We have more to lose if the predictions are true and we don't try to do anything about it than if they are not true and we do try to do something about it. The first situation could be existential, the second merely financial and we get a cleaner world.
AC didn't deserve the Troll rating. In a sense the sky really is falling because the upper atmosphere is contracting. The top of the sky is getting closer to the surface of the Earth. I thought it was a nice turn of phrase.
CO2 is essentially transparent to visible light (your high energy photons). The visible light is absorbed (or reflected) by things that aren't transparent to it. That absorbed energy is then emitted sooner or later as energy in wave lengths according to Planck's law, generally in the infrared range at normal Earth temperatures. CO2 is not transparent to certain wave lengths of IR radiation so it captures it. The heat capacity of CO2 has nothing to do with it, it's strictly a matter of radiative physics.
It's impossible for water vapor to drive global warming. The level of of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. If the feedback from additional water vapor were high enough to drive global warming it would have driven the Earth to get so hot the oceans would boil and totally evaporate long ago.
Ok, you're right about the volcanoes. Too many people think they're a much bigger factor than they are.
What got to me is that you left out the second half the opening paragraph in that Skeptical Science article you cited which said:
However, natural CO2 emissions (from the ocean and vegetation) are balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation). Land plants absorb about 450 gigatonnes of CO2 per year and the ocean absorbs about 338 gigatonnes. This keeps atmospheric CO2 levels in rough balance. Human CO2 emissions upsets the natural balance.
It might be more accurate to say that CO2 affects the energy balance of the Earth in various ways depending on where it is. Warming near the surface and cooling in the stratosphere and above. Since we all live below the stratosphere we experience global warming.
There's nothing wrong with the term "global warming". I've seen references to it in scientific literature from as far back as the 1950's. And even though Arrhenius didn't use that specific term he was talking about global warming when he wrote:
if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
Global warming is simply a subset of climate change (which also got mentioned in the 1950s) since warming is only one of the effects (albeit one of the major ones) of the buildup of excessive greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Increased drought and precipitation in different regions are another effect. Outside the realm of climate change ocean acidification and the contraction of the upper atmosphere mentioned in this/. post are others. The contraction of the upper atmosphere is actually a good thing for LEO satellites, reducing the drag they experience.
The single biggest reason that few nuclear plants have been built since the 1970's has nothing to do with anti-nuclear activists. It's economics. It's because it was far cheaper with a quicker return on your investment to build new coal plants and lately natural gas power plants. If nuclear had been/was cheaper than those then I guarantee more plants would have been built regardless of activists objections. And if you want to complain about excessive regulation, I'm sorry, nuclear power badly handled has the potential to render large areas of land uninhabitable. I'm not interested in letting the profit motive override safety considerations. I'm willing to see tweaks to the regulations to improve them if solid evidence can be presented to make the case but wholesale revisions are out of the question for me.
Or like me they're not against nuclear power per se' but think more needs to be done to ensure the proper handling of nuclear waste and that currently the cost of building nuclear power plants makes it one of the most expensive ways to produce electrical power. If those things can be solved then I'd be more interested in it.
Gaseous CO2 absorbs infrared radiation (heat) in certain spectral bands. This is easily shown in the laboratory. The amount a IR radiation that it absorbs is affected by the concentration of CO2. The IR radiation that CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs is mostly from the Earth's surface absorbing incoming solar radiation, mostly in the visible range, and re-radiating it in the IR range. More concentration of CO2 means more IR absorption.
In natural warming coming out of a glaciation (ice age in the common usage) the warming initiated by Milankovitch cycles causes the oceans to start warming up. This causes the oceans to release CO2 as warmer water is less capable of holding it than colder water. This is the source of the "lag" in CO2 concentrations to temperatures but it's also true that if the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere didn't increase the ultimate warming reached in the interglacial period would not be nearly as high. But that in no way precludes CO2 from leading temperature increases too. It's not an either/or situation. Both can be true.
