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Humanity Responsible For Current Climate Change
tehanu writes "Scientists working with Antarctic ice have found that the level of greenhouse gases is at the highest level in over half a million years. Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years. Methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas is 130% higher. The period of time studied covers eight full glacial cycles including a time when the earth's position relative to the sun is the same as it is today. Other scientists have found that the annual rate at which the sea has risen since the industrial revolution is twice that of over the last 5000 years. It is predicted that by 2100 the sea level will be 40cm higher. These results provide strong evidence that human activity since the industrial revolution, rather than just natural processes, has strongly altered the world's climate. As one of the scientists involved in the research put it: 'The levels of primary greenhouse gases such as methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are up dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, at a speed and magnitude that the Earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years.'"
This is an interesting turn of events...
When the evidence was less than conclusive about either global warming in general or our role in it in particular, the administration roundly decried it, calling global warming a 'myth' and a 'fantasy'.
When the evidence was conclusive about global warming in general, but inconclusive about our role in it, the administration switched to "well...perhaps it is real, but it's surely just a natural phenomenon...we can't be more than marginally responsible".
And now that the evidence about both global warming in general and our role in it in particular is conclusive, the line will now be "oh well...water under the bridge. There's nothing we can do about it now".
In other words...business in usual. It might be a good idea to sell that beachfront property and start shopping for property further north...particularly since you'll be hunting for your own food when the climate shift causes worldwide food shortages.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Galileo started recording sunspots. Mars has its polar caps showing sines of melting and pluto also shows signs of warming.
It would be nice if all the reports about the environment didn't carry the chicken little byline.
Yeah thats really smart. Make gas $6 a gallon so people already hurt by the poor economy the US is experiencing can be hurt even more. For the record, I am very environmentally minded, but the fact is that people will drive no matter what the price is. We pay around $2.50 avg around the country (not an exact figure, just estimating for sake of argument) and no one takes the bus to work. The main problem is that in many US cities there is no choice but to drive everywhere. Public transportation is seriously lacking, and I feel that should be top priority in any large metropolitan area. Make public transportation easy, cheap, and readily available, and people will gladly use it instead of paying high gas prices.
And besides, we're going to run out of oil in the next 100 years anyway, and the earth will balance itself out and go back to equilibrium, and everyone will be happy (except for the oil companaies).
I got nothin'
So what were those lousy smegheads doing to the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago? Stupid cavemen and their earth-raping!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
"Sense" is neither one view or the other. If we develop ways to produce and consume energy that do not pollute the environment, the debate on whether global warming is caused by humans would be completely irrelevant.
What bothers me is the folks who cannot accept that the answer is somewhere in between, it has to be a total disaster scenario or complete denial.
Of the two news items that read "So and so has almost positively proven the cause of global warming" or "So and so has developed a way to reduce co2 emissions by 2.76%" - which one is more sensational, which one qualifies as "front page"? Which sceintist will get more funding and publicity - the one behind the former story or the latter? Yet which of has contributed more to society? That's problem with us people, hype-driven beings...
If the thesis of this article is true -- and that's a big "if" -- then who is more to blame than anyone else for global warming? Why, it't the anti-nuclear "environmentalists," of course. Nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases -- none! Yet the U.S. gets half its electric power from coal. Folks, we burn three tons of coal per *second* in the U.S. alone, and the gaseous emissions kill an estimated 50,000 people per year.
If indeed human activity is causing global warming, then we can solve this problem inteligently or stupidly. The intelligent solution starts with nuclear power. The stupid solution is to give up our mobility and regress to third world living conditions.
If you oppose nuclear power, please educate yourself.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Why is it so hard to believe that us humans are responsible for global warming? The Industrial Revolution brought about automated machinery which required energy and power. We decided to use fossil fuels like oil and coal. We burn these things and it releases carbon dioxide into the air. The more we produced the more people could be sustained, so there was a population boom. This meant more farm lands needed to be created so we cut down more trees. This also lead to more factories, more power stations, the need for more energy. We burned more fossil fuels hence more carbon dioxide.
