This is part two of the climate change blogs.
I think it is getting serious. Very serious. The evidence is all around us, and yet we continue to deny what seems like a simple enough truth to grasp.
This is an article ("Stunning 30-year timelapse shows earth's changing surface") by Dylan Stableford of Yahoo! News, published on Thursday, May 9, 2013. It is both fascinating and informative, if also quite frightening in what the implications are. Still, I recommend that you read it, scary or not. We need to understand what is going on, and hopefully the more exposure to the irrefutable proof that this is more than a mere theory, and the more there will be a chance that people will wake up.
We have to still hope, right?
Another thing that can help (although it certainly can be frustrating as well, to say the least) is to discuss these things.
I have tried a few times, when the opportunity arose.
One time, there was a coworker (in his sixties, and a former police chief of a small, New York state town) that walked in from a snowstorm one day and said, "Well, I guess this shoots the shit out of the global warming theory!"
I told him that it was not because it was a cold and snowy day in Pomona, New York, that it disproved or discredit the theory. There was an attempt to explain that he should at least familiarize himself with the theory, before he tried to"shoot the shit" out of it. Global warming does not mean that things just keep getting warmer and warmer. After all, the "global" part actually means something and does not mean that it only gets warmer everywhere, all of the time.. After all, then, if we follow that logic in it's most extreme form, why would different seasons exist, if it was only supposed to get hotter and hotter? Why have we not melted yet?
What the theory actually suggests, beyond the name which on the surface suggests warming, is more extreme weather before an overall average warming. it never barred the possibility of cold days, or snow. In fact, quite the opposite. It suggests more extreme weather, which means greater amounts of snow at times, in some places. Ask people of the South in recent years if they have been surprised by how much snow they have seen. Ask people in Europe. Ask Minnesotans this May.
As for more extreme weather, have we not seen ample evidence of this already? Or is more proof needed?
When is enough enough? At what time are we going to reach a point where there really is no denying, when certainty has been achieved even by those that remain willfully skeptical of what an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests is very credible?
Stunning 30-year timelapse shows earth's changing surface
by Dylan Stableford of Yahoo! News, published on Thursday, May 9, 2013
In 1984, the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA launched a program called Landsat, capturing and archiving hi-resolution satellite images of the earth's surface. Google and Time magazine recently teamed up to create time-lapse videos from the images, releasing the results of the project on Thursday.
"We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public," Rebecca Moore, engineering manager for Google's Earth Engine & Earth Outreach program, wrote in a blog post announcing the Timelapse launch.
Zooming in, users can see startling video footage of melting glaciers in Alaska, deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, coastal expansion in Dubai and urban sprawl in Las Vegas, created using millions of historical satellite images:
We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.
As the final step, we worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, recipients of a Google Focused Research Award, to convert these annual Earth images into a seamless, browsable HTML5 animation.
"Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-resolution image uses 2 million," Time's Jeffrey Kluger noted. "The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic."
http://news.yahoo.com/stunning-30-year-timelapse-shows-earth-s-changing-surface-161911528.html
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