntyre asked for the data, the journal got Briffa to hand it over.

A year later he has done so, and McIntyre swiftly found that the trees he relied on were astonishingly few - just 10 by 1990. Why had more not been used to produce a more reliable sample?

McIntyre found that Briffa could have used 34 more tree ring cores from Yamal that he'd actually referred to in other papers, and which had been collected by his colleague Schweingruber himself.

McIntyre then checked what difference that bigger sample of tree rings would have made, had Briffa added them to his sample of just 10. Answer: the bigger sample showed no warming at all over the past century, with temperatures today lower than in medieval times. The past 12 years don't include 11 of the hottest in history.

Briffa, who is ill, has not said why he did not include Schweingruber's trees but denies "cherry-picking" samples.

It's too early to say if his hockey stick is now broken, but not too early to say that the global warming theory is unproved.

Rather the reverse. The big scare now is not that we're heating the world to hel_l, but that so few journalists and scientists refuse to see the growing evidence that we're not.

[teatree]

Climate fears based on lies, Calgary told

Think-tank adviser says CO2 not a threat; Warming science called flawed

BY GINA TEEL, CALGARY HERALD

CALGARY - As far as Lord Christopher Monckton is concerned, the debate on global warming is over as the science linking rising CO2 levels to calamitous environmental consequences is fatally flawed.

New studies say the warming to be expected from the doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) between now and 150 years from now is going to be one-sixth of previous UN Climate Panel estimates, according to Lord Monckton, a one-time journalist, businessman and former policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

"Half a degree Celsius in 150 years. Not much to write home about," he told reporters in Calgary on Thursday.

The forecast comes as a result of new methods of measurements, as science has moved away from computer modelling to direct measurements of what's going on in the atmosphere, he explained.

Monckton, currently chief policy adviser for the Science and Public Policy Institute, was in town to present his Apocalypse Cancelled: The Overheated Hype behind Global Warming presentation to a lunchtime crowd of about 300.

The global warming scare is having catastrophic effects as it's leading to the creation of public policy that ultimately harms people, he said.

He noted that prior to a ban on the agricultural pesticide DDT, used to stop the spread of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, 50,000 people a year were dying of malaria worldwide.

At the instigation of environmental pressure groups, DDT, "with no more scientific basis than they have now on the global warming front," was banned, Monckton said.

As a result, the number of deaths from malaria skyrocketed to one million per year. The situation persisted for 40 years until the ban was reversed by the World Health Organization, he told the crowd.

(In May, the UN and the WHO announced a plan to combat malaria while reducing the reliance on DDT and phasing it out by 2020 due to "long-standing and growing concern" over its use.)

"How long it's going to take this (global warming) scare to end, I cannot foresee. That it will come to an end is now certain because the science is in, the truth is out and the scare is over," he told reporters.

Monckton cited the "biofuels scam," as another misfire related to the climate change scare.

The bent for biofuels has taken one-third of U. S. agricultural land in the past two years alone out of food production, doubling the world food prices and causing havoc in Third World countries.

At the close of his presentation, Monckton said he trusted he'd done a good job of exposing the lies behind the climate change scare, and hoped Prime Minister Stephen Harper would "do the right thing" at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein, on hand for the presentation, said he, too, is concerned about the science, generally.

"I think the prime minister, going into Copenhagen, I'm worried that the science is being used as a smokescreen for the real issue, which is health care," Klein said.

Roger Gibbins, president of the Canada West Foundation, said the collapse in the economy has given people pause to step back a bit from the climate change debate.

"The real question is, as the economy rebounds and we're back into climate change debate, will there be any marked change over the last year? I think that's a very open question," he said.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Climat...8176/story.html

[JR Texas]

There are people who seem to know absolutely nothing about the subject of climate change that keep posting here..........whatever, a good place to start is here:

http://www.realclimate.org/

[teatree]

Worrying Signs of Climate Doom

Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years.

Satellite data used to measure the seasonal growing and shrinking of sea ice area in the Southern Hemisphere make a stark realization clear: Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years. As a planet and global community, we need to prepare for the worst. The time to dither and argue is over – the time to act is now.

I call on the leading governments of the world, the United Nations, NGOs, environmental activists, and uber-informed stars of popular culture to meet in a central location (I suggest Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi) to deal with this crisis. They must develop an innovative plan to shepherd the other 6 billion people of the Earth to more environmentally sensitive life styles – before it’s too late.

People must be taught to temper their greedy desire for luxuries such as electricity, safe shelter, food and clean water, and long life expectancies. People need to learn how to overcome the archaic ambition of working to make a better life for their children. Better yet, they should just stop having children.

If you do not understand the treacherous environmental precipice upon which we are poised, let the unalloyed data speak for itself. Brace yourself – five of the six years with the greatest Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent have occurred in just the last decade! If this historically unprecedented* trend continues, we are doomed.

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/10...ern-hemisphere/

[brahmburgers]

Worrying Signs of Climate Doom

Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years.

Satellite data used to measure the seasonal growing and shrinking of sea ice area in the Southern Hemisphere make a stark realization clear: Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years. As a planet and global community, we need to prepare for the worst. The time to dither and argue is over – the time to act is now.

