U.N. Climate Conference Opens With Call for Unity

[Parkbandit]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/science/earth/23climate.html

An excerpt:

During the speeches on Tuesday, the change in language coming from America was stark. Gone was the Bush administration’s questioning about whether global warming is caused by mankind. Mr. Obama was quick to take responsibility on behalf of said mankind.

“John F. Kennedy once observed that ‘our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man,’ ” Mr. Obama said. “It is true that for too many years mankind has been slow to respond to or even recognize the magnitude of the climate threat. It is true of my own country as well; we recognize that.”

He said he was committed to the United States making its largest-ever investment in renewable energy, new standards for reducing pollution from vehicles and making clean energy profitable, among other initiatives. He said developing nations must also provide financial and technical assistance to help the rest adapt to the impact of climate change and pursue low-carbon development.

“We understand the gravity of the climate threat,” Mr. Obama said, but he noted that the push for change comes in the midst of a global recession. “And so all of us will face doubts and difficulties in our own capitals as we try to reach a lasting solution to the climate challenge.”

_______________________________________________

I'm just wondering.. what exactly is the climate threat we are facing? I've noticed they went from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" since over the past decade, the average temperature has fallen.. thus making the entire theory of global warming unsubstantiated.

So what exactly is the climate threat we face?

I'm in the energy conservation business.. so I'm all for using energy wisely as well as limiting your pollution. But no one can give me a straight answer on what the threat for climate change is.. if the temperature since this debate started has been both up and down.

It's almost as if this has zero to do with climate change and everything to do with something else.

[Latrinsorm]

But no one can give me a straight answer on what the threat for climate change is.. if the temperature since this debate started has been both up and down.You should talk to more scientists.

[Parkbandit]

You should talk to more scientists.

So should you.

So.. I take it you don't have an answer, yet again?

Weird.

[Latrinsorm]

I've given you the answers to your question previously. The reason I specifically used the word "talk" is because you maintain a rigid belief structure regarding the PC that does not permit you to consider what certain people say.

[Cephalopod]

I'm just wondering.. what exactly is the climate threat we are facing? I've noticed they went from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" since over the past decade, the average temperature has fallen.. thus making the entire theory of global warming unsubstantiated.


I think you'll find a lot of the buzz words sliding to 'climate change' as many people are pointing to narrow bands of result data (last decade of mean temperature, for example) and saying "LOOK! NO WARMING!" rather than looking at the actual scientific data that shows much longer-running trends and worrying issues developing. In order to accommodate these folks, scientists (and politicians) are having to use the more general 'climate change' to avoid those sort of specious arguments.

The science is out there; being in the energy conservation business, I'd assume you are aware of it. However, I can't even begin to guess what you might consider a 'valid source'.

NOAA: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html

Totally biased site, but with references to some pretty substantial hard data:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/latest-climate-science.html

[Jack]

The level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has increased approximately 30% since 1880. Just looking at the figure alone you can cause the many people to run around screaming about the sky falling, and cause them to make demands for lower carbon dioxide emissions. Let's try putting that figure into perspective though.

Current levels of CO2 are about 383 parts per million, while in 1880 the level was about 306 parts per million. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Let's look at the other gasses in the atmosphere though. Nitrogen levels are 780840 parts per million, Oxegyn levels are 209,460 parts per million. So about 78% of the atmosphere is Nitrogen, 21% Oxegyn, and then we have CO2 at .0383%. So the level of carbon dioxide as a part of the atmosphere has increased .077%. Not even a tenth of a percent. Does it still look like the sky is falling?

[ElvenFury]

Ban Nitrogen emissions!!!! Oh wait, Nitrogen doesn't trap the suns radiation inside our atmosphere. The fact that CO2 is only .04% of our air isn't nearly as relevant as the fact that the levels are 30% higher, because that means we're getting 30% more reflection, which is why polar ice is shrinking at an alarming rate, and glaciers are retreating.

The real problem is that climate change is going to snowball, so by the time the signs are so obvious that skeptics can no longer ignore them, it will be too late.

BTW, we have manatees visiting us at Cape Cod this summer. No, that's not typical.

[Cephalopod]

The level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has increased approximately 30% since 1880. Just looking at the figure alone you can cause the many people to run around screaming about the sky falling, and cause them to make demands for lower carbon dioxide emissions. Let's try putting that figure into perspective though.

Current levels of CO2 are about 383 parts per million, while in 1880 the level was about 306 parts per million. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Let's look at the other gasses in the atmosphere though. Nitrogen levels are 780840 parts per million, Oxegyn levels are 209,460 parts per million. So about 78% of the atmosphere is Nitrogen, 21% Oxegyn, and then we have CO2 at .0383%. So the level of carbon dioxide as a part of the atmosphere has increased .077%. Not even a tenth of a percent. Does it still look like the sky is falling?

If the level of hydrogen cyanide around you increases from 0.2ppm[1] to 110ppm, you will die. BUT THAT'S ONLY A TINY INCREASE IN HYDROGEN CYANIDE COMPARED TO THE ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE! Not even a tenth of a percent![2]


[1] - The amount of ambient hydrogen cyanide.
[2] - This entire statement is meaningless, just as saying "It's only a total increase of 0.077%!" is meaningless.

[Jack]

So how much has the average temperature increased due to this "30% increase in reflectivity"? How fast were these same glaciers shrinking prior to the industrial age?

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

I subscribe to a different theory. I don't dismiss the CO2 impact, I just think it's one of many.

Personally I think our planet goes through natural warming/cooling cycles, as well as MANY other factors influencing global temperature. I like this guy's research for instance. http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/

How do you explain glacier expansion and retreat from the different ages? Did you know our planet has been both hotter and humid than it is today as well as with far more CO2 than today for most of it's existance? Look at the earth in terms of geological time. Some would argue we are in a temporary warming period before we go back to an ice age (have been for about 10,000 years, and geological evidence suggests they occur about every 100,000 years). I don't think anyone KNOWS it's all man's fault. If we halved the CO2, my money says the earth would still be warming up.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

Also, did you know sea levels have been on the rise for about the last 15,000 years?

[Cephalopod]

Also, did you know sea levels have been on the rise for about the last 15,000 years?

Just like glaciers have been advancing and receding for the last 15,000 years, and average global temperatures have been rising and dropping. The issue now is that there is quantifiable proof that more recent atmospheric contributions (from us!) have been causing accelerated changes to all of these levels: faster glacial recession, faster sea levels rising and faster temperature deviations.

It's well known, and I'd hope accepted that the climate changes. It's just that we (humans) have been accelerating that change in a way that is detrimental to our health in the long run. And yes, detrimental to OUR health: don't believe any of the bullshit that we're hurting the planet. The planet as a whole, or even in most distinct parts, won't care what happens in the climate. Species adapt and move on, or die out. It's not a big deal that the climate is changing faster, since it'll all even out over the next few thousand years -- the big deal is that its going to impact humans, and we're selfish.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

Just like glaciers have been advancing and receding for the last 15,000 years, and average global temperatures have been rising and dropping. The issue now is that there is quantifiable proof that more recent atmospheric contributions (from us!) have been causing accelerated changes to all of these levels: faster glacial recession, faster sea levels rising and faster temperature deviations.

It's well known, and I'd hope accepted that the climate changes. It's just that we (humans) have been accelerating that change in a way that is detrimental to our health in the long run. And yes, detrimental to OUR health: don't believe any of the bullshit that we're hurting the planet. The planet as a whole, or even in most distinct parts, won't care what happens in the climate. Species adapt and move on, or die out. It's not a big deal that the climate is changing faster, since it'll all even out over the next few thousand years -- the big deal is that its going to impact humans, and we're selfish.

But we may be accelerating the temperature to be warmer as we go into an ice age. If the earth has a 100k year climate pattern, spaced by 12-20k year "warm periods", and it's been "warming" for 15k years (as easily evidenced by rise of the sea level), would it be too much to assume we are about to have a glacier (in geological time) in Kansas? Maybe we want that extra 3 degrees of temp :)

And actually, on average glaciers have been receding the past 15k years, as evidenced by the rising sea level. So has average global temperature. So, let's just go back to 1 AD and earlier, a mere 2000 years ago. Was it "our" fault then? What about 5k years ago? 10k? Perhaps it was the mammoths fault. They could have been extremely flatulent.

[Stanley Burrell]

After half a year of intensely studying the geomorphology of eroding and accreting coasts (and every way that pollution ties into the aforementioned) ... I am not even qualified to add to this discussion let alone post in it with an objective opinion.

[Parkbandit]

I've given you the answers to your question previously. The reason I specifically used the word "talk" is because you maintain a rigid belief structure regarding the PC that does not permit you to consider what certain people say.

If by certain people, you mean you.. you are 100% correct. I typically skip right over your stupidity.

[Parkbandit]

I think you'll find a lot of the buzz words sliding to 'climate change' as many people are pointing to narrow bands of result data (last decade of mean temperature, for example) and saying "LOOK! NO WARMING!" rather than looking at the actual scientific data that shows much longer-running trends and worrying issues developing. In order to accommodate these folks, scientists (and politicians) are having to use the more general 'climate change' to avoid those sort of specious arguments.

But didn't Gore and friends use the same type of short term data to "prove" that the Earth is warming up due to man?



The science is out there; being in the energy conservation business, I'd assume you are aware of it. However, I can't even begin to guess what you might consider a 'valid source'.


There is a world of difference between climatology and energy conservation. I don't study the effects on the environment or climate.

[Parkbandit]

Either way, I don't think "30% more CO2" equals "30% less reflectivity of the atmosphere," considering CO2 is a tiny part of the atmosphere itself.

Not to mention that man's contribution to the entire CO2 emmissions is estimated at only 1-3%. That's 97-99% that occurs naturally.

[Tsa`ah]

Not to mention that man's contribution to the entire CO2 emmissions is estimated at only 1-3%. That's 97-99% that occurs naturally.

Yes and by eliminating natural CO2 sinks .... where does all of the CO2 go?

You think 1-3% is small, but we're talking an additional 25-30 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere and roughly 40% of that being absorbed by sinks.

Aside from that ... http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/globalwarming/ar4-fig-3-6.gif

There's your temperature averages over the last 150 years. Ya, that 1-3% is insignificant.

Can I point out how stupid you are misspelling a word now?

[Parkbandit]

Can I point out how stupid you are misspelling a word now?

A misspelling might be stupid, but in no way is it even close to the stupidity of "Ft. Camp Lejeune". Then again, I won't defend a typo for 3-4 posts that I meant to spell it like that.. that back in the day, that word was spelled like that..

http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2009/Jun-26-Fri-2009/news/29627300.html

[Parkbandit]

There's your temperature averages over the last 150 years. Ya, that 1-3% is insignificant.


Why go back 150 years? It's weird.. why not go back 100 years.. or 200 years.

Oh, that's right.. what scientists have dubbed "The Little Ice Age" ended 150 years ago... so it brilliantly shows a temperature change that is dramatic enough for your model.

We couldn't show 2000 years.. because that would show how the Earth was warmer than it is today, then cooler, then warming... thus showing a natural cycle.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image158.gif

We also wouldn't want to show solar activity for this time period either.. since it happens to coincide with the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere. Well, unless you think man's contribution to CO2 is somehow affecting the sun.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image191.gif

[AnticorRifling]

I'm looking forward to the next ice age, those talking animals are going to taste delicious.

[Tsa`ah]

...

I'm going to offer you some advice, and this is crucial if you want to be taken seriously.

When you're looking for a source to debunk global warming/climate change ... getting it from a guy that is an amateur fossil hunter tied to the coal industry that lacks any education relevant to the topic isn't really going to get you anywhere.

I'm sure he's a great source of information on fossils found in coal mines ... and on coal mining in general, but I wouldn't consider him for much outside of that.

Care to give it another go?

[Parkbandit]

OH NO, I MUST BE IN THE POCKET OF BIG OIL TOO!!!

Seriously Shit4Brains.. grab a cab, go back to Ft. Camp Lejeune.. and kill yourself. Maybe with a million dollar selling book that no one reads as evidenced by your trip to Borders.

I'm going to offer you some advice, and this is crucial if you want to be taken seriously.

Stop posting. Turn off your internet. Kill yourself.

[Paradii]

It seems that PB gets awfully defensive when cornered with actual facts

[Tsa`ah]

....

You're an endless source of ignorance based amusement.


It seems that PB gets awfully defensive when cornered with actual facts

He doesn't understand the difference ... but will generally foam at the mouth on command.

[Parkbandit]

It seems that PB gets awfully defensive when cornered with actual facts

Not at all.. show me some facts.. not cherry picked statistics that make your case.

[Parkbandit]

He doesn't understand the difference ... but will generally foam at the mouth on command.

:rofl:

Listen kid, I don't get so upset about things that I lose the ability to breath and need an inhaler.

[Paradii]

Not at all.. show me some facts.. not cherry picked statistics that make your case.


PB, you just cherry picked some stats to make your case. The road goes both ways. Unfortunately, there is no "omgz wowz, climate change is definitely happening 100% due to the nature of what is being studied. You can't duplicate these processes in the lab, and if there is a golden gun, it has not been found and probably won't be. I am not saying it's a soft science, just that statistical assumptions have to be made at certain points. Climate change is a big money maker now in the research world in both acadamia and in the government sector. Hopefully some interesting data will be released within the the next 5 years that will convert a few of the non-believers.


However, data can be made to show anything. If you don't think that we are having an adverse effect on our climate, fine.

