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Climate Engineering As US Policy?
EricTheGreen writes "The Associated Press has an article featuring Obama administration science advisor John Holdren discussing potential climate engineering responses to global warming. Among the possible approaches? His own version of Operation Dark Storm — shooting micro-particulate pollution high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. I'm sure the rest of the world would have no issue with that at all, of course. Yikes ..."
...what the rest of the world says. Bush made it policy that the US acts unilaterally when the administration believes it is in our best interest.
As Obama has made clear with warrantless wiretapping, he intends to hold onto Bush's powers.
Let's test it on Venus first.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Nice way to conmemorate the 10th year since that movie... scorching the skies as Morpheus said, just that "the machines", this time, are just spambots.
What even makes them think that the U.S. has the right to tinker with the global climate. I'm an american citizen, not a U.S. hater, but we don't have the jurisdiction to make changes that will affect the global climate.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
This is not a reversal of climate change.
Reflecting more sun from the top of the atmosphere while increasing greenhouse gasses will place us in yet another unknown region of the earths dynamics.
It might work in controlling temperature - for some small part of the earth - if you get it right, but this is a multi variable system, people might not like your attempts to control temperature if rainfall patterns are altered, winds and currents change, and we get less sunlight to run solar and wind power and grow crops.
We already have one uncontrolled multi decade experiment running, lets start another. I'm quite certain there are no precedents that would indicate that rapidly constructed fixes to problems cause any more problems than the original one.
Jeesh, Obama doesn't work here anymore, you know that was years ago.
What do you mean the entire northern European Continent's former residents now want reparations now that their countries are under an ice sheet?
After all it was just a little dust, not even what a volcano produces.
It must have been the fault of the relative lack of Solar sun spots.
Oh, what? 100 million people are now claiming they "own" the U.S.? Ice reparations?
You'll destroy us just like, well, the Treaty of Versailles did to Germany a century ago...
I'll tell you what Nathan Lewis at Caltech says about ideas like this. I'm sure they are included in the talk/seminars he has on his webpage. The climate is a massive machine we don't fully understand that we need to live. Now you want to walk up and turn a fairly random knob really hard?
The real problem with any such approach, they argue, is
This religiosity in climate-change politics fascinates me - it's why I like the Michael Crichton essays/speeches on the topic even though he says "climate change is fake!" and it's pretty much Not Fake. More recently, I've seen stuff in that same Libertarian magazine comparing the current climate-change political scene to "denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. [It] is every bit as callous and irresponsible."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Unfortunately, there is nowhere near enough space to plant that many trees. Unless of course you'd like to stop a ton of farming in the central U.S....or I guess you could just force it on some third world country and then sit back and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from not personally causing global warming.
Isn't this kinda the same idea as what killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, just on a slightly smaller scale?
Solar along with thermal, will no doubt, be the future of our energy.
One can claim ownership of land and now, they, "the few" will attempt to own the light.
Quite honestly, I believe this is just a cycle change for our planet and people are over reacting.
Yes we see the results of global warming, but I am cautioned to see that maybe we are letting our fears get the better of us here.
Instead of inventing new ways to pollute our atmosphere with these particles, or attempts to "control" light, we should rather be cleaning up our existing mess.
I see yet again, the combination of media twisting fears, greed of money and desire for supreme control over the masses driving us to a new set of future conflicts.
Oh and lets not forget shear boredom as well. I am not impressed.
I dunno about you guys, but the idea of a bunch of "scientists" directly messing with the climate scares the hell out of me. I'm envisioning a climate equivalent of "The Happening" or "I Am Legend".
This is postponing the problem until some future generation has to fix not only the original problem, but also the problem created by this "fix".
I'd hate to be alive for that, and I have a feeling I will be. We're suckers.
The article didn't mention of any space based proposals. I've seen a group argue for a large "solar umbrella" to be placed at the Earth-Sun L1 lagrange point. While the L1 point is unstable, it is possible to make a craft that can stably orbit the L1 point. Just a relatively small umbrella (1-5 miles across) would be enough to block 10% of the incoming solar energy. It'd be expensive, but its doable. I wish I had a link.
A similar group came up with a results to show that 2% of incoming solar energy can be blocked with a *lot* of tiny umbrellas that might fit in a single large rocket (delta IV heavy): http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technovel_sunshade_061111.html
We'll do the next best thing. Block it out.
Will you guys put away the heavy words? The wonk was talking possibilities. How much does climate change get fixed by hyper-cynicism? Perhaps the effort on real solution consideration is beyond your capabilities.
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
Most of these Dire Global Warming predictions are based on computer models which are known to be flawed.
Any measure taken to counteract perceived Global Warming must be reversible if found ineffective (or worse, a hindrance). Injecting more particulate pollution into the atmosphere to counteract Global Warming doesn't sound to me like an easily reversible thing. Far safer and easier to do, me thinks, to park a large asteroid in synchronous orbit between the Earth and Sun to occlude solar radiation. If it's "too effective" then it can be (comparatively) easily moved or removed, if it's "not enough" then more can be gathered.
... I'm a climate engineer!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
250,851,833 cars in the US
2,428,202,240 acres in the US(less 6% water)
Your right, theres nowhere near enough space to plant 250 million acres of tree's.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Evidently, the amount of Greenhouse pollution spewed by the average new car these days is the same as the amount of CO2 that a half-acre of trees sucks up into growth.
If every new car sold came with a certificate that an acre of trees was planted and maintained somewhere, cars would be responsible for slowing and then reversing the Greenhouse.
Getting the trees to grow back seems a lot safer and less stupid than continuing to pretend we can mess with the complex and sensitive atmosphere like we know what we're doing, which is what got us into this mess.
And about every 10-20 years we could cut down the trees and build something with them as an added bonus.
And no, I'm not trying to be funny. Young, growing trees "suck up" more CO2 than mature trees. Cutting them down and planting new ones actually makes them more useful as air filters. This is why I think it's so sad when tree hugging protesters protest outfits that plant a new tree for every tree they cut down and only cut the mature trees to thin a forest out (as opposed to clear cutting it).
Now, the only problem I see with your plan is that we make a lot more cars than we have acres. Eventually, all of the US will be covered in trees especially when you consider that trees last much longer than cars. A ten year old car is ready for the heap whereas a ten year old tree is just getting started.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
As we are in 2009, which is less than half way to 2030, let be generous and say there are 900 million cars on the road today.
This means we need to plant trees on 1.8 billion acres.
Considering that the Sahara Desert is over 2 billion acres, I think we have plenty of space. and as the Sahara is not too densely populated, it won't affect too many people, and will actually provide a lot of work for people in Africa, which will go a long way to solving may problems there.
