Heavy Floods in Utrakhand, India

Sorry to hear about that. Hopefully we will see an international effort to get food and water to those that are stranded.

Was it really necessary to blame these heavy rains on climate change?

From what I understand, monsoon rains have been happening for a very long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_Indian_subcontinent

I have doubts on the climate change balme as well.

Seems far worse floods have happened in the last 2000 years and it would appear that your floods came in a 182 on the list with around 250 - 350 dead not 3 - 4 thousand.

Top Deadliest Floods in history.

Now on the other hand when a holy site gets washed away along with everyone there maybe someones God has something to do with it?

No body knows how many people were swept away in the floods official count is only 1000 but local count is estimated around 3-4 thousand. This is due to fact that around 65000 people were on the journey to shrines in mountains. This is the season for holy yatra (Journay).

It seems rather cold-hearted to dismiss how serious this flood is, by ranking it against the worst floods of all time.

If you must go by The Guinness Book of Records instead of seeing the suffering that is happening right this minute, I suggest you at least wait until the flood is actually over and the death toll finalized. The number of missing is still many thousands. I heard the number of confirmed dead as of a couple of hours ago has risen to 6500. When the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami hit, the first reports were of a few hundred people. Then they discovered many entire villages gone, along thousands of miles of coast, with nobody left to say how many had died.

Yep, that's our boy.

Mother nature has no conscience either.

And with a population of 1.241 billion people, is this really a significant loss of population in India? Mathematically it's not even noise.

Sorry to sound callous, but....................

And with a population of 1.241 billion people
And counting.

Looks like rescue efforts are well underway:

http://news.yahoo.com/india-monsoon-floods-kill-least-560-thousands-missing-063101300.html

If you had FEMA, they would be spending billions on figuring out why it rained so hard.

Natural catastrophes have been occurring since the beginning of history and before.

Climate has been changing since the earth came into being, by whatever means, for whatever reason.

I, for one, believe that climate change CAN, and does, affect the weather patterns of the planet. What drives climate change may be open to debate, but that it changes cannot. It's just part of the life cycle.

In the grand scheme of things, people will continue to go to the shrines, forever. The fact that thousands of people have now died at this one will only increase the mis-guided reverence some religions have for a piece of real estate.

Overpopulation may be as much to blame as Mother Nature.

Proposals for water Dams are on the go . It may materialise sooner .

Hastily constructed dams, made from local materials, without the benefit of proper engineering and permitting will be a curse, not a blessing.

We can't get it right here in the USA and we've got billions of US dollars to throw at these problems.

Our bridges fall down with great regularity, because nobody wants to pay to have them maintained. Spending money on necessities won't get you votes. Those come from special interests, who want favor$. Sorta like the difference between where babies come from and where jewelry comes from.

You're on a roll, but I must disagree...

The stimulus program fixed all of our roads and bridges.

In the long term though, I would say that constructing massive reservoirs in the mountainous regions of India to collect the rainwater that comes all at once, would be a great idea. Clean water and and electricity, with a little help from gravity, sounds like a winning scenario.

"The stimulus program fixed all of our roads and bridges."

Don't quit your day jobs. You'll never make it as a comedian.

Seeing as how you are in a different time zone than I, I can only assume that the party has begun.

The sun is past the yardarm, somewhere.

We're just having growing pains, we don't live in a perfect world and I hope we never do, because that will mean that all the humans have died...or, even worse, have become irrelevant....natural disasters are never a surprise to some people, because the same thing has happened before and the probability of it happening again was known, just not properly prepared for...If we were properly prepared for a 'natural disaster' it would just be called a 'natural phenomena'....

I'm a little saddened to see technical types retreat into engineering ostrichhood when the subject of carbon-driven climate change comes around. It's such a simple subject, really. Greenhouse effects increase heat retention, increased total energy causes bigger weather effects. I think the ostrich effect is simple fear for our children with no easy way out. Unfortunately, the corporate liars are winning by default, but engineering types should know better. But gearheads aren't necessarily rationally moral.

