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Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars
MCraigW writes "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide 'ice caps' near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."
says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.
Ya but what changes? Can we measure said changes? What about global dimming?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
So you mean only source of heat and energy for the planet is responisble for it's weather and tempreture? Wow. I bet these guys went to post-graduate school to figure that one out.
Take THAT hippie environmentalist tree huggers! I'm gonna go set a pile of styrofoam on fire in celebration.
I am more worried about carcinogenic crap in the ground, in the water and in the air than global warming. .. the global cancer rate is going to go up.
Under the guise of "global warming isn't real"
Thanks a lot.
We need clean nuclear power ASAP charging our electric cars, not driving around cancer fumers.
We must destroy the sun!
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
CO2 dissociates in water to produce carbonic acid. The increased acidity can have major impacts on eg corals by dissolving their exoskeletons. Even if high levels of atmospheric C02 do not cause global warming, it is still a problem.
Let's suppose that the orbit alteration is not the case. Wouldn't it still make sense to prepare for the worst? Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
Global warming is such a politicized issue from both sides, and a lot of money from both environmentalists and big oil is going into 'proving' it, that it's really quite difficult to know what is happening at all. This is in addition to the natural difficulties of the subject, who can say for sure what is happening in such a big place as the earth? Sure we have the satellites measuring temperature, but we know they had errors once, how do we know they are not in error still? Anyone who says they 'know' global warming is/isn't reality ought to be treated with suspicion.
That said, taking care of the environment in general is a good thing. So either way we ought to research renewable energy, keep recycling, etc.
Qxe4
Yeah, and they measured the temperature and CO2 levels on Mars for the last couple hundred millennia as well!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
crackpot:
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.
"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."....
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.
But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.
It is common knowledge that the sun goes through cycles in which its output is increased thereby increasing the the solar radiation that strikes its planets. However we are still putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which act to trap the solar radiation on the Earth. No reputable scientist will claim that every fraction of a degree in temperature increase is due to human influence on our atmosphere but they do know that the methane and carbon dioxide that we put continually pump into the atmosphere acts as a solar trap and can't help but raise the overall temperature of the planet.
If it's true, and if global warming isn't really our fault, that would be sort of a relief, since we wouldn't have to clean up our act. Of course, it would also mean that Mars is equally screwed. So much for moving there. I guess I'll just stop worrying about it and go back to playing video games.
The Martians still use CFC's.
Actually, Mars may be a good model for human inputs of CO2 since as the Martian polar dry ice caps evaporate it simulates the effects of human produced CO2. So, no, actually, this doesn't prove that the sun is the sole cause of planetary fluctuations in temperature.
Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming
Think of what stopping CO2 emissions will do to those poor defenseless plants! You plant-killer! We at PETP (People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants) will not stand idly by and allow you to suffocate all those dandelions! Dandelions have feelings, too!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If you don't know why, you can't fix it. Duh.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
"I'd like to see a reply to his "documentary" called "Inconvenient Facts." Al Gore is nothing more or less than a phony, and I'd love to see him called on it. Of course, if it were made, it'd be almost impossible to get it publicized or into theaters because it wouldn't say what Hollywood Liberals want said."
One name - Oliver Stone.
As far as your latest apologist whacko theory is concerned, it is more than obvious that vast amounts of
CO2 and Methane are carried away from Earth's atmosphere by solar wind into space where it is deposited on
the other planets of the solar system. That's why we're losing the martian polar caps! It's YOUR IMMENSE
CARBON FOOTPRINT that's causing it so WE REALLY NEED THAT CARBON TAX YESTERDAY!!
Your SUV is consigning the solar system to a fiery death.
Pluto - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html
t a_trunc_sys.shtml
j r.html
Triton - http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980526052143da
Jupiter - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
LUKOIL and Exxon?
I see a major increase in the amount of conservatives believing scientists.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Yeah the IPCC that decided based on thousands of peer reviewed papers that human-caused warming is very likely, all the papers their conclusions were based upon, they should have looked at news articles like these.
If you read the IPCC's report you see how they take solar influencing into account, and that it likely has been having a positive warming effect, but that it doesn't account for all the warming we're experiencing.
Given that the sun is probably giving out more heat, do we want to exaggerate the impact that would have by itself by releasing gigatonnes of sunlight absorbing gasses?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
When the temperature hits 200 F in a couple of years, we will be glad to know we didn't cause it.
Absolutely correct. Liberals control the world. Sucks to be a poor, oppressed, powerless right winger these days.
It's just a suggestion, but you might want to hold off on the victory dance until these results are verified and studied a little more thoroughly.
Kythe
Honestly, I think humans have some effect on climate. You can't increase the concentration of an important greenhouse gas like CO2 by nearly 50% and not see SOME effect. On the other hand, to totally dismiss the effect of the sun like the IPCC has is foolish. (By the way, IPCC is hardly unbiased and I tend to discount their opinions on such matters. They are not the ultimate authority on climate change, being just as biased as any oil company shill).
In the simplest terms, you've got an equation that determines the surface temperature of a planet. The biggest effects are the output of the sun and the albedo of the planet. Atmospheres are only a second-order term. Granted, the atmosphere raises the temperature by about 50 kelvins and we're concerned with 1 kelvin, but the fact still remains that a 1% change in solar flux or albedo will have more of an effect on temperature than a 1% change in the atmosphere's absorption. Of course, the question still remains as to how much the solar flux and albedo of Earth have changed versus how much more radiation our atmosphere absorbs.
Either way, no way I'm giving back my Oscar! -Al
I highly doubt that you are qualified to present papers on the subject, or that you have any involvement in science.
Solar forcing is already taken into account in today's models of climate change, and estimates range from no substantial effect to around 5% or so of warming being caused by the sun - the rest is nearly all anthropogenic.
Furthermore, if you read the article, the person proposing this as the SOLE means of heating really doesn't understand the greenhouse effect, or the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Please stop trolling - you are wrong, the person pushing this is wrong, and the evidence is out there on this already if you would but look.
'ice caps' near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.
3 summers is hardly an indicator of a long-term trend.
Table-ized A.I.
Let me guess, you are a tenured professor of geophysics at a private university in the eastern United States and have 5 degrees?
NASA has been sending probes and landers to Mars since the 70's. How long will it take until some radial environmentalist group decide that this is the result of man's interference there? While any rational person would see this article as a reason to question global warming theories on Earth, some people will see this as an excuse to blame humans for Mars' melting ice caps. Be prepared for this to be used as a new unfounded excuse.
Yeah the IPCC that decided based on thousands of peer reviewed papers that human-caused warming is very likely, all the papers their conclusions were based upon, they should have looked at news articles like these.
Not to bash on the IPCC or anything, but your argument doesn't respond to his. If most of the people submitting papers, and thus those doing the peer reviews, are in favor of global warming, then all the papers that come out of the IPCC are going to be in favor of global warming. I'm not saying they are all trying to make that outcome (although without a doubt some are) but sometimes that's what happens.
Qxe4
Because if we try to change what's going on without understanding the situation we might easily decide on a cure that's totally ineffective. If C02 emissions aren't a major factor (And I'm not saying they aren't.) then lowering them won't help much, if at all. It's better to spend a little money learning what's really going on before we spend a huge amount of money on possibly useless countermeasures.
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Sir it's always good to see another of the same persuasion and I fully endorse your article and I would
ask you to do the same for my reply to this heresy. Here is what I told these man-made global warming
denial morons just a few minutes ago countering their childish theories with sound science-inspired deep
thinking on the matter:
As far as your latest apologist whacko theory is concerned, it is more than obvious that vast amounts of
CO2 and Methane are carried away from Earth's atmosphere by solar wind into space where it is deposited on
the other planets of the solar system. That's why we're losing the martian polar caps! It's YOUR IMMENSE
CARBON FOOTPRINT that's causing it so WE REALLY NEED THAT CARBON TAX YESTERDAY!
I can't wait for the day we can take them to court for their hate crimes and then lock them away for good.
Oh please. How dare you profane my Internet with such hooey. That makes about as much sense as their claim that a study of temperatures for the last 150 years is invalid just because it only represents .00075% of the time man has been on the planet and .00000003% of the earth's existence.
Just think of that number: 150. That's a big number. If someone walked down the street and offered you a $150 wouldn't you be happy? That happiness is what the Republicans want to take away.
-Al
Maybe bacteria from the half-dozen or so Mars probes of the 70's has spread on Mars and is starting to change it. By some accounts the sterilization done to the probes by both the US and Soviets was inadaquate.
Table-ized A.I.
You know, this is extremely interesting. Mars' climate is vastly simpler than Earth's. The lack of oceans alone reduces the complexity enormously. Earth's biology, and its ability to convert and store massive amounts of gases adds additional complexity. Throw in humans, and its pretty much impossible to figure out what's really going on. Although Mars has an atmosphere, the processes going on there are so much simpler that external forces (the sun) will result in faster and more dramatic change. Thus Mars would be a great litmus test of what impact the changing sun might have on Earth. I have a hunch that if this is really the cause of what is happening on Earth, and if we had this quality of Mars data going back further in time, we could have possibly predicted the trends we are seeing on Earth now.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I'm pretty sure doctors DO argue about it. A bad diagnosis can lead to death, yanno.
I wouldn't say that my stance has ever been "Anti-Global Warming" as much as asking people to question what they're being told and the motivation behind it ...
...
I think that (regardless of your stance on the science) it is clear that Global Warming has been promoted mainly for political purposes. The argument has stopped being about what the science says, how strong the science is, or whether we can trust computer climate models (when we are really in the infancy of the technology) and moved to being a political debate.
I suspect that if we had the voice of God come out of the sky and say "Man Made Global Warming is a myth" or "Man Made Global Warming is happening" it wouldn't have any impact on the debate today
But I'm not a right winger, I'm a Moderate. (Yes, a tad to the right of center, but I'm not a Conservative by any means.) Of course, you might consider anybody who's not a Liberal to be a right winger, but that's your problem, not mine.
I might add that I'm not claiming that Liberals control the world, just that most of the people with power in Hollywood seem to be Liberals today.
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'Let's suppose that the orbit alteration is not the case. Wouldn't it still make sense to prepare for the worst? Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output'
I agree. The part I debate is where to cut emissions. There is this strange prevailing belief that nature is somehow superior to man and that therefore it must be man who upset this delicate balance. Maybe it is time that we started ignoring those naysayers (based upon a long history of manmade technology ultimately proving to be superior to nature in in the applications it is designed for) and looked curtail the far more substantial natural sources of CO2 emissions. It could be time to look into putting caps and scrubbers or some such onto volcanoes to reduce their emissions instead of nickel and diming with cars and gasoline.
Perhaps reducing these far more immense sources of CO2 would reduce emissions enough to that man wouldn't have to alter his lifestyle.
isn't it, considering the CO2 poles are now melting. What effect is the new atmospheric CO2 having on the surface temperature on Mars?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So, what, we're seeing a noticeable increase in global temperature from the last 50 years (as opposed to the thousands in the past) and you're saying global warming is a load of 'hooey'? Supporting an alternative theory is all good and well but you can't just toss global warming aside, once you put two and two together its fairly obvious.
Answer that or STFU.
Without knowing why it's happening you don't know what to fix or if you even can fix it. Say for instance it's the sun and it's only the sun causing global warming. What in the hell are you going to do about the sun? I'll tell you what you're going to do about the sun. You're going to sit there and put on your sunblock and shut the fuck up. The sun owns our ass like George Takei owns.... somebodies ass. What if it is "Intelligent Warming because God is chilly"? What are we going to do about it?
The part where we try and figure out the cause is the most important part there is. Otherwise we stand a good chance of wasting resources we don't have or screwing something up that isn't broken to begin with.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Are you crazy? You can't just ASSUME what wrong with the guy & begin to treat him for your guess. More than likely you'll KILL him. So much for "do no harm."
If you've actually ever been in an ER, you know they don't do anything until they know the cause. Know the cause, know the treatment. Anything else, you're seeing a witch doctor or something.
Bring it back to the article, you're missing the central point. If carbon emissions really aren't causing global warming, reducing them will have absolutely no effect. The earth will still get hotter, we're still be in square one, only with less time & money.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
. . . because if our CO2 emissions aren't to blame, then we have a much more serious problem here. I hate the stupid Green Peace commercials, and the smug, self righteous environmentalists, and my first instinct is to be happy every time some thing like this comes up that might prove them wrong and knock them down a peg, but the fact of the matter is that if we aren't causing it, we're going to have a much more difficult time doing anything about it.
The bottom line here is that it doesn't matter whether we're causing Global Warming or not, we still need to move towards renewable energy, if not for the environment, then for the economy. If global warming is going to be the boogeyman that scares people into investing in alternate energy sources, then I'm all for it, even if it means siding with the environmentalist doomsayers.
Al Gore replied with:
"During my service outside the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Inconvenient Facts."
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
While I agree that many people are foolish enough to think we are the cause of global warming, and that this is incorrect, it isn't really seriously disputable that we are having some effect. How much? This issue has been politicized so much, it's hard to tell. Regardless of the main culprits, we should be attempting to mitigate the damage as much as we can. Instead of saying: "It isn't us, it's impersonal natural forces." we should be saying: "We'll stop the little (?) damage we do, and see if we can come up with solutions to offset the natural forces."
Personally, I'm not particularly concerned with a handful of extinct species (except the mice, of course, we're only here for them after all) or with (likely) trivial coastal city water level increases. I'm more concerned with bizarre weather states. How much will this fsck precipitation, degree-days, cloud cover, and the like, where we produce our food.
I recently saw a projection of how our viable, arable land will shift northward. This would be a disaster. I grew up on a farm, have spent plenty of time in the SD badlands, and in central and northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and I can say (with quite a bit of confidence), that conditions for agriculture are better in the badlands than in the alkali swamps and pre-cambrian shield of the north. Even if such projections are inaccurate, the changes in weather patterns will have serious repercussions.
Whether or not we are largely responsible is kind of a moot point. We have a problem, and it's likely going to cause a lot of damage, and a great deal of money to deal with it. The last thing we should be doing is industrial-business-as-usual.
I actually was nearly finished writing a "Mod parent up" post, when I realized you're not quite right. Causes _are_ important because they affect how we treat it. A better analogy (if we *sigh* need an analogy) would be if someone came in coughing blood and vomiting. It's very important to know whether that's drug related, viral, cancer, etc, before you can treat him effectively. So it is relevant whether it's carbon emissions, or solar activity, or some other unknown factor. If carbon emmissions were irrelevant (just SUPPOSE, I'm certainly not advocating that as truth in any way), then spending money to cut emissions would be a waste of resources that maybe we need to build a solar shade (or whatever).
That said, however, there does come a point when you need to say, OK guys, the house is on fire, and it's time to do SOMETHING, even if more information would be handy. And to the extent that we are nearing that point, the bickering over causes does need to stop, particularly if it's just going to be all heat and no light.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
This is in addition to the natural difficulties of the subject, who can say for sure what is happening in such a big place as the earth?
More to the point, we've only been observing weather in any sort of scientific way for just a little over a century. Much evidence does point to warming cycles happening on a long period, over centuries - think of the frequency of ice ages. Our observations have been for but the blink of an eye. And I would bet that's all that is happening now.
Remember too that a mere 20 years ago, the big worry was global cooling, again caused by human pollution (this time blocking out the sun). Predictions of an impending ice age were running rampant. I seem to remember it being on the cover of TIME sometime in the mid 1980s.
The science behind all this is in its infancy, and it's a subject ideal for fanning anti-capitalist flames about how evil the automotive and energy companies are.
Having said that, of course, careful resource utilization is important. I don't think a hybrid car is the answer - more complicated, meaning more expensive to fix, meaning less likely to be fixed as it ages, meaning accelerated replacement cycle, meaning more coal to smelt the steel, meaning arguably no net environmental benefit. Buy an SUV, but only if you need one. Buy a truck, but only if you need one. Otherwise, stick with a small car, maintain it well, and plan on keeping it for 20+ years. Can it be done? Absolutely. My first car was a 1980 Chevette. I bought it for $200 in 1992, spent about $500 in repairs over 8 years, sold it for $1000, and I know it was still on the road in 2005. And though it didn't need an emissions test (too old), I got one anyway, just to see if it needed anything - timing, vacuum leaks, ignition, etc. - after all, fuel is expensive, and a poorly-tuned car wastes it. In 1998, my then 18-year-old 'Vette passed the test for a 1987 model.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It must be those SUVs NASA is operating on Mars that is the cause of the temperature rise...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You see, There most likley won't be any verified or serious studying of this theory. This isn't the first time this has been noted and there wasn't any serious studies contradicting them. To date. almost every "sun is the cause" theory has been dismissed by the pros without citing were it is wrong or why the common view is better. You will see words like junkscience thrown out as it's dismissal. You will see that it doesn't fit the current models (when the current models are structured incorectly to show any association with the sun). You will see things like Exxon is behind this. You will see things like psudoscience being thrown out. You will see statments like we didn't understand exactly what the studdy is saying. You will see all kinds of stuff discrediting this view except for facts.
And yes, I agree with waiting to celebrate. Someone could have made a mistake. But when every thing is out there and all the objections and discrediting revolves around blasphemy because the religion says otherwise, I will celibrate that this study was corect. And yes, I did just liken the global wamring science to a religion. It has become one for some people. I'm not saying you, but some people.
As usual, some useful discussion of these issues can be found on RealClimate.org. The following two articles are worth a look, though neither is especially recent:
The punchline from the latter article is, "There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth..."
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
and is experiencing hot flushes. Give old Mother Earth a break...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
News at 11, the ocean is wet.
God spoke to me.
No. Really. We must all start using bicycles because we are warming 2 planets!!!! Someone let Gore know. We need a sequel to get more people on our bandwagon. Come on people! Let's get going before Pluto thaws!!!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Or, in modern vernacular, "chill out, dude."
Seriously - you can't "do" something helpful, unless you have a clear reason why you are doing it.
After all, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"... which I personally think is a result of the Law of unintended consequences.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It's sad when contributors pick and choose only the parts of an article that support their own viewpoint and hope that readers are unwilling to read the whole article. Anyone who has RTFA can see that fully half of the article is a repudiation of this man's hypothesis by most of the scientific community:
Choice quotes
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University. "And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
To add to this, I'd like to point out that global warming deniers are quick to dismiss 650,000 years of data about earth's temperature as not being representative of the facts, but they jump on 3 years of data (and data confined to a local area and not the whole planet) as evidence against global warming, solely because they think it supports their opinion. If they were serious about science, they would apply the same rigour to the arguments they agree with as to the arguments they disagree with.
I came here for a good argument
Searching through for his previous works he has never published anything on climatology. This would be make his speculations well outside his field of study. Now, being a physicist myself I know that knowing physics gives you better understanding many other things. But, his one article doesn't get precedence over the mounds and mounds of other published work by people in the fields of climatology, environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, etc. who are considered experts and are well published. If anything he might just be mentioning global warming to get money, as some /.'ers assumed about the deep sea temperature oddities article a while ago. Both sides can do it you know :).
