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Is Climate Change Affecting Bushfires?
TapeCutter writes "After the devastating firestorm in Australia, there has been a lot of speculation in the press about the role of climate change. For the 'pro' argument the BBC article points to research by the CSIRO. For the 'con' argument they quote David Packham of Monash university, who is not alone in thinking '...excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had...' However, the DSE's 2008 annual report states; '[The DSE] achieved a planned burning program of more than 156,000 hectares, the best result for more than a decade. The planned burning of forest undergrowth is by far the most powerful management tool available...' I drove through Kilmore on the evening of the firestorm, and in my 50 years of living with fire I have never seen a smoke plume anything like it. It was reported to be 15 km high and creating its own lightning. There were also reports of car windscreens and engine blocks melting. So what was it that made such an unusual firestorm possible, and will it happen again?"
It burns! It burns!
...so it didn't cause the bushfires. Fires like this are normal. Suburbs sprawling into the bush are abnormal. Fifty or a hundred years from now it may be a different story.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
boring, getting tired of hearing about global warming.
The answer is no. ... we had to rely on the 22nd amendment to get the job done.
Despite Al Gore and Michael Moore's best efforts, climate change did not get Bush fired
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Some years ago, Fine Homebuilding did an article about houses that did and did not survive wildfires in California. The houses that survived had certain characteristics. They were clad with non-burning material like stucco. They had metal or tile roofs. They didn't catch heat under the eaves. They didn't have trees near the house. The plantings they did have mattered. There was one kind of ground cover that was full of water and that would burst if heated, releasing the water and cooling the fire.
The Australian houses I have seen (in pictures, I haven't been there) had almost none of the characteristics of the houses that survived the California fires. So, my question is; if you live in a country that has bush fires, why don't you build your houses to accommodate that fact?
The ever increasing severity of wildfires in Australia, North America, and elsewhere have nothing to do with any hypothetical climate change. It has everything to do with honest to Cowboy Neal human intervention.
Every year, dry areas with lots of vegetation catch fire. This is natural. Every year, humans that are stupid enough to build flammable houses in fire prone areas fight the fires and put them out. This is not natural. If the fire was let to burn out on its own, the thick and highly flammable undergrowth would turn into fertilizer for the larger, healthier, and more fire resistant plants that have historically survived such wildfires. Unfortunately, because society likes to coddle the retards that build in fire prone areas, the undergrowth survives year after year and becomes thicker and thicker. Then when the conditions are especially ripe, like during a drought and wind storm, the brush that had been saved for all those years suddenly goes up and creates a massive fire with the fury of all the years that human intervention prevented nature from taking care of the problem. Lo and behold, the massive super fire is much more destructive than the natural fires would have been. Good job.
Flood prone areas with human settlement have the same problem. Levees prevent the natural yearly floods and deprive the land of the silt deposits that would have normally been left after the flood plains have lived up to their name. This causes the land to over time sink and become less fertile, and then when the levees fail OH MY GOD BUILD AN ARK THIS IS THE WORST FLOOD EVAR!!!1
tl;dr climate isn't the problem, retards fighting nature is
...just as the current cold winter in North America canNOT be considered as casting douby...
David Packham is our foremost expert in this area, he "wrote the book".
It is clear that when you let 35-50 tonnes of fuel build up per hectare by not backburning then you will get these sized fires.
We have had similar fires in the 1850s, 1870s, 1930s, 1980s. The common factor is the amount of fuel ready to be burnt.
Shouldn't Climate Change have actually reduced fuel load by killing the trees?
It has a lot to do with the fact that the Government departments failed to conduct the necessary backburning.
There will always be arsonists, lightning strikes and stray cigarettes. We can't stop ignition. We CAN reduce the amount of fuel available to a bushfire. Climate change has nothing to do with proper back burning.
It's been classified more as "global weirding" rather than "Global Warming." Where I am from, it's freezing cold, and has had colder weather here than we normally have. But you can't just speculate and attribute these weather storms to global whatever. They have and will continue to happen regardless.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
let's just wait for the findings of the Royal Commission before debating the merits of global warming vs green policy vs urban sprawl. The scale and ferocity of the firestorm has devestated entire communities. The sooner politics are removed from the debate the sooner the answers may be found. Neither side of the debate is immune from point scoring or spin. The fact remains that the indigenous Australians have used seasonal burning as a land mangement practise for thousands of years.The foolish guidelines allowing people to build combustable homes within heavily wooded areas without sensible conditions has led to the worst loss of life,both human & animal in the recorded history of the continent.To say the cause of this tradgedy is global warming is stupid
Regardless of whether climate change is affecting bushfires, the bushfires will affect the climate. Put enough ash high in the air and we could cool the planet.
I'm a fruit pirate. I bought a watermelon once, and spat the seeds in the back yard. They grew into another watermelon,
There will always be arsonists,
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
so what was it that made such an unusual firestorm possible, and will it happen again?"
1. The failure to control the fuel load using prescribed burns.
2. Yes, unless they stop putting out every fire and enable the fuel load to grow and grow.
All you have to do is look at what happened at Yellowstone.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Stuff like this has happened before.
The 2 notable ones I remember are:
canberra a few years back
and ash wednesday back around 1984(I think)
whilst it would be nice to know better management plans, (planned burn offs work great IMHO)
I think blaming global warning seems like a bit of a "what can be blame today".
When people ask if I'm an optimist, I say "I hope so". --Bill Bailey
Your post ignores:
1. Science
Doesn't the scientific method mandate a testable hypothesis?
Please explain how we can test "climate change".
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Climate change hasn't affected bushfire occurrences significantly in any way. This is all speculation and from a very unscientific standpoint as far as I can tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfire#Significant_bushfires
Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia. And the documented dates go back to 1851. Climate change has nothing to do with anything, a bushfire is longstanding and naturally occurring event, and has been observed that way for 150 years on record.
Where is the data that shows that fires have occurred more often and burn longer and stronger AND the reason so is climate change and not the fact that suburban sprawl introduces woodland areas to power lines, lit cigarettes as litter, and other human fire related causes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wildfire
There is the same issue with wildfires occurring in California. And an even bigger threat or cause of wildfires than global climate change is still lit cigarettes being discarded in woodland areas. More on that later.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2327145120071023
Here's a short article from Reuters discussing some basic wildfire facts in California.
* During Santa Ana conditions, fires can be easily ignited by nature, in the case of lightning, or by humans. Some are arson, while others can be sparked by machinery operated near dry brush, campfires or carelessly tossed cigarettes. Downed power lines also pose a fire hazard. Once the wildfires are whipped by the winds, they spread quickly and are extremely dangerous and difficult to fight.
* "Fire Season" officially begins in early summer and lasts through October, though officials say that as the state suffers through cyclical drought conditions, they consider the season to be almost year-round in Southern California.
http://ca.prweb.com/releases/20061010/6/prweb393120.htm
In September 2002, a wildfire that scorched 247 acres on the Camp Pendleton, California base was started by a cigarette butt tossed by a passing motorist.
In January 2001, a motorist driving along Interstate 8 in San Diego County flicked a cigarette butt onto the center median, sparking a fire that burned more than 10,000 acres, destroyed 16 homes and charred 64 vehicles.
http://www.kbtx.com/home/headlines/40452047.html
In Texas, people cause 95 percent of wildfires. The Texas Forest Service says residents should not engage in activities, such as throwing out lit cigarettes, welding and burning debris, that could lead to an accidental wildfire start.
So we are causing a vast amount of wildfires. In some places even 95 percent.
Maybe climate change plays a large role in bushfires, but I need way more evidence to convince me that it's not people being careless with litter, downed power lines, or household electrical fires, etc. causing the majority of these fires.
We wait until its too late to act.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Science is a human endeavor and subject to limitations of humans. There is one thing that has and will continue to often trump and cause the revising of science:
reality
We have - guess what the results are: the ones you ignore.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If climate change can literally destroy the planet, shouldn't we understand it before we act?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
With recorded weather data.
We have a test for climate change? Please please please, can you tell us what this test is?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
1. Water vapor is by a feedback effect. Google "op amps" or something. Water vapor multiplies the effects of carbon (and methane, and other effects that are not modified by feedback).
2. The life that was supported was single celled algae. No cows = no steak = low quality of life.
3. Global temperature is dead accurate for 30 years. It has been measured to a high standard for a century, and has been reconstructed over millennium. It's been rising the whole time.
4. Yeah, we could shut down the THC, and screw up England and the West Coast. That would cool things down. Didn't you see the movie?
OK, The Day After Tomorrow was a little inaccurate, but the idea of global warming freezing New York does have a grain of truth, you just wouldn't get supercell ice tornadoes, or whatever they made up to make it more exciting. The process would take years, or decades. Compare it to 300 (Spaaraaa!) which was also a weird mix of real history, and crazy impossible special effects.
And you do realize that point number 2 assumes that everything is in a standard state and that these levels have always existed at a constant and never in different forms such as just plain O2 and C or through the breaking down of much more complex molecules when carbon based life forms consume food or breath in and out just to name a few. We know about climate change because we can look at ice core samples which record a great deal of information about the climate over millions of years and how it has changed and using advanced computer models make fairly accurate predictions. You appear take the "climate change can't happen let me shove my head in the sand" approach and ignore a great deal of evidence.
Climate change can easily play a role in bushfires since one area can become much dryer than usual and therefor everything becomes dryer and if you add fire to a now very dry area then you get a bushfire.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
There will always be arsonists,
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
Except if you don't make a song and dance about fire ban days, you get people like some of my relatives who insist that a hot, windy day is the perfect time to hold an imprompt barbie with that pile of old branches in the middle of a paddock.
Poor urban planning and lack of forest management are definately contributing factors.
However: We've been in drought for 12 years, this has been the driest February on record, the hottest week on record was earlier this month and the hottest day on record was the day of the worst of these fires.
It's pretty easy to convince me of global warming after living through this.
And in the meantime while the plant might be being destroyed? What should we do?
2. But if you follow global warming models, as Al shows them to us, the CO2 quantities at that time would make it impossible for even the most basic cellular life to form.
3. 30 years is not a long time. The biggest collection of temp. data used in favor of Global Warming came from NASA and was plagued with a Y2K bug (bizarre, I know). Methods for reconstructing millenia old temperatures are scientific, but well, untested. We may be warming, our indicators suggest we are, but we don't have the data to make an empirical claim.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
Confusing wording, but there is bit of accurate information in it. Much of the world's petroleum is believed to have been formed during periods that were warmer than now, with higher levels of C02, perhaps as much as 2-3x higher or more. While possibly a paradise for some kinds of plants and algae, it should be mentioned that such periods were also accompanied by Anoxic Events and enormous waves of mass extinctions.
1. Water vapor is by a feedback effect[sic]
To have water vapour, you usually have to start with water. Most of the more populated areas of the country have been in drought for several years, and there can be no doubt that this is a major contributing factor to the fires - the forest floor is (or was) essentially a tinderbox waiting for a spark.
So your argument is actually we should go back to the stone age. Gee, could have fooled me.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Oh, y'all know there's no such thing as global warming. The bible says so.
It's about time y'all stop believing in that junk science and realize that inteligent design is how God made us.
I know this because the nice young man on AM560 said so, and he's got an associates degree in divinity with minors in atmospheric science and marketing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Quick, do something! Anything as long as we DO SOMETHING@!
1. Water vapor levels aren't being artificially increased.
2. The CO2 absorbed by that organic material has been sequestered for millions of years. The climate required for our lovely little civilisation began a few thousand years ago and depends upon that sequestration.
3. Global temperatures are easily tracked back via examination of ice cores and other scientific methods, back long before thermometers and writing with which to record any observations made.
4. Global warming begets climate change, so functionally they are one and the same. Close observation of past events allows prediction of future events.
5. You have no clue and blindly parrot propaganda without consideration of facts or logic.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
So, you don't believe in global warming, but you do believe in the Y2K bug.
You can't make this stuff up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But that is going to happen.
None of this has anything to do with fake climate change.
Nope, you can't
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.
However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.
Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Without knowing the specifics in Australia, the fact elsewhere in the world is that many governments treat things like Russian Roulette.
With 6 cylinders, and 1 bullet you can keep pointing the gun at your head and pull the trigger.
You can keep making cuts to various departments and everything keeps going ok.
You pull the trigger a few times, and then, bang. Your dead.
And then, out of the blue, the shit hits the fan and your carefully managed cuts are too deep and you bleed to death.
"David Packham is our foremost expert in this area, he "wrote the book"."
So why is he peddling disinformation on the BBC and why is it that I could not find a description of his position at Monash?
"It has a lot to do with the fact that the Government departments failed to conduct the necessary backburning."
Please re-read the summary and look at the reference.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
you know, sometimes inspite of our best efforts shit just goes very very wrong. we are not masters of the universe. to suggest global warming is to blame for the bush fires is media whoring at it's worse, and totally disrespecting those who died and their families just to push their own agenda.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
âoeWeâ(TM)ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads wonâ(TM)t cut trees downâ¦â
The fires were a direct result of several actions:
1) A hot and drier than usual summer
2) A LOT of fuel on the ground
3) "Environmentally Concious" governance, including banning clearing of ANY land whatsoever, even banning clearing of land as a means of fire reduction.
4) Insufficient backburning, except for when it is too late.
Obviously 3) and 4) are the problems here. If either 3 or 4 (or both) were allowed, then the death toll and property losses would be far less.
Both 3 and 4 are the direct result of interference by greenies and environmentalists.
But seriously, these fires are nothing special. Victoria had devistating fires in the 1980s and the 1930s.
Given the relatively short time Australia has been populated, it's not hard to imagine that these fires are probably a 1 in 20 to a 1 in 100 year event.
Use the LHC to create a black hole to suck all the heat out of the planet and thus prevent climate change!
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
You seem to misunderstand what a "testable" hypothesis really is.
It doesn't mean that we need to somehow develop a laboratory test to evaluate climate change. Obviously that poses some problems.
A hypothesis only needs to explain observed phenomena and make predictions concerning future related phenomena which can be verified or falsified by observable evidence.
In that sense, climate change as caused by increasing CO2 levels is a testable hypothesis.
Consider an analogous situation: astrophysics. How can we ever "test" any astrophysical hypothesis we develop?
