On another thread someone mentioned that they noticed that it seemed to be getting hotter more often where they have lived for many years. I have lived in the Virginia Beach - Hampton Roads / Tidewater area of Virginia for most of my life. I remember when I was a kid in the late 1970's and 80's, we would receive at least 1 or 2 snowfalls every winter. This seemed to stop by the late 90's. Now in my area we only receive snow once every few years and our winters are considered mild. I am NOT a global warming person however I do believe what my college professor explained and showed us with data collected using ice core samples, etc. that it is a natural cycle of the Earth's weather to go through periods of cooling and warming especially as the Earth and the Sun's solar system orbit the Milky Way galaxy. Has anyone experienced or seen cooling in an area ??? God Bless !!!

There are so many moving parts to what makes the temperature what it is in any given year or decade, that the simplified claims from the alarmists don't work for me.
That doesn't mean I have closed my mind to any credible discussions, just that I don't buy their claims of things like the east coast being under water in X number of years.
Just go back to the late 90's and early 2000's and see what people like Al Gore were claiming that 2020 would look like.

Its called climate change for a reason and its a real thing.

Earth gets cold and freezes, then it warms up and thaws out. Been happening a lot longer then we've been around.

The earth has undergone ice ages many times throughout its geological history. The last significant one happened while humans were alive and they certainly were not contributing to the overall carbon emissions. What made the ice melt? I want clean air and water like everybody, but the claims of the earth is dying are crazy. Climate change alarmists have adopted climate change as their religion. They have an accepted dogma of beliefs that they believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is hard to have an honest discussion with such people. Yes, over the course of my time on this rock, I have experienced climates that changed. Some years were hotter, some years were colder. In the mid 1970s, Time magazine printed an article about the upcoming ice age, two decades later they were printing articles about global warming. We are learning more and more about solar storms on the sun and their impact on Earth every year. I don’t have the answers, but I would be willing to have an honest discussion. The climate worshipers are incapable.

“It is impossible for a man to learn something he thinks he already knows” - Epictetus

Anthropogenic climate change is a superstitious cult.

quote:

Originally posted by SpinZone:
Its called climate change for a reason and its a real thing.

Earth gets cold and freezes, then it warms up and thaws out. Been happening a lot longer then we've been around.

This ^^^^^

There's no question we're warming up. The question is why. Some want to blame it on man's activities. Others claim it's a natural thing and man's activities have little or no bearing on it. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in-between?

All I know is this: It makes good economic sense to conserve to the extent reasonably possible. On a personal level: It costs money. On a more macro level: There's only so much oil, natural gas, and coal in the planet. When it's gone, it's gone.

By happy coincidence: Conserving energy also minimizes any possible contribution, if any and no matter how small, to the warming.

Beyond that I don't worry about it.

Regardless of what we believe is causing it, there are irrefutable signs that global temperatures are rising and that (strangely enough ) is causing the climate to change. I can’t cite all the evidence, but it isn’t just hotter temperatures than people have ever experienced before in their lifetimes and as are supported by official records. Other evidence includes the obvious facts that glaciers have shrunk dramatically, the permafrost in many areas is melting, flowers are blooming earlier, insects like pine and spruce beetles are spreading into areas where they were never seen before, birds are migrating earlier and sometimes farther.

Many people who claim to believe it’s all a hoax take comfort in the fact that some climate scientists decades ago thought that the earth was entering a new ice age. That was driven largely by the fact that a series of especially harsh winters occurred and even affected combat operations in the USSR and Korea. It made sense then to think that maybe the climate was cooling—just as it makes even more sense based on much more evidence to believe that it’s warming now.

There have always been alarmists among us, and the scientific fields are no different. Wild, irrational predictions about the future have always been with us because they make good news copy. But one of the earliest predictions about the effects of warming temperatures that were first noticed decades ago was that weather patterns would change: some places would become wetter, some drier, and storms would become more severe. All that has happened. I have noticed that myself about wind patterns where I live in just a bit less than 30 years. On the other hand, we often get less snow than was common decades ago. When we get a rare more snowy winter, the old timers who’ve lived here for 50-60 years will say, “That’s how winters used to be.” Even the ski resorts in my part of the state have noted and tried to adapt to later snowfall starts and less of it. That doesn’t happen every year, but it’s happening enough to be noticeable.

On the other hand because of changing wind patterns, places where significant snow was rare are now seeing it. One inevitable result of rising temperatures is that more water evaporates into the atmosphere from the oceans and elsewhere, but sooner or later it comes down in the form of rain or snow.

I’m not going to bother arguing about any of this, but this thread served to give me an excuse to say some things that have been on my mind for a long time.

I'm not saying it's not changing, I'm saying I didn't cause it.

My questions for the climate change religious cult are these:

How do they think we can tax our way out of it? How does that work?

If carbon dioxide is the great environmental boogeyman, (LOL) why aren't they screaming for the planting of billions of trees everywhere?

Have I got this all wrong?

Never mind...

The only "climate change deniers" are those who think the climate is supposed to be paused at a perfect climate from when...the climate on earth in the 1950's maybe until the end of time? How insane are these people? THEY are the ones who seem to deny that the climate ever changes. We on the other hand know better.

Climate changes typically occur on timescales much longer than a human lifespan, so it’s easy to assume that what someone has experienced during their life is typical or normal. In the 70’s we were all predicted to freeze in a coming ice age; now we’re all going to burn up due to greenhouse gases. I’d guess the people who lived through either the beginning or ending of the 70-year long Maunder Minimum period probably panicked as well if they thought they were either entering an ice age or a tropical climate, respectively. Particularly since they didn’t understand solar cycles back then.