Note: There are other deserts that could be used as well ;)
www.Buy-Proxy.com - A "buyer-driven" global marketplace.
I like that idea. The problem with that is you're more likely to be funding a 30-year corporate investment than genuinely offsetting the pollution. Eg $1000 charged to consumer returns $30,000 when the "crop" is harvested. That's a brilliant scheme if you have a car factory... until the wood market is flooded, I guess.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
...and tell them that Obama is planning to bring "change" to the climate.
I'm sorry, but are you saying that Obama is NOT trying to change the climate and that you need to be a tin-foil-hat-wearing-conspiracy-nut to think that he is?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It also happens to be slowly spinning out of control. Do you want to try to understand it and fix it now, or when you're having trouble breathing?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Preventing a cancer before it starts is far more effective than attempting to treat it after years of abuse. But yeah in these types of topics I generally get modded Troll for telling people they need to give up their cars and ride bicycles if they want to stop (or slow down) climate change. Yes there are certainly a very great deal of reasons why, for example, people can't ride bikes: weather is too hot, weather is too cold, work is too far away, biking causes sweat, etc. Yep, just mark me Troll.
"When shit gets bad enough people will finally start calling for solutions."
Yes, but will anyone listen?
"One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the recent January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel on the east side of the peninsula, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound on the west side." Mercer, Nature 1978 v271.
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old and have all collapsed in recent years, except for the Wilkins shelf which is collapsing as we speak.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Everybody wants America (as well as most of the west) to do major cutbacks. The simple fact is, that ALL countries need to cut back. Obama appears certain to join the cap-trade idiots. So far, all the countries that are participating in it, are cheating their ass off. Now, ppl are talking wild ideas. Totally insane.
The best approach is to instead have the west put in a VAT on ALL GOODS based on amount of Pollution created in its production. It should be PHASED in, rather than just hit the economy. By taking that approach, ALL countries/states will be penalized that have lots of fossil fuel usage esp. if not cleaning them up. By taking this approach, it would give time to companies to adjust by cleaning up as well as changing their medium and long-term plans. By taking the approach of saying that the "rich" nations, they are really saying western nations. Even now, China is the number one polluter in the world AND oddly, one of the richest. Yet, they will be overlooked with many of these approaches.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know this is somewhat off topic, but did anybody else ever watch The great global warming swindle? Have we actually determined that the warming models are correct, and that we actually can reverse the course of climate change? I have the feeling that global warming continues to be more of a politically driven argument than a scientific one.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
But either way, this is kind of stuff is confusing. Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
I guess it's the same as fixing the the huge credit problem in the U.S. by telling banks to issue more credit to more at risk lenders?
Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?
Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?
Or by fixing solving the global nuclear threat by reducing our nuclear arsenal while Iran and North Korea continue to push theirs.
Is his Administration pulling these ideas out of their asses or what?
(I know I'll be rated a troll by all the kool-aid drinkers, that's okay)
How much additional CO2 will we put into the atmosphere to irrigate the Sahara?
Fool. Just use carbonated water.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Venus's atmosphere has a few magnitudes more CO2 than the earth. So far the most workable modern plan for terraforming Venus would involve creating a sun shield to freeze the planet, then launch a bunch of CO2 blocks into space.
This is my sig.
China is way ahead of us at protecting the planet with particulates.
It's a silly thing but the operative part of a tree that we want is photosynthesis. A key challenge of absorbing CO2 is to optimize the surface area of the photosynthetic elements while keeping all of them illuminated. Nature did this pretty well, but one wonders if mankind could do better if we have LEDs inside otherwise dark areas.
This is my sig.
It rains. That gets the dirt out of the air. So the problem with mitigation will be, what will happen when all of these things we launch into the air come back and hit the ground.
We had a ton of pollution that essentially accomplished this effect and to some degree masked global warming. Once we got smart and lowered the size of and then got rid of particulate emissions of many kinds, that's when temperatures started moving up.
This is my sig.
... build more nuclear power plants.
Yeah, I know, -1 Flamebait.
But yeah in these types of topics I generally get modded Troll for telling people they need to give up their cars and ride bicycles
That's dumb. If you really wanted to be a troll, you could recommend that the nuclear nations go and nuke the third world, cutting the population of the earth down to a more sustainable 2 billion.
Really, with nuclear proliferation, this is probably inevitable anyway. Some American cities will survive because of a limited missile defense system, but the rest of the world will probably be exterminated.
This is my sig.
What about a giant space shield to reflect the suns rays? Could make it ultra thin from carbon fiber, probably wouldn't even need to be out there very long...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Spinning out of control? How can we make such a judgement without understanding how it works? Plus, fixing something you don't understand is pretty much guess work and luck.
Barack Obama convenes the Planetary Council!
Agenda: Launch solar shade
-----
Sorry, I know that makes two SMAC references in one week, but it couldn't be helped.
If the plan worries any of you, don't think too much about it, Sister Miriam will probably veto it anyway.
But does this plan have as much plausibility as the environmentalists' plan to reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions by 200%? (Logically impossible, but this is what would be needed to reverse global warming, where it's unlikely that we'll even see a slow-down in the growth of carbon emissions without enormous sacrifices to our standard of living.)
What's this "rest of the world" thing people like to mention every now and then? I've never heard of it.
"No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude."
Perhaps that's because organised astroturfers have conviced many people science doesn't apply to AGW.
The fact that the first hit on a google search for 'icecap "global warming"' is the icecap.us site would indicate your pessimisim is warranted. I actually had someone reply to me the other day who said something like "you don't get to quote Nature and Science as evidence for AGW because they are not statisticians".....sigh.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What?!
You mean a democrat believes that the Government should meddle in EVERYTHING and that there nothing that it does not have any limit to what it should do?!
Shock and Horror.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
And about every 10-20 years we could cut down the trees and build something with them as an added bonus.
In other words, you're talking about running a plantation that could produce lumber, but instead storing the lumber to sequester carbon dioxide. So we can calculate the cost of this program fairly easily: it's the cost of running our cars on lumber. Unfortunately I understand that's kind of high.
oh no! the spinning top is slowing down, quick poke it with a stick. Doing something that *might* work is just as likely to make things worse as better when you really have little idea of what is going on in the first place. 50 or so years of real data backed up by extrapolated data that may or may not be accurate is not a good reason to blow a cloud of shiny dust into the air when climate patterns of the scale people are afraid of take millenia to develop.
or when you're having trouble breathing?
