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User: riverat1

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  1. Re:Catastrophe? on How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? · · Score: 1

    Well, I used the term seabed because I was following your lead. It has more to do with the warming of ocean water itself which can be caused by any number of things.

    Methane releases under water can lead to anoxia as much of the methane will oxidize before it reaches the surface unless it starts our shallow to begin with (1 CH4 + 2 O2 ==> 1 CO2 + 2 H2O).

    The PETM is not especially well understood but it appears to be the closest analog to what is happening now in the prehistorical record. Even then the warming happened over a period of around 20,000 years rather than the several centuries we are on track to do now. There is no doubt it caused a lot of changes to life on Earth just like our current situation will. How bad it will be for human civilization remains to be seen but at the least it's bound to be expensive.

  2. Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!! on How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? · · Score: 1

    Because someone went through the trouble of directly measuring what was being indirectly measured to insure that the indirect measurement was good enough. That's not happening with climatology.

    I doubt you have enough knowledge to even know if that's true or not of climatology. Do you have any evidence that "most such temperature proxies have been handled, aggregated, interpreted by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia" or is that just your biased opinion? As far as I know most temperature proxies are done by the individual researchers and most of them are not associated with the CRU.

  3. Re:Dog and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!!! on How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? · · Score: 1

    Anyway, appeal to authority arguments have been debunked. Its 99% of respondent scientists in a ten year old survey. Global Cooling first. Then Peak Oil. Then it was Global Warming. Then it was Anthropomorphic Climate Change. Carbon PPM Quantity Tipping points. Fracking Earthquakes. Methane Bombs. It'd be a lot easier to believe all these sounding of alarms if they ever led to different conclusions. They usually end up with the same prognosis: More government oversight over personal freedom, reduced economic output, central planning, Al Gore.

    It's apparent that you have no more than a superficial knowledge of any of those things if you are able to dismiss all of them so easily as simply vehicles for more government control. If you could make a cogent scientific argument about it I'd be more willing to listen to you. As you say there is no optimal temperature to the Earth and it doesn't really care if humans exist or not. But most humans do and most of those things you mention have to potential to massively disrupt our civilization (global cooling was just a blip that was quickly dismissed). So I suppose your Randian solution is to just let civilization slowly fall apart as the effects of climate change worsen. I'd rather see my grandchildren have a decent life.

  4. Re:Catastrophe? on How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? · · Score: 5, Informative

    The most likely candidate for the last seabed warming of this potential magnitude was about 55 million years ago during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. That period did coincide with a lot of extinctions.

  5. An elephant never forgets on Dolphin Memories Span At Least 20 Years · · Score: 1

    I think it's been demonstrated that elephants have long memories. I recall a story about two elephants greeting each other like old friends when they hadn't seen each other for over 20 years.

  6. Re:Lead poisoning... I wonder... on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    Hmm. I wonder if lead poisoning could explain the NRA steadfast insistence on thinking that they have a god given right to shoot weapons.

    Ha! That deserves a Funny mod.

  7. Re:The Romans found out about lead on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 1

    You are right, it wasn't discovered that lead was the problem until much later. I was simply going for a first post with something coherent and cogent.

  8. The Romans found out about lead on NRA Launches Pro-Lead Website · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Romans found out about lead and its toxic effects. There's no point in using it where it isn't necessary.

  9. Re:Age of the glaciers on Glaciers Protect Alpine Peaks From Erosion · · Score: 1

    Most of the area of these glaciers is less than 13,000 years old.

    I'm trying to understand where you get that statement from. Are you saying those areas were not glaciated during the last ice age (from ~100,000 years ago to ~13,000) years ago? I'm pretty sure they've had glaciers there during all of that time. It may be that the oldest ice in some of them is only 13,000 years old but that is simply a function of the fact that glaciers flow, they get new snow which becomes ice at the top and as it reaches the bottom it melts out.

  10. Re:Correlation is not causation on A Climate of Violence? · · Score: 1

    Correlation is not automatically causation but often it's a big hint about where you need to look for causation.

  11. Re:What? on A Climate of Violence? · · Score: 2

    Yeah, Napoleon found that out.

  12. Re:Weird on A Climate of Violence? · · Score: 1

    Weather is to climate as a single roll of dice is to the statistics of thousands of rolls of the dice. Climate change/global warming is like subtly loading the dice so it skews the statistical average toward the higher end. That doesn't mean the lower end things can't happen, just that they will become less common on average.

  13. Re:"Hey, can I cut into your lane?" on NTSB Calls For Wireless Tech To Enable Vehicles To Talk To Each Other · · Score: 1

    Exactly, this is the equivalent of the ADS-B system for aircraft. It will probably become a necessity in order for self driving cars to become practical.

  14. Re: Honesty? on How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists · · Score: 1

    So, the solution to global warming is air pollution. Got it.

    That's the proposal of some in the geoengineering camp. Some problems with it ar you can never stop and it does reduce the sunlight hitting the surface thereby reducing the amount of sunlight available to grow plants.

    Also, what global temperature is ideal?

    From the Earth's perspective there is none. But from a human perspective the one that's allowed our civilization to develop to the extent it has over the last 8,000 years is probably best. We're well on our way to moving outside of that envelope.

    If that means melting ice caps then we get more rain, ...

    What makes you think that is the case? More and more it appears one of the effects of global warming is more variability in the weather which is not a good thing for human civilization.

