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This is methane, not CO2, so sequestering carbon isn't relevant.

"Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period."

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html

FTA: "And because 3NOP boosted the digestibility of nutrients in the feed, the cows that received the supplement actually gained more weight than cows that received none. "

It might actually be useful in meat production. Headline is misleading. Meh.

That's okay, we make up for it at the refinery and drilling platforms.
Only if you know that the charging station isn't getting its electricity from coal or gas, like almost 70% of electricity generated in the US.

The only thing impeding electrics is politics

The two things impeding electrics are politics and battery size/weight to storage ratio. No wait...
The three things impeding electrics are politics, battery size/weight to storage ratio, and the high cost of solar power. Umm...
The four things impeding electrics are politics, battery size/weight to storage ratio, the high cost of solar power, and the fear of nuclear power
Amongst the things impeding electrics...

It's like the original iPod. The original slashdot review was right - No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Where it was wrong, and why the iPod won, was because you could buy music in iTunes and you couldn't do that with other mp3 players. In the same way, the technology that beats ICE will not necessarily be faster, or cheaper, but rather, will have some other benefit that ICE can't compete with. Lots of people here are saying they can't wait for autonomous vehicles - I would agree that is a game breaker that will disrupt individual car ownership/commuting.

If you ask me, soon all cars will become basically plug-in hybrids, to take advantage of regenerative braking and high torque of electric, with petrol to deal with range anxiety (even more than actual range problems).

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

" the effect of increased temperature will depend on the crop's optimal temperature for growth and reproduction. [1] In some areas, warming may benefit the types of crops that are typically planted there. However, if warming exceeds a crop's optimum temperature, yields can decline"

Not to mention that the available land mass for agriculture (due to rising oceans and increasing desertification) will be much less.

I recalled a bit to-do over a CFL some time back. I did not bother to look for the article as I was not sure how accurate it was or anything and it was not important. I did find the cleanup instructions from the EPA. As the story went, if I am recalling properly, it was in a school and resulted in the kids being sent home and then some testing being done by a local emergency HazMat team. Here are the EPA's suggestions:

http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleani...

I could see a school being pedantic about it. I have never broken one. They seem pretty damned tough.

The records were showing a cooling trend until they were recalibrate.

Some of the recalibration were obviously valid. Others are not as clear cut. For example, the orbital decay correction was entirely valid.

Regardless, even the corrected datasheets don't show warming if you look from 1998 to today
http://data.remss.com/msu/mont...

The whole "pause" thing which is argued started in 1998 and what caused people to start looking for where the heat went. You're saying into the ocean... because it isn't in the air.

70.0 - 82.5 is the global table. The other columns address different regions.

As to sea level... from church:
http://static-content.springer...
From the EPA
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
the actual graph:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

Do you see the problem?

The sea rise is linear. Our rate of emissions have not been exponential. Explain how the CO2 even correlates with that when the trend lines don't match?

The rate of change in emissions should be reflected in the rate of change in the environment assuming these systems respond quickly to these changes.

What we're seeing is LINEAR changes to exponential inputs. That implies the two variables don't even correlate much less one being caused by the other.

Also sort of interesting is this data on on the CO2 concentrations:
http://co2now.org/images/stori...

I find it interesting that basically was flat from 58-64... as you can see it ramps up going faster and faster towards the present.

Anyway, I'd like to see if we can get a single point emission of CO2... something large enough to be detectable globally for some period of time. I think a large volcanic erruption might create such a rise... and then I'd like to see how long it takes for the trend line to return to normal.

Your IPCC citation assumes 120 years. I don't understand how that is possible. We're emitting 1 percent of total atmospheric carbon every year and the rate of actual change in our environment is about 1/3rd of our emissions.

That implies that 2/3rds of our emissions are being taken out of the atmosphere and not re-emitted ANNUALLY. If 2/3rds of our emissions are being removed and not re-emitted annually... then what does that do to the life expectancy of emitted CO2?

The IPCC figure you're citing is 120 years... that seems obviously impossible. And your other figures you were cited were ranging from 100-30 years... which means we have range of 30 to 120 years just from your citations.

We're talking about the 6 foot tall man give or take 30 feet again. As to serious debate, you're in one right now to the extent that any such thing can happen on the internet. I'm not interested in your political references. Stop making them. I'm utterly indifferent to how many people agree with you.

