Global Warming Debate

[merttan]

For those saying taking action before something happens is sloppy... Do you have PFDs, VHF, Radar, or EPIRB on your boat? If so, why? Are you expecting something, like sinking or getting into some trouble in the middle of the ocean? Tsk tsk tsk...

Ordovician era was when the world was covered by the oceans, wasn't an ice age... Algeas were the photosynthesis source and oh yeah almost forgot, we would survive on 4400ppm... The land wasn't there yet...(450million years ago, which is way before beginning of the time for some)

Kyoto requieres %5.2 drop on emissions... Not an economic suicide...

Lead was used as cavity filler, was in the gasoline and paint, and then all of a sudden we are trying to avoid lead even in fish we eat!!! Somebody saw it coming...

The fish we catch on our shores have health warning about consuming limits! What happened here? It's that good old fish...

The scientific community needs that funding for proving their points...

Apparently no one touched the Carbon tracker? What's wrong guys?

Earth does go through cycles but;
"As noted above, the ocean, which covers 71% of Earth’s surface, has been one of the principal sinks for anthropogenic CO2. If one were to examine its “heat content,” the role of the ocean becomes even more significant: approximately 84% of the heat energy associated with global warming resides in the ocean. This observation can be explained by the large heat capacity of liquid water to store energy compared to the atmosphere and biosphere. Over the past 50 years, ocean heat content has been observed to increase even to depths of 1000 meters. The ability of the ocean to absorb both heat and CO2 is enhanced by its ability to sequester them over a kilometer-thick layer. But future changes are expected to lead to reduced oceanic mitigation due to both increased water temperature (less ability to absorb gasses like CO2) and a more limited depth range for heat storage. A reduction in the depth of oceanic heat storage by a factor of two will result in a doubling of the climate sensitivity to CO2 increase and thus a doubling of the expected future global temperature increase."
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457&tid=282&cid=14087

"In the absence of human influences, the amount of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere is controlled by the balance between sources and sinks for CO2, much like the amount of money in your bank account is controlled by how much you put in and how much you take out. The primary source for CO2 on geologic time scales is volcanism and outgassing from the mantle, deep within the Earth. Erosion of oil-rich, or petroleum-rich, rocks has also contributed to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past. The sink for CO2, on geologic time scales, is the erosion of silicate rocks. Silicates are the type of rock that makes up mountains. So the erosion of mountains reduces CO2 in the atmosphere; volcanism and exposure of hydrocarbon-bearing strata increase CO2 in the atmosphere.
Concentrations of greenhouse gasses like CO2 and methane are higher now than any time in the past 600,000 years, and are projected to increase even more (Fig. 1). Initially, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were projected to double (Fig. 1) over the next 100 years. But we may be on a fast track where a quadrupling is not inconceivable. At that point in time, we would be living in a greenhouse atmosphere much like that of the mid-Cretaceous, 90 to 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs (and not humans) ruled the earth."

We are releasing the carbon from the depths where it's been trapped and that's what changing the balance...

And yes, we don't have flaggers in front of the cars but we have traffic regulations, signals and safety cautions... Ironically, Germany has a really low death rate by traffic accidents versus US, yet has higher or no speed limits!!! Why? Because, it takes 3 years to EARN your licence there, not one afternoon!!! Education and training makes the difference!

Even China seems to be the biggest emissions provider, it's actually the USA... Number one in something we should be ashamed of... If you are OK with running your car in your garage when your children in there, I have nothing to say...
And US doesn't have much dependency on fossil fuel, if only the consumers ask for better options! The technology is here, just ask for it... Example, how many of US consumers are expecting Laser TVs in 2008? The rest of the world is... How come the European and Asian cars are offering the newest technology, meanwhile the American auto industry is still trying to sell me a car that's outdated?

[StuMyers]

Just pointing out a few misconceptions;

1. On geologic time scales, the climate is dominated by the configuration of the continents. Comparing carbon dioxide levels (or temperature for that matter) of a billion years ago to today is nearly meaningless.

2. On shorter (<1 million years) time scales the interglacial periods are kicked off by Milankovitch cycles. After the initial warming (super-summer in the northern hemisphere) released carbon dioxide keeps the climate warm for a few thousand years (hence the saw-tooth pattern, and the apparent lag mentioned by a previous poster).

3. The magnitude of temperature forcing due to a known increased concentration of each greenhouse gas is well known. It's just freshman physics. Local climate change is harder to predict.

And yes, I'm one of those US government scientists. Feel free to ask me about my motives.

[sailaway21]

k1vsk,
You're better at stating the certainty of man-made global warming than you are at acknowledging the costs of changing that behavior. You blithely advocate a policy of better safe than sorry, yet fail to so much as even imply that there might be a cost to safety, a significant cost. I'll stand by my original post and characterization of your position until such time as you choose to defend your position in some way other than the "better safe than sorry" stand.

[sailaway21]

I'd also like to address the falacious thinking that ice core samples can tell us much about causality. If we accept that an accurate picture of the atmosphere can be derived from ice core samples for a given time in the past, and I am not conceding that to be a given, we are no further ahead on exactly what caused those gases to be present in those concentrations at that time. All we really have to go on, in interpreting the data, are relatively recent caches of data that do not reach back nearly far enough to make generalizations about activities of a thousand, or thousands, of years ago. That's not honest science; that's what is called a swag. A swag is a scientific wild ass guess. At the heart of the data interpretation is some sort of idea that our present condition is somehow "normal", or was until recently "normal", and that change is bad. And again that is faulty thinking. The only thing that we do know is that change is constant, sometimes cyclical, but what causes it and why we're substantially less sure of. By substantially less sure of, I mean "we can take a swag".

