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Cleaner Air Adds To Global Warming
shmlco writes "In the "You Can't Win For Losing" department, an article on the BBC web site is reporting that reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be adding to man-made global warming. Research presented at a major European science meeting adds to other evidence that cleaner air is letting more solar energy through to the Earth's surface.
Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse. Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?"
Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?"
Uh-uh. Last time I tried that on Sim Earth, my planet was overtaken by sentient robots. Of course, the robots eventually get taken out by carnivirous plants, but is that really much of an improvement?
Marked increase in SMUG. Damn you, George Clooney!
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
I've seen a (semi) serious suggestion that the best way to deal with global warming is to put a thin film of dust in between the earth and the sun. This wasn't from some internet hack either, but a rather senior physicist.
Point is that man-made pollution is more than the earth can absorb because there are too many humans. If we reduced the population, earth would be better able to absorb the naturally-created pollution.
Ohhh! Pay Dirt! A pair of half-eaten choco-pants!
Have no fear, global warming that this generation of scientists are sure is happening will meet head on with the new global ice age that the previous generation of scientists were sure was happening and the net effect is we'll all have weather like San Diego.
Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse
s/make things worse/change the environment/
Maybe we should just realize that we live and therefore we affect the world around us, and that the environment is ever changing. Oh, and things evolve. And it's not a good idea to build a dream home on a sand dune.
Actually, the pollution was (or 'is', in southern Asia and China) *masking* the effects of increased warming at ground level. Cleaning up the air doesn't add additional forcing; it merely keeps it elsewhere.
I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot AGW stories. If you think that, you don't know what you're talking about. Go away and read Real Climate or, for a comprehensive refutation of all the trolls we can expect to see attached to this story, please refer to this excellent debunking of so-called 'sceptic' canards, lies and deliberate mis-statements of facts.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?
I nominate Idaho for Nuclear Whipping Boy
I say we carry on as before. Clean up the environment, sure, but for more immediate reasons of beauty and health: nobody likes to walk a littered beach, or suck down the smoggy L.A. air, after all.
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
Nowadays, global warming is the new scientific fad. And not only does it appear that global warming is much greater in scope than any amount of anthropogenic factors can account for, it also appears that there's not much we can do about it anyway.
On top of all that, I suspect that the smarty men, for all their expert and well-intentioned efforts, still haven't mastered the climate change models to the extent some of us would like to think.
So I say we carry on as always: sometimes building, sometimes tearing down. Sometimes exploiting, sometimes preserving. Sometimes making a mess, sometimes cleaning it up. And always refining and improving our methods and priorities, not based on the current socio-scientific fads, but based rather on the traditional motivations: the ebb and flow of human desire, expressed individually and collectively by various means.
I mean, if we don't even properly understand climate change, and can have only a measurable but insignificant effect on it, then how can we possibly make good decisions about what sacrifices to make and what goals to pursue in relation to climate change?
There are plenty of other more sensible, more practical, and more meaningful reasons to change some of our behaviors. I, for one, would like to see more arguments for ecological responsibility based on those, and less arguments based on voodoo climatology.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
you're assuming that the only space and resouces that people use are the ones they're standing or living on.
what about the land needed to grow the food these people eat? that's not in cities. what about the water required to irrigate deserts so those people can have lettuce in january? that's not in cities. what about all the oil required to run suvs and make platic shampoo bottles for all those people? what about the massive hydro and coal electricity projects needed to run all those electric shavers and 60" televisions?
just consider food for a moment. the average north american diet requires 3 acres of areable land per person per year. for the entire population of the united states that works out to just less a billion acres.
overpopulated.
2 1337 4 u!
No it isn't.
If we can cause the problem, we can fix it. The only question is, will we?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Acutally, the book was Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, and it went a little further than that. The ice age had been held off by pollution-related greenhouse warming. It was only after the world cleaned up its act that the ice age came on.
It's a great book. The heroes were SF fans.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
My 10 gallon fishtank has about 500 goldfish in it right now. There's still room left for a few hundred more. I don't understand why people think the tank is overpopulated.
This guy's the limit!
No, really, it is.
