What the... Snow in June, then in August!

[Zyx]

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_ ... tions.html
Interesting talk on several levels.

[Seriously Unserious]

It is. He presents an interesting hypothesis on another way that mass extinctions can happen.

[Chaos-Shaman]

hehehe, yes, we can start with not driving cars SU, i so agree, but you and i both know that's not going to happen, SUVs hhehehhe

[Seriously Unserious]

we can also redesign cars, trucks, etc to not run on polluting fuels, but rather on clean, renewable energy sources. The only reason such technologies have not been developed is that the petrochemical industry have a strangle hold on our energy supply and doesn't want to lose this, and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep us dependent on them.

[Chaos-Shaman]

i would think it is because the economy can't handle the price tag that comes with it, and how in the world is a third world country just trying to get off its feet be able to afford this new energy, considering there is way more population that has no money than does have money, it makes no sense, so it's not the oil companies, it's economic common sense that oil is that much cheaper.


yesterday, JUNE 3rd, Hearst Ont, had 5cm of snow, now that matches the headline of this thread, and it's not in the mountains, it's not far north either, it's Ontario. so this oddity has been happening for a few years now which removes it from the class of weather and into the class of climate.

[Seriously Unserious]

Unless people start developing machines that can tap into the ambient energy that is all around us in abundance, then you'd realize just how cheap energy can be. It's the oil that's expensive, after all, it's a non-renewable resource of finite quantities, whereas ambient energy is always there. One example of such energy is static electricity, which is present in large amounts, but most of the time it doesn't do anything, unless something happens to make it active. Just consider the amount of energy involved in a lightning bolt, that's static electricity being put into motion by an imbalance in energy causing a massive spark of static discharge. All it takes is for people to start thinking outside the box, and develop machinery that's capable of harnessing that static electricity by being the catalyst that puts it into controlled motion. That's just one example of ambient energy that can be put to work.

It's up to us to find ways of using this abundant energy, supporting those who are researching it and above all, stop ridiculing them all as wackos or crackpots or frauds. The problem is the big money's in scarcity, not abundance. scarce resources are expensive resources. It's all about supply and demand. If you control access to a scarce resource that has a huge demand for it, you become the price setter and can charge whatever the market will bear for it. You can make a killing in other words.

[Chaos-Shaman]

haha, yeah, I create enough static for everyone here on this site, heh, you can have it SU i often get a discharge before getting into a vehicle, i kiss my spouse and it's a shocking kiss, we get a kick, i mean jolt out of it.
it is easier to just stop using the vehicles than it is to look to feed this energy demand, my parents came from horse and buggy, had no power, had an ice man come by with a block of ice. we really don't need the energy as much as we think. my parents lived in a shack, 12' x 12' , and my dad got lucky, they decided to put a highway through his shack, he got a whole new house, 2000 square foot, he had 9 more children after that now that he had power . now the reason we don't see that reversal is everyone wants their toys, be it a car (most of the city i come from all have jobs with GM) or iphone, gaming system etc, this cheap energy is the only way to go. personally i'd like to see all manufacturing of vehicles reduced considerably and make travel in the city impossible for any single car vehicle. we need to take out half the lights on our streets, we don't need them and they take a LOT of power, hopefully the newer led lights will come about, we'll see.
why are our cell phones, ipads and stuff not solar powered like our old calculators? there must be a reason why. our demand for energy is not going to stop, the more devices we get, the more demand there is, third world countries are just starting that demand, look what China has done in a decade, heh, if it were not for China this economic recovery would take decades, so what i'm saying here is if there wasn't a demand for energy and goods from China to China (China was mostly an exporting poor country until recently), we'd be in big trouble.

frost yesterday for much of the Eastern parts of Canada, a little late season for that.

