our winter will start soon

it seems that I have to buy warmers for my little babies :



although the winter, according to the calendar, should not start before....

what's about the global warming

cheers
Bernhard

Bernhard, you could call me a skeptic but I think it should be called a global cycle, not not global warming.

I agree with Roseman. When we were in NZ earlier in the year, we went to see 3 glaciers and were told all of them were advancing...NOT RETREATING !!!

No new ice age, the weatherfrogs were mistaken. Now the forecast says -6°C.

we will survive!

Bernhard, they Australia is the driest continent, we are getting help with water soon. Off the coast of Antarctica there is an iceberg measuring 19 x 8 metres, it is going to dock over in West Aus, should help for a while,

I think the majority opinion in Australia is that climatic cycles and species extinctions happen naturally and are unpreventable; global warming and extinctions caused by Homo sapiens also happen, and we should do whatever is necessary to stop them.

Agreed, Margaret. The concern seems to be that the climate change is happening so fast that we won't be able to adapt quickly enough to cope with it.

I believe we will speek more often about this topic. I agree with you, that it is a cycle. We can not fix the effects on our observations made in one or two years. There will happen events, like the melting of glaciers, which will also have an impact on the climate. The worst szenario is the breakdown of the gulf stream. This would indeed result in colder winters in western Europe. We would get a climate like in Canada. what will happen on your island ?
I hope all our politician will agree to go a common way to stop the warming (a little bit). Our children will have to live in the 'warm world', want not to paint a picture of it.

...a German once said...

Cheers Bernhard

Margaret, I agree with you.

Me too... cycle yes... however, by our actions it is happening at a rate much faster than ever before... if you want a real scare have a look at ocean acidification too... in many ways it makes global warming look like a walk in the park. Last time the oceans acidified it took 100 million years to recover:

Ok, i'll have a stab at this and shoot a hole in my foot. It's been a long while since i did chemistry at high school. The chemical formula of carbon dioxide is CO2. When it combines with water it uses one of the oxygen atoms in the water (H2O) to produce a carbonate whose formula is CO3. A carbonate by it's formula is alkaline...not acidic !!! Now, if you are talking about burning fossil fuels such as coal as they mention in that video, the sulphur that is emitted, WILL turn to an acid such as sulphuric acid (H2SO4) I'm now going to blow my foot right off and admit that i have sat on the fence for a long while listening to all the debates of global warming and the bad guy...carbon dioxide !! Without it, plants will die...and us along with it !! Core samples taken from ice in the arctic regions shows carbon dioxide levels hundreds of times higher than what they are now. How could that be as mankind wasn't even on the planet then creating his pollution then ?? I totally agree that mankind is to blame for some of the problems we are having now. All we are doing is hurrying up what mother nature is doing all by herself !!! I agree that the debate on global warming is going to heat up as time goes by, but i really do think we should stand back for a while and forget about the hype that is being fed to us by politically motivated experts and learn the real facts whatever they may be.

Good on you Dave - your last sentence sums up the way I feel too. It's very hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff and political motivation can cloud the issues a great deal.

Dave... carbonate ions are indeed associated with alkaline compounds... unless they are combined with hydrogen ions to form carbonic acid (whose formula is H₂CO₃. I use a real simple experiment to demonstrate this to kids. If you take a small amount of water and add universal indicator to it then bubble exhaled air through it the water will change from green (neutral) to yellow and then take on an orange tinge. The closer towards the red end of the spectrum it goes the more acidic it is. So the water is clearly becoming more acidic. The sulphur thing you mentioned is correct too... I do a simple experiment to demonstrate acid rain to kids as well. If you put a small amount of sulphur in a deflagrating spoon and a small amount of water with universal indicator in a gas jar then light the sulphur over a bunsen and put the deflagrating spoon in the gas jar the smoke will fill the gas jar and will begin to dissolve in the water and turn the indicator orange and eventually almost red indicating the pressence of a strong acid. No one is arguing that these processes are not present in the ice cores or in fossil evidence etc but what is known is that whilst these processes have happened before they did so over a much longer time scale and then it took the planet hundreds of millions of years to recover. Since marine invertebrates possess exoskeletons based on calcium carbonate if the oceans become more acidic the level of carbonate ions (or more correctly bicarbonate (HCO₃^-)ions) will be reduced and their ability to grow new shell will be inhibited because they extract much of what they need to do so from the water. When you place marble chips into hydrochloric acid (HCl) it will begin to dissolve forming calcium chloride and CO₂ gas and water. The marble chips are essentially the same as invertebrate shells so not only will they have a reduced capacity to build new shells but the shells they already possess can begin the thin and become more brittle as it dissolves in water with a lower pH... so whilst I agree that a lot of what we hear about climate change might be hype... I do not think the ocean acidification issue is on the same level, nor can it be ignored for too much longer.

Hi Simon. Yes mate, you're probably right as chemistry wasn't one of my stronger subjects at high school hundreds of years ago !! I wasn't trying to s**t stir or even open a debate...all i was trying to do was to make people think and not be led by the nose by all these so called climate experts. I think we all have to agree that at one time at least through history, the oceans have been higher, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere etc etc. It's a cycle that mankind is only making worse and speeding it up at that !! If CO2 levels were much much higher millions of years ago, how did the inverterbrates survive then i wonder ?? Even tho they had time to adapt then because it happened so slowly, how did a newborn inverterbrate survive when it's shell came into contact with the acidic water ?? Interesting isn't it !! The only way i could see it happening is that it was born with a thicker shell and hoped like hell it could grow and multiply before it's shell gave way. Another question that has always puzzled me is this ozone debate. Ozone is O3 by formula. It's created by things like lightning, electric motors etc and it ends up adding another oxygen atom to it making it O3. Doesn't adding another oxygen atom make it heavier than air and if so, why isn't it down here at sea level instead of in the upper atmosphere ?? It's always bugged me that one !! I think it's good having these discussions as it makes us aware of these problems instead of blindly being led by the nose. As a taxpayer i want to know that my $600,000,000,000 (a lot of noughts ain't it !!) is being spent properly but more importantly, we only have got one crack at this so we have to talk about it sensibly and get it right first time !!! BTW, i'd love to be one of the kids in your chemistry classes !!! Lol.

Bemo, there are different concerns in this region. Australia is likely to see catastrophic bushfires more often, and more frequent/severe droughts. In my state at least, a lot of wheat-farming land is borderline, and increased droughts will make it unusable for grain.
In the Pacific region, there are flat islands which will be flooded by not much rise in sealevels. The inhabitants can be relocated, if there is somewhere willing to take them, but in moving, people lose their sense of belonging and much of the basis of their culture.
I've also been told that it would take a surprisingly small rise in sealevels (can't remember the number of metres) to flood almost all the major cities of the world. Something to think about.