"engineering ostrichhood" Really? That's a new term to me.

I don't believe that "carbon driven climate change" has been mentioned, until now.

The subject was floods, and climate change was mentioned, but not in the context that you inserted.

Don't worry, be happy.

What has puzzled me is that the Kedarnath temple shrine which is supposed to have been built in 8AD or nearly 2000 year old- is standing tall-and was right in the center of the deluge of floods. All the houses, resorts, shops etc built nearby for the pilgrims- by humans in recent years have been totally destroyed / washed away. The temple walls were not damaged- even though huge boulders had been brought by the flood waters. The water came from behind the temple and so I am not aware of waht damage could have happened inside the temple. As per news papaer- the main idol- spaitika (what is english equivalent of this- I dod not know) linga, Hanuman staute are missing (I dod not believe it- it even could have been stolen by now), and Adi Shankara's samadhi is damaged.

But I am sure - it will be renovated and will become a more popular shirne afetr restoration.

About ecological damage- it does seem to be manmade damage by cutting trees, building man made structures by destruction of forset around thus loosening the soil- and allowing river Ganga - to flow down so fiercly and causing landslides.

I fear that forest cutting has more to do with it than climate change. My heart goes out to the dead, who no doubt died in horrible ways.

It is too soon to look for ways to prevent this from happening again, however, Suresh Sharma, please examine the causes of this disaster now while they are still plain to see, and determine if there can be any way to plant trees, zone land to forbid farming or building of subdivisions, and divert the flood waters which no doubt come every year or so, though often not as bad.

We here in Canada are facing some serious flooding this year as well...Calgary seems to be pretty much under water. This has NEVER happened before. Minnesota over there in the 'States is facing some serious flooding. It does not seem to be climate change so much as a combination of circumstances which come together rarely.

Canada has never seen flooding before? The entire country used to be trapped under an ice sheet. What happened when the ice melted?

I know, I know...all climate events are driven by man, and I'm an ostrich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period

I'm not having another climate change debate, but when you come out of the gate with insults, and hold on to this belief that, if not for humans, the entire planet would remain in a static state...I have to respond.

What the HELL are you on about?

I got your PM, and I totally agree with you that continuing to rebuild in known flood zones is stupid; particularly in the US. I may have misread your post.

I'm getting very touchy about climate change being blamed for everything from tornados, to heavy rain, to hurricanes, to heavy snow....to every other climate event. This line of thinking is destroying the US economy.

Like you, I am not a proponent of deforestation; there are sustainable ways to do just about everything. Sorry if I was off base.

Accepted.

If there is something which CAN be changed, then we must do it. Or face the horror of thousands being buried in landslides, drowned in the homes which are supposed to be their refuge, or even washed out to sea. Or we can continue to do dumb things which get us killed. Nature doesn't care either way....

When there is a disaster, something we did went wrong. When it is a natural disaster, then something we didn't do went wrong. And sometimes....it just happens and we weren't prepared.

Maybe I'm missing something, but in India's case, I think that as they continue to modernize, they may want to think about installing the infrastructure to move clean water throughout the country.

It would prevent people from living on the riverbanks, (that are known to flood), and save lives. I think flood zones, (in the US as well), would make great places to raise crops. A ready supply of water, and when the big floods occur, we lose some food instead of people and homes. Just a thought.

Here in NC, I pay higher homeowners insurance rates, to supplement the people that want to live on the beach and gamble with hurricanes.

The combination of circumstances may come together rarely, but in recent years rare circumstances are not so rare. Suppose two independent events each have a 1% probability of happening in a given year, say next year. The probability of both happening next year is one hundredth of that, or 0.01 %. If both of them double in probability, then the probability of both happening next year goes up exponentially by 4X, to 0.04%

But suppose each event goes from a 1% probability to a 10% probability. From a hundred year event to a ten year event. The probability of both occurring next year goes from 0.01% to 1%, a hundred fold increase.

