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Old School Data Mining, Maritime Style?
jason0000042 writes "The BBC is reporting on Cliwoc, the Climatological Database for the World's Oceans, which pulls data about climate change from 18th and 19th Century sailing ships' logbooks. It's like a window in time that could help us better understand global climate change, if they can decipher the olde timey language of the 1750's. Personally, I can't wait to know if we're going to melt down, or alternatively, have an ice age."
Expedition to Tanzania seeks clues about ancient climate
http://www.smu.edu/newsinfo/releases/99355a.html
Hunt is on for ancient 'global warming' documents
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_787743.html
...the current data being collected by Volunteer Observing Ships today. See: http://www.etl.noaa.gov/programs/oceanobs/ for details. Basically the program combines physical data with old fashioned observation.
If they are worried about the Great Ocean Conveyor giving out in the Labrador Seas due to an increase in freshwater runnoff, (there is evidence to suppor that this happened during one of the last ice ages, when a ice dam broke and billions of gallons of fresh water dumped into the North Atlantic, shutting down the Gulf Stream, and turinng a gradual thaw into a deep freeze,) there is a simple solution, should this be found to be the problem.
Dump lots of dense, salty crud in the North Atlantic!
This will help keep the water sinking, drawing more warm water up from the Gulf, and incedentally keep Europe warm. Where to get this water densification material? Why good old fashion pollution, of course.
Heavy metal salts, and any industrial ionic or polar goop that readily disolves in water can be spread by the tanker load accross the Labrador and Greenland Seas, increasing the density of water, and compensating for the freshwater runnoff that is occuring as a result of global warming.
The normal quote in industry is "The solution to pollution is dilution" Well, in this case, "The solution to dilution is pollution!"
if they can decipher the olde timey language of the 1750's
;)
Isnt the fact we cant even decipher 1750's English a testament to our inferiority at predicting the weather.... not to speak of the fact Ive never known a single weather reporter to give a accurate forcast of the weather.. well now thats where I slip up
Gotta love this weather thing.
moo
The basic gyst is that the warming melts Greenland. This diverts the gulf stream; plunging Europe into an Ice Age.
To be more specific, the meltwater coming off a warmer Greenland will dilute the seawater at the terminus of the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is driven in part by salinity differences (hence the term "thermohaline circulation), and if the dilution reduces the magnitude of these differences too much, then it is possible that the Gulf Stream will shut down. A good introductory discussion of this subject can be found here.
To see what Europe might be like without the Gulf Stream, consider that the British Isles are at the same approximate latitude as Newfoundland. Brrrrr!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
we need to at least *prepare* for it if we cannot do anything else.
The thing that the "we're all going to die!" extremists miss, is that the changes will happen over a very long period of time. e.g. In 5 years, the shore may creep up 10 inches. If it starts becoming a problem, you'll find that governments will start building dykes, or digging shoreline trenches to keep the water at bay.
To anyone who thinks this sort of terraforming is a big deal, you need to take a trip to visit Superior-Deluth on the border of Wisconsin and Michigan. You can see quite a few Army Core of Engineers' trawlers on the water. These are used to regularly dig out deposits of dirt and soot to keep the harbor deep enough for the thousand footers to sail and dock.
As you said, humans are quite adept at adjusting the environment to meet our needs. The Earth will be fine. Worry more about poisoning ourselves or blowing ourselves to kingdom-come.
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Seriously... this is the title of the Caltech Michelen Lecture, 1/17/2003 by Michael Crichton.
...and...
Since this discussion will lead to the inevitable global warming flap, this paper offers a good viewpoint on the issue (although I disagree with his assertion that SETI is a religion - it isn't - it's an experiment).
A few quotes:
Regarding Sagan's claims of nuclear winter:
Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, "I really don't think these guys know what they're talking about,"
In my book, if Feynam said it, it was almost certianly true. I used to go to his lectures at Hughes Malibu Research Center and it was an amazing experience.
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
The only good weather is bad weather.
on the history channel had a special kinda relating to this. The episode What sank the armada? had a scientist researching why the spanish were not prepared for a naval battle (defeat of the spanish armada). The scientist was researching the log books and trying to recalculate areas of low and high pressure. pretty interesting.
You can believe all you want that we can always just sprawl out more and more, but think of the consequences, deforestation, extinction of species, contamination of water sources, etc...
Oh, cry me a river. We change the environment just by existing. The primary difference between the way we change it and animals change it, is animals find their niche for adding balance, and stop there. Humans continue to change their environments more and more, but as a price must learn to complete the cycle.
Thus "deforestation" has become a scientific process of cutting down older trees and encouraging the growth of young ones. Nature would have eventually wiped a whole area out with a forest fire instead.
Extinction of species sucks. It's also a natural process. When the balance that an animal brings to nature is superseded, they are no longer to change the environment to meet their own needs. By preserving them, we are actually changing our environment more. Is preserving them then a bad thing? I don't think so. You never know when another change in our environment would foster the reintroduction of a species.