[Ameena]

One rather major problem in cutting down so heavily on transport would be that people would have to work close to home if they wanted to be able to get to work. Plus things like food deliveries kind of need large vehicles in order to ship stuff from its place of origin to the supermarkets or wherever it's ultimately being distributed from - there are a lot of humans in the world, and I'm not sure there's enough space for everyne to try and be self-sufficient. Farmland takes up a hell of a lot of space, after all, and what happens if you're living in a terraced house with no garden, or up the top of a block of flats or something? If you wanted to grow your own plants you'd need space (and resources) for that. If you wanted to farm for stuff like meat and eggs and other fauna-based produce, you'd need space for said critters to live in, plus you'd need enough of them to sustain you. And you'd need to get food for them, too. And somewhere to put all the refuse that would come from it (a compost heap, I suppose, but that would be rather stinky especially if you had a small garden, and where would you put larger creatures once they'd died, assuming they weren't being bred for meat in the first place?).
It's easy to say "we shouldn't have any cars", but if you actually think about it, however wonderful and idealistic the thought is, it's just not practical in this overcrowded world we're intent on occupying (and making worse). If it was another species taking up so much space I'm sure there'd be little hesitation in having a mass cull thing to whittle down the population and stop them messing up the ecosystem. The problem is, when it's your own species causing the problem, suddenly it's "unethical" to start wiping people out. We're all animals - it's just that our species has advanced far enough that we can control the environment (to an extent, anyway) and declare ourselves somehow better than all the other life forms on the planet. Hey, some humans even have this attitude toward other humans. Oh well, I'm sure we'll manage to totally balls things up at some point and Earth can work on recovering from our terrible onslaught. It'll only take a few hundred thousand years and there'll be no traces left of us at all .

[Seriously Unserious]

haha, yeah, I create enough static for everyone here on this site, heh, you can have it SU

*fzzzt-fffffff-zbbtzzzffffttttt...

what was that Chaos-Shaman? I couldn't hear you, must've been all that static... I think you're breaking up...

i often get a discharge before getting into a vehicle, i kiss my spouse and it's a shocking kiss, we get a kick, i mean jolt out of it.

Ahh, you go boy, make those sparks fly with your wife...

As for technology, there's nothing wrong with it, the problem is in relying on technology that pollutes and not doing anything about it to change it to technology that doesn't pollute, or at least doesn't pollute as much, just because a few people have this idea that they have to control everything. That sort of thinking is driven from fear, or rather should I say mortal terror of people like us. Those who seem to have everything really don't have as much as they think they do, for all the thinks they've acquired, they just can't enjoy them because of the overriding terror. I really don't envy such people at all. Those who would insist on profiting from polluting our planted and from other's suffering and pain are people who are in for a reckoning in their next life and I wouldn't want to be one of them when it comes.

Back to the main topic, after some torrential rains last week that were some of the heaviest rains I've seen here in my life, we're now getting hot, hot, sunny weather since Monday. Today, when I left for class in the late afternoon it was absolutely scorching hot.

[Ameena]

We've actually, finally been getting some proper Summery weather these last few days...hey, it's only about three weeks till Midsummer's Day . At some point very early this morning it totally pissed it down for a bit - I woke up briefly and heard it, then fell asleep again. It was probably about 5am or something like that. But it's been fine today, and hopefully will be tomorrow as my partner and I intend to go for a walk. A yummy walk, because there's a Frankie and Benny's at the other end (takes about an hour-and-a-half to get there, and we walk back again afterwards as well) .

[beowuuf]

Yeah, same in Basingstoke - rain overnight, warm but overcast turnign to cold and overcast then rainy, then by the mid afternoon it was all heat and sun again. Woot!

[Seriously Unserious]

In the Vancouver area we got some rain this morning, but by afternoon it had moved on and we even got a little sun. The rain cooled things down a bit though so it's not as hot as it was yesterday. which was pretty hot for this time of year.

[Chaos-Shaman]

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_ ... tions.html
Interesting talk on several levels.

mass extinction will happen again, and it was ironic about the volcano being the culprit. i do not believe the sea level rise of 250' , it'd take a lot of melted ice to do that, we can't include the ice on the ocean, it is already floating on the water, like an ice cube in a glass of water, the level stays near the same, maybe even drop a bit.

