President 'has four years to save Earth'

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Trust the BBC to get the science wrong. Anatomically modern human beings, as a separate species, seem to have split off from the ancestral strain somewhere around 150,000 years ago. A new species - by definition - doesn't interbreed with other species, so there weren't very many off them when they got the ball rolling.

There was certainly a bottle-neck, but it wasn't a near extinction event - or at least not for us. Whatever the ancestor species was, it hasn't survived, probably because we out-competed them in all the available ecological niches, so it was an extinction event for them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ravinghorde confesses to functional illiteracy.

The last question is particularly stupid. The ice core data records the response of the global climate to the remarkably small forcing generated by the Milankovitch Effect

which is reinforced by a couple of positive feedbacks. As the oceans warm up, carbon dioxide comes out of solution and builds up in the atmosphere where it provides extra positive feedback as a greenhouse gas.

Our current situation is different because we are burning fossil carbon and injecting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the oceans. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be providing a lot of the forcing we are seeing, backed up by positive feedback from the extra water vapour evaporated off the warmer oceans.

In the past the orbital forcing has been the cause and the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been a lagging effect.

Today, the extra carbon dioxide that we are injection into the atmosphere is the cause of the warming, and leads the other effects.

The only people who don't seem to understand this are denialist web- sites, and people who haven't looked anywhere else.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Bill you're ignorant and dumb and a pillock who loves to argue for the sake of it. I think you owe the BBC an appology. Wazzock.

/quote The human population appears to have crashed to around 2,000 individuals around 70,000 years ago, at the same time they were headed into the worst part of the last ice age. The crash was possibly brought on by a massive volcanic eruption, Wells said.

"The hypothesis is that the survivors of this near-extinction event had to be smarter in order to survive, and this allowed them to settle the rest of the world outside of Africa. So, 'human-ness' may not been widespread until around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and this could be seen as the real origin of our species."

/end quote

This link is to a 1997 publication which is about the time I heard the theory from Chris Stringer himself at Oxford Uni. And before you ask Chris Stringer is a peer reviewed expert in human evolution.

/quote

At one stage, according to genetic data, our species became as endangered as the mountain gorilla is today, its population reduced to only about 10,000 adults. Restricted to one region of Africa, but tempered in the flames of near extinction, this population went on to make a remarkable comeback.

/end quote

Unproven?The main positive feedback mechanism is increasing levels of water vapour in the lower atmosphere, and water vapour does happen to be a known greenhouse gas. Which denialist web-site are you getting your nonsense from?

You are confusing climate and weather.

Nonsense. Search on the Suess Effect.

Your idea of "cutting edge" science seems to be roughly a century out of date, give or take a bit - the Suess Effect is claimed to date back to the 1950's but doesn't seem to have been widely acknowledged before the 1970's.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

What makes you think any positive feedback is caused by CO2 rather than temperature?

No. You call warming climate and cooling weather.

You are disagreeing that man is putting out more CO2 than the atmospheric increase? So is man putting out less or are you claiming it is the same? So the oceans aren't abosrbing any of the CO2 man gives out?

read yesterday's entry. Yes I'm out of date I haven't read today's entry.

$1.37 this morning. I think I heard as low as $1.26 late yesterday.

...Jim Thompson

It was a $1.36 transient. I don't mind, I earn most of money in $, now I get £7300 rather than £5000 for every $10000 I change:)

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Yes. It is. You may not want to believe it but apart from a handful of mavericks the science is now clear.

What we should do about it is another matter altogether. But making all no regrets energy efficiency savings would be a start.

There are computer models that can compute these for various compositions of atmosphere. But to illustrate my point about the science (rather than the politcal rhetoric) you can look up some of the widely believed results quoted in Lindzens paper. He is a sceptic, but a proper *scientific* sceptic. His critique of the weaknesses of the current modelling approaches is largely valid and his paper contains nothing much that I would disagree with. I am a bit suspicious of his claim that the oceans do not damp the time constants but we will let that pass.

He is not well liked by the environmentalists, but his scientific arguments do have merit. This is in stark contrast to the typical denialist websites that pretend it isn't happening or doesn't matter and provide your list of questions.

It is more conventional to talk in terms of doubling the concentration. We are pretty much committed to doing that now no matter how hard we try to avoid it. The answer probably lies in the range +0.5C to +4C depending on what model you subscribe to. None of the genuine climate scientists believe it makes no difference.

Nothing is ever *proven* in science. A particular model becomes widely accepted because the predictions it makes match new observational data and all existing historical data better than any other competing model. People design experiments to test these models to try and find weaknesses.

Indirect observational methods for testing the feedbacks rely on the planets impulse response to major volcanic eruptions in recent times and ice cores in the more distant past. You can infer a lot from the gasses trapped in ice and the stable isotope ratios of the ice locked in the polar cap (light water is more volatile).