Patrik
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Well, if global warming is caused primarily by solar heating (in the relevant sense), there's probably not much we can do about it. Instead of diverting our resources on a lost cause, we can invest those resources to deal with other environmental issues we can do something about.
After all, I am strangely colored.
So. The Sun, which we can't control, is cooking all the planets. Whew! I feel much better now. Now we don't have to give up our SUVs. When it comes time to evacutate the last New Yorker like in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the Sun went out of control, they can drive off in an SUV and not feel the least bit guilty. Except, in that episode, the women were really living in an NYC that was in the grip of an ice age, and the whole thing was a dream. Hold on, let me pinch mys#%@# NO CARRIER.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Now the liberal Martian bacteria are suggesting imposing CO2 quotas while the libertarian single-celled organisms don't want to impose any regulations.
No word from the conservative cells.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Why do we have to waste time arguing about the cause? If a guy comes into an ER, and passes out, they don't stand around arguing about why he passed out before they help the guy."
You've never watched "House" have you...
Geting back on topic, moving to more efficient vehicles has other advantages than just reduced CO2 emmissions, oil will eventually run out.
Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. -- C. Montgomery Burns.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
We're going to see the god-damnest crap pouring out of ExxonMobile and their buddies' PR machine over the next year or two, and that Mr. Abdussamatov gets a hearing now is just a taste of what's coming. Hell, if I wanted to make series money, I should be sniffing around Madison Avenue and K Street right now, instead of wasting time dealing with crackpots on /.
Addressing the parent post, it's true that Methane is one motherfucker of a greenhouse gas, and plants crank it out. Plants have always cranked it out, because plants have been rotting since the beginning of life, so that's just part of the baseline. What's different is the extra gas that 1.3 billion domesticated cattle are passing every day. What's different is that billions of frickin tons per year of carbon being cut loose from fossil fuels, vast quantities that leave the the methane as not much more than a rank odor.
Luke, help me take this mask off
DING DING DING!
Did it really take two missions to Mars and the head of an observatory to tell you that?!
Seriously. I don't care WHY you think the Earth is warming, all I care about is people trying to DO something about it.
I'm waving a magic stick around. What are you doing to stop global warming?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
What's the word I'm looking for here? thanks.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
One Title - Natural Born Shrillers
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Thank heavens you posted that. I had fallen under the sway of the 99.99% of scientists who say global warming is real. I'd also foolishly taken at face value the core samples from the last half a million years, the disappearing ice caps and glaciers, and so on. But your assertions, so strong and confident, more than counter-balance all of that nonsense. And the truth of your words is so obvious that you correctly didn't feel the need to even bother posting a single link to back up anything you said.
It seems obvious in retrospect. Why haven't more people tumbled to the truth that scientists always fudge their own data, and conspire to keep the fudging secret, in order to impoverish our hard-working and honest industrialists? These god damn scientists, they can never give a billionaire an even break.
Thank god for you and Rush Limbaugh, Argoff, or I just wouldn't know what to think.
.....I suspect that if we had the voice of God come out of the sky and say "Man Made Global Warming is a myth" or "Man Made Global Warming is happening" it wouldn't have any impact on the debate today ...........
More likely is that nobody would believe Him. He has in fact told us about severe Global warming caused by the sun. (Isaiah 30:26, Rev 16:8-9) It will be part of the process when God cleanses the world of evil and brings down the rule of man over earth and will send Jesus, the God-man back down here to take over the planet. Unfortunately, the question that Isaiah asked in 53:1 he would still ask if alive today.
Moderators may again kill the messenger by modding this post a troll.
All theory is gray
Why? We're not having any effect on the climate, following your logic. 8^)
Okay, kidding aside, you're absolutely right that understanding causes are critical to success, but just as generals don't wait until they understand the full disposition of the enemy before they engage them, we can't allow a lack of certainty to stop us from taking action before it's too late.
Sometimes you have to work with the best available information. That information seems to suggest that there is a significant correlation between human activity and climate change. And this study doesn't contradict that, either. It suggests that the sun may be playing a role, but does not, to my understanding, do anything to disprove or even dispute the effect of human activity. Anybody who understands anything about complex systems (and that includes just about every self-respecting climatologist) assumes that every effect has multiple causes.
We have a choice right now: We can sit around, saying, 'It's all so confusing!' and do nothing, or we can take action. We already know that there are huge benefits to be had from energy conservation and a reduction in the consumption of petrochemicals. So even if we dead wrong about climate change, we still win. So, honestly, why are we waiting?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
If you wish to debate that Earth's orbit alteration is not significant for Earth's recent climate change please explicitly say so.
I ask this because you use a quote about Mars' orbit alteration then refer to "human global climate impact"; and Earth's human global climate impact should not be included in a discussion about orbit alteration being the conventional theory for the climate change on Mars
How about starting by cutting short your surfing session and turning your computer off? ;)
Was I the only one who saw this headline and the only thing I could even think was "Duuuuh"?
i hear there may be a few more planets floating around out there. be nice too if they were warming up too.
- js.
It doesn't even go that far. Err it does exactly as your saying.
See how those sentences sound totaly different but convey the meaning I want to have? I will let you in on this secrete of mine in case your wondering what the hell I'm doing.
Like you said, The IPCC when making this statment about humans likley to be causing global warming, were looking for a rock and found a rock. They didn't pay attention to the dirt, the bugs or worms in the soil, they were lookin for a rock and found a rock. And now they are saying that area over there is full of rocks. But when you look at it, You see rich farm land teaming with life and nutrience and a couple of rocks. The IPCC didn't go on a quest to find out what was causing the earth to warm, the went on a quest to find if it was warming and if humans could be the cause. And they found that. Yes, humans could be causing the earth to be warming. But they statment shouldn't be taken as more then that.
I have also looked at all these reports that the vast majority of the science comunity belives humans are causing global warming. And all these reports revolve around a few peer review articles were a sample of scientist were asked it the papers were flawed and to make sure tey used good science. The people who said they didn't see any flaws or that good science was used were counted as people supporting the outcome of the papers. The minor few who had an objection with them for some reason, were counted as disagreeing with them. The endresult was the vast majority of scientist agree with global warming and that humans are the cause. But the questioning had nothing to do with this. It is a play with words and misinterpretations of wording used for a specific purpose.
The relevence here is that it is possible to create a model, perform experiments, be completly and scientificly acurate and still get it wrong. This is the nature of science and why people check others work. And this is why science finds new discoveries that change the way we think about things.
So you are right. Their job was to find evidence of global warming and that humans were the cause. They did exactly this. But the GP is very wrong in making the asertion that this rules other explainations out. It doesn't touch the validity of other explainations. What he doesn't seem to know is that the truth doesn't change with popular opinion. The truth always is and we change how we understand it. This change in understanding changes popular opinion. He has stopped trying to understand the truth and just wants to regurgitate popular opinion. Even when it is wrong.
Now the line about truth not changing came from someone else. I wish I could quote him on it but I forget his name and what context it was said in.
I just want to say that the headline for this story is one of the funniest I have seen in a long time.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
>> moving to more efficient vehicles has other advantages than just reduced CO2 emmissions,
no no no! you don't understand! the ONLY reason anyone would ever do anything good for the environment is because of man-made global warming, if you don't believe in that then you are pro-pollution!!!
for the sarcastically challenged... that SHOULD have been a ridiculous statement... but somehow it seems to be the prevailing thought pattern. I personally don't think that humans have caused the whole global warming problem, and I hate the way that theory is revered as it's own religion and anyone opposing it is instantly ostersized... however at the same time I also believe we need to reduce polution, we need to be more efficient with our energy, and we need to find more renewable sources of energy... for many reasons, think smog and cancer, and acid rain, and polluted waterways, and the finite supply of oil, there are many reasons to want to reduce pollution, we don't have to use the global warming religion to justify it.
Maybe we should send Al Gore to Mars so he can warn Martians about driving their SUVs.
How long do we have to argue about the why before we just start to try to ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?
First of all, I have this rock here that keeps away tigers. How much will you pay me for it? Before you say... please... think of the children.
Seriously, what happens when we cool the earth and suddenly the sun shifts cooler and we hit a double strength ice age?
I don't know the cause for sure honestly (and yes I absolutely believe it's happening), but I would like to before I start tinkering with shit... like any complex program.
no. no they didn't. he used 3 years of data. he's a crack pot and his notion was pretty much trounced on page two of that article (wobble).
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If your putting two apples and two oranges together and comming up with four steak dinners you can.
I'm not saying global wamring is a load but the fix seems more like a political agenda then anything meaningfull. And if this statment about the sun is somewhat correct, then we seem to have been adding the wrong things together to get our results. It isn't as if it would be the first time this has happened.
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help... Here are the FACTS:
1) The Earth has been warmer than it is now before! We are not seeing temperatures outside the spectrum of nature, and even assuming worst case according to the IPCC we won't be outside normal for more than 500 years.
2) CO2 levels are not high now. There was an article in Scientific American which documented this, CO2 over the last 2 million years has fluctuated between ~200ppm and ~1400ppm. Right now we are at about 300ppm.
3) The Sun and the Orbit of the Earth both fluctuate and are beyond our control and both influence the climate much more than anything we could possibly do.
4) The Earth has been through many cycles of ice age and temperate age all before we were here.
5) The last temperate age melted almost all of the polar ice and caused sea levels to rise 4-6 meters this was 125k years ago. It is safe to assume it will happen again (with our without us)
6) We are still coming out of the last ice age, and we haven't seen temperatures comparable to the last temperate age yet, so we can easily assume temperatures still need to go up before the cycle starts again.
These things are completely beyond our control, if we spend billions (and I'd argue it would cost many trillions) to "fight" global warming, well if you want to fight against the solar system, go ahead but I'm not giving you my tax dollars to do it.
Data that indicates that all planets are experiencing comparable warming would indicate that humanity causes 0% of the warming. In such a case, it would be irresponsible to claim that we could influence it in any way by reducing any human activity. The only thing humanity could do in such a scenario (if dire) would be to take a pro-active approach to affecting one of the bulk processes we know are involved.
Unfortunately, due to the short timespans involved: global temperature data has only been recorded on earth for a few decades, other planets even less, I doubt definitive results can be claimed.
"Take no more than three data points. There will always be at least one type of graph paper on which they fall on a line."
"If you have only one type of graph paper, take no more than two data points."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And everyone said Microsoft was evil.
Forgetting greenhouse gases, changes in the sun, etc for a moment, isn't is conceivable that the fact we're burning so much stuff, and putting out so much heat is a factor in global warming?
In addition, most of our energy generation and populsion devices are fairly inefficient. A significant portion of the energy consumed is wasted as heat, which is then dissipated into the environment in one way or another.
Maybe all heat generating devices have minimal impact on global temperature, I don't know. I'm not a climate expert. But I've just never seen any mention of it at all....
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Stars move up and to the left in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H-R_diagram.png during their main sequence lifetime which means they
get cooler but more luminous. It it the luminosity that is most important for the temperatures of planets. Watch the evolution here http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/star _age/evol_hr.swf and you'll see that a factor of 2 in a billion years is about what
the evolution looks like. That is less that a part in 100 million per year. So, main sequence evolution is not the sort of thing we can
measure right now. There are changes in solar brightness at a larger level and on shorter timescales though recent changes do not account for
the measured warming. See a rough calculation here http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html.
s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar: It's steady. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Or, it suggests that our planet's recent climate changes might have a natural AND human-induced cause.
http://outcampaign.org/
Let's send him to Venus instead. That planet is suffering the worst heat wave
since the sun ignited.
Well, Beside what others are saying with the "if we fix the wrng thing we are still in for it" or the "if we are wrong the fix could be worse then the problem.", I will add that if the sun is the problem, it will contiain and correct itself. Direct sunlight causes evaporation which makes clouds which block the sun. The air holds as much water as the temperature will allow. So if it is the sun, It will slow back down and nature will fix everything.
BTW, Water vapor is one of the most abundant greenhouse gasses and has the biggest impact of the greenhouse gasses. Currently water vapor is factored as an effect of global wamring and not a cause. (feed back verses forcing)
just that most of the people with power in Hollywood seem to be Liberals today.
Allow me to fix the above for you.
just that most of creative people in Hollywood (like most creative folks anywhere throughout history), tend to be liberal in their outlook, while the guys who run the business side of things (producers, studio execs, accountants, managers, etc.) are invariably conservative.
Personally, I'd like to think this entire line of discussion is off-topic. At least to the degree someone making their views known with respect to global warning isn't so easily influenced by the steady stream of the opinion-peddling on AM radio and Fox News that passes for news or discussion, or otherwise suffers from an irrational distrust of everyone involved in the Clinton presidency.
That said, here's a tip: you'd be hard-pressed to find many business types "in Hollywood" who didn't vote for Bush in the last election, or the one prior. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. Folks whose business is money insist on keeping as much of it as possible and routinely vote for the "lower taxes and less government involvement" candidate. The same often holds true for people who regularly earn large sums of money; many of the news anchors and high-profile execs in the "liberal media" vote conserative. Ironic, huh?
I suppose it's to be expected, but it's a shame more scientists don't involve themselves more in the political process. Imagine a world where global warning wasn't an Al Gore thing and people instead relied on the efforts and conclusions of people who devote their professional lives to the subject. In time, perhaps. It wasn't too long ago that some nutjobs started to get hysterical about shit being dumped into rivers and oceans and complained so loudly that the government decided to create the EPA. Funny they're no longer considered the nutcases everyone back then thought they were.
Why is this modded Insightful? You do not need to know why something happens to take steps to prevent or mitigate a problem. There are fairly straightforward solutions to global warming that would reverse the trends regardless of cause. A shield or solar diffuser of sufficient size would cause the world to gradually cool no matter the cause. It isn't necessary for Pacific Islanders to understand WHY a volcano erupts, merely that it does and that they should take steps to mitigate the disaster (possibly by building their village in the safest location they have available).
However, the same things that will reduce CO2 emissions (taking fossil-fuel powered cars and coal-fired power stations out of service) will also tackle some of the biggest sources of these other pollutants. In fact, it's my guess that the savings in health costs would, on their own, go a long way to offsetting (if you'll pardon the pun) the costs of tackling CO2 emissions.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We can use hydrogen bombs.
Let's ship 50 thousand of them by DC-9 planes.
-- "His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion."
Wow! That's sticking it to him. He's repudiated allright.
--"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report".
You mean "He Contradicts our kick-ass report we delivered to the UN". Still more repudation.
-- "Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
I think he meant "Aww bah! I don't wanna hear any of this, it contradicts scripture". What a masterful debunker of
"mere ideas".
--"Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface."
Perhaps the biggest blunder in the official theory is the fact as global warming increases so does the amount
of land increase that is hospital to plant life. The Vikings tilled the fertile earth of Greenland which is at the
moment covered by ice. Plants get their carbon mostly from the air.
That's true, unless you consider the scientific worldview to be a valid, dependable, fruitful, beneficient way of looking at the world. As a person who wears eyeglasses, uses medicine, rides in automobiles, travels in airplanes, enjoys the internet/electricity/air conditioning/light bulbs/telephones/etc, I have to confess that I'm biased in favor of science. Scientists, despite what you seem to be saying, have come to the conclusion that global warming is both happening and is being worsened by human actions. They have already taken that hot ball of plasma in the sky into account. Are you really entertaining the idea that scientists forgot to take the sun into account when figuring out global warming? The entire community of climatologists would have to be complete morons. Are you saying that's the case?
"But this is not a troll; there are plenty of scientists observing the sun."
Your post is not a troll but TFA certainly is.
For anybody wondering about the attribution of various +/- forcings affecting climate, including variations in solar flux, please see figure SPM-2 in the 2007 IPCC SPM report. For those who like the Mars idea as expressed in TFA please explain why 3yrs of data should be accepted as a trend, let only accepted in preference to a theory that has made some accuate predictions and has an observational record that uses multiple idependent lines of inquiry for periods that are up to a few orders of magnitute longer?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
When probes starting flying by Mars in the seventies Mars was undergoing a global dust storm. This would have had the effect of a nuclear winter and cooled the entire planet, allowing the ice caps to grow. Our initial point of reference is immediately after this period before Mars completely recovered. The fact that the ice caps have receded and the planet has warmed up since then is unsurprising.
We are only touching the surface of martian and earth weather. Adding multi-month and possible several year long global dust storms to the mix makes predictions much much harder. Scientists can't even adequately explain why Venus and Mars are so acidic. Which probably has the simple explanation that a lack of an effective magnetic shield has allowed solar wind to strip away surface and atmosphere hydrogen...
Now, granted, I normally argue on the side of people disproving greenhouse gas induced climate change, but arguing with Mars as a counter point is old news. We need to find an effective way to track the thermal output of the sun over long periods of time. We only have anecdotal evidence and unproven simulations on either side of the argument. Right now we are running a fever without having an appropriate solar thermometer or even long term precise records of Earth(millions of years).
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
I think there is a massive potential for fixating on stories like this to rationalize continuing bad behavior. I've heard gaps in the fossil record being used as a reason to throw out Evolution as the source of life and replace it with the Bible. Solar cycles are well known and do vary. The cycles do cause temperature change. So does volcanic activity. To accept this as the cause we have to ignore the fact that the temperature change has mirrored increases in CO2. CO2 does cause a rise in temperature. No one is really debating that yet there is a lot of other possible causes being pushed. The other things will contribute to increases but they always have. This spike in temperatures is unpresidented and so are the levels of CO2. At no time in traceable history has the CO2 spiked this fast. The source is obvious. We're pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the environment. Playing smoke and mirrors won't make that go away. We know what CO2 and temperatures have been like on Earth. What we don't know is what the poles of Mars have been like over the last few hundred let alone few thousand years. This is likely a normal retreat of polar ice which will reverse in five, ten or a hundred years. We can't let possible secondary causes distract from the real cause, us. It's very dangerous to take the position that we won't do anything until we can eliminate all other possible causes. Remember five years ago it was only crackpots that believed in global warming. Now the biggest naysayer the US President has admited to global warming. That's a massive turnaround. The problem is while we debate causes we are approaching a point of no return. We may have already gotten there. We know CO2 is damaging the environment and that isn't being debated. Better to play it safe and radically cut CO2 production. Right now the debate is about spending billions. In twenty five to fifty years the numbers will be in the trillions. Take your pick, SUVs or most of the coastal property in the world including most of the inhabitated part of Florida. And that's just one side effect of global warming. Believe it or not there are worse ones. Let's say we got word that an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting in 25 years and it would devastate the coast and throw us into nuclear winter killing most life on earth. Now would you say to wait until we are sure even if we won't know until the year before? Or would you say to prepare? The effects of global warming potentially are as severe as an asteroid strike and yet there is no debate about it hitting the only debate is about the size of the global warming asteroid. Do you want to take the chance it's a dinosaur killer or do you want to do something about it while you can?
Cause if you don't know why, you can make the problem worse. Are you 100% the solution you present will work?? What if it cools it too much and creates a runaway cycle in the cooling direction. It probably won't, but humans seem to have a knack at presenting solutions, such as building dams to generate electricity, only to discover unintended consequences.
