![[0083] The Solution Is Part Of The Problem](http://www.sandraandwoo.com/comics/2009-08-06-[0083]-the-solution-is-part-of-the-problem.png "[0083] The Solution Is Part Of The Problem")
I had the idea for this strip during a period of very hot days two weeks ago. However, the current summer is fairly average compared to the “summer of the millennium” in 2003 (and the extremely hot July 2006). It is believed that the extreme heat wave in 2003 cost the lives of ten thousands of people all over Europe, especially elderly people in France. That summer was obviously not much fun without an air-conditioning system. (Houses with air-conditioning systems are very uncommon in Germany and other European countries.)
Having a look at the following chart of average daily temperatures in Germany, we can expect to get much more similarly hot summers during the next decades due to global warming 
. You can see a rapid increase of the average daily temperatures starting in the 1980s after a slow increase during the first decades of the 20th century.
1761–1770: 7.5 °C 1771–1780: 7.8 °C 1781–1790: 7.6 °C 1791–1800: 7.9 °C 1801–1810: 7.4 °C 1811–1820: 7.3 °C 1821–1830: 7.8 °C 1831–1840: 7.5 °C 1841–1850: 7.4 °C 1851–1860: 7.4 °C 1861–1870: 7.9 °C 1871–1880: 7.7 °C 1881–1890: 7.3 °C 1891–1900: 7.7 °C 1901–1910: 7.7 °C 1911–1920: 8.0 °C 1921–1930: 7.9 °C 1931–1940: 8.1 °C 1941–1950: 8.3 °C 1951–1960: 8.1 °C 1961–1970: 7.9 °C 1971–1980: 8.2 °C 1981–1990: 8.5 °C 1991–2000: 8.9 °C 2001–2008: 9.3 °C
(The source of this list is the German Wikipedia article Zeitreihe der Lufttemperatur in Deutschland which uses the official weather data provided by the Deutscher Wetterdienst.)
- Sandra: Whew…
- Sandra: Something has to be done against the terrible consequences of global warming!
- Woo: Exactly!
- Richard: Forget it, I’m not buying an air-conditioning system for our house!
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Sandra should have asked for a window A/C unit first, then slowly work up the idea into her dad’s head about getting an full house A/C unit. they are not THAT expenisve.
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Why wouldn’t the house have full AC in the first place?
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Go sit in the car! :3
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Poor Woo, he has all that fur, too. I’m surprised he’s not slurping down water right now!
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It’s shocking how many people still believe in Global Warming.
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hot air for cool breeze
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At least global warming will fix itself. The ice melt causes the oceans to dilute, which eventually causes the ocean currents to stop, thereby stoping the et stream and allowing the polar regions to creep south and eventually refreze enough water to make the oceans more slaty again. Gotta love home schooling to get an actual education in America.
Ain’t Nature grand?
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@ Nanashi well me nameless friend, its surprising how short that cycle actually is. Seems to be between twenty and forty years. Sometimes I wish I had been home schooled, but ended up just having to use the library instead.
Honestly though, a human can’t feel the “global warming” rise. Its less than half a degree. That would be summer time…
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@ Zaiki – Many places in the north do not have air conditioning.
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I can’t really imagine not having AC, in Texas it isn’t really a hard decision. Where does she live?
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Lucky ducks. Up here where we live we’ve gotten maybe three weeks of sunny weather, tops. The rest has been rain and overcast.
Of course, personally I stopped believing in global warming the moment the thermometer hit -35 degrees. I had my doubts before, but you know, when you live south of Canada and it starts getting to be arctic temperatures outside, well, you aren’t exactly inclined to believe in global warming after that. And when you factor in how the whole “global warming” thing has been used as an excuse for ever increasing amounts of government intervention (“Like hell you’re going to monitor my power usage.”), I think I’m just echo the words of that Great British American Hero Daniel Hannan and say, “We’re humans, we can adapt.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPWlHtXhKzM
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Global Warming is still a possible threat, maybe not to us but to our descendants and other living creatures; in a few hundred years if we follow our current out put of carbon dioxide it is possible that we could super charge our atmosphere making the earth similar to venus.
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Regardless of whether or not Global Warming is real, it being -35, or any other temperature anywhere, neither confirms nor denies that. It refers to a shift in the global average, not in local immediate temperatures, and can easily have local cooling effects. “Global Weirding” would be a better term.
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Global warming is just another in a long line of alarmist fads. Remember the Y2K scare? Acid rain, back in the 1970’s? The threat of human overpopulation before that?
BTW I live in the Chicagoland area. This has been the coolest summer I remember in my entire life.
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I live in south Florida. Down here we have a word for people who don’t have air conditioning.
Freaks.
The idea of building a house without central air is downright alien to Florida natives.
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Global warming…. shouldn’t the world be a burnt cinder by now, or something?
We need that Global Cooling that they had back in the 1970’s again.
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@ avatar
We feel the same way about people here in AZ. That said, I actually rather like summer, until it gets above 110 + it rained the day before. Humidity is annoying when you’re used to it, but it’s downright awful when you’re used to 5% most of the year.
