The thing that has changed is the amount of information and population. Every year more and more sensors, satellites, and other global change devices get added to measure every little bump or burp our planet does. This means we get more reports of change, more reports of disasters, and faster circulation of the information. Every year more houses are built, places that just had houses now have town, places that only had town have cities etc. Every year we push further into places that are more hazardous to us. More house on cliffs, coasts and beaches, and towns build on man made areas such as behind levies. What would otherwise be major crop damage or a storm that kept the boats from fishing now a city destroyed. Here is a question, how many cities were destroyed during the Pleistocene period. None. Even though it covered the land that Moscow, New York and other Major Cities in about 160 feet of glaciers not a single person was effected. Simply because there were no people around at the time, about 2.5 million years BP. Nobody around, no body to harmed. When man first came around he tended to stay on the planes, near fresh water supplies and farther away from oceans and mountains, or at least that would be more logical. You can't live on drinking salt water and hunting is easier on flat ground as well as early farming. But I have gotten off point.
There has always been natural disaster, when the largest glaciers melted from a warming planet, we were not even around. The planet has and will always go through periods of climate change even if we stop to exist.
People tend to say how man is such a threat to the planet but man is a part of nature as anything. Most creatures change their own environment. Insects build hives and colonies, birds build nests, beavers build dams that flood rivers, and the list goes on. Most if not all creatures and plants spread out as much as they can. All animals eat nature, and nature eats all animals. The only differences are that we tend to do those things better as well as adapt better too. One of the main rules to nature is that you need to adapt or die. One day, we too may become extinct. Maybe from mass starvation due to overuse of the planet, maybe from a asteroid, maybe from a mass nuclear war, or any other reason but eventually we too will be gone. Good thing is that it probably won't happen any time soon or in our lifetimes, could be millions or billions of years from now but I doubt it will be that long.
What time period are you referring to? Some years there are more than others, but life goes on.
When I was young they blamed the different weather patterns on the explosion of the Atomic Bomb.
Quote by Will Harper, Princeton University physicist, former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy: “I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism....I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect....Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past.”
Has there been a qualitative difference? Show us your findings.
What makes you think there has been increases? There are facts that show storms are decreasing and that hurricanes are also on the decrease. Some will say intensities have gone up, but we continue to be more technologically enhanced as we go through the years.
It's easy to see all of the things going on in the world with internet and TV. Makes the world look smaller.
Here's a satellite view of the world from NASA if you want to see how big the world really is : http://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/map/viewer/#app...
It's pretty cool and gets down to being able to see a couple of acres at one time. Enjoy!
I'm no scientist, but my opinion is that short term there certainly seems to be an increase overall in frequency and severity of natural disasters, and there is evidence that those disasters are tied to increasing global temperature averages. What is less clear to me is how directly related to mankind's activities they are and if there are natural processes that may counterbalance whatever influences mankind has on climate change.
For example, one person comments that earthquakes are occurring more often and another says that has nothing to do with global warming; however, there are at least some people who say that melting ice over land masses decreases the weight on top of those land masses, they rebound-rise up-and this increases seismic activity. Is this true or not, theoretically or otherwise? And if it is true, how would one connect those events directly with mankind's use of fossil fuels, etc other than seismic activity related to fracking that occurs only in the area of the fracking, another concern expressed by some environmentalists related to our use of fossil fuels? For the average person on the street, extreme events are relative to his or her life's experiences in the locales they have inhabited. Elsewhere, their awareness of those events is limited by the attention they receive in the media, so whether it is an earthquake, storms like Hurricane Sandy or extensive drought it is hard to quantify these events without a lot more information than is readily available without a lot of study, let alone determine the causes for them. Nonetheless, there are an awful lot of people out there who believe they know the answers absolutely based on a limited spectrum of information, sometimes from political ideolgues in the media, on the internet, and even, sometimes, offered in an archaic format called "writing" which includes using products known as 'paper' and 'ink.' Barbaric, I know.
Now I am an average guy on the street and I got other demands on my time than the more or less full time effort that would be required to understand climate science. I tend to rely more on credible and informed sources than the white noise produced by the pundits, politicians ideologues, conspiracy theorists, fast food shift managers and retired sodbusters et al who laughably claim to have it all figured out and then complain that yet another conspiracy is afoot to silence them when they produce the grunts and f*rts they claim makes them 'scientists.' It is entertaining, though it gets annoying from time to time.
Back in the land of the sane though, the credible sources rarely claim a direct correlation between any single event or a short term weather pattern and mankind's acceleration of global warming. Rather, they suggest that the longer term patterns will reveal the correlation that the theory of AGW predicts. There have been a few people who have gone out on a limb and said certain regions will receive more snow and some less or that certain and specific events such as hurricanes will increase in frequency and ferocity. But in general and as I understand it, science does not attempt to connect dots in that way related to climate change, which some people take issue with every year if it snows more than usual in their back yards.
Earth quakes have absolutely nothing to do with global warming. Yet, an increase in storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes has been detected due to change in climate.
If they were due to global warming they wouldn't be natural, would they.
the increase in natural disaster and are they to goable warming are process that time.
Yes you put more energy into a chaotic system and it will become more volatile.
Sadly for some of us it doesn't seem to be enough.
Quotes by Sagebrush (a self proclaimed Christian and ardent AGW denier) :
"Execute all those who voted for OBAMA"
"Hire the handicapped, they are fun to watch!"
i would say yes. it seems like there is more and more lately. here in tn there is like a tornado every other day.
yes.... more earth quakes