[Ameena]

Umm, actually there is a sizable amount of ice above the level of the water (though not as much as is already below it). Pushing an ice cube down further into a glass of water does have a noticeable effect - magnify that by the amount that would occur if it was a load of icebergs in the sea and I'm pretty sure you'd get a fair bit of flooding in some places...

[Seriously Unserious]

that's right, Ameena. There's also significant geological evidence of global sea levels changing by as much as 30 meters or more, depending on how much water is locked up in glaciers, and how much of it melts. Shorelines can change dramatically over time, geologic time that is. For example, go back to about 500 million years ago, and where I'm sitting right now (south coast of BC, Canada) would be in the middle of an ancient ocean. Back then someplace like Calgary would've been Canada's major west coast harbor as that's about where the ancient coast was at the time. Go back a few hundred million more years ago and where I am now would be in the middle of a super continent (the 2nd last such super continent), the last one being Pangea, which broke apart about 200 million years ago.

Other factors that affect coast lines are when parts of the crust get pushed up when colliding with each other, sort of like what's happening along the Rocky, Andes, Alps and Himalaya mountains, to name the most famous examples, where the crust not only gets pushed up, but also crumples up as well. On a smaller scale, you can also get a large section of crust get pushed up by a large section of another part of the crust getting pushed under it, which can lift the land, and dry out once underwater areas. This usually happens when 2 parts of the crust are colliding with each other and one is getting forced under the other, and part of them gets caught up and the movement stalls, until a breaking point is reached, and whamo, you get a huge earthquake and the land sinks back down to it's natural level, which can be as much as a few meters, and can lead to coastal land being inundated by ocean. These types of coastal changes are typically localized to only the area where they actually happen.

Plus there's areas of Great Britain and France that have rocks like chalks and limestones that usually form underwater, in the ocean, so when those were formed, there had to have been ocean there at some point in the past.

On a global scale, changes in coastlines can really only happen either when a super continent is forming, breaking up, or the amount of liquid water changes, such as water being frozen into ice, or melting from existing ice.

[Ameena]

The different types of tectonic plate collision are called stuff like subduction zons and erm...subvention zones or something like that. I can't remember exactly, but there're names for the different things that happen when plates meet - whether they both rise (like the Himalayas), or whether one forces the other down (and later it springs back up again as an earthquake). I'm not sure if there's a name for the mid-Atlantic Ridge thingy where land is being basically generated and the two sections are "flowing" away from each other.
As for the UK and its chalky cliffs and stuff...I saw part of an interesting programme a few days ago, in fact, called something like "Super Tsunami", presented by Tony Robinson, in which he talked about how there'd been an extra, low-lying area of land occupying what's now mostly the North Sea. This country was called Doggerland (named after Dogger Bank, I think, which is basically a large underwater hill in that area or something), and it was around when our prehistoric ancestors were, because they had settlements there and stuff. Doggerland was a very fertile, open area but when there was some kind of massive landslide thing somewhere (I think in the region of Norway or thereabouts), it made a massive tsunami which completely changed the geography of the area by flooding Doggerland and creating the North Sea, the English Channel, and basically breaking the UK off from what became the continent of Europe.
They showed evidence for this, of course, including an inland rock layer (as in, a couple of miles inland or so) comprised of stuff that was consistent with a sudden flood, plus there were fossilised remains of tiny little critters which were/are only ever found in the ocean, therefore the only way all this stuff could've ended up where it was would have been if there was a massive flood, like a tsunami. They could even date it to the season because there were cherry stones mixed up in it, or something, and cherries only fall in the Autumn, therefore this happened in the Autumn of whatever year it was (about 30,000 years ago or something, I think...can't remember exactly). There were also some other people who'd used satellite images to map out the sea floor and found what the land used to look like, with hills and rivers and stuff...I think the pattern of the lines they found could only have been caused by rivers eroding the land away, a long time ago, and that if the place had been underwater the whole time, said lines couldn't have appeared.
There was other stuff like that. In fact, here, I went and found a link to it...
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/time ... ecials/4od
Okay, it was 8000 years ago. I knew it was a long time, anyway .

