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Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach New Monthly Record
mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of carbon dioxide gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA's latest results. “It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012. In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone."
I guess the amount of money that will be spent dealing with the coming mess, the lives that will be ruined, and ocean levels are just arbitrary numbers as well.
Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written that "[one] of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas."[53] However, he believes that existing simulation models of climate fail to account for some important factors, and hence the results will contain too much error to reliably predict future trends: ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Freeman Dyson also doesn't understand gravity (no one does). But that doesn't mean some vague claims can't be made about the two -- "heavy objects hurt when they fall on your foot" isn't a rigorous scientific statement, but it is true, as is his (vague) quote above.
The proof that CO2 does not drive climate is to be found during the Ordovician-Silurian and the Jurassic-Cretaceous periods when CO2 levels were greater than 4000 ppmv (parts per million by volume) and about 2000 ppmv respectively. If the IPCC theory is correct, there should have been runaway greenhouse induced global warming during these periods but instead there was glaciation.
You can't ignore the fact that the Sun was dimmer back then and the topology of the continents was completely different. CO2 isn't the only factor in the Earth's climate, just the most important greenhouse gas in determining it. (If you want to chime in and claim that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, it's true that WV causes the largest effect of the greenhouse gases but WV is a condensing gas under conditions in the Earth's atmosphere and the level is strictly controlled by temperature. Water vapor can not drive climate change.)
Incredible how well temperature predicts changes in CO2 concentration, isn't it? (Temperature is blue, CO2 is red)
The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!
So, you're basically chiming in here to agree with the global climate models. There was more carbon dioxide in the paleozoic, and the climate was warmer. Yep. The climate was warmer, and the dinosaurs lived with it Of course, the planet didn't have any ice caps then, and a lot of what we call "farmland" they called "shallow ocean".
We probably won't get the dinosaurs back, though.
Underwater front property valuations are in for a rather rude and sharp decline. As this increases, denials and attacks will increase (they will become extremely loud, aggressive and distorted, pretty much anything goes), to allow the rich and greedy to dump those properties, into a market of the gullible. Low lying water front at this time is a truly horrible investment and governments who approve construction in low lying coastal areas are corrupt as hell. Yes, developers will be seeking to develop and on sell land with multi-million dollar new buildings on it, knowing full well, they will be flooded out because it is more profitable than just dumping the land alone.
Other bad investments, coastal tourism companies, hotels chains with lots of at risk properties. Port facilities will of course be in major turmoil, needing to either relocate or where higher land is closely accessible shift from fixed dock design to a floating dock design. So no ifs just when, how bad and how fast and a real hold your breath when it comes to major methane releases which could trigger extreme compounding surges (fortunately the methane does readily break down over time, unfortunately, no where near fast enough and as flooding increases so does displaced organic matter and hence more methane is generated).
Never make the mistake to think the deniers are disbelievers, they are not, all they care about is how much they can make and how much power they have and totally disregard the consequences of their actions upon other people. A whole bunch of deniers are actually believers and are simply denying now to continue destructive practices and to be able to off load at risk investments (a whole lot of pension funds are going to be burdened by at risk investments and basically glug, glug, glug).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Freeman Dyson
"Generally speaking, I'm much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they're not talking nonsense." - Freeman Dyson (who is smarter and more educated about damn near anything, than any of you fools).
"What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate." - Freeman Dyson
As a general rule, if Freeman Dyson doesn't understand something, you don't, either.
Oh don't go there.
Dyson is a good guy, and if you point that out, these people are going to organize campaigns to shun him, have what he says banned, make it impossible for him to get work, and likely organize protests at his home.
It's the way tolerance works in the 21st century. Any resemblance to 20th century fascism is purely coincidental.
Actually that's some nice numbers, roughly 2.5 doublings of CO2 content, and a 3 degree C temperature rise, give about 1.2 deg C per doubling, in line with the 1.0 deg C per doubling you'd actually expect from CO2's measured properties, and a far cry from the IPCC publicised figures of 2-4.5 generated from GCMs of dubious accuracy.
So what does this tell us? The feedbacks are NOT strong, and not very positive.
So, with a climate sensitivity of 1.2 we can look forward to a slightly warmer climate for the next couple of centuries, which as the IPCC agrees, will be good for humankind. Good news if you like people, bad news if you are trying to impose a global government or whatever the climate crybabies want.
Yes, I'm 100% sure that they just walked up there, plopped it down, and it didn't even *occur* to anyone at NOAA to consider the volcano thing.
Jesus fucking fuck, what the hell IS it with you people on slashdot who think that the first "insight" you have five seconds after thinking of something for the first time in your life hasn't occurred to people who do it for a living? Here's a hint: If you were *that* smart you wouldn't be talking shit on Slashdot.
Ordovician... Jurassic... at too long an interval, we are all doomed to repeat what we have no chance to remember.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun is a stable G2 dwarf, and over the short term (millenia/eons) its power output is stable to parts per ten thousand.
Sure, I really would like that to be true too. But that "fact" doesn't explain the Maunder minimum which appears to be a fluctuation in solar power output considerably greater than the threshold your assertion. I notice that some researchers are actually claiming that a 0.2 W per square meter change in solar output somehow causes climate changes on par with a supposed 2 W per square meter heating today from greenhouse gases (other than water vapor).