[Cephalopod]

I subscribe to a different theory. I don't dismiss the CO2 impact, I just think it's one of many.

Personally I think our planet goes through natural warming/cooling cycles, as well as MANY other factors influencing global temperature. I like this guy's research for instance. http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/


I cringe when reading anything written by intelligent design theorists, but I'll go ahead and give this a look, since that really should have no bearing on his science relative to climate change. Since I'm already engaging in ad hominen attacks on Dr. Timothy Ball, I'll give this guy the benefit of the doubt.

I don't think anyone is claiming CO2 is the sole cause of global climate change. Solar activity, sulfate aerosols (from volcanos, for example), black carbon, among other factors, all contribute to changes in the atmosphere and climate. The argument is that given Earth's natural warming and cooling cycles, we are seeing anthropogenic forcing of accelerated climate change.



How do you explain glacier expansion and retreat from the different ages? Did you know our planet has been both hotter and humid than it is today as well as with far more CO2 than today for most of it's existance? Look at the earth in terms of geological time. Some would argue we are in a temporary warming period before we go back to an ice age (have been for about 10,000 years, and geological evidence suggests they occur about every 100,000 years). I don't think anyone KNOWS it's all man's fault. If we halved the CO2, my money says the earth would still be warming up.

Again, no one is saying its all man's fault, and if we halved our CO2 emissions the earth would certainly continue with climate change -- warming and cooling. These long-term effects are well-known, documented and have been modeled. The current argument is on anthropogenic acceleration of many of these factors that is detrimental to our collective health, and changing our land use and reducing greenhouse gas emissions makes the projected climate changes more livable.

Specifically on glaciers, while glaciers have expanded and retreated during many different climate periods, glaciers are currently receding (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uoc--rag111405.php) and calving at record rates (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4508964.stm). Recent data on the greenland ice sheet suggests that there has been a large acceleration in mass loss just in the last few years (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8357537.stm), outside the realm of what would be normally expected given long-term climate models.

Here's a capsule of the IPCC report, which summarizes why this is surprising and why 'standard climate patterns' don't apply:


The IPCC Fourth Report confirms that over the past 8,000 years, and just before Industrialisation in 1750 , carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increased by a mere 20 parts per million (ppm). The concentration of atmospheric CO2 in 1750 was 280ppm, and increased to 379 ppm in 2005. That is an increase of 100 ppm in 250 years. For comparison and at the end of the most recent ice age there was approximately an 80ppm rise in CO2 concentration. This rise took over 5,000 years, and higher values than at present have only occurred many millions of years ago.


These sort of climate changes are common, in geological ages. The problem is the accelerated changes that appear to be caused by man.

Finally, w.r.t Roy Spencer, there's a pretty solid debunking of his assertion that we aren't seeing the climate feedbacks that should be expected:
Part 1 (http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/spencers-folly/) | Part 2 (http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/spencers-folly-1/) | Part 3 (http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/spencers-folly-3/)

He's missing some coverage of Spencer's assertions relative to water vapor feedback, but that's covered fairly well here (http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/is-the-atmosphere-drying-up/).

More recently, Spencer has been arguing some of his hypothesis are supported by Lindzen and Choi's work (while simultaneously claiming they've incorrectly processed their data, no less!), but I haven't had a chance to review all of that.

While Spencer was once caught making a mistake with data interpretation (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/science/earth/12climate.long.html?ex=1281499200&en=2588a631b8c5cc5d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss), I'd consider him a respected source. His main point is that while we are affecting CO2 levels, we are not effecting them enough to cause climate change. He's not a bad person to listen to, I just happen to not agree with his conclusions. I believe there is adequate data to show that anthropogenic climate change is occcuring, and nothing that Spencer has pointed to dissuades me from that belief.

[Gan]

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6736517/Copenhagen-climate-summit-1200-limos-140-private-planes-and-caviar-wedges.html

[Cephalopod]

This reminds me of Obama's original plan to fly to get his Nobel Prize, come back to the US, then fly to Copenhagen for the summit. (Maybe he still is? I haven't looked to see what the new itinerary is since they decided Obama would show at the end of the summit instead of the beginning.)

Flying 10,000 extra miles... yeah, that's very climate-conscious!

I think a few people are missing the point of the summit, including our president.

[Fallen]

Honest question here guys, if the world isn't getting warmer, why is everything melting? I keep hearing about icecaps and what not melting.

[Sean of the Thread]

You guys are all unpatriotic terrorists.

[Cephalopod]

Honest question here guys, if the world isn't getting warmer, why is everything melting? I keep hearing about icecaps and what not melting.

Because Tiger Woods is THAT FUCKING HOT.

[Rocktar]

PB, you just cherry picked some stats to make your case. The road goes both ways. Unfortunately, there is no "omgz wowz, climate change is definitely happening 100% due to the nature of what is being studied. You can't duplicate these processes in the lab, and if there is a golden gun, it has not been found and probably won't be. I am not saying it's a soft science, just that statistical assumptions have to be made at certain points. Climate change is a big money maker now in the research world in both acadamia and in the government sector. Hopefully some interesting data will be released within the the next 5 years that will convert a few of the non-believers.


However, data can be made to show anything. If you don't think that we are having an adverse effect on our climate, fine.



Well, easy to fix, let's look at all possible known data on the subject. Oh wait, we can't, the raw data was dumped due to storage reasons. All we have left is the "pertinent" (read slanted to support hypothesis) data.

While I do think that reducing emissions and pollution in general is a good thing and something we need to do, I think that they way we are going about it is all wrong. I also think that our President is demonstrating that he is a moron with his declarations at the conference and this will be used, like everything else, to support more tax and spend expansion of government and Socialism in the name of this crisis flavor of the quarter.

[Parkbandit]

Honest question here guys, if the world isn't getting warmer, why is everything melting? I keep hearing about icecaps and what not melting.

The earth has and always will run in climatic cycles. The earth has been warming than it currently is. The earth has been cooler than it currently is.

Now.. if you want to just look at the past 100+ years out of 4+ billion, and start from the bottom of the "Little Ice Age", then you might buy into man causing the .7% temperature increase.

[Nieninque]

http://chir.ag/res/center/calm-down3.jpg

[Sean of the Thread]

The earth has and always will run in climatic cycles. The earth has been warming than it currently is. The earth has been cooler than it currently is.

Now.. if you want to just look at the past 100+ years out of 4+ billion, and start from the bottom of the "Little Ice Age", then you might buy into man causing the .7% temperature increase.


You know what sucks is that Florida has been almost completely under water every 10k years and I like this place.

Good for real estate I spose.

[Parkbandit]

You know what sucks is that Florida has been almost completely under water every 10k years and I like this place.

Good for real estate I spose.

Weird. I didn't think we had SUVs 10,000 years ago.

[Cephalopod]

Weird. I didn't think we had SUVs 10,000 years ago.

http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/s/stucker/broche.jpg

Well, let's see: First the earth cooled. And, then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died, and they turned into oil. And, then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And, Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it, he took her best summer dress out of the closet, and put it on, and went to town.

[EasternBrand]

So, serious question. Have these climate cycles looked like regular sine curves over the last, say, 500 million years? It can't be enough to say that the climate goes through cycles, therefore man is having a negligible impact. We can't reasonably expect that a naturally warming portion of the cycle happening now will bring the Earth back to its early primordial soup climate, can we? My guess would be that if you looked at cyclic temperatures stretched out over an extraordinarily long period of time, you would find that they do not undulate regularly, but instead that the peaks and valleys are getting closer and closer to the mean. That kind of graph would indicate an increasing level of stability, and the question would become whether or not we think that rising temperatures are higher than what they ought to be; that is, if rising temperatures now seem to fit into a larger geological picture, are they nevertheless rising TOO high or TOO fast?

I have no idea what the answer is, but surely the question is more complex than people on either side make it out to be.

[Sean of the Thread]

Yeah well there wasn't people back in the day and the core samples kind of tell the story.

Unless you're dumb and religious.

[Parkbandit]

So, serious question. Have these climate cycles looked like regular sine curves over the last, say, 500 million years? It can't be enough to say that the climate goes through cycles, therefore man is having a negligible impact. We can't reasonably expect that a naturally warming portion of the cycle happening now will bring the Earth back to its early primordial soup climate, can we? My guess would be that if you looked at cyclic temperatures stretched out over an extraordinarily long period of time, you would find that they do not undulate regularly, but instead that the peaks and valleys are getting closer and closer to the mean. That kind of graph would indicate an increasing level of stability, and the question would become whether or not we think that rising temperatures are higher than what they ought to be; that is, if rising temperatures now seem to fit into a larger geological picture, are they nevertheless rising TOO high or TOO fast?

I have no idea what the answer is, but surely the question is more complex than people on either side make it out to be.

In the past 100,000 years (which is extremely recent timeline compared to the age of Earth which is estimated at 4.5 billion years) the Earth has been warmer than it is now and the Earth has been cooler than it is now. Man contributes 2-3% of all "global warming pollution" while good ol' Mother Earth hates herself at a tune of 97-98%. If we really believe that CO2 emissions is what is causing global warming, er I mean climate change.. then we would be better off spending the TRILLIONS of dollars this "crisis" is going to cost the US and figure out how to cap volcanoes and preventing all forest fires.

[EasternBrand]

In the past 100,000 years (which is extremely recent timeline compared to the age of Earth which is estimated at 4.5 billion years) the Earth has been warmer than it is now and the Earth has been cooler than it is now. Man contributes 2-3% of all "global warming pollution" while good ol' Mother Earth hates herself at a tune of 97-98%. If we really believe that CO2 emissions is what is causing global warming, er I mean climate change.. then we would be better off spending the TRILLIONS of dollars this "crisis" is going to cost the US and figure out how to cap volcanoes and preventing all forest fires.

That's fine as far as it goes, but my question is an attempt to get behind the numbers. Just because it was warmer or cooler in the past, isn't there a real cause for concern if the Earth's temperature is rising at a rate more rapid than it has in past cycles? Now, I don't know if it is, I'm just suggesting that absolutes may not be the best way to make measurements in this area.

The problem with comparing man's emissions to the CO2 emitted by the Earth itself has, I think, been covered previously on these boards, and goes to the fact that adaptation and evolution are extremely slow processes. Even if man has gone from close to 0% of all CO2 emissions to 2%, that change has most likely happened in under 500 years. The percentage, by itself, doesn't give a full picture of the possible consequences of that kind of change in a relative blink of an eye.

[Sean of the Thread]

You are such a hippy douche bag. I wish I knew who your alter ego is. I'd guess backlash but you seem strangely more intelligent.

[Parkbandit]

That's fine as far as it goes, but my question is an attempt to get behind the numbers. Just because it was warmer or cooler in the past, isn't there a real cause for concern if the Earth's temperature is rising at a rate more rapid than it has in past cycles? Now, I don't know if it is, I'm just suggesting that absolutes may not be the best way to make measurements in this area.

The problem with comparing man's emissions to the CO2 emitted by the Earth itself has, I think, been covered previously on these boards, and goes to the fact that adaptation and evolution are extremely slow processes. Even if man has gone from close to 0% of all CO2 emissions to 2%, that change has most likely happened in under 500 years. The percentage, by itself, doesn't give a full picture of the possible consequences of that kind of change in a relative blink of an eye.

:rofl:

[EasternBrand]

You are such a hippy douche bag. I wish I knew who your alter ego is. I'd guess backlash but you seem strangely more intelligent.

I'm just relatively new to the PC, mang. But I did lurk appropriately for about two months before I activated an account.

[EasternBrand]

:rofl:

If you're willing to explain why that's such a crazy line of thought, I'm willing to listen.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

We are actually nearing the end of a very predictable warming cycle that runs about every 100k years and lasts for 10-12k years. Unless something dramatically changes, in the next 1000 years we will be back in an ice age which lasts 80-100k years.

BUT OMG THE CAPS ARE MELTING AND WE"LL ALL BE UNDERWATER BY THEN!

[Parkbandit]

If you're willing to explain why that's such a crazy line of thought, I'm willing to listen.

I was just reminded of this post, after Gan called you out for being a Choir boy in the Climate Change Religion:


I haven't spoken to my point of view on climate change in this or any other thread on the PC. You're still not addressing my main contention, which is that you linked a comparatively shitty conversation that proves nothing in the face of an illuminating analysis that seems to debunk a lot of claims made about the emails.

Looks like he pretty much read you like a cheap novel.

[EasternBrand]

We are actually nearing the end of a very predictable warming cycle that runs about every 100k years and lasts for 10-12k years. Unless something dramatically changes, in the next 1000 years we will be back in an ice age which lasts 80-100k years.

BUT OMG THE CAPS ARE MELTING AND WE"LL ALL BE UNDERWATER BY THEN!

All I'm asking is whether the most recent temperatures map with what we think they should be, given the historically cyclical nature of the climate. I'm not debating anything, really, because I've admitted already that I don't know the answers.

My question is really this: if the cycle is so predictable, then shouldn't any deviation from the pattern concern us? I don't know that it has deviated, and I've been saying that since I started in this thread. Do you know that it hasn't? My question earlier, asking whether or not these cycles were slowly curving toward the mean, was asking basically the same thing. I'm willing to look at thoughtful answers to these questions, but I'm not content with answers that don't even conform to elementary notions of statistical analysis.

[EasternBrand]

I was just reminded of this post, after Gan called you out for being a Choir boy in the Climate Change Religion:



Looks like he pretty much read you like a cheap novel.

