Slashdot Mirror
Study Rules Out Global Warming Being a Natural Fluctuation With 99% Certainty
An anonymous reader writes "A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations. 'The climate reconstructions take into account a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales. For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... His study [also] predicts, with 95% confidence, that a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the climate to warm by between 2.5 and 4.2 degrees Celsius. That range is more precise than – but in line with — the IPCC's prediction that temperatures would rise by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius if CO2 concentrations double.'"
we cannot ascertain the temperatures of past centuries with enough precision to make any such study nor claims
... because we can use Earth2 as a control group.
and because our experiments are reproducible on Earth3.
Stop it! What I believe is what is real.
If I don't know, TV will tell me what to believe. And if they have "balanced discussions" with "experts on both sides", who cares about (un)certainties and such things. Clearly, the issue has not been decided!
(just illustrating the reality of the majority, science-shunning-except-when-improves-my-life crowd)
Thou shalt chill, not shill.
The solar system circles the milk way every several hundred million years, there are variations of the planet's orbit and tilt that deviate every several hundred thousand years...
But a study of the last 500 proves it is not a natural deviation.
Yes, I am convinced.
So what do we have to give up to have a zero change in the global temperature
Only one thing: having so many offspring.
The problem isn't that we have an excessive lifestyle. The problem is that there are TOO MANY of us having an excessive lifestyle. Get the population down to a billion or so and we can all have diesels, coal-fired power stations and as much beef as we could ever desire.
It's just that all 7 billion of us can't all do that at once.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And yet the climate change deniers will CLING to that 1% and continue to stick their ignorant heads in the sand and pretend that we aren't messing up our climate.
How about do a real study when spans more than 500 years. That is no where near long enough time to make such a claim
Ah yes, because earning less then they could with the same degree out in private industry is such a gravy train....
If the government is going to interfere it needs 100% proof as an absolute minimum.
--
roman_mir.
The confidence levels in the data are 99%, not in the conclusion.
PS - I believe in man driven global warming, I just hate sensationalized headlines.
If you want to find the modern culprits of greenhouse gases, look to India and China, not the US. We've cut our emissions drastically over the past 20 years.
I don't get it, after reading the comments here, why is there so much resistance accept that man is causing climate change? Just thinking logically, it makes sense. We're taking carbon that's been buried for millions of years, and then burning it, on a huge scale. How can this not affect the climate? I actually hope that the climate skeptics are right.
well that settles that
Ah, now there is the problem.
Because CO2 is going UP and the temperature is going DOWN.
The study is based on modelling, and adjusted base data. It's another scam....
will include the true value. Do not transpose the conditional. Also, he is only "disproving" whatever model of natural variability he is using. If this turns out to be a strawman like most then this was a waste of time.
Temperature goes up more or less linearly, and CO2 goes up more or less linearly. Thus they are well-correlated. There's not a lot of power to that correlation, as the article demonstrates itself by trying it with different lags (from 0 to 20 years -- would have been interesting if he'd tried negative lags); the data is too featureless to show anything interesting.
I'm going to guess that if you don't believe in climate change you also don't believe we stopped acid rain and most smog around the world because we changed what we are doing. Because that would admit you are wrong and well your ego can't handle that.
500 years isn't even enough time to properly determine how cities develop, never mind the climate.
Also, you guys are behind the times on the whole manmade climate change thing. It's irrelevant if the climate is changing as a function of what mankind is doing, in whole or in part - because we aren't making enough of a change to be a problem. Any changes under way are a blip compared to the natural climate ranges that have existed in the past, and not even close to any degrees of change that will require substantial effort to adapt to.
But good luck scaring the kids! It might even last for a few hours until they figure out we've dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere for the past decade with almost no upswing in temperature. Once you realize that, you start caring about real pollution again instead of hating on poor old carbon so much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think I'm going to create a theory that states if you point a laser pointer at space for a long enough period of time that it will cause more meteors to hit the earth.
Then when the rate of meteorites hitting the earth goes up I'm going to claim my theory was apparently correct.
I'm going to purposely ignore the reality that the meteorite rate could also be due to some other root cause because I need to convince people that meteorites are going to kill all of us and the planet if we don't do something about it.
I just hope that no one comes along who predicts that the rate of meteorite impacts will be just like what I predicted but will explain that the rate has nothing to do with any influence on my part but rather the rate increased simply because of a natural phenomenon. I should be safe though. The media will prefer the fear aspect of my theory, the progressives will be able to use my theory to impose unprecedented levels of control on citizens of my country to better align with other countries that are already moving in this direction of controlling cow flatulence, vehicle flatulence, house flatulence, etc. and evil corporations, which liberals hate when republicans protect them, will be able to make billions off this fake theory, which will make liberals and progressives who receive bribes and donations from the same evil corporations will become rich off it as they continue lying to people that my theory is true.
My theory will be the excuse people need who believe in total control by government. And I'll get rich by receiving money from these my own government and others to continue lying about my data and interpretations in order to counter valid claims my theory has been proven false.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Yep. Garbage in, garbage out. Models are like maps, they are not the territory. Since these "scientists" want me to ignore their 4.5 billion years of climate change and accept their area of focus that would not even qualify as a sliver of that time frame. They are just promoting pseudo-science. I to can smell a scam.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Here's a simple solution to the problem.
1. Require everyone (corporations included) to publicly record whether they believe that the majority (51%+) of global climate change is caused by humans.
2. Allow everyone to decide whether or not to do business with entities in the other camp.
3. Apply a 10% yearly tax against the gross (not net or adjusted) incomes of everyone in the group that believe humans / industry is the culprit.
You can decide what problem I'm solving...
If you believe that humans are causing the problem, and believe the solutions that the UN is suggesting, then you are a hypocrite if you want to force other people to pay for it.
/. was a great place to witness the flame wars between M$ and the Linux community. And where a geek could go to get help or insight to a technical problem. Now it's becoming another version of MSNBC.... Miss the old days.
Nope.
Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, Ford Focus Electric, Chevy Spark or any other decent BEV with that supplies reasonable range for most North Americans or Western Europeans.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It's become a political litmus test. Just look at the names attributed to anyone who doesn't agree with you: denier, alarmist.
There's no room for real science.
The only way we are going to be able to rely on wind and solar if we can get refrigerators, microwaves, computers, AC's to run below 20 watts which seems impossible for now. Electric cars are nothing new they have been done back in the late 1800's but mostly used by the post office. If we can find away to utilize 100% of gas(a new type of engine) and run maybe 200-400mpg then we might reduce co2 dramatically. Electric car range and recharge time sucks for now.
I've never understood the controversy...does anyone think that pollution isn't harmful?
Our modern industrial society makes by-products of type and/or scale that **hurt nature**
No one, absolutely no one, even the climate change "deniers" can contradict this fact.
It's about government regulation...that's the only thing that keeps companies from unscrupulously disposing of their waste.
Companies do not want regulation...that pretty much explains the entire "climate debate"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yea, look at this ice core data. Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Certainly no catastrophic AGW, humans do well in warm times.
Cold is cop failures, starvation, and freezing to death.
Shockingly, and unsurprisingly, by limiting themselves to the last 500 years, such pesky issues as the Medieval Warm Period go away. So all this tells me is that they can't even explain that. At least other climate scientists recognize the issues they have with the MWP, rather than just waving their hands to make it go away.
Folks, there is no doubt that man causes some degree of global warming. It may even be significant.
But putting forward a very questionable "study" with little practical "science" and having almost nothing that can be repeated or validated does not help the cause of proving global warming. It harms it! With each one of these "studies" it makes me wonder why there isn't some expert who has proven the thesis, with so many interested "scientists".
These news stories might be adequate for the masses, but definitely not for me, thanks.
Isn't that a more accurate term?
Pollution is harmful. So you BASTARDS that have been trying to reduce CO2 (which plants use as food!!) have diverted vast funds of money that might have gone have gone into reducing real and meaningful pollution.
Many species have died and will die because of your idiocy.
Those of us who ACTUALLY care about the environment saw Global Warming as the political sham it always was, funneling money into lining the pockets of many politically connected people and industries. Those of us who care have seen the rusted wind farms of Hawaii and California from decades past, and shake our heads as the cycle of meaningless and environmentally damaging forms of alternative energy comes around for another pass..
But please, do go on posing as if you care what happens to the Earth while you block support for things like nuclear reactors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maths are dodgie...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/lovejoys-99-confidence-vs-measurement-uncertainty/#more-107364
Look at those measurement uncertiantys he assumes !
Typical attempt for the global warming alarmists as they get more and more desperate.
There has been no warming for the past 13-17 years depending on which temperature series you look at.
You're exactly right, but how do you get from here to there? If current demographic trends hold, we are drop down to a reasonable carrying capacity in 2100 or so.
Or next week, depending on the scenario.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In ***unnatural*** concentrations anything is a pollutant.
Scale is key. Nuclear waste is pollution b/c of its radioactivity (found in nature)...CO2 is pollution b/c of the **scale** it is being unnaturally produced
All pollution is harmful b/c it *distrupts nature's perfect system*
Pollution disrupts in many ways.
Thank you Dave Raggett
we are drop down?
Sorry, caffeine insufficiency. Off to rectify that issue.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Breaking news, 2+2 = 4 !!!!!!
Seriously global warming deniers are no more credible than any of the other nutter, why does slashdot still run stories like this?
Electric cars? Still use fossil fuels. Natural gas would be the easiest, but still has carbon. Try using the petroleum consumption of the USA per year in barrels, find out the BTU per barrel, multiply that by the refining efficiency, then the efficiency of its uses keeping in mind the 35% approximate efficiency of the internal combustion engine, then compute the number of kilowatt hours it takes to match those BTUs, divide by both the efficiency of the electric car battery (abt 90%), and the efficiency of the electric car motor (about another 90%) and then the efficiency of the electric grid at about 93%. Then figure out how you're going to generate all that while remaining carbon free. Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country. Solar? How long will it take to ramp that up, and at what cost? Would solar thermal and PV panels double the price of electricity? Probably. Have a $300 / month electric bill for your house now, then you start getting a $600 / month electric bill after solar happens. And, of course, there's the no bird-killing, not as expensive as solar nuclear, but figure 1300 - 1600 new power plants the equivalent size of our largest in Palo Verde, Az. How long do you think it'll get the permits for those? Never? Yeah, never.
Short answer: Research geo-engineering solutions, keep drilling, and keep researching geothermal...
I'm certainly not suggesting that we wait until we have 5 sigma confidence in the measurement before acting, but just pointing out that a commonly stated criterion for a particle physics "discovery" is 5 sigma or 99.99994 percent confidence.
Whoever this soulskill poster is , he is a big libtard.
Can't post anything that isn't a part of the big ole libtard agenda.
Population trends show a rise to about 9 billion in 50 years time, with global population flatlining at that for the foreseeable future. Which is good news and bad news. Good news is that population isn't growing without end. Bad news is we need to plan for 9 billion when making AGW mitigation plans.
The existing and future dominance of Asia in creating and increasing atmospheric pollutants will doom the chances of colleges here in the West from affecting the global effect of Asia's pollution.
If humans are natural, part of nature, then the headline is wrong regardless of the cause of any warming or non-warming. How about this instead:
Study Rules In Global Warming Being a Natural Fluctuation With 99% Certainty
Where I live (Illinois) I can choose to pay slightly more for my power generation dollars to go to renewable generators. I dug a little deeper and verified that it comes mostly from wind and some solar. I also think its a misconception that electric cars put a tremendous load on the grid. Unlike our central air conditioning in the summer, we hardly noticed an increase in our electric bill after we got our Tesla.
Greed is the root of all evil.
February 2014 was the 21st warmest February on record since 1880. The temperature was yet again above the 20th century average, for the 348th consecutive month. That is every month above the 20th century average for the last 29 years. Please, tell me just how you determined the temperature is going down?
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
On the other hand the media consultants employed by the billionaire owners of coal, oil, petroleum companies and investments in forestry products have absolutely no conflict of interest and they speak the original unvarnished truth.
