October 31, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Heh... the problem with the indecision that some face as to who to vote for is simple... which idiot will cause the least amount of damage? 😛
If you want to really cut down on CO2, tell China to put the fires out they have in their coal mines. These are BIG fires...
Someone else said it... Ethanol has caused the price of my breakfast to go up. And, 10% Ethanol gas is just stupid. Ethanol carries some of it's own Oxygen atoms and that causes mileage to go down. When I first bought my truck, I used non-Ethanol fuel in it and got about 350 miles to the tank. Now, because of laws, I'm forced to use 10% Ethanol and my mileage has dropped to about 315 miles per tank... a 10% reduction in mileage. That means I have to buy about 10% more fuel to go the same distance. 10% Ethanol saves squat on the amount of gasoline we need or burn and it's driving the price of food up. We need to stop burning food.
And, if you really want to cut green house gases and pollution, people need to stop having so bloody many babies. There's too many people as it is. China just might have that part right... 😉
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 2, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Matthew
- "anthropogenic global warming is a hoax"
The science vehemently disagrees with you. The greenhouse effect is both well understood and accepted, without which life on Earth would not exist. H2O, CO2, CH4, N2O, CCl2F2 and O3 are the most abundant greenhouse gases. H2O is not considered as a major problem as once atmospheric concentrations become high enough it will precipitate out. O3 is unstable at lower altitudes or in high concentrations and will naturally decay to diatomic oxygen (we need it at higher alts to protect us from UV radiation). To look at the others, CO2 has the highest radiative forcing of all of them (1.46W/m^2). This shows that CO2 is the gas we really need to be concerned with.
The vast majority of climate scientists and reputable scientific organisations have all issued statements indicating that the Earth's climate is changing anomalously quickly and that "human activity is very likely the cause". The IPCC, after reviewing peer-reviewed papers submitted by scientists across the planet, have made their policy recommendations stating that we need to scale back our ouput of CO2 and other greenhouse gases or else see changes to our planet we have yet to mitigate.
The logistics of carrying out a hoax like this would make your head spin. Not only would it be prohibihtively expensive, it would also be an impossible secret to keep covered. In other words, it's an idea that straddles ludicrous.
- "CO2 is vital for plants/Concentrations in the past have been a lot higher than currently."
Yes, but is that necessarily good for us? The problem is not necessarily the CO2 per se, it's the rapid shift in climate patterns. I won't go into related rising sea levels, destruction of agriculture, povery, environmental displacement/refugeeism, famine, disease etc but there are many things you simple have not considered. Everytrhing is linked and this is not a black and white problem. Rapid climate change been the cause of planetary mass extinctions in the past, it is folly to believe it can't happen again in the future.
- "CO2 lags, not leads tenmperatures"
A close examination of the CH4, CO2 and temperature fluctuations recorded in the Antarctic ice core records does in fact reveal that yes, the temperature moved first in what is, when viewed coarsely, a very tight correlation. But it's not correct to say the temperature rose and then hundreds of years later CO2 rose. These warming periods lasted for 5,000 to 10,000 years (the cooling periods lasted more like 100,000 years!) so for the majority of that time (90% and more) temperature and CO2 rose together. This means that this remarkably detailed archive of climatological evidence clearly allows for CO2 acting as a cause for rising temperatures while also revealing it can be an effect of them.
- "do you think the Roman warm period and Mideaval warm period were also caused by SUV's"
This is a joke, right? I won't waste my own time.
- "The fact is that globe has stopped warming since 1998"
1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analysis. It was not just a record year, it blew away the previous record by .2oC (the previous record was set in 1997). According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. Choosing that year as a starting point is a cherry pick and demonstrates why it is necessary to remove the very chaotic year to year variability that exists by smoothing out the data using 5 year moving average. As 1998 was an excessively hot year, data taken after that will clearly show cooling. Looking at the trend data however, one can see that the global temperature anomaly as, albeit slightly leveling off after this point, it's still heading upwards. To put this into perspective, 8 of 10 of the hottest years ever recorded were recorded past 1998. NASA has recorded that 2005 exceeded the record set in 1998 by a small amount but this will not be released until 2009 (due to the 5 year moving average normalisation process requiring data up to 2008).
- "The cooling of the last two years has reversed the warming of the last hundred years."
This claim is simply not true but is common from those who aren't familiar with statistical analysis. It initially requires scientific evidence to back it.
- "it's the sun"
Solar irradiance varies at around 2W/m^2 depending on where it is in it's 11 year solar min/max cycle. This has remained constant over the 30 years or so that we have been measuring it, demonstrating that our accelerated climate change cannot be attributed to the sun's irradiance.
Sunspots actually block the Sun's radiation. It is the smaller bright spots (faculae) that increase the Sun's output and these were not recorded until recently. The correlation between sunspots and bright faculae is not perfect, so estimates of solar activity based on sunspot records may be out by as much as 30%. Hence, you cannot link sunspots to climatic changes without incurring large degrees of error.
- "In this universe you have to burn something to generate enegry. You cannot avoid it."
This is not entirely correct and to imply that science is 100% sure of anything is fallacious.