They don't. Either one will do. You are falling for the fallacy that says you should always carry a bomb on an aeroplane because the chances of there being two bombs on a civil airliner are essentially zero.

Increasing CO2 as a GHG in the atmosphere increases the Earths temperature and that then releases more CO2 and increase water vapour in the atmosphere.

But equally if the Earth gets warmer though the sun changing brightness then the Earths temperature will increase and CO2 and water vapour will increase in the atmosphere (gasses are less soluble in warm water).

Both mechanisms are perfectly valid. Either can be the dominant pathway. However, we can rule out the sun getting sufficiently brighter during the recent epoch because of satellite monitoring.

Has it ever occurred to you that it is because *we* are adding very large quantities of fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere. We can observe this by watching the changing isotope ratio, and more directly by monitoring the O2 remaining in the atmosphere. The latter measurement shows that at present a proportion of the CO2 we emit is still dissolving in the oceans. That cannot be relied upon once the seas and permafrost tundra start to warm up. Then there will be significant methane released as well and that is a much more potent (if shorter lived) GHG.

If we let the oceans get too warm they will stop being an effective carbon sink and turn into a source. That is pretty much what the geological record shows.

Regards, Martin Brown

If all you look for is the worst in man, you shall surely find it...

---- Bank Fraud --- Dutch Bank Fortis Named in Subprime Securities Fraud Suit

"Dutch bank Fortis violated U.S. laws by selling its shares at inflated prices while hiding its exposure to toxic subprime mortgage loans, according to a securities fraud lawsuit in Manhattan federal court.

The suit follows the Dutch government's Oct. 4 takeover of Fortis, saving the bank from collapse with an infusion of about $23 billion."

---- Recession ----

"The European Commission estimates that the Dutch economy will contract by two percent this year, with the eurozone as a whole suffering 1.9 percent recession. This mean millions of jobs will be lost and that European unemployment will average out at 9.25 percent."

Would you troll feeders please add SLOWMAN to the Subject line, so I can efficaciously dispose of the little bastard? Continuously adding "References" filters is getting tiring ;-)

Thanks!

...Jim Thompson

Taxes, I expect.

James Arthur

The point being that the current economic nonsense is not just an American problem. And there's lots of blame to go around.

But the pound has been slowly decling for decades now. I think I remember it being $5. The real milestone will be parity; there will be blood in the streets of The City of London.

Maybe we should do the tourist thing again; I like London and Oxford, and I want to see Cornwall. What time of year is the weather the least dreadful?

John

I had the same end in mind, just a different means--I thought a fair comparison might slow down the torrent of unfair negativity at its source, sparing us all.

Probably foolish of me though.

Cheers, James Arthur ~~~~~~~~~~~

P.S. Bill has been busy this month, hasn't he?

What happens when they figure out that the dollars they're being paid back with have half (or less) of the value of the dollars they lent?

Thanks, Rich

James Arthur wrote in news:yW3el.1295$ snipped-for-privacy@nwrddc02.gnilink.net:

thar be money in them thar regulations.

more people to hire for government,more power for their supervisors,more VOTERS dependent on gov't salaries. More lawsuits,more money for the lawyers. Ya gotta remember the ones writing and enacting the laws are mostly lawyers. It's like they are writing themselves employment security.

Fortis was a Dutch-Belgian bank at the time of the offences; it had taken over the larger Dutch ABN-Amro bank sometime earlier, taking on a huge load of debt in the process. The Dutch government's October 4 takeover was restricted to the Dutch components of Fortis, and will eventually reconstitute the ABN-Amro bank. The Dutch components of the Fortis bank that took over ABN-Amro will be integrated into the new ABN-Amro. The US courts aren't the only ones planning on prosecuting the Fortis executives responsible for the debacle.

Your Matthew C. McNally doesn't seem to have got the nationalities straight, which doesn't say much for his competence, or yours.

True. And establishing that the Netherlands is affected by the consequences of your sub-prime crisis and accomodates the same kinds of bad apples as the US wasn't a useful way of spending your time.

In particular, it does nothing to disprove my point that the US has been running a large balance of payments deficit for long enough that it is no longer in a positon to pay for its imports by selling off its assets to foreigners, because everything worth buying seems to have been sold, and you now seem to be reduced to fraud to get your hands on foreign exchange. John Larkin has gone to some trouble to prove that the US national debt isn't unusually large, ignoring the point that 25% of it is owed to overseas creditors, which may prove inconvenient.

Weaseling again.

What's inconvenient about 25% being owed to foreigners? Since national debt is unlikely to actully be paid back, it's far superior to stiff foreigners who don't vote or do business here.

Inflation steals savings. So let's steal some Saudi and Chinese savings. It's just a pity the 25% is so low.

Simple stuff, if you think instead of wish.

John

They will conclude that we're smarter than they are.

John