Global Warming: Your opinion ....

You are describing the Maya illusion concept where basically everything as we see it now including us is the dream of Brahman (God and the only real thing). And our main objective is to attain moksha (nirvana) and exit the rebirth cycle. I don't agree with that way of thinking! There are some quite idiotic things involved in it. For example it is possible to go down the rebirth cycle and be reborn not as a human but as an animal. In general you can't take Religion and its concepts literally. If you look at any Religion the simple message is to live your life in the right way. The problem I have is where they get this concept of right and wrong. This will bring in moral relativism and things can fall apart. It will also put us waaaay off topic.
You speak of ego, you do realize that simply looking inward and putting the priority in the "self" is very egocentric. It can also be looked at as a human flaw in thinking. I agree with Alpha we need to look outwards. There are many concepts on reality floating around but there is only one truth and as Mark Twain said "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
Reality will be greater than anything humans can "dream" up. Look around at "what is" and not be blinded by "I am". If we all are creating what we see using our minds then why is it that we all see the same thing ? Wouldn't make us too unique or fascinating would it ?

 

Climatologists Trade Tips on Destroying Evidence, Evangelizing Warming

Penn State researcher and his CRU/IPCC colleague treated AGW like a religious "cause" despite warnings from peers

Anthropogenic global warming is a fascinating hypothesis that mankind may be able to systematically increase the Earth's temperature in the long term by burning deposits of hydrocarbon fuels. But the key thing to note is that despite the intriguing premise, little definitive information has been determined in this field even as politicization runs rife. In fact, researchers are still struggling to explain why warming has stalled in the last decade even as levels of carbon dioxide -- supposedly the most important greenhouse gas have rose.

I. Climatologists "Pull an Enron", Shred the Evidence

The recent University of California, Berkley "BEST" study -- perhaps the most comprehensive climate change investigation to date -- was blasted by AGW proponents. They were upset that the study -- funded in part by the charity of a major oil entrepreneur -- highlighted the fact that temperatures had flat lined over the past decade, and were more upset still that the study suggested that other factors like sea currents could have driven the warming that occurred in the 1960s-1990s.

But newly reportedly leaked emails reveal that accusations of bias are perhaps a bit of projection. The new emails include discussions that sound as shocking or more so as the infamous "Climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The new emails revisit embattled climate researcher-cum-AGW evangelist Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In one email Professor Jones explains to researchers how to best hide their work to prevent anyone from being able to replicate it and find errors:

I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.​

Of course Phil Jones and his supporters will likely claim that the emails were taken out of context of some larger more appropriate discussion. But as a researcher it's pretty damning to make comments that even would seem to imply that you were engaging in trying to suppress peer review of questionable data -- academic fraud.

Particularly trouble is the phrase "cover yourself", which suggest a conspiratorial, political undertone to what is supposed to be a transparent field of research.

The emails contain outright requests for the destruction of professional communications regarding research in an effort to cover up public scrutiny of public flaws. The leaks add yet another humiliating scandal to Pennsylvania State University as they implicate prominent Penn State climatologist Michael Mann even more directly than the last release.

Writes the Professor Jones to Professor Mann:

Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]? Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!​

_{Michael Mann (left) and Phil Jones (right) appear to share tips on how to best destroy damaging climate evidence. [Image Sources: (left) PSU (right) Chris Bourchier / Rex Features]}​

Some professors and experts even tried to reach out to Professor Mann, warning him of the danger of turning science into religion by purposefully ignoring evidence. Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office writes:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary. I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.​

Even Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research who was implicated in the first CRU email scandal for suggesting the removal of an editor who allowed peer-reviewed skeptical studies to be published, seemed to agree on this extreme instance:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.​

The IPCC did eventually change the draft somewhat -- perhaps due to this feedback -- but critics say it still did far too much cherry picking of its sources.