Then suppose that there are many things that COULD occur together to cause a devastating combination, that are all low probability, but all are rising. For example, a flood could be caused by a combination of a rare heavy rain and a rare shift in the jet stream, as happened last winter. Or it could be caused by a heavy snow cover being melted suddenly by a rare spring heat wave, as a few years ago in the Sierras. Or it could be caused by two storms arising at the same time, like Sandy. And of course the word "trifecta" was made famous by "The Perfect Storm." I'm sure you can think of other examples. All of these could cause a flood, and if they are all getting more likely, the probability of a combination of them rises exponentially.

If you simply look at the trends without bothering to get into the causes of global warming, you see that hundred year events are indeed becoming ten year events or worse.

MrYusef,

Until now no body is able to find out the cause of such flood. It could be due to heavy rainfall (300 mm) in few hours, dam bursting, deforestation, construction of hotels and houses on the river bank.

I know recently there were floods in many countries such as U.S, Canada, Germany and China. This is the reason which prompted me to draw attention of all our CR4 friends.

Looks like a case of human error on a monumental scale.

With 3 days advance warning, there is no excuse for the cost in human lives.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23753-indian-flood-deaths-blamed-on-mindless-construction.html

The World Bank released a report this week about the effects of climate change. Regarding South Asia, here is a quote from a summary press release:

"The report, prepared for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and peer reviewed by 25 scientists worldwide, says the consequences for South Asia of a warming climate are even worse if global temperatures increased by an average of 4°C by 2090. In this scenario, seen as likely unless action is taken now to limit carbon release in the atmosphere, South Asia would suffer more extreme droughts and floods, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and declines in food production. In India, for example, an extreme wet monsoon that currently has a chance of occurring only once in 100 years is projected to occur every 10 years by the end of the century. Events like the devastating Pakistan floods of 2010, which affected more than 20 million people, could become common place. "

Here's a link to a site where you can download the report in pdf form:

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/03/17473996/looking-beyond-horizon-climate-change-impacts-adaptation-responses-reshape-agriculture-eastern-europe-central-asia

It amazes me that climate scientists can tell us what's going to happen decades in the future, but they were unable to predict this devastating monsoon a week ago. If they were able to sharpen their near term prediction skills, thousands of lives would have been spared.

With a surface area of 196,935,000 sq miles, it comes as no surprise that weather predictions over a single square mile are difficult, as we know from the recent tornados in USA.

Climate scientists don't predict monsoons, only the long term probability of monsoons. Meteorologists predict the weather, including monsoons. I'm sure you have heard many times about the difference between weather and climate. But I'm going to explain it again anyway.

If you have a cup of coffee, and pour milk into it, predicting exactly where every swirl of milk will be for every millisecond is not simply difficult, but impossible. It's not just that you have to know the exact volume, velocity, viscosity, temperature, density, and location of both the milk and the coffee, which would be a massive computational problem anyway. The big problem is that it is a chaotic system in which variations too small to detect are magnified into visible differences. You can't get even an approximation of the solution, because the tiny differences cause large variations. That's weather.

If you want to know what the temperature of the cup of coffee will be after the milk mixes, all you have to know is the volume, temperature, specific heat of the milk and the coffee, the properties of the cup, etc. It's a simple arithmetical calculation in which you can get more and more accurate in the answer by taking more variables in to account. That's climate.

If you want to know how much heat/energy there will be in the atmosphere in the future, you can answer the question. The answer does not behave chaotically. There is a measurable amount of heat entering the earth's atmosphere. There is a measurable amount of heat leaving the earth's atmosphere. Any difference between them must be accounted for, and so they refine the calculation by looking at the amount of energy that the oceans absorb, how much ice melts, how much energy goes into kinetic energy of wind, etc. The answer does not behave chaotically. A small difference in a variable does not cause a large difference in the result. You can get closer and closer to the correct answer by refining your data and looking where the energy goes.

