Cont: Global warming discussion V

Alright. There's a bunch of claims made here, so I'll be doing a bit more splitting up than usual and this will get a bit long. First, though, thank you for expressing such as you did and moving this discussion here, much as it probably would have been slightly better to provide a direct link to here as courtesy in the thread that you moved this part of the discussion from and a direct link/quote to what you were responding to in this thread. Luckily, I had posted previously in this part of the thread, though, so it didn't matter as much.

(Answer to Aridas)
If you look at the actual warming statistics they show that it's only getting warmer during the winter time and in cold countries.

After checking that again... I'm ruling that claim as false, given the "only" part. It is true that there's notably more effect in the direction that you're emphasizing, though, because, in general, cold things are warming up faster than warm things, with the Arctic, for example, heating up at roughly double the average rise.

To poke at some effects of that in the US, incidentally, NPR's got a piece that pokes at the subject a bit. How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything. Warming winters would be a notable problem, even if it was just that, but to be clear -
Summers Are Getting Hotter Faster, Especially in North America's Farm Belt
Four decades of satellite data confirm man-made global warming and find seasonal warming trends that could threaten crops.




There's also that storms

First, your source?

Absent that, I'll scrounge around a little. You're referring to, perhaps, stuff like this? Not much change in projected difference? Maybe some of this?
According to the National Hurricane Center, storms are no more intense or frequent worldwide than they have been since 1850. Temperatures were high in the 1920s and 1930s when there was much less CO 2 in the atmosphere. Constant 24-7 media coverage of every significant storm worldwide just makes it seem that way.
The latter, I should note is argued by H. Leighton Steward -
Steward is also a director at oil and gas company EOG Resources, formerly known as Enron Oil and Gas Company, where he earned $617,151 in 2008. Steward also serves as an honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute. [2]
Naturally, that the guy has severe financial conflicts of interest doesn't negate what he says directly, but really should make you much more wary of what he's pushing.

With that said, a short summation of what looks like the overall evidence on the issue is...
It is unclear whether global warming is increasing hurricane frequency but there is increasing evidence that warming increases hurricane intensity.

To poke at that further,
Global satellite data since 1981 can be used to extend analysis of hurricane intensity to each ocean, looking for any trend in wind speed (Elsner 2008). Figure 3 plots the long term trend in maximum wind speed (eg - whether hurricanes are getting stronger or weaker) against different strength hurricanes. This tells us not only whether hurricanes are overall getting stronger but also how different strength hurricanes are being affected. Overall, there is a statistically significant upward trend (the horizontal red line). But more significantly, Elsner found weaker hurricanes showed little to no trend while stronger hurricanes showed a greater upward trend. In other words, stronger hurricanes are getting stronger. This means that as sea temperatures continue to rise, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes hitting land will inevitably increase.

As noted, there is uncertainty about the specifics of the subject for a number of reasons, not least being very significant changes in the quality of data collection, but your claim here seems to suffer notably from the common phenomenon in climate change denial of trying to cherry pick some fact or claim that does not represent the larger picture all that well.

Fun fact/link on one aspect of hurricane damage, though, just because. Today's hurricanes kill way fewer Americans, and NOAA’s satellites are the reason why


and forest fires are down since 50 years ago.

As for forest fires, that's a generally more complex subject. Trying to solely focus on one aspect of forest fires numbers is inevitably going to be misleading. For example, when significant areas of forest are removed to make space for agriculture, that's significant area that can no longer be counted when it comes to raw numbers for how many forest fires are happening. It's entirely plausible that fires can happen at greater frequency and severity in the remainder of the forest while the raw numbers go down. To be clear, I'm using that as an example of why it's wrong to look at more complex problems like that through a narrow lens when evaluating them, rather than presenting that as a sole cause.

To poke further into the larger issues -

Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world

From the abstract there -

Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth's surface and atmosphere for over 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence. Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends. Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago. Regarding fire severity, limited data are available. For the western USA, they indicate little change overall, and also that area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement. Direct fatalities from fire and economic losses also show no clear trends over the past three decades. Trends in indirect impacts, such as health problems from smoke or disruption to social functioning, remain insufficiently quantified to be examined. Global predictions for increased fire under a warming climate highlight the already urgent need for a more sustainable coexistence with fire. The data evaluation presented here aims to contribute to this by reducing misconceptions and facilitating a more informed understanding of the realities of global fire.

