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Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses
Cally writes in: "The BBC reports that the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a 200m thick ice floe covering 3,250 sq km, has disintegrated. This is terrible news. The widely respected British Antarctic Survey are quoted as saying "We knew what was left would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering[...] [It is hard] to believe that 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." As a Greenpeace member who's been following the debate for over a decade, it's hard not to feel aggrieved at those with their own agenda who have pushed the theory that global climate change isn't happening. Risk = probability x consequence..." The big iceberg is a separate event.
Here is a mirror.
Alan Thicke's Journal
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In that case, we'll destroy 500 million billion tonnes!
Would it happen as fast? Probably not, but the fact is that the earth will change if we do anything or not.
Free Mac Mini
Umm... so where is your linkage?
Not saying I'm on any side. It's just if you're gonna play URL poker you gotta ante up.
The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated -- massively. Only in the past thousand years or so has the temperature leveled out at a rather warm plateau. But if you look at a statistical chart of the earth's history over the past few million years you'll see wide temperature swings that have absolutely nothing at all to do with humanities actions or inaction.
I know it's nice to think we've become so powerful we can disintigrate millions of billions of tons of ice just by driving to the quick-e-mart, but in reality it's probably nothing more than the sun outputting a little more energy than normal.
A PR comapny if ever there was onr. Greenpeace's only motivation is the continuation of itself.
A few years ago they created a huge amountof havoc over plans to decommision an oil platform. They cited the huge environmental damage caused by the radioactivity, without actually considering that this was natural radioactivity. The net result of the media misinformation was that the platform had to be dismantled at great cost, and actually caused considerably more pollution, and took up a great deal of landfill spcae when otherwise it would have served as a habitat for lots of rare marine life.
And I get a bit fed up of them giving me the hard sell for donations. I would have much more of an urge to do this if their salepeople weren't on commision.
Given that we are constantly learning about various cycles in global climate, some of which seem to span over thousands of years ( E.g. NASA: The Sun-Weather connection), you can't possibly claim for certain that any temperature fluctuations over the past 10, 20 or 50 years are due exlusively to our behaviour.
I'm not against cleaning up the earth, I just think that global warming isn't a good argument.
For comparison, how much water is in Lake Titicaca? About 9 trillion kg. Over a thousand times as much. And how much would global sea levels rise if Titicaca drained into the ocean? Negligible.
It seems as though Slashdot has expanded from making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted claims about technology and privacy to making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted and non-mathematical claims about the environment.
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Rather than a link, I'll just post a quote from the BBC article linked above:
However, the picture generally in Antarctica is a complicated one with temperatures in the interior actually falling over the same period.
Evil is the money of root.
I agree with you on nuclear power. But the US outputs eight times the CO2 per capita versus China. Furthermore, Chinese CO2 production is falling while US production is growing.
Blasting massive amounts of pollution into the atmosphere seems like a very bad idea nevertheless. Remember acid rain? Smog? I do, even though I haven't been in a smog filled city for decades. It's not only about saving the environment for the sake of saving the environment. It's a quality of life question.
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
Absolutely. Kyoto is flawed because it is based on present-pollution levels, not delta-p (the rate of increase of pollution). The Western nations emit a lot of CO2, but are addressing this, slowly but surely. Nations like China, India and Brazil don't emit as much CO2 right now but their rate of increase is much higher.
If the Kyoto treaty is to be meaningful it must bind every industrialized nation, otherwise it will merely encourage "pollution arbitrage" - i.e. moving polluting industries offshore to exempt nations.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
OK, serious question. Uranium is a mineral, it's found in the Earth. It's naturally occuring. And when it is used in a reactor, it's still uranium afterwards. Why is burying it back in the ground from whence it came a problem? (At least until our space-launch tech is mature enough that it can be dropped into the sun at negligible risk).
From what I understand, Man produces about 1% of all of the planets cloro-floro carbons (greenhouse gases). If we cut production completely, we would end up with a negligible effect.
In addition to that, we produce carbon dioxide thru processes like, say, breathing. Carbon dioxide is what plants breathe with. More C02 means more plants! Oh no!!!
Finally, who caused the last Ice Age? But more to the point, who raised the global temperature enough to get us out of the Ice Age? Actually, nobody knows for sure, but I highly doubt it was because the cave-men had too many campfires.
Perhaps we can change the global temperature to some small degree (no pun intended), but the natural processes that take place on the earth (volcanoes, most notably) do much more to raise the global temperature than Man could ever hope to achieve.
Yup, it sucks, but we're pretty much at the mercy of our planet. Not the other way around.
People do realize that for 6 months (during the fall and winter in the northern hemisphere), it is continously daylight in Antartica, right? Of course the ice cap there is going to shrink.
Last summer, when it was dark there, it was reported that the ice cap expanded, so what is the big deal?
I'll bet you in 6 months, Greenpeace will be saying the northern polar ice cap is melting too.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
The real problem is all the salt in the ocean, it is eventually gonna melt all the ice. We need to get rid of it NOW. It is probably caused by the road commision spreading so much in the winter --to melt the ice on the road, which then drains off into the creeks and streams, then to the rivers and then the ocean, making it salty! Stop using salt to melt road ice, and things in the ocean will stop melting.
Will these two phenomenon affect sea water salinity? I read recently that decreased salinity is a serious threat to the sub ocean currents that keep our global climate stable. Does anyone have a link that discusses the point?
Can I bum a sig?
Well. Yes.
The problem is that US has something like 500:1 vehicles comared to thos poorer countries.
And US' steel industry (single most pollutive in terms of C2O) is badly b0rked. And Bush' goverment just went on to support it.
And in Finland our goverment has insane (like 150%) taxes on new vehicles, so most (75%) people drive in damn non-catalyzator cars, polluting just more.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
Your post is typical of the 'skepticism by convience' found so often in this debate..
Here are some resources:
BBC Report
EPA website on global warming
Union of concerned scientists.
btw, you forgot to post your evidence.. (typical skeptic evidence: We don't know for 10000000000% sure, so this must be environmentalist propoganda"
-D
p.s. Ok, I'll say It. You, are a mo-ron.
It always ticks me off that the Greenpeace people oppose anything that creates greenhouse gasses while at the same time protesting nuclear power which is the only real way to get free of greenhouse gas emmisions. That is unless we decide to go back into the stone age as many of them suggest. If they weren't such jackasses about the nuclear power situation public opinion might be much different and greenhouse emmission might be significantly less.
The alternative power that they keep on trying to push is a myth. When you look at actual output, it is trivial to any real source. You aren't going to run a 60 MWe silicon refining plant in the northwest with solar panels and windmills. It isn't going to happen. Not unless the price is increased 10-fold. Sure you can power your house as they always point out. But your house is 2 KW load. Industry takes up far more power than housing.
The only way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses is to stop burning coal and gas. Thats it. And it has to be done now instead of 30 years from now when the alternative power myth becomes useful (probably more like 50).
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
John Daly's massive clearinghouse, Still Waiting for Greenhouse
An article by MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen.
There's lots more, but others might want to play.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Yeah, but the point is that in those countries perhaps one out of 5000 people has a car, while the US has probably more cars than people. Fact is, the US is the world's biggest polluter and energy waster by a LARGE margin.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Nice BBC chart...
and I bet that if you followed that curve all the way back/down, you'd find a ice-age at the beginning of it...
I don't dispute the EVIDENCE that the world is getting warmer.
What I am NOT convinced of is that it's not exactly what's supposed to happen.
We STILL don't know EXACTLY what happened to the dinosaurs. Could it be possible that this thermal cycle is NORMAL for this planet in that, like a person with a virus, their tempurature rises to try to rid itself of the virus?
Who ever said it's SUPPOSED to last forever?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
If you're unsure where you stand on the issue of global warming, you might want to look at the following two graphs. The first shows that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising. There is no real question that this is much human induced. At the same time, global temperatures are also dramatically rising. Here the extent of human influence is more debatable. It is possible that an apparent cause (rising CO2) and an apparent effect (rising temperatures) are both happening independently but, coincidentally, at the same time. And, also at the same time, there is some other, unknown force causing the entire planet to heat. It truly is possible. But I wouldn't personally bet the world on that.
The St Roch, commanded by Sergeant Larsen, needed 28 months to complete its first traverse of the NW passage, during WW2. (Basically defending the Canadian Arctic from our insensitive American allies.) The recreation of its voyage, in 2000, encountered clear sailing in waters that had been choked with ice sixty years earlier, providing very clear evidence of global warming.
Where you're completely wrong is with regards to carbon dioxide emissions, the primary vehicular contributor to global warming. CO2 emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption (no pollution control gear can make the CO2 go away), and the US market chooses larger and thirstier vehicles than every other significant market. No matter how much emissions gear you have on your Chevy Suburban, it's still a fuel-sucking greenhouse gas factory.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
According to most scientistics, the retreat in the West Antarctic ice sheet has been occuring for 10,000 years.
Also on BBC, Ice thickens in West Antarctica
Sun is hotter, but shrinking (mass energy conversion, you know).
Maybe we should realize that perhaps some of the global warming hype is just hype. Everytime there is a heat wave on the news coasts, there a new round of global warming stories. Normal climate variability is large, and modern winters are not the warmest ever (or even in modern history). Check out Minnesota 1877. The observed long-term warming trend since 1900 is not unusual in terms of climate history.
BTW, risk of Kyoto protocol is followed in 100% of the expected cost, because it is certain damage to world economy.
Yeah, that sounds bad, until you realize that the per capita GDP of the US is ten times the per capita GDP of China. So if we produce ten times more stuff, but only eight times as much CO2, it really sounds to me like we are remarkably efficient when compared to the Chinese.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I agree with you on the nuclear issue, but the rest is bullshit. Using poor, overpopulated, sometimes highly corrupted and dictatorial nations (China) as an excuse for not doing anything is hypocritical and stupid.
Looking to Greenpeace for facts is like looking to Salon for the same.
The issue that arises is, do any of the doomsayers really know what it means for this large chunk of ice to separate from the main flow? We just don't have enough historical data to honestly say what effect it will truly have. As proved countless times, mother nature does more damage to computer models than those same models predict we do to her.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The trends have been measured over several thousand years using ice cores and sediment analysis.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Using the figures you quote (I haven't read the article yet, and I don't know the density of ice)
The amount is ~2.16e14 kg or 216 million billion kg (US billion)
I'm guessing you either divided by the density when you should have multiplied, or you forgot that 1 Km sq = 1,000,000 m sq not 1,000 m sq
Scientific data -- and not anecdotal stories -- does suggest a warming trend for the Earth. I'm quite convinced that "global warming" is, indeed, happening -- at least in the short term.
However: We don't know if global warming is a long-term event, or if humanity is the sole (or even most important cause) of any changes in climate. Consider, for example, ice core evidence from Greenland, which shows how the Earth's climate has undergone radical short-term changes, long before humans were a factor. NASA recently noted changes in the Sun's output. Over the last 10,000 years the global climate has significantly warmed, and I don't see how we can make absolute statements based on a few years (maybe a century) of research.
I'm not in favor of pumping our atmopshere full of chemicals and garbage, regardless of global warming. I am in favor of rational, scientific debate, as opposed to the scare-mongering going on at both ends of the political spectrum.
All about me
We might need it someday. What for? I don't know. The ancient Greeks couldn't see much use for that nasty black tar stuff.
Best Slashdot Co
And this quote:
CDIAC responds to data and information requests from users from all over the world who are concerned with the greenhouse effect and global climate change.
The greenhouse effect and global climate change due to it are a theory. Read this center's About and Philosophy sections and you'll see they've already made the assumption that the theory is real.
That's not science. That's dogma.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Not to say that Global Warming does not exist. Maybe it does maybe it does not. But does it matter?
Seriously, look at history. About 1000 years ago Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada was capable of growing grape wines. That must have indicated that the entire area was very warm. But yet people survived and proposered. After that period the world went into a very mini ice age with the peak being around 1400's. Since then the world has been warming up.
