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dear reader .....Just a note to alert you that you can read the comments - without being registered. We won't even know who you are... although you will be counted. But a heartfelt thanks, even if you just looking at the cartoons ... to be able to comment you will have to register but no one would have to know who you are, except the administrator of the site. Please note that this site is archived in the National Library of Australia in perpetuity. Just click on "recent comments" or on "read more" in the line below the cartoons to access some of the most fascinating and pertinent information there is from Australia and around the globe. Sure, we tend to bag Howard, his government and George Bush, but we do it for very good reasons. For example if you click the recent comment "the greenhouse effect" you get to discover a summary of the problem with a link to a proper scientific paper on the problem. By the time you read these lines you may have to click on "more'" (at the bottom of the "recent comment" line) and then scroll till you find the comment, possibly by then on "page 2" or 3, of the comment scrolls. Here on yourdemocracy we have not shied away from the issue of global warming - the greater challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Terrorism and such will become little slideshows to the massive climatic shifts that we're going to endure. I became aware of the water problem in this country only a few years after I migrated. I have participated in many publications (in the shadows of great scientists and fascinating authors), in which this and other problems such as the decline of bio-diversity were put to the fore. I've had fierce arguments with some scientists who - short of funds - were only prepared to save the "significant" subspecies, while to me all subspecies were the keys to understanding evolution. Scientifically, I became aware of the major climatic equation around 1984 but it was not until 1994 that, with the possible threat of dying form CJD (having been experimentally injected with human growth hormones when a young adult), that I put pen to paper... I wrote frantically on many subjects, in layman's terms. I also had a solid knowledge of radioactivity, the nuclear decay cycles, and much other stuff involving engineering and strangely I also wrote some humorous novels. I also did cartoons. None of that was ever presented to publishers except one project close to my heart that was nearly published but was finally rejected because of my strong attack of the "religious" dogma. By 1994, I calculated the global warming from a different viewpoint. Energy mostly transfers when there is a "difference of potential" of some kind... Thus with various estimates in hand, I somehow worked out the amount of "solar-year energy" we were facing while burning fossil fuel. And how this could become a problem. I must admit my methodology was crude but "accurate" enough at the time, to let me know that with a few thousand years plus or minus, we were basically releasing back in the atmosphere the equivalent of 25,000 years of solar/photosynthesis/ decay/ accumulation/gasification/coalification per single year. Now, in 2007, the equivalent is around 35,000 years of such transformation per year AND GROWING. In fact I could have been wrong by a factor of up to ten in the worst of direction... In the last hundred years we may actually have burned the stored energy by the process of solar/photosynthesis/decay/ accumulation/gasification/coalification of up to 35 million years. That means that this enormous carbon release (35,000,000 to 100-under "natural" conditions) in whatever form, does not have time to be reabsorbed by the natural earth processes. We are heading towards a time on earth (before carbon was thus "sequestrated" by geological processes) when weather was lots warmer than it is now, albeit more equalised all over because the earth did not have the "northern and southern ocean fridges" due to continental mass position. Presently, the southern ocean weather - unstopped by land masses - act like a self defrosting refrigeration unit for the driest continent on earth, Antarctica... Back in that earlier time mentioned, sea levels were massive higher, possibly over 100 metres what they are now. By releasing an enormous amount of carbon back in the atmosphere, with the inability for the biosphere to absorb it back even in the oceans, we have opened the door of our fridges, north and south. For a while, we won't be (and we're not yet) feeling the full result of this, apart from a bit of melting here and there. But soon there will be a point at which, the fridges won't work any more... Average temperatures could start rising by about one degree per year... One of the major problems is that it is relatively easy to create "warm" and difficult to manufacture "cold". Even our most advanced technology in fridges and air conditioning make more heat "outside' that they create cold "inside"... The only solutions to our incoming problem are: a) stop fossil fuel burning NOW. b) reduce energy consumption MASSIVELY c) use only carbon neutral energy sources such as wind, solar, and d) reduce world population by natural attrition. Far fetched... ? "We ain't seen nofin' yet". I hope I am wrong...
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Sooner than we think...
From the NYT
Record High Temperatures in Europe in April
By JAMES KANTER
Published: April 30, 2007
PARIS, April 30 — The month of April was so warm and so dry across Western Europe that it rewrote the weather record books in country after country, national weather services said today, as hot air masses from Africa and the effects of a changing climate combined to drive up temperatures and drive away rain.
April 2007 was the eighth consecutive month of higher-than-normal temperatures in Germany, and the 13th straight month of unusually warm conditions in France.
“The sustained period of above-average temperatures across a number of countries is undoubtedly linked to global warming,” said Patrick Galois, a forecaster at Metéo France. May, June and July are also expected to be unseasonably warm, Mr. Galois said.