As to your data on increases in carbon... I didn't say carbon wasn't increasing. I said that the rate of increase in the carbon doesn't match the increase in our emissions. If the time it stays in the atmosphere is 120 years as the IPCC says or around the 100 year range that wikipedia says... then we should see a closer match between emissions and atmospheric concentration. The discrepancy can only be explained by the biosphere sinking the carbon... possibly in the oceans if you like but still out of the air. And even the 30 year figure seems dubious to turn an exponential curve into a linear one.

As to Turley et al 2006, you're skipping over my request for a longer trend line on pH valu

The records were showing a cooling trend until they were recalibrate.

Some of the recalibration were obviously valid. Others are not as clear cut. For example, the orbital decay correction was entirely valid.

Regardless, even the corrected datasheets don't show warming if you look from 1998 to today
http://data.remss.com/msu/mont...

The whole "pause" thing which is argued started in 1998 and what caused people to start looking for where the heat went. You're saying into the ocean... because it isn't in the air.

70.0 - 82.5 is the global table. The other columns address different regions.

As to sea level... from church:
http://static-content.springer...
From the EPA
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
the actual graph:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

Do you see the problem?

The sea rise is linear. Our rate of emissions have not been exponential. Explain how the CO2 even correlates with that when the trend lines don't match?

The rate of change in emissions should be reflected in the rate of change in the environment assuming these systems respond quickly to these changes.

What we're seeing is LINEAR changes to exponential inputs. That implies the two variables don't even correlate much less one being caused by the other.

Also sort of interesting is this data on on the CO2 concentrations:
http://co2now.org/images/stori...

I find it interesting that basically was flat from 58-64... as you can see it ramps up going faster and faster towards the present.

Anyway, I'd like to see if we can get a single point emission of CO2... something large enough to be detectable globally for some period of time. I think a large volcanic erruption might create such a rise... and then I'd like to see how long it takes for the trend line to return to normal.

Your IPCC citation assumes 120 years. I don't understand how that is possible. We're emitting 1 percent of total atmospheric carbon every year and the rate of actual change in our environment is about 1/3rd of our emissions.

That implies that 2/3rds of our emissions are being taken out of the atmosphere and not re-emitted ANNUALLY. If 2/3rds of our emissions are being removed and not re-emitted annually... then what does that do to the life expectancy of emitted CO2?

The IPCC figure you're citing is 120 years... that seems obviously impossible. And your other figures you were cited were ranging from 100-30 years... which means we have range of 30 to 120 years just from your citations.

We're talking about the 6 foot tall man give or take 30 feet again. As to serious debate, you're in one right now to the extent that any such thing can happen on the internet. I'm not interested in your political references. Stop making them. I'm utterly indifferent to how many people agree with you.

As to your data on increases in carbon... I didn't say carbon wasn't increasing. I said that the rate of increase in the carbon doesn't match the increase in our emissions. If the time it stays in the atmosphere is 120 years as the IPCC says or around the 100 year range that wikipedia says... then we should see a closer match between emissions and atmospheric concentration. The discrepancy can only be explained by the biosphere sinking the carbon... possibly in the oceans if you like but still out of the air. And even the 30 year figure seems dubious to turn an exponential curve into a linear one.

As to Turley et al 2006, you're skipping over my request for a longer trend line on pH valu

As to the link, I think I cited the wrong link...

The new link does show corrections to a single satellite dataset - but there's nothing there even faintly close to the 0.6 degrees/year you were claiming. There are both positive and negative corrections that are a fraction of that, as they discover and account for factors like orbital decay.

There is your citation. Don't be stubborn or proud. It will undermine your intellectual credibility. Admit that and move on ;-)

As to zeta joules, I can't process that information... That means I can't audit it. And I don't like evidence that can't be audited.

Perhaps you should engage in further study, then - and until then, you'll have to accept that this evidence has been audited by expert reviewers, both before and after publication; by people who have enough experience in the field to understand what heat content is. This is how science works in every field.

That said, I don't understand your confusion. How would a temperature figure help here? Do you just want to see an overall degrees/year amount so you can decide subjectively if it's "significant" or not? It's rather more complicated than that.

18810.48 cubic km of water

Did I make another error here? Because these numbers are still no where near what they're talking about. That shows nearly five times the melting of that estimate. That's not even close.

That's because you're calculating from incomplete data. The 200 Gt/year ice loss figure I quoted was an estimate from a single paper that dealt only with the major ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. To get a more accurate figure for all the sea level rise inputs, you also have to factor in the melting glaciers everywhere else in the world. This is further complicated by the fact that ice melt in different areas can contribute quite differently to sea level rise (e.g. if it's floating, or if shrinking ice extent decreases albedo, resulting in warmer water and thus more moisture uptake in the atmosphere, to name a couple of factors). Then on top of this you have to include the effects of thermal expansion, which is around 25% of the total rise.

