As we focus so much on the impending climate crisis, does anyone agree with me that.......?

Question

we are totally neglecting the vast over population of wasps in the UK?? Those pesky little critters are everywhere man!

Answer 1

Tis partly the fault of the aggressive wasps that the bees are dying out.  Watched the other day as wasps attacked the bees feeding on the blossom and stung them to death.  Worst thing was when I stuck a spade in a soft spot of the lawn to check it out and it turned out to be a wasps nest.  Think it took all of 32 microseconds to leg it back into house for shelter after being stung in their first attack wave.  They lost in the end as I donned a complete leather suit from top to toe and sprayed the nest.  They werent happy with that either but then who would be.

Answer 2

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

by Richard Harris

Listen Now [3 min 57 sec] add to playlist

Stuart Westmorland

Oceans hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. Corbis

Morning Edition, March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

Answer 3

At least fighting a wasp can be entertaining.

Answer 4

.. that's ok, that balances out the fact that all the pesky bees are dying out.

Answer 5

One other thing to consider is the melting of the icecaps.This fresh water will disperse over the earths surface,once the caps have melted,the immense weight, at the poles, will no longer be there,as the earth is an oblate spheroid and rotates with a pronounced wobble,will this shift be enough to throw us out of orbit and become a comet?Major changes are certain ,but to what degree ? One thing about wasps,they are productive, and unlike us,necessary in natures grand plan.

Answer 6

Isn't most of the entire population of the UK WASPs?

Pesky - yes....