Most were out-competed by a freshly-evolved type of animal, small mammals; some evolved into birds. Mass-extinctions were not selective, they affected most all species to a greater or lesser extent, including sea-life and plants. It didn't happen like Walt Disney's "Fantasia" depicted it, in all probability. Then again, according to Gary Larson, it was smoking that killed the dinosaurs. --- diveboss@xmission.com wrote:

What killed the dinosaurs?

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--- Joe Bauman <bau@desnews.com> wrote:

I'm open-minded on this issue. But I have a hunch there are a lot of politically-correct politicians and scientists who are not willing to at least look at the possibility that global warming is natural.

Joe, Ideological politicians ignoring data and trying to force a conclusion that global warming is not man-caused by manipulating reports scientists are a real concern for me - too. Clear Skies - Kurt 2005-06-08 White House allows a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute to edit the national global warming plan - watering down its contents http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html?ex=1275883200&en=2... 2005-06-08 Whitehouse defends its editing of the report http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-08-white-house-climate_x.htm 2005-06-12 White official resigns after document editing flap http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0612-04.htm And to keep this thread marginally astronomical - here's one about global warming and NASA: 2006-01-29 Climate Expert [NASA/NOAA's James Hansen] Says NASA Tried to Silence Him George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, participated in a series of telephone calls to Hansen "who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be 'dire consequences' if such statements [that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century] continued . . ." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?ei=5090&en=51... 2006-02-08 A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA "George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told . . . a Web designer to add the word 'theory' at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/politics/08nasa.html?ex=1297054800&en=dc3c... - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Cheap talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. http://voice.yahoo.com

Interesting reading Joe. One question I have never seen answered. Why are Mars and Jupiter experiencing global warming if the solar component is not at least a major factor in global warming on earth? -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces+djcolton=piol.com@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces+djcolton=piol.com@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Joe Bauman Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2006 2:57 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: WARNING: THOSE BORED WITH SUBJECT, don't read: RE:[Utah-astronomy] Climate chaos? Hi Tyler, Did you see the Gore movie? He attributed the big hurricanes to global warming. First, I'm pasting in an interview I did with Ed Zipser -- I assure you, with complete lack of any bias -- on the question. I have the greatest respect for Mr. Zipser who, if anyone locally does, has a great understanding of global climate issues. For more than eight years, Prof. Zipser has worked for years with the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite. TRMM makes global weather checks of the most sophisticated type, having the only down-looking weather radar in orbit. Then I'll put in a slightly more recent article on the issue. Please read them before you condemn anyone as misguided because they don't make Gore's connection between global warming and today's hurricanes. My comment about the ice ages was to show that the difference in temperature we see today could be due to a gradual warming, not to suggest what sort of drop in temperature is needed to trigger an ice age. Surely, you don't think the average temperature during the last ice age was only 6 to 8 degrees C. below what it is now, do you? Are you saying we could have ice sheets over most of North America with the average temperature only 6 to 8 degrees below what it is this year? For example, the average temperature in New York City in July is about 22.2 C. (75.6 F.). If you knock 8 degrees C. off that, you get an average July temperature of 14.2 degrees. In other words, when New York was under thick ice and boulders were scraping along Central Park because of the motion of the ice sheets, the temperature was a relatively balmy 57.6 degrees F.? I don't think so. Also, Mr. Gettings said, "Based on ice core, geologic, and instrumental records, along with time-series analysis of orbital parameters, we should have already entered a new ice age (within the past few hundred years). That may or may not still happen." First, I doubt that ice ages appear like clockwork. It seems more likely that variations of hundreds of years, or maybe a thousand years, would occur. But assume he is right, and one is overdue. Isn't it better to face global warming, with cities pulling back from the coasts and the adjustments and changes (probably including more plant growth) than to have most of North America buried under sheets of ice? Just a thoughts. I'm open-minded on this issue. But I have a hunch there are a lot of politically-correct politicians and scientists who are not willing to at least look at the possibility that global warming is natural. I'm not saying it isn't happening, and I am not positive that man isn't causing it or contributing to it. I'm just skeptical and unconvinced. I merely want to raise the discussion topic that warming is part of long-term cycles that have been happening forever, with humans possibly -- and possibly not -- contributing somewhat. We need to fully understand what's happening before making any drastic changes that could harm people. We have to know the consequences of both acting and not acting, and we have to decide if the cost of action or inaction outweighs the other. Thanks, Tyler and the rest, for a stimulation conversation. -- Joe Monday, September 5, 2005 Deseret News [Edit Document]Edition: Metro Page: B01 Scientist downplays global-warming role Effect on Hurricane Katrina minimal, U. meteorologist says By Joe Bauman Deseret Morning News "The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina - in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures - can visit on his country," Jurgen Trittin, Germany's minister of the environment, wrote in an essay quoted by Spiegel Online. The German publication goes on to denounce Trittin's writing as "a slap in the face to all the victims." But is there truth in Trittin's implication that global warming caused, or at least vastly increased, the destruction in New Orleans? No, says Ed Zipser, professor of meteorology at the University of Utah. "I think I can speak for at least a majority of meteorologists who understand hurricanes pretty well that any change in the frequency and intensity due to global warming is probably a very small effect." Weather experts would "never, ever" attribute any specific hurricane to global warming. The warming is taking place over a long period, he added. If there is an effect on hurricanes, it might involve the technical calculation of the "maximum potential intensity." That upper limit depends, among other factors, on the temperature of the sea's surface. But it is more a theoretical figure than an actual effect. "Any given hurricane is not likely to reach its maximum potential, and you might think of that as an upper limit," Zipser said. "But most hurricanes don't get anywhere near it." Also, the effect would be relatively small. Global warming of the sea's surface, which has been measured, is in fractions of a degree. That would change the potential "by a very small amount," he said. A hurricane like Katrina would have created horrendous damage on the path it took, regardless of whether it was a Category 3, 4 or 5. In this case, the storm actually weakened by 30 miles per hour over the last 24 hours before it hit land, he said. "And there was no particular reason for the decrease," Zipser added. "I would not have been surprised if it had stayed 175 (mph winds), I would not have been surprised if it had dropped to 125." Katrina was a huge, intense hurricane. A storm of Category 3 would have done comparable damage wherever it struck. "To try to talk about the possible effect of a half-degree due to global warming is just missing the whole point," he said. "To me, by far the most important lesson from the storm is that the warnings were fantastically accurate, and they were as dire as they should have been." Yet, Zipser said, the region was not quite prepared for it. "Some people simply don't listen to warnings," Zipser added. In the future, we should learn if government preparations were adequate, he said. "It seems pretty obvious that there was no plan that was equal to this tragedy." Perhaps no connection can be drawn today between global warming and the frequency or destructive punch of hurricanes. But a cautious soul might point out that is no guarantee ferocious weather won't strike someday - perhaps far in the future - because of climatic changes. Document no. 1 of 100 [Go To Best Hit] Wednesday, October 5, 2005 Deseret News [Edit Document]Edition: All Page: A13 Neither Bush nor global warming caused hurricanes By Walter Williams President Bush, in his post-Hurricane Katrina address to the nation, said, "And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility." Accepting the blame for the federal response is one thing, but I hope he doesn't shoulder the blame for the hurricane itself. In a Sept. 9 speech to the National Sierra Club Convention in San Francisco, former Vice President Al Gore told the audience that Hurricane Katrina and global warming are related. He warned, "We will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming." Our European allies, most of whom have signed the Kyoto Protocol, have been scathing in their attacks on President Bush. "Katrina Should Be a Lesson to the U.S. on Global Warming," read a headline of the German magazine Der Spiegel. Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environment minister and a Green Party member, said, "The American president is closing his eyes to the economic and human costs his land and the world economy are suffering under natural catastrophes like Katrina." Writing in the Aug. 30 edition of the Boston Globe, Ross Gelbspan said, "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming." Bush, according to Gelbspan, is to blame because he's taken his environmental policy from "big oil and big coal." Major categories 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes are relatively rare. If you check out the Web site of the National Hurricane Center, www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml?, you'll find that the most active hurricane decade was 1941-50 - recording 24 hurricanes, with 10 of them being giant category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3, 4, 5) came in the decades of the 1890s, 1930s and 1940s - an average of nine per decade. Of the 92 giant hurricanes that have struck the U.S. mainland between 1851 and 2004, 61 of them occurred before 1950, long before global warming was an issue. Six noted tropical cyclone experts wrote a paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society titled "Hurricanes and Global Warming." Their three main points were: No connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes. The scientific consensus is that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small and within the context of observed natural variability. Finally, the politics of linking hurricanes to global warming threatens to undermine support for legitimate climate research and could result in ineffective hurricane policies. Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, says, "Katrina is part of a well-documented, multidecadal scale fluctuation in hurricane activity. This cycle was described in a heavily cited article printed in the journal Science in 2001." His colleague, Chris Landsea, agrees, saying, "If you look at the raw hurricane data itself, there is no global warming signal. What we see instead is a strong cycling of activity. There are periods of 25 to 40 years where it's very busy and then periods of 25 to 40 years when it's very quiet." About the connection between hurricanes and global warming, Goldenberg concludes, "I speak for many hurricane climate researchers in saying such claims are nonsense." The bottom line for Bush is that unless he's God, he shouldn't accept the blame for Hurricane Katrina. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.utahastronomy.com

