Global Warming GIF

I think I can answer that.
It's a fairly popular notion in USA to eliminate all American fossil fuel use, but I would say that climate change is being used more as a hammer to reach that goal. If we get global cooling tomorrow there will still be a big fight to leave fossil fuels in the ground in America.

 

You may be on to something here ... maybe instead of snowballs, Sen. Inhofe can pass around icicles on the Senate floor, and call them empiricles.

:gdr:

-Chap

 

GlobalTempChange-spiral

 

I'm in agreement with you. What is an extremely simple problem to understand has been grossly mischaracterized as some sort of scientific tit-for-tat exotic debate. Hopefully, this explanation should be clearer:

1) All incidents of massive dumping of pollution products has cause much needless human misery. There is no case where the massive dumping of industrial waste products into the enviornment caused anyones health to improve. Despite this reality, it always takes significant illnesses and deaths to move the larger population to wake up.

2) The biggest unconstrained dumping of pollution remaining is burning every and all manner of fossil fuels regardless of whether they are gas, liquid, or solid. Then the dumping of the combustion product to the air is done. Presently, the world is planning on burning every last atom of fossil fuel everywhere and dumping the CO2 (and other incidental pollution) into the air.

3) If this complete and total burning happens, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere probable goes above 4000 ppm (presently we are at 400 ppm). The actual final number is debatable, yet the resulting damage is massive.

4) 4000 ppm CO2 concentration will change a lot more than the climate, it will kill off a lot of humans just due to respiratory issues alone. Humans were not designed to live at those CO2 levels. Global warming is an issue for those that can live in this hyper polluted environment. There are a whole lot of incidental pollutions as well. All the mercury from burning all the worlds coal has to go somewhere.


Why this big picture, ultimate pollution disaster is ignored to debate how much climate change occurs with just a small fraction of this dumping is sad.

 

Why, who knew, a sense of humor.

Actually, the book "Bored of the rings" is a wonderful, mischievous read, it's fantasy, but reality dictates when discussing an end of species event, and playing ostrich is rather dull, in the big picture

 

On the second point in #25, I would say that burning of wood and dung as fuel is 'right up there' in negative health effects, as they are used as cooking fuel in confined spaces.

On the third point, I don't think it is appropriate to think about 4000 ppm now. There are plenty of more proximate matters

 

Once again, ostriches do not stick their heads in sand. Minus 1 for Pliny the Elder.

 

I disagree. As long as the real problem is confused with just one symptom, solutions will be compromised. We do not have a singular global warming (or climate change) problem. We have a pollution problem. Climate change is just one symptom of very hard to predict symptom outcomes. As any global warming effect does not match the prediction, many will call it a case of cry wolf. When presented as a pollution problem, the full extent of the symptoms is:
1) Climate consequences
2) Poisoning consequences
3) Resource depletion consequences
4) Chemistry consequences (acid oceans)
5) Economic consequences (extraordinarily expensive energy)

There are others. Making the case for resolving pollution elimination at every individuals lungs is a much better basis than prediciting hard to relate slow climate issues unevenly felt across the globe.

 

Actually, the volume involved, I prefer red, brown-gold, malted, isn't my idea of fun, malbec works, but myths are forever, and ignoring is well described via ostrich, but who's counting

 

I cannot disagree with anything in #29.

Don't remember bringing it up here, but a medical study showed net positive benefits of physical exercise up to very high levels of microparticulate pollution. Levels that are rarely seen outside central to eastern Asia. I was very surprised. So, keep exercising even when the air looks pretty 'thick'.

 

While you may see a series of (potential) failures, I see parallel. Same time, more or less related.

I just want to keep an eye on the ball. We all want the human enterprise to continue to prosper. Differences on how to achieve, and who should appropriately be rich or poor.

We gotta make it work. Energy production is helping. Net CO2 emission is not entirely helpful . Making this all about +CO2 (whoever says it) is an inappropriate view of the situation.

 

They do! They do! they dig small holes for thier eggs and turn them! They don't put their heads down to avoid preditors, they are not that stupid, but some people following think they are, so by transference ....