On the global warming topic, I frankly put it up there with every other crazy claim that seems to attract all the extremists.
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Up here in Washington, air conditioning is rare. Considering it’s only useful in the summer… and even then, not even every day of summer, just the occasional heat wave, most don’t have a need for it… up until a heat wave rolls in.
Also, agree with BarGamer. Poor Woo!
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Evidently air conditioning is relatively rare in Europe–or at least Germany. It’s more of an American thing.
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Try living as far south as I do. Here it’s no luxury, it’s a necessity. The local news has a special segment in the summer for heat related deaths.
I don’t understand how anybody can be so stupid to deny global warming although the effects are ALREADY clearly visible all over the world. This does not mean that the effects of global warming all have to be bad, some countries like Russia will actually most likely profit from it.
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Because it’s not real, or at least not in the way the media spins in. The Earth heats up naturally on it’s own, then cools, then heats up, etc. The amount of greenhouse gasses we put in the air are minuscule compared to what the Earth puts out naturally.
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“global warming” is a bit misleading. It does not mean “everywhere will get warmer constantly until it’s preptual summer”; so far, it seems to mean shorter winters and longer, hotter summers. That may vary from place to place, however. Furthermore, even if things average out over the long run, that does not mean things won’t go haywire while things do average out(and go haywire worse than they would if we were not pumping out CO2 like crazy). Sure, things will cool off and that might return to normal in about a few centuries, but look at the havoc a few centuries of cooler weather wrought in the late middle ages and early modern era. If I may paraphrase John Maynard Keyes, “In an ecological crisis, things can stay haywire longer than you can stay alive”.
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You’re forgetting that the temperature is going up a lot from the 1700s thanks a lot to the mini-ice-age. Further, you’re assuming that the weather that some magic, lower, temperature, is “normal”. To be perfectly frank, the “normal” global average over the last few million years is higher than our yearly average.
No one said the world as we know it is the world as it should be. Or what we know about the world is what the world is really like. A little more humility is needed when we try to find out about the world — because as monkeys go, we’re only slightly more clever than our nearest cousins.
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@KageMizu: We don’t dump enough methane into the atmosphere to become like Venus.
@Long Tom: Soylent Green is People!
@Foxfire15: You also don’t have furnaces in AZ, you have “Heat Pumps”. Try taking a warm shower on those rare cool days… BTW, your A/C is also good for pulling the moisture out of the air.
@Novil: Would you prefer another Little Ice Age? Those ice chunks in the Delaware River in that painting of George Washington are no work of fiction. Nor was the starvation in France in the late 1780’s. Or the July snow in the New England region of the U.S. 1816. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_without_a_summer
@D.G.: The Little Ice Age was not a side-effect of, nor backlash to, any man-made action. It just kind of came and went on its own. Also, the measurements used to claim Global Warming include ground-surface measurements areas which have gone from forest to farmland, and now have more direct sunlight. http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd06oct97_1.htm
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I agree with Timmah360. The amount of gasses humans put out is almost nothing compared to what the earth does naturally. Although I don’t want to be careless with the earth, just reasonable. I don’t think I could live for a summer without air conditioning, In May for a week it was above 100 Degrees F! And the June was really cool, it doesn’t matter what month it s, Hot is hot! I hope Sandra can pull something off, is this comic a foreshadowing comic? Yea, thats all from me.
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I’m not going into the debate about global warming… definitely not. Instead, I’d like to say that I love Woo’s body expression.
Because body expression it is.
But yes, I remember the extremely hot July 2006. It’s impossible to forget. We were in Latvia that July, and it felt almost like being somewhere in the south.
I can live quite easily in a non-air-conditioned house, though, because I live in a thick-walled 18th century house that remains cool in summer and reasonably warm in winter.
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Novil, I don’t deny that global warming is happening, I just deny that humans have anything to do with it.
If you notice in the list of temperatures you gave, the average increase is between .3 and .4. That has been going on since the 1700s (when there was a mini ice age). In the 1700s, we didn’t have the industry to have an effect on global temperatures. The fact that the temperature is rising by the same amount now as it was then argues that we still don’t have the industry to change the global temperature.
Also, since we have had the ability to measure them, the temperatures of both Mars and Jupiter have been rising. I truly don’t think that our industry is so pernicious that it has poisoned their environments as it has supposedly poisoned ours.
The temperature increase of Mars, Jupiter (and Earth) just might be affected by the fact that the temperature of the Sun has been increasing.
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It gets worse, look beyond the debate itself. Who is pushing that debate (in the bigger sense, not anyone here ATM). When people say we are having “Global warming” or more recently “climate change” they also demand that the US (a rather responsable and cleaner that most county) get reduced to a 3rd world poverty crippled back water nation with all of their demands on us. India opently denouced the Keyoto treaty and China won’t abide by it. Those two countries (India and China) pollute more than nearly the rest of the world combined. Why? think about it.
