U.N. Report on Climate Change

[AstusAleator]

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7009189585

http://www.ipcc.ch/

The UN has released a seemingly comprehensive and conclusive report on global warming. See the links for more details.

Discuss

[h2so4hurts]

My prediction: The current administration will dismiss and ignore all of this scientific information

[AstusAleator]

Sounds reasonable

[MrMistery]

admitting climate change as a major problem would mean Al Gore was right, wouldn't it?

[mith]

Global warming deniers are almost all related somehow to big corporations.

However this report comes out at a bad time. The UN report on AIDS just got hailed as being inaccurate, reporting estimates way higher. Some claim it is for funding reasons.

[alextemplet]

How can anyone seriously deny global warming? Even in my short lifetime I can remember when it used to be a lot colder. Only about a decade ago, Louisiana used to experience several hard freezes every winter; now we're lucky if we have even one!

[AstusAleator]

Well, that's a particular type of case that people like to use to argue against the percieved threat, since temperatures and weather patterns are known to fluctuate over years and generations. Scientific evidence supports the hypothesis that weather patterns occur in cycles; cycles within cycles even. So a person arguing against your personal proof (which I am not) would simply claim that the changes you have observed are part of a natural weather cycle. Furthermore so-called global-warming does not necessarily result in hotter temperatures across the globe, but in some areas can have a cooling effect, and in others have no effect at all.

But, I would venture that of all the US states, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas are probably the most likely to feel the warming effects of global climate change. It's even more likely that those states will (and have been) experience more severe weather

So your experience most likely does have something to do with the reality of global warming.

Here's an excerpt from the summary of AR4

"It is very likely that over the past 50 years: cold days, cold nights and frosts have become less frequent over most
land areas, and hot days and hot nights have become more frequent. It is likely that: heat waves have become more
frequent over most land areas, the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most areas, and since
1975 the incidence of extreme high sea level3 has increased worldwide. {1.1}"

[AstusAleator]

PS: if anyone didn't bother going any further in the links I already posted, here's what you missed. The summary of AR4, with all the interesting facts and statistics.

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... yr_spm.pdf

[alextemplet]

Hm, more severe weather, huh? I guess that explains Hurrican Katrina.

[AstusAleator]

Oh but wasn't there all sorts of punditry about a hurricane of similar intensity and destructiveness around the beginning of the 1900s?

[alextemplet]

Yes there was, although I forget the year. It virtually destroyed the entire New Orleans aristocracy, who at the time were all vacationing on Grande Isle, right in the hurricane's path.