Now I'm no uranium engineer here, but I well recall the global cooling scare of thirty years ago and it proved to be unfounded. And thirty years is quite some time in terms of scientific data gathering abilities-heck 30 years ago I was throwing temperature logs over the side for Scripps, now it's done by satellite. What has not changed though is the innate intelligence of scientists. Those guys in the seventies were no less bright than scientists are today, and they believed we were cooling. So let's do away with the notion of the infallibility of scientists. And that is waht the global warming advocates are asking us to trust, to the tune of a major restructuring of the world's economy.

What HAS changed is that science is now big business. Usually big business on a government grant. If you are employed at a research university you are quite likely to be more valuable, hence higher paid, for any research monies you can bring in versus any individual spectacular scientific discovery. From a governmental standpoint, the congress is confronted with scientists seeking money to study in impending avian flu virus competing against scientists seeking funding for the study of global warming. And that funding is on a scale that makes what was spent on the Manhatten Project look like "doofs dabbling with isotopes". It takes little imagination to see this research end up right where cancer research is at-nowhere. Do not get the impression that I am against studying any of these things; I'm just not prepared to declare the crisis necessary to make GW research the next General Motors of science. Those who do appear to have the cart before the horse and, when in doubt, I recommend "follow the money". The GW public relations campaign has a very familiar odor about it. It's an odor that has become increasingly common over the last forty years, since roughly the first Earth Day. And it's not the cause that stinks so much, it's the selling of the cause. The TV shopping channels do much the same type of marketing and selling for far more tangible goods, proving the method works. In another time this was known as the 'blue light special" where you were encouraged to hurry over and get a deal, before time ran out, on something that, in retrospect, you might not really have needed.

A lot of us who've been on the planet for longer than ten minutes think we recognize these tactics. One word describes them. Spinach. We don't like it and we ain't eatin' it.

[camaraderie]

Merttann...I'm gonna stay on the subject "doing something about GW" and your statement " Kyoto requieres %5.2 drop on emissions... Not an economic suicide... "

No one is anymore claiming Kyoto will actually DO anything measureable to the temperature even if it was fully implemented. The projection for an implemented Kyoto in 2050 is a .06 degree change!


In case you can't read the source there...it is UKMO...or United Kingdom Met Office. So Kyoto would be a lot of money spent/transferred with no result except $$ going to places it otherwise would not. I'll stay out of the politics but that is what drove the agreement...not good science or results.

I have to find my source and graphs again (too much data!) but there is another reputable study that says...OK, so Kyoto doesn't work...what if we reduced ALL tailpipe emissions 26% and built 1000 nucleat plants to reduce the equivilent # of coal plants? Even with this kind of expenditure...the net result was about a tenth of degree departure from the currently predicted UN temperature in 2100.
EDIT..FOUND THE DATA: From Dr. John Christy, John R. Christy
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Alabama State Climatologist

1000nukes.jpg

The red line is the UN best estimate of future temps if their predictions are correct. The blue line is what effect building 1000 nuke plants BY 2020!!...would have and it is .07 degrees by 2050 and .15 by 2100. Similar graph exists for cutting auto emissions by 26% and that only results in a .01degree temp lowering by 2100.


I will come back with the graphs and citations...but for now...the point is that fighting global warming (IF you believe the IPCC warming projections!) in any meaningful way is pretty hopeless and VERY expensive unless you want everyone to live like in colonial times again!!

[StuMyers]

Not a good idea to confuse how the popular press reports science, and what gets written in scientific journals.

The press may have run lots of "holy-cow ice age on it's way!" stories in the 70's, but they didn't have widespread support in the scientific community.

We have scant doubt that warming is occuring. We also know that even stopping it is likely impossible. We want to slow it down, because adaptation is less expensive if it is spread out over a longer time. That's it. Forget silly conspiracy theories about grant money, or we wanting people to live in potato sacks.

Two very simple (and related) things will slow climate change, and make adaptation less expensive. One is to tax coal and natural gas at an appropriate level to take into account the damage they do that we all have to pay for. This will make nuclear fission the obvious power source of the 21st century. Clean, efficient, and safe. Second, plug-in hybrid cars whose short trips are powered off the nuclear-electric grid. You don't even have to subsidize them. Cheap electricity will do. That's it. No doomsday, no crippled economies. Oh... and energy independence as well.

[camaraderie]

Stu...we agree on nuclear fission and plug in cars as essential to our future (though for different reasons! Mine are national security, reduced dependence on foreign oil better balance of payments and reduced REAL pollution- not CO2.) What do you think of the graph above on nukes from the Christy article?
Here's the link to his full presentation. http://www.directionsmag.com/images/...l_10-17-07.pdf

[poopdeckpappy]

Originally Posted by StuMyers

And yes, I'm one of those US government scientists. Feel free to ask me about my motives.

Ok, what's your motive

[StuMyers]

I think there's nothing more than an unreferenced claim. I fail to see how (he figures) 1000 nuclear plants would cut carbon emissions by only 10%

There are many sources of forcing. The two largest are carbon dioxide and methane. Most of that is produced by two sources: coal and natural gas. Just getting rid of those two big things should slow warming sufficently for me. I'm looking at a law of diminishing returns. Don't worry about cutting everything, just cut the worst offenders for the least immediate cost.

Nuclear fission currently supplies ~20% of US energy from about 100 power plants. 300 additional plants would boost that to 80%, and effectively end our burning of coal and natural gas (and most oil incidentally).

[StuMyers]

Originally Posted by poopdeckpappy

Ok, what's your motive

Opportunity cost. Saving money. Climate change is exponentially expensive to deal with, the faster it comes. I want to slow it.

Unfortunately we can't even have that rational conversation in our society because groups like the American Enterprise Institute are still pushing: denial denial denial. (cigarettes don't cause cancer!)