Global warming - the sky is falling…again (Page 2)

I don't know about you, but I'm MUCH COLDER now than I was in September.

You have a good point on your head!

i could go into my usual long explaination of global warming and how there is no absolute answer, but I'll go another way.

In the 70's, the fear was nuclear winter.  There were great alarmists predicting that nuclear war would launch massive amounts of aerosol into the stratosphere and cause global cooling and years of winter.  There was also thought back then that burning fossil fuels would throw massive amounts of carbon into the atm and cause a similar effect.  We were all going to die of endless winter.  You know what?  It seems about that time, we had a series of cold, snowy winters to back up those claims.

Here we have the same deal.  The difference is, the enemy is not the Russians.  It's big buisness.  Politicians make more money going after energy and auto companies because of all their invested money.  Anymore, global warming is nothing but economics.  Look at all the protocols planned to go into action.  Carbon caps and credits, alternative energy sources, ect... lots of people stand to make lots of money in the carbon trade if these go active.  Of course there is going to be tons of pressure to get the ball rolling.

The sad thing is the science is falling behind the politics.  Al Gore's book is a prime example of this.

Take a look at any 5 years of climate data.  You will find records of both unseasonable warm, unseasonable cold, unseasonable wet and dry, and severe weather events.  Looking at this data, I could really claim any trend I want.  The fact is that the weather is variable.  It is variable from day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year....  You will get anomolies.  TO see a trend requires MANY years worth of data, not one winter with warm temps or no snow.

Cool charts - I like data!  However, I don't see anything that says this is caused by humans....the only chart that might suggest this is the CO2 being casued by the industrial revolution however, one could also graph world population and get a very similar curve as the CO2 level graph.  In the last 200 years we went from 1 billion people to 5 billion people on this big blue marble we live on.  This graph would be a similar parabolic curve and look just like the CO2 graph.  So does that mean that 5 billion people breating out CO2 is the cause of the increase?  I dunno. 

Not much we can do about the world population...although the Chinese are tyring to slow the growth by limiting woman to 1 baby and aborting 'excess' babies.  Maybe they should just convert to flourecscent light bulbs instead!

~Mike

Or maybe off the nearly 60 consecutive months of a "bull market" in economic growth!  Whatever happened to the it's-the-economy-stupid campaign?  Casualty of war I suppose.

~Mike

First of all, none of those graphs have error bars on them and they are the same stock graphs every global warming alarmist passes out.  Once you consider error, those peaks aren't nearly so bad and the nice noticable trend isn't so noticable.

Secondly, you are assuming cause-effect and revisability here.  You are assuming that warming isdirectly caused by CO2 emmissions and that by reducing the CO2 in the atm, warming can be reversed.  It doesn't work like that.  The atmosphere is extremely non-linear in nature and boarders on chaotic.  Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is just as 'dangerous' as putting it in.  We have no idea what would happen if we started dropping concentrations, because the resulting climate change we are seeing is actually caused by a series of causes, possibly with CO2 as a trigger.  A particular set of circumstances came together (CO2 possibly being one) to create this increase on global temperature.  We don't understand these mechanisms fully, so we can't predict what will happen either way we go.

I am not a global warming denyer.  I accept the global climate is changing and that right now we are going through a period of warming.  I accept that humans might be having an effect on it, but you know what?  We will ALWAYS have an effect on the environment.  No species (plant or animal) on the face of this earth does not have an impact.  Yes it's a bad thing to pollute, but its rediculous and some what arrogent to believe that we are so big and powerfull that we alone control the climate and that the fate of the world rests in our hands. 

peope hate to feel that they don't have control.  Guess what, we don't.  The climate is like a semi speeding over a frozen lake.  We can't steer it.  All we do is nudge the brake, or the accelerator or the steering wheel.  It's going to go where it wants to go.  Our influence may be 'huge' in our eyes, but in reality it equates to having a bug hit the windshield.

and be carefully with your argument.... We are arguing greenhouse gas emmissions, not pollution.  Particulates and noxious gases are a different story, and I agree we need to crack down on their production.  Greenhouse gas is not a pollutant.  Cutting down on green house gas emmissions for the sake of cutting down on them really won't make a noticable difference if they are not linked to climate change.

again, it all boils down to money.  To take a quote from MIB: "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they Do... Not... Know about it! "  That's the climate.  It's only when people stand to make or lose loads of money do they start to care and bring it to the public's attention out of 'concern'

Apparently that isn't helping....WH approval rating still in the 30's.

Exxon has given over 16 million dollars for those papers in the last 5 years.