It's disingenuous to mention the CO2 emitted naturally every year in the carbon cycle without mentioning at the same time the natural sinks that make the natural carbon cycle closely balanced over the year.
I recently tracked it down and the major eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 released around 40 million tonnes of CO2 over several days compared to around 23 billion tonnes of CO2 released by humans that year. Current human emissions in 2012 are around 30 billion tonnes of CO2.
Even if CAGW were real, the current "climate scientists" not only have not proven it, they are actually doing pretty good job of discrediting it both behaviorly and with poor quality papers. This a much bigger scam than Piltdown Man.
There's a lot of bluster about that in the climate contrarian sound machine but little evidence of it in the scientific realm.
Over 100s of millions of years changes such as the layout of the land masses, the location of large mountain ranges and I'm sure a number of other things has a significant effect on climate. You have to take those into account over the long run. Within the last 5 million years the rise of the Isthmus of Panama cutting off currents between the Atlantic and Pacific was a factor in the cycle of ice ages we've been having since then. Coincidentally another thing that arose within the last 5 million years is the genus Homo.
If you bothered to dig a little deeper you'd find that the increase in Antarctic sea ice is partially a result of global warming and partly a result of the Antarctic ozone hole. Meanwhile Antarctic land ice volume is still dropping.
Unfortunately the uninformed like you do not know how to read data tables. If you do the math you find that the temperature anomaly for the past 10 years has been 0.17C higher than the previous 10 years. Also I find it amusing that you use the CRU report that the vilified Phil Jones is the head of. How about a link to that report so we can evaluate it ourselves rather than depending on your interpretation. Actually I doubt you've read it but rather are depending on what some talking head said about.
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We have more to lose if the predictions are true and we don't try to do anything about it than if they are not true and we do try to do something about it. The first situation could be existential, the second merely financial and we get a cleaner world.
AC didn't deserve the Troll rating. In a sense the sky really is falling because the upper atmosphere is contracting. The top of the sky is getting closer to the surface of the Earth. I thought it was a nice turn of phrase.
The physical world is not always as simple as you'd like it to be.
CO2 is essentially transparent to visible light (your high energy photons). The visible light is absorbed (or reflected) by things that aren't transparent to it. That absorbed energy is then emitted sooner or later as energy in wave lengths according to Planck's law, generally in the infrared range at normal Earth temperatures. CO2 is not transparent to certain wave lengths of IR radiation so it captures it. The heat capacity of CO2 has nothing to do with it, it's strictly a matter of radiative physics.
It's impossible for water vapor to drive global warming. The level of of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. If the feedback from additional water vapor were high enough to drive global warming it would have driven the Earth to get so hot the oceans would boil and totally evaporate long ago.
Ok, you're right about the volcanoes. Too many people think they're a much bigger factor than they are.
What got to me is that you left out the second half the opening paragraph in that Skeptical Science article you cited which said:
However, natural CO2 emissions (from the ocean and vegetation) are balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation). Land plants absorb about 450 gigatonnes of CO2 per year and the ocean absorbs about 338 gigatonnes. This keeps atmospheric CO2 levels in rough balance. Human CO2 emissions upsets the natural balance.
And Mega-gazillions of plants consuming CO2 and releasing oxygen. You have to look at both sides of the equation.
Have you ever heard of the Carbon Cycle? If not educate yourself.
It might be more accurate to say that CO2 affects the energy balance of the Earth in various ways depending on where it is. Warming near the surface and cooling in the stratosphere and above. Since we all live below the stratosphere we experience global warming.
There's nothing wrong with the term "global warming". I've seen references to it in scientific literature from as far back as the 1950's. And even though Arrhenius didn't use that specific term he was talking about global warming when he wrote:
if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
Global warming is simply a subset of climate change (which also got mentioned in the 1950s) since warming is only one of the effects (albeit one of the major ones) of the buildup of excessive greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Increased drought and precipitation in different regions are another effect. Outside the realm of climate change ocean acidification and the contraction of the upper atmosphere mentioned in this /. post are others. The contraction of the upper atmosphere is actually a good thing for LEO satellites, reducing the drag they experience.