For a more detailed discussion, you could start with Meier et al 2007, which for example estimates that 60% of sea level rise actually comes from glacier melting, not including the two ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic.

you're going to have to show a graph that predates the heavy emission of fossil fuels.

Take a look at Figures 5 through 7 in Church et al 2011, that I already linked to earlier.

Obviously satellite data doesn't go back that far, which is what Shepherd was looking at, but we have fairly good logs of tidal data going back hundreds of years. These are confirmed by sedimentary cores going back to 1300.

That shows a much lower rate of rise... I think they're saying inches per century

This is only looking at ice melt in some specific areas. A direct quote:

we quantify mass-change trends in 19 continental areas that exhibit a dominant signal... the net effect was + (1.1 ± 0.6) mm/year.

This is consistent with our calculations above, as it includes areas beyond Greenland and the Antarctic. But it does not include all global sources of sea level rise; besides, we can measure that directly.

What's more, the rate of sea level rise has itself been increasing. Prior to 1900 it was close to 1mm/year, but in the las

What in the printer is going to be damaged by stray toner? If stray toner was an issue then laser printers wouldn't exist because no fuser can possibly hope to keep every particle charged and then melted without any falling off. As to the carcinogenicity of carbon black I'll quote the EPA

RTECS posts a 90-day intermittent inhalation "lowest published toxic concentration" of 50mg/m3 for 6 hours/day (TOXID9, as cited in RTECS) for respiratory tract changes in the rat,

If you think that refilling a toner cart is going to result in anywhere near that concentration of carbon black in your house for that period of time I have a bridge or two I wish to sell you. You're as paranoid as the folks that rail against CFL's due to the tiny amount of inorganic mercury they contain.

Ok, let's talk about that then. The first observation is that humanity has only studied the ozone hole for a few decades.

The US began banning the use of CFCs in 1978, and the Antacrtic ozone "hole" wasn't discovered until 1985. Yet somehow the science of CFC impact on atmospheric ozone was conclusive enough for policy makers to act *without* having discovered the cyclical depletion of ozone over the Antarctic. When the situation in the Antarctic was discovered, it certainly didn't weaken the well proven science on CFCs - if anything it strengthened it.

As a result, we aren't even sure it's unusual in extent or duration or if it would get worse in the presence of CFCs

Ozone is destroyed in the presence of CFCs. Period. To say we don't know if ozone depletion would get worse with CFCs present is to deny well researched and well understood chemical reactive processes.

(maybe we have underestimated the production and non-anthropogenic destruction of ozone, for example).

Speculating on *how* the science might be weak doesn't mean the science *is* weak. If you've got something other than your speculation to support your contention, let's see it.

We will never see how much worse off we are because we chose to impair our economy by banning CFCs. Second, we don't know how much refrigeration and air conditioning use has been curbed due to the higher costs of such equipment. But we do know that people routinely die in heat waves from choosing not to run air conditioning.

I could just as easily claim that banning CFCs *improved* the economy, that CFC replacements *lowered* the cost of refrigeration equipment, and that individuals' choice of running their AC has *nothing* to do with the type of refrigerant in their systems. If you want your claims to carry more weight than mine, CITE SOME AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES.

YOU are the one claiming CFC replacements are less efficient for refrigeration than CFCs.

This is common knowledge.

If it's common knowledge, then you should have no problem citing some authority. Right now, you're doing nothing more than asking us all to take your word for it. Over and over and over. You act as though we all recognize you as an expert in these matters. We don't.

CFC replacements are often more chemically reactive (the reactivity greatly reduces the half-life of the chemical in atmosphere, such as HCFCs) and sometimes more hazardous to human health.

FAIL. The greater reactivity of CFC replacements has nothing to do with their efficiency inside the closed loop of a refrigeration system.

Having said that, I do see that a formerly common refrigerant CFC, R-12 was significantly less efficient than it's replacements (such as R-134a).

So I guess the reason you neglected to link to your source on refrigerant efficiency was because the source refutes your argument. Well done!

I would try to get my heating and cooling costs as low as possible. Something similar to the Passivhaus standard. I might not be strict to the standard if the cost benefit becomes too extreme. I would probably also use some sort of geothermal system as well.

When the power goes out, it would be nice to have some sort of battery backup and/or renewable source of electricity on hand. I also like the EPA certified wood stoves that are now available, like those made by Quadra-fire. They're much more efficient than old fashioned stoves, and don't require electricity. However, their output is likely too high for a house that meets the Passivhaus standard.