[Seriously Unserious]

The different types of tectonic plate collision are called stuff like subduction zons and erm...subvention zones or something like that. I can't remember exactly, but there're names for the different things that happen when plates meet - whether they both rise (like the Himalayas), or whether one forces the other down (and later it springs back up again as an earthquake). I'm not sure if there's a name for the mid-Atlantic Ridge thingy where land is being basically generated and the two sections are "flowing" away from each other.

Since you have expressed an interest, I'll post the technical info you are talking about:

There are 3 main types of plate boundaries
1- Divergent - plates are moving away from each other, and creating new crust. Volcanic activity and Earthquakes are common along this type of boundary. When this occurs on an oceanic plate, it creates what's called a Mid-ocean Ridge, The MId-Atlantic Ridge is a prime example of this.
Here's a good diagram to illustrate this:

When this happens on a continental plate, a rift valley is created, such as the East African Rift.


2- Convergent - This is where 2 plates are moving towards each other. There are 3 types of Convergent Boundaries:
1- Ocean-Continent: When an oceanic plate collides with a continental plate, the oceanic plate will always be forced under the continental plate, back down into the molten part of the Earth, called the Mantle. This is the process of Subduction that you referred to in the quote above. The best example of that would be the West Coast of South America and the forming of the Andes Mountains.

2- Ocean-Ocean - In this type of collision, both plates will try to subduct, but the plate with the older rocks will be the one that succeeds in subducting. Thus creates a deep trench in the ocean, like the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean.

3- Continent-Continent - This is where landmasses collide. Continental Crusts are the least dense rocky material that the Earth is made of, so it has a strong tendency to float on the mantle, and will not subduct. So when continents collide, they buckle, warp, and form huge mountains, like the Himalayas, where India is colliding with Eurasia.


In the first 2 types of convergent boundaries, volcanoes and earthquakes are common. In the 3nd type, there will not normally be any volcanoes but earthquakes will be common.

3- Transform Plate Boundary - This is where 2 plates are sliding sideways, past each other, creating a line of faults (fractures in the rocks). An example of this is the famous San Andres Fault of California, which is responsible for most of California's earthquakes. Earthquakes are common along transform boundaries but there will be no volcanic activity.

As for the UK and its chalky cliffs and stuff...I saw part of an interesting programme a few days ago, in fact, called something like "Super Tsunami", presented by Tony Robinson, in which he talked about how there'd been an extra, low-lying area of land occupying what's now mostly the North Sea. This country was called Doggerland (named after Dogger Bank, I think, which is basically a large underwater hill in that area or something), and it was around when our prehistoric ancestors were, because they had settlements there and stuff. Doggerland was a very fertile, open area but when there was some kind of massive landslide thing somewhere (I think in the region of Norway or thereabouts), it made a massive tsunami which completely changed the geography of the area by flooding Doggerland and creating the North Sea, the English Channel, and basically breaking the UK off from what became the continent of Europe.

I'm not surprised that the North Sea was dry land at around that time. 30000 years ago would've put it in the late stages of the last big ice age, which started about 1.8 million years ago and ended about 10000 years ago. So by about 30000 years ago, the Earth may have been slowly warming up and the ice slowly melting, causing the sea levels to rise globally. Also, if the Eurasian plate experienced any settling at around that time, that could also have lowered Doggerland enough to flood it with sea water. Further, if the Atlantic Plate were pushed upward significantly, that could also displace enough water to flood Doggerland, thus creating the North Sea.

As it happens we just finished discussing Tsunamis in one of my classes a couple of days ago. The do leave a few distinctive traces behind. First off, they leave a layer of sand often referred to as Tsunami sands, Second, they can cause an inundated region to have what's called ghost trees, basically a forest of dead trees that were killed of by the salt introduced by the sea water.

