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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.'"
Any rise in temperature must be part of the Grand Design.
Don't sweat it! (e.g. shit happens.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Of course the world is heating up. The rapture is nigh!
sigfault. core dumped.
I take issue with the conclusion of this submission headline, as there is plenty of evidence suggesting the possibility that we're not much of a contribution at all. I have yet to hear explanations for why temperatures actually DROPPED from the 1940s to the 1970s despite an increase in our use of automobiles and other gases. Not to mention that when you add the numbers up and take into account water vapor, mankind is only responsible for--wait for it--0.27% of the so-called greenhouse gases.
So, as Penn & Teller put it in their Bullshit! episode on the matter, we're still gathering data. So stop jumping to conclusions!
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
____
~ |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.
BTW, I usually run Firefox, but happened to open this up in Internet Exploder - all three URL's in the article had popups - you forget about those things when you predominantly use Firefox.
P.S. I'm argueably contributing to global warming with my 20,000+ Christmas lights ... although at least I signed up for wind power.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Awesome. That's 40 cm less I have to drive to get to the beach.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Forgot to post the link where I got the 0.27% number from: Global warming--a closer look at the numbers
I was discussing the global warming issue just last Tuesday with someone who was very adamant that humans are responsible for everything. As I offered more and more opposing evidence suggesting that there is no definitive proof that mankind is responsible, he grew more and more emotional until he told me "attitudes like yours are why the planet is going to hell" and wouldn't discuss it further. Unfortunately, these kinds of responses are common when you're trying to rationally discuss climate change and point out that correlation does not equal causality, and that a proven link has not been made. Most of the time, you see lots of "consensus science" used as a debate point--as in, "Well, so-and-so organization says we're responsible and these guys say we're responsible."
I subscribe to what I call my "1/3 the hype" theory. When you see a lot of hype over something, reduce it to 1/3 of itself and believe that instead. E.g., "Linux on the desktop this year is going to take over!" becomes Linux will make a few gains here and there. And "mankind is responsible for everything according to correlation in some figures!" means there's some possibility we're responsible but no hard links yet.
Besides, when someone mentions that temperatures are higher, they always neglect to mention that temps actually dipped from the 40s to the 70s, giving the impression that it's just been a steady, consistent ramp upward with no variation, when it hasn't. And it is misleading to omit that fact.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Well the Tech is out there to reverse this .
2 7424,00.html
We just need a Apollo program level of devotion to it .
University of Wisconsin has a working 3HE reactor, he fuel is just the issue, the moon is the answer.
Helium-3 on the moon, and the new finding of altering Hydrogen atoms molecular
orbits in a manner unknown before and pointing to fundamental errors in physics/Calculus .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,16
Keep in mind he has had some peer review on this before chucking it on the bone pile .
The Algae that makes enormous amounts of oil for biodiesel and other uses also
gives as a short term methodolgy vs. drilling for oil . It also burns cleaner .
* Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
* Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
* Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
* Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160 m/km)
* Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2]
* Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
There is yet Hope, but stray a little and you will fail to the ruin of us all - LOTR
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I live in Minnesota, and it was about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (about -13.3 C) on Turkey Day morning, so I don't really give a hoot that all you suckers in Florida are gonna drown, winter is COLD up here, and I'm for as much global warming as we can push out of our gas-guzzling tanks-as-SUVs. I mean, I think there's a "Minnesotans for Global Warming" club somewhere, and I want to join! (We have recorded -60F (-51C) temperatures in MN like 10 years, and that ain't no stinking wind chill, either, so we have pretty harsh winters!)
(In other news, sell any property you own near sea level.)
There is too many reports citing scientists on global warming doom and gloom and next to nothing being published about our progress in using hydrogen as the source of energy. It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
The reason? Doom is sensational - and guess what the news outlets will publish first?
Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years.
But the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Maybe the C02 level rises every million years or so, each time life evolves into things that make internal combustion engines. Then it falls for a while after each thermonuclear war.
A graph of the last 3 million years?
1. Buy land a few feet above sea level
2. Steady the course, environomentally
3. Sell ocean front real-estate in 30 years
4. PROFIT!
Miller gave an interesting interview.
h tml
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/miller.
I discount his science because he's as fundy for gaia as some are for god. Global warming has become a religion and no longer counts as science.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The Earth will not lose the ability to support life. Even all out USSR USA nucular war would not remove the ability to support life, as cockroaches would still be around...
