Flowchart-A summary to our research!

THESE ARE THE FLOWCHART/MIND-MAP

e.g. PICTORIAL VIEWS OF :
-How is global cooling caused
-.....
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Introduction to Global Cooling( GC )

There are ominous bad signs that the Earth’s weather have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may lead to a drastic decline in food production. This might lead to serious political implications for ALL nation on Earth. The drop in food production could begin in 10 years from now. The great wheat-producing lands of Canada regions are destined to feel its impact, along with parts of India, Pakistan, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is affected by the northern/ southern monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions are accumulating so massively that meteorologists are worried that there might be bad effects on the England farmers from 1950, with a overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen, so disastrous that in some areas may lead to drought.



What are the Benefits?
This project brings many benefits, both to the global climate, and also to the locals where solution are implemented.
-Immediate impact on climate
-Improved agriculture, forestry and biodiversity
-Increased rainfall and improved water supply
-Reduced flooding, desertification and soil erosion

How much cooling impact can this have?
The project is not concerned with Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, and it does not allow us to stop our efforts to reduce our greenhouse gases emissions. However, it does buy us more time to delay the effects of global warming by a decade later.


Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately matches the understanding of ice age, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s. Due to the global cooling conjecture, the mainstream scientific opinion is that the Earth has not cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the 2000.

These research shows that
-Global cooling is present

-effects of global cooling is disastrous

Currently, the concern that cooler temperatures would continue, and perhaps at a faster rate, has been observed to be incorrect. More has to be learned about climate, but the growing records have shown that the cooling concerns of 1975 have not been borne out.
As for the prospects of the end of the current interglacial,it is not true that interglacials have previously only lasted about 10,000 years; and Milankovitch-type calculations indicate that the present interglacial would probably continue for tens of thousands of years naturally. Other estimates put the unperturbed length of the present interglacial at 50,000 years.
As the NAS report indicates, scientific knowledge regarding climate change was more uncertain than it is today.Climatologists had not yet recognized the significance of greenhouse gases other than water vapor and carbon dioxide, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons. Early in that decade, carbon dioxide was the only widely studied human-influenced greenhouse gas. The attention drawn to atmospheric gases in the 1970s stimulated many discoveries in future decades. As the temperature pattern changed, global cooling was of waning interest by 1979.

Signing off---Marist United:)

effects on GC

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may lead to a drastic decline in food production, with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth, even the US. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the northern/ southern monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree, so disastrous that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. In the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states for the past 1 decade.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The fact is that after 75 years of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost dissapointed in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground by 1% between 1964 and 1975.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid of University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when used to freeze so solidly.
Just what causes the major/ minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is only that little,” concedes the National Academy’s report. “Not only are the many scientific questions unanswered, but in many times we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James of Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment says that its much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago. Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from 1 place to another.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to slows down its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies.

The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become a unbelievable reality




Dino

Week 8 reflection

1.What I know after the survey?
2.What I think about the findings of the survey?
3.What I learnt from the survey?
4.What I intend to do with the survey results.?

Ans 1: I know more about the awareness among peoples & knew that global cooling is harmful..
Ans 2: I think that the findings were reasonable as most replies were expected
Ans 3: I learnt that people themselves have alot of awareness about global cooling
Ans 4: I would most probably present my findings online to educate people

^_^-dino

Survey on Global Cooling

Done by Dino


This is AVERAGE REPLY collated by me in MSN & FB
Thx to all who did this survey and submit their anwser!!!

Done with Google docs

Analysis : “The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend.” The authors show how regional short-term temperature fluctuations help explain the “gullibility” with which some people have been “so readily convinced of a false conclusion” that the planet has stopped warming. The NOAA National Climatic Data Center’s annual summary posted on January 15 says: “The 2000-2009 decade is the warmest on record, with an average global surface temperature of 0.54 deg C (0.96 deg F) above the 20th century average. The years 2001 through 2008 each rank among the ten warmest years of the 130-year (1880-2009) record and 2009 was no exception.”

Conclusion:

Research on global cooling

Introduction
In dry regions that have a short rainy season, rainwater harvesting helps increase soil moisture. Increases in soil moisture bring increased growth of plants and trees. This increases cloud formation.
Low altitude clouds reflect sunlight back out into space - currently 77W/m2 on average - which makes the planet cooler. (It's true that clouds at night have an insulating effect, but much less than is reflected by daytime clouds.) Secondly, deep convective clouds carry heat energy from the land to the upper atmosphere (currently 78W/m2), from where it is radiated into space (currently 235W/m2).
NB Neither cooling process involves the Greenhouse Effect.
While the global cooling effect is important, actual impact on human beings and ecosystems is determined more by local and regional change, which sometimes act counter to global trends. So any actions at the regional level creating regional climatic improvement and decreasing climate vulnerability is worthwhile, whether or not there is a large global impact.
The strongest regional effect is increased rainfall, which helps both farmers and natural vegetation.
The global cooling effect begins as soon as the cloudiness increases, unlike the effect of CO2 emissions working via the greenhouse effect, which develop over 50+ years. This means that increased low altitude cloud cover can have an immediate and sustained cooling effect.
To help this cooling, it is necessary to work on a big enough scale, and concentrate initial efforts in certain parts of the tropics where conditions are particularly favourable. Early indications are that the most favourable areas are semi-arid zones which have a rainy season between 300 and 1000mm, e.g. Mali, Nigeria and Senegal. In some cases some of the work may already be underway or completed, as part of agricultural improvement programmes.
For maximum impact on cloudiness, studies indicate that working in swathes of land 10km long in a chess board or fishbone pattern can be particularly effective.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can soil moisture be increased?
A Slovak hydrologist (Michal Kravcik) has proposed rainwater harvesting and water management across entire river basins in the tropics, starting with selected river basins in Africa.
This can be combined with special planting techniques developed by the Permaculture Institute of Australia to make a significant difference to soil moisture, making tree/plant survival much more likely, increasing groundwater and leading to positive feedback from shading, improved percolation and cloud formation, and potentially also from increased rainfall and cooling due to latent heat factors.
Rainwater harvesting is being promoted by the UN (UNEP) especially in Eastern and Southern Africa and so there is now a large body of experience here and in Brazil, India and China.
How firm is the science?
Nineteen senior scientists have published a call for land-atmosphere interactions to be taken into account in climate change policy. (An extract is appended.) In his comprehensive review of land-atmosphere processes, Professor Roger Pielke Snr states:
"An important conclusion from such studies is that land-use change directly alters local and regional weather and climate in two ways. First, the local and regional atmospheric conditions are changed since ... the surface heat, moisture, and other trace gas and aerosol budgets are altered.
".... vegetation and soil processes and change directly affect the atmosphere and climate globally on a variety of time and space scales. This alteration in fluxes directly modifies the environment for thunderstorms which are an effective conduit for heat, moisture, and momentum to higher latitudes, landscape processes exert a major influence on global weather and climate."
From R.A. Pielke Sr: Land-Use/Convection/Regional Climate.
Consensus is established on the cooling role of low-altitude clouds, the ability of soil moisture and vegetation to produce increased cloud and rain, and the ability of rainwater harvesting to produce an increase in soil moisture and tree survival and growth.
To show that these three relationships work together to produce a global cooling effect is more difficult as so many other things are going on: models, though, are proving increasingly reliable and sophisticated and the accompanying science dossier provides studies showing the global impact of soil and vegetation changes in the tropics.
The regional cooling impact is easier to prove as changes have been observed over recent decades and different regions can be compared to each other. Deforestation is particularly strongly linked to regional decreases in rainfall.
Several senior UK scientists (e.g. Professor Peter Cox from the UK Meteorological Office and Dr Richard Harding of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) specialising in land-atmosphere interactions have been approached and have backed the project in writing - i.e. they are sufficiently confident about the effect to publicly advocate and support this approach to global cooling and drought reduction.
Will this be an aid project?
There will be considerable spin off benefits for (e.g.) Ethiopia, like better conditions for agriculture, reduced flooding, employment creation and less drought. Nevertheless, it is suggested that this is seen neither as an "aid" project nor an indigenous development project, but as a straight business deal - individuals, NGOs and countries wanting global cooling "pay" low income countries, workers and communities to undertake this work, partly in cash and partly in community and health projects. (Since the project will lead to an increase in pools of water, increased malaria is likely to be a downside for local people if there is no concerted effort to minimise this.)
It's nice to think that (e.g.) Ethiopia plays a lead role in saving the world, rather than "rest of the world helps poor Ethiopia with another famine".
Why hasn't this been proposed before?
Perhaps because of the separation between the hydrology and meteorology professions, and because climatologists are mainly concerned with understanding and describing what is happening, and warning about dangers of current human activity, rather than proposing pro-active solutions. Perhaps also because so much attention has gone on CO2 and methane, it has been easy to neglect the role of water vapour and clouds. Also, until recently this role has been hard to quantify and incorporate into climate models.
What is rainwater harvesting?
Rainwater harvesting (RWH) involves lots of medium, small and micro-scale community level projects to catch and hold rainwater in the soil during rainy periods.
There are broadly speaking 5 types of RWH:
Rooftop RWH - mainly for domestic use.
In situ RWH - where there is little slope and run-off of water.
Runoff RWH - where there is slopes and run-off (illustrated below)
Sub-surface dams - for sandy soils
Large catchment water harvesting - includes floodwater diversion


This will be followed up by a survey conducted in facebook or MSN(messenger)

Marist united~Dino