What part do you think Global Warming is playing?

[Coredesat]

Voted none at all. If this season is the result of global warming, what about 1933 or 1887 (whether or not the storms were valid)?

[Windy]

:roll: What a bunch of crap.

Hurricanes happen. Period. Sometimes (cycles) they are worse than other times. I get fed up with the arrogance of people thinking that we people cause everything. The earth rules, not us. We happen to be here for the time being. Thats it. You can try to politicize it, but it's nature, not human nature at work here.

The fact that discussing climo factors in storms can be construed as "politicizing" these days says a lot about our current state of society.

BTW, I guessed "maybe some". It's really an unknown. Probably no effect at all, but then I don't have the ability to know what the climo pattern will be like for the next century. Looking back, I'm sure scientists (if there are any left in a hundred years) will know the answer to the poll question.

[Clint_TX]

I'm a None at all guy, but I think any of the answers could be correct

[caribepr]

:roll: What a bunch of crap.

Hurricanes happen. Period. Sometimes (cycles) they are worse than other times. I get fed up with the arrogance of people thinking that we people cause everything. The earth rules, not us. We happen to be here for the time being. Thats it. You can try to politicize it, but it's nature, not human nature at work here.

Well, hmmm. I voted *some* because I think there are some valid issues to the global warming theories, even while I'm not informed enough (and it seems even the most educated on the subject agree that it is still an evolving - pun not intended - issue) to say more. But I thought this was a really good article concerning global warming, weather impacts and one suggested cause - clearing rainforests...which ain't done by beavers.

http://www.ran.org/info_center/factsheets/04a.html

[arcticfire]

Voted none at all. If this season is the result of global warming, what about 1933 or 1887 (whether or not the storms were valid)?

Well I'm in the camp of taking any pre 1940 hurricain data with a huge grain of salt personally. However even if the old data is correct it matters not.

*all my opinion*

Firstly , up here in alaska we are experincing 3x-4x greater global warming(GW) effects then you folks down south. They are not exactly sure why yet , but alaska and siberia are warming faster then anywhere else on earth. I bring this up because while most people in the U.S have not really experince anything to really bring it home to them eventually they will have 3-4deg warmer temps too eventually.

I can assure you , it affects everything. My answer to the poll was "some". Since I belive fundamentally hotter oceans have an effect however hard to measure on hurricains just by the raw principal of how hurricains work. Global warming causes hotter oceans = affect on hurricains to me. I highly doubt Katrina or Rita where spanwed due to my cars tailpipe mind you.

GW as I have experinced it over the past decade has worked kinda like a light switch. From about 1998 on back things seem totally normal as far as our weather went. Which ment 9 months of winter, 3 of summer and transitional seasons in between if you blinked you missed. Sub 0 temps were common in our coldest months Jan,Feb,Mar. Snow and ice where on our roads for such long periods of time during the year the city usually painted the snow with lane lines. Plowing was big business etc etc. In short , it was Alaska weather.

Then suddenly it all changed , the following winter we had basicly no snow at all , it rained all feburary and I don't think it got to sub 0. Let me tell you an alaskan steps out on their poarch in the middle of Febuarary , see's no snow and is being rained on , it freaks you out.

Fast foward to today , We now have 4 distinct seasons here. Winters are half as long as they used to be , summers about the same but hotter , and we actually have a spring and fall season. Huge changes , really starting to regret most cars are not sold with air conditioning up here. Neither of mine have it , and I have not used my block heater in about 2 years cept once or twice (thats plugging in your car to keep the cold from killing your egine when it's not running)

I think GW is affecting hurricians because I think it's effecting everything. I highly doubt the effect on hurricains is anything dramatic , but eventually it will be. It might not be like flipping a switch like up here , but eventually people even in the tropics will stop going threw denial.

This whole conversation is rather pointless really thow. The pro's will keep spouting what they were told in collage that it's a cycle , till 10 years from now when it's beyond evident it's not and then they will change stories. From what I keep reading , by then it will be to late and GW will likly be spinning way beyond our means to have any effect. So I'm taking a buckle up and enjoy the ride attitude , afterall the weather is just getting better for us up here , feel free to take vacations up here when yours start to royally suck

[abajan]

...up here in alaska we are experincing 3x-4x greater global warming(GW) effects then you folks down south. They are not exactly sure why yet , but alaska and siberia are warming faster then anywhere else on earth...

Yes but that's AW and SW (Alaska warming and Siberia warming) which doesn't necessarily translate into GW.

It reminds me of a few years ago when someone in the audience on Talkback Live (a talk program that used to show on CNN) practically cussed out a guest who was a weather expert for not believing global warming was happening.