1. They aren't being increased by every boiling pot in America, or every breathing child, or every AC unit in America?
2. Our CO2 levels need to stay within the range of the last few thousand years? We're all doomed for sure then.
3. I agree, scientific, but untested.
4. Right, it predicts change. This is untestable, and self-affirming. If it were scientific, there would be a testable hypothesis. No such testable hypothesis exists, ergo not scientific.
5. Because I disagree?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
....Please explain how we can test "climate change"....
That is easy! Climate ALWAYS changes, at least it has historically. Sometimes it gets a little warmer, and sometimes a little cooler, but it is always changing. There are many cycles in nature, climate being just one. There is indeed evidence that long ago the average temperature of the Earth was significantly warmer than it is today. Greenland is called that for a reason. It was within human history once a green land. Ice cores drilled to the bottom of the ice contain molds, pollen and other microscopic evidence of plant life now still in existence on the East Coast of the United States.
The climate of Earth has always changed up and down, warmer and cooler, long before people discovered oil and coal and started burning them. In fact, climate changed before there were people at all and it will continue to change no matter how much we pretend to be able to do something about it one way or the other.
All theory is gray
Global Warming affect bushfires...
Ah, so that explains what happened at the Justice Department.
I dunno.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
What?
My point is that hypothesis can only be proved, it cannot be disproved. If it canned be disproved, it is not testable.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Yes, climate always changes, and since Global Warming is politically tied to Climate change, it is invariably true?
This is hand waving. This is not science.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
I blame the O2, there was a lot of it that day and it was from the direction of central Australia so it was hot and dry. i.e. strong nth wind in Summer = fire storms for Victoria Australia. If you want the historical info, look at soil cores, the carbon and ash layers from fires should give you an idea of what has happened in the last 1000 years or so, not that it is a long time, the first Australians have been there and lighting fires for 40 to 60 times longer than than.
You entirely miss the point because you ask the wrong questions. It is not about testing climate change. During the Cuban Missile Crisis they hypothesized that if one country launched an nuke, we'd all launch them and it would be the end for us all. That was untestable, but we avoided it anyway on far less testable science than we have today to suggest that climate change is occurring and will alter life on this planet. If the sum of humanity's knowledge suggests that under a certain situation (launching a nuke, or business as usual carbon emissions) something bad has a probability very close to 1 of occurring, it is probably best to avoid it.
Science is frequently about using proxies and models to test whether something will occur without actually having to perform an experiment (which may be impossible). This type of science has been regularly used for climate change. So let's lay out the basics really quickly:
So, science hasn't given up on climate change yet. It's not as if they are saying "there, we've proved it, now we only need to respond." No, scientists are providing as much evidence as possible to help us understand just how much this will or will not affect us.
If they haven't given up on climate change yet, why have you? While you sit there convinced that it's not occurring, we continue to blindly provide an input (carbon) into an extremely dangerous system (climate). All of the knowledge we have says that there is an extremely high probability that doing so will result in extreme shifts and war, famine, drought, etc - and you want to wait for a directly testable hypothesis? Goodness.
And in the meantime while the plant might be being destroyed?
Water it and stop the cat from eating its leaves.
Actually, with the population of the earth, going back to the stone age would be catastrophic. People would build wood fires for heat, light, and cooking. That would require mass deforestation, and the burning fires would release more pollutants than we are now.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
by the way people who take any opposing view on this subject -- no matter how valid their comments -- get modded as "troll". That is not a very adult way to behave.
At least one poster above had good and true things to say, but got modded as troll anyway. Some others may not have had all their facts right, but they were no more off than people on the "other side" of the question, and they got modded as troll too, even though the people who made ridiculous statements on the "pro" side of global warming were not modded.
That really sucks, folks. You can do better. That kind of crap makes me ashamed to be here on Slashdot.
And by the way, I just want to point out: the UN "TAR" or Third Annual Report on Climate Change, which is what much of this Global Warming argument is based on, has by now been found to be seriously flawed, AND politicized. Much that was in that report was not science, either. In fact, at least one paper the report was based on was an outright fake. You can't rely on flawed and discredited data for your argument, then turn around and tell others that their argument is "not science". That would make you a hypocrite. What you really meant (whether you knew it or not), was "that is not science, either".
I live in Australia and I love the bush and all of our country.
Awhile ago the greenies (green political party and other environment supporters) mistakenly tried to stop natural bushfires and back-burning. The reasons being that nobody likes to see burnt animals (koalas, kangaroos etc..) or burnt plants.
However, there has been a turnaround in thinking regarding this. Bush fires actually bring around new growth and some plants only drop seeds when a bush fire goes through. Bush fires are actually necessary and if they are allowed to occur regulary then it's actually better for everyone. Because the greenies and other people stopped back-burning and because we intervene and fight bush fires the dead leaves, plants etc... don't burn but rather just sit there waiting as potential fuel for the next big one.
However, obviously nobody wants to see humans hurt. The answer to this is allowing natural bushfires and backburning. To stop this hurting humans we need to build fire breaks, surround housing with concrete fire breaks and build bunkers to protect humans who live near the bush.
Simple: check the historical record. The one thing that we can be sure of about the climate is that it's always changing. Sometimes it's getting hotter, sometimes colder, but it's always in flux.
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I'm sorry but this is ridiculous.
You don't need to understand exactly how a toilet works to know to shut off the water if it overflows.
Similarly, it doesn't take any extreme level of understanding to recognize the benefits in limiting our emissions.
Or are you trying to make the case that the byproducts of fossil fuels are actually HELPING our environment?
Read these two assertions carefully:
excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had
However, the DSE's 2008 annual report states; 'The DSE achieved a planned burning program of more than 156,000 hectares, the best result for more than a decade.
The intended effect is this; two conflicting statements cancel each other out. The net impact on the reader is therefore zero. This is an intentional deception.
The skeptical reader notes that the two statements do not, in fact, conflict. The first statement asserts insufficient fuel management. The second asserts some quantity of fuel management, but does not attempt to counter the original assertion.
The second argument asserts a quantity of prescribed burning that amounts to a square 24 miles on a side. Now that we've dispelled the ambiguity of a figure like "156,000 hectares" we can see that very little fuel management was performed relative to the size of the Australian bush, and this is asserted to be the "best result" in a decade!
This is now to be the basis for story after story, year after year of how "global warming" caused the bush fires. You people wonder why there are global warming skeptics? Shut down the boneheads that publish this sort of blatantly obvious nonsense in the name of "global warming" and maybe there wouldn't be so many. Or maybe there wouldn't be much to talk about.
Hmm.
MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").
There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.
MYTH 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 Ã" 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare.
The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.
MYTH 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
MYTH 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3 % of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, (about 97%) of water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O, of which carbon dioxide is the largest amount. Hence, CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. While the minor gases are more effective as "greenhouse agents" than water vapour and clouds, the latter are overwhelming the effect by their sheer volume and Ã" in the end Ã" are thought to be responsible for 60% of the "Greenhouse effect".
Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.
MYTH 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.
FACT: The computer models assume that CO2 is the primary climate driver, and that the Sun has an insignificant effect on climate. You cannot use the output of a model to verify or prove its initial assumption - that is circular reasoning and is illogical. Computer models can be made to roughly match the 20th century temperature rise by adjusting many input parameters and using strong positive feedbacks. They do not "prove" anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are
No it hasn't. That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked.
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There's a bunch of deniers who say that global warming is a myth, and that somehow Muslims are behind all this.
Of course, they are no different than the Nazis of the 1930's
Jesus told me global warning was a lie.
He speaks to be through my dog, Winkers.
Usually he stays on topic, but he was lecturing me on intelligent design the other night when he let this one slip.
1. Where do you think that water came from in the first place? -gasp!- The atmosphere! It is merely returning, completing a cycle.
2. For the current climate upon which our agriculture (food) depends, which the global population requires, absolutely. We're not all doomed, just a large number of us.
3. The methods by which those observations are proven are well-founded in basic science. I will leave it as an educational exercise to you to discover what those are.
4. The proof you seek is presented every evening on your local newscast. That you would utter such a statement bespeaks your ignorance and astounding failure to embrace simple logic.
5. Because your statements prove you can't be bothered to even use Google before repeating nonsense.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
There's a very famous quote by a member of one of the burned out communities. Basically, he was upset that they had been asking for years to have accumulated brush cleared, or even the right to clear brush near their homes, but this was blocked by environmentalists.
The moral is pretty simple. Environmentalists make choices that try to balance people and nature, and if you choose nature sometimes over people, sometimes people will die for it. This isn't the only time this has happened, or will happen. When we make energy more expensive, that means more people will freeze. When we make water more scarce, more people will go thirsty. When we give more land to the animals, there is less land for farming, and so people will go hungry. If you make things more expensive, as green practices do, you make people poorer. That's just the way it is.
This is my sig.
Climate change isn't the theory. It is the effect. The theory is that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the atmosphere of a planet. This has been well tested with small scale experiments and large scale observations (such as observing the atmospheric composition and temperatures of Mars and Venus). There are a lot of details that go into climate change, but the general idea is very common sense:
Step 1: Shine some light in the visible spectrum on an object through a gas that doesn't absorb a huge amount of energy at most of those wavelengths (for example, from any random object that you might see that has a 5780 K blackbody temperature).
Step 2: Choose an appropriate gas (like CO2 or methane) that will absorb a lot of energy from the blackbody emissions of that object (Stefan's Law).
Step 3: Watch the temperature of that gas rise.
Do you get the gist? It isn't rocket science. If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
4. Yeah, we could shut down the THC, and screw up England and the West Coast. That would cool things down. Didn't you see the movie?
You're right, shutting down the distribution of THC would certainly hinder the West Coast... Hip Hop scene.
1. They aren't being increased by every boiling pot in America, or every breathing child, or every AC unit in America?
An amazing thing happens when the water vapor in the atmosphere increases, it is called rain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That may contribute a small amount, but the main cause is ...whales!
Since we stopped hunting them(for the most part), they have been increasing in numbers.
When you have more whales, you have more whale breath- great clouds of steam!!
Cow farts? Bah! Whale farts make Neptune tremble and weep!
And don't get me started on rabbits...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
There are different ways of acting.
Stopping dumping tons of crap into the atmosphere is unlikely to make things worse. Now trying to fix things by releasing some other chemical to try to balance the problem could backfire.
The first is like "Shouldn't we understand the complete ecosystem of the lake before we stop using it as a garbage dump?". It's generally unnecessary to wait to have a 100% complete understanding. Maybe the fish are dying for some other reason, but stopping dumping junk is unlikely to make things get any worse.
The second is more like "The lake seems too acid, maybe we should compensate by dumping several tons of base to neutralize". Now this kind of solution will require a complete understanding, lest it turns out that wasn't the problem, and things become even worse than before.
Narcberry 1, Slashmob 0.
I come here for the love
You have been misinformed:
1. This is simple high school science. Water vapour in the atmosphere is at it's "satuartion point" and is totally dependent on pressure and temprature, this is why you get dew drops forming in the desert overnight. Any amount of water vapour you pump into the atmosphere will fall out as liquid within days.
2. Coal is the biggest contributor to GHG, the carbon locked up in coal, oil, etc was never present in the atmosphere all at the same time (unless you want to go back before multi-cellular life appeared).
3. Opinion that is not supported by fact or mathematics.
4. The term "climate change" was introduced by skeptics who pointed out that the term "global warming" could be construed as biased.
If you would like to post a link that backs you up we would all be interested, as it stands you are simply trolling by parroting psuedo-skeptical talking points.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The current GW argument is now framed as an impossibly illogical syllogism. First they accused those with evidence against the claimed warming trend to be flat-earthers. But now that undeniable evidence shows the cracks in their warming theory, they rephrase their position as "climate change", but they do not change their conclusions. They still require massive programs to further control, tax and regulate virtually every activity.
So now they equate any climate change at all as "proof" of their models and their theories. Nobody denies that the climate changes, in ways both known and unknown, but that in no way implies that their interpretation of these changes supports their theory of anthropogenic global warming and its theoretical effects. So they have cleverly posed an irrefutable argument: Believe in "climate change" - yes or no. Neither "yes" as they interpret it is true nor is "no".
The argument:
Global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect which is caused by greenhouse gases which are released from burning oil.
The problems:
1. Ignores the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect: water vapor.
The water vapour in the atmosphere is dependent on the temperature of the atmosphere. Its effect is well understood. And no, water vapour isn't ignored like you would have us believe. But I doubt you've ever read the IPCC reports to validate that specific conspiracy theory.
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
The formation of life is a complex topic, but it really isn't relevant as this is a straw man argument. There are three carbon cycles: organic, inorganic, and geological. You argue as if CO2 can only go between plants, oil, and the atmosphere. In reality the majority carbon is removed from the atmosphere through organic and inorganic processes in the oceans, is precipitated in the form of limestone on the bottom of the oceans, and is dragged along by plate tectonics (where it can be reemitted after subduction by volcanoes or pushed to the surface and weathered away). This process takes tens or hundreds of millions of years. Only a very tiny percentage of the CO2 of this planet ever made it into oil or coal (which is from a different process). If one were to follow your theory and think that it would be just fine to put CO2 into the air just because it was there before, then there would be no problem with releasing the 50,000,000 Gigatonnes of carbon stored in limestone (in contrast with the 5000 Gigatonnes in all of the known fossil fuel reserves and the 5,000,000 Gigatonne weight of the entire Earth's atmosphere).
3. Global temperatures have not been tracked long or accurate enough to make the empirical claims that have been made.
Bullshit. You don't know what you are talking about.
4. Global warming has been replaced with Climate Change, and all evidence is, by definition, in favor of Climate Change. Ie, it is now disprovable since it accurately predicts the future can hold anything.
All in all I'm glad it it makes its way into every topic...
Yes, it is a conspiracy theory. We've been trying to fool the world, and we would have been successful if it wasn't for your meddling!
When the bush fire tragedy occurred I realized that it might of taken just box cutters and a bunch of nutters to take over an air plane to terrorize the US.
But in Australia, all it would take is some nutters and a box of matches.
