Reading the rest of your post, do you seriously think that the scientists have not thought of this (and a whole lot more besides)? Do you bother to look at the science behind the headlines?
Of all the years the Earth has been around (4.5 billion?), why would a run-away process happen now?
Over the very long term, the history of the earth's climate has been a case of the sun getting gradually hotter, and CO2 levels dropping in compensation. This system nearly broke down around 800 million to 600 million years ago, leaving the earth almost entirely frozen over.
75 million years ago, temperatures were extremely high by today's standards; there is a lot of leeway within the long term equlibrium. As an aside, Ice caps as we know them are quite rare throughout history.
The mechanism is simple; high temperatures lead to faster chemical erosion and CO2 drawdown. Low temperatures have the opposite effect. This does take a long time (in human terms) to work.
In about 1 billion years, CO2 levels will have nowhere left to drop, and runaway warming will indeed cook anything left on the planet.
This kind of run away heating will not happen as a result of human induced global warming; however, a return to conditions seen in the Oligocene, circa 15 million years ago, is within the realms of possability. This would cause significant economic disruption, esecially (as seems likely from the evidence) if it were rapid.
But, if the net change allows for more productive use of the world's land then the new configuration is more optimal.
Indeed this may be the case after the change. If climate changes rapidly, agricultural producivity, amongst other things, will be near impossable to maintain.
You can either use common sense, or the mean value theorem if you wish, to show that there must have been a period of global warming between then and now.
You could even put dates on it, find causes, evaluate them, look at rates and effects, and do a lot of other stuff. Simply waving your hand and saying 'It's been colder, it's been warmer, so what' isn't even an argument.
So you believe that paleoclimatology says that the mean world temperature is static and has been for thousands of years?
Errm, yes, it's been extremely stable for the last 8-10,000 years. Indeed, this period of stability has been extremely unusual for the past few million years; this has been very, very lucky for the development of complex civilisation. Even minor excursions like the little ice age and MWP have had the effect of collapsing major civilisations.
(c.f. Egypt, Maya )
You question my claim that warming will occur, followed by cooling, and you question my knowlege of paleoclimatology?!?! I suppose that it is faintly possible that starting from this moment, cooling will occur followed by warming, but that is the only other possibility. Period. Stasis is not in the cards.
No, you were just wining on about 'it'll warm up, cool down, whatever'. With no consideration of rates, causes, effects or, quite frankly, anything. Stasis, in historical terms, has been exactly what has happened for the last 6000 or so years.
you're so ignorant of history that "specific scientific references" seem likely to fly over your head.
I doubt that.
Warming and cooling will occur; climates will shift. The question is not whether climate change will happen, but whether the final configuration of "civilization" will be better or worse then the initial. The cost of changing is a given.
To me, this seems like a complete reversal of the 'don't worry' tone of your original post. Rapid climate change is, in my book, something to avoid.
Only on slashdot could such a comment be called 'insightful'.
Are you so sure that the conditions we are experiencing right now are the precisely optimal conditions for life?
Human life - or more precisely current human civilisation - yes. The placement of cities, agricultural techniques, population distribution, and all of our infrastructure is set up for the current climate. How could it be otherwise?
Are you so sure that a couple of degrees warmer might not be a good thing? Or that a couple of degrees colder might not be a good thing?
If it were not for the above, it would not matter.
Global warming will occur, and it will be followed by a period of global cooling.
Sure of that? Or just making up whatever fits your prior beliefs best? Or just totally ignorant of paleoclimatology? Sorry, but your vague handwaving in this paragraph does reveal your total lack of knowledge of the subject.
Debating the impact of long terms trends is interesting;
Here's a debate question, then. Using your apparently definitive knowledge of the earth's climate history and future, when the earth's climate changes, does it do so:
a) Slowly and smoothly, or
b) Rapidly with fairly extreme local noise levels.
False. This does not happen naturally (at least for O2, N2 and CO2), and there is no 'new atmosphere' waiting in the rocks.
We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface.
False. The natural heat flux is out of the planet into the oceans/atmosphere.
We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds.
In order to do useful work (such as make molecular bonds as you describe) you need a (high temperature) source and a (low temperature) sink. If the atmosphere was your source, what would your sink be (Hint: the atmosphere is currently used as a sink for practically everything). Making hydrocarbons from CO2 and water is a trivial challenge compared to this!
