The local tidal range is up to 15 metres springs, say 9 metres neaps. So what you are trying to make us believe is that 1200 years back the sea level was at least 10 metres lower than it is today. And that presumably everyone at the time failed to notice stuff like half the Mediterranean draining into the Atlantic.

Am I following you so far?

This is a basic fact, like the sky being blue and the sun setting in the west.

Based on such a spotty knowledge of history, all you enlightened people are making sure-fire predictions about the future.

Sunny, tree rings, ice-cores and such, some dating back thousands of years, are NOT anecdotal. they are really the only reliable and SOLID evidence we have of our climate’s past, yet you dismiss them.

If we don’t know where the climate is comming from, then how can we possibly ascertain where it’s going?

This thread is unraveled! I’m off to purchase some warm wollen undies and socks…..not to mention new mittens!

You guys can freeze!

A photo of the Roman town at Bolonia. The one which’s never been underwater.

Europe was warmer, the rest of the world wasn’t. Probably down to deforestation, and probably knocked back a few centuries by the black death. Now changing up to fifth gear again.

The abbey was founded around 600 AD. It may be off the coast of France now, but back then it was located in the middle of a lush oak forest.

I think you mean
St Michael’s Mount” off Cornwall, not Mont Saint-Michel off France.

Both have been islands or tidal island since earliest recorded history (400 BC), with any changes being due to tidal shifts, silt buildup, etc.

There are legends that the rock of St Michael’s Mount was once set in a wood, but if they are true, they date back to far prehistoric times.

I think you mean
St Michael’s Mount” off Cornwall, not off France.

There are legends that the rock of St Michael’s Mount was once set in a wood, but if they are true, they date back to far prehistoric times.

And if no one here is aware that Mont St-Michel once stood in the middle of an oak forest instead of on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway, then I’m just friggin’speechless!

What was once dry land just 14 centuries ago is now covered by seawater. That tells me much more than a 1000 scientific studies.

You can reject them based on either superior personal expertise, or because you don’t like the implications.

If the latter, you are mired in the consequentionalist fallacy. If the former, by all means step up to the mark.

By the way, I’ve been considering the idea of an individual carbon trading system. Give each adult an allowance of air-miles, road miles, whatever and let those who choose not to fly or drive trade their ration to the larger consumers.

This is not an anecdote; this is a FACT

Sahil, Sunny and all; it may come as a surprise, but sea levels have been rising steadily for some time; in fact, centuries.

I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the shrine/abbey of Mont St-Michel sitting just off the northern coast of France.

The abbey was founded around 600 AD. It may be off the coast of France now, but back then it was located in the middle of a lush oak forest.

Once again, this is not an anecdote; this is a FACT.

In an era long before we began burning fossil fuels, the Channel waters inexplicably began to rise and in the space of several centuries inundated the forest, turning it into seabed.

Is the flooding of the land around Mont St-Michel “normal” or was it result man-made CO2 emmisions?

I think it’s all part of a natural process.

One more thing, Roman chroniclers have mentioned the treacherous waters of the English channel. The channel is extremely shallow, but back then even more so. Roman sailors has mental maps of the countless shoals visible just under the waves; most refused to make the crossing at night simply beacuse they’d be unable to see them. Equally, old Roman maps depict channel islands that are no longer there…….at least at high tide.

On the rare occasions when tides are extremely low, a few of these former islands remerge from time to time as fetid mud-flats

It’s not faith, just look at the thousands of articles from geophysics, biology, marine biology, etc… Plus your tree rings are just one methadology for looking at tempreture variation, 100s of other methods have been applied that support ARTIFICAL rises in tempreture. Maybe you also believe that any form of product can be recycled without cost and thus, we have just as much wood as 200 years ago, but now it’s simply carbon in the atmosphere. Maybe you just want to be a Bjorn Lomborg:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/12/do1202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/12/12/ixop.html

Or maybe you want to actually look at what the Pentagon actually written:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/world-bank-pentagon-warn-cli

Riiiiiiight… so that’s why all those predictions that the melting glaciers will raise sea levels or that the increased CO2 will make climate warmer are rubbish?