    If we stop our CO2 output then where I sit could revert back to the mile thick ice, or the saltwater lakes, or the desert

    That statement is just plain silly and shows your lack of understanding of the science. If we stop our CO2 output the atmospheric level will stop rising and in 50 years or so the temperatures will stop rising. Where you sit will not revert back to mile thick ice or saltwater lakes although global warming could turn grasslands into deserts.

    We'll have forests in Sahara in no time.

    Not in your lifetime and not until there is enough precipitation to support them. There;s no indication that will happen anytime soon.

    I pretty sure more CO2 means more plant growth, ...

    That's a pretty facile assumption. Water and temperature both have greater effects on plant growth than CO2 and they'll be changing too, not necessarily for the better.

    What I see in your posts is a lot of warrantless rationalization about how easy it will be to adapt to global warming without much to back it up. Good luck with that.

  15. Re: Honesty? on How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists · · Score: 1

    Arrhenius said:

    if the quantity of carbonic acid [H2CO3] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.

    That's still an accurate statement .

  16. Re:Honesty? on How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists · · Score: 1

    If Phil Jones' data was the only data in the world you might have a point but it isn't. And he deleted his copy of the data over 25 years ago (are you even that old?). It's still available from the original sources which are various weather bureaus around the world.

  17. Re: Honesty? on How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists · · Score: 1

    If it were only as simple as your analysis implies. When looking at temperature increases you have to not only look at the atmosphere but the oceans as well (the land surface has a small role too). Over 90% of the energy being captured by the increase in greenhouse gases goes into the oceans. There is coupling between the atmosphere and oceans and cyclic events such at El Nino/La Nina (and others like the PDO) affect the balance of energy and the temperature between the two. El Nino's correspond an increase in atmospheric temperatures and the 1998 El Nino was one of the largest ever seen. Since then the cycle has been dominated by La Nina's which correspond to slightly cooler conditions and the Sun saw the lowest solar cycle in a century over the last half of that period. That along with increased aerosol pollution from southeast Asia has conspired to slow down the rate of temperature rise.

    Still in most temperature records 2010 is the hottest year so to say the warming has stopped is not particularly accurate.

  18. Re:Honesty? on How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists · · Score: 1

    You conveniently ignore that they called it climate change before they called it global warming. After all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in 1989. Here is a paper from October 1970 by George Benton titled "Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change".

  19. Re:More to the point... on Global Warming 5 Million Years Ago In Antarctic Drastically Raised Sea Levels · · Score: 1

    Sorry but the infamous Hockey Stick Graph has not been tossed in the trash bin. It has been supported by new work that has been done since it came out in 1999. See if you can pick out which line it is in this graph of ten different temperature reconstructions of the past 2000 years (scroll down for the key to the graph). You'll see Mann's Hockey Stick fits in quite nicely with the rest of them.

    What it amounts to is that the demise of the hockey stick graph has become a matter of faith on the (d-word) side. Another "fact" with no facts to back it up.

  20. Re:More to the point... on Global Warming 5 Million Years Ago In Antarctic Drastically Raised Sea Levels · · Score: 1

    How about we call them FUDdy duddies for all the FUD they are fed and regurgitate..

  21. Re:More to the point... on Global Warming 5 Million Years Ago In Antarctic Drastically Raised Sea Levels · · Score: 1

    That's pretty funny. If you were willing to take the time to really investigate you would find that every single bit of it has been peer reviewed. I challenge you to point to any specific part of AGW that has not been peer reviewed.

  22. Re:Global Warming / Climate Change I'M DONE on Google Raises Campaign Funds For Climate Change Denier · · Score: 1

    I can understand getting tired of the arguments. I do too. At my age I'll be beating the odds if I live another 25 years but I care about the lives of those who will come after me.

    I pondered how to respond to the rest of your post but you say you're done with it and don't appear to be interested in digging in to the science. So I'll just make a couple of short comments. First, there hasn't been any climatologically significant cooling since the 1950's-1960's. The supposed cooling trend of the last decade is actually a warming trend at a somewhat slower pace than in the 1980's and 1990's. Climate scientists use a 30 year average for temperatures so trends of less than 15 years or so are not particularly meaningful.

    Theoretically we should be seeing cooling as the last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago and the natural cycles that drive the ice ages hit their peak about 8,000 years ago and have been declining and the Earth has been slowly cooling ever since.

  23. Re:reprehensible behavior on Google Raises Campaign Funds For Climate Change Denier · · Score: 1

    Denier is a perfectly good English word that has been in use for hundreds of years before the Holocaust occurred. Should be retire it from the language because it's been associated with people who think the Holocaust is a hoax?

  24. Re:Global Warming / Climate Change I'M DONE on Google Raises Campaign Funds For Climate Change Denier · · Score: 1

    I don't see how the Earth Observatory article you cite in any way supports the points you are trying to make with your other cites. The Alaska Dispatch is about just this past spring. Get back to me if most of the next 5 or 10 springs match or exceed it. The research explained in the Nature article has a long way to go before it overturns existing science. We'll see.

  25. Re:Spin much? on Google Raises Campaign Funds For Climate Change Denier · · Score: 1

    How did "The increase in temperatures has not been statistically significant to the 2 sigma level (although it's very near that standard)" get warped into "The temperature has been declining for 15 years"? The 2000's are still the warmest decade on record and 2010 is the hottest year ever recorded in nearly all of the major temperature records.