I mean, who would you trust? Some one who is smart enough to make millions of dollars working for billionaires? Or the fools who spend so much of time studying and ending up working for a pittance? If these so called scientists are so smart why aren't they billionaires and millionaires? Shows who is smart and who you should listen to.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>If they found that there was no man-made global warming, they'd be out of jobs.
You are showing complete ignorance of the scientific funding situation as well as academia.
Tenure track positions don't disappear if they don't get certain results. And there is a multitude of other climate topics that are important and need scientists working on.
And of course, this wasn't done by people with a vested interest in a positive conclusion, it was done by physicists. Statisticians with no vested interest have also found the same results.
You are just createing a false narrative that allows you to ignore facts you do not like.
If you can afford a Tesla, I'm not surprised you didn't notice the increase in your bill. Don't forget to thank the rest of us for the tax subsidy on your Tesla.
I said:
"In ***unnatural*** concentrations anything is a pollutant."
You can't counter that.
ex: Salt.
Sodium Chloride...its food for crying out loud! Everyone has it in their homes! We give it to babies! How can it be pollution??? WTF?
Dump 1,000 of salt onto a field and it becomes fallow.
****THATS POLLUTION****
same with CO2
Thank you Dave Raggett
jeez i'm trolling myself....i misread your post...holy crap...
sorry...you were agreeing with me and my previous comment will not make any sense
i need to just stop posting in this thread
Thank you Dave Raggett
You're exactly right, but how do you get from here to there?
Don't worry about that, it's a self regulating system.
I wonder why this topic is so much discussed in the USA. In every other country climate change and the fact that we, humans, are causing it is accepted as a scientific fact. However, in the US, there is still a large fraction who doubt it or ignore it. And I am wondering why is that so?
90%, 95%, 98%, 99%... what's next, 99.9%? Deniers like to argue that it's not caused by human activities. Pure bullshit, but it isn't even relevant. There are some who think that whatever happens is good as long as man didn't cause it. Those are the ones that might be OK with climate change as long as we didn't cause it. Where does this end? Is it OK for most of Earth's multi-celled life to be destroyed by a celestial collision just because we didn't cause it? Regardless of the reason for it, reducing greenhouse gases will slow it, so that needs to be done immediately.
We sacrificed other things so we could buy what was for us a swing for the fences dream car. Thank you everyone for the tax subsidy. And you are welcome for our support of the Tesla strategy to get the cost of electric cars low enough so that gas cars don't make sense.
Greed is the root of all evil.
The study was only published this past April 6th. So, I assume it will be reviewed by climatologists, statisticians and a bunch of folks - including interests in the fossil fuel industry who need to protect their profits - will pick that study apart and I am quite sure that if there is ANY pseudo science, it WILL be found out and criticized.
Of course, it WILL be criticized by "peers" who are paid for by anti-global warming interests.
So, we shall see if this is in fact pseudo science - of course, I will ignore everything from the fossil fuel industry and their proxies because they are liars until proven otherwise. Conflict of interest.
See studies by Cigarette companies that showed no connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, male impotence and the myriad of other diseases the smoking causes - which turned out to be ALL lies.
Businesses lie to protect profits - there are no exceptions.
you are making the mistake of assuming that because it happened naturally in the past that this change can't possibly be man made.
furthermore most of those changes you see there are associated with massive cultural collapses!
climate change is BAD for human civilizations. they can't adapt fast enough. even today only the wealthy nations will be able to adapt fast enough and only at great expense.
it is sheer madness to bring cause climate change ourselves.
I hear mother nature has been secretly receiving yellowcake shipments. Proof enough?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
So the Ice Ages are a myth? As well as the warming period between Ice ages? Idiot.
If they found that there was no man-made global warming, they'd be out of jobs.
Tell that to the shills working for the fossil fuel industry! Or the Koch brothers would hire them.
Please! Or look at the medical researchers who worked for the cigarette companies "proving" that cigarettes don't cause cancer, heart disease, male impotence, emphysema, polyps, etc ...
There is always employment from businesses to make up shit to protect their profits.
Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country.
It's a myth. The occasional bird is killed by a wind turbine, but as a cause of death it shrinks into irrelevance compared with other man-caused bird deaths - chief amongst them windows. Far more birds die from flying into windows than wind turbines.
PV gets cheaper every year, and is already very much the cheapest way to power an EV.
There's nothing wrong with nuclear. Built more plants.
And you haven't even considered the potential of the enormous power available in the oceans, both tide and wave.
Certainly the last thing we should be doing is drilling for more fossil fuels. Especially by fracking.
What more carbon - global warming will do.
CLimate change will devastate agriculture.
As far as comparing man made vs. natural man is affecting the CO2 BALANCE - we're throwing nature off and causing unnatural warming.
It was a 7 degree rise for ages:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matte...
Now that's the high end of the "prediction".
In 2010 NASA said this:
"8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise."
And "New NASA model: Doubled CO2 means just 1.64C warming
'Important to get these things right', says scientist"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
In 2011 it was "Discovered" trees eat CO2:
Originally found at: http://www.google.com/hostedne...
Forests soak up third of fossil fuel emissions: study
By Marlowe Hood (AFP) – 5 days ago
PARIS — Forests play a larger role in Earth's climate system than previously suspected for both the risks from deforestation and the potential gains from regrowth, a benchmark study released Thursday has shown.
The study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate and boreal forests, researchers said.
"This is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide," said co-author Josep Canadell, a scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national climate research centre in Canberra.
"If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world's established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions," he told AFP, describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected".
Also odd how this guy in 2007 was able to predict this winter's 100-year record breaking cold from things the IPCC have nothing to do with climate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Do the alarmists have an explanation for these?
Need Mercedes parts ?
People have made up their minds unfortunately. Changes in climate can easily be brushed off as natural variation. A few days of locally cold weather is enough to re-enforce a denier's belief that global warming is a farce.
Over time the consequences will become increasingly hard to ignore and people will suffer. As is typical, the poor will suffer the worse. Ironically, many otherwise conservative organizations such as insurance companies will be willing accept global warming as fact because it gives them an excuse to raise their rates in coastal areas.
There was no subsidy. Not stealing people's money with income taxes is not a subsidy, it is just doing the right thing. There should be no income taxes. Repeal16.
As climate changes and agriculture gets it in the chin and water becomes much more scarce in many areas, there will be wars over water, food and other resources.
It will happen mostly in Third World countries - Africa is going to REALLY get bad - especially countries like Ethiopia. We will see more genocides.
We, the US will be involved of course, but it will be framed as "fighting for freedom" or "liberating [some country here]" or whatever - because we Americans are too squeamish to face the truth.
As for me, I am working on a plan for investing in food commodities so at least, maybe I can be rich enough to move to Elysium.
If global warming means more girls in bikinis then I'm all for it. Seriously, what is wrong with warming up the earth a few degrees? What is wrong with milder winters? No one ever explains this, what is so wrong about global warming?
No it doen't. " For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... " That's what we call circular reasoning. Your argument is literally invalid for tripping over the common-to-"scientists"-lately fallacy of using the conclusion for the premise.
Cranky educator.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
and keep in mind that wind power is a very small portion of the power produced in the country now. Ramp it up to produce 100%, and you're going to have nowhere where you wont be able to see a turbine, and nowhere a bird can fly and expect to live a normal lifetime.
Drilling absolutely should be done for both sustainability and geopolitical reasons. We cannot convert the entire vehicular complement of transportation in this country to electricity for decades, and possibly never if the magic battery is not invented. Still no one knows how to build it. When they do, then we can get on with battery powered cars that can perform like internal combustion engined cars, and semi-trucks and boats / ships too. This may never happen.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
What we have to do is to keep costs down as long as possible, and that means petroleum. Only with the prosperity brought to us by petroleum will we have the research money to possibly perfect something that actually works, be it wind, solar, geothermal, whatever.
And we still have to research geo-engineering because the damn commies in China are NOT going to quit digging coal, ever. We either figure out a way to take the CO2 out of the air in order to reduce its concentration, or figure out how to live with a warmer planet. Maybe put some $$$ behind getting this working:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
You are technically true as bats are not birds ..... but 600,000 bats died from interactions with wind turbines in the continental United States last year alone.
You know how Democrats love to belittle Republicans when they mess up on a "family" matter, like having an affair, since they run on family values all the time? Well, why isn't the hypocrisy on the Left the same way? Liberals are HUGE on this global warming issue, but none of them are voluntarily giving up their cars and planes.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. There _is_ _nothing_ wrong with nuclear, but TRY to build more plants. The damned environmental extremists (EEs) oppose that, while other EEs oppose using land for solar and other EEs oppose fracking and more EE's oppose the bird-killing wind turbines and some EE's have gotten the power distribution wires stopped from being built from a solar farm into a California city (San Diego, I think, but its been years and I forget) because there was a forest in between. No progress can really be made except for petroleum, because that is familiar, unless we kill all the environmental extremists. Sign me up for that firing squad, they are the sort of enemies foreign and _domestic_ that would strangle our nation and cast our people into suffering from unmanageable costs of living.
Oh, and I don't consider tidal and wave because it requires even more research than using geothermal, which would be inexhaustible if perfected.
Take a bike, walk, or take transit.
Feel-good tech like the Prius are neutral and horribly eco-pretentious at best, and counterproductive at worst. If you're not changing your lifestyle, there is no real change.
No global warming in nearly 20 years now, not that this is even a significant period on the geological time scale.
Trying to attribute 10 or 50 or 1000 years of changing measurements to any one specific thing is like insisting you see Jesus in the snow on an empty TV channel.
It strikes me that 500 years, practically the blink of an eye, might not be quite sufficient to determine trends on geological scales...
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage
FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
"If we accept the premise that CO2 and Warming are tightly coupled, and that the former causes the latter, the data leads us to conclude that CO2 and Warming are tightly coupled, and that the former causes the latter, and since humans make CO2, all global warming must be manmade"
What a crock of shit.
This brought to you by the stereotype-and-kneejerk department.
See you here http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
* Downmodding the last 2 times I posted this (via sockpuppet usage, that much is obvious, since there is NO WAY you merit a +4 on your bullshit here I tore up -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... )?
Both here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... here too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... for confronting you with it too?
Please (lmao):
Lame & WEAK, just like your b.s. I shot down WITH EASE in the link above... lol!
APK
P.S.=> There's LITTLE question I tore you apart in the 1st link above + my other post there vs. your "so-called 'points'" that you "amended" bogusly, changing your parameters/constraints there!
(Prepare to be utterly humiliated, publicly - there's NO way your b.s. there merits the +4 upward moderation it got (you must have used sockpuppets to do it, modding yourself up))
... apk
Then figure out how you're going to generate all that while remaining carbon free. Try wind, but you probably won't have a bird left alive in the whole country.
Wind doesn't kill that many birds. I've been to multiple wind farms in multiple countries and have not seen piles of dead birds at the foot of the turbines. It just doesn't happen. It may have happened for some wind farm placed in a migration path, but it doesn't happen in the manner currently asserted by the green-haters.
Solar? How long will it take to ramp that up, and at what cost?
The longer we wait, the longer it will take. So we should start sooner rather than later. Distributed PV is the best solution, with night storage via hydro, kinetic, thermal or chemical batteries (probably in that order).
keep researching geothermal...
Ah, the guy that wants his pet theory to be the only one. It's been researched. It's only viable for areas with active surface thermal (Iceland, and areas with hot springs). It will *never* be viable in arbitrary areas. That's why there isn't that much research into it. You want to see your $300 electric bill got to $3000 and still have rolling blackouts? Try geothermal.
Learn to love Alaska
Its f'n 20 miles to town and I'm 66 years old. Even if I could bike it, I don't have time for that, and would get killed by a drunk within 3 years on the roads around here coming back from my poker games at 1 AM. Bike,. my ass. That won't even solve the problem, either. You need petroleum to grow your food, or if not yours, for the teeming masses in the big cities, you need petroleum to transport it, you need petroleum to heat your homes, and so forth.