Your example about volcanoes is a good example. Knowing why volcanoes erupt provide the means to determine what 'safe' is. Moving the islanders away from Krakatoa into Yellowstone, for example, isn't necessary a good thing.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You can only measure the changes with Habibullo Abdussamatov's patented
Space Solar Limbograph
I am not making this up.
Sadly, by the time enough proof is available millions will be DEAD. How about we let Japan or the EU launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory but no-- Bush does not want the USA to contribute anything.
Lets stop the fags from getting married so we can decrease asthma, acid rain, smog, severe weather, mad cow, etc. because god is causing those to punish us for tolerating our neighbors.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Amen!
I think global warming is a bunch of crap. But I'd pay 10k extra to drive a fully electric car. I'm planning on spending ~30k this year to put solar panels on my roof (save ~250/mo in utility bills). I'd love to hook those solar panels up to a water electrolizer, produce hydrogen and use that to drive, store for non-sunny days, whatever.
I am so put off by the global warming religion that it drives me nuts. There are so many viable, provable, rational arguments for using renewable energy and polluting less. Using this crackpot, unprovable, faith based excuse of global warming to convince people to pollute less is insulting to anyone who has a brain.
There are ways to do it (pollute less, consume less) without inconvenience. I telecommute 3 days a week now, saves me ~90/mo in gasoline. If 50% of the US telecommuted 50% of the time I bet we'd comply with the Kyoto Protocol.
My question to you is--how much longer do we study this problem? How much longer do we scratch our collective chins and furrow our collective brows? If in five years, the climatologists are STILL saying the exact same thing they're saying NOW, will you be convinced? Mind you, oil companies and conservatives (who can't grant the evil liberals political capital by acknowledging that environmentalism is a legitimate and compelling issue) will still oppose the idea, right up the bitter end, and the media will STILL be breathlessly covering the "debate" as if the science wasn't firmly established. Would-be uber-skeptics on Slashdot will still be preening and saying "we can't be sure". But at what point will YOU be willing to believe the climatologists? Five years from now? Ten? Never? I need to know. At what point do you believe the climatologists on questions of climatology? This is important, so please get back to me.
It depends how big a part of the problem manmade CO2 production actually is, and how much you want to slow it down, and how fast. Keep in mind that a lot of manmade CO2 production is a side effect of keeping millions of people fed, clothed, and warm in the winter.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
After we're done dealing with Islam, it's gonna be the eco-terrorists' turn.
Judging by the way you're "dealing" with Islam, the "eco-terrorists" have nothing to fear, then...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is what happens when you switch to Intel chips!
He has a point. In this case, the lab work shows causation and not merely correlation. The correlations are between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. People hesitate to call the relationship there causation because there is inadequate time resolution. You don't know for sure that the increase in CO2 came before the increase in temperature or the other way around. However, we stand on the brink of a brave new world: I urge skeptics everywhere to take the experimental approch and reduce the CO2 concentration to the pre-industrial level.
This is the only sound science approach. If we're not sure about global warming, we need to check on this. Let's track temperature changes as we remove carbon from the air just as quickly as we've put it in. It is the only way to settle the debate.
Yes, in an ideal world, we should know the cause before we act. However, there is such a thing as paralysis through analysis. If we spend too much time studying the problem without doing things, we are likely to end up with a harder problem to solve once we know what the cause is. We need to strike a balance, by continuing to study the problem and learn more about the causes and best solutions, while at the same time enacting partial solutions based on our best knowledge of what is going on. We have to balance the risk that our initial countermeasures are useless (unlikely IMHO, but they might or might not be as helpful as we hope; they might even be harmful, I suppose) against the risk that if we wait to get started the problem becomes harder and more expensive to solve. My intuition is that the result of that analysis is that we shouldn't yet panic, we should keep researching the problem, and most importantly we should start trying for the low hanging fruit in terms of greenhouse gas reduction.
The polar bears would prefer not to wait until you're satisfied that it can't be anything else. Don't care about polar bears? The Arctic is being called the canary in the coal mine. Let's say you're in that proverbial coal mine when the canary drops dead? Now do you wait for a second opinion or do you leave the mine? The arctic is an 800lb carnary right now so you may want to pay attention.
It's all those NASA SUVs (Science Utility Vehicles) driving around on Mars, that are causing Mars global warming. All they need is a small two wheel drive soil sampler or even the old lander but nooo they have to get the latest SUV just to impress all their friends.
One of the last few psuedo-skeptics....*sigh*.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Objection to form.
Lack of foundation.
we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
How is this insightful? This kind of thinking shows everything that's wrong with the environmental movement: a complete disregard for cost/benefit analysis. You're saying that it's somehow "better" to impose arbitrary restrictions on the economy of a completely unknown cost, in the hope that whatever you did creates some kind of unspecified benefit.
This is no better than a medieval doctor removing a few pints of blood because it's better to remove your blood and be wrong than to leave you with a cold and do nothing.
If you want to help the environment, present your solutions in the way every other idea needs to be presented: here are the expected benefits, here are the expected costs, and here is how we're going to be accountable for these benefits and these costs.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Thank you, but no. I prefer my words the way I wrote them, without going through the filter of somebody else's preconceptions. I wouldn't be surprised that the money-mongers are conservative and the artists liberal, but how many of the money-mongers have creative control?
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Ah yes, I was wondering when somebody was going to bring up consensus as though it were an irrefutable argument. When it comes to facts, consensus only means that everybody agrees, it doesn't mean they're right. (or wrong either, for that matter) There was once a consensus that the world was flat; did that make the world flat? There was once a consensus that there were exactly four elements; did that make this true? There was a consensus that life could be generated spontaneously from dead matter; did that make spontaneous generation a fact? I could go on and on, but I think you get my drift.
I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening; there's ample evidence that it is. I'm also not saying that pouring C02 into the atmosphere can't have an effect. I am, however, saying that we don't know, yet, how much of an effect it's having and if it's significant, how much we have to cut back to stop things from getting worse. Before we do anything drastic, we need to find out the answers to those questions, and we can probably find out fairly quickly for "only" about $25,000,000. I'm not asking for endless studies, or decades of time, just time to do some simple, basic, fundamental research on just what's going on, for a lot less than Kyoto would cost us.
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Funny you should mention Flat Earthers. Is your stance that CO2 doesn't affect temperatures? The point is environmental factors normally balance out so change is gradual. this change is very sudden. Climatology and geology aren't like astrology they are legitimate sciences. There's been a very detailed study of temperatures based on information gathered from ice core samples. They go back over a million years and this rise in CO2 is not normal and the only other likely cause would be a lot of volcanic activity. There hasn't been enough to account for the increase but there are a hell of a lot of coal fired power plants and cars out there spewing out CO2. Do you believe the good CO2 fairy removes manmade CO2 from the environment? I understand you don't want to change your lifestyle but it will change because climate change will force a change. Food prices will go up, energy prices will go up. There will be droughts and the coastline will change. We're already seeing a radical increase in bad weather costing tens of billions a year and this is just the begining. Nature is clearing her throat. You say what if you're right? Well here's food for thought, what if the scientists are right and you are wrong? The worst thing that happens if you are right and we make the changes suggested is we get cleaner air and we're actually prepared for oil running out. If you're wrong and we do nothing it's a massive disaster and billions will suffer. Personally I'd rather take the opinions of people educated in the field than some one that isn't. I'm assuming you aren't a climatologist since none of them debate humans are responsible for global warming. Next time you hear a would be climatologist claim it's all a scam check to make sure they are what they claim to be and find out who pays them. You might be surprised to find they aren't educated in the field and happen to be paid by the oil companies. There is no debate among legitimate scientist only among the Flat Earthers.
You make a very good point and I agree 100% with you.
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
If we start building the IRF reactor system which was designed by Argonne Labs (and shut down by clinton's administration in 1994!) then we have over 60,000 years of uranium supply on hand already mined... this for a fleet of about 110 reactors. North American can produce 100% of its power from nuclear - but we need about 1200 reactors to do it. We havn't started to build any. Any new reactors are years away.
Then we have the biofuels people. If we take ethanol for instance, it can be produced from pretty much any plant material. Plants are sugar polymers for the most part. We can break these polymers down. This is what fungus do and this is what yeast does... its just yeast needs to start wtih pretty simple sugars whereas a fungus like Trichoderma reeshii can break down celulose and this is why its used to make stone washed bluejeans. How effective T. reeshii will be in celulose to ethanol production is open and then we have that about 50% of plant material is not cellulose but instead is ligins and pentosans - which fungus like Pleurotus and Lentinula spp (and many other species can digest). Whether they will produce alcohol is an open question.
Ethanol from grain is viable. To do this cost effectively is equaivalent to brewing beer at $2.50 per keg. To produce all the liquid fuel North America needs we would need to consume more than the worlds production of grains. Please note: One tonne of dry plant biomass is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil and this is if we can convert it for free.
So, I'm not particularly worried about CO2 levels. CO2 is a fertilizer and encourages plant growth. I am however quite worried about fuel supplies in the not too distant future and I think we are already starting to see supply constraints.
People should start by doing what they can... like insulate their houses for instance. Instead people run around and point their fingers at CO2 levels (and understand practically nothing about it). Heating houses creates CO2 - so why won't they do something that they can do and save themselves money in the mean time? Are they bound and determined to freeze in the dark?
My father who has now passed on is an example. He refused to properly insulate his house. When I grew up and it was 40 below outside there was frost on the walls of the bedroom. He put in an oil furnace about this time and was burning a tank up every 3 weeks. He'd been told oil was cheap and insulation was expensive I guess. I was pretty little but still old enough to remember the 1 1/2" of rock wool he was putting in the walls and I asked him why he didn't fill the whole wall up? He said it was not "cost effective". That xmas my mother and father were looking at their oil bills wondering how they were going to heat their house.
At this point, that house is going through 18 cords of wood per year. It is still not insulated.
A similar size eco-designed house is using 3/4 of a cord per year.
This is what insulation and good design can do. It doesn't cost much extra to build it right in the first place. For instance, R50 fiberglass in the walls will cost about $1 buk per square foot during the construction phase. After the house is finished you need to tear walls down.
If houses in North America were properly insulated they would be much cheaper to heat and much more comfortable to live in. So why won't people do it? It will greatly reduce CO2 emissions.
What really worries me is what the next generation is going to do. Gas hit $17 bux on the Henry Hub a little over a year ago. Next year it might hit $20 bux. While we have a short reprieve, I am personally close enough to the Oil and Gas business t
This is the "no shit" moment where everyone who has been saying that the "sky is falling, and it's your fault" proponents are out of their minds.
I'm not denying that burning carbon-based fuels is bad for the ecology. I'm not denying that polution sucks, and that we over-consume. I accept all these things - but they aren't causing any sort of significant climate change. There simply isn't any correlation between temperature and CO2/etc. production.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Would the Sun be heating up or cooling down? If the Sun were becoming less energetic, cooling down, would it put out more energy in the infrared spectrum as opposed to the higher visible and ultraviolet bandwidths? There could be a difference not only in the heat it puts out but also the other types of radiation it produces. What would happen to plant life if there was more or less ultraviolet energy available for photosynthesis? No plants = no food. Maybe just looking at heat output is a bit short sighted. What is the change in power for the other parts of the radiation spectrum?
No offense, dude, but go take a physics class. That goes for whoever modded _that_ "informative" too.
1. Heat flows from the sun to the earth, and from both to the vast expanses of open space anyway. It's not the outside space that's heating the Earth, but the Sun.
2. The laws of thermodynamics have to do with atom/mollecule movement, and transfer of heat between bodies in contact. The only (ok, vast majority of) energy flowing in or out here has _nothing_ to do with thermodynamics as such, since there are no two bodies in contact exchanging heat (i.e., exchanging mollecule movement by impact.) What is happening there light being absorbed and radiated, and yes that can happen in the opposite direction just as well. There are relevant laws there, e.g., Stefan-Boltzman, but the second law of thermodynamics isn't it.
E.g., you can cut sheet metal with a focused laser beam even though the heated point is basically a hell of a lot hotter than the laser. It will absorb the light anyway. E.g., to address your "inside" and "outside" concerns, you can fry an ant with a magnifying glass even though the ant ends up hotter than the surrounding air. That's because the energy comes from the sun, not from the outside air.
So, sorry, the GP post was right, you are wrong.
But to get back on topic, what's happening is that the earth receives some radiation energy from the sun, and it radiates some back into space. The equilibrium temperature is when the energy radiated equals the incoming energy. Basically if energy E is incoming, then the equilibrium temperature T is when surface times emissivity times Stefan-Boltzmann constant times T to the 4'th power equals E. That's all.
The "insulation" and its non-uniformity across wavelengths messes things a little, but as long as the temperature variations are relatively small, the wavelength don't shift horribly much, so basically the proportionality stays. And a global warming of 1 Celsius (which at least at one point was all the heating Earth had experienced) isn't enough to throw it off the hook. If the Earth's temperature is, say, approximately 300 Kelvin (for the sake of a nice round number), we're talking a third of a percent increase. Since the rest is constants T1^4/T2^4=E1/E2, so it only takes an increase of (1.00333)^4=1.0134, or 1.34 percent increase in incoming energy to fully explain it. Better yet, since Stefan-Boltzman applies to the Sun too, to fully cause it, the Sun would have to experience the same heating the Earth does. A third of a percent heating of the sun creates the extra energy to heat up the Earth by a third of a percent.
So that's basically all the debate here: did our "insulation" change over time, or is it simply that the Sun got slightly hotter? The former wouldn't explain why Mars is heating up too, while the latter fully does.
Funny the things one can learn by paying attention in physics class, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help...
The Stern report, authored by the former World Bank chief economist, says more like 1% of global GDP to prevent a 10-20% drop due to warming.
The Earth has been warmer than it is now before!
I suppose if a huge asteroid were on course to hit Earth, your argument would be "the Earth has been barren and molten rock before! let's not do anything!"?
CO2 levels are not high now.
CO2 levels in the last 720,000 years never went over 300 as we know from the EPICA ice cores. We're over 375 right now.
I love that you're smarter than thousands of climate scientists, essentially every relevant scientific organisation, and the 154 nations who had to unanimously sign off on the IPCC's conclusion that there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part. When's the Nobel being awarded?
Yes, the sun is responsible for some global warming, that is well-known and has been taken into account. Changes due to greenhouse gases are on top of that. The contribution due to solar changes make acting particularly urgent because it leaves even less room for human contributions.
The scientist who looked at the polar ice cap melting said it was from a global climate change on mars, while discussed in this link http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192 the ice caps are melting due to regional climate change. That conclusion was based on numerous data measurements across the planet of mars. The inferrence of solar radiation and global climate change on mars is baseless.
That's akin to the time I thought my engine was acting up because it didn't have thick enough oil, and poured some of the thickest crap I could find plus three cans of oil stabilizer in. It burned a lot more gas and started burning tons of oil, not to mention it didn't exactly like what I fed it and I needed an oil change 3 days later... oh, and had to pour cleaner through the oil to make sure I got the burned gunk out... and the oil filter clogged with shit...
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Wow, I knew my new Sunblades were hot, but Mars!?
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
If you are talking about movies: All of them? Without them, the movies do not get made. If they prefer certain themes (that are more compatible with conservative viewpoints), then they will prefer those over some liberal stuff. Hell, Yes, the artist would complain, but at that point they have two choices: Either the movie gets made the way the producers want it, or it doesn't get made at all.
just look at Jerry Bruckheimer! You have more flag-waving in his movies than you do in the annual flag-waving contest!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
Nope, not at all. Peakers keep claiming we're at peak, and showing "projections" which take the current trend of ever increasing production after 1980 and drop it off sharply after the current date. It's amusing to watch them keep making new projections as years go by and the production collapse doesn't happen.
Essentially, there was a fall off around 1980, but since then oil production has been increasing pretty regularly.
I don't disagree that nuclear power is the way to go. Shame on any environmentalists that protested nuclear power and is complaining about oil.
...please...for the...love of {DIETY OF CHOICE}...mod...parent...up...
...read page two of that article. Abdussamatov is a nutcase, and neither recent overall warming of Mars nor any attribution to increased solar output are serious scientifc propositions.
Stephan
Heat rises. That creates wind. The Earth isn't going to get appreciably hotter, it's just going to get windier. I don't think we're going to see much surface temperature change, but if we could look at the energy being stored and dissipated in the atmosphere, we'd see a dramatically different story. That's why any environmental alarmist worth their salt will talk about "climate change" and not "global warming".
:P
Now, Earth and the ecosystem is a buffer system, and buffer systems tend to try to hold conditions steady. Of course, once they get pushed to the edge, they abruptly go way off. So things should get interesting.
On the bright side, hopefully when things get really really bad and people start dying en masse, we'll finally make some policy changes and the ecosystem will correct itself again relatively quickly. But I'm not holding my breath. In all previous environmental issues, we've had to wait for things to get really bad to take any action (industrial pollution vs. deaths due to London fog, the ozone hole, etc.). Just too bad we can't figure out a way to hold people accountable for not taking action sooner
Yesterday we learned that "correlation is not equal to causation" (Give back that Oscar, Al). Today's lesson is on the folly of linear extrapolation. A new-born baby often triples it's weight in the first year. At what age does the kid have an event-horizon?
We know that the Earth has warmed and cooled in cycles. During the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) Greenland was warmer than it is today. The Vikings had a productive settlement there. It was evacuated as a consequence of the end of MWP and the start of the "Little Ice Age". Why should be assume that the current warming trend will continue indefinitely?
Clearly we need to continue to monitor the warming trend. But it's premature to assume that trend will continue indefinitely, the ice caps will melt, the oceans will rise, and the wolves will attack.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I agree that getting away from oil is a good thing. Personally I think it would be great. However, the current leading proposal for getting off oil is mandatory carbon taxes. The only way we can currently meet a carbon cap that would have any sort of meaningful effect would be to simply turn off 30-40% of the electrical grid and take 30% of the cars off the road. This would instantly shrink our economy by at least 20%.
Yes we should work toward energy independence, we should invest in and create renewable energy sources. But we shouldn't do it because of global warming, we should do it because they are worthwhile things to work towards in their own right. Scare mongering and trying to get people to rush into these changes will only cause pain and suffering, and that is why I strongly dislike the global warming movement. It is irresponsible of the global warming proponents to use such tactics, it is seriously akin to MS's FUD campaigns.
The fact is, even if the worst case scenario plays out the IPCC is saying we might have a 1-2C degree increase in the next 100 years. They are saying we will have a 1-2cm rise in sea levels in 100 years. Those are stats directly from their report. That is the worst case. A 1 inch rise in sea level. How many people is that really going to effect? How much is that 4 sq miles of real estate world wide really worth? Should we spend hundreds of billions today to save it? Even in 5-600 years if it continues and all the ice melts and the sea level rises 6 meters. People can move. What is the worth of that real estate? I would like to see a map of the world with 6m of extra water to see how many square miles it would be, but I bet it would be cheaper for governments to just accept this as inevitable and start a fund to start buying people's property from them as the sea level rises instead of trying to save that real estate through who knows how many billions in research, development, and all the rest.
