Because of that, we really don't know what is required to shift the balance. Can a butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil affect the weather in the US?
A totally runaway greenhouse effect is probably not possible.
Er, isn't that a bit contradictory? Just to add a random bit of information to the "5 years ago in Nature" style discussion, here's a piece on my favorite little kicker in all of this, thermohaline circulation.
Arctic Thawing May Jolt Sea's Climate Belt nytimes.com
Buried in there, some recent information on the random current fluctuations that happened to have opened up the North Pole ice just now:
Could an influx of fresh water brought about by global warming make
that happen again? Recent studies lend the question new urgency. In one,
reported in the December issue of the journal Geophysical Research
Letters, scientists analyzed data collected by sonar aboard nuclear
submarines and found that the floating ice cover of the Arctic Ocean has
become about 40 percent thinner than it was two to four decades ago.
In another, reported in the current issue of the journal Science,
researchers led by Dr. Ola M. Johannessen of the Nansen Environmental
and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway, used satellite data to
measure the area of the Arctic ice sheet.
They found that the perennial ice cover had shrunk by 14 percent over
the last two decades.
The third study, by nine researchers headed by Dr. Konstantin Y.
Vinnikov of the University of Maryland, analyzed data from five different
sources and found that sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere as a whole
had decreased by about 7 percent in the last 46 years.
No sense worrying about it, though. With all people out there hard at work discounting every individual piece of evidence, who cares about the big picture?
I recommend that everybody here who doesn't believe global warming is happening sign the petition at oism.org. That way, the next time the Wall Street Journal does an editorial page article "debunking" global warming, your voice will be counted among the "scientists" too.
Cheers, Dan. |
