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Still More on Global Warming
hype7 writes "The Daily Telegraph is running a piece on the world's temperature. Apparently, it was a lot hotter in the middle ages: "A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.""
The telegraph article is a pretty lousy article, and gives few details. A bettle article is available at Space Flight Now. Apparently, the study was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute so I would be especially wary of bias.
There isn't enough evidence in the articles to understand what the study actually found. They published some of their findings in the Climate Research journal, which only gives an abstract without a subscription. However, they haven't even published their full findings which are supposed to be published in Energy and Environment which appears to be more of a policy journal than a scientific journal.
I think it is very hard to evaluate the credibility of these claims without seeing the actual journal article that explains them. Another thing is that according to Space Flight Now article, is that the study is actually "A review of more than 200 climate studies," and we need to look at the authenticity of these studies. However, maybe it will help us look at global warming from a new perspective.
That's funny... it never ceases to amaze me how arrogant people can be in thinking we are outside the ecology, or can just trample all over it, quite obviously upsetting balances in drastic ways, and then try to justify it either because we're somehow special, or because "that's just nature". Sure, we're part of the ecology, but it dosn't mean to say that everything we then do in the ecology is a good, natural thing to happen.
Its perfectly natural for our temperatures to fluctuate. Its not that long since we had a fucking Ice age so a bit of warming is not an inherently bad thing.
It also amazes me how ignorant people can be. Yes, certain temperature fluctuations are perfectly natural, but the question is: are the temperature fluctuations we have seen over the past couple of hundred years normal, or are they the result of human activities? It is a fact that rising temperatures are already causing problems in low-lying areas, and that if they continue to rise, as the majority of the scientific community believes, we will see many more problems for humans and the ecology as a whole. You're just fudging the argument.
Chernobyl would have been much safer if the soviets listened to the scientists. As for Three Mile Island, that wasn't much of a disaster. Just about everything that could go wrong did, and there was still no major damage.
Secondly, the US didn't ratify Kyoto for economic reasons, not scientific ones - the US Govt's own sceintists confirmed that global warming exists and is caused by a boatload of human activites - though no doubt some ignorant Congressmen voted against it because they bought the bull from phoney science. It was the protection of major US interests that drove them to not sign it... that, and ignorance and stupidity.
That's not completely true, or at least there's more to it. The Kyoto treaty was meant to cut down on emissions and to reduce possible sources of greenhouse gasses. It was supposed to be binding to all signers. Sounds great, right? But think about the full story -- especially with regard to the two most populous countries: China (~1.5 billion) and India (~1 billion). Conveniently, they were both exempted from the Kyoto accord because the benevolent governments of the world did not want to impact their economic growth potential. So why would the US, a country with less than a 5th of the combined population of those countries, saddle itself with a policy that will not touch those countries? BTW, those two countries are also the largest producers of greenhouse gasses with Mexico and Brazil following way behind them.
everything in moderation
Not operator incompetence, because the operators had a book of rules to be followed, and this book contained the error. So they did what they were told and it was wrong.
"Despite the fact that land sinks help remove carbon from the atmosphere, the U.S. continues to emit more carbon than it removes. In 1990, for example, the country released 1.337 billion tons from fossil fuel emissions, making it a net source of between two-thirds and 1 billion tons of carbon per year."
Got a reference for your statement?
Conservationists are the people who steward the Earth, not Enviromentalists. Enviromentalists are the crazy sidewalk-preachers warning us the end is neigh.
Care to back that up? The Dept. of Energy says we emitted 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon via CO2 emissions in 1999.
This site puts us at the top of global carbon emitters. I don't recognize any of ucsusa's members' names, but their figures for the US approximately agree with the DOE's; I see no reason not to trust them.
BTW, those two countries [China and India] are also the largest producers of greenhouse gasses with Mexico and Brazil following way behind them.
That's not true, according to the US Department of Energy. According to them the top producer is the USA. China is second, and India is 5th.
In that article (Schneider S. & Rasool S., "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols - Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate", Science, vol.173, 9 July 1971, p.138-141), he said "We report here on the first results of a calculation in which separate estimates were made of the effects on global temperature of large increases in the amount of CO2 and dust in the atmosphere. It is found that even an increase by a factor of 8 in the amount of CO2, which is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years, will produce an increase in the surface temperature of less than 2 deg. K.
However, the effect on surface temperature of an increase in the aerosol content of the atmosphere is found to be quite significant. An increase by a factor of 4 in the equilibrium dust concentration in the global atmosphere, which cannot be ruled out as a possibility within the next century, could decrease the mean surface temperature by as much as 3.5 deg. K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!"