It's honestly not hard to cherry pick from that at all, given that again, forest fires are a notably more complex issue than the simplistic versions that tend to get tossed around. I do suggest reviewing that in greater detail if you're actually interested, though, with the added note that it's still not even close to a full overview. As well as this article from the same people (well, plus one) that's much more recent - Wildfires Are Becoming so Frequent and Intense They Are Turning Forests From Carbon Sinks Into Climate Heaters.




The only thing would be rising sea levels but from what I can see, the Oceans are large enough that they won't be going up by that much.

First, sea levels, then. You sound a bit dismissive about this, but even a few inches has a very disproportionate effect on humans. Something like 40% of humans live quite close to the coasts and 8 out of 10 of the biggest cities in the world are on the coast. What's projected to happen in the next thirty years is expected to do quite a huge amount of damage and displace potentially hundreds of millions of people. That displacement and damage then has plenty of subsequent consequences as well.

Second... your analysis is wildly incomplete if those are the only factors you're looking at. Global warming and the resulting climate change is not all bad, but the negatives significantly outweigh the positives.

Also what makes oil company executives an authority on global warming?

They're not an authority. To be clear, they weren't being used as an authority in what I said, either. What I said is that they *knew* with great certainty (because of the actual authorities on the subject) and decided to work hard and spend big to obfuscate what they knew to be the case for the sake of profits. That's to the point where Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public

As early as the 1950s, the groups shared scientists and publicists to downplay dangers of smoking and climate change


Do you dispute this?

With CO2 based global warming there's a special danger in that it's taken to be undisputable where the scientific process of retesting conclusions isn't allowed to function like it normally would. That's why after the models have all failed to predict the last 20 years, and the CO2 levels in the antarctic record went up after the earth got hotter, the theory still is prevalent.

*sigh* Honestly, this post is far too long for easy consumption already and has taken a dramatically greater amount of my time than it took for you, so I'm not going to look into this part more deeply and respond as I did the previous parts. Given the nature of the rest of your response, though, I don't consider it at all likely that there's all that much merit to what you're saying here when it's put into the larger picture. Hopefully, you've learned a bit, either way.
 
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First, sea levels, then. You sound a bit dismissive about this, but even a few inches has a very disproportionate effect on humans.

Good post, but I'll just add to the sea-level comment.

Something often missed in the sea-level rise is that the rise is amplified by both spring (aka: king) tides and storm surges, so that if the sea level rise is said to be six inches, the area of impact might well be the two feet, depending on the local topography and sea floor.

Very long explanation of it all here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-019-09549-5

tl;dr version:

Interactions between the contributions to coastal water level have significant implications for projected changes in the frequency and amplitude of future extreme events, yet most projections neglect the interactions discussed in this paper and consider only linear additions of the relevant processes
 
Kurzgesagt recently published a video about Global Warming.
Like all of their educational videos it's mostly aimed at kids and laypeople, so it's not highly technical, but it does give a pretty succinct big picture of the problem and the current situation.

 
California Wildfires Have Burned 4 Million Acres And The Season Isn't Over Yet

California hit a grim milestone on Sunday as the total number of acres burned this wildfire season crossed 4 million, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

The agency said that since it started recording the amount of land burned in a single season the state had never surpassed 2 million acres until this year.

"The 4 million mark is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it takes your breath away," Scott McLean, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, told The Associated Press.

Makes me wonder how much the fires themselves add to the problem.
 
California Wildfires Have Burned 4 Million Acres And The Season Isn't Over Yet



Makes me wonder how much the fires themselves add to the problem.

It's a small problem, but not nearly as big a deal as these fires

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02568-y

It's not just the difference in total CO2 that is the problem. These Peat/Permafrost fires are releasing Carbon that has been sequestered for tens or hundreds of thousands of year.

