AssemblyBoard

Good morning all!

Well, I survived being called a Californian AND a Geftakys, imagine that!  ;D

Al & Verne have been very kind in their pm's to me and I appreciate that. Tom, we don't always agree, but actually, I like it that way. You're cool with me, Professor. I realize that I got a little sarcastic last night with the composite Sondra entity. Mea culpa.    ;)

Thanks goodness for Brian who intervened with the persona non grata. (Yay for moderators who moderate!)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: does anyone think Hurricane Rita could be related to global warming? A report I heard last night said that the frequency of storms hasn't picked up in the last 100 years, but the severity of individual storms has spiked. Some say this is because the ocean's surface temperature is rising. Another meterologist said this was simply a common natural occurence (some years you get stronger storms, other years are less severe) and this season has nothing to do with global warming.

The Jet Propultion Labratory had a press release the other day a warming up (or "global warming", if you will) on Mars.

GLOBAL WARMING ON MARS: "New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress."  (http://instapundit.com/archives/025681.php)

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/newsroom/20050920a.html  Full Story

This suggests that often these changes have more to do with natural cycles than SUVs.

http://www.globalwarming.org/

Global Warming is JUNK SCIENCE by some who never got the recognition they feel was due them. Now they created a Global Warming CULT following that is a travesty to REAL observable Science. A report in Canada recently to PROVE WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS backfired. They wanted to find out how much carbon dioxide trees absorb to protect the environment. They put plastic bags on branches of pine trees in British Columbia. They measured the carbon and rather than decrease it increased. Surprise.

There are cycles of super hurricanes the latest ended early in the 1960s. We are now back in a new cycle that could last over 20 years.

Does burning fossil fuel hurt YES but people have blown it up out of proportion. It is a bunch of frustrated intellectuals who feel there day has come who want the limelight.

Should we have SUVs. I think they are a status symbol to many and rather than appeal to Global Warming I see no need for most people having them. I challenge you good Christians to look in the face of a starving child and tell them you can't help them out as you drive away in $100,000.00 Mercedes. Waste is waste no matter what. So call it what it is. Cut back on pollution for health sake not Global Warming.

Hugh

I am now sure how the topic got as polticized as it did but here are the facts.
The early scientific papers on the global warming trend were by very capable and well-respected prinicpal investigators in the field.
Windbags like Rush Limbaugh pooh-pohed the warnigs as a liberal conspiracy; just like second-hand smoke.
There is absolutely no current disagreement among scientists that global warming is indeed taking place and anyone who contends otherwise has simply not kept up with the current literature.
What is still being vigorously debated is whether the warming trend (surface waters have reportedly risen and average temperature of 1 degree c over the last 30 years according to several studies) has a causal realtionship with the increased frequency of higher category hurricanes etc.
The theory, which is well undestood, is the the warmer waters provide thermal fuel for powering storms to higher levels of intensity more frequently, than previously seen. As I said, the causal connections are still being debated, not whether global warming is occuring. If needed, useful links will follow... :)
Verne

Verne

Global Warming is happening. I think according to studies I have seen that it is part of a cycle and the Greenhouse gases issue though somewhat valid is not in line with the findings of climate studies over thousands of years. We can help but it won't amount to much because other forces were at work before we started industrializing.

Hugh

Folks,


We can thank  God for global warming!   :o

Or, at least for greenhouse gasses.  In Antarctica they can drill down through around 400,000 years of seasonal layers in the ice. Trapped air bubbles allow them to analyze the content of the atmosphere during various periods. Up until about 12,000 years ago the climate went through wild cycles of average annual temperatures.

It seems to have stabilized shortly after the end of the last ice age due to greenhouse gasses.  What happened 12,000 years ago?

The domestication of goats, sheep, and cattle (methane).  Plus the spread of agriculture, (more carbon di-oxide).  Until this happened, no developed civilization was possible.  

Stranger and stranger.

Thomas Maddux

I agree.  Studies have shown that although the average temperature has increased over the past 200 years, the majority of the warming happened in the early years of the industrial revolution. The amount of warming due to the burning of oil/gas/coal in the past century is unknown.