All right, here's my condensed position on climate change.

The overwhelming scientific majority claims that humans are responsible for an increasing share of pollutants, and this is causing a greater-than-expected rise in temperature. I think this is probably true, but I haven't done my own independent analysis of the issue. I'm willing to accept that, if there exists solid evidence that this is not the case, then they may be wrong. It's hard to ignore the chorus when it comes to any topic you don't claim expertise in, and I'll grant you that that's not always a good thing.

I think that reducing, reusing, and recycling are independently beneficial. They save money and avoid turning more of the planet into a landfill, which if nothing else is an aesthetic positive.

I think that regulating industrial pollutants is independently beneficial. They may leach into groundwater reservoirs, which I think we can all agree is not something we want. Even if technology is 100% effective at removing these pollutants from the municipal water system, there are other water delivery mechanisms that are more easily compromised. A well at my ex-girlfriend's house comes to mind. That was some good water, there.

I'm not a tree-hugger. I'm a city dweller. Sometimes I leave my lights on. I'm more pissed because of the electricity bill than because of the environment. I try not to litter because it makes my neighborhood less attractive. I've never been active in any environmental organization.

[EasternBrand]

I should have added this:

I think that both sides are equally discredited when either position attempts to use dubious arguments to bolster themselves. In other words, I think it's equally invalid to justify inaction by saying that we can stand to get a little warmer in here, as it is to justify overreaction by saying that we can't.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

I am for anything which reduces waste in the world with reasonable effort. I am not for alarmists claiming the world is going to end if we don't change RIGHT NOW. I recycle, probably not as much as I could, but more than most I bet. I turn lights off, I compost my own mulch, and I have low water use washer/dryer, shower and toilets.

I also enjoy a green lawn, 69 degree indoor temp year round and occasionally buy bottled water. And of my two gas guzzling vehicles the best mileage I get is 24 mpg.

When alternative fuels/methods are affordable I'll join up with the tree huggers and pitch in more. For now though, I affect my piece of the world without letting it inconvenience me more than mildly. If I wanted to live in the dark ages and reap none of the benefits of a modern society, I suppose I could go all Ted Kaczynski and live in a cabin, but I enjoy modern conveniences.

[Latrinsorm]

Ganalon posted a graph once of CO2 and "temperature", from what I remember it was only loosely modeled by a sine curve. I'll see if I can dig it up.

[Latrinsorm]

Here it is, in stupid .pdf format:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articlefiles/climatechart.pdf

Summary:

1. In 400,000 years worth of data, CO2 levels have not only never been higher than they are today, but never been higher than 80% of what they are today.
2. The "average earth temperature" looks more like a plucked string oscillation than a sine.
3. It looks like the last big pluck took place about 25,000 years ago.
4. We are experiencing the steepest temperature growth of the last 400,000 years.

[Cephalopod]

I'm pretty sure this is proof that god plays a ukulele.

[Parkbandit]

All right, here's my condensed position on climate change.

The overwhelming scientific majority claims that humans are responsible for an increasing share of pollutants, and this is causing a greater-than-expected rise in temperature.

Source?


I think this is probably true, but I haven't done my own independent analysis of the issue.

Well I, for one, am awaiting this breakthrough analysis and I bet the rest of the world is too. Please, let us know the MOMENT it's published.


I'm willing to accept that, if there exists solid evidence that this is not the case, then they may be wrong. It's hard to ignore the chorus when it comes to any topic you don't claim expertise in, and I'll grant you that that's not always a good thing.

Well we won't know if it's right or wrong until you do your own independent analysis. Not sure what the hold up is.. since the fate of mankind is at stake. Get cracking kid.


I think that reducing, reusing, and recycling are independently beneficial. They save money and avoid turning more of the planet into a landfill, which if nothing else is an aesthetic positive.

I hope your independent analysis is more productive than this.. because we learned all about recycling in the 1st grade. Who is against recycling?



I think that regulating industrial pollutants is independently beneficial. They may leach into groundwater reservoirs, which I think we can all agree is not something we want. Even if technology is 100% effective at removing these pollutants from the municipal water system, there are other water delivery mechanisms that are more easily compromised. A well at my ex-girlfriend's house comes to mind. That was some good water, there.

This may have been as late as 7th or 8th grade stuff. I'll be honest.. so far I'm pretty unimpressed and hope that your independent analysis will bring about far more insight.



I'm not a tree-hugger. I'm a city dweller. Sometimes I leave my lights on. I'm more pissed because of the electricity bill than because of the environment. I try not to litter because it makes my neighborhood less attractive. I've never been active in any environmental organization.

Awesome. Personally, I'm in the pocket of Big Energy.

[EasternBrand]

There's really no such thing as reasoned discussion with you, is there?

[Parkbandit]

There's really no such thing as reasoned discussion with you, is there?

If that is your best reasoned argument... probably not.

[Cephalopod]

We are actually nearing the end of a very predictable warming cycle that runs about every 100k years and lasts for 10-12k years. Unless something dramatically changes, in the next 1000 years we will be back in an ice age which lasts 80-100k years.

BUT OMG THE CAPS ARE MELTING AND WE"LL ALL BE UNDERWATER BY THEN!

Source on this? This isn't quite what research based on the Milankovitch cycles and related research show, but it is a common misconception:



(source) (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/207/4434/943)
"Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years."


Other research shows the next ice age may be as far out as 620,000 years (http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/articles/html.format/orb_forc.html).

Section 2 of the IPCC WG1 report (http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/072.htm) covers this pretty thoroughly.

[Cephalopod]

In the past 100,000 years (which is extremely recent timeline compared to the age of Earth which is estimated at 4.5 billion years) the Earth has been warmer than it is now and the Earth has been cooler than it is now. Man contributes 2-3% of all "global warming pollution" while good ol' Mother Earth hates herself at a tune of 97-98%. If we really believe that CO2 emissions is what is causing global warming, er I mean climate change.. then we would be better off spending the TRILLIONS of dollars this "crisis" is going to cost the US and figure out how to cap volcanoes and preventing all forest fires.

Just saw this. Source on the 2-3% and 97-98%? Specifically, I'd be interested in the breakdown you're claiming of 'global warming pollution' -- are you including water vapor as pollution?

[Gan]

Here it is, in stupid .pdf format:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articlefiles/climatechart.pdf

Summary:

1. In 400,000 years worth of data, CO2 levels have not only never been higher than they are today, but never been higher than 80% of what they are today.
2. The "average earth temperature" looks more like a plucked string oscillation than a sine.
3. It looks like the last big pluck took place about 25,000 years ago.
4. We are experiencing the steepest temperature growth of the last 400,000 years.
http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll102/learningtewfly/chart.jpg

You really need to reread the chart again. Please review the CO2 levels again from far right to far left and tell me if you dont see higher estimated levels than you see today. Hint: Look at the 330k mark. Also check your steepest temperature growth numbers too. They appear to fall short of the 330k mark as well. Also check out the sea level growth at the 330k mark. (How does this work into your whole religion purview, Do Adam and Eve go back that far?)

WHERE WERE ALL TEH SUV'S, FARTING COWS, FLYING JETS, AND COAL PLANTS 400,000 years ago/330,000 years ago/240,000 years ago/210,000 years ago, 130,000 years ago, and 10,000 years ago?

I love this graph, even with its numbers estimated by data which might or might not be accurate, because it shows a natural earth cycle in temperatures, sea levels, and CO2 levels. Lets say it again for good measure... natural earth cycle. ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Do I think man can clean up the mess its made? Sure. Folks need to learn to respect the environment they live in without shitting all over it. But dont sell me this BS that man's going to cause the earth to assplode in the next 50 years and then make it so ungodly expensive for me to live in that I cant afford naught but the cheap plastic shit that has a half-life of 50,000 years. Sell that to someone else who's buying, I'm certainly not interested.

Lets at least get through 2012 first...

[Cephalopod]

You really need to reread the chart again. Please review the CO2 levels again from far right to far left and tell me if you dont see higher estimated levels than you see today. Hint: Look at the 330k mark. Also check your steepest temperature growth numbers too. They appear to fall short of the 330k mark as well. Also check out the sea level growth at the 330k mark. (How does this work into your whole religion purview, Do Adam and Eve go back that far?)


I think you may want to look at the chart again. In particular, please look at the farthest right datapoint. Hint: it may be higher than you are looking.

[Gan]

I think you may want to look at the chart again. In particular, please look at the farthest right datapoint. Hint: it may be higher than you are looking.

I stand corrected. I was reading to the line, not up the line.

*on the CO2 line.

[Cephalopod]

I was reading to the line, not up the line.

http://wisportsconsin.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/spaceballs-right-now.jpg

I said across her nose, not up it!

[Gan]

So what do you think caused the previous peaks in this series of cycles? Previous troughs, expansions, and recessions (to steal from the business cycle vernacular)?

Dinosaur farting?

Comets?

Volcanoes?

Aliens?

God farting?

Open door here...

[EasternBrand]

I believe consensus is that slight shifts in the Earth's orbit are the primary cause of the cycle, and the reason they're so regular. The cycles are amplified by feedback loops, so that when it starts warming and ice melts, the Earth absorbs more heat, and so on. Then when the Earth tilts again, it begins to cool a bit, water freezes, and the Earth reflects more heat.

[Gan]

So lets look at the graph again.
http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll102/learningtewfly/chart.jpg

If the existence of civilized man (if you can call us that) arrives around the peak of the current tilting cycle, what do you think is going to happen when the shit starts cooling down?

Of course I realize that I'm talking a span of 20,000 to 80,000 years from now; and I'm making the assumption that we're close to if not at our peak of the 'tilting cycle'.

It seems to me that the earth is going to do whatever it wants to do and we're just along for the ride. Or at the very least, our efforts will pad the beginning effects of an eminent long cooling (ice age) period.

[EasternBrand]

I think the primary concern is how we are going to affect those feedback loops.

The argument, as I understand it, goes like this: if man causes more warming, then more ice melts, and the warming cycle winds up way outside the bounds of at least the last 400,000 years. If the climate shifts so drastically in such a short span of time, very few currently thriving species will be able to make the shift with it. In the past, of course, species have evolved to meet the new climate in a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, so even though environmental change is more rapid, life on Earth is almost certainly not imperiled. But the question that climatologists are posing with this data is whether or not that life will bear any resemblance whatsoever to any of the ecosystems in which humans have evolved over the last 100,000 years. When the Earth does tilt again, and the cooling process begins, it may look nothing like what it's looked like since we first arrived on the scene, and huge regions, especially poor and developing ones, are going to be entirely unprepared.

[Cephalopod]

It seems to me that the earth is going to do whatever it wants to do and we're just along for the ride. Or at the very least, our efforts will pad the beginning effects of an eminent long cooling (ice age) period.

For the most part, this is entirely true -- on a larger scale, the Earth is going to keep on keepin' on.

But with as many as 620,000 years until we enter the next ice age (see my previous post, responding to SHM), the fact that we (humans) have accelerated climate change means that issues we may not have had to deal with for thousands of years (if at all) become a reality within a hundred years. (I'm somewhat dubious on shorter-term impacts.)

I'm going to steal something from Coby Beck, because it covers my general feelings on why we can't let anthropogenic climate change go ignored:


Rapid change is the real danger. Human habits and infrastructure are suited to particular weather patterns and sea levels, as are ecosystems and animal behaviors. The rate at which global temperature is rising today is likely unique in the history of our species.

This kind of sudden change is rare even in geological history, though perhaps not unprecedented. So the planet may have been through similar things before -- that sounds reassuring, right?

Not so much. Once you look at the impact similar changes had on biodiversity at the time, the existence of historical precedent becomes anything but reassuring. Rapid climate change is the prime suspect in most mass extinction events, including the Great Dying some 250 million years ago, in which 90% of all life went extinct.

What we know about ecosystems, and what geologic history demonstrates, is that dramatic climate changes -- up or down or sideways -- are a tremendous shock to the biosphere and cause mass extinction events. That, all in all, is not likely to be a good thing.

[Latrinsorm]

It seems to me that the earth is going to do whatever it wants to do and we're just along for the ride.Nachos touched on this, but I wanted to further expound on his or her thoughts from an urban perspective. Consider some of the American cities that are at least partially at sea level: New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Diego, Baltimore, San Francisco, Boston, Jacksonville, Seattle, Miami. Certainly they won't be entirely flooded, but what happens if the oceans rise 10 meters? Where do those people live now? Where do those businesses go? Cities come to a standstill when a crummy foot of snow hits the ground, how are we going to handle meters of standing water? New Orleans still hasn't fully recovered, what happens when every city needs levees?

People asked to reduce consumption sometimes talk about not wanting to have to give up the fruits of civilization: that may not be a choice we can make.

[Cephalopod]

Cities come to a standstill when a crummy foot of snow hits the ground, how are we going to handle meters of standing water?

I'm not a girl. :(

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

Source on this? This isn't quite what research based on the Milankovitch cycles and related research show, but it is a common misconception:



Other research shows the next ice age may be as far out as 620,000 years (http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/articles/html.format/orb_forc.html).

Section 2 of the IPCC WG1 report (http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/072.htm) covers this pretty thoroughly.


