Global Warming is really starting to run out of gas

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(viking31 @ Oct 24 2007, 01:12 PM) [snapback]529759[/snapback]</div>

Finally someone with a little common sense! To start with it is extremely arrogant of humans to even think they are capable of contributing to global warming except in the most miniscule way. Follow the money and you will see why there is so much B/S about global warming. If you look at the pictures of the sites where they measure the temperatures you will see why the recorded temperatures are rising. This is exactly the type of situation where the old addage "Garbage in / Garbage out" is hitting it on the head! Wake up people and remove your heads from that dark place behind you! Demand scientific evidence that stands up to scrutiny. If 1000 scientists tell you Global Warming is a fact and they can't or won't back it up with actual science they folks they are LYING to you. Better you sghould be trying to figure out why they would try to deceive yoyu than to believe them because they are scientists (usually scientists that have absolutely nothing to do with Meteorology) Will you go to a Dentist if you have Cancer? (well there is this pitcher in Cleveland; sorry I digress) I read the other day that the rain forest loses land the size of the state of Ohio every year. If that is true we should have run out of rain forest a long time ago. People on this site aren't stupid or you wouldn't have bought a Hybrid to start with. A lot of you researched Hybrids and Prius's at some length before making a decision. Yet a lot of you will blindly believe in Global Warming just because Al Gore says so! Just because THEY say it is so doesn't mean it is so. Ever wonder why they don't allow scientific review of their data unless it is by one of the believers? Its because it wont stand up to real scientific review. Is there such a thing as global warming? I personally think there may be a small amount of it going on but is that a bad thing? Not if you are growing food it isn't! Try a little reading about the mini-ice age in the 1800's and learn what horrible times they had with starvation and such then maybe a degree over the next hundred years isn't such a bad thing.

 

This is the MOST IMPORTANT DEBATE OF OUR TIME. Unfortunately the debate seems to be mired in a battle of science vs truthiness (and science being used as a tool of truthiness).

Whatever the cause the earth is warming. And it is a natural event. Since human beings are part of nature, everything we do is natural. The primary difference is that we, unlike volcanoes or forest fires or farting cows, are aware of our effects on the planet.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(BuddyL @ 2007 10 28 09:17) [snapback]531576[/snapback]</div>

Maybe, maybe not. Definitely, some of them are incredibly ignorant, and proud of it. <_<

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(IsrAmeriPrius @ Oct 24 2007, 07:04 PM) [snapback]529917[/snapback]</div>

When Glaciers slide into the ocean that is called calving. It is caused by the Glacier growing not by Global Warming. Where some Glacier may be receding others are growing. You hear about the former but never the latter. Ever wonder why? Follow the money!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(IsrAmeriPrius @ Oct 24 2007, 07:04 PM) [snapback]529917[/snapback]</div>

When Glaciers slide into the ocean that is called calving. It is caused by the Glacier growing not by Global Warming. Where some Glacier may be receding others are growing. You hear about the former but never the latter. Ever wonder why? Follow the money!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(BuddyL @ Oct 28 2007, 11:33 AM) [snapback]531584[/snapback]</div>

Please post comparison of melting glaciers to growing glaciers. Do they cancel out each other? Or is there more melting than growing? And by what ratio or percent?

As a poster stated before, this is a complicated issue and there are some aspects people are unaware of.

I knew about the dirty snow but that poster hadn't heard of it. Because of airborne particulate matter (pollution) falling on snow, that snow retains heat and melts faster. They're finding this all over, even in the antarctic.

Another aspect not mentioned is the thawing of the arctic tundra, releasing a lot of green house gases that were trapped there when the ground was frozen. With the thawing because of even the small increase in temperature, that is all being released.

Only the ear-plugging LA LA LAers seem to think the action's of humans have NO contribution to this "natural" cycle.

I'm afraid by the time we can get these luddites to admit to the problem, "I told you so" will be of little consolation because by that time....nothing will be able to be done.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(BuddyL @ Oct 28 2007, 09:17 AM) [snapback]531576[/snapback]</div>

Pretty much your whole post is BS. lol

Maybe you should research the money being spent to produce the information you are reading. Follow the money right? How much money is being spent on think-tanks to confuse the public about global warming? Yeah, that is what I thought.

As a budding scientist I will tell you straight up that there are very few rich scientists who havn't sold their souls (biostitutes). In fact I just spent the morning with 5 well respected scientists in my area doing a restoration project and none of them drove fancy vehicles or were afraid to get dirty and throw down some hard work. Too bad the same cannot be said for 98% of the CEOs and capitalist pigs that rape our (and our neihbors) resources for profit.

