Study: European winters may vanish by 2080

[Shadowfax]

Study: European winters may vanish by 2080

Wednesday, August 18, 2004 Posted: 6:41 PM EDT (2241 GMT)

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) -- Europe is warming up more quickly than the rest of the world, and cold winters could disappear almost entirely by 2080 as a result of global warming, researchers predicted Wednesday.

Heat waves and floods are likely to become more frequent, threatening the elderly and infirm, and three quarters of the Swiss Alps' glaciers might melt down by 2050, the study prepared by the European Environment Agency (EEA) said.

more on this...

interesting. i wonder if global warming could really cause something like this on such a short notice. hopefully other organisations will do a similiar study as well. it sounds quite dramatic in my opinion...the last 8 years we haven't had a good winter (just a bit of snow, no ice) while we used to have quite cold winters before that (10+ yrs ago that was anually). but so far, there's no sign of any draught around here; summers are still shitty.

and yes, it is raining here now as well. i love dutch summers.

 

[Oz]

2080 eh? I won't buy a new winter swimming cozzie just yet then

 

[Gonz]

global warming

Shut the fuck up. We haven't hit 90 or more in about two years. Todays high was 68. We haven't seen 80+ all month. At this rate it'll be snowing by Labor Day.

 

[Inkara1]

Yeah, this summer's been a good bit cooler overall than it used to be every year when I was growing up in this area. Kinda makes global warming seem silly, at least from the perspective of someone in this area. Whatever happened to the ice ages we were being promised in the 1970s?

 

[Gato_Solo]

Ummm...It recently snowed in Colorado...

 

[Shadowfax]

Shut the fuck up. We haven't hit 90 or more in about two years. Todays high was 68. We haven't seen 80+ all month. At this rate it'll be snowing by Labor Day.

if you define global warming as something that causes high temperatures in summer, than you'd be right. but that's not the impact of global warming, and you know that as well...

 

[Gonz]

define global warming , causes high temperatures in summer

Shadow, my poor confused & gullible friend, that is precisley what global warming means. That & oh so much more. It turns valuable temperate areas into vast deserts. It turns deserts into wastelands. It melts polar caps & turns Denver into a beach resort.

Of course none of that is true & the scientific community is realizing it's all based on bad science, much as the earlier 70's panic over a coming ice age.

Check out this silliness.

Glaciers Shrink, But Some Resist Global Warming
Fri 20 August, 2004 17:46 By Alister Doyle

OSLO (Reuters) - Glaciers are melting faster than before in some regions from the Arctic to the Alps but others are getting bigger, scientists said on Friday.

They are unable to crack the conundrum of why certain glaciers may be more resilient to global warming, though one reason could be that melting sea ice falls back to earth as snow and so causes some of the ice mountains to grow.

Reuters UK

So, some faster melting pieces of ice are losing their importance to some slower melting pieces & scientists are unsure of the reason. Might I suggest a possibility? Natural cycles. imbeciles

 

[chcr]

Shut the fuck up. We haven't hit 90 or more in about two years. Todays high was 68. We haven't seen 80+ all month. At this rate it'll be snowing by Labor Day.

Hmm, didn't someone (can't remember who now, but it must have been someone I know on the board) mention once that global warming leads to global cooling. Counter-intuitive, but none the less the data support the theory.

Seriously, though, the mean world temperature has been oscillating for about two million years. Why do so many people expect that to stop because it's inconvenient to humanity? I actually expect global temperatures to continue to increase no matter what we do (over the long term, centuries or millenia) until enough of the ice caps melt to trigger the next ice age.

Been cooler here this summer too Gonz, One year's observations are meaningless. Heck, ten year's observations are meaningless. A century's worth can be deceiving. Geologic time is too long for such temporary abberations to mean anything. I think Shadow's study is probably a "worst case scenario." I wouldn't stay awake nights worrying about it.

 

[A.B.Normal]

We must ne gettin' everybodies heat here then ,its been 90+F(30+C) all summer and only rained twice.Currently we are experincing level three watering restrictions,its expected to rain on and off for the next couple of days though ,so hopefully things won't dry up any more.