I take it you didn't notice the foxes and raccoons dealing with the corpses? It's *amazing* what a hungry raccoon will eat.
Where the H did that come from? There's other things to tax, don'tcha know? We didn't even have income taxes 'til 1913 and were getting along just fine until Democrats insisted on being able to steal people's money directly. We even had the golden age of the 1880's, which was our greatest economic expansion of our entire history. Its no coincidence that there was no income tax at the time.
You first.
You have to hit him in his beak then go inside and kill him, but remember it will result in the revenge of the Reptites at some point.
Ha ha ha! Your reference to this "being no myth" is a site that is guest hosting Ann Coulter, and calls Global Warming a myth! Thanks for demonstrating my point so well. The bird killing aspect of wind turbines is just a myth made up by the same anti-science people that deny global warming.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
I would have thought the fact that I said build nuclear would have answered that for you. And I don't care whether fracking has been around since the 1840s, it's an environmental blight and a serious health problem.
the damn commies in China
You're a fucking imbecile. No wonder you linked to a Ann Coulter supporting site.
No, it is NOT true that the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to ramp up solar. It is exactly the opposite.
Wind has an extremely small penetration in the electrical generation market right now. If you ramp it up to 100% or more to account for windless days, there's nowhere you're not going to be able to see one (do you WANT a landscape like that?) and there will be billions of dead birds.
You say we can't drill arbitrary places to find geothermal, and that may eventually prove to be true, but don't you think we ought to be trying? Such a thing, if perfected, will last longer than the sun itself.
I kinda like solar-thermal, but try to make it work in the midwest where normal == overcast. Same problem for PV.
Electric cars won't use fossil fuel once we go nuclear.
deny anthropomorphic climate change/global warming on the basis of not trusting data representing past temperatures (tree rings, lake sediments, etc.) put absolute trust in a book written 2k years ago to be the word of God himself.
I don't have a Tesla, but I thank you and everyone who helps move us to electric cars. I'd like to see Exxon stock holders taxed at a higher rate to support Tesla.
this is simply not enough time to base this assumption!
Actually Bill Clinton lead the largest peace time expansion of our economy.
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream. Small amount of wind power is good, sure. But it is fated to be a small portion.
Why do we let the deniers control the conversation? We need to ignore them and figure out what we need to do about global warming. Should we turn off half the streetlights? All the streetlights? Or would we rather go without air conditioning? How will a "free" society that has optimized itself for blind consumerism re-optimize itself for intelligent consumption? Can it even hope to do such a thing? Or do we all agree that there is nothing that can be done collectively?
When I worked for PG&E I saw the sulfur emission at the geothermal plant in Norcal. The entire plant, and road, and the field out to the main road was yellow. This is a problem.
Girls, girls. Settle down. You're both pretty.
Bark less. Wag more.
Scientists not 100% certain that climate change isn't natural.
In the past 20 years, has a higher correlation between temperature predictions that our best weather models.
None of the predictions in the past 15 years has come true, including Al Gore's famous "Snow will be a thing of the past by 2012."
I also do not trust the IPCC because they are a major backer of carbon exchanges, which has nothing to do with science.
The carbon exchanges if you do not know that they are, will tax every nation based on how much CO2 they use. This money which will measure in the 10's of trillions of dollars per year, will then be used to create a Global Army to enforce the C02 emissions/taxes as well as a new Elite class.
This new Elite class will not be electable, and not answerable to anyone. Sort of like how the idiot Europeans run their EU Union and have the GAUL to dictate to Putin what democracy is and how the Ukraine should be governed.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
RTFA. They're physicists, not climate scientists. Wah wah wah...
It has been getting warmer, and human carbon emissions have probably contributed to that.
Having said that, the paper itself doesn't show that. It gives a 99% confidence under a shitload of assumptions, many of which are picked out of thin air. So the confidence in its result is much lower.
None of this gets to the heart of the matter, though: even if it has been getting warmer and even if humans are responsible for it (statements I both believe to be true), that tells us nothing about the future or what policies we should adopt.
..."examine historical temperature data going back 500 years"
Because "climate cycles" are never more than 500 years long? Seriously?
-Styopa
"A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years..."
In other words, "We looked at the last 2 seconds of this 9 hour VHS quality movie and determined that the car featured in it is moving faster than it should be in last frame."
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The American economy grew by more than 400% from 1865 - 1900:
http://www.shmoop.com/gilded-a...
Clinton do that? Factor for his 8 years vs that 35, that's about 4 to 1, so Clinton would have had to grow the economy by 100%. Didn't happen.
So....what's that big scary number when you express it as a percentage of total bat deaths?
No sig today...
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
Nobody's saying it is.
But how does it stack up when compared to other bird killers (like glass windows, cars, etc)?
No sig today...
Why, you increase benefits and food stamps and aid to foreign countries, of course.
I don't get it, after reading the comments here, why is there so much resistance accept that man is causing [changes in the Earth's rotation speed]? Just thinking logically, it makes sense. We're taking carbon that's been buried for millions of years, and then burning it, on a huge scale. How can this not affect the [Earth's rotation speed]?.
That's not really an argument. Something is either happening or it's not, regardless of whether it sounds logical to you or anyone else.
People are skeptical because the climate change alarmists want to centralize government power over individuals. There's a never-ending list of reasons why we are told we should give governments more power over us. When one reason fails, the power-hungry always come up with a new reason. There's an equally long set of historical examples for why government power over individuals is dangerous.
Since power-hungry people have an obvious motive to lie, and since free people have obvious reasons to be suspicious of the power-hungry, why shouldn't you expect "resistance" when yet another reason to concentrate power is offered?
So he wants to determine whether or not the temperature increases since 1880 are part of the normal fluctuations in climate and he only goes back to 1500 for data to analyze? As part of normal fluctuation in earths' climate, Manhattan Island and New England were underneath a glacier (the Wisconsin Ice Sheet). At another point in earths history, tropical plants grew inside the arctic circle. Again, all part of the normal fluctuation of earths' climate. I was very disappointed in this study because this is question I would like to have answered. We have seen periods in earths' past where the concentration of carbon dioxide increased rapidly and then reversed itself. I mean really reversed itself; all the way to an ice age. What is the mechanism for the reversal? Some have suggested the increase in CO2 caused more plant growth which soaked up the extra CO2. OK, but why didn't the CO2 level stabilize? Why was the decrease so dramatic? Is it possible earths' climate is fundamentally a chaotic system?
And that suddenly makes them qualified to do the job of climate scientists? Look, either climate scientists are real, or they're physicists, biologists, and chemists in disguise. And not the super-heroey masky type of disguise either. With how much they're trying to push political opinions, it really just looks like Skrully, body-snatchery type disguises.
You say we can't drill arbitrary places to find geothermal, and that may eventually prove to be true, but don't you think we ought to be trying? Such a thing, if perfected, will last longer than the sun itself.
And is roughly as safe as fracking. Pumping stuff into the ground to get something else out sounds familiar, even if it's just water in and heat out.
Wind has an extremely small penetration in the electrical generation market right now. If you ramp it up to 100% or more to account for windless days, there's nowhere you're not going to be able to see one (do you WANT a landscape like that?) and there will be billions of dead birds.
Nah, there won't be that many dead birds. Wind is still much better than geothermal everywhere. The forced earthquakes and such it causes.
The problem with green power is it's best to have multiple ones. Wind works at night, and solar works on windless days. Having some storage to even out the generation differences would make all the difference. With storage in place, PV is much better than solar thermal, and wind is a better "top-up" for the batteries, though many areas reliably use it for base generation, as it can be a constant power source, but is area dependent, like geothermal.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm a couple decades younger, and even in the daytime, I'd get plowed by a soccer mom or some douchebag in a BMW attempting to cross under/near an interstate.
Take a bike on a bus? For a bus that comes every half hour with two slots on the bike rack, good luck. There will be some other hipster who will ensure his fixie is on the rack before you. Even if you did make it across town with the bus, there are not many bike racks, and the city is slavering to cut someone's lock off because those bikes sell really well at pound auction. If you did make a space on a bike rack, someone will be making way with your steed, or whatever parts that can be yanked off. The local university has this miserable looking graveyard near campus buildings of bikes with a wheel missing, no fork, pedals gone, or even sans bottom brackets.
So there is always the folding bike... which means carrying it and a backpack on a crowded bus. You can't really lock up a folder, and a lot of buildings disallow them. This is probably the best option, but you are stuck lugging two fairly heavy things with you during your town foray.
People bag petroleum, but they spend more time attacking alternative solutions. It will be a shameful thing to tell my kids that the former switches on a wall had lights turn on, but never do now because a group of people just didn't want people to have anything but a bare subsistence living standard.
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
CFACT is not a remotely reliable source, nor to they cite any such source. Google Scholar is usually good at finding real research papers on the topic. This is the top hit for 2013, and while it finds some bird mortality due to wind turbines, it estimates the effect to be much lower than that of other anthropogenic risks for birds, even assuming a 10-fold increase in wind turbines.
There is no silver bullet, nor will we ever manage to return the planet to Garden of Eden conditions. But "there is no single perfect solution, therefore let's not do anything" is not a viable approach to life. Perfect solutions to any problem are exceedingly rare, but that does not stop us from improving situations.
Stephan
Actually, that was the Gilded age: something gilded appears golden but is actually not so.
You fanatics and your dedication to the 100% number. Maybe you should accept that humans are only worth around 6% of CO2 emissions worldwide instead of blaming us for absolutely all of it.
What do you mean "once we go nuclear"?
We went nuclear in the '80s.
Oh, you don't live in France, so sorry.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Off-topic: the 16th Amendment didn't change anything. It's a distraction from the fact that judges have been ignoring the letter of the law for decades. Look at the grammar and compare it to the laws that came before. Then ask yourself what was repealed. The answer is nothing was repealed. People say it applies to personal income taxes, but there are no words in there that could possibly refer to a person. The 16th Amendment is a restatement of the existing laws in an intentionally confusing fashion. Add in public schools telling kids what to think and you slowly get a society that accepts things just because everybody else says so.
Everything you said is complete bullshit.
Now, read this and STFU.
Moron.
"Lloyd Christmas: What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?
Mary Swanson: Well, Lloyd, that's difficult to say. I mean, we don't really...
Lloyd Christmas: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?
Mary Swanson: Not good.
Lloyd Christmas: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary Swanson: I'd say more like one out of a million.
[pause]
Lloyd Christmas: So you're telling me there's a chance... YEAH!"
-- Dumb and Dumber, 1994
Piers Corbyn has a different take on this issue:
http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/pv.asp?p=wact48
There is climate change, but who is more accurate with what data to back them up? Can their results and data be replicated and verified?
The are two opposing sides to climate change? Which one is actual science vs. fiction?
They could have thought about a study like this when they first started thinking about the green house effect and climate change:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/121...
But no, temperature recordings normally start mid 19th century, that is tardy. Now if they had actually started doing something against climate change around 1950
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ep...
that would have been wise, alas ...
Je me souviens.
Precisely. No matter what alternative energy you come up with, as soon as it threatens to become practical to use it at scale, the environmentalists will find a problem with it and shut it down. Fuck em, just burn lignite.
"It is impossible to know whether similarly large short-term temperature fluctuations may have occurred at other times, but are unresolved by the available resolution. The next 150 years will determine whether the long-term average centered on the present appears anomalous with respect to this plot. Since there is no scientific consensus on how to reconstruct global temperature variations during the Holocene, the average shown here should be understood as only a rough, quasi-global approximation to the temperature history of the Holocene." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
The study infers what the temperature was from "a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales."
