Mal4Prez nails the climate change debate... by kpo

America loves a winner!

It's been proven that there's a lot of bad science involved in the climate change scam. And the E.Anglia e-mails prove that results have been cooked, and language crafted, to slant the data towards a preconceived conclusion. Add to the fact that many ( almost all ) scientist get their funding from where ? Govt. The same govt which is promoting a particular political agenda is funding the science which, gosh almighty, just HAPPENS to agree w/ the stated agenda.

What are the odds?

The climate has never STOPPED changing on this planet. Mankind's involvement in it all, amounts to nothing.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 2:39 AM

OK, if my post starts a thread, I get to define a rule: it shall not be taken over by back and forths with he who posts the same long ago refuted shit with absolutely no supporting facts or links. You all know what I mean.

If this thread doesn't become another yawn-fest of prove-Rappy-wrong, I'll finally get down to posting pictures I took of a museum exhibit in Fairbanks, AK last summer. (It took me this long to find the cable and connect to my camera.) Very disturbing images and data - yes DATA - about changes in temperature and glacier size up there.

I'd do it now, but I'm heading out the door. Should have time this afternoon.

BTW, thank you KPO. I feel the compliment!

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 2:43 AM

America loves a winner!

What's already been decided? You're not pulling the AlGore card, and claiming that the science is settled, are you ?

ROFLMAO !!!!!

Some glaciers recede, others advance. Hardly a case being made for global warming / climate change.

But who doesn't like pretty pictures, right ?

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 2:46 AM

M52NICKERSON

DALEK!

Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
OK, if my post starts a thread, I get to define a rule: it shall not be taken over by back and forths with he who posts the same long ago refuted shit with absolutely no supporting facts or links. You all know what I mean.

If this thread doesn't become another yawn-fest of prove-Rappy-wrong, I'll finally get down to posting pictures I took of a museum exhibit in Fairbanks, AK last summer. (It took me this long to find the cable and connect to my camera.) Very disturbing images and data - yes DATA - about changes in temperature and glacier size up there.

I'd do it now, but I'm heading out the door. Should have time this afternoon.

BTW, thank you KPO. I feel the compliment!

I would love to see that.

Oh, and I will be totally ignoring Raptor in this thread. I hope everyone else does as well.

I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 2:50 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:

Oh, and I will be totally ignoring Raptor in this thread. I hope everyone else does as well.

As you wish...

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 5:04 AM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

I haven't been around a couple of days mostly because I can't find a thread worth responding to, there's so much bickering. News is slow, so I haven't found anything worth starting a thread with, either. But I'd love to see those photos, too. Looking forward to them.

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 6:01 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

rappy, as in a lot of areas (economics, warfare, and statecraft) you are sadly out of your depth in the science of climate change. I suggest you look deeply into the REAL issues of East Anglia, which had nothgin to do with widespread fraud and didn't change the final result one whit.

Instead of relying on your right-wing sources to pre-digest your thoughts for you so you can eat them up and regurgitate them later... completely (you will notice) bypassing the brain, why don't you challenge yourself by doing some real digging and some real thinking?

I know you won't, and that's why I call you a flat-earther: someone who is so absofuckinglutely deluded that would deny the ocean if they were drowning in it.

Oh, and BTW, I noticed that back in the OTHER thread you couldn't defend a 23% tax rate (probably because you had not put more than 1 minute looking it up using google, and not more than 0.5 seconds into it thinking about whether it actually made any sense) so I agree that you are not worth responding to. If I wanted to listen to right-wing propaganda, I'd go to the AM radio. I'm here to talk to people, not idiots.

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 6:17 AM

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
rappy, as in a lot of areas (economics, warfare, and statecraft) you are sadly out of your depth in the science of climate change. I suggest you look deeply into the REAL issues of East Anglia, which had nothgin to do with widespread fraud and didn't change the final result one whit.

The fact that I don't buy into the spin from the Left is hardly evidence that I'm out of my depth. To the contrary, I'm more aware of this issue, and science in general, than your average joe/ jane citizen. A lot more. If anything, the lot on the Left remind me of the young earth creationists I use to debate, long ago. Mindless zealots, clinging to a empty belief system, all for the sole purpose of promoting a useless agenda.

Quote:

Instead of relying on your right-wing sources to pre-digest your thoughts for you so you can eat them up and regurgitate them later... completely (you will notice) bypassing the brain, why don't you challenge yourself by doing some real digging and some real thinking?

Yeah, 'real' thinking equates to that which agrees w/ your point of view. No thanks.

Quote:

I know you won't, and that's why I call you a flat-earther: someone who is so absofuckinglutely deluded that would deny the ocean if they were drowning in it.

An apt description of yourself, actually.

Quote:

Oh, and BTW, I noticed that back in the OTHER thread you couldn't defend a 23% tax rate (probably because you had not put more than 1 minute looking it up using google, and not more than 0.5 seconds into it thinking about whether it actually made any sense) so I agree that you are not worth responding to. If I wanted to listen to right-wing propaganda, I'd go to the AM radio. I'm here to talk to people, not idiots.

The FAIR Tax is the most researched and fact supported proposal out there. I don't know what you want me to do to " defend " it. I'll not bother with defending the lies and misrepresentations that the attackers ( both from the Left and Right ) have levied against the FAIR Tax, but why don't YOU take some of your own advice, and do some of your OWN research. And stop relying on the pre-digested thoughts and opinions others have crafted for YOU.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 6:56 AM

DARKJESTER

Wow! I'm away for six months or so.... and not one damn thing changes.

MAL "You only gotta scare him."
JAYNE "Pain is scary..."

http://www.fireflytalk.com - Big Damn Podcast

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 8:47 AM

HKCAVALIER

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même troll.

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:29 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Well, the last time little Rappy tried to have a thought, it was that the inhaler being taken off the market MUST be Obama's fault - just like everything else! A notion he clung to even after the FDA press release was posted citing the Montreal Protocol and the CFC propellant. You could almost see him beaming with pride 'cause > HE < figured the propellant MUST be absorbed. Except he figured wrong. No wonder he clings to other people's ideas - his own thinking has let him down so terribly. It goes awfully, horrendously wrong. And then he gets confused. And doesn't know what to think.

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?

Yeah, me neither....

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:46 PM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
OK, if my post starts a thread, I get to define a rule: it shall not be taken over by back and forths with he who posts the same long ago refuted shit with absolutely no supporting facts or links. You all know what I mean.

If this thread doesn't become another yawn-fest of prove-Rappy-wrong, I'll finally get down to posting pictures I took of a museum exhibit in Fairbanks, AK last summer. (It took me this long to find the cable and connect to my camera.) Very disturbing images and data - yes DATA - about changes in temperature and glacier size up there.

I'd do it now, but I'm heading out the door. Should have time this afternoon.

BTW, thank you KPO. I feel the compliment!

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Oh, and by the way M4P, if I didn't say it in the other thread, you DID nail this, well and truly. You nailed it like Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door.

We don't see eye to eye on some things (a very few things, it seems), but as I've said before, you are 37 kinds of awesome.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 1:36 PM

University of Alaska – Fairbanks Museum Exhibit, July 2010

Notes from mal4prez: I wasn’t allowed to use a flash in the museum, so the pictures are a bit blurry. The text will be hard to read, so I’ve typed it in, as well as the descriptions that were hanging on the walls next to the glacier photographs.

There were a lot more photographs in the exhibit, but not all of them came out well on my old camera. There’s enough here to get the point. I’ll put my comments in italics, though I’ll try not to make many.

And bear with me for a minute – I’ll likely have to do some picture resizing.

Shrinking Glaciers

Glaciers are valuable indicators of climate change because ice responds directly to temperature and precipitation. Repeat photos can dramatically capture the advance or retreat of glaciers.