What you are worried about is significant change in the balance. We already have that. Think about the change in world population in the last 1000 years, from millions to billions. That is disruptive, as we are not currently self-sustaining.
You want to lock us in to one point in time and make sure nobody is hurting too bad. Guess what, bad things may happen and a lot (millions) of people may die until things settle out to a sustainable level.
I hope our tech can hold off major change for a few generations, but you never know...
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...
And neither did Clinton. Oh, and no one on either side of Congress voted for it, either. Sorry for this temporary insertion of non-slanted facts. You can resume your regular misinformed spin now.
Floating ice will make no difference due to hydrostatic balance. The difference in sea level comes from warming of ocean water itself and resulting expansion, and melting of continental glaciers - Greenland probably most worrisome right now.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Bush didn't sign the Kyoto protocol
Clinton didn't sign it, either. Thankfully, neither one could sign it without the Senate's approval.
You had it coming, suckers!
Uh, excuse me, but who's running more and more Diesel engines? You're not exactly complying with Kyoto either, and you did sign it.
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
Let's assume Global Warming is a fact. Now let's pull back to a Geologic Time Scale. Earth has been in an Ice Age for the past 5-10 million years. Apply Global Warming and. . . . . . . . we get "normal" conditions for the vast majority of this planet's history. When dealing with planetary-level events, one should also use a planetary-level timescale. . .
The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years.
.15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small, .08-.28 C."
So what? There has been a history of natual climate change cycles. Why would a relatively miniscule change in CO2 be the culprit for global change? 27% is not miniscule you say. well lets look at the composition of the atmosphere.
Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?
Well we still should take action, you say?
Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed
Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *
[from the article]...levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.
Ah, good point. Methane is a much worse green house gas than CO2. Is this humanities fault? Well we raise cows and cows burb methane. Sorry, not a fraction of what termites produce.
The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.
Man, I am tired of these self rightgious echoterrorists scarying the shit out of my kids at school. What is even worse is that some industries or even governments may be exagerating the dangers just to scare people. Why else would we see almost daily headlines about how pacific islands are being washed over by rising sea levels. While while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rise
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I'm blaming the dolphins and mice. They actually know what they are doing.
I am Spartacus
Notice that dip you're talking about in your graph is still above the mean temperature in the 1800's. You know... not that looking at a graph isn't better than an actual statistical analysis.
Congrats, you've finally figured out a way of making Minnesota appealing.
The thing is, correlation does suggest causality, and in this case it is likely because *we understand the mechanism by which our actions cause global warming*.
Nothing has been proven to show that it is "likely." Correlation != causality is an important scientific idea to prevent people from jumping to conclusions based on a symptom that might be caused by something else.
We know what we're pumping into the atmosphere, and we have solid science and chemistry that allows us to understand how the chemicals we are pumping into the atmosphere can affect climate.
What we're pumping into the atmosphere is a total of 0.27% of the Earth's greenhouse gases. The rest are completely natural, most of which comes from volcanic eruptions and natural water vapor.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Heh, dude... you really don't want global warming, if you don't like the cold... why? cuz if the freshwater ice in greenland/northern canada and cap conntinue to melt--and (with the possible exception of greenland) they're doing a whole heck of a lot of melting--it would kill the salinity balance in the northern atlantic (and recent articles (sorry, no links, but I did see them here and in discover/scientific american) suggest the levels are already way off standard) ... currently, the ocean currents that bring warm water to northern north america and most of europe operates in that the warm water comes north, cools, and sinks, and moves south again to counterbalance... it's literally the pump that provides us with a climate warmer than is natural for these regions. Changing the salinity level would cause the water 'density' to lessen, thus making it unable to sink even when cold... this would mean a temporary increase in temps, but would also collapse the circuit, and (in an as yet only speculative few years) cut off our access to warm weather. You, I (being a mainer), and europe would suffer harshly from suddenly harsh weather and the onset of either another mini ice age (like the one seen from about 1300 to 1900) or major one (since we're overdue).
so.... uh, yeah... you don't want global warming... at all.
The jump to a causal relationship is stuff and nonsense. When A and B both occur, this does *not* mean that A caused B. The sun's output is variable. This planet has been warmer in the geologic past than it is now. It has been warmer in recorded pre-industrial history as well (see the Medieval Warm Period, which can't be blamed on industrial activity). While it is certainly probable that humans have indeed contributed to global climate change, it is entirely possible that their total contribution is minimal compared to that which is happening naturally. Too many people want to claim causal relationships that can't be proven when we are still gathering data. Don't panic, and don't let anyone else panic, don't make any wild claims, and make certain that the spirit of open scientific inquiry is kept alive on this subject. Remember Chicken Little.
