"TORONTO, Canada (Reuters) -- Three of North America's Great Lakes -- Lake Huron, Lake Superior and Lake Erie -- have frozen over for the first time in nearly a decade after icy weather lasting more than a month, experts at Environment Canada said."

"...after record low temperatures, without a hint of the warming trend that is normal for this time of year... the coldest for March in a century, according to Environment Canada."

Read the whole story here:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/03/12/ canada.lakes.reut/index.html

And how does this relate to global warming, may I ask? Three great lakes freeze for a relatively short amount of time in Canada, and this is intended to nullify statistics relating to global warming? It's a local occurrence, not evidence that there is no global warming.

-Dagolar

Dago wrote:

Oh please. Chretien and Hussein are two very different leaders. They have different ethics, run a different regime, and Chretien has done good and bad in Canada. He's not a murderous tyrannt, and he's going to retire peacefully. The two simply cannot be compared.

Different ethics, yes. But their morals are the same. Chretien would love to cheat, lie, backstab, and steal. Anyone with any sense of humanity would have graciously accepted a loss of the political run and not exploited a loophole to steal several hundred thousand dollars of the taxpayers' money to serve in the office for the remainder of a term he did not earn.

Yes. There's no affirmed "path" that it is taking. You are correct, and I agree with your view. I think the acknowledgement that something IS happening is a start. Where it goes is up to differing opinions from experts.

-Dagolar

Iraq should not be invaded because the U.S. and the U.N. failed in their attempt to dethrone him. If Suddam is removed, fine. Great. All good. But doing a unilateral invasion from the United States is a piss poor FINAL solution that they have come up with. I think it is interesting that, as Noam Chomsky put it, the U.S. is the only country that actually sees Iraq as a threat to their own security, and secondly, that all attempts to divert war for another solution has been repeatedly and not very convincingly shot down by the U.S..

I don't know how many times I've heard Colin Powell use the argument that "Iraq is deceiving us yet again". That's getting very old, one because there is no current evidence to support it, and two, because the priority for war is a little too high to be solely for the purpose of removing him as a threat. There's an underlying agenda here. Oil? I don't know...maybe. I don't guess at those things. But I think it's fairly obvious that there is an underlying agenda coming from the U.S. on this event. I see George Bush as more of a threat to Canada than Suddam Hussein.

-Dagolar

are you "we all"? no. i don't appreciate the sarcasm

How does it relate? I deliberately excerpted the more relevant quotes... I'll excerpt them again, for all the good it will do: "without a hint of the warming trend that is normal for this time of year" and "the coldest for March in a century."

What does one spot have to do with global warming, you ask? Silly question. Are the Great Lakes part of the cube? The cylinder? The dodecahedron? Last time I checked, they were part of the globe. In the midst of a global warming trend, we're measuring 100 year record lows. How likely is that?

My question is, why is the temperature at the Great Lakes irrelevant but the temperature in Alaska (or any other of the locations commonly cited in these "global warming" studies) so damn important? Are we just throwing out any locale that shows an impressive cold trend? Not that we can say the GL region has shown a general cooling... just that March this year happened to be colder than any year in the past 100. See the explanation on the numbers game, end of this post.

Further down this subthread, someone starts talking about how the global warming is part of an overall trend for "more extreme temperatures." Smoke and mirrors... any time you try to prove that the globe is getting warmer, someone points out that if you start counting a year before or stop counting a year after, then the "results" come out different, so you try to make it sound like that itself is the problem... like the fact that weather is unpredictable is because of humanity's dangerous impact on the "fragile" ecosphere.

You're starting from the basic assumption that there is a global climate, that there is a normal temperature, that there is a status quo we could preserve and protect. Researchers and builders are continually excavating structures on land that had been dry, then under sea level, and are now back on dry land again. We didn't do that. It happens all the geologic time. Let's say we look at satellite images, thermal images, for as long as there has been satellites, and have a computer average out the temperatures all over the globe for as long as such images have been capturable. Let's say it shows that yes, the temperature has increased steadily, more or less all over throughout the world, over that whole time period.

Let's say we do this, and it comes out that way. What exactly does this prove? That's an eyeblink. That's less than an eyeblink.