Schneider also had this quote on the back of Lowell Ponte's book "The Cooling" (Prentice Hall, N.J., USA, 1976) "The dramatic importance of climate changes to the worlds future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we have been lulled by modern technology into thinking we have conquered nature. But this well-written book points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face, and that massive world-wide actions to hedge against that threat deserve immeadiate consideration. At a minimum, public awareness of the possibilities must commence, and Lowell Ponte's provocative work is a good place to start."
In Scheider's own 1976 book "The Genesis Strategy", he predicted that falling temperatures would cause major crop failures by the end of the 70's.
I am not saying that any of the above statements regarding global cooling are true/false or that the statements regarding global warming are false/true, far from that. I am only pointing out Schneider's global cooling stance. I stand by my answer, Stephen Scheider, one of today's Global Warming proponents, was a major voice in the Global Cooling scare of the 1970's.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
...and you will see that the author of the paper being discused in the article, a Dr Philip Stott, is really juat an right-wing anti-enviromentalists pro-GMO goon. See:
http://www.probiotech.fsnet.co.uk
He's even quoted on the Ultra conservative EviroTruth website:
http://www.envirotruth.org/myth1b.cfm
More info about Stott can be found here.
The sun is getting brighter. Also, there is a remarkable correlation between solar activity and climate, like the Maunder minimum (cessation of sunspot cycle) coinciding with the Little Ice Age in Europe. If the sun does have an influence on climate, then the problem is not outside the area of expertise of astrophysicists. This current study doesn't rule out the role of solar variability, and actually makes it a stronger argument.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Ahem - how nice of you showing ignorance of the actual issue at hand while blaming others of it. The way GM plants are made to reduce the need for pesticides is by making the plants produce pesticide chemicals on their own. To find out why this is a bad idea and has already backffired, read this article - http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story .jsp?story=392044
Many people misconcieve what golbal warming actually is (much of this based on the incorrect use of terms) a better term would be "climate instability." Basically, the weather (already very unpredictable) would be even more unpredictable. A previous slashdot article I believe covered the fact that the
whole of Europe would become much cooler. This would be because their warm fronts would be disrupted.
"Guns don't kill people, bullets do."
> You honestly believe we could eliminate every single bacteria in the world?
r eation/isotop e_list.html
:-)
Clearly you didn't actually read my post, or you wouldn't have bothered to ask this. I said we could destroy all life larger than one cell in size. I still believe this to be true.
And an asteroid impact bears absolutely no resemblance to what would happen if you impregnated the atmosphere of the world with extremely radioactive compounds with a very long half-life. Dramatic climate change is a bear, but it's nothing compared to an environment that takes self-organizing life forms and corrupts the information that they need to pass on to their progeny. I think it conceivable, though not obvious, that we could in fact wipe out the vast majority of unicellular life as well.
> Within a few million years, you'd never know humans existed.
We could fix this, too. Take a radioactive substance with a really long half-life... on the order of 20 or 30 million years. Spread it far and wide through the atmosphere.
Here are some good candidates:
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/c
> Could we fuck it up to the point that humans could survive in it?
Um... I'm pretty sure it's fucked up to that extent already.
> But nature doesn't revolve around man
Yes, but at some point you have to decide what IS important. If you don't think that life is important, then that's fine, because nothing we're going to do is going to have much effect on *geology* in the short term. If you think that us destroying everything except for unicellular life is a negligable change, then that's clearly true from the universe's perspective and clearly not true from the earth's perspecitve. The biosphere is thin, but it has had an extremely large impact on the composition of the surface of the earth.
You clearly don't even believe we could have that much of an effect. But I submit to you that, given the even distribution of a few million tons of highly radioactive materials with a really long half-life over the surface of the world (and, of course, in the oceans as well), we could probably prevent any even modestly complex self-replicating organisms from existing for an extremely long time. If you don't know enough biology to understand why this is, the conversation stops here, I'm afraid, because I'm not going to take the time to explain it to you.
Suffice it to say that the human capacity for destruction is nearly as great as the human capacity to ignore facts that we don't want to acknowledge.
If we were (in some bizarre, science-fiction way) to produce a hundred kilograms of antimatter, would you still claim that anything we could possibly do would have any real impact on the earth? E = 200 * c^2 = 1.8 * 10^19 kg * meters^2 / seconds^2 = 1.8 * 10^19 joules.
This would be enough (by a couple of orders of magnitude, in fact) to bring the moon down onto the earth. Would you consider that 'serious'?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I live in Poland. Ten years ago I used to wear T-shirt, sometimes a pullover in April. Today I see the snow behind the window. Brrr. And this year winter was one of the coldest I remember.
If someone could warm it a bit, I'd be grateful.