Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Kirkhill]

I note that the discussion has moved from:

Scientists agreeing on global warming to;
a consensus of scientists agreeing on global warming to;
credible scientists agreeing on global warming to;
a majority of credible scientists agreeing on global warming

It appears to me that the body of experts is diminishing and that there is now a bar that has been set to determine who is an expert has the Truth.

Soon we will be down to those imbued with the Truth and the faithful.

Attached is a record of temperature change as recorded in Canadian Ice for the last 150,000 years (none of your foreign Danish or Russian stuff here) as supplied by the Department of Natural Resources online at
http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/posters/nu/nu_02_e.php

What it shows is that minus a bit of background noise amounting to a variation of +/- 1-2C the signal for the period from 150,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago was indicating a temperature steadily FALLING from 3C warmer than today to 11C colder than today.   The signal trend is generally supposed to be the result of solar forcing resulting from us wobbling around the solar system.  The noise is the result of nasty things happening on an irregular schedule that make life miserable/interesting.  Trying to cure those intermittent impulses is always a challenge.  Ever taken your car in to get a problem fixed on to have the mechanic report he can't find anything but it is running fine now?

About 12,000 years ago something really miserable/interesting happened.  The event itself has been known for a while.  It was when all the Mammoths died out.  We've been beating ourselves up for years for being bad boys and girls because we either slaughtered them all, destroyed all their food or else submitted them to some sort of disease.  But the problem was there were always these strange creatures that looked as if they were perfectly healthy, with food in the bellies and hanging from their mouths at the time they were flash frozen in ice-cubes.

It turns out that it may not have been us at all.  It may have been this:

A team of American scholars is theorizing that about 12,900 years ago a powerful comet (a large ball of ice) -- measuring an estimated five kilometres in diameter and packing a punch comparable to 10 million mega-tonnes of TNT (Hiroshima was 15 kilotonnes) -- exploded above the earth or crashed down just north of the Great Lakes region....

No crater was found, but Douglas Kennett, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon and member of this multidisciplinary team, says the huge ice sheet covering the Great Lakes region at the time was likely thick enough to have absorbed the blow. It would not, however, have stopped the flooding and continent-wide wildfires that the team believes occurred after impact. Put simply, "this was not a good day in North America," says Kennett.

http://www.macleans.ca/science/environment/article.jsp?content=20070618_106211_106211

The perfect crime:  throw a ball of ice at a sheet of ice at high speed and generate steam and hot water.  No big holes to leave clues, only a bit of dust that we can finally detect all over the globe.

Steam generates clouds, blocks the sun and the air temperature immediately takes a nose dive.  The water on the other hand heats up and over time it overcomes the solar cooling and heats the whole planet up by 14C in a matter of years.  This generates a nice cosy planet that allowed us to recover from the shock and create civilization.

The Ice Ball hit us 10,900 BC.  
Two thousand years after the event we were building monuments in Turkey at a place called Gobekli Tepe.
The oldest level at Gobekli Tepe is dated to 9,100 BC

Some really nice drystone masonry and brilliantly sculpted animals can be seen if you follow this Google link to Gobekli Tepe images.
http://images.google.com/images?q=Gobekli+Tepe&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7SUNA&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi

Meanwhile the earth continued wobbling on its merry way and went back to its previously scheduled cooling trend, cooling from a lovely and warm 3C warmer than currently to 2C cooler than currently.

Since James Watt stole the credit for inventing the Steam Engine and heralding in the Industrial Revolution (an early model for Thomas Edison), the temperature signal has bumbled along at about 1C cooler than it is today  with a couple of spikes during WWI and just after WW2.  But neither of those spikes show up as being anything more than the background noise typical of the last 150,000 years.

Not time to panic yet.

Cheers,  

 

[RangerRay]

I seem to recall reading somewhere (I can't remember where) that the scientists that say global warming is caused by humans tend to be biologists, and those that say it's caused by sun spots and cyclical change tend to be climatologists.

On a subject of climate, I tend to believe climatologists.  The scientists featured on The Great Global Warming Swindle were mostly climatologists and meteorologists.

As for Dr. Suzuki, while I was in uni taking forestry and biology course, my professors tended to sneer at his opinions on most matters.  He is a geneticist, not a climatologist.  The only reason he has an "credibility" with the masses, outside his area of study, is because he's a celebrity with his TV show.

 

[vonGarvin]

The only reason he has an "credibility" with the masses, outside his area of study, is because he's a celebrity with his TV show.

[sarcasm]You mean to tell me that people believe him only because he's a celebrity?[/sarcasm]
What's next: News networks having Paris Hilton updates from jail 24/7?  Slo-mo helicopter cams of former football stars turned murderers in LA?  Sheesh, next you're going to tell me that the Earth orbits the sun!