My point is that maybe the world is warming up. BUT SO WHAT!!! Humans adapt and we will survive. It is all part of the cycle of the planet.
What we should really be concerned about is that we are becoming inflexible in dealing with change. And that can cause our demise!!!!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Exactly...
There is now even evidence that the planet at one time was a huge chunk of ice. It seemed like a crazy idea at first, but evidence is mounting. But notice even after the chunk of ice ordeal the planet is still around?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The article quite clearly says 500 million billion tonnes.
For a real understanding of why, government researchers, EPA, NOAA, NASA, IPCC and most peer reviewed reports and data on global warming can't be trusted read:
Satanic Gases
The author also debunks the myth that global warming would actually harm us. It is a little dated, but still a great read. Very technical.
Follow it up by reading some of Micheal's other recent articles:
2002 where he shows that even some of the original governemnt scienists are coming around.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Global warming, whether caused by humans or not, is nothing to scoff at, either. Many people, particularly in third world nations, live on the coastline, in areas that would (and will) be innundated if and when a higher global temperature causes ocean levels to rise. This is a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of many people. People in the third world can't simply move and buy another house, nor can they afford to maintain a system of dikes like those of the Netherlands. Whether or not humans caused global warming, it exists, as the collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf indicates, and it is a threat.
In addition, it's true that a certain amount of melting, calving of icebergs, and such occurs with the change of seasons in Antartica. Thank you, whoever noted that sun causes ice to melt, for stating the obvious. But the Larsen Shelf was not noted for being susceptible to such seasonal oscillations - indeed, it was incredibly stable, and old. Ice sheets that are 200 meters thick and more than 3000 square miles big don't form or melt overnight. The instability which caused the collapse was a relatively recent development. That such a stable chunk of the Antarctican ice should disintegrate is of great concern.
Finally, while man may not have created global warming, our industrial revolution has certainly contributed. A previous poster listed these graphs. A temperature spike and carbon dioxide spike, coinciding with the industrial revolution, are clearly visible. We have contributed to global warming. Sure, we can't stop industry, and sure, we don't have effective alternative energy sources. But we can adopt less wasteful methods of doing things, and cleaner manufacturing processes. And if we never start seriously investigating alternative energy sources, we will certainly never make any progress in that realm. So don't dismiss global warming as a liberal joke, or a tool for Greenpeace. Perhaps humans didn't create it, but the Larsen Shelf's collapse joins a growing bank of data suggesting that warming does exist, and that humans have contributed to some extent. We should be concerned, because this does affect us, and our future.
Floating objects float because they displace their mass. The ice shelf extends from land and is in fact floating. When it breaks off and floats away, it neither raises or lowers the water level. As it melts, it becomes more dense taking up less volume than the ice did. (ice is less dense than water which is why it floats instead of sinking) If an iceburg were coated underneath with some kind of container, the entire melted iceburg would fit in the container except a small amount. This is due to the ocean being denser than fresh water and a smaller volume of seawater would is displaced. (A smaller volume of sea water is displaced by an object than the same object floating in fresh water. The floating object displaces it's mass in both cases.)
The truth shall set you free!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't global warming talking about something on the order of a tenth of a degree every decade? Soo... The Industrial revolution was late 19th century, but we'll assume we've been abusing the atmosphere since the early 19th century. That's 2 centuries. That's 2 degrees. 2 degrees have melted this ice floe? What are you smoking? I'm not saying that because it's a slow speed of warming that we can continue to abuse the planet, but I am, however, saying that it's fairly unlikely that global warming is the monster who destroyed this ice floe, but rather that it was a natural part of the earth's ever changing environment. Maybe it broke up a year or two earlier than it would have, but two degrees isn't going to dissolve 500 million tonnes of ice in the span of a month.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I wonder how many scientist would get funding if they found out everything was just fine. Scientist have a knack for finding exactly what they are looking for and they are now looking for higher temps.
Not only that, but it the temperatures that are rising are at ground stations. The satellite temperature measurements diverge significantly and show no global warming. Considering urban sprawl, badly maintained sites, and a general bias for error to show up on the warming end are associated with the ground stations, not the satellite data, it's predictable that those with an agenda are sticking to the less accurate ground data to prove their fear mongering.
The US is not the biggest waster of energy. On a per capita basis the US's neighbor to the North beats everyone (Canada).
I know I live in Quebec and to us energy is nothing to gripe about. We have our own well and heat our houses with electricity (Cheap). But let me tell you it is nice to have a warm home and water left, right and to the center...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Yes, I believe the earth's climate changes all the time. We had an ice age that proved it. We also have had warmer times. We are somewhere in the middle. Now the ozone layer fluctuating so much depending on our environmental laws shows that sometimes we can slow or speed these climate changes up.
Now gas and oil energy is of course bad in the long run. But who here thinks we are strong enough to actually kill our world in the next 50 years? Seems pretty arrogent to me. And if you think so I'm sure you were the same people who thought those horrible factories in the 1930s which produced pure black smoke would have killed us by 1980. Somehow we survived.
Now who thinks in 50 years we won't be using water, wind, solar, hydrogen, and fusion power? Its hard to imagine we won't. In 10 years we should be seeing electric cars in large cities all the time. So to think in 50 years that we won't automatically save ourselves is a little foolish.
Our main problem will be getting asia and south america (and who knows if Africa will be industrializing by then) to switch over after Europe and the US does. That may take forever.
Now do I support corporations saving every last dollar to destroy the earth? No, but I understand that these same evil corporations that are destroying our earth will eventually save our earth for the same reason. Money.
False. Try looking at per capita CO2 emissions per unit GDP - i.e., how much pollution is produced per unit of stuff created, which is a good measure of efficiency and waste. The US is not the worst offender, by far.
I'd tell you which countries are worse, but that would spoil the joy of discovery for you when you go and look it up for yourself. So, try to guess which countries are worse, and just how much worse they are, and then go look it up.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I think people obviously haven't been to the major Chinese cities lately, either.
The air pollution problems in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou are REALLY bad--they make Los Angeles look clean in comparison. Heck, even the spare the air days in Santa Clara County in California during the summer is considered very clean air by Chinese standards.
I couldn't say whether that's true or not (though certain American cars that are allowed in the US do not meet European emission standards).
However, in the US cars tend to be bigger, heavier and have larger engines, all of which means more fuel burned per mile. In places like Japan and Europe small cars are much more popular. One reason for this is that petrol is several times more expensive in Europe (particularly Britain, where 80% of the cost of a litre is tax and duty) than it is in the States, so buying a more efficient car becomes much more financially worthwhile.
Suck figs.
I love the way they drive boats, cars, and fly to protests to try to stop the use of fossil fuels.
I wonder if they have a plan on how to get home if one of the protests actually worked?
Don't panic. This is a floating ice shelf. That does little to the total mass or volume of the ocean.
Now if the polar ice caps melt which are not floating, run to the sea, and add to the mass and volume of the ocean...
The truth shall set you free!
"But notice even after the chunk of ice ordeal the planet is still around?"
Nobody is seriously arguing that global warming is a threat to the planet (although some of the discourse may be phrased in those terms - "Save the Planet" etc.). However it is argued that it represents a threat to human civilisation, i.e. The World As We Know It. This is what makes it a matter of pressing self-interest for all of us.
How can you trust an organization, such as Greenpeace, when its own founder quit the organization because he thought it was hijacked by environmental extremists?
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
- UCS examines The Skeptical Environmentalist
- Nine things journalists should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist
As a long time skeptic on many issues myself (just ask my friends who have asked me what sign I am) skepticism is a good thing. Just remember that it goes both ways.-Miko
Miko O'Sullivan
I won't bother arguging one way or other,
but I'd like to mention a very intersting book
that everyone should at least take a look at
in regards to this topic --
the Skeptical Enviromentalist
by Bjorn Lomborg.
Just pick it up at your local Barnes and Nobles
and leaf through it. You won't be dissapointed you did.
--Dante
-- What doesn't kill you hasn't tried hard enough.
RFN had links to other research sites, some of which have pics every week or two for the past two months.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
How exactly would it NOT make a difference? Each tiny bit of increase in temp causes a decrease in the longitude that ice can remain frozen. Imagine a line drawn around antarctica, and the line moving downward towards the south pole with each change in average temp. Even a small change in the position of that line causes a pretty big change in the area in that circle.
:P
One of the iceberg articles said the change was 2.5 degrees.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
You're being naive.
If it was legal to pollute in China, but not in the U.S., industries with high pollutant generation would be moved to China. Pollution would not be reduced.
The problem with that is just because life in general can survive that doesn't mean that 'human' life can survive that. Every continent except antarctica has tons of human life on it. You can't just say, well Asia just froze over... just move away from Asia! More than a few people would die.
Just because there have been radical changes in climate in the past doesn't mean it is 'ok' for it to happen in the future.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
I can't believe someone modded this up. Which volcano? Which eruption? Where's the study? Do you have reference to any study or article suggesting this?
Pinatubo did release large amounts of sulfer dioxide, but sulfer dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. In fact, it's believed that Mount Pinatubo masked global warming in the years following the eruption.
-Bruce
A mini-ice age ended around 1850. The earth has been warming up ever since. Before that it was cooling down. Now it's really convinient that the industrial revolution just happened to start around the same time. Makes it easy to point the finger at us because you KNOW that the earth's climate is 100% stable! (sic)
Scientists have predicted that the earth will continue to warm up for the next 300 or so years. And there's not much we can do about it. And lets face it, the earth's climate is about as stable as an interview with Robin Williams. It's been ever changing and will continue to be ever changing regardless of the numbers that we generate.
Remember, humans didn't cause the global warming that cleared up the glaciation that was as far south as the south western US.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
As a Greenpeace member who's been following the debate for over a decade, it's hard not to feel aggrieved at those with their own agenda who have pushed the theory that global climate change isn't happening. Risk = probability x consequence..."
A nice biased report, as usual. What Greenpeace don't want you to know is that there is no scientific proof that global warming is the result of the actions of mankind. The majority of scientists agree with this. I am sick of hearing about people that Greenpeace describe as 'having their own agenda', which generally means those people brave enough to question these fanatics. Or those who lose their jobs as a result of eco-terrorism.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Get a towel. You do know where your towel is right?
CAREFULLY, fill one of those huge 64oz Texaco cups full of ice, and THEN oh-so delicately fill it up with water. Also, add a little salt (remember, we ARE talking about salt water: Ocean, DUH...)
Now, RUN LIKE HELL!!!
That thing is gonna go off like an ill-measured volcano at a 4th grade science fair!!! The water will overflow the glass and flood your kitchen, so be prepared! Thats what the towel is for!
Luckily, you are on a hill, so just open the door and all the water will flow down on your lowlying neighbors...(for fun, open a door facing someone you don't like!)
*shaking head/rolling eyes/laughing lightly*
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
So I guess this is good news!
Has New Orleans or New York been flooded yet? No?!
With enviro wackos, any change whatsoever in the status quo is gloom and doom.
Oh my goodness, something changed, it will be the end of us all!
I'm still working on a clever footer.
I think it is correct to say we can't say with certainty what the climate would be doing without human intervention. It's a chaotic system.
However, I've never seen the logic of the argument fully followed through.
If massive environmental change is inevitable and out of human control, doesn't it make sense that humans adjust their behavior to this fact? To protect the resources the biosphere will need to adjust to the new state -- ecological and biological diversity?
This point is always argued by people who want to believe that they don't have to take the environmental impact of their actions into account. If anything, these people would be happier with the Kyoto protocols than the logical policy consequencs of accepting a chaotic climate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
After many diplomatic disastrous decisions, and a terrorist attack (that turned a completely dumb president in a great stadist), maybe now GWB listens to the commom sense and decides to accept Kioto treat.
Its a fact that US is by far the most polluting country in the world, and the only economically big to refuses to accept Kiotos terms.
US must realize that this kind of decisions make it more and more seen as a "evil empire" (using GWB own words) by other countries that believe that all this decisions aims its own interests and forgets about all cooperation among other countries.