Each gas that comprises the atmosphere has the capability to act as a greenhouse gas, and each one blocks different wavelengths of infared radiation. Some of then trap it when the sunlight passes through the atmosphere, some of them capture it when the radiation bounces off the earths surface back into the atmosphere.
C02, Methane, and *gasp* water vapor all contribute to heat retention in the atmosphere. It's basic Geography 101 shit that everyone learns.
However, since water vapor is, you know, an integral part of the atmosphere and several cycles on earth, we really can't do much about that. Better to worry about all the other gasses we up dump into the atmosphere that we can control.
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
If cows pollute more than cars, it's because we breed them in huge numbers. This is not "natural".
What do you mean? If we're products of evolution, then we humans are supremely natural. Furthermore, everything we do is supremely natural. Just as bees act according to their nature, and whales act according to their nature, so do we act according to our nature. How could it be otherwise? At what point would you say that "un-nature" has been introduced into the process?
Lions use teeth and claws to take their prey. This is natural. Apes use twigs to fish ants out of anthills. This is natural. Bats use sonar and aerobatic maneuvers to snatch bugs out of the air. This is natural. And we humans use our minds and hands to imagine and build tools to accomplish the desires of our hearts. This is natural.
Are you saying that space aliens have secretly induced us to act against our nature? Perhaps we are breeding unnatural numbers of cows to feed their alien appetites (it would explain the cattle abductions and mutilations). But wouldn't the aliens--and their cow-cravings--also be natural? Wouldn't that make the entire Human-Cow-Alien system yet another natural phenomenon?
Are you saying that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has laid down a moral law restricting the number of cows we can naturally breed, and that it goes against the FSM's law to breed more cows than that? If so, we can all look forward to being whipped with wet noodles for all eternity, in the afterlife.
But seriously, what natural or moral yardstick are you using to measure the nature of Man? Because it seems to me that if Man is a product of nature, then all the products of Man are also products of nature.
Cow population, nuclear reactors, SUVs, Catholicism, Nazism, anthropogenic factors in climate change: All natural. So where's the problem?
And don't say that the problem is that we're going to make ourselves extinct. Species make themselves extinct all the time. Nothing more natural than that. Ebola has a hard time spreading because it overuses its resources and kills its host too quickly. It's natural when viruses do it--and not just viruses; all organisms tend towards this, if not restrained by natural effects such as other organisms or environmental conditions (and note that the lack of such restraints is also natural). Why should it be unnatural when humans do it?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
What do you mean? If we're products of evolution, then we humans are supremely natural.
There's a difference between being "natural" and "sustainable". The vast majority of natural creatures are also sustainable, because if you don't live a sustainable lifestyle your lifestyle (or species) will not persist. The unsustainable ones get winnowed out. Being "natural" or not has no bearing on whether your species will go extinct or not.
The word "natural" has become so mangled that it that it is both useless and meaningless except as part of a marketing campaign.
And then my cities were surrounded by mind worm boils! They were everywhere! Where did they come from? Did they not like me replacing their fungus with my pretty tree farms? I don't know, but they were pissed off. So I convened a meeting with the planetary council and got the vote to um raise sea levels and uh... Um, sorry what were we talking about?
OK, dude, time for calorimetry 101. Let's assume for a second that the temperature increase was just for the oceans (to avoid messing around with too many different specific heats). Let's further assume that it only applies to the top centimeter of the water (ie, the rest of the oceans are not affected). What would the impact be of a 2 degree fahrenheit increase in the surface temperature?
That's a lot of energy to have floating around that we didn't used to have.
All's true that is mistrusted
>If we can cause the problem, we can fix it.
Boy, I'd like to be able to agree with you on that one. But I can't.
Aside from the question of unified will, which is big enough, we get to the point of physical possiblities. We're learning a lot about climate, weather, modeling, etc. But I suspect that the experts will be the first to admit that they're not experts. Engineering a climate is a far different thing from trying to decypher what is happening with one. We also know that some of these processes are very-long scale, certainly longer than quarterly profit reports or even election cycles, which only compounds the unified will problem.
What if the North Atlantic Conveyer stops? (for a theatrical example) Let's presume we want to restart it. How do we do that?
What if defrosting permafrost releases CO2 that dwarfs what we've released? How can we possibly compensate?