95% of climate scientists agree that CO2 is causing a buildup of heat energy in the atmosphere by blocking a certain wavelength of infrared radiation that water vapor does not block. There is plenty of data that supports this hypothesis. The data that was thought to disprove it turned out to be incorrect.

Contrary to the dire warnings, there has been no warming in 2 decades.

http://www.calwatchdog.com/2013/04/07/why-enforce-ab-32-when-new-studies-show-no-global-warming/

I wasn't aware that India didn't have Doppler radar. That is a real tragedy; it should have been in place years ago. The time to respond to these storms, was 48 hours before they arrived. People could have been moved to higher ground.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-10/bhopal/33136891_1_dp-dubey-monsoon-observatory

Perhaps we should be focusing more on the here and now, rather than attempting to predict catastrophies that may, or may not, happen 100 years from now.

Two decades is an exaggeration. At most one decade, and even that is ambiguous. But you linked to Warren Duffy, the conservative commentator, who has no scientific credentials. This is an engineering forum so I don't see why you even mention him. I prefer to believe the 95% of climate scientists.

Warming has apparently paused. It has paused before, in the 80's, and then shot upward again. But the heat has to be going somewhere. If it's not escaping into space it must be going somewhere else. It might be getting mixed into the oceans faster than expected, or melting the glaciers and antarctic sea ice.

The El Nino, La Nina years also have some kind of effect on temperature. If you look at this graph you can see that the recent La Nina years alone can be causing the pause in warming. But the La Nina years are also rising rapidly, so if this is just a pause, it looks like it will start rising again soon.

Why didn't you go to the original NASA article, instead of Principia Scientific International?

Here's what PSI says:

"A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth's atmosphere."

"NASA's Langley Research Center has collated data proving that "greenhouse gases" actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth's upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing a key role in the energy balance of air above our planet's surface."

Here's what the NASA report actually says:

"Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats," explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER's principal investigator. "When the upper atmosphere (or 'thermosphere') heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space."

"That's what happened on March 8^th when a coronal mass ejection (CME) propelled in our direction by an X5-class solar flare hit Earth's magnetic field. (On the "Richter Scale of Solar Flares," X-class flares are the most powerful kind.) Energetic particles rained down on the upper atmosphere, depositing their energy where they hit. The action produced spectacular auroras around the poles and significant¹ upper atmospheric heating all around the globe.

"The thermosphere lit up like a Christmas tree," says Russell. "It began to glow intensely at infrared wavelengths as the thermostat effect kicked in."

For the three day period, March 8^th through 10^th, the thermosphere absorbed 26 billion kWh of energy. Infrared radiation from CO₂ and NO, the two most efficient coolants in the thermosphere, re-radiated 95% of that total back into space"

As you can plainly see, the actual NASA report says absolutely nothing about a conflict with climatologists, nothing about global warming, nothing about CO2 cooling the planet, and nothing about preventing "95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun." If you think about that last claim even a minute, you would realize that the only way that that could happen is for it to block 95% of the visible light that heats up the ground. The sky would have to turn gray.

What it says is that when solar flares warm up the upper atmosphere, CO2 and NO re-radiate 95% of that heat back into space.

I appreciate you pointing this web site out. I can add PSI to the list of web sites that lie about scientific news to try to cause doubt about the human role in global warming. Don't take anything they say at face value. Always check out the original sources.

As you can plainly see, the actual NASA report says absolutely nothing about a conflict with climatologists, nothing about global warming, nothing about CO2 cooling the planet, and nothing about preventing "95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun." If you think about that last claim even a minute, you would realize that the only way that that could happen is for it to block 95% of the visible light that heats up the ground. The sky would have to turn gray.

Let's have a look at the differences between the visible light spectrum and infrared light:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared

You are positing that CO2 acts as a coolant, but only during solar flares; I don't understand how that could be.