In evaluating reports of global warming, it is necessary to identify the purpose of the report.  Some reports, usually published in professional journals, Nature, Scientific American, etc., add to the scientific understanding of the phenomenon.

Others, usually seen in the print and visual media, are "spun" for political ends.  The message tends to be, "vote for our side or die."

Thomas Maddux

Yep! You too Hugh..
Verne

I've had a bit of science in my education.  As Tom has pointed out, not all studies are scientific.  In fact, today, very few are.

Nevertheless, there are a few hard facts with regard to global warming.  It is happening.  It is reality.  There is no way anyone, Rush Limbaugh, Al Gore, or even the Sierra Club can say to the contrary.  Global Warming is a fact.

Ten thousand years ago, (I think that's about right.  Could be twenty thousand) much of Europe was under ice.  The reason it melted, and is no longer there is because the globe got warmer.  I don't know what type of cars they drove back then, or what their regulations were on particle emissions were, but I know they must have been horrible polluters to have melted all that ice. 

I wonder if this global warming thing has been going on for a long time?  Maybe the hurricanes aren't our fault at all?  Perhaps the real blame lies with the industrial pollution from twenty thousand BC.

How come we never find any DNA in oil?  If it's decayed plants and dinosaurs, why don't we ever get any pieces, or even some denatured protein? 

Sometimes I wonder if our learned men really think straight at all.

those who deny global warming usually have monied reasons for saying so. Big Politicians can't afford to bite the Big Business hand that feeds.

follow the money trail and you're bound to dig out some politician willing to declare global warming as junk science, a bunch of liberal hoopla.

eventually when some massive hurricane destroys Rush Limbaugh's beautiful Florida mansion, even he will have to admit there was something to that pesky little global warming theory.

If global warming is responsible for hurricanes, why did we have have hurricanes before 1800?

The junk science is on both sides, and it isn't relegated to global warming!  We could talk osteoporosis, cholesterol, skin cancer, and other things as well.

Remember the "junk" science that king Nebucadnezzar had with all his Wise men, and Satraps, and Astrologers?   We aren't really any different today.  Not long ago the most respected scientists taught that the earth was flat, and that it was the center of the solar system.  More recently, experts opined that men would blow up if they went faster than seventy MPH.

X-ray machines were found in Kinney's shoe stores in the late 50's and early 60's.  Horrible doses of radiation in the most sensitive areas of the body were given to thousands of kids who wanted to see the bones in their feet.  The experts in the medical profession assured everyone that x-ray was harmless.

How about infecting blacks with syphillus? 

Science, especially state sponsored science, is often some of the most unscientific stuff to be had anywhere.  Global warming is right up there with the worst of 'em.

Of course the globe is getting warmer!  It's been doing it for a long time!  How else did all that ice melt?

Not too many white folk know about, let alone being prepared to admit the horrors of the "Tuskegee experiment"...some similarly abominable experiments were performed on Jews by the Germans...
Verne

Horrible, frightening and unbelievable....but true.

Science, you know.  Scientists were at the root of it.   They had an ulterior motive, of course...

Globalwarmingists also have a motive other than love for the earth, and as Eilizabeth pointed out, the "corporations" also have a bias.  In fact, they would really like to show that industrial pollution causes global "cooling," if they could!

Did you know that it takes more energy to produce a solar panel than the panel itself will produce over it's lifetime?  The fact is, making solar panels pollutes more, and uses more energy than if we all got them for free! 

Let's make it a little easier to know. Click here:

http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/

Verne,

I learned about this through a secret source of underground information that only a few of us have access to.  I can't say the name of it on the internet, but...(whisper) I saw it on PBS.    ;)

Thomas Maddux

BAT,


Actually, this is a popular myth spread in a novel in the 19th century by Irving or Hawthorne.  It said that the Catholic church told Columbus the earth was flat.  Actually, the Catholic scholars told him his estimates of an 8000 mile circumference were too low.

Educated people knew the earth was spherical from at least the days of Aristotle, and Eratosthenes (5th century bc) calculated the circumference at around 20,000 miles by measuring the angles of stars from the bottom of wells, using Euclidian geometry.

This was the figure the Catholic scholars used to advise Columbus.  Turns out they were right!  If NA and SA had not been where they are, Columbus would have died in the middle of the ocean, long before reaching Asia.