Euel Gibbons's "Lack of oxygen scare" played out in the 70s - We're still here and breathing fine thanks.
And about monkey'n with the atmospheric machine -
Das machine is nicht fur der fingerpoken und mittengrabben. Is easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und popencorken mit spitzen sparken.
www.joke-archives.com/oddsends/achtung.html
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old
It's an amazing coincidence that the last ice age peaked about 10k years ago too.
Hmmm maybe we are emerging from an ice age, and glaciers and such mmmm melt after an ice age...
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Highlander II:
It's the year 2024 and all the ozone above Earth has gone. To protect people from dying, MacLeod helped in the construction of a giant "shield", several years ago. But, since there isn't left anyone Immortal after MacLeod's victory in the previous film, he has stopped being an Immortal himself. Now he is just an old man, until one day some other Immortals arrive on our planet. You see, the Immortals come from another planet... Planet Ziest.
Oh God! We've become a bad movie. There can be only one.
--
Toro
Some folks spend their entire life walking on paved over ground. I suppose some of them will never ever set foot on ground that's not been bull-dozed flat, planted and manicured. They've only ever seen nature through a car window or a TV screen, and every word the announcer utters is gospel, and the constant message is "Be afraid, be very afraid". By the way send money to our lawyers who will help save the cute-furry critters.
Those are the folks who worry most about the environment.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Just because you personally don't understand it well enough to make sound risk management decisions does not imply others are in the same prediciment.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"So whats the plan?" ... and.... well perhaps if we built a giant badger..."
"Galahad, Lancelot, and I will leap out of the rabbit. Catching them completely off guard, and by surprise"
"Who jumps out of the rabbit?"
"Galahad, Lancelot,
A more ambitious solution exists that does not hold such unpredictable consequences. We currently are investing billions in solar cell technology. The next step is to put mass produced panels in space and transmit power to the surface. It would kill three birds with one very large stone. And maybe some more birds would die from the microwave transmissions for power transfer, but I want to emphasize the benefits. It could provide us with a relatively clean energy source that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide a global cooling effect by blocking incident sunlight, and free up land space that is being taken up by solar crop fields. I know I'm not the first to think of this idea. Larry Niven's ringworld had a similar system to simulate day/night. Slashdot had an article earlier about how science fiction influences future technology. This concept is one that is ambitious, but could save the planet. The only thing to figure out is whether or not it's practical.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html
He brings up exactly this kind of geoengineering solution, talks about the good parts and the bad parts and the side effects of the idea. Then he suggests even if we don't do it, maybe China (or someone else) will do it in 50 years and we won't be able to stop them at that point. And we won't even have a good idea on what our response should be if they are planning to do it, since we won't have any idea of the consequences for a particular method.
He concludes with the idea that whether geoengineering is a good idea or not, we should start thinking the various ways it could be accomplished now, rather than waiting, even if the purpose of thinking about it is to decide not to do it.
Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable. The ice caps are melting does not imply that my house is going to be flooded next week, or next year or next century (and if it does, I probably don't give a shit, it's a century from now, meh), so how am I supposed to react? "Shit keeps changing, I don't like it!"
How we know is more important than what we know.
Paraphrased :
- We have got a lizard problem now, they will eat all the bird, not only the pigeon
- No problem we will breed and release chinese poisonous snake
- and what if the poisonous snake become a problem ?
- Then we will breed gorilla to hunt the snake
- Gorilla ?
- And winter will then take care of killing them
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Quick call Al Gore, the parent post just solved the puzzle! Or maybe not. /sarcasm
What on Earth makes you think that an ice age that ended more that 10Kyrs ago has got anything to do with the melt observed over the last decade?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Speaking as a Principal Engineer at a Fortune 500 company... geo-engineering is not engineering.
Where is the rigor?
Where is the testing?
What are the consequences of failure?
Might we make things worse?
The honest truth is that any geo-engineering is a global-scale gamble whose short and long term effects are completely unknown.
It is easy to see how geo-engineering could inflict more damage that it purports to solve — the climate is one of the most complex, chaotic systems known.
And we claim to have mastered our climate system enough to fix it??
Finally, fighting pollution with more pollution is counter-intuitive, to say the least.
Not exactly. I was (attempting to) remark on the curious bent of a particular breed of commentators towards spittle flecked paranoia about things they once supported, or at least acquiesced to; but now associate with Obama.
The FEMA concentration camps story, for instance, is interesting in that it was extremely popular in militia circles during the Clinton administration, then became oddly quiet under Bush(despite the well documented increase in executive ability and willingness to conduct all sorts of detention), now it's back for Obama.
In this case, yeah changing the climate is precisely the proposal. My suggestion was that that proposal would be glommed on to by conspiracy theorists from a previously unrelated area, who would interpret it as evidence for their own pet project.
Woah, woah, "spinning out of control????"
Look heat balance is a tricky thing to calculate for several reasons. One, q=k*A*e*T^4, which means that dT/de goes like 1/T^3: very small temperature changes balance out small emissivity changes, and balance out more quickly at higher temperatures.
The tricky bit is that we live on a thin skin, so there's some "difference of very large numbers" type effects that could have a wide-ranging effect on us
But there's no spinning out of control. It's possibly moving slowly toward a new, very slightly different equilibrium.
Please excuse yourself from the debate* for a while while you stop hyperventilating and do a little research. We'll be glad welcome you back in when you're ready to talk without histrionics.
*the public policy debate. The science, while far from settled, says what it says. We can't change the science by debating it. All we can do is discuss what, if anything we're going to do, and that must take into account more than just "how to keep the environment exactly the same as it is right now."
For a while the United States considered many methods for stopping a hurricane including detonating an atomic bomb at the eye of it. Eventually we decided not to even care about lesser methods of stopping a hurricane because if it was successful other nations would see us as a threat. If another nation had a typhoon, hurricane or tsunami, they may blame it on the United States and their weather control voodoo.
If we drastically alter the Earth's climate not in accordance with the international community, we'll be blamed(rightly) for causing longer and harsher winters.
God spoke to me.
Here's a simple solution I haven't heard anyone propose. Extensive renewable thinning of the forests.
Forests only absorb co2 as they grow, once they reach maximum density they become carbon neutral. When a forest reaches maximum density all carbon absorbed by new trees is offset by the trees that died and provided the room. But by continually thinning out our forests and allowing them to regrow we'd gain a infinitely renewable supply of zero net carbon fuel in the form of the harvested wood.
The wood produced could be used to generate electricity, or could be even chemically converted directly to combustible fuel. In addition, the wood could be used for cheap carbon negative building material.