It's okay for scientists to say they don't know; quite refreshing actually. I'm not going to pretend that I do know.

Here is a full report that was recently published by The Global Warming Policy Foundation:

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/03/Whitehouse-GT_Standstill.pdf

There is lots of good reading there; or I suppose you could add it to your list of sites that lie.

http://www.thegwpf.org/

Not sure what your links to visible and infrared light are supposed to mean. Would you say what they are supposed to indicate?

The links to the Global Warming Policy Foundation are not very informative. They repeat what we already know: There is an apparent pause in global warming. They call it a standstill. They say it means that Global warming has stopped.

In their words:

Calculations based on ensembles of climate models suggest prolonged standstills of about ten years can occur once every eight decades. Standstills of 15 years are much more difficult to explain. This report shows, that if we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change.

OK, they are using one prediction of the consensus models to show that another prediction of the consensus models is incorrect, and that therefore we need to throw out the consensus models. Maybe the part of the consensus model that is wrong is the idea that 15 year pauses are difficult to explain. I would suggest, instead, that if that pauses of 15 years are unusual, and difficult to explain, until we find the explanation. Then they become easy to explain.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that we are on the threshold of global observations requiring a refinement of the consensus theory. The theory says that the heat has to go somewhere. Are they saying that the heat can just disappear? There is a known imbalance in the amount of energy entering the atmosphere from the sun and the amount of infrared radiation leaving the atmosphere from the earth. If you are an engineer, you know that the heat has to be going somewhere. Right?

I've already posted the plot of El Nino years and La Nina years. Here's something even better. Measurements of the heating of the oceans. Here's a link to one of several articles by one of the actual scientists who did the research:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/jun/24/global-warming-pause-button

Here's the plot of the heat content of the oceans:

The bottom line is... we have implemented political agendas around the globe, that are based on computer models that were wrong.

Just yesterday, our president promised to shut down our coal industry by bypassing congress and using executive orders and EPA regulations. As promised during his first campaign, our energy costs will necessarily skyrocket.

We have the cleanest burning coal technology on the planet, and in a stunning display of hypocrisy, we are going after our own power plants while steadily increasing our coal exports to China.

I saw a cool show on PBS last night about cave diving in the Bahamas. The teams brought along scientists, and in one segment, they were cutting open stalagmites lengthwise and studying the cores. They showed very substantial and abrupt climate changes throughout history; all of which would have had a profound impact on humans. More here.

The point is, that regardless of CO2 levels or our part in it, the earth is going to continue doing what it does. People will die, floods and droughts will continue...all kinds of bad things are going to happen that are detrimental to human life.

Anyway, we've done this on here more times than I can count. Feel free to do a search on global warming to the right; if you want to restart any of the threads, I'm still subscribed, but we have beat this dead horse over and over again on here.

The fact that bad things happen does not mean that we should continue to cause additional bad things to happen. There are enough bad things that happen without causing some really big ones.

There is no reason to think that our energy costs will skyrocket. It is very true that many people want us to think that, to scare us into doing nothing. I haven't actually seen any actual numbers about the harm that reducing carbon emissions will cause. Why do you believe that when scientists predict that bad things will happen, they are wrong, but when right-wing fossil fuel spokesmen predict that bad things will happen, they are right?

While coal is being reduced other technologies will increase. It's not like coal mines will be shut down tomorrow. We can save far energy more by conservation than the entire coal industry produces (based on figures that I saw that say we can save 90% of our energy by conservation), and provide a higher standard of living at the same time. Every little purchase of weather stripping, wall insulation, window coverings, etc., will pay for itself pretty quickly, so nobody need suffer. Quite the contrary. And even solar panels pay for themselves eventually. How does that create any hardship? There are companies that will install solar panels for free on houses, reducing their energy bill to 0, and charging them a much smaller fee. Who gets hurt by that? Ironically, it is the rich who buy the most solar panels, because they are good at analyzing the costs and benefits and are willing to pay the upfront costs to get the long-term benefits.

