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Scientists wrong on Greenhouse Warming, Again.

a_unique_person said:
It's enought to already be affecting life on the planet. Species are migrating to cooler climates. Those 'trapped' on mountains won't be able to move and will die. Many won't be able to move past man's cities and farms. The oceans will become more acidic, with huge effects on eco-systems.

In geological terms, it's a massive spike.
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You sound most unskeptical.

The debate still continues, the researche goes on, new data becomes available.
 
Darth Rotor said:
It seems to me that there is a need to work from both ends.

1. Reduce gross CO2 eimissions
2. Increase CO2 absorption capacity.

A step, among others.
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Don't forget:
3. Adapt to changes

How cost effective are 1 and 2 versus 3? This is what I meant by climate scientists not even really being able to provide the answers.
 
Badger said:
You sound most unskeptical.

The debate still continues, the researche goes on, new data becomes available.
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But, we do know that the oceans have become more acidic.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/060406_ocean_acid.html

The oceans are, at the same time, becoming less saline. Surely you realize what an extreme danger is presented if we lose our coral reefs. (And they are being dissolved.)

The cynic in me hopes that when it gets bad enough, industry will finally take notice, just as the oil drilling industry is suddenly interested in preserving the wetlands that protects their rigs off the shore of New Orleans.
 
Ceritus said:
Good point. Anyone who wants to save the environment and has alot of money, give me some and I promise to buy a more efficient car I will also promise to buy a house and also promise to paint the roof white. If you give me enough money I'll even set up solar cells on my roof and will promise to deal with heating cooling problems as well as refrigeration problems on cloudy weeks. All in all I would be glad to change my habits for enough money.
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LOL!

Hey, you left mine out! About recycling metal? Someone will pay you to do that!
 
Well, industry responds to the public. Part of making money is looking good doing it, so a company wants to be perceived in a positive light and will do whatever it takes for that to happen.

I don't see a big push on by the general population to conserve energy and resources, anywhere. Many cultures want big houses, powerful cars, the latest fashions, etc. The cynic in me concludes that we're going to continue to widdle in our own beds for some time to come.

But that same cynic is consoled by the belief that in a million years it'll be like we were never even here.

We won't kill the planet. It'll recover and thrive, whether we're around to see it or not.
 
Badger said:
The debate still continues
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No it doesn't.

The debate only continues in terms of IDers saying there is a debate about evolution. There are individual criteria that deniers set, which cannot be met by people studying climate change. It's like saying, 'we've found irreduceable complexity and you can't explain it away.'

Anyhoo, I refer you to this month's Scientific American for a fun look at the current state of options for Climate Change solutions.
 
Badger said:
We won't kill the planet. It'll recover and thrive, whether we're around to see it or not.
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Or, as George Carlin says, we don't need to save the planet. The planet will be fine. It'll just shake us off like fleas.
 
Badger said:
Well, industry responds to the public. Part of making money is looking good doing it, so a company wants to be perceived in a positive light and will do whatever it takes for that to happen.

I don't see a big push on by the general population to conserve energy and resources, anywhere. Many cultures want big houses, powerful cars, the latest fashions, etc. The cynic in me concludes that we're going to continue to widdle in our own beds for some time to come.

But that same cynic is consoled by the belief that in a million years it'll be like we were never even here.

We won't kill the planet. It'll recover and thrive, whether we're around to see it or not.
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I'd like to think there is better in store for my children and their children.
 
DeviousB said:
1) Buy a more efficient car. Over 20% of the US's carbon emissions come from light to medium vehicles (Jackson and Schlessinger, PNAS [2004]) with an average fuel economy of under 20 mpg (EPA [2006]). An average European car does about 35 mpg, a Toyota Prius gets 55 mpg.
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Elect a government that ceases to subsidise the oil and auto industries, and allow the market price of petrol rise to it's real value.

LOL! As if!
 
pmurray said:
Elect a government that ceases to subsidise the oil and auto industries, and allow the market price of petrol rise to it's real value.

LOL! As if!
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And this same government would subsidize ethanol derived from corn instead, so when the next drought hit, not only will there be no food and no fuel, but your taxes will be through the roof as well.

If I had some extra cash, I would buy a huge tanker of gasoline just before 2008.
 
According to a recent Antarctic ice core, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn't been this high for 800 thousand years.

How's that for evidence?
 
Jimbo07 said:
No it doesn't.

The debate only continues in terms of IDers saying there is a debate about evolution. There are individual criteria that deniers set, which cannot be met by people studying climate change. It's like saying, 'we've found irreduceable complexity and you can't explain it away.'

Anyhoo, I refer you to this month's Scientific American for a fun look at the current state of options for Climate Change solutions.
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Thanks! Bought it, read it. Some stuff is good, and some stuff I found a bit propagandaish (but then, I would).