What can I say, I work in the energy field. Saving energy is fun to me.

Numbers from the EPA seems to disagree. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

Numbers from the EPA might leads one to think the contrary, cf http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

The toxins are the problem, not the beads.

And the toxins don't get into some of these organisms without the beads, which is why the beads are a problem. You don't get to pretend the toxins don't exist. Also, the plastics themselves produce toxins when they decompose.

No, only a few toxins are, most notably PCB and mercury compounds.

These are the bioaccumulative compounds of primary concern, you are full of shit as there are plenty more.

I don't know the details of proposed and actual treatment mechanisms for non-pathogen problems (though here is an outline of the regulations surrounding levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, and zinc permitted in the US. Regulation of organic pollutants and hydrocarbon levels were considered; but dropped and don't currently apply); but my understanding is that 'composting' on a wastewater treatment scale is not much like what people do in their back gardens, and is generally done in relatively vast hardware far from the neighbors. If anything, doing it properly probably scales up better than it scales down(amateur composters frequently fail to achieve optimal temperatures, moisture, etc. That's merely inefficient if you are dealing with grass clippings; but potentially fatal if dealing with intestinal pathogens; professionals can afford expertise, instruments, and process control, if they care).

Unfortunately, once you get past metals and pathogens(metals are at least measured, pathogens are acknowledged as a threat), you get a whole lot of 'more research needed'(the usual answer on endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical persistence); or 'ooh, it's just a teensy bit, and we aren't required to model bioaccumulation from populations exposed to higher levels of contaminants in food producing biosolids higher in contaminants, which produce more contaminated food, and so forth..'(this is why dioxins, dibenzofurans, and similar known-nasty carbon/chlorine creations aren't covered by final regulations).

In the long run, we've obviously survived exposure to this planet, trace metals and all; and more than a few unpleasant chemicals, so I'd hope that the problems can be worked out; but the financial pressure from people who just don't want to deal with the cost of incineration or landfilling has led to some rather questionable decisions. You tell someone that if they spread the stuff over a large enough area, they get to call it 'soil treatment'; but if they bury it all in one place they need to abide by standards for non-permeable landfill construction to keep the contaminants from leaching out, you create a deeply perverse incentive.

Better separation of industrial sources is an obvious first step(it's always more expensive to un-mix things after the fact than it is to keep them separate); but I get a lot of 'more research needed' when it comes to household disposal and drug excretion.

On the bright side, we don't use pig toilets anymore! So there is that.

Ah, sharing the science of your gut feelings is it? Very rigorous. Your gut doesn't beat scientific models which make predictions which have so far agreed with the data (and are also tested by making sure they can predict past changes in the climate too). http://arstechnica.com/science... http://arstechnica.com/science...

" Oh by the way, more CO2, more for plants to breath, better crops."
This is hopelessly naive. Yes, crops can photosynthesise more, but there are other implications on crops and the environment more generally. Specifically, nutrient levels are reduced in tests:
"Effects on human nutrition are likely as well. In FACE experiments, protein concentrations in grains of wheat, rice and barley, and in potato tubers, are decreased by 5â"14% under elevated CO2 (Taub et al. 2008). Crop concentrations of nutritionally important minerals including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus may also be decreased under elevated CO2 (Loladze 2002; Taub & Wang 2008)."
http://www.nature.com/scitable...
so it's a mixed picture. But that isn't the real issue with crops. Some regions may have gains in production, but a larger share will lose production: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... pg 488

A major issue for crops is that an increasing frequency of droughts etc is having and will have an increasingly major impact on food supplies:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm...
and those areas affected by droughts will be hit even more (particularly Africa) http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... . Of course, this is still one narrow area of the impacts from climate change.

"We WANT the greenhouse effect."
The greenhouse effect is the warming that follows an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. You managed to balls that up and confuse it with the increase in CO2.

Ah, sharing the science of your gut feelings is it? Very rigorous. Your gut doesn't beat scientific models which make predictions which have so far agreed with the data (and are also tested by making sure they can predict past changes in the climate too). http://arstechnica.com/science... http://arstechnica.com/science...

