getting warmer in some parts of the world, it's getting colder in other parts.

I know a LOT of people who have had their eyes opened here in East Tennessee this past week. I live halfway between Knoxville & Chattanooga, and we were running around in shorts and T-Shirts Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after Christmas, with temperatures ranging from 71 to 75 degrees! That's about 35-40 degrees above normal!

Between Christmas Eve & Christmas day, we had almost 10 inches of rain and we were under tornado watches and warnings. had a lot flooding in my area....

Nothing against you, so please don't take it that way, but I think that we will get farther using the correct terminology of "Global Climate Change" rather than the misnomer of "Climate Warming".... but whatever works for you, as long as you can get people talking about it on some level, and taking it seriously.

I hope you and yours are enjoying a Happy, and safe, Holiday Season!

Peace,

Ghost

The term "Climate Change" is a cop out as far as I am concerned and here is why I believe that. It is a "politically correct" term that masks the real fact that the climate is actually warming. Even with warming there will be cold spots and winter storms. Even in a warming scenario winter storms will be more severe and snow amounts will be huge. At the same time where it is above freezing rain will fall and will come in copious amounts. Warmer air holds much more water than colder air.

Take the "Goliath" we have right now. The boundaries between large amounts of snow are thinly divided where large amounts of rain are falling. I am seeing a lot of rain where there is usually snow in the past. And temperature differentials are larger and that fact make tornadoes much larger and long lasting. Tornadoes above F2 being on the ground for as long as they have been seem really unusual to me. One or two mile wide tornadoes are a new phenomenon as far as I am concerned.

I watched a Weather channel special on the Washington, Illinois and Henry, Indiana tornadoes. Henry took a double hit is a very short time. The Washington tornadoes we particularly violent. I will be 72 and do not remember tornado activity like we have now when I was in grade school.

As a matter of fact tornadoes were done with by June for the most part. Never ever remember being scared of tornadoes in the winter. Now we have them at times that never happened before.

During the Permian period scientists now believe that "global warming" was the cause of that extinction. It was natural caused but very devastating to life then.

Finally eventually cold spells could end and it could become warm everywhere. No on e knows for sure the outcome if we continue on this path. Predictions on change are long range but an "atmospheric" flip is possible.

"Climate change" is a euphemism to make our predicament look a lot less threatening as far as I am concerned. I see it as a "cop out" to the deniers.

to respond, I have been down with my bad back again and have not done much of anything except gu to the doctors when I wasn't flat on my back. This is the first time that I have been able to sit up straight for more than 20 minutes without being in excruciating pain.

As stated in my original reply, whatever term works for you, as long as we can get more people talking about it, and taking it seriously... as it should be.

I won't even take offense to you saying that the term 'Climate Change' was a "cop-out for deniers" because I hope that it is obvious that I am NOT a denier.

I am originally from Miami, Fl., and still have a lot of family and friends who live from The Keys, both coasts of Florida, some on the Gulf Coast in La. & Mississippi and some in Coastal California. I have heard from ALL of them that the sea levels are rising, and some places that were once land are now water. I've also heard that it is impacting the Marshes in the Everglades and in Louisiana.

I live 5 miles from the Tennessee River and the Watts Bar Dam & Nuclear Plant. They lower the lake and river levels during the winter here, but as of Tuesday we were 7 feet below flood stage, and every Dam/Lock along the River, all the way into Alabama, has ALL of the spillways open to get the water moved out. We were pouring 820,000 gallons of water PER MINUTE Tuesday morning, and one of the Dams in Alabama was pouring almost 1.2 MILLION GALLONS PER MINUTE! That's a whole lot of water, isn't it?

Back to the meat of the issue... if "Global Warming" makes you happier, I have no problem calling it that when discussing the issue with you. Like I said, the IMPORTANT thing is to get people discussing it and taking it seriously.

Happy New Year, and Peace to you and yours,

Ghost

to make what is happening sound much nicer and less threatening. The term was very deliberately crafted by conservative spinmeisters and sold by right-wing media funded by right-wing billionaires, especially the energy industry.

The reasoning was like this. The term used by scientists, "global warming," is scaring people. What can we use instead? Let's use the word "climate" because it has nice connotations. People move to and vacation in attractive "climates."

"Warming" is a problem! Most people think summers are already plenty warm and that's making them really nervous. So lets say X instead, no G, no T, no...Z? No. We're going to have to settle for "change." Change can be good...

And thus we hear everywhere,

"Climate change": The not-necessarily-bad global holocaust.

in that something is going whooey with the climate.

If it drops to freezing in MO anytime soon, it will be very ugly.

They will re-write history.
They will wake up one morning and deny that they ever doubted it.

"Of course climate change is real. We never doubted it for a minute."

As soon as climate change becomes too obvious like a 95 degree day in Boston...
Their response will be “Lord Jesus is Telling us its time”

When the island is sinking. The people refuse to evacuate, because the King says it's not happening, because "It's never happened before."

And lots of folks out there make sure they are paid, very well, to say them. And those people are of every political stripe, save one, Democrats.

That very act, the financing and subverting of reality, precludes one from bearing the moniker of being a believer in democracy.

Not that it stops them from wearing it, they know no shame. As we see on display, daily, in so many ways.

lets say Miami goes glug glug and the insurance companies sob in terror and demand a bailout.


pacific islands? no
drought ? no
heat? no
other extreme weather ? no

we hold dearly to our delusions

When big insurance says it's climate change, the GOP will say it's climate change. If they don't they lose their millions of dollars in campaign donations. People have no power in this country. Money does.

A net gain or neutral consequences overall?

It's 60 degrees here for instance so I'm not running my heat, less fuel emissions. Less car fatalities and economic losses due to less snow and ice. More construction and and insurance adjuster jobs due to increased property damage by non-typical weather events like tornadoes.