Rocks like limestone, and chalk especially when forming in thick layers as are the case with the chalk cliffs of England and France, need a stable somewhat deep marine environment for them to form. They won't form in water that's too shallow since the particles they are made of can't settle to the bottom because waves will keep stirring them up, whereas in deeper water, they aren't being stirred up as much by waves and so have a chance to settle to the bottom and eventually get pressed and cemented together into rocks.

[Ameena]

Ah, thanks for the informative details on plate tectonics - I couldn't remember all the names .
And the tsunami thing was only 8000 years ago - I corrected myself at the bottom of the post after I'd gone and looked for the link to the programme .

[Chaos-Shaman]

yeah, I loved it. it explains things in an easy fashion. this sublimation and subduction action is what we're talking about.
i think the west coast BC is in for a big one, that's you SU, make sure you have all the emergency preparedness equipment and plans just in case these predictions from these mad scientists just happen to be right. articles read keep warning about that it's past due.

so, does everyone agree that there has been more activity with the earths crust? earthquakes and volcanic activity elevated just a little...

[Seriously Unserious]

@Ameena, Chaos-Shaman: you're welcome.

@Chaos-Shaman: The big one is due, anytime from right now, to as much as 200-300 years from now. That's the thing about plate tectonics, their timing's not at all predictable, It's just a matter of when the rock finally gives away, and there's just no telling when that will happen, there's just too many unknown variable at play...

@Ameena: That time frame definitely makes more sense, as it meshes better with the ending of the last ice age, and the melting of the enlarged ice caps, which cold produce enough of a sea level rise to inundate the North Sea area. The tsunami though may or may not be related. A huge ice sheet falling off a nearby landmass into the water could have triggered it, as could a massive underwater landslide, or a large scale crustal movement (IE and earthquake, underwater volcano)

Okay, it was 8000 years ago. I knew it was a long time, anyway .

For us it would be a long time ago, but in terms of geologic time, that's practically a current event. Geologically speaking, Earth formed about 4.56 billion years ago. The first landmasses formed out of the lava oceans about 4 to 4.3 billion years ago, with the first ocean not far behind (just a few hundred million years or so). The first lifeforms about 1 to 2 billion years ago, the first life on land about 440 million years ago, the dinosaurs about 250 to 300 million years ago, the dinosaurs became extinct and mammals rose to prominence about 65 million years ago, and humans came into existence about 200 to 300 thousand years ago. A mere 8000 years is nothing compared to all that.

[Chaos-Shaman]

who knows when, or what will be the trigger. best to ask Chaos when

[Ameena]

Ah yes, I meant a long time relative to our lifetimes . The programme I linked to is pretty interesting and probably explained in detail how they think the tsunami happened and all that. I left the room before it finished so I didn't see all of it.
I once, at school, saw a vid about the history of life on Earth or something. It said that if you fit the entire "lifespan" of the Earth into a single day, there would have been no life from midnight till about 4pm, then just bacteria till 10pm, and eventually humans come along at one second before midnight.

[Seriously Unserious]

That sounds about right.

[Chaos-Shaman]

http://greengoddesslove.wordpress.com/2 ... estilence/

interesting read about earthquakes, volcanoes, sunspots etc.

check the charts out on how active it has been the last 10 years

[Seriously Unserious]

Once thing I noticed is that the guy said

Some people believe there is a link between the sun and our climate. No, I’m completely serious. Stop rolling your eyes. Yes, we are all aware that the sun warms the earth. We are also aware that the lack of sun cools the earth. But this idea is more subtle and more difficult to prove directly due to the aforementioned fleeting lifespan. We simply don’t have enough long term data to make a firm case.

This is not entirely true. Yes our lifespans are short, yes we have only been recording exact data ourselves for about 100 to 200 years at best. What he didn't say is that the rocks have been recording data for billions of years. Some of that data is lost to erosion, some is gained because of erosion.