Its due to these kind of decision, and due to the ignorance of countries that feels that they can solve this problem with violence, that attacks like the ones in 9/11 happens.
Itll be much better if GWB really considers to change his decisions about foreing politics to avoid more conflicts, not armed conflicts, but economic conflicts that can be worse then armed ones (US cant lose a armed conflict, but I cant say the same about economic ones)
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
About 1000 years ago Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada was capable of growing grape wines. That must have indicated that the entire area was very warm.
Some reasearchers believe that what is now the nothern part of the world was once in the equatorial region. Areas that were once rainforests but are now covered with snow and ice are further evidence that supports that theory.
There were reports a while back about how Mars is experiencing global warming of it's own. If the sun is making Mars hotter it is only logical to believe that the earth is going to get warmer as well. They also never seem to mention that we are about as close to the sun as the earth gets. That has to increase the temperature of the globe at least somewhat. We also have to keep in mind that the sun is in a very active cycle. There is also the fact that there isn't all the nuclear weapons testing (nuclear winter anyone?) that there was a few decades ago.
Some more sources.
. org/: //www.scienceforum.net/n t/ipcc/tar.html: //www.epa.gov/globalwarming/index.htmlw .ipcc.ch/
http://www.earthdot.org/a nl.govh tml
i d_ 1880000/1880566.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1833000/1833902.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1528000/1528348.stmg lish/in_depth/sci_tec h/2002/boston_2002/newsid_1825000/1825283.stmt p://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/americas/n ewsid_1820000/1820584.stml ow/english/sci/tech/newsid_ 1804000/1804467.stml ines/y2002/15jan_gree nhouse.htm?list98953n glish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1782000/1782691.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1779000/1779619.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1718000/1718183.stmw s/early-earth-01k.htm la s/n ewsid_1375000/1375089.stml ow/english/sci/tech/newsid_ 1664000/1664887.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1706000/1706823.stmg lish/uk/england/newsi d_1661000/1661560.stme nglish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1643000/1643156.stml ines/y2001/ast07sep_1 .htm?list98953
http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.marshall
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/welcome.html
http
http://www.rivm.nl/env/i
http://www.worldwatch.org/
http
http://ww
http://www.unep.org/unep/eia/geo2000/
http://www-climate.mcs.
http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/Model/model.
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/acpi/
And some (mostly BBC) stories related to climate change:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
ht
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://science.nasa.gov/head
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/e
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://www.spacedaily.com/ne
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/americ
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/
http://science.nasa.gov/head
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Of course the US produces about 25% of the world's pollution (and consumes about 25% of the world's resources, BTW) - that's exactly what you should expect when you realize that the US makes about 25% of the world's stuff. How else would you have it be?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I remember a South American volcanic eruption that pu t more chlorine free radicles into the upper atmosphere than all the cfc's ever produced. This was in mid 1997. What people need to realize is that with very few exceptions we are NOT producing anything new, we are just turning up the chemicals that already exist here on the planet, at one time all of them have been in the atmosphere. Human's are amazingly adaptable beings, there are humans living in the gobi desert and there are humans living in the artic circle, we can adapt to just about anything this planet throws at us, we have to because humans evolved through times on savanah's but had to deal with an ice age.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
check out this
article at new scientist. A little more balanced about what this might mean. Two things I noticed right away. a) The Larson A Ice Shelf, which is nearly as big as this one dropped off in 95. b) this ice shelf is only 1800 years old. Where I am sitting now was under a mile of ice 15,000 years ago. Perhaps the Ice shelf's existence is the abnormality, not the fact that it has dropped off! These are MODELS people. Models can be wrong. Until these guys can predict the weather accurately one month from now, I'll save my money betting either way. Watching these guys "predict" events is like watching Jack Ryan predict Crazy Ivans. Its a guess, but you might just get it right some time...
Interestingly, the climate models that are predicting massive warming over the next 100 years and which are the basis for making draconian cuts in emissions and destroying our economy aren't even capable of taking into account the effects of a) The sun and b) the clouds.
The greenies acknowledge that the sun and the clouds have "some affect" on the climate, but they haven't been able to determine exactly what it is. So they simply throw in "fudge factors" which supposedly take those factors into account. In reality, the fudge factor is the number they have to add to the climate models to generate the amount of global warming they want to scare an appropriate number of people.
Their climate models, had they been applied to climate data in the 1900s, would have also predicted TWICE as much global warming during this century as has actually ocurred.
In fact, every time the climate models become "more accurate" (i.e. taking into account more natural factors), the prediction of the amount of global warming always comes down.
I don't know about you, but to me the BIGGEST two factors for deciding whether it's going to be hot or cold is whether there's sun beating down on us and whether there are clouds to block it. If they can't even take those two most important factors into account then I think you know where they can stick their climate models.
Nobody contests that global climate change is a fact, what they contest is that a direct link has been established between human production of "greenhouse" gasses and long-term global warming. Temperature averages over 40 years do not a geological event make. Nor can you make the assertion that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming without having to prove it. It's called the scientific method.
Fact: Global cyclical heating and cooling patterns are well documented in the geological record. Fact: Production of "greenhouse" gasses is on the rise. Fact: Short-term weather patterns suggest we are in the midst of some form of warming effect. Hypothesis: This is the direct result of the build-up of "greenhouse" gasses. However this assertion is by no means proven.
Environmentalists also asserted that the burning of oil fields in Kuwait would blanket the earth in black smoke, blocking out the sun and causing the world to descend into another ice age where humans would be forced to labour in underground sugar mines by pale, telepathic masters with gills behind their ears. (I just checked, still no gills!)
It's entirely possible, and even quite likely, that "greenhouse" gas production and global climate change are inextricably linked. However I for one will wait for proof before I elevate a theory from conjecture to fact.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Why is this a disaster? The shelf displaced the same amount of water when it was solid that it does now melted because it was floating in the first place. Considering that the interior recessions have appeared to stop, the dire predictions of a sealevel rise are totally unsubstantiated.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I am really fed up with listening to all those whining european liberals. The USA leads the world in science and technology. Why don't they just listen to us and trust what we say? Global warming is just hippy crap.
I think we're absolutely right to tell those whining Europeans to stuff their Kyoto protocol. It is obviously just political and not based on scientific research, like the USA's policy.
And the Japanese! What are they doing agreeing with the Euros? And those South Americans. Of course they don't have many scientists there, so they probably don't understand what they've signed up to. Even the Chinese have implemented reforms of their energy sectors to cut Co2 emmissions and have cut them by over 6 percent over the last five years. What are they thinking? I guess they must be just sucking up to the Europeans.
I just don't get it. When will the Euros (and the Japanese, Chinese, South Americans and the rest of them) stop falling for that environmentalist rubbish and start listening to informed, scientific, and unbiased view of our great leader, G W Bush?
Yes, this is sarcasm.
The greenies will say that "Mount Pinatubo masked global warming in the years following the eruption" for two reasons:
1. To try to explain away why there wasn't been any global warming in the following years when there "should have been."
2. To try to discredit the fact that volcanos naturally produce more greenhouse gasses then humans, period.
Keep in mind that the whole reason that there is life on earth is because of all the early volcanos which created so much greenhouse gasses that the earth heated up and was able to support life. That would have never happened if volcanos WEREN'T able to warm the earth.
So, yes, volcanos spew plenty of greenhouse gasses. I don't have the exact information on hand and I don't have time to search for it right now, but if you jump to google.com and do some honest research I'm sure you can find it for yourself with little trouble.
PS--Don't blindly believe the greenies. They have an agenda and the environment is their means to an end. Once you recognize that you will see all their hype in an entirely new perspective.
Given your rational POV, you surely know what a "false dilemna" is?
Personally, I think there ought to be more R&D spent on solar chimneys.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The economies of these countries are in a different phase than ours. They're in the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. This means much of their development is in the form of low-tech basic industries such as steel production, textiles, raw materials, etc. These also happen to be the most polluting type of industries. However, they are well suited in poorer countries that need large, low-tech, established industries that can employ vast numbers of relatively less educated workers.
In contrast, the U.S., and Europe have moved into a postindustrial economy where much of the GDP is generated by service industries and by a highly educated workforce engaged in "information" industries (or whatever the buzzword is these days :-).
Given that, it's easier for the first world to impose higher environmental restrictions on their economies since they are less dependent on the high pollution ones and since they are wealthier than the others. But it's harder to ask developing countries to do the same.
Furthermore, there's also a sense of fairness at play. Keep in mind that the U.S. and Europe went through an industrial age as well (the time of the so called Robber barons and monopolies and Carnegie and Rockefeller) before being able to generate the wealth that allowed them to transition to a service economy. And they did this before there were any environmental controls. To ask the third world to suddenly accept tight restrictions whereas the rest of the world never had to before is a little disingenous. Of course one could argue that we didn't know about these things before and regardless of what happened in the past, it's up to all of us to correct it now. While that's true, I think some concession for the different development stages of different economies is not a bad thing.
What's more, it's highly ironic that "fuel efficient" american SUV's are being compared to "black smoke belching" thirld world cars seeing as how the average third world resident uses non-polluting walking as his primary mode of transportation :-) But seriously, what's more unfair? Asking Americans to give up their SUV's for slightly less gargantuan cars, or asking an Indian to give up the wood he uses to cook food for his family because it burns dirty?
ACtually I toured a nuclear power plant once. It was designed to sustain a direct hit from a large plane and a major earthquake. Apparently these were known threats decades before Sept. 11.
40 miles x53 miles = 2120 sq miles.
That's bigger than Delaware: 1954 sq. miles (land area)
That's more than twice Rhode Island: 1045 sq. miles. (land area)
But only a very small fraction of Alaska: 571951 sq. miles. (land area)
(The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2002)
First of all those are isolated events. Second of all, it's usually far away from most populated area. If you want to live in a smog infested city, fine, fill your house with smoke. But most of us prefer cleaner air, thanks.
The satellite record is much more accurate because it covers 90%+ of the earth whereas the surface record only covers a small fraction of the earth. I.e., where there are cities, mostly in the northern hemisphere, and almost no constant readings from the high seas.
Further, the surface record is heavily biased due to the fact that urban sprawl has created "heat islands" around cities. Recording stations that used to be out in the fields are now in the middle of parking lots.
While the greenies have tried to discredit the satellite record, they haven't succeeded, and the satellite record is the most reliable and accurate information we have about global temperatures. And they haven't increased in 23 years.
Those of us that don't believe in human-caused global warming are NOT living in denial nor is it that we could care less about the planet. Those of us who don't believe in global warming have taken the time to study the facts and come to a conclusion which is very unpopular in today's culture.
But, say this to yourself until you understand what you means: THERE HAS BEEN NO GLOBAL WARMING IN THE 23 YEARS WE'VE HAD SATELLITES MONITORING GLOBAL TEMPERATURES.
We STILL don't know EXACTLY what happened to the dinosaurs. Could it be possible that this thermal cycle is NORMAL for this planet in that, like a person with a virus, their tempurature rises to try to rid itself of the virus?
Did dinosaurs build machines that used chemical processes to suck stuff out of the planet and then SPEW stuff that is toxic into the environment..? Maybe thats what killed them eh?
Environmental change is natural (the hot/cold cycle) but what WE ARE DOING is not a "natural" part of that cycle, we are a FIRST external force on that natural balance.
On the other hand, if we're wrong about these assumptions, I would like an anti-environmentalist to tell me where I can find the undo button. Is Bush going to re-plant the forests American companies burn down to give space for US Burger Cattle?
From the article;
'However, the picture generally in Antarctica is a complicated one with temperatures in the interior actually falling over the same period. There is also some evidence that the retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, on the other side of the peninsula to the Larsen B shelf, has halted'
Add to that there is this gem 'Scientists hope the data gathered on site will help them determine when such an event last happened and which ice shelves are threatened in future.'