" Oh by the way, more CO2, more for plants to breath, better crops."
This is hopelessly naive. Yes, crops can photosynthesise more, but there are other implications on crops and the environment more generally. Specifically, nutrient levels are reduced in tests:
"Effects on human nutrition are likely as well. In FACE experiments, protein concentrations in grains of wheat, rice and barley, and in potato tubers, are decreased by 5â"14% under elevated CO2 (Taub et al. 2008). Crop concentrations of nutritionally important minerals including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus may also be decreased under elevated CO2 (Loladze 2002; Taub & Wang 2008)."
http://www.nature.com/scitable...
so it's a mixed picture. But that isn't the real issue with crops. Some regions may have gains in production, but a larger share will lose production: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... pg 488

A major issue for crops is that an increasing frequency of droughts etc is having and will have an increasingly major impact on food supplies:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm...
and those areas affected by droughts will be hit even more (particularly Africa) http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... . Of course, this is still one narrow area of the impacts from climate change.

"We WANT the greenhouse effect."
The greenhouse effect is the warming that follows an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. You managed to balls that up and confuse it with the increase in CO2.

Another reason the feds may be lowering the fluoride standard is that we're getting more in our food recently. In 2004 and 2005, EPA registered sulfuryl fluoride for control of insect pests in harvested foods such as cereal grains, dried fruits, nuts, cocoa beans, etc. Sulfuryl fluoride breaks down to fluoride when it is applied and can leave fluoride residues on treated food. More info here: http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/....

yet no one ever correlates the increase to deforestation of rain forests.

They do. Deforestation is a well known part of the CO2 problem. But fossil fuels are a bigger part.

True, and here is your citation..

Ph level is a sliding scale with acid on one side and alkaline on the other. If Ocean water is moves from alkaline to neutral to below 7 on the scale, which is what tehy are saying is/will happen, then it is becoming acidic. It is currently at an 8.1 out of a 14 point scale.

They are saying it, but is it true. The EPA's website only shows data from about 1985, at the earliest, but PH has been measured fairly accurately since the mid-19th century. And it doesn't match the extrapolated history.

I'm sorry you're so stubborn, ignorant, and nationalistic to believe that a mere 1% of the ash generated from burning coal couldn't possibly escape into the atmosphere in the Fatherland. Unless you've got alien-level technology, your German scrubbers are bound by the same physics as those in the US - ~99% efficient is the maximum you can get.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/t... - 99% efficient

http://www.britannica.com/EBch... - 90% - 99% efficient

http://www.gdnash.com/rocktron... = 99% efficient

Table 3 in this document directly compares particulate matter emission regulations in the US and Germany - as you can see, the average PM emissions for German plants is 50 mg/Nm^3 as opposed to 18.3 mg/Nm^3 for all new large plants in the US as mentioned in this document.

It's certainly not a 'hoax'. Coal contains (to varying degrees) all of these pollutants.

Coal plants do often have filters these days, but always:

http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerp...

the emissions are significant, and not everything gets filtered out.

Also the filtering is expensive and the carbon dioxide that coal emits is becoming a *massive* problem. Although carbon capture has been trialled, it makes coal non competitive with other technologies.

3. Eat fish

WHOA BRAKES!!!

That one needs some expansion unless you want mercury poisoning. Eat more freshwater fish, or fish known to be low in mercury content. Mercury poisoning is on the rise in many countries because of the rise in people eating "healthier" by eating more fish.

EPA Mercury and Fish/Shellfish page

1) Modern diesel engines burn cleaner than gasoline.

2) Modern wood-stoves can produce 1/10th the emissions of your granddad's outdoor wood boiler.

I don't know about agriculture as a source of air pollution, though I know the runoff causes massive damage to aquatic ecosystems.

The bigger problem here, we just have too damned many humans. Not too many cars, not too many woodstoves, not fuel-X vs fuel-Y, not farming-method-P vs farming-method-Q. We don't need emissions controls (well, we do, but I consider that secondart); we need population controls.

Nothing short of that will "fix" our pollution problem, our energy needs, our water needs, our space needs. Our planet just can't handle the size of our species.

The EPA has a page on the very subject, claiming that green roofs not only help with cooling, but also heating, since they act as insulators. They also reduce pollutants in the air and combat the heat island effect present in many large cities. I am not aware of many negatives for them, aside from the maintenance required for the more elaborate ones.

the EPA can worry about the environment, leave NASA to what NASA is supposed to do.

The EPA is a regulatory agency, not a science agency. It's not the EPA's job to conduct the research on earth.

http://www2.epa.gov/research

Tell you what, I'll pass their phone number along to you so you can set them straight.

Aeronautics occur within the earths atmosphere. To not study it is completely insane.

"Aeronautics" != "[Enviroment|Climate|Earth Science]".
 

The EPA is a regulatory body.

One that has a considerable research arm.

I'm with the grandparent - NASA should get out of the earth science business (and probably astronomy, and energy efficient houses, and all the pies the bureaucrat have stuck their hands in), leave that to more appropriate agencies.

