Anthropogenic Global Warming

[shams]

HappySqurriel said:...

 

I don't know enough about Austrailia to comment about it but ...

In the world there are so many distinct climate zones that extremely rare weather conditions should be expected in multiple zones every year. The probability of having the warmest or coldest spring, summer, winter or fall in 150 years (assuming a probability of 1/150 for each) is 5.2% for any given weather region; if you have 20 weather regions in a region you have a probability of 65% to see one of these "rare" weather paterns in any given year. When you start adding extreme rain or drought, high and low numbers of storms and forest fires and countless other extreme weather patterns it becomes extremely likely that you will see dozens of these weather paterns in a year.

Yes, but these are NOT isolated events. That is exactly the point.

Even in the 10 years that I have lived in Melbourne, I have noticed a very distinct shift weather patterns. I remember being here 15 or so years ago - very wet/unstable, and very cold (middle winter). There is absolutely no question that there has been a gradual increase in the average temperature, gradual decrease in rainfall (etc..) over the last 10-20 years. I would be ecstatic if this or next year we had a cold winter (back to normal), and a more wet summer - but I don't have my hopes up.

The Earth is (unless I am VERY mistaken?) a closed system. This system has been self-regulating itself for billions of years. There is definitely a large variation in normal amount of CO2 generally produced (volcanos, bush fires & other events), but I don't have ANY doubt that human activity has unbalanced this closed system.

Remember that its a double effect - not only have we been pumping (increasingly) massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere at a regular basis - we have massively degraded the planets natural ability to absorb and process CO2 by destroying/clearing large amounts of natural forest and plantlife.

Surely its common sense? Take a closed system, regularly inject increasing amounts of a gas that warms the system, while regularly weaken the tool that removes this gas from the system.  What do you get? A build up of this gas, and a slow - but steady - increase of the temperature within the system.

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<ahh.. so much to say... :( >