The infrastructure for this would be cheap, the technologies available, and most importantly, it would be immediately profitable. I'm not surprised this hasn't been seriously considered though, both sides in this controversy seam more interested in using it for political leverage than approaching the problem with any sense of logic.
If every new car sold came with a certificate that an acre of trees was planted and maintained somewhere, cars would be responsible for slowing and then reversing the Greenhouse
I like the idea, I really do, but I wonder what is to keep the carbon that the trees sucked up from getting released back into the atmosphere when the wood burns or decomposes?
It seems to me that if the problem is vast quantities of CO2 being pumped from underground into the atmosphere, then the solution would need to pump even larger quantitites of CO2 back out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere permanently. Unless you're planning on burying the grown trees or something.... ?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
...only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action...
Wait a second! The weather is currently under our control!? To any degree?!
...by then there will likely be nothing we can do...
I find your lack of faith (in humanity) disturbing. I am supremely confident that people will always be able to convince themselves that their contributions to a faux-noble cause are meaningful. You recycle don't you?
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
"Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable.
Yes but how many "ordinary people" realise that is a red-herring because the statistics of chaotic systems are stable? Examples: Turbulent water flow does not mean you can't measure the rate of flow. The n-body problem of celestial mechanics is chaotic but that does not prevent us from exquisite accuracy in the trajectory of space probes.
Weather is chaotic, climate is the statistics of weather and by comparison is stable over centuries/millenia. To be pedantic climate is in dynamic equilibrum over all but extremely long time periods.
Many "ordinary people" have been duped into beliving science does not apply, ordinary people have kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, ect, who will be affected by much more than wet carpet in much less than a century.
so how am I supposed to react?
Keep defending science and common sense as you have done in the past...and maybe build a well stocked bunker on high ground...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
He gets re-elected.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
This is just a maneuver by the administration that sets the bar for AGW response so far out in wackyland that anything else seems reasonable by comparison. They know that there would be massive resistance (by The Rest Of The World, see above) if this was seriously considered. AGW, real or not, is making a lot of people rich, and those folks don't lead by example. This is not a problem that 'wants' to be fixed - it's making far too much money and keeping the pols in power. The result will be either 1) cook the numbers = yay it worked = reelect us, or 2) cook the numbers = still trying to save the earth = give us more money and reelect us. Want to bet which one happens?
"Those are the folks who worry most about the environment."
Sorry to burst your political bubble but this environmentalist grew up in the Aussie bush where lawyers are non-existant and most of the critters are anything but cute and furry.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The North west passage was first crossed in 1906 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/420084/Northwest-Passage
Al's famous hockey stick is dirty data taken from weather stations that have experienced heat islands being installed in the form of pavement. Go check out surface data.org. Sometimes one needs to "scrub" the data, and throw out obviously tainted data from a compromised station.
Remember all the data pointed to a new ice age in 1970, now the same data points to warming...
Go see Geology.com for the latest in antarctic dust... Turns out that just about all dust in antarctic ice record comes from Patagonia. Previous thought was that dust in the antarctic ice record indicated global warm dry years. Current thought is dust in the antarctic ice record is heaviest in cold dry years when Patagonian glaciers were advancing, released little water, and dust from dry terminal moraine coated antarctic ice. Warm years in Patagonia the glaciers retreat flooding the terminal moraine, and trapping the dust.
http://www.geology.com/news/2009/antarctic-dust-and-climate-record.shtml
The real source is Nature.com, but I don't have an active account.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I agree. A cap and trade scheme needs to be transparent and auditable for it to become a viable market, trees and many other land use credit schemes do not currently fall into that category. There is substantial evidence that fast rotation plantations may actully output more CO2 from the soil than they absorb from the atmosphere.
As with any complex problem we should start with the things we can measure and control in a large scale and meaningfull way, ie: coal, oil, gas, concrete, sustainable bio-fuel, sustainable bio-char.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action"
This implies that the weather was... under control at some point in our history?
Our climate models are consistently wrong — either massively under-estimating or massively over-estimating climate change effects.
If we cannot even get the guesswork right, how can we ever hope to "engineer" the most complex, chaotic system in our world?
It snowed again yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Consensus in these parts is "Global warming: Bring it on!"
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that. Besides moot or Stephen Colbert becoming president of the world that is..
You just got troll'd!
Others have pointed out that geoengineering is not new, and they are right. We started geoengineering on a global scale when we started removing vast quantities of carbon that had been sequestered in the earth, oxidizing it, and releasing it into the atmosphere.
And the energy community is already geoengineering how to get this released carbon back into the ground through carbon sequestration techniques. They are pumping carbon dioxide into oil bearing formations to increase well production. They are creating zero emission oil platforms that burn natural gas for energy, capture the CO2, and pump it back into the ground.
There are other, more complex, less studied ways to sequester carbon, such as seeding small parts of the ocean with iron, which will increase plankton production, which will draw down CO2 as they incorporate the carbon into their shells, which will sink and become part of the seafloor, effectively sequestering the carbon. Or by simply pumping liquid CO2 into places where it can't escape (basalt formations, subseafloor sediments, etc).
TFA states that pumping particulates into the atmosphere is a rather extreme solution, but sadly many other active sequestration techniques were not discussed. There are a lot of other, much more benign, better studied methods of geoengineering, it is a shame the article only discussed two relatively unstudied methods.
As another commentor noted, this stuff is confusing. And particulate pollutants are not the same type of pollutants that cause the greenhouse effect. Particulate pollutants are the reason why we see a decrease in global temperatures after a major volcanic eruption, the simply reflect sunlight back into space. But these pollutants are heavy and do not last long in our atmosphere. Greenhouse gases however can have a much longer residence time in the atmosphere, and operate on an entirely different principle than particulate pollutants.
Opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away.
You have have been misinformed.
....[snip]...
We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities." /end_quote
/fixed
The NW passage was not suitable for cruise ships in 1906. Besides none of the crossings via a temporary route say anything much about climate.
"Al's famous hockey stick is dirty data taken from weather stations that have experienced heat islands being installed in the form of pavement. Go check out surface data.org. Sometimes one needs to "scrub" the data, and throw out obviously tainted data from a compromised station."
First of all it's Mann et al's hockey stick not Al Gore's, second there is no such "surface data.org" web site, third the source of your half truth is the national academies testimony to the senate which states...
"The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years
"Remember all the data pointed to a new ice age in 1970, now the same data points to warming..."
No, but I am old enough to remember reading a whole lot of newspaper articles based on one national geographic article that by chance I also read when in HS. I do remember when the negative forcing of soot was offsetting the positive forcing of CO2 more than in is now. Again looking at the national academies, they first warned of global warming in the 50's, nothing has changed in those warnings except the credibility and urgency have increased by orders of magnitute.