That's a pretty frightening thought let alone what an actual organized concentrated coordinated effort in multiple places over Australia could achieve. :-(, really doesn't help me sleep at night.
the good article I would like to place in mysite http://www.refinancing-home-guide.us/
...just regurgitate what famous people tell you. Like how to "save" the ice caps.
If you really, really wanted to save the polar ice caps, you'd create a time machine and travel back..say, 19,000 years ago. Back when the polar ice cap extended down into what is modern day Illinois.
Which predates SUVs and industrialization by around...19,000 years or so.
That is one of the global warming metrics, right? Save the shrinking polar ice cap, right? You'd need to go back to a time when you can't blame humans. Even then, you'd have to go back yet again to the previous ice age, or any of the numerous ice ages.
In order to understand that simple scientific concept, you'd to do more than regurgitate Al Gore and co.
Yay, the next intelligent species on earth will use us as fuel within a few million years! (I'm joking)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Please explain how we can test "climate change".
Gee I dunno, make lots of measurements?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I guess that you fail to consider that the "shitload" of CO2 (from all sources, including man-made) account for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if 0.5% constitutes a "shitload", what would you call the other 99.5%?
And since you brought up observations of Mars and Venus, perhaps you can explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars? That would lead the cause of warming to be something the planets have in common - the Sun. Empirical measurements show solar output higher, so wouldn't you think that the most likely explanation would be the most logical one, rather than simple-minded "explanations" of processes that we don't nearly understand?
Considering the stakes, shouldn't we err on the side of caution?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
If CO2 levels increase/stay the same and the global temperature drops then there would seem to be a problem with the hypothesis.
No way. A term that isn't used outside of Australia (OK in a few little islands too) occurs mostly in Australia!
That wouldn't be because the exact same thing is called a wildfire everywhere else would it?
The argument:
Global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect which is caused by greenhouse gases which are released from burning oil.
The problems:
1. Ignores the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect: water vapor.
Which you would eliminate... how? By removing all water from the planet?
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
Yes, and there was no oxygen then either. But that sort of life isn't necessarily compatible with human life, at least of the sort that isn't in a bunker all day.
3. Global temperatures have not been tracked long or accurate enough to make the empirical claims that have been made.
600,000+ years worth of Antartic ice core samples (which have atmospheric air bubbles trapped in them) be damned.
4. Global warming has been replaced with Climate Change, and all evidence is, by definition, in favor of Climate Change. Ie, it is now disprovable since it accurately predicts the future can hold anything.
Climate change is, by definition, happening. The consensus is that is is getting warmer. The consensus is that this will be bad for current life - specifically coral reefs, amphibians and people that live by the ocean or eat food grown in mega farms. i.e. Most people.
All in all I'm glad it it makes its way into every topic...
Glad you're here to nay say the facts. Next up, the biblical 6,000 yearists...
The point is we don't know. If our survival depends on a strict range of natural conditions, then removing too much CO2 from the environment could spell disaster as well.
Since you like metaphors, if you're playing poker with your existence at stake, would you go all-in before looking at your cards?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
So we should continue burning CO2 regardless? Isn't CO2 also a pollutant as well, so regardless of the climate effects we shouldn't stop producing it so we can continue to have unclean filthy air, continue to rely on foreign oil, and stop progress into a new and cleaner age of technology that doesn't rely on finite resources such as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. which produce pollution and harm the environment in general
Correct.
Partly correct. It was in the atmosphere, but it wasn't all there at the same time.
Probably incorrect. Volcano's and other natural sources of CO2 have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere since the world began. Various other natural sinks of CO2 have been removing it for almost as long, keeping the CO2 roughly constant. One of those sinks has been the process of making oil.
So now, we have a situation where:
. The earth is naturally producing CO2 at roughly the same rate as it ever did
. We are removing trees by the football stadium per day, or hour, or second, or whatever (I believe the football stadium per time unit is the standard unit of measure for tree removal), and so are removing one of the natural sinks of CO2
. We are burning the previously-sinked CO2 from the ground in the form of oil and are putting it back into the atmosphere
. As a result, the earth is getting warming and other natural sinks aren't working as well
. As a result of the earth getting warmer, more water is being evaporated into the atmosphere
Can you see the problem?
For those of you who don't have a solid grasp of the language, "many" is not actually synonymous with "most", as is asserted here.
It should be pointed out that wildfires are "normal" conditions in southern California a distressing amount of the year.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
With the Cuban missile crisis, we had very little to lose by reducing the risk of a nuclear attack.
With global warming, we lose a very large set of things to combat it. Should humanity suffer for every possible risk to earth? How can we progress as a species when anything could potentially spell our doom? What is more important, humanity or earth?
Which is more likely:
1. We heat up the earth with our tiny fraction of man-made greenhouse gases and make the earth inhabitable.
2. We restrict our energy sources so tightly that we cannot continue to feed our growing population and starve to death.
Since both options are very dangerous to us, we should be careful in making our decision.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
What part of the cyclical nature of the Earth's temperature did I ignore?
You make me ashamed to be hanging out with you.
Since you like metaphors, if you're playing poker with your existence at stake, would you go all-in before looking at your cards?
Yes.
Not a typewriter
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature. Because of this, the degree of interpretation required to actually test the hypothesis makes it very difficult to make a strong case either way. When coupled with the amount of money involved, (and perhaps the very continuance of our planet as we now it) almost everyone has a stake. It becomes very easy to politicize the process, because the scientific portion is so murky.
Considering the degree of pushback on evolution, a theory which has been tested in numerous places and has been well understood by scientists for over a hundred years, it's not suprising that theories involving climate change have an even higher degree of pushback.
There's little question that humans have some impact on the environment, and certainly on climate, but we always end up back at the big question: How can we mitigate the impact of humans to acceptable levels while maintaining an achievable and sustainable level of technological development and advancement?
http://www.donarmstrong.com
That's not true. Increased CO2 causes global warming which causes an earthly imbalance which causes climate change.
So:
if CO2 levels rise and something in the climate changes, global warming is true.
if CO2 levels don't rise, than we can make no predictions.
There is no possible way to disprove global warming.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
As indicated in the article summary, the Victoria State agency responsible for controlled burned boasted about having burned 165,000 hectares the year before (and this was a notably high year). However, Victoria has 22.8 million hectares, almost all of which is probably relatively rural or even wild. I bet that means that controlled burning (in a relatively aggressive year) only turned over 1-2% of the land area threatened by wildfires. This strikes me as more support for the theory that Victoria simply has, due to decades of bad brush fire fighting policy, too much fuel in its rural areas. Once again, I see an unwholesome eagerness to blame a local problem on "climate change".
I suppose one could say that 1-2% of Victoria is a lot of land area, but keep in mind that in a 24 hour period a few days ago, apparently around 220,000 hectares was burned by brush fires. My take is that the planned burns were minuscule compared to the size of the problem. Further, one probably needs to burn these ares every 20 or so years. That would imply planned burning program up to five times as large as the current one, if my math is correct.
Actually, number one is far more likely and will include people starving to death.
In reality, most economic models predict that we actually stand to gain far more in terms of prosperity by making the switch to clean energy. Even the worst models predict at most 5% GDP loss as compared with a 25% GDP loss if we do *nothing* and let climate change force us to adapt on its terms, not ours. There little, if anything that is dangerous about stopping climate change, there is much to gain and almost nothing to lose. It's not that anything could potentially spell our doom. As I said in my first post, this is well-understood and well-researched and is not just a few people suggesting willy-nilly that we have a problem.
I'm not ruling out global warming, but if the guys behind global warming are the same guys saying the GDP benefits from clean energy, well I'm a staunch skeptic.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
I have here an old family postcard dated 1902 or 1907 mailed from Australia. It is a painting of a huge bush fire. The note on the back says that they were the worst anyone had ever seen. All manner of people, lovestock, fields, forests and buildings were destroied.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I guess that you fail to consider that the "shitload" of CO2 (from all sources, including man-made) account for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if 0.5% constitutes a "shitload", what would you call the other 99.5%?
And since you brought up observations of Mars and Venus, perhaps you can explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars? That would lead the cause of warming to be something the planets have in common - the Sun. Empirical measurements show solar output higher, so wouldn't you think that the most likely explanation would be the most logical one, rather than simple-minded "explanations" of processes that we don't nearly understand?
First, the Earth's atmosphere consists of about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and trace other gases (including water of about 0.5% and CO2 of about 0.05%). Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, oxygen is not a greenhouse gas, and argon is not a greenhouse gas. Thus, of the 32 K greenhouse effect, CO2 plays a very important role. Water is the dominant greenhouse gas, but it primarily serves to amplify the effect of other greenhouse gases since warmer air can hold more water. Additionally, water isn't as significant as it may appear (having a tenfold higher concentration than CO2) because it will precipitate out at colder elevations. Thus, CO2 and methane are the primary greenhouse gases that are really driving the greenhouse effect (with their effect amplified by the water vapour).
Second, the possible effects of a slight increase in solar intensity have been noted. They are too small to account for the increase in atmospheric temperature if they exist. And even the largest potential effect could only account for about a quarter of the warming that has been observed.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
We restrict our energy sources so tightly that we cannot continue to feed our growing population and starve to death
How would driving smaller cars and using energy more efficiently cause people to starve?
Better than my attempt to explain it. To add, less than one percent of Victoria was treated to controlled or "planned" burns. Supposedly in a recent 24 hour period, more than 220k hectares burned. That is almost 1% of Victoria's land area in a single 24 hour period. Let us review the problem: Australia like the US and other developed world countries engaged in highly aggresive bushfire fighting for a long period of time. Then they follow up that precarious situation with woefully inadequate amount of controlled burning. Sure, let's blame global warming^W^Wclimate change.
Sure, the Earth was much hotter when dinosaurs were around. Then again, it was a climate which suited them. Homo Sapiens evolved in a cooler climate. If there's a chance we can prevent the global climate from going back to the time of dinosaurs, why not acting?
No sig is good enough for me.
You misunderstand. The argument is not that global climate change is causing more fires but that global climate change is causing the fires to be more intense.
As another poster pointed out, this part of Australia is suffering from one of the worst droughts recorded, the week before had record temperatures and the day the fires started was a record hot day. No matter whether human caused or otherwise fires start easier in hot dry conditions.
Whether the unusual hot dry spell is caused by natural cycles or is part of climate change is hard to say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Water vapor is near the saturation point nearly everywhere in the atmosphere. The only place where this isn't true is the polar regions, where most of the water has been frozen out of the air. It's here that CO2 will have its biggest effect. Also, exactly the last place where you want temperatures to rise.
Currently existing oil was conviently put there with the deaths of billions of billions of algae cells. Lets leave their bodies where they are.
The key phrse is not just "Climate Change", but "Anthropogenic Climate Change". In other words, the climate provably changing due to specific human activities. This not only covers the greenhouse effect of CO2, but also things like overgrazing causing desterification.
Not a typewriter
That would require mass deforestation
I don't think stone age people can clearcut forests....
What would happen is cities would basically cease to exist since the necessary infrastructure to support them would be gone, and all that would be left are rural populations that are much closer to being self-sufficient.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
By the Bushfire CRC and the CSIRO:
http://www.bushfirecrc.com/research/downloads/climate-institute-report-september-2007.pdf
From the concluding remarks:
"In this study, the potential impact of climate change on southeast Australia is estimated. Simulations from two CSIRO climate models using two greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions scenarios are combined with historical weather observations to assess the changes to fire weather expected by 2020 and 2050. In general, fire weather conditions are expected to worsen. ...
The number of "extreme" fire danger days generally increases 5-25% for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios. By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% in the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios. The seasons are likely to become longer, starting
earlier in the year.
These results are placed in the context of the current climate and its tendencies. During the last several years in southeast Australia, including the 2006-07 season, particularly severe fire weather conditions have been observed. In many cases, the conditions far exceed the projections in the high scenarios of 2050. Are the models (or our methodology) too conservative or is some other factor at work?"
Add to this, the fact that the place is tinder dry precisely because of the preceding 12 years of extreme drought AND the cutbacks to brush clearing and back-burning ("green" policies are an excuse for councils and state governments spending less $$$ - just like every other service they've cut), and you've got the "perfect (fire) storm" conditions we had on Black Saturday.
Given that climate change isn't going away, and that all the models indicate SE Australia will get drier and hotter, and given that governments aren't going to be increasing spending in this area any time soon (OK - maybe they'll be shamed into doing something for a couple of years before the new programmes get cut back again), it is HIGHLY LIKELY that this sort of thing will become a frequent occurrence (say every 2-3 years somewhere in SA, VIC, NSW).
By the way, NASA have a fantastic pic showing how anomalous the heatwave leading up to Black Saturday was against recent summer averages:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36900
Of course, while we were burning down south, the banana benders up north were setting new records for floods.
Considering the stakes, shouldn't we err on the side of caution?
And which way is that? How do you know your actions won't make things worse - or have higher negative consequences?
I have no idea what you're trying to prove with your second statement. That because plants evolved in an environment half a billion years ago where the concentration of CO2 in the air was high means that if you release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere it's somehow OK for humans? Yeah! Plant life may have formed under conditions where it was tropical at the Arctic Circle. Is that good for humans? Doesn't follow.
["2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!"]
You are completely uneducated with lack of foresight.
CO2 doesnt exist in Oil, Carbon does.
Oil is compounded of Carbon! over decades, this carbon is taken from CO2 into plants, The plant excretes the Oxygen to the environment and keeps the Carbon to it's mass. Once the Plant dies after a decade or two, It's mass is compacted heavility and forms oil and Coal.
Once burnt this massive collection of decades of carbon is instaneously released at a rate far exceeding its return to Oil.
In laymans terms
We are releasing decades of Carbon back into the atmosphere each year, and Less than 10% is being returned to the earth as Carbon in its basic form.
That said Methane from Livestock in Australia far outweighs green house emission from other sources
This is where modern physics becomes separate from other sciences.
Modern physics does describe our reality - there are no stones unturned when it comes to understanding naturally occurring physical phenomenon on our planet.
The problem is the mis-conception of statistics as being science - statistics itself does require margins of error as a constant, but these are never a concern for the general public apparently. Without real science, how do we even know we are asking the right statistical questions ?
Conclusions based upon statistics are sketchy at best - correlations do not mean causation
Statistics are best used when estimating the best fit for a given model of our reality - the model itself should not be guessed, it must have a theory that is consistent with all previously known statistics.