 

[Thirstyson]

I seem to recall reading somewhere (I can't remember where) that the scientists that say global warming is caused by humans tend to be biologists, and those that say it's caused by sun spots and cyclical change tend to be climatologists.

On a subject of climate, I tend to believe climatologists.  The scientists featured on The Great Global Warming Swindle were mostly climatologists and meteorologists.

As for Dr. Suzuki, while I was in uni taking forestry and biology course, my professors tended to sneer at his opinions on most matters.  He is a geneticist, not a climatologist.  The only reason he has an "credibility" with the masses, outside his area of study, is because he's a celebrity with his TV show.

That's plain wrong. The vast majority of atmospheric scientists and climatologists agree that we are contributing heavily to global warming. Why not dig around and find your source. From the presentations by atmospheric scientists I've seen, (scientists that aren't even neccessarily environmentalists) they just end up getting depressed when showing the results of their measurements and the implications.

The people behind this report aren't biologists btw. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13463/1066/

 

[observor 69]

And I repeat the most sensible thing on this topic I have read so far:

http://tinyurl.com/yoyt9g


Climate change a 'questionable truth'
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

January 27, 2007 at 1:11 AM EDT

A n Inconvenient Truth, the hugely influential documentary starring Al Gore, is a shoo-in for an Oscar. Its riveting depictions of violent storms, collapsing ice mountains and parched deserts have scared millions of people into believing that the world faces a catastrophic fate unless we make dramatic changes to our way of life, starting now.

Climate change has made its way onto the agenda of every developed nation, even the United States, where some of the nation's biggest businesses, including energy companies, are pressing the government to take action. It even figured in George W. Bush's State of the Union speech this week.

And next week the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will unleash another storm of headlines when it releases its latest consensus of scientific findings, stressing even more emphatically that human activity is causing global temperatures to rise.

Is the sky really falling? How fast and how hard? And if the vast majority of scientists agree, then why don't governments act? After all, nobody wants the world to melt.

More at link

 

[Brad Sallows]

>The vast majority of atmospheric scientists and climatologists agree that we are contributing heavily to global warming.

And they might very well be wrong.  The fact that most of the very little evidence we have points in one direction doesn't make the hypothesis strong.  A large fraction of a small number is still a small number.

 

[canadianblue]

And they might very well be wrong.  The fact that most of the very little evidence we have points in one direction doesn't make the hypothesis strong.  A large fraction of a small number is still a small number.

But shouldn't we take action, because if they are correct waiting 25 years could prove to be too late.

 

[canadianblue]

http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_warming_worldbook.html

A small number of scientists argue that the increase in greenhouse gases has not made a measurable difference in the temperature. They say that natural processes could have caused global warming. Those processes include increases in the energy emitted (given off) by the sun. But the vast majority of climatologists believe that increases in the sun's energy have contributed only slightly to recent warming.

 

[vonGarvin]

But the vast majority of climatologists believe that increases in the sun's energy have contributed only slightly to recent warming.

Ask yourself: what do they mean by "recent".  Also note that they "believe", not "know" or "hypothosise".  Be more critical when you read this stuff.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>But shouldn't we take action, because if they are correct waiting 25 years could prove to be too late.

If they're wrong and we blow massive resources solving a non-problem, we will be truly fucked if a real and massive problem comes along, not to mention the diversion of time and treasure from the myriad other serious problems facing people.

 

[canadianblue]

If they're wrong and we blow massive resources solving a non-problem, we will be truly ****ed if a real and massive problem comes along, not to mention the diversion of time and treasure from the myriad other serious problems facing people.

But isn't becoming more sustainable, reducing dependance on non-renewable resources, and becoming more environmentally friendly a benefit for society.

 

[Kirkhill]

But isn't becoming more sustainable, reducing dependance on non-renewable resources, and becoming more environmentally friendly a benefit for society.

It may be, depending on the social and economic costs of each particular action taken to address each identified and quantifiable problem.  Absent identified specific problems that can be quantified then it is not possible to determine a solution and the costs and benefits associated with those solutions. And not all costs and benefits have to be quantified in dollars and cents but the do have to be quantified before solutions can be compared.

Doing nothing is always an option.

 

[canadianblue]

Doing nothing is an offense to the progress of humanity though. If we have been capable of doing so much in this past century alone, is it not within the realm of possibility that with the right effort we could change the way we move around, heat our homes, get electricity, use resources and do business.

 

[the 48th regulator]

Doing nothing is an offense to the progress of humanity though. If we have been capable of doing so much in this past century alone, is it not within the realm of possibility that with the right effort we could change the way we move around, heat our homes, get electricity, use resources and do business.

Teehee,

How?

dileas

tess

 

[canadianblue]

I'm not a scientist so it's not in my area of expertise. However I've read alot of articles in National Geographic, Time, and Popular Science on the subject. If I can I'll find a source, however I think one needs a subscription for either.