"Turns out that just about all dust in antarctic PENINSULA ice record comes from Patagonia."
Not sure what your point is here because more dust/soot sitting on the ice speeds up the rate of melting, your link correctly states that the dust levels are low right now because the glaciers are MELTING in patagonia?
I'm not sure where you get your information but if I were you I would start to question them since the sources you do give, are now publishing papers that make Al Gore's movie look optimistic.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's far from the best SF book on the shelves. I read it when it came out, and many aspects grated quite irritatingly, especially the fandom crap superposed on the story. It was perhaps the only book with Niven among its authors which I almost abandoned before finishing, and never re-read. However, the book did criticise the mindless pursuit of eco-ideals far beyond their justification (which the GP alluded to), and this was one of its good points.
Fallen Angels appeared to be too much by Pournelle and too little by Niven or Flynn, IMO.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The hockey stick has been updated with better data, finding that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years.
[quote] The hockey stick has been updated with better data, finding that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years. [/quote] You've got to be kidding me. This paper has also been discredited, particularly by Steve McIntrye (someone who works tirelessly to expose the statistical nonsense that is Hansen, Mann, et. al.). What we have here is policy based evidence manufacture. And very profitable it can be too.
No. Ordinary people don't even know what "chaotic systems" are. Ordinary people have no idea what the ice caps melting will eventually imply.
But we have a bunch of very smart people who do complicated experiments in controlled environments, who then take the results of those experiments and do their best to extrapolate them to a global scale over a span of decades or centuries. Some of them will be wrong, but some will most likely be right. It only takes one or two "right" scenarios to change our planet beyond the ability to support "life as we know it" (which doesn't imply supporting no life at all, though it could.)
And we have a bunch of people telling us that there's nothing to see here please move along, or promoting cheap quick-fix solutions that could potentially make things worse in the long run. (Often and I'm sure entirely coincidentally, these are the same people who would have to put up the biggest stake in order for a cleanup to really work on a large scale.)
The only things we really know for sure is that we have exactly one example of a planet that supports life as we know it, that its changing faster than current research suggests it should, and that our own actions have a high probability of being a major cause of the fast-tracked change.
So the question is: do YOU want to risk your only planet (or your grandchildren's only planet if it takes that long) on the slim chance that the scientists are the ones who are wrong? Unfortunately there's currently an overwhelming "yes" from the people in charge. I'm sure its another coincidence that they're frequently the same people (or have ties to the same people) who tell us that science is wrong.
Ordinary people believe what they're told. If they're told two contradictory things, they'll take a brief glance at the available information and choose whichever side seems the most obvious to them regardless of the basis of that particular side.
Many, if not most, ordinary people these days will tend to fall on the side of the scientists if you ask them what they believe (its a lot easier to believe that making things hot melts ice than it is to believe a politician is telling the truth!) Then they'll get in their non-carpooled SUV, drive 20 miles to get to their suburban home and turn the AC to full because they don't understand the basis.
I freely admit to falling into the category of "ordinary people" when it comes to climate change. I listen to what I'm told, then pick my side based on what makes the most sense to me (I'd bet the tone of my comment suggests which side that is). Maybe its just the programmer in me, but I like to look at it in terms of worst case scenarios:
- O(science is wrong): Nothing changes and life goes on. A few large corporations have to spend 0.1% of their budget for 5 years implementing cleanup plans that turn out to be useless. Theres a bit less smog in LA.
- O(stakeholders are wrong): All life on earth is wiped out within the next century or two. No one is alive to care about the smog in LA.
Now of course worst case isn't necessarily the most likely case, but I'd still rather not take the chance. I hope to have grandkids someday and I'd prefer if they have a planet to live on. Its a good thing that I'm not really fond of SUVs.
Ya know, not driving that SUV might be what causes the heat death of the universe. It's a chaotic system.. that's just like a butterfly flapping its wings. Simply put, you have no fucking idea whether or not your individual actions will have a positive or negative effect but you're happy to preach at people.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Link?
If you actually mean "discredited" and not "refuted", I think that you're the one guilty of politisizing this issue.
I find it completely outrageous that one side's profits are so suspicious, but the other side's (the oil industry's) is beyond doubt, even though they realistically must have much more money riding on the outcome of the AGW debate.
It snowed again yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Consensus in these parts is "Global warming: Bring it on!"
Until crops fail due to bad weather. The snow doesn't actually leave most of the year, and food prices go through the roof.
There is a reason why it is a bad idea to let idiots make important decisions.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
This approach reminds me of the way they tried to control rabbit overpopulation on a small island south of New Zealand. Settlers introduced rabbits as a source of food. Of course rabbits, without predators, multiplied out of control destroying much of the local vegetation. They tried to control their population by introducing feral cats. Of course the feral cats preyed on the local fauna as well, decimating it. Finally, they had to hunt down the feral cats and now the rabbit population is back to previous numbers. Can we afford blunders of this kind on a global scale?
No sig is good enough for me.
Planting that many trees would make lumber prices plunge. Housing and packaging and other products could return to using wood instead of plastic. The total amount of wood "in use" would increase, especially as population increases, while the amount of Greenhouse-polluting plastic would decrease. And a lot of the used and abused wood could go into landfills or scrubbed furnances, producing soot that's buried or mixed with animal/human excrement for fertilizer (that replaces petroleum fertilizer, reducing more Greenhouse pollution).
Yes, some fraction of the increased forests and their products will return to the air. But the total carbon sequestered in forests and in use in products at any given time will be a lot larger. And therefore a lot less in the atmosphere. The carbon sequestration programmes getting popular now that pump gaseous CO2 into old cracks in the Earth are risky (ground chemistry and leaks back into the surface air). But indeed burying shredded or charcoaled trees in those cracks would indeed be safe forever. And much later on, they'd produce coal and oil, or the feedstock for it, if our descendants want it.
--
make install -not war
Interesting perspective that looks backward to me. I've always viewed the weather as being pretty much out of control, and am waiting to attack problems that I *can* control (like where to grow crops, or where to build a seawall, or where NOT to be when a hurricane is forecast to blow through).
I have a better idea. Stop building golf courses and McMansions.
The Government Is Already "Geo-Engineering" The Environment
http://www.infowars.com/the-government-is-already-geo-engineering-the-environment/
"However, a study of past and ongoing upper atmosphere aerosol programs confirms that the government has been active in this field for years.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program was created in 1989 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is sponsored by the DOE's Office of Science and managed by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research."