There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet.
Any in particular, or are you just making more stuff up?
How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?
"if Humphreys hadn't actually burned two across the plate already"
Well; let's see.. he constructed an arbitary model, used arbitary constants to make it fit real world data and then did an extrapolation with a couple of orders of magnitude of error.
That's not 'burning two across the plate', which would imply that he had a model grounded in reality. After all, if your model assumes that a planet suddenly popped into existance made of water(!), then suddenly transformed into a ball of rock/volatiles/hydrogen (different every time, of course).
Well, I could point out the end-proterozoic super-glaciation, where Ice cover seems to have reached >90% of the planet several times, or the Late Cretaceous greenhouse, with sea levels ~200m higher than today's. Ice caps are quite unusual for the planet over geological time.
First, your analogy is wrong; it's more a case of the speedomoter saying 10 when you're doing less than 10.
Second, you haven't demonstrated radiometric dating doing what you claim; as I have repeatedly pointed out, IF you want to date something, you have to know exactly what it is you are dating. If you date a crystal in a volcanic rock, you are dating the time of crystalisation, NOT the time of eruption. Do you understand this? Do you realise that in a course on radiometric dating, the majority of the work concentrates on sources of systematic error and how to avoid them?
You may not like the fact that humanists call humanism a religion, but they do.
No, some American humanists want to call it a reliegon. Certainly I wouldn't, and many people who describe themselves as humanist wouldn't.
I take it that you've abandoned your uninformed attack on radiometric dating, since you've started witnessing. Out of interest, if you are so protected and stuff, why do you have to post anomously? To me that reeks of cowardice and insecurity.
I answered that, explaining why it was precisely the method we must use to falsify K/Ar dating.
No; using a technique inappropriately does not falsify it. You could falsify it by finding a place where the relative ages of rocks as determined by structural geology failed to match K-Ar ages on those rocks.
Regarding the more recent one.. you really should read the papers you cite. ALL it is saying is that phenocrysts (Which are slowly grown crystals in the magma chamber) will date older than the groundmass of a volcanic rock, thus giving an anomolusly old age to a 'new' volvanic rock.
This is, of course, well known and covered in Geology courses. Indeed, it offers a way to date the history of magma prior to eruption.
It also cites some other examples. You will note that all of the ages obtained are small relative to geological time; after 50 million years, the errors thus caused will be insignificant.
a) The Earth is not perfectly spherical, and it is distinctly non-Isotropic.
b) You need to include some calculations on how much energy would actually be available from the known crater. Even under generous assumptions, we are looking at a magnitude 10.5 earthquake at best.
c) Surface waves are strongly attenuated in the crust, which is strongly anisotropic. The energy arriving at the other side of the planet would be negligable. P and S waves would not be focussed at all.
Mercury is interesting.. but you will note that this feature is 1300km across, and the impactor would have been around 150km across - 15x the diameter and therefore over 3000 times as massive; and Mercury is smaller and more isotropic than earth.
Potassium-argon dating is accurate from 4.3 billion years (the age of the Earth) to about 100,000 years before the present.
So using it on 10 year old rocks would be absurd, then.
By the way, radiometric dating (and 'old earth geology', as you would put it) is used commercially by the oil industry. Do you think that they would be willing to waste 10s of millions of dollars drilling dry wells just to prop up some conspiricy?
Take known age rock.
Test it radiometrically.
Answer is absurd.
Fair enough - since the answer is not absurd, there is no problem.
Try this:
Take a 1 meter rule.
Use it to measure the width of a hair, previously measured with a microscope micrometer, using your eye and rounding to the nearest mark. (say, 1cm or 0cm)
I suspect that what you are alluding to is the K-Ar dating of Hawiian and St Helens Basalts/Andesites.
There are two explanations you haven't mentioned. One is that we are measuring the ages of crystallisition of xenocrysts (crystals incorporated from the country rock) or xenoliths (rock fragments from the country rock). Without references and thin sections, we can't know this.
The other is that we are measuring the amount of Ar incorporated at formation, giving a falsely old age. If this is the case, then the error (say 3 million years) becomes less significant the older the rock is; this would be a 1% error in a 300 million year old rock.
In my view, what you would do would be to extract and concentrate the high level stuff (fission products). This has a half life of around 30 years; these pellets give off a lot of heat. You then use this heat to generate power, thus a) Paying at least some of the storage costs, and b) Providing an incentive for people to look after it.