Sorry, I'm in a glass half-full kind of mood today

Last edited Sun Dec 27, 2015, 12:16 PM - Edit history (1)

it's all good!

And hundreds of millions of jobs created relocating existing coastal crops and housing to new locations along the new coast line.

with a 2+ C degree increase in global temperature.

These and other effects of global warming, if left unchecked, will likely contribute to the disappearance of up to one-half of Earth's plants and one-third of animals from their current range by 2080, according to a 2013 report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
...
Warmer temperatures will also expand the range of many disease-causing pathogens that were once confined to tropical and subtropical areas, killing off plant and animal species that formerly were protected from disease.
...
Agricultural systems will likely be dealt a crippling blow. Though growing seasons in some areas will expand, the combined impacts of drought, severe weather, lack of snowmelt, greater number and diversity of pests, lower groundwater tables and a loss of arable land could cause severe crop failures and livestock shortages worldwide.
...
This loss of food security may, in turn, create havoc in international food markets and could spark famines, food riots, political instability and civil unrest worldwide, according to a number of analyses from sources as diverse as the U.S Department of Defense, the Center for American Progress and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

will require massive construction which will require burning even more oil/coal to accomplish. This does not end well. Your glass is not half full, your glass is shattered and you have eat the glass.

. . . a vast terrain of granite, schist and ancient lava flows.

Oh, and they'll do just fine, even though they evolved in areas not subject to the same day length, climate and growing season constraints found in areas closer to the poles.

and still claim it was "God's will" before conceding it was the result of global warming.

and they all start dropping like flies. I hate to sound racial, but it's a biological fact that white people cannot handle intense sunlight because they don't have enough melanin to protect them against the extra UV rays from a warming climate.

It is about the energy of the sun that is absorbed by the Earth and re-radiated at a longer wavelength being trapped by interactions with certain molecules in the atmosphere, notably CO2. That leads to temperature increases, without the sun's radiation levels changing. So, sunburns are not really an issue.

Destroying the ozone layer does have this consequence, but that is a (mostly) separate issue from global warming.

Last edited Sun Dec 27, 2015, 10:09 AM - Edit history (1)

...we all know he's a Hawaiian Muslin.

They would have to abandon their religious beliefs (the Lord created the earth and man is incapable of changing it) and their political ideology (since government action is required; the "free market" is a total bust in this area).

With those beliefs plus their innate paranoia they will go to their graves thinking it is a evil liberal plot that must be resisted at all costs!

when they die off. That is pretty harsh, and I'm very sorry even to admit thinking it. But I keep thinking "NOW they'll wake up to the truth!" when some catastrophe happens. But then I hear them making the strangest explanations to avoid staring at the truth...

I guess we MUST depend on the next generation of folks who have learned the lesson of climate change in school and know whata we are saying is true...

It's changing and not for the better, and it shouldn't matter whether it's caused by humans or not. The question becomes what are we going to do about it.

The science-illiterate manage to defuse the entire topic when they blithely state that we can't prove humans are causing climate change.

That shouldn't even be the subject. The subject should be what can we do about it?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A 90% chance of rain means the same as a 10% chance:
It might rain and it might not.[/center][/font][hr]

Then you can't make much of a case for changing human behaviour (i.e. reducing fossil fuel use to slow the build-up of CO2).

We can still make things better by cutting down on CO2 build-up. Just like we don't argue about what causes a tornado to devastate a town, we simply rebuild the town and make it more resistant to being devastated again.

The Earth is warming. Cutting down on CO2 production will help alleviate that. So long as the GOP can say "You can't prove that!" in regard to the cause, they will always be able to put off doing anything at all
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A 90% chance of rain means the same as a 10% chance:
It might rain and it might not.[/center][/font][hr]

and he will fix it if he sees fit. I have also heard them say "well, the climate is always changing and that is God's will." There is a danger in their comfortable complacency with the Almighty...

You know, with science-y things like medicine and hygiene and such. Growing crops depends on science so keeping crops healthy from climate change should be right up there on the list of things to attend to, as well.

It's true that none of this may make a difference but I don't see that any progress can be made on arguing about a cause that can never be proved to their satisfaction, much as lung cancer can never be proved to be a result of cancer.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A 90% chance of rain means the same as a 10% chance:
It might rain and it might not.[/center][/font][hr]

This has been such a godawful fight I think these people are past any rational thought. These people have kids and many are in public schools where the truth is being taught. The best we can hope for is that at least they have some exposure to rational thought on the subjective and the older ones are just dying out...

- mankind has chosen its own path and Christianity has basically followed right along. As long as they continue to blame everything on God then they will not be taking the blame for their own actions.

Unless, of course, their entire city becomes flooded due to the rising oceans, and God himself tells them personally that this was caused by global warming. But I bet they'll just call God a heathen...

1) When THEIR home gets flooded they'll scream about lack of action

or

2) If President Obama comes out against global warming

maybe then. Who knows.

To record the room temperature during the next Republican debate.

So, I suppose, we should prepare to move in soon.

Two possiblities:

When a Republican-led state is faced with incontrovertible real-world, real-time impacts, e.g., Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach, etc. irredeemably flooded.

When a Republican-led state is denied federal funds in the aftermath of extreme weather-related damage, e.g., Texas yesterday.

EVen then, I think they would prefer that their heads explode than acknowledge reality.

using a sock full of quarters.

They absolutely think that God would never let that happen. They are seriously misinterpreting the Bible but their whole political ideas are based on their error in interpretation.

go ahead, call me cynical.

Both offering the same amount of slack jawed silence for them to duck out of the room, check the stock ticker and hop on a jet for another "important" business & golf luncheon.