Oh, so we don't even know if this is a cyclical event and if so how often it happens..... From 1947 to the late 1960's or early 1970's (depending on who you believe) there was a global cooling. At that time some scientists were predicting another ice age.
This is a serious event that warrants study and careful scientific examiniation. It does not warrant people running about screaming at the top of your lungs "The sky is falling".
Doing so just makes people disbelieve you when/if you do have the hard evidence to back up your claims.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I sure hope this was a troll. If it is, it was a good one. You managed to convert a metric mass into a metric mass and introduced an inaccuracy of 2.4x10^11 into the calculation. And it seems like several people bought it too ! Good effort.
Maybe you're just a fuckwit, but that's the essense of a good troll, it's hard to tell.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Actually science shows us how global temperatures DROP after major volcano blasts. By comparing thr rings on tree trunks (thiner in cold years, wider in warm years) to a record of big blasts (such as here.)
Your turn.
PS why should I blind believe you over 'the greenies'? No doubt you have an agenda to, yet you seem to think you are the only one who knows theirs
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
Which is my point all along. Everyone wants us to drive a SUV that gets 37 miles per gallon. The problem is is that this car can't exist without a significant cost to the consumer. R & D has to be paid for some how and a law doesn't pay for it. It makes it more expensive. Thanks for the links!
Gorkman
Ah, yeah, the good old lowest common denominator argument... Be worse than your neighbour, or your industries will move.
Now, guess what, the US has many other qualities to retain its economic activities, and does not need to allow excessive pollution/supress all welfare programs/lower taxes down to zero/carve to any lobbying/etc... to remain competitive.
This seems pretty emblematic of the average Slashdot debunking of the work of a large number of scientists around the world who work on climate issues.
Peer-reviewed science is wrong, we just know it in our hearts, we don't know quite why, don't have hte exact information on hand, but I'm sure we can find it on the trustworthy internet if we just use google. Because, after all, if we can find a debunking on the internet, it must be true!
The Forcast:
last Thursday for Saturday, sunny and in the upper 60s, the rest of the week increasing temperatures...
The Reality (as of Tuesday):
Saturday, mid 50s and cloudy, Sunday 50s and cloudy, monday - wednesday rain with possible flash floods, possible freeze next weekend
If they cant forcast into next week I sure as hell dont believe they can forcast 100 years out.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The Vikings in Newfoundland are probably not the best example for historic Climate change as most Historians place Vinland around New Brunswick/Nova Scotia/Mane.
We just havn't found it yet.
I have NO idea if they grow grapes in Mane.
However it should be pointed out that form the 400 to the year 1500 (CE) there were masive world wide migrations from the North to the South. Angles, Saxsons, Jutes, Goths, VisiGoths, Vandals, Huns. in Europe. Inuit (Rather the people who were before the modern Inuit) abandoned The High Canadian Artic. China Was invaded from the north also at the same time.
If you want more evidence of Climate chage
There are Prehistoric Farms that are being uncovered in Northeren Europe that are well with in the current Perma-frost regions.
Britans main Export in the Roman era was Wine (From Grapes)So it had a warmer climate.
Cartharage Was a major exporter of Wheat... Indicating a wetter climate. Now it is just desert.
We can also ask How all those Coral Islands Rose above the surface of the seas also... Did Global cooling lower the water levels, and they are now returning.
Any body else have better examples?
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
Why the funky spelling of Greenpeace? Where are the vast sums of money and the fat-cat bleedinghearts getting rich off the donations of well-meaning hard-working schmoes?
Just askin'.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Indeed, my SUV is powerful.
I would agree that we need to cut pollution where ever possible. Fuel cells anyone. But to blame the current global changes on anything but solar cycles is just plain silly.
Nothing to see here. Move along....
--Scott 8-}
Yes, volcano's blast kilotonnes of dust into
the stratosphere, preventing some of the
suns light reaching the earths surface and
cooling the climate of a period of one or two
years.
Actually, that's pretty far from the truth. Check out the IPCC report and the NAS report. Both say that global warming is happening, and that it is likely to be partially caused by human activities.
Some selections from the NAS report:
Quite simply, those who know (the climatoligists) agree this is significant.Wow, did you come up with all by your little self?
It's significant because I would like to continue fucking living, thanks very much. And while we're on the topic, I'd like my kids to be able to do so as well. AAAAND just outta the goodness of my heart, I'd kinda hope the same for everybody else. Not to mention the fact that it's hot enough in Texas as it is, and if it gets one degree hotter I WILL kick somebody's ass.
- Rev.No, but they farted.
One of the biggest producers of green house gasses are the methane from farm animals. That is a major 'Machine' that uses chemical processes to suck stuff out of the planet and then SPEW stuff tht is toxic into the environment.
You mean like those impartial scientists that falsified the lynx data in the Pacific Northwest?
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
And besides the potential for catastrophic accidents, there's also the issue with the disposal of depleted uranium rods. Where are you going to store these things for 10,000 years? The government is having enough problems right now (e.g., Yucca Mountain, Nevada) trying to store the current amount of nuclear waste that it generates; do we think this will get any easier if we increase the waste we generate for nuclear power generation? Not only are people having issues for where to store the stuff (even in as sparse of states as Nevada), they also are worried about the transportation of it (even if they do say that they are stored in strong containers). Granted, there is a little bit of paranoid behaviour here, but should we just trust the government and forget about it? We're just getting reports about nuclear fallout from testings in the 50's being more significant than what once was believed. What may be popular scientific belief right now may turn out to be not-quite-true in the future, or may actually be just propoganda for a government to get the dirty deeds done for as cheap as possible.
Until something happens that makes fossil fuels not as attractive as nuclear power, we will continue to burn hydrocarbons for our power.
Umm, actually plant growth is much more related to the amount of sunshine that the plant gets over the course of it's active cycle. The longer and sunnier a summer is, the more growth that occurs. The diminished growth observed in the years following a major volcanic event could probably be better tied to the amount of ash in the upper atmosphere, which blocks the sunlight. Cooler temperatures are a byproduct of this, and are thus _indirectly_ related to the amount of growth recorded in the trees. The localized (localized by a few years) effect of lowered temperatures is not an indication of whether or not the volcanic event has effected "global warming" as even the greenies point to the fact that global warming is a gradual effect which can only be seen over the course of decades. Of course they only point that out when it helps their argument.
-These aren't my pants.
Of course, we don't live in the stratosphere. And the principle component of the NOAA data is from the sea surface, which doesn't have parking lots. That component alone is consistent with the whole.
So why isn't there a reason to change something??
Unless you meet the following conditions, you are a hypocrite and I scorn you and denounce you to heaven and earth.
- You live in a room with your extended family
- You have no heat in the winter and no cooling in the summer
- You grow your own food without using anything produced using petrochemicals
- You do not own a car
- Half of your siblings and your offspring died in childhood
- You own one set of clothing and the tools you need to do your work and the room you live in and the land you garden on (making you extremely wealth)
In short, unless your standard of living is that of the third world, you are part of the first world's pollution problem. The problem is a result of production and consumption of resources; that production and consumption is what creates the first world's standard of living.
To solve the pollution problem, simply do this (and you're either part of the PROBLEM or part of the SOLUTION):
Lower the standard of living, lower consumption, lower production, lower pollution
What did it do to the "Envirenment" of Antartica? This does sound like a huge sheet of ice.
I just heard that penguins (real ones, not linux geeks) have been dieng in Antartica. How would this breakage effect them?
What, are you NUTS?!? Tux is out there somewhere! He might have been on that iceburg!!
This does not bode well for the Linux community. It has now been revealed that global warming was probably all part of the Microsoft plan after all.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
According to former Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan, trees are the true source of the problem.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
My point is that it takes a very strong reason for an industry to move from the US to China. Most industries will choose to stay in the US and comply with new environmental regulations rather than to move to China, because the US have hundreds of other overwhelming benefits to offer that China or other 3rd world nations don't have.
I believe there is a short-term temperature drop due to the dust in the air which blocks the sun. But that does not mean the volcano hasn't emitted massive amounts of greenhouse gasses. It has. Plenty.
In fact, it just goes to show that clouds (in this case volcanic dust) has much more affect on climate than greenhouse gasses.
So, actually, your very response has strengthened the anti-global warming cause by admitting that the greenhouse gasses emitted by a volcano, though much greater than that emitted by humans, is apparently of no consequence when compared with clouds.
I agree with that.
PS why should I blind believe you over 'the greenies'? No doubt you have an agenda to, yet you seem to think you are the only one who knows theirs
Actually, I wouldn't want you to blindly believe me. I would just hope that I would provoke you to truly STUDY the whole issue rather than listening to one side or the other. I am not a climate scientist and, unlike many greenies, I don't pretend to be one.
I will, however, defer to the 17,000 scientists who have signed the above petition that states that global warming does NOT appear to be linked to human activity.
When I was growing up, they where talking about the upcoming New Ice Age. There where scientists on TV telling about why this was coming and how bad it was going to be. Then, people started talking about global warming with the same dire predictions.
I have a hard time giving any credit to the "scientists" who reverse themselves every 30 or so years. The planet goes through cycles. Sure we need to stay as clean as possible and I'm all for protecting our home. But this Chicken Little routine is getting old.
Interesting that your post quotes "500 million billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." while the original article says "500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." But what's a minor 10^6 error when you're trying to make a point? And isn't the British "billion" equivalent to the American "million"?
Risk = Probability x Consequence..."
Probability = small chance human action is having significant impact on global climate
Consequence = unknown
Risk = a small chance that something unknown will happen as a result of human action.
Human nature is far more predictable than the climate. Humans want things to stay the same, out of fear that things may get worse, so they tend to emphasize the bad things that might happen. But the consequences are not known - and could be an improvement.
For example, what if the earth had been about to slip into another ice age (as was thought by climate scientists in the 80's), and greenhouse gases have prevented that so far? Humanity would fare much better with a hot planet than a cold one.
"...the earth will shake us off like a bad case of fleas..."
And it's true! The earth has been and WILL around for much longer than us, and it's completely arrogant of the human race to think that we can do anything about it. Our pollution isn't ruining the earth, it's ruining human life. Once we poison ourselves to death, Mother Earth will take over and heal whatever superficial wounds we've inflicted and create life again...this time maybe lifeforms with a little more intelligence...
Save the earth, hell. We have to be concerned about saving OURSELVES!
The reason that anti-environmentalists don't want to acknowledge the warmup is not based on degree of error in measurements, or a disagreement about basic science.
They want to drive their cars.
They have a visceral dislike of long-haired hippy tree huggers.
Antarctica will continue to melt. The north pole has turned into a giant Slushie(tm) as of last summer.
If God writes in letters a thousand miles tall on the face of the moon: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OF THIS, then the Almighty would be accused of liberal sympathies.
The warming is starting to pick up steam. It may take most of a hundred years, but it will happen, mostly because of our beloved cars.
But, the way it will happen, I think, is that the same businesslike people who now deny the reality of the change will be the same ones buying up new oceanside property to develop at amazing profits. Call me cynical...
dont forget that most will be american too :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
If anyone if unnerved by this event, you should read Clive Cussler's "Atlantis Found" which deals with an evil organization attempting to cause a similar event in order to take over the world. Good escapist reading.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
You make the mistake here that everybody makes. What you don't understand is that it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. What we're talking about is what kind of CHANCE we want to take with the environment. The bottom line is, there's a probability that one side is right and there's some other probability the other side is right. Then you look at the down side, and decide what kinds of risks you want to take on.
My feeling is that the downside of the pro-environment movement is that we have more efficient cars that cost a bit more. The downside of the fuck the environment movement is the slow heat death of all life on earth.
Let's say there's only a 20% chance the environmentalists are right. Still feel like taking that chance?
I know using the waste heat from a nuclear reactor was looked at for Stockholm, which already has a system of heating buildings with water. The idea died mainly because of the genreal superstition agains all things nuclear. Most people probably believed that their homes would become radioactive. So instead the warm water is just flushed into the Baltic and Stockholm heats it's water some other way.