Climate is the main factor affecting all glaciers. But not all glaciers behave the same. Over centuries, some tidewater glaciers (those that end at the ocean) go through a natural cycle of advance and retreat, independent of climate.

Glaciers in Alaska’s Brooks Range only retreat as a result of changes in climate. Aerial images and repeat photos show that all Brooks Range glaciers are shrinking. Some have disappeared entirely. Emphasis theirs.

Okpilak Glacier: photographed in 1907 by Ernest Leffingwell, 2007 by Matt Nolan

I didn’t photograph the caption of this one:

Unnamed glaciers, eastern Brooks Range. Attempts to repeat the entire old photo were hampered by bad weather. Individual repeat photographs from a helicopter show glaciers that are retreating. Photograph from 1950: Col-photo [?] collection, 2007 by Ken Tape

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 1:42 PM

The Arctic and Beyond

When temperature and precipitation patterns change, so does the landscape. Repeat photos from Alaska’s Arctic tell a story of more shrubs and less ice.

Changes in the Arctic ultimately affect the heat balance of the entire earth. While polar regions have warmed quicker, the rest of the planet is not far behind. Changes here foreshadow changes elsewhere.

(smaller font) The total change in average annual temperature from 1951-2009 for the hemisphere (right) and from 1949-2009 for Alaska (below).

Note – the colorscale is
white: 0˚F
yellow: 0.36 – 0.9 ˚F
orange: 0.9 – 1.8 ˚F
dark orange: 1.8 – 3.6˚F
red: 3.6 - 7.2˚F

Fairbanks – Barrow Mean July temperature
from 1930 to today, vertical scale varies from 44˚F to 56˚F

Note the end of the graph to the left. The sharply upward turning orange line is the trend from the plot on the right. The rest of the graph on the left stretches the scale back 20,000 years. That’s to the last ice age. I could only get it in one picture from an angle. You can see how sharp the upturn is, and that the temperature is now hotter than it's been since the last ice age.

And how do they know temperatures going back 20,000 years? From a side board:

Discovering Past Temperature

Scientists sometimes use unusual methods. To learn about past climates, they have found tiny midge flies helpful.

Midge fly larvae live in lakes. As they change into adults they leave behind part of themselves in the sediment at the lake’s bottom. Scientists can take a core of lake sediment and date the mud layer by layer. There are many different species of midge flies, and some survive better than others at different temperatures. By sorting and counting the proportion of different midge species within a layer, the average summer temperature for a given time period can be estimated.

Other methods can also be used to find past temperatures. Core cores from ice sheets, scientists have learned about earth’s climate up to 700,000 years ago. The lake sediment method provides a more localized estimate of temperature.

At Burial Lake in Alaska’s Arctic, scientists have cored deep enough to reconstruct the temperature 20,000 years in to the past.

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 1:58 PM

The exhibit addressed the past 100 years and the past 20,000 years. So how about further back? For that, see Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum by Ruddiman. I’ll sum up his findings here with a few figures. (I’ve posted this stuff before, twice I believe. But what the hell.)

True, the earth’s climate goes through natural cycles of ice ages. Ice cores and geological data show that earth has had at least 4 regular cycles 100,000 years or so in length. Each cycle has about 80,000 years of ice age with 20,000 year breaks for warm weather. We’re in one of those breaks right now.

That’s right - ice ages are the more common state of things. I hadn’t realized it, but there’s convincing evidence of it.

The ~100,000 year long cycles have been shown to correspond very well to orbital variations caused by the location of the other planets. When the Earth is in an orbit where it gets more intense summer sun at the northern latitudes, (so the orbit is highly elliptical and perihelion falls at the summer solstice), ice sheets in Canada, Alaska and Siberia melt enough in the summer that they shrink. Ice sheets draw back from the US and Europe and central Asia, the long ice age ends, and the short break begins.

Evidence: see the peaks at present day (far left), then at 120 kya (kya = 1000 years ago), 240 kya, 340 kya. These are peaks in temperature, atmospheric CO2, and atmospheric methane. This is all from Volstok Ice cores. Orbital variations (modeled) are on the bottom. There are some time shifts, likely due to error in aging the ice cores, but the pattern corresponds quite well with variations in heavy oxygen in the atmosphere – an indicator of temperature. That’s in the second to bottom plot.

And now from Ruddiman: methane levels and solar radiation at 65˚ North latitude, graph below. Hot sun = more methane in the atmosphere. Even before humans. But wait – what’s that happening at the far right. (Present day is to the right on this graph, opposite from the one above.) Why haven’t the methane levels fallen as solar radiation decreases? What has been different in this past 10,00 years that wasn’t around in the 200,00 years before?

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 2:00 PM

And my last post:

The last end-of-ice-age happened about 20,000 years ago. Which means we’re due to go back under the ice sheets. At this point of the last 4 cycles, (geological evidence of this is described and referenced in Ruddiman’s book) ice was growing in northeast Canada. But it’s not this time. In fact, this cycle the glaciers are melting, disappearing completely. (See Fairbanks museum above.)

So again - what’s different this time? What’s happened during this break in the ice eras, over the last 20,000 years, that never happened before? What started 8000 years ago that might have affected CO2 levels?

And 5000 years ago that might have affected methane levels?

And if agriculture and rice irrigation did this, (which is how Ruddiman answers the 8000 and 5000 year ago questions) what could be the effect of pulling tons of carbon out of the earth and dumping it into the atmosphere in an extremely short time?

Enough to stop an ice age? Enough to throw off the natural cycles of the earth's climate?

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 3:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Hehe...

You and your environmentalist ways....

Reminds me of how I question every day if there was a god.

I wish I had your conviction.

I've never been so sure about anything so unpredictable and unprovable as what you're talking about in my life.

God, how I envy you.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."

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Sunday, October 2, 2011 5:43 PM

I'm a pretty ardent environmentalist and I feel this particular issue is buried, and was decided in auraptor's favor.

I posted the relevant math here several times and tried to draw attention to the science so that we could actually debate it, but no one was at all interested in discussing the issue from a science perspective.

If I have to classify this one, I'll put it in the Alex Jones corner, something Pirate News probably already thought of: It's a form of panic-mongering to get the people to enact radical policy, much like the war on terror and other dubious dangers.

There are very real and damaging effects on the environment caused by humans. IMHO, this is not one of them. This is a distraction from the cause, much like animal rights, anti-nuclear power, etc.

The issues I feel represent a serious threat to life on earth, ourselves included, re: the environment are species loss; habitat loss; population depletion; deforestation; overfishing; pollution (air, water, earth); the contamination of our food with non-comestibles; environmental degradation done by radical mining practiced (mountaintop removal, fracking, the alberta-pipeline project) etc.

But the fractional change in co2, which is not caused by industrial emissions, is not having a deleterious effect on the planet. The change in weather patterns is also not all that remarkable, weather patterns change all the time.

This to me is like focusing on sharia law as a threat to american liberty while ignoring the patriot act, the war, gitmo, torture, habeas corpus, etc. etc. etc.

Focus, people.

Peace out.

ETA: Correlation doesn't prove causality. Even so, what would you rather have for a co2 level? Also, the ice age ended more recently than that, and no, we're not due for another one. It's not coming, actually. There is no end of the world here, but we could lose a lot of what we have if we don't stop and pay attention to the real world. I'm afraid this story is fantasy.

Consider the output of industrial co2, compared with the yearly intake and output of the planet. The co2 level is rising because of deforestation, even a cursory look at the math makes that obvious.

