Doing Something About Climate Change

[jordan179]

Recently, chris_gerrib accused me of not taking a stand on what we should do about anthropogenic climate change, saying in one of the threads from this entry

http://chris-gerrib.livejournal.com/322157.html

9 out of 10 people use the "can't be sure" argument as an excuse to do nothing. Try harder

Comments

[banner]

Before we do -anything- about 'anthropogenic climate change' I'd like to see some actual PROOF that it exists! To this day, no one has shown any proof that it is happening at all (Just like the 'Ozone hole', there has been no actual science involved, just a lot of idiots yelling at the top of their lungs).

And if they do manage to prove it, I'd like them then to prove that global warming is a bad thing. Especially as we're heading into another Maunder Minimum and possibly a little ice age (if not a -real- ice age) according to solar scientists.

And that statement about '9 out of 10 people use the "can't be sure" argument as an excuse to do nothing. Try harder to differentiate yourself as 1 out of 10' ? Wow, that is just made out of pure stupid.

[jordan179]

Before we do -anything- about 'anthropogenic climate change' I'd like to see some actual PROOF that it exists! To this day, no one has shown any proof that it is happening at all (Just like the 'Ozone hole', there has been no actual science involved, just a lot of idiots yelling at the top of their lungs).

It is obviously difficult to prove the extent to which human deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions change the balance of atmospheric gasses and to which this changed balance alters the climate, because we don't have an alternate Earth to use as a control for an experiment. However, we know that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, we have some quantitative test results from which to extrapolate to the macro-scale, and we can track average atmospheric temperatures over thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of years (with decreasing levels of accuracy) due to core samples. So we're not completely in the dark here.

It's easy to see how human action could cause climate change, and hence it's important over the

[banner]

I'm going to number these to try and keep things clear

[chris_gerrib]

Using your numbering scheme:

1) The National Geographic Society begs to differ.

2) No, not really - the seminal work was done in 1896.

3) No, not really.

4) Depending on how warm. The Holocene optimum saw much of the US grain basket as a desert, which is not good for agriculture.

5) Well, that's just an opinion. But by looking at the mix of isotopes of carbon, you can see that the total increase comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which don't have carbon-14 in them.

6) If you'd followed the link in my article, you'd have seen that the Maunder - sunspot link is badly flawed.

[banner]

1) Yes, and they're a very liberal political action group these days, very PC.

2) And its still not proven.

3)Yes, actually it does. What do you get when you mix CO2 and water? Why does it get used in certain procedures? Cause it migrates out.

4) Before settlers moved here, the california central valley was a desert. So I'm not so sure this really means that much.

5) No, it's not an opinion. It is fact. You say man can affect the global climate? You must prove it. So far, no one has.

7) I read the study, but I have no interest in going to discovery.com, an unabashedly left wing enviro-nazi organization. They do politics, not science.

[chris_gerrib]

I see a pattern here - if a source says something you disagree with, that source must be wrong. This is conspiracy theory thinking, in which every fact that disproves the conspiracy is interpreted to mean that the conspiracy is deeper than previously thought.

But once more into the breach:

1) So, NASA's in on the conspiracy?

2) Actually, experimental proof exists.

3) You don't think that the scientists know about soda pop?

4) The reason Central CA isn't a desert is because of irrigation, not rainfall. How exactly are you planning to irrigate Iowa?

5) No, I just keep throwing facts at you and you keep throwing conspiracy theories back.

6) So you concede that CO2 increases is due to fossil fuel burning?

7) The sun is cooling but climate is warming.

[ext_531464]

And yet it's considered bad if I don't watch a Pat Condell video or trust a source on Atlas Shrugs. What's with that?

[banner]

I have no idea what your reply is supposed to mean.

[banner]

1) Yes. The head global climate guy at NASA has been caught faking or adjusting data. More than once. Yet they won't fire him. NASA rarely does science when it comes to our planet anymore, they only do politics

[chris_gerrib]

The most politically-conservative guy I know spent the last 30 years as a researcher at Argonne National Labs. He's also scrupulously honest. So, calling all climate researchers "lying frauds" because they are "leftists" doesn't fly for me.