The single biggest reason that few nuclear plants have been built since the 1970's has nothing to do with anti-nuclear activists. It's economics. It's because it was far cheaper with a quicker return on your investment to build new coal plants and lately natural gas power plants. If nuclear had been/was cheaper than those then I guarantee more plants would have been built regardless of activists objections. And if you want to complain about excessive regulation, I'm sorry, nuclear power badly handled has the potential to render large areas of land uninhabitable. I'm not interested in letting the profit motive override safety considerations. I'm willing to see tweaks to the regulations to improve them if solid evidence can be presented to make the case but wholesale revisions are out of the question for me.
Or like me they're not against nuclear power per se' but think more needs to be done to ensure the proper handling of nuclear waste and that currently the cost of building nuclear power plants makes it one of the most expensive ways to produce electrical power. If those things can be solved then I'd be more interested in it.
Gaseous CO2 absorbs infrared radiation (heat) in certain spectral bands. This is easily shown in the laboratory. The amount a IR radiation that it absorbs is affected by the concentration of CO2. The IR radiation that CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs is mostly from the Earth's surface absorbing incoming solar radiation, mostly in the visible range, and re-radiating it in the IR range. More concentration of CO2 means more IR absorption.
In natural warming coming out of a glaciation (ice age in the common usage) the warming initiated by Milankovitch cycles causes the oceans to start warming up. This causes the oceans to release CO2 as warmer water is less capable of holding it than colder water. This is the source of the "lag" in CO2 concentrations to temperatures but it's also true that if the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere didn't increase the ultimate warming reached in the interglacial period would not be nearly as high. But that in no way precludes CO2 from leading temperature increases too. It's not an either/or situation. Both can be true.
It's disingenuous to mention the CO2 emitted naturally every year in the carbon cycle without mentioning at the same time the natural sinks that make the natural carbon cycle closely balanced over the year.
I recently tracked it down and the major eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 released around 40 million tonnes of CO2 over several days compared to around 23 billion tonnes of CO2 released by humans that year. Current human emissions in 2012 are around 30 billion tonnes of CO2.
What makes you think for a minute that your money will shield you from "the coming economic and social collapse"?
Here's a proposal to do just that.
Even if CAGW were real, the current "climate scientists" not only have not proven it, they are actually doing pretty good job of discrediting it both behaviorly and with poor quality papers. This a much bigger scam than Piltdown Man.
There's a lot of bluster about that in the climate contrarian sound machine but little evidence of it in the scientific realm.
Over 100s of millions of years changes such as the layout of the land masses, the location of large mountain ranges and I'm sure a number of other things has a significant effect on climate. You have to take those into account over the long run. Within the last 5 million years the rise of the Isthmus of Panama cutting off currents between the Atlantic and Pacific was a factor in the cycle of ice ages we've been having since then. Coincidentally another thing that arose within the last 5 million years is the genus Homo.
Try this. It's a graph of different causes of bird mortality with some references.
But what if it's all true and we don't do anything about it? Most of the evidence keeps pointing in one direction.
If you bothered to dig a little deeper you'd find that the increase in Antarctic sea ice is partially a result of global warming and partly a result of the Antarctic ozone hole. Meanwhile Antarctic land ice volume is still dropping.
Unfortunately the uninformed like you do not know how to read data tables. If you do the math you find that the temperature anomaly for the past 10 years has been 0.17C higher than the previous 10 years. Also I find it amusing that you use the CRU report that the vilified Phil Jones is the head of. How about a link to that report so we can evaluate it ourselves rather than depending on your interpretation. Actually I doubt you've read it but rather are depending on what some talking head said about.
There's a difference between surviving through a glacial cycle and producing the volume of beans that human consumption demands.
Yeah, I only went there once.
They had a tea party.
+1 Insightful