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Water Vapor Causing Climate Warming
karvind writes "According to BBC, new studies suggest that water vapor rather than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main reason why Europe's climate is warming. The scientists say that rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gases are increasing humidity, which in turn amplifies the temperature rise. This is potentially a positive feedback mechanism which could increase the impact of greenhouse gases such as CO2. Even though 2005 will probably be warmest year, climatologists still differ in opinion"
Rather, mining the atmosphere for water is done by capturing water that woudl have condensed anyway, and preventing it from re-evaporating, which is what happens to most dew.
here are some examples. The "dewponds" of Britian are the most well known.
Hey genius, millions upon millions more people are suffering and dying from not enough money than from global warming. Improving the economy will do far more good for the foreseeable future than any of the hippy crap you're spewing.
Fuck it
Why do you hate the greeks so much? Is it because you think they are all faggot buttfuckers? It's not true you know. Greeks do not have a higher rate of homosexuality then other people. You should not let your hatred of homosexuals affect your view of greeks.
I was going to say there is no need to hate homosexuals but I know you can't help it, it just comes with the territory.
evil is as evil does
SO why do you hate greeks so much then?
Also you are a conservative aren't you? Why are you denying your conservative beliefs? Are you ashamed of them?
Since you are obviously a republitard err I mean conservative and since you have admitted to hating the greeks I thought it was perfectly reasonable to think that your hatred of greeks came from your ignorant perception of greeks as being homosexuals.
The hatred of homosexuals by conservatives is pretty widely known no?
evil is as evil does
You're not a liberal if you call yourself "on the left".
You must be American. You guys seldom get two things correct in one sentence.
it's in my head
Ok, so if nothing every stops this positive feedback, why didn't all the oceans evaporate long ago? CO2 concentrations in the past have been higher, and obviously there was no run-away warming effect. There is obviously some effect that counterbalances this positive feedback cycle (most likely an increased rate of vegetation growth, which consumes and fixes CO2 and water vapor both).
So the temp increases, water evaporates, and it starts raining in the deserts again. They bloom, and start sucking down massive amounts of CO2 and water. Over the millenia temperature then drops, less and less rain comes to the deserts (now rain forests), deserts return, CO2 increases. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
That is, my boy, why there is no science in global warming. Ten years from now we'll be laughing at the idea of global warming, just as we laugh now at global cooling. Those of us who have been dubious at the idea of spending X% of our GDP reducing carbon emissions will have the last laugh.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Well, I would first off repost that I am not aware of what is written in the big book of "How Things Are Supposed To Be" so I really can't even begin to say what is negative, positive, or neutral. Those are arbitrary value assessments made on some way you imagine things are supposed to go in some ideal world. You think you are talking about some objective sense of good or bad, when in fact all you are really doing is stating your own sense of aesthetics as some sort of objectivism.
Do human actions have an effect on the environment as a whole? Sure, but then so do frog actions, horse actions, and bird actions. It is a large and complex system where everything effects everything else. You are making some moral (a very human way of looking at the universe) judgment that says what is or isn't beneficial to the climate of the earth.
The climate of the earth is a system, of which we are a part. What we do, is what we do. It is that simple. If (and it is a very big if) a climactic shift causes an environment that makes it impossible for us to survive, then we cease to survive. The planet does not cease to exist, life on the planet does not cease to exist, the entire atmosphere of the planet doesn't cease to exist, we are just gone.
It is your self-aggrandizing hubris that makes you assume that is some horrible crime against nature. The simple truth of the matter is that you are just playing a big game of "what if" and then taking a presumed moral high ground based on the results of your game. Greenhouse gasses are produced by forest fires, greenhouse gasses are produced by every living animal on earth, and greenhouse gasses are produced by geological events. Dramatic climatic change can be produced by a number of factors that range from shifts in the biomass of the planet, all the way to astronomical events.
You (and many others of the same moralistic and philosophical stripe) have concocted a fairy tale where free of the 'unnatural' intervention of man, the entire planet is a perfectly balanced, self-regulating system, that would always seek a garden of Eden like equilibrium point that would always sustain life, and where no species would ever become overpopulated, or extinct. However, there is nothing that can ever happen in the natural world that is 'unnatural.' Mankind is not some supernatural blight on this poor unsuspecting planet. We are just another little mite crawling on the surface of a ball of rock and dirt.
Secondly, instead of just replying with rote attacks, you might want to actually read what is being written by the person you are responding to, instead of your imaginary evil foe. I take the bus everywhere, so it doesn't really make much sense to ask me why I don't take the bus to work.
Ah, I see. So your position is that there has been a perfect consensus among the entire scientific community for some time, but don't listen to those environmentalists, because they are a bunch of loons, and don't listen to geologists, because they don't really know what they are talking about, and don't listen to environmental chemists, because they aren't studying the problem properly, and don't listen to physicists, because they aren't part of the right club. None the less, there isn't a single scientist who disagrees with these findings, outside of a few kooks.
Ok, so climatologists are the only scientists in the world, their grasp of how the ecosystem works is inarguably perfect, and they have nothing to learn from any other branch of science, because those people don't know what they are talking about anyway. All that is important is that the climatologists all agree. Of course, anyone who doesn't realize that is an ignorant fool, who has no right to talk about science. Well, I can certainly see why you find it so hard to believe anyone would not see the inherent truth of you position. You remind me a lot of supporters of Objectivism. You pick your position, then start your "examination of the facts" by first disqualifying large amounts of data as being either spurious, dubious, or irrelevant, then oh what a surprise the result you find is exactly the result you were looking for to start with.
You even argue the same way. Rather than reading what is on the page as a whole, you pick little snippets out of context, based on how well you can use them to make the person you are arguing with fit your preconceptions of what an unbeliever must be. When you get into trouble, of course, you fall right back to the same appeal to authority, over and over, and over again.
You see, here is my problem. Whether you believe it or not, I'm actually an uncommonly smart guy, who spends most of his time doing nothing but thinking about the world, then going and hunting down other really smart people at universities and such. I ask them questions, to learn more about things, and I read whatever they point me to. I study just about every discipline, from economics to philosophy, physics to biology. This keeps me from being an expert at any of these disciplines, but I've never really had a hard time finding people accomplished in the field, who can explain to me what they are doing, and work through their theories, and explain to me how it works, and why they think it works that way. That is, except climatologists. Any time I try to follow up on this line of inquiry, all I find, are people like you. People who don't claim to be particularly accomplished in the field, people who don't even claim to have their own theories, but rather people who say over and over "well, a bunch of really smart people got together somewhere else, and they came up with this report. Since they are so much smarter than you or me, we just have to trust that they know what they are talking about, because they are all really smart, and they all agree." It is funny, but there aren't many other sciences that work that way. When I ask a physicist a question, he can usually tell me who is working specifically on the type of research that is relevant to my line of inquiry, and who I need to talk to to get a better handle on what the current theory is. I can't remember ever once having a geologist direct me to an organization, or governing body to answer a question. It is always something more along the lines of "oh yeah, Bob Smith is the guy you want to talk to about that. He is doing the most exciting work in the field on that." The closest analog I can find to how climatology works, is the field of medicine, or the political sciences.
I suppose being able to just ramble around talking to people like this is one of the advantages of being an artist, and not having to go to a job every day. One of the many things I have learned from this interdisciplinary search for knowledge, is that an awful lot of otherwise really smart scientists