What is “normal” may not be established exactly, but we do KNOW that rising temperatures and rising sea levels will HAVE AN IMPACT on our cities and ecology and way of life. That is the problem. If a few million people die because of increased water levels are you going to carry on claiming that we still don’t know what the “natural” temperature levels are? Utterly ill-thought out logic.

If you are in a plane flying low in fog and losing altitude, with no working radar, you don’t say:

We don’t know whether or not there is a mountain ahead, so we can’t say when we will crash. Best estimate is if the ground is flat, we will slam into it in 30 minutes. However, we can’t rule out the posibility that there will be a big canyon that goes below sea level, so maybe that could be longer.

A trend towards increased temperature caused by increased C02 is a simple physical fact, like the height above sea level of a plane dropping. The thing that’s more difficult to calculate is the combination of that and the natural cycles, like the height of the plane above the unknown hills and valleys on the ground.

But have it keep on dropping, eventually something bad will happen.

That is not an anecdote, that’s a fact.

Yes glaciers are retreating, but who’s to say what “normal” is for a glacier.

Are they retreating back to altitudes never before attained, or are they simply shrinking to levels similar to those of the Middle Ages?

It is interesting to note that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the height of the “little Ice Age”, teams of monks in Alpine countries would often assemble at the foot of advancing glaciers praying that their progress be halted so as not destroy nearby villages.

They often did, though.

And if retreating glaciers expose the residues and remains of engulfed villages, what then will the “wamers” say?

That the remains were “planted” by Haliburton?

To claim that global warming is real, that it is OUTSIDE the range of normal climate variations, and to then put a PRECISE pricetag on those claims; that whole position is an article of pure faith.

Sorry.

Hi Electro, sorry but a few anecdotes here and there do not a trend make. Look at the larger picture, as Riz has pointed out: rapidly disintergrating glaciers; rapidly increasing level of C02 in the atmosphere PPM; rising overall temperatures; changing migrating patterns etc.

You are arguing against all the data on the basis of a few chilly rooms and better wine?

There’s something to be said in favour of ageing, you know.

Remember those “Whole Earth” catalogues that were recieved as fact. They were very popular in the 70s. When I was about 20 ( 1978) I can remember one issue in particular in which the editors claimed that by 1985 the world would run out of resources.

What! No flying cars?!

Last summer we broke two records for heat. “Weather channel” had a panel discusssion on global warming……all were wide-eyed and clearly “ascared”.

Two weeks ago the city of Buffalo had a blizzard, the first on that date in RECORDED history. In fact, the first in October in recorded history.

So I shall go now, sit atop Mont
Royal and scour the horizon for approaching glaciers, while savouring the dividends of my petrole stocks…….

Last winter Montreal hosted a global warming conference.

Not a very bright idea for mid-January

While climatologists, many of ‘em from the tropics, prattled on about melting ice sheets and such, the city experienced a record cold-wave.

The participants discussed a variety of topics, but mostly they just complained about “chilly” hotel rooms.

To support, see the:Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2001 Study.

Also, from The Economist’s recent survey on Global Warming: ‘Since that IPCC report five years ago, the science has tended to confirm the idea that something serious is happening. In the 1990s, satellite data seemed to contradict the terrestrial data that showed temperatures rising. The disparity puzzled scientists and fuelled scepticism. The satellite data, it turned out, were wrong: having been put right, they now agree with terrestrial data that things are hotting up. Observations about what is happening to the climate have tended to confirm, or run ahead of, what the models predicted would happen. Arctic sea ice, for instance, is melting unexpectedly fast, at 9% a decade. Glaciers are melting surprisingly swiftly. And a range of phenomena, such as hurricane activity, that were previously thought to be unconnected to climate change are now increasingly linked to it.’ …and this Survey is sponsored by BP!