I'm not so sure. Apparently the traditional method of production involves partially chewing the corn kernals, then spitting them into large vats for fermentation. No thanks, I'll stick with IPA.

OK Fine! A more modern and hygienic version then...

I saw that Dogfish brewery did make a limited edition of it once.

"From about 700 B.C., the lake core record paints a picture of warm, dry spells in the high Andes about every 500 years that correspond with major societal changes. When the climate cooled, societies would retreat down slope, returning once it warmed again."

So was it a "serious problem" every time for them. or just once in a while? Sounds like the periodic cooling was the problem and that they fared much better in the warm times. Among the European civilizations it was that way. In the 10th century warm period the Vikings had a thriving colony in Greenland, lifespans and population increased greatly. When it cooled again (as it always does) there were famines and plagues.

The worth of any scientific theory (except maybe for string theory) is evaluated based on its ability to make testable predictions. In the last 30 years, average gas mileage has over doubled. Has there been any measurable effect? We brewed up an ocean of ethanol to burn in our cars. Has there been any measurable effect (aside from making food more expensive)? In 1995, Al Gore predicted that the North Polar Seas would be ice-free year around in 15 years. Has it happened?

All the predictions the climate change drum beaters seem to make can be categorized as follows: 1) If its too warm, it will get hotter 2) If it is to dry, it will get drier. 3) If it is too wet, it will get wetter. 4) If it is cute and fuzzy, it will die. 5) If it is ugly and poisonous, it will thrive. It all just seems too contrived.

from http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.¹

Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. Studying these climate data collected over many years reveal the signals of a changing climate.

Certain facts about Earth's climate are not in dispute:

• The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.² Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.

• Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.³

The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:

Sea level rise

Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.⁴

Global temperature rise

All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. ⁵ Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. ⁶ Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase. ⁷

Warming oceans

The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.⁸

Shrinking ice sheets

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

Declining Arctic sea ice

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. ⁹

Shrinking ice sheets

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

Declining Arctic sea ice

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. ⁹

Glacial retreat

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.¹⁰

Extreme events

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.¹¹

Ocean acidification

The carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s oceans has been increasing since 1750, and is currently increasing about 2 billion tons per year. This has increased ocean acidity by about 30 percent. ¹²

References

¹ IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5

B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46

Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306

V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141

B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.

² In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

³ National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

⁴ Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded
from the CSIRO website.

⁵http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ anomalies/index.html

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

⁶ T.C. Peterson et.al., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.

⁷ I. Allison et.al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm

⁸ Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).

⁹ L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7

R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009

http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

¹⁰ National Snow and Ice Data Center

World Glacier Monitoring Service

¹¹ http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html

¹² C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371; Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36. Also see: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/OA/

nicedream1 - Didn't know whether to post here or below. First of all, thanks for doing the research. I read it all, and with great interest. I did not, however, read the references due to lack of time - sorry.

Unlike KiloByte1339, below, I do not doubt that global warming is real. I am a chemical engineer, so I do not doubt the greenhouse effect or the fact that anthropogenic CO2 has increased levels of the gas in our atmosphere. What I do doubt, as noted above, are the dire predictions that are made, I believe, to scare the public into going along with measures that will be of dubious utility in wrenching the planet into a cooling trend or a steady state.

Your own post starts with "The Earth's climate has changed throughout history." And throughout history species have adapted and the ecosystem has survived. I have no doubt that it will continue to do so and also that climate change, in one direction or another, will be the only constant in the Earth's atmosphere. (at least until it is stripped away by our sun entering its red giant stage).

Now, I suppose it behooves me to offer some evidence that the effects of global warming won't be so dire. I recall, dimly, two Scientific American articles that are pertinent. The first was a report on an ice-age prediction model that was a perfect match for GISP and other data over many cycles until about 5,000 years ago. The authors theorized that human agriculture had interrupted the normal cycle. Their conclusions were that we would be entering an ice age now if it wasn't for human activity, and that anthropogenic warming will only stave it off for another century or so before it inevitably happens.