Accurate theories of climate change are paramount, since, without them, our statistics just tell us what just happened.
"3. Global temperatures are easily tracked back via examination of ice cores and other scientific methods, back long before thermometers and writing with which to record any observations made." Hmm. Lots of folks seem to believe that that a long timescale makes no sense, the earth is just 6000 years old. Discussion of ice cores won't cut it for such folks. I despair that anything short of a mass die-off of humanity will make an impression on them.
This is not about starving to death, this is about your "right" to own a Hummer for driving the two miles to the shopping mall. Instead you may have to do so in an electric vehicle.
But no! An electric vehicle is *inconvenient* when you want to go on a road trip (which never happens, but just in case you might want to)! Or when you want to haul entire trees out of the forest (which you never do either, but again, just in case)! And your friends will laugh at you!
So you'd rather make the Earth uninhabitable than give up that large, wasteful vehicle you didn't need in the first place. That's the real choice here: losing a tiny fraction of your convenience, vs. death and destruction for a very large part of the worlds' population.
Use the LHC to create a black hole to suck all the heat out of the planet and thus prevent climate change!
mmmm? -273K and remove all of the light as well.
ABSOLUTE DARKNESS BWAHAHHAHAHHA!!
They will just claim it's The Rapture...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Your first concern if you're a renewable energy skeptic shouldn't be climate change. It should be how we support a 6 billion person population that is growing exponentially on non-renewable resources which are finite. Imagine the volume of the earth were completely filled with petroleum, and the population of the earth grows at 1.7% per year. The world consumes 4.8 cubic kilometers of petroleum per year. How long before this hypothetical sphere would be depleted? How long before 0.5% of this hypothetical sphere, which is a generous estimate of world petroleum supplies, can't keep up? It's a first year calculus problem, and the results aren't pretty.
I was working under the assumption that the GP was indicating that we were suggested to step back into the stone age. That would be the entire population of earth, without modern technology to assist us. Really, I think the farthest back we would go would be to agrarian society, but that would have significant drawbacks.
Say something cataclysmic happened tonight, and in the morning there was no power grid, no city water, no supply chains for food, fuel, etc. I'll focus on only the United States, because I am more familiar with it, and finding numbers relating to it.
According to the 2000 US census, just about 226 million people lived in 3,629 population centers that could be considered "Urban". That's just over 79% of the US population.
Assuming these people had exactly what they started out with before they went to bed, they typically would have 0 to 14 days of food supply on hand, and assuming the use of any water supplies available (i.e., toilet tank water, bottled water, etc), they may have a 3 to 4 day supply of water. Right now, if there is sufficient snow on the ground, some people may be smart and gather all the fresh fallen snow that they can. Virtually no one has any provisions for collecting rain water for drinking or cooking use.
In up to 11 days, people will begin dying of dehydration. In up to 28 days, mass starvation would take effect. Sometime between day 1 and day 10, people will begin using force to horde supplies from weaker people.
Some people will realize the futility of remaining in an urban area, and attempt to leave. In a best case scenario, starting with a fully fueled vehicle, and ideal cruising conditions, passenger vehicles can travel 400 miles. That's a best case. In reality, it won't be just one person saying "we have to get out of here", it will be hundreds of thousands. One accident, vehicle running out of fuel, or mechanical failure, and all vehicles behind them will come to a stop.
The 21% living in "Rural" areas may have a better chance. If (IF) they are lucky, they have a fresh water supply that does not depend on electricity. Most rural homes I've seen are supplied with water from electric pumps. If they are lucky, they have a good on-hand food supply. If they are lucky, they already have a food crop that can be harvested on a regular basis.
In reality, the numbers dwindle. Less than 1% of the 79% of the urbanites will be lucky enough to get to somewhere survivable, but they won't be alone. Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel). How do you trade bare essentials with your neighbors who you can't reach without a car (no fuel).
But, if the 285 million people in the United States did manage to disperse from the urban centers, to areas that could sustain them temporary for food, water, and shelter, and they managed to have or improvise hand tools to cut down trees, make fire for warmth and cooking, it would be absolutely disastrous for the environment.
This is an easy game to play. Go into your garage and shut off the main breaker (or pull the main fuse in older homes). Shut off the water and gas mains. Take all the money out of your wallet, and your credit cards, and stick them in an envelope somewhere safe that you won't touch them. Now, survive for 6 months.
In reality, if we stepped back to the "stone age" tonight, only small pockets of humanity would survive, and they would be the rural dwellers who live in fresh water rivers, have farms, and can live off the land. Everyone else will die.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Just if you have 1h40 min of available time for the global warming and the end of low-cost energy :
just see the conference in french but translate in english (need to have flash player)
http://storage02.brainsonic.com/customers2/entrecom/20080227_Spie/session_1_uk_new/files/index.html
Thank you for reminding me of "Threads"! Don't forget, there's a lot of water in your hot water heater. But you are correct - "civilization" is defined as the method by which we convert petroleum into food. Without the ability to convert petroleum into food, we perish.
The problem is the whole different era that life lived in, and that the burning of oil releases the time span collected volume, not just one little mosquito at a time.
"2. The CO2 absorbed by that organic material has been sequestered for millions of years. The climate required for our lovely little civilisation began a few thousand years ago and depends upon that sequestration."
Seriously? A few thousand years... That's the problem with people today, they have no idea between the difference of hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions...
Did you even read the page you linked to? The controversy is long over and the result is considered valid.
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The reality is that not much will be cleaned up and that politicians are much more interested in bringing in taxes (majority of which will end up on the people, not corporations) than forcing industry to evolve. I fear they have just jumped on the "climate change" bandwagon for political points and that they have no real intention of forcing industry to be clean. After all, thats where they get most of their money from, the very industry they are supposed to be fighting in the name of climate change. Not only do they get their money this way, they also get lush jobs when their short political careers are over. There are 30,000 odd corporate lobbyists in washington and they aren't there to visit the shrines...and they definately aren't there to tell the government how clean their clients want to be... Obama promised he'd get rid of the lobbyists, what a joke...its increased. His 1st executive order that was supposed to reduce lobbyists is nothing but token bullshit for the camera's. It does nothing in reality to reduce the amount of corporate lobbyists. It just makes the firms rotate lobbysist's.
If normal people like yourself dont stop watching the TV and wake up and use their own brains? we're all fucked.
TFA lists a few of the most prominent ideas about what may be the reason for Australia's dry spell. Throws in a vague "maybe climate change has something to do with it somewhere in there too". Then goes on to point out the fact that the region damaged horribly by fires is a giant tinderbox because people apparently do not take issues like property management seriously enough to correctly evaluate the risks to their property and lives.
Forest management is a necessary thing regardless of climate change of any kind. In a fire prone area, this is especially true. And its abundantly clear that the governments of the area are failing to protect the lives and property of the people that pay their salaries. Negligence of a particularly disgusting variety.
I am getting tired of seeing so many damn tragic yet actually mundane things being rolled up in this BS "OH, and it might also be a sign of the apocalypse" reporting.
I really hate to break it to you, but the Y2K bug was most definitely real. Did you think it didn't exist?
i have no idea if it is climate change.
what i do know is the following.
since 1997 the state of victoria, australia has had reduced rainfall activity:
http://www.melbournewater.com.au/images/annual_lrg.gif
this part is unexplained and is "possibly" due to climate change
the graph illustrates a lack of access to usuable water
of note melbourne is in stage 3 restrictions
part of this involves only watering gardens 2 mornings a week
there are places further in the bush up to stage 6 restrictions for several year
i do not know what this level of restriction entails
the point that is that the state is essentially drying up
fast forward and victoria received 3 days straight of 43+ degrees C:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/relief-for-melbourne-as-cool-change-hits-20090130-7tlp.html
the maximum heat during the period did not set any records
the major focus at the time was the failure of the public transport system
what went under-reported was that vegetation died
crops like lettuce and various fruits failed
you could walk past a fruit tree and step in dead unripened fruit
tree leaves turned colour and dropped resulting in an early autumn
it's the last point that is the most important
it ruined 8 months of back-burning efforts
there was now dry fuel laying around to be burned
that following weekend victoria hit a record 46.4 degree C temperature
the weekend was 'black saturday':
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/02/15/2491978.htm
Oh? Really? You mean that the Little Ice Age and the Early Medieval Warm never happened because a computer simulation doesn't show them? I don't think so.
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One thins is for sure:
The hot gasses emitted by all politicians most certainly increase global warming.
But we will be controlled, won't we: http://www.infowars.net/articles/february2009/270209Warming.htm
Well, First you have to make sure that the crap is actually crap. Then you have to look at what the crap is actually doing, not just what you think it is doing.
If someone flipped a switch tomorrow that magically stopped all Fossil Carbon emissions, we would be worse off then the are now. Particulate maters in the emissions offset a portion of the sun light by trapping it or reflecting it in the upper layers of the atmosphere. The effect is basically that is Carbon emissions are bad, it will get a lot worse when we stop because we are protected from a portion by the particle matter in the atmosphere.
When the majority of air traffic was stopped right after 9/11, the lack of those emissions were enough to measure both an increase in sunlight making to ground level and temps in those areas for that short period of time. Stopping the dumping of garbage can have a really bad effect if we don't understand what it is doing.
The problem is that Co2 will rise and fall with the temperature whether it is a problem or not. Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it.
There are tons of sources of Co2 that will be emitted or sequestered based solely around the temperature of the earth without ever getting into man made emissions.
Your also purposing a test that is practically impossible to do. You can't control Co2 emissions. Even the current so called solutions to it don't attempt to eliminate it, it attempts to tax the hell out of it so the products made are too expensive for people to purchase meaning less products get made and they attempt to push manufacturing off onto smaller less developed countries for various political reasons.
How would driving smaller cars and using energy more efficiently cause people to starve?
I have no clue, however I can tell you how the converse would cause starvation... Average temperature rises, normal weather cycles are purturbed resulting in frequent unpredictable floods and droughts. Global breadbaskets become desserts or lakes. Food stores plummet, and mass starvation ensues. Add to the sudden population explosion of insect vectors and condition ripe for the transmission of diseases and you can add probably epidemics and possible pandemics to the equation. Finally combine the effects of loss of habitable land between hard-cold hitting the subarctic and high temperate zones, and extreme heat in the equatorial regions, you have a recipe perfect that is absolutely spot on for starting wars and regional conflicts.
None of this is certainties, but the probabilities are predictably high.
Why would climate change reduce fuel by killing trees? I thought that trees need carbon dioxide in order to survive. From my experiences they should grow faster, not die.
The mention of 'engine blocks melting' reminds me of speculation about the Chicago fire over 100 years ago.
It wasn't Mrs. O'Leary's cow that was responsible, of course, and there is no proof of any theory ... but there is a very strange recent theory to consider.
First, consider some of the unique aspects of the fire. People jumped into the river to avoid the flames. There, far from any flammable material, many of them died. Autopsies showed that their lungs had been cooked from breathing air that should have been cool.
At the banks of lake Michigan was a steel storage yard, stacked with huge iron beams ready for the construction boom. These were also far from any fuel source, yet the beams melted to the ground. The intensity of the heat and the sometimes odd location of the heat indicated a very unusual fire.
It was unknown then that Chicago was not alone. Other intense fires occurred nearby and possibly across Siberia in various, mostly rural, places at around the same time.
In our time a theory has evolved that the fires had the same cause. This from Wikipedia:
"An alternative theory, first suggested in 1882, is that the Great Chicago Fire was caused by a meteor shower. At a 2004 conference of the Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, engineer and physicist Robert Wood suggested that the fire began when Biela's Comet broke up over the Midwest and rained down below. That four large fires took place, all on the same day, all on the shores of Lake Michigan (see Related Events), suggests a common root cause. Eyewitnesses reported sighting spontaneous ignitions, lack of smoke, "balls of fire" falling from the sky, and blue flames. According to Wood, these accounts suggest that the fires were caused by the methane that is commonly found in comets.[10]"
You will enjoy the fruits of your further research into the subject.
...omphaloskepsis often...
All of this sounds really clever and all, but where are your sources? It's all fine and dandy that you have these facts, but just like all the other nuts, if you can't prove it you are just adding fuel to the flames (bad pun, I know).
I don't think stone age people can clearcut forests....
Why not? The more common way would be burning the forest, but 6 billion people with stone axes could get rid of most forests rather quickly.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The point is we don't know. If our survival depends on a strict range of natural conditions, then removing too much CO2 from the environment could spell disaster as well.
Removing CO2 from the environment isn't a concern. That won't happen for a long long time.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
If CO2 levels increase/stay the same and the global temperature drops then there would seem to be a problem with the hypothesis.
Unless of course there was another hypothesis which explain it say: Global warming -> temperature -> arctic melting -> ice age
null
The somewhat inaccurately called "Y2k bug" that he is referring was a very specific bug, and has been discussed on slashdot before. Climate change skeptics were making a big thing about some tiny correcting to Nasa's tempatures. The changes effected the temperature curve for the US a tiny but, but was nearly completely negligible for the world. Here is is an article, and a blog entry about it.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
Of course, there are other variables, such as supplies in urban areas that would be looted. Also barring some extreme act, we would be unlikely to have no governance (e.g. in the event of a catastrophic final economic collapse). Here in Ireland for example, it is likely that electricity could be provided for maybe an hour a day just using native resources and the handful of older hydro/peat power plants we have (of course, here the electricity company is semi-state owned/run, other places may not have that luxury). Many essential services have at least a couple of days grace period (battery/fuel back-up) that may allow further time for emergency measures to ensure native resources can be utilised to keep very basic services going. In a sense, I'd expect Ireland, at least outside Dublin, to be more back in say the 1930s (the era of rural electrification just beginning) than complete collapse of society.
Personally, our approach is to have stockpiles for a week or two of disruption - anything beyond that and we are all pretty stuck anyway! A couple cans of fuel and generator will keep the freezer going (10 mins per hour) and charge the UPS (for broadband/phone) and one laptop (for uncensored outside news). Our telecoms infrastructure has at least a week's back-up (state-run TV/radio plus land-lines, some mobile telecoms and wireless broadband) and a special crisis mode that TV services are switched to in the event of an emergency (tested just a couple weeks ago at 3am).