II. Forget Science: You're Either For the Cause, Or You're Against It

In a later email, Professor Mann implies AGW advocacy is a political/pseudo-religious "cause" and that those who question it on scientific merits are enemies of the "cause". He writes, "I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause."

Ironically, Professor Curry appears to be the only one behaving like a true scientist. The emails neglect the forgotten truth that the distinguished Georgia Institute of Technology began as a believed in man-made global warming, publishing a notable 2005 study published in the prestigious Science journal investigating the potential correlation between hurricanes and man-made temperature increases.

The study earned scathing criticism from warming skeptics, but rather than treat her work as religious dogma, she carefully considered the criticism. Supported by her co-author, she personally met with some prominent critics and considered their claims. After all, she recalls in a Scientific American interview, "We were generally aware of these problems when we wrote the paper, but the critics argued that these issues were much more significant than we had acknowledged."

Soon she began to blog for AGW a skeptical blog run by Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, and Climate Audit, run by statistician Steve McIntyre. She began blogging hoping to convince skeptics of the merits of AGW theory via an open discussion. But in time she found herself increasingly troubled by the lack of transparency and conclusive evidence on such an important topic. She singles out the IPCC as a particularly guilty party, accusing it of outright "corruption."

Given the released emails it's hard to argue with that assessment. Writes Jonathan Overpeck, lead coordinating author of the IPCC's most recent climate assessment:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.​

Aside from destroying evidence and ostracizing colleagues, the emails also reveal another sign of dogma and the antithesis of science -- ignorance. In one email Phil Jones admits he has no idea how to perform the basic statistical analysis that forms the basis of one of his past claims, writing:

I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I'm not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.
What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won't be statistically significant, but the trend is up.​

III. When in Doubt, Deny

Already AGW advocates are jumping to the defense of the researchers implicated in the scandal. Writes Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard:

Rather than smearing scientists, reporters might want to try some actual reporting.

The new round of hacked emails from climate scientists floating around the internet hasn't generated the same buzz as the last iteration—at least not yet. But in certain circles, it's playing out much like the first batch of emails did in 2009. In addition to the tranche of emails, the poster included a list of "greatest hits"—short quotes from the emails taken out of their context that are intended to paint scientists as scheming or lying. The entire batch was quickly posted in searchable format on another site.​

But such critical reports have thus far failed to actually provide virtually any such contextual explanations, despite their suggestion that they must exist. Further, the critics of the email publication are ignoring the fact that there are certain types of things that researchers should know to never say -- such as making comments that even sound like suggesting the destruction of academic evidence.

The reports also ignore the fact that while it's easy to accuse the media, the oil industry, et al. for a mass conspiracy to silence anthropogenic global warming advocates, there's just as compelling a cause for AGW proponents to conspire to silence their critics in a dogmatic, non-scientific fashion.

Such an approach not only guarantees researchers lucrative research grants, it guarantees their political allies potential billions of dollars in windfalls in "carbon credits" and other AGW-inspired wealth redistribution schemes. Al Gore in particular has made close to a billion dollars based on his evangelizing AGW in lectures, film; via carbon credit investments; and by pushing the government to funnel money to his high-risk "green energy" investments in the name of fighting AGW.

_{AGW political proponents like Al Gore stand to make billions more if they can convince world governments to fully enact their wealth redistribution schemes under the auspice of "fighting warming". [Image Source: Associated Press]}

You can download a torrent of the emails here.​

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Last big chill suggests lower climate impact of carbon

[h=2]By John Timmer | Published a day ago[/h]