NOAA Paleoclimatology
Illinois State Museum http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/
Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary by Jonathan Adams (1.), Mark Maslin (2.) & Ellen Thomas (3.)
Global Change Research Information Office
Department of Atmospheric Science and Earth System Science Laboratory - Dr. Christy
Remembrance of Things Past: Greenhouse Lessons from the Geologic Record by Thomas Crowley

[Latrinsorm]

I'm not a girl. :(I said OR her, his OR her! It's not my fault English has no good gender-neutral pronouns, I've tried pretty much all of them and they're more trouble than they're worth.

[Gan]

Nachos touched on this, but I wanted to further expound on his or her thoughts from an urban perspective. Consider some of the American cities that are at least partially at sea level: New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Diego, Baltimore, San Francisco, Boston, Jacksonville, Seattle, Miami. Certainly they won't be entirely flooded, but what happens if the oceans rise 10 meters? Where do those people live now? Where do those businesses go? Cities come to a standstill when a crummy foot of snow hits the ground, how are we going to handle meters of standing water? New Orleans still hasn't fully recovered, what happens when every city needs levees?

People asked to reduce consumption sometimes talk about not wanting to have to give up the fruits of civilization: that may not be a choice we can make.

Its almost as if humans have forgotten about adaptation if I understand you correctly. That being said, businesses move all the time, people move all the time. Change happens! Those who adapt succeed, those who do not fail. We are migratory beings, remember?

If water level rises - resources shift inland along with the population. Its not like we live in Canada where 90% of our landmass is useless. Will it suck? Sure. But we'll survive. We dont live in mud huts anymore nor are we limited to the basic necessities being only available from natural resources. We grow shit indoors now, we live in climate controlled environments, etc. etc. etc.

Its that same theory as people living in the desert complaining because there's no food or water. NO SHIT! Move! I think there's a Sam Kinneson line in there somewhere...

I dont think we're going to see the ocean water levels rise so drastically within the next 50 to 100 years like Gore says. Might it rise over the next thousand years? Possibly, at least until the next ice age starts - then history shows that the levels recede again. And our coastlines will then become middle America and people will be able to drive across the Gulf of Mexico and from Alaska to Russia.

But before we think about what to do in 50,000 years, we have to get past the 2012 prediction and Al Queda posessing nuclear weapons. Mankind has provided many more efficient means of its demise than what the climate or the earth will dish out.

We'll kill each other off way before the earth does. ;)

[EasternBrand]

Its almost as if humans have forgotten about adaptation if I understand you correctly. That being said, businesses move all the time, people move all the time. Change happens! Those who adapt succeed, those who do not fail. We are migratory beings, remember?

If water level rises - resources shift inland along with the population. Its not like we live in Canada where 90% of our landmass is useless. Will it suck? Sure. But we'll survive. We dont live in mud huts anymore nor are we limited to the basic necessities being only available from natural resources. We grow shit indoors now, we live in climate controlled environments, etc. etc. etc.

Its that same theory as people living in the desert complaining because there's no food or water. NO SHIT! Move! I think there's a Sam Kinneson line in there somewhere...

I dont think we're going to see the ocean water levels rise so drastically within the next 50 to 100 years like Gore says. Might it rise over the next thousand years? Possibly, at least until the next ice age starts - then history shows that the levels recede again. And our coastlines will then become middle America and people will be able to drive across the Gulf of Mexico and from Alaska to Russia.

But before we think about what to do in 50,000 years, we have to get past the 2012 prediction and Al Queda posessing nuclear weapons. Mankind has provided many more efficient means of its demise than what the climate or the earth will dish out.

We'll kill each other off way before the earth does. ;)

You're probably right, insofar as people will find a way around it. Many fortunate people in developed countries will survive due precisely to the amenities they have. But hundreds of millions of people don't have access to first-world amenities, and wouldn't be able to survive. The moral and ethical questions are extremely murky: if developed, industrialized nations are causing a problem, the most severe impacts of which fall most heavily on poor, third-world countries, and the developed nations have options to limit or curtail the effects of the problem without bringing upon themselves second- or third-world problems, should they have an obligation to do so?

[Gan]

Life really isnt fair.

[EasternBrand]

Can you see why, given the question posed, many people would consider that answer, standing by itself, extremely callous?

There must be some sort of cost-benefit analysis that wouldn't just equivocate all types of harm with all levels of sacrifice, and I'm not advocating this equivocation. So in one respect, you're right; we can't possibly say, "Well, 50 million Indians are going to get washed away, so we have to shut down our manufacturing plants." For instance, we're fine with cost-benefit analysis when it comes to regulation of, say, our drinking water. We look at the data that say N parts per million of Chemical X will cause cancer in 1/100,000 people, knowing for certain that many people will get cancer and die from the water fountain. But eliminating Chemical X entirely would be so unbearably expensive that it would put serious dents in the economy. So we regulate Chemical X, allowing N parts per million. That's the way most of our regulation works. But the more I look into the issue, the less I feel we can afford to justify inaction.

There's another argument, too, but I haven't really seen anything in-depth on it, so I'll just sketch it out roughly. I don't know how well the argument would play out if you worked the numbers, but it seems pretty intuitive and is essentially a take on the old maxim "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." So let's say no money is spent on preventing further increases in temperature, and some form of the scenario above plays out five hundred years down the line. People are forced to make extreme changes in order to adapt, from the way they live to where they live. The markets will probably fold, especially given New York, London, and Tokyo's proximity to the shore, but maybe they'll survive in some form and there will just be a serious crash. No matter how you slice it, a serious global crisis would cause trillions of dollars worth of economic harm: to lost productivity, to lost goods, to lost services, to lost opportunities. If there is good, reliable data that $N spent now can prevent $>N dollar harm, surely that's reason to spend a lot of Ns.

[Gan]

I agree, it is callous. Crass, and completely uncaring. Hell, call me Darwin even!

I wish we lived in utopia. I wish no one ever died, harmed another, committed any crimes, ever went hungry, was never unhappy, and had their own rainbow and unicorn in their backyard. But the reality of it is, its not that way. Not everyone is created equal and live is cruel, brutish and short.

:shrug:

[Warriorbird]

I suggest all you partisan hacks take a look at some of the suggestions Dubner and Levitt give in Superfreakonomics. Both sides. I like em.

[EasternBrand]

I agree, it is callous. Crass, and completely uncaring. Hell, call me Darwin even!

I wish we lived in utopia. I wish no one ever died, harmed another, committed any crimes, ever went hungry, was never unhappy, and had their own rainbow and unicorn in their backyard. But the reality of it is, its not that way. Not everyone is created equal and live is cruel, brutish and short.

:shrug:

The issue I take with this sentiment isn't that I'm trying to manufacture utopia, because I'm not. I also happen to think utopia would get extremely boring extremely quickly. But this sentiment can be so easily stretched to cover anything and justify a wholesale lack of regulation. If it's easier to make money by dumping an unregulated amount of industrial pollutants directly into rivers and oceans, even though it will cost millions to clean up later, well, that's just the way things go. If we could make more money now by forgoing sustainable forestry, let's go whole hog. Nevermind that we can avoid these things, it's just easier to justify when you can chalk it all up to a brutish existence. An extreme example using just this same logic would be claiming power based on strength. Why not just let the guy with the biggest sword can claim the throne? He's bigger and stronger and doesn't require the will of the people to rule if he can cow them into submission.

The issue should be reframed from one where the only choices seem to be between panic and nonchalance, to one where it's in our self-interest to act rationally. A philosophical reliance on Darwin applies in a neutral setting, but if it's true that our actions are causing serious consequences that can be avoided or curtailed, then the setting is no longer neutral.

[Gan]

A safe and happy boring none the less.

[EasternBrand]

I suggest all you partisan hacks take a look at some of the suggestions Dubner and Levitt give in Superfreakonomics. Both sides. I like em.

Appreciate the reference, I'll take a look, even though I'm sure you weren't referring to me with that partisan hackery nonsense.

[Warriorbird]

We're all guilty. It was more a Nachos + Republican chorus nudge than anything.

[Latrinsorm]

Its almost as if humans have forgotten about adaptation if I understand you correctly.We absolutely have, in a sense, because advanced civilization requires extreme specialization - drop a computer programmer, a mechanic, and a neurosurgeon off in the jungle with no supplies and they'd all be dead in a week, no matter how much Discovery Channel they watched. Individuals do not "adapt" in a Darwinian sense, individuals die. Life adapts, almost always at the expense of not only beings but entire species.
That being said, businesses move all the time, people move all the time.Individual people, individual businesses, sure. Millions of people? Thousands of businesses? And again, where are they moving to: Denver? Dallas? St. Louis? East Rutherford? There comes a point where the amount of forcibly relocated people simply overwhelms any infrastructure they land in. It's taken us hundreds of years to build America, it's not something we can just pick up and move.
I agree, it is callous. Crass, and completely uncaring. Hell, call me Darwin even!Some might be tempted to call you Mlle. Antoinette.

[Gan]

We absolutely have, in a sense, because advanced civilization requires extreme specialization - drop a computer programmer, a mechanic, and a neurosurgeon off in the jungle with no supplies and they'd all be dead in a week, no matter how much Discovery Channel they watched. Individuals do not "adapt" in a Darwinian sense, individuals die. Life adapts, almost always at the expense of not only beings but entire species.
So nobody ever switches professions? Re-educates? Rural America is not the jungle either. Try finding an example thats closer to our current level of civilization in the US... Sheesh, you're totally out in left field with this supposition.



Individual people, individual businesses, sure. Millions of people? Thousands of businesses? And again, where are they moving to: Denver? Dallas? St. Louis? East Rutherford? There comes a point where the amount of forcibly relocated people simply overwhelms any infrastructure they land in.
Who said they all have to move to the same place? Try broadening your scope of the whole landmass of non-coastal continental United States. ;) I know rural America can be frightening - but the space is there!


It's taken us hundreds of years to build America, it's not something we can just pick up and move.
Its a good thing we have so many vehicles and all these roads/highways/interstates with which to travel on. And who the hell said we could do this overnight? It will take time and it will suck but it wont be the end of civilization if the oceans rise a few feet and some cities get wet. Shit happens and we survive.

[Latrinsorm]

Its a good thing we have so many vehicles and all these roads/highways/interstates with which to travel on. And who the hell said we could do this overnight? It will take time and it will suck but it wont be the end of civilization if the oceans rise a few feet and some cities get wet. Shit happens and we survive.This is the crux of the matter. How well did New Orleans "survive"? How about each place Katrina refugees went? Some places did fine, sure, but how's the murder rate in Houston doing?

Now instead of New Orleans, we need to relocate some undetermined part of 20 major cities. You talk about rural America and all the space there - space is precisely the problem! You can give the occupants of twenty Manhattan blocks all the space you want, how are you going to give them lodging? Food? Clean water? Electricity? Somehow I think Grandpappy's barn just isn't going to cut it (besides the fact that a tree just fell on my particular Grandpappy's barn).

And if it's ever done, we will have to do this overnight because no one's going to do anything until the water is literally lapping at their feet. Talk about human nature, this is it to a T.

[Cephalopod]

I suggest all you partisan hacks take a look at some of the suggestions Dubner and Levitt give in Superfreakonomics. Both sides. I like em.

I've been meaning to pick this up. I enjoyed Freakonomics a lot. (Check out Malcom Gladwell's books -- pretty much any of them -- for a similar type of insights.)

Unfortunately, this book has gotten a lot of bad reports on its science w.r.t. climate change:

Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places. (http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/12/superfreakonomics-errors-levitt-caldeira-myhrvold/) (ClimateProgress, an admittedly biased source)

Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aVKXZg_Z.vMY) (Bloomberg)

Expertise, and "expertise" (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/10/expertise_and_expertise) (The Economist)

A biased but rational blogger, Stoat (http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/10/superfreakonomics_global_cooli.php)

The Freaky Science of SuperFreakonomics (http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/10/superfreakonomics-freaky-science) (Mother Jones)

New Book "SuperFreakonomics" Mischaracterizes Climate Science (http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/book-superfreakonomics.html)

I'm still planning to read it, though, and maybe the science isn't what you're referring to.

[Gan]

This is the crux of the matter. How well did New Orleans "survive"?
I suppose you're going to ignore variables like poor planning, poor leadership and ineffective logistics by LA and NO officials in addition to a populace that chose to either 'ride it out' or wait for someone to come get them. Sad part is I expected this from you. :(


How about each place Katrina refugees went? Some places did fine, sure, but how's the murder rate in Houston doing?
So now all the refugees from NO are criminals and thats where they landed is in Houston? Awesome. :lol:
The crime rate in Houston rose when we saw an influx of refugees from Katrina - but with time, effective law enforcement and a great local economy, the Katrina related crime is minimal at best. Big surprise here but people adapted to their new environment.


Now instead of New Orleans, we need to relocate some undetermined part of 20 major cities. You talk about rural America and all the space there - space is precisely the problem! You can give the occupants of twenty Manhattan blocks all the space you want, how are you going to give them lodging? Food? Clean water? Electricity? Somehow I think Grandpappy's barn just isn't going to cut it (besides the fact that a tree just fell on my particular Grandpappy's barn).
You're making the great assumption that they are going to be forceably relocated without any resources of their own; and that they will all be forced into one area that is ill equipped to handle the influx. Talk about a narrow vision.


And if it's ever done, we will have to do this overnight because no one's going to do anything until the water is literally lapping at their feet. Talk about human nature, this is it to a T.
I suppose the real question is what sort of timespan do you anticipate the water level rising? A week? A month? A year? A decade? Do you think it will hit like a tsunami? Or will it be a gradual encroachment?