Weather/climate may well be a chaotic system in the short and medium term and have interactions with variables that humans haven’t even discovered yet, much less know how to predict. Supercomputers help, but accurate models still seem to be a long ways away in the future, IMHO.

We know of and hear and read of many places getting warmer. However does anyone know of any areas or places that seems to be getting colder or cooler ??? God Bless !!!

^^^Antartica...

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

Many people who claim to believe it’s all a hoax take comfort in the fact that some climate scientists decades ago thought that the earth was entering a new ice age. That was driven largely by the fact that a series of especially harsh winters occurred and even affected combat operations in the USSR and Korea. It made sense then to think that maybe the climate was cooling—just as it makes even more sense based on much more evidence to believe that it’s warming now.

Climate is always and ever changing. The hoax is that climate change is all man-made and that mankind has the power to stop it. Many who believe in anthropogenic climate change take comfort in their bias and disregard the totality of the science and history of the subject.

For what it's worth I believe... that Mother Nature is in charge, and the several of the solar cycles are the principal driver of this. I recycle and try not to pollute any more than modern life seems to require of us, but thinking man can make incremental changes more meaningful than the sun, might be a bit grandiose.

We've been warned about global warming, and alternatively cooling, since the 1900's. Al Gore's computer models turned out to be completely wrong. It got (ever so slightly) cooler for 10 years (albeit a meaningless scale as well). There are plenty of us that just see this "weather" as a natural process, even when it turns the midwest into a dust bowl, or the NE gets an polar vortex of below normal temps for a month.

Think back to when we were kids burning ants under our 3" magnifying glass . Now put that solar lamp on 1/2 of the earth 24/7. Spring temps can go up 30+ degrees in a single morning in these parts. Then, on a cloudless night we can lose that 30 degrees to radiational cooling in the next 10 hour span. Every week a TV meteorologist will describe how the cloud cover will prevent cooling or daytime heating in your area. Yes, some places get warmer, and yes 2 days ago the record high was set in 1934 and we weren't even close. As mentioned above climate is measured in thousands of years, not 50-100.

Warming and cooling trends happen from year to year. There's zero we can do about it and we are responsible for none of it.
Did you know that having polar ice caps is very rare for our planet?

Climate change doesn't happen over years or decades, or even centuries, but over millennia and longer periods. Temperature changes recorded over human historical periods are simple variances from the norm, as noted by a previous poster, we humans simply haven't been paying attention long enough to notice meaningful change.

Those who speak of anthropomorphic climate change have a political agenda, not a scientific one.

12,000 years ago there was a mile high glacier where I am sitting now. It paved the great plains flat, and created the foothills south of here. When it melted it created the Great Lakes.

The earth has gotten warmer since then, naturally. After the peak, it will cool again.

The cycles have something to do with a giant ball of nuclear fusion at the center of earth's orbit. You know the thing that we need to prevent the earth from being a cold dead rock.

The ONLY question is if and how much effect human generated CO2 has.

Since we are talking about 1 degree C over a century, changes in weather you are seeing in your lifetime are just the weather not the climate.

I find it silly that a slight warming is being predicted to cause catastrophic changes. Hotter summers, colder winters, more hurricanes, more rain, more droughts, more floods, more fires, and on and on. There is no validated way to predict this. Perhaps slightly higher temps will cause BETTER climate and weather in some places. The only thing we can predict is that things will be different, but how different is impossible to predict.

People are more easily controlled through fear.

Never forget that.

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
People are more easily controlled through fear.

Never forget that.

Read Michael Crichton's Book, "State Of Fear" and it'll tell you all about it.

And this is nowhere near the hottest the Earth's ever been.

quote:

Originally posted by vinnybass:
I'm not saying it's not changing, I'm saying I didn't cause it.

My questions for the climate change religious cult are these:

How do they think we can tax our way out of it? How does that work?

If carbon dioxide is the great environmental boogeyman, (LOL) why aren't they screaming for the planting of billions of trees everywhere?

Have I got this all wrong?

Never mind...

By applying a financial penalty/burden, it'll alter people's behavior (ie. nicotine tax). This sometimes works, and other times results in unintended consequences. This is a common vehicle when viewing through an economists lens.

We all know that charities with aggressive campaigns and promotions (Wounded Warrior, Breast Cancer Relief Foundation, etc) barely see initial donations make it all the way through to the intended beneficiaries; climate tax is the same racket. The organizations that see the grant money filter through to them, allows those at the top, to line their pockets, while middle management can maintain a career while claiming they're apart of a jobs program for the believers, I mean foot soldiers. The government agencies that get funding directly through this, merely see it as revenue, a tap of money that if it was flowing just a bit faster we could do X.


As a whole, I believe we live on a living planet, sometimes it heats up, sometimes it cools down; that's what makes earth different than other planets. We have enough history to know that this is irrefutable. The time of the dinosaurs and early man, the earth was warmer than today; man also survived through a series of ice ages. We also know that pumping out coal exhaust into the air isn't a good thing in the long term, nor is dumping your trash into waterways (that was a thing for awhile) not very good either. Unfortunately, many political and high-profile types have taken it to be their cause celeb, the younger generation, not very nuanced or, sophisticated run with the idea and ham-fist a position into a near-religion.