Well, this is the thing. One of these days I'll calculate what the CO2 concentration in the air would be if we had kept coal for baseline generation instead of Nukes world wide; I suspect it makes a bigger dent than ever other alternative way of generating electricity put together.
My idea (well, don't think I'm the first)... is that you use the solar heat/electric to make methanol direct from CO2 and water; at a 10% energy efficiency you'd get about 1 liter/m2/day.
You'd need about 3.5 Billion m2, or an array about 60km to a side would do for all world gasoline usage.
No, but nuclear resources are pretty large, and breeder reactions can be used to greatly extent the supply. Fusion reactors have a potential fuel supply that is huge.
Can we recycle any waste?
Practically all of a used fuel rod can be recycled back into reactor fuel. The small amount of high level waste can either be buried under a salt formation or used to generate electricity from it's heat.
Let's skip this one then.
Fine; as long as you have a practical alternative.
Without doubt, nuclear power has a major waste management problem.
Because a lot of people will try to block any attempt to dispose of the waste. It's a political rather than engineering problem.
I don't think the same thing applies to PhotoVoltaics or wind turbines.
PhotoVoltaic manifacture involves a *lot* of very nasty chemicals indeed; wind turbines are already having problems with bird kill and noise pollution. Plus you can't use either to run a reliable electric grid.
I have read far too much from some nerds who are willing to endanger their chilrens-childrens-childrens-childrens... lives to the half-life of stuff that anti-matters.
The half life of the non recyclable waste is 30 years; it only becomes a major problem when you ban reprocessing.
Slashdot Mirror
thier entire arguement is based on the premise that the heat output from the sun is NOT changing.
Liar
Reading the rest of your post, do you seriously think that the scientists have not thought of this (and a whole lot more besides)? Do you bother to look at the science behind the headlines?
Of all the years the Earth has been around (4.5 billion?), why would a run-away process happen now?
Over the very long term, the history of the earth's climate has been a case of the sun getting gradually hotter, and CO2 levels dropping in compensation. This system nearly broke down around 800 million to 600 million years ago, leaving the earth almost entirely frozen over.
75 million years ago, temperatures were extremely high by today's standards; there is a lot of leeway within the long term equlibrium. As an aside, Ice caps as we know them are quite rare throughout history.
The mechanism is simple; high temperatures lead to faster chemical erosion and CO2 drawdown. Low temperatures have the opposite effect. This does take a long time (in human terms) to work.
In about 1 billion years, CO2 levels will have nowhere left to drop, and runaway warming will indeed cook anything left on the planet.
This kind of run away heating will not happen as a result of human induced global warming; however, a return to conditions seen in the Oligocene, circa 15 million years ago, is within the realms of possability. This would cause significant economic disruption, esecially (as seems likely from the evidence) if it were rapid.
But, if the net change allows for more productive use of the world's land then the new configuration is more optimal.
Indeed this may be the case after the change. If climate changes rapidly, agricultural producivity, amongst other things, will be near impossable to maintain.
You can either use common sense, or the mean value theorem if you wish, to show that there must have been a period of global warming between then and now.
You could even put dates on it, find causes, evaluate them, look at rates and effects, and do a lot of other stuff. Simply waving your hand and saying 'It's been colder, it's been warmer, so what' isn't even an argument.
So you believe that paleoclimatology says that the mean world temperature is static and has been for thousands of years?
Errm, yes, it's been extremely stable for the last 8-10,000 years. Indeed, this period of stability has been extremely unusual for the past few million years; this has been very, very lucky for the development of complex civilisation. Even minor excursions like the little ice age and MWP have had the effect of collapsing major civilisations. (c.f. Egypt, Maya )
You question my claim that warming will occur, followed by cooling, and you question my knowlege of paleoclimatology?!?! I suppose that it is faintly possible that starting from this moment, cooling will occur followed by warming, but that is the only other possibility. Period. Stasis is not in the cards.
No, you were just wining on about 'it'll warm up, cool down, whatever'. With no consideration of rates, causes, effects or, quite frankly, anything. Stasis, in historical terms, has been exactly what has happened for the last 6000 or so years.
you're so ignorant of history that "specific scientific references" seem likely to fly over your head.
I doubt that.