On a side note, Al Gore has been at the head of the new religion of “global warming” and he’s made millions off of it and and lives a lifestyle that is 10 times (or more) polluting than an average guy. the hypocrite…
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@ Taxil Oh, don’t worry, we’ll be crippled and become a third world country by our own rights as we go now. So soon, there won’t be anything to worry about! The world will be safe from us destructive human in no time at all. Either that, or the heat will kill us off, and the world will fix it’s own problems, like it has since the beginning of the world. Or God will squash us all with his thumb. Makes as much sense to me as the rest.
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@Taxil – Sources please. That’s all I’m gonna say.
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Many places can’t get air conditioning it is true. Americans can forget how “spoiled” we are in that AC is readily available to many of us.
I say this, living in South Mississippi in the US, where this summer we had a string of days over 100 degrees F. That’s a lot even for here. And then our central AC went out, leaving us with one, tiny, overworked window unit…
Don’t mock the suffering it causes. Even here in my city old people die in this kind of heat.
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MI is about the same latitude as Germany, which explains all the German settlements. We just had the coolest July in years–not that I’m complaining!
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If I didn’t have a splitting headache, I’d formulate a very intelligent and informative response to the global warming debate, but unfortunately, in my current state it would degrade quickly into some rather unladylike language. So, I’ll just stick with what I was going to say in the first place, before I read some of the previous posts.
It’s hard to imagine a place that doesn’t have AC units attached to every house. Here where I live, the high tomorrow is expected to be 98 F (37 C), and with the humidity we get, it’s going to be even worse. My car doesn’t have AC, and just the 15 minutes it takes to get to or from work can be horrible.
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“I don’t understand how anybody can be so stupid to deny global warming although the effects are ALREADY clearly visible all over the world.”
Going back to my comment about acid rain, for years the Canadians blamed us for acid rain in their country before they were finally forced to admit it was caused by their own industries.
The United States isn’t responsible for problems in other countries. Get over it.
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Normally, I don’t comment on many webcomics, as I find it to be time better spent doing other things. However, after seeing all the comments made by uneducated individuals who seem to think it appropriate to deny the phenomonon known as global warming, I have this to say:
You people are terribly addled, or at least incredibly ignorant of scientific data that has been previously made public. The information that has been made public, in fact, provides all necessary data to disprove all of your statements of denial.
I suppose the first thing to point out is that no, natural greenhouse gases are nowhere near the amount that have accumulated since the rise of inustry. In fact, as of the last few decades, the measurable greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have increased to several times what would otherwise have occurred naturally. In other words, no. What we are doing is not as insignificant compared to what we already have as most would like to beleive.
What else? Some of you think that dropping temperatures in some areas is evidence enough to disprove global warming? Well, that’s actually a fairly logical claim to make, but it is still a false claim, sorry about your luck. The problem is that the increase in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere does not have the same effect in all areas at all times of the year. The method through which global warming is measured is by average annual temperature. So, even though your winters may be colder on occasion, the rest of the year will tend to be warmer, winter will be shorter-lived, and normal summer temperatures will eventually be thought of as heat waves.
There’s more, but I personally do not have the attention span or the patience to continue on. Try reading some essays, reports, and such, or simply watching similar things about global warming, (more recently referred to as climate change) keep an open and logical mind, and realize that no, this is not a simple data scatter. The results of global warming, as of now, bring the average global annual temperature to a much higher number than has been determined ever to have happened in calculatable history, (and pre-history, for that matter. Ice-cores are handy for that.) In fact, our average global annual temperature is several degrees above the highest recorded value. And although a few degrees (celsius, I might add) do not seem significant, when all of that is in the summer, with little change to winter, that value will be multiplied, up to a 10 degree increase or higher in some places.
Despite the fact that he seems a bit of a hypocrite, from what most people think, many things presented by Al Gore do make quite a bit of sense, and he even puts it in layman’s terms for modern society’s nigh-brainless corporate drones to understand. Look for a few things from him, you might be a tad surprised.
And, if this problem is not solved by our global population as a whole, then I suppose the heat will kill off all living beings on it, and either it will become like Venus, eternally molten and uninhabitable, or will fix itself over the course of billions of years, and hopefully evolution will not cause us ever to exist again, nor anything else so self-centered as to destroy their own planet for the cause of their own short-term pleasure.
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Enough already. What you’ve told us already we’ve already heard before. This subject I’ve seen already debated on other forums by far more educated minds. Global warming isn’t the definite scientific fact it’s been made out to be, and a lot of scientific data supposedly proving it has already been discredited. And just because we don’t tale the concept of global warming as gospel doesn’t mean we’re stupid. As I have mentioned before, there are other supposedly scientifically proven phenomena that were subsequently discredited. One of many examples is where the planet Neptune’s orbit was supposedly caused by another planet (Pluto) orbiting beyond it? It was since discovered that the mathematical calculations of Neptune’s orbit were simply faulty and Pluto did not affect it.
And note that “Global Warming” is now referred to as “Climate Change”? Very telling in its own right.
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WAIT! I found it, the perfect way to win any argument!
Stick your fingers in your ears and ignore everyone! Works for either side, it’s brilliant!