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One of the key measures of the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide is called the climate sensitivity, which provides an estimate of how much the planet will warm in response to a doubling of the CO₂ concentration. This figure has been estimated using a variety of methods, producing a range of values; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the most likely value is 3 Kelvin, but recognizes there's a reasonable chance it could range anywhere from 2.4-4.5K. A new study that uses a climate model to evaluate the peak of the last glacial period, however, suggests that the IPCC's figure might be a bit high, and that very high values are overwhelmingly unlikely.
Glacial periods are triggered by small changes in the Earth's orbit. These aren't enough by themselves to alter the global climate, but they set off a drop in atmospheric CO₂ and an expansion of ice, which reflects sunlight back to space. These feedbacks help the Earth enter a deep chill during glacial periods.
The study focuses on the peak of the last glacial cycle, called the Last Glacial Maximum, which took place around 20,000 years ago. The conditions the authors use include larger ice sheets, lower greenhouse gas concentrations, increased dust, and the changes in solar forcings driven by the orbital differences (a forcing is anything that can shift the climate). For the actual conditions, they obtained temperature data from pollen samples, ice cores, and ocean sediments. Combined, these samples cover about a quarter of the planet's surface, and provide one of the most detailed reconstructions of the temperature of the LGM.
So the authors have a set of inputs—the things that force the climate—and an estimate of the output, namely the global temperature. To estimate the climate sensitivity, they perform multiple runs of a suite of climate models, providing them different climate sensitivities, and perform a Bayesian analysis to figure out which values are consistent with the state of the planet. For this work, they used a set of 47 different versions of theUniversity of Victoria climate model, which they consider "intermediate complexity." In this case, that means that it incorporates information on dust, but doesn't include feedback changes in clouds or winds.
To look at climate sensitivity, the authors short-circuited the actual role of carbon dioxide, and simply changed its impact by adjusting the amount of infrared radiation that escapes through the atmosphere (carbon dioxide acts by trapping this radiation). Each of the 47 different models has a different value for this escaping radiation, and so models different levels of greenhouse gas impact.
This approach let them set a number of limits on the climate sensitivity. For example, model runs where it was too low keep the planet warmer than it was at the LGM. In other words, if the contribution of reduced CO₂levels is too small, the changes in the remaining forcings aren't enough to trigger a deep glaciation. In the same way, high climate sensitivities produce an extremely cold planet, far colder than the LGM. In fact, climate sensitivities above 6K trigger a global glaciation, or snowball Earth—something that has happened in the past, but not for over half a billion years. "Our model thus suggests that large climate sensitivities cannot be reconciled with paleoclimatic and geologic evidence, and hence should be assigned near-zero probability," they conclude.
Overall, their best fitting model involved a climate sensitivity of 2.4K, a touch under the IPCC's best fit, and a range of likely values that's also generally lower than the IPCC's. That best fit, however, has some problems: the model has Antarctica 4K warmer than it actually was, but suggests the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was 7K cooler than the actual data indicates. It's not clear whether this is an issue with regional details, or an indication that the best global fit isn't actually a very good fit.
The authors offer three explanations for why their results provide a lower climate sensitivity than previous work: their temperature reconstruction suggests the LGM was warmer than earlier work; their temperature data comes from sources that are a bit more evenly distributed around the planet; and not all studies have included estimates of atmospheric dust.
This looks like a solid effort, and should be easy to extend to using other climate model ensembles, which would provide a greater degree of confidence in their climate sensitivity value (assuming that other models agree, of course). But, as the authors note, their results are sensitive to the estimates of global temperature, which in turn are dependent on where we've obtained information about the LGM. More widely dispersed sources of data from this time period would be the clearest way of improving all the estimates derived from this time.
The other thing worth noting is that there may be limits to how much a climate sensitivity from the past can tell us how the Earth will behave now. Because of different feedbacks and starting conditions, it's possible that the climate sensitivity at the height of a glacial era will be slightly different from that of an interglacial era like the one we're now in. Fortunately, whatever conditions that created a snowball Earth millions of years ago don't seem to currently apply.
Science, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1203513 (About DOIs).
Photograph by NOAA
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North American mammal evolution tracks with climate change

December 22, 2011 | Contact: David Orenstein | 401-863-1862
Rhino-like animalsThis painting by artist Carl Buell depcits a scene from the late Eocene of North America. The rhino-like animals in the background are brontotheres. The pony-sized Hyracodon, a closer relative of living rhinos, in the foreground.Credit: Carl Buell


Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — History often seems to happen in waves — fashion and musical tastes turn over every decade and empires give way to new ones over centuries. A similar pattern characterizes the last 65 million years of natural history in North America, where a novel quantitative analysis has identified six distinct, consecutive waves of mammal species diversity or “evolutionary faunas.” What force of history determined the destiny of these groupings? The numbers say it was typically climate change.
“Although we’ve always known in a general way that mammals respond to climatic change over time, there has been controversy as to whether this can be demonstrated in a quantitative fashion,” said Christine Janis, professor of evolutionary biology at Brown University. “We show that the rise and fall of these faunas is indeed correlated with climatic change — the rise or fall of global paleotemperatures — and also influenced by other more local perturbations such as immigration events.”
Specifically, of the six waves of species diversity that Janis and her Spanish collaborators describe online this week inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, four show statistically significant correlations with major changes in temperature. The two transitions that show a weaker but still apparent correlation with the pattern correspond to periods when mammals from other continents happened to invade in large numbers, said Janis, who is the paper’s senior and second author.
Previous studies of the potential connection between climate change and mammal species evolution have counted total species diversity in the fossil record over similar time periods. But in this analysis, led by postdoctoral scholar Borja Figueirido, the scientists asked whether there were any patterns within the species diversity that might be significant. They were guided by a similar methodology pioneered in a study of “evolutionary faunas” in marine invertebrates by Janis’ late husband Jack Sepkoski, who was a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.
What the authors found is six distinct and consecutive groupings of mammal species that shared a common rise, peak, and decline in their numbers. For example, the “Paleocene fauna” had largely given way to the “early-middle Eocene fauna” by about 50 million years ago. Moreover, the authors found that these transfers of dominance correlated with temperature shifts, as reflected in data on past levels of atmospheric oxygen (determined from the isotopes in the fossilized remains of deep sea microorganisms).
By the numbers, the research showed correlations between species diversity and temperature change, but qualitatively, it also provided a narrative of how the traits of typical species within each wave made sense given the changes in vegetation that followed changes in climate. For example, after a warming episode about 20 million years in the early Miocene epoch, the dominant vegetation transitioned from woodland to a savannah-like grassland. It is no surprise, therefore, that many of the herbivores that comprised the accompanying “Miocene fauna” had high-crowned teeth that allowed them to eat the foods from those savannah sources.
To the extent that the study helps clarify scientists’ understanding of evolution amid climate changes, it does not do so to the extent that they can make specific predictions about the future, Janis said. But it seems all the clearer that climate change has repeatedly had meaningful effect over millions of years.
“Such perturbations, related to anthropogenic climatic change, are currently challenging the fauna of the world today, emphasizing the importance of the fossil record for our understanding of how past events affected the history of faunal diversification and extinction, and hence how future climactic changes may continue to influence life on earth,” the authors wrote in the paper.
In addition to Janis and Figueirido at Brown, the other authors are Juan Perez-Claros and Paul Palmqvist at the University of Malaga and Miguel De Renzi at the University of Valencia in Spain. Figueirido is also affiliated with Malaga.
Grants from the Fulbright program, the Bushnell Foundation (to Brown) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation funded the research.

Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476.

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Dinosaur forests mapped

28 February 2012, by Adele Rackley
The first detailed maps of the Earth's forests at the time of the dinosaurs have been drawn up. The patterns of vegetation, together with information about the rate of tree growth, support the idea that the Earth was stifling hot 100 million years ago.


The new maps show that the Earth was covered by bizarre monkey-puzzle trees.