In other words, the author relies upon a strong (perhaps even one-to-one given his 99% certainty claim) relationship between the average seasonal temperature from the thickness of a tree ring, or a layer in some ice or lake sediments. Now I may be a bit ignorant on the subject, but I do believe that we'd be talking about trees that are 500 years old, which only grow in certain places (such as Sequoia trees on the Pacific coast). Ice cores 500 years old must be either far north or in Antarctica. Lake sediments will accumulate only where there is a basin fed by significant rainfall. So, this author's sampling is from a few distinct locations around the world.
Now the thicknesses of these metrics does not prove temperature, it suggests the amount of precipitation. Trees grow better where there is rain, and ice and sediments accumulate more when precipitation increases. Show me the proof that an increase in temperature in these locations increases precipitation, and I might begin to believe this author. (I imagine that will be difficult to do, because there was no one around 500 years ago taking temperature readings at the locations of these metrics.)
(Oh, and for you global warming nuts out there: please forgive me for examining this intellectually.)
Because none of them are realistically controllable and adaptation is they only practical course of action. This requires greater funding and activity in science and technology that can only be generated by an expanding global economy and a growing scientifically literate population, and not by imposing reductions, taxes or restrictions on any sector that isn't directly pathological to the economy or population growth.
Those who are anti growth are like fools who would spend millions trying to save a father from cancer when it will have little chance of success, rather than investing in the man's children. i.e. If we can progress technology rapidly enough then the long term problem of unlimited population growth becomes a non issue as humanity transcends the limits that hold it trapped below the thin blue line.
The US great plains over the last two hundred years in some places went from two feet or more of topsoil covered with with Prairie grass, Native Americans, and Buffalo to now more like six inches of topsoil mostly due to atrocious soil farming practices by the European invaders more akin to strip mining than stewardship. That is a lot of carbon loss.
http://bigprairieprepress.com/...
"The farming practices of early settlers caused erosion of the topsoil. By the late 1870's the topsoil had vanished in the center of the prairie and the settlers who farmed there moved out to its edges. This was the beginning of the process that would create the Big Prairie Desert. This pattern of land use, dry conditions and soil erosion is what caused the dust bowl that was begining at about the same time in states further west."
Related (although perhaps an underestimate of the total loss):
http://boingboing.net/2011/05/...
"These pillars --- located outside a rest area off Highway 80 in Adair County, Iowa -- represent the topsoil Iowa has lost since large-scale farming began 150 years ago. In the 19th century, Iowa had 14-16 inches of topsoil. Today, it has just 6-8 inches of the stuff, and more is being lost all the time. The irony: The very farms that are depleting the topsoil desperately need it, too. "
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
"Although the figure is frequently being revised upwards with new discoveries, over 2,700 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon is stored in soils worldwide, which is well above the combined total of atmosphere (780 Gt) or biomass (575 Gt), most of which is wood. Carbon is taken out of the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis; about 60 Gt annually is incorporated into various types of soil organic matter (SOM) including surface litter; about 60 Gt annually is respired or oxidized from soil.[2] "
So, three-quarters of more of the carbon-rich top soil of the center of an entire continent (North America) was lost, much of it a century ago. That I think may help explain some global climate changes even more than recent fossil fuel use.
From:
http://people.oregonstate.edu/...
"When we lose soil, we are losing a resource that is, for practical purposes and human timespans, essentially non-renewable. An inch of soil takes between 200 - 1000 years to form, yet it can be swept away in a few seasons."
Ways to create topsoil faster included organic farming (focusing on adding organic matter to the soil) and remineralization from ground-up rock dust.
http://remineralize.org/
Still, maybe without all the extra carbon in the air we'd already be in another mini ice age?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
for the tax and blood that it took to pay for your oil wars, healthcare costs due to car exhaust, etc.
People have made up their minds unfortunately. Changes in climate can easily be brushed off as natural variation.
Sure it's natural variation. It's the exact kind of variation you would expect in the climate after releasing tonnes of greenhouse gasses that had been sequestered for millions of years.
we'd have to get developing titans like India and China
This gets bandied around a lot as a "reason" not to do anything, or to do very little, about reducing human impact on the environment (Not saying that this is your point, just picking the words out). It's crap for two reasons: first, the impact of the US on the global environment far outweighs India or China's impact, now or in the foreseeable future. Secondly, and more importantly, the argument effectively says "can't fix everything so there's no use even trying." It may be that you can't fix everything, but we have to start somewhere, and doing something is better than doing nothing.
Phile Jones, the man responsible for ALL the data from the first IPCC reports has admitted to manipulating the data to get the results he wanted. Even after said manipulation he still didn't get the results that he wanted, but the IPCC reports said he did anyways. When other researchers wanted to double check his work he stalled them ignoring FOIA requests for years. After 7 years of ignoring such requests and it was immenent that he would be legally obligied to hand over the data he deleted instead where he wrote in an e-mail that he would rather delete the data than let opponents peer review what he did.
Does this sound like the actions of reasonable honest person? No. And despite what AGW people claim, none of them can actually dispute a SINGLE item I have listed. I have posted the above nearly 100 times on /. and other sites and have yet to have anyone tell me where the above is wrong, period.
That is why there are "deniers". People who know those involved and where all the data has come from know the above. People who believe AGW have to either not know the above or pretend none of it happened.
I'm not impressed with your spin-title: 'In 2011 it was "Discovered" trees eat CO2'
Why would I trust you to interpret ANYTHING ?
You didn't even read past the title of the first article you linked to.. or didn't clue in on the difference between 7 degrees Fareinheit and 4.5 degrees Celcius...
from the very article you linked to: "rise 4 degrees Celsius or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit".
You didn't even read your own links... ??
Need anyone say more? More rubbish from the money grubbing losers in life.
No single tech will replace petroleum - that's why we're pursuing more than one option.
And the less you spend on paying for gas, the more you have to buy electrons. Some sort of offset or special pricing will be needed for low-income folks who see their electric bills go up if power prices rise.
There's also still a lot that can be done for efficiency, even if you don't shift all the way to Passivhaus standards.
Wrong answer: keep drilling. I hope to live long enough that the only person being told to "drill, baby, drill" is Todd Palin.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
There are climate scientist, and most of them work on climate models. The physicists in TFA are working the same problem from a different angle: statistics (and coming to the same conclusions). They won't profit from more money being invested in climate models, though, falsifying the assumption on which the post I originally replied to was based. Not that such an obvious troll really needs falsifying.
OK, now all he has to do is to get someone to verify his findings with findings of their own. Lets not include the scientists who were caught red handed lieing (is that spelled right?) about climate change and their false data. Quite frankly, this is a subject that warrants no importance. Its just a way to take more of your money through carbon credits (what a scam!) and taxes. Bunch of fucktards.
Yeah, its as safe as fracking most likely, so its something we should be doing.
Dead birds are dead birds. Those big paddles in the sky are going to have an effect, and if there are LOTS of paddles in the sky, then there's going to be LOTS of dead birds. I really ain't that all broke up about it, EXCEPT if it does rid the skies of all the birds. Don't think it'll happen at any concentration of wind machines, having birds live normal length lives might be a thing of the past.
Yes, wind and solar. Solar thermal can work at night if the thermal part is used to heat something that stays hot all night. Wind is 24 hours as long as there's a good enough breeze. But these things are EXPENSIVE. If it was just a matter of all the well-to-do people just having to cough up some more so that they are not quite so well-to-do, it might fly. But there are something like 49 million people in poverty in the USA, and they cannot stand having their electric bills double. They need cheap to survive. Living in poverty is said to take about 6.5 years off your life, and if you do it as a kid, the 6.5 years are not recoverable with subsequent prosperity. We can't induce more poverty while chasing this idea.
Oh yeah? How do you make a car go down the road on nuclear electricity? You can't just use a long extension cord, you need a battery. So far, the battery tech is too expensive and too limited to replace all the internal combustion engined vehicles there are. You can get it to work for a price in a car like a Tesla, but your Ford F150 with an electric motor is probably going to have a 12 mile range with current battery tech.
It _adds_ to dead birds, rather than trading places with glass, cars, etc. How they compare will be determined by how far out we want to build wind. If we go 100% - 150% of our requirements, and account for the staggering increase in those requirements from not only powering the grid that exists, but adding to it electric vehicles to 100% convert the highways to electricity, there probably won't be a square inch of sky that you can photograph in the USA that doesn't have a wind generator occluding it.
Shoot the environmentalists. If we'd have listened to Shakespere, and shot all the lawyers, we'd also be better off now. This is like that.
No shit.
In the 70s Newsweek said global cooling would starve the planet. Then the warming hysteria kicked it up with a bogus "hockey stick" graph thats laughable in the way it used data and erased temp fluctuations any historian of mid ages knew about. Then we got bogus stories about 40 dead polar bears after only 4 bodies were found after a huge polar storm. Then we got Al Gore making all kinds of dire predictions that never came true (ie no atctic ice in summer by 2013). We also had researchers admitting they were lying about warming. NASA's Hanson regularly gets busted for bad science by amatuers. A co founder of Greenpeace says warming hysteria is fed by Marxists and anti-Americans who flooded enviro movement after fall of Berlin Wall. Look at any warming conference and see who is holding the signs outside calling for "end of capitalism". NO surprise UN wants "rich" countries to transfer wealth to "poor" countries (with leaders who keep money sent to people). "Climate change" is a scam, a ruse, a Trojan horse - I feel sad for people who consider themselves intelligent who fall for this baloney. Academics and universities are flops - grant and PR whores.
"Sometime in the 1980s the green movement lost its way," says Moore. It culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when "an influx of peace activists and Marxist ideologues into the green movement destroyed the remnants of a science-based agenda," Patrick Moore formerly of Greenpeace.
Yes, a single tech _will_ replace petroleum because it has to. Right now, there seems to be exactly two ways to convert potential energy into kenetic energy that can power a vehicle down a road and they are burning something or magnetism, as in electric motors. Electricity will be the single tech that replaces petroleum for everything except possibly flight at jet-power speeds. We don't know how to do that with magnetism yet, I think.
Offset for low income people? Where's that supposed to come from? You one of those guys that thinks the rich can provide all $$$ to run everything? Hint: They're not THAT rich:
http://townhall.com/columnists...
They just don't have enough money to lift us all out of our miseries.
The right answer is to keep drilling, only faster, and keep everyone living well so those of us that may be capable of finding an answer are not occupying all their time trying to figure out how to live on what's left after the gov't steals their money with some nonsense like a carbon tax.
You have to go back tens of thousands of years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
600,000 bats.... That's roughly one colony the size of the IH-35 McNeil overpass in Round Rock, Texas. Spread out over a whole year, and a lot more land mass than even the entire state of Texas.
Give me a 10 million grant and I will do the study and I will get the results you want. I will guess there is a 99% chance I'm right, but will not be able to prove it.
"Offset for low income people? Where's that supposed to come from? You one of those guys that thinks the rich can provide all $$$ to run everything? Hint: They're not THAT rich:"
Call it a tax break, which rich people benefit from all the time.
A properly designed and er, well-regulated carbon tax can and will work - if gov't can keep the "makers" from cheating the system.
These latter years, it's seems to be very difficult to do.
Oil prices have been very high for years, despite America's domestic production being at its highest in a long time.
You're not going to drill your way out of the coming climate disaster but will merely have a bigger hole to bury yourself it.
If we find ways to stave it off, it'll be because of reduced usage of oil and other carbon-intensive fuels.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Once you install solar, your bills won't go up unless your usage does, so long as you put in a right-sized system. So, solar reduces poverty. Some places will install systems for "free".
Learn to love Alaska
OK, now you try to explain how coal was formed and why we get ice ages. There were no humans back then. If you look at temperature evdence on a geological time scale, then mammals have a stabilizing influence on climate.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Ofc the change is natural. Do they really believe that it is divine intervention?
Let me try it again slowly.
It's been a 7F degree rise for ages.
Now it's a range of 1.5 to 4.5 (4.5F ~7C) degree change.
Has this gone up, or down? Looks like down to me.
NASA pointed out the prediction was too high and the current prediction has been attenuated somewhat.
If you check, since 1985, smarter people than you and I have been saying "but plants eat CO2, especially when they get warmer" and the alarmists have always said "no". Check for yourself.