On the other hand, the co2 rise itself is not a threat. There's not really a strong historical correlation, in spite of those charts. Look longer term. Sure, if it got up into the thousands you might see a greenhouse effect. Not a deadly runaway burning planet, but a rise in temp. However, you can't get up into the thousands because there's not enough free carbon left on the Earth. it's all trapped in limestone as the result of aeons of microscopic shelfish.

Maybe in a few hundred million years, that could be a problem. I'm more worried about what could happen in the next 20 if we don't change our policies on forests, fishing, water and air pollution and our own exposure to toxics and the consumption of food substitutes.

One milliliter of TCE in your water can kill you. Doesn't it bother you that the president's energy plan currently calls for pouring a million gallons of it into your water supply? Yes, it's the evil corporations, yes, it's the evil govt., yes it's the evil republicans, yes, it's the evil democrats. It's the evil. Stop the evil. Don't fuss around with fantasyland. Deal with the real consequences.

IIRC, when I did the math on this one I estimated the annual consumption of carbon to be somewhere around 50 trillion tons. There isn't that much carbon of course. That's because it gets cycled through many times over.

If it seems like I'm belittling the issue, that's because I am. This is a science fiction translation of "the end is nigh."

The co2 consumption of photosynthesis is 2,000 times the total human industrial production. The reason co2 is rising is that we cut the consumption through environmental destruction. Ergo, it will continue to rise until the equation balances out. There's not really anything we can do about it, except stop destroying the planet. But no change in US fossil fuel consumption will have an effect. In fact, it's impossible for us to reverse the trend we may have helped. But this cycle in itself isn't the end of the world. I mean, it's been cycling for billions of years. People on the GW side always post the very short term graph because if they went back just a million years it wouldn't support their case. If you go back a billion you realize these are insignificant changes.

Here's the whole history of Co2 levels, temperature, and its loose but extant association whichever way it goes, over the whole history of higher life forms on the Earth

Data speaks for itself. To the left of this graph it was 300 once before, then it jumped to 3000, then stalled, then went to 7000. Prior to that, in the billions of years ago, it was way up as a majority component, before getting converted to limestone. Obviously that's not a hospitable situation, but it's also not something which can return.

By my calculations, there's enough carbon out there to bring us up to 600-700ppm, but not in fossil fuels.

I'm much more concerned about what the extraction process is doing to the surface of Alberta, or for that matter New York, than I am about the effect if may or may not have on a pretty large scale swing in the atmospheric carbon exchange engine.

This is just not the end of the world. It's not a panic button issue.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Monday, October 3, 2011 2:05 AM

KWICKO

Quote:
Consider the output of industrial co2, compared with the yearly intake and output of the planet. The co2 level is rising because of deforestation, even a cursory look at the math makes that obvious.

So after agreeing with Rappy, you just threw him under the bus with that paragraph. That *IS* man-assisted global warming, right there. Or do you think those forests are chopping themselves down?

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Monday, October 3, 2011 3:03 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:
Quote:
Consider the output of industrial co2, compared with the yearly intake and output of the planet. The co2 level is rising because of deforestation, even a cursory look at the math makes that obvious.

So after agreeing with Rappy, you just threw him under the bus with that paragraph. That *IS* man-assisted global warming, right there. Or do you think those forests are chopping themselves down?

That's probably my general political position anyway

We're wasting time on this, there are actual dangers, even environmental ones. I think Rap was trying to make the case that this argument has been discredited, which I think it has.

The danger is not that some small routine behavior of all humans is destroying the planet, but that massive impacts done by a handful of individuals can destroy massive parts of the planet.

There are lots of misdirected efforts, and TPTB are always trying to misdirect us more, giving us some shiny issue to fight over.

I get annoyed with this one because of the simple math. I'm probably not above using this to try to get people environmentally aware, but I don't want people who are already aware to waste their time on it. It's very much like the "threat of terrorism" or "war on drugs" sort of thing, it's just ignoring the real problem.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Monday, October 3, 2011 3:11 AM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Mal4, thankx everso, that was very illuminating. Nothing I didn't know, but put out there in terms I could understand. Did you enjoy the trip? What's Fairbanks like, and what did you see?

I'm not getting into this "debate" because it isn't one. Those who believe, believe; those who don't, don't. Nothing will change their minds, and I don't think any of us will live long enough to find out for certain. Aside from the fact that even if it were to happen in YOUR lifetime (I'm certain not in mine), those who disbelieve still wouldn't, they'd find another "reason". So it's not a debate for me and hasn't been for a long time.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the facts you've presented. Wish I could wander that display myself, looks fascinating.

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Monday, October 3, 2011 3:21 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Reminds me of how I question every day if there was a god.

You do? Seems kind of a waste of time.

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Monday, October 3, 2011 4:37 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Nothing will change their minds, and I don't think any of us will live long enough to find out for certain.

First of all, it IS happening "in our lifetime". It's happening NOW. If you're not certain, it's because you're not looking.
Greenland Ice Cap Melting Faster Than Ever

Quote:
ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091112141311.htm Now, for those who think that this is "normal" - after all, there was a Norse settlement on Greenland, right? .... the ice sheet has been a stable geological feature for over 100,000 years. There has not been a melt like this in all of human (homo sapiens sapiens') existence. The last time the ice sheet reached a minimum was about 400,000 years ago... before the Neandertals, when Homo erectus was being transformed into Homo heidelbergensis.
www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5883/1622.abstract

King crabs invade Antartica

Quote:
Giant king crabs are invading the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula, which are warming with climate change, say[s]... Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography... "For the last 14 million years or so, these kinds of crabs have been excluded from the Antarctic shelf waters because it's too cold for them," said Smith. "But on the Antarctic Peninsula, the water is warming very rapidly."

www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/09/07/science-king-crabs-antarct
ica.html

Again, to put this in perspective, the last time that king crabs emerged onto the ice shelves..14 MILLION years ago... hominds were emerging from australopithecans. We hadn't even gotten to "homo" yet. And that was a long time ago! So we are seeing more than historic changes, and even more than prehistoric changes, we are seeing changes on a geologic timescale.

The question isn't whether the earth's climate changes. It does. There have been many changes; some due vulcanism, some to large meteor strikes, some due to solar output, others due to orbital variation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycleshttp://en.wikipedia.or
g/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

But just because there are several different causes for climatic shifts doesn't mean we can't be one of them. That's like saying that since you could have been shot, stabbed, smothered or crushed, I couldn't possibly have poisoned you. Where is the logic in that? The presence of other causes doesn't negate other possibility of yet one more. If you REALLY want to find out what the cause is, you have to look at the evidence, in detail. Something that our more flamboyant flat-Earthers avoid like the plague.

And IF it is happening.... and the evidence is incontrovertible that it is... can we stop it? Can we at least adapt to it?

Sadly, we are doing neither.

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Monday, October 3, 2011 4:50 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"... I don't think any of us will live long enough to find out for certain."

I think you're optimistic. We already are experiencing the results of global warming and I think we will be at the point of 'OMG our systems are crashing down around us' crisis in a couple of decades.

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?

Yeah, me neither....

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Monday, October 3, 2011 5:30 AM

Interesting.

Mal4Prez, I think you and I read a similar study once about human agriculture and methane throwing off the natural ice-age cycle ten thousand years ago. The ten-thousand years ago thing was determined by the Milankovitch cycles.

The midge fly data suggests however that we are in a break period. Clearly there are more factors involved here than I initially thought. However, there might also be differences to be expected from using climate boring data from the north as compared to ice boring data from Antarctica, as land and ocean have different responses to cyclical temperature change, and the north pole has a lot of land around it (excepting the northern sea), while the south pole is surrounded by oceans (and has a continent with high albedo covered in ice).

