There are different interpretations as to the origin of the name Greenland. Early nautical charts term the area “Gruntland” or “Groundland” which is a reference to shallow bays. “Greenland” could have evolved from this name, or from the usage of Eirik the Red who reportedly was exiled there (from Iceland) and according to legend termed it Greenland to attract more visitors.

~gtd

Obviously if you have to pick a group that is more money hungry, it would be the scientists.

Yep, makes perfect sense.

Why people pretend when our future is at stake..over stupid politics is just stunning to me and I have to wonder what has to happen for people to wake up. I’ve actually heard people make the illogical claim above. Scientists are greedy, not the oil and gas lobby and there’s a massive conspiracy afoot by the world’s scientists and actually the GOP knows better.

How dumb.

According to Diamond, Greenland was named that by one Norse leader who had to leave Iceland and wanted to bring followers with him, but it was never very green. So sorry but the data refutes your “theory” about Greenland’s name reflecting its climate.

According to Diamond, a few bad winters killed off the last of the Norse Greenlanders, but it wasn’t so simple (there was also a loss of trading relations with Iceland). Inuit people on Greenland continued to thrive. According to Diamond, the Norse would only eat meat, and refused to eat fish. When a few bad winters limited seal or walrus hunting (sorry, I’m forgetting the details), the Norse began to starve. Ice fishing would have provided plenty of good food, and over the period of 400 years, the Norse doubtless observed the Inuit eating fish, but to the Norse, it was culturally unacceptable to have such a diet. According to Diamond, they literally starved amidst plenty.

Perhaps you should go see Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” He actually presents data from tens of thousands of years of ice cores from Greenland, and hundreds of thousands of years of ice cores from other sites. Gore is merely parroting climatologists’ consensus. How inconvenient.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/10/nclimate10.xml

Or a just released study that says models that predict drought are wrong (mind you, they now say the problem is flooding, but it speaks to how accurate a lot of this stuff really is.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070601/tc_usatoday/studyclimatechangemodelsoverstatedroughts;_ylt=Aj98GFboqrqTL2_CM2ZvwanMWM0F

See instead:
http://timlambert.org/2004/08/mckitrick6
and a major recent analysis
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/WahlAmmann_ClimChange2006.html
or wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years

Does the house heat up faster or slower? Or maybe you can’t tell because you’re dead?

Anyways, you’re absolutely right about climate change coming completely down to economics. It’s all a question of risk. So, is it worth betting on the chance that human activity will have no impact on our lives or our planet? In the scenario above, you are betting that your car will run out of fuel before filling your house with enough carbon mono and dioxide to kill you. There are a number of variables to how long you have – how airtight is your house and if it’s a bit drafty, is it a windy day, how large is the interior volume of the house, how many houseplants do you have, etc? In this case a scientist might be able to give you an idea. You might last if the tank was half full, but not if it was 3/4 full.

Climate change is the same type of predicament on a global scale. How much stuff can we burn? how much can our planet reabsorb? The behavior of carbon dioxide is the most basic chemistry, not rocket science. carbon dioxide is good at trapping heat – it is the warm blanket that makes life possible on this lonely rock floating about space. But carbon dioxide takes a long time to dissepate back into the soil. Water vapor, which you cite as the key warming gas, has zero net effect on the temperature of our atmosphere and actually helps keeps surface temperatures low. It does not insulate. Our planet is covered in the stuff and as it heats, it turns to gas which rises into the atmosphere, cools, condensces into clouds and returns to the surface in the form of precipitation. It’s just like boiling water on the stove – the water never gets above 100C as long as there’s still water in the pot.

Increases in global average temperature create severe weather, like drought/flooding cycles because they speed up and intensify the water cycle. While our exhalations of carbon dioxide are basic life processes, excessive carbon dioxide emision clearly become pollutant when they are out of natural balance.

If we return to the most basic economics again, the adaptations required to hedge against the risk of climate change will themselves drive innovation and economic growth. But these are the very arguments for doing nothing, right?
The main problem is the current winners (oil, natural resources) may no longer be winners in a world less dependant on their products. I’m sure Al Gore might be a winner in any new status quo… perhaps, instead of being beholden to keeping the profits of the resource exploiters nice and high by paying $3.20 for gasoline and turning the AC powered by burning coal up nice and high, you too could profit from a small risk, estimated cost at .1% of global GDP per year over the next 50 years or so.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/01/breaking-hockey-stick.html

http://eteam.ncpa.org/commentaries/wheres-the-data

The statistical methods used by Mann and his colleagues have been the subject of much recent scrutiny. Based on our own research and a detailed comparison with the published evidence, Willie Soon and I raised the spectre of flawed statistics in the Hockey Stick when we testified with Mann at a U.S. Senate committee hearing in 2003. Subsequently, two Canadians with strong statistical training—energy analyst Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick—attempted to replicate Mann’s results using the data he had supplied them. They found a number of errors, improper calculations, and misrepresentations of methodology. In the refereed literature, other researchers have expressed concerns about and demonstrated problems with the Hockey Stick. The McIntyre and McKitrick study led to a corrigendum in Nature, where Mann and his colleagues admitted to various inaccuracies in their original description of their data and analysis. Nature took the extremely unusual step of requiring Mann and co-authors to provide a new archive of data and a new verbal description of their methodology. But even with this revised release, key aspects of the Hockey Stick remain impossible to replicate—and replication is a hallmark of scientific inquiry. Mann continues to refuse requests for full disclosure, telling The Wall Street Journal that to do so would amount to “giving in to intimidation.”