I think this is typical of the current silliness in climate research that one can assert without supporting evidence that solar output doesn't change significant on the scale of millennia while ignoring the only known solar fluctuation which correlates with significant climate variations of the time.
Nothing resolved itself. People took action, and you fucking idiot don't even bother to figure out that someone else saved your sorry ass.
Just like Y2K, It's the same shit over and over again: society expends resources to head off disaster, because of said expenditures disaster is averted, fucking morons baffled because disaster that everyone was talking about didn't happen.
Fucking morons believe disaster scenario was made up to expend resources.
REALITY FUCKING BAFFLING TO MORONS! FILM AT 11
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The ozone was being depleted by chlorofluorocarbons. International efforts were able to largely phase them out, and the Ozone layer has recovered.
One of the first predictions of running out of oil was made in 1914 by the Bureau of Mines. They thought the world would run out in 10 years. There have been similar predictions since then. Why haven't they come true? Because huge sums of money have been invested in making sure we don't run out or at least to put it off as long as possible. Billions and billions have been spent on locating more oil, and figuring out how to extract the relatively small amounts of oil that are in places we already know about. Think about some the crazy stuff we do to get oil out of the ground even in the middle of the ocean.
One of the consequences has been that the price of oil has gone up over time. It's slumped back down for now, just like it did in the 90's but it rose after that and you can bet it will again. If in the early 90's you had told somebody that gas would cost almost $4.00 a gallon in a decade, they would have thought armageddon was coming.
In both the case of the ozone layer and oil supplies, the dire predictions didn't happen in large part because we did what was necessary to keep them from happening. Same thing with Y2K. A ton of money was spent updating computers and software.
And we could avoid the problems being predicted as consequences of global warming if we take action and be willing to spend some money. But for some reason, we'd rather just argue about it whether it's really a problem or not and in the meantime the solutions just get more expensive and likelihood of widespread consequences increase.
It gets harder and harder to take these claims from environmentalists, scientists and politicians seriously, when they're so wrong again and again and again.
Someday, you'll realize that everything said by a politician, and most things said by a journalist, are misleading exaggerated gibberish. Try talking to someone with a science degree about your science-related concerns.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Note: Fortunately the world as a whole is making substantial investments in renewable energy while the US drags its feet. Of course the problem is that we will largely have to import solutions developed elsewhere. We are wasting an opportunity for more energy independence. While renewable/nuclear energy will be produced locally, we will have to import the technology from places that were smart enough to make the investment.
Linus Pauling was very smart and a good man. He has Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Peace to prove it. As a general rule, if Linus Pauling didn't understand something, you don't, either. Yet, toward the end of his life, he had some odd ideas regarding megadoses of vitamin C that haven't ever been proven in clinical studies. The point is that a great scientist can, at times, be wrong about things--especially when they are outside his field of specialization. The big difference between Linus Pauling and Freeman Dyson is that Linus Pauling's ideas regarding vitamin C were mostly harmless, while Freeman Dyson's claims on climate change can be quite catastrophic if we take them seriously.
Led lights, fuel efficient cars. We have choices to help fix things. But you fuckers get bent out of shape just trying to get you to use a different light bulb.
More importantly, it's a sampling site in the middle of the ocean, far away from human influences. When the wind is coming from the ocean, it is very clean. When the wind is coming from the direction of an active volcanic vent, they throw out the data.
Of course, anybody who's in doubt could take a sample of air at a location of their own choice, and send it to a lab for CO2 analysis.
The problem with focusing on the fringe like this is that the fringe rapidly becomes a straw man argument for environmentalists. If you actually go to the Greenpeace web site and read their policies they don't suggest any of the stuff you mention, but every debate on Slashdot about environmental issues claims that they do.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes, but the people deciding today will be long dead by then.
It's just because the world is not dominated by engineers/scientists anymore. History has shown that if you sit down and try to constructively solve a problem rather than argue about it, you can achieve some pretty incredible things. But the world has never been dominated by problem solvers. It is generally dominated by bullies who realise it is easier to steal someone else's lunch than figure out how to make more sandwiches. The world wars showed the folly of this sort of destructive, zero-sums thinking, and for a while after people worked on solving problems and creating new stuff. Now we are just quickly heading back to our old (and normal) ways.
This is why companies like Tesla are so interesting. I really hope that Musk can prove that a market led solution can bring about positive technological change. If he fails then it pretty much means we should all go re-train as lawyers. It isn't anywhere near as hard as you might think, you just have to lose hope in humanity first.
"It does not take a few years to cause noticeable change in Global Warming. It takes centuries. Maybe your great-great-great-grandkids will intent a timemachine and shoot you for your own stupidity,"
Those idiots, if they just would have continued pumping up the CO2 levels we wouldn't have this ice age now.
And the big one, population growth. But another big one is also this:
An environmentalist who had travelled the world to find a job in carbon trading, explained to me that, "it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production and consumption; it is about reducing GREED."
As far as I know she wasn't religious, but it seems the West has inherited a monotheistic dogma about man being full of original sin, and sometimes it shows up in environmentalism.
Humans are creative intelligent creatures full of potential for empathy and freedom. But rather than champion our better qualities, some think we should persecute starving Africans for being born.