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Monday, October 3, 2011 12:04 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

There is no question that the climate is changing. The question is how much of it is man's fault? The secondary question is what is man doing to add to it if it is partially man's fault? If we are adding to it at all it is through deforestation, that's how I feel, I guess I agree with DT really. The earth does this stuff, whether we have any part in it or not. I think what we should focus on is correcting the stuff we know is our fault, deforestation and all the stuff that DT mentioned with bad mining techniques, nonsustainable practices etc. Whether we play a small role in climate change (if we play any role at all) doesn't seem as important as us cleaning up our act and taking care of the earth like we're supposed to.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Monday, October 3, 2011 2:50 PM

Yes, the earth does change naturally. That has been quite clearly established, and was central to my posts. But all evidence I see points to how the natural cycles are now being messed with. No naysayer is addressing the rather obvious changes in CO2 and CH4 that just happened to occur when humans took over the scene, other than to say: but it just can't be!! Put your calculator where your mouth is, folks. Show some hard numbers, some real, peer-reviewed research that counters what's happening on the time scale of the current ice age cycles.

Six - this is not about conviction, it is about the evidence I have before me. When I see different evidence, I will draw a different conclusion. Got any evidence? Really. I'd be happy to shift my ideas about this.

DT - you post a graph that covers the scale of millions of years. Yes, there are extreme changes over such a time scale - duh! From molten early earth to snowball earth, shit happens. Doesn't change the fact that since humans joined the scene the pattern of ice age cycles has changed in a clear, measurable way.

It also doesn't change the fact that, though the earth survives such shifts, our modern society would not. You want to live on snowball earth? Or on Earth with sea levels up 5 feet, or 30 feet, or more?

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Tuesday, October 4, 2011 5:01 AM

Mal, it's tired and been done, and we've addressed it all before. Decaying plant material exudes 180 time the Co2, and probably a similar ratio of Ch4, as human industry.

My problems with this debate are multifold

1) It ignores climate, itself, the concept. Why doe the world mean temperature hug close to geothermal? One mights say it radiates, but that wouldn't explain why large portions of he planet differ radically from the geothermal mean.

Plants. Forest cover creates a massive convection cycle bringing up a tremendous volume of subsurface water that is sitting down closer to geothermal norm. The places where surface temperature differs greatest in both directions are forestless, so the temperature is free to flow at the whim of the sun, wind, and sure, things like the greenhouse effect. Don't believe me? Drive into a city. Then drive out again. Drive into a forest. Then Drive into a primeval forest. The temperature changes are dramatic each time.

2) It ignores math. Not only does human industry not produce enough carbon to create the effect, and what it creates is consumed by an engine turning over thousands of times more carbon each year than we could possibly produce.

The first thing you have to figure is how much Co2 we produce. I worked it out, and my personal use is, and it's about 3 times the amount that I use breathing. GW crowds says the world average is 10 times, the "naysayer" crowd says about .7 times. The issues are really "how many people drive" "how many miles does the average person drive" (very few drive as much as the US, Canada and Australia) and "what percent of out impact is our direct consumption?" (about 50%) So, that means for me, 6 times as much Co2 is produced by my part in industry as in my breathing.

This look at the human total biomass. Okay, what if we are producing 10 times as much as our norm per our biomass? Humans are <1% of the animal biomass, animal biomass is <1% of the land biomass and land biomass is <1% of the Earth biomass. Each of these things is producing and/or consuming Co2 all the time, and we're barely a spec on their radar. If do drive into the city, I pass through billions of trees each one weighing hundreds of tons. I realize that statistically I'm driving through one of the most densely populated parts of the planet, and just visually, I see no humans. I see a trillion times the biomass of the humans there, which is why I'm not seeing them. They're just not very significant.

Sure, humans have little human-dense deserts called cities, but these don't make up much of the surface or biomass of the Earth. Now, if you want to talk about *local* climate change, I'll agree with you.

3) It ignores anything else that might happen in the meantime. Said biomass is not a steady stable state, but is constantly in flux. With or without human intervention, it will change its intake and output of Co2 all the time. Right now, plants here are growing like never before. (In my lifetime) Why? Well, winter is shorter, the atmospheric Co2 is higher, and the water table is significantly higher. This isn't raising sea level, we're 1000 feet above sea level. So, my sister planted a tree two years ago, it's now towering 20 feet. That's new. It's not bad, but it sure is new. Could be any number of factors involved, including the evolution of trees, genetic differences. But I've been seeing a lot of that. We're probably in for a lot more of it.

4) I don't think it's a sincere scientific argument. Not yours, personally, but the overall debate. I think it's politically motivated, and so it contains elements of academic dishonesty to try to win over its goal, which ultimately probably boils down to each one trying to make the other side look bad.

To wit, here are some more issues with the story:

[Over 50 million years the temperature falls steadily, measured in glaciation]

Okay, there's the intermediate term temperature graph of the global mean. (60 million) The Ice Age cycle graph you see all over is like bad stock market charting, it shows four cycles and pretends that's forever. Why did this catastrophe happen? I don't know. It could be falling co2, but more likely that was one of many factors involved. Could be a change in solar output, slight variations in the distance of the Earth from the sun, precession of its tilt, or change in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. Or perhaps there are far more important factors we have yet to factor in.

Some things are clear. One is that low global temp and co2 are bad for life on Earth.

[Showing temperature dip at 450 million years ago being associated with a mass extinction]

I blame us for the recent extinction, and I think we're largely to blame, but only to some extent. The Ice Age(s) also are to blame. The entire dip though can easily be viewed as one giant Ice Age, and we are still in that age, and we may now be coming out of it. This is the fourth such dip in the history of life on Earth, and we were born right into the middle of it. Or perhaps near the end of it. But clearly, life on Earth does fine without it.

There is probably no longer enough carbon floating about in our ecosystem to see a big kick back to the thousands, thanks to the sequestering of sea shells (The sort of factor that may be missing) but still, it could co up to maybe 600-700ppm. The data doesn't seem to indicate radical changes if that happens.

Now, the other part of the data that is misleading is the 1900 to present temperature graph. That also pretends that nothing like this has even happened before.

[Temperature of the Northern Hemisphere over the last 2000 years, showing a climb and peak 1000 years ago very similar to today's. Low points at 600AD and 1600AD, previous peak at 1100AD]

The thousand year view weakens the case a little. Now, sure, humans were cutting down trees a thousand years ago, but they weren't driving cars.

Riona,

Thanks. My point would be that those secondary factors of human influence have some primary impact of more importance than the relevance to change in Co2, like that overfishing has led to the loss of 1/3 of all species of Salmon.

I forgot to do this for the last graph I posted, but here it is again with caption.

Temperature dips down to 12C at 450, 300, 150, and 0 million years ago, or every 150 million years in 4 major frozen ice ages not to be confused with the four smaller dips in the last one million years that we call Ice Ages. Our Ice Ages, I'm postulating here, represent little dents in the bottom of a big ice age that we're still in. The 3rd of these 4 dips is shallower, hitting maybe 15C, and the 2nd is more pronounced, lasting longer. The normal mean is 22C.

The graph also shows Co2 falling across 500 million years, from 5000-7000 ppm to 300ppm at the second (pronounced) dip, and then going back up to 3000 ppm, before recently coming back down to 300ppm. In the past century it has risen from 340ppm to 385 ppm.

Mal,

So, what would happen to human civilization? With any luck at all it will collapse. This climate shift thing gives us more than enough time to adapt, but our civilization appears to collapse under the weight of our own book-keeping.

As for what can be done for civilization? I don't know, euthanize it? Right now, our luminary leader and his mideast opponents have policy disagreement which I largely believe to be trade policy. However, they have both decided to solve it by enlisting millions of their own people's teens to kill each other with anything that blows up. Can this civilization be saved? Or more importantly, should it be?