What if the Earth really WAS headed back into an ice age before we got going with the industrial revolution? What if global warming is what's keeping the climate friendly?
What if this is all so danged nonlinear? What if a friendly climate is NOT the norm? What if the Earth is *normally* encrusted with ice, or a hot jungle? What if our entire development as an intelligent species has been during an unusually friendly inter-ice-age?
Enquiring minds want to know.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Why don't you just voluntarily self-terminate so that there's more for me?
A Chemistry Prof of mine back in the day brought something along these lines up. His argument went something like this (I've shorthanded it for those who don't like to read paragraphs):
Pollution = Greenhouse Effect
Greenhouse Effect = Increase in global temperature
Increase in temperature = More water evaporating
Vapourous water = Clouds
More clouds = Less sunlight getting through
Less sunlight = lower temperature
The point being that there is a sense of balance in place. Yes, we're messing things up, but there are some checks and balances that lessen the impact. That's not to say we should keep on polluting, but that the situation IS reversible if given time.
His other big environmental statement was that he'd wish the "Save the Rainforest" people would spend more than 5 seconds looking at their arguments. The fact is (again, according to him) that the rainforests are NOT the "lungs of the Earth." They actually do a small minority of the CO2->O2 conversion compared to what the oceans and seas do. Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3 = Limestone) in the oceans does much more. Plant life in the major bodies of waters (ie.- algae) also is a significant contributor (in relation to rainforests). But there is almost no major coverage of the damage we've done to the oceans through shipping, dumping and other pollution.
Interestingly, the tie-in between the two lies in the algae and plant life. An increase in temperature can lead to an increase of plant life that can convert the polluting gases into O2... as well as other pollutants.
The problem isn't necessarily that we're polluting the environment, it's that we're doing it faster than nature can balance it. This used to be due to ignorance, but now it's willful and due to monetary pressures and laziness.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Thus, by your math, the U.S. can provide all of the agricultural products that it needs, and this is supported by the positive balance of agricultural trade that the U.S. has shown for the last 40 years (2). We ship out things that we can grow more easily (e.g. corn), and import things that we can't (e.g. rice). That margin is dwindling, and we may start to import a bit more than we export, but this is primarily due to an increase in import of consumer-oriented products, not bulk imports. This suggests that to a large extent, this is due to consumers being more savvy and choosing to buy more imported products for variety, rather than because we can't produce enough food.
Anybody who says that that the U.S. can't feed itself is either misinformed or outright lying. Either way, that's a sure sign of somebody with a political agenda.
1. Source: WorldStats.org
2. Source: TruthAboutTrade.org
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No they didn't.
Yes, yes, they did. Perhaps you're too young to remember the scare, but I very clearly remember being terrified after listening to a scientist explaining to the viewing audience that we were all going to starve to death in the near future. Your link is quite convincing, and I'd probably believe it if it weren't for the fact that I was there and I remember what was said.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'd say there's a small kernel of truth in the overstated assertion that environmentalists were trying to "destroy industrialization". One of the things that long frustrated me about environmentalism was its Original Sin of Man against Mother Earth mentality (despite the prevalence of pooh-poohing about the same Original Sin meme from Christians). This was the source of a general nostalgia for bucolic pre-industrial life (back to nature), and a general distrust of things industrial. That made a lot of people anti-growth.
However, as environmentalism has matured (and as a younger generation has taken over), a lot of that has dissipated. Many of us would now say what we want is post-industrialism - a world where industry has been retooled so that sustainable management of inputs, outputs and waste are all part of the business model (rather than only the first two, and without regard to global issues). Industrialization was not only a vastly leap forward for humanity and its quality of life, but was in fact good for much of the environment: before industrialization people burned an awful lot of trees, farmed a lot of land poorly, and relied on massive animal stocks for transportation, and none of this was all that friendly to the earth. Now that we've seen the negative consequences of our current industrial methods, it's time for the next major leap forward. And despite all the propaganda, it's clear that pushing green industry will very quickly drive enormous economic growth and likely help humanity solve persistent problems like global poverty.