Brush fires in California can rapidly re-absorb carbon due to new growth following the fire, so differences in land use are the real problem. Eg desertification in which the new landscape won't hold as much carbon as the current landscape.

In terms of total CO2 though, there is no real comparison. Artic peat lands and Permafrost hold enough carbon to drive 3 - 5 deg of warming on their own without even factoring in fossil fuels. .
 
It's a small problem, but not nearly as big a deal as these fires

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02568-y

It's not just the difference in total CO2 that is the problem. These Peat/Permafrost fires are releasing Carbon that has been sequestered for tens or hundreds of thousands of year.

Brush fires in California can rapidly re-absorb carbon due to new growth following the fire, so differences in land use are the real problem. Eg desertification in which the new landscape won't hold as much carbon as the current landscape.

In terms of total CO2 though, there is no real comparison. Artic peat lands and Permafrost hold enough carbon to drive 3 - 5 deg of warming on their own without even factoring in fossil fuels. .

Then there's the methane, 25x as heat-trapping as CO2...
 
Then there's the methane, 25x as heat-trapping as CO2...

Discussed before, but due to it’s short lifespan in the atmosphere methane released from Peat/Permafrost would decay into CO2 before there was any meaningful effect on climate. It’s all but impossible to melt that much permafrost over the course of a decade, but even if you could the climate impact would also last only a decade or so, after that it’d be like a CO2 release, rather than a Methane release.
 
Discussed before, but due to it’s short lifespan in the atmosphere methane released from Peat/Permafrost would decay into CO2 before there was any meaningful effect on climate. It’s all but impossible to melt that much permafrost over the course of a decade, but even if you could the climate impact would also last only a decade or so, after that it’d be like a CO2 release, rather than a Methane release.

Interesting. Net effect, still bad. So to reach the Permian-level methane release, we need ocean floor methane. Coming right up...
 
Interesting. Net effect, still bad. So to reach the Permian-level methane release, we need ocean floor methane. Coming right up...

Permian extinction likely wasn’t Methane driven either. Methane only lasts a little more then a decade in the atmosphere before it decays into CO2. Basically, you’d need a single really big event to cause damage, which doesn’t seem to be the case with the P-T event.

The best current guess for the cause of the P-T extinction is that large-scale volcanic activity either directly released CO2 or burnt off coal beds releasing the sequestered Carbon in them as CO2. Temperatures rose causing a mass extinction on land and warmer conditions caused nutrients to flow into the oceans. The combination of nutrients + warmer water deoxygenized the oceans and along with the increased acidity from the CO2 release toppled the ocean food web and allowed bacteria that consume sulfur oxides. These emit poisonous hydrogen sulfide, which killed most remaining life in the oceans.




Anyway, the main takeaway is that the culprit from the P-T extinction was almost certainly CO2, not methane.
 
An interesting video that (et alia) debunks Planet of the Humans:



On the subject of a carbon tax, I think the way to make it more popular would be to give every taxpayer a carbon tax "prebate". What I mean is, it's like a rebate, but you get it at the beginning of each year (or each fiscal year, or starting at the beginning of the period when the carbon tax goes into effect). So people will get money up front so that it feels more like a benefit than a tax. Of course, the first "prebate" would have to be an estimate, but I don't see that as a major problem. It shouldn't be very hard to make a ballpark prediction of how much money it will bring in.

Would it be better to get one big check per year or divide it into 12 monthly payments? The latter sort of also feels attractive to me, but maybe I'm a minority in that respect.
 
Many times I have come across die-hard people who insist that there is no climate change and all this is a conspiracy. But if you just watch the weather, you will notice that the winters have become milder. In the last 10-12 years, there are almost no such severe frosts as in my childhood. And the fact that the temperature on Earth is increasing is also evidenced by real facts. I read the article "Arctic Tundra Going Green" and I understand that this is not fiction. This is real scientific evidence that the climate is changing. And I doubt that warming will bring us any positive changes. Scientists are already claiming that with warming, there will be more insects and a higher risk of contracting humans with yet unknown diseases that live and mutate on animals.
 

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