My point is you state quite clearly that you think global warming has the possibility to "eradicate this iteration of civilization" I contend that that statement is so grossly overstating global warming's possible effect as to be criminal. Yes global warming could cause us some inconvenience. People who live within 15 or 20 miles of the coast may have to move. Major cities may have to be relocated (or placed on stilts, heck they figured that out in Venice hundreds of years ago, I'm sure we could manage today). Global warming will never be listed as the "cause of death" on a single death certificate. It will never even be listed as a "probable cause" of a major weather event such as a hurricane.
I love how you think that burning a few billion barrels of oil could have more effect on our planet than a huge fusion reactor just 8 light minutes away. That is so hideously egotistical it would be funny if it weren't so sad. Look, we are on this planet spinning around a huge fusion reactor, if its output fluctuates slightly or our orbit wobbles slightly (both known and accepted facts) then it is going to get warmer or cooler here. The earth has had huge fluctuations in CO2 in the past (200ppm-1400ppm) and the ice caps have melted before and glaciers used to cover huge parts of Canada. We can adapt to these changes, we can't control them. Get over yourself.
The interesting part about global warming and heating houses is that global warming in fact reduces heating costs. I guess, if we presume that it is indeed CO2 that causes global warming, there can be a sort of negative feedback -> higher temperatures, less CO2 produced by heating houses. Frankly, I might be alone, but has anybody ever considered that global warming can in fact be a GOOD THING? Who needs cold winters, anyway? On the opposite side, global warming hype is good for technology. We might see much needed new nuclear plants and electric vehicles boom soon.
On the other hand, if we do nothing, humanity can finally achieve world peace (through self-extinction).
-GiH
For example, when I microwave my burrito... it gets hot.
Clearly the sun and the burrito have a microwave cause for being heated, rather than human reasons.
"Oil companies... give money now!"
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
As science promotes health among the infirm and physically unfitt, those who survive into their 80s will be more prone to degeneration than those who would otherwise have died earlier of heart attacks, anurisms, pancreitis, SIDS, etc.
If you want reasons to cut down on polution, look at incdences of childhood and early adult non-cancerous lung failure (fine particulate "white/black lung"), allergies, and asthma.
-GiH
I am SO not a medical practictioner.
So your argument is that we are currently in a state where the earth is warming by natural causes, and that the rapid increase in global temperature is just a coincidence?
I don't know about you, but I've always considered theories which reqires that the world is in a special state at this point a bit suspicious. Earth beeing the center of the universe comes to mind...
-GiH
I agree that nuclear is the way to go to reduce CO2 and preserve our lifestyle and economies, but the Argonne reactor type is actually called IFR 'Integral Fast Reactor'. Read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reacto
In todays 'climate' (no pun intended) that project should be revived immediately.
Our whole electricity usage could be converted to nuclear, our heating could be converted to electric. That would cover about 2/3 of our CO2 output (numbers for the UK). Serious attention to 'plugin hybrids' ( http://www.calcars.org/vehicles.html ) could convert a lot of our consumer car miles to electric as well. Where are we at? 80% reduction already? The LA smog won't be the same...
X.
Abdussamatov is a nutcase,
Why do you say that? Does he hurl vitriolic condemnations at people who disagree with him? Does he try to shout them down, or demand that their funding be cut off?
BTW, you fulfilled my expectation that there would be an ad-hominem directed at the researcher in question within the first ten replies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Scientists discover the sun heats the earth!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
We NEED to promote development of better ways to cool our homes, protect our elderly, and deal with the other effects of increased heat. We need to start looking at the 20-30- and -50 year flood plains; start moving people or building dams now.
...or we can be idiots and wait till shit blows up to notice there's a problem. Your call I guess?
-GiH
Geez, I thought we just turned up the heating during summer!
I don't know where you get the "rapid increase" the IPCCs report says we've had a .8C increase since 1951. That is not an unprecedented increase even going back just 1000 years, and certainly not going back over the history of earth. The rate of change as stated in other posts is not unheard of the IPCC is predicting 2mm-6mm/yr rise in sea level over the next 100 years (how they measure that who knows, I would think measuring something like the ocean in millimeters would be a problem filled experience, a 2mph wind causes a 1mm wave), but that's beside the point, the average annual sea level increase since the last ice age is around 7mm/yr so this isn't abnormal or high, or "rapid" in any sense of the word.
No where do I state that the earth is in a special state at this point. I'm stating that the earth has moved over this trajectory in its climate pattern many times in the past, and we are still on that same trajectory. I am stating that if we were burning fossil fuels or not, the pattern of our orbit around the sun and the sun's output are greater drivers of our climate than anything we can do. Those things are what control the ebb and flow of ice ages and we are still in the ebb pattern of the last ice age (meaning the ice is ebbing).
Talk about inconvenient...
Nope. The proposition that manmade greenhouse gases are causing "an enhanced greenhouse effect" is the proposition of a nutcase called James Hansen.
And you swallowed the lie whole with a side of bad climate modelling.
Funnily enough Triton is warming as is Pluto
Of course the biggest lie you've swallowed is that all of this is somehow disinformation by Exxon. It takes a very wide gullet to manage that one but you've taken it in your stride.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Most all the political solutions (kyoto) have included their policies that were once rejected. And yes, most of hollywoods considers itself liberal. They do control a good part of the distribution proces.
Instant Kyoto compliance to help offset Al Gores inconvenient electric bill.
But when every thing is out there and all the objections and discrediting revolves around blasphemy because the religion says otherwise, I will celibrate that this study was corect. And yes, I did just liken the global wamring science to a religion. It has become one for some people. I'm not saying you, but some people.
You mean like this or this?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
The worst case scenario according to IPCC is only a 1 inch sea level rise in 100 years, how is that going to cause a 20% drop in GDP?
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? type=worldNews&storyID=2007-02-02T212335Z_01_NOOTR _RTRJONC_0_India-286068-7.xml
No, it's not. They're predicting 4-30, and they've been widely criticised for being too conservative on the issue - ignoring unusually fast melting in Antarctica and Greenland, for one thing.
Sure if sea levels rise 6m it will displace quite a few people, but I still don't think it would cause that much upheaval.
10% of Bangladesh would be under water with a 1 meter sea rise. That's about 15 million refugees in one nation alone, and you can be sure Bangladesh can't afford to pay 10% of their population's land just to let it get eaten up by the ocean.
A 6 metre sea rise would also destroy Miami and a number of other major cities on the East Coast of the US. We're talking about pretty huge repercussions with that big of a sea rise.
The Stern report isn't just pulling numbers out of their asses.
As far as the asteroid is concerned what would your recommendation be?
You're missing my point. The OP stated that the Earth had seen much higher CO2 in the distant past. My point is that just because it has happened previously doesn't mean it'd be fine if it happened again - after all, the Earth started up molten and airless, but that wouldn't be conducive to human survival today.
That is what you environmentalists don't get, you never factor in risk/reward
Again, read the Stern report. For a 1% cost of GDP we protect 10-20% of GDP. How is that not factoring in risk and reward?
On the CO2 front I guess Scientific American got it wrong then I'm just quoting their article verbatim... So either they are lying, or you are, but whatever.
If you have the article in front of you to quote from, surely you can provide a citation?
I'm reasonably sure I'm not lying, and so is NOAA: Vostok's 420,000 years of data and EPICA's 650,000 years of data, for your perusal
The IPCC did not state anywhere any sort of statistical probability as you state.
http://www.google.com/search?q=IPCC+90%25+certain
" The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.
That is a toughening from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report in 2001, which judged a link as "likely", or 66 percent probable." - http://in.today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx
How does that not support my statement, quoted as follows: "there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part"?
I don't see #1 - the 60% chance figure - in the 2006 IPCC report. Sure you're not looking at the 2001 report?
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help
A cleaner industry, and a focus on renewable energy and energy conservation, would not cause a decline in GDP, but an increase: it would be an industrial boom, like the IT and internet was, but more sustained.
There would be some industrial branches that would be negatively affected, namely the petrol and carbon industry, and countries that rely mostly on mineral oil production, for its' revenues, but western countries, Japan, China and India would actually profit from a nascent "new energy" industry.
That's all I wanted to say on the subject.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The only way we can currently meet a carbon cap that would have any sort of meaningful effect would be to simply turn off 30-40% of the electrical grid and take 30% of the cars off the road. This would instantly shrink our economy by at least 20%.
e ssment_Report:_AR4
Good thing the only people suggesting such an idiotic course of action are the anti-global warming strawman killers.
The fact is, even if the worst case scenario plays out the IPCC is saying we might have a 1-2C degree increase in the next 100 years.
Start looking up your figures before you vomit them out onto the Internet, eh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC#IPCC_Fourth_Ass
"World temperatures could rise from anywhere between 1.1 and 6.4C (1.98 to 11.52F) during the 21st century"
Your supposed worst-case is just about their best-case, and they've been criticised for being far too conservative - ignoring recent data showing much faster than expected melting in Antarctica and Greenland.
I love how you think that burning a few billion barrels of oil could have more effect on our planet than a huge fusion reactor just 8 light minutes away.
And what is oil? Stored solar power, when you get down to it.
Burn hundreds of millions of years worth in a century and a half and guess what happens?
Your points are probably all correct, but what you have failed to mention is that all these changes happened over thousands, sometimes millions of years. The current human induced changes are happening over next decades. Nature can adapt over the former timescales but not over decades. Complex ecosystems will be distroyed - Great barrier reef amazon rainforest etc. Rats, cocroaches, pigeons and humans will probably survive. Is that the kind of world you want to live in ? The last time something like this happened, the dinosaurs went extinct and the dominant life form on the planet was fungus for thousands of years.
If you assess risk by mass, then you can blame global warming on cows. Methane reduces ozone. Cows fart out lots of methane and other stuff. By mass, they produce much more than all aircraft. This is probably wrong, but widely quoted. But aircraft chuck their stuff out in the upper atmosphere, where it gets further and probably has a lot more effect.
We cannot do the traditional experiment - have two worlds, one with a population and one without, and measure the differences. However, we can look at the natural experiments in the solar system. If the icecaps of Mars have shrunk at the same times as the icecaps of Earth, then there may be a link. If we think there is a link, then we try and gather more evidence. This is what science does. It's a bit dull, and it rarely moves as fast as we like on important issues. It may be more fun to report on academic rows, controversies, and consparacies. But they really don't help much in the long run.
Although it is pointless to argue against such "facts" I, nevertheless, feel it is important to point out a few things:
1. Congratulations you deserve a medal for having successfully grokked what science has been teaching us for the better part of a century-for most of earths history human habitation was unthinkable due to harsh climactic conditions. The rise of human kind corresponded to certain changes in the environment which facilitated our existence. Pointing out that the earth was previously warmer than it is now makes it seem as if all of this talk of global warming is just hot air. Yet comparing the earths current temperature to the temperature found in times prior to human life, or prior to organic life does little to reveal the role which humans have played in influencing the climate of the earth. Which of course is the whole point of the ongoing discussion. Your "fact" is irrelevant and more importantly misleading, because it evades the question of what impact human society has had on climate.
2. Stating that "C02 levels are not high now" is yet another fine example of brain-dead "facts". Sure such a statement is accurate given a time frame of millions of years. But then again no one is arguing about the human effects on the climate in that time frame, perhaps because human society only figures prominently in the last 10-15,000 years. The debate has been about what kind of impact human society has had on the climate and more specifically the human impact on the climate during the era of human industrial activity. Given this time frame the CO2 levels are incredibly high(ie. CO2 levels are currently quite high relative to the last several hundred years.) So yet again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading.
3. Yet again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading. No one here is arguing that human activity is the sole agent of change or that the impact of human activity outweighs "cosmic forces". However it is misleading to state such a "fact" in a debate about global warming-such evades the question at hand by attempting to relativize human impact on the climate to being trivially insignificant.
4. Again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading. The only relevance that such an argument can have in regards to global warming is the case where you can prove that the changes in climate being experienced are the product of long-term cycles of warming and cooling. Paradoxically a tremendous amount of evidence has been gathered which shows fluctuation in the earths temperature relative to the rate of industrial exploitation ie. changes in the earths temperature due to human impact. You don't need to be intelligent to be aware of the "ice-ages" but intelligence is required to distinguish between such long-term cycles and the relative impact of human society on our environment.
5. What may or may not happen in the next 5-100,000 years is not really interesting to me. Yet if my grandchildren are no longer capable of enjoying much of what I have taken for granted, due to my generation having taken such for granted, then such issues become relevant. Nature did not bring mankind to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Mankind did. If in our nuclear powered insanity we had made the mistake of unleashing all out nuclear war, most if not all of the natural cycles, which to a large extent, historically, have determined our environment would have been negated. There is no reason to believe that any of the natural cycles would continue unabated in a world bereft of organic life.
6. Ibid.
And finally your brain-dead conclusion. Here we see a fascinating conjuncture of
"The Scientists", i.e. only if you agree with the global warming dogma, are you a scientist?
"There is no debate amoung legitimate scientists"?
You sure don't sound like a scientist to me.
A real scientist knows that you can prove no theory, only disprove one. The evidence for global warming is strong, but I personally do not find it overwhelming, and the issue has become very politicized. We've seen many theories flip-flop in in the past (cold fusion, ice ages, continental drift, magnetic monopoles, business cycles to name a few). I have a hunch that global warming is on weaker ground than Al Gore (inventor of the Internet) would like.
The effect of the sun on our temperatures is now getting a lot of attention from "illegitimate scientists". I am curious to see what they conclude.
This is from the draft of the upcoming 4th Scientific Assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
"1.4.3 Solar Variability and the Total Solar Irradiance
As early as 1910, Abbot believed that he had detected a downward trend in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) that coincided with a general cooling of climate. The solar cycle variation in irradiance corresponds to an 11-year cycle in radiative forcing of about 0.23 W m-2. There is increasingly reliable evidence of its influence on atmospheric temperatures and circulations, particularly in the higher atmosphere (Labitzke and van Loon, 1997; Reid, 1991, van Loon and Labitzke, 2000; Balachandran and Rind, 1995; Brasseur, 1993; Haigh, 1996). Calculations with energy balance models (Wigley and Raper, 1990a; Reid, 1991; Crowley and Kim, 1996; Bertrand et al., 1999) and 3-dimensional models (Wetherald and Manabe, 1975; Cubasch et al., 1997; Cubasch and Voss, 2000; Lean and Rind, 1998; Tett et al., 1999) suggest that such relatively small changes in solar radiation could cause surface temperature changes on the order of a few tenths of a degree centigrade.
The solar radiation can be derived from the sunspot number. Naked-eye observations of sunspots date back to ancient times, but it was only after the invention of the telescope in 1607 that it became possible to monitor routinely the number, size and position of these "stains" on the surface of the Sun. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, numerous observers noted the variable concentrations and ephemeral nature of sunspots, but very few sightings were reported between 1672 and 1699 (for an overview see Hoyt et al.,1994). This period of low solar activity, now known as the Maunder Minimum, was one of several which occurred during the climate period now commonly referred to as the Little Ice Age (Eddy, 1976). There is no exact agreement as to which dates mark the beginning and end of the Little Ice Age, but from about 1350 to about 1850 is one reasonable estimate.
During the latter part of the 18th century Wilhelm Herschel (1801) noted the presence not only of sunspots but of bright patches, now referred to as faculae, and of granulations on the solar surface. He believed that when these indicators of activity were more numerous, solar emissions of light and heat were greater and could affect the weather on Earth. Heinrich Schwabe (1844) published his discovery of a "10-year cycle" in sunspot numbers. Samuel Langley (1876) compared the brightness of sunspots with the surrounding photosphere. He concluded that they would block the emission of radiation and estimated that at solar maximum the sun would be about 0.1% less bright than at the minimum of the cycle, and that the Earth would be 0.1-0.3C cooler.
Measurement of the absolute value of total solar irradiance (TSI) is difficult from the Earth's surface because of the need to correct for the influence of the atmosphere. Langley (1884) attempted to minimise the atmospheric effects by taking measurements from high on Mt. Whitney in California, and to estimate the correction for atmospheric effects by taking measurements at several times of day, i.e. with the solar radiation having passed through different atmospheric path-lengths. Langley's value of TSI of 2903 W m-2 is considerably larger than current estimates, of about 1365 W m-2. Between 1902 and 1957 thousands of measurements of TSI were made from mountain sites by Charles Abbot and a number of other scientists around the globe. Values ranged from 1322 to 1465 W m-2. Foukal et al. (1977) deduced from Abbot's daily observations that higher values of TSI were associated with more solar faculae.
In 1978 the Nimbus-7 satellite was launched with a cavity radiometer and provided evidence of variations in TSI (Hickey et al., 1980). Additional observations were made from the Solar Maximum Mission, launched in 1980, with an active cavity radiometer (Willson et al., 1980). Both of these missions showed that the passage of sunspots and faculae across the Sun's disk influenced TSI. At the maximum of
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies. These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!". There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
PS: I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
id rather reduce the population of beef/cattle by 99%
;)
We dont need them, they waste tonnes of water and pollute like hell.
There are other meat alternatives that grow faster and damage land a lot lot less.
No, its not whales
But it couldnt hurt to eat less beef.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
From what I understand, there are 4 approved climate models which predict different levels of damage. Which 2 models do you think Stern used? The best 2 or the worst 2? Give you a clue: The people who want lots of extra road taxes paid for this report.
Stephan
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies
Actually since Pluto is moving further away from the Sun and continuing to warm despite that fact, it indicates that something doesn't fit the "Constant Solar Constant" BS
So you've failed the reading test. Will we get a conspiracy theory?
These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
I didn't posit a conspiracy since the astronomers are simply reported experimental results. By no means do all or even most astronomers believe the global warming hysteria, nor all climate scientists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!".
I didn't say that he did then, although he has exactly no scruples about doing it now. Nevertheless the decision to back the greenhouse theory was a political decision taken during the Carter administration, as described in a book called "The End" published in 1988.
He also has no scruples about rewriting recent climate history making the late 20th Century warmer and the early 20th Century colder. This isn't conspiracy but cold hard fact. History being rewritten according to a hypothesis. It's just like Wikipedia.
There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
Actually it survives not because it makes the best observations (it doesn't) but by a scorched earth policy of accusing any critics of complicity with Big Oil or the Republican Party. Comparisons with Holocaust Deniers abound, and Hansen keeps altering history to fit his pet theory.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
If you look at Iraq and Afganistan or Athabasca Tar Sands you can see some more obvious environmental changes caused by fossil fuel dependency. Not that wars and massive environmental damage are limited to energy products and are different than over-fishing, clear cutting, continuous cropping, etc.
The Peak Oil Theory is another pointless discussion. It's like discussion on 'Peak Diamonds'. Have we reached the diamond peak? If we have and we run out of diamonds, how are future young couples going to get engaged and married? Oh, they are doubling the retail price of diamonds, I can understand that, they are past "peak" production.
As a parent I try and teach my children to share their toys, not waste their supplies, to save some of their candy for another day and to clean up after themselves. These aren't hard concepts to grasp, even for a 3 year old.
I think as individuals we are born with a sense that we should "Take what ya' need and you leave the rest" as Robbie Robertson put it.