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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
The situation is further complicated by the fact that we're coming to the end of an interglacial period - the last Ice Age technically didn't finish, and will be back for more. Such periods are unstable, in and of themselves, as they change very rapidly on a geological timescale.
There is also the fact that we've got masses of sunspots over a prolonged period, unusual geological activity, etc. All of these will complicate any attempt to model the environment and will muddle which variables humans are responsible for and by how much.
HOWEVER, we must also look at the nature of natural events. Volcanos are very short-term things and they pump the gasses into a much higher part of the atmosphere than do humans. We can therefore filter out natural contributions to the greenhouse effect, because those will go into an entirely different cycle. Human activity is prolonged (and, these days, often 24 hours a day, all year round), is highly regionalized and is often in areas that have a reduced ability to act as sinks. Water near industrialized ports is likely going to have a thin film of oil, making it harder to absorb gasses. Land near industrialized cities is often badly deforrested, with the same results. Farmland is no better, as farmers don't do crop rotation and use chemicals to add nitrates, etc.
Whether you can deduce from all of this that humans are responsible for all damage is tough. I believe so, but I wouldn't be able to produce a convincing argument for it. What CAN be deduced is that the climate has become unstable and may not be survivable if nothing is done. I believe the focus of the debate should be less on who did what (because nobody is taking responsibility, regardless) and should be much more firmly focussed on preserving as much of the biosphere as possible.
Damage to the Amazon jungle is something like 60% worse than previously believed, because loggers have been using thinning techniques to hide evidence of illegal logging. I believe that is a problem. Fish stocks are 10% of where they were at the turn of the 20th century. I believe that is also a problem. Species are becoming extinct at an accerating rate, which I definitely think is a problem. I believe that if we do something to correct these problems, then a lot of other problems will take care of themselves. We then only have to deal with whatever is left over.
People are generally lazy, politicians doubly so, so any plan that involves relatively little work (and less pain) now would surely be a better bet no matter who is right on the global warming front.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Do "normal" conditions for the "vast majority of this planet's history" allow for comfortable living by us humans? As I recall, a big chunk of the planet's history included a time period where the atmosphere didn't contain much oxygen.
Which begs the point, why stop at that point and declare results? Sounds a bit convienient. Why not dig a bit further? Say 700,000, 750,000, 1 million, then present results that show discrete fluctuations over those timeframes? Perhaps I'm cynical from MS-marketing "studies", but the point in time seems to be too convienient as compared to the results. Heck, who financed the study -- and not just the Uni that provided the researchers, either?
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
What I find ironic is how often people who don't trust the fossil fuel industry, and claim not to believe anything they say, etc. have been taken in by the anti-nuclear FUD spread by the very people they claim to distrust.
It's like some bad comedy routine.
Joe Public: I don't trust you.
Coal and Oil guy: I can understand that.
Joe Public: Nothing you can say will make me trust you.
Coal and Oil guy: I know just how you feel.
Joe Public: You do?
Coal and Oil guy: Sure. See that guy standing over there? The one with the pocket protector?
Joe Public: What, Nuclear Guy? Sure, I see him.
Coal and Oil guy: I don't trust him at all.
Joe Public: Why not?
Coal and Oil guy: He wants to kill all our babies and make giant insects and stuff.
Joe Public: Really?
Coal and Oil guy: Really. And he wants to make stuff that will kill people a bazillion years from now if they so much as think about it. That's why I don't trust him.
Joe Public: Wow. Thanks for the warning. But this isn't going to make me trust you any more than I did before.
Coal and Oil guy: I can understand that. Just so long as you don't trust him either.
Joe Public: Or don't worry about that. That guy is scary!
--MarkusQ
1. Buy Air Filtration Unit before Air gets really bad
2. Start putting Air into neat little cans, with 2 nostril holes
3. Call your new product 'Perri-Air'
4. !?!
5. PROFIT!!
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
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
A common comment I see here is:
- humans only contribute 1% of the CO2.
- hence a 27% increase is a 0.27% increase
This is NOT what the studies show. It is 27% higher than ANY CO2 level in the past 650 000 years. This includes BOTH natural processes and man-made processes. It does not distinguish between the two sources. I've seen their graph. There is a nice cycle with greenhouses gases, and temperature with temperature slightly lagging behind C02 levels. This is the natural cycle that people talk a lot of. Who knows what causes it. Then suddenly, in recent times, the cycle is destroyed and there is a sudden upsurge in C02 levels near present times. It is very clearly anonomalous.