First of all, different types of rocks form from different types of sediments (bits of broken rocks from erosion). Different sizes of sediments settle in different areas based on size, mineral composition and geography of the area. In a high energy area, like a large, fast flowing river or at the bottom of a steep slope, you will tend to get large boulders with smaller sediments like gravel and sand thrown in. In a medium energy environment, such as a typical river, you will get a few boulders, but mostly gravel, grading down to sand if the river slows. This is because the bigger the sediments are, the heavier they are and the more force it takes to move them. In a lower energy seting, such as a slow river, beach, or windy area like a dessert, you will get mostly sand settling. In an even lower energy environment, like the calm waters of a lake, swamp or a bit off shore in a sea, you will get even smaller sediments settling, such as silts and clays. in the lowest energy setting like the deep sea, you will get mostly very fine particles like volcanic ash and remains of microscopic shelled organisms.
So the types of rocks you will get will tell you where the water was, since certain types will only form around water.

Types of rocks and where/how they form are:
chalk (deep sea) - made of the remains of microscopic microorganisms
limestone (shallow warm sea, caves) - made from the remains of larger shells of sea creatures and/or coral
siltstone/mudstone/shale (near shore sea, lake, swamp) - made from very fine particles of rocky materials sized less then 0.0625mm
sandstone (beach, dessert) - made of sand sized sediments, sizes range from 0.0625mm to 2mm
conglomerate/breccia (old river beds, bottom of hill, some beaches) - pebbles and rocks of sizes larger then 2mm with smaller stuff filling in the gaps and holding it all together.

So based on this you can tell where water was at any given area and at any given time in the past, which can help to identify global changes in sea level, and where ancient rivers would have been. An important first step in estimating past climates.

Next, you can tell what a climate was like by the patterns of the erosion itself. If you see large areas with a grooved pattern, and a mixture of debris ranging from huge boulders to tiny clays, with no sorting by size and weight at all, you know glaciers had to have been there in the past. That's the only force that can gouge rock in that way and when the debris from this gouging gets frozen in the glacier it all gets frozen in, regardless of size. Later, when the glacier melts, it all gets dropped wherever it was, regardless of size. Of course, if wind or water starts moving this glacial debris it will get sorted later on, but the rock-gouges will still remain, and get preserved when new rocks form on top of them.

Of course, all these types of rocks are prone to erosion, so these records can very easily get erased.

Other types of rocks can also tell us where volcanoes were even up to billions of years ago, or where the roots of ancient and now dead mountains once were, because when there's volcanic activity or mountain building it will permanently change he nature of the rocks, by either squeezing them, or cooking them (but not melting, that would form a new volcanic type of rock).

I could go on, but this does show that the records are there, in the very rocks beneath our feet. This is a branch of science called paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climates though rocks.

[Zyx]

Interesting, but you don't know how the sun was behaving. Without data about the sun, you can't prove a theory linking the sun and the climate. That's what the guy meant.

[Chaos-Shaman]

i am not counting on science to tell all about our past climate, especially if it's in the billion year range, we're not that smart, we guess really good though. science has been proven wrong lots of times, has fooled us in some cases for thousands of years. it is all about the sun though as Zyx said. we need some more time to study what's going on, science should have patients, it's never CLEAR. whenever you hear that word CLEAR, most of the time it is not, remember this and check out how that word is used. at one time it was clear Pluto was a planet, not any more.

so the chart shows a marked increase in volcanic activity the last decade by three fold, it has something to do with the sun and its output, its polarity. i am more worried about the possibility that the change in magnetics will send a bad ass asteriod our way, or a comet. this is a bigger problem than CO2 is, and if anyone has been paying attention, there have been a few close calls as of late. one of those suckers will just about finish us off.

[Seriously Unserious]

Interesting, but you don't know how the sun was behaving. Without data about the sun, you can't prove a theory linking the sun and the climate. That's what the guy meant.