Warming and cooling will occur; climates will shift. The question is not whether climate change will happen, but whether the final configuration of "civilization" will be better or worse then the initial. The cost of changing is a given.
To me, this seems like a complete reversal of the 'don't worry' tone of your original post. Rapid climate change is, in my book, something to avoid.
Only on slashdot could such a comment be called 'insightful'.
Are you so sure that the conditions we are experiencing right now are the precisely optimal conditions for life?
Human life - or more precisely current human civilisation - yes. The placement of cities, agricultural techniques, population distribution, and all of our infrastructure is set up for the current climate. How could it be otherwise?
Are you so sure that a couple of degrees warmer might not be a good thing? Or that a couple of degrees colder might not be a good thing?
If it were not for the above, it would not matter.
Global warming will occur, and it will be followed by a period of global cooling.
Sure of that? Or just making up whatever fits your prior beliefs best? Or just totally ignorant of paleoclimatology? Sorry, but your vague handwaving in this paragraph does reveal your total lack of knowledge of the subject.
Debating the impact of long terms trends is interesting;
Here's a debate question, then. Using your apparently definitive knowledge of the earth's climate history and future, when the earth's climate changes, does it do so:
a) Slowly and smoothly, or
b) Rapidly with fairly extreme local noise levels.
Answers with scientific references, please.
This is true. Indeed the more normal (geologically speaking) sea level is around 50-100 meters higher than at present.
Actually, there's an entire scientific subject based around this; it's called 'Geology'. Try learning some.
Radiation exposure is binary
Since everyone is exposed to radiation all the time, then by your definition there is no problem.
We can boil some of the atmosphere away.
False. This does not happen naturally (at least for O2, N2 and CO2), and there is no 'new atmosphere' waiting in the rocks.
We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface.
False. The natural heat flux is out of the planet into the oceans/atmosphere.
We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds.
In order to do useful work (such as make molecular bonds as you describe) you need a (high temperature) source and a (low temperature) sink. If the atmosphere was your source, what would your sink be (Hint: the atmosphere is currently used as a sink for practically everything). Making hydrocarbons from CO2 and water is a trivial challenge compared to this!
There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet.
Any in particular, or are you just making more stuff up?
How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?
We're not trying to.
"if Humphreys hadn't actually burned two across the plate already"
Well; let's see.. he constructed an arbitary model, used arbitary constants to make it fit real world data and then did an extrapolation with a couple of orders of magnitude of error.
That's not 'burning two across the plate', which would imply that he had a model grounded in reality. After all, if your model assumes that a planet suddenly popped into existance made of water(!), then suddenly transformed into a ball of rock/volatiles/hydrogen (different every time, of course).
Well, I could point out the end-proterozoic super-glaciation, where Ice cover seems to have reached >90% of the planet several times, or the Late Cretaceous greenhouse, with sea levels ~200m higher than today's. Ice caps are quite unusual for the planet over geological time.
First, your analogy is wrong; it's more a case of the speedomoter saying 10 when you're doing less than 10.
Second, you haven't demonstrated radiometric dating doing what you claim; as I have repeatedly pointed out, IF you want to date something, you have to know exactly what it is you are dating. If you date a crystal in a volcanic rock, you are dating the time of crystalisation, NOT the time of eruption. Do you understand this? Do you realise that in a course on radiometric dating, the majority of the work concentrates on sources of systematic error and how to avoid them?
You may not like the fact that humanists call humanism a religion, but they do.
No, some American humanists want to call it a reliegon. Certainly I wouldn't, and many people who describe themselves as humanist wouldn't.
I take it that you've abandoned your uninformed attack on radiometric dating, since you've started witnessing. Out of interest, if you are so protected and stuff, why do you have to post anomously? To me that reeks of cowardice and insecurity.
But Humanism is a religion by its own descriptions. From here:
Ther're talking rubbish, or just trying to make it palatable to a US audience.
I answered that, explaining why it was precisely the method we must use to falsify K/Ar dating.
No; using a technique inappropriately does not falsify it. You could falsify it by finding a place where the relative ages of rocks as determined by structural geology failed to match K-Ar ages on those rocks.
Regarding the more recent one.. you really should read the papers you cite. ALL it is saying is that phenocrysts (Which are slowly grown crystals in the magma chamber) will date older than the groundmass of a volcanic rock, thus giving an anomolusly old age to a 'new' volvanic rock.