The audience member was saying how California was experiencing extremely hot weather and the expert must have had his head burried in the sand etc.

Some parts of the globe have actually cooled some but in the present climate (no pun intended) that usually doesn't get news coverage.

[oneness]

Global heating and cooling are cyclic, it just so happens we are on the heating side of a cycle.

Yes, permafrost is melting, glaciers are retreating and vast chunks of permanent ice-sheets carve off. This is precisely what always happens on the heating side of a cycle. And yes, SSTs will increase and sea level will rise in response to the gradual natural oscillation. No surprises there.

It just so happened that the industrial age blossomed within a heating phase. Not a surprise that this should be occurring during a heating phase, when you think about it, as this is what allowed agricultural surpluses and resource excess a few thousand years ago, which left time for elites to engage in informal and formal scientific and technical development.

--

If on the other hand, the industrial age had begun past the peak heating in the current cycle and instead, 21st century humanity was running into cooling temperatures, what would we be discussing or voting upon at “Blizzard2K”? Frosts, inducing regional crop failures, chronic famine, permafrost reducing the area of cultivatable soil, sewers and reservoirs continually freezing solid. Tropical rain forests and coral reefs in full-retreat toward an already over populated tropical/equatorial region. However, equatorial land area has now dramatically increased in South East Asia, and the protracted land-border conflict between Sri Lanka and India has finally been settled. Continental shelf areas have become the most fertile areas as new land is exposed, due to the ongoing rapid sea level fall.

Heating energy shortage and the Arab insurgency is on-going, with no end in sight, as the single remaining global superpower, Indonesia, attempts to secure and maintain strategic control of the Middle-East’s heating-oil and supply continuity. The ever-problematic Inuit Empire in North Asia are the Indonesian’s principle rivals, and they deny supplying weapons to the Arab insurgency, though obviously they continue to do so.

Increasing sea ice and mounting anthropogenic “environmental destruction” from the global-cooling, longer winters, followed by a marginal spring and 3 week summer, are causing Indonesian and Indian environmentalists to jump up and down. They are lobbying hard for a drastic change in policy at the General Assembly of UN, in Jakarta.

Their proposals involve reducing all jet travel by 25% from 2020, in order to reduce albedo forcing via excessive contrails in the cooler tropical air. They also propose to burn 75% of all Australian and Chinese coal-measures in order to increase the “CO2 Buffer”, and thus help reduce the rate of global cooling.

They then propose to disperse the soot and ash from the burned coal-measures, directly onto the advancing sea ice, ice-sheets and permafrost, in order to increase light absorption and help these to melt faster during what passes for spring and summer.

It is a bold plan, and may work, but political resistance from Jakarta’s Big-Heating-Oil conservatives have frustrated the environmentalist’s best efforts. If heating oil were required less, then the political influence of Big-Heating-Oil would be significantly attenuated. Nevertheless, heating-oil is running out fast and urgent steps must be taken, but even rare scientifically educated environmentalists have considerable trouble making a convincing scientific case that the marginal cooling rates are being enhanced by anthropogenic factors. The Indonesian Government and it’s Allies in the Greater Sahara and Congo basin, seem unmoved by doom-and-gloom arguments and nutty proposals.

Nevertheless, images of the famine and malnourishment in North America and Europe are played nightly on Indonesian TV and a “Thaw the World” pop concert was just held in affluent and trendy Port Moresby. In the light of the outpouring of public support for this cause Jakarta have announced a dramatic trebling of food aid and heating-oil shipments to both North America, and the ongoing tragedy which is Europe, plus an expansion of Green Card quotas. There is also a program of investment to produce snow-shoes in the impoverished US capital of San Diego.

--

World history would be very different if we were in a cooling phase. I don’t think anthropogenic causes can be shown to have anything to do with observed SSTs, hurricane numbers or intensity. Some perspective:

http://www.palmod.uni-bremen.de/~mschul ... SR2004.pdf

[isobar]

Forgive my oversimplifying a complex issue, but if a hurricane's purpose is to transfer large amts of latent heat to the mid-latitudes, it would appear to me that in a theoretical GW environment, that heat transfer would be largely unnecessary, hence weaker systems.

The atmosphere, although appearing chaotic and out of control at times, is a very well-balanced, self-correcting system.

[arcticfire]

...up here in alaska we are experincing 3x-4x greater global warming(GW) effects then you folks down south. They are not exactly sure why yet , but alaska and siberia are warming faster then anywhere else on earth...

Yes but that's AW and SW (Alaska warming and Siberia warming) which doesn't necessarily translate into GW.

It reminds me of a few years ago when someone in the audience on Talkback Live (a talk program that used to show on CNN) practically cussed out a guest who was a weather expert for not believing global warming was happening.