Accusations of this were made several times and denied but someone hacked into the email servers and released a bunch of email showing them discussing withholding the information. Now it is said that the original raw data does not exist any more nor does the methods and processes used to correct irregularities of it.

Interesting, but the first link shows that CRU scientists would be lousy lawyers, and the second is unrelated to CRU completely. And now for a dose of facts about the CRU affair:

The British House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee investigated the matter and concluded: "Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that 'global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity'."

The Independent Climate Change Email Review team investigated the matter and concluded: "On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

Lord Oxburgh’s independent panel investigated the matter and found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever"

The US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the matter and stated that they "reviewed every e-mail and found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets. Four other independent reviews came to similar conclusions."

And so on and so on. Should I continue? More or less, the worst thing anyone in possession of facts has to say about the CRU scientists is that they suck at communicating. Bummer, but not an uncommon one.

Now, I know you are a global warming pusher

No, I'm not a global warming pusher, CO2 is a global warming pusher. I have no interest in contributing to global warming.

and have your own beliefs but this is not about you in the slightest.

No, it isn't. It's about you and presumably some other people apparently being unable to grasp basic principles of reasoning. Even if if you found out evidence of gross academic misconduct having happened within CRU (which didn't happen), it still wouldn't prove anything about global warming (or the lack of it). If you find flaws in a study saying "P", it doesn't mean you've proven "not P". All you have at that moment is an empty set of proven claims. And if you have ten independent studies of global warming, all of them saying the Earth is warming, every study having independent data, research, and people involved, and one of the people or teams is found to have made anything invalidating that one study - anything from flawed methodology through measurement errors to even outright scientific fraud, it demonstrates nothing about those other studies. All it demonstrates is that from the one flawed study in question, no conclusion can be made about the subject in either direction. Arguing otherwise would be an argument from fallacy, which is a formal fallacy in its own right.

One gram is enough to make 3,000,000 smoke detectors.It not only doesn't exceed licensing requirements, you're allowed to throw smoke detectors in the regular trash.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates the radioactive materials in smoke detectors. Because the amount of americium in these devices is so small, NRC's regulations exempt individuals purchasing smoke detectors from licensing requirements including those related to disposal of radioactive materials. You can dispose of single, household smoke detectors as ordinary trash.

And if you're going to use the Americium as a radiation source, you don't have to remove it from the material it's electroplated to.

And if you think that little bit of Uranium ore is so dangerous in theat toy. let's talk about those nice granite countertops and kitchen islands.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/t...

And that's a pretty hedged site - don't want to upset the Real Estate and Construction industry. They don't note the mining, cutting and polishing of the granite.

If using less materials would be considered "green", then doing so by electroplating would be considered "red"... as in, rhymes with dead... getting rid of heavy metals, nasty solvents, and cyanide can also drive up costs.
http://www.epa.gov/oaqps001/community/details/electroplating_addl_info.html

According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, the vast majority of farms in this country (87%) are owned and operated by individuals or families. The next largest category of ownership is partnerships (8%). The "Corporate" farms account for only 4% of U.S. farms and 1 percent are owned by other-cooperative, estates or trusts etc. However, the term "family farm" does not necessarily equate with "small farm"; nor does a "corporate farm" necessarily mean a large-scale operation owned and operated by a multi-national corporation. Many of the country's largest agricultural enterprises are family owned. Likewise, many farm families have formed modest-sized corporations to take advantage of legal and accounting benefits of that type of business enterprise.

http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag...

Apparently the CDC only has data from 11 States, and Mississippi isn't one of them. Other groups have more data available, but so far the best compilation I've found is at some anti-vax site - http://vaxtruth.org/2012/04/wh... Their chart has Mississippi ranked 44th for autism rates, West Virginia is 39th.

And yeah, that does make the autism argument look real dumb. Especially when you look at the top 3 States for autism - Minnesota, Maine and Oregon; which interestingly enough also have some of the highest rates of non-vaccination.

Those are all states where houses commonly have basements, and they are in the hottest zones for radon exposure. Those are all states where a large number of people get their water from wells, and arsenic in the groundwater is a problem. The Radium in groundwater map is tilted towards those 3 states too. When I was a kid in Maine, we drank untreated well water and played in the basement nearly every day.

I think it makes a lot more sense to look at connections between long-term exposure to known toxins and autism.

Well, a quick Google search shows you wrong - there is well-documented research into the amount of radioactivity in coal plant emissions. As an example, USGS: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
EPA: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/coalandcoalash.html
and others.