This is, of course, well known and covered in Geology courses. Indeed, it offers a way to date the history of magma prior to eruption.
It also cites some other examples. You will note that all of the ages obtained are small relative to geological time; after 50 million years, the errors thus caused will be insignificant.
Your hypothesis has a few problems..
a) The Earth is not perfectly spherical, and it is distinctly non-Isotropic.
b) You need to include some calculations on how much energy would actually be available from the known crater. Even under generous assumptions, we are looking at a magnitude 10.5 earthquake at best.
c) Surface waves are strongly attenuated in the crust, which is strongly anisotropic. The energy arriving at the other side of the planet would be negligable. P and S waves would not be focussed at all.
Mercury is interesting.. but you will note that this feature is 1300km across, and the impactor would have been around 150km across - 15x the diameter and therefore over 3000 times as massive; and Mercury is smaller and more isotropic than earth.
They miss the point because their religion (humanism) and its core value (evolution) demand it of them.
This is called 'projection'. And by the way; humanism is a set of values, not a religion, and evolution is a scientific theory, not a value.
she needs prayers, lots. Won't go into why.
Oh. Please do.
How can you miss a point that is so simple?
How can you continue to ignore the explanations? A more complete reference if here.
Potassium-argon dating is accurate from 4.3 billion years (the age of the Earth) to about 100,000 years before the present.
So using it on 10 year old rocks would be absurd, then.
By the way, radiometric dating (and 'old earth geology', as you would put it) is used commercially by the oil industry. Do you think that they would be willing to waste 10s of millions of dollars drilling dry wells just to prop up some conspiricy?
Take known age rock. Test it radiometrically. Answer is absurd.
Fair enough - since the answer is not absurd, there is no problem.
Try this:
Take a 1 meter rule.
Use it to measure the width of a hair, previously measured with a microscope micrometer, using your eye and rounding to the nearest mark. (say, 1cm or 0cm)
Answer is 'absurd', or inaccurate.
Therefore this concept of 'Meters' is useless!
I suspect that what you are alluding to is the K-Ar dating of Hawiian and St Helens Basalts/Andesites.
There are two explanations you haven't mentioned. One is that we are measuring the ages of crystallisition of xenocrysts (crystals incorporated from the country rock) or xenoliths (rock fragments from the country rock). Without references and thin sections, we can't know this.
The other is that we are measuring the amount of Ar incorporated at formation, giving a falsely old age. If this is the case, then the error (say 3 million years) becomes less significant the older the rock is; this would be a 1% error in a 300 million year old rock.
I have to wonder why you didn't point that out
In my view, what you would do would be to extract and concentrate the high level stuff (fission products). This has a half life of around 30 years; these pellets give off a lot of heat. You then use this heat to generate power, thus a) Paying at least some of the storage costs, and b) Providing an incentive for people to look after it.
Well, this is the thing. One of these days I'll calculate what the CO2 concentration in the air would be if we had kept coal for baseline generation instead of Nukes world wide; I suspect it makes a bigger dent than ever other alternative way of generating electricity put together.
My idea (well, don't think I'm the first)... is that you use the solar heat/electric to make methanol direct from CO2 and water; at a 10% energy efficiency you'd get about 1 liter/m2/day.
You'd need about 3.5 Billion m2, or an array about 60km to a side would do for all world gasoline usage.
Is any form of nuclear power renewable?
No, but nuclear resources are pretty large, and breeder reactions can be used to greatly extent the supply. Fusion reactors have a potential fuel supply that is huge.
Can we recycle any waste?
Practically all of a used fuel rod can be recycled back into reactor fuel. The small amount of high level waste can either be buried under a salt formation or used to generate electricity from it's heat.
Let's skip this one then.
Fine; as long as you have a practical alternative.
Without doubt, nuclear power has a major waste management problem.
Because a lot of people will try to block any attempt to dispose of the waste. It's a political rather than engineering problem.
I don't think the same thing applies to PhotoVoltaics or wind turbines.
PhotoVoltaic manifacture involves a *lot* of very nasty chemicals indeed; wind turbines are already having problems with bird kill and noise pollution. Plus you can't use either to run a reliable electric grid.
I have read far too much from some nerds who are willing to endanger their chilrens-childrens-childrens-childrens... lives to the half-life of stuff that anti-matters.
The half life of the non recyclable waste is 30 years; it only becomes a major problem when you ban reprocessing.