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/10...ern-hemisphere/

Hello Teatree, It's not so clear as to what the '...extreme yearly sea ice extents....' mean. It's assumed it means; retreating ice that doesn't get replaced (Antarctica is a desert in terms of precipitation), but may actually be construed to mean an increase in ice(!)

Is the text your own words, or is it someone else's? If another person's report, the author should be credited. I haven't yet clicked on the link, so that may clear things up.

UPDATE: Ok, I just now read the link. It's a tongue in cheek assessment that proposes we earthlings should now worry about global cooling. Seriously though, the graph on the website (which is questionable veracity) concerns 'sea ice' (ice which is floating in the freezing water). That sort of ice is a lot different in terms of climactic modeling, than ice sheets covering Antarctica. For that, and other reasons, the article is pretty much bogus, as shown by its shouting headline and sub-title.

Edited October 8, 2009 by brahmburgers

[teatree]

Worrying Signs of Climate Doom

Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years.

Satellite data used to measure the seasonal growing and shrinking of sea ice area in the Southern Hemisphere make a stark realization clear: Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years. As a planet and global community, we need to prepare for the worst. The time to dither and argue is over – the time to act is now.

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/10...ern-hemisphere/

Hello Teatree, It's not so clear as to what the '...extreme yearly sea ice extents....' mean. It's assumed it means; retreating ice that doesn't get replaced (Antarctica is a desert in terms of precipitation), but may actually be construed to mean an increase in ice(!)

Is the text your own words, or is it someone else's? If another person's report, the author should be credited. I haven't yet clicked on the link, so that may clear things up.

UPDATE: Ok, I just now read the link. It's a tongue in cheek assessment that proposes we earthlings should now worry about global cooling. Seriously though, the graph on the website (which is questionable veracity) concerns 'sea ice' (ice which is floating in the freezing water). That sort of ice is a lot different in terms of climactic modeling, than ice sheets covering Antarctica. For that, and other reasons, the article is pretty much bogus, as shown by its shouting headline and sub-title.

No, it isn't saying that we should now worry about global cooling. It is satire on the dishonest methods used by man made global warming believers. Its claims are ridiculous but no more so than those I have heard in the media, like the prediction that the Arctic is just a few years away from melting away, amongst others.

The methods highlighted in the article are used all the time to hype man made global warming , get everyone scared and get them making decisions with their R-complex rather than with their cerebrum.

[brahmburgers]

Its claims are ridiculous but no more so than those I have heard in the media, like the prediction that the Arctic is just a few years away from melting away, amongst others.

The Arctic is melting. Maybe or maybe not 'a few years away', but quite likely a decade or two from melting away altogether. At least it's likely there'll be an ice-free Arctic Ocean for some weeks per year in the not-too-distant future.

Similar for the C shaped Island of Greenland (it's rocky part is C shaped).

It's not a black and white scenario. It's not like, "Oh, it's not going to all melt away in a few years, so what's the big fuss!"

These things happen over time, in increments, and the best scientific data shows some very serious developments - toward significant % of Arctic and Greenland ice cover melting, and not getting replaced.

Antarctic may be faring a bit better comparatively - but still calving significant amounts of ice that are not being replaced.

The fake 'news item' which tried to be cute witty and funny, wasn't.

Edited October 9, 2009 by brahmburgers

[AleG]

Worrying Signs of Climate Doom

Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years.

Satellite data used to measure the seasonal growing and shrinking of sea ice area in the Southern Hemisphere make a stark realization clear: Five of the six most extreme yearly sea ice extents ever measured in the Southern Hemisphere have occurred in just the last 10 years. As a planet and global community, we need to prepare for the worst. The time to dither and argue is over – the time to act is now.

I call on the leading governments of the world, the United Nations, NGOs, environmental activists, and uber-informed stars of popular culture to meet in a central location (I suggest Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi) to deal with this crisis. They must develop an innovative plan to shepherd the other 6 billion people of the Earth to more environmentally sensitive life styles – before it’s too late.

People must be taught to temper their greedy desire for luxuries such as electricity, safe shelter, food and clean water, and long life expectancies. People need to learn how to overcome the archaic ambition of working to make a better life for their children. Better yet, they should just stop having children.

If you do not understand the treacherous environmental precipice upon which we are poised, let the unalloyed data speak for itself. Brace yourself – five of the six years with the greatest Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent have occurred in just the last decade! If this historically unprecedented* trend continues, we are doomed.

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/10...ern-hemisphere/

That's as it may be, but the important factor is that the land ice mass of Antartica is shrinking, that's ice that either gets shed into the ocean (via glacier flow) at a higher rate, thus possibly explaining how the ice sheet expands, or melts and flows as water into the ocean. I think it's pretty well understood that changes on floating ice sheets like the Artic are irrelevant to the level of the oceans (although they are representative of a rising global temperature), on the other hand, shrinking, land locked ice masses being dumped into the oceans as in Greenland and Antartica do increase sea levels. If all of Antartica's ice cover would melt and drain into the oceans (not very likely that ALL of it would, thankfully!), sea levels would rise 80 meters.