On 22/04/2008, at 6:50 PM, Wayne Eddy wrote: > > >> it may trigger glaciation, but no where near as fast as portrayed in >> the movie, "the day after tomorrow". > > I didn't think it would & I didn't say it would. > I'm not even saying that it is certain that the gulf stream will > shut off.
No, it's not. But it's happened before, and it's weakening now... > > > I wouldn't recommend buying property in Vanautu, Bangladesh, New > Orleans or > Venice, but the only thing I am really sure of is that nobody knows > exactly > how human caused carbon dioxide emissions will effect the world. No, not exactly. But climate scientists have a better idea than most, and the greenhouse properties of different C02 levels and other greenhouse gases (CH4, water vapour...) are well known. We know how much gas is absorbed in water, we know the carbon cycle, we know how much C02 we're emitting, we know how much C02 is used to build forests. Worth listening to people that work in the field... > > > Even the seven day weather forecast is never 100% percent accurate. Completely different things. Climate and weather aren't the same at all. They're wrongly conflated. Melbourne is the same climate as Cyprus, where I used to live. But the weather is totally different. There are very good reasons why it's hard to predict the weather accurately more than a few days ahead, and there are ways of working out how accurate those predictions are. But long term trends in climate are easier to understand. How those trends will affect local conditions is very hard to know or understand, but the global averages are moderately well understood, and climatology's predictions have been pretty good - I saw a comparison between the predictions made in Hansen's 1988 paper for the following twenty years and the actual data between 1988 and 2007... not bad at all. http://opinion-nation.blogspot.com/2008/04/climate-science-predictive-power.html So yes, there are uncertainties, but we have lower and upper ranges for our estimates. Charlie No Longer A Working Scientist, But I Do Play One On TV _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
