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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.""
in the 70's, many of today's Global Warming researchers were claiming that the Earth was falling into an Ice Age.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Ranking of the world's countries by 1999 total CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring.
That specifically excludes the largest source of greenhouse gasses - domestic animal farts, aka "methane", of which India & china are huge sources.
Its a such a significant problem that New Zealand is considering a genetically engineered bacteria that lives in a cow or sheeps gut that will reduce methane production by 30% - this pretty much covers New Zelands Koyoto commitments.
I wonder how the green party (part of the government in kiwi land) will cope with that ?
- reducing greenhouse gasses good ...
- GM bad ...
- Baaa! baaa !
They'll probably go with "GM Baaaad...", logical thinking and compromise is not their strong point
When the scientific community cannot even find where 30% of the carbon flux goes, why should we believe any assertions about carbon sinks. This is one of the many reasons that Kyoto is bad policy - it is based on an infant scientific field with lousy data. That doesn't mean that the science is bad - it means that it is insufficient, by a long ways.
As far as Kyoto went, what nobody seems to mention is that it was a fraud and a trap. If you believed the numbers that the Kyoto framers themselves used, Kyoto would have resulted in an unmeasurable change in global temperature over the 100 year timeframe of its scope. Or, put another way, it would have delayed whatever warming there was by just a few years.
Kyoto was meant to do two things:
1) Hurt the US economically compared to Europe, by hitting us harder
2) Provide a start to a process that would have required drastic cuts in CO2 emissions - cuts that would have been politically impossible if called for in the first treaty, but cuts that would be necessary to achieve Kyoto's goals.
Without breakthrough technology and massive investment, those cuts would have been impossible. But there is no way to cause breakthrough technology - it is like pushing a rope!
The ultimate conceit in Kyoto was its assumption that its CO2 emissions rules could be maintained, world wide, for 100 years. That requires an absurd faith in the stability of international life that is unprecedented in history. If Kyoto had been put in place 100 years ago, is there anyone alive who believes it would have made any difference? Do the Kyoto planners really believe that the world will be stable... that monstrous regimes will not arise (which will give a fig about the environment - witness the USSR)... that unforseen technological innovations will not occur? After all, 100 years ago there were no airplanes, electronics, computers, antibiotics, totalitarian regimes, Naziism, Marxist-Leninism, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, etc.
Finally, one almost never hears any support for the cheapest, most reliable anti-CO2 emissions technology around: nuclear. France would have an easy time with Kyoto, BECAUSE 70% OF ITS ELECTRICAL POWER IS NUCLEAR. But US enviros have completely killed nuclear power, in spite of its free world history of ZERO deaths - the safest power ever invented.
This in itself is enough to make me strongly doubt either the sanity, education or honesty of almost every pro-Kyoto proponent!
The only good weather is bad weather.
You honestly believe we could eliminate every single bacteria in the world? To answer yes would show that you have a very limited understanding of biology and bacteria in general. Aside from that, when you look at the astroid impacts of this planet's history, remember that they would have caused something very similar to nuclear winter. Would nuclear winter wipe out all humans on this planet? More than likely, it would eliminate virtually every single higher life form. Would nuclear winter eliminate other life forms, such as bacteria? Hardly; there any many types of bacteria which would thrive in such an environment, and many others which would lay dormant for however many millions of years it took for the ecosystem to begin to reform.
You forget that life on this planet started in conditions that were staggeringly uninhabitable by today's standards. We could launch every single nuclear missile and release every chemical and biological weapon ever created and we'd still end up with tons of organisms surviving. Within a few million years, you'd never know humans existed.
"we could seriously fuck up the ecosystem beyond all hope of repair if we're not careful'"
That's just arrogant. Could we fuck it up to the point that humans could survive in it? Yes. But nature doesn't revolve around man - man's existence "revolves" around the center of the galactic toilet bowl, hoping nature doesn't decide to flush.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."