ETA: Mal, I don't want to bicker in part because I don't have the time, but in part because this isn't your thread, and not your intent to stoke the argument, and I really have no disagreement with your rant reposted above, and Rick Perry is a class a douche.

My short point on this would this:

The argument itself has been modified from its scientific roots, which I think you'd admit are sketchy in places, and transformed into a political hot button for a reason: Panic.

Whatever the goal of creating panic, be it partisan manipulation, radical proposals or just cold hard cash, whatever. The point is that it's panic, just like was stoked up on the social security debate, just like was stoke with the war on terror.

To me, this is sort of like saying "Oh no, in five billion years the Sun could go Nova and destroy the Earth!"

The *scientific* story would have gone like this:

"Preliminary results of sample data may show human industry as contributing to rise in atmospheric Co2, fueling further speculation of an industrial role as one factor in rising global mean temperature."

If so, that would just go down as one more reason not to pollute, which stems from Frem's simple logic "Don't p*ss where you drink."

But that's not the story running. The story running is chicken little. The sky is not falling. Science doesn't deliver the kinds of ultimatums that politics does, or the kinds of clear one sided data. I think this kind of thing leads to bad decision making, and I think that's why politicians do it: They want bad decisions made.

Electing Rick Perry would be a terrible decision, but then again so would passing a global cap and trade tax.

The whole system is a scientific curiosity more than it is an end times scenario, which is fine, along side "Why the Dinosaurs died out" or more importantly "How." But like much of politics, the debate ends up distracting everyone from more important issues. That people in Pennsylvania can set their water on fire is more alarming than that the result might be contribute to an incremental change in atmospheric Co2. As such, these arguments which push for radical change are easily shot down and make debates against pollution lose when they should succeed. No one wants water you can set on fire. I don't think there's a voter block in favor of that.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Tuesday, October 4, 2011 12:49 PM

Agreed about bickering, but I must disagree with so many things. Just because you've decided something, doesn't mean that it "has been decided." Especially when you can't state it with references, or without using "probably".

I don't know why you stick with the millions of years time scale. And you seem to debate by making assumptions with little or no basis: you first assume you're right, then use your assumptions to build a logical argument to prove that you're right. It's just not convincing.

Let's start here:

Quote:

Why doe the world mean temperature hug close to geothermal?

First of all, huh?

So... I'm not sure, but you seem to mean that the internal heat of the earth controls the climate. Though you then say that not everywhere on earth is the same as the "geothermal." Hence more Huh?

BTW: one might say that the earth's heat radiates, and that would be because it does. Blackbody radiation in the infrared.

You bring up "Plants growing like never before" - like how the earth was covered in old growth forests before human agriculture began? You mean Asia and Europe and Africa and South America and major parts of the US have somehow become all forested again?

It turns your whole "drive into a forest" argument against you: yes, forests effect temperature and atmospheric content. So how much forest has been lost since 10,000 years ago? Don't you think that would have change things, since by your own argument trees are so huge and important?

Speaking of which...

Quote:
If do drive into the city, I pass through billions of trees each one weighing hundreds of tons.

Hundreds of tons?

www.ncrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/ch/ch01%5CChvolume01page401.pdf

Tree weights vary from 0.25 to 10 tons. I'm sure a few northern CA trees go beyond that, but those are rare and take up a helluva lot more room.

Billions of trees? This I want to test.

There might be 300 trees per acre, if they're spaced by an average of 12 feet. That only allows 6 feet of branch radius for each tree - these aren't huge. No redwoods here. There's 640 acres in a mile^2, so about 2E+5 trees/mile^2.

In order to see "billions" of trees - let's call it 2 billion, you'd need to see 10,000 square miles. If you can see 10 miles each way off your highway, that's 500 miles of solidly wooded land you drove through. OK, not so far off as I'd expected, but still it's 50% longer than the north-south length of Maine. It works if you have to drive through most of New England to get to your city.

Now, I don't know what twisty stuff you're doing to find your personal CO2 use, and from that inferring the human CO2 contribution. Let's try this instead:

World Crude Oil production 1980-2007
Data from:
http://205.254.135.24/emeu/international/oilproduction.html
6.19E+11 barrels, 1 barrel = 42 gallons so that's 2.60E+13 gallons
Fuel oil produces 22.29 lbs of CO2/gal.
Total CO2 released: 5.80E+14 lbs of CO2

That's 2.90E+11 TONS of CO2 released since 1980.

That’s only from oil – doesn’t include natural gas and coal. In fact, it you’re willing to go with wikipedia as a source,

“Emissions of CO2 by human activities are currently... about 27 billion tonnes per year.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#In_the_Earth.27s_atmospher
e

27 billions tons of CO2 per year. How many trees does it take to process that? I'll leave that for later...

Anyhow, I'm sure this is all a waste of time because no climate change denier seems to use math in the way I'd expect. You know, with a calculator rather than with their hands waving in the air in front of them.

But this is a fun exercise and one I've been wanting to give my students. I'll probably put it into my classes this spring.

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Tuesday, October 4, 2011 1:25 PM

He actually did show his work once. After I figured out where he'd gotten the numbers from, I followed his math on a calculator, it came out the same. The main question remaining is whether the equation was set up right and if we missed any sources or sinks for the closed system.

I'm also not sure why there's any problem with looking at temperature data or CO2 data for the cenozoic era in total.

Also, he does think cutting trees has an impact, he wasn't ever arguing that they don't. His argument is more against industry, not that there's no climate change, temperature change, or change in CO2 levels.

Aw, no one wants to discuss break period versus Milankovitch predictions and northern borings versus southern borings with me. ._.

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Tuesday, October 4, 2011 8:23 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

Byte, I saw a show about something like that when I was at my grandma's house a couple of weeks ago and my dad and I tried to watch it but it was just ending when we turned it on and we had to leave to go home anyways. Sorry I don't have anything more relevent to say on the matter, but that stuff is interesting.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Tuesday, October 4, 2011 11:02 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"What started 8000 years ago that might have affected CO2 levels ? ... And 5000 years ago that might have affected methane levels?"

I'm not seeing it, simply b/c populations levels were very low back then (estimated 7M and 14M). https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pbb0aoD3hdM-HgD-knTGXIA
If it takes the full press of a large population and modern technology to put the Amazon under pressure today, enough to see a global effect, could a relatively small scattered population with limited technology create global CO2 and methane change?

Are there calculation estimates for that?

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?

Yeah, me neither....

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 12:31 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Aw, no one wants to discuss break period versus Milankovitch predictions and northern borings versus southern borings with me. ._.

Milankovitch cycles are cool. I don't know what the rest of it is - arctic ice vs subarctic ice? Please explain!

(But I can't visit fff at work, and I'll be there late today, so you may not hear back for a while.)

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 12:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"What started 8000 years ago that might have affected CO2 levels ? ... And 5000 years ago that might have affected methane levels?"

I'm not seeing it, simply b/c populations levels were very low back then (estimated 7M and 14M). https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pbb0aoD3hdM-HgD-knTGXIA
If it takes the full press of a large population and modern technology to put the Amazon under pressure today, enough to see a global effect, could a relatively small scattered population with limited technology create global CO2 and methane change?

Are there calculation estimates for that?

There are. I'll dig them out when I get a chance.

BTW, despite appearances, I'm not completely convinced by this idea. But it's the first compelling science I've seen behind climate change. I'm waiting for a solid argument to counter it - "solid" meaning based on science and actual measurements, rather than hand waving over what people think should be intuitively obvious.

If I've learned one thing from teaching, it's that human intuition sucks at science.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 5:29 AM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Quote:
We already are experiencing the results of global warming and I think we will be at the point of 'OMG our systems are crashing down around us' crisis in a couple of decades.

