Monday, July 22, 2013

IS GLOBAL WARMING SERIOUS? IF SO, HOW DO WE KNOW IT, AND WHAT SHOULD WE BE DOING ABOUT IT?


Here below I have embed two videos from a Global Climate Change Conference held in 2008. Each of these videos is an hour long, and each features two speakers who keep to their allotted half-hour slots.

If you are not a scientist, you may suppose that you will not be able to understand any of the speakers.  However, I am going to help you by providing the immediately following figure.

The "secret" is to first understand the principle of a simple x-y graph (x is the horizontal axis and y is the vertical axis) and then take note of what x and y stand for.  The graph below has the easiest to understand x axis, i.e., TIME.



In this graph, you see that the x axis runs backwards in TIME from "Today" (on the right) all the way to 400,000 years in the past (extreme left). The basic picture is a screen capture that I took from the one of first speaker's slides.  However, I've colorized and labeled some parts and added several anthropological facts in green type.

To get an idea of how long a time 400,000 years is, check out the meager length of time taken up by the entire recorded history of human civilizations (the Egyptian civilization began only about 5,500 years ago).  I've also marked the approximate time during which our common "African Eve" walked the earth (as has been determined by very exacting studies of the dna of both living and long-dead humans).

By now you have likely begun to notice that the ice ages are very long, whereas the temperate/hot periods are pretty short (meaning "only" about 15,000 years).  Obviously, all of our cave-men-and-women direct ancestors survived all of these long, grueling cold periods.  By contrast, I've noted that those homo sapiens who migrated out of Africa before about 200,000 years ago all went extinct; their dna is not found in presently living humans.

At this point you may be wondering where the 3 jiggly curves came from.  Well, they are from the Vostok Ice Core recovered prior to 1999 from the Antarctic ice sheet by a Russian expedition using a hollow drill.  Scientists have discovered means of determining both the geological age of a particular level in the ice core as well as the average global temperature at the time that ice layer first formed (black curve).

The blue and red curves in the figure above are measures of the changes in the amounts of of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere as functions of time from today all the way backward to 400,000 years before present.  Note that both of these curves follow the temperature curve quite closely.  So cause and effect can be assumed.  But which is the cause and which the effect?  Well, note that in the three central warm periods, the CO2 spikes precede the temperature spikes -- strong evidence that this greenhouse gas determines when the earth warms up and to what degree!  With this in mind, I call your attention to the facts that original graph was published in 1999, whereas I have taken the liberty to add the CO2 concentration as of 2008 (above the "Today" arrow).  As the speaker will tell you, top climatologists are now convinced that the CO2 in the atmosphere must be forced back down to 350 ppm or lower to avoid catastrophic melting of ice sheets, which would result in many of the world's coastal cities becoming inundated by consequent rise in sea level.

Once you are comfortable with all aspects of the figure above, it will be time to test your new abilities by listening to the first speaker on the video below. (You may skip the second speaker because she does not show such slides.)

Global Climate Change Conference - Part 1
http://youtu.be/i2d8SCEnu8Q


I am providing the next video from the same conference with a different motive, that is, make you aware of the stupendous amounts of toxic chemicals being put into the atmosphere that we breath.  To learn about this you should listen this time to the second speaker, Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri.  (So this time you may skip the first speaker by clicking and dragging the time marker directly to 30 minutes.)

Global Climate Change Conference - Part 2
http://youtu.be/eXub7aVfjN4


If, after watching Dr. Perlingieri's discussion of chemtrails (beginning at 46 minutes), you would like more information, I highly recommend going to one of her articles on the subject: http://wakeup-world.com/2013/03/25/chemtrails-do-you-have-heavy-metals-poisoning/


The YouTube particulars for the second video are as follows:
Uploaded on Jan 20, 2010
http://www.mslaw.edu

"Threats to Biological Diversity & Human Health" The Massachusetts School of Law's Educational Forum presents part 2 of a Conference on Global Climate Change. The segment is hosted by Assistant Professor of law Kurt Olson with Patrick A. Parenteau, J.D., Professor of Law from the Vermont School of Law and Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, author, educator and environmental writer.

The Massachusetts School of Law also presents information on important current affairs to the general public in television and radio broadcasts, an intellectual journal, conferences, author appearances, blogs and books. For more information visit mslaw.edu.

MSLAW podcasts are available on itunes (just search for mslaw) and at http://mslaw.libsyn.com/rss.

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