I begin to see the enormity of Kurt's statement regarding CO2 production, in light of increased solar output- it bears repeating. The argument that the solar component is at least partly responsible for a rise in global temperature, is itself actually a strong reason to curtail man-made CO2 production. Once a runaway greenhouse effect is triggered there may be no way available to mankind to slow or stop it. Since the threshold is unknown, it seems that any addition to the CO2 total concentration should be avoided. IIRC, the sun's output has increased some 30% in the past few billion years, and will increase by a like amount for the remainder of it's main-sequence life. Not that we'll be around that long, but it illustrates that we have a delicate balance here and now, and without further understanding of the exact implications, producing gigatonnes (!) of CO2 seems foolish in the extreme. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Cheap talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. http://voice.yahoo.com

This site demonstrates that Mars may not be experiencing global warming: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192 --- "Don J. Colton" <djcolton@piol.com> wrote:

One question I have never seen answered. Why are Mars and Jupiter experiencing global warming if the solar component is not at least a major factor in global warming on earth?

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Hi All, I don't know if everybody is familiar with the Antikythera Mechanism, probably the most astonishing mechanical device ever recovered dating from ancient times. New research has shown its almost unbelievable sophistication. Here's a story you might like to read: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061129/sc_afp/sciencehistory_061129202046 and here's another: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6191462.stm Best wishes, Joe

Most amazing. I wonder what else we don't know? Thanks Joe Barney ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Bauman" <bau@desnews.com> To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 2:11 PM Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Amazing astronomical calculator

Hi All, I don't know if everybody is familiar with the Antikythera Mechanism, probably the most astonishing mechanical device ever recovered dating from ancient times. New research has shown its almost unbelievable sophistication. Here's a story you might like to read:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061129/sc_afp/sciencehistory_061129202046

and here's another:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6191462.stm

Best wishes, Joe _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.utahastronomy.com