Good News on Global Warming

TheSync writes "OK, CO2 levels are rising, but iAfrica has a report that atmospheric methane concentrations are leveling off. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas, accounting for one fifth of total warming. Researchers don't know why this is."

Comments

Re:Inverse Time Capsule

[Red Rocket]

Yeah, environmental groups are the ones infiltrating and skewing scientific study -- that's a laugh. Only if that time capsule came from the future of Bizarro World. Back here in the real world it's corporate whore science that's steering the results to match their profit motives and corporate whore politicians who edit even those findings to paint pretty pictures for the uninformed. Environmental groups have been effectively silenced and marginalized, just as the corporations would have it. Wake up and smell the exhaust fumes.

Understood all too well.

[Spamalamadingdong]

Dramatic decreases in emissions will most certainly have to be accomplished by decreased production. Retooling may now be an option, as Bush has relaxed some of the constraints on emission standards, the permit producers to make their plants more effecient, but may result in increased capacity for emissions. However, "environmentalists" and the media lambast Bush for this not because they care about the environment, but because they have an anti-capitalist agenda.

You're looking at (the text of) an environmentalist, who is also a capitalist who thinks that the political left is 80% loons. In short, you're wrong.

First, Kyoto did not require dramatic decreases in anything. A small reduction like 10% could be easily accomplished just by moving all new motor vehicles to hybrid technology, no other changes required. If you added some common-sense measures such as best-practice insulation standards in all building codes, you could take an even bigger whack out of emissions related to space heating and cooling (50% is fairly easy).

Second, some large improvements are easily accessible. If you combined an acid-rain abatement program with efficiency improvements and mandated that all old coal-fired powerplants be either retired or repowered with integrated-gasification combined-cycle plants, you'd boost efficiency from 30-33% to around 40%. This would give you a reduction in CO2 emissions between 20 and 25% per unit of electricity. It's been done; check this.

My beef with Bush is that he's obviously a pawn of the industrial interests. We created a regulatory regime for reducing pollution, but existing plants were grandfathered in and not required to do anything until they were replaced or upgraded. Industry's response was to game the system, failing to build new plants and claiming that their changes to old ones never met the requirements for having to clean them up. If you want to look at negative effects on the economy, think of all the employment that would have been generated in construction if those mandates had instead been on a timetable with no exceptions and those plants had been scrubbed, replaced or re-powered.

Bush's slimy acquiescence to the polluters is particularly galling to me, as I live in a state where the game fish are so loaded with mercury (mostly from coal-fired powerplants) that eating them steadily can cause acute mercury poisoning even in an adult. I don't even want to think what is happening to children (who are far more sensitive to heavy-metal poisoning), and when I see Bush touting his efforts on their behalf all I can think is "what a fucking liar".

Global warming is a crock

[phlegmofdiscontent]

Does anyone remember a little article posted on slashdot a few weeks ago? Some scientists re-examined the data used in the study that forms the basis of the UN's climate policy. They found that the original authors of that study pretty much made up data and massaged the rest to come up with their conclusions. These scientists used the same methods on the same data, WITHOUT all of the data manipulation and found that while the 20th century was indeed slightly warmer than the 19th century, it is far from the warmest in the past 500 years. I see numerous studies showing that global warming is a farce. For instance, it was much warmer 1000 years ago, which was what allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. Hell, just look at the name. There isn't much green in Greenland these days. I saw another study that shows a direct correlation between solar influx and global temperatures.
The problem with this global warming theory is that it is rapidly becoming dogma and any "heretics" are figuratively burned at the stake for having dissenting views. It is preached as truth when in fact it is mostly based on flawed data and computer simulations. Creation theory practically has more hard data behind it than global warming.
Now, that's not to say I wouldn't like to see some reduction of emissions from fossil fuels. The way it is now seems wasteful to me. But if we blindly follow the environmentalists, we'll be reduced to squatting in ditches, poking berries up our noses. I'd personally like to see a move to nuclear energy and a hydrogen-based economy, but if and when that happens, the environmentalists will probably find a way to bitch about that too.