Mary Nichols has her head in the sand, literally. She thinks that if california reduces ghg somehow magically the world will do the same. Of course many in california have their collective heads shoved up a different orifice. That makes even stating the problem hard to do.

 

Ostrich 'assuming the position'
File:Struthio camelus - strus (2).JPG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Care to point out how this graph is fantasy?The past 10,000 years were mostly warmer than present.
With lower atmospheric CO2.

 

Dedicated readers will remember reading “most temperatures in the past 10,000 years were higher than now” more than once. Indeed there is some basis for so claiming, we have explored that basis and found it less than sturdy. But for newer readers who might respond “wow I did not know that”, I give this another shot.

Greenland GISP2 ice core is a cornerstone of this assertion. It looks like the following, which mojo himself has posted here before (but without the blue decorations on right that I explain below). I earlier showed that ‘present’ refers to ice from ~1855AD, but apparently it had no impact on mojo’s repeated claims.



This leads us to wonder how Greenland T (especially at high elevation of GISP2 ice coring) has gone since then. Some data have been published but geez, I gotta say that it should be easy to get Greenland summit T data time series because taxpayers paid for that. Not (yet) having the data I present two published summaries.

Box, JE, et al. 2009. Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Air Temperature Variability: 1840–2007. J Amer Met Soc 22: 4029-4049. DOI: 10.1175/2009JCLI2816.1



The blue squiggle refers to inland Greenland, and we see rapid –T in years around 1855. This is unhelpful because I can’t pick a single correct starting point. The full range indicates that T has increased by 1 to 1.5 degrees (Celsius = Kelvin) until 2007. Smallest +T already damages the claim of “most temperatures in the past 10,000 years were higher”, and largest +T does more. I added this range to the first graph as Box09 in blue.

Also, some Greenland summit station T records, presented by

Shuman, CA et al 2001. A Dozen Years of Temperature Observations at the Summit: Central Greenland Automatic Weather Stations 1987–99. J Appl Meteorol 40: 741-752.



They reported the period as rather complacent, averaging about 245 degrees Kelvin which is -28 Celsius. I added a horizontal blue bar for this. It is above all the ice-core history and makes “past 10,000 years were higher” even more difficult to support.

Several times before mojo has said this, and I expect he will again. All I can do is post evidence I find, and y’all will make your own conclusions. Putting this Greenland thing completely into context would require a website where one click would give me all the Greenland summit T data. Until there is such, I show what I have.

 

Top of GISP2 core corresponds to 1950
UW Quaternary Isotope Laboratory - GISP2 Oxygen Isotope Data

Get the data yourself
"SUGGESTED DATA CITATION: Alley, R.B.. 2004.
GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology
Data Contribution Series #2004-013.
NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA"

First two lines of that data file
Age Temperature (C)
0.095141 -31.5913

Age refers to thousands of years before 'present' which was described above. 1950 minus 95 years equals 1855.

I happen to think it would be appropriate for the GISP2 team to discuss this in the media, as their temperature graph is often misrepresented in this way. Not my call though.

do not know whether Shuman01 or Box09 better represents current air T at the site. Neither supports 10,000 mostly higher. Again, I'd prefer to download their most recent 10 years of air T, take the average and use that for 'present'. Real present.

I have not done a detailed search of our archives here to know how many times it has been said. At least 4 I think. Perhaps mojo remembers.

 

I had to bring this back, because so happy, found Greenland summit air temperatures from mid-2008 to present. This is 8 years. We can put a 'most recent 8 years' dot on the graph above, and it is at...
...
...
-29 oC

Those crazy guys measuring weather on top of Greenland let me put a final dot on the graph above. From that you can see that from T inferred from the GISP2 ice core, the 3 highest peaks were warmer than the last 8 years. I know you'll be thrilled.

I know you'll also bear in mind that while this lonely outpost may have only briefly been warmer than now, during the last 10k years, it is not the whole world. In fact it is pretty horrible up there. Not so horrible as where the UAH and RSS temperature inferences come from, but still, not all that much nicer than Mars.

Hats off to the crazy weatherguys on site. Let them leave their hats on though, lest they freeze.