We probably have native food production to last for a short time (e.g. native power can probably ensure continuation of minimal milk production for example), long enough to switch farm production to essential supplies (probably not enough for anything beyond rudimentary survival for the first year). It would be worse than during WWII though ("The Emergency" as it was called here - the State did go into crisis control-mode, and took direct control of many sectors of society to see us all through it). Undoubtedly many people would be doing manual labour again - e.g. if we kept the peat power stations running and wanted winter fuel, hundreds if not thousands would be in the Midlands cutting turf manually rather than the machine harvesting that occurs at present. Native gas supplies would be used only for essential power/industry - our heating would be switched off (it would be bad - but tolerable for most in the Irish climate).
Particularly with the past threats of nuclear catastrophe, I would expect the US to have plans for a special emergency mode - I suppose with it being a bigger place, not everywhere will be attended to, but I doubt loss of control would be absolute or even the majority of regions.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
On the day of the fires the temperature was 47-48 degrees, with 100kph winds and a relative humidity below ten per cent. We have had virtually no rain in 2009 so the country side was tinder dry. No amount of fuel reduction would change those numbers. When the fire risk index reaches 50 it is called extreme, on Black Saturday the index was well over 200. No amount of back burning would change that. The fire was so hot it could kill from 200 metres. Even today, three weeks after the big day, there is still an 1100km fire front burning through the more remote areas. It keeps getting hotter and dryer, the dams are slowly emptying, we have regular crop failures. It is time to stop coming up with bullshit excuses for what is happening. Climate change is already destroying our world and politicians continue to waste time on nothing schemes.
No, C02 is what you're breathing out and what trees need to survive. If it's not having a climatic effect there's no real downside to having more of it in the air.
Now it's exactly here where the science is not settled. See for instance this very recent article by Nir Shaviv, where he calculates the effect of the sun on the total ocean heat content. Quote:
Considering the global temperature rise in the 20th century of roughly 0.7K (+- observation errors) it seems that most (if not all) of the temperature change could be explained by the sun. All in all this is still very much active science, only the politics seems to be settled. Also, for all of us who doubt all the global warming CO2 spoonfeeding, that would like do have some DIY experience; do these steps;
Did you know that there were about twice as many sunspots in the last decades of the previous century as in the early 1900s? And three times as many as in 1830?
Bart
P.S. did you know that the Global Circulation Models outputs that are being used to predict the future don't actually have confidence intervals in them? The modellers do a lot of different runs, with different outputs (say between 1.5K and 6K increase in one century) and then confidently claim the 1.5-6K as a confidence interval, as if that means that the future is going to be within that range with that unspecified confidence. Whereas if these models are even 1% off in total albedo, they'll be so wildly wrong it's not funny anymore.
Climate hange cannot destroy the planet, the life on it, or even the human race. It can - and very likely will - simply make things extremely uncomfortable (= billions die) for us, as growth zones of various plants change and weather patterns become chaotic for the duration of the change.
However, those who most profit from not cutting fossil fuel consumption will be able to use those profits to shield themselves from the consequences, so resistance is useless.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
We do understand what is causing it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This must be some previously unknown usage of the term "debunked" to mean "replicated and demonstrated to be robust".
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Sure, a lot of self-appointed experts are saying "there wasn't enough fuel reduction", plus a few real ones with barrows to push. We'll have to wait for the results of the formal investigation, but so far its looking awfully like those firestorms went straight through absolutely everything: bush that hadn't been burned for years, bush that had had recent fuel reduction, bush that had had recent summer fires, managed plantations, and even farmland with scattered trees. When it hasn't rained for weeks, the temperature has been between 35 and 45 degrees C for much of that time, and then you get 46 to 48 deg C with gale-force winds, EVERYTHING burns. You'll get little argument that fuel reduction burning reduces the impact of wildfire under "normal" summer conditions. But when the gale force winds blow at over 45 deg C (that's over 110 deg F), all bets are off regardless of prior burning.
"lovestock", eh? ewwww.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Technocrat? is that you?
I dont want to get into the whole climate change argument but I feel it must be pointed out that Australia goes thru this same thing everytime there are major bush fires(I was born in semi rural Australia and spent the first 28 years of my life there). Australias environment has adapted to the indigenous population using buring as a hunting method. They have been doing this for around 40000 odd years. What is required in Asutralia is a policy of controlled buring to reduce the build up of combustibles. If you talk to an Australian firefighter she or he will thell you this is obvious. It is not however always obvious to our city populations or politicians who sometimes grow a bit lazy and indiffernet to the problems. Perhaps this recent firestorm was made worse by climate change and perhaps not. For me it is more a pointer that Australians have to be a lot more vigilate about fire. A few years ago many of my friends homes were almost taken out by the fires surrounding Canberra(where I grew up) and destroy a wonderful radio telescope. People forget so quickly what we need to do.
"Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it."
Yes, CO2 does rise with temprature however this is a deliberate misunderstanding of cherry-picked facts by the person who popularised this peculiar fiction.
The ice core data does indeed support the half-truth you state but the reason for the initial temprature rise at the end of an ice age is clearly related to the Earth's orbit. When this causes the ice to receed the permafrost melts releasing large amounts methane and CO2 which then ADD to the warming (ie a feedback). In the current situation humans are the ones who are adding CO2, which then causes the globe to warm, the ice to melt, and more CO2 and methane released from the permafrost.
We have had many exchanges in the past and I recognise you have the right to ignore the prefered cap and trade solution and rant against a tax solution in order to misinform and push your own politicaly inspired anti-science agenda.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The Problem with any discussion to do with Global warming is that it starts off from the wrong point. There is so many variables in Climate which cannot be proven and we could spend decades discussing this and that point back and forth until the planet is no longer viable. Or only so for Cockroaches. The Term which we should all be using and which I cannot see how anyone can debate whether or not it is a good thing is TOXIC GAS BUILD-UP We all know we live in a closed system. We all know that everyday we humans pump out tons of stuff which we cannot live on. IE: Toxic Gasses. Lets stop discussing and start looking seriously at how we can cut down on the volumes of toxins we are putting into our closed system. Most of the technology already exists to do many things which would make a huge difference. It is vested interests, laziness an inertia which prevent us moving forward.
My point being that lacking the infrastructure that "stone age" people don't have, you can't have 6 billion people in the forests cutting down trees all day. Logging didn't develop until fairly recently (last 300 yrs?) due to limits on society. The advent of the internal combustion engine and later the chainsaw is what got things moving in the logging industry. Though if you look back a few hundred more years they also used alternate transport like dropping trees into the water and rafting them downstream to the mill, or even using steam powered suspension chains to drag them to the mill. But that still requires civilization to make happen.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I misunderstood the title and assumed it had something to do with G.W. moving to Dallas.
Nobody is saying "no more electricity". Nobody's saying "Turn it all off NOW".
Now, lets say 10 years to turn it all off, no more fossil fuel derived power.
10 years to build a water tub for rainwater. Is that impossible for the US?
Those in the south of the US have need of AC but they need it because it's hot and sunny. Solar power and solar water heaters.
Those in the north of the US need heating, but they need it because they have little insulation.
Live closer to where you work. Electric trams picking up passengers run from municipal renewables.
Is this IMPOSSIBLE to do even on such a short timescale as 10 years?
But no matter what, it isn't "ALL off NOW!".
"That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked."
The hockey stick has not been debunked, in fact it has been made more robust by a recent follow up paper. If you are genuinely interested in the science as opposed to the politics then I urge you to re-read your own wikipedia link, particularly the first paragraph in the "updates" section.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Global warming had nothing to do with the Australian incident. Bush, forest, snarf fires have pretty much always happened.
What happened to make it bodycount was that their government has more and more been taken over by envirowackos that prohibit people from putting trees down, even if it means living surrounded by a potential inferno.
I read about this guy that was gonna put down some two hundred trees to make a 100-meter fire clearing for his house. The government fined him. He said fuck it, and did it anyway. His house is one of the few that didn't burn to the ground.
Bottom line, even if global warming is that big a problem, the last one we should have fight that problem is the State and its army of mediocrity, incompetence and lust for power.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
OMG, -273K. What funky physics are you working with?
Or are you trying to make the case that the byproducts of fossil fuels are actually HELPING our environment?
Yes. Most of the life on earth developed when the concentration of CO2 (also known as "plant food") in the atmosphere was much higher. The biosphere is absolutely loving the (tiny) increase we might've managed to accomplish.
it's in my head
ALL of the data we have suggest that the earth will shift if we continue to emit carbon because the earth's systems will react
No.
I'm a bit interested as to why you would claim such a thing as well.
it's in my head
you're deluded, most of the results of modern physics are in fact statistical. Every new particle "found" in the last few decades was in fact just a statistical clustering of results that conformed within statistical margin to model being tested. And our physics most certainly does NOT describe all that is known. For example, we don't have a gravity model that can be verified. We don't know if the Standard Model will hold at higher energies. We don't know how many dimensions the universe has. We don't know why high temperature superconductors work. And the list goes on and on.....
There is nothing on the hockey stick graph that eliminates the little ice age or medieval warming.
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Also, for all of us who doubt all the global warming CO2 spoonfeeding, that would like do have some DIY experience; do these steps;
Did you know that there were about twice as many sunspots in the last decades of the previous century as in the early 1900s? And three times as many as in 1830?
Okay, I followed your steps (well, actually I followed some similar steps a while ago) and the result was this. Historically things don't look to bad, but the last 50 years or so show a distinct divergence in sunspot activity and temperature trends. That divergence happens to line up nicely with CO2 trends. Your claims of clear correlation in sunspot activity with recent warming just don't hold up upon inspection of the data. Yes there are clear correlations between sunspot activity and global temperature; that should come as no surprise: of course changes in solar activity affect climate. Those correlations do not in any way account for the current observed rise in temperatures however.
The python code to generate the plot (pulling the latest data directly from online sources) is included on the linked page, so if you want to play, have at it.
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In reality, if we stepped back to the "stone age" tonight, only small pockets of humanity would survive, and they would be the rural dwellers who live in fresh water rivers, have farms, and can live off the land. Everyone else will die.
The people who survive will end up living in rural areas, but there's no guarantee that they'll be the ones who started out living there. Ammunition will be the primary constraint.
realclimate.org is run by Michael Mann of hockeystick fame who is so sure that he knows it all that he has to name his website 'realclimate'.
realclimate.org is run by Michael Mann who created the hockey stick. Try to get some independent confirmation
"CLIMATE CHANGE" is a much more spectacular and scary than "we fucked up." If we say "climate change" causes problems that are more accurately attributed to our own actions, then we offset the blame to everybody else. If we say "we fucked up," then it is immediately obvious who is to blame.
If a hurricane comes through and ROFLSTOMPS your sub-sea level coastal city with ancient levees, you'll feel better by role-playing the victim. Lets keep citing "climate change" as the cause of every natural disaster: Living a fantasy requires less usage of anti-depressants!
Cuz I'm gunna go an a hunger strike if'n I cain't drive my Hummer!
within statistical margin to model being tested
Statistics are best used when estimating the best fit for a given model of our reality
So, if we are in agreement, does that make you deluded as well ?
I am thinking since I was the only one to recognise it, there is only 1 deluded person.
So, can you postulate why you think our best theory of gravity, or lack thereof can be a statistically significant factor in climate change models ?
*YOU* don't know how many dimensions we have along with all string theorists searching for more funding.
I think physicists would agree that if it were not intractable, simulating the upper limit of superconducting temperatures would not be that tricky. As it is, I think the work in this field has a long way to go, and virtually none of it is significant to modeling climate change.
All of this argument is useless in the face of the mere fact that statistics alone do not make a model. In the realm of climate change science, so much is sketchy because it is hard to find a model for such a large system, and whilst we are just taking measurements, we get no closer to understanding climate prediction.
I think its fair to say that any brilliant model to cover a global climate accurately is most likely going to include a large degree of uncertainty - which is why many are saying, let's act to prevent the worst case occurring.
Burning plants tends to make about 1 ton of CO2 per ton of plant. It turns out that if you burn the 35-50 tons of fuel you end up reducing the temperature of the fire by a significant amount so more trees survive. Many areas also are subject to desertification processes which means due to a lack of future water, there will never be as many tons of trees so what used to be a CO2 sink, no longer is as large. The numbers I remember for a forest like the one near Marryville will be about 15,000 tons of trees per ha while forests on the north side of Mt Macedon are closer to 5,000 and drop to about 1,500 tons per ha in areas adjacent to the deserts. If those numbers are accurate, then the failure to burn 50 tons of fuel you quoted may have resulted in a permeant loss of maybe 10,000 tons of CO2/ha in the worst burned areas near Flowerdale.
Hopefully someone will post accurate numbers since I'm sure the ones I remember are mixing up metric and imperial systems worse than a NASA space probe.
With the Cuban missile crisis, we had very little to lose by reducing the risk of a nuclear attack.
About half of Kennedy's advisors didn't think so at all.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
No, it wasn't climate change. I greatly suspect it was letting the brush build up for too long. Remember the big Yellowstone fire? Same thing. Older forestry and land management practice was to stop fires as soon as they started. But fire is an important part of the ecosystem, and regular brush fires keep the brush down and the fires moderate. But now we have lots of areas where we can't even do controlled burns anymore because the brush has gotten too thick.
If the media is reporting on this as a symptom of climate change, they're idiots. It is anthropogenic, but not the kind they're trying to assign blame to.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
1. We heat up the earth with our tiny fraction of man-made greenhouse gases and make the earth inhabitable.
"Tiny fraction of man-made greenhouse gases": the logical fallacy that everything else being the same, a tiny change can be ignored (if you don't like the result).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"Debunked," as in, "fails to show effects that are known to have occurred." As I wrote above, the hockey stick doesn't show the dip caused by the Little Ice Age, and there's ample evidence that that happened. If it doesn't show what we already know happened, how can we believe its claims for the future?
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" The sum of the earth's other climate mechanisms is unable to adequately balance out our carbon emissions and prevent climate change from occurring."
Umm....if this is true, why has the temperature been FALLING for the past six years, during which we have been releasing more and more CO2?
Sorta suggests that Global Warming is a lie, don't it....