I challenge you to produce credible links to your supposed "iron-clad" proof of your convictions. So far all I'm reading is the BS that is spewed out by these think-tanks to fool, hood-wink, bamboosal, and confuse the public into inaction. According to your last comment about global warming being a god thing for food production I can already tell you are not an environmental scientist and certainly not a botanist.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(BuddyL @ Oct 28 2007, 12:17 PM) [snapback]531576[/snapback]</div>

Couldn't agree more. And who do think has more money. Exxon/Mobile or a bunch or research scientists?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(banjoman @ Oct 24 2007, 05:48 PM) [snapback]529908[/snapback]</div>

My first post here. How utterly bizarre (and indicative of how far this country has to go to catch up to the developed world in understanding this subject) to find self-described Prius owners who think the climate change consensus is some sort of big "alarmist" plot. I wonder, do you two regularly throw thousands of your hard-earned consumer dollars away on something you consider a hoax, or is the irrationality contained to this purchase? At current gas prices you don't actually come out in the black compared to buying a Camry (nearest Toyota equivalent) till at least 5 years out (assuming 15K mi/year). I mean, it is a cool-looking car, but I wouldn't think that was quite enough to warrant the extra money. Maybe it's a hedge against possible future gas price explosions (which will come, it's just a question of when). Just wondering. If doing your part on greenhouse gases isn't part of the picture for you, viking and banjoman, why did you waste your money on this boondoggle?

As to the term "climate change". When I see someone characterizing this phrase as some sort of marketing-driven repackaging of "global warming" it tells me that the person hasn't spent much time with the writings of actual scientists, either on the web at their local library. This term has been preferred for some time in the climatology community for a very specific reason. Well, three, actually that I can think of of the top of my head.

First, while grossly speaking, the main problem *is* a building-up of energy that's coming from outside the "system" contained by our atmosphere (i.e., a warming of the planet due to higher concentrations of greenhouse gases), the effect isn't going to be uniform across the planet (which might be inferred from the word "global"). For starters we are seeing faster warming toward the poles than at lower lattitudes - though there are lots of less well publicized regional variations. Secondly, as with most natural systems, when you increase the driving force behind a variable, you tend to crank up not only the mean value of the variable (average global temperature), but also its variance (ie, the swings around that rising average value). Thus climatologists are expecting more heat waves, but also (to some lesser extent) more bitter cold spells. Basically, the nice well-behaved system we have "grown up in" as a species is beginning to go a little haywire. Thirdly, "climate" refers to much more than just temperature, so the term "warming" only captures a small portion of the problems we are (already) facing. With this extra energy in the system we are expected to see more chaotic weather systems, like big storms. The warming-hurricane connection is not completely settled yet, but even forgetting hurricanes there are expected increases in the frequency and intensity of other classes of storms.

And lastly (kind of a fourth reason for using the term), the earth's climate is complex enough that it is somewhat hard to predict just what kind of chaos-driven behavior will ensue. One extreme possibility is the one where the "global conveyor belt" shuts down from freshwater infusion if enough of the Greenland ice melts. This could send the northern hemisphere into a manmade ice age (like in the sensationalized movie "The Day After Tomorrow"). Still not terribly likely in our lifetime (knock on wood), and it would never happen as fast as in the movie. But climatologists have been stunned before by events they thought unlikely, like the Larson ice sheets collapsing in the Antarctic. So, in a sense banjoman's snarky post has a grain of truth in it - though not really in the spirit he meant it. We're likely to see all kinds of crazy stuff happen in the coming decades because we refused to deal with the issue honestly in the 1980s and 90s when it was first coming clear. So, it is kind of a "catch all" term - just not in "fast and loose" sense that banjoman implied.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(viking31 @ Oct 26 2007, 06:26 PM) [snapback]530929[/snapback]</div>

You are free to place your head anywhere you wish. Where it is currently, you will have precious little company from the climatology community, especially anyone who's done peer-reviewed work in the past decade.

Science is guided by consensus. If not we would never get anywhere, and would still be bleeding patients for just about every medical problem encountered. No, actually we'd still be doing exorcisms. While once in a great while science does bark up a wrong tree in some coherent, prolonged way, far more of the time they are proceeding in a direction toward objective truth. If you think so little of scientific consensus, then I highly suggest you stop taking any life-saving medications you may rely on that have been developed in the past century. And take up smoking immediately. Not because I say so, but because Philip Morris does, and they know better than the scientists, with their silly little peer-reviewed journals and piles of data. (And I'm sure P-M has no monetary stake in this matter to be clouding their motives.)

Not outside the waiting rooms in the corporate suites at Exxon you won't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_op..._climate_change

National and international science academies and professional societies have assessed the current scientific opinion on climate change, in particular recent global warming. These assessments have largely followed or endorsed the IPCC position that "An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities"[1].



<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(BuddyL @ Oct 28 2007, 11:17 AM) [snapback]531576[/snapback]</div>

An excellent idea. Here, I'll help.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2612021&page=1

Senators to Exxon: Stop the Denial

ExxonMobil should stop funding groups that have spread the idea that global warming is a myth and that try to influence policymakers to adopt that view, two senators said today in a letter to the oil company.

In their letter to ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., appealed to Exxon's sense of corporate responsibility, asking the company to "come clean about its past denial activities."

...

Since 1990, the report said, the company has spent more than $19 million funding groups that promote their views through publications and Web sites that are not peer reviewed by the scientific community.