Until this year. Now we have flooding. (Farming here is severely stressed, yet again, because they can’t get into the fields.)”

Sigh. I take it you didn’t bother to read the bit where I said there was no proof that Australias’ drought is related to global warming and that that wasn’t my point? My point was that even small changes in weather patterns can be extremely destructive. And while I know you think the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are incompetent and corrupt fools surely you’ve heard that they aren’t predicting a uniform global increase in termperature by a few balmy degrees – they’re predicting increases in weather extremes. That means all of hotter, colder, wetter and drier are likely in different parts of the world. But whatever the local variation is you can bet that for most people on this planet it will lead to disruption of agriculture and thus even more people will starve.

But that’s ok. It’s only the weather.

Please ask yourself why the rise in CO2 is of more importance than the water vapor – which, despite the hyperbole, constitutes the overwhelming amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Please ask yourself why there is a desperate attempt to shout down any voice who asks those questions – even when they are genuine experts in the field. And despite the denigration of the shouters, there are genuine experts who vehemently disagree and are not paid tools of the oil companies.

Please ask yourself why “90% of climate scientists” means any more than the virtually 100% of physicists who firmly believed that Einstein was insane with his silly theory.

Ask yourself. Seriously. Virtually every lay (as in non-scientist/non-engineer) supporter of global warming theory relies on imparted wisdom – not individual thought about it. They get their science from the likes of Al Gore – energy hog, strip miner and a man with a huge financial stake in acceptance of global warming.

Think.

You are right. Who is to say that climate change will not affect us for the better.

Let’s see…. I am from Texas and on a routine Summer we go to the 100′s, so with Global Warming we can now look forward to say … 140 degrees in the shade, if you can find one because by then all the trees would have died.

But if on the other hand you live in Canda you can now have winters that only last 6 months, not 10 and you can change your economy to produce sugar cane, tobacco, and bananas. Your polar bear as well as all Artic animals will be no more, but no problem you can now replace them with Rattle snakes, Coyotes and Chimps.

New York, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, etc will be under water but they can change there economies too. That Southern accent will sound so nice when accompanied with bubbles!!!

The Shara will extend itself all the way down to South Africa, but who needs Africa anyway. The entire continent can be used to store nuclear waste, old coal plants, all kids of toxic materials, extinct animals, tires, Neo-Cons, and Al Gore books.

Of course Greenland will be green again and look like Can Cun, and that’s a good thing because Can Cun will be under water along with half of the Yucatan, and a bunch of pissed off Mexicans. It’a good thing we are building a wall, because after the “Pinches Greengos Pendejos” remarks we are sure to get, guess what Mexicans are going to try to do after thier country turns into a big version of Lawrence of Arabia at the Rio Grand.

Lovely little world we can expect. You are right home page, absolutely right. I am going out now to get myself a Hummer and set some trees on fire.

Gaius, this argument is ridiculous. Climate predications are based on actual measurement of temperatures and effects we’re seeing now in sea temperatures, growing seasons, and surface ice, among other things.

Over 90% of climate scientists (not meteorologists – there’s a very big difference) say that 6.5 billion people burning lots of stuff every day will have a serious effect.

How can you equate that with the three-day weather forecast, which is based essentially on looking up at the sky and predicting where masses of air will move tomorrow?

That would be weather. Any link to climate change is complete speculation. (And downright silly). Where I live in the Midwestern US, we had a several year long drought. Farming here was severely stressed.

Until this year. Now we have flooding. (Farming here is severely stressed, yet again, because they can’t get into the fields.)

This isn’t historical data, but I think those of us living through the current Australian drought have a pretty good idea what a “warm period” can do. The devastation of Australia’s farming community is overwhelming, and the stories of personal loss seem endless. And keep in mind that we have the luxury of developed-world wealth to soften the blows, so what happens here is only a mild prelude to what may happen in poorer countries.

No-one can say for certain at this point if the drought is a direct consequence of global warming trends but that isn’t the point. The point is that relatively small changes in climate can have consequences that won’t be fixed by cranking up the air conditioning a notch.

What a statement. You combine your contempt for the less-fortunate with a chance to create a straw man argument. I suppose a fine conservative like you would have taken the time out from your summer holiday save the old and useless.