Okay, I’m done now before I get banned from this webcomic forever. *Would be saddened*
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@VieiraN: Try Inforwars.com, drudgereport.com, yahoo, google etc. It’s not that hard to find. take the lead and go out looking for it. in this day and age of the internet, finding what you are looking for isn’t hard.
@Anglomancer: my, you do have a talent of speaking much and saying nothing. learn brevity, it will serve you well.
two more points and i don’t think i will have to post here any more till the next update. I don’t think many of you have read “Jurassic Park” (if you have read the whole thing, good for you), you should do so. this topic is pointing out that humanity is growing arrogent. we can’t kill this world even if we tried. (and we can’t turn it into venus either, go learn astronamy). we are responsable for this world, but we should not be held hostage to it. Our destiney is to go out to the stars and beyond.
the other point is again. i hope this comic will steer clear of flame wars bait topics like this one today. it takes away the enjoyment of the comic. (and if it does touches on it again, it should do so in maybe a more light hearted way)
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@Taxil: You sure ain’t getting, I would like for you to say where did you get that information.
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For the record, yeah, we had the coolest July ever here in Kansas, too, but we had the hottest June on record. Global warming =/= hotter temps ALL the time–it means the global average temperature is going up, which is an indisputable fact. As global temperatures rise, things get mucked up, and we get August’s weather in June, June’s weather in July, and September’s weather in February. The steady, predictable climate we had was a delicate balance, and whether or not we caused the imbalance ourselves or if it’s nature, that balance has been screwed up. Yes, nature fluctuates on its own, but what’s happening now is a result of human behavior. Maybe nature will fix it, maybe not, but to say that global warming a hoax is…well… stupid. Global warming = rising average GLOBAL temperatures. This is fact. This is proven. Get over it.
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Taxil–I doubt the author had any idea so many people would start jumping around screaming that global warming isn’t real.
Like AC units, I guess denial of reality is a largely American custom.
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All the trees humans are cutting down, the pollution being dumped out from cities, the overfishing of the oceans… that is all a lot more than what “naturally” occurs in our recorded history. The Earth does cycle between warm and cold periods, but humans have the ability to push those figures a lot farther and faster than what Nature normally would do. Humans are quite capable of trashing the planet to the point human-kind ceases to exist. We should be careful to think about the impact our actions have on our planet because right now it’s the only place we got.
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I find it sad that there are folks who believe that we are in no way responsible for climate change. This line of thinking follows the belief that we’re not big enough to make any changes and that I would rather something blow up in my face than to change what I’m doing? What about the ozone hole? Entire species going extinct? RainForest being cut down? No Freon’s totally harmless, there are so many of them we couldn’t possibly kill them all, there’s lots of forest we can cut forever. The fact is we’re all interconnected in some way. Remember the butterfly effect where one butterfly could technically change the course of a hurricane? How about 5 billion butterflies heading towards 10 billion? No that couldn’t possibly do anything at all. Sadly even if it becomes absolutely clear that climate change is here I have doubts we could change. After all humans learn by disaster. We are almost nearly never pro-active on matters like this. I’m not saying the world will end. It will likely not be a better world especially for the poor farmers in our world who are more dependent on weather than you would like to think since a rain can mean the difference between starving and surviving. I also find it amazingly short sighted that folks would cite third world countries as main polluters. Sure but they pollute because we insist on cheap products from them. We’re so cheap we’re willing to put our own industries and manufacturing out of business. I think most folks who believe in climate change understand that it’s likely that very little can be done, but it’s annoying to find that there are folks who would deny any responsibility for it. That is truly being ignorant.
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No, skepticism is an American custom. Scientists can be wrong, too, and even fraudulent. Ever heard of room-temperature superconductivity? The theory turned out to be wrong. Cold fusion? A botched experiment. The Piltdown Man? A definite fraud, but which took 30 years to disprove. N-rays? The overactive imagination of some French scientists. Dr. Kinsey’s study on sexuality? Very poor scientific methodology, as it was subsequently revealed, and the conclusions were quite wrong.
And some people wonder why we don’t take global warming as holy gospel. The evidence is fal less conclusive than some people realize it is.
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Prehaps I should clarify something. “Global Warming was first thought up in the 1970s. During the early 90s, the scientific community was still uncertain. About five years ago, said scientific community said “we are about as certain of this as we are of anything”. Therfore, scientists have spent the past 20-30 years throwing stuff at global warming and it has survived. More importantly, we have most of the tools we need to fix this. The issue is finding the stomach to do politically risky things like spending a lot of money and ticking off West Virgina.
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This is off-topic, but I first saw this poll on the day I entered an older category. Dang, being handled the same as really young adults makes me feel ancient. Just so you know that if I would have voted yesterday, you would have one more 14-year-old reader.
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@Anglomancer: It is possible to be been given just enough truth to believe a lie, just enough information to be dangerous rather than constructive. And the sheep never believe they’re sheep, and are too easily convinced that the wolves are the sheepdogs and vice-versa. Welcome to alarmism.
@Moroni: The trees’ processing of carbon dioxide is nothing compared with that of the algae in the oceans. And while deforestation programs in South America (to obtain farmland) are indeed quite destructive, the logging industry in Canada tends to use the trees which can be replanted and regrown quickly. (In fact, I’ve heard they could put the U.S. paper industry out of business with stupidly cheaper prices if they really wanted to., and still not reduce their forest coverage.)