End of discussion.
In the US, poverty is defined by the government as falling below a certain income level. If you are single and not someone's dependant (as in a child or a university student where your parents are paying your way) poverty is defined as making less than $10,210, for a family of four less than $20,650. Now compare that to an African nation, Congo in this case, where the per capita GDP, not income, is $700. Clearly the two countries have a different definition of poverty. Over in Congo, making $10,000 would put you in the top earners, perhaps even the top percent whereas in the US it is considered to be poverty.
You have to be real careful when you see estimates across countries of many things because often they don't use the same metric. There's not a global poverty metric and really, there can't be. The US is richer and thus it makes sense to consider poverty to be at a higher level than a severely impoverished country. That doesn't mean their plight is the same.
It seems you misunderstood the expression ad-hominem. If the argument had been "I know Abdussamatov, and he is a nutcase, therefore his opinions must be wrong", we would have had a case of ad-hominem. In this case, the argument is "what Abdussamatov says is wrong, and therefore he must be a nutcase".
It is not necessarily valid, but it is no example of an argumentum ad hominem.
Why can't it be a crazy solar cycle *AND* human intervention?
If there's anything we've proved from all this science and conference nonsense going around on the news, is we can do tiny things and make drastic changes to the environment. If we were concentrating on keeping the Earth nice and cool during a crazy solar cycle, we could probably do it.
Having the fossil fuels, CFCs and all that stuff in the way is going to make a warm decade unbearable, basically. That's the problem; if we hadn't fucked the environment we may well just have been in for a great set of summers and mild winters. Now we'll get a Katrina-grade hurricane every year, half of Alabama flattened by tornados, freak ice storms in Australia..
Yes, you are missing something. The choice is not between "do something to limit the effects of carbon dioxide" and "do nothing". The "do something" option actually costs money and resources, which could have been spent on other things. The "do nothing" option implies doing other things with the resources. It can be things like improving health care, building new art museums, start new wars or anything. Some of the other things are laudable. Some are not.
All facts I have access to, tell me that we should cut carbon dioxide emissions drastically straight away. That is my personal opinion, your opinion, and it is shared by most scientists in the world.
However, someone with access to other facts, like Abdussamatov, may be perfectly justified in claiming that there are more important problems in the world than carbon dioxide.
If it had been true that the sun was the main culprit, it would be better to find ways to live with the increased temperatures rather than doing things that have no effect anyhow.
Typo sorry. If you read the discussion portion of the IFR artical you'll see where I calculated the uranium on hand issue. In the artical its worng. I didn't change the artical because its a moot point (they say "more than") and rather than do an exact calculation... well... long before an IFR technology can chew into the spent fuel and depleated fraction, the artical can be corrected.
But I stand corrected and missed the typo before I submitted it. THanks. And thanks for adding the link.
Also... I might add by way of clarification... the issue of ethanol biofuels.
We hear on the media the term Corn Surplus. This is a euphamism for corn that we export that other people eat. It does not at present go to waste.
You might note that in poor countries we still have starvation. This starvation will increase as more of the planet's grain supply goes to feeding automobiles in rich countries and consequently poor people and especially children have nothing to eat.
Anyone truely conserned about the well being of the planet and its people should note this point. I personally take great exception to the term surplus grain. I would urge that perhaps the general public might want to stand up and become rather vocal and start demanding of these bio-fuel ethanol people how they can justify depriving poor counties and consequently starving children of food so that we can feed our gas guzzlers. This is far more productive in my opinion than pointing the finger at CO2 levels.
In fact, to point the finger at CO2 levels and proclaim ethanol is carbon neutral completely obscurs the point that surplus grain -> ethanol will deprive people in poor countries of their daily bread.
Perhaps what we need to do is start computing the number of children who need to starve to death in order to free up grain for ethanol production.
This doesn't begin to address how we can brew beer for $2.50 per keg. The number is easy to compute. A keg is about 59 liters @ 5% ethanol. 59*0.5 = 2.95 liters. A kg of ethanol has about 25 Mj and a kg of gasoline has about 45 Mj. So, if we have a budget of say $2.50 then if gas costs $1.50 per liter we can buy 2.50/1.50 = 1.67 liters. 1.67*45/25 = 3.0 which is the equivalent number of liters of ethanol we need to provide the same energy as gasoline.
Note: I did not address cellulose, lignans and pentosan -> to ethanol production. I did comment that T. reeshii might do it. This also can compete with food production because some of our favorite mushrooms can be grown on these types of substraits. I share the opinion of many mycologists that this area can be one of the most productive sources of food to feed the planet. However, I'm not too conserned because the cost of substraits is so small in comparison to the amount of gormet mushrooms that I, for instance, can grow that cars can't compete.
There is an issue however. The left over plant mass builds soil structure. Loam and high quality agricultural land contains a very high percentage of biological material that is in the process of decaying. If we harvest this material to produce ethanol rather than return it to the land, then we lose soil structure and turn our loam into basically heavy clays. Anyone who has any knowlege of farming can tell you that these types of impoverished soils are marginal at best. So we will further destroy our soils in our efforts to create ethanol from biomass. It is simply not correct to say that straw for instance is a waste.
Mind you, in some areas we do have a surplus and sugar cane baggase is an example. So, cellulose to ethanol has some future and we can actually probably get quite a lot of fuel from this source. Algae to ethanol and bio-diesel also has a great deal of potential. Perhaps we should look at innoculating large areas of presently dessert ocean with selected strains of algae and iron (because this is in part why these areas of the ocean don't support much life). Factory ships coul
Indeed. I'm not seeing too many comments addressing the fact that just because there's another cause doesn't mean it's not a concern. Besides that, I haven't seen any comment yet on the thought that human-produced CO2 may multiply the effect of the increased solar output. Wouldn't that make sense? The fact that the solar output is increasing seems to indicate that reducing greenhouse gasses is even MORE urgent.... and yet, there will be people who take this as a sign that humans can continue in their wasteful ways.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
I am stating that if we were burning fossil fuels or not, the pattern of our orbit around the sun and the sun's output are greater drivers of our climate than anything we can do.
Yeah, we got that. Repeating it won't make it true.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Global warming would be good for the planet. The Medieval optimum as noted from the history books illustrates this. However the amount of warming won't make much difference to the heating bills. Insulation is still a lot cheaper than trying to heat up the outdoors.
We only need to go back as far as the eocene for instance to find when the planet for millions of years was warmer than now. A good place to check is http://www.scotese.com./ During the eocene the planet was both warmer and wetter. A really important issue is to note where the planet was warmer and wetter.
The tropics and subtropics won't warm up much. They are already warm. Water vapour levels can be up around 80,000 ppm (remember CO2 is at about 370) and at these levels the water vapour traps most of the incident solar energy that can be trapped. As we get to higher latitudes we lose H2O because as the temperature drops the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere plumets. When we get down to freezing, we have effectively lost most of the H2O. IE, Antarctica is the dryest continent on the planet even though its covered with snow and the reason is because its so cold. The dryness allows the incident solar energy to escape. So the colder the planet gets the more energy leaky it gets.
If anyone wonders - could the planet flip into a deep freeze and totally freeze up as it loses all of its H2O blanket? The answer is yes. There is very strong evidence this happened several times during the precambrian. Check the Stuartian tillites for instance which were deposited as part of the Flinders ranges in Australia. At the time of these glacial deposts, Australia was north of the equator and quite close to the equator. The theory is that because the planet was totally frozen over, CO2 released by processes such as volcanoes could not be absorbed and eventually built up into levels measured at 1000's of parts per million. At these levels it's green house capabilities were able to make the difference and eventually tip the planet out of the frozen state at the equator at which point as the ice melted water vapour was able to accumulate which added to the effect and Boom - planet earth flipped from a totally frozen state to a warm balmy state about 10C warmer than now... where it stayed for millions of years. Solar energy back then was not as great as today and this would explain why the earth went through several cycles of deep freezing. Also one would expect the orbit of the planet to be somewhat larger than today because there is some debris in space which should apply a little orbital friction. I've not come across how much orbital decay one would expect over the last billions of years.
The CO2 mind you was not able to stay in the atmosphere at these levels. It ended up forming carbonate rich cap rocks which overlay the tilites and are massively thick and found all over the planet.
The best we can hope for if we do have global warming is that high latitudes might warm a little and this might postpone the next ice age. During the last one Toronto for instance was covered with over a mile of ice. I don't think those people would do so well if this re-occurs. I do however suspect many torontonians worry about global warming and do not worry about how to cope with a mile of ice.
If we had global warming to the tune of say 5 degrees, then Calgary might gain a climate more like Denver. Areas of the North West Terriories and Siberia might become more appealing and people might migrate. Agricultural crop bands would move northward to the poles. The tree lines would creap to higher latitudes.
In fact, 5 million years ago there were trees growing north of the arctic circle. So its obvious the earth was quite a lot warmer back then and it certainly was not because of man made CO2 emissions.
With warming we would expect more moisture and probably a greater accumulation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps because these regions would still remain well bel
You better go check the BHP statistical review of world energy production. North American natural gas supplies peaked in Jan 2001 just as I stated. It is possible we could see a new peak of course. One of them has to be the last peak and I expect 2001 is the last one.
We've lost a huge amount of the North American fertilizer industry since then. Its more or less permenantly shut down. Then we had Calpine corporation planning on so many co-gens they would have burned up most of the North American gas supply all by themselves. They almost went bankrupt with this hair brained idea.
They are still in chapter 11 - so I guess technically they did go bankrupt - but may come out of it.
Currently gas supplies are looking ok. If we have a cold winter next year there will be all hell to pay and the industrial use of Gas in the North East will need to be greatly curtailed to leave supplies sufficent for heating. This senerio almost happened a couple years ago.
Even today - the draw down of gas reserves is great enough to be a consern and if March is very cold there could be a problem.
So, you need to check your fact because they are not up to date.
He boldly asserts on that page without a shred of evidence that "barring a sudden change in input from the sun, changes in climate upwards can only occur in a smooth, slow and limited fashion".
So the sudden change (by geological standards) of radiative forcing effects caused by mankind's consumption of fossil fuels over the last 200 years has no effect?
Feedback loops all take time to stabilise - what we're seeing now is a rapid increase in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, possibly unprecedented.
Our ancestors and the dinosaurs certainly didn't burn fossil fuels at the rates we do.
It's bogus pseudo-science, I'm afraid. It's way too easy to come up with comforting conclusions if you ignore half the evidence.
I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
In that case, you should not be surprised if the standard model regarding anthropocentric climate change turns out to be wrong. It is that very complexity, the intellectual taming of a massively chaotic system, that should introduce an element of humility and caution into the discussion, rather than the hysteria and hyperbole that has, up until now, characterized it.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
I didn't posit a conspiracy since the astronomers are simply reported experimental results. By no means do all or even most astronomers believe the global warming hysteria, nor all climate scientists.
All true climate scientists believe in global warming.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...blaming somebody else for their misdeeds.
Face it: Global warming is real, human made and will be a huge catatrophy that will be a dominant influence on the human race for centuries.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Since he likes his little gold statue so much, I'm afraid he would think that solar warming is a bit of an inconvenient truth.
The original article mentions Mars as having global warming, but scientists are also reporting that Jupiter http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_j r.html, Triton http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/triton-0715.htm l and Pluto
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html may also be warming up. Coincidence again?
I see the recent IPCC report mentioned often, but I wonder how many folks that refer to it have only actually heard about it through the news or even actually read the summary. I wonder because at least 7-8 of the scientists that wrote the detailed reports have complained that the IPCC official summaries and press releases show the opposite conclusion from the detailed reports. In other words, at least some (if not much) of the actual science behind the IPCC report apparently was unable to find any definite correlation between humankind's effects and climate. That doesn't mean that anyone thinks current pollution levels should continue, or even that the Earth isn't getting warmer right now. One interesting series of articles about those scientists is at http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=2 2003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0
Personally, I'm suspicious of the global warming industry because of some of the funding issues I've read about (but don't have references handy, sorry). For one, the funding rate went up by a factor of about 100 after global warming was announced around the time of Pres. Regan. Also, it seems that anyone who attempts to publish any research contrary to popular views has their funding cut (and some have lost their jobs completely). To me, that sounds like an organization that wants to stay alive at any cost, rather than one interested in real science. Especially since the funding seems to be tied to producing proof that, rather than determining if, Man is responsible for global warming.
Sun is also warming up to the open source community. Go Sun! Go!
1. I don't want to see him in that suit.
2. I don't want to see him fly.
3. He's got to fight a giant spider in the third act.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
on the original poster, how about reducing emmissions simply because its
healthier not to breath in all that crap?
on this poster commenting on population - I do wonder if these climate models
actually consider the heat output of the increased population of the past 100
years? Nevermind the fossil fuel use, just the heat of bodies (and associated
increased food stock) alone has to add quite a few Joules.
So in short, he doesn't support your position...disagrees with those you agree with...and generally is "contrarian" to your position...therefore the man's obviously crazy.
This isn't the first time I've heard that other planets are warming too. Additionally, the Sun being warmer is apparently quite accepted and I would think fairly easy to measure. The "fact" is, it is warmer. Yes, humans may be contributing to Global Warming but it was going to warm up anyway and human contribution is an almost insignificant percentage. Its enough of a percentage, however, to capitalize on now isn't it!
Heretic! Burn him at the stake!
If the temperature rise is due to the sun and not due to CO2 emissions, cutting back on CO2 emissions isn't going to help. We will need to spend our money on doing something else that is going to help. If we spend all our money on reducing CO2 and it doesn't work, we are screwed.
Mark Steyn: How Gore's Massive Energy Consumption Saves the World
Talk about inconvenient truths...
Why do you defend a nutcase just because he agrees with you?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
... so no one's going to read this, and it's slightly off-topic anyway. I'm prepared to take the Karma hit.
I posit that the causes of global warming doesn't matter. What does matter is entirely economic: a move away from non-renewable fossil fuels, the raise in standard of living world-wide by instituting pollution controls, and the leveling of the economic playing field by putting the same pollution controls in country X as in country Y.
This article says that the sun causes global warming. Well no shit. Of course it does. And a fluctuation of the solar output would spike temperatures on Earth and Mars. This still doesn't excuse our society from the fact that in the past century+ of industrial growth, we have been wasteful and that the continuing argument for that wastefulness is the fact that in the short term the costs of using and developing new technologies is more expensive using a cost-benefit analysis. What happens when fuel becomes too expensive and the technology isn't on-line to provide a cost-efficient alternative?
In brief, I'm tired of the argument on whether or not global warming is cause by human beings. It's a moot point. The important point is that current fuel usage is non-renewable and wasteful. Everything else is just published results.
The global warming of mars is caused by the greenhouse gases that the rovers have emitted
for fuel efficient Mars Rovers.
Christ, man. This is not POLITICS or ETHICS or anything where OPINIONS is all that counts. This is SCIENCE.
I'll call a man crazy if he disagrees that the Earth orbits the sun, and it is not just because he disagrees with my "opinion".
This is the reasons I replied to you. I have little concern about your snide remarks on the liberal control.
I'm sorry you found them snide. For the record, one of the enduring hallmarks of modern "conservatism" (read: right-wingerism) is the belief and the attitude that liberals are everywhere, they control everything, right-wingers can't get a fair shake and are an oppressed, silent majority.
All of this is patently, demonstrably absurd, of course (last I checked, hard-line right wingers still have an overwhelming presence in both the media and the highest levels of government, and even with the recent Congressional takeover progressives are far less represented in government than right wingers). However, if it seems too nasty to note this in an offhand comment, I'll simply plead long, bitter experience as my explanation for an itchy trigger finger on the subject.
As for Hollywood and liberals, as others have noted many of the execs who control what actually gets made are GOP'ers, and when it comes to media in general, one has only to look at the likes of "24" and major network productions like the blatantly biased and fictional anti-Clinton "Path to 9/11" to prove that right-wing fantasies get turned into what we see every day. IMHO it's a pretty tough case to make, then, that real evidence human-induced global warming is wrong wouldn't make it into either Hollywood productions or TV specials.
Kythe
If a higher solar output is heating up the Earth and Mars, then the other planets should be heating up too. Is there any evidence of a warming up of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus etc. ?
Damn! This is not religion we are talking about. He and you are free to form your own religion and say whatever the hell you want, but that is not science.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
It's greenhouse gas emissions from the rovers!
For the love of God, mod parent up.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
It isn't the *amount* that is disturbing: it is the curve of change, the *rate* of change, that is disturbing. Using the known data (including hundreds of thousands of years of ice cores), there is no precedence for the rate of change we are currently experiencing.
As far as a few degrees C: every erg of additional energy we store on earth help contribute to larger, more devastating storms, for instance. Every fraction of a degree increase allows pests such as beetles survive the winter cold in places like Alaska, allowing them to decimate millions of acres of pine trees in the summer.
Life itself is not fragile, just as your body is not fragile. Ecosystems are fragile. These little changes we are experiencing now will transform the earth a little. And if the *rate of change* does not decrease, the changes will get more dramatic.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Actually since Pluto is moving further away from the Sun and continuing to warm despite that fact, it indicates that something doesn't fit the "Constant Solar Constant" BS
And that is why noon is the warmest time of day. Oh, no, wait...
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The main problem as I see it is that you always have to validate computer models by making specific predictions and seeing if they are correct. You can't just make it fit past data and say it is a good model. Otherwise you could just fit a polynomial of a certain order to any data and perfectly predict past results with little predictive capacity. I do this type of testing and modeling for a living. And we constantly think we have a system modeled well and then we expand the testing to conditions out of family the models break down. I don't see how people expect to be able to model something like earths climate when there are almost infinitely many factors that feedback at different rates and some that we may not even know about. It is pointless to try to make policy decisions on CO2. I consider myself a reasonable environmentalist. I want clean air, clean water, and I willing to pay extra for those things. But even speaking about CO2 as a pollutant is just wrong.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
[ba dum dum DING!]
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
It may be pure apologetics but the explanation I've seen about Pluto getting warmer is somewhat like the reason it's warmest on Earth just after noon (1-2pm). If this explanation is true, we should see it begin to cool again within a fairly short time (perhaps years? I dunno).
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
I'm with him. I think the current global warming craze is a crock, as much as global cooling was. However, fuel-efficiency is always a top consideration in cars I buy (my current gas-sipper is actually too small for my family), use public transportation when I can, and buy efficient-everything (including almost all CFL in the house). In my younger days I did go to excess, I actually had a car with a moderately-tuned 2.5l V6. OMG!
Could I do more? I would if I had more money to do it with. But right now I'm doing my best to save energy. And I mean save REAL energy -- it's not like I'm Al Gore and suck up 20 times the national average for my house, but pay "carbon credits" back to myself to make me feel good.
In summary, it's not about greedily not wanting to change a lifestyle, but about intellectual honesty.
As long as you're willing to apply judiciously that same scientific rigor to the findings of comparative planetologists as you are those of the climatological chic, fine, and well met.
As I see it, there's a lot of guff on every side of this argument. As a matter of caution, though, I will always side with the concerned scientists, over the excuse-seeking ones, even if an excuse is a very reasonable think to be seeking.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Ummm...wow. So this guy doesn't even buy the idea that CO2 traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere?