 

[Yrys]

a few laywoman guesses:

the way we move around :electric or hydrogene car. And a Mc Do owner is using
used oil fry topower his car . He's starting by gaz to heat it, then to oil for running then
back to gaz to clear the motor before stopping. More public transportation, including more trains
in beetween cities, more bycicle and alternative way of tranport.

heat our homes : better way to construct our homes that are not in use due to
the constructors not beeing aware of or not caring of those ways. Those ways include,
but are not restricted to : orientaton of the house toward the sun, size of windows depending
of the sun and surronding, materials use for the house, etc. Solar heating of it. Having a
clock for the heating of the water tank.

That group construct a building which is more energy efficient to house their activities

http://www.equiterre.org/en/index.php

get electricity : solar and wind one come to mind

use resources : less packaging, les plastics bag, etc

and do business : put the price of non-renewable ressources at a level that will reflect more tht it's not renewable ...

etc.

Add : housing: http://news.architecture.sk/2007_07_01_archive.php
                      and of course changing the light bulbs which technique is 100 years old to the new ones.
                      Unplugging electric appliances when not in use (as microwave)
           

        use ressources : buying more food that were make/grow nearer home, with more ecological means, buying less meat
     
        do business : buying more fare trade products ( http://www.equiterre.org/en/equitable/index.php ) which mean
                                    more healthy life for the producers in others countries.

 

[gnplummer421]

Speaking of alternative energy.

How about the Aquabouy. A company called Finavera Renewables is building a device that captures energy from waves in the Ocean/Sea/Lakes. Pretty amazing concept. The only thing to worry about is the impact on marine life. I might have to invest in that one..

Personally I would love to be able to go completely off the grid and have Hydro 1 pay ME for electricity  ;D

Gnplummer421

 

[Kirkhill]

And industry is constantly looking at all those options Yrys, and evaluating whether or not they make sense, in particular whether or not the costs of production can be trimmed.  Any kind of waste, be it energy or unburnt fuel or unused raw material or unnecessary processing aids (like water) is an opportunity to make more money by reducing costs.  

Try this one on for size:  

We want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Accordingly we decide to divert corn from feeding people to inefficiently fueling cars and Richard Bransom's aircraft.

At this point we are still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere from the engines at exactly the same rate as we were before but now we are starving the third world of corn, depriving the livestock of feed and pushing up the price of producing food for everybody else.

On the other hand, as others have pointed out, plants need Carbon (C) to grow and we need Oxygen (O2) to breathe.

If we want to feed more people then we need to put more Carbon into the functioning Carbon Cycle that allows plants to grow and regenerate Oxygen from the waste we exhale.  To grow more plants and make the planet greener we need to top up the Carbon Cycle by adding more carbon.

It is similar to the need to add money to the economy as the economy grows with more people, more people needing more things and more things costing more. Every transaction has a buyer and a seller.  You need money in circulation to facilitate all the transactions in the economy.  You need carbon circulating to make possible more plants and more animals to feed more people.  If you don't add more carbon in sync with increasing population then the ecology will collapse just as an economy will collapse if there are too many goods and too little money.

I don't even pretend to know what the right balance is, either in economy or ecology.   I do believe that our planet, and we as a species, have survived events a lot more calamitous than anything we can imagine inflicting on it.    In the meantime we will continue to bumble along like the Dow-Jones and the TSE - the sum total of millions of individuals making rational decisions, each according to their own criteria - up days and down days, winners and losers, always changing but generally adapting and advancing.  I have faith in us.  I don't see the need for, nor do I trust, a superbureaucracy trying to make a plan for all the rest of us to adhere to.

 

[a_majoor]

But isn't becoming more sustainable, reducing dependance on non-renewable resources, and becoming more environmentally friendly a benefit for society.

That's only in the idiom of this society. The Vikings reacted to the last bout of Global Warming by expanding their population and pillaging their way across Europe, into Russia and sailing west to "Tilley" (Iceland), Greenland (which really was green at the time) and "Vineland" (Modern Newfoundland and Labrador). The next "little Ice Age" will elicit a different response , and five hundred years from now some future human civilization may have yet another way of dealing with the renewed warming.

Even in the contemporary world, the Chinese and Indians are satisfying a very different set of priorities, so there are no "universal" answers, just a range of responses.

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

Accordingly we decide to divert corn from feeding people to inefficiently fueling cars and Richard Bransom's aircraft.

And this is the crux of the problem with the "just in case" argument: a lower standard of living to us might mean riding our bikes to work rather than driving, but at the same time result in something far more dire for those with fewer choices or alternatives ... it's been brought up before, but the "just in case" banning of DDT is the sole reason why millions continue to die of Malaria to this day.