And yes, the ice caps are melting. They do this. They're, well, how do I put this? Ice. Ice melts. Core samples from the ice caps show that while they don't melt this fast all the time, our era's not exactly unique. You know what happens when they melt? Cold water gets circulated all over the planet, the ocean levels rise a bit, and the earth generally cools. For all we know, it's part of the whole ice age/warm age thing. When the snow melts in the spring, we don't assume it's something cataclysmic... we know the snow was only there because it's winter, and summer is coming and summer will be warm and hot and, in some places, relatively dry.

Yeah, so maybe we're done with geologic spring and heading into geologic summer. It's not going to be a picnic, that's for sure, but it's just part of the cycle. It's not something we're doing, it's something that the greater body of which we are a part does. You're like a microbe or organelle worrying that it's your fault the animal body in which you reside is sweating.

Yeah, this could be bad news for any interests we have right along the coast, but hey... we'll cope or we won't. New Orleans has been beneath sea level forever. It had a good run. :P

And yeah, it would be great if we could reduce greenhouse gases.... they're sure not helping much of anything. Yeah, air pollution should be cut down... smog in places like Los Angeles and London has actually killed people, to say nothing of long term effects due to debilitative disease. It's nothing new, though. I just read on another story at CNN.com that 22% of the methane in the air is produced by animals. What must that have been like in the age of the dinosaurs? Rome at its peak put all kinds of lead and crap in the air, and they had no knowledge of filters.

So, no... pollution is not a good thing


A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF THE NUMBER GAME FOR ALL INTERESTED PARTIES:

Look at this sequence of numbers:

1, 17, 3, 12, 2, 6, 8, 10.

Imagine that the numbers measure the level of something over the period of eight months. If you start with the first month and go to the last, you can say, "Within an eight month period, the level jumped 9 points. We must do all within our power to fight the dangerous increase in the level!" If you happened to start counting on the second month, though, you would say, "Within a seven month period, the level dropped 7 points. Preventing a further disastrous drop is of paramount importance!" A five month study starting with the first month would say, "Although the level fluctuated, at the end of the period, it was almost the same as it started. Nothing to worry about."

Very good article. Quite enlightening.

Indeed... although it does have this I'm-a-political-science-student feel to it... it seems like the references to big-important-political-concepts are dropped at a regularly timed interval. "Mentioned Hegel last paragraph, got Realpolitick down now, gotta mention Marx next. I'm totally getting an A on this!"

But the guy that wrote it looks to be in his late 90's, so perhaps not.

-AbyssDragon

Dago wrote:

Iraq should not be invaded because the U.S. and the U.N. failed in their attempt to dethrone him.

Um... huh? If attempting to dethrone him was a good idea, why shouldn't it be attempted again?

But the UN never attempted to dethrone him; the UN tried to rein him in, and the US went along with that policy for nearly 12 years. If reining him in isn't working, then what?

If Suddam is removed, fine. Great. All good. But doing a unilateral invasion from the United States is a piss poor FINAL solution that they have come up with.

You keep using the word "unilateral" as if it's true. We have a coalition of nations standing with us on this.

I think it is interesting that, as Noam Chomsky put it, the U.S. is the only country that actually sees Iraq as a threat to their own security, and secondly, that all attempts to divert war for another solution has been repeatedly and not very convincingly shot down by the U.S..

Noam Chomsky is a rather rabidly extremist partisan who can be counted on to do anything except present a cogent argument. In this case he's said something that's demonstrably false: Iraq has been an ongoing threat to its neighbors since before the Gulf War, and is only less of a threat now because we've tried to keep Saddam contained. But the threat remains. Kuwait and Qatar still feel threatened enough by Iraq that they've allowed our troops to be stationed on their soil for the purpose of dealing with it. Israel certainly sees Iraq as a threat to their security! And nations that were involved in the recent terror arrests centering around poisoning plots (like the ricin incident in the UK, or a similar arrest in Spain) definitely see Iraq as a threat, since the current regime has allowed the plotters of those acts to operate in the northeast.

I don't know how many times I've heard Colin Powell use the argument that "Iraq is deceiving us yet again". That's getting very old, one because there is no current evidence to support it, and two, because the priority for war is a little too high to be solely for the purpose of removing him as a threat.