Contamination of water sources is an age old problem. Fresh water in its natural state would never have been able to support the number of humans alive today. As a process of changing our environment, we've build damns, pumps and water purification centers to provide enough fresh water wherever it's needed. (Except California, where people seem to enjoy polluting and eco-freaks get in the way of actual solutions. Don't even get me started on how every technology to them is the wrong one.)
The way we do things in the US will not always work in other parts of the world.
This is true. I used the U.S. as an example, because it worked. Very few other countries with undeveloped land have tried much of anything.
Secondly it's not just a matter of food it's also waste.
Guess what? It came out of the Earth in the first place. There's no reason why it can't go back. The bigger picture is that we're learning to better deal with our waste. Recycling is a good step, but cheap energy could bring down the costs of waste processing. In fact, if energy were cheap enough, we could break everything down to its base components and either resell it or reintroduce it to our environment in its original state.
Not that any of that will happen as long as nuclear technology is seen as "EEEEVIL".
Thirdly while the rate of growth has slowed it has not stopped. The world's population is still rising and we are running out of places to go.
Got numbers? I'll bet I can show that the rate of growth has slowed considerably and that projections could be made for when a worldwide depopulation would start.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Any even passing knowledge of history, just little old human history, will show you the sorts of catastrophic social changes that occur as a result of serious climate change. The Mfecane in SE Africa was a massive migration caused by climate change there: Shaka Zulu was the end result. Krakatoa erupting around 535 A.D., affecting the global climate for a handful of years, may have indirectly caused "plague, famine, death, great migration, the fall of the great Mexican city of Teotihuacan, the Anglo-Saxon victory over the Celts, and may even have played a role in the rise of Islam."
Global climate change will make the world a much more volatile place, and that doesn't just mean floods and tornados. Would we like to have a nuclear power like Russia, or the United States, go through catastrophic climate change? No, that would be a bad thing. It doesn't take any imagination at all to see what the potential effects might be -- it just takes the barest respect for history.
This ain't something we can hide our heads in the sand over. But as long as a facile argument will soothe us back to sleep, we'll try to ignore it, best we can.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
If this is just a small patch in the middle of a thriving rainforest, no problem -- when the ash is exhausted and the nutrient poor soil won't grow crops, it is abandoned and the rainforest regrows quickly. But most of the time it is massive deforestation instead.
Interestingly, there was an article a while back that suggested that the reason the South American rain forests grow as well as they do is because early indians cultivated the soil for farming. A similar situation is believed to be true for North America as well.
So cutting down the old trees to encourage growth of young ones is just the opposite of what you need to prevent unnaturally intense forest fires.
I'm not so sure about that. While younger trees are often consumed (and nature obviously reseeds), my understanding was that it was the dead wood that provided the fuel. By logging an area, we tend to remove the dead wood before it ignites.
Next, you also argue that extinction of species has been happening for a long time and that makes it normal, natural and okay. This overlooks the key issues of rates of extinction.
I'm hardly arguing that we aren't indirectly causing the extinctions. I'm arguing that we are changing the environment to meet our needs, and as a result, we are taking over the processes that used to be provided by various wildlife. As we take over those natural processes, the wildlife that depended on that place in the eco-system no longer has a home and goes extinct. But as I said, we are further changing our environment by preserving those animals which would otherwise disappear.
Finally, there's your delightful argument that [waste] "came out of the Earth in the first place. There's no reason why it can't just go back". This completely ignores the fact that one of the major results of industrialization is the concentration of wastes and the creation of entirely new forms of waste.
With enough energy, we can restore anything we use back to a natural state. That includes "Enriched" Uranium byproducts, which can either be reused, or reprocessed back into stable elements. (Processes exist to degrade radioisotopes into isotopes with a half-life of minutes. These expend a great deal of energy, then become an inert chemical.) BTW, that's FISSION, not Fusion. Fusion is still a Pie-in-the-Sky energy source. Even if fusion is finally accomplished, it still won't be as "clean" as everyone makes it out to be.
And of course, we shout down as "eco-freaks" those who have the temerity to suggest that technologies that produce less wastes are better than technologies to clean up waste.
You can only squeeze so much water out of a rock. Energy efficiency is the goal of any engine producer. However, there are hard ceilings on how efficient a given process can be. Interestingly enough, extremely high energy density processes (such as fission) tend to be cleaner than less efficient processes. However, the more energy you have, the more cautious you have to be with it. I label "Eco-freaks" as annoying anti-progressives, because they tend to hate any and all technology. They keep saying, "make the existing stuff 100% clean!" Sorry, it isn't going to happen. We have to move to processes such as Fission which produce bountiful energy, but are seen as "evil" by eco-freaks because of how dangerous they are.
Our choices boil down to:
1. Improve our technology and continue to improve the "eco-loop" we took over as a species.
2. Live like wildlife and be subject to the whims of the environment.
As a minor comment, the dinosaurs were in the second category.
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