Now they're describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected" that this actually happens. These are the "experts" that know ALL about CO2. Suuuuuuuuure they do.
But wait. There's more. Recently Freeman Dyson said:
“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”
A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic predictions trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO-2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.
“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”
and
"Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 — even though we humans poured record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere during that decade."
Recently Lovelock said:
"Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that."
Last week the Daily Fail reported the AP had had the IPCC report leaked to it and reported:
"Scientists working on the most authoritative study on climate change were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed.
A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft.
Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain."
"Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries.
Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat - and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve."
"The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.
The last IPCC ‘assessment report’ was published in 2007 and has been the subject of huge controversy after it had to correct the
Need Mercedes parts ?
Check the math. There's been no warming since 98. If you had facts on your side you wouldn't need to use rhetoric like "denier".
This is not the holocaust.
Also, this wasn't "a few days of bad weather" this was two years of awful winters, cold springs and 100 year record cold in some places because of five polar vortexes in a winter that a) began a month early and b) ened late and c) was predicted in 2007 by a method the IPCC claimed had nothing to do with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Excuse me but you're on the wrong side of the prediction credibility gap here. And all the rhetoric in the world won't fix that. You may lie, but the numbers do not.
Need Mercedes parts ?
There are places that are having more extreme temperatures, he or she could be in one of them. Here in the UK, winters are warmer, rain fall has increased to create flooding, summer temperatures are getting more extreme so i guess there is the opposite happening somewhere. People tend to attribute "their" local experience as a whole world experience
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"97%+ of geologists agreed the continents were stable. It was Settled Science. Hundreds of research papers supported it. Overwhelming consensus. And wrong. And, oddly (not really, if you think about it a moment), it was not a geologist but a meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, who ultimately showed all the mutually agreeing geologists they had it all wrong; the continents move." - Dr. Michael K. Oliver
Need Mercedes parts ?
I am not sure if you are aware of this, but in the rest of the world you can buy an extremely efficient diesel car. Hell, my Jag gets 40mpg!(US, not UK).
Some years ago we had a VW polo. That thing got 65 MPG and even had a diesel particulate filter so its emission level were very low.
In my opinion, a modern diesel is much, much cleaner over-all than a shitty Prius.
Hey, I'm all for quitting burning fossil fuels. Give me a cheap form of energy I can burn that doesn't contribute to greenhouse gasses, and I will use it. I can't attach a windmill to my car. I can't run my car on what solar panels put out. There is not enough power from these sources. When people yelp about not burning fossil fuels, they are talking about crashing society. They want to make people suffer. They want everything to stop, to radically change all that is, to force everyone to being a tree hugger. They want you to change your whole life without giving you any better option. They refuse nuclear, even clean nuclear. They want to blight the landscape with windmills, even when the noise and vibration makes you sick and the blades kill the songbirds, they want you to ride a bicycle when you are a geriatric, when its impractical to do so: across thousands or tens of thousands of miles through very deep snow. They want you to suffer, be cold, and die. They don't care about progressing society. They want to wreck it. If we are all dying, at least with fossil fuels you will be warm and comfortable. They are offering you CFL's that leak mercury. They want change but either offer piss poor solutions, or no solutions at all. I have begun to hate them. They protest and sign petitions, but are too lazy to think. They refuse to do the real work of change. That's why I hate them. They claim burning fossils are a free lunch and maybe it is, but insisting on change without offering a viable solution to change to makes them all so very useless.
Exactly. The solution to both the western dependence on oil and the contribution our nations make towards greenhouse emissions is nuclear power with a fuel reprocessing cycle. Perfect? Not by a long shot, but it would certainly have given us some breathing space; time enough to get our cars off oil, invest in solar, geo, tidal and wind power.
However it didn't work out like that because the no-nuke greenies stepped on the neck of nuclear power, effectively stopping it cold. We're resourceful buggers so we did the next best thing and focused our efforts on technology to yield significant energy savings and developed alternative energy sources to keep society moving along.
Oh, wait - that's not what happened at all - silly me. Instead, life went on. Growth went on. We built coal and gas-fired power stations to keep up with demand. Who could have predicted that outcome? Certainly not the no-nuke greenies anyway; likely they were off somewhere else by this time, busily chirping at people for eating McDonalds or some such.
Now we're at 400ppm atmospheric CO2 with 2-3 degrees of warming as a likely entrée to a much, much bigger problem. If the warnings are right then we should say thanks to the no-nuke NIMBYs. In the short term you've kept us all on the oil tit unnecessarily, but I really hope you all enjoy your true place in history as the motherfuckers responsible for Humanity's collapse back to the iron age and the destruction of countless species in the process.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
i'm not surprised you are trolling as an AC, that was embarrassing.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Now you're just being disingenuous.
Again.. from the link you yourself provided: "According to this new research, global temperatures could rise 4 degrees Celsius or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 "
Note the use of the word "could". It's a newspaper summary of a report... what do you think the actual report states? A range maybe.. ??
Freeman Dyson is a great mind. Here's one of his quotes:
"[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151
YOU are not helping advance the scientific discussion. You are only adding to the discourse that results in real anti-global warming scientists being grouped in with you and having their voices silenced. Freeman Dyson is trying to throw a lifeline to anyone buried under you...
JJones
Well, I just don't believe that abusing the American people, to prevent the relatively small amount of driving that isn't absolutely essential, in a country that has already reduced its carbon footprint more than any other, in the face of countries like China and India that don't really give a F, is going to be sufficient to solve this problem.
I believe the way to solve this problem is to keep prosperity as high as we can make it, research the problem scientifically and find a solution that the American public will buy. That solution would be something that solves the problem _and_ makes their lives better. That solution would be something like the STEP process I've been linking to, that would reduce the carbon in the atmosphere to pre-industrial revolution levels. That solution would be the electrification of transportation completely, bringing with it a dramatic reduction in the cost of transportation from everyone from the poor to the rich. Stuff like that. Building 1500 or more huge nuclear power plants and the invention of the magic battery to enable using it on the highway would have the American public kissing your feet.
But (further) crippling the economy with a carbon tax, and most likely precluding the research necessary to make these things happen I still believe to be counterproductive.
Hey, here's one thing we can do with a political solution that will improve the situation and be "bought" by the American people. Since the income taxes, and NOT "work-for-peanuts" foreign workforces is the real reason that jobs have gone and stay overseas, lets REPEAL the income taxes, get our jobs back from overseas and cross-border, build 100's of 1000's of factories that run on electricity that is produced by MUCH cleaner natural gas that will come from fracking the whole USA, and shut down those foreign factories that are running on coal. Now, THAT will have a positive effect on the carbon footprint of manufacturing world wide, as American industry does it better with cleaner energy, and incidentally results in full employment including those that never went to college. It doesn't take college to do pipefitting and welding and millwright things and electrician work or production line work or etc. in a factory. The economy would boom, we would have a positive effect on the CO2, and it wouldn't even require that those participating in the whole thing believe that they are doing something for global warming. They don't even have to believe in global warming, they can believe it is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind, but will still cooperate because it is in their interest to do so, as would be the electrification of transportation.
These sorts of things will work because it would be good for everybody. A carbon tax won't work because it will further pauperize the American people and they will resist it, successfully, politically.
I don't think that's realistic. "Me" putting in solar is a possibility, but I'm already spending $25K - $30K next fall to install geothermal heating and cooling. Even I, as a retired Navy engineer, can't afford to do both, at least not right away. And, my electricity is so cheap anyway, being anywhere from $65 / month to $150 / month in the summer when the air conditioner runs won't save me much, I think. And the poor, including the working poor that we have millions of today, won't be able to afford it either.
Solar, if it ever works at all, is probably going to have to come from the electric company setting up large facilities.
But solar reducing poverty? I just don't see it in either mode, privately owned solar systems or power company owned systems. I believe that electricity will be much more expensive than we have now.
Man, it's sometimes hard in threads like these to pick out the real trolls vs the heavy sarcasm. Commenting to undo incorrect moderation. We need a freakin' undo.
The economy grew by 400%. That's golden in anyone's book.
Only in the USA were people still seriously considering it being a natural occurrence.
Just how much can you keep putting your head in the sand?
There is a pdf floating around the web: 'the case for electric cars'
I think prius is obsolete now. (i would rather a pure electric)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/greendorm/participate/cee124/TeslaReading.pdf
This helped convince me because it shows the math making a case for electric cars versus gasoline and hybrid cars.
At the end of the day the tesla model rated at2.18km/MJ and a prius was 0.56km/MJ versus a honda civivc (i think its the most fuel efficient gasoline car in america?) 0.52km/MJ.
It convinced me (notwithstanding all the usual garbage that people carry on about making the batteries steel for the car itself) that in fact electric cars make sense for their energy efficiency even if they are hooked up to the grid run by coal power stations.
And with every improvement in battery technology you see more tangible gain with energy efficiency, distance, charge time.
Witness the sheer intelligence (not) of Sardaukar86 (foaming @ the mouth) http://news.slashdot.org/comme... + http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Nobody wants to discuss the real issue. Overpopulation. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet and the climate. Every stupid slut needs to have 5 fucking kids for whatever reason. I hope nature wipes us out soon. Humans are a cancer.
The climate cycles on Earth are hundreds of thousands to millions of years long, with smaller variations separated by hundreds to thousands of years. Lesser and major ice ages are examples. So the Lovejoy McGill study is irrelevant in terms of climate science. Climate science is something very few climate "scientists" do. That said, cutting down forests and burning forests is removing a major source of carbon (dioxide) consumption (carbon sink). So CO2 variations (increases for now) are man-made. How CO2 influences the earth's temperature or climate is still not well understood. An example of that is the latest IPCC report, which says that CO2 is only a small driver of Earth's temperature. That is because (climate pseudo-scientists did not realize) CO2 reflects sunlight away from the Earth as well as trapping some of Earth's radiation inside the atmosphere. This is a mostly balancing effect.
If climate "scientists" were doing science, they would tell us that planting trees and forests could reverse the CO2 increase trend (trees eat CO2 and release oxygen). Banning long-term clear-cutting would reduce the CO2 increase trend. Banning slash-and-burn clearing would greatly reduce the CO2 increase trend. Forests regulate the climate in their region, not just under the forest canopy. Tree and forest planting is a simple, easy, low-tech, immediate solution to most if not all of the CO2 increase trend. That does not mean that climate change would stop. A large driver of climate change is the cycle of warm and cold water rivers in the ocean. Their paths appear to have two stable patterns. The paths may currently be flipping from the one stable setting to the other. There does not appear to be anything we can do to affect that.
Another problem is the "storage" of CO2 in the oceans. Oceanic CO2 is stored below the surface, until the below is full up. When the top of the storage level reaches the surface of the oceans, the stored CO2 is released very quickly. The level appears to be temperature driven, and has reached the surface in the Antarctic, with large regions bubbling furiously. This CO2 release could be a catastrophe to animal life on the surface. The saturation of the oceans with CO2 is already a major catastrophe to oceanic life, although there has not been significant study of how much CO2 acidity affects the population of various species. The only way we could fix the oceanic CO2 problem would be to reduce atmospheric CO2 (plant trees), plant forests of green plants in the shallows, and plant floating forests of green plants in the open seas. This would be a very long term project (centuries).
Another way to reduce the atmospheric and oceanic CO2 temporarily is to dump iron dust, iron oxide, and iron sulfate into the ocean. The resulting algae and plankton blooms eat CO2 and feed the oceanic food chain. But that CO2 quickly gets released. so it may not help in the long term.
wake up and hold your nose
My wife and I don't have kids, so this isn't our problem -- if your children inherit a world that's on fire, they'll have to live with the consequences.
I do, however, care about sending more of my money to OPEC countries, and will happily support [some] climate change initiatives if it reduces this (I'll also support the Keystone Pipeline too, btw, so don't go patting yourself on the back just yet).
