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Global Warming – Is It Real?

Global Warming – Is it real?Is Global Warming really happening? Should you care? Can you do anything about it anyway?

The short answer is a big yes to all three. The vast majority of scientists have agreed for the past decade that global warming is happening. Why you should care is that even small changes to average temperatures on the earth trigger tremendous, sometimes irreversible changes to our weather and sea levels. We have a short memory of the earth’s history, but science has learned that the earth goes through vast cycles from ice ages to periods of tremendous inland flooding that last tens of thousands of years or more. The trigger for these events have been natural in the past, but global warming is triggering a major change on its own. If the current warming cycle continues, erratic weather, droughts, changes in climate, destruction of habitat, more frequent and more powerful hurricanes and the flooding of coastal cities will just be the beginning. I kid you not. Can you personally do anything to stop it? Right now even as you sit reading this, you are unknowingly contributing to the problem – become a part of the solution instead.

How are we creating Global Warming?

Mostly by using energy. Most of the energy we use come from fossil fuels like gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, coal. They all release carbon dioxide, a clear, mostly odorless gas, as a waste product as they burn. Carbon dioxide is naturally in the environment, there are over a thousand trillion pounds of it present in our atmosphere. We contribute approximately thirteen trillion pounds to the atmosphere every year from burning fossil fuels, burning forests to clear land and natural wildfires. Our contribution is relatively small but constant. Every year earth’s carbon dioxide (CO2) levels get higher. Carbon dioxide is called a greenhouse gas because it allows sunlight to pass through it, but traps the heat from the sun in the atmosphere. The end result is that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer on average over time. Just small shifts in temperature trigger greater melting of the ice caps. The more the ice caps melt, the less they reflect sunlight back out into the atmosphere and the more heat is absorbed. It becomes a viscous cycle that eventually can result in all the ice caps melting and large portions of our landmasses submerged under water. To learn what science knows about global warming visit www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/crosscutting and click on Climate & Society.

If Global Warming continues what can we expect?

Researchers are already associating global warming with bleaching of the world’s coral reefs, retreat of mountain glaciers and reduction of the planet’s ice caps, record high temperatures being set and unusual droughts and floods being triggered by small increases in average global temperatures. More severe hurricanes are expected since they are powered by warm water. The large scale circulation of water between the oceans could also be disrupted as the oceans warm. This could further alter climate by shifting warm currents. This could both heat up or cool down areas depending on where the currents shift to. Northern Europe could experience a small ice age due to the loss of warm currents even as large areas of the planet heat up, when you muck with mother nature the consequences are complex and hard to predict. As the ice caps melt and the oceans expand from being heated, first the coastal cities, then much of middle America and low lying lands like the middle east will be threatened by flood. Geologic history records that over half of the land mass of the current United States has spent as much time under water as above water when natural triggers caused ice caps to melt.

Does Al Gore know what he is talking about?

The information Al Gore provides in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is accurate though not always presented in a completely unbiased fashion. Al Gore does not present much evidence to contradict his message but then there is not very much substantial contradictory information out there. Most of the critics point out that the earth has always gone through these changes naturally without our help and question whether our small inputs can make a difference one way or the other. These skeptics are just making comments none of them have significant scientific research behind them to make their opinions supportable. Many critics of global warming are supported by the oil industry to give the general public the impression that the issue was still in dispute by science. Since the release of Al Gore’s movie, the view of the general public across the world seem to have moved closer to the general scientific consensus that warming is occurring.

Guest

How much more government news aecneigs can we obsorb as a people. I don't want a Pravda and other news aecneigs supported by the Govennment,,,us,,,,,let them die a natural death and be done with it....They do not represent the people anymore. News use to be just that News it didn't matter what their political agenda was that was covered very well by the editorial page....Not so now....They certainly are not government watchdogs as they use to be......everything changes so let them die. Never give them subsidies If the government tries they well be beholding to them and the government never gives anything for free....they will dictate the terms....I ramble...stay well....

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Guest

go to the wiki page on Milankovitch cycles to get an idea of the gross iutnps and feedbacks that affect global climate and also the uncertainties involved.What isn't discussed is how the continent layout and ocean circulation restrictions appear to also have a role (these two factors affect how the heat is distributed around the world), as well as the effects of ice cover in solar reflection.One of the problems is that how the climate is controlled in actuality is really not all that well understood. In gross terms, there is a pretty good idea of the important factors. It is how these factors play together to produce climate variability that is the big question. Anthro warming proponents emphasize greenhouse effects as dominant over the short term. It isn't clear that that is actually the case, but it is the essence of the argument that they present.I don't think I would characterize the idea that recent global warming is mainly caused by man as either a fact or a fiction. It is one possible explanation, one possible interpretation of the available data in terms of a poorly understood and very complex system.Not mentioned in your case is whether antro global warming is necessarily a good or bad thing. That opens up a whole different set of questions. For example, it may be that in the absence of our (man's) iutnps to climate, things would have gone and would be going fairly rapidly in the other way, towards cooling, glacial expansion, and so forth (return to the ice age), and thus warming may actually be the lesser of two evils.I think it is very important to point out that the climate is not static. It does not stay the same for long. It will change to warmer or colder and tends to cycle back and forth, sometimes fairly severely. People that scream about the horrible warming tend to operate under the false premise that without man, there would have been no climate change. This is emphatically a false presumption.Not sure if that helps you or not.

Guest

I built a battery pweored tesla coil myself.One of the hardest parts of working with batteries is their life span. The primary circuit of a tesla coil draws a LOT of current. Batteries are rated in amp-hours, meaning the number of hours they can go if the load is drawing 1 Amp of current. A good battery has about 4-6 amp hours. However, a tesla coil absolutely has to draw more current than 1 amp in order to get anywhere near a respectable current going through the primary current (remember that the primary coil has high current, and the secondary has high voltage). So the batteries will die very quickly.I built my coil using lantern batteries, 2 of them in series (12V), running through a pulse circuit and a car ignition coil to produce high voltage. The ignition coil will output somewhere around a 1-inch spark at a very high frequency.The ignition coil method (which is by far, the most efficient tesla coil you can make with a limited power supply like batteries) works very well. I have used the ignition coil tesla coil method run plasma globes, make Kirlian photos, etc.This is the way that it works:An ignition coil requires a pulsed AC signal in order to continuously output a spark like a tesla coil. Batteries are DC, so you need to find a way to pulse the DC signal. Specifically, you need to make a square wave(a square wave is where it goes on-off-on-off thousands of times per second).There are two ways to do this:1. Use a relay wired as and electromechanical buzzer. It sounds very diificult, but it is not. It is $2.00 worth of parts and can be assembeled without soldering in less than 5 minutes. This way is the most similar way to the one that Tesla used.2. Make an integrated circuit. There are a lot of people out there on the web who have used transistors to develop a complicated circuit that will pulse a 555 timer to drive an ignition coil. If you are good at soldering and circuitry, this way probably makes a nicer spark.I answer a lot of tesla coil and Nikola Tesla questions, so you might want to browse thru my profile for more info.

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