November 2, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Hi,
does anyone has a clue if it is legal for a paid campaign activist to make an unsolicited call to home, request identification, and then specifically question personal voting choices.
I thought privacy and confidentiality of vote bearer is protected by law and is imbedded by law safeguarding election process.
November 3, 2008 at 9:05 am
Michael:
The greenhouse effect is not what I called a hoax. As you quoted, I said "anthropogenic global warming" is a hoax. In other words warming of the planet cause by human activity which is not proven. It has been noted that Mars has also experience global warming over the last thirty years and it would be incredible to think that warming on Mars has had a different cause than warming on Earth, but one this is for certain man did not cause it.
Carbon Dioxide's ability to warm the planet has diminishing returns. The second additional 100 ppm will warm the planet less than the first additional 100 ppm. Carbon dioxide only absorbs certain wavelengths of light so once these wavelengths are saturated additional carbon dioxide will not cause any additional warming. At most the warming cause by carbon dioxide is around one degree celcius. The larger warming amounts cited by the IPCC are due to positive feedback loops used in the computer models. It is doubtful these positive feedback loops exist in nature because they would have caused either run away warming/cooling already. Positive feedbacks are rare in nature and could not dominate a system that has been stable for millions of years.
Throughout human history warmer periods have been a boon to mankind leading to longer growing seasons, greater rainfall, and greater habitable ranges. Global cooling periods have led to crop failures, famine, and economic collapse. The Roman warm period was followed by the Dark Ages cool period, then the Midaeval warm period, then the Mini Ice Age, and now the current warm period which started around 1850. If carbon dioxide caused these cycles of warm and cold where did it come from and where did it go. There were no SUV's, cars, or heavy industry around to pump the air full of carbon dioxide but yet the planet warmed. Conversely, there was no Kyoto protocol, alternate energy, or CO2 abatement programs in place to cause the cooling.
When NASA recalculated their historical temperatures it turns out that the warmest decade of the twentieth century was the 1930's not the 1990's. About half the warming for the twentieth century occured before 1940 while the majority of the carbon dioxide increases were after 1940. The cooling between 1940 - 1970 was significant enough that scientist were worried about global cooling. Funny how the global temperatures decreased while carbon dioxide levels were increasing. I do not need to cherry pick dates when temperatures decline since 1998. With increasing carbon dioxide levels we should be setting new heat records every year, but instead over the last two years we have been setting new cold records.
The number of sun spots correlates better to global temperature than carbon dioxide concentration. Sun spots are related to magnetic cycles of the sun which affect the solar winds. Less sun spots, less solar winds, more cosmic rays, greater cloud formation, more solar radiation reflected into space, cooler planet. Sun cycle 24 has been delayed and we had no sunspots during the month of August. The last time this happend we entered the Maunder minimum which started the mini Ice age. Whatever affect man might have on the climate is insignificant versus the impact of the sun.
November 3, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Matthew
- Climate change Hoax, changing Mars etc.
There is far too much evidence for ACC to be a hoax.
You seem to have done a 180 degrees. On the one hand, the greenhouse effect exists as a product of the molecules previously discussed, but when humans emit those molecules (and we are emitting a staggering amount of them) they then have negligible effect? You gloss over the fact that they are cumulative, CO2 stays around for 100’s to 1,000’s of years and CH4 stays around for longer than that!
Again, saying that anything in science is 100% proven is fallacious; "proof" is a property of mathematics.
Warming on Mars would be an interesting coincidence, but even if it were the case it does not necessarily have to have the same cause. The only relevant factor the Earth and Mars share is the sun, so if the warming were real and related it would logically be due to the sun. Well the sun is being watched and measured very carefully back here on earth and it is not the primary cause of the current climate change.
There is very little evidence when it comes to global climate change on Mars. The only evidence out there that I’m aware of is a series of photographs of a single icy region in the southern hemisphere that shows melting over a 6 year period (about 3 Martian years) and a year of localised data from the NASA rovers. Here on earth we have direct measurements from all over the globe showing widespread glacial retreat, reduction of sea ice and satellite measurements of the lower troposphere up to the stratosphere. To compare this mountain of data to a few photographs of a single region strains credulity. And in fact, the scientists studying Mars believe the observation described above is the result of a regional change caused by Mars' own orbital cycles, like what happened during the Earth's own glacial cycles.
For clarity, on Earth we have poles melting, surface temperature rising, tropospheric temperatures rising, permafrost melting, glaciers world wide melting, CO2 concentrations increasing, borehole analysis showing warming, sea ice receding, proxy reconstructions showing warming, sea level rising, sea surface temperatures rising, energy imbalance, ice sheets melting and stratosphere cooling which leads us to believe we have climate change driven by an enhanced greenhouse effect.
On Mars we have one spot melting which leads us to believe... one spot is melting.
- Carbon Dioxide
Climate scientists know that CO2 climate forcing is logarithmic in concentration. The CO2 forcing estimates which are used to attribute warming to CO2 already include this effect. The forcing is still large enough. The argument that CO2 forced temperatures "increase slower than linearly" doesn't mean "negligible". And they know that CO2 levels have been larger in the past. Your assumption seems to be that scientists don't know any of these well known facts, or else they ignore them for convenience. This doesn't prove what you want it to prove.
