Live News From Spain As It Happens

catalanbrian said:
Saturday, April 26, 2014 @ 9:19 AM

This is a confused article. Arctic ice is mostly floating on the ocean and thus displaces its own weight of water. Thus whether it is ice or water the total level of the sea would remain the same, so I cannot understand how melting Arctic Ice could have any significant effect on sea levels. On the other hand, melting glaciers, such as those in Greenland, and the melting of Antarctic ice, which is mainly on land would certainly increase sea levels. Additionally increased water temperatures will increase the volume of water thus causing sea level rise. But not the melting of Arctic ice.

midasgold said:
Saturday, April 26, 2014 @ 10:19 AM

Climate has been changing since time began. No amount of
'lefty crap ' will ever stop it.

campogirl said:
Saturday, April 26, 2014 @ 1:01 PM

How will not exploiting the artic make any difference to the ice melting and raising the sea level.

Global warming whether man made or natural(for those global warming sceptics) will affect the sea levels by melt off from land ice such as glaciers and as mentioned above the Antarctic. there is also Greenland and to some extent Iceland to consider.

Its just a pity that technology still will not allow harvesting of icebergs. The recent calving of the ice berg the size of Birmingham would supply enough fresh water to grow crops in desert areas and perhaps reverse the growth of deserts by changing the reflection of the sun and perhaps allowing clouds to form over the cultivated areas.

Global warming should in this century bring benefits if only the wealthier countries were to invest in research in to water technology. Otherwise it will just bring misery to millions.

TTWHO said:
Saturday, April 26, 2014 @ 6:18 PM

The founder of Greenpeace left recently because he thinks the organisation is being hi-jacked by loony lefty's. This his take on climate change -
A Greenpeace co-founder testified in Congress on Tuesday about global warming. What he said is hardly what anyone would expect.

“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” said Moore, who was testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight.

“If there were such a proof, it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.”

Moore didn’t hold back in his Senate appearance. He quickly zeroed in on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and strongly scolded it for claiming there is a “95-100% probability” that man “has been the dominant cause of” global warming. Those numbers, he said, have been invented.

He also characterized the IPCC’s reliance on computer models as futile; told senators that history “fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming”; and noted that “during the Greenhouse Ages,” a period that precedes our fossil-fuel burning civilization, “there was no ice on either pole and all the land was tropical and subtropical from pole to pole.”

Moore further crossed the line of accepted climate change discourse when he insisted “that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one” and reminded lawmakers “that we are not capable, with our limited knowledge, of predicting which way” temperatures “will go next.”

Anyone who has been caught in the snow because the NOAA predicted a warmer winter already knows that. Our ability to predict the weather grows hazier at a distance in time. We can’t predict the weather two weeks from now. We certainly can’t predict the weather two hundred years from now.

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.

He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all – renewable energy. Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem and“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”
Recycling, he adds, is “almost certainly a waste of time and energy”, while having a “green lifestyle” amounts to little more than “ostentatious grand gestures”. He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. “Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam … or if it wasn’t one in the beginning, it becomes one.”



The moral of the story is that environmentalists are basically trolls and should be ignored.

catalanbrian said:
Saturday, April 26, 2014 @ 7:42 PM

I am not going to get into a great, and clearly pointless argument but as in excess of 95% of scientists agree that mankind induced climate change is occurring I am inclined to go along with the science, rather than the small but noisy band of climate change deniers, such as the commentators above who offensively refer to anyone who disagrees with them as " loony lefties" and "trolls". The real point is that even if the climate change scientists are wrong the worst effect of amending our ways to use less energy and to emit less CO2 will be that we will have spent a bit of money to no effect. If on the other hand we listen to the climate change deniers and just continue as we are the effects can be catastrophic.

And Campogirl I am with you on this, but we should not use incorrect information to make the point. The melting of Arctic Sea Ice will not increase sea levels at all. As I said onland ice is a different matter.

midasgold said:
Saturday, April 26, 2014 @ 10:35 PM

Denier no - Realist yes.
Night follows day - fact. Man can not change this.
Death follows birth-fact. ditto
Nature works in cycles - again fact and again ditto.
Only the loony left think man can change this with their
expensive and near zero efficient wind farms and stupid
tax on anything they see as not being green.