To answer the critics who say "if this is so great why doesn't business do it itself", I have a couple answers. First, as anyone who's worked at a startup or on a new product launch can tell you, markets move incrementally and businesses outpace them at their peril. So to get the market to surge forward, you often need external intervention. Second, much of what's needed is massive capital investment for long-term gain: in research, in infrastructure upgrades, and in capitalizing new technologies. Businesses generally do not have a 20 year mandate to improve infrastructure, whereas the government has exactly this mandate. And yes, the government intervention does makes mistakes, can promote inefficiency, or can produce unintended outcomes. But it almost always gets the market moving in the intended direction, and the mistakes can be cleaned up later.
If this all sounds a bit breathless, get me a gig at Wired. But I really do believe that investing heavily in this jump will give tremendous results for people, business, and countries.
From the article:
Between the 1950s and 1980s, the amount of solar energy penetrating through the atmosphere to the Earth's surface appeared to be declining, by about 2% per decade.
then later:
"During the solar dimming we had really no temperature rise. And only when the solar dimming disappeared could we really see what is going on in terms of the greenhouse effect, and that is only starting in the 1980s."
Every single time I've ever pointed out the global temperature drop from 1942 to 1975, a number of liberals jump at my throat and claim I'm making it up. Now here's a climatologist making the statement that temperature didn't rise from '50s to the '80s. The liberals will never buy this; that one statement of his invalidates the entire study in their eyes.
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
No they didn't.
Don't know how old you are hawkfish, but I distinctly remember that they did. The phobia of the 70's was distinctly the other way. I remember my parents arguing about climate cooling at the dinner table. My mother was convinced that an ice age was imminent. My father was very skeptical. The argument revolved around how well science could predict climate. My father was convinced that since he couldn't get accurate weather forecasts, that climate forecasts were even more suspect. Here we are, 35 years later and the same arguments are still playing out.
The great plains ( a huge area) were essentially created by huge numbers of buffalo. I would say they have a significant effect on the environment.
Plants and plankton transformed the bloody atmosphere- so I would say they had a significant effect on the environment.
Soldier ants had a regular habit of laying waste to huge areas-- so... you get the point.
Most wildly successful species will reach numbers that impact the environment.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If both polluting and not polluting are correlated to global warming, is it not sensible to investigate whether or not NEITHER is causing global warming, and the correlation is indeed a false correlation? I mean, if A -> B and !A - > B, then one is tempted to conclude that B happens regardless of whether A happens or does not happen. And if that's the case, B is going to happen no matter what A does, which further means that B isn't influenced by A's behavior.
Now, I'm not so naive as to think that it's really this simple. I've long held that enacting crippling policies to "combat global warming" at this point is silly, and that more research and data collection is necessary before we can even set realistic and helpful goals. When research like this comes out, I feel that it bolsters that stand. But research like this also bears further investigation before we accept it at face value.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
So your parents were scientists or they got their info from the media?
If it's the latter, then that is exactly the parent posts point (if you bothered to even glance at the links).
The media reported an Ice Age was imminent. Peer-reviewed scientific journals did not.
Contrast that with today, when after a review of 981 ISI science journals, 75% of them were found to either explicitly or implicitly accept that global warming is occuring and that it is the result of human processes.
None of them were found to support the idea global warming is not occurring or that it is not the result of human processes (see here for details.
Rural Illinoisan here to tell you how full of shit you are. Meat is easy, we have factory farms for that, a relative of my raises pigs by the tens of thousands....per facility that he owns, and he owns 6. And he's not the only one around here with such facilities. And chickens and other birds are similarly raised, intensively, in what are basically factories. Beef is a bit different, it's more open, but there's no lack of cattle around here either...it's a big business in fact.
And what the fuck do you mean we can't grow strawberries? There are more strawberry farms within a short distance of here than you can shake a stick at, apple and peach orchards as well. And vinyards too while we're on the subject, make damn fine wine.
As for vegetables, there are locally grown vegetables everywhere....but it is true that most large scale commercial production is in certain parts of the country. That's more of a factor of local economics than the condition of the land.
this country was built upon. Legal immigrants that moved here and became part of the great 'melting pot' and melded into society.
There's a few dead indians who would like to have a word with you about that...
The country was founded on genocide and slavery, simple as that. Stop rose-tinting it in order to soften your xenophobic views.
You can't take the sky from me...