On the day of the fires the temperature was 47-48 degrees, with 100kph winds and a relative humidity below ten per cent. We have had virtually no rain in 2009 so the country side was tinder dry. No amount of fuel reduction would change those numbers. When the fire risk index reaches 50 it is called extreme, on Black Saturday the index was well over 200. No amount of back burning would change that.
You can't burn what isn't there. There will always be weather like this sooner or later, global warming^W^Wclimate change or not. Controlled burning (not backburning which is a burn deliberately set during a bush or forest fire in front of a large burn to exhaust its fuel supply) could have reduced the intensity of the fires. It could have created burned out zones with much lower rates of propagation of the flames. Even in situations that are worsened by global warming, humans can do a lot to mitigate or exaggerate the effects.
No it hasn't. That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England.
Ignoring all other blather, if the LIA supposedly made it impossible to grow grapes in England, why didn't it make it impossible in Werder upon Havel that is in a colder climatic zone? There is good indication that the British stopped growing wine not because of the declining climate but simply because they could get finally get better wine due to improved trade relations with the continent.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Unlike the Global Warming Fanatics, I don't claim to be able to explain everything. You may be right about why the English stopped growing grapes, or there may be other reasons. I've heard that there are laments in chronicles of the era that they're unable to grow grapes or make wine any longer, but I can't cite them because I've never seen them for myself. If you prefer to dismiss this because it's "just hearsay," I shan't argue.
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Like I said, you don't know the effects of the close system. I just pointed to where removing all our emissions would acually cause an increase in heat build up. It's not as simply as saying quit putting that shit into the air. There is already shit in the air and if we stop pushing particulate matter in, we are going to change the climate even more and most likely for the worse.
We will take your toxic gas buildup argument and work from there. Let's say the gas buildup is 30 times normal. Now we can forget that normal will always be an arbitrary number and just focus on the so called normal. If 30 times the normal has 30 times the effect, and the effect is hampered by half because particulate matter is blocking the sunlight in the first place, then we are only realizing the effects of half or 15 times normal. If we stop emitting the particulate matter, we will effectivly have doubled the gas effects causing twice the amount of warming or more.
Look at it this way, you have a river that goes through a town. Every year it floods the town and someone ended up building a dam upstream to control the flooding. The dam holds back the bulk of the water and releases it in a controlled output when the weather is good so the town doesn't flood. But now the river has more water in it year round then it normally should. People realize this after a few years when it starts washing the bases for the bridges away and they have to rebuild them. Someone notices that there is a damn upstream that stops the town from being flooded and having to rebuild everything instead of just the bridges. Now, you seem to be the person who says Tear Down the Dam. It isn't natural and the river flow should be this arbitrary number despite that society has adapted to the other flow and built around it. So without ever looking at the volume of water on the other side, you decide to dynamite the dam which releases 200000 times the water that the river has ever seen and wipes out the entire town and every town down stream for 200 miles. Your dead too but died knowing "it's natural now".
You need to know what your actions will do before you do them. If this was simply you driving your car on a deserted road with no one else around, I couldn't give a fuck. But your essentially demanding the damn be torn down not understanding what it's doing or what is behind it. You are wanting to put everyone Else's life at risk because you have fallen into some blind following of irrational thinking. You need to understand what will happen before action.
1. They aren't being increased by every boiling pot in America, or every breathing child, or every AC unit in America?
Since most ACs in the US are used to cool - they actually condense water vapor.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Since when did we stop talking about Global Climate Change and care only about US Climate Change?
From your source: "The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought)..."
All 10 of the hottest global temperature years have been since 1997, despite that correction.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
Unlike the Global Warming Fanatics, I don't claim to be able to explain everything.
Yeah, only such things as that the "the Hockey Stick Graph" is obviously wrong because the British "could not" grow grapes any more.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Is any of this based on fact or research or is it simply just guesswork?
One thing that stood out to me was this:
"Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel)."
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance? but even without that kind of water supply, in the America's plants like cacti provide a good supply of water to keep you hydrated. Having butchered many myself I can assure you that sucking the liquids out of them is fairly easy, much like any fruit such as a kiwi only they're much more efficient at storing it than most other plants. Saguaro (Carnegia gigantea) in Arizona/California for example at their hydrated peak consist of around 90% water and can soak up 200 gallons. The other 10% consists of woody stems, the skin and spines. Many cacti can survive over 2 years without a drop of additional water than that already stored in them and if you chop them they'll callous over quickly. Effectively what this means is if you chopped down a large cactus, you could suck or extract a lot of liquid from it, let it callous over and it would effectively act as a self-sealing water storage device. Many desert areas that are human inhabited in the rest of the world where cacti don't grow (at least natively) have similar plants, commonly Euphorbia. Areas that aren't desert like wont have much of an issue with water supply anyway!
I see little reason why rural populations couldn't survive in almost their entirety. The biggest issue would be the urbanites that did escape and if they overwhelmed the rural populations, but in general they wouldn't necessarily lead to a decline in the rural population, if anything an increase unless they started getting reckless and killing each other for resources. It'd almost certainly be more likely the cause of human actions that would lead to mass deaths in the rural areas if anything than it would people unable to find what they need to survive there.
Taking into account humans killing each other due to scarcity of resources this happens all the time and has since man figured out how to kill each other wouldn't have much effect on long term rural populations as when they'd killed enough of each other, resources would no longer be so scarce they'd be worth fighting over.
I'm not really sure why you make the assumption that if people's water pumps failed that they'd be wholly unable to gather water themselves from a stream, from rainfall, from plants, from a well?
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature
No, the real problem is that "global temperature" isn't a meaningful thermodynamic quantity. Global atmospheric heat content is, but no one has a clue what that is because we need to know both temperature and humidity (ie, both wet and dry bulb temperatures) to determine it.
However, global ocean heat content appears to be measurable, and appears to be rising.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
ALL of the data we have suggest that the earth will shift if we continue to emit carbon because the earth's systems will react.
I think it is an overstatement to say that ALL the data we have support this. We see here on /. regular announcements of climate scientists who are flabbergasted by some new datum, generally spun as "things are getting worse even faster than we thought!" as if the climate can full described by a single parameter, "worseness".
A more nuanced consideration of the same phenomenon might suggest that it reveals how little we understand about the climate, and how unsure we are in interpreting the evidence. If we weren't so lousy at interpreting the evidence, climate scientists wouldn't be surprised with such clockwork regularity.
And while it is true that there is very little evidence that cannot be interpreted as supporting the utterly uncontroversial hypothesis "the climate is changing, same as it always has", distinguishing natural from anthropogenic change is more challenging, and nominal matches between spotty data and unphysical models does not really constitute very significant support.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Not necessarily. The heat content of the atmosphere may rise, assuming there are absolutely no non-linear feedbacks involved (hint: there are plenty.) But even if the heat content rises, the temperature may fall due to changes in global humidity, so it is far from obvious that the temperature will rise.
There just isn't a slam-dunk case that is quantitatively convincing: even if it were the case that the whole system was linear (which it isn't, even approximately) it is not necessarily the case that the amount of CO2 we are dumping will raise the heat content of the atmosphere by a significant degree. The computer models that purport to demonstrate this are unphysical, and therefore can't be taken as anything like "proof". They barely pass muster as plausibility arguments.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I'd like to point out that during the Revolutionary War, it was possible to drag cannon across the Hudson River in Winter, because it was frozen solid. By 1830, that would have been impossible, and by about 1850, it had stopped freezing over. This shows (qualitatively, not quantitatively) that the climate was getting warmer before 1900, when the Hockey Stick starts climbing. If you go through the historical record of the era, you'll see numerous other examples, all of them inconsistent with the flat line of the graph. Face it: the graph simply doesn't represent history accurately, and if it doesn't, why should I expect it to predict the future?
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The earth has been hotter and colder since humans have been around and it still suited us.
It appears that your only looking at the extremes. No one has said the earth is going back to the time of dinosaurs, at least not for hundreds if not thousands of years from now. Don't mistake looking for the right ways to react as not reacting at all.
but in the case of climate modeling, just as with gravity, we don't even have a useful model.
In the last 15 years, climate models predicted drought, then more rain, then rain in some places drought in others. stronger hurricanes, same but more hurricanes....in short, climate modeling is a useless money sewer promoted by people seeking to justify their existence, that only a complete idiot would use to make policy. We can't model earth's climate, the system is too complex.
You cannot control burn all the forest areas of the state. The fires started in the area east of Kilmore that has a fairly high population density making controlled burning of minor use. The Kinglake ranges also had a high population density so controlled burning would have had only minor impact. The firebreaks were useless. Controlled burning would have been effective around Marysville. Where I will agree with you is that that fires will become more common and the state must have some serious work done on reducing their ferocity. And that includes bigger firebreaks and more controlled burning. I however stick to my first point, on Black Saturday the fires would have occurred anyway.
Your post ignores:
1. Science
Your post ignores:
1. A valid counter-argument
The fires are still burning, indeed today is rated as bad as "Black Saturday". "After the firestorm" is still some time off. As of yesterday, there were 120 separate fires, 4 of which are major fires. The combined fire front is around 1000km.
CO2 isn't crap. It's the stuff that all life is dependent on.
All of this sounds really clever and all, but where are your sources? It's all fine and dandy that you have these facts, but just like all the other nuts, if you can't prove it you are just adding fuel to the flames (bad pun, I know).
Top Jap Scientists: Warming Not Caused By Human Activity
Yes I know, it's what's called an original source.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Considering the stakes, do you worship jesus, allah, budda along with all the other deities out there?
I presume you don't, and thus your arguement is flawed.
Having a 'really bad possible outcome' is meaningless without having some idea of the chance of it happening.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
There just isn't a slam-dunk case that is quantitatively convincing
Replying to myself: the closest thing to a slam-dunk case is ocean heat content. See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/ for a discussion of recent work.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
This is plain wrong. The fire index for 1939 fires was 100, for these fires the index was 200+, a figure never imagined before it occoured.
Hiow do you backburn 20 MILIION hectares?
You dont.
Not so fast. There may be another path of investigation. Eucalyptus trees produce Eucalyptus oil in the leaves. This, on a hot day produces the blue haze after which the NSW 'Blue Mountains' are named. The oil is highly flamable. In a mix of air, the vapor would be similar to a fuel-air explosive device. This would explain the reports of the fire sounding like a thousand trains. In http://www.anbg.gov.au/callistemon/index.html: "Fire also stimulates the opening of the fruits in some bottlebrushes. " There may be other plants which benefit from a 'pruning'. Evolution has some surprises. My condolences to all who lost loved ones in these fires.
www.discussglobalwarming.com/blog says, no it is NOT. Global warming is a hoax.
Nope, the plot you linked to is not what I'm talking about, as you can see from the averaged curve it averages over much shorter periods. I mentioned 30 years (ca. 3 solar cycles) to see some sort of cumulative effect. The correlation is much stronger, and nicely shows the warming trend of the later part of the last century.
It seems the warming has essentially stopped the last 10 years, which is also consistent with a sun that is becoming less active. We'll definitely know in a few years because it looks like the sun is going into a very low activity cycle, and if that's as important as I think it is, we'll start to get more cooling years (like the last one).
I see no such assertion. So where is that assertion of many=most that you claim I made?
Most is a larger claim than many. It's perfectly normal to show the larger claim in order to show the smaller.
I wasn't saying the poster claimed "most" were in Australia, I was claiming that "most" are in Australia due to naming (they would be called wildfires elsewhere and hence not be in that list) and hence it's not surprising at all that many of them have been in Australia.
If "most" of something has property X, then any idiot can see that "many" of that thing will have property X. So what exactly are you trying to point out to those of us without a strong grasp of the language?
I'd like to point out that during the Revolutionary War, it was possible to drag cannon across the Hudson River in Winter, because it was frozen solid. By 1830, that would have been impossible, and by about 1850, it had stopped freezing over. This shows (qualitatively, not quantitatively) that the climate was getting warmer before 1900, when the Hockey Stick starts climbing. If you go through the historical record of the era, you'll see numerous other examples, all of them inconsistent with the flat line of the graph. Face it: the graph simply doesn't represent history accurately, and if it doesn't, why should I expect it to predict the future?
So apart from the fact that "the Hockey Stick" starts climbing in 1700 - the difference between "local" and "global" doesn't just apply to the present. But please don't let facts get in the way of your argument.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Hello David.
There has been more fuel than this built up before, but never fires this intense. Why is that? It can't have something to do with record temeratures for several days leading to an unusually strong wind change, could it?
No we didn't. We had similar destruction caused by fire, but then we weren't using skycranes in those fires. We didn't have a week of 40 plus degree days leading up to fires, combined with such a strong wind change. Yes, that cool change was what set off the fire storm.
That's the thing about global temperature rising, some areas get hotter, some areas get colder and there's a crapload more turbulence between. Thus the devestating wind change that nearly blew me off my feet that Saturday.
Oh, now you're just being stupid. Trees in this part of the world are actually well adapted to high temperatures an arid conditions. It will take a bit more to kill them all. In fact there is some research that in the short term, higher CO2 levels encourage growth, so climate change potentially leads to more fuel.
Check your facts before posting shit like this. read TFA.
This is true. Climate change does have everything to do with the extreme weather conditions that lead to the fire. You haven't provided a single argument to counter this, and you have in fact made yourself look incredibly ignorant on the subject.
I don't therefore I'm not.
You're forgetting that some of the louder proponents of 'big chang' to address global warming envision ideological side-benefits for those changes.
David Packham is not out foremost expert. He is an "Old School" fire researcher who believes that fuel reduction is the only solution bushfires. His view has been successfully refuted by Guy Rundle's piece in Crikey.
To Summarize Rundle's argument (copied from a comment to this article):
*The pros and cons of burning off are heavily debated among bushfire specialists.
Forest fuel levels have no effect on fire speed, which was the main killer in these fires.
*Dryness is a contributor to fire speeds.
*Forestry activities may promote dryness by thinning forest canopies.
*Climate change may be a factor, and if it is, a different set of strategies will need to be employed than if it isn't, so it's worth debating.