There's a mountain of evidence to support that Saddam is still deceiving; to say there's none is either ignorance or dishonesty. Just the other day, a type of missile was discovered in Iraq that was designed solely for the purpose of dispersing chemical and biological agents. And at about the same time, it was disclosed that Iraq has yet another UAV designed to spray those agents. Iraq has yet to account for almost all of its known weapons stockpiles that existed when the inspectors were ejected in 1998, and those large quantities of weapons remain missing--since the burden of proof is on him, there's no reason we should simply take the regime at their word when they say those things were destroyed, particularly when their December declaration made no mention of any such destruction. In his press he praises his "nuclear mujahadeen", the scientists who work on the nuclear program, yet he claims to the rest of the world that he has no nuclear program. Saddam continues to make only grudging concessions to inspectors, when strong force is applied, instead of cooperating fully and immediately.

And there's a huge difference between letting people go where they want to go, and voluntarily giving them all the information they need. The point has been raised before and I'll raise it again: We know what cooperation looks like because we've seen it from South Africa and Kazakhstan. Saddam has had months to hand over documents about the destruction of his weapons--or to hand over the weapons themselves. He's had months to tell inspectors that a given facility was used to dispose of the weapons, and to show them in as much detail as they wanted. He's had months to pony up the 18+ mobile biological weapons labs. All of this could have been done voluntarily in December. Look at what he's done instead: He started destroying a few of his illicit rockets, only after weeks of complaint about them and massive pressure to act, and for about a week after the inspectors asked for his cooperation in the matter he still wavered on whether to do anything.

Saddam is still stalling for time. This is undeniable and irrefutable; his actions prove it completely. If he was willing to offer more than token cooperation, he'd have done it by now.

There's an underlying agenda here. Oil? I don't know...maybe. I don't guess at those things. But I think it's fairly obvious that there is an underlying agenda coming from the U.S. on this event. I see George Bush as more of a threat to Canada than Suddam Hussein.

Well, put your mind to rest: We won't be invading Canada any time soon, unless your government is eager to house some terrorist training camps in Manitoba.

Oil is not a significant reason for the action at hand; it's important, don't get me wrong, but it's only important for secondary reasons. But you're right that there is an underlying agenda.

The agenda at hand is essentially to weed out a perennial pest from the Middle East, plant something better in its place, and use that as a hedge against the decay all around it. Like planting a line of well-irrigated crops at the border of a desert to hold back the advancing sand and restore greenery to the area, the hope for the long term is that replacing Saddam Hussein's brutal regime with an imperfect secular democracy will put pressure on neighboring regimes. It is hoped that this will particularly offer leverage over Saudi Arabia (this is partly where oil would come in), so that their thousands of princes will stop funding Wahabbism--the dangerous radical sect of Islam that spreads the terrorist mindset all over the globe. This will also put intolerable pressure on Syria and Iran. Iran is in the throes of upheaval and may face a democratic revolution on its own, though it seems that there's enough distrust for Americans that a direct invasion of Iran would probably hurt that, not help; yet with Iraq subdued and a democracy built there, just as Germany and Japan were rebuilt after WWII, the proponents of freedom in Iran will gain serious momentum.

One of the important reasons for choosing Iraq for this is that it furthers a lot of goals. First, Saddam Hussein runs a terrorist state; that is, he sponsors terrorism. Iran and Syria are still the leaders in that regard, but Iraq does have training camps and some of al Qaeda's people are in fact there. And given the weapons he's known to have and his willingness to use them, especially if he can duck blame by using an intermediary to deliver them, this makes for a bad combination. Second, putting a democracy in the region, especially if it houses a substantial number of our troops, greatly leverages our power there and makes it many times easier to prosecute the long-term war on terrorism. Third (related to the above), Saudi Arabia as I mentioned will take a hard political hit; they have never really cooperated with us in dealing with al Qaeda and the ilk, and new political realities might force them to. Fourth, Iraq is a largely secular nation with an educated populace, so it has a good shot at becoming something like Turkey; democracy has a chance to work. Fifth, rebuilding there will be less costly, because the oil wealth of the nation will finance a lot of their internal development. Sixth, it puts the Fear in other terrorist states, and gives them a strong incentive to divest themselves of groups like al Qaeda and Hizbollah.

I strongly recommend the article Gughunter posted, as further reading.

Lummox JR

A lot to say, I see. I have one, simple question. Do you believe that we are in no way responsible for climate flucuation in the present and in...say, the last 200 years? Is humanity in no way responsible for that?

-Dagolar