 

[Gonz]

When you guys hit 125 days without measurable precip of any type, then & only then can you complain about how dry it is. I seem to remember Phoenx hitting the 180th day & it still didn't end..

Well, I was only 9

GREATEST NUMBER OF CONSECUTIVE DAYS WITHOUT 0.01 INCHES OR MORE, 1896-1995

160 days December 30 1971-June 6 1972

125 days July 16 1973-November 17 1973

117 days March 11 1970-July 5 1970

114 days March 11 1968-July 2 1968

114 days March 28 1991-July 19 1991

 

[A.B.Normal]

Yeah,but Gonz I've never heard of a raging Cactus fire,up here when we go without rain the the trees BURN!!! real quick.

 

[Gonz]

Fire makes great fertilizer

 

[Rose]

Been nice and cool here in Oklahoma, too. Not good for the heat/air guys -- but great for a golf course.

 

[BeardofPants]

Been a mild winter over heres in da wop-wops; almost like an extended spring... which is about two weeks off, so it'll prolly rain.

 

[chcr]

We must ne gettin' everybodies heat here then ,its been 90+F(30+C) all summer and only rained twice.Currently we are experincing level three watering restrictions,its expected to rain on and off for the next couple of days though ,so hopefully things won't dry up any more.

Yeah, but everyone knows god hates Canadians.

 

[Shadowfax]

Shadow, my poor confused & gullible friend, that is precisley what global warming means. That & oh so much more. It turns valuable temperate areas into vast deserts. It turns deserts into wastelands. It melts polar caps & turns Denver into a beach resort.

please spare me the sarcasm, Gonz, my biased & indoctrined friend. my point is that global warming doesn't limit itself to summers. ie: a not-so-warm summer doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist.

 

[Gonz]

Biased, perhaps, but indoctrinated? In what? One must follow the teachings of liberalis unscientificus politicus to be indoctrinated into the ways of you & yours

Seriously...a number of cool summers is the very antithesis of global warming, a phenomena that is losing favor among the non-agendized scientific community. They are beginnin gto see that. A)we are placing way too much power into mankind to think that in 50 years we could so easily destroy a natural ocurence (the ozone layer) and B)the earth has cyclical cooling & warming periods that are beyond our scope of fundamental changes.

 

[Shadowfax]

we are placing way too much power into mankind to think that in 50 years we could so easily destroy a natural ocurence (the ozone layer)

I agree with that. i don't like the panic stories of people who claim that we will all die within the next 50 - 80 years due to tsunami's, globalwarming, etc due to human disturbance of the natural balance.
i am positive we can destroy the earth entirely in a lot less time (nuclear weapons are pretty useful for that purpose) but not in the way we are living now.
BUT! it is pretty certain that we are slowly destroying this earth. it's sheer stupidity to ignore the fact that the pollution we are producing is affecting the ecosystems on this planet. besides polluting the earth, it's plausible to think that there is also an effect on the mondial temperature.
the effects might not be as big as some people shout (cry for attention) but it doesn't mean they are not there at all, nor that they should just be ignored.

here lies the problem; people don't want to think longterm. things will have to change now, in order to keep a healthy environment. we can ignore the effects of pollution, we can ignore the fact that the ozone layer is getting extremely thin, we can ignore the rise in global temperatures, but in doing so, we screw over the world our kids have, or theirs.

maybe there are cyclical cooling and warming periods of the earth we can't comprehend, but that is no excuse to make things even worse by our own actions.

 

[chcr]

BUT! it is pretty certain that we are slowly destroying this earth.

Even that isn't entirely accurate, Shadow. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. The worst I think we can do is make the planet uninhabitable for humans. The dinosaurs held sway for nearly 200,000,000 years. once they disappeared, we took their place. Something else will take ours.

 

[PT]

Yeah, but the dinosaurs didn't have cars. Or at least we don't have any evidence of them having cars...