Okay, Kiki, let's say "I won't be around..."

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 5:39 AM

Quote:
I'm not seeing it, simply b/c populations levels were very low back then (estimated 7M and 14M).

It's actually a very interesting argument. Around that time, both slash and burn and also growing rice in rice paddies was starting to kick off. The slash and burn has some obvious greenhouse releases, but it was also thought that the rice paddies might release a lot of methane.

I'd have to see if I could find some manner of chart showing any possible CO2 or methane increase at the time to confirm it, but if Milankovitch cycles are at all accurate in predicting the onset of an ice age, then early human civilization derailed it before it could start.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 5:50 AM

Quote:
I don't know what the rest of it is - arctic ice vs subarctic ice? Please explain!

Okay, so your lake sediment borings from Alaska up north are showing midge flies which show some approximate temperatures, right? From those temperatures scientists are determining that we're in a ice age break period.

But ice cores from Antarctica and the Milankovitch cycles suggest we should have started an ice age about ten thousand years ago, and one theory about that is that human agriculture kinda derailed it.

So it's an interesting question of what's going on here? And the idea I came up with, that I was attempting to run past you, is that the arrangement of landmasses around the sampling site is actually having a noticeable impact on the climate record at those sites. The midge flies are showing a warmer than ice age climate, consistent with a break period, but that might be due to the fact that there's landmass around Alaska and the Arctic Ocean and has been for quite some time. Landmasses get warmer than ocean.

Meanwhile, down south you have some ice cores that suggest an ice age cycle more consistent with the Milankovitch cycle. But on the other hand, Antarctica has very little landmass around it and it's high, icy albedo means it's going to be colder than average as well.

It's just interesting to see the differences. Trying to adjust for those differences could be a key factor in determining where we are in a climate sense. If we really were meant to be in an ice age right now, then it's kind of a whoa nelly! But if we're meant to be in a break period, it's kinda like, well, the earth has been relatively warm in general, humans are making it warmer, is there a significance and how much is significant?

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 8:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:

I don't know why you stick with the millions of years time scale.

I added it to the data set because you excluded it. I don't know why you excluded it. Adding prospect shows radical departure from the theory, which is based on short term data and the exclusion of conflicting data. That's not good science, hell, it's not science at all. It's politics. This is what politicians do. They show you islamic radicals fighting and they do not show you islamic radical charities. It's the same with anything. Also, science does not make sweeping statement or draw end times scenarios.

Quote:
And you seem to debate by making assumptions with little or no basis

WTF.

Quote:

Quote:

Why doe the world mean temperature hug close to geothermal?

First of all, huh?

Have you even *met* geology?

[above graph shows geologic subsurface anomaly (hotspot) in reference to standard gradient.

Any theory involving climate should first know what the fuck it is and how it works. The median temperature of the earth is drawn to a geothermal mean, as per the gradient, by means of convection.

Quote:
Though you then say that not everywhere on earth is the same as the "geothermal." Hence more Huh?

Yes, you see large derivations in the middle east (120F) and Antartica (-70F) which you do not see in more heavily forested areas, perhaps because less convection is taking place. Under antarctica, where the critters live, it's 40F, fairly similar to under Iraq or Saudi Arabia.

If we go to a heavily forested area, like the amazon, if there was no such thing as convection, we might expect to see that it was the same temperate as Iraq. The average temperature in the rainforest is 80F. Not that different from here in the summer. So, sure, the position of the sun affects the temperature, but heat also radiates from the earth, and also, temperature is exchanged by convection.

A hotspot is an anomaly, also based on convection. But Saudi Arabia is not a hotspot anomaly, it's a desert.

Quote:
You bring up "Plants growing like never before"

Relative to my experience with them. It was hyperbola.

Quote:
So how much forest has been lost since 10,000 years ago?

Since humans, quite a bit, of course after the ice age, forest cover increased. It changes. The Earth changes.

Quote:
Don't you think that would have change things

Sure. Notice any very large changes on the chart of millions of years in temp and atmospheric co2 having nothing to do with humans?

Quote:
Hundreds of tons?

Met any trees?

Quote:
Tree weights vary from 0.25 to 10 tons.

Seriously, have you met any trees? I've planted trees that weigh 0.25 tons or 500 pounds as we call it. When they come down, I cannot carry them away. Trees can weigh anything, but first growth trees can weigh a lot more. Now you are nitpicking.

Billions of trees? This I want to test.

Quote:
There might be 300 trees per acre,

Depends on the trees, but sure.

Quote:
if they're spaced by an average of 12 feet.

Sure,

Quote:
That only allows 6 feet of branch radius for each tree

There are no branches at the base.

Okay, you're really wasting time. The forest is 200 miles on a side, so I can calculate the number of trees: 7,680,000,000

That's billions. That's more trees than there are humans on the Earth.

Why are you doing this? Nitpicking every offhand comment I make. It's just a dick move. You're wasting my time. Clearly, the biomass of trees exceeds that of humans, that was the point. There are virtually no humans as a biomass, we are biomass irrelevant as a species. So is our industry.

Mal, I did the math, a few times here, and you intentionally ignored it. Most of the world's biomass is in the sea. 37.5 trillion tons of carbon, which if burned would be 137 trillion tons of co2. Circulating, there are about 6 trillion tons of co2 at any given time, about half of which is in the atmosphere

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

The total consumption and creation of the Earth is around 50 trillion tons, which means each carbon molecule is being turned over many times. Forest biomass is about 1000x land animal biomass. Humans are 0.3% or so of animal biomass, so even if we are, as GW crowd claims, 10x as much co2 producers as any normal specials, it's still so what.

The Earth is big. You have to check the mass of humans and human efforts against the mass of a constantly changing Earth in a highly complex system.

Byte,

I've done it every which way and posted it a couple of times. I see that wikipedia came to the same conclusion, as have many websites. The GW argument relies on the omission of critical data, as witness above. Data exclusion is not science. This is not a scientific argument, it's a political one. The idea is to create an atmosphere of panic to force the enactment or radical policy. While not all of the policy changes I disagree with, from a scientific perspective I have to disagree with the argument. I think it's fear mongering, and I think it hurts the environmental cause.

You have a point about irregular data from different bores, etc., but this GW argument is so many degrees of magnitude out of sync with reality that I don't think a data error is the problem. There's an arch conceptual problem that has not measured the total weight of humans and their machines, which just isn't up there

If you solved this problem, you'd then have to prove the greenhouse effect, which is sketchy, we again have the problem that correlation doesn't prove causality, such as the rate at which co2 is sucked into ice cores as the temperature falls vs. when it rises. Temp. changes could easily create reading changes in ice core samples.

But all together I fail to see the apocalypse. The Co2 level is rising from 340 to 385 and will continue to go up, to maybe 600-700, and it could take some time to get there. our total output is actually less than the 45 ppm since this would

This has all been done and overdone. The total human production is = or < the total change, but the consumptionof co2 by the world's forest cover is 10x to 100x the human co2 output depending on whose numbers you use, but about 225 billion tons co2. Most of the biomass exhange is in the ocean, where 99% life and 99% of the atmosphere is.

There is some exchange between the ocean and the air each year, and the overall co2 dispersion map does not represent industrial production sites:

[source:NASA]

The map doesn't reflect pollution, the world's major industrial centers: northeast US, Europe, China, but rather, it represents consumption.

Co2 consumption lowers the local Co2. Sure it diffuses, but, it does that no matter whether it's production or consumption, we would still see a differentiation in shade centering on local areas.

[source:UN]

There are the world's forest showing land based consumption, which we can see affecting the world atmospheric bands by wind currents.