Is it an issue? The released radioactivity from a coal plant is up to 100 times that of a nuclear power plant - but those emissions are so ludicrously low that you can treat it as (100 * 0) = 0. There really isn't a health issue from the emissions.

Mercury, Sulfur, Nitrogen, sure - Radioactivity, not so much.

The US greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to about 6 billion metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Each tree you plant offsets about 1 metric ton of CO2 over its lifetime, so that means we need to plant 6 billion trees every year.

If we figure that the trees would be planted at an average stand density of 200 per acre, that comes to 30 million acres of new forest that we'd have to plant every year, or 47,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, this means covering an area the size of Pennsylvania with new forest every year.

On another note: Some people point to algae or plankton. Globally, land plants remove 45-68 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year, compared to 45-50 billion tonnes removed by phytoplankton, so it's not true that plankton remove more carbon than land plants.

Agreed that "greenies" aren't the only ones making billions off of CO2 hysteria -- see the Koch brothers in the article below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

but there are lots of people seeking to make money in the carbon and carbon trading game, and IIRC Gore is indeed one of them. A description of the billions at play already can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

where the number given is "60 billion dollars" which certainly counts as "billions" in any marketplace where people make a margin on all trades. The bulk of the people making money of of CO2 hysteria are, however, not Greenpeace volunteers or the like -- they are the same extremely wealthy individuals and companies who both "run civilization" and incidentally own the big energy companies worldwide. If you looked at where directly invested money intended to combat CO_2 goes (e.g. research money) a substantial fraction goes directly to the energy industry in the form of research grants, another substantial fraction goes to the energy industry in the form of subsidies. But the real payoff for the big carbon-based energy companies is, paradoxically, in the artificial inflation of carbon based energy costs to the consumer. Again, power companies make marginal profits, generally at what amounts to a fixed (publicly regulated) margin. The only way for them to increase profits at fixed production is to raise prices. The only way to raise prices in a world where coal is plentiful and cheap is to create an artificial scarcity, which has the added benefit of stretching out the lifetime of profitability of the resource to the owner. I would argue -- although it is difficult to put specific numbers to this since it is difficult to see just what fraction of the cost of a kilowatt-hour is directly attributable to the global warming hysteria, and because the media is strangely reluctant to follow the money (perhaps because they are predominantly owned by the same wealthy people, perhaps because they profit from things that rouse strong feelings, like an impending global catastrophe) -- that the increased marginal profits to the global energy industry due to catastrophe-driven price increases dwarfs all other money being made in association with the hysteria and is the great invisible elephant in the debate.

As Br'er Rabbit once said, "Don't through me into that briar patch, oh please no no no..."

I am, however, curious as to why you'd ask for citations and then refer to the billions being made off of "denying" climate change by (specifically) two large oil companies. Surely you understand that oil companies are nearly irrelevant to global warming, a small fraction (around 13%) of greenhouse emissions relative to coal fired electrical plants, industrial energy production, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

and

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

The oil companies are perfectly happy to skim billions off of the artificial renewables industry that has been created by the hysteria, and until this year have been both investing and making billions from it. But the bottom has apparently fallen out of this:

http://www.eenews.net/stories/...

very likely driven by the increased supply of oil and gasoline that is reflected in oil prices dropping by nearly 1/3 this year. They are suffering far more from a SURPLUS of oil that leads to low prices and hence a serious hit on their profits than they ever suffered from global warming hysteria in a world where demand is nearly copmletely inelastic and generally growing. It also appears that the profitability of sustainables is taking a (in my op

Parent's is a very thoughtful post. I'll just add some figures. The following represents regulations for NOX emissions by new cars in grams per mile.
1975: 3.1
1977: 2.0
1981: 1.0
1994: 0.6
1999: 0.3
2004-2009: 0.07

What I can't find is, what were typical emissions prior to the EPA - i.e., prior to 1970. Clearly the 1975 figure of 3.1 already represents a reduction; likely a significant one.

Essentially all of the pickup was in place by 1999. Everything since then has been an exhibition of EPA masturbation. It's become nothing but a fetish. This is nationally; the extra stringent California regulations are just ludicrous. It's beyond masturbation.

Social Security has paid out all benefits owed since its inception with an overhead of less than 3%.

The infamous loan program under which Solyndra failed is expected to profit taxpayers by $5 billion over its lifetime.

The Clean Air Act has produced far more benefits than costs. This page has some links. The Second Prospective Study 1990-2020 estimates $65 billion in costs for $2 trillion in benefits.

Medicare is well liked by most of its recipients and has very low overhead compared to private insurance.

