if the ice caps melt from global warming, then wouldnt the oceans decrease in salinity, raising the freezing point, and thus making icecaps that are as big as it was before, if not larger? isnt the whole thing self-adapting to the global warming situation? Then again the effects of deep sea and shallow currents would be significant, but disregarding that, is the melting ice caps as much of a threat to coastlines as people would fear?
"Solar cycles, not CO2, determine climate." http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/ Just for reference. Not read it yet.
"if the ice caps melt from global warming, then wouldnt the oceans decrease in salinity, raising the freezing point, and thus making icecaps that are as big as it was before, if not larger" Yes, but I doubt the salinity would decrease that much. Changes in the Gulf stream would make more difference I think.
With warmer oceans, there will be more evaporation, and hence more cloud formation in many parts of the World. Extra clouds will increase the albedo of the planet, and act against continued warming - although water vapour itself is a greenhouse gas, too. In its purely gaseous state, it acts to heat the Earth; when condensed into the droplets which form cloud, it has a cooling effect. Increasing cloud cover also means more snowfall, certainly in Greenland and Antarctica - if we're lucky, this may add fresh ice to the glaciers almost as fast as they melt!
What you envision has been included in the climate models. But we all have the same problem: "to what extent". Is one effect substantial and the other neglible or vice versa? Even if you do your math, things stay mere gestimations. The impact of doubling CO2 on the total greenhouse effect has been estimated between 30% and less than 1%. I guess that the latter is more accurate.
Who else has seen The Day After Tomorrow recently? Sensationalised and exaggerated as the movie is, it does contain an intriguing idea about how global warming might actually trigger catastrophic COOLING.
Yes- this would be an example of the sort of negative feedback which has kept the Earth habitable for a billion years; despite the increasing luminosity of the Sun, and the long slow incorporation of atmospheric carbon into the crust, our planet is still as habitable as it was in the Cambrian.
In the article linked to us (Earth gets wetter to fight global warming By Amanda Hodge May 11, 2004), there are a couple of assertions at the end of it saying this: <dir>“And while climate changes might be good news for some species, the future is not so bright for animals endemic to grassland which are dying out at rates faster than ever before witnessed. … Earlier this year a comprehensive study published in Nature found that climate change could drive up to 40 per cent of all land animals and plants into extinction within 50 years.”</dir> There are many misconceptions in the global warming issue, and one of those is the “species extinction” myth. If those claiming there are “dying rates faster than even before witnessed”, they should give us the figures and statistics, and the sources and studies that have found this occurrence – if they want the people with critical thinking to believe them. Unfortunately, people with educated and critical thinking are in the verge of extinction. The “comprehensive study published in Nature” was quickly refuted by four professors from Oxford University (they are hard die ecologists: Richard J. Ladle, Paul Jepson, Miguel B. Araujo, Robert J. Whittaker Biodiversity Research Group, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, UK) but they found the “study” was based on false assumptions and could do more harm than good to the Green Cause. According to some excerpts from a website dealing with frauds in ecology: <dir>“On the 7th of January 2004, the journal Nature published a study that modelled the potential effects of global warming on the extinction of certain taxa of land animals and plants. The results of this study suggested that under moderate climate change scenarios between 15% and 37% of the 1103 organisms considered within the study would be committed to extinction by 2050.” “The origins of many of the most crude generalizations and extrapolations can be traced back to the original press releases and agency newswires. The first of these was the press release (7th Jan.) from Leeds University (Thomas' employer), which ran the headline: Climate Change Threatens a Million Species with Extinction”. It is here that Thomas' quote concerning a million species first appears along with the unattributed claim that a quarter of land animals and plants may go extinct.”</dir> Go here and read the whole article: http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Calen4/crywolf.html Who else has seen The Day After Tomorrow recently? Sensationalised and exaggerated as the movie is, it does contain an intriguing idea about how global warming might actually trigger catastrophic COOLING. The intriguing idea behind The day After Tomorrow is the favorite scenario of certain climate modelers in which the North Atlantic oceanic “conveyor belt” and Gulf Stream are turned off, thereby turning Western Europe into Siberia. Not a chance for such a scenario. More realistic models show that the warmer European temperatures are not set by the Gulf Stream but by the perturbation of the atmospheric circulation induced by the Rocky Mountains of the Western US. (Seager, Richard. 2003. Quart. J Royal Meterorol. Soc). Another model shows that even as there is a freshening of the North Atlantic, the conveyor belt is strengthened not weakened (Wu, P., Wood, R., and Stott, P., 2004. “Does the recent freshening trend in the North Atlantic indicate a weakening of the thermohaline circulation?” Geophys. Res. Lett. 31: 10.1029/2003GL018584). Finally, we have the direct evidence from the atmosphere: Previous warmings, the Holocene optimum (8000-5000 BP) and the Medieval Climate Optimum (ca. 1000 AD), did not cause any abrupt cooling. Believe me, gentlemen, the sky isn’t falling. Chicken Little can calm down, once and for all.