Don't forget the 1% is someone's guess about how much mankind contributes.
Even though this number shows up on Wikipedia (and its 1000 spam clones), I looked at some of the references and could not find where they claimed this number. Since it is 20,000%-50,000% (fifty thousand percent) more efficient than soybean oil, why would the latter even be considered for a second? Are we saying I could set aside 1/10 acre of my yard (the size of a garden) and produce 1000-2000 gallons of fuel a year?? That might provide all of my heating needs, gasoline needs, and electricity needs with room to spare! Where do I sign up? I'm sorry, I just find it hard to believe. But if you can find an authentic source (not Wikipedia) - and I hope you're right - please post it.
who's running more and more Diesel engines?
It's impossible to tell from the article. However if you limit it to just 1992 to 2002 then it's not Ireland; but it is Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Belgium and Germany. The telling part is that there's no mention of the US or the whole of Europe in the article itself. The statistics are also three years too early to have a bearing on the effectiveness of the Kyoto protocol (this came into force in 2005).
Who ordered that?
Apparently, we're just now coming out of an ice age(oh... about 460 Million years ago) and according to the Illinois State Museum,
I know very few people who can think on geological time scales. I am not one of them. However after hearing all this stuff about being "short sighted", what would one call an over-reaction to bad science (i.e. the hockey-stick graph) that started the global warming "problem"? Also, wasn't there a fear of "Global Cooling" a few decades back?
The Human Race needs to get their collective head out of it's ass and start learning about the world surround it. That learning might lead to enlightenment. And, God knows what Enlightenment MIGHT lead to!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Global warming is change. So what?
I've looked into it. I know what could happen.
Look harder. The soil in the permafrost is very poor because most of the good stuff was scraped by glaciers down into the prairies. With significantly less rainfall, those prairies could be heading for another dustbowl (you've heard of the 1930's, no?). Generally, the most productive soil for farming is in temperate zones and as the temperature rises, rainfall in those areas will decrease (on average) and so will crop returns. As temperature rises, loss of water to evaporation increases, and past a certain point, food production drops and it's not compensated for by the increase in growing season. The U.S. has already been depleting the water table across the midwest, and it's only going to get worse. For anybody even more south, sufficient crop irrigation will be really hard to come by. Get ready for lots more illegal immigrants/economic refugees as equatorial countries start facing more droughts and starvation.
But hey, don't worry and be happy. It's all a hippy plot to make you feel guilty about driving an SUV.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_mons ter
However, it's not as simple as that; the technology hasn't been developed to actually farm the stuff on a commercial scale, but there are people working on that. The first test deployments are by these guys, who are using the exhaust systems from conventionally-fired power to provide nutrients for the algae and prevent the release of CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.
But yes, in the future you might well be able to grow all the fuel for your car in your backyard.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
By the same guys who largely deny there's any such thing as global warming: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.", in regards to Iraq's nonexistant weapons of mass destruction.
Well we don't want the smoking gun to be beachfront property in Utah. Even now, those same cretins who claim no proof of global warming, are thinking up ways to spin a fast buck from the disappearing arctic ice caps.
Hell, for all we know, maybe all the excess CO2 is coming from right wingers chanting denial.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It doesn't gradually increase. As I said in other posts, the results show a clear cycle in greenhouse gas levels and temperatures. This is the natural cycle. Then close to the present time, there is a massive almost delta-function like spike in the greenhouse gas levels that elevate the gas levels far beyond any other point in the graph. It's so sharp it's practically vertical. And the delta function occurs in all three gases measured (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide). There are no similar events in any of the other results from the last 650 000 years. There are other spikes but they are a magnitude smaller and occur over a longer time scale.
If you're really interested in what people who know what they're talking about on this issue have to say do the research. One place already mentioned by other posters is http://www.realclimate.org/ and another is http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/begbroke/Display/page /Climate.Basics.html which is the Oxford University site Climate Basics. RealClimate includes information on pretty much every objection that some of the people here have posted. They also explain a lot of the misinformation that's out there and also take suggestions on subjects to post about. It's definitely interesting to see here how many technically knowledgable people aren't really scientifically literate.
