Latest on Global Warming.

[ezra]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^sorry above was response to this ^^^^^^^^^

I guess I've been guilty of being in the denial camp but it's pretty hard to ignore the facts. Even I have to admit that the typical winter we had when I was a kid (I no longer am) and the typical winter of today do not seem to be the same, particularly when it comes to length of season. Years ago we never even thought about the snow being gone until mid-April. Now it's iffy by the second week in March. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The thing that strikes me now is how extreme the winter warm spells can be and quickly a warmup can wipe out several weeks of slow buildup to good riding conditions. Here in the southern part of the state where the trails often cross cultivated land, I've seen excellent riding conditions blown away in 2 -3 days of warm weather and rain. Very frustrating.

I can also remember a few yrs with less than 2 rides all season as a kid no snow some times in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s just the way it is

 

[Hoosier]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^sorry above was response to this ^^^^^^^^^
I can also remember a few yrs with less than 2 rides all season as a kid no snow some times in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s just the way it is

I grew up in Northern Indiana where the lake effect hits. I seem to remember better snows back then also, but we have a picture from the Christmas my Dad bought an 83 or so Bravo. It is of my 3 brothers and I all sitting on the Bravo - in T-shirts as it was almost 60 degrees that day. Of course one day is a very small sample size, but so is 30 years of climate history.

I sure hope global warming is just a way to get Al Gore ridiculously rich so he can live in huge mansions and fly all over the place warning us, but how will we ever know? And if it is real, how will we know if man is causing it? And if man is causing it, how do we know if we can really reverse it? And if we can, should we? Are the cons of global warming worse than the pros? And what is the cost to fix it? And is that the best way to spend our limited resources? The estimates some of these scientists throw out there could easily wipe out several diseases and solve global hunger. Someone has to do a cost/benefit analysis on all of this. Perhaps a longer growing season isn't all bad. I am just tired of hearing the science is "settled" and that action is necessary, when we have no answers to all of the above. The USA sure as heck can't afford a global carbon tax or whatever else is the answer right now.

I'm not convinced the green movement isn't just another way to implement global governance now that the USSR and socialism failed. But that might just be the conspiracy theory. I sure hope global warming is a fraud, but my main reason for being concerned about it is the fact I love the snow.

 

[skiroule]

hmm mid April I don't remember many if any mid April snows in the MN metro I am trying to think way back I can remember riding my new ACT 110 I got for my B day in 4/11/1979 in shorts and t shirt.my whole childhood I wanted to have a ski b day party and never could always closed. I think everything was bigger and longer than it really was

Sorry Ezra, I wasn't very clear on this. The mid-April comment was referring to my early days on the Canadian border, ay.

 

[motor_slut]

Global Warming as stated by Al Gore is not proven yet. Probably never will be. Global warming as a natural cycle of the Earth's climate warming and cooling over tens of thousands of years is more likely.

 

[misty_pines]

My thought is that his article doesn't touch on any controversy about global warming, climate change or whatever it's called now and the fact that some climate scientist claim is caused or greatly accelerated by human activity. Just temp observations and that the earth has warmed up a very slight bit. As John and others so very well indicated, the earth has always had a changing climate. That is how it works. Great discussion though and gets us thinking.

 

[skiroule]

A bit of weather nostalgia. This is a old black and white photo taken on our farm in northern MN in mid-March, 1966. The quality is pretty poor but it was almost 50 years ago. My brothers' 59 Merc in the foreground doesn't look too bad but the combine in the background is half buried. Definitely rideable snow.

Both of us being teenagers, it was always important for us to get into town so we did a lot of shoveling back then. If we wanted to go, we shoveled.

 

[bearrassler]

I like the old picture Skiroule, but growing up a couple of hours west of where you lived, we had our worst blizzard of recorded history in early March of 1966. The snow was all but gone by the 1st of March and then the blizzard hit, so the snow was great until late March that year. In 1996 we could ride until early May and when MN fishing opened in mid May they were still ice fishing on Lake of the Woods, we have years with low snow, great snow, and average snow, and it has been that way since I can remember. I think that almost everyone thinks that we had more snow when we were young but a 2 foot high snowbank looks like more when you are 4 feet tall than when you are 6 feet tall, and if you watch the vintage sledneck video on another thread you can see that the sleds we rode in the 60's and 70's only needed about 8" to be over the bumper deep. The climate is always changing but whenever we have a weather event in the US it seems that the media tries to make a connection to climate change and I don't buy that.

 

[skiroule]

Your memory is better than mine BR. I remember the storm but I don't remember our conditions prior to the storm.

I guess if I think back on it, the claim was often made that the low snow years in the mid 70s (among other things) wiped out most of the snowmobile manufacturers.

I suppose that in addition to being short, the longer than average winters could have made it appear that there was more snow than was really the case.

Slowly but surely, you guys are debunking my position. Well, I've been wrong before.

 

[xcr440]

All this global warming comes down to 2 points.

Either you disagree/don't care, and you just forget about it.

OR

You agree, and think we should do something about it. This is the tough one, what exactly are you going to do about it? At what temperature should we set Mother Nature's thermostat at? And then, at what cost?