Why does it seem to some that humans can not bring about climate change? Our population keeps swelling, we keep burning fossil fuels and chopping down trees. Do you think we are unable to produce enough greenhouse gases? Is nature so vast and giant that humans seem to dwindle in strength? We humans are a part of nature. Locusts can devour forests. Why can't us humans ravage the earth?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Actually, you just made the argument against the conclusions of the study. The argument for humans causing global warming goes something like this:
- The temperature is higher now than it's been in x years of records. (X here is usually in about 1000 years of measurements, though there's arguments about a few periods in there where it might have been warmer.)
- The greenhouse gases are higher now that they've been in Y years. (Y = 650,000 years from this study.)
- Humans have been creating a lot of greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution started a couple of hundred years ago.
- Aha! We must be causing it.
That 30 years is insignificant over these time scales also means that 200 years or so is insignificant as well, which is the entire argument about us causing global warming. You can't claim 200 years is significant and 30 isn't whenn compared to these time-scales.
There are many missing pieces from the argument so far to keep it from being a solid argument of some sort:
(1) What is the time-correlation of the greenhouse gases. Fine, they're higher now than any time in the last 650,000 years. Did they keep within some normal fluctuations until about 200 years ago and then steeply climb, or did they start climbing 200,000 years ago, and are slowly leveling off? What's the pattern? If it's the former, one could correlate it to the industrial revolution and us. (Not necessarily causation, but higher correlation is more convincing.) If it's the latter, it essentially removes any use of the study as an argument for humans being the cause since we didn't produce greenhouse gases 200,000 years ago. This is highly important to the argument.
For instance, when I moved away to university, I was taller than I had been in my previous 18 years. Therefore, university causes growth spurts. If I suddenly grew tall right after moving, perhaps it's true(but not necessarily). If I grew taller over years and was leveling off when I moved, it has nothing to do with it. The correlation over time with events is the most important part of the argument and we don't have it for gases.
(2) We do have some of the correlation over time with events for temperature, and there is a rough correlation of temp with increased greenhouse gases, but not a firm one and there are correlations with other things (such as increased solar activity). If human-produced greenhouse gasses are the cause, what happened in the 30 years from 1940 to 1970. We can't claim to understand the causation of climate change over 200 years but can't understand causation over 30 years. Either we understand what affects climate or we don't. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
(3) How can such a small fraction of greenhouse gases, as produced by humans in comparison to naturally occuring, cause such large changes? Why is the climate so much more sensitive to these small amounts?
There are probably more missing pieces. Incidently, I actually do believe that humans are having a bad effect on climate. I hate SUV's, waste, inefficiency, and so on. However, I also have a firm understanding of deductive reasoning and the scientific method and can't throw that out just because I believe something is true. The argument for human causation is so full of holes right now it isn't convincing. That doesn't make it wrong or that we shouldn't be trying to be more efficient and less polluting; but there's either insufficient evidence yet for the argument or it's not being presented properly.
Did you EVER have a job where you had to haul tools and material around? Where every job you get might be two counties over from where you live? The entire planet is NOT just people who only need to haul a laptop or some schoolbooks from the apartment to some convenient office or school. You are suggesting that some plumber or carpenter needs to take 18 trips on the bus just to get to work and back with all his tools, plus walk hauling a backpack of tools and lumber over his shoulder from wherever the bus stop is and the job site isn't? Or are you prepared for the price of about everything to go up like triple or more? That's the choices you have. That's what tripling the gas price would do, it ripples throughout our economy. All these people who actually build stuff and grow stuff and do stuff-actual wealth PRODUCING jobs-not wealth re arranging jobs or paper or electron shuffling jobs-have to drive, have to haul mass quantities of stuff,there is no other way around it, and if you up their prices, they will guaranteed "up yours". Like ordering stuff online and getting it delivered by UPS or Fedex? Think they will keep the same rates? how about snail mail? Trip on the plane to go see grammaw? All the stuff that has to get from factories or mines or farms to the processing plants and manufacturing plants then to the wholesalers then to the jobbers then to the retail outfits "downtown"? In the US anyway, 6 buck a gallon prices would cause a great depression to make the last one look like a charity give away.
.what you got going at home now, how large is your personal solar array? Or anything similar? How much organic food do you produce with a hoe and shovel and carry to the local food coop or haul with your bicycle trailer and sell cheap?