At least one ancient Greek scholar taught a heliocentric solar system.

Interesting what?

Thomas Maddux

Folks,

One recent theory as to the cause of global warming is that subterranean magma flows heat the sea water.  As the magma heats sea water, the whole earth is affected.

Thomas Maddux

Did you believe it? 
Some folk did not...
I for one was incredulous.
Some still deny it happened (Julius Justice Wilson, former U of C professor actually did a survey of whites about the incident and not only had the vast majority never heard of it, they contended that such a thing could never happen!) ...the same ones that say racism no longer exists in America, and tell us how lucky Blacks were to brought here... :).
I would wager that if you surveyed the readers of the BB,for most, this is the first they have heard of it.


You have something against CO2?  ;D

Verne

Tom I thought you taught history.
Have you ever heard of Copernicus?
Here are the facts.
The flat earth theory did begin as a religious thesis and it happened in the sixth century, not the nineteenth as you erroneously suggest. Some of the men who sailed with Columbus were terrified that they would eventually fall off the earth and almost mutinied before they sighted land.
The flat earth theory was proposed by an Alexandrian monk named Cosmas Indicopleustes in a work entitlted  Christian Topography and was in fact sanctioned by the Church.
Tom it is a well-known fact that the Catholic Church once tried to establish itself as the sole authority on matters not only of religion, but also of philosophy and science.
Despite the incorrect geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy, I am not certain he would have appreciated the linking of the flat-earth theory with his view of the cosmos.
Of course many navigators knew better, including Columbus, despite the general acceptance of the flat-earth notion among many clergy.
Luckily for Copernicus, he died the day his heliocentirc thesis was published... :)
Of course Galileo is credited with taking up defense of Copernicus' theory and openly challenging the notion of a flat/geocentric, and immovable, earth.
Some ignoramuses have tried to discredit the Bible by claiming that it teaches the earth is flat, but that is another story...
Verne

Verne,

Take a look at this http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm

Or this http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html

Blessings,

Thomas Maddux

Verne,

Here is a quote from Samuel Elliot Morrison, retired admiral, historian, and author of a biography of Columbus entitiled, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea."

"     One present-day writer who deeply appreciates the
contributions made by Irving, but who nevertheless criticizes the
above statements as a glorified myth, is Samuel Eliot Morison
(Pulitzer Prize Winner).  He writes,
 
     "What becomes of the celebrated sessions of the
     University of Salamanca, before whose professors of
     mathematics, geography, and astronomy Columbus argued
     his case, and was turned down because he could not
     convince them that the world was round?  That is pure
     moonshine.  Washington Irving ... took a fictitious
     account of this non-existent university council
     published 130 years after the event, elaborated on it,
     and let his imagination go completely."(14)
 
He further comments,
 
     "...the whole story is misleading and mischievous
     nonsense.  The University was not asked to decide....
     The sphericity of the globe was not in question.  The
     issue was the width of the ocean; and therein the
     opposition was right."(15)
 
The whole text can be found at http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/geo/ODLCASE1.GEO

The flat earth is one issue, the geocentric solar system is a completely different issue.

Thomas Maddux

Thanks for the link.
Ther are clearly differing viewpoints being presented depending on the authors.
I was just a bit startled by your suggestion that "flat-earthism" ( is that a word??!) started in the nineteenth century...it is certainly true that the moving, heliocentic, spherical earth idea was NOT commonly accepted when Copernicus first made his claims. I agree that the issues are separate, but the in the historical  debate they were inextricably linked as you well know...
Verne

Verne, about the same time as the original PBS broadcast, Ohio's widest read newspaper ran a week-long story on the Tuskegee experiment, and a number of former Tuskegee airmen were interviewed in/on various media.  Having spent a "lifetime" in Alabama during the summer/fall of 1961, I had no difficulty believing any of it.  (As you often say, "I could tell you stories...")

There are people in the U.S. who deny all evidence of the WW2 holocaust, as well as some who think the moon landings of U.S. astronauts took place in a secret TV studio on earth.  It is not a sane world we live in, but no sensible believer in Christ should have cause to doubt the capacities of the unredeemed for working evil...

al