Personally, I'm with the first option, don't care.

 

[lenny]

All this global warming comes down to 2 points.

Either you disagree/don't care, and you just forget about it.

OR

You agree, and think we should do something about it. This is the tough one, what exactly are you going to do about it? At what temperature should we set Mother Nature's thermostat at? And then, at what cost?

Personally, I'm with the first option, don't care.

I think it is a bit more than just that but agree for the most part. Since we do have concrete evidence of a wide variation of climate dynamics over the eons and of recent years, it lends credibility, concerning a warming trend (and a great amount at that) to what we are observing. It is a huge jump to claim man's interference in this. It is irresponsible to take the liberty, waste time, resources and tax payer money to develop a plan of action. Actually we have seen some poor behavior some time back on the news about GW guys messing with the numbers or something of that matter. I mention this to show how driven some are. I mean come on,,,, There is no doubt an agenda and that is clearly shown by the action these guys took being devious and promoting their agenda with falsification. After all, who took the initiative to bring this GW to light? GW opposition does not disagree we are observing a warming trend but to conclude this observation as a picture as they have painted it is not science at all, especially since we have proof of this occurrence before we burned fossil fuel. I can only speculate as to what their objective actually is but I can tell you if left unchecked, we will suffer by all the money, resources, time, regulations that will come into place.

The best course of action would be to continue to observe, test and be certain we are being responsible in a reasonable manner. We cannot allow fear to cloud the issue. It sounds all real nice and politically correct to do as DCSNOMO says but it's still unreasonable to act as he stated without any evidence to support the claim. Allow science to determine the facts and than act accordingly, in the mean time live responsible and continue to refine our abilities to keep the environment clean.

 

[arcticgeorge]

Well said Lenny..........I would like to add that John Coleman the founder of The Weather Channel said fluctuation of the Earths temperatures has occurred naturally in the past, so one degree or so warmer??? woo... Tom Skilling said that the Pendulum can swing the other way and the cold snowy years of the late 70,s early 80's could return.

 

[mride460]

How did the ice age end I guess its been getting warmer for how many of millions of years?

The last ice age was actually a result of the last time the earth went through a warming cycle.. Didn't you see the movie?? lol

 

[G]

Climate change has been going on since there was climate. It warms up - it cools down - it does what it does. Anyone that thinks there is no such thing as climate change is a fool. Has man contributed to the current cycle? There is really no way of telling. We could be in a natural warming cycle. It could make absolutely no difference how much of whatever we are pumping into the atmosphere. Nobody can prove otherwise. There are not records that go back far enough to make any rational judgements. If man were wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow the earth would 'heal' itself from whatever damage man did to it very rapidly. Things might look a little different and some species would be extinct. So what? New forms and variations of life would evolve. It is all 'change' which man really has very little to do with. These Whack-jobs would have you think that if they ( the Whack-jobs) had been around when there were Dinosaurs we would still have Dinosaurs. Elephants do not claim to have an effect on the climate. Nor do Wasps or Tadpoles or Condors. Only man in all his arrogance claims the power to alter climate. Oh, and a little $ to grease the whole process never hurts.

 

[mride460]

Bring on da snow!!!!!

 

[Jonger1150]

This thread is a tad old, but I wanted to add something.

I'm 32 years old and the first 20+ years of my life we almost never built snowpack in southern Michigan. We would get a garden variety storm of 6-10 inches. It would last about 1-2 weeks and melt away. Once 2000 hit I started noticing the increasing amount of snow-on-snow events as I called them. We now keep snow on the ground long enough for successive snows. This is a pretty bad example of that type of winter, but this is a wide scale anomaly regardless.

 

[alindstrom3]

i believe weather almost always averages itself out everyone has already forgot that last year was a record setting year for snow in wi at least where i am from. and this year Europe and Alaska have set records for cold and snow! i know we only have records from a hunderd years ago or so but how can you say we had so much snow back then when we set records you can deny fact!

 

[frnash]

"Coming Out of the Climate Change Closet"

From Global Warming.org, January 27, 2012: Coming Out of the Climate Change Closet, by Matt Patterson, quoted here in part:

So much for consensus.

For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.

That was always bunk, of course. For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it. There just wouldn’t be any debate. No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism. That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.

 

[frnash]

Earth is not warming.

Another article by Matt Patterson,
this from the Washington Examiner, January 25,2012 (?): A really inconvenient truth is Earth not melting after all, quoted here in part:

A really inconvenient truth is Earth not melting after all

Earth is not warming. According to Big Green enviros, only Luddites
and lunatics would believe such a ludicrous statement.

Well, now government scientists must be added to the long list of the so addled. Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horse's mouth, a new report from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies titled "Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects:"

"Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998."

 

[frnash]

"Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years"

From Mail online (the Daily Mail, London), January 12,2012:
Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again), quoted here in part:

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

* * *
​

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

 

[frnash]

To steal a phrase from Bill Clinton …

To steal a phrase from Bill Clinton … "It's the sun, stupid!"

From the National Geograpic News, February 28, 2007 (!): Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says, quoted here, in part:

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.

* * *
​

"Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov said.