@Fa: That one AFAIK is legitimately due to the increase in CFC emissions from aerosols and discarded air conditions. Note that the U.S. now does not use CFC’s in aerosol cans, there are alternatives to freon for some air conditions, and there are explicit recycling programs for air conditions which harvest the freon before junking the unit. However, note that we’re generating ozone as well, as a byproduct of gasoline engines. Catalytic converters on cars help with that, but not every state country requires them. And we don’t “insist” on cheap products from third world countries. They provide them to undercut our domestic production, and the bulk of the cost savings are in the labor costs, not the lack of environmental controls. That deforestation you and Moroni and others are citing is *not* happening in the U.S. or Canada, it’s happening in South America because they’re using it for new farmland as they use up the viability of the land they already have. In the U.S., we use alternate fields in alternate years, or rotate crops with stuff like peanuts, which re-enriches the soil… and we have a *lot* of unused farmland in a deliberate effort to keep prices *high* enough that the farmers who *are* growing stuff can make a living at it comparable to city-dwellers and surburbanites. (The farmers whose fields are idle have alternate jobs.)
@Long Tom: Don’t knock Kinsey too hard. He admittedly sought out the so-called oddball cases, but he did a lot to break this country’s culture out from under the thumb of the repressionists.
@Ga’Tor: Regarding Venus, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I agree with you but not just because of Carbon Dioxide levels. We don’t dump sufficient *methane* and *ammonia* and *sulfur* into the atmosphere to get Venus-like conditions. The only way to do that would be to trigger a massive collection of humongous super-volcanoes, all in a relatively short timeframe (say, one a year for a couple of decades). And then there’s the density and pressure. And as for runaway greenhousing, the current theory is that it didn’t become runaway until the surface water all evaporated… which means the atmospheric temperature worldwide would first have to rise another 70-90 degrees Celcius on the average. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_(planet)#Atmosphere_and_climate
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One-digit average daily temperatures? Germany rocks!
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I’m for caring for the earth, and I’m against killing myself to do so, as Taxil said, “we are responsable for this world, but we should not be held hostage to it.”
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Wow. This is umm… an impressive discussion. I would argue too, but all I’d have are facts and statistics and nobody listens to those. They’re boring.
I’ll just point out something that seems important to me. It’s easier to break things than it is to fix them. If our very lives depend on something, perhaps it would be in our best interest to be absolutely sure we’re safe before we do something that might risk breaking it. That seems prudent to me.
Sure there’s lots of political clout to be gained by making people afraid, but technology has come a long way in the last hundred years or so, even if people haven’t. Is it really that hard to believe that we are having an effect? Just because opportunistic people are using something doesn’t automatically make it false.
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Before you accept the global warming theory as proven fact, you need to ask certain particular questions:
1)Has the earth ever been much warmer, or much colder, than it is now? (It has. Multiple times, in fact, just during recorded human history…. During the Medieval Warming it was MUCH warmer than it has been over this “warm period.” they were growing grapes in SCOTLAND, and Greenland was settled by Viking farmers– who were subsequently frozen out when the temperatures dropped again. According to scientists, in geological terms we are just coming out of a “little ice age.” And this is nothing to say of the age of the Dinosaurs, or the last ice age…
2)Have temperatures tracked accordingly with either man-made CO2, or atmospheric CO2 in general. Answer, yes they have— BUT NOT IN THE WAY GLOBAL WARMING CLAIMS. Remember that big scary chart Al Gore had of atmospheric CO2? You’ll note they didn’t zoom in too close. The data was a bit fudged— you see, the original data shows that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere have been PRECEDED by increases in temperature. Sometimes by 800 to 1000 years. This is logical, as increased warmth means increased biosphere activity, which means more CO2 in the atmosphere.
3)Is there a phenomenon with a closer one-on-one correlation to temperature change? Yes: Solar activity. Continent-wide records over geologic periods of time in Antarctica— a good laboratory for this sort of work, with nearly zero human infrastructure to clutter up the readings— show temperatures following cyclical solar activity with meticulous accuracy. Yes, Virginia, the sun’s output fluctuates. And the Earth warms and cools accordingly.
4)Is man’s output of CO2 sufficient to cause actual global climate change? Extremely doubtful. The earth’s oceans emit and absorb vastly more CO2 routinely. The Amazon Rainforest emits more CO2 than oxygen simply due to all the decaying plant and animal matter. A volcanic eruption belches out more pollutants than the entire industrial revolution combined. Add on top of this that CO2 is a relatively MINOR atmospheric gas: on a chart the length of a football field, atmospheric CO2 would be represented by a stripe in the end zone less than a foot wide. Actual climatologists admit– at least when you corner them— that the real driver of the so-called “greenhouse effect” (a poor metaphor) is WATER VAPOR.