Perhaps you might need to think this reactionary tax through just a scosh more, follow the economic food chains around. And speaking of actual food chains, I live and work on a farm, you raise the fuel prices to triple what they are now, well get ready for 12$ chickens and 3$ a piece corn on the cob and 6$ loaves of bread at your local urban store. And because the costs of energy are closely related, how about tripling your winter heating bills now? When one fuel goes up in price, they ALL do basically.
I think a better idea is what we are doing now, people switching to hybrids or the coming soon plug in hybrids, adding solar to their roofs, large wind generational projects going in, research into clean coal burning technologies, and etc.
and..just for grins..
See? It's big problem, it's not all just cars and finger pointing. That just gets the finger pointed right back at ya.. That crap with cars is sorting itself out just fine now, people may be dumb but they aren't so dumb as to not notice fluctuations at the pump with mostly UP as the range and the general rise of "other" fuel prices like in their natgas bills and propane and whatnot. People ARE switching to better mileage and cleaner burning cars. check the stats, hybrids are the fastest growing market. And an SUV made it into the top 5 mileage vehicles sold in the US this year, the Escape hybrid. Clunky as it is and slow, the system is starting to work. We are talking overcoming inertial with 300 million people in the US and a lot of entrenched industries. This stuff takes time and a lot of individual effort as well as corporate effort and governmental incentives. . And the track record of governments passing laws and RAISING taxes to try and fix stuff is just mostly pure dismal. People fix stuff when it is practical, logical and do-able to do the fix and not much sooner. That's just how it works.
We are a mobile society, we sunk our infrastructure bucks into roads designed for personal vehicles and trucks as the primary method of travel, and it just isn't practical to have full public transport that goes everywhere, it would cost dozens of trillions of dollars just to get started on it and even then it would never fit all situations..
Want to make
Instead of taxing gasoline, they should increase registration fees, tax unnecessary supersized vehicles with supersized engines and offer registration fee reductions for low emission, high efficiency, well-maintained, etc. vehicles down to (or even below) current rates. This way, people with average cars could work their way around the registration hikes/taxes by keeping their vehicles in perfect working order and by opting for more fuel-efficient and low-emission vehicles in the future. Many places already do things along those lines, some even go as far as offering subventions and tax deductions for hybrids. Taxing gasoline would do all the things you suggest, much more simply, much more fairly, and much more effectively. Why have the government have a billion-and-two regulations for which vehicle gets what tax or registration fee, when you can just tax gasoline, which forces people to pay in direct proportion to how much they pollute? Your proposed system is completely arbitrary - someone who drives a decently fuel-effecient vehicle hundreds of miles per week pays nothing, while someone who owns the "wrong" vehicle may drive only fifty miles per week but pays through the @$$, even though he or she is polluting far less.
If you are concerned about the poor, the situation can be handled with a fuel credit equal to the average value that people put in each year. For example, a typical person driving 12k miles per year at 20 mpg uses 600 gallons. Let's say we implement a $1/gallon tax, but give a $600 tax rebate. This is approximately tax neutral, but slams gas hogs and rewards those are frugal. It encourages everyone, rich and poor alike, to conserve. It also does not harm the poor. as most will find a way to come out ahead, and the gas hogs who don't are SOL.
A gasoline tax is quite close to economically efficient, and fairly taxes everyone in direct proportion to the problem they create. It is both fair and effective. Arbitrary regulations and cut-offs, such as you suggest, are neither.
The main problem is that in many US cities there is no choice but to drive everywhere.
;P
Sure. I can accept that. What I can't accept is the whine about gas prises, from people who drive cars that aren't really economic. I mean with 10 MPG or there abouts, you have no right to complain
Invest in a more economic car, that goes 50 MPG or more.
For the record, I pay around USD $5.70 per gallon. And yes, I do whine about it too. Car prises in Denmark are insane though, so I can't afford to switch cars (mine only gets around 32 MPG)...
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
The fact that the earth hasn't seen levels like this in half a million years is like stating that it will never snow because the last three days has been 20 degrees celcius. Half a million year is nothing on a timescale measured in billions of years. What is interesting in the article however is that we see a shift from blaming carbon dioxide to blaming methane. This is done because a lot of evidence has been accumulated that contradict the doomsday scenarios of climate change caused by CO2. This is basically another article that is aimed at increasing funding for research into a change that is quite natural and has occurred over and over again for a long long time.