I dont see it happening overnight. I dont see the populace waiting until its in their house to move when its evident that its not a temporary thing. I dont see folks sitting on rooftops waiting for rescue.

I do see folks relocating when it becomes clear that the area they chose to live in is becomming unfit for living. And through relocating they'll either choose to live off of government assistance or provide for themselves with their own resources, as its always been done. I'll let you figure out which category of people fall into those scenarios...

Here's that Darwin idea again.

[Daniel]

Life really isnt fair.

Yea, but god forbid anyone use this rationale for a policy you don't support or like.

[Gan]

God forbid indeed.

[Latrinsorm]

I suppose you're going to ignore variables like poor planning, poor leadership and ineffective logistics by LA and NO officials in addition to a populace that chose to either 'ride it out' or wait for someone to come get them. Sad part is I expected this from you.No city in America has an effective plan for relocating itself any distance, let alone miles inland. It's not a question of "planning" or "leadership", it is logistically impossible to move a power plant, or a skyscraper, or three thousand miles of water pipes, or etc. etc. We're not the Mayans, we have no concept of permanently abandoning an established city.
So now all the refugees from NO are criminals and thats where they landed is in Houston? Awesome.If you read "some" as "none of the" and "but" as "and", yes, that would be an accurate rendition of what I said. It's like the Ten Commandments, if you ignore all the "nots", woo! Jehovah gets a hell of a lot more interesting.
I suppose the real question is what sort of timespan do you anticipate the water level rising?Faster than people have practical plans for. You say things like "when it becomes clear", "when its evident that its not a temporary thing", as though everyone suddenly had a doctorate in climatology. It'll be "evident" when people are wading to Walmart, and not a moment before.

If we started moving Houston and its people today (and everyone was miraculously on board with the idea), how long do you think it would take to have its facsimile up and running? How long do you think we have?

[Parkbandit]

So you know the ocean water levels will be rising? Really? What is that timeline?

You will excuse me if I don't just accept the science is settled as you obviously have.. from someone who claims the middle of the Earth is "millions and millions of degrees"...

[Latrinsorm]

I'm not sure why you think Al Gore has anything to do with anything that's going on in this thread.

And of course the ocean levels are going to keep rising. Here are some relevant scientific points, you tell me which require "settling":

1. When ice melts, it turns into water (as opposed to rainbows or gum drops).
2. Ice is melting on a global scale.

[Parkbandit]

I'm not sure why you think Al Gore has anything to do with anything that's going on in this thread.

And of course the ocean levels are going to keep rising. Here are some relevant scientific points, you tell me which require "settling":

1. When ice melts, it turns into water (as opposed to rainbows or gum drops).
2. Ice is melting on a global scale.

So, the question remains.. is ice melting due to man's CO2 emissions or is it like it has always been on this planet.. a climatic cycle and natural?

And you really don't think Al Gore has anything to do with this global warming crisis? Really?

[Gan]

No city in America has an effective plan for relocating itself any distance, let alone miles inland. It's not a question of "planning" or "leadership", it is logistically impossible to move a power plant, or a skyscraper, or three thousand miles of water pipes, or etc. etc. We're not the Mayans, we have no concept of permanently abandoning an established city.
Stop being stupid. Stop being so literal. Focus on the word abandon. If water levels rise to the point where its now sea level in city streets then the city is effectively abandoned.


Faster than people have practical plans for. You say things like "when it becomes clear", "when its evident that its not a temporary thing", as though everyone suddenly had a doctorate in climatology. It'll be "evident" when people are wading to Walmart, and not a moment before.
I disagree. The rise in water levels would be gradual if at all.


If we started moving Houston and its people today (and everyone was miraculously on board with the idea), how long do you think it would take to have its facsimile up and running? How long do you think we have?
Why would there have to be a facsimilie? Its as if you think the city leaders would strike north, claim a huge plot of unowned land and stick a shovel in the ground and proclaim to all "we shall build here!". People are going to gravitate to where infrastructure already exists. Not all Houstonians are going to gravitate to the same place either, why would they?

[Gan]

I'm not sure why you think Al Gore has anything to do with anything that's going on in this thread.
Yea, why would Al Gore be associated with anything relating to Global Warming, Climatology and rising sea level theory...


And of course the ocean levels are going to keep rising. Here are some relevant scientific points, you tell me which require "settling":

1. When ice melts, it turns into water (as opposed to rainbows or gum drops).
2. Ice is melting on a global scale.
Ice on land? Or Ice floating in water? Pleae provide details of your choice...

[Cephalopod]

So, the question remains.. is ice melting due to man's CO2 emissions or is it like it has always been on this planet.. a climatic cycle and natural?


If at this point you are still asking this, the argument is going in circles indefinitely. The scientific consensus is for anthropogenic climate change. If you choose to ignore the cited scientific evidence in favor of a loud minority of anthropogenic climate change skeptics with no sound basis for their dissent or your 'gut' feeling that the recent accelerated climate change is natural, nothing will change your mind, and that's OK.

I can show you hundreds of papers and millions of sets of scientific data that point towards anthropogenic climate change rather than 'natural' climate cycles. No matter how much people stuff their fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING, the facts are very plain and clear.

1) Anthropogenic climate change is a reality
2) Sea levels will rise due to factors caused by anthropogenic climate change
3) ???
4) Profit.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm moving to Kansas before 2180 (I expect to live a long life) when Cape Cod gets sunken underwater (http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=41.9094,-70.0117&z=7&m=14) and rejoins with The Great Old Ones.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

You are convinced and believe the papers and research you've read, and I'm convinced and believe what I've read. Neither "side" is overwhelming, and neither is a minority. You like to dismiss arguments not like your own as gut feelings and minority opinion when you can easily find argument and counter argument at every point.

When California drops into the ocean because of an earthquake caused by man and causes the oceans to rise 14 meters I will be happy because California will be gone.

[Cephalopod]

You are convinced and believe the papers and research you've read, and I'm convinced and believe what I've read. Neither "side" is overwhelming, and neither is a minority. You like to dismiss arguments not like your own as gut feelings and minority opinion when you can easily find argument and counter argument at every point.


I don't agree. I feel there is an overwhelming 'side' and a very loud denialist minority 'side'. PB has stated his feeling is that climate change is not man-driven, so that was the specific gut feeling I'm referring to.

And I believe the reason I feel I am correct is because the minority opinion does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. I'm willing to accept that you feel the same about your opinion -- that the scientific majority cannot stand up to scientific scrutiny from a skeptical minority. I just disagree, and believe there is ample evidence to back that disagreement.



When California drops into the ocean because of an earthquake caused by man and causes the oceans to rise 14 meters I will be happy because California will be gone.

Agree.

[Warriorbird]

I fall somewhere in the middle on this. I think human action contributes SOME to global warming.

I don't think the planet is going to turn into a volcano ala that fake Ben Stiller action movie in Tropic Thunder.

But...

I also don't feel that we need to view the small contribution as justification to do whatever the fuck we want environmentally.

Unscientific or no, I think human ingenuity can bring forth pragmatic solutions to deal with our contribution and maybe even cyclical warming or shifting, which I consider a far greater threat.

[Parkbandit]

If at this point you are still asking this, the argument is going in circles indefinitely. The scientific consensus is for anthropogenic climate change. If you choose to ignore the cited scientific evidence in favor of a loud minority of anthropogenic climate change skeptics with no sound basis for their dissent or your 'gut' feeling that the recent accelerated climate change is natural, nothing will change your mind, and that's OK.

I can show you hundreds of papers and millions of sets of scientific data that point towards anthropogenic climate change rather than 'natural' climate cycles. No matter how much people stuff their fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING, the facts are very plain and clear.

1) Anthropogenic climate change is a reality
2) Sea levels will rise due to factors caused by anthropogenic climate change
3) ???
4) Profit.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm moving to Kansas before 2180 (I expect to live a long life) when Cape Cod gets sunken underwater (http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=41.9094,-70.0117&z=7&m=14) and rejoins with The Great Old Ones.

I'm thinking the checklist is more like:

1) Create an environmental crisis. Global Cooling didn't quite catch on.. let's try acid rain! Wait, that didn't really catch on either.. what about Global WARMING!!
2) Create a series of events that will happen if we don't believe in Global Warming and call those who question this "settled science" "Flat Earthers"
3) Hope like hell ONE of these many predictions happen.
4) Profit, profit and PROFIT!!!

I have a good friend in Canada who can't wait for Global Warming to start.

[Parkbandit]

I fall somewhere in the middle on this. I think human action contributes SOME to global warming.

I don't think the planet is going to turn into a volcano ala that fake Ben Stiller action movie in Tropic Thunder.

But...

I also don't feel that we need to view the small contribution as justification to do whatever the fuck we want environmentally.

Why does it have to be one extreme or another with you? Why is it if you don't believe in Global Warming, then you automatically think we should do whatever we want to environmentally?

I don't think I've read one single piece of news that had some sane person on record saying "We should be able to do whatever the fuck we want to do" regarding the environment.

[Warriorbird]

People drift to extremes. Somebody proposes anything environmentally related these days and you have Republicans going, "We shouldn't DO IT! GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT REAL!"

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

People drift to extremes. Somebody proposes anything environmentally related these days and you have Republicans going, "We shouldn't DO IT! GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT REAL!"

How much are we spending in Iraq?!

[Parkbandit]

People drift to extremes. Somebody proposes anything environmentally related these days and you have Republicans going, "We shouldn't DO IT! GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT REAL!"

No Republican in the past few decades has proposed that people should be able to do anything they want regarding the environment. Stop being a hyperbolic fool.

[Warriorbird]

How much are we spending in Iraq?!

So presupposing your ha ha ha so lulzy point were correct... you're suggesting that all environmental spending would be wrong because one segment is questionable.

The bit you miss is the Democrats don't typically bring themselves forth as a party of fiscal responsibility (The Republicans do, and thus my oft repeated point)... but they do do a decent job of promoting environmental legislation. If you've taken a look at the systematic dismantling of environmental policy under every modern Republican administration, they can't hold forth anything in that regard. Sure, John Warner might've been one of the proposers of the original (and highly successful) cap and trade program on sulfur dioxide... but cap and trade is now SATAN to the Republican Party. There really aren't any serious examples of Republicans doing much of anything environmental since the 90s because they no longer have the balls or the un lobbyist influenced clout to do anything that's ANTI BUSINESS.

[Warriorbird]

No Republican in the past few decades has proposed that people should be able to do anything they want regarding the environment. Stop being a hyperbolic fool.

No... they've merely decimated any environmental legislation they could, defunded countless programs, and sold off thousands of acres of private land. Uranium strip mining in Virginia is a TOTALLY REASONABLE IDEA to the new Republican governor of Virginia.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

I haven't once said environmental spending is wrong.

I was just adding the statement you somehow forgot to your typical "republican's say/do whatever" line of anecdotal BS. I wanted to make sure you didn't feel like you needed to post it again later.

[Cephalopod]

I'm thinking the checklist is more like:
1) Create an environmental crisis. Global Cooling didn't quite catch on.. let's try acid rain! Wait, that didn't really catch on either.. what about Global WARMING!!


Global cooling... mostly a media manufacture, okay.

Acid rain... I'm not clear on what you're saying here. Acid rain is a reality, it's a problem, and things have been done to work on correcting the problem.



2) Create a series of events that will happen if we don't believe in Global Warming and call those who question this "settled science" "Flat Earthers"


The events 'that will happen' are not settled science. The fact that it is happening is settled science.



3) Hope like hell ONE of these many predictions happen.


Well, since so far the IPCC's predictions from its 2001 report have been shown to be largely true (and even understated) as of the 2007 report, looks like we're well on the way!

I'll even ignore the 2009 'Copenhagen Diagnosis' by the IPCC scientists (but not the IPCC), since I feel it's nothing more than a propaganda piece, but that shows that even the 2007 report was understating the potential impacts.



4) Profit, profit and PROFIT!!!


At least we both see the same conclusion!

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

No... they've merely decimated any environmental legislation they could, defunded countless programs, and sold off thousands of acres of private land. Uranium strip mining in Virginia is a TOTALLY REASONABLE IDEA to the new Republican governor of Virginia.

Really? ZOMG. Where can I get at this private land that's for sale? Did all the funding from defunded (is that a word?) programs go to the war in Iraq?!

Do you really want to assign stupidity to a party? How do you define sex?

[Warriorbird]

Really? ZOMG. Where can I get at this private land that's for sale? Did all the funding from defunded (is that a word?) programs go to the war in Iraq?!

Do you really want to assign stupidity to a party? How do you define sex?

Become a corporation or a developer with clout. Apply for admittance to an auction or make a bid directly to the Department of the Interior. It works somewhat less well under Obama.

A lot of the funding went towards developing Homeland Security.

I love serious responses to non serious posts.

[Parkbandit]

No... they've merely decimated any environmental legislation they could, defunded countless programs, and sold off thousands of acres of private land. Uranium strip mining in Virginia is a TOTALLY REASONABLE IDEA to the new Republican governor of Virginia.

So only Republicans are responsible for any of the above? Do you have any cite sources on this Republican attack on Mother Earth.. or do you want to just continue to make shit up?

And PS - I'm for Uranium strip mining in Virginia, if it can be done so in an environmentally responsible manner.

[Parkbandit]

I love serious responses to non serious posts.

Oh? Which post(s) of yours weren't serious? Or did they become non-serious after we pointed out how stupid they were?

[Cephalopod]

And PS - I'm for Uranium strip mining in Virginia, if it can be done so in an environmentally responsible manner.

