from Hacker News

Nasa.gov: Evidence of Climate Change

by sharan on 10/24/10, 7:34 AM with 88 comments

• by todayiamme on 10/24/10, 1:08 PM

  You know whenever I read about this debate for some reason I recall George Carlin's prophetic words;

  "The planet is fine....

  The people are fucked."

  http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&...

  Whether we like to admit this or not; the earth and life will go on without us. It's our own survival we are fighting for over here; not a complex system in which life has taken hold by surviving through tough odds without the intend of surviving. This piece of rock really doesn't give a damn.

• by kia on 10/24/10, 11:49 AM

  Why did they decided to cut the graphic at 400,000 years before today? Maybe that's because a couple of million years ago the concentration of CO2 was well above today's level?

  By the way here is another picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_CO2_with_glaci...

• by sliverstorm on 10/24/10, 10:10 AM

  I think at this point, everyone has made up their minds which side to believe, and more evidence isn't going to help the matter, unless it is the sort of rock-hard evidence no one can possibly ignore (like repeated snowless winters in Detroit).

• by bd on 10/24/10, 2:05 PM

  Does this mean human beings can effectively prevent ice age?

  These are supposed to be cyclical, so it's pretty much guaranteed sooner or later we will have to face one.

• by KaeseEs on 10/24/10, 9:59 AM

  You'd think NASA would know well enough to start the y-axis at 0. Lousy graphs of this sort create the appearance of deceit, even in it absence, and wind up giving ammunition to skeptics.

• by mcritz on 10/24/10, 3:07 PM

  So much armchair quarterbacking, very little PhD in climatology. Reading the deniers’ comments I wonder if they tell their doctor how their endocrine system is powered by crystal energy and argue with the pilot about Bernoulli’s “so-called” Principle.

  Science has come to a conclusion. Do you listen or merely justify your previously held belief?

• by ChristianMarks on 10/24/10, 5:04 PM

  Despite the conservative naysayers, the federal government is heavily invested in climate research. Take the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab (GFDL) in Princeton, NJ. This is a NOAA facility involved with sophisticated climate models. Raytheon, a major defense contractor, was involved in day-to-day operations and public relations.

  A defense contractor is involved with public relations for this facility, not Indymedia.

  Typically, climate models require the resources of high-performance computing facilities with thousands of processors. These facilities cost tens of millions of dollars to implement, and millions to maintain.

  Why is climate research a matter of national security, involving the oversight of defense contractors and personnel with security clearance? For at least two reasons. First, it is of strategic interest to the United States to know how the planet will be affected by global warming. If large parts of China or the Netherlands are going to end up submerged under 20 feet of water, and millions of people will have to be evacuated, this U.S. would not want to outsource the ability to forecast this to, let us say, non-allied countries.

  Another reason is that with the increased likelihood of hurricanes in the Gulf (to mention one case of extreme weather) it is a matter of national security to have better models for predicting the likely trajectory of a hurricane as it approaches land. A wrong guess can cost billions.

  Despite the global warming deniers among politicians who are loyal to the big energy lobby, you can rest assured that funding for the development of sophisticated climate models and the elaborate high-performance computing systems, scientists and operational support personnel needed to design, run and maintain them them is provisioned by the federal government as a matter national security.

• by thangalin on 10/24/10, 7:54 AM

  Visit:

  http://whitemagicsoftware.com/software/climate/master.shtml

    1. City: Cranbrook BC
    2. Days: June 1 to October 1
    3. Click Report
    4. Repeat for any number of Canadian cities

• by mfukar on 10/24/10, 11:52 AM

  Does anyone have any reference(s) to the methods used to sample data about atmospheric 400,000 years ago? It's amazingly interesting.

• by motters on 10/24/10, 10:19 AM

  Also see http://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/

• by harscoat on 10/24/10, 12:41 PM

  The power of a graph.

• by points on 10/24/10, 10:29 AM

  Religion doesn't belong here.

• by TerraHertz on 10/24/10, 2:05 PM

  For anyone who still thinks Anthropogenic Global Warming is real, some reading material: http://everist.org/archives/links/!_AGW_links.txt http://everist.org/archives/links/!_CRU_emails_links.txt

  Oh and yes, the graph was limited to 400K years,because otherwise it would show CO2 levels in the past FAR higher than today. And it doesn't show CO2 vs temp over geological timescales, because that graph clearly shows that CO2 lags temp, not the other way round.

  It's the same old story - figure out who hopes to make money from a scam, and things get a lot clearer.