See article for FULL details.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Why would you link the IPCC report when it's common knowledge that 650 of the scientists whose work was used for the report have come out publicly and said that the entire report is pretty much a fabrication and false in nearly every aspect?
Because the content of your link is a crock of shit? (As is the rest of the site: "If Barack Obama Becomes the President Prepare for Marxism", "Bristol Palin Pregnant, but Makes Brave Choice", "Sarah Palin: A Conservatives Dream Come True"!)
Your link quotes TV weathermen, people who claim the sea levels are falling, that the global climate is *cooling* (despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
Classic myths (teh Sun is causing the warming!) sit side by side with quotes that claim the planet is cooling.
Why don't you link to the debunking of your... erm... bunk?
I was wasted last night and too lazy to look up a more legit link, but the quotes are all legitimate, as well as fact that well over 650 of the scientists have spoken out against the IPCC report. Global warming is a political thing, if scientists were to speak out en masse against it they would lose their funding for whatever research they do etc
This is what happens when science is politicized, either you toe the line or you get fucked for actually interpreting the facts for what they really mean.
Yeah, people keep complaining that the water level on Lake Michigan and Huron is dropping recently. If you look at a terrain rendering it's clear that Saginaw bay and lake StClair used to cover half of lower Michigan. Thay've been receding ever since the glacier melted, so why should we think that process should stop? People have a hard time imagining things ever being different than they are now, so these changes seem like recent events. Dredging the rivers may have contributed in this case, but that doesn't invalidate the trend.
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
Actually it's worked for us already. We have disasters all the freaking time. We've got floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, mud slides, earth quakes, and thunder storms. Our electrical grid is just starting to not be a joke. I mean this in the US. Be realistic it has spot failures all the time that we are constantly fixing. The same goes for our roads and other infrastructure.
Katrina was bad because it happened real quick. If the effects of Katrina were spread out over a 20-50 year period, do you think that NO wouldn't have been able to adapt by itself? The doom says like to panic people, but the truth isn't that in one magic day in the future that water levels will drastically change. It's more like over a 20-50 year period slight changes in coastal sea level might happen. (And that's actually extremely short time wise for most of what I've read.) Don't you think that we'd be able to gently/calmly change stuff within that sort of time frame? Heck, in that sort of time frame, we might just be able to raise coastal sea walls around our major cities so that we don't have to relocate them.
I'd agree that we won't be doing anything until it is more obvious that something really needs to be done. It'll be decades (more like a century or two) before anything is really more obvious one way or another.
If we all wear tin foiled hats; that would reflect enough of the suns energy back into space to cool the planet.
Katrina was only a surprise to the retards who decided it was a good idea to live between two rivers that flood all the fucking time. The rest of us were like "had to happen sooner or later".
How we know is more important than what we know.
Can't we get a whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag on this post? Please?
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old and have all collapsed in recent years, except for the Wilkins shelf which is collapsing as we speak.
Well great - since that's likely due to massive ice buildup on the continent. You know, calving glaciers are a sign of them growing, not shrinking.
"According to the University of Illinois, Antarctic sea ice area is nearly 30% above normal and the anomaly has reached 1,000,000 km2. You could almost fit Texas and California (or 250 Rhode Islands) inside Antarcticaâ(TM)s excess sea ice."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/08/polar-ice-worries-north-and-south/
it's in my head
Nuclear energy is not zero emissions. It just doesn't emit carbon dioxide, which, unlike spent nuclear fuel, can be safely sequestered inside living organisms.
There are four fundamental problems with nuclear energy:
One thing that always struck me about nuclear power proponents was the myopia of the larger issues. Nuclear doesn't solve the energy crisis; it only defers it until a later date, adding additional problems as it does.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
"Young, growing trees "suck up" more CO2 than mature trees."
"This is why I think it's so sad when tree hugging protesters protest outfits that plant a new tree for every tree they cut down"
Citations needed.
Google is your friend. But since you are too lazy to search for yourself, allow me to do the work for you while you download porn. From HERE (PDF Warning):
Numerous scientists and studies confirm
that actively managed, sustainable forests
absorb carbon more quickly and efficiently
than mature trees.5 Although mature trees
contain large amounts of carbon, their rate
of absorption has slowed to a near halt.
They store more carbon than young trees,
but young trees accumulate carbon at a
rapid rate.6 While some carbon is released
through decomposition after a tree is
harvested, much of the carbon is stored
harmlessly in wood products.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Unintended Consequences
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Obama's plan for global warming research dollars is 400 million in 2009 http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjcyODIyZGM2MGU1ZDdkNDgxZDc3OTNjYjM4ZDY1ODI=
Size of the market for women's shoes in 1996 is 37 billion dollars: http://www.packagedfacts.com/sitemap/product.asp?productid=130270
So it looks as if we spend more money on the world womens' shoe market in one year than all of global warming research ever done. Guess we have our priorities in order when you consider the cost of global warming is probably not quadrillions but quintillions of dollars (think massive impact to world economy for 1000 years and possible end of market). I like my planets like I like my women!
Really either nobody really believes this threat is real, or the world is massively insane for not trying to understand the problem... You decide.
How do you know? The link you gave says they made the NW passage in 2006 only because of an icebreaker. It says almost nothing of the conditions in 1906. The second part of your statement is true although AGW advocates claim it does when it's happening "now."
Try surfacestations.org
Also Mann's hockey stick (which was popularized by Gore) has been discredited. It's been shown that the algorithm he used will produce a hockey stick from almost any data because it preferentially selects/emphasizes the data that will create a hockey stick.
Actually just try to measure water flow in a rapids by placing a few random flow sensors in the water. I'm not sure you'd be able to calculate an accurate flow rate for the entire river unless you got lucky. As far as I've heard that's what we're doing right now for global warming. We needed that satellite we just lost.
Who said the climate is a chaotic system on centennial time scales? It's mostly a boundary value problem, not an initial value problem. That's why we can predict that summer is hotter than winter even though we can't predict the weather in 6 months: you increase the net radiation flux, it will get hotter on average. You can't predict the microstate of the system (which city has what temperature on what day), but you can predict the average macrostate (the system absorbs more heat). Similarly, there is molecular chaos in a pot of water, but that doesn't mean you can't predict the water gets hotter when you turn the stove on.
Now, if the climate system happens to be balanced near a bistable threshold, then you can get chaotic effects, where internal variability can unpredictably flip the system to one state or the other. It's possible that we could cross some threshold with help from anthropogenic climate change, but it's unlikely to happen by itself soon, considering the relative stability of the Holocene climate.