*Fires of the "Black Saturday" intensity burn through burnt-off bush because they move at crown and canopy level
*The burn off levels advocated by green groups, are of the same order as those advocated by those bushfire experts who believe that higher burn-off levels increase risk of fire without giving consequent benefit.
*Burn-off levels do not play a role in urban green votes, and they never have.
End Quote.
By the way one of the most prominent enviromentalist has stated that "Greenies" support fuel reduction burning to the full extent that forest scientists recommend.
My reading is fire that happened was due to the horrible conditions of the day. Any fire that existed on that day would have become a uncontrollable monster. My families farm was damaged by the Grass fire that swept through their area. Thankfully it was on the edge of the fire and the neighbours had a water truck and came over at night to save the buildings when a spot fire after the main front threatened the buildings (no one was at the property that night day. The person that was there left to defend his home further up the valley).
Spending a weekend repairing irrigation lines in the vineyard was eased by the car loads of people that turned up in town at the relief centre and asked to help out.
The sad thing is then I read this self serving hate-mongering drivel in the media that is trying to turn this event into another chapter in the culture wars. The best description I have found is also on Crikey by Ben Sandilands:
Tree huggers, "greenies", climate change deniers, climate change zealots, BMW drivers, horse owners, and the viciously intolerant like Danny Nalliah -- who claimed it was God's punishment of Victoria for supporting abortion -- or Miranda Devine's advocacy of blaming and hanging "greenies", are all fuelling a conflagration of indignation, entitlement, prejudice and hate.
Some of the stories, about people being fined for tree clearing that protected their homes (only 257 trees) flirt with agendas supporting the clear felling of more land for farming.
Others, like this morning's opportunistic call by the National Association of Forest Industries for an urgent bushfire summit lead-off with the big lie that "the current process of locking forests up in conservation reserves and national parks with no on-going fire management regime has proven to be fatally wrong."
End Quote.
This disaster has brought both the best and worst of people.
Climate change will not destroy the planet, in fact all environmental change generated by humanity will not destroy the planet. The logical target of all environmental protections is not to preserve the planet but to preserve the conditions under which we evolved. The further those conditions change from what our bodies have adapted to the more problematic and difficult our survival becomes. The more new chemicals we introduce into the environment that we have not evolved protections against the more we will suffer.
Climate change has it greatest impact not directly upon people but upon the infrastructure of society. So destroyed coastal cities, rural economies disrupted due to climatic shifts and, of course unpredictable weather extremes, will all cause significant disruption to society. People of course being the short haired, cranky, rock throwing monkeys that they are will not react well to those disruptions and start killing each other (not that they need much excuse to do that) passing around the blame and the violence for the damage done to the environment.
The planet and all life on it will continue to grow and evolve long after the minor dip of humanity in life value of the planet has disappeared. Meanwhile the minority rich and greedy will continue to exploit the planet at the expense of future generations, with a complete lack of feeling, remorse or any guilt, why, because they are hard wired that way, they really do lack any shared measure of empathy for the harm and suffering they cause. It is really amazing that such a mentally ill minority in fact just minor percentage points can lead the rest of human society down such a destructive path, literally thousands killing hundreds of millions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Actually, if you'll look at this image of the graph, you'll see that it climbs between about 1750 and 1800, drops again, then starts its dramatic rise somewhere around 1900. If it were as accurate as you claim, the Hudson probably wouldn't have frozen over enough to allow people to walk on it, let alone drag cannon across. But please don't let facts get in the way of your argument.
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I however stick to my first point, on Black Saturday the fires would have occurred anyway.
This is part of the problem. We shouldn't be attempting to stop fires in bad weather conditions from starting. We don't have enough control over ignition conditions. Instead we should be reducing the intensity and extent of those fires. Firebreaks and controlled burns don't eliminate the fires, they keep them from getting bad as they did. They would slow down the growth and the reach of the fire which in turn would reduce how harmful the fire ended up being.
I live in Sydney, most of my family lives in Melbourne. Let's say that in a completely green society I wish to visit said family.
Currently there are no green alternatives for powering a commercial jet... can't fly.
The electric car with the longest range goes less than 400km - so I'll need to stop and recharge for 3hrs twice on my journey. The trip time becomes 18hrs... that's puts it firmly in the realm of a two day road trip. No longer can I just pop down and visit over a long weekend, let alone just a normal weekend.
And this will seriously isolate Perth and Darwin, both of which have have gaps of > 500km between towns no matter which way you take trying to get there. It's a little more than inconvenient.
I'm all for moving to renewable energy sources; but let's not rush into something we're not ready for.
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
It's trivial to change the size of the smoothing window in the code, so I played around with sizes in the range you suggest, but to no avail. The correlation you claim just isn't there.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
"How would driving smaller cars and using energy more efficiently cause people to starve?"
Energy is fixed, populations and usage are not. Right now, it depends on what you mean by "more efficiently." As it stands now, effiency increases dependency on a false system of subsidies and decreasing supply of polluting energy sources.
Conservation in this case is simply a stopgap, not a solution. Any energy conserved is simply sold elsewhere at the same or lower price due to your action of conservation. iow, when you have an oil or coal addiction, with increases in efficiency, all you are doing is spreading the addiction to more people, i.e. enables a growing population more readily or more goods produced consuming that exhaustible and polluting and CO2 puffing energy. *You* may be reducing CO2, but the overall CO2 emitted is still going up because the per capita energy consumption continues to rise.
(This is also why residential rooftop solar power is spotty for CO2 reductions; most energy production is done using plants that run at a fixed or near fixed speed, i.e. coal fired powerhouses. You have to wide adoption, in a concentrated area (not diffuse) which is generally not present in any industrialized nation, even those with more aggressive plans and implementations, because to make an impact you have to reduce the number of coal plants or expansion of current plants to make a difference. Even natural gas powerplants tend to spool up regardless. Conversely, this is also why "green islands" work, since there is a fixed concentration of energy to a known population.)
Conservation only works if absolutely mandated, and why conservation will fail us; human beings are horrible self-regulators, requiring government regulation, and government is horribly inefficient at providing food for the masses for extended periods of time.
Taken further, this is also why Obama's adoption of the green energy stuff may or may not work. If he relies on conservation in any part of the system for significant reduction that is not cost effective, we're screwed. If conservation is only temporary or with fixed goals in the plan, and the energy is moved from coal and oil to solar and wind (wind mainly) and nuclear, it'll work.
All in all, conservation sucks. The most backward, energy inefficient non-conserving populations are the lowest CO2 emitters overall and on a per capita basis. In an industrialized society, any 20% increase in efficiency or conservation is going to correlate with an economic boom, which correlates with more people, which will consume that energy AND more mouths to feed that at present levels. You make your home tighter and use less fuel oil this winter? Good. *You* saved money. However, on an energy level, you just made diesel fuel cheaper for someone else who decided implement some expansion strategy or buy a ticket on an airplane due to your efforts.
Here is a picture of the smoke and the cloud formations it formed. http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewkneebone/3261316889/ and here http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewkneebone/3261313629/
"During the Cuban Missile Crisis they hypothesized that if one country launched an nuke, we'd all launch them and it would be the end for us all."
Uhh, so? People hypothesized that sonic booms would kill mass amounts of people and disrupt lives. Turned out to be false, but that still didn't stop protests against trans-Atlantic flights of the Concord and utterly stopped intra continental supersonic travel for the masses, still.
"Carbon traps heat that would otherwise escape the atmosphere. Falsifiable: yes. True: yes."
So? So does methane. Methane lasts longer in the atmosphere. And in equivalency to carbon dioxide, contributes more to global warming.
And define what you mean by carbon. Are you saying that short for carbon dioxide? Because there is flat out plain carbon in the air, and carbon is a very well known heat absorber. I'm not sure what you are referring to, I'm guessing it's the new fangled "carbon credits" crap (sad when the scientists can't get the damn language right on what they are crediting or the problem they are trying to fix) lingo you are trying to use. Annoying stupid self-limiting terminology serves no one except those trying to sound good for personal advancement instead of advancing the ideas they are supposed to be championing.
"Humanity is emitting carbon back into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered. Falsifiable: yes. True: yes."
Same with methane, which now leaks out during distribution. Methane was burned, not shipped, in the past. Now it's collected. Methane is also being produced in farming, with lagoons of animal shit left to rot and convert to methane instead of being used as fertilizer. Instead of incinerating trash and recyling, we dump our stuff into landfills, which release huge amounts of methane.
Methane is a major greenhouse gas AND it lasts longer in the atmosphere AND is more destructive as a greenhouse gas on a molecule to molecule basis.
"The sum of the earth's other climate mechanisms is unable to adequately balance out our carbon emissions and prevent climate change from occurring. Falsifiable: yes (in more granular pieces). True: probably. This is where science is currently working. ALL of the data we have suggest that the earth will shift if we continue to emit carbon because the earth's systems will react. However, science hasn't given up on this yet and numerous studies are released every year on this subject attempting to falsify pieces of this (suggesting that this part or that part might take up the slack, etc)."
So the one thing you think you know, talking about carbon, you don't know for sure. You also don't know why in the early 1990s, certain people were sure cities would be entirely fubar'd by 2005. Didn't happen. Oops. Oh, right, you'll say "yet" somewhere in there because we are supposed to fear. And since then, we've done things worse than those models predicted, such as destroying huge swaths of wetlands and rain forest acreage and had massive forest burns beyond near anything seen or predicted--these were huge carbon dioxide sinks.
Anyways, my point isn't so much as to say you are absolutely wrong. It could be carbon dioxide. And CO2 likely plays a significant role.
But your analysis, pretending to be a scientist, or an explainer of your scientific opinion, began on a false presumption and focus on one particular molecule as if it's THE one and only greenhouse gas, when you and I know that isn't true. So why start your analysis with a clear omission?
It's because you don't really know, but you want us to fear while you pretend to figure it out, maybe.
Smell that? The politics of fear, anew. Ain't it smelling all sweet and fresh now.
Let's see.
He said: Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia.
Note the use of "many".
You responded with: No way. A term that isn't used outside of Australia (OK in a few little islands too) occurs mostly in Australia!Note the use of the word "mostly".
So, he said "many", and you contradicted him using "mostly".
While it is true that the phrase bushfire may be only in use in Australia, the use in the OP's post was largely irrelevant to that, and your comment hinted that you believed that the KEY to his entire post was the use of the word "bushfire".
Of course, he didn't actually say that "most" bushfires were in Australia, so explaining to him that the word was only used there was pretty much irrelevant to his argument ("It's a BEAUTIFUL day", "No, you're wrong, the grass is green").
BLOCKQUOTE>Most is a larger claim than many. It's perfectly normal to show the larger claim in order to show the smaller.
Umm, no. It's not. Two of three is "most". Two is NOT "many". See how that works? They are not necessarily a subset of the other.
Two of three is "a few", but it's also "most".
Two hundred of five hundred is "many", but not "most".
Note that something can be "most" without being "many", and can be "many" without being "most".
Which all reduces to: you shouldn't inflate his claims by using a larger term than he uses. That's not good argument technique (well, it's not if the other fellow is paying attention. It's used quite a lot, and quite a lot of people rather foolishly find themselves believing "most" is what's being talked about when they started out discussing "many").
On a final note, I have a toothache, and I have a catscan tomorrow to determine the progress of my cancer, and I'm generally in a nitpicking grouchy mood.
For which I apologize.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sorry to burst your balloon, but it seems that global ocean temperatures are actually falling, not rising. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
Shit happens and it's usually caused by assholes
While it is unlikely tat many would starve, anytime time there are additional taxes or regulation imposed on energy sources there is an increase in the total energy price. Those that are unable to afford either the increased energy cost or the more efficient technology will have their standard of living reduced.
That's actually exactly the opposite of a falsifiable hypothesis.
We weren't talking about any of those cases.
The only reason "many" is not "most" in your example of three things is that the word "many" doesn't apply. I was talking about an actual concrete case, not in general. Clearly if the word many doesn't apply at all to some set then any claims using that word don't make sense.
I didn't claim that something which is "many" must be "most" - I claimed that something which is "most" is also "many". I was trying to speak English, not mathematics - I wasn't referring to generic subsets but to a given subset "bushfires in australia" of the set "bushfires". Though even if you do try and pretend I was being more formal than I was:
"""
If "most" of something has property X, then any idiot can see that "many" of that thing will have property X.
"""
in other words,
If there is a subset A of the set S, such that MOST(A) is true, then MANY(A) is also true.
That doesn't make any claims about the existence of other subsets which also satisfy MANY(), so your "can be "many" without being "most"." statement is irrelevant.
Your "something can be "most" without being "many"" is irrelevant also because we are talking about and actual list on wikipedia, that the term "many" does apply to.
So what is your point?
The Op claimed "many bushfires are in Australia", I gave a reason why "most bushfires are in Australia". I still fail to see how that reason could no apply to the "many" case. I strengthened my claim, but the original claim is completely encompassed by it.
Seriously, you never do that? You always show only the exact thing at hand? When you kid asks "why are the leaves on that tree green?" you only ever answer about that exact tree, without mentioning that most trees have green leaves for that reason?
Let me repeat myself, just for fun:
The OP made a comment as if there was some strange reason why many of the bushfires in a list were in Australia. I pointed out that that's because it's an Australian specific term so most of them will be. I could have used the word many, it would be a weaker claim - but why I stated many because I had a quick glance and obviously many of them were.
I should have said "all", which is what I originally though, but I didn't want check the list for some odd case (I just did now, and yes all of them are from Australia). Luckily I didn't, I'd hate to imagine what that would have triggered in your nitpicking.
By the way I nitpick, but this is a stupid one. I wasn't expanding his claim. I was making a larger one which would include the smaller one. I wasn't expansing his claim in order to disprove the larger case, because I wasn't disproving. I was agreeing! He said "many" were in Australia. I said "most" where, obviously agreeing. In fact "all" where.
If I was disagreeing you would have point. If I has said "you fool, most are in New Zealand" then I would be making a fallacious argument. But I didn't. I made the stronger claim because it was obviously true, and I didn't want to say "all" and then see I didn't see one item in the list.
I also happen to agree with the OP, bushfires are not new in Australia, and neither is drought.
The fact is that the hottest 10yrs on record have all occured in the last 12yrs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Huh? Trees survive drought pretty well, and Eucalypts at least seem to enjoy high temperatures. Why should they get killed off by hotter, drier summers?