Actually, there are other branches of science that can get data on that, so some extent, by studying tree rings, you can get a sense of overall conditions, and such, as one example. There are other means of determining that from traces left on the Earth as well, but I just don't now what those methods are. I would need to make a career of studying paleoclimatology in order to understand all that and I do like learning about how our planet works, but I'm not that into it that I'd want to study it for a living.

so the chart shows a marked increase in volcanic activity the last decade by three fold, it has something to do with the sun and its output, its polarity. i am more worried about the possibility that the change in magnetics will send a bad ass asteriod our way, or a comet. this is a bigger problem than CO2 is, and if anyone has been paying attention, there have been a few close calls as of late. one of those suckers will just about finish us off.

Maybe a big hunk of rock and ice will smash into our planet soon, maybe it won't. We aren't able to control that -- yet. We are proving very good and controlling the environment though and it's only a matter of time before we figure out how to prevent the catastrophic cosmic collision disaster scenarios though. Once thing we can control now though is what we're doing to the only planet we know with absolute certainty can support life as we need it -- and have access to.

If you don't believe the experts about what CO2 in the atmosphere does to planetary temperatures just take a look at Venus. It's about the same size as Earth. It's about the same Mass as Earth. It's seismically and volcanically active like Earth is. Yet average surface temperatures on Venus are about 480 degrees (hotter even then Mercury average surface temperatures of 166.86 degrees, which is much, much closer to the sun then Venus is). The average surface temperatures on Earth are about 14 degrees. So why is Venus so much hotter not only then Earth, but even the closest planet, Mercury? The answer, Venus' atmosphere consists mostly of CO2 AND SO2, both greenhouse gasses, in fact, the atmosphere around Venus is 98% CO2! Mercury, on the other hand, has a very thin atmosphere so it can get as hot as 700 degrees in the daytime, but can drop to a bone chilling -180 degrees at night. The atmosphere around Venus is also so thick that at the surface it is the equivalent of the pressure of the deepest part of Earth's oceans.

So looking at the hellish conditions on Venus should give us more then reason enough to find clean ways of producing our energy that don't emit greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere and find ways of ensuring the systems that take CO2 out of our atmosphere are carefully preserved. The ideal is to ensure CO2 levels don't go much higher then they are now, but at the same time don't let it fall too low either, unless we want another snowball Earth, like what happened between about 1.5-1.0 billion years ago, when virtually the entire surface of the planet, even the oceans, was covered in ice.

As far as current weather goes, the Vancouver area has turned hot. Temperatures today got to over 33 degrees Celsius with high humidity, and it's supposed to be almost as hot tomorrow, and it was quite hot yesterday. The 2 week trend on The Weather Network predicts very little rain and all sun for the next 2 weeks.

[Chaos-Shaman]

"If you don't believe the experts about what CO2 in the atmosphere does to planetary temperatures just take a look at Venus. It's about the same size as Earth. It's about the same Mass as Earth."

that's not a good example though SU, we're nothing like Venus. if Venus was in our orbit, it'd be like the earth. if people were serious about it, if our governments knew exactly what is going to happen, they'd stop encouraging people to drive wouldn't they. i do not see commercials on TV telling us not to drive vehicles, nope, just the ones driving over mountains and through our forests, i hate those RAM commercials!!!!!

yeah, and Germany and England are in for a cold July. it is the whacky polar jet that is causing this wild fluxing, not CO2, and that is because the water in the N Atlantic is cold right now. it is strange seeing 30c in parts of the Arctic Circle for a week there, but at the same time the polar jet was giving below temps in the east. we had frost on June 7th, snow in Hearst Ont, my garden is the worst it has evern been, it's been either too cold or too wet this year. the last 5 years have sucked for growing vegetables, i know this cause i have a 20x50' veggi garden. we had a week of nice weather just as spring was winding up, other than that, it's been cold and lousy where i live.

[Ameena]

It finally seems to be Summer here, as of the last week or thereabouts - it's finally hot and sunny outside :O.