A friend was asking if I knew of any citations that prove that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that affects the Earth's atmosphere and to what extent it does. He's a degreed engineer who made an honest effort to do a literature search.
All I could offer was "umm, Venus?," but that's pretty weak. If anybody has cites handy, please leave replies here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The lives of billions of people could be improved radically TODAY via renewable energy. It doesn't take fears of Armageddon hitting 50 years down the line to motivate people to adopt renewable energy.
Now this adequately summarizes where I am on the whole thing. Any engineer worth his salt shoudl agree that waste and inefficiency are just silly. Oil's too danged valuable to burn....let's make houses more efficient, explore better and cleaner ways to make electricity. Technology will solve the problem; it always does.
If that makes the folks who are worried about C02 happy as well, excellent. If not...well, at least it's a smarter and cleaner industrial base.
Ferretman
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
It's religion when you question alternate, science-based theories. It's religion when you brand your opponent's as "deniers" and question their scientific credentials. It's religion when you look to it to solve your future worries and give you guidance how to live your life today, and most importantly, it's religion when it allows you to tell other people how to act.
It's religion. Calling it "science" doesn't make it science anymore than my calling myself a duck enables me to fly.
Love sees no species.
We've done that - we are well beyond the "Is there a problem?" and the "I wonder what the cause is" stages - we have gotten through the "What the heck can we do to fix this" part, are now into the "OK - we understand this very, very well - so now over to the politicians to implement our recommendations" phase...but everything has come to a grinding halt. (Well in some parts of the world at least).
Yes, there are still a few skeptics - but in any human endeavor, there are always skeptics and there comes a point where you have to stop letting a very tiny percentage of experts cripple your decisionmaking and doom you to inaction.
If we have to wait until 100% of scientists and laymen believe in this then the planet is doomed. The number of scientists who are dissenters is down to a very tiny number indeed. The public at large is nowhere near as far along that road - but that's because the press seem to delight in giving equal prominance to the 0.1% of dissenting scientists (I made that number up but it's not so far off) than to the 99.9% who agree that there is a problem.
This is now an urgent matter - we don't have time for yet more studies and yet more dissenters. If we don't act very soon indeed - we won't be able to pull the planet back into some kind of stability until we have 2 billion people with flooded-out homes, 30% less viable farmland and half the species of animals and plants exterminated.
If it should (by some amazing flook) prove that the majority are wrong - then the costs of cleanup won't be wasted. Cutting down pollution from all sources and reducing our dependence on dwindling stocks of fossil fuels is undoubtedly a public good - and would be worthwhile even if global warming were not an issue.
The consequences of inaction when needed are so profound and the consequences of unnecessary action are so minor in comparison that even if it was a 50/50 thing, we should still be doing this.
www.sjbaker.org
The only kind of planetary warming that has relevance to Earth is warming due to increase in solar output, because that is the only factor Earth shares in common with other planets.
Solar output has been increasing for some time. However:
1. The warming on Mars is not due to an increase in solar output; solar output actually decreased slightly over the period that its warming was observed. (It's also not global warming, but rather regional warming of Mars's south pole.) See here.
2. According to the article you cite, the warming on Pluto is not due to an increase in solar output. It is due to orbital variations: Pluto recently passed perihelion.
3. According to the article you cite, the warming on Triton is not due to an increase in solar output. It is due to changes in surface albedo (the amount of solar radiation that the planet reflects vs. absorbs).
4. According to the article you cite, the climate changes on Jupiter are not due to an increase in solar output. They are due to changes in atmospheric circulation patterns. (It's also not clear from that article whether the overall effect is global warming; there is warming at the equator and cooling at the poles.)
In short, other planets don't tell us much about global warming on Earth. Even if they were all warming for the same reason, that reason would have to be solar output, and we don't need to study other planets in order to know about that: we can measure solar output directly.
As it turns out, solar output isn't sufficient to explain the observed global warming. It has been increasing overall, but not by very much. It explains a little bit of the warming, but not most of it. See this article for more details (subscription required).
Mine is Good
I think that the fact that climate modelling is difficult was kind of his point. Personally the main issue I have with the whole global warming hypothesis is just that. Climate modelling is a joke. Yes, I think you were wasting your time. I also don't trust the accuracy of temperature measuring stations around the globe for the past 100 years. And GIGO. IMO, we simply don't know whether the earth as a whole is heating up and we just can't handle that fact. So we prefer to think that we know.
The reality: maybe there is an increase in global temperatures due to excess human CO2 production and maybe not. There is just insufficient evidence. And anyway we will be running out of fossil fuels in like 50 years, so who gives a rats arse? And it may become too expensive for most applications way before then anyway. With the small (barely detectable by the limits of thermometer accuracy and precision) tempurature increases the earth is not going to become like venus in 50 years time. Hell, it hasn't even been proven in any even remotely scientific way that increased average surface temperatures will have any significant negative effect on, well, anything. We know that plants would be happy. Although, no doubt equatorial folks would be a bit miffed at having to deal with days that are a few degrees warmer on average. And if sea levels really do rise the rich people who own ocean front homes will be a bit ticked off if they have several feet of seawater in their house. Would sort of make it difficult for the maid to clean up.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
These guys can't debate...
Anyone who's ever listened to thirty minutes of right-wing "news" knows that there's no point.
It's not that the left/middle/smart can't debate. It's that they actually CAN, and they have the winning argument, so the right just tries to change the rules.
There should be a rule against citing wikipedia in the case of *any* controversial theory. A majority rules 'encyclopedia' where the main page constantly changes as people argue about which side is right? Give me a break. Don't get me wrong. I think wikipedia is great (although still unreliable) for non-controversial topics. Even for uncontroversial topics citing it to prove any point is a bit ridiculous. May as well cite your own web page.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Big energy (and their political supporters) have all tried to put forward simple statements and try to disprove it by hand waving over discontinuous facts. This current story is just like it. This guy is claiming that the planetary wobbles are causing this. But he even points out that current solar energy is decreasing (which it is).IOW, he is trying to take 2 facts and exaggerate them so that they MAY account for it, while disregarding that one of his facts actually works against him.
Simple use your head here. Look at the fact that ALL climate scientists who are looking directly at this are saying that it is occurring. There are lots of people who are not experts in this field (almost all are politicians who had a science label applied to their poly sci degree) are claiming that it is not occurring. But nobody who is current and knowledgable in this field is saying it.
There are some who say that their work does not support it, such as Dr. Grey @ colorado state, but they have not produced data to support it. They admit that it is a gut feeling. In particular, Dr. Grey will say that the hurricanes are on a natural increase in strength and numbers (of which I believe him). His real argument is that global warming is not causing what we are seeing recently WRT his hurricane study. That makes sense. But it does not preclude that GW could increase it more than what is expected esp in the near future. As it is, simply look at the recent tornado's that have been hitting the south east. That is not normal within the context of recorded history or natural findings.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is the entire problem - why won't people think?
My PC has a 400W power supply - that's the most it can draw it probably uses much less than that on the average say 350W - but let's roughly double that just to be on the safe side because we have a monitor to power too. Let's add a bit to allow for my natural love of round numbers and say that my PC consumes 754.7W (!)
Why? Because 745.7W is 1 horsepower.
My car (a particularly small, fuel efficient one) has a 150hp engine.
So on very rough numbers, running my PC for 150 hours is equivelent to driving my car for 1 hour.
It should be abundantly clear that saving energy by surfing less is really pretty pointless. If I drive for one hour and web surf for ten hours then then buying a car with ten less horsepower will completely "pay" for all of the "wasted" surfing I do.
www.sjbaker.org
I thought that UltraSPARCs ran hot, but whole fucking planets? Good job Sun.
You should at least hover your mouse over the link I posted, even if you're too busy to read the article.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's not a strawman, it's just the way things are. Consensus does not decide the facts, any more than correlation proves causation. (You do know about that, don't you?) Clearly you need to learn to comprehend what you read because I didn't deny Global Warming, just pointed out that the consensus on the cause isn't evidence of what the cause really is.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Actually, we've gotten to the politicised stage where it's hard for papers with contrarian ideas to get past peer review. The only reason this study is such big news is that it's taken this long for a paper like this to get published. There's big money involved in being a true believer in CO2 being the be-all and end-all in Global Warming and lots of "scientists" will say whatever gets them grants.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Thank you for that oh-so-relevant comment. We are all happy you took the time out of your busy day to make this important statement.
FYI, it's always noon.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Have you ever wondered why there are so many people quick to condemn the notion that global warming might be man-made? Are all these people, who jump at any chance to suggest it's just a theory, all employees of oil companies?
I submit if you do research you may find that most anti-global-warming people are christians. Christianity seems to be one of the few religions on earth where there is absolutely no mandate in their doctrine whatsoever to take care of the planet. Even islam recognizes that there is a duty to treat the environment with respect. As far as I can tell, christianity is unique in this respect. The notion that jesus is going to show up and rescue everybody precludes the idea of being that concerned about the future of the planet. I suspect many people, especially christians may not even be aware that this is an underlying motivation behind the anti-global-warming movement. But it does make sense. Let's face it. God in the bible, is the ultimate destroyer of the environment. Christians, at least those who follow the bible, don't want to entertain the idea that they may have any responsibility to the earth. Jesus is coming any day now... why make ourselves inconvenient for a future that won't happen?
Quackin' A, man.
<flap, flap, flap, flap, flap>
I agree with you! And the cautious, humble approach right now would be to assume we ARE affecting the environment. If we're wrong, we waste a few trillion dollars. If we're right, we saved many times that (and some things that are priceless).
Jeremy
You can find calculations of how it contributes to temperature in climatology textbooks, or hunt around on the web (e.g. here). In the link above (an applet) notice how it looks like there were higher temperatures in previous interglacials? Yes, the temperature has been higher in the past. What is your point? I see a strong correlation with the CO2 that suddenly stops ( saturation?) Not saturation, just that the ice age cycles were being driven a lot by Earth's orbital variations as well as CO2. Above 280 ppm CO2 is the industrial period, where temperature is being driven mostly by CO2 alone.
Note that the industrial temperature/CO2 correlation is still there: the correlation does not disappear, it merely changes slope. In fact, the correlation between the two (measured by how well the data approximates a straight line) is much stronger than in the pre-industrial ice age cycles, meaning that the current temperatures are much more closely determined by CO2 levels than they have been in the past. There seems to be a lower and upper bound. The earth seems to be bouncing between two states, kind of like a Lorenz butterfly. If anything I would be more worried about us perturbing the 'orbit' of the system in such a way to send us into an Ice Age. Given the apparent dynamics of the system (2 strange attractors?) that would seem a much more likely danger. Umm, out of which thin air did you pull this latter conclusion from?
With every ideologic belief there is some underlying truth to it. or at least circumstantial evidence that points to a truth. It may not be 100% acurate but there has to be something under it. There is no reason to discount something just because a group of people have taken it to the core of their cause.
I'm not sure it is that absurd at all. When you see media outlets that resemble some of your own ideals, you tend to think of them as normal. When you see them making statments or standing against your ideals, you notice and take not of them. This has an effect of making it apear to be more ballenced against however you want to see the world. And the conservative media that you see today is something that was manufctured out of a need to ballence/reach these people for revenue. This is economics more then anything else. When businesses started seeing there was a vast amount of consmers disatisfied with the left leaning news and such, they created right leaning and even non leading programs to ballence them and pull these consumers over. Fow news channel is one such ventures that not only mad a stand against traditional media, the top the rating compared to the other news networks for a good majority of their shows.
Ok, As far as i know, 24 doesn't have any political leaning in it. Ok side the main charector being a bad ass and protecting everyone from ill gotten harm, I'm not sure I see the leaning anywhere. I have only watched it a few time though. Thjere could be something I don't know about. Now if you trying to associate the plot concpet behind 24 with conservative because it revlves around badguys placing the country or some people in danger and then the good guys saves them, I think we are having some serious problems with what we expect outof democrates. I hope this isn't it.
And for the path to 9/11. As far as i know, It is supposed to be historicly acurate. Nothing in it is supposed to be false. Unlike documentries by some of the left hardliners, everything in the path to 9/11 is supposed to be backed and verifable. But to continue uing it as your example, What happened durring the showing of this? Clinton and several other democrats made a stink about some of the content and ABC edited it out before airing. When has ABC done this for conservative concerns? The parrent company wlt disney did stop miramax from distributing fahrenheit 911 but did allow a smaller sibling company to distribute it. Sone think it was a stunt to gain media attention and free advertising from it so Disney didn't look blatently liberal or anti bush.
You don't need to look much past the campain contributions comming out of hollywood
heretics like him should be burned at the stake, the world would be much better of without the vile contrarian rants of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Okay let's say the pro-warming folks are actually right. The evidence is not there. And computer models don't prove shite. To say they have been wrong before would be an understatement. And we're about to run out of the stuff (fossil fuels) soon anyway. But let's just say that the amount of human produced CO2 is affecting our climate, perhaps even enough to cause the extinction of some species, including humans, before the fossil fuels run sufficiently low to make them economically unfeasable. Seems like science fiction to me. But let's just suppose all of this really would come to pass.
What precisely is it that you folks are proposing we do about it? Seriously. If we really are going to be extinct within the next 50-100 years (before fossil fuels run out), then perhaps it is worth trying to introduce a worldwide death penalty for any sort of combustion. After all, it is to save our entire species. In fact such an extreme measure might even work. Would you be in favor of that? And as far as enforcing it worldwide, surely The Ministries of Peace of most countries would be willing to go to war, perhaps even nuclear war to enforce these requirements against any rogue nation. Again, we are talking about the exctinction of our species. Surely it would be justified. Also, you can't possibly be thinking that the majority of the human population would be willing to voluntarily go back to pack animals and sails as the sole methods of transportation.
I could see nuclear fission plants as being a possible solution, albeit a stopgap one since uranium ore also will not last forever, especially as the sole source for human energy needs. I believe nuclear airplanes have been shown to be possible. And cars and trucks could reduce their range and be powered by batteries recharged by nuclear generated electricity. I particularly like the idea of safer (but less efficient) nuclear tech like pebble bed reactors. Needless to say we would need some place to put all that nuclear waste. And more than a handful of serious nuclear accidents around the globe could also cause the extinction of our (and many other) species. Still the problem with nuclear fission (or even fusion, assuming it will ever be feasible) as a solution is that if combustion is still a cheaper method of energy production, stopping it will still require the use of a World Police State to enforce the global ban on combustion, since the majority of people will still choose the cheapest option.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The fact is, climate modeling is not that bad if you don't push its predictions past a century or so. Climate models do fit the observations, and it's not just overfitting; you can't get the models to fit any set of observations. In particular, you can't get models with only natural or only anthropogenic forcings to fit the observations; you need both. I also don't trust the accuracy of temperature measuring stations around the globe for the past 100 years. Now you're being ridiculous. Global warming is not even remotely an artifact of inaccurate temperature measurement. With the small (barely detectable by the limits of thermometer accuracy and precision) tempurature increases the earth is not going to become like venus in 50 years time. The temperature increases that have been measured are much greater than the limits of thermometer precision. And nobody is claiming that "the Earth is going to become like Venus in 50 years time". That's a strawman constructed to make concerns about global warming look absurd. Hell, it hasn't even been proven in any even remotely scientific way that increased average surface temperatures will have any significant negative effect on, well, anything. We know that plants would be happy. That's not wholly correct; it will, in general, encourage plant growth, but some species will suffer as the local climate changes alter their preferred climate, and crops can have decreased nutritional content even when their overall growth increases. Although, no doubt equatorial folks would be a bit miffed at having to deal with days that are a few degrees warmer on average. 5-10 degrees F warmer is quite possible and is nothing to sneer at, even in non-equatorial regions. And if sea levels really do rise the rich people who own ocean front homes will be a bit ticked off if they have several feet of seawater in their house. A great many of the world's population centers, and a number of entire nations, are close to sea level at the ocean front. It is not just "rich people's" problem. In fact, poor people will be disproportionately affected, as is usual.
You're also neglecting the damages and deaths from more extreme weather events, the consequences of droughts, disrupted ecosystems, fishing patterns, shifts in regional climate, new disease vectors, and so on.
No. It is not a fundamentally complicated issue, and no it is not difficult to know what is happening
You can either (1) look to the experts on the issue, or (2) understand the basic issue, and either way it you find a simple easy essentially irrefutable answer.
(1) Looking to the experts: A database review and analysis of 900+ published climatology papers over a decade found that 70-75% explicitly or implicitly accepted human caused global warming. 25-30% of the papers either dealt with strictly prehistoric climate or dealt strictly with methodology and said absolutely nothing either way about the state of the climate. 0%... in fact exactly zero of the 900+ climatology papers over an entire decade... challenged or contradicted human caused climate change. If you look to national academy of science of of any major nation... if you look to the national meteorological society of any major nation... if you look at the geophysical union of any major nation... every single on states that global warming is real and that human CO2 emissions and other human activities are the cause or, at minimum, part of the cause.
(2) Understanding the basic issue: The atmosphere is an insulating blanket keeping the earth warm. The natural warming effect of this blanket is ALREADY around 50F (about 30C). It is simple irrefutable physics... so simple that any elementary school child knows it... that if you make a blanket thicker then it traps more heat and warms you up. It's really as simple as that. No one - not even the greenhouse deniers... no one disputes the fact that human fossil fuel burning has increased the CO2 blanket from 280PPM to over 380PPM. No one disputes that humans have increased the methane blanket and added various other never-before-existing gases that cover various holes that CO2 has in the heat spectrum. The fundamental issue is asbsolutely simple... if you make the blanket thinker and you cover holes in the blanket with other blankets... then you get warmer. Predicting the amount of warming can be quite complex... predicting the effects of that warming can be quite complex... factoring in numerous other effects (such as the sun) *on top* of that can be quite complex. However the fact that humans are making the blanket thinker and that that does trap more heat is dead simple. The people arguing otherwise... almost all of which is bought by corporate PR campaigns.... they can hand wave about a hundred different things to confuse the issue and spread FUD.... but none of it has a single shred of legitimacy unless they can deny at least one of the two fundamental points.... (A) that humans *ARE* in fact increasing the greenhouse blanket or (B) that making the blanket thicker *WILL* trap more heat. That is all you need to resolve the basic issue with a yes/no. Either humans are increasing the blanket or they are not, and either a thinker blanket will trap more heat or it wont. I think it is irrefutable that both of those points are true, and global warming deniers do not address or challenge either of those two points. People can reasonable debate about size of the effect, people can reasonably disagree with predictions of what secondary effects it will cause, people can reasonably argue what (if anything) we should do about it... but there is no reasonable way anyone can dispute the basic true-false fact that human activities are causing a warming effect. Any change with sun as the article discusses... what would not invalidate anything above... anything about the sun would only be multiplier to increase the effect from the fact of human greenhouse gases.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
PS: I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
Well it's certainly quite plausible that a lot of are skeptical simply because we have built computer models that have failed to predict anything useful; the whole field of chaos might not exists if computers could simply generate useless predictions repeatably.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"I love that you're smarter than thousands of climate scientists, essentially every relevant scientific organisation, and the 154 nations who had to unanimously sign off on the IPCC's conclusion that there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part. When's the Nobel being awarded?"
m
You got me to laugh here. First, 154 nations are right so we must be wrong. Argumentum ad populum.[1] I daresay most of these nations also do not support women's rights or modern democracy. Therefore, we should do likewise? Most people eat meat, so should vegans be forced to eat beef? By your logic, they should. My teen-aged son gives this argument all the time, too, but he's starting to realize just how idiotic it sounds.