"Chaos" is right up there with "entropy" and "quantum mechanics" with most misused scientific concepts.
If you keep dumping CO_2 into the air, then we can dump whatever we like into the air too.
Are there any international treaties anywhere about dumping shit into the atmosphere? Is even something as specific as the CFC ban a treaty? AFAICT, world leaders pretty much assume that any sovereign nation can do whatever the fuck it likes to the atmosphere, the ocean, etc...
But what if we come up with a countermeasure so successful that we no longer have to reduce our CO_2 output? What if there are long-term quality-of-life issues or ecosystem implications that don't affect classical economics? Does anyone believe that those will have a voice?
Mostly, I'm delighted: after only 110 years of knowing how global warming works, and 50 years of evidence, a handful of our least ignorant leaders already recognise that there's a problem. Go humans!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Katrina was only a surprise to the retards who decided it was a good idea to live between two rivers that flood all the fucking time. The rest of us were like "had to happen sooner or later".
Actually, Katrina could be used as an excellent example of what could happen to us if we don't take any precautions. Katrina could have been a nonevent if NO had spent a few million decades ago raising the height of their levies like engineers told them to. They knew if on action was taken a once in a 100 year event could damage the city. Well, the city didn't want to spend the money.
Well, Katrina and what NO should have done is far more obvious than the entire climate change thing. If we had engineers that fully understood the climate and pretty much said that in 500 years that we are going to have these sorts of climate events/changes every so often and that we should do something to prepare for it or it'll be Katrina on a larger scale, then we'd do something. Our climate scientists can't even reliably predict stuff 5-10 years out. Oh they can predict as well as you or I could on what the climate might be like. The problem is that that's not generally how things actually turn out.
It would be like asking con men and preachers if NO needs to build higher levies. Actually, that might have worked if the con men would have got a cut, or the labor was local from various religious groups.
"You've got to be kidding me....[the hockey stick]...has also been discredited"
He isn't kidding you but someone obviously is. Can you name an institution with more credible statistical expertise than the national academies? Again, here is the link to their testiomony in the Mann/McIntyre beat up that supposedly discredited Mann.
And very profitable it can be too.
This is the best joke of all, the scientists who write the IPCC reports do not get paid. Even if they did the IPCC has a budget of a measly $5-6 million a year despite being sourced from the governments of 300+ politically diverse nations. I've worked in busnisses with twice that budget for 25 people, the IPCC reports have a tad more than 25 people behind them, people who collectively REPRESENT every major science body on the planet. Personally I think the IPCC ranks as one of the most robust peer-reveiw process ever undertaken and it has been acomplished for less than what it costs to make a hollywood block-buster.
Of course they could be wrong and any scientist worth their salt will demonstrate that with error bars, that's how science progresses, but given the track record of science do you know of a better philosophy for understanding the natural world?
Do not take the following rant as pertaining to you personally, for all I know you could be a teenager who hates his science teacher.
Creationists are a rare sight on slashdot but moderate belivers who are conflated with creationists are not so rare. I am not relious in the slightest but I have been accused of subscribing to "AGW religion", "worshiping Al Gore", etc. In fact similar comments when not aimed at a particular person but at some general group (such as greenies, IPCC, Al Gore and his mates), will regularly be modded +5 insightfull.
Perhaps the most despised religion on slashdot however are the scientologists, their method of shouting lies untill you belive them is bizzare but for some reason it does work on a suprising number of people. There are genuine disagreements in climate science and there is are general consensus represented by the IPCC reports yet a good number of slashdotters attack these claims with the same methods the shop keeper uses in monty python's dead parrot sketch, and in some cases the same methods as scientologists.
To be fair to all slashdotters these posts only stay positive until the cult mebers blow all their mod points, by the time it's at the bottom of the page the moderation is more...well...moderate. This must be a dilema for them wrt do they blow all the points early, wait until near archiving, or just concentrate on keeping the best machevellian posts up at +5?
I'm 50yrs old and remember the "tabacco scientists" with great clarity, when that enevitably collapsed in total ridicule many of the same "tabacco scientists" became "climate skeptics". They go by names such as the Heartland institute, Marshall institute, Frontiers of Freedom, etc, and are backed by people such as ex-senator Malcolm Wallop, senator Inhofe, and a sizable number of politicians around the planet that have a coal mine on their turf. ExonMobile also fund this anti-science campaing, not because they are an oil company but because they have large investments in coal. The same machevelian bullshit goes on here in Oz but ranting about that on a US centric site would require a shitload of links to people most slashdotters have never heard of.
As I said above, I'm not from the US, I couldn't care less about the 2000 election but I can smell the anti-science lobbyists in those organisations from half a world away. Thing is I don't know if slashdotters who drink their kool aid are simply ignorant, misinformed, practicing luddities
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Next time Obama has a weekend dinner date in Chicago, or wants to slam Special Olympians in Burbank, think about the huge amount of CO2 that is being generated:
1) Air Force 1. A huge 747 airplane. Did you know there is also a backup 747 that follows AF1 around just in case?
2) Heavy lift airplanes (C-130s?) The president's limousines and helicopters have to be transported to the site.
3) Support staff/security. You can just imagine the huge effort required to keep the president safe and in contact with his advisors/speechwriters/teleprompter.
So, Mr. President, how about doing instead of just talking?
Actually, the problem is that ordinary people don't realize that chaotic systems ARE predictable. You cannot predict precise specific events, but you can predict broad trends with very good accuracy.
However, ordinary people simply don't think in terms of broad trends, they only think in terms of specifics. Because "the scientists" are unable to accurately predict the exact temperature in their home town on the Sunday of the big football game, they feel climate science is worthless. And what the climate scientists can predict (things like the average temperature going up 0.5 degree year-by-year) is too small and distributed for an average person to even notice, yet it has huge effects on the world.
The problem is that people are allowed to graduate high school without a basic understanding of statistics and probability, so instead they rely on personal experience and anecdote. They think "I didn't see it happen, so it won't happen." or "I saw it happen, so it is likely to happen."
A couple of examples that I like to use to give probability-impaired something to ponder:
* Almost every week, someone wins the lottery. But lottery tickets are still a very bad investment.
* 5 out of 6 times you play "Russian Roulette", nothing bad happens. But it is still a very bad idea to play.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
This reminds me a bit of Maos Great Sparrow Campaign:
The sparrows are eating our crops. Kill'em! Oh! Sparrows were eating locusts, too. Locusts are eating more crops than sparrows did. Remove locust habitat by pulling up grass! Oh! Grass was keeping sand from creating dust storms. Great. Now we have neither sparrows, locusts, grass, food nor breathable air.
