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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1389)	7/31/2005 10:45:46 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24210

Global Warming: How Hot? How Soon? the thing that i find kind of puzzling in most discussions of global warming and temperature increase, is that it seems that people don't really talk about sun intensity and the effect which it has on the environment. for instance, many of us up in my area have noticed that, even on the very coldest winter days, the bright winter sun now melts icicles almost as fast as if you turned a hot blow dryer on them. when i was a kid, icicles would often form during the night as water melting off of roofs would freeze overnight. the resulting icicles would often stay in place for days, and in fact, they would often build up in size each night, until there were monster-sized icicles hanging from the edge of the roof. now, i'd be hard-pressed to find icicles hanging from the edge of any of our roofs here at the farm -- even though they did so about 25 to 30 years ago. if I see one, it's usually melted and gone by about mid-morning. what has changed? nothing about the house is different. the outside air temperature in winter is about the same. as far as i can tell, it is the intensity of the sun that seems different -- it seeming to make anything that it shines on very hot. we noticed the same thing while down east recently. even though the temperature was much cooler than at home, one afternoon, we went hiking and came back to the van and went to do up our seatbelts, and the metal buckles were so goddamned hot that i actually burnt my thumb on it. what in the hell is going on??? this week, i was out looking for crayfish in a local creek. this is a place i have been to many times over the years and i consider it a sort of special place. very clean water and full of aquatic life. i get there and the water levels are the lowest i have ever seen -- and this in a "wet year" here. the crayfish were covered in a thick, black, organic guck, and the "guck" was loaded with thread-like white maggots or similar worms. i have never seen anything quite like this before. only thing i can say is that, i hike up on the Shield, which is mainly thin forested soil over precambrian granite. well, something i've been noticing when hiking up there... started maybe 3 years ago (to a noticeable degree), is that everything seems to be getting dried out... basically "cooked"... especially some kinds of trees, but also the mosses and lichens. some of the mosses that used to be nice and green are now all wiry and scratchy and dead and feel like a scouring pad if you touch them. very creepy. anyhow, it may not have to get that much "warmer" in temperature before we start seeing major ecological change. my guess is that it's already happening in most places only not that many people notice what's going on around them as they don't pay very close attention to the environment. ~croc