Please define environmentally responsible strip mining. Reforesting an area after decimating an ecosystem?

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

Please define environmentally responsible strip mining. Reforesting an area after decimating an ecosystem?

What would be acceptable to you?

[Cephalopod]

What would be acceptable to you?

What would be acceptable to me, or what would I consider environmentally responsible?

I don't believe there is any form of strip mining that is environmentally responsible, and I imagine it's impossible for this to ever be achieved.

I'm willing to accept that strip mining is a neccessary evil, though, and I'm not against it outright. Attempts at reforestation after strip mining are certainly good, although there's no way to recover the destroyed ecosystem completely.

I'm just wondering, since PB tossed out 'environmentally responsible', what that would consist of.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

I was just curious.

I love the outdoors and wildlife as much as anyone, and I don't want it to disappear - but the world is getting smaller, and unless alternative fuels are discovered we've got to get it from somewhere.

[Cephalopod]

I was just curious.

I love the outdoors and wildlife as much as anyone, and I don't want it to disappear - but the world is getting smaller, and unless alternative fuels are discovered we've got to get it from somewhere.

Same.

<waxingprosaic>
Similarly, for all of my insistence that anthropogenic climate change IS happening, I'm not in support of the massive changes in human behaviour that it would take to 'reverse' the climate change, especially since its just as likely that whatever massive changes were enacted would have some unforseen negative impact as well. I'd like to see smaller changes more sensitive to our direct impacts on wildlife and global ecology, rather than major shifts in attempting to halt glacial melting or modify atmospheric carbon levels.

So, I accept it as a problem, but there are no good solutions out there. The solutions being presented (in Copenhagen, for example) are either misguided or seem like they would be totally ineffective. I don't think there will be a global consensus on handling the issues, and ultimately I don't believe anything worthwhile will be done.

In the end, the climate changes (that I believe we have accelerated) will occur and we'll pay the price in some way. Maybe the price won't be too high, and climate change skeptics will be vindicated.
</waxingprosaic>

I'm a cynic.

[Warriorbird]

So only Republicans are responsible for any of the above? Do you have any cite sources on this Republican attack on Mother Earth.. or do you want to just continue to make shit up?

And PS - I'm for Uranium strip mining in Virginia, if it can be done so in an environmentally responsible manner.

WALL OF TEXT time!

Bush withdrew from Kyoto (since you believe that global warming is totally uninfluenced by man, air pollution is just fine, right?)

IRIS assessments, which were largely how toxins were regulated in America, were constantly rejected under the Bush administration. Toxic compounds that were declared 'mission critical' by other agencies could have their regulations completely diluted. Alternately, if Bush's OMB decided they were 'too expensive' the EPA reports could be completely altered.

60% of EPA scientists said they'd faced political interference with their work.

Superfund cleanup spending fell 11% during Bushes first term.

Let's take it timeline wise though... this is probably the easiest 'Do my work for me' task you've ever handed out. I'd love to see your 'positive things Dubya did for the environment compared to even his Dad' report.

Bush's first Secretary for the Interior, Gail Norton, primarily had experience working for the mining, logging, and oil industries.

Next up, he rolled back the "Roadless Rule" that Clinton laid down... this opened up 58 million acres of National Forest to logging, roadbuilding, and coal oil and gas leasing.

This was followed up by cancelling new standards for arsenic in drinking water.

Then came the first stab at drilling on public lands, a mandate not to be concerned about asbestos around ground zero, and removal of rat poison standards for schools.

Then 'Clear Skies.' 78 million more tons of coal use and a weakening of the Clean Air act.

Then the EPA is in court over gerrymandering the boundaries of the Yucca Mountain storage site to make it appear safe.

7 Superfund cleanup sites then got left to communities to deal with.

Oil drilling in Padre Island then... a place that gets tons of tourists (not just a few polar bears).

Then 'thinning forests is beneficial for wildlife due to reduced risk of fire.'

The 'Healthy Forests Initiative.' made a bunch of logging exempt from environmental review.

Then oil and gas drilling in millions more acres or forests across Utah (Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park on the list).

The quite Republican EPA director, Christy Whitman, resigned.

Then the EPA lifted a ban on selling land contaminated with PCBs.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-01-epa-usat_x.htm

Moving further against the 'Roadless Rule', the Tongass Forest in Alaska was completely exempted.

The Bush administration tries to prevent a requirement installing modern pollution controls in new power plants, but the courts blocked it.

Formaldehyde then gets declared 1/10000th as toxic.

A NASA scientist goes off on the Bush EPA et al for looking as bad as some of the pro global warming people currently are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/science/26climate.html?_r=1&th

It's okay to release sewage into public waterways as long as it has been mixed with water! A huge part of the war Democrats have had to fight against local Republicans environmentally started here.

We should only combat mercury pollution voluntarily! All those businessowners are responsible like PB and SHM and would NEVER pollute.

EPA funding is being spent on PR for Bush's then somewhat problematic legacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18contracts.html?_r=1

Then it becomes voluntary for corporations to cleanup oil and gas drilling on public land through the Bureau of Land Management.

The EPA found a whole lot of toxins in the soil in the aftermath of Katrina. None of it was cleaned up by the end of the Bush administration.

The NASA chief spoke out on issues with attempting to stifle evidence of global warming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18contracts.html?_r=1

Then the Secretary of the Interior resigned to go work for Shell Oil.

Then small communities are allowed to have water that doesn't meet EPA standards still be declared 'restorative of health.'

3,500 chemical factories don't have to meet reporting regulations.

7,124 permits for oil and gas development on public lands then (Should've gotten in on it, PB and SHM)

Questions about formaldehyde in FEMA trailers are squelched.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18contracts.html?_r=1

Grizzly bears are no longer endangered! Colbert was right!

In Bali UN global warming conference, Bush said caps on admissions were anti business.

Then the EPA blocked states from putting out vehicle pollution standards for CO2 and other pollutants.

Wolves no longer endangered!

Oil and gas drilling isn't considered when assessing risks to polar bear safety.

EPA power plant exemptions were apparently illegal. Whoops!
http://somd.com/news/headlines/2008/7176.shtml

The CDC cancelled a report suggesting that 9 million Great Lakes residents (including some PC posters) might've been subjected to PCB, lead, and mercury contamination. They demoted the person who drafted it for saying that blocking it was censorship.
http://somd.com/news/headlines/2008/7176.shtml

Then new smog restrictions, 7-20% higher than the suggested limits by the folks who researched them.

Reduced air regulations at 156 National Parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges, and 24 coal fired power plants allowed to be built near 10 parks.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2008/0424/p13s02-sten.html?page=1

Chemical safety should totally be determined by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy.

Polar Bear seas opened to oil drilling.

20,000 tons of PCBs (imported from Mexico, LOL) to be burned at Port Arthur despite it being banned for over 20 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/19PCB.html?src=tp&pagewanted=all

The White House wouldn't even open messages from the EPA suggesting global warming should be controlled.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/19PCB.html?src=tp&pagewanted=all

At the G8, Bush says everybody else should cut emissions but not us!

Then he lifts an oil drilling ban right after a 12,000 barrel oil spill.

Despite all scientific evidence to the contrary BPA (Bisphenol A) is safe!

Members of the Department of the Interior's Minerals Monitoring Service were apparently shacking up with people they were supposed to be monitoring. Yay family values! Right around the time of a huge drilling vote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html?hp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/10/AR2008091001829.html?hpid=topnews

Rounding things out.... 1.4 million tons of waste disposal got deregulated.

Percholate in drinking water is fine! It's in rocket fuel. It has to be safe!

Carbaryl is a fine pesticide. It might only kill all bees.

Mining company waste burying standards are relaxed. This even extends to uranium mountaintop and strip mining, which worries me deeply about Virginia.

100,000 miles of public land leased to Bush allies near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Dinosaur National Monument, and Nine Mile Canyon. You guys missed out, SHM and PB.

What a legacy!

[Parkbandit]

:rofl:

Which site did you copy all that from?

That's awesome and I'll have to go through it when I'm not on the road.. but let's be at least intellectually honest about Kyoto.. we neither ratified nor withdrew from it. And if memory serves, wasn't the vote unanimously against signing it in the Senate? Something like 98-0? Not sure how you can pin that all on Bush... but I know how Bush is extremely evil.. he probably used an evil Jedi mind trick on all members of the Senate!

Besides, the US military accounts for something ridiculous like 60% of the energy consumption in the US, and that's the *main* reason why we didn't want anything to do with the Kyoto protocol. And this is a direct quote from someone in the state department, so don't even begin to fuck with me on it's authenticy.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

It's funny how "your" wall of text is directly from NRDC.

[Parkbandit]

It's funny how "your" wall of text is directly from NRDC.

:rofl: if that is true.

Nice plagiarism without a cite source. I figured it had to be lifted from somewhere.. if there is one thing WB is besides wrong.. it's lazy.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

He changed some words, but it's clearly a copy from a timeline there.

[Latrinsorm]

People are going to gravitate to where infrastructure already exists.This is the last time I'll make this point: America barely has enough infrastructure to function now. We don't have backups, we don't have spares. If you don't remake the lost cities, there is no place or set of places in America that can tolerate the refugee stress. We're talking about three of the five most populous cities in America. Send 30,000 to live in teepees in Denver, 20,000 to live in shacks in New Jersey, 40,000 to live in trains in St. Louis... you haven't even accounted for Houston refugees yet.
Ice on land? Or Ice floating in water? Pleae provide details of your choice...Not only both, but most importantly the ice that is currently suspended above water that keeps ice on land from turning into ice floating in water. The "weak underbelly" is, as the name suggests, not a structure of immeasurable durability.
So, the question remains.. is ice melting due to man's CO2 emissions or is it like it has always been on this planet.. a climatic cycle and natural?I cannot understand how you can say "like it has always been" when you have a picture directly in front of your face that shows our current state is unprecedented since well before the lifetime of our species. How can I give you an answer when you blatantly ignore that which you disagree with? I may as well be writing in Phoenician.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

I cannot understand how you can say "like it has always been" when you have a picture directly in front of your face that shows our current state is unprecedented since well before the lifetime of our species. How can I give you an answer when you blatantly ignore that which you disagree with? I may as well be writing in Phoenician.

Huh? Couldn't you also say of MANY species? Unprecedented? Be specific and explain what is unprecidented about this "heat wave" that hasn't happened in geological time in the past?

[Parkbandit]

This is the last time I'll make this point: America barely has enough infrastructure to function now. We don't have backups, we don't have spares. If you don't remake the lost cities, there is no place or set of places in America that can tolerate the refugee stress. We're talking about three of the five most populous cities in America. Send 30,000 to live in teepees in Denver, 20,000 to live in shacks in New Jersey, 40,000 to live in trains in St. Louis... you haven't even accounted for Houston refugees yet.Not only both, but most importantly the ice that is currently suspended above water that keeps ice on land from turning into ice floating in water. The "weak underbelly" is, as the name suggests, not a structure of immeasurable durability.I cannot understand how you can say "like it has always been" when you have a picture directly in front of your face that shows our current state is unprecedented since well before the lifetime of our species. How can I give you an answer when you blatantly ignore that which you disagree with? I may as well be writing in Phoenician.

SPOILER ALERT:

I know this might be shocking to you.. but man's time on this planet is a mere instance in the 4.5 BILLION years that this planet has existed. I realize that this conflicts with the Bible teachings.. but it's true.

[Gan]

This is the last time I'll make this point: America barely has enough infrastructure to function now. We don't have backups, we don't have spares. If you don't remake the lost cities, there is no place or set of places in America that can tolerate the refugee stress. We're talking about three of the five most populous cities in America. Send 30,000 to live in teepees in Denver, 20,000 to live in shacks in New Jersey, 40,000 to live in trains in St. Louis... you haven't even accounted for Houston refugees yet.Not only both, but most importantly the ice that is currently suspended above water that keeps ice on land from turning into ice floating in water. The "weak underbelly" is, as the name suggests, not a structure of immeasurable durability.I cannot understand how you can say "like it has always been" when you have a picture directly in front of your face that shows our current state is unprecedented since well before the lifetime of our species. How can I give you an answer when you blatantly ignore that which you disagree with? I may as well be writing in Phoenician.

Lets suffice to say that you're refusing to recognize my point and I'm refusing to recognize yours. I disbelieve your whole premise that we'll wake up one morning underwater and have nowhere to go and we'll all die. Its rather stupid and short sited of human nature. Now if you're basing your premise on how you would react - that I believe. Once your knee high stockings got wet - you would be useless.

[Parkbandit]

Once your knee high stockings got wet - you would be useless.

:rofl:

http://stores.funsockcity.com/catalog/Rainbow%20Stripe%20Knee%20High%20Socks_1.jpg

[Parkbandit]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtzMBfDrpI&feature=player_embedded

I'm sure there's nothing to hide... keep drinking the koolaid kids.

[Parkbandit]

:rofl:

I am watching "The Day the Earth Stood Still".. which is a bad movie before the whole "I'm saving the Earth from you humans" plot reveal.