Vortmax, I respect your opinion and the attention you give to these posts, but I'll put my faith in the IPCC.  It's hard to find a study that comprehensive on any subject matter that exists today.  I'm sure you've done your research and seem quite intelligent, but by the looks of your pictures I would say that you are either in grad school or a recent grad.  So I can't imagine that you have had the time or resources to look into this issue at a depth that even comes remotly close to the IPCC study.  Nothing against being young, I'm 26 and an engineer 3 years out of school.

Is there something about the IPCC that would suggest that they are full of crap.  I know that a few nations stand to benefit financially from things like the Kyoto Protocol, but this study was a conjoined effort of 113 nations and the big players stand to lose a lot from these findings.
  

yaqui - 2007-02-02 9:31 AM Come on Global, don't let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy angle. It's already been pointed out to me in this thread that thousands of scientists agreeing that global climate change is 90% likely caused by humans is not a consensus. What I don't understand is that the penalty of reducing carbon emmisions, IF they are not to blame for global warming, is cleaner air to breathe (bastards!), and cleaner water to swim in (sons a bitchin bastards!). scott

Clean air is for wusses  

the nonlinearity implies many things:

• we could be headed for a clif and tapping the brakes now stops us
• tapping the brakes could send us to a different clif
• there could be no clif (just a big bump that looks like a clif) and tapping the brakes could make us stop on top
• we are headed for a clif and tapping the brakes won't do anything
• insert other option combining existance of clif and direction we travel to it

Chaos theory boils down to extreme differences in final outcome to small changes in intial conditions.  In the chaotic system, bumping the breaks could result in the truck doing what we want, but there is a chance that the truck could be thrown into a skid, causing it to flip, or that we wind up breaking the breaks and start accelerating out of control, just to name a few options.  We don't know what bumping the brakes will do until we do it.

as for the observation of increasing green house gas and increasing temps.

There actually is evidence that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is from us.  If you look at the radio-isotopic mass of the carbon, it turns out to be very low.  Primary producers (plants) metabolize carbon with low isotopic mass more easily, so fossil fules have very low isotopic mass.  The carbon in the atm has been analyzed and found to have low isotopic mass.

However, you can't just look at two increases and say they are connected.  CO2 does not directly affect temperature.  CO2 alters the outgoing energy budget of the earth.  That energy budget is controled by many things, including water vapor, other green house gases, the earth's albedo (reflectance), ect.  All of those things are functions of other properties.  You get a giant conglomerate of feed back loops between greenhouse gas and temperature.  It is possible that CO2 is directly related to the warming.  It is possible that CO2 triggered something else that is causing the warming.  It's possible that other Green house gasses (Methane, CFC, HCFC, ect) are causing the warming and CO2 is along for the ride.  It is even possible, when factoring in the human element that it's a positive feedback loop.  Warming temperatures could have helped trigger the industrial revolution, which lead to warmer temps, which lead to more utilization of fossil fules.  We don't know causality, just that the two trends exist and there is probably some connection between them. 

so in short:

We don't know exactly what releasing green house gas in the atmosphere WILL do.  We believe that it is interacting with other processes and trends to produce elevated warming.

We don't know different levels of CO2 will effect the future.  This includes reducing CO2 emmissions.  The earth system is non-reversable.  You can't hit undo.  We will never be able to recreate conditions 20 years ago.  We will never even create conditions we had yesterday.

I say we do have an effect, but no matter what we do, we will have an effect.  If we weren't causing warming, we'd be causing cooling, or desertification, or killing off the spotted owl.  It's the nature of the beast.  Regardless of what this effect is, people will get alarmed and try to change it.  We don't like our current effect, so we try to change it, then cause something else to be alarmed at.  I guess I just don't see 'global warming' as a big doomsday scenario.  Something is going to happen.  The climate is going to change.  Humans will adapt.  Life will go on.

edit: the 90% of scientists thing.  That isn't surprising.  Like I said earlier, I agree that we have something to do with the warming.  I wouldn't go so far as to say 'caused' it (I prefer influenced), but I'm sure my opinion would be lumped into that catagory by whoever published that statistic.  I'm not disagreeing with the IPCC, but much of what they are reporting is being really poorly reported and understood by the mass media and public.  For instance global warming causing Hurricane Katrina, or the warm winter this year.  I think the IPCC has good points and good research.  However I still believe that 90% of the driving force behind this issue is based in politics and economics.

I don't!  But that's only because I own a few semis and the thought of them on ice is disturbing.  Especially because global warming is causing the ice to melt right under them!  Ack!