From one of the research papers (deltaD is what they use to measure temperature BTW):
The coupling of CO2 and {delta}D is strong. The overall correlation between CO2 data and Antarctic temperature during the time period of 390 to 650 kyr B.P. is r2 = 0.71. Taking into account only the period 430 to 650 kyr B.P., where amplitudes of deuterium and CO2 are smaller, the correlation is r2 = 0.57. Corrections for changes in the temperature and {delta}D of the water vapor source, which also affect {delta}D of the ice, have not been made yet. The strong coupling of CO2 to Antarctic temperature confirms earlier observations for the last glacial termination (9) and the past four glacial cycles (7) and supports the hypothesis that the Southern Ocean played an important role in causing CO2 variations.
Looking at their figures, there include data from the Vostok ice core which overs 0-415kyr BP and the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is r2=0.7.
One gallon of diesel has 135000 Btu of energy, or 142 MJ. 10,000 gallons is 1.42 TJ. One acre is roughly 4046 square meters. So (presumably you're talking about annual yields here), each square meter of land will be producing roughly 350 MJ per year.
Peak solar power at sea level is 1 kW/m^2. Let's make the totally unrealistic assumption that the sun shines at peak brightness for an average of eight hours a day, no clouds or anything. That makes 28.8 MJ of solar input energy per day.
Huh. I'm rather stunned. Sure, it bespeaks a significantly impressive efficiency on the part of the algae, but there's likely no perpetual-motion tomfoolery here. Man, I'm going to grow a tank of greasy algae in my backyard!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wait, I can get more precise. Average values have been shown to be around 125 to 375 W/m^2. So, guessing an average of 250, we can get 7.2 MJ per day. Since algae doesn't care about seasons or anything like that, we can multiply that by the 365 days in a year to get 2.6 GJ per year.
So, the algae has to be around 13.3% efficient to get an energy yield of 10,000 gallons of diesel per acre. I have no idea if that efficiency is plausible or not.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There is no increase in greenhouse gases.
There is no gasoline shortage, though gasoline prices need to go up to stimulate a healthy economy.
Smoking does not cause cancer.
Outsourcing is necessary to stimulate a healthy U.S. economy.
There are WMDs in Iraq; we just haven't found where those fanatics hid them.
Our twice-elected-by-the-good-Christian-people-of-Amer ica, George W. Bush, said so, and that's good enough for me!
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
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 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.
I dunno man, I think we are a poorer society without our philosophers. I was looking back at the archives at my uni, and they had old records from philosophers., that families used to sit around the phonogram and listen to. I suspect we'd be a lot more thoughtful society if people still revered philosophers like they used to.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
To the moderator's that moderated the above comment "interesting", be aware that the 0.27% figure is fabricated. The same figure was rejected by Wikipedia as it was deemed "junk science". The source of the figure is a mining engineer's personal website (Monte Hieb) rather than a scientific journal or paper.
So what if we are exitinct? Who cares?
After you, pal.
...the cockroaches can take a shot at running the place
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new blattarian overlords.
That said, if they end up being half as dumb as humans, they'll probably mass-produce Raid for military purposes.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Your calculations show that 0.01% of the atmosphere is CO2. Hence you argue, it is impossible for a 27% increase in the CO2 levels to affect anything. 0.004% of the human body is iron. So the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is 250 times the percentage of iron in the human body. http://www.britannica.com/ebi/article-202929 Using your reasoning, I guess iron has absolutely no effect on the human body and is just there as filler eh? 20grams is 0.03% of the weight of a 60kg man. Yet, the lethal human dose for arsenic is 20g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic 50mg is 0.000083% the weight of a 60kg man. Yet, the lethal human dose for hydrogen cyanide is 50mg. If it is inhaled, concentrations of 300 parts per million is all that is needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanide
Why do so many people act like scientific consensus is infallible?
It's not. However, the consensus of the scientific community tends to be the best guess available on scientific issues from information available at the time.
Climate models are only useful if they can predict the future accurately. When they fail to predict the future accurately, they aren't useful. When they're falsified the parameters are changed, and the process starts over again. Pretending that they are correct when they don't perform useful predictions is just as foolish as misusing Newtonian physics.
Which climate models are you thinking of? Of course, the scientific community is continually coming up with better ones - that's the nature of the game. But it's my understanding that for some time now the climate models have been giving rather painful warnings.
One of the largest problems with the current scientific consensus about global warming is that it comes to its conclusion in a manner that is not convincing in an intellectually honest manner. It attempts to short-circuit the process in order create political influence to solve any number of problems and non-problems.