As for the Ice Age, I think there are longer term cycles as work. Clearly the ice age cycle pattern is a small wave form inside of a much larger and more significant one, and I'm not convinced that there ergo is another one coming, but I'm not sure we had an impact, except in the degree of forest cover we destroyed. It's possible that the glaciation reduced co2 consumption by destroying forests and thus raises the co2 level, and this could effect temperature, but it's a very complex system with lots of other things going on.

Another flaw in all climate studies is the failure to take into account so many really major factors. Take a look at the world map.

Imagine if Madrid had a winter like New York or Seattle, or London had one like Banff, or Edinburgh like Alaska, or South Korea had a summer like the Northern Sahara, or Okanawa like Baghdad.

The radical differences in climate between areas on the same latitude and even very similar geologic setup outside of everything but current are obvious and extreme. No climate measures show this kind of difference, and yet people are "certain" that human indurstrial co2 can be the only cause? Earth currents driven by pressure systems could shift by a few degrees and throw Europe into an Ice age with no change in atmospheric Co2 or global mean temperature. Also, has anyone stopped to consider why 65 degrees south there are Ice sheets anyway? Doesn't that seem odd?

Oh no, the davis shelf is melting

Maybe it does that every year, I don't know, but it's not even in an arctic climate. But for some reason it leads people right away to this

Meanwhile there are arboreal forests 80 degrees north or more. Oh, and the bearing sea

It's like we're in the year 1000, and people are in a panic because they think that judgment day is at hand, and an angry Jesus is going to sort out the damned.

Or like it's 2012 and the Mayan prophesy predicts the end of the age of civilization.

Welcome to the Earth

Don't fuck it up

The world's not about to end, you don't need to put a halt to humanity. However there are some issues that are much smaller which could be addressed. the above two pictures are of Athabasca, Alberta., and unfortunately, that's change I can believe, but not believe in.

Closer to home, for me anyway, my neck of the woods

I don't really care how much atmospheric co2 the president's energy plan creates

Or the affect this has on the price of beef.

There's not enough carbon in the world to have a significant impact on the world temperature, but fearmongering will have an impact on human behavior, and it will not have a good one. People will fall for radical policies. The Earth is our home, and it has weather many radical changes in co2 and mean temperature far beyond our capacity to create, but, while the planet can withstand our massive destruction of its surface, will it really create a place we want to live?

Just focus on the problem at hand. People will reject apocalyptic speculations because they can't handle them, the end of the world is out of your control. If you tell them they can solve it by reducing their "carbon footprint" they will do it and feel good about themselves, but have no effect on the environment. Tell them someone is poisoning their drinking water and they might actually do something about it.

Okay, enough of this, I have to get back to cancer research, side effect of someone poisoning the drinking water.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 9:03 AM

Hmm. The only thing I want to add to that is that geothermal temperatures, while they will radiate into air, you're talking about a phase change and a much less dense medium, meaning more insulating. The air is never going to be so warm as the average 25 degree Celsius temperature coming off the ground, and within the first hundred feet or so you can affect the surface temperature of the ground through weather, biome, and climactic effects.

There is some laboratory evidence about gases being able to behave as greenhouse gases, though it depends on where they are in the atmosphere. Upper atmosphere CO2 actually has a cooling influence. Close to ground atmosphere, as in the toposphere and stratosphere are more what you're going to be looking at if you want to look at how gases absorb heat and change ambient temperature.

Also, when I was talking about boring samples and discrepancies, I'm just shooting the breeze, not making arguments one way or the other.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 9:04 AM

M52NICKERSON

DALEK!

I'm I the only one that finds it funny that DT will argue against pretty hard science of climate change but then expect people to listen to him about a drinking water contamination conspiracy?

I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 9:05 AM

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

How about we get real as to what's actually behind all this and why?

Quote:
Not too long ago, belief in climate science wasn't a political issue. Honestly! As recently as the 2008 U.S. presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates professed belief in the threat of global warming, and each advanced policies designed to curb U.S. carbon emissions. Senator John McCain had even co-sponsored one of the first congressional bills to create a carbon cap-and-trade system. And it wasn't just McCain; Mitt Romney, runner-up for the GOP nomination last time around, supported a regional cap-and-trade program while he was governor of Massachusetts. There was still a wide gap between Democrats and Republicans on the severity of the climate-change threat and on how ambitious carbon-cutting policy should be, but at least there was a general agreement that global warming was a real thing.

Not anymore. With the exception of Jon Huntsman — who barely registers in polls — you can't find a Republican presidential candidate who unequivocally believes in climate science, let alone one who wants to do anything about it. Instead of McCain — who has walked back his own climate-policy realism since the 2008 elections — we have Texas Governor Rick Perry, who told voters in New Hampshire over the weekend that "I don't believe manmade global warming is settled in science enough." And many Republicans agree with him: the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering yes to the question of whether the effects of global warming were already being felt fell to 30% or less in 2010, down from 50% in 2007-08. Meanwhile, liberals and Democrats remained around 70% or more.

That's deeply troubling. It's one thing when people disagree on the effectiveness of different approaches to fix a problem; it's worse when they refuse even to believe that a problem exists — despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that says it does. One of America's major political parties has, in effect, adopted denial as policy. How did we get here?

As the sociologists Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and Aaron McCright of Michigan State University suggest, climate denialism exists in part because there has been a long-term, well-financed effort on the part of conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science. That's the conclusion of a chapter the two researchers recently wrote for The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. "Contrarian scientists, fossil-fuel corporations, conservative think tanks and various front groups have assaulted mainstream climate science and scientists for over two decades," Dunlap and McCright write. "The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine."

For those who've followed the seesaw of the climate debate in the U.S., there's not much new in Dunlap and McCright's chapter, but they do lay out just how long and how intensively some conservatives have been fighting mainstream climate science. Fossil-fuel companies like Exxon and Peabody Energy — which obviously have a business interest in slowing any attempt to reduce carbon emissions — have combined with traditionally conservative corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative foundations like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, to raise doubts about the basic validity of what it. That message gets amplified by conservative think tanks — like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute — and then picked up by conservative media outlets on the Internet and cable T.

All of the naysayers seem to be following the playbook written by the tobacco industry in its long, ongoing war against medical findings about the dangers of smoking. For both Big Oil and Big Smoke, that playbook is lethally simple: don't straight-up refute the science, just raise skepticism and insist that the findings are "unsettled" and that "more research" is necessary. Repeat that again and again regardless of the latest research, and you help block the formation of the solid majority needed to create any real political change. That's made all the easier because whether you're quitting smoking or oil, the job is painful — and voters don't like pain.

"It's reasonable to conclude that climate-change-denial campaigns in the U.S. have played a crucial role in blocking domestic legislation and contributing to the U.S. becoming an impediment to international policymaking," write Dunlap and McCright.

It's certainly true that the U.S., even after President Obama's election, remains an international outlier when it comes to belief in climate science, as former President Bill Clinton noted recently. Climate denial makes Americans "look like a joke," Clinton said from the stage of his foundation's annual meeting last month. "If you're an American, the best thing you can do is make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial." That was also the main message behind former Vice President Al Gore's recent Climate Reality project, which was broadcast around the world on Sept. 14.

Of course, the fact that the message is coming from two political figures who are — to say the least — highly associated with the Democratic Party is part of the problem. Over time, belief in climate science has become less about the science than about establishing a cultural identity — you're a denier or a believer depending on whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, just like you're a Yankees or a Red Sox fan depending on whether you're from New York City or Boston. Of course, polarization is harmless in sports — and indeed, it can be essential to the fun. It's insanity as a basis for complex public policy.