And then there are the wars, of course. How many American soldiers will not have to go to war if we reduce our need for oil? That alone sounds like a tremendous improvement in the lives of Americans.

And none of these reasons even include the benefits of reducing the harm of global warming, which could be enormous. If you say you don't believe that part, that's OK. But be skeptical about the predictions of economic calamity too.

And I would definitely support creating a program to help the coal miners into another industry.

Oh boy.

I don't automatically believe right wing anything. I think you missed my point when I mentioned that while we are nixing our own coal fired plants, we are simultaneously boosting our coal exports to China, where it is burned in dirtier plants. This may make some people feel good, but it does not equate to a reduction in carbon emissions. It's all one planet.

It's kind of like the ethanol thing, which reduces mileage, has led to an increase in CO2 output, has been wildly expensive, including impacting food prices, and has required government subsidies since day 1.

I'm all for real world solutions; we just haven't seen any.

I was responding to what you said:

"Just yesterday, our president promised to shut down our coal industry by bypassing congress and using executive orders and EPA regulations. As promised during his first campaign, our energy costs will necessarily skyrocket."

I'm saying that energy costs will not necessarily skyrocket. Can you say why you think they will?

Going after coal, is just a small part of the president's climate initiative. When relatively cheap energy sources are shut down, and replaced by very expensive and unreliable energy sources, price rises are sure to follow. If we don't see a change in our power bills, it will mean that Washington is printing, borrowing and taxing us, to pay for the expensive energy.

You won't like this site, but it kind of sums it up.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/27/president-obamas-climate-initiativethe-bad-news-and-good-news/

The other reason I say that, is that I love my president, and I know he would never lie to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4

Sorry about the delay. You are absolutely right that I would not like that site, and it does sum up what the fossil fuel industry wants non-scientists to believe about global warming:

"The good news is that, despite fears, man-made emissions have very little effect on Earth's climate. Water vapor, not carbon dioxide, is Earth's dominant greenhouse gas. Emissions from human industry cause only about one percent of Earth's greenhouse effect. And contrary to predictions by all 73 of the world's top climate models, global temperatures have failed to rise over the last 15 years."

All totally incorrect.

Lets just face it...there are far too many conflicting scientific "facts" out there, for either one of us to know what the hell the truth is.

All we can know for sure, is that it's been politicized.

I just hope for all our sakes that it is man made activities which are causing global warming because then we would be able to do something about those activities. If its just the "sun getting warmer", we are finished.

Actually the scientific facts don't conflict. They all point in one direction, toward global warming caused by humans, and that it will get much worse before it starts getting better.

You are absolutely right that it has been politicized. After all, there are enormous sums of money that the fossil fuel industry stands to lose. Most of the "facts" on the other side come from deliberate misinterpretations of bits of data taken out of context, picked up and amplified by the echo chamber of right wing propaganda, and then distributed to us as "scientific" proof that global warming is wrong/a hoax/all natural/beneficial/better than Obama/better than communism/etc. And then conservative confirmation biases kick in, and it sounds like there isn't any truth at all in global warming.

And here I thought the ice cores were scientific facts. I suppose that was a misinterpretation the data taken out of context. How dare they use data of the history of the world to contradict climatologist's computer models. Fortunately that can't happen with the data the climatologist use. Their use of algorithms for correcting raw data and fabricating missing data, insure that the temp. taken from a bucket of water pulled up from the side of a ship in the early 1900's, has the same reliability and validity as 'state of the art' satellite thermal imaging. _{(All of their little graphs should have a note on the left side stating "Uh, we really have no idea!")}

You need not worry about the fossil fuel industry losing money. They will do just fine. I assure you, it will be the people who suffer from carbon finance. After all, there are enormous sums of money, hundreds of billion of dollars per year, they will have to pay.

Sorry, you'll have to do better than hand-waving and ridicule for data.