Which leaves me in a quandry - do I believe a group of experts who have been researching and experimenting for decades, or some guy on the Internet who blogs with one name?

[jordan179]

I consider it to be bad when you critique a video without having actually watched it, for the simple and cogent reason that you are expressing an opinion on a topic on which one has no actual knowledge. This is generally a bad thing to do, and it doesn't magically become a good thing just because you don't like the person who made the video.

[baron_waste]

I remember being appalled at learning about that “Earth as featureless billiard ball” computer model Comrade Carl cooked up… but not at all surprised. He'd always struck me as the worst sort of ivory-tower goat-milk-and-granola ponytail liberal, but over time I'd realized that he was more than that: He was a hypocritical limousine-liberal clown. He, who popularized and glorified science, was a bad scientist. For the Greater Good, the collectivist agenda was what mattered, not science.

[Back at the time, Richard Hoagland - who made a brief but profitable career from the “Face on Mars” - found him infuriating. Hoagland did have, or seemed to have, some interesting data that suggested possible correlations that ought to be investigated. Saint Carl of Cornell dismissed him with the ex cathedra pronouncement that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and yours is insufficiently extraordinary” - like the Church archbishop who refused to look through Galileo's telescope because there was no need, because he couldn't be right,

[jordan179]

I remember being appalled at learning about that “Earth as featureless billiard ball” computer model Comrade Carl cooked up… but not at all surprised. He'd always struck me as the worst sort of ivory-tower goat-milk-and-granola ponytail liberal, but over time I'd realized that he was more than that: He was a hypocritical limousine-liberal clown. He, who popularized and glorified science, was a bad scientist. For the Greater Good, the collectivist agenda was what mattered, not science.

To be fair to Sagan, computer modelling techniques were in their infancy in 1982, which was when TTAPS unveiled the model. And his team deserves considerable credit for developing the "dust winter" model, which had previously been proposed for volcanism but whose relevance to asteroidal impacts and nuclear wars had not previously been realized. Finally, Sagan was almost certainly right that some degree of nuclear warfare could induce the described "nuclear winter" -- he was simply off regarding the required magnitude of dust emission

[jordan179]

On deforestation, depends on the area under consideration. The United States of America (and some other First World nations) have reforested over the last century (thank you, industrialized agriculture!), but the world as a whole has suffered massive deforestation over the last century. This has been particularly severe in Amazonia and Indonesia.

CO2 is both a leader and a trailer of global warming, because it directly increases atmospheric heat retention and higher temperatures lead to more CO2 release. I would assume that climatologists take into account gas movement through ice. Furthermore, the presence of dissolved gases in ice core samples are not the only sort of evidence of CO2 presence and of average temperatures across geological time. Finally, CO2 is more important to climate change than is H2O because water vapor cycles in and out of the system faster than does CO2 and the water vapor cycle isn't out of balance: despite the smaller magnitude of the CO2 the CO2 thus gets to exert a bigger cumulative effect at the

[banner]

The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.039% so that means .00039 parts of the atmosphere are CO2. If we double the CO2, we will have .00078 parts. That is really a fairly small number

[jordan179]

The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.039% so that means .00039 parts of the atmosphere are CO2. If we double the CO2, we will have .00078 parts. That is really a fairly small number.

CO2 is highly-effective at warming the atmosphere per unit of atmospheric composition because it is (1) just the right size to intercept waves of infra-red light and (2) atmospherically persistent, especially if total green-plant biomass declines.

Water vapor is at least 2 to 3 percent or .02 - .03 parts of the atmosphere. Three quarters of the ocean is always covered in clouds (Ocean Scud).

You've just pointed out one of the reasons why water vapor is less effective at warming the Earth, because cloud cover increases albedo. Those clouds reflect away visible light which would otherwise have reached the surface and been absorbed as heat.

By contrast, carbon dioxide only produces global warming, not cooling, effects -- unless a planet is very cold (in which case the CO2 turns into reflective dry ice). No parts of the Earth are cold enough for