High temperatures and possibly more atmospheric carbon dioxide caused forests to extend much closer to the poles and grow almost twice as fast as they do today.The findings have implications for understanding the long-term effects of global warming.Scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London, plotted the maps after creating a database of more than two thousand fossilised forest sites from the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs were at their peak.'Our research shows that weird monkey puzzle forests covered most of the planet, especially in the steamy tropics. At mid-latitudes there were dry cypress woodlands, and near the North Pole it was mostly pines,' said Emiliano Peralta-Medina, who led the study.At that time the humid tropics extended over a wider area than now, and temperate climates – like the UK's – reached much closer to the poles, which had more tree cover than ice.It seems though, that just before the dinosaurs went extinct the forests changed as angiosperms – flowering plants – made an appearance.'Flowering trees similar to present-day magnolias took off, bringing colour and scent to the world for the first time,' says Peralta-Medina.The angiosperms gradually took over habitats previously dominated by the conifers, until by the end of the Cretaceous they are the most common tree species.As well as mapping the fossil forests, the team gathered measurements of tree rings – which indicate annual growth rate – from samples of fossil trees and from earlier studies.They found that Cretaceous trees grew twice as fast as their modern counterparts, particularly nearer to the poles.'Some fossil trees from Antarctica had rings more than two millimetres wide on average. Such a rate of growth is usually only seen in trees growing in temperate climates. It tells us that, during the age of the dinosaurs, polar regions had a climate similar to Britain today', explains co-author Dr Howard Falcon-Lang.The reason for this baking hot climate seems to have been extremely high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - at least 1000 parts per million (ppm) compared to 393 ppm today.'If carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise unabated, we will hit Cretaceous levels in less than 250 years,' explains Falcon-Lang. 'If that happens, we could see forests return to Antarctica.''It's unlikely that dinosaurs will be making a comeback,' he added.The findings are published today in Geology.

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Peralta-Medina, E, Falcon-Lang, HJ, 2012. Cretaceous forest composition and productivity inferred from a global fossil wood database. Geology 40(3) doi: 10.1130/G32733.1
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Mass Extinctions Tied to Past Climate Changes

Fossil and temperature records over the past 520 million years show a correlation between extinctions and climate change
By David Biello | October 24, 2007

Roughly 251 million years ago, an estimated 70 percent of land plants and animals died, along with 84 percent of ocean organisms—an event known as the end Permian extinction. The cause is unknown but it is known that this period was also an extremely warm one. A new analysis of the temperature and fossil records over the past 520 million years reveals that the end of the Permian is not alone in this association: global warming is consistently associated with planetwide die-offs.


"There have been three major greenhouse phases in the time period we analyzed and the peaks in temperature of each coincide with mass extinctions," says ecologist Peter Mayhew of the University of York in England, who led the research examining the fossil and temperature records. "The fossil record and temperature data sets already existed but nobody had looked at the relationships between them."


Pairing these data—the relative number of different shallow sea organisms extant during a given time period and the record of temperature encased in the varying levels of oxygen isotopes in their shells over 10 million year intervals—reveals that eras with relatively high concentrations of greenhouse gases bode ill for the number of species on Earth. "The rule appears to be that greenhouse worlds adversely affect biodiversity," Mayhew says.


That also bodes ill for the fate of species currently on Earth as the global temperatures continue to rise to levels similar to those seen during the Permian. "The risk of future extinction through rapid global warming is primarily expected to occur through mismatches between the climates to which organisms are adapted in their current range and the future distribution of those climates," Mayhew and his colleagues write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, though it may also be that warmer temperatures lead to less hospitable seas, he adds.


That is not to say that global warming was the cause of this Permian wipeout or that all mass extinctions are associated with warmer worlds—witness the disappearance of 60 percent of different groups of marine organisms during the cooling at the end of the Ordovician period roughly 430 million years ago. But these scientists argue that the evidence of a link between climate change and mass extinctions gives reason to be concerned for the future. "We need to know the mechanism behind the associations and we need to know if associations of this sort also occur in shorter-term climatic fluctuations," Mayhew says. "That will help us decide if this is really a worry for the next generation or if the threat is merely a distant future threat."

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