[Latrinsorm]

Huh? Couldn't you also say of MANY species? Unprecedented? Be specific and explain what is unprecidented about this "heat wave" that hasn't happened in geological time in the past?I suppose I could, if I had occasion to speak with pine trees or whatever. The point was that humans are complex biological organisms, which means we have an extremely strict set of environmental requirements, which means that the conditions of Pangaean earth (or anything else significantly before 200,000 years ago) are irrelevant if we're worried about humans surviving as opposed to sharks or jellyfish.
I know this might be shocking to you.. but man's time on this planet is a mere instance in the 4.5 BILLION years that this planet has existed. I realize that this conflicts with the Bible teachings.. but it's true.See, again. I don't understand how this works for you: I state specific numbers and figures, you respond with a religious crack which makes zero sense on its face. Are you afraid of numbers, or math? Are they just invisible to you? Your behavior is totally baffling.

[Warriorbird]

Your perseverance is very Christian, Latrin.

[Gan]

Thats the great thing about math. You can come to any solution using many different methods.

[Warriorbird]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/trust_scientists

[Gan]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/trust_scientists

Interesting blog... until the end.


But if we want to get any info with regard to the climate over the long term, we have to make the most of what data we have."

And some of the comments below [the blog] are pretty good too.

[Gan]

COPENHAGEN: Population and climate change are intertwined but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC) .

"Dealing with climate change is not simply an issue of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the population concern fits right into the picture," said Zhao, who is a member of the Chinese government delegation.

Many studies link population growth with emissions and the effect of climate change.

"Calculations of the contribution of population growth to emissions growth globally produce a consistent finding that most of past population growth has been responsible for between 40 per cent and 60 percent of emissions growth," so stated by the 2009 State of World Population, released earlier by the UN Population Fund.

Although China's family planning policy has received criticism over the past three decades, Zhao said that China's population program has made a great historic contribution to the well-being of society.

As a result of the family planning policy, China has seen 400 million fewer births, which has resulted in 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions a year, Zhao said.

The UN report projected that if the global population would remain 8 billion by the year 2050 instead of a little more than 9 billion according to medium-growth scenario, "it might result in 1 billion to 2 billion fewer tons of carbon emissions".

Meanwhile, she said studies have also shown that family planning programs are more efficient in helping cut emissions, citing research by Thomas Wire of London School of Economics that states: "Each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one ton" whereas it would cost $13 for reduced deforestation, $24 to use wind technology, $51 for solar power, $93 for introducing hybrid cars and $131 electric vehicles.

She admitted that China's population program is not without consequences, as the country is entering the aging society fast and facing the problem of gender imbalance.

"I'm not saying that what we have done is 100 percent right, but I'm sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited," she said.

She said some 85 percent of the Chinese women in reproductive age use contraceptives, the highest rate in the world. This has been achieved largely through education and improvement of people's lives, she said.


This holistic approach that integrates policy on population and development, a strategy promoting sustainable development of population, resources and environment should serve as a model for integrating population programs into the framework of climate change adaptation, she said.
(China Daily 12/10/2009 page10)


http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-12/10/content_9151129.htm
_____________________________________

Interesting perspective, I suppose if people should exercise constraint in other ways of life - this would be something to look at.

I wonder with the RCC has to say about it.

:thinking:

[Parkbandit]

I suppose I could, if I had occasion to speak with pine trees or whatever. The point was that humans are complex biological organisms, which means we have an extremely strict set of environmental requirements, which means that the conditions of Pangaean earth (or anything else significantly before 200,000 years ago) are irrelevant if we're worried about humans surviving as opposed to sharks or jellyfish.See, again. I don't understand how this works for you: I state specific numbers and figures, you respond with a religious crack which makes zero sense on its face. Are you afraid of numbers, or math? Are they just invisible to you? Your behavior is totally baffling.

You've chosen to select a tiny slice of time in order to "prove" your point. Much like the "hockey stick" graph which "proves" that man is creating global warming.

Your behavior isn't baffling at all... you believe in Global warming just like you believe there is an alien being that created the heavens and the Earth and all life in 6 days. Let's just say I'm a bit more skeptical and need more than a couple cute stories to form an educated opinion on things.

[Daniel]

Thats the great thing about math. You can come to any solution using many different methods.

Lol, whut?

[EasternBrand]

COPENHAGEN: Population and climate change are intertwined but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC) .

"Dealing with climate change is not simply an issue of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the population concern fits right into the picture," said Zhao, who is a member of the Chinese government delegation.

Although China's family planning policy has received criticism over the past three decades, Zhao said that China's population program has made a great historic contribution to the well-being of society.

The "great historic contribution" stuff is so wonderfully bureaucratically bombastic, can't you just see the rest? "Zhao added, 'The Chinese program is a shining example of the blindingly bright continuity of the glorious revolution!'" I don't know, it just struck me as funny.

Anyway, I shouldn't obscure the message, because there's a really good point to be made there. It's almost tautological, but it still bears mentioning. It could be much worse, though. Birth rates are at their highest, and rising most quickly, in developing countries where there is little to no access to birth control. Those countries also tend to be among the smallest producers of emissions both at a national level and per capita. Even so, a population rising unnecessarily quickly in almost any place these days can easily be seen to produce both local and global stresses. Accessible birth control should definitely be a priority; it's probably the cheapest way to cut down on some portion of emissions.

As an aside, the United States's Rate of Natural Increase (that is, the birth rate - the death rate) is only 0.1% greater than China's, which is almost certain to mean that China is still adding more people per year than is the U.S., and China is far and away the country with the most rapidly increasing emissions.

Here is where I got the population data: http://www.prb.org/DataFinder.aspx

[4a6c1]

http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii18/dirtyflaws/tankgirl-1.jpg

TG has the solution.

1. break things
2 fondle self
3. ?
4. SUCCESS (planet cured)

[Mighty Nikkisaurus]

http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii18/dirtyflaws/tankgirl-1.jpg

TG has the solution.

1. break things
2 fondle self
3. ?
4. SUCCESS (planet cured)

:rofl:

[Gan]

The "great historic contribution" stuff is so wonderfully bureaucratically bombastic, can't you just see the rest? "Zhao added, 'The Chinese program is a shining example of the blindingly bright continuity of the glorious revolution!'" I don't know, it just struck me as funny.

Anyway, I shouldn't obscure the message, because there's a really good point to be made there. It's almost tautological, but it still bears mentioning. It could be much worse, though. Birth rates are at their highest, and rising most quickly, in developing countries where there is little to no access to birth control. Those countries also tend to be among the smallest producers of emissions both at a national level and per capita. Even so, a population rising unnecessarily quickly in almost any place these days can easily be seen to produce both local and global stresses. Accessible birth control should definitely be a priority; it's probably the cheapest way to cut down on some portion of emissions.

As an aside, the United States's Rate of Natural Increase (that is, the birth rate - the death rate) is only 0.1% greater than China's, which is almost certain to mean that China is still adding more people per year than is the U.S., and China is far and away the country with the most rapidly increasing emissions.

Here is where I got the population data: http://www.prb.org/DataFinder.aspx

So how would you feel about population control measures being adopted here in the US?

If the earth is really in dire straits then we should abandon things such as coal based power plants (sorry folks - you'll have to do without electricity in some areas), shut down beef production and institute population controls on methane emitting livestock (vegitarians of the world unite!), and population controls on people (just like China). Right?

I see lots of alarm over questionable data and questionable methodology used to derive said data and yet no real solutions or proof of sustainable change from those proposing the problem. And when drastic solutions are suggested in the face of a proposed eminent demise there will be many if not all who will be resistant to such solutions becuase of the loss of personal freedoms those solutions will mean.

[Latrinsorm]

Interesting perspective, I suppose if people should exercise constraint in other ways of life - this would be something to look at.The trouble is that in history only China's methods have been effective enough to systematically make people stop having kids, and organizations have been trying for millennia. It actually reminds me of the global rise of fascism pre-WW2: overpopulation is a big issue for lots of reasons, it may only be a matter of time before other countries try out China's methods, which is a pretty terrifying possibility.
You've chosen to select a tiny slice of time in order to "prove" your point.The tiny slice of time when people have been alive is the only time that matters if we're worried about human survival. 4 billion years ago the earth's surface was covered in lava - how is this relevant to human survival? 2 billion years ago all life lived in the oceans - how is this relevant to human survival?

[EasternBrand]

So how would you feel about population control measures being adopted here in the US?

If the earth is really in dire straits then we should abandon things such as coal based power plants (sorry folks - you'll have to do without electricity in some areas), shut down beef production and institute population controls on methane emitting livestock (vegitarians of the world unite!), and population controls on people (just like China). Right?

I see lots of alarm over questionable data and questionable methodology used to derive said data and yet no real solutions or proof of sustainable change from those proposing the problem. And when drastic solutions are suggested in the face of a proposed eminent demise there will be many if not all who will be resistant to such solutions becuase of the loss of personal freedoms those solutions will mean.

I never said I was in favor of enforced population control anywhere, I said we should support the expansion of availability of birth control, and I should have included supportive education to bolster the increased understanding and use of effective birth control. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons that the birth rate in most developed countries is so much lower than that in undeveloped ones. And what surprised me the most was that the order of the countries on the Rate of Natural Increase table barely shifted. In other words, way more people are being born than are dying in Zimbabwe than in the U.S., despite what I am sure is our great advantage in life expectancy.

I'm not in favor of any of the situations that you suggest I should be, but at the same time it seems to be sensible public policy to move away from all of the things you mentioned. Each one is implicated in climate change, but each one also implicates some other measure of public health.

Coal, for instance, is a limited resource. Many of the earliest coal mine towns, booming decades ago, are ghost towns now. It only makes sense to seek alternative, renewable sources of energy in this context. Industrial livestock practices inflict their own risks on public health. There are, of course, the health problems associated with a diet excessively high in red meat, but industrial livestock are also associated with E. coli and salmonella contamination in all sorts of foods. The rate of illness is not particularly high, but the fact that you can potentially pick up salmonella from a fucking cantaloupe is absurd. But this doesn't mean we should shut all the feedlots down; instead, it's only rational (particularly for personal nutritional health) to cut back on red meat. In fact, this is exactly what's been happening (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/SB965/sb965f.pdf). By the way, I know I'd heard before that methane cow farts are a problem, but I haven't really seen this backed up to as great a degree as other emissions. The EPA (http://www.epa.gov/rlep/faq.html#3) says that half of methane livestock emissions are from the "cow-calf sector" of the beef industry. I have no idea what this means, but they do chalk much of it up to a poor diet. Cows apparently aren't meant to eat exclusively grain, and it seems like what happens to them when they do is very much like what happens to me when I eat too much Indian food. So even if livestock emissions are as huge a problem as some people claim--and I'm not sure they are--it seems like a lot of it could be prevented if we just gave them some grass. But I don't know, I'm no livestock producer. Although I do think this livestock thing has gotten more attention than other, more pressing concerns. Also, full disclaimer, my favorite food in the world is a medium-rare ribeye.

It just seems to me that there are sensible alternatives that we should be seeking to implement now, rather than either forcing u-turns or relying on the status quo. As I look into the issue more, the conclusion becomes clearer to me that we do have to make changes, but that there are things we can do both on the individual and societal level short of wholesale, immediate "kill-switch" measures, that can head off serious problems down the road.

[Stanley Burrell]

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

Edited to Add: lolbrielus

[Warriorbird]

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

Edited to Add: lolbrielus

http://iheartau.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/doom.jpg

[Stanley Burrell]

http://iheartau.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/doom.jpg

Just you wait until I come up with a fib as to how I really am an avid follower of the late Charles Bukowski.

P.S. Props on the more contemporary reference.

[Parkbandit]

The tiny slice of time when people have been alive is the only time that matters if we're worried about human survival. 4 billion years ago the earth's surface was covered in lava - how is this relevant to human survival? 2 billion years ago all life lived in the oceans - how is this relevant to human survival?

Serious question: Are you purposely being stupid.. or are you really this stupid?

In order to think something so preposterous, one would have to believe that the climate of the Earth started with the introduction of man (probably what.. in the Garden of Eden?)

You do realize that there was life on this planet for hundreds of millions of years prior to man, right? Because if you are just going to quote Bible shit to me at this point.. I think we're going to be done.

PS - The time period of when the Earth was covered in lava and the beginning of man is probably 3-4 billion years... not counting any real global calamities that happened. There has been life on this planet for 3 billion plus years... while man has only been around for maybe a million or two.

[Latrinsorm]

Serious question: Are you purposely being stupid.. or are you really this stupid?

In order to think something so preposterous, one would have to believe that the climate of the Earth started with the introduction of man (probably what.. in the Garden of Eden?)

You do realize that there was life on this planet for hundreds of millions of years prior to man, right? Because if you are just going to quote Bible shit to me at this point.. I think we're going to be done.

PS - The time period of when the Earth was covered in lava and the beginning of man is probably 3-4 billion years... not counting any real global calamities that happened. There has been life on this planet for 3 billion plus years... while man has only been around for maybe a million or two.Now we're onto something. You can't think it's preposterous that the environment humans have survived in is the environment humans have survived in, it's a tautology. The only way it can work is if you read "The tiny slice of time when people have been alive is the only time that matters", append some random religious words that I didn't say, and voilà! My post is suddenly about creationism, and you're the weary defender of science and reason.

As to why you would do this, I am still stumped. Someday!

[Gan]

The only way it can work is if you read "The tiny slice of time when people have been alive is the only time that matters"...

Why would you restrict yourself to data points only within the timespan of human existence when we're discussing cyclicle patterns of earth's geological behavior? Especially when the its our existence that is so easily threatened by environment shifts rather than vice versa.

Its just not logical.

Thats like a doctor ignoring familial history when performing a physical on a patient.

Someday!