The audience member was saying how California was experiencing extremely hot weather and the expert must have had his head burried in the sand etc.

Some parts of the globe have actually cooled some but in the present climate (no pun intended) that usually doesn't get news coverage.

Your correct in the sence that AW&SW don't in and of themselves constitute global warming. When I say 3x-4x greater global warming , that does not mean no other place has warmed. For instance the average global temp has risin 1 degree in the past century, AW/SW just happen to have gotten 3-4deg warmer for some reason.

I'm not personally totally convinced we have as great an influince on GW as we may think. However , every little nudge is simply that another little nudge. You pass a certain point and big things start to happen like I think are now. Natural or man encouraged won't make one iota of difference past a certain point. Right now Siberia and to a smaller extent alaska are starting to release their methane reserves. Thats likly to end up a huge warming contributor over the next few decades.

I'm actually of the growing opinion we will not be able to stop the changes now, or have any measurable effect anyway given the science I've read. Stopping all our green house gas emmisions today would not prevent warming for at least the next century. Nevermind all the feedback effects now in motion like peat bogs blowing methane thats been locked since the last ice age. I mean heck having an ice free arctic ocean in the summers likly before 2070 is pretty much a garuntee now.

If or not man has tipped the scale totally , or if we just gave it a nudge in a direction it would have gotten eventually anyway is illrelavent. Cause the next century is going to contain some monumental changes. If the "worst case" scenarios play out it still wouldn't mean the extiction of man or anything. At worst a few billion people die due to starvation till our population gets down to what the new climate will be able to support. Best case scenario , alaska gets better weather no ill effects world wide , and all this fuss will have been for nothing.

At the end of the day man will endure , untill such time as there is not enough Oxygen in the air to sustain life anyway. As to hurricains , tendy science says anywhere from now till 15 years of this active "cycle" , so they have plenty of time to change their minds.

[caribepr]

At the end of the day man will endure , untill such time as there is not enough Oxygen in the air to sustain life anyway.

And then the cockroaches, rats, and other resilant slimy sluggy things that don't need nearly as much oxygen (or other little things man seems unable to live without...such as...oh...clean water) will hang around getting fat, until one day the two legged upright things start again, saying, we are the intelligent beings! Let's build a new world! But hey! I won't be around then, so let's enjoy!

[oneness]

Keep in mind that greater biomass in warmer northern oceans will sequester larger quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere and deposit it as sediment. The same applies for a more active and longer growth period of vegetation in a longer warmer summer season. etc. i.e. there are other processes which will balance the system. Run-away heating does not occur on planet Earth in geological history, because other life feedbacks attenuate it, and I doubt humans can cause it to go much out of dynamic balance. Runaway cooling does not occur either, ever though albedo must skyrocket during a glacial period.

[milankovitch]

Firstly , up here in alaska we are experincing 3x-4x greater global warming(GW) effects then you folks down south. They are not exactly sure why yet , but alaska and siberia are warming faster then anywhere else on earth. I bring this up because while most people in the U.S have not really experince anything to really bring it home to them eventually they will have 3-4deg warmer temps too eventually.

It is well understood and quite intuitive why the high-latitudes are warming more than the low lattitudes. The tropics recieve a ton of energy so the added forcing from GHG's don't make as much of a difference as in the high-latitues where they don't have as much energy to begin with.

[curtadams]

Global heating and cooling are cyclic, it just so happens we are on the heating side of a cycle.

What heating cycle? There are two cycles affecting global temperature- solar activity and Milankovitch. Neither can be causing the current warming because, as radiative heating, they predict the opposite of almost every observable aspect of the current warming - greater heating in the tropics when it's in the Arctic, greater heating during summer when it's in winter, and greater heating in the day when it's at night. Strike three, batter out. Greenhouse gas emission not only explains the *directions* it not accurately predicts the *degrees*. It's very well supported and there is no scientific alternative.

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

I heard that as the sun gets older it will get hotter...In will start growing in size.

[Geomagnetic Man]

I said some, but my question is this. What the heck is the difference between "some", and "maybe some" Sounds the same to me. Some being you think some is doing that, and maybe some being you arent sure if it is?

[oneness]

Global heating and cooling are cyclic, it just so happens we are on the heating side of a cycle.

What heating cycle? There are two cycles affecting global temperature- solar activity and Milankovitch. Neither can be causing the current warming because, as radiative heating, they predict the opposite of almost every observable aspect of the current warming - greater heating in the tropics when it's in the Arctic, greater heating during summer when it's in winter, and greater heating in the day when it's at night. Strike three, batter out. Greenhouse gas emission not only explains the *directions* it not accurately predicts the *degrees*. It's very well supported and there is no scientific alternative.