Federally sponsored research in the ARPA lead to the basic infrastructure of of the internet. In general federal support of scientific and engineering has produced far more benefits than it has cost us.

Social Security has paid out all benefits owed since its inception with an overhead of less than 3%.

The infamous loan program under which Solyndra failed is expected to profit taxpayers by $5 billion over its lifetime.

The Clean Air Act has produced far more benefits than costs. This page has some links. The Second Prospective Study 1990-2020 estimates $65 billion in costs for $2 trillion in benefits.

Medicare is well liked by most of its recipients and has very low overhead compared to private insurance.

Federally sponsored research in the ARPA lead to the basic infrastructure of of the internet. In general federal support of scientific and engineering has produced far more benefits than it has cost us.

You are very confused. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

Just because we did not ratify it, does not mean that we did not actually honor it.

Right.

And yet, America has met the terms of the Kyoto agreement.

Wrong. Seriously, why do you think that?
Wikipedia:

The initial aim was for industrialized countries to stabilize their emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000.

Our emissions have gone up since then. We're now higher than our 1990 levels. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Crop yields down. Yes, seriously.

All you've shown is that we're growing more corn - which should be no surprise to anyone given how it's used in all our first-world processed junk food, and now we're even using it to fuel our cars. And the US has been subsidizing the hell out of it.

Suggesting that global warming could be a net positive for global crop yields flies in the face of all research to date:

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

This is one of the biggest problems global warming is bringing with it, I don't know how you'd missed it.

If this was reported immediately, the sewerage plant could increase their chlorine injection to far higher levels than usual. Chlorine will destroy polio virus. Sewerage plants usually chlorinate at a modest level to kill bacteria, but in an emergency like this, they can easily crank the levels way up. Sewerage plants are constantly adjusting their systems depending on what's coming in.

If the safety people at GlaxoSmithKlein, or whoever this was reported to, called the plant operator at the sewer plant, there would have been immediate agreement to crank up chlorination levels, and sampling would have been started at the sewerage plant. The reports, which indicate after the fact analysis, indicate that didn't happen.

http://www.epa.gov/otaq/cafr.h... You have no idea what you are talking about. Read and understand the above and then respond.

It's the EPA's own recommended cleanup procedure that states this. Not only that, anything that gets the dust on it, needs to be tossed out, so if you have one in a fan over your bed, and it breaks, you are *supposed* to bag all of your bedding and pillow up and toss it in the garbage. EPA's words, not mine. They even go so far as to say call a HazMat cleanup professional at one point in their cleanup procedure for CFL's.

http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleani...

"Sharply reduced" is not accurate. You can find year-on-year declines but the trend is up -- and expected to get worse. source (Scroll down for data).

A "Carbon Tax" is not the way to solve the problems

Pigovian taxes are the best way to deal with externalized costs within a free market system. The real question is what price should the tax be set at? Choosing an appropriate discount rate makes a large difference in the price to be set. A logical rate would be one that mimics the growth of the economy, so the real GDP growth rate seems suitable, perhaps a trailing 20year average. Given that information at the chart provided by the EPA http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... we're probably looking at a reasonable price of around $61 per ton.

But the majority of the worlds pollution comes from Power plants and Shipping.

Bullshit. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... Transport accounts for 13% and energy accounts for 26% of global carbon emissions. Even if you managed to eliminate all of those, it would only slow down climate change a little.

There are only a few dozen huge container ships in the world that are producing more pollution than all the cars combine.

Bullshit too. http://www.statista.com/statis...

We could build more nuclear power plants while we wait for Solar to mature.

Nuclear power plants aren't the answer; they are hugely expensive, there is only limited fuel available, and we have no political solution to the waste disposal problem. And solar won't "mature" if the first thing you do is dampen down the world economy through emission restrictions.

We can do something about it.

Why won't anybody think of the children! It would be totally ineffective, it would wreck the world economy, it would hurt people far more than climate change itself, but at least we would feel like we are doing something!

The most effective way of getting emissions to go down is for government to stay out of the way. Fossil fuels are costly and people are highly motivated to use less of it already. If you make it harder for people to ship solar cells, or buy them, or make silicon, or whatever, solar cells will "mature" more slowly or stop maturing at all.

To really reduce emissions we need nuclear power. Converting CO2 heavy transport to using electricity generated by CO2 heavy coal wont do any good:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

So I did some research, natural gas is 26% of total energy production but the methane leaked through use is roughly 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions, so replacing all coal and petroleum with methane would only result in an ~70% reduction in total greenhouse gas effects, using propane from carbon neutral sources would be closer to 98%.