5)Have we heard this song and dance before? Um, yes. Repeatedly. Most of you are probably far too young to remember, but in the 1970s the big climate scare was Global COOLING. Scientists were quite ready to cover the Antarctic in lamp black to decrease the planet’s albedo and offset the inevitable ice age that was coming. And the usual suspects were blaming (surprise!) human industry, development, and pollution for the coming icy doomsday.
Prior to that, in the sixties, editorials can be found where the authors fretted over the rising temperatures around the globe. This in turn was preceded by a period of ominous rumblings about the dropping temperatures, the Year Without a Summer, etc… and always, the villain of the piece was rampant uncontrolled Western industry. And the solution was to shut off the lights, close down the power plants— and put all control of human industry and the economy in the hands of Our Moral Betters(tm).
The concept of “never let a panic go to waste” is not a particularly new one.
6) Is CO2 a pollutant?
NO.
It is a rather important part of the natural cycle of the biosphere. Perhaps this has been missed, but PLANTS BREATHE IT. If we actually succeeded in somehow reducing the atmospheric CO2 content by a measurable percentage, we would actually DAMAGE the ecosystem by causing a diminishing of plant growth and life… Fortunately, barring any mad-hatter mega-engineering by Our Moral Betters(tm), this is unlikely to happen— because, as noted, man is not a particularly major emitter of CO2.
FINALLY, and this is the almighty important question that global warming asserters have YET to answer:
What is the temperature SUPPOSED TO BE, and how do you know what it is?
Tell me, was it better when they were growing grapes in Scotland, or when there were glaciers drifting south across Ohio? Considering the consequences if we get it wrong, it seems like the first question that we need to ask, to me. Yet noone seems to care.
The earth’s climate is not a thermostat we can run to and twiddle with whenever we get uncomfortable. And frankly the only measurable consequence of our twiddling is that we annoy and inconvenience– if not outright impoverish— other people who share the planet with us.
In summation:
Buy the AC, you silly ninny. You’re roasting your raccoon for no good reason.
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@ Ga’Tor: Try not to be too hard on politicians; most of them don’t have scientific backgrounds. I’m not under the impression Gore does either, but he is like many other politicians who want to make themselves a household name. As far as his getting a Nobel Prize, Yasser Arafat got one as well, which ought to tell you something.
@Zephr: You are right. But as I have mentioned before, scientists can be wrong. Theories become popular , and they may be believed for a while, but they can be discredited later on. (I used the orbit of Neptune as an example because it was a logical and genuine theory, as opposed to the frauds I also mentioned. But it was simply inaccurate.)
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Scientists are wrong all the time. Within their field of knowledge they’re wrong a lot less than anybody else though. I’ll take a scientist’s word over that of someone who’s trying to get me panicked about terrorists and socialism any day.
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Except terrorists and socialism are real threats, and have killed far more people than supposed global warming has. I’ll worry about genuine threats, not theoretical ones.
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I personally found the joke of the comic funny. :3
Why do these comics always cause these HUGE debates?
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Terrorism kills less people than bees do, and the United States is about as far from socialism as any major power in the world in has been in the last hundred years. Let alone the kind of communism that actually kills people, which is not even remotely the same thing as socialized healthcare. I’d rather worry about things that matter.
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Grumble grumble grumble… I know how Sandra feels in this comic. And yes, Good Author, I do enjoy the comic.
But, I don’t believe the lie that is global warming. I’ll let more articulate people speak for me.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/moregw.htm The Myth of Global Warming.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Record_Lows_2009.htm It’s been getting colder and colder since 2001.
http://www.savage-productions.com/debunking_global_warming.html There’s also no consensus on global warming, as well as many skeptics. It’s a bit of a long list.
http://anarchy.wordpress.com/2006/11/25/an-inconvenient-lie-debunking-al-gore/ It’s never good when someone’s Inconvenient Truth is labeled an Inconvenient Lie.
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Summers are usually hot anyway. On warm days I’ve seen raccoons nap in abandonned groundhog burrows, in trees, or even in the rafters of outbuildings. They become active at night when the temperatures have dropped to a comfortable level. Clever little guys.
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Buwhahaha……….. Your complaining about an average temp of what, 9C and what, rather low humidity? ………………. your kidding right? down here in the upstate of SC we see an average yearly temp of 21.5C, yeah, you read right, 70.7F. Now, factor in 70%-90% with about 90F which comes to about 32.8C, yeah, its really really hot. Now, add a hanger with no airflow and your having to do some actual work in a really tight spot, thats how my summer has been.
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Ugh.. your complaining.. our June was nothing but rain, COLD in July, and now FINALLY were getting some sun.
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One of the problems that keeps the global warming arguments so alive is that the cause and the effect are so close to each other.
I’m sorry to say this but Novil provided the classical switch off, and it’s a tactic I’ve lost patience for.
Novil said ” don’t understand how anybody can be so stupid to deny global warming although the effects are ALREADY clearly visible all over the world” I’ll come back to this in one second.
Most of the global warming arguments are over the cause of global warming. Is carbon dioxide causing it? Is anthropogenic carbon dioxide tilting it over. Is the environment fragile? These are all arguments that can be refuted, and there is sufficient doubt on both sides. However, the one part that is pretty prevalent an know is that from when we started taking the temperature in 1850’s, our mean temperature has gone up by .5 C.