The other cost is that, statistically, there will be other 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc., incidents. The more plants you run, the higher the chances.
Not really. Each incident gives us new knowledge and makes new accidents less probable. Look at the airline industry for a comparision. In the early days, accidents were much more common than today. (I'd guess at least 100 times more, but I don't have any real facts available.) The accidents that happened in those early designs will not happen again.
Which also sounds great until you realize that:
a) it isn't true. China has a GDP of 4.5 trillion, the US 10 trillion.
b) the US's GDP is 80% services, versus China's 35% services. Thus, 3 trillion of China's economy is from industry and agriculture, compared to 2 trillion of the U.S.'s. If you just want industry, then it is 2.2 trillion (China at 50%) vs 1.73 trillion (US).
Here's my source. You should read the other things these environmentalists are saying about the U.S., like "the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels; water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; very limited natural fresh water resources in much of the western part of the country require careful management; desertification". Those wacky ecoterrorists at the Central Intelligence Agency will say anything, huh?
-no broken link
While one may argue about the significance of the human contribution to global warming, I find it hard to understand anyone who can doubt that there has been a contribution. Actually, there have been many contributions. They range from the killing off of the buffalo herds to the paving of large areas of the planet's surface to the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere to the denudation of rain forests. Etc.
That these have effects on the climate seems hard to deny. I can understand one who might argue about the magnitude of the effect, but to deny that there has been any effect seems non-sensical.
So, to me, there is clearly some measure of contribution from human activity to the current state of the global climate. And, as we need to live on this planet, we need to take what steps we can to ensure that it remains livable. Arguing avout the effectiveness and tradeoffs between various options is reasonable. Trying to assign "blame" is only useful in so far as assigning blame helps one to determine causation, and that is basically useful in determining what steps would be most useful at the moment.
As an example: The collapse of the ice sheet was dramatic, and acts as an obvious sign, but is arguably less important than the weakening that has been reported in the Gulf Stream. And that may be a precursor of a new ice age (which would lead to global cooling). But it appears to be caused by the Atlantic becoming too warm (I've seen projections that within 40 years the Artic Ocean will be essentially ice free).
Climate is hard to predict, complex, and with lots of pieces that fit together in a way that isn't simple. Just because it's hard to figure out exactly what role we have played in causing our current situation doesn't indicate that we didn't play a role. Manifestly, we have. But it seems plausible that the current heat wave has so far advanced that we may need to start worrying about how to prevent a new ice age. It's hard to know, our models are incomplete, and the whole thing appears to be a chaotic system.
But warmer oceans lead to not only melted ice, but also to increased rainfall and cloud cover, and, eventually, to large snow packs building up on the continents. Which can lead to glaciers that march south. But perhaps it doesn't always happen that way.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Imagine fission at the turn of a switch!
Also, radioactive waste may not be a problem. Laser induced fission.
Essentially it means that radioactive waste can be recycled. Bombarding it with laser induced neutrons can force it to fizz until it is no longer radioactive, while hopefully still generating more energy than the laser costs to run. A second benefit is that nuclear plants no longer need to maintain critical mass. Turn on the laser, and watch the nuclear reaction go, turn off the laser, and see it stop!
GPL Deconstructed
Six months ago, a bit over half of the highly-modded comments on stories like this were scathingly skeptical about global warming. As I read at 4+ just now, the common sense here has shifted to over 95% of moderation favoring statements of prudent environmentalism.
What's changed? Is this one big enough to put denial of evidence - at least for the moment - out of style?
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
You forgot Mexico City.
Having grown up around Los Angeles, I remember all the Stage I and the occasional Stage II smog alerts. We used to get held inside during recess, and most of the kids hated it. Now, I don't think we've had a smog alert in three years. I can see for miles now from Brea to downtown Santa Ana and clearly make out buildings (about 12 miles for those of you not here), whereas a few years ago, seeing more that two or three miles was a rarity.
The United States has made considerable progress. We're not done by a long shot, but new requirements for environmental friendliness have to be phased in, not dictated like some would have.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Keep reading those CIA pages. If I am to be lectured about "per capita pollution", then I reserve the right to compare per capita GDP, as I have done. And the per capita GDP of the US is...ten times larger than that of China. See, apples to apples, my friend.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Any time you're dealing with a state of dynamic equilibrium, small differences can have huge effects. (Consider the social effects of gender ratios in India, for example. The imbalance is small, but it gives us hordes of horny indians on yahoo chat....)
Two things to consider: Massive volcanic activity is not continuous, human pollution is. Volcanic pollution has been a factor in the environment since the beginning, human pollution has not.
Volcanoes may have bad effects over the short term, but humans are screwing things up a little more every year.
Oh, and I'd like to know how long it takes for one of these ice sheets to form...the sea ice sheets, not land-based glaciers. That would pretty much settle any doubts I would have about global warming (like, if it's a decade, the libertarian-because-it-is-convenient crowd may be right. If it's a century, it's a question mark. If it's multiple millennia, they need to shut the fuck up.)
That's true. But measures put in place to curb pollution are not without consequences of their own. Some of the unintended or unknown consequences, like what we've seen after substituting MTBE for tetraethyl lead in gasoline, may be worse than the problems they were intended to solve.
If you have an urgent problem then it often makes sense to make an immediate decision and hope that the unknown consequences are better than the known disaster. If your house is on fire, then jumping out the window and risking serious injury makes sense. But if your house has a leaky roof then jumping out the window is not a rational reaction; the solution to the problem isn't appropriate and doesn't warrant the severe consequences. When every environmental problem these days is posed as being an imminent planet-threatening disaster then it becomes very difficult to rationally weigh what we need to do and how quickly it needs to be done.
Even the most recalcitrant of industries have begun to realize that they have to clean up their mess, it's just a matter of how to do it without bankrupting themselves and/or putting huge numbers of people out of work. Environmentalists need to take a more pragmatic approach and stop preaching continual doom and hellfire before they lose what credibility they have left.
Try looking up ANYTHING on global climate change and cringe in horrer as you discover that the earths climate has chaged monstrously hundreds of times in the last 50,000 years all without the benefit of human activity!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I don't want to say that everything is fine and we don't have to worry. However, we should remember a detail before jumping to conclusion: 2000-2002 is the peak of the current solar cycle, during which there is a slight but definite increase in the downpour of solar energy.
Just ask the Mir station what it thinks about the effects of solar maximum on the high atmosphere layers. The extra energy expanded the outer atmosphere layers and increased the aerodynamic drag on low-orbiting satellites, sending a few of them to their burning death. Granted, Mir's orbit was in a bad shape to begin with.
So it's not impossible that this Antartica event is the result of the current solar peak. We lack data to compare. We'd need at least 4 or 5 cycles (1 cycle = 11 years) to have even a rough idea. Alas, satellite surveillance is too new, we don't have 55 years of Antartica ice shelf measurements. So let's be cautious.
Also, don't forget that weather patterns are widly fluctuating. Europe suffered a record cold wave this winter. The Parthenon was covered with snow, the Cote d'Azur had snowstorms. You'll have a hard time convincing the people living there that the solar maximum actually slightly warmed up the Earth. :-)
Remember that there is something that would be even worse than ignoring climate changes, and that would be misidentifying them and spending all our time and resources barking at the wrong tree.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Calling the steps that led to Chernobyl a series of mistakes is not quite correct. IIRC, six *separate* safety mechanisms, any *one* of which would have prevented the disaster, were specifically disabled by the technicians in their efforts to finish their project. That's not a mistake: that's incompetence.
As for Three Mile Island.... Well, that's a different story. But keep in mind that it was averted because of the knowledge of the workers and the fact that the safety mechanisms, while not working perfectly, slowed the problem sufficiently to give time to end the crisis. The radiation release was negligible, and new procedures were put into place at every power plant in the United States to prevent a repeat.
I have a nuclear plant about 60 miles from me (San Onofre, CA). There is growing talk of shutting it down, and I would *gladly* have one built closer, but the damned NIMBYs populating the southern half of the county driving around in their SUVs don't want anything to take a few dollars off the value of their $700K homes.
As for storage and transportation, Yucca Mountain has been shown to be just fine in every study done. I'm sure there are other stable sites that can be picked in Colorado or any of a dozen other states, but because everyone is afraid of something happening, the current materials sit in poorly-secured, decaying facilities on-site. Transport the stuff in a convoy guarded by the military if you must; I'll deal with the road being shut down for a couple of hours per section. Taper the need for oil, gas, and coal, and put up the reactors until the rest of the renewable sources can be developed to a reasonable efficiency standard.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
About 5%. So what?
Where's the point here?
I would have thought that the point was blindingly, glaringly obvious. If I make 25% of the world's pizzas, it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that I consume 25% of the world's pizza dough and sauce. And it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone if I also produce 25% of the world's pizza-making emissions, don't you think?
And if Nick, Jim and Tony come together to make 10% of the world's pizzas amongst themselves, it still shouldn't be a surprise that I consume more than they do, and produce more waste than they do - I make more pizzas than they do, even though there are three of them and only one of me. Get it?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
You assume that our human actions are what is causing this. We are in a warming period between ice ages and this could very well be completely natural. Without data from the previous ages, we have nothing to base these opinions on other than direct data for the past few decades and some guesswork on geological surveys.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Farther around Antarctica from there, several colonies of Adelie and Emperor penguins are endangered by breakups in the ice. The changes in ice have made it difficult for the adult penguins to get between their breeding grounds and areas where there are enough fish to feed them, and there's a substantial chance of a major population crash due to chick deaths.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That would be hard to believe, indeed, especially since the actual article at antarctica.ac.uk says: "Hard to believe that 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month."
But a factor of a million here, a factor of a million there, who cares, right? This is Slashdot! We don't need no stinkin' proofreading!
Ok. My bad. I was confused by your statement "we produce ten times more stuff" I thought you were saying "we" in total, but obviously the thread is per capita.
So doing the math again yeilds China with a per capita industrial GDP of 1900 and the US with 6300. This gives a ratio 3.5. Hell, let's include agriculture, since that is "stuff" too, and you may think it's more fair (personally, I'd stick with industry, since agriculture has mostly different pollutants that we are talking about). China: 2400/capita, US: 7190/capita. Ratio: 3.
So if we are only produce 3 times more stuff percapita, why 8 times more polution?
-no broken link
So if we are only produce 3 times more stuff percapita, why 8 times more polution?
Because well over 2/3rd of China's population live in the preindustrial rural territories, IIRC. They're industrializing fast, though, and they have ridiculously large quantities of coal for fuel, so I'd expect their pollution levels to rise quickly, which as another poster said is clearly happening in their urban centers.
OT: I'm getting sick of these goddamn leftists modding down my posts every time I say something politically incorrect. My post at the top of this thread has been modded down twice already. Censoring bastards.
Of course it is very comfortable to think (fool yourself) that no abnormal heating is happending, and that we can happily continue our wasteful lifestile without grave consequences.
But, how can you be so sure? Many experts claim the heating is caused by human actions. Some experts claim it has nothing to do with that (or that it is not even sure yet that there is global warming).
I too tend to be sceptical on very strong claims ("evidence") for human induced global warming. And I hope it is not true.
But also, it is very hard to rule it out, there is at least a non-neglectible chance that burning all fossile fuel that has been built up over many millions of years within a few decennia has bad effects on the earths climate. Given the serious consequences if it were true, I think caution is necessary.
Fooling yourselves because you don't want to give up your own egoistic lifestyle (at the expense of the rest of the world and of future generations) is not going to help. Even without global warming, is it right to use (waste) all fuel in a few decennia, leaving nothing for future generations? Is it right for some parts of the world to use 100 times more energy and resources per person than the rest of the world?
I keep hoping that this temperature fluctuation is normal and nothing to worry about. But alone the possibility that it might not, should suffice to cause a drastic change of behavior and lifestyle.
As though "environmental" groups don't have their own, self-serving agendas?
t .shtml#030899 )
The Sacremento Bee did a five part report on the environmental movement back in April, 2001, called Environment, Inc. The Bee notes that "Five other major groups -- including household names such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club -- spend so much on fund raising, membership and overhead they don't meet standards set by philanthropic watchdog groups."