One thing I wonder about with regard to CO2 concentrations and their relation to fossil fuels is "What were concentrations while fossil fuels were being formed?"

I mean coal, oil, and gas were formed by deposition of ancient plant and animal matter, which had to source its carbon from the atmosphere, right? What were CO2 levels then? And what was the climate and ecological distribution like (taking into account continental drift)? Were there vast tropical deserts while the poles basked in Florida like weather and vegitation?

Anyone got anywhere they could send me for this kind of info?
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
According to a recent Antarctic ice core, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn't been this high for 800 thousand years.

How's that for evidence?
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Um, That'll be exactly one more piece of evidence for Global Warming. And from a single location at that.

Fortunately, climatologists have a lot more evidence to work with and don't have to generalize the entire world's climate from a single ice core!
 
casebro said:
So, all we and all the climatologists in the world REALLY know, and all we CAN possibly know at this point in time, is that it's 1/2 degree warmer now than it was 150 years ago. PERIOD.
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The purpose of the study was to investigate the 'hockey stick' paper of M. E. Mann et al. The particular approach of the paper requires a specific quality of data from several proxy measures be used, in particular the source data needs to be well defined in time. After review, the NAS said that the previous 400 years of data are good enough for this approach, before that there is either too little data or too much uncertainty in its time axis to extend the graph any further backwards.

This 400 year limit does not apply to all climate science in general, nor to all climate data. It is a specific comment on the models of the type used by Mann and co, and more generally on fine-scale climate reconstruction over a range of around 1000 years. When the resolution need not be so fine, ice core data, etc. allow global climate to be determined with considerable confidence back hundreds of thousands of years.
 
DeviousB said:
The purpose of the study was to investigate the 'hockey stick' paper of M. E. Mann et al [...]
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Hmm, just read this back to myself and it seems a bit confusing (confused?). Ah, f*** it, no-one is listening anyway!
:)
 
I;ve become convinced the best way to cut emissions would be to demand an extra four weeks vacation for all workers. That way, disposable income would be cut, which means we wouldn't be able to afford all that plastic junk that comes from China. We would spend less time commuting, and when we were sitting around the house on weekends, we wouldn't be able to contemplate heading to the mall, because there wouldn't be any point, since we couldn't afford anything when we got there.

Seriously, all economic activity in the modern world burns up energy. If you want to use less energy, work less. Meanwhile, we could do without all the junk that fills our homes anyway. We just buy it because the neighbors have one, too.
 
DeviousB said:
This one paper sits among many (Josh Willis of JPL in 2004, Sydney Levitus of NOAA in 2005, etc.) that have confirmed ocean warming in line with the projections of Global Warming. Also, the complete loss of 20% of the heat content of the upper oceans from the ocean system would have resulted in sufficient thermal contraction to cause a noticeable drop in sea level that has not been observed.

As such a drop was not recorded, for the cooling to be real either; (a) the 'missing' heat is still in the ocean, or (b) the decrease in sea-level caused by the cooling was more than compensated for by an enormous increase in the rate fresh (melt) water is entering the oceans. Neither scenario is particularly comforting.
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I did some looking around, and I don't see a contradictory study; the Willis et al. 2004 paper deals only with data up to 2003, and the Levitus et al. paper deals also with data up to 2003; whereas the Lyman et al. paper deals with data from 2003 to 2005.

Your point about the volume is well taken, however. From that we can see that whatever the mid-ocean heat sink may be doing over that period, considerable heat must have been pumped into the icecaps during the same period, to provide the latent heat of liquefaction, in addition to the temperature rise.

I know that this is very new data, so there may not be good answers yet, but is there a possibility that the meltwater might be part of the answer to why the temperature decreased in the mid-ocean? Are the currents fast enough for that to happen over a 2-year period?

DeviousB said:
Climate change alarmism is certainly a real effect, and is most apparent whenever a new 'weather record' is set (e.g. "hottest July on record", "wettest Labour Day since JFK's death", "most active hurricane season since the last one", etc.), when frequently some pundit - and infrequently an actual climatologist - has a microphone shoved in his face and is asked "Is this due to Global Warming?". A good climate scientist will probably end up on the editing-room floor for pointing out that it's pretty hard to make a convincing argument for an increasing trend in a time-series of global averages from a single data point.

Naysayers do much the same only in reverse. A local cold spell or a single decreasing trend (of whatever magnitude and duration) is instantly the death-knell for anthopogenic climate change and/or global warming in general.

It's a single paper, with problems. It's not the smoking gun that did for GW, any more than last year's hurricane season was proof positive that climate change is going to wipe Florida off the map!
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I could hardly agree more. I'll be watching to see what they find out and figure out based on this new data over the next year or two.
 
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