You climate change people market this stuff incorrectly by using alarmist tactics -- focus on the F*** Y** factor and you might get more people like myself buying into some of your message.
i think we would have to build a whole lot more turbines to compensate for the drag of the trees we have cut down the last century across the globe.
BTW, if there would be nothing slowing down the wind/jet stream, it would be speeding up all the time, approaching light speed eventually.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Utter balderdash.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8061
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream. Small amount of wind power is good, sure. But it is fated to be a small portion.
Are you just making this stuff up? This is a complete nonsense.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Exactly. Statements like this do not help the debate because the sensational headline is in itself a misstatement. If anything, statements like this give AGW skeptics ammunition.
Ah, the awesome combination of towering hatred and towering ignorance!
No, the all-powerful hippies are not holding corporate cowering helplessly in their thrall.
Do you know how many actual, real nuclear power plant projects in the U.S. have been halted by environmentalist opposition? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. It is impressive in fact how completely all attempts to halt nuclear power plants through protest failed.
But weren't all those nuclear power projects abandoned at the end of the 1970s halted by those d*mned "extreme environmentalists"? Nope. It was lack of electrical demand - those plants were planned under the idea that the rapid growth in electricity consumption of 1950s and 60s would continue forever.
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants make them unattractive investments compared to coal and natural gas plants. Only government subsidies (or a carbon tax) could make them cost competitive. It is good old profit-maximizing capitalism that has been holding nuclear power back.
There are in fact nuclear power plants starting construction right now - Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georiga. The plants project might have started a couple of years sooner - but what was holding it back was were the federal subsidies demanded by the private companies. At the start of this years the final i's were dotted on those subsidies ($6.5 billion in loan guarantees) and the plants are going forward.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The only cure for global warming is money.
...
(Oh, and for you global warming nuts out there: please forgive me for examining this intellectually.)
We "nuts" will forgive you when you do decide to examine this intellectually.
Your current offering fails to even attempt this.
You start with "I may be a bit ignorant on the subject" and then go on to show that indeed, you truly are. To address this "intellectually" you need to actually be willing to do a little hard work - read real research summaries and become familiar with why the objections you pull off the top of your head make you look foolish (hint: they actually are foolish).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Where the fuck have you been? The average tenured professor makes more than 90% of people in industry and for some field, like this one, there are only university jobs.... For example, in Engineering, I know tenured professors who make twice what a working engineer does. You don't think Mann drags the dollars in by the shipload, then you are a fool.
Since the Western nations all have sub replacement birthrates, I suppose you want all those 3rd countries to force their numbers down. Just like Mao and Staling did, huh?
Just goes to show you, throw enough poop (i.e. Global warming clowns money) at a wall, and soon you can't even see out the window, and the room stinks. 500 years of data is insignificant. people have been around for a long time. The "Cow flatulence" debate is laughable too......for example, how many Buffalo roamed the plains of north america up til 100 years ago....herds covered entire states (no not the "sissy states" on the east coast, "real men" states like Kansas, South Dakota, and Wyoming sized herds....thats a lot of red meat!!!!! Unless the buffalo were eating LOTs of Beano, probably a bit of methane there too. Umm, the problem here is that we really don't know....it is fun for some to use "incomplete data" to write studies on toilet paper that "prove conclusively" that something is so, but frankly we just don't know. Washington genius has again shut down our space exploration (once thought to be a source of global warming and weather changes!!!!) We now know most "green house gases" come form the mouths of politicians. Simple answer close washington, problem solved. BTW - that is MORE easy to prove than any hokum from environmental socialists. The real "problem" if you want to call it that is the glowing orb in the daytime sky...thats right, the Sun!!! We have no clue how the sun works over time, and frankly since that is what warms this planet and sustains ALL life (contrary to what the libs think) then perhaps studying the Sun and space weather is better use of our time. Trouble is we'd have to divert the "fun money" from washington to do that, and we'd probably stop allowing the Bureau of Land management to harras the rancher out west because of a few desert tuttles.....desert turtles....does that kind of explain how productive the land is for anything OTHER than ranching.....maybe they want the land for some OTHER purpose.....who knows. Desert turtles are like hippies....any surviving of either type had their day in the Sun and should quietly fade away!! HAH
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
"A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back .00001% of the earth's total age in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations."
Interesting what happens when you plug correct data into the report. They used a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments from the last one ten-thousandth of a percent of the earths age to show they are right. even more interesting is over half of that about was the period of that if they were correct was be considered affected. So to be succinct they fudged the numbers. Its laughable that
“This study will be a blow to any remaining climate-change deniers,” Lovejoy says. “Their two most convincing arguments – that the warming is natural in origin, and that the computer models are wrong – are either directly contradicted by this analysis, or simply do not apply to it.”
when he offers a study that only reviews .00001% of the earth's age. Thats like basing the temperature of a building over the last year on a single hour long visit.
I assume Lovejoy couldn't get access to the antarctic core samples retrieved in 2003 that are 3/4 of a million years old. http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
http://www.rmtrr.org/oldlist.h... talks about the oldest tree rings which date back to 300 BC almost all are in California.
Even more amusing is Sister university UC Berkeley has ancient sediments at the bottom of Northern California’s Clear Lake they pulled in 2012. This is among thousands pulled up in the last 30 yrs.
So when someone actually offers the same info from the last .01% of the earths age, I'll listen. That at least covers an ice age and several geologic periods.
All that will happen is people who actual degrees in climatology will tear his paper apart. But at least its nice to know there are people falsifying climate data just like there are people doing the same to fossils http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/da... https://tumblehomelearning.com...
We are not actually returning all that carbon to the atmosphere. A great deal of it remains locked away in the plastics we use every day in everything from automobiles and computers to clothing and hairdressing supplies. Also, the oil buried in the Earth cannot account for all of the CO2 taken out of the atmosphere by the formation of the coal and oil deposits. If the CO2 content of the atmosphere at the beginning of the Carboniferous Era was about 2000ppm, we have to consider that a great deal of that was absorbed by the oceans as well, and then subsequently redeposited as gypsum, limestone and other carbonates. Even if we were to burn all the oil and coal, there is still that carbon locked away in those minerals, and the atmosphere would not return to the state it was in at the dawn of the Carboniferous.
"Reduced it's carbon footprint more than any other" - that's arguable. More likely the emissions have been shifted elsewhere since so much of the stuff North Americans buy comes from Asia and those container ships have horrible emissions thanks to the bunker fuel they burn.
Even if I grant you that "reduced carbon footprint", it's still MUCH too high.
Get the per-capita emissions down to within 20% of the average advanced Western European country and then we'll talk.
Expanding fracking beyond what is now is a HORRIBLE idea; it sucks fresh water out of places that are already in short supply, emits large amounts of methane that have a much greater short-term GWP than CO2 and contaminates the water table.
Instead of repealing income taxes, just cut the defence budget to the $ equivalent of its lowest point during the Clinton administration; cut the DHS budget to 20% of its average since Obama took office and invest that money in job creation.
Solving the problem of nuclear disposal or reprocessing is required before you can build large numbers of new nuke plants which always cost much more and take longer than estimated.
And efficiency measures at all levels should be a priority - and those kinds of new builds & retrofits would create millions of new jobs.
The lack of a carbon / emissions tax has hidden the depth of the problem from the average person. It's telling that most large corporations have been using an internal carbon tax for years - incl Exxon whose CEO has been calling for a carbon tax since 2009.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I do not actually deny that humans are contributing to climate change, so much as refuse to concede that it is any great cause for alarm. If the CO2 content of the atmosphere at the dawn of the Carboniferous Era was around 2000ppm, today's value of 400ppm, while double what it was before the Industrial Revolution, is pretty snall change. And life was thriving at the dawn of the Carboniferous Era, else we wouldn't have today's coal and oil deposits. True, we are returning SOME of the carbon that has been locked away for millions of years back to the atmosphere, but not all of it. Very likely nowhere near enough to cause temperatures to climb to what they were during the Carboniferous Era. A great deal of the oil is used to make plastics, fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals, and the carbon contained in those items is not being returned to the atmosphere. Also, a great deal of the CE CO2 was dissolved into the Earth's oceans and fresh waters and subsequently redeposited as gypsum, limestone and other carbonates. That carbon is not going back into the atmosphere anytime soon either. If the Earth's atmosphere ever does return to the state it was in during the Carboniferous Era, it will most likely be due to extended periods of massive volcanic plume eruptions similar to those which created the Siberian Traps
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this may be true.
For all who don't know McGill U is in Montreal, QC. Obviously this study does not take the last 3 years into account where Quebec has had unprecedented amounts of snow over the winters. 500 years? Earth's climate cycles are in the 100,000 to million years so how can 500 years be an indicator? Is global warming/climate change happening? Probably. Is it man made? Don't know as there isn't enough imperical data covering the last 2 or 3 major climate cycles.
They say that the Mayan civilization died out due to years of drought that withered their crops. If that is what happened then I agree that it was due to local climate change but not necessarily global climate change. Until scientists can tell me how the earth's climate works don't fear monger about change. Heck they don't even know what causes the ocean currents to change causing El Nina or El Nino conditions.
And finally, I think their concern over global warming is the potential loss of the winter to spring transition which without would mean no more maple syrop.
I believe that electricity will be much more expensive than we have now.
In the right areas, PV is cheaper than grid power. The "right area" is growing every day.
Learn to love Alaska
Here is my satirical quote for the day (made from my earlier quotation from the study report):
"There are a variety of gauges for validity of arguments found on Slashdot and other comment-capable websites, such as the amount of insulting and abusive comments made in replies and the lack of true information and argument therein. Fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the variations in validity of comments over wide ranges of time scales."
'nuf said.
A few days? It's been cooling for some 15 years now.
Murphy was an optimist
You're absolutely right, of course, and it is, in fact, even worse than this.
Now the new plan is to shut down the coal plants - which were at 89% of capacity last winter - replacing them with NOTHING. Which means the next hot summer, or cold winter, we'll get rolling blackouts and people with no heat and air conditioning. What will happen? We'll burn up oiur fossil fuels faster, of course.
And then we have the ludicrous idea that by taxing the crap out of everything (Carbon Tax), and giving that money to the most corrupt government we've ever had... they will spend that money wisely!! No, a few people will get fabulously wealthy, a few folks will get even more power over our lives, and our freedoms will be reduced. The middle class will become more poor, and the income gap (which has gotten far, far worse under Obama & the Democrats) will get even wider.
And yet most people here are arguing for exactly these things to happen, because? I don't get it.
Murphy was an optimist
Hey retard, what makes you think anyone gives a fuck about you or whoever you are butthurt about this week?
Sure wish SlashDot would stick to technology. I almost have to take valium to ease the "dizziness" created by your Liberal spin. I'm not going to try to convince you of anything, because liberals are incapable of reason. Some people listen in order to respond (Liberals), while other listen in order to understand (the rest of us). Why would you not mention the funding from Maurice Strong, or "The Tides Foundation" or local Agenda 21 advocates? You tell only part of the story in order paint the picture that helps you to deliver your agenda. We see through you. And you suck. You are pathetic. ----[set FLAME RETARDANT=ON]
The "science has been done" statement is hugely over used and is false. The science has been manipulated and we don't want to have it scrutinized is a far more accurate statement. The bottom line is none of the models can explain the pause in warming, none of them can explain the medieval warm period (and ignore it) and all of them seem to imply that the weather should be a static not chaotic model.
Also, it is acknowledged that we had a mini ice age and given we aren't in that ice age now one could reasonable assume that warming occurred as a natural cycle to remove us from that ice age.
Warming is an excuse for governments to tax individuals more, assert more control over our lives and enforce draconian laws. The backers are on the gravy train and have a vested interest in keeping it going.