I'm too ignorant to judge claims made by most environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They may be right. But the implication that their motives are above reproach is laughable.
Junk Science reported big chunks of ice back in October 1998:
Large icebergs not new
Submitted by Paul Jensen
On October 16, it was reported that an iceberg the size of Delaware broke free from Antarctica. Of course, this was attributed to global warming.
For a little perspective, we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as "The Bowditch."
The text reads "In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic."
Notice that this last iceberg was more than 4 times bigger than that little "ice cube" noted in the Washington Post story. And by some miracle, the world did not come to an end after the discovery of this giant.
So last week's iceberg was not so extraordinary -- except that it was perhaps the first linked to the dreaded global warming.
(Also at http://www.sepp.org/weekwas/1998/oct19_25.html and http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/environmen
The right-wing publication Scientific American, in an article about rising ocean levels in the August 1998 issue, noted that there is "some evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet may, in fact, have melted at least once before. Between about 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, when the last shared ancestors of all humans probably fanned out of Africa into Asia and Europe, Earth experienced a climatic history strikingly similar to what has transpired in the past 20,000 years, warming abruptly from the chill of a great ice age."
(This is by the same author who wrote the cover story of the March 1997 issue about rising sea levels. That article is not available online, and I don't have it here at work with me).
Sure, sir.
Climate Model Uncertainties
Cliamte models still wrong
Show me the Evidence: A tale of Two Whoppers
No More Fudge Factor: Unfluxed Model Cools Warming
Now, I leave further research as an excercise to the reader.
I would strongly recommend you do a little research before you attack someone in the way you did. At worst it's slander in and of itself and, at best, it makes you look like an uninformed ass.
The NAS(USA) eventually sent out a public rebuke disavowing involvement and pointing out that it's own committee had reached the opposite conclusion.
--everytime you learn something a piece of your brain is replaced by something that someone else said
This argument really annoys me. Of course human activities are a partial effect. The climate is a very complex system.
But it's rubbish to use this as an argument (as many have tried to do) that the human impact is therefore less important. If anything, it just means that the research is more complex and requires more resources, and we need to live with wide error bars on our estimates.
Thought experiment to illustrate this point:
Assume that each degree increase in temperature is equally "bad". Imagine that the human impact of "current course" is +5 and "Kyoto targets" is +2.
Suppose the cost of a one degree increase is X, and the cost of implementing Kyoto targets is Y. Then the right course of action is to implement Kyoto if 3X is greater than Y.
Then imagine that there is a random factor R that varies between +N and -N degrees.
You now decide to implement Kyoto if 3X+RX is greater than Y+RX. I.e. the decision you should make is exactly the same. Note that the size of the random fluctuation is irrelevant in determining the correct decision. Hence using the existence of random flucation as an argument to do nothing is completely wrong.
The real model is of course more complex, non-linear etc. But the principle still holds - the key issue is to focus on the relative costs and benefits of the alternate approaches and argue around these, not some spurious waffle that fundamentally amounts to "it's been OK before so it will be OK in the future".
Even if that is true, the 2000 climate scientists out of the 17,000 signatories is much better than the the greenies who had just 10% (260) of their signatories somewhat qualified to make qualified opinions, and only ONE climatologist.
The fact remains that most scientists do not believe in global warming as it is promoted by the greenies.
It is not very credible and it seems to me you are the one only listening to one side of the debate?
Au contraire, my good sir. I've visited sites on both sides of the debate. On balance the greenies lack evidence and really seem to have an agenda that benefits by global warming existing--further research grants, economic and political changes they favor, etc.
On the other hand, the 17,000+ scientists that have signed the forementioned petition have nothing to lose nor nothing to gain. They simply are fed up with what they correctly recognize to be a lot of hot air (pun intended).
I invite you to do some INDEPENDENT investigation. That means reading information from both sides of the issue, consider what each "side" has to gain or lose by their side being right or wrong, and use your own brain to come to a conclusion. Also, when reading BOTH sides, try to separate the facts from the opinions and/or vague statements.
Bullsh*t.
SUV's are such a scam. They are TRUCKS, dressed up TRUCKS. Yet, people pay out the nose for them. The margins on SUV's are already good enough that R&D costs aren't a problem.
Not to mention: nevermind SUV's that get 37 mpg. The industry has to work on building SUV's that aren't a menace to occupants and other vehicles.
...then there's the whole problem of cars that aren't reliable enough to outlast the loan.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If I remember right, the only breeder reactors we have are for weapon grade material making. I think there's one in the northwest, I forget where, somewhere in Washington I think. Theres a few more in Europe, but the "green" people hate 'em more than regular reactors; keep in mind no new nuclear reactors have been commissioned since like 1977 or something.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
This is a classic way to present data to make a point without being backed up by the data.
This is plain and simple dishonest.
I suggest you go get a graph of that data that is zero based and see that this is really just a blip.
With all this talk about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and cheap energy, a certain question comes to my mind: What do we do if we find a source of unlimited free energy?
Nevermind the physics or politics of the question. The important part is that even if we had all the energy we wanted without any greenhouse gas pollution or nuclear radiation, we'd still be polluting one very large thing: heat. Given that a certain amount of greenhouse gas is in our atmosphere at any time, there will be a point in which using energy will cause a change in overall temperature.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
There are more trees now than there were 20 years ago. There are vast reforesting efforts in place, most logging involves harvesting repeat growth timber, not stripping forests, and most logging companies replant more trees than they take.
The biggest destroyer of forests isn't industrial concerns but slash and burn farmers in the congo. Go tell the primitives to stop burning the forests and leave the loggers alone.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
But because GDP only measures the market value of final goods, and not the value of intermediate goods, much of the electricity consumed by the service sector doesn't count towards the GDP. If that makes sense - it still has to be produced, because it's used to make other things, but because it is used to make other things, it doesn't count towards GDP. So you have electricity generated that produces some pollution, but contributes nothing towards the GDP, because it isn't a final product in and of itself. And the net effect of all that is to skew the pollution per unit GDP upward by having some pollution produced that doesn't directly add to the bottom line. It does add to it indirectly, of course - this is just an artifact of how we calculate GDP as much as anything else.
I also suspect that the CIA has dumped "transportation" industries (trucking, railway, airlines) into the service sector as well. As the US has a mature and well-developed transport system, it shouldn't surprise us that much of the non-industrial pollution comes from there as well.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
No matter who cuases what where, it all comes down to dumbfucks and their curved lines. People like to see curved lines when it comes to statistical analysis "look a curved line we must have gotten the answer right!". When confronted with data that doesn't fit a curve of some sort people go completely batshit saying the world is going to end. There is no mean fucking temperature on the Earth, saying so is just ridiculous. It can't rise or fall if it isn't there. Even druing the bigger ice ages in history not every part of the Earth was covered in ice. If you measure the temperature at one point and then at another point a hundred miles away and say the average temperature if somewhere between the two values, what exactly does that REALLY say. All it means that somewhere between those two points, close to the middle you hope, the temperature will equal that "average" value. What good is that?
This isn't meant to say the BAS folks don't know what they're talking about, they know a whole lot more than I do about this ice sheet. However the folks at Greenpeace and their incessant dumbfuckery have concluded the Earth is going to Hell in a neatly wrapped package. Whether humans are ruining the planet doesn't matter much, we can either fix it or cannot, even if we can an asteroid might crash into the planet making it a moot point. Nuke all the fucking unborn baby grey whales.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
We're beyond any discussions on whether global warming is real or not. We have conclusive, undeniable evidence collected from many unrelated scientific surveys showing that global temperatures are rising.
Show me.
All of the data I have seen indicates a stable global temperature over the last few hundred years. This study is an example. There are more out there. The global climate is not altering significantly. There have been some extreme local swings though, which people are erroneously attributing to global warming when it's anything but global.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
to push an agenda driven by a bunch of hippies without much college education to back them.
There has been global warming since the last ice age. There is still no hard, firm, factual evidence saying we are making any difference in the pace.
We know that the climate of the Earth cycles between warm and cool, as it has happened many times over history.
The Earth has also gotten much warmer during the various cycles, so it only stands to reason that it will get much warmer before the next ice age.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that global warming is a bad thing. I'd like to point out that the greatest amount of fauna and flora existed during the Earth's warmest periods.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
And twice in other parts of this subject I've posted links backing that up, so I might as well post one here to re-affirm what he said, if you don't believe us check out this link.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
We're not done by a long shot, but new requirements for environmental friendliness have to be phased in, not dictated like some would have.
I think my opposition to the Kyoto Protocols is the fact the accord does not provide a transition period to implement the changes mentioned in the accord. It would have caused horrible stagflation, as the price of gasoline would have zoomed past US$3.50/US gallon and also would have devastated our domestic tourism industry as no one could afford to travel long distance by car.
Anyway, like I said earlier, the biggest determinant of our planet's climate is this nuclear fireball 93 million miles away called the Sun.
In point of fact, the only thing we know for sure is that the environment is changing, and it appears to be doing so at a markedly faster rate than one would expect without the addition of a trigger like, say, an impact event.
That's all that we know. We do *not* know if this is a natural condition, an unnatural condition (i.e., human caused) or a combination of the two. Furthermore we don't know if there's any way to halt, slow down, or lessen the change, or what actions could be taken should such a thing be possible. Or even if such actions are necessary or desirable.
Now, the typical moron argument here on slashdot falls into two camps. Camp A consists of the Priests of Gaia, the folks who adamantly state that changes in the ecosystem are bad, that humans are the undeniable cause of all change, and therefore that humans are essentially evil and should be punished for their sins - according to the dictates of the Priests, of course (e.g., "reduce emissions of gas x to levely y, screw the economy"). Camp B is composed of the Ostriches, who insist that there's nothing to see, move along now, sticking their heads in the sand and insisting that everyone else join them in ignorant bliss.
Real scientists - those who recognize the basic truths in paragraphs 1 and 2 above - want to spend money doing research on the questions posed to see what the answers are. Why? Because if we listen to the Priests and take corrective measures without basis in fact we could end up wasting a great deal of resources, or worse - altering things in an undesirable way. If we listen to the Ostriches and do nothing then we could end up with a scenario which involves later having to build dikes around every port city in the world as the least expensive option for adaption.
The sensible thing is to ignore both the Priests and the Ostriches, conduct the necessary studies to see exactly what's going on, what the effects will be, and what we might do to stabilize the situation - assuming it needs to be stabilized. Which is precisely why you see very little of this kind of attitude on "science meets Jerry Springer" slashdot.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I find your industrial GDP's rather suspect as well.
Dyolf Knip
"We can't hurt the environment because we're part of the environment! Everything we do is 100% natural!"
This is a blatant attempt at distracting the debate from the real issues. The question of whether humanity's actions should be described as "natural" or as something apart from nature is more of a semantic debate, and it sheds no light on the real issues. Whether our behaviors are "natural" because we are a product of natural evolution is irrelevant. The question is whether we are doing damage to the environment that will degrade both the health of the ecosystem as a whole and to our own prospects for long-term survival.
There are plenty of examples of species' performing actions that undermined their own future. Locusts can overbreed, then feed and feed until everything edible is gone. The Ebola virus kills its hosts off so quickly that it doesn't have enough time to spread to others, inhibiting its long-term survivability. These actions are natural, but stupid and self-destructive.
Again, the real question is whether our actions are beneficial, not whether they can be defined as "natural."
Oh, and it's a self-serving and disingenuous argument if only because it's primarily put forth by right-wing Republicans who almost invariably believe that mankind is a special creation of God, not just another part of nature. To put it bluntly, the people who put forth the argument almost never really believe it. That's pretty much the definition of sophistry.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
We just wait ~50 years to run out of fossil fuels.
Greenpeace's other founder left to start Sea Shepherd, because he thought Greenpeace was too willing to compromise. All things are relative.