So would it make a difference if the conservative denial machine were to collapse tomorrow? Sadly, I'm not sure. Even in places like Western Europe, where belief in climate science tends to be much stronger, it's hard to build support for the actual steps to reduce carbon emissions. Human beings have a hard time dealing not just with pain, but also with long-term problems, especially ones that don't necessarily show immediate effects. Whether it's planning for retirement or losing weight, we find it too easy to disregard very clear science — and disregard our long-term health — in order to satiate our immediate desires. There's no excuse for the sort of half-fictions and outright lies that too often make up the climate-change-denial machine, but it's human psychology — as much as politics — that's preventing us from dealing with one of the greatest threats the species faces. The most powerful denial machine of all may be the one inside our heads. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2096055,00.html

That about covers the REAL facts of the issue, as well as why our Rabid Righties are so sure they're right.

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 9:09 AM

...

What is with all the buckshot I keep getting hit with...

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 9:17 AM

Niki, I see that the argument I'm about to make has become adopted by Republican candidates, which makes me feel filthy, but I also see there's a bit of effort being put out to deny it and discredit it by various members of the news agency, which is dangerous, because they also support the status quo and big business (including oil) etc.

Fortunately for me, the avalanche of right versus left nonsense hasn't yet dropped the information so far down on google that I can't find it.

I'm just going to post this here, and ask people take a notice of the date.

http://www.env-econ.net/2009/02/cap-v-tax-bp-v-exxonmobil.html

Exxon support for one measure and BP support for the other does not fill me with supreme confidence that either measure is on the up and up.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
The air is never going to be so warm as the average 25 degree Celsius temperature coming off the ground, and within the first hundred feet or so you can affect the surface temperature of the ground through weather, biome, and climactic effects.

Byte,

It's like GW temp graphs, you can get much finer tuned charts of geothermal in the top few hundred feet. The standard temp at 300 feet IIRC is about 57F. At least around here. There's a clear relation going on here.

Outside, you're competing with space, solar or the void. The water drawn up from the roots of trees is likely to be at some geothermal temp, not because the roots are 300 feet deep, but because they're drawing on a subsurface body of water that is going to be close to uniform temp because it's a body of water, and so it's dragging towards geothermal as well, which is why you always have groundwater instead of ground ice unless you're in the arctic tundra. That and pressure. But it's pressure that's creating the geothermal ultimately anyway.

As a result, the trees around here are transpiring around that temperature. The water in the amazon is warmer than here, but not radically.

As for the atmospheric behavior of co2, it's complex, as you say, certainly not as simple as portrayed in the GW argument. This argument is simple panic created for simple people. It's political, and never going to hedge its bets, temper its language or admit to multiple factors having various impacts or systems having dynamic feedback.

Nick

I have on this forum, on several occasions, *shredded* the rather bogus "science" of mainstream GW theory. There are a number of people who agree. It's a political football, and it's relation to science is loose. I don't disagree with it politically, as an environmentalist, it's actually useful to me. I disagree with it scientifically because it is wrong, as in incorrect.

Niki,

Nah, it was before 2008. Al Gore made it into a partisan issue, but he had help from John Kerry who said in in the 2004 campaign. The motive there was simple: Bush got a lot of funding from oil companies. But behind that is more of the same end of the world panic-mongering.

What I really don't get is that at the same time you had people on the right going off about the rapture and on the left going off about catastrophic runaway GW that would turn the Earth into Venus... and neither one of them could see that what they were peddling was the exact same thing: completely bogus end of the world panic.

Byte,

I pegged early on that Obama and BP were close bedfellows. You're right of course neither is on the up and up. They both want a scheme that allows them to tax the opposition while giving themselves a loophole to get off with not only no tax but open license to pollute and some sort of monetary bonus.

It's a global derivatives scheme. They both are.

And don't feel dirty for agreeing with a republican, it happens. Consider it this way: I've been trading mortgage derivatives. Think how I feel ;)

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 1:20 PM

Quote:
dragging towards geothermal as well, which is why you always have groundwater instead of ground ice unless you're in the arctic tundra.

Yeah, tundra and permafrost is what I was thinking of. Anyway, while this is a big factor, I'm not sure this is the only factor, at least around the surface. Deeper than 100 feet, yes, you're going to start seeing that gradient more. As you go down each kilometer rock and soil (being primarily Silicon) adds about 30 degrees Celsius temperature, excepting the hot spots and the cold spots you mentioned. Ambient temperature has an influence towards the surface, as does groundwater temperature, around 1 km that influence is negligible.

Probably the biggest air temperature factor is the angle of sunlight, followed by air and ocean currents. Otherwise I don't think we'd ever see permafrost.

Quote:
You're right of course neither is on the up and up. They both want a scheme that allows them to tax the opposition while giving themselves a loophole to get off with not only no tax but open license to pollute and some sort of monetary bonus.

Thought so.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 3:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:

I don't know why you stick with the millions of years time scale.

I added it to the data set because you excluded it. I don't know why you excluded it.

Um - isn't it obvious? Because I'm interested in what happens over the next couple thousand years. That has a little more effect over us humans than what will happen in the next coupled million.

Choose your time scale a little more wisely my friend. See this is what I mean about your assumptions - you choose to focus on the wrong time scale, then you kvetch about the rest of us worrying over the sun going supernova. You chose the wrong time scale, not me.

Quote:
Have you even *met* geology?

Well, technically, my PhD is in geophysics, not geology. So I'd have to say that I haven't blown him or anything, but we're passing acquaintances.

You?

Yes, there are geothermal areas. There is a heat budget of thermal energy conducting up through the crust, the cause of which is pressure and radioactivity. And this has what to do with the climate? I know: you found a pretty picture and it got you all excited. Right? And that means you know "the fuck" about the climate? You have lots of scientific studies showing that variations in radioactivity in the earth is tied to climate variations? And it fits observations as well as Milankovitch cycles? Do show. Do.

And where exactly did you study this? The same place you learned that heat comes out of the earth through convection? To quote you: "The median temperature of the earth is drawn to a geothermal mean, as per the gradient, by means of convection."

I'll just be sitting here pointing and laughing while you go google "convection" and look into those time scale issues. I won't waste time with the rest of your post.

-----------------------------------------------
hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 3:38 PM

M52NICKERSON

DALEK!

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:

I have on this forum, on several occasions, *shredded* the rather bogus "science" of mainstream GW theory. There are a number of people who agree. It's a political football, and it's relation to science is loose. I don't disagree with it politically, as an environmentalist, it's actually useful to me. I disagree with it scientifically because it is wrong, as in incorrect.

If you could shred climate change (what it is called now) you would not be talking to us here but you would preparing you peer reviewed article.

I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 4:24 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"There are. I'll dig them out when I get a chance."

That would be cool (so to speak). I'll wait.

As an aside, this is what I was thinking:
The major reason for land clearing in the Amazon is for cattle grazing. Grazing takes a lot of land per person (it's a very inefficient use of land for food production). And b/c it's the Amazon, the soil is worn out within a couple of years, so they have to go and do it all over again. They carry this out with chainsaws and bulldozers - a high technology method dependent on fossil fuels. There is so much that has to be in place for a few million humans to have that kind of impact.

What humans DO seem to be able to do in a short time with relatively small numbers and primitive technology is wipe out animals. In N America the extinction of a lot of animals comes after human settlement - oh - and a large meteorite that seems to have struck somewhere in - Illinois ? I think. But you see the same pattern in other places - Europe, Australia, NZ etc. However, I can't think of a way that would affect the climate. And it's waaaayy off in terms of timeframe.

So, I'm at a dead-end with my question. How could humans have caused climate change in those time periods?

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?

Yeah, me neither....

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 5:17 PM