Please cite a scientific reference to ice core data that contradicts global warming. I can dispose of a popular one, Steve Easterbrook's analysis of Greenland Ice Sheet Project data (GISP2), right off the bat. Easterbrook's GISP2 plot claims that the past 10,000 years are almost entirely warmer than the present. Unfortunately the data he is basing that on only goes up to 1855, long before any of the modern global warming occurred. Yet he claims that it goes up the "present". Further, it is only from Greenland, and only from one location, yet he claims it is a proxy for the whole planet.

Climate models are not used as proof of anything. The data is all the proof we need. The climate models are only attempts to figure out where it is going from here, and the cretors of those models know very well that they can be inaccurate. Case in point is why they didn't predict the current pause in atmospheric temeprature. Unfortunately the oceans have been warming instead, and they hold far more heat than the atmosphere.

People who have the money to invest in solar power will save money in the long run. The big question for purchasers of solar systems, hybrid cars and electric cars is not whether they will pay for themselves, but how soon. Then there are the people who just want to not have to worry when there is a war somewhere in the world and the price of gas jumps up instantly. And then there are the people who worry about massive oil spills, or trains of crude oil not having their brakes set properly, or cancer rates downwind from a refinery, or explosions at a refinery.

Can you imagine the destruction that would happen when a school covered with solar panels has an accident? Yeah, nobody would notice except the maintenance guy.

Hey, I can get behind that attitude!

Too bad its off topic or I would like, totally give you a good answer!

There is nothing in the ice core data that contradicts global warming...they prove it!

They also show that CO2 levels, as well as cooling and heating cycles, have been fluctuating for thousands of years. Like a heartbeat monitor, our current warming period is right in line with the pattern established in the ice core samples.

Assuming the patterns go as they always have, we have another ice age on the way.

Yes, CO2 levels fluctuate, and there are cycles in the temperature, but the current heating is not in line with any of those cycles. The hockey stick has been validated over and over. We should be continuing to cool now, but the temperatures took a sharp turn upward in the 20th century, and now is above the average for the past 10,000 years. Air and land temperatures paused for the last 10 years, but ocean temperatures are continuing to climb, and that rise is melting the Antarctic ice sheets from below, even while surface ice may increase.

Here is a set of three plots of the data for the past 10,000, from Kobashi 2011. Note the rise in temperature at the end. There is also a rise just before that, which is in the Greenland data but not in the other temperature records, which you can see clearly in the middle graph.

Here's a record not based on just GISP2 that does not show the Greenland peak before the hockey stick "blade":

Very sad.

Here's hoping that all CR4 readers, their families and friends are safe.

Hearing stories of those people who have survived and rescued by choppers is very very pathetical. They have lived in rains in forests not slept for 3-4 days,had remained hungry for 3-4 days, have seen their children die before their eyes, they had to leave their bodies in jungles. Such is the painful experience of the people who had gone for holy trip in Himalaya.

Of course you could always stop spending money on Fighter jets,nuclear bombs and missiles, and spend it on your people and an infrastructure that works. Drainage flood protection and a sewage system. but whatever you can always wait till it blows up in your face and then bleat "Help us " to western nations. That seems to be the only policy your government has

Uncomfortable, but with a small grain of truth.

Infrastructure is stimulus spending. It comes back into the State coffers within a few months. When a nation neglects its infrastructure, one would do well to examine the one holding the purse strings.

Of course you could always stop spending money on Fighter jets,nuclear bombs and missiles, and spend it on your people and an infrastructure that works
There is no profit potential in that.

"There is no profit potential in that."

Sure there is. Just for different people. Shoddy, or no, construction standards leave plenty of room for fraud, deception and theft.

Thanks. Why superpowers & UN doesn't advise governments to do it. By pleasing superpowers,selling weapons, intervening in other countries' affairs,destroying minorities,killing people etc they want to show superiority & earn money.

And how would you change that? A sit-in in a Montreal hotel?

"All we are saying....is give peace a chance".

Security is expensive. Get over it.