Second, 154 countries "unanimously signed." Well, if you don't sign, what is that? How can you non-unanimously sign? Can you sign a petition to say you think you might agree but aren't sure? There are, what, 250+ countries in the world. So, if you're looking at a total national head count, I think you only have about 60%; there goes unanimous. But, I love that you said "had to sign," which is to suggest that refusal to sign would result in a cut to UN aid. That's how you build a consensus.
Third ". . . causing warming at least in part." A Fourth of July Barbecue with baked beans contributes to atmospheric methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas. Therefore, there is some partial contribution. But "cause" is a little hard to prove. Fortunately, the document contains so many weasel words as to cause a lawyer to blush. The best part is that they only have to believe ninety percent. That gives them ten percent to say "or not."
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populu
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Do you drive your car at 7000 RPM constantly? If not, then you aren't using anything close to 150 HP.
That's the thing about science; it's not about `truth', it's about progressively more accurate approximations of reality. For a lot of cases, a fairly coarse approximation is all that is required; Newtonian mechanics is valid for all of the situations 99% of people will find themselves in. If you are on the leading edge of science, however, then relying on superseded approximations is a mistake.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And as we all know, scientists never make mistakes...
I love my sig.
Without knowing why it's happening you don't know what to fix or if you even can fix it.
It's a great thing we've got scientists digging into the subject all the time. And by the way, we do know that radiation from the sun has been strengthening lately. It's been strong enough to explain about 7.5% of the warming we're seeing (with some possibility for error, but not enough to change the conclusion). That's strong enough to warm up Mars, but far too feeble to explain the warming of Earth.
Source: IPCC summary, the Radiative Forcing chart on page 4.
... to know that we can, to some degree, control the climate effects of variations in earths distance to the sun, via control over carbon dioxide and such in our atmosphere.
The controlling minds are of course those who put such products into use that the human population will use for what ever reason but have a side effect of dealing with the distance change.
This is not about politics or science bias. Its about air conditioning comfort, but on a planet scale, instead of just a building or car.
Well, yes - but my PC isn't using 400W all the time either (expecially if I'm web browsing) that's also a peak figure...and for sure my car isn't *ever* using as little as 1hp. But I agree that my numbers are indeed very, very rough - and to do a proper comparison we'd have to look at the relative efficiency of an internal combustion engine versus a power station...the losses in getting the energy to it's destination and the relative amount of CO2 output. But my point remains - a car uses VASTLY more energy than a PC - so if you are looking for a place to save, keeping from pegging your tachometer at every red light, buy a fuel-efficient car, turn off the A/C...any of those things will completely dominate your overall energy consumption - and an extra couple of hours of web surfing is pretty negligable.
www.sjbaker.org
Got any data to back that up? We are talking both accuracy and precision. I want to see the manufacturer specs on the actual equipment that has been used at the hundreds of temperature measurings stations around the world for the past 100 years or even 30 years. Go ahead and try to find that data. Or are you claiming that it is not relevant to the discussion? I want to see numbers. After all numbers, quantitative data, is what we are talking about here. If it is so obvious then show me. If you can't do that at least talk about the temperature measurement tech we are dealing with here. Do the temperature measurement stations use infrared tech? At least cite which type or types of thermometer have been used around the world to measure these obvious changes.
The simple fact is that temperature measuring technology that is actually used to measure the air within a useable temperature range is highly imprecise and highly inaccurate. Most will only be able to measure temperature to within +/- 2C! And that assumes calibration that needs to be performed on a periodic basis. And digitals generally fare even worse than analogs at least if you ignore miniscus parallax issues (which of course you should not). It is interesting to me that everyone (on both sides) seems to dance around the very issue of where the rubber meets the road, the nature of the very equipment that seems to be predicting the end of our species, not in the distant future, not 10,000 years from now, but in less than a century. That would seem serious enough to at least warrant a discussion of such issues.
Francis Bacon, the great philosopher of science, cautioned against letting a theory stray too far from the data. This theory is so far from it that hardly anyone even bothers to talk about the uncertainties in that data. As if our methods of measurement, not just in the US in 2007, but in the Soviet Union in 1943, were perfect and absolutely without error. And what about human error, errors in recording the data? We seem to be assuming no human error whatsoever in the the recording of the temperature readings. Did they have automated computer temperature logging in the 1920s in Indonesia or Siberia? Do they even have it today? Such questions should at least be occuring to you. The fact that they are not makes me wonder about whether you really care about the truth.
I would sneer at the idea that it would mean the end of our species and openly laugh when you claim to have evidence that would prove it without the slightest doubt. So much so that any person to deny it is a crank. In fact, barring any unproven, unforeseen, effects, I would quite like an extra 5-10F increase at the lattitude where I currently live. Just means that there would be some migration away from equatorial regions. Some of us already regard them as inhospitable, especially at midday. Bad for some, good for others. On the whole, it sounds like a wash. Certainly not the end of all terrestrial life on our planet.
Actually all of them are. hehe. Okay. Sorry about that. Couldn't resist.
But in a positive way. Show me someplace, anyplace in the world where property on the coast is worth less than inland (discounting the costs within cities)? The owners of such property tend to be (comparitively at least) wealthy. It is true even in Indonesia (one of the poorest countries in Asia).
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I thought those new Sun server boxen were supposed to be environmentally friendly?
Mod parent up! This is sanity rarely seen on this or any other forum.
Ok, then explain ice ages and temperate ages without those things? If you are saying that the earth's orbit and the sun have 0 effect on the climate then explain how ice ages happen.
I'm mildly disturbed by how much people simply rally behind their talking points, although not as surprised as I would like to be.
As I see it, this is an interesting perspective, and has the potential to clarify the human contribution to global warming, in either direction. What we need is to figure out how to get historical temperature data for the other planets. Fluctuations caused by external influences should correlate strongly. Deviations are probably caused by local factors. If we find a strong correlation that includes Earth only until recently at which point there is increasing deviation, this is pretty strong evidence for human cause in global warming. If we find a strong correlation that includes the Earth presently as well as earlier, then this is pretty strong evidence for a lack of human cause. I personally would expect the former and be surprised at the latter, but I'd accept the evidence once the astronomers and climatologists have had a look at it.
We don't need to know anything about the past climate to know that natural effects are not the dominant contributor to climate change today. But if you want to include historical data, that only strengthens the case that the current warming trend is not natural. Ummm, from the historic temperatures which have always hit an upper limit of approximately the same value over and over again You will note that historically CO2 levels were nothing like what they are projected to become by the end of the last century.
Negative feedbacks do kick in eventually, so that temperatures will not grow without bound, but you cannot point to past trends without also pointing to the gross differences between the past and present climate.
Temperatures hit will hit a limit in the future as well, but the limiting temperature will be much larger when the climate comes into equilibrium with the much larger amount of CO2 that is now present. If we are perturbing the system, there seems to be only one real direction it can go. This is manifestly false, as (a) the Vostok data gives no indication of what happens to interglacials when CO2 concentrations are above 300 ppm, and (b) temperatures in previous geological eras far exceeded any interglacial period visible in the Vostok data.
That's all -I- needed to do, and got a mild chuckle out of it.
A mild chuckle is pretty good, and at least I got the joke.
You got me to laugh here. First, 154 nations are right so we must be wrong.
No, but you'll need a pretty good argument why the vast majority of... well, everyone... accepts the scientific data but are still wrong.
When just about every climate scientist and relevant scientific organisation acknowledges the fact of global warming, and the doubters are spouting off long-discredited talking points about volcanoes and Martian warming and whatnot, I'm going to go with one of those groups. Guess which one.
Second, 154 countries "unanimously signed." Well, if you don't sign, what is that?
Every member nation of the IPCC must sign off on the report. If they won't, you go back and re-do the report. That's why the 2001 report could only muster the support for a 60% certainty that humans are causing global warming, and the 2006 could muster support for the 90% figure. It's also why the report is criticised for being too conservative with its predictions.
Got any actual arguments, or is "nuh uh" pretty much it?
ahh....but you forgot about ZFS. In the project leaders own words:
"Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans."
I fear the Y2038 bug
It would be really nice if you started to check your facts! H2O is a more effective absorber than CO2 is. It is found at concentrations many many times CO2. H2O will be anywhere from 0% to over 4%. That is up to 40,000 PPM compared to 370.
e sis This is not a CO2 gun.
Note: Your 1st link is not found.
It does not take centuries for the CO2 to be absorbed. At most a little over a decade. Plants absorb CO2 from the Air. Water vapour condenses. Both gases move into and out of the atmosphere.
The idea of equilibrium is also misleading. CO2 has been present in the past at concentrations many times what it is now. Geologically speaking, CO2 is not correlated with climate change.
Where do you get the idea of a saturation point? CO2 levels in the Ordovician were 13x to 17x higher than now. There is no evidence this was past a saturation point. During the precambrian CO2 levels were 100's of times higher than now. Now, CO2 levels are actually very low.
Note the temperature of the earth before the Permian-Triassic extinction was about 10 degrees warmer than now. This increased ANOTHER 5 degrees during the event.
The artical you cited talks about a Calthrate gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypoth
Note the development of the Siberian Traps. This was a larger volcanic event than the Deccan Traps in India. It is possible the Deccan Traps were associated with the K-T extinction. Simailarly the Siberain Traps may have been responsible for the P-Tr extinction.
I'm having issues with the idea of a huge buildup of fungal detrital material. Fungi are inhibited by high CO2 levels. At even 1000 ppm we get huge morphological changes in many species. Plants will often do much better at these CO2 levels. Check this: http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm But perhpas this does explain it. If the fungi are inhibited then they may well have consumed part of the detrital material but were unable to complete the process and hense ended up themselves becoming the detrital material. This would greatly impede the ability of plants to obtain nutrients since many if not most plants form mychorrizal relationships with fungi.
Suppose CO2 at the time got upwards of 5000 ppm. This would be about 14x the present levels (370 ppm). This is at a level which is dangerous. Its high enough to severely impede fungal growth. At 5% which is 50,000 ppm its lethal. So I see no reason to believe it ever reached into the 50,000 PPM range in the recent geological history and I sort of doubt it was much over a 1000 ppm if it even got up that high during the Pr-T extinction... but it is possible that the fossil record which shows the high percentage of fungal fossiles is providing evidence of how high the CO2 levels actually were.
Quote: "Figure 18: Young Eldarica pine trees were grown for 23 months under four CO2 concentrations and then cut down and weighed. Each point represents an individual tree (56). Weights of tree parts are as indicated.
Figure 18 summarizes the increased growth rates of young pine seedlings at four CO2 levels. Again, the response is remarkable, with an increase of 300 ppm more than tripling the rate of growth.
If you are saying that the earth's orbit and the sun have 0 effect on the climate...
I said no such thing.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The simple fact is that temperature measuring technology that is actually used to measure the air within a useable temperature range is highly imprecise and highly inaccurate.
Got any data to back that up? I want to see the manufacturer specs on the actual equipment that has been used at the hundreds of temperature measurings stations around the world for the past 100 years or even 30 years. Go ahead and try to find that data.
If you want to assert that the accuracy and bias of temperature measurements is something other than what studies have shown it to be, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate that — and even moreso, that these errors introduce a systematic upward bias into global temperature averages of a magnitude sufficient to render the observed global warming an artifact of measurement error.
Thermometer intercomparison studies do exist; I saw one cited in a similar Slashdot thread last month, which I've spent the last 20 minutes trying to find. As I said, if you want to dig around on Web of Science or Google Scholar long enough, you can find them too.
Most will only be able to measure temperature to within +/- 2C!
That is completely absurd. Even thermometers hundreds of years ago could accurately measure temperatures to better than 1 degree accuracy. Meteorological thermomenters in the 20th century are far more accurate.
And note again that the combined average of many thermometers are more accurate than any single thermometer.
I would love to know where you are getting these "facts".
This theory is so far from it that hardly anyone even bothers to talk about the uncertainties in that data.
Idiot. Read any paper on the instrumental temperature record and you will find discussion of the uncertainties in the data. Track the references back far enough and you will eventually find the calibration and bias estimation procedures used.
We seem to be assuming no human error whatsoever in the the recording of the temperature readings.
No, we do not. Human errors, both random and systematic, can be and are estimated. Search the literature for "bias correction", "cross validation", etc.
Such questions should at least be occuring to you. The fact that they are not makes me wonder about whether you really care about the truth.
I have not claimed that the instrumental temperature record has zero error. I merely claimed that the errors in the record are much smaller than the warming trend observed. The fact that you know nothing about how that record is calibrated and debiased tells me you certainly do not care about the truth.
I would sneer at the idea that it would mean the end of our species and openly laugh when you claim to have evidence that would prove it without the slightest doubt.
No one has claimed that global warming will "end our species". But the existence of global warming has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
I would quite like an extra 5-10F increase at the lattitude where I currently live.
I doubt that you would, as temperature increase is far from the only effect of global warming. And nice of you to care so much about people at other latitudes.
Just means that there would be some migration away from equatorial regions.
Oh, yeah, "some" migration. I'm sure you would like to support the costs of that relocation, too, along with the social and political unrest which accompanies it. (More likely, you would prefer your fellow taxpayers, or ideally other countries altogether, support it.) Not to mention your complete lack of ethics in supporting climate change which results in the relocation of other populations which conveniently don't include you.
Actually all of them are. hehe. Okay. Sorry about that. Couldn't resist.
Not all of the world's population centers are located close to sea level at the ocean front,
all the planets are warming, even Pluto
Pluto's not a planet any more.
Why?
Because scientists say so.
It's just like global warming.
Global warming is happening because scientists say so.
Since you don't believe scientists when they say that Pluto isn't a planet, it's not surprising that you don't believe scientists when they say that humans are causing global warming.
You should be censored and your funds cut off.
That's the only way to deal with scientist-disbelievers.
At least, that's what the scientists say, and scientists are always right.
Right?
"Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era," Oxford's Wilson explained. (Related: "Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says" [September 13, 2006].) All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth's wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years. If Mars' wobbles take anywhere near the time earth's wobbles take, we may be able to expect a long term (200-1000 years period) correlation between temperature and axis wobble on the planets. However, I would not expect to see things correllating on a yearly basis on a dramatic scale like we are seeing. If the Russian scientist has real data that supports his claim, I might jump aboard. I am not impressed with "climate scientists" in general. I think a large percentage of them (on both sides of the debate) are looking for fat salaries and grants. It is a fad, it will die out, and those people will change to new fields.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Well, I have suggested that the unusually warm weather at least here in the Pacific Northwest can't be exclusively caused by man-made global warming. This doesn't make it less of a threat. But the last three years could certainly be an aberration.
Most people don't understand the economic threat of global warming. It is a serious threat. But this doesn't mean that you can say that it is the only cause of, say, Katrina. It may be only one of a number of contributing factors.
Three years of data may say something about the last three years. It doesn't say much about the decades of evidence suggesting an accellerating and man-made warming of our planet though.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you are purporting to *KNOW* what is causing this climate change I expect you to be able to explain past climate changes in similar terms. What the global warming theorists are saying is "We know that the climate has changed drastically in the past for natural reasons, but this time we are 100% certain the reasons are not natural" Well, I'm not 100% certain, I know that CO2 concentrations have been higher in the past, I know that ice ages happen as well as warm periods, and none of these events in the past can be explained by man's interference with the planet. So, if we are inside of a known normal range for this planet, why are we supposed to assume that any little variation or change is caused by man or that it is inherently bad?
The orientation of the axis of Mars has been about the same as Earth, but it historically has varied by as much as 60 degrees. When the northern pole of Mars has been pointed towards the Sun in the past, the frozen carbon dioxide there melted and produced a greenhouse effect. If this is what is occurring today, then the change is in Mars, instead of the Sun and does not necessarily explain anything about Earth's heating.
If you are purporting to *KNOW* what is causing this climate change...
I didn't say that, either. There are a few areas where I know my stuff, in some other areas I just know enough to know who to ask. If you really want to *KNOW* what is causing this climate change, more power to you! We need more people who are researching this issue. It will take a 5 to 10 year commitment, though, otherwise you won't be much farther than I am.
(I assume you haven't commited those years yet, though even if you had - and there's no way I can know for sure since you're just some internet guy - I still couldn't really know if I could trust your judgement.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
That is completely absurd. Even thermometers hundreds of years ago could accurately measure temperatures to better than 1 degree accuracy.
I work for one of the leading global suppliers of meteorological equipment. The issue isn't with how accurate the sensors can be, it's if they are being properly calibrated and maintained. In the US we do a fairly good job, although if a sensor is reporting off by a degree or two it is within accepted functional range and will pass any inspection.
I always put on my hip boots when I see phrases like "might have a natural -- and not a human-induced -- cause."
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
If no comparable climate changes have been observed on Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune I would presume the sun as the causal element would be reduced or eliminated.
So have any trends (or lack thereof) been observed on the other planets with substantial atmospheres?
I must confess to a certain amount of admiration for the bit of anti-Gore propaganda to emerge from the right wing attack machine. As dishonest as it is, it is beautifully constructed.
The key allegation, of course, is that Gore is a hypocrite because he lives in a large house that consumes more energy than average. What I think is quite elegant is the way that the perpetrators (a right wing front organization with the typically misleading name of Tennessee Center for Policy Research) use minor deceptions to conceal a big lie. The object is clearly to get people arguing about the minor deceptions, such as overstating Gore's relative energy use by comparing it to the national average rather than the regional average, and in the process to spread the real attack meme across the media. Here it is, shorn of the distractions:
Al Gore wants to destroy Americans' standard of living in the name of fighting global warming
Of course, stated baldly like that, it sounds pretty idiotic, since Al Gore has clearly never said anything of the sort. But look at how cleverly it is concealed to slip it past our critical faculties: The suggestion is that Al Gore is a hypocrite for living in a big house. The only way that could be true, of course, is if Al Gore is opposed to Americans having large houses, which would of course make him the enemy of anybody who owns a big house, or who aspires someday to do so.
Of course, the reality is that Al Gore believes that the use of low carbon emission energy sources, combined with economic incentives (such as carbon credits, a part of the Kyoto Protocol that Gore supports) to promote commercial development of low carbon emission technologies will allow Americans to reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing our standard of living. And he is in fact doing exactly what he advocates--paying extra to buy energy from sources that do not contribute to carbon pollution, buying carbon credits, investing in solar technology for his home--which makes him pretty much the exact opposite of a hypocrite.