I'm not sure what part of this you think is intellectually dishonest. From the raw data available from the ice cores in the article, we can conclude that: a) the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased massively; b) so has the amount of methane. Both of these are potent greenhouse gases (this can be measured in the lab, in case you're wonderering how they know), so it makes a great deal of sense, going by these findings, to predict a rise in temperature. The political influence in this case is tangential to the science - it's just caused by lots of scientists looking at their data and/or reading their journals and going "holy cow! My grandchildren are going to be screwed!"
If the data was being faked or the models were being fudged to support these conclusions, then it'd be dishonest, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that this is the case.
In 200 years, whether humans were warming the planet or not, this will all be looked upon with scorn as pseudo-science.
In 200 years the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be even higher. At some level they will cause the temperature to skyrocket - firstly due to the basic thermodynamics of "planet retains more heat => planet gets hotter" and secondly due to the side-effects of reduced (reflective) ice caps and increased water vapour (also a potent greenhouse gas). This is all fairly solid science - no pseudoscience required. If it happens significantly before the end of the next 200 years, our descendents will be stuck at the top of an ex-mountain somewhere hoping the rain will stop before the water reaches the summit.
Yes, it's possible that, by some deus ex machina that scientists haven't noticed, the climate finds a way to maintain acceptable temperatures and sea levels. But a) historically scientists have had a better idea of scientifically-analysable phenomena than politicians; b) do you really want politicians betting your great-great-grandchildren's lives on this; and c) do you really think they're making decisions because they think it'll all work out, or because they're getting vast campaign funds from the oil industry and couldn't care less about the future of the human race?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
er no, 650,000 years is just how far they got back in the ice core
So ... guilty till proven innocent?
The point of guilty until proven innocent is to default to the least injurious assumption. In crime, that means that we default to the one that doesn't ruin a man's life and that keeps the investigation of a crime going. In global warming, we should default to avoiding disaster.
Remember, if global warming people are right and we don't listen to them, the worst that can happen is a disaster that will take centuries to reverse and will lead to widespread famine from desertification in Africa and Central Asia and the loss of temperate topsoils, the irrecoverable loss of the world's biodiversity and the medicines that could come from it, the freezing of Europe due to the loss of the North Atlantic current, the flooding of most of the world's current shorelines, increased hurricanes due to longer seasonal warming of waters, increased spread of malaria due to greater tropical insect populations, vicious resource wars that will tear apart the Middle East and fray relations between all neighbors who share rivers & other water resources, diminished international trade, and diminished political capital for the USA -- the nation that consistently blocked action against fixing the problem.
If the global warming people are wrong and we listen to them, then the worst that happens is we have poured a bunch of money into more efficient use of resources & alternative energy (technologies needed for space colonization anyway) instead of all the products we could've had with our previous expenditure of energy.
Of course, a snarky soundbite just sounds so much better than actual reason.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Taxes are both an arbitrarily imposed political burden and a form of outright punishment, and are also primarily a form of rigid political control by the power elite, and being a proponent of personal soverignty and Freedoms, they are anathemic to my basic core philosophy of living.. In addition, the entire notion of taxes in an artifical fiat currency based economy are economically and logically *absurd*. They are ludicrous. That they are even considered valuable and necessary by most people is, to me, the result of massive and persistent brainwashing of the populace by the same power elite via their overtly propogandized controlled educational system and mass media. Not only in the US but in any other nation that has its economy controlled by central bankers and their criminal peers in so-called government.
I'm sorry, but as a thinking person...really, I am just not that stupid. I simply refuse to be dumbed down to that utterly absurd level.
When we have a true produced tangibles wealth-based currency system, you can get back to me on imposed taxes. they might be necessary then, who knows, but perhaps. Until then, I am against taxes and only recognize reduction of taxes or tax credits as the only legitimate non threat of violence form of gentle persuasion by the societal groupings known as "government".
And perhaps you don't know much about me, but I am a big alternative energy proponent,I am a consumer of same, and an innovator of same. I have been a true conservationist and politically active since the early 60s on this subject. I am fully aware of the future and our responsibility to the planet and our progeny. And in my studied political and economic opinion, taxes are not the way to induce positive change, in fact, they usually result in the opposite occurring.
I would never seek to coerce, punish, admonish or threaten any of my fellow humans. I seek only to gently encourage and educate. Two paths,and I know the one I chose long ago.