Your point about fuel load is spot on though.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Look here, I'm not saying the planet is not somewhat warmer today than it was a century ago. I'm just saying that I doubt that CO2 is the cause of that because even in these last 100 years there is not a good correlation between CO2 and temperature.
If you're interested in some of the deeper thinkers that think the sun is the more important player in climate, have a look at Nir Shaviv and especially On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget
How many times do you have to be told?
Oh, BTW, mind looking at the blue curve, not the 50 year avareged black one?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Er, what? CSIRO doesn't just make this shit up you know.
Fuel load is one factor. Another factor is the number of days when it's really hot and really windy, and it's this latter that's projected to increase. The Aussies would need to cut the fuel load to keep the risk of significant bush fires the same, assuming the trend of increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall continues.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
You have a good point about the usefulness of climate models, but some models, even with their large uncertainties, point to possibility of disaster - the measures required to deal with problem, if it is even a problem, are actually good sense from any reasonable point of view about resources in general. The measures involve being responsible for our resource use, as in what we use we somehow balance back if we can.
Even if we are only guessing about the when and the how, the logic of the balance of resources will get us in the end if we don't act responsibly.
NAS testimony, Mann's post.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Your post ignores:
1. Science
No. His narcberry's post excludes popular, forced-concensus, post-modernist science.
According to science though, CO2 does have another use and I'll name it. Plant food.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Don't fall for the trap of trying to "explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars", and treat it as a valid question/argument. It's bogus, and the moment anyone sprouts it, it should send alarm bells that they're simply trying to muddy the waters and have no interest in science at all.
On the one hand, a common claim is that we don't understand enough about what's going on with the science, so we can't make conclusions that man is creating global warming.
But in the same breath, a sceptic will also say that it's perfectly acceptable to point to the weather systems of Mars and other planets - planets we don't live on, haven't been studying for the same length of time as earth, and that we hardly know anything about their weather patterns in comparison - as evidence that the Sun is behind it all.
Hell, we've only just confirmed there's water on Mars, but if Mars is warming it's an indicator that man's influence on global warming is bogus!
Got to love their determination.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Isn't the argument "lets err on the side of caution" just another way of saying "I cant prove it, lets do it my way anyway"?
[...] we continue to blindly provide an input (carbon) into an extremely dangerous system (climate). All of the knowledge we have says that there is an extremely high probability that doing so will result in extreme shifts and war, famine, drought, etc
Your language is the Environmentalist equivalent of the Christian Armageddon. What is obvious about your statement is the irrational fear you convey to try and scare people into agreeing with your point of view.
Mine is Good
The climb and drop were on the blue curve, not the black one, as you'd see if you bothered to look at the image for yourself. (I ignored the average, because the year-to-year results were what was important.) And, I'm giving you local anecdotes because those are the ones I happen to know about. They used to have Ice Fairs on the Thames in that era, but it doesn't freeze either and hasn't since the mid-19th century. I'm sure if I looked around, I could find similar cases from many other places.
During the Little Ice Age, French farmers expected to get two measures of grain back for each one planted; if they got a third, it was "a gift from God." They didn't even know that Roman farmers got over a dozen back for each one planted. How much of that was better farming and how much a longer, warmer growing season? I don't know, but I'd bet that the climate change had the larger effect.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I've talked about this whole concept in depth with various people. Being a good gun owning American, I do agree. There are variables to this though. Who is better at long range accurate shooting and ammunition conservation?
1) A thug from a metro area, has killed several people in drug/gang violence, but hasn't yet been caught.
2) A mafia "enforcer".
3) A good ol' country hick, who is 3rd generation on his families 100 acre farm.
All good sterotypes implied.
While I'd like #1 or #2 on my side for any sort of urban combat, when you get out into rural farmland, #3 is likely to be the clear winner. Most city dwellers didn't grow up shooting squirrels in their back yards. Many may not have even tried to move around silently in the woods. Most have no practice with hunting, tracking, and/or trapping. They can find their target in the city through social connections, and adjust their standard of living dramatically (think bloody and painful).
There's always dumb luck too, so the result can't be guaranteed. I would be #4 on the list, and unless I have a personal interest in any side, since we'd all be fighting over the same resources, I'd stay out of their way until they were done.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
This is a wonderful argument. Don't worry, you aren't the first one to say it to me, but you are the first on this thread.
Brute force and work animals, of course. Hand operated machines. Even people dragging small plows by hand. But.... Say tonight is the end, and tomorrow we wake up to by previously described scenario. Where would you find a mule, a horse, a hand powered water pump.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance?
Would you drink from the Hudson river? I happen to be in a rather wet area. The largest nearby river is not safe to drink or swim in due to bacteria. Many retention ponds (natural and man made) exist in the area, but those are questionably safe to drink.
Waste water is a bigger concern. It may not be in the first few days, but how long would it be without having running water and working sewage systems, that human waste contamination rendered those local supplies contaminated?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
I like that idea. "Given a choice." You know on day #1, given an empty piece of land, a fistful of seeds, and a hoe, all you have is that. It takes months for crops to grow. I don't know about you, but us humans will die if we don't eat in months.
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
When you go to the grocery store again, look carefully at the boxes or labels in the fresh produce area. You'll find many or most are imported. Then start checking the frozen produce. The more you look, the more you'll find that most of your food doesn't come from anywhere near you.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
On the 364 days of the year when you just go to work or the supermarket, an electric vehicle would be fine, even in Australia. As for your family across the country, if you take the 7:45 train from Sydney you are in Melbourne at 18:55. In the meantime you can read a book, or look out the window, or whatever you want to do.
I agree that it is a challenge to discern the science from the political shitstorm surrounding it. That doesn't mean there isn't valid science in there, somewhere. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
What good is more "plant food?" Plants don't need more CO2 than was present in the atmosphere, pre-industrial revolution. Humans don't need as much food as we grow today either... we are now seeing a whole host of health problems that originate in overnutrition rather than undernutrition.
Roughly half the nitrate "plant food" in the world today is derived from fossil fuels. Production of chemical fertilizer consumes about 1% of the energy we produce. And, of course, the stuff is toxic once it inevitably washes down the Mississippi and creates a huge dead zone in the Gulf, for example.
More isn't always better. There is such a thing as "too much."
I'll make it easy for you. They have not been dropping.
Try considering world temperatures instead of just your local region.
Here in Australia, the past couple years have been hotter than ever; and we recently had the longest hottest heatwave on record.
If climate change, nee global warming, has caused the extreme temperatures experience in Victoria, please explain why, on February 6, 1851, temperatures reached 117 deg Fahrenheit at noon. You can bet it reached 120F by 2:00pm. The whole state appeared to be burning. In fact, people in Tasmania could see the great pall of smoke and some thought the end of the world had come. It has also been suggested that the years of drought are NOT caused by the Southern Oscillation Index but the Indian Ocean Dipole, which has not been associated with global warming. The DSE and the councils in Victoria have been infiltrated by greenies and any suggestion that controlled burns have been common place are crap. One man cleared around his house to 100metres. The council only allows 20m. That man was fined $30,000 plus $20,00 costs. His was the only house in his area to survive. Don't try to link this with climate change, it just shows your desperation to make climate chane appear real. If there is to be any climate change, it will be another mini ice-age like the last lime that CO2 reached 400ppm.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) H.L. Menc
"Brute force and work animals, of course. Hand operated machines. Even people dragging small plows by hand. But.... Say tonight is the end, and tomorrow we wake up to by previously described scenario. Where would you find a mule, a horse, a hand powered water pump."
Well you don't need a mule and a horse because again we're talking about farming for ourselves, not a number of people, one person can do the work required to feed themselves and a few others without the need for additional equipment. A water pump is largely irrelevant too, you can work on that or just digging a well later, immediate water requirements are satisified by rain, plans, collected water and so on until you get to that point.
"Would you drink from the Hudson river? I happen to be in a rather wet area. The largest nearby river is not safe to drink or swim in due to bacteria. Many retention ponds (natural and man made) exist in the area, but those are questionably safe to drink."
So sterilise it, most people could produce fire to boil water if need be and if they want to be really sure could rig up something such as a cloth to collect the steam and filter it off. Simply boiling it is fine though for the most part.
"Waste water is a bigger concern. It may not be in the first few days, but how long would it be without having running water and working sewage systems, that human waste contamination rendered those local supplies contaminated?"
That's only an issue effecting urbanites which as mentioned I accept would run into these problems and die. In rural areas there is enough room to deal with waste. If you're worried about living beings crapping in your water supply then again, you can still just sterilise it.
"I like that idea. "Given a choice." You know on day #1, given an empty piece of land, a fistful of seeds, and a hoe, all you have is that. It takes months for crops to grow. I don't know about you, but us humans will die if we don't eat in months."
Who said anything about an empty piece of land? What about the millions of acres of farmland that already had food on but could no longer be collected due to lack of tractors etc.? I'm just talking about using existing farmland which already exists to feed far more than just local rural populations which would be fine to provide for quite a while.
"When you go to the grocery store again, look carefully at the boxes or labels in the fresh produce area. You'll find many or most are imported. Then start checking the frozen produce. The more you look, the more you'll find that most of your food doesn't come from anywhere near you."
It depends what you're talking about, things like milk, meat, wheat and so on certainly tend to. If you're after some Belgian chocolate or Jamaican bananas or something then yeah, you're going to be shit out of luck.
Back to my original question though was anything you said including any of the figures based on fact? Not knowing about sterilising water or pulling food and water from plants and so forth suggests at very least you don't have much knowledge of basic survival which most people do.
I'll just skip to your question.
I know how to do those things. I, by myself, or with a small group, could likely survive pretty well. But, I am 1. What about the rest of the millions. We would likely still run into serious problems. Sure, we may find farmland that has supplies for us, but others are going to find the same land. The owner may not be pleased with my group of a dozen or so taking up camp and eating his crops. If we established a camp, others will come and ask for (and then take) our supplies. There's no way that I could set up in a day for thousands... or tens of thousands.
In the county I'm in, there are an average of 1000 people per square mile. This area is a mix of urban and rural. You'd be amazed how far the smell of cooking food goes, especially when people are hungry. Dinner for a dozen can't sustain even 1000.
How do you suggest to deal with this?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I don't expect we could deal with this but I already covered that in my closing paragraph. The people already living in rural areas could be supported, additional people from the cities could be supported, but not everyone. Hence we'd almost certainly see fighting as we do elsewhere in the world but when enough humans would died and resources were no longer scarce, as mentioned, we'd still end up with the equivalent numbers of the rural population and then some more on top because that's what could be supported by the available resources.
Populations always tend to follow a model where you get peaks and troughs from different factors but where they ultimately end up in equilibrium positions when they have settled at a point that can be sustained unless something additional comes along to change that such as a further disaster.
Regarding survival, the thing there is it only takes one person in every 50 or a 100 or 1000 that knows how to survive for the others to learn too. Humans are amazingly adept at survival which is why we're so succesful as a species, sure modern life has nullified that somewhat, but not totally. I'd bet most people (apart from those who, without a better way to put it, would be selected against via natural selection - i.e. the morbidly unhealthy, the severely disabled) could survive better than you might imagine if they were dumped into this kind of disaster scenario.
Troll? lol - disagree with facts please.
it's in my head
Really, I hope if the day comes, you are right. If that day comes, I'll do my best to help as many people as I can. I can only hope there are enough people around that will do the same thing.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
6 billion people will never live long enough to clear cut all of the forests.
Umm... No, methane does NOT last longer in the atmosphere than CO2. It has an atmospheric half-life of about 7 years. And when it does oxidize in the atmosphere it becomes CO2 and H2O. CO2's atmospheric half-life is more on the order of hundreds of years.
Climate change models don't ignore the effects of water vapor at all. It's built right into them. There's a difference between water vapor and CO2.
H2O freezes at 0C and boils at 100C. That means excess water vapor in the atmosphere can condense and precipitate out. The level of water vapor in the atmosphere is dependent primarily on the temperature of the atmosphere and the availability of water to evaporate into it. It's been calculated that if you removed 100% of the water vapor from the atmosphere it would be nearly back to normal in 3 or 4 months.
CO2 freezes at -78.5C and can't be a liquid under less than 5+ atmospheres so it can't precipitate out of the atmosphere and remains a gas at normal pressures. (I wonder though if it ever gets cold enough at the poles for some CO2 to freeze out?)
So water vapor in the atmosphere is a significant amount of the over all greenhouse effect but it only changes in response to the temperature and local conditions. Increasing the temperature adds a little more water vapor which increases the temperature a bit more which adds a bit more water vapor and so on until it reaches a new equilibrium point. Water vapor by itself can't drive climate change but CO2 which doesn't precipitate out of the atmosphere can.
What's wrong with a train? It will get you there efficiently and more cheaply than driving.
I'd look at something real, like increasingly acidic ocean and damage it is causing, and act from that rather than any silly model
Yes, but without some model of the acidity levels, the data only serves knowledge of the past. Any projection forward is some kind of model. I think its fair to say that any model maybe silly if we could only act on a high degree of certainty.
If there is a possibility of large scale sufferring, I think we should forgo the luxury of a precise model,
the hardest part will be admitting to ourselves that to reduce the risk in the face of high uncertainty requires the will to act.
I have trouble coming to terms with it myself - I fear we are headed for many social collapses to coincide with a global resource crunch.
#3 is going to be cautious, probably quite skilled, and certainly familiar with the terrain - but #4 will have the advantage that he's coming from a formerly civilized area and thus should have better access to necessary tools. It should be a reasonably fair fight between them. Besides, we'd all get better a shooting pretty quickly.
It's not just Australia, on 8 Oct, 1871 firestorms raged across Wisconsin and Michigan, in the thumb of Michigan the fire was so hot there were reports that bake potatos could be dug out of the ground! 1,250,000 acres burned and 1,100 people died.
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Greenhouses don't work by inhibiting outgoing IR radiation, they work by inhibiting, air convection; when you use the term "greenhouse gas" you allow an intelligent layman to depreciate your premise with an middle-school level experiment.
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unless you subscribe to the Abiogenic petroleum origin which means we have no upper limit to how much CO2 we can put into the atmosphere.
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