I confess, I don't understand why people use "follow the money" as an attack against Greenpeace yet don't admit that the same logic makes most of the "global warming is good for you" counterhype just as suspect. Greenpeace has donations to win by scaring you, but those donations are chump change compared to profits from oil companies and related industries.
Can you honestly tell me that you think Exxon-Mobil and Ford don't have a tremendous vested interest in convincing us that scientists warning us about global warming are all wrong? In fact, when you look back at the bulk of corporate history, there's a long tradition of being against anything that might cause a loss in profitability, from safety regulations to fuel economy requirements. They've done a really good job at convincing libertarians that CAFE is an an assault on personal freedom. Bullpucky.
And, again using the "follow the money" logic, your poster boy Patrick Moore works for an "astroturf" group called the British Columbia Forest Alliance. It's funded by logging industries and was set up by the PR firm Burston-Marstellar, a group notorious for this kind of work. It sounds to me like the real issue for Moore is that those "environmental extremists" can't scare up enough donations to pay nearly as well as the people they're campaigning against can.
Which kind of says something about which side has more of a vested interest to protect, really. Hint: it's not Greenpeace.
You're right. It does take a very strong reason. Money is just such a reason. Not in small form. Not money as in hundreds or thousands or dollars. Millions of dollars in fines, extra workers, extra equipment and time investment to either comply with the new laws, fight the lawsuits, or both.
Most industries will choose to stay in the US. This is true. Them problem is that the minority that doesn't will choose to do so when money drives them to move. Heavy levies and fines will cause heavy polluters to at least consider the move. Cheap labor and easily bought local officials will convince them.
No, it doesn't. Your source on that claim is probably Dixie Lee Ray's book _Trashing the Planet_, or Rush Limbaugh's frequent quoting of it, or somebody else's quoting (or mis-quoting) of Rush. Dixie Lee Ray unfortunately got a few of her facts and calculations wrong, and the resulting misinformation has been bouncing around the net ever since. For a correction, um, try this FAQ. Here's the relevant snippet:
I play Nerd-Folk!
To repeat a folkloric figure that I can't back up, a coal plant releases more radiation in a day than the entire three mile island accident. My third-hand source for this ran across it when he was writing a paper. He went out to both a nuclear plant and a coal plant with a geiger counter. He accidentally left it on, and it was going nuts by the time he reached the gate of the coal plant. He refused to go any farther . .
three mile island did, of course, waste billions of dollars, and everyone within a couple of thousand miles blamed everything bad that happened to them for the next couple of years on the radiation . .
hawk
The "big freeze scare" was "nuclear winter", ie the results of huge numbers of fires caused by nuclear bombs. Most global warming predictions do not take into account a nuclear war.
No fucking way will they bring back the double nickel. I am not slowing down to save oil for some SUV driver. Make the drivers PAY for their gasoline!
sulli
RTFJ.
But we can see that China is not as efficient at agricultural production as the US is - based on population, China should have an agricultural GDP of 4 times the US if it were as efficient as the US, with a comparable percentage of the labor force in agriculture in both countries. But China is much less efficient - not only is its agricultural GDP only 3.3 times larger than the US, but China has approximately 50% of its labor force in agriculture, whereas the US has about 2.5% of the labor force in agriculture.
So, his numbers are fine, and you're still right - the US is far more efficient than China at agricultural production. We produce a third of what they do with only about 3.5 million workers in agriculture (2.5% of a labor force of 140 million), and they produce what they do with about 350 million workers (50% of a labor force of 700 million). It takes them literally ten times as many workers to produce three times the agricultural goods that we do. In terms of per-worker agricultural output, the Chinese don't even come close.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I never said they were independent. Unfortunately, sources for both sides of the global warming debate are generally biased one way or the other.
The main reason the the "global warming debate" has split on partisan lines is, in large part, precisely because the global warming issue is being used to accomplish social and political ends. If it were truly about the planet you'd see more conservatives on board. Contrary to liberal propaganda, conservatives aren't inherently any more likely than liberals to trash the planet for a buck.
So... you have a bunch of liberals crying wolf and claiming, quite literally, that the sky is falling (or the earth is warming or the seas are rising). All this is based on questionable science but has the immediate affect of promoting a liberal political agenda. Is it surprising that conservatives will be opposed to that?
Do you really think that if there was any real proof that Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, Miami, and Boston would all be consumed by a rising sea within 100 years that conservatives would ignore it to make a buck? If so, then you are truly being blined by liberal propaganda.
www.national.org is a conservative think tank therefore why shouldn't I conclude that the statitics it quotes are carefully selected and partial?
You should conclude it is partial and carefully selected. Just like when you read an article that is being portayed as suggesting that an iceberg in the south is proof of global warming.
What you should do is read both biased sides of the debate. If you are lucky enough to find something truly neutral, read that too. Unfortunately neautrality is almost impossible because as someone reaches their conclusion they will almost always come down on one side or the other (unless they just say "We don't have enough information" in which case any subsequent comments is based on their opinion).
What it comes down to is:
1. Global warming is not accepted as fact. That is not to say that the theory of global warming is flawed, but there isn't any conclusive evidence that the earth is currently warming. There apparently was about a .5 degree temperature increase in the last century, but it all happened before 1940. In the last 23 years there has been no discernible warming.
2. If there were warming, it is not clear that it isn't completely natural. Temperatures were below their "normal" levels 600 years ago and temperatures have increased somewhat since then--moving towards "normal."
3. If there has been recent global warming, it is not clear that it has been caused by man. Sun cycles, earth cycles, closeness of the earth to the sun, volcanos. There are so many natural factors that can contribute to warming of the earth that it is very questionable what, if any, impact man has on the equation.
4. If man does have an affect on global warming, it is not clear exactly how much or in what fashion. If man caused 0.1 (hypothetical number) of 0.5 degrees of warming in the early 20th century does that justify draconian cuts in emissions and subsequent reductions in economic output that will reduce our ability to improve the quality of life on the planet, both at home and--eventually--in poorer countries?
5. If man does have a substantial affect on global warming, are we sure that this is a bad thing? Why do we think that the current state of the planet is best? Because we are used to it? Or could it be that changes in the climate could cause LA to be consumed by the ocean but cause the desert southwest to become farmable land which could be used to produce more of a surplus of food that could be exported to poorer countries?
All in all, there are a heck of a lot of assumptions that greenies make when they try to promote the whole "the earth is heating up" rubbish. Even if the earth is heating up the fact that they purport to know that that is necessarily bad is telling.
Nothing in this world is static. Especially the weather and, by extension, the climate.
reference was perhaps a little... reckless, dare I say trollish. Neverthless, I
continue to find the general attitude of scorn
and derision, backed up with half-baked, long-discredited pseudo science,
misunderstandings of half-remembered TV documentaries and ads paid for by the
oil industry, profoundly depressing. Speaking as a goddam limey, it's seems
to be that this attitude is far more prevalent amongst Americans that others.
And that's just skimming at +4! Gawd knows what it's like at -1... *wince*
Depressing to see such (accidental, presumably) misinformation and just plain
wrong "facts" being moderated up as "informative".
There are so many myths and straw men arguments... I'm going to go through
all the comments, isolate each duff point made and refute it. (Mail me if
you'd like to know when it's done. I mis-munged my email address in the
submission: it's cally, at zpok, dot demon, dot co, dot uk . I'll try to
draw attention to any genuine areas of disagreement, or doubt, or even where
there are some real science people who disagree on an area.
To everyone who pointed out that the sun has or is getting hotter or colder:
yes, of course the sun's output has fluctuated over time. How do you know that?
And don't you think that the climate modelling people might have thought of that,
too, and ALLOWED for it in their calculations? Well, of course they have, and
yes they have.
Lots of straw-man arguments about what "environmentalists" think. The IPCC,
the Hadley Centre, and all the other groups around the world working on
the fantastically complex area of (a) working out what the climate was like
in the past, (2) modelling it well enough to predict the present from the past,
and (3) make assessments about the probability of various outcomes - that is,
to "make predictions" - are NOT "environmentalists". They are reputable
scientists. They study data, test hypothesis, publish in peer reviewed journals,
argue with each other, test models, criticise other models, and all the rest
of the "scientific method" as practiced today, with all the crap that goes
along with it. This is the BEST WE HAVE. If it's good enough to make engrave
computers on slivers of rock so small that quantum effects start to make
themselves felt - and make the planes fly and drugs work and all the rest of
it - then the overall consensus is probably a pretty damn good guess. It's
the best we are going to get, for now anyway.
Whatever. I'm knackered (I have a 4.5 hour commute, gotta get up again in
7 hrs), and no-one will read or moderate up this comment, coming so late,
but I AM going to write that page listing the myths and broken arguments
that keep getting trotted out here. Then perhaps we can get on with arguing
about whether it's worth spending money to prevent socio-political problems
that will affect our kids, and, with luck, their kids...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I have heard many arguments that the US adopting the Kyoto protocol for the reduction of greenhouse gasses is too expensive, unsafe, or inconvienent. For example, BP has already met the conditions of Kyoto in 4 years and in fact is now saving money because of it. DuPont has made even better progress, reducing their contribution of greenhouse gasses by 50%!
Cutting greenhouse gasses is not necessarily that difficult. For example, last year I added more insulation to my home. I saw a 25% reduction in natural gas because of this, and with various other improvements I have made over the last few years I am sure my home consumes far less energy than it did in 1991. The net result of these improvements to my house is that I spend less money on heating and lighting and in only a few years all of the changes will more than pay for themselves. Not only that, but with the added insulation my house is more comfortable.
Everyone seems to think that increasing the milage of cars is the most important step. While it is important and I believe easily doable with todays technology, many other areas are even easier.
How many of your homes have old furnaces and sub-standard insulation?
Perhapse if we had to pay the true cost of energy things would change. Here in California where we are stuck with outragiously high electricity costs (my bill is over $0.20/kwh) and very high gas prices, many people have taken advantage of methods to reduce energy usage. The state has helped as well by offering rebates. For example, it is now not unusual to buy a 100 watt equivelent compact flourescent light bulb for less than $1.
One doesn't have to be a rabid environmentalist to see the benefits from reducing greenhouse gasses. It also makes sense in the pocket book.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Wolf wrote:
.72 AU (ie, Venus), there would be higher temperatures but not runaway greenhouse. -- at least not until the CO2 levels reached critical and the hydroxyls started boiling away into space. Keep CO2 levels low and you're okay.
There's absolutely no way that Earth can turn into Venus. For one thing there isn't enough carbon to make the carbon dioxide to push up the greenhouse effect to that degree. For another Venus is simply closer to the Sun.
And further, the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by man is dwarfed by the amount produced by volcanoes; by more than ten times. Even if we deliberately tried we can't influence the environment that much. Some, but nothing like you are implying.
Whoever wrote this obviously is too young to have been in a classroom where they used... chalk. Ever looked around you? The earth is layered in calcium carbonate and other retentive materials (wood, coal, oil, coral, krill) that extract carbon from the atmosphere and keep it locked up. Yes, volcanoes and other factors churn it out, but our biosphere has evolved processes for packing it away again... processes that we are increasingly interfering with.
The carbon cycle. Look it up. If you're some sort of computer weenie with no chemistry skills think of it as a finely balanced recursive algorithm with hundreds of inputs and outputs that somehow maintains environmental homeostasis. Knock this out of whack and you've got hell to pay. You can easily get Venus, or Mars (Snowball Earth).
Your supposition about Venus is also plain wrong. The incident stellar energy per square metre on the upper atmosphere of Venus is only incrementally higher than Earth's. If the Earth as currently constituted was at
Alone of all the planets the earth does not exist in physical equilibrium. It's the only planet so far discovered with a strong biosphere that resists change and maintains temperature and humidity levels. Dismissing that unique gift is dangerous and absurd. Have you heard of chicken little?
Try this on for size.
Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.
The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.
Da Blog
I see a lot of argument about whether global warming is a problem, whether humans have any effect, and should we do anything about it.
:-(.