The end result of all this move to green has already been seen here in Australia when Melbourne had high temperatures (not extreme and not unusual for the time of year so don't scream warming) and their brilliant wind farms sat there doing absolutely nothing as there was no wind so guess what had to pick up the slack (no, not solar). This lead to brown outs and serious issues over a number of consecutive days. Then we could talk about all the failed and rusting or sitting at the bottom of the ocean wave generators (total joke). The common theme here - tax payers money wasted for no gain (in any dimension) and smarmy green advocates lining their pockets with those wasted dollars.
I already own a Prius; it makes good sense for 99% of my driving being in urban traffic alone. But 500 years is not enough to claim that all climate change is due to manmade sources; you need to go at least 2 million years of climate data to eliminate mankind. And in addition to that 500 years isn't even enough to cover one full ice age cycle. I call confirmation bias on this one.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I don't believe there has ever in the history of the world been climate stability?! From where I sit, we could use a little bit of warming. Bring it on!
The AGW advocates always present the AGW discussion as some sort of 'vote' by scientists in which the percentage of something or other is the most important thing. TFA in this case points to a '99 percent' certainty that the world is screwed unless we do what they say. ALL of this is based on computer models of the earth's climate that have not been accurate at forecasting because of their crude modeling of the atmospheric water cycle. Water is the most important 'greenhouse' gas, by hundreds of times, due to its a) prevalence, and b) massive greenhouse effect. But...the AGW advocates ignore the effect of water with their general assumption that a)it's always been there and b) always will be there, and c) does not change and focus all of their attention on carbon dioxide and the hawaiian concentration measurements showing a steady atmospheric increase. However, they completely ignore the carbon cycle. ALL of the carbon that we are exploiting was in the atmosphere in the past and was eventually 'sequestered' through natural processes that continue to this day. ALL of the carbon currently in the earth's crust will eventually be released into the atmosphere, either by the actions of man or by natural processes. For example, there are thousands of locations around the world where hydrocarbons (primarily ch4 but larger hydrocarbons as well) are naturally released into the atmosphere continuously. ALL of the carbon currently in the atmosphere will eventually be returned to the earth's crust. Carbon is constantly being cycled into and out of the earth's crust. Man's exploitation of hydrocarbons are just part of the cycling out of the crust. Moreover, there is absolutely zero evidence that the carbon concentration in the atmosphere is a constant value but rather has obviously changed dramatically over time. The earth's climate may warm over the next century or it may cool (through change in solar output) but there is nothing that we are going to do that is going to change it even 0.1 C. Politically, however, this is an enormous issue because new laws driver by AGW fearmongers will potentially give governments much more power than they already have over the distribution and use of energy. In the United States, we have already seen the beginnings of regulation of carbon dioxide 'pollutant' emissions.
Oh Yes. I know, - since 1998. Like I said above, - that's a popular myth among climate changes skeptics but a myth nonetheless.
Ask yourself this question: What would it take for you to believe in AGW?
No. Really. What would it take? Is it even possible? Does it even matter what the science says as long as you can find a few credible sounding people that disagree?
My guess it doesn't matter how much consensus there is amongst the scientists who study these things. You've closed your mind.
All that they did here was run a statistical analysis on the same flawed, "adjusted" data that Mann used on his initial "hide the decline" fraud. Even if the math here is sound, it doesn't matter because it is all based on deeply flawed, horribly bad data.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Global climate trends take longer than 500 years. Go back to the last ice age and plot CO2 against average temperature. Bet you see something other than AGW.
OK, sacrificing mod points to reply, because this is just ridiculous.
First of all, please quote the actual studies, not blog pages like El Reg. That keeps things much clearer, and minimises the obvious bias possibilities.
Secondly, you compare one study's "likely" 1.64 degrees Celsius rise for doubled CO2 vs another study's "up to" 7 degree rise Farenheit - by the year 2200. Have you ever thought about comparing apples to other apples, or did you just grab two numbers at random to make your comment look more exciting?
Third, there is still no clear agreement as to how much temperatures will rise with a doubling of CO2. Nearly all scientists agree it will go up, and most agree on a rough range for that value, but there is still much debate on exactly what that value is. This is why the latest IPCC report (which surveys hundreds of studies over many sub-fields, giving a much better picture than any single study) says the "likely" increase is anything between 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C (same as the first three IPCC reports), while the "most likely" figure within that range is between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees C. Cherry-picking a single study that posits the lower bound is not a credible way to present your case.
Fourth, you deliberately (and obviously) mischaracterise a study about increased foliage increasing CO2 uptake as "discovering trees eat CO2". This might be news to you, personally, but climate scientists already have a pretty good idea of how much CO2 is currently being absorbed by current levels of global vegetation, and are more interested in finding out how much this might change - in response to increased CO2, or continuing deforestation.
Fifth, a YouTube video, from some random bloke who edited out bits of some other guy's presentation? I'm not even going to bother. Citations of real studies only, please, if you want anyone to listen.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
First of all, they claim that anything about humanity-created global warning is fake, forgery and lies by homosexual, liberal quack-scientists, anf then the Koch brothers will pay for finding "the truth" in the remaining one percent.
stop lying!
Global climate change is a tool of world socialism - only.
The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere 130% modern levels. CO2 is 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. Temperature a WHOLE 3 DEGREES C over modern times – Oh noes!. The Jurassic DGW, Dinsaurogenic Global Warming, shows that those Dinosaurs, with their Airplanes, and Cars, and stuff, you know, they Dinosaurs and their DGW destroyed! THE WHOLE PLANET! With their DGW! Look, who wants 26% atmospheric oxygen? More air to breathe? Who wants that! And who wants more CO2 @1950, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2! Who wants that! And we DONT want the massive biodiversity of the Jurassic, no, we dont want more plants and animals and trees, no. Any time period they want to “prove” A. And they have the perfect example, the Dinosaurs and their horrible DGW, Disnosauric Global Warming, destroyed the Jurassic - wait, no , it didnt, it was the best time for life on earth with 1950 ppm CO2! Another Cult of the Church of Climatology propaganda piece.
Already done it.
Your turn now.
One major problem is that a 500 year sample of a population size of 4.5 billion years is not enough to draw anywhere near these levels of certainty. Garbage in = garbage out.
They are 99% certain that there's not been temperature shifts like this in last 500 years-- no duh, last Ice Ages and warming periods of comparable significance were more than 500 years ago.
Separate but also important discussion--what if the longer growing seasons enabled by global warming enable us to better feed a rapidly growing global population?
Ah the instant polarization of the enemy by creating a straw man that doesn't exist, and then declaring that the enemy believes it. You've mastered the Alinsky propaganda tactics quite well, grasshopper, and are to be commended, Please report to the nearest train station - and bring a blanket and a shovel, that's all you'll need!
In the mid1970's, when you were but a gleam in your mother's eyes, I was a Senior in High School, and we were taught that it was SCIENTIFIC FACT that the next ice age was coming. Now the modern re writers of history sell a new version where these teachings were a right wing fantasy - they are liars. I was there, and eagerly read Time Magazine, a leading news source at the time (Before Internet)... who ran story after story about the coming ice age.
In those times the same loons that exist today were claiming anyone who didn't believe in AGC was an ignorant hayseed who was bad for America, that there was scientific consensus, etc. etc.
So what do I believe? I believe that climate science has been so corrupted by greed that nobody really knows what the truth is about any of this. And that the corruption of climate science is one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the advancement of the human condition. There is ample proof of so called scientists fabricating data to get more grant money. There is ample proof of folks who allegedly care about the human condition becoming fabulously wealthy by running around claiming that the end is near.
I urge you to learn to think with your brain, and not your heart. Learn to recognize propaganda, now re branded as "community organizing" and realize that the people spinning these well crafted, emotional arguments are only trying to part you from your money. Speak out in the name of truth. Learn what real science is, and how it works, not the bullshit that passes for science on the Internet.
Murphy was an optimist
If your opinions are based on "real science" rather than whatever happens to fit your world view, then how is it you could so easily come to a conclusion about my age that is so completely wrong.
Trust me. By the mid 70's I was much more than a "gleam" and I remember the ice age predictions. Perhaps you should go back and see what was being written in SCIENTIFIC publications and the National Academy of Sciences about climate at the time rather than was was being condensed into Time and Newsweek. I have. You might be surprised.
Regardless. The point of my original post is that people like you have made up your mind and it doesn't matter what the science really says. You're going to choose to believe whatever it is you wish. On the bright side, I'm apparently a much younger person in your world.
I'm afraid I'm doing what I told myself I wouldn't, -wasting my time arguing with closed minds.
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream.
You'd have a problem disrupting the jet stream if you covered every square mile of the US with wind turbines, given that the Jet Stream is several kilometers up in the sky, and they don't build turbines much bigger than a couple of hundred meters.
It's not the environmentalists objecting to wind turbines. It's you right wing nutters.
Wow. What a loon you are. The 1998 crap has always been an obvious falsehood. Deliberately confusing short term trends with long term ones. We all figured you idiots would drop that one when the long term trend continued and we had multiple years hotter than 1998, but nope. The stupidity goes on. You're scientific facts is so wrong it's not even funny. We're in an ice age right now, so I don't get what you think science told you.
The level of wrongness has convinced me that people like you are bullies. Lying intentionally because it makes them feel powerful. Like they're fighting evil scientists with the only thing they have, willful ignorance.
ding ding ding ... we have a winner.
Not literally anyway ...
I'd be more receptive to the climate alarmists if they weren't making so much money off this.
http://www.kusi.com/story/13167480/the-amazing-story-behind-the-global-warming-scam
California just implemented cap and trade. The electric rate payers will get a climate credit twice a year to help offset the rising cost of electricity. The carbon market is man-made and does nothing but remove more money from consumers as a hidden tax. It is always the workers who pay for this crap and the elite find ways to skim ever more money from our pockets. If peak oil and carbon were truly a problem, why don't the traffic lights employ smarter technology to ensure that the cars keep moving in an optimal fashion? Why does Al Gore's jet produce more carbon in one trip than I will ever produce in my lifetime?
So a butterfly farting in Canada won't have any effect in the US? This isn't a butterfly effect scenario, though, this is simple thermodynamics. The energy you get bleeds from the current store. Change the flow enough in places, and other places will feel the effect.
The first item on a Google search for "wind power limits 10% usa energy " deals with carbon emission problems scaling wind power
...
this study concludes that a more practical upper limit for wind penetration is 10%. ....
sible wind energy industry in the U.S.”
Existing estimates of the life-cycle emissions from wind turbines range from 5 to 100
report
Also of interest: report
"Each wind turbine creates behind it a "wind shadow" in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine's blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith's research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines' slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
An internationally renowned expert on climate science and technology policy, Keith holds appointments as Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and as Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Coauthor Amanda S. Adams was formerly a postdoctoral fellow with Keith and is now assistant professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"One of the inherent challenges of wind energy is that as soon as you start to develop wind farms and harvest the resource, you change the resource, making it difficult to assess what's really available," says Adams. But having a truly accurate estimate matters, of course, in the pursuit of carbon-neutral energy sources. Solar, wind, and hydro power, for example, could all play roles in fulfilling energy needs that are currently met by coal or oil. "If wind power's going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that's serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less," says Keith. If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severe -- perhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2."
"The real punch line," he adds, "is that if you can't get much more than half a watt out, and you accept that you can't put them everywhere, then you may start to reach a limit that matters." In order to stabilize Earth's climate, Keith estimates, the world will need to identify sources for several tens of terawatts of carbon-free power within a human lifetime. In the meantime, policymakers must also decide how to allocate resources to develop new technologies to harness that energy. In doing so, Keith says, "It's worth asking about the scalability of each potential energy source -- whether it can supply, say, 3 terawatts, which would be 10 percent of our global energy need, or whether it's more like 0.3 terawatts and 1 percent." "Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts." The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Well I guess we can't ascertain the sun is made primarily of burning hydrogen, also we can't prove dinosaurs lived either, we also can't prove gravity. Your argument is pointless and stupid. Just because you can't understand the science doesn't mean you can just say it's wrong. You're wrong, you've always been wrong, you will most likely always be wrong and that would be fine if your idiotic ideas and lack of intellect didn't affect me, but they do, so when you stop trying to destroy the one thing that we have that sustains human life, then we can start talking like rational adults, until then I'll treat you like the terrorists you are.