Now often in an argument over AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) an AGW supporter will often try to change the argument to CC The phenomena of climate change. Since the changes of the climate are pretty obvious, even if very small, they are pretty irrefutable. This makes it seem like the AGW party won the argument. (As a side note, there are other things that I think may have resulted in the sudden temperature spike of the 1980’s-90’s. Namely digital thermometers.)
I equate this to this little story.
Billy, Joe and Bob are driving down the street when suddenly the car goes sailing through the air, flipping end over end. After landing the boys are fortunately unhurt, but unsure as to what caused the flips. Billy thinks that the car hit a pole, while Joe sees a missing sewer cap and water on the road. The two argue about weather the flip was caused by the pole, or the sewer exploding. Joe begins to persuade bob that the car was flipped by the dangerously exploding sewer, when Billy begins to claim that the car flipped end over end. Unable to refute Billy on his claim Joe is defeated.
Its just much more obvious there.
But another thing. I’m tired of people citing the Medieval warm as a cause for why global warming is a natural thing. It was very limited to the Atlantic and Europe.
The Neolithic and Helocine eras though, Were much longer and much warmer than the MWP or Current day. And both were a boon for humanity. We developed farming, law, cultures, building, carpentry, and masonry in the Neolithic. We mastered the working of Bronze, Iron and Steel in the Helocine. And they were world wide too.
Anyway, I think this comic just stepped in something the dog left on the porch. I still love it though.
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well i was gonna ask why they wouldn’t have an ac, but then i started reading everyone else’s comments and realized i already had my answer. and i don’t mean to be inconsiderate, but about that “extreme heat wave in 2003 [which] cost the lives of ten thousands of people all over Europe, especially elderly people in France.” it didn’t get that far above 100 F (about 37.7 C or so) and the idea that people would actually die from that to me is amazing. i mean, around here, the local paper has a contest each May to guess when the first day where we hit 100 F is. we consider it normal for summer at about 95-97 F (35-36 C) or so, and about 100F or so its “hot” for summer. really hot is about 110 F(43.3 C), but we hit that every 2 or 3 years naturally. i personally keep my house at 80 F(about 26.6 C) to reduce the costs of electricity. ‘course, i wouldn’t want to experience a european winter:having an average daily temperature of even 48.7 F(9.3 C) seems inordinately cold to me since ours is 65.5F (18.6 C)
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I’d retype my previously lengthly response…but, I’m not up to it, right now.
Thought the messages section was shut down over the contraversy of the responses for awhile, there. Perhaps, it was apart of that Twitter attack???
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Am I reading something wrong on the temperature list? Those averages are typical of mid-spring temps here in the Great Lakes.
Our winter temps range from -15C to 0C, spring runs 0C to 16C, summer runs 17C to 27C (occasionally to 35C) and fall is 4C to 18C.
I don’t think that the summer would lift our average up that much nor so I think that the winter would pull the average down, I would put out average around 13C.
Our family hosted an exchange student from the eastern section of Germany and she complained about the cold all of the time. Strange as I think that our average is higher than hers near Berlin.
Nice summer day here near Buffalo, NY, it started out at 23C and is going to 30C with thunderstorms later, winds gusting to 90KPH possible, just like home…
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i really dont believe you people!
Nivarion, Anglomancer has the right idea- global warming IS happening.
there have been hundreds of tests, and, if i may point out, in africa the temperature has risen to 40 degrees celcius, as an average.
as said by the writer/drawer of the comic(pardon me, i don’t know your name)
the temperature in germany has risen like so:
1761–1770: 7.5 °C
1771–1780: 7.8 °C
1781–1790: 7.6 °C
1791–1800: 7.9 °C
1801–1810: 7.4 °C
1811–1820: 7.3 °C
1821–1830: 7.8 °C
1831–1840: 7.5 °C
1841–1850: 7.4 °C
1851–1860: 7.4 °C
1861–1870: 7.9 °C
1871–1880: 7.7 °C
1881–1890: 7.3 °C
1891–1900: 7.7 °C
1901–1910: 7.7 °C
1911–1920: 8.0 °C
1921–1930: 7.9 °C
1931–1940: 8.1 °C
1941–1950: 8.3 °C
1951–1960: 8.1 °C
1961–1970: 7.9 °C
1971–1980: 8.2 °C
1981–1990: 8.5 °C
1991–2000: 8.9 °C
2001–2008: 9.3 °C
by almost 2 degrees in the past 250 years.
it’s getting faster, due to the Co2 gas amissions, which cause more of the suns rays that heat up the planet, not to be able to escape, causeing them to reflect back down to earth, heating it.
you people are in deniel ~ either you don’t want to grow up in a world that’s rapidly heating up, or you dont want the next generation to- it IS happening.
some people are saying “oh, but it’s COLD here!”
so what if it is? it was colder before.
i invite you to read this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
very usefull. and detailed, and speaks with facts, not wishes.
also: http://www.climatehotmap.org/
http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/globalissues/climate_change/global_warming_basics/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=global%20warming&utm_campaign=Allianz%20Knowledge-Climate%20Agenda
and: http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/quiz-global-warming.html?source=sem_G2300&esvt=GOUSE&esvadt=999999-4994875-3690177-1&esvid=327778&gclid=CMGipr3ilpwCFRMUagod0V2bdA
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With a few selectively-chosen facts and an obvious political agenda, you can “prove” anything. We’re not “in denial”-we’re genuinely not convinced. The evidence is just plain too weak and arbitrary to be even remotely conclusive. And that’s why we don’t believe YOU.