Ewww, that's just another "folk science" website. It essentially puts together some numbers and lulls people into judging them with their gut and not with their brain.
Or to put it in another way: It's irrelevant wether your gut thinks that man-made amounts of CO2 are too small to affect the climate. That's now the way you do science. In science you use the brain and not the gut. Fact is that during thousands of years rises in CO2-concentration were followed by rises in temperature. Fact is that in the last decades rises in CO2-concentration were followed by rises in temperature.
Fact is also that man puts lots of CO2 into the atmosphere while reducing the vegetation that absorbs CO2.
You say: "I offered more and more opposing evidence" but you don't post any. All the anti-global-warming websites are just like anti-evolution websites: They attack some details, come up with outdated or just plain wrong numbers and most importantly they don't offer any explanation at all.
Essentially the anti-global-warming position is that it's just a coincidence that we have the highest CO2-concentration and highest temperatures in hundreds of thousands of years. Which is no explanation at all. To say that some cycle that "we don't understand" is responsible is just like saying that God did it (like the anti-evolutionists) or that it's just a coincidence that the highest temperatures fall in the period of the industrial revolution. The anti-global-warming people provide exactly zero evidence for their "cycle"-theory, their whole theory is based on belief, not fact - and wishful thinking (that we don't have to change anything) of course.
On top of all that the most stupid point of all is: The "We don't understand it perfectly, so let's just do what we want" - argument. Sane people would say that you have to be extra-careful if you don't understand what concequences your actions have. Only a complete moron thinks that lack of understanding is a reason to mess even more with things.
It's true that particularly Germany has a higher population density than the US, and a decent public transport system. However, I wouldn't say people use public transport to save money -- a modern car would cost less in fuel, despite the high prices we have here. It's just that it's a comfortable way to travel if you want to go from city to city, i.e. if you're lucky enough to have a good connection to where you want to go. Some read a book, some work (or play) on their laptops. You can't do that while you drive. Public transport for shorter distances has the advantage that you don't need to find a parking space. For those who use it to get to work on a daily bases there are monthly tickets that make it affordable, and in some cities it has the advantage that special bus lanes go past the rush hour traffic jams. But as with trains, it depends on your personal situation whether it is a good option or not. Depending on where you live and where and when you want to go you might have to change (potentially crowded) busses, walk to the neares bus station in the rain, and so on. So, it really depends, and doesn't necessarily save you any money if you have a car anyway (however, it makes it possible to live without one, depending on personal circumstances).
No, the main effect the higher prices really have isn't that people drive less or buy less cars (Germany even has more cars per capita than the US), but that consumers buy more efficient cars. Germans drive more than they used to, but use less fuel -- the average new car is down to 30mpg (link in German, sorry).
I just read somewhere that 47% of new cars bought in western Europe have diesel engines, they use roughly 40% less fuel for the same power. Modern diesel engines don't have the disadvantages you might associate with them, i.e. they're not noisy, they accelerate quickly and so on. There are filters for particles.
So, my conclusion is that instead of whining about high fuel prices (which aren't that high at all, compared to what it costs elsewhere), Americans should simply buy more efficient cars. I can understand that some people need cars to get around for their job, that they're needed for travel and all that, no problem. It's just that, personally, I'd buy an efficient car if I was in that situation, no matter what fuel costs. You don't even have to buy an expensive hybrid, modern diesels come pretty close.
Last I checked there was only one car for sale in the US that got better than 50MPG: the Honda Insight, which is rated for a max of 2 people. That SUV (which gets closer to 20mpg, though I agree that is bad) will haul 6 people. Divide it out, and a per person when full. The SUV can also haul around a lot more cargo, which is handy from time to time.
So if you need to haul a load even once in a while, haul a family once in a while, or need 4 wheel drive once in a while; the question is can you justify the second car as well. I did the math - it pays for me, but I drive 100 miles/day, and then I only can justify it for a cheap used car, not a new car. When my commute was half that it didn't pay.
There are a couple cars that get in the 40mpg, but not many. There are laws of physics that make it really hard to get that high, without compromises that most people do not wish to make.
My solution to high gas prices is to mi 50/50 ethanol/gas in my cars (My cars don't run right with more ethanol than that).