Lets look at the best and worse cases:
* Best case is that global warming is either not happening, or part of a self-limiting natural process and not any sort of problem. In this case, if we keep doing what we are doing (keep increasing emissions), we are fine, and if we attempt to reduce our emissions, we go through some temporary hardship as we can't do all the things we are currently doing, but in the long run we are quite good at working around constraints.
* Worst case is that global warming is going to be a catastrophe, and we are playing a large part in causing it. In this case, keeping with our current course is a disaster, and we need to do what we can to try and reduce the level of the problem, or at least delay it to try and find some more options.
Looking at these, continuing our present course is a very large gamble with the whole ecosystem at stake, and attempting to reduce our impact on the problem might cause some real short-term hardship (particularly economic), but might also save us in the long term.
Given this, it seems clear to me that while we seek more knowledge and understanding about what is going on, we should play it safe, and try to clean up our act until it becomes clear whether what we are doing is a problem.
One version of the Precautionary Principle (http://www.biotech-info.net/rachels_586.html) states:
1. People have a duty to take anticipatory action to prevent harm. ("If you have a reasonable suspicion that something bad might be going to happen, you have an obligation to try to stop it.")
2. The burden of proof of harmlessness of a new technology, process, activity, or chemical lies with the proponents, not with the general public.
3. Before using a new technology, process, or chemical, or starting a new activity, people have an obligation to examine "a full range of alternatives" including the alternative of doing nothing.
4. Decisions applying the precautionary principle must be "open, informed, and democratic" and "must include affected parties."
I think this (particularly parts 1 and 4) applies to our situation - we have a reasoable suspicion (even if no proof yet) that what we are doing may be harmful.
Of course hardly anyone will read this because I've posted it so late in the discussion
If you are talking about dumping toxic waste into rivers which can very easily be shown to be detrimental to those downstream, then they need to change their ways. I have no problem with that.
If you are talking about emitting smog that has a demonstratable affect on the health of people then, perhaps, there should be some taxes levied to give them an incentive not to pollute--or to relocate perhaps in the middle of the desert where no-one cares. This, however, should only be done if doing so will really help. If smog particle X is acceptable at 5 ppm and currently is at 200 ppm and chasing away all the heavy polluting companies will reduce it to 150ppm I would submit that you shouldn't chase away those companies.
If you are talking about vague allegations of global warming that may or may not be happening and may or may not be caused by human activity then I think that it's not unreasonable to mention that the immediate affect of global warming (or not) is in the greenies research funds more than any imminent or delayed threat to the earth.
Mostly greenies are just burning up research dollars that could be better spent on something else. Working to eliminate disease, world hunger, whatever.
Whether or not global warming is real, the most immediate result of any conclusion regarding global warming is the greenie's research funds. Either they get more research funds or they have to go find a real job that actually produces something.
If the factories are truly causing physical damage to a large number of people then they need to get clean. I have no problem with that.
By the same token, if a plant locates in the middle of a desert and is emitting smog that bothers some rancher down the highway then the rancher should move since the cost to society is less for him to move than the factory which is already located far away from civilization to reduce these types of problems.
I also see that you are very quick to use a diminutive term "greenie" to describe anyone on the other side of this debate. Showing that you, yourself, are not above using apeals to frame the debate and attempt to decrease the credibility of your opponents, rather than attacking them on purely logical grounds. This of course does not invalidate any point you make, but does expose your bias.
Actually, this is the first thread I've ever used the "greenie" term. I just used it because it's so much easier than mentioning every special interest group that makes up the greenie movement. Socialists, activists without a cause, animal rights, communists, just plain liberals. It's easier to call 'em "greenies". Everyone knows who I'm talking about.
That said, my bias should be obvious based on my comments regardless of whether or not I call them "greenies."
That said, I think environmental issues are important, and we definitly need to get a global handle on them and reduce the amount of polluting we do. Regardless of whether there is a global warming problem or not.
I agree, as long as we are addressing some kind of real problem. If we're reducing factory emissions because half the city has asthma, that's worthwhile. If we're doing it so that the sky looks blue instead of grey then that's an asthetic issue, but perhaps worthwhile to a given city.
But I'm not in favor of draconian cuts in invisible emissions to solve a problem that may not even exist. If it could be done without affecting the economy that would be one thing. But, no, call me a capitalist but I am not willing to give up one dime of the world's "GDP" to address a problem that may not exist. I'm not willing to give up one dime of the U.S.'s GDP nor one dime of Nigeria's GDP. It just doesn't make sense.
As they say, if it's not broke, don't fix it. At this point we don't even know if anything is broken.
Your freedoms do not exist in a vacuum, and there are many very worthwhile causes that are not explicitly about freedom.
While replying to yourself is probably some form of onanism, I was wondering exactly how the difference in solar constant levels due to distance would affect temperature on earth and venus.
The answer? Not much -- it's really all down to CO2 and albedo. Without atmospheres, Earth would have a mean temperature of Earth (-12C) and Venus (-23C).
More here, and here is the key:
The atmosphere would finally stablilize at a still higher temperature and pressure after all the carbon dioxide had been driven from the rocks. In fact, we believe that if this sequence were to take place on the Earth, the resulting temperature and pressure of the atmosphere left behind would not be very different from that for present-day Venus: the atmospheric termperature would be hundreds of degrees Celsius and the pressure would be maybe 100 times greater than it is today. Thus, we believe that in the case of Venus the initial solar heating kept oceans from forming, or kept them from staying around if they did form, and the subsequent lack of rainfall and failure of plant life to evolve kept the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rather than binding it in the rocks as is the case for the Earth; thus, Venus has an environmental disaster for an atmosphere. The sobering warning for us is obvious: we have to be extremely concerned about processes such as burning of fossil fuels in large volumes that might (we don't know for sure because the scientific questions are complex) have the potential to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and produce on the Earth atmospheric conditions such as those found on Venus.
Da Blog
I don't think anyone is denying that there was any effect; some people are merely arguing that the effect is insignificant. I.e. if of the current warming trend, 99% is the result of an increase in solar power output and 1% is the result of human activities, then you are correct -- humans have contributed to global warming -- but it's also irrelevant, because they've contributed so little that it might as well be 0.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Are we sure that big chunks like this don't occassionally break loose regardless of any alleged warming trends? Are we sure what part of real warming trends are and are not man-made? I think, in any case, that this event is a poor excuse to act as if all the "the earth is warming up and it spells your DOOM!" people were right-on all along and all others are blowing smoke.
Yeah I know that too. You'd never catch me buying the Cadillac SUV. I'd rather have an Avalanche or the dressed down Trailblazer. You'd never see me in a Escalade. SUV's are for those idiotic enough to think that buying a mini van makes them loose their cool (when they have already lost it anyway....).
Gorkman
One volcano affected climate by several degrees C over several centuries....
Humankind has (obviously) caused none of that, yet the earth still went up by several degrees.
Global warming over the past couple of decades appears real, but is likely to have a natural cause. (solar insolation increases).. Conjectured models that don't fit any of the observed data are not sufficient to predict that.
Buddy.. Humankind is *small change* in the world energy budget... Now in a century this may change, but not yet.
Uninformed ass. Interesting choice of words.
Your first two links were from a right wing front group dedicated to, among other things, printing anything to deny that global warming exists.
Your third link was from the "Reagan Information Exchange". Same deal.
Your fourth link was the funniest of all. It was from an outfit called the "Greening Earth Society".
Here's a bit from their About Us page:
Our climate focus expresses scientific skepticism concerning the potential for catastrophic changes in climate due to humanity's emissions of CO2.
Greening Earth Society is a not-for-profit membership organization comprised of rural electric cooperatives and municipal electric utilities, their fuel suppliers, and thousands of individuals.
Some advice, friend: next time you want to brag about how informed you are on the topic of global warming, try posting some links that aren't from GOP sites and energy utilities. You might want to consider some links from actual scientists. Unless you're of the Limbaugh persuasion and believe that scientists are all liberals with agendas who can't be trusted.
So, yes, volcanos spew plenty of greenhouse gasses. I don't have the exact information on hand and I don't have time to search for it right now, but if you jump to google.com and do some honest research I'm sure you can find it for yourself with little trouble.
What happened, was your VCR busted on the day that Rush did his show on volcanoes?
I also loved how you can hardly write a paragraph without bashing "greenies" and then you tell others to not trust those with agendas. That's even funnier than when you posted the link from a consortium of energy companies disproving global warming.
If it is a problem, we shouldn't compound the problem.. But..
Changes aren't free or costless.. As an example, gov't could ban burning anything for energy tonight, but that policy obviously isn't costless.. (And the gov't would be overthrown tomorrow.)
Thats the problem.. If the choice to avoid burning stuff was costless, I'd agree with you; the only thing I'd agree was worth burning was charcol in a BBQ. But changes aren't costless.
That was your funniest message yet.
You used the word "greenie" seven times, while claiming that it was a word you just added to your vocabulary tonight.
You said that if pollutants can't be reduced to optimal levels, then they shouldn't be reduced at all. What's a 25% reduction in pollution worth compared to the fiscal well-being of heavily polluting companies?
You said that climate research is usually done by crooked scientists trying to milk the system of research dollars. You said such people should find real jobs that "actually produce something". That would be real convenient for all the polluters you champion, wouldn't it?
Why bother with research, just blame it all on volcanoes. Nothing to be done here, folks, move on, and keep on pumping out those pollutants. Don't be taken in by those god damn "greenies" who express concern about the quality of land, air, and water we pass on to the next generation.
Georgia Forestry association is where I'm getting my numbers. They have no contacts with the logging companies that I know of and spend a lot of time regulating them.This link has the stats for georgia, including numbers on how many acres have been reforested etc... There are similar sites for most other states that show generally the same thing. You can also hit some rainforest watch pages that will give you the stats on who is destroying what and how much.
But I don't have any links handy for those.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
No.... I'm just disputing the claims that its costless.
If something *is* costless and leads to long-term advantage, sure, lets go for it.
But if it does have a cost, then the decision must be *JUDGED* based on the costs and benefits.
Most environmental nuts seem to think that their policies are costless. (Say, like banning DDT), when in truth they have incredible costs (DDT, properly applied, is safe and has saved over a *HALF BILLION* lives)
Another blatant example... What are the costs of using 'renewables'? Given average insolation, it is going to take several hundred square kilometers of solar cells, or a line of 100-meter wind turbines 500km long. To power *one* state (cali). Ignoring the costs of manufacturing the equipment and power-lines. Those are the costs.. Now what are the benefits? Well, you can be off-grid and independent. You can please greens. It'll be a lot more expensive and encourage conservation.
Now, for those who live in the middle of nowhere, the benefit of works off-grid is invaluable. For those who eant enforced conservation, it also works..
But for most people and places... The costs far outweigh the benefits.
Its only when one doesn't have their head in the sand and one looks at the costs and benefits that one can make an informed decision. Most econut theories are far from costless, and they seem to have an inability to see those costs.
The point about the random factor is that is doesn't matter what it is. Even if it were -3 as you mention, then it is *still* worth implementing Kyoto as you get a net result of -1 which is better than +2. All this is under the stated assumption that a degree less temperature is good of course.
Naturally I agree that this is a simplification, all the equations are seriously nonlinear, and extra warming might therefore be beneficial at some points on the curve.
My whole point was that the argument that combating global warming is unnecessary because other factors affect global temperature is invalid because you can find a simple counterexample.
We need more information on this issue before we can come to a definitive answer, in particular whether the global climate is self-correcting or potentially unstable. Given the risks involved, I actually think we're mad not to take more precautionary steps right now.
If you're going to be an eco-freak, get your facts straight.
Rich
We are measuring global temperatures using two different systems, satellite and ground stations. They are giving divergent readings with the ground stations showing global warming and the satellite data showing no warming or even a slight cooling.
My point is that matters aren't cut and dried and that we should resolve the data discrepency before we condemn 10s of millions extra to poverty/death because we spent our resources on global warming amelioration instead of economic growth.
DB