Yes, the same ones that show we've never had a rate of temperature increase this quickly before, those ice cores? Yes let's discuss those and show how the same gases that used to be spewed by volcanoes are being spewed by our vehicles along with the particulate matter. Let's do that Chuck. Also take a look at how much it takes to go from iceberg to desert while you're at it, and match those up to the massive extinction events in our prehistory and once again, tell me what the hell you actually are looking at.
In order to try to meet a significant level of the earth's current energy usage, airborne turbines are necessary.
"Airborne turbines that convert steadier and faster high-altitude winds into energy could generate even more power than ground- and ocean-based units. The study examined the limits of the amount of power that could be harvested from winds, as well as the effects high-altitude wind power could have on the climate as a whole.
Turbines create drag, or resistance, which removes momentum from the winds and tends to slow them. As the number of wind turbines increases, the amount of energy that is generated increases. But at some point, the winds would be slowed so much that adding more turbines will not generate more electricity.
The group found that wind turbines placed on Earth's surface could extract kinetic energy at a rate of at least 400 terawatts, while high-altitude wind power could extract more than 1800 terawatts. Current total global power demand is about 18 terawatts.
At maximum levels of power generation, there would be substantial climate effects from wind harvesting."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120910143414.htm
Current models, as I understand it, are conflicting in terms of the level of effect of feedback loops. Pulling energy out slows the wind. Slower wind means less energy to pull out, but also localized heating, which likewise makes the location less functional. We are talking orders of magnitudes (yes, plural) regarding disagreement in overall interactive effect, especially between "theoretically possible" and "actually plausible", and "plausible and also non-catastrophic". Without doubt, though, there is a geophysical limit. Also without doubt, somewhere way below the geophysical limit of maximum sustainable drain, there is a region of maximum acceptable ecologic impact. That region is the only region that matters.
I didn't mean that as flamebait. I honestly feel that externalized costs are a determent to the functioning of our market system. Signals get lost. In order to eliminate externalized costs, one way would be to hit not just the corporation but also the owners of the corporation. Otherwise the system is rigged to reward and thus induce externalized costs. This would be direct, effective, and in keeping with capitalist virtues of free-markets as I learned them in MBA school at least.
What I believe is that money corrupts science, and that the money poured into Climate Science has corrupted it so badly that the outcomes of studies are meaningless. That's completely different than where YOU want me to be - A climate change DENIER. I've made up my mind that the believability of both sides is extremely low, close to zero. The contradictions over the years - that you want to hide - are real.
Your overall assertion - which has the underlying tone of words like "people like you" and "You're going to choose to believe" and "You don't study "real science""... this is all based on a philosophy where the enemy/opposition is an ignorant hayseed, country bumpkin, uneducated, ill-informed sort of person who isn't terribly bright, and therefore dangerous. This is a classic propaganda technique. People who practice this technique are not scientists, they are politicians intent on controlling people so they can live aristocratic lives at the expense of others. People who practice this technique have caused more human suffering than anybody else, and I, for one, do not trust their motives.
Murphy was an optimist
You claim to to believe neither side, yet you repeat the (false) claims of the climate change skeptics. You basically admit you're choosing to ignore anyone who could reasonably claim to be an authority of the subject on the basis that they've likely been corrupted by grant money and because of contradictions you and others have exaggerated.
Maybe we should just stop all research that requires money. Surely nothing accurate can come from it.
I agree that not taking a stand either way is pretty convenient. You can disassociate yourself from the worst of the skeptics and chicken littles while at the same time not taking any action.
Has it occurred to you that that is maybe the plan of some of these folks? Create just enough doubt to keep any real change from occurring? Who are the ones really fighting against the idea of AGW? Aren't they the ones living the aristocratic lifestyles?
France and Japan are there, and England is building 38 plants to reduce reliance on Russia's pipeline. By "we", I actually meant the species. Some subjects transcend nationality.
The rational in that post made no sense at all. Knowledge must be based on fact, even if just a seed at the start. Knowledge not based on fact is not knowledge, it is faith which has little place in a scientific discussion. People "believe" in something, but they don't know it with out some concrete basis. One of the first steps is learning the difference between faith and science. I can believe in something because it fits within what I do know, I ca believe in something just because it sounds right, I can believe in something...just because, but I can't know something unless I am able to derive a concrete answer from what information I do have and that information must be fact, or based on fact. No one can know something just because. They can't just know something. That's a belief!. I can know within a given percentage that what "I believe I know is the correct interpretation" In faith, you believe or don't believe, there is no room for statistically saying, this belief is 99% likely to be true while this belief is only 30% likely. It's my faith is right and yours is wrong. We can say (with a great amount of risk) your belief is barbaric and ignores the laws of common decency. Look at the Crusades and "Dark ages". Look at Galileo and the church which is a classic example of the collision between faith, science, and control of power.. One problem today is revisionist history. Science is based on laws and theories. Accepted theories have survived the test of time and gone through many rigorous tests.
At least to start, the same group the Tobacco companies use to combat the health issues were hired to spread confusion and dissent against AGW. Now some of the oil companies "appear" to be coming around. IOW, they see the science as concrete enough they do not want to be seen on the losing side.
My stand is on the side of the scientific method, honesty, truth, and morality.
I refuse to parrot a narrative, and I refuse to deal with people who want to classify sentient beings as "narrative believers" or "the enemy". Such black and white duality has caused so much human suffering I want no part of it.
I'm sorry if that position offends you. I'm insulted that you believe I am "taking no action" -- You don't know squat about me, but if you want to stand in judgement of me based on a few words written on slashdot, then I truly feel sorry for you, I really do.
Murphy was an optimist
I'm not offended by your position at all nor do I see you or really anyone else as "the enemy".
I am curious though. You don't seem to be convinced that global warming is occurring yet you are insulted that I implied that you're taking no action. So what actions are you taking in that regard and why are you doing so?
And if you're not parroting a narrative and don't trust climate scientists, nor climate change skeptics, why would you claim that the climate has been cooling for 15 years? It would seem to me that if you truly doubt both sides, you could come to no conclusion at all about whether the climate has been cooling or warming.
I agree that the current situation resulted not from lack of technical ability but rather due to social forces. I would suggest that one would do better to follow the money to determine the sources of propaganda than to merely make note of protests in the streets.
Or Prius... You realize that electric cars have been going zero to 60 MPH in less than 5 seconds for a very long time now, right? That F150 doesn't have to lack in torque.
Do you remember the 80s?
/really/ bad"; "WOW, is that another igloo?"; and, " Wait, what? We are actually a city in North Dakota?" seasons).
/very/ obtuse data sets in support of scientific claims that have /very/ political ramifications.
/really/ don't think that we can address this problem in good faith, without reform, considering all of the scandal behind this "science".
Global Warming? Climate Change? or Human Induced Global Warming? Which one are we debating about now???
I remember when we were told that "AquaNet Hairspray" and CFCs were causing "Global Warming". I suppose the school lunch room cafeteria talks were not as enlightened as most--considering Michael Jackson and Madonna were drowning out most of the conversations.
Human "Induced" Global Warming has become a "religion" of sorts. There is very little tolerance towards those who are sceptical about the "science" behind it.
No one really opposes the idea of "Climate Change" in general. Climate swings, hot, cold--after all, we do have 4 seasons, (except in Canada, where there are three: "our hockey teams are
You cannot blame the majority of the population for looking at the empirical evidence that all of us have have access to, and this evidence can validly be used to refute
Rather, we should commend sceptics as they require "real scientists" to attain a much higher benchmark of evidence.
Its easy to accept Climate Change... Even possible to accept global warming. But "Human Induced" Global Warming Theories that affect politics? Whoa now. Slow down.
There is WAY too much conflict of interest behind the "theory" of "Human Induced" Global Warming. (And no, PhD researchers at universities are NOT neutral, who struggle to please their advisers, grant providers, trying to maintain immigration status, get their degree, not lose their internship, etc).
We need research reform at universities--definitely an outlet for whistle blowers in academic and professional fields.
I
Why so much resistance? 6 Common Answers:
/scientifically valid/--because they can be falsified, (and have been, in some way). Valid theories should at least be falsifiable. But the last theory???
/very/ political consequences, establishing massive conflicts of interests both financially and politically. As a result, it is absolutely necessary to require a much higher burden of proof.
/many/ new theories about how evolution occurs, and how/why it occurs gradually, or in leaps.
1. Because "Climate Science" has become a religion of sorts--and there is incredible intolerance towards sceptics--especially intolerance towards professional and Academic sceptics.
2. There is WAY too much conflict of interest. Way too much manipulation in political arenas in the name of "God" -- err, so-called "Climate Science."
3. There is WAY too much intolerance towards sceptics--which are absolutely necessary for scientific progress because much higher benchmarks for evidence are pursued.
4. Its hard to accept this debate, because its a changing target, equivocation: Is it "Global Warming", "Climate Change", or "Human Induced Warming/Change"? The first two most people don't have a problem considering--the theories are
5. The Problem is the theory: "Human Induced Climate Warming/Change." Because, this theory has
6. There needs to be a way to falsify theories--to accept them as valid. Remember the "Theory" of evolution? And by "Theory", I mean the singular theory.. Everyone was aware of "Darwin's Theory". But even Darwin understood the necessity for falsification and explicitly stated ways his theory could be falsified, (examination of the fossil record, the nature of blood cells, etc). Because Darwin's Theory was falsifiable, it was eventually falsified--leading to
So-Called "Climate Science" must be falsifiable to establish their validity, and to promote the development and maturation of the theories in general.
I'm convinced that we really don't know what is happening. I do know that many of the claims made 15 years ago by so called "experts" and "scientists" just haven't come to pass.
What I am personally doing? Trying to be a good steward of the land I own, and the waterways I enjoy. Contributing money to causes I believe in. Continuing to read the evidence, but with a very careful eye. Trying to educate young people that things aren't as black and white and they seem, and that science, and religion actually have more in common than they have different. Asking people to look at motivations, and follow the money before going bat-shit crazy.
Murphy was an optimist
On another note, how much proof of of NOT crashing in the next plane do you accept as tolerable for taking said plane? You seem to argue for 0%: we need to be absolutely sure that we are crashing this plane before we refuse to take it.If we survive 1 in a 100 flights, we shouldn't complain. We need to be absolutely sure that we crash this plane before we try to do something about it.
Wrong, we like 'em. They're an engineering marvel. Unfortunately, they produce really expensive electricity. Implement them widely, and the 49 million people in poverty already, and already an unacceptable number, may go to 70 million, or 100 million. Cheap energy is how we live well. If it gets expensive, it's going to kill some people, because poverty is deadly.
Fair enough. I can respect that.
If you like them, then you are either in a small minority, or a very quiet group. Virtually every right winger that expresses a preference want's rid of wind turbines.
As to price, you're spoiled by cheap fossil fuel. But the days of that are numbered, not only because of it's greenhouse gas problem, but because it's finite.
Wind is a genuinely free resource. Fossil fuels were a temporarily cheap resource that's getting more and more expensive as the easy stuff disappears.
Thanks for the sci-fi link. But...
The group found that wind turbines placed on Earth's surface could extract kinetic energy at a rate of at least 400 terawatts, while high-altitude wind power could extract more than 1800 terawatts. Current total global power demand is about 18 terawatts.
You claimed 10% of the USA requirement would disrupt the jet stream. This is theoretical stuff looking at something that would create 100 times more than the current global power requirement.
Case closed.
"Only 99% probable? So all those claiming AGW is a certainty are lying, like I always said. "
the data is not there to support anywhere close to that level of precision. There is only one question to be answered. Is this fraud or is this incompetence?
You are looking at the total amount of energy in the system as the theoretical limit. Obviously if all the energy were removed at once there would be a problem. How much is not a danger? Not 100%, for sure.