Bottom line. Don't mess with an ecosystem on which you depend and don't understand.
Actually, the Global Warming CULT is becoming the Global Warming MOB. Scientists who don't support IPCC (UN) claims are finding out what happens to them. Now with our newly elected Dear Leader, other countries are going to find out what happens to them if they don't comply with the UN Mafia.
Yep, sample size matters. I agree we needed the sattelite that's now at the bottom of the southern ocean. However we don't need it to be sure our CO2 is a problem, we already have satellites such as MOPITT, GOME, OMI, TES to measure atmospheric gasses/areosols and their distributions, there are at least two gravity probes that yeild data on ice loss plus information that is vital for modeling ocean currents. Add to that highly sensitive altimiters for, snow depth, sea level, etc plus all the run of the mill weather satellites and we have a sizeable armarda of sattelites collecting evidence from space.
There are also litterally millions of sensors spread across the globe in various networks bobbing about in and under the sea, on land, on glaciers, in rivers, in aircraft, weather ballons, rooftops, submarines, ocean liners, etc, we started building and maintaining this massive data set in earnest about 150yrs ago when physicists argued over wether the sun was made of coal or not. Then you have paleotologists who look at dust and gas trapped in ice cores, tree rings, the tickness of sea shells, isotopes in microsopic samples, pollen distribution, the independent lines of evidence are vast and go all the way back to Fourier in the 1820's. To seriously debunk the claim that AGW is the major factor in the observed warming requires extrodinary evidence that is currently only noticable by it's absence.
What we needed the OCO satellite for was to more acurately pinpoint the major changes in emmision sites (NO2 is also a GHG as is Methane). If an international treaty is to be effective this type of data is essential and the more acurate the more certainty there is for business in a future carbon market. If the treaty includes land use issues such as tree planting, highly accurate data will be needed to audit those claims and monitor this experiment we call the industrial revolution.
Personally without such data I think the planting of trees for carbon credits is of dubious value to fixing AGW and ripe for corruption. Trees are valuable in their own right, far better if a farmer got a credit when he plows biochar into the ground. Making and burrying biochar is an efficient carbon negative process that can run on raw sewarge and other waste organic matter, not only does it's sequester the carbon for 1000yrs but will also fertilize the soil and reduce the need for oil based fertilizers. However, even on a massive scale, biochar alone is not enough to counter our current emmissions.
If you haven't read the IPCC reports the best place to start skimming is here, the reports go back nearly two decades and it's interesting to read some of the older ones and compare their warnings to recent events. These people are certainly not infallible but nothing is, they represent the world's scientific institutions and IMHO getting that many experts to agree virtually gaurentees their statements will be qualified, conservative, and backed by a mountain of evidence.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
From TFA:
"Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide â" the chief human-caused greenhouse gas â" out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said."
Umm, how about this: Let's just stop cutting down the trees we do have, and let forests grow?
It seems like mother nature has a perfectly workable plan for recycling CO2; in fact it even USES CO2, making oxygen we so love and crave! Rather than trying to re-engineer and deploy fake trees that merely store the stuff for who knows how long, why not just let natural processes work for a change? Is this SO hard to do?
"Also Mann's hockey stick (which was popularized by Gore) has been discredited. It's been shown that the algorithm he used will produce a hockey stick from almost any data because it preferentially selects/emphasizes the data that will create a hockey stick."
Again read the fucking testimony, it is the primary source of your disinformation and it directly contradicts your claims.
Surfacestations.org is 404.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Dude, test your own information, here is how others here have done it.
1. Pick someone who sounds qualified from your list.
2. Look them up on google scholar.
3. Compare what they say in their own words to the out of context quotes in the propoganda piece.
4. If not convinced article and list are a crock of shit, goto 1.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable. The ice caps are melting does not imply that my house is going to be flooded next week,
The system may not be entirely predictable, but that doesn't mean we can't track our effects on the environment and predict what the impact of warming will be. It really doesn't matter wether or not you're a believer in AGW, if we can show that we can do something to fix the problem, then we are obligated to do so.
The fact is that warming is already affecting the world's poor in terms of food and water shortages. If it gets much worse, then global polictical instability will become an expensive problem even for joe consumer in the US.
There are more sensible ways of producing the desired results than injecting pollution in the atmosphere, the problem is that they rely on personal responsibility, and government action. Unfortunately the US has proven to be very capable of either thus far.
Here's an industry expert that talks about the effects of global warming and the kinds of things that will have to be done to combat them: http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated#chapter_01.
The link in your sig is broken (suspended account). What's the book that you were referring to in it?
Your brain is not a computer.
This is what happens when science is politicized, either you toe the line or you get fucked for actually interpreting the facts for what they really mean.
That's been pretty much business as usual for the last several millenniums
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It snowed again yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Consensus in these parts is "Global warming: Bring it on!"
I'm assuming your house is not built on permafrost?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Good enough for you?"
No, but the question in step #4 is; is it good enough for you? If it is then there is no point continuing the discussion.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Honestly I consider the biggest problem with global warming is political. Namely that we let it get political. We let people show glacial calving and present it to the public as images of our melting icecaps (when the glaciers that no longer even reach the water may be the most disturbing thing in reality). We let this become international treaty territory instead of simple enlightened self-interest when there are a great many people who distrust the entire international diplomatic community. And we let Al Gore use it to grab the limelight for himself. Seriously Al Gore? About the only way you could screw the pooch and polarize the issue more irrationally in American politics would be for Hillary to have done it.
Anyone else reminded of the Stargate Atlantis Season 5 episode?
Hey TapeCutter, Here is the site http://www.surfacestations.org/ It supports my observations that weather stations report increasing temperatures when heat islands have been installed around the station.
I'm 47, and have seen lots of hysterics whipped up. After 30 years in electronics, I'm back in college anticipating a career change. I see the writing on the way, and I want to own the exit plan. In 06 I had a college class where one project was to correlate global climate and glacial retreat of the Nisqually glacier. So I plotted the retreat of the glacier and global weather data provided in the text. R-squared was 0.47, pretty crappy correlation. I read some about the Nisqually glacier, it's on an active volcano, and also sees around 250 earthquakes a year. So that's one picture of climate science, have students plot temperature and glacial retreat of a glacier on an active volcano.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
From your own link, Dr Kiminori Itoh in his own words:
And in other people's words:
Maybe you missed step 2?
The Americans can modify the crappy earth all they want. The chinese and soviets however are aiming for space. But of course not until they waste the earth even futher with their space industries.