The other article was more recent and detailed a paleontological study of (I think) north-central Brazil during a global warming episode far more severe than today's. Their hypothesis was that that region was the hottest on the planet at that time so that making it even hotter would have caused serious loss of biodiversity, since there were no species better adapted to heat that could move into the area from somewhere else. They were surprised to find that the amount and diversity of pollen grains in the fossil record both actually increased. Their revised hypothesis was that the increased stress had caused an increased rate of speciation.

I don't have any more time now, but I would enjoy reading your reply and continuing our discussion in the future.

Oh - and one more thing: I would really appreciate just one more week of above-freezing temperatures in the fall so that I could finally enjoy a crop of tomatoes.

I imagine it'll actually be much, much worse than most models predict. Simply because many models likely haven't accounted for just how much organic-matter carbon is stored in permafrost.

There was a study published in 2009 in the Journal of Global Biogeochemical Cycles where they revised the estimate to how much carbon was in permafrost. It ended up being roughly 1.5 trillion tons, which is about twice as much as in the atmosphere.

Being permafrost, it's more or less permanently frozen. So with increased temperatures, you're going to have thawing of areas of permafrost, which will open the carbon up to consumption by bacteria, which will then end up putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which will increase temperatures, which will thaw more permafrost, which will open up more carbon to bacterial consumption, etc.

In other words, it's going to be a feedback loop. I imagine with the current state of things that it's already too late to reverse (since even is we put the breaks on all emissions, we'd still see effects increasing for the next 100 years). So global warming is going to be much direr. And since there's enough folks out there denying global warming and its effects, we aren't fully addressing the problem which means we're going to be more severly impacted than if we had started preparing.

As for increased temperature and biodiversity, you won't see as many impacts in the tropical regions (aside from changed rainfall patterns, which will effect biodiversity in its own way -cf current multi-year drought on the Amazon and its effect on net primary productivity), but you will see greater changes in the higher latitudes. That is, vegetative communities, assuming they can cope with faster rate of change than would otherwise normally happen, will be expanding further from the equator. Tropical systems will expand more northerly (in our atmosphere), displacing temperate systems. Temperate systems will move northward, displacing boreal systems, etc.

The big effect that worries me about this is the effect on agriculture and rain patterns.

I've read (about) those studies and also those about the possibility that methane clathrate will accelerate global warming:

"The initial phase of the project found that buried deposits of clathrates, which are icy crystalline compounds that encase methane molecules, will break apart as the global temperature increases and the oceans warm.

In the second phase, the scientists found that methane would then seep into the Arctic Ocean and gradually overwhelm the marine environment’s ability to break down the gas. Supplies of oxygen, nutrients, and trace metals required by methane-eating microbes would dwindle year-by-year as more methane enters the water. After three decades of methane release, much of the methane may bubble to the surface — where it has the potential to accelerate climate change."

And then there's the feedback loop associated with albedo decreases due to loss of snow/ice cover.

But all this represents cherry-picking only those effects that support "dire consequences". There are lots of mitigating effects that tend to be ignored: increased CO2, increased temperatures, longer growing seasons, larger growing surface area. They all increase biomass production and therefore carbon sequestration. Warmer ocean temperatures increase rainfall and therefore atmospheric scrubbing.

But you haven't addressed my most important point: Global warmings many times in the past, even those accompanied by large and rapid CO2 increases due to volcanic events, Have not had detectable "dire consequences". If all of those feedback mechanisms will be triggered by our apparent initial warming, they would have been triggered many times in the past - they weren't. I subscribe to the part of the Gaea hypothesis that suggests that the entire Earth's ecosystem has evolved in the same way as individual organisms - to survive. I believe that it is well adapted to to survive such frequent events as global warming and cooling, and will continue to do so.

I've posted evidence showing that global warming is real.

Now it's your turn to post the 'plenty of scientific evidence that disproves' global warming.