Sorry, not a chance there.

The Little Ice Age:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Earth is on the upward temp curve of a multi-century climatic cycle, and that cycle will go down, then up, and then down ... ad infinitum. It has been doing this for more revolutions of the sun than you can grasp. These cycles are well known from recorded history. If a global warming proponent claims an anthropogenic change in atmospheric gasses is the cause of any observed ‘anomalous’ global warming, its probably (but not definitely) grossly incorrect. At the very least, the warming is not ‘anomalous’—even the historical chronological records tell us to expect this.



Source article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000 ... arison.png

As anyone can see, Earth, and sub-regions of Earth, are observed to go through heating and cooling cycles, both multi-decadic and multi-century, which have vary little, if anything at all, to do with anthropogenic causation.

What various GW models and intuitive theories of climate 'predict', has little to do with what Earth actually does. Better to observe what Earth does, both now and in the past, than to go off half-cocked with adamant theoretical conclusions.

Earth itself has shown us that we are seeing the results of multi-century overlapping and mutually interfering, (enhancing and cancelling) regional and global climatic cycles.

[caribepr]

I said some, but my question is this. What the heck is the difference between "some", and "maybe some" Sounds the same to me. Some being you think some is doing that, and maybe some being you arent sure if it is?

That sounds rational to me. What I am surprised by is the overwhelming flat out absolute positively couldn't be at all possible vote. How can anyone state with pure certainty that we are having absolutely NO effect on the planet by our activities? Oh yeah! We're the two legged ones without the full body hair, I forgot!
~~~~~~~
Hmm. That was strange. For one moment the poll said that 56 percent were voting not at all. Now it is back down to less than half. So reskew the math, but not the sentiment!

[coriolis]

I like a chemistry debate...NOTE THIS IS
CLIMO-CHEMISTRY NOT POLITICS:

Enhanced methane content of the atmosphere intensifies storms, regardless of whether or not its emission is caused by man or nature. Recall that prehistorically prior to the production of oxygen by prolific cyanobacteria the atmosphere was filled with methane, ammonia, and H-2 and other gases and had too much violent weather activity to support anything more than the bacteria....



The reduced nature of methane renders it unstable, and thus in any reaction can give off quite a bit of Gibbs Free energy, its instability renders its Delta (change in) Gibbs Free energy in a reaction negative, since the Product energy-reactant energy < 0 since the product has much less energy than the reactants. Methane has powerful capabilities.



The impacts of Methane are felt in ACTIVE CYCLONE DECADE CYCLES ONLY (WITH REGARDS TO HURRICANES)....During inactive periods like 1970-1990 the atmospheric conditions are so unfavorable for hurricane development that not even methane can stimulate the development through increased warming or etc..!



The tremendous amount of Gibbs free energy as indicated by Delta G in methane reactions is due to methane structure. Methane is heavily reduced (not oxidized at all) and reduced hydrocarbons contain intense energy potential. Methane when it reacts is highly exothermic, meaning it is capable of giving off a large amount of heat (thus the products of a reaction involving methane contain much less energy, as that energy was released in the form of heat, which explains why methane oxidation reactions are SPONTANEOUS, the heat availabe in methane's constituent hydrocarbons are just BEGGING TO BE RELEASED!)



Methane is not the only dangerous pollutant out there. But I place emphasis on it here because it is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of implications for global warming.

It's energy from the breakdown of methane and other hydrocarbonic molecules that increases heat and energy available to power a storm. Although this is not the only factor, it certainly plays an important role in exacerbating the impacts of other deleterious hurricane-intensifying factors (Oscillations, Solar Energy, Ionospheric Conductivity and Oceanic Coupling, etc.).

Methane also has large enthalpy release magnitude values that
are negative in nature, indicative of heat release and substantial chemical corroboration of my earlier claims.

Tampa Bay: What is the mechanism by which the energy is released? Methane is fairly stable at normal conditions. It takes an energy input to break those covalent bonds to allow it to be oxidized. What gives it the push it needs?

[feederband]

Global warming IMO has everything to do with it as far as us having more intense storms...The earth's average temp is getting warmer....SO THE SST'S are warmer...Do we humans have anything to do with it??? I think it is just a cycle....

[x-y-no]

I selected "a little" although I could just as well have slected "some."

A fair body of research over the past decade (see in particular the work of Kerry Emmanuel - a faq regarding his work can be found here: http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/anthro2.htm) shows that the current maximum of the multi-decadal oscillation in the Atlantic exhibits substantially higher SSTs than the perevious one in the mid 20th century. SSTs are quite clearly correlated with tropical cyclone intensity.