Global cooling or global warming... I don't know. One thing's clear though - we're going to suffer a catastrophe one day and we're all going to die. I'm beside myself with worry. What ever will we do?

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup

there is not such a direct correlation between clouds and average humidity in the atmosphere. on one hand air could be oversaturated with humidity and you still may not see a cloud, because there are no starting clusters for kondensation/crystallisation. you could on the other hand have cloudformation with relatively little humidity if there are starters around (the german word is Kondensations-/Kristallisationskeime, i dont know what that is in english). such starters could be dust (St. Helen) or allready crystallised water or ions. a way to manipulate the weather is to ionize airmolecules in the upper layers of the atmosphere to cause cloudformation. it is also possible, that the atmosphere carries overall less water, but there are more clouds, because the water is accumulated in cold regions of the atmosphere, while the lower, warmer regions are relatively dry.i dispute, that there is more watervapor in the atmosphere. the earth it not warming, it is getting colder by the day. ever since it came into existence as a ball of melted rock billions of years ago it has been emitting more energy than it absorbed from the sun, leading to a more or less solid crust, that is still emitting energy into space, which makes a net loss of heat. the thin layer we live on is fluctuating in temperature all the time, the reason for which is mainly changing solar activity and sometimes in the history of our planet due to geological activity, as the earth's volcanoes produce a lot more CO2 than the puny human civilisation of today.

Guys, if you really want more scientific details about this subject, just go see "The Day after Tomorrow." It will explain all the facts to you, seriously.

Saw it last night. Not a great movie but entertaining nonetheless. I am sure many of you will enjoy it for various reasons (I won't spoil it for you). I will say that they cast an evil Cheney look-alike, hilarious.

Are you serious?

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup

Haven´t seen the movie yet, but CNN has a section where it dissects the rights and the wrongs of the apocaliptic vision shown in it.
In some they are right, in others it´s just wishfull thinking.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/27/day.tomorrow/index.html
Click on the "Gallery-The day after:Could it happen?" for it.
In the movie, it is all condensed into just a few weeks, but obviously it would take way longer for it to happen.

If the planet continues to warm up, not only will the ice caps melt, it will also cause the water temperature to rise, even if just a couple of degrees. And that rise in temperature will cause all the methane trapped beneath the ocean floor to loosen and rise to the surface and then to the atmosphere. This methane hydrate is kept in stasis by the huge pressure and low temperature on the ocean bottom, turning it into the solid form. But scientists have already noticed that in some places that methane is already escaping the ocean floor, due to temperature change, turning the solid methane back into its gaseous form. And as methane is a very powerfull greenhouse gas, it will grow into a vicious cycle. The more methane released, the hotter it gets, and thus even more gas gets released. Scientists say the switch has been pulled, and that there´s no turning back.
http://www.geology.iastate.edu/gccourse/ocean/methane.html

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/meth27.shtml

Assuming all that methane is released, the planet might experience something in the likes of a natural nuclear winter.Eventually, after all sorts of gas get released into the atmosphere, it will create a barrier for sun light to penetrate, causing the planet to suffer extensive cooling, an ice age even.
This ice age would last for as long as it would take for all those gases to get reabsorbed and recycled, either on the ice caps, or on the ocean (if we still have one).
There´s even a theory wich states that´s what happened in Mars.
So yes, it´s something worth getting worried about. Of course all this will take a long time, and with a little luck we will have found a way to colonize other planets, or if we are really really lucky we find a way to reverse the process...
But for the process to be reverted, people have to start giving a fuck about it, and somehow that just isn´t happening. It´s easier to keep sucking the planet dry of its fossil fuels and dump all the byproducts into the atmosphere and the oceans.
The thing is, if there was some quick tragic change in climate, people would get scared and start doing something! But because the climatic changes are constant but slow, people will just get acostumed to them. They will say " i saw hurricanes and floods all my life, it´s a natural thing", yet they forget that our great grandfathers never saw such things before. Too slow to notice, but too fast for confort!
I think people will only start moving their asses when blizzards start hitting L.A., and hurricanes start hitting Europe...
:rolleyes:

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Heh heh heh, no. I tried to make it sarcastic by adding words like really and seriously but then again it may seem like I am doing the opposite. I am sure that if you are in the US you would have seen at least one of many articles about how appalled the scientists were about the movie and so on.

The movie doesn't talk too much in detail about the problems we may have or how to improve the conditions. *spoiler* One of the main premises of the movie is "instant freezing" where a big funnel cloud brings down cold air from the atmosphere to completely freeze the area in a few seconds. They bring up a mammoth found in the siberian tundra as proof that this does indeed happen, but I read up a little on it and it seems no one can know for sure if instant freezing really happened by air. *spoiler over*

It's just entertainment and it obviously filled the seats this past weekend...

Yea, you don't seem like the type of person who would believe all that doom and gloom scenario crap. Sorry I missed your intent.
Or whether we even can improve the conditions. The trouble is that millions are going to start holding up this movie as a premonition rather than a work of fiction with no more liklihood of happening than the Empire building a DeathStar. Already, some media in the States are using the movie to illustrate why we should sign Kyoto.

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup

so what? there are also some loons, who are calculating the coordinates of Vulcan and who are preparing for 1st contact after watching star trek movies.

It doesn't take many loons with loud voices before the country is spending billions to reduce greenhouse gas levels by .01%.

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup

I don´t know if the world is darker since Bush took over, but it certainly is windy!!




Sorry, couldn´t help myself...
:fart: :fart:

__________________
"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.