_________________________

Also, for a nice breakdown of the skeptics Exxon is funding to confuse the public (at least in the 2000-2003 period), see

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2...xxon_chart.html

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TimBikes @ Oct 28 2007, 03:18 AM) [snapback]531516[/snapback]</div>

That is a valid point. My feeling is that in the past CO2 levels have been a positive feedback loop (it was released as temperatures warmed up, unlocking stored carbon underneath glaciers), whereas this time around, we're making it the primary temperature driver and other factors are now positive feedback loops. Realclimate.org does address that issue as well, but it's been awhile since I've read it. They probably have a more scientific analysis of it with studies referenced. We do know that it is a greenhouse effect and all else being equal, temperatures will vary directly with CO2 levels.

So much reading to do!
The last 'assignment' on black carbon soot causing the melting of arctic snow had this to say about it "... we estimate global annual mean BC/snow surface radiative forcing from all sources (fossil fuel, biofuel, and biomass burning) of +0.054 (0.007–0.13) and +0.049 (0.007–0.12) W m?2, respectively. Snow forcing from only fossil fuel + biofuel sources is +0.043 W m?2 (forcing from only fossil fuels is +0.033 W m?2), suggesting that the anthropogenic contribution to total forcing is at least 80%." (emphasis mine).

I'm not sure where you got your 90% figure for soot contributions to melting. It was also unclear to me why there'd be so much wintertime boreal fires, unless it's referring to burning of firewood for home heating? I certainly haven't heard of frequent wildfires in the boreal region, and I grew up in the southern reaches of the boreal forest. (I didn't want to pay for the full report).

Sure: from Wikipedia, the source of the chart "This figure shows historical CO2 (right axis) and delta-deuterium (a temperature proxy; left axis) records based on Antarctic ice cores, providing data for the last 650,000 years. Note that deuterium levels differ between Vostok and EPICA ice cores and are therefore plotted on separate scales to maintain the relative levels. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are on the same scale throughout."

The main reason I included that was to show how the current levels of CO2 are apparently significantly higher than anything seen in the last half-million years, plus or minus 100K years. So we really don't know how that's going to affect things over the next century, let alone the next millenia. For my purposes, we can ignore the temperature chart, keeping in mind that there has been some kind of connection between temperature and CO2 levels.

My feeling is it's really arrogant of us to think our lifestyle is more important than the lifestyles of the human population for the next unknown number of centuries that we might be affecting things. The prudent thing is to slow down on carbon emissions until we can show one way or the other what the affect is. A good deal of this reduction on carbon emissions can be done without significant sacrifice (keep house sizes reasonable, encourage bicycle use, put a gas tax to encourage high efficiency vehicles, promote R&D on cellulosic ethanol instead of coal gasification, perhaps even pursue hydrogen technology).

 

Very excellent post nerfer.

Thus ends another thread, in which the AGW skeptics are shown to be completely ignorant of the facts and lacking in even the most rudimentary analytic skills.

Have a nice day all, it was fun.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(kingofgix @ 2007 10 30 07:26) [snapback]532405[/snapback]</div>

Don't forget to tune in next week, when we get to have the same argument yet again.

 

Not with Pinto Girl home sick and with access to a computer!!


Still waitin' for the "are the glaciers, overall, getting bigger or smaller?" answer (as requested above)...

Here's how I see it: Cleaner and more efficient business practices do tend to win over those that cling to outdated methods and ideas. This is a chance for us to really revisit how we do business, and bring some things up to speed *on our own terms.*

Before, oh, say, our European competitors do...and force us to play catch up.

Here's the thing: Even if the USA decides unilaterally that GW is a farce, this doesn't necessarily mean the World will come to the same decision. Perhaps leadership on this might prop up or flagging respect worldwide...?

As it is, we're (I fear) seen as a bit too self-absorbed to determine the economic and ecological future of everyone, everywhere.

 

a benchmark used to measure the onset of GW was the loss of one million square miles of artic sea ice. previous models done in the 90's showed that that level would be hit in 2050.

we hit that level about 2 months ago

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA @ Oct 30 2007, 05:39 PM) [snapback]532614[/snapback]</div>

Yeah, but what's the DOLLAR VALUE of each of those one million square miles of arctic sea ice...?

I'd say, current market value is $0.00.

They don't call it an Arctic WASTELAND for nothing...there's NOTHING OF WORTH out there!!
[she said with great sarcasm]

 

it was once predicted that that much ice gone would doom the polar bears to extinction... obviously not true....several have managed to not drown swimming from one distant ice float to another

 

it was once predicted that that much ice gone would doom the polar bears to extinction... obviously not true....several have managed to not drown swimming from one distant ice float to another

 

What's really weird is, our system is completely incapable of valuing natural things that, in a sense, are only worth something to us if they're NOT around anymore!

It's an odd paradox, but I think it's true.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA @ Oct 30 2007, 05:50 PM) [snapback]532620[/snapback]</div>

Yes, and increasing ocean temperatures are causing the growth of "soft shelled" coral polyps, where the hard coral we took for granted, can no longer.

Soon, we can all go see "the great polyp reef."