But truth is not much of a defense when it comes to propaganda as John Kerry and John McCain can attest. Remember how well the "Al Gore can't be trusted" meme stuck even after it was established that all of the supposed examples of Al Gore's "exaggerations" were false. There is clearly a great fear that Al Gore will decide to run. After all, this is a guy who won the popular vote before, and actually warned that the Iraq war was a mistake before we dug ourselves into a quagmire, which is more than you can say for most of the other candidates. And in his lecture tour to raise consciousness regarding global warming, he has overcome his major liability, his former awkward style of public speaking. Clearly the old "Al Gore exaggerates" meme is wearing thin. I think we are seeing the birth of a new attack meme, designed to undermine Al Gore's greatest asset--the fact that he is one of the few modern politicians with any real vision.
It is relieving to read this report of a report (how meta) that we may not be wholly responsible for climate change. However, that does not mean we should lighten up our efforts to move away from petroleum-based fuels and the larger petroleum-based economy and towards non-petrol fuels that have been proven to be as efficient and effective as biodiesel. (For a variety of reasons, I do not consider ethanol to be such a fuel.)
Nor does reading this mean I will relax my efforts in starting the Milwaukee Biodiesel Co-op. The biggest reason to get away from petroleum-based fuels is rooted in the one of the classic planks of the Republican Party: local control. No, I'm not a Republican, but one thing I have come to appreciate as a lowercase-d democratic activist is the Republican's old platform is the concept of local control. Biodiesel fuel lets us have local control over virtually all aspects of fuel production, from growing the crop which it is made from on American farms to where the production plants are located. For people in the upper Midwest, it's even more local. Farmers in my state of Wisconsin benefit from it. My city of Milwaukee benefits when it's used, as unlike emissions from burning gasoline or petrol diesel, emissions from burning biodiesel in vehicles or generators are much less toxic. In fact, they are non-toxic. There are higher emission of some smog-creating chemicals, but we already seeing solutions to this. For example, the forthcoming Volkswagen TDIs will meet California's tough emissions standards for the first time, as VW engineers came up with a way to trap the nitrous fumes prior to release to the atmosphere.
(Now if American car makers got smart and emphasized biodiesel rather than ethanol, we'd all benefit a lot more. Lobbyists have seen it's gone the other way, but that may yet come around.)
-- haaz.
actually, this is nothing other than a proof that our governments have already started terraforming Mars...
Trots off to edit /. Wikipedia page on Slashdot inside jokes.
Here are some facts about global warming. Some of which you hear and don't hear from the main stream media:
t ic_031212.html). I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields. I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetosphere ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_fiel d ) due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this? j r.html [space.com])/ mars_snow_011206-1.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=410901&in_page_id=1770)
i ndex.html)
1 826.o0mynclv.html [breitbart.com])? Also, how do you explain huge ice ages on Earth? Were thse caused by huge carbon emissions or was it a small natural climate cycle that just happens? Were those climate changes, which are no doubt more extreme than what's going on now, caused by the combustion engine? I don't have answers and everyone seems to have an opinion including a Nobel laureate who says the answer is more pollution (source: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/16/smog.wa rming.ap/index.html)
1.) The world appears to be getting warmer with many computer models showing an increase in global temperature.
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
3.) Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_magne
4.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_
5.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem
How can you explain the recent same climate changes on different planets? I doubt it's all those cars being driven there.
6.) The United Nations found that there is more Methane produced from livestock, which raises global temperature greater than CO2 by a factor of approx. 20, than any human caused CO2 combined (source: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/
Is it possible that the warmer temperatures that Earth is experiencing are caused by cyclical natural phenomena? What about glaciers in Greenland that have been shrinking for 100 years (source: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/08/21/06082119
One last thing. Lets say we all buy into the fact that we're causing the climate change through CO2. Regardless of what actions we (America) take, China will still produce more CO2 than anyone because they want to get rich. There's no stopping it.
Did you actually read the link? It had nothing to do with Global Warming. Instead, it was another example of logical fallacy.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Accurate representation of reality == truth.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
"The fact is, climate modeling is not that bad if you don't push its predictions past a century or so"
It's been a daily observation of mine that climate modeling is not very good for even a week, if you follow the weather on the news. I would say there is a lot of room left for climate models to mature.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
The Big Oil companies should be strongly censured for tampering with the output of the Sun in an effort to derail political arguments for man-made, global warming. I'm not certain how they did it but we should at least have a congressional hearing into this matter. Further, investigation into alternative explanations for global warming should cease until Congress publishes guidelines for future study and interpretation of the results.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Three years of data, or decades of data... Is that all we are basing global warming on? That is a joke. A mere millisecond on a geologic scale. I think too many humans have a hard time admitting that our puny existence on this rock has only been quite recent as compared with the lifetime of the earth. Give me 100,000 years of data and you might be able to show me a possible trend.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Pluto will continue to "warm" until what little atmosphere the planet has refrozen.
Even on earth, our planets warmest days are not the first days of summer nor is our coldest days the first days of winter. Climates lag orbital dynamics.
If you want to get into observations, we have numerous weather satellites and countless weather stations on this planet monitoring changes in climate and weather. Terabytes of data every single day. This same data is criticized by the very same ones saying that a comparitively small number of inferred observations show that other planets are warming so it's not "our fault".
Horeshit.
Until we have somewhere near the climatological coverage we have on Earth, I doubt that many will take these results seriously. Unless, of course, one has no problem with employing double standards on data that support their cause.
~X~
~X~
Humans build robots on earth.
Earth starts to have global warming.
Humans send robots to mars.
Mars starts to have global warming.
Obviously robots are the cause of global warming.
The solution to global warming is:
DESTROY ALL ROBOTS!
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
The implication is that this "evidence" disproves the effect of greenhouse gases is nonsense. There is no reason to not think that if the Sun is warming then it is additive.
Shouldn't that spell Limbaughgraph? ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
No, see, when the President is still saying he feels scientists are still not agreeing that global warming is a problem, we are NOT past the "Is this a problem" phase. We're still convincing idiot politicians and political/religious fundamentalists that the
potential death of humanity is enough of a motivator to spend a few bucks of their precious profit now rather than later.That's the real root of my question. I misworded it. I didn't mean to say, "How long to we argue why," I meant to say, "How long to we have to argue over who or what to blame" before we try to fix things. We keep getting stuck up with "well maybe the rising carbon dioxide levels are natural" and "well there's always been a hole in the ozone" and "hey, just thirty years ago you all thought we were headed for an ice age!" When you deforest the planet, yeah, rising CO2 levels will follow. Sure, it's possible there's always been a hole in the ozone layer, but empirical evidence showed CFCs destroyed ozone, and it didn't really cost anything in the long run to stop using CFCs. And yes, 30 years ago there was some speculation about a potential ice age, but there was never the consensus there is today, not to mention we have not just 30 more years of evidence, but 30 more years of studying the evidence we already had, and 30 more years of gathering more historical evidence too.
I'm just tired of worthless fingerpointing when we CAN do some things to try to offset our impact. Hell, even if we're NOT at fault, we'll at least stop contributing! It's a no-lose scenario. We become more energy efficient, that saves money, and puts a smaller burden on the Earth. We cut back on pollution, that makes our environment safer for us to live in. We practice more sustainable farming methods which means more food to get fat on for everyone, and less expensive to boot. We recycle more waste products saving energy and raw materials, and thus money.
I really believe the root behind the arguments against this is fear of change, and not trusting anything they don't come up with themselves. They don't want to do anything to change their established place in the world because it might pose a personal risk to them, because it's easier to do more of the same than something different.
Go ahead, mod this down too. In the end, we're going to have to act anyway. The only real question is when. How long to we wait to act. But remember this, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
oops.. I wrote anthropomorphic global warming. I guess I thought it would talk to me or something.
Maybe I should cut down on the caffeine.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I always knew that Sun's new blackboxes (http://www.sun.com/blackbox) put out so much heat that they're heating the Earth, but I never dreamt that the blackboxes' heat would reach Mars!
--deckert
You don't just waste a few trillion dollars. You affect the developed world's ability to produce goods and services for the ENTIRE PLANET. Look at what is happening to Mexico just because the US wants to use more methanol (a cleaner, renewable fuel ?).
Developing countries can afford coal and nuclear plants but they are being sold a bill of goods with respect to 'renewable' resources such as wind and solar that they can't afford. Meanwhile their people starve.
The humble approach is to COLLECT MORE DATA. The egocentric approach is to believe that we are doing such a huge amount of irreversible damage to the planet, AND that we know the PERFECT solution.
If the truth is flamebait, then so be it.
We all know that climate change happens naturally. Greenland was much warmer in the 11th century than it is today, for example.
What we do know is that the carbon dioxide that is emitted by burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the air from carbon that was stored when the earth was much warmer than it is now and ocean levels were substantially higher. We do know that over the last hundred years, we have seen an accellerating warming of our planet which seems to correspond with fossil fuel consumption (which is also accelerating at a similar rate). Given that we know that the CO2 component of our atmosphere is both very small (0.25% of the air) and critical for keeping our planet warm, it is not unlikely that these are all related.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Crud e_NGPL_IEAtotal_1960-2004.png
Pretty much what I said
I was talking about Natural Gas. Go check what I wrote. Oil production may not may not be at peak at present. Besides, that chart is world production and its a horrible chart. I've seen much better.
I was talking about oil. And the NGPL is Natural Gas I believe.
Ah--it's all proof of CO2 causing warming. The atmosphere is over 95% CO2!
I'm more worried about global cooling than global warming. Even the maximum 11F increase would not be a big deal compared with an 11F decrease. Ice ages are no fun.
I work in a GLP laboratory. We just finished GLP validating our digital temperature monitoring system. We verified our thermometers to a 2 degree accuracy. That is we took temperature readings in the areas monitored by our new digital thermometers and with NIST certified thermometers over a period of time, and if the two thermometers agreed within 2 degrees it was close enough to be considered accurate.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No NGPL is Natural gas plant liquids which is commonly just refered to as Natural gas liquids.
I highly recomend you download the statistical review from the BHP website.
If you have good ideas, which most slashdotters have, then I think its a good idea to augment these tools with data.
You DO know that plants resperate (consume oxygen) in a process that is distinct from their phtosynthetic (oxygen producing) process.. right? Or did you think they didn't need to break down sugars in order to sustain themselves?
No, actually. Plants merely consume CO2, sunlight and water. They produce life-sustaining sugars, and how they actually combust those sugars is their own problem! That is their place in life, it is not up to humans to kill them by withholding nutritious carbon dioxide! Fuck those assholes who say that there isn't enough freshwater because of plants! You are should join PETP! We save the plants! Even if you're an uncircumcised European, we might even be able to help YOU!
(While we abhor the cruelty to the fungal ecosystem under your foreskin, but due to medical and legal advice, we do suggest that you wash under it at least every six to eight months. Frequency should increase if you're likely to receive fellatio.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's a shame that this is posted AC, because I want to "friend" this poster.
Sure, CO2 is a cause of global climate change. I'll go with that, but it's just too early to start branding those who question the current theories as unscientific, crazy, or politicized. We did this to Galileo, Newton, Einstein...
We party on anthropogenic CO2 (a small faucet on a really big bathtub) because it's easy to fall into the trap of favoring the simplest solution to a problem (if reducing anthropogenic CO2 by 70% can be labeled "simplest"). Even after one of my friends warned me not to do it, I favored trying to pin my '85 Volvo's inability to start on the fuel-pump relay. I didn't do this because it was the most likely culprit. I did this because it was only $40, and it was easy to fix.
$300 later, the car runs, and it wasn't the fuel-pump relay that needed to be replaced.
Science is more about asking questions than knowing answers. If those who know the answers scoff at those who ask new questions, science isn't being done.
That's Slashdot for you... the parent gets +1 for making some snide remarks against the right but I make some against the left and am modded flamebait. Hey, it's Slashdot--news for socialist leftist geeks.
In Russia, globe warm you... ah, never mind.
Which is well inside the sun. (449km from the center of the sun)
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Again, I was talking about gas production, which has been steadily increasing for the last 20 years. You said the following:
"I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak."
There's no data to support that claim.
When it comes to global warming, everything is political. That's what happens when the world's governments (except USA and Australia who are run by monkeys) get together to solve a global issue: it becomes political.
In fact, scientists often put their own work (and grants) ahead of any objective notion of truth, so it's really very naive to think that "science" is somehow apolitical.
Ughh, yet another huge slashdot discussion where a bunch of people who won't take the time to read the actual science think they should be able to evaluate the evidence for global warming. Invariably analogizing the acceptance of the consensus opinion among climate scientists with religious belief.
Now these climate change skeptics are right when they point out that scientific consensus means nothing against the evidence. It doesn't matter if every single person on earth disagrees with you, if the evidence is on your side you have the better case. However, it is a mistake to infer from this that in practice scientific consensus is irrelevant.
The situation with climate science is much like that of a complicated high-profile murder trial with no smoking gun. We all recognize that it would be a mistake to judge the defendant based on the evidence we see presented in the media. All sorts of biases affect what the media reports but most importantly is the fact that news comes in byte sized chunks. If the prosecution's case is simple (he was found with the gun) while the defense has a long list of little details then the information in the media won't give a fair view of the evidence. This is why we have juries who actually listen to all the evidence rather than having the public vote on the matter.
Now it is the *evidence* which determines what we should think about someone's guilt or innocent and if we sat on the jury no consensus in the public should sway us from what the evidence says. However if we just read some accounts in the media and the jury said, "Yeah we considered those but there was a huge amount of little points that outweighed that" then we would be smart to believe them. If we replace a jury with a group selected to be experts in the field the point is even more clear.
So sure this study may be *evidence* against anthropogenic global warming but whenever a psychic gets lucky that is evidence for telepathy too. The only important question is what the balance of the evidence says. Now if you think that evidence in murder trials can be detailed and long it has nothing on climate science and there is just no way a mass media article can convey the results from thousands of scientific papers and arguments.
But just like with a trial if you really care you can go straight to the source (scientific journals/trial transcripts) and look for yourself. However, if you aren't willing to spend the time to look for yourself then it's just idiotic to try and second guess trustworthy people of good reputation who have.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Right, and since correlation implies causality... Oh, wait.
If patriotism is racist, is racism patriotic?
"it goes around the Sun Earth barycenter."
Which happens to be so close to the centre of the sun that it makes no difference.
Science sure makes less mistakes than you.
I knew Mars would be heating from gas emissions in the near future. There are no humans there yet, but we already sending vehicles.
We have had satellites orbiting our planet outside the atmosphere for over half a century now. Most have been solar powered. Measurement of the output of those solar panels would indicate if there has been any increase in solar output.
Weather is not climate. It is far easier to predict a global average for a whole year than it is to predict local weather in a particular city on a particular date.
Actually there is good data to support this. Read Matt Simmon's book "Twilight in the dessert". You might note the price of oil?
You might also actually check the BP statistical review.
I'm in favor of someone placing a thermometer on Uranus to see if it is warming up. But I don't want to do it myself!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Great! If we can blame the sun and not human activity then we don't have to do anything about it! Sort of like if a flood is caused by a storm and not by a dam breaking then we don't have to try to swim. Ummm, wait a minute...
... yeah, it does matter which is the cause.
...
But the question is do *what*.
If what you want to "do" is to severely, painfully limit human activity, and, um, the problem isn't caused by human activity and won't be significantly helped by what you want to do, then
Or to use your metaphor: if the flood has nothing to do with the shoddy dam breaking, then maybe applying 99% of GDP to dam inspection and repair might be a hasty course of action
This report and the study underneath it are useless. Publicizing it at all means there are still people trying to justify ignoring realities that everyone else understands.
Three years of data does not even begin to make a long term trend. Polar bears threatened with extinction because ice that has been in place practically forever is disappearing makes a much more compelling long term trend.
There has been a lot of debate over global warming in the wake of this article. There shouldn't be. This has nothing to say about it that we didn't already know based on historical sun cycles for which we have a lot more data. Mars should be warming a bit. The sun is near the peak of a cycle. The earth should be warming a bit too, just not nearly as much as it is.
Davis
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
The right is the one with false assumptions about economics and human behavior. Look at recent research & experiments in economics and games theory. The selfish actor theory is flat out wrong. People are not primarily motivated by self interest. They are far more motivated by notions of reciprocity and fairness. Our entire economic theory is based on a dangerous falsehood. Because it assumes selfishness, it actually encourages it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well said.
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
When you have correlation and suspected mechanism which would have one causing the other, you have suspected causality.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I don't want to do any research to figure out which of you is right, so I'm not going to take sides, however...
The parent mentioned greenhouse gases, including water vapor, and you are only talking about CO2.
Until we have somewhere near the climatological coverage we have on Earth, I doubt that many will take these results seriously. Unless, of course, one has no problem with employing double standards on data that support their cause.
Since Triton and Pluto have extremely slight atmospheres and the temperature change is on the order of 5 degrees, it makes it very close to an equilibrium situation with no feedbacks to worry about.
Comparing that with the 0.6 degrees of Earth during the 20th Century demonstrates a) how much negative feedback is in the Earth's climate and b) how insignificant and ridiculous are the claims of "eco-Apocalypse".
The double standard is of course that there's no James Hansen to alter the historical record in order to present the current warming as "unprecedented" in X thousand years when its nothing of the kind.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
OK its getting hotter on earth and mars, but we blame sun? Come on ... it's more probable that our "global" warming affects mars. We just broke precious ecosystem on mars by "global" warming. ;]
I cant stand it anymore goodbye world I'm stoping emission of CO2 right now... well after i find a big cliff
Nice argument. You sure won over the undecided with that one. You've done your cause a great service and made global climate change doubters everywhere look mature and well reasoned by association. Well played. I bow to your superior debating skills.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Is your stance that CO2 doesn't affect temperatures? The point is environmental factors normally balance out so change is gradual. this change is very sudden.
.00315 percent to .00375 percent in 45 years of measurement...but there is a LOT of question about whether that has any effect on global surface temperatures or what those levels are in relation to historical levels prior to when measurement began.
My 'stance' is that we don't know what the effect of CO2 increases on surface temperatures will be. The temps may increase by 0.4F, 4F, 40F, 0.004F, or they may decrease by 4F. The predicted increase is based on computer modeling that is simply not good enough to predict this with the information available. Computer models have gotten better and better. We routinely get weather forecasts, based on the models, that are fairly accurate to 3 and 4 days into the future. But predictions 10 years out based on changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, are far beyond the ability of the modelling. And 100 years out...laughable.
This is about respect for the truth, not about some politicized rush to action, based on false information. That never leads to a good result. There is no question that atmospheric co2 concentrations have increased from
It's a great idea for people to use less fossil fuel, ride bicycles, walk, drive hybrids, use renewable power, etc. Those are great things to do as obviously there is a limited supply of fuels. But don't ask people to believe that doing that will have even the slightest effect on global temperatures. That undermines respect for the scientific process and its integrity.
This agrees with the explanation these scientists give for the real cause of global warming".
Do you think most global warming political advocates know the percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere
or the true relationship between sun activity, clouds, cosmic rays and the Greenland and Antarctica ice core samples?
Are these scientists more convincing than the "Inconvenient Truth"?
Is the Political lobby so far along that true science can't catch up?
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!