Additional light of all wavelengths is continually replenished from the sun, our emissions of CO2 are increasing exponentially and the climate forcing effect of CO2 is cumulative. How can it be possible to hit a saturation point? This would be possible if the amount of light was constant and CO2 was finite. Also, the other greenhouse gases absorb the wavelengths that are missed by the absorption spectrum of CO2. All these gases act in tandem and thus will work to increase the radiative effect of CO2.
http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/images/image7.gif
- Medieval warming period
I’m not arguing that we’re in the ideal climate right now but I am arguing is that the transition time needs to slow. Plants and animals, without which we cannot survive, need time to adapt. We're already pressuring our natural resources beyond what they can support and are living unsustainably. What chance does our natural world have when also up against a rapidly changing climate? Life is tenacious, lest we’d be extinct long ago, but we need to wise up and stop treating the natural world as though its preservation is a luxury.
The proponents of anthropogenic climate change have never claimed that CO2 is the only factor controlling temperature in the ocean-atmosphere climate system. Climate change theory makes the claim that CO2 is the primary driver of the current warming trend, as in the rapid rising seen over the last 100 years. This rise has not been smooth and steady, nor would it be expected to be.
There is no strong evidence that the medieval warming period was a globally warm period comparable to today. Regionally, there may have been places that did exhibit notable warmth, Europe for example, but all of the various global proxy reconstructions agree that it is warmer now and the temperature is rising faster than at any time in the last one or even two thousand years. Anecdotal evidence like wineries in England and Norse farmers in Greenland can never tell you a global story.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration presents a whole selection of proxy studies together with the data they are based on and these can be found here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html . Specifically, they have this to say about the medieval warming period:
"The idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect."
- Global cooling
The 1930’s contained 2 anomalous years, 1933 and 1934. To address this, it needs to be understood that temperature is in no way a predictable entity and it depends on a lot of complex interrelated factors. It has and will continue to vary, depending on these factors. I can't comment on the causes of these very specific temperature anomalies because I don't know. However, anomalous years don't disprove the current theory in any way, providing that the climate trend holds it's strong correlation to atmospheric CO2 concentration, which it does.
The cooling period between 1940 and 1970 is explained by particulate and aerosol pollution. When regulations on this pollution were enforced and levels in the atmosphere dropped, guess what happened to temperatures??
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution_png
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_png
The majority of scientists were not worried about global cooling in the 1970’s. There were two articles that ran in Newsweek and Time magazines, both of which never passed the scrutiny of scientific peer review. There was no proposed theory and they were based on the opinions of a handful of maverick scientists whose specialised fields were not climatology. To portray these articles as having “worried the scientists” is a fallacy commonly put forward by climate change deniers.
It’s true that a lot of warming has occurred prior to the middle of the last century. I could also argue that the most dramatic warming happened post the industrial revolution in the 1920’s and would also be correct. Temperatures have declined only because 1998 was anomalously hot (I've already explained the driver behind this in my previous post), however, the climate trend - 5 year moving average on raw temperature data - still has a strong positive gradient and that is where one needs to be looking. “Climate”, by definition, is temperature over time.
- It's the sun
The anthropogenic effect we have on climate is in addition to those “natural” primary climate forcings, not in place of them. The sun is the most influential driver of Earth’s climate, but arguing that sunspots and solar min/max cycles are the primary drivers in our current climate change has already been discussed and shown not to be the case. For a further and more in depth analysis on this topic, it's adequately covered by Real Climate:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/did-the-sun-hit-record-highs-over-the-last-few-decades/[/url]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/the-lure-of-solar-forcing/[/url]
My apologies for digressing from the thread topic. This will be my last post on this subject.
Peace
November 3, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Hello steve!! Are you the guy that talks about ReDriven wind turbine on the Blog site? If so let me know. thanks
November 4, 2008 at 3:03 am
Michael, I agree with you. Events on earth affect climate changes a lot more than anything else. 1940-70 anomalies were cause by extreme emissions of particles, aerosols and gases from war efforts, nuclear experiments, etc. Add to the mix volcano eruptions and you have a hint on medieval anomalies.
Nature regained some balance over time after these events. However, lately it is becoming more or more difficult. Oceans are warming, so a lot of life forms disappear. Overfishing. On land, forests are disappearing, either cut or polluted. Ozone layer is disappearing, meaning a lot more energy reaches the surface to be absorbed by greenhouse gases. So, the nature's ability to balance ecosystem is stretched to minimum. Add to this tense situation events like meteorites, volcano eruptions, big part of nature will be wiped immediately.
We can't control many of these things, we can't stop pollution or CO2 emissions, but we can limit them. Each of us. Individual efforts do look like a drop in the ocean, but a lot of drops make a difference.
November 5, 2008 at 10:45 am
which blog site? Probably not me, as the Redriven doesn't sound familiar. I'll check it out.
November 5, 2008 at 11:26 am
With the results of the election we should see some kind of alternative energy solutions over the next four years. It will be interesting to watch.
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