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@Itssnowing I did not say that the world is not heating. What I have trouble with is the the AGW statements that CO2 has the highest influence of all on the warming. Most of the computer models exclude the sun, cloud cover and oceanic forcing, which causes a very heavy tilt in CO2’s favor as being the cause of Global Warming.
Oceanic forcing is the idea that since the ocean is dark colored it absorbs heat faster than ice. Since it is water it takes longer to heat but holds that energy longer. As the ocean goes up the ice melts causing more dark space. This would eventually melt all the ice even if the ocean started as a small puddle at the equator and was surrounded by ice from pole to pole.
The sun has a long history of flux.
Clouds are white and reflect sun.
There are historical times in which CO2 concentrations have been much higher than today, with temperature at much higher or lower than current.
Oh and buy the way Itissnowing, Keep it on the subject of AGW. You did the switch i talked about. Tried to make it into Global Warming instead of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
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HOLY CRAP! I hope the authors intended this debate-through-comments when they made the comic. Personally, I’d be pissed with so many people still arguing using my site to do it. [I have closed a live journal for that exact reason].
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hmmmm so the weblink I posted on this was worthy of deleting yay for telling both sides
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In the forties and fifties, atomic bomb tests scrambled the ratios of radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere, including Carbon (in the form of CO2). There is a dramatic increase in the amount of radioactive carbon, versus stable carbon, at this time, and therefore all radiometric dates are given as “years before present” meaning before 1955.
Since this time, we have spewed so much fossil carbon (which is stable carbon) into the air, that the ratio is more heavily weighted towards stable carbon than it was before the bomb tests.
This is a very difficult fact to harmonize with the idea that modern industry produces less carbon than natural earth processes. So most people take another switch and say that there are “colder temperatures” coinciding with higher levels of carbon. But generally, these coincide with massive injections of materials that cause cooling and are obviously bad examples, at least when those arguing the point are polite enough to actually provide examples.
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Global warming is a real SOLAR CYCLE!!!! Mars and venus have both risen the same percentage of tempurature as the earth has. We are not causing it or effecting it in anyway. The solar system has heat waves when the sun produces relativly few sunspots accross multiple decades and has ice ages when the number of sun spots Increase to a high streching accross multiple decades. In fact we are actualy do for cooling soon as the sun should be nearing a time when it will start increasing the number of sun spots.
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It’s a very fine line between pointing out an error and calling someone a complete idiot. It’s great to let your emotions drive you to the meeting, but it’d probably be better if we gave them a twenty and told them to go catch a movie until we’re done, instead of inviting them to join in.
But then again, what do I know, I’m just sittin’ here, eatin’ my pasta…
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Taxil… just to answer an earlier post if yours…
“It gets worse, look beyond the debate itself. Who is pushing that debate (in the bigger sense, not anyone here ATM). When people say we are having “Global warming” or more recently “climate change” they also demand that the US (a rather responsable and cleaner that most county) ”
From BBC…
………………………………………
The US contains 4% of the world’s population but produces about 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions. By comparison, Britain emits 3% – about the same as India which has 15 times as many people.”
………………………………………
Assuming BBC does not speak complete lies, you are a bit off by saying the U.S. is clean and reponsible.
“get reduced to a 3rd world poverty crippled back water nation with all of their demands on us. India opently denouced the Keyoto treaty and China won’t abide by it. ”
Following the Kyoto Treaty would in no way make the U.S. a crippled back water nation. Far from it.
“Those two countries (India and China) pollute more than nearly the rest of the world combined. Why? think about it.”
http://www.vexen.co.uk/USA/pollution.html#2004
Once again BBC.
China+India+A bit of Europe, according to this, combined- do not pollute as much as the U.S. does on its OWN.
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Ummm… aren’t we coming out of an ice age or did we forget about that time waaaay back in history where everything was frozen and covered in ice?
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Solution: Swamp cooler! IMO they’re more effective anyway.
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great title !!
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@Clover it causes so much debate bc it’s very hard to actually win an argument over the internet.
I don’t particularly care if global warming/climate change is happening or not, fact of the matter is we should take better care of the place we live, I personally like the smell of trees a lot better than that of smog(as in cali)
@whoever made the comment about no deforestation in the USA, that’s baloney, it may not happen like the clear cutting in the rain forests, but trees are being cut down as cities and roads expand and not being replaced.
Speaking of cities, cities create things called heat islands as the city gets larger the effect of the heat island increases, that is just one more variable to consider in the whole climate issue, so really who cares about the truth of it?
@the authors of the webcomic love the irony