Thread: GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHANGE TRUE/FALSE

Well, has anything else in the past dug deep into the ground and burned massive amounts of it? Nature had its equilibria well established. What we are doing with fossil fuels is well beyond normal surface burning and clearly is not "natural."

As always, I recommend everyone read the Humanure Handbook, which has each of its chapters downloadable for free.

Originally Posted by Utopian

Nature had its equilibria well established

Not according to those charts. Look at others as well - I see patterns on different time scales that last for several cycles and then are disrupted either temporarily or to follow different patterns

Humanure sounds like a good read

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

Humanure sounds like a good read

OK, we can agree on that!
Even if you have no interest in doing it, the book is still an extremely informative and surprisingly entertaining read.

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

And just to show another graph with the time period of that in the one Ron posted - which data is correct?

Well after untangling the wrong references of the 'science by the people for the people' and tracing the sources to the original publications your graph is correct. Ron's graph is pretty much the same (probably slightly different smoothing to convert the discrete data into contiguous curve) up to the big spike around 0 (i.e. current times). I believe that's due to transition in the data for CO2 levels from ice-core samples to the more direct measurements that have been made in the last decades.

You'll have first to find where Ron's graph came from, how it was produced and then how the two pieces (assuming I'm correct) were pieced together.
Or you can also look up the scientific discussions on the matter in the relevant publications (the tabloids of science, i.e. "science" and "nature" are great for that), and you can relatively easy find out the arguments for doing this and the objections of the critics.

I just stumbled over a paper

"The Copenhagen Accord for limiting global warming: Criteria, constraints, and available avenues" Veerabhadran Ramanathan, and Yangyang Xu The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093"

It is an interesting read and effectively stated that we are well past the tipping
point. Yet they have a plan that mandated a 50% reduction of global greenhouse
gases including CO2.

If you accept their conclusions it gets almost obvious why there is so much
confusion. Most of the rats running onto and off the boat are just looking for
a safe game to play. Depending on the game they pick the action plans differ.
The ship is sinking and the island will be under water ;-)

One of the papers I scanned today mentioned a 12 degree polar temp increase
with about 2 degrees as a global warming projection. This tells me that global
warming guys and weather change guys can sure clutter things when reporters
do not pay attention.

Considering cap and trade in the context of this paper tell me that
it is a shell game intended to redistribute wealth and pad the pockets
of the agents that make a market to that end. If you like the current
banking crisis you will love cap and trade.

We in the US should be ready willing and able to burn coal or anything
includig nuclear energy to pump water, grow crops and what ever it takes.
Not that we should do so now but we should not enact law or treaty that binds
our hands and feet.

Again...
Not that we should but we should not enact law or treaty that binds us.

We should resolve to act in accord with the Accords but not be bound
by them.

Again...
We (the US) should resolve to act in accord with the Accords but not be bound
by them.


And BTW... the science is limited and it is easy to be critical of it.

So we're "well past the tipping point" but we should carry on as usual?

Originally Posted by Utopian

Isn't it obvious?

No, here is why. Those CO2 cycles looking back 100s of thousands of years show a trend. At the end of each climate cycle there is no way to know what happened in relatively insignificant time intervals of decades.In terms of error, it would be mixing units of 1000s and adding a decimal magnitude of .00001 to the data and fixating on the ,00001 and ignoring the 1000. Reliability in significant figures or tolerances have been ignored on this graph.
It is the proverbeal "pimple on the horses behind" or the "fart in a wind storm" in terms of common sense in measurement.

Those spikes in CO2 are an average taken over much longer time. Meaning the spikes could have been just as high as today, that makes this graph out of scale in geological terms.These are major sources of error that need to be taken into account.
Simply put, what we see accuratly over the last 50 years is impossible to do 150,000 years ago. Again, this spike is just like all the others and it signals that we are approaching or we have already reached the end of this warm period of geological cycle.

The larger issue that gets ignored is what happens after the spike? It always crashes and it gets cold for a long time.(geological time) A cold earth would not support human life as we know it. That might make some fanatics euphoric, but it would mean human suffering of magnitude that has never happened before because of our numbers.

Ironically, if you were to totally buy into the anthropogenic warming arguement, it might be the only thing that saves us from a cycle that has happened repeatedly throughout geological time.

Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. scale that into a calender, man does not appear on that calender of one year until the last minute of the last day. Stay warm all and goodnight.

Originally Posted by Utopian

So we're "well past the tipping point" but we should carry on as usual?

As long as the circles that we're all running around are done so civilly.

If it goes on long enough then those in favor might just change their minds, as will those against, and we can have the same arguments but from different sides!

Originally Posted by Kingfish

No, here is why. Those CO2 cycles looking back 100s of thousands of years show a trend. At the end of each climate cycle there is no way to know what happened in relatively insignificant time intervals of decades.

And yet during those times, there was not billions of people all burning massive amounts of fossile fuels pumping teh CO2 into the atmosphere while at the same time clear cutting most of the forests that would then convert that abundant CO2 back into oxygen.

Originally Posted by markevens

And yet during those times, there was not billions of people all burning massive amounts of fossile fuels pumping teh CO2 into the atmosphere while at the same time clear cutting most of the forests that would then convert that abundant CO2 back into oxygen.

This is for sure. Restoration of raped wetlands and management of forests is where we should be investing. Education is vital. Less laws, more action. It would be nice to see more resources going into habitat restoration rather than vacuous litigation and more layers of government. It makes good sense environmentally and ecomically to have funtional natural systems for all to enjoy.
It is really discusting to see how much wealth is wasted and how little gets done. A clear case of too many chiefs...I bet if we could pick how and where a given percentage of our tax dollars go each year, the folks on the other end might start to compete and spend it more wisely.