[Parkbandit]

Why would you restrict yourself to data points only within the timespan of human existence when we're discussing cyclicle patterns of earth's geological behavior? Especially when the its our existence that is so easily threatened by environment shifts rather than vice versa.

Its just not logical.

Thats like a doctor ignoring familial history when performing a physical on a patient.

Someday!

Much like the "hockey stick" graph, it only works if you limit the scope to a small select time period. If you were to use the whole applicable data, someone would say "looks like we're in yet another climatic cycle.. one that has happened multiple times in the past" instead of "HOLY SHIT, MAN IS HEATING THIS PLANET UP! WE NEED TO TAX PEOPLE TO FIX IT!!!!!"

Another stupid thing out of Copenhagen last week... the idiots want to get the PPM of CO2 on this planet to 350ppm. It's currently at around 390 ppm planet wide. Since man is responsible for 3% (high limit) of all CO2 emissions, that accounts for 12ppm.... which means that the natural occurrence of CO2 is 378ppm if we take out ALL man made CO2.

[Mabus]

Another stupid thing out of Copenhagen last week... the idiots want to get the PPM of CO2 on this planet to 350ppm. It's currently at around 390 ppm planet wide. Since man is responsible for 3% (high limit) of all CO2 emissions, that accounts for 12ppm.... which means that the natural occurrence of CO2 is 378ppm if we take out ALL man made CO2.
Valid point. Can I ask where the 3% figure comes from?

[Latrinsorm]

Why would you restrict yourself to data points only within the timespan of human existence when we're discussing cyclicle patterns of earth's geological behavior?Because I'm discussing human survival. If your doctor takes into account which single-celled organism humanity descended from, or how the Earth condensed from the proto planetary disk, or which supernovae seeded the sun with heavy elements, your doctor is a twit.

You are both under the impression that I am blaming humans for what is happening, or even suggesting that we be curtailed in some way. Though I wish this surprised me, it is not the first time you have invented positions of mine to respond to. Everything I've talked about in this thread is how we are to deal with what is currently happening and what is going to continue to happen. It can't be that hard to read words.

[Parkbandit]

Valid point. Can I ask where the 3% figure comes from?

I've seen it put at anywhere from less than 1% to 5%. 3% seems to be the area where both sides of this debate generally end up.

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/GlobalWarmingPrimer.pdf Sorry.. it's a pdf. Page 7 shows 3.4%

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html A bit wordy and long, but they show you how they get to 3%

[Parkbandit]

Because I'm discussing human survival. If your doctor takes into account which single-celled organism humanity descended from, or how the Earth condensed from the proto planetary disk, or which supernovae seeded the sun with heavy elements, your doctor is a twit.

You are both under the impression that I am blaming humans for what is happening, or even suggesting that we be curtailed in some way. Though I wish this surprised me, it is not the first time you have invented positions of mine to respond to. Everything I've talked about in this thread is how we are to deal with what is currently happening and what is going to continue to happen. It can't be that hard to read words.[/QUOTE]

No one is asking you to go back to single celled organisms. Hell, feel free to throw out the first billion years of Earth's history and you are STILL talking about a significantly small portion. You are doing the equivalent of flipping a quarter 5 times and deciding that tails is 80% more likely to come up because in the 5 samples you did, 4 came up tails. Why wouldn't you flip the coin 1000 times for a better sample size? Because if you did, you would find that your skewed assumptive work is rediculous.

[Cephalopod]

I've seen it put at anywhere from less than 1% to 5%. 3% seems to be the area where both sides of this debate generally end up.

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/GlobalWarmingPrimer.pdf Sorry.. it's a pdf. Page 7 shows 3.4%

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html A bit wordy and long, but they show you how they get to 3%

The first one is amusing. You'll accept the 3.4% from that, but none of the other data and conclusions from that primer?



(page 7)
Humans contribute approximately 3.4 percent of annual CO2
emissions. However, small increases in annual CO2 emissions, whether from humans or any other source, can lead to a large CO2
accumulation over time because CO2 molecules can remain in the
atmosphere for more than a century.

...

(page 15)
CO2 levels have been fairly constant for the last 10,000 years. Largely due to
human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, CO2
levels have risen approximately 35 percent since the beginning of the industrial
revolution, with more than 80 percent of that rise occurring since 1950.


The problem with saying "But we only generate 3.4% of all CO2 emissions!" is that it ignores the fact that for every gigaton of CO2 emitted naturally, there is a matching, natural carbon sink.

According to the IPCC, 150 billion tons of carbon go into the atmosphere from natural processes every year, which is almost 30x what humans emit. Until the industrial revolution, every gigaton of carbon going into the atmosphere was balanced by one coming out.

And guess what? Thanks to nature, only about half of the CO2 we generate stays in the atmosphere, because the rest is absorbed into the sea and other carbon sinks. But we've already passed the tipping point where between CO2 generation and deforestation (removal of carbon sinks), we've accelerated CO2 levels beyond where they've been for the last 400,000 years.

For an analogy, let's picture a toilet. If you don't shit or urinate in the toilet, providing no catastrophes occur, the toilet will always flush out the water in the bowl and refill with a similar amount. Then we start peeing and pooping in our toilet. It still flushes out and refills, and life is fine for the most part, with some variations. But then one day you have some bad Mexican, and now your toilet won't flush down. You get the plunger and with a little help, the toilet starts working again. A few weeks go by and everything is fine. Suddenly, though, it's Thanksgiving and you invite a herd of hungry hippos over to eat. Your toilet can't stand up to dumpings of that magnitude, and finally your septic tank backs up and overflows. Now there's shit everywhere and it's going to cost you thousands of dollars to repair the septic tank and increase the grade on your drainage field, so you sell your house and move a few states over, but the stench keeps following you.

...I think I lost the thread of my analogy there. It's a moot point, though, because it's all a natural cycle, right?

[Parkbandit]

The first one is amusing. You'll accept the 3.4% from that, but none of the other data and conclusions from that primer?

You do realize I was answering a question.. right?



The problem with saying "But we only generate 3.4% of all CO2 emissions!" is that it ignores the fact that for every gigaton of CO2 emitted naturally, there is a matching, natural carbon sink.

According to the IPCC, 150 billion tons of carbon go into the atmosphere from natural processes every year, which is almost 30x what humans emit. Until the industrial revolution, every gigaton of carbon going into the atmosphere was balanced by one coming out.


Is this the same IPCC that stands to gain a metric shit-ton of power/money if this global warming, wait... I mean "Climate Change" is pushed down our collective throats? You'll forgive me if I don't quite buy their claims... since they obviously have one of the biggest horses in the show.



And guess what? Thanks to nature, only about half of the CO2 we generate stays in the atmosphere, because the rest is absorbed into the sea and other carbon sinks. But we've already passed the tipping point where between CO2 generation and deforestation (removal of carbon sinks), we've accelerated CO2 levels beyond where they've been for the last 400,000 years.

For an analogy, let's picture a toilet. If you don't shit or urinate in the toilet, providing no catastrophes occur, the toilet will always flush out the water in the bowl and refill with a similar amount. Then we start peeing and pooping in our toilet. It still flushes out and refills, and life is fine for the most part, with some variations. But then one day you have some bad Mexican, and now your toilet won't flush down. You get the plunger and with a little help, the toilet starts working again. A few weeks go by and everything is fine. Suddenly, though, it's Thanksgiving and you invite a herd of hungry hippos over to eat. Your toilet can't stand up to dumpings of that magnitude, and finally your septic tank backs up and overflows. Now there's shit everywhere and it's going to cost you thousands of dollars to repair the septic tank and increase the grade on your drainage field, so you sell your house and move a few states over, but the stench keeps following you.

...I think I lost the thread of my analogy there. It's a moot point, though, because it's all a natural cycle, right?

Seriously, that was the best analogy you could come up with? Because, it made no sense. First and foremost.. when you eat "bad Mexican", you get diarrhea.. which is far easier to flush down the toilet than a hard shit. Second of all, you can simply have your septic tank pumped out and it doesn't cost thousands of dollars to do. It sounds like you are making up something that rarely happens to prove a point...

Wait.. maybe it's not such a bad analogy. It has all the same things as the Global Warming, er.. I mean Climate Change crisis has: A bunch of shit, a worst case scenario based upon someone's imagination and a pricetag that is well over inflated.

If you really believe the science behind Global Warming, er I mean Climate Change.. why wouldn't you simply tackle a small portion of naturally occurring CO2 emissions rather than concentrating all of your efforts on 3% of the problem?

[Cephalopod]

Is this the same IPCC that stands to gain a metric shit-ton of power/money if this global warming, wait... I mean "Climate Change" is pushed down our collective throats? You'll forgive me if I don't quite buy their claims... since they obviously have one of the biggest horses in the show.


What exactly do you think the IPCC, a collection of thousands of individual scientists, gains from getting meaningful climate change? They won't get it, but what do you think they'll earn if it does magically happen?

Do you see NOAA scientist Dr. Susan Solomon receiving a large, sweaty wad of cash somehow as a result of her heading the 2007 IPCC WG?

And this is as opposed to most of the climate skeptics, who tend to be related to or funded by legacy energy companies. Yeah, let's not believe either side because they have money riding on the outcomes.




Seriously, that was the best analogy you could come up with? Because, it made no sense. First and foremost.. when you eat "bad Mexican", you get diarrhea.. which is far easier to flush down the toilet than a hard shit. Second of all, you can simply have your septic tank pumped out and it doesn't cost thousands of dollars to do. It sounds like you are making up something that rarely happens to prove a point...


Sorry, I was speaking from a small amount of personal experience, having had my septic tank overflow. In order to bring it up to local standards, the drainage field had to be raised, and it cost thousands of dollars. I was making something up that rarely happens to prove a point. I admit it was a poor analogy, since the volumes are way off anyway, but I was seized by the scatalogical.

How about this: we have 97 gallons of water hooked up to a first class filtration system. We pour in 3 gallons of cyanide. Have a sip.




If you really believe the science behind Global Warming, er I mean Climate Change.. why wouldn't you simply tackle a small portion of naturally occurring CO2 emissions rather than concentrating all of your efforts on 3% of the problem?

Let me get this straight.

- Nature generates and absorbs most of its own CO2 emissions.
- We generate and absorb none of our own CO2 emissions, but nature absorbs about half of them for us.
- We are deforesting land, making it harder for nature to perform this helpful CO2 absorbtion.

This clearly means we should try to modify the earth so that it doesn't generate as many natural CO2 emissions, rather than modify our behaivour to stop generating the portion that isn't being well absorbed?

Here's an idea. Let's shut down every active volcano on the planet to reduce emissions. But even if we somehow 'cap' every volcano on the planet, this would hardly make a dent. The sum total of all CO2 out-gassed by active volcanoes amounts to about 1/150th of anthropogenic emissions. A little short of the 3% we need, and with potentially catastrophic effects on the tectonics of the earth.

So, what are you going to do to stop this natural CO2 emission? Can you predict how it will affect the biosphere? Because simply reducing anthropogenic CO2 output has a very predictable result.

Question: are you willing to admit that anthropogenic CO2 emissions represent a non-significant impact on the earth?

[Mabus]

I've seen it put at anywhere from less than 1% to 5%. 3% seems to be the area where both sides of this debate generally end up.

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/GlobalWarmingPrimer.pdf Sorry.. it's a pdf. Page 7 shows 3.4%

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html A bit wordy and long, but they show you how they get to 3%
Thanks PB.

That means if we more then double the figures given there and use 7%:
7% of 387 is 27.09
387-27.09=359.91
359.91>350

So if we stopped all human-produced carbon dioxide, and even if we stopped double the upper limits of human-produced carbon dioxide, we could not reach the 350 ppmv being proposed in Copenhagen.

Insanity.

[Parkbandit]

Sorry, I was speaking from a small amount of personal experience, having had my septic tank overflow. In order to bring it up to local standards, the drainage field had to be raised, and it cost thousands of dollars. I was making something up that rarely happens to prove a point. I admit it was a poor analogy, since the volumes are way off anyway, but I was seized by the scatalogical.

How about this: we have 97 gallons of water hooked up to a first class filtration system. We pour in 3 gallons of cyanide. Have a sip.

Huh?

Actually, the more correct analogy would be: We have 97 gallons of water hooked up to a first class filtration system. We pour in 3 gallons of water. Have a sip.

Your response would be "NOOOO! THAT WATER WILL CAUSE DIABETIES BECAUSE IF WE TAKE A LOOK AT THE PAST 5 HOURS OF DATA, SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE GOT DIABETES AND HE DRANK SOME WATER! COINCIDENCE! I THINK NOT!!!!"

Let's be honest.. you suck at analogies.




Let me get this straight.

- Nature generates and absorbs most of its own CO2 emissions.
- We generate and absorb none of our own CO2 emissions, but nature absorbs about half of them for us.
- We are deforesting land, making it harder for nature to perform this helpful CO2 absorbtion.

This clearly means we should try to modify the earth so that it doesn't generate as many natural CO2 emissions, rather than modify our behaivour to stop generating the portion that isn't being well absorbed?

Here's an idea. Let's shut down every active volcano on the planet to reduce emissions. But even if we somehow 'cap' every volcano on the planet, this would hardly make a dent. The sum total of all CO2 out-gassed by active volcanoes amounts to about 1/150th of anthropogenic emissions. A little short of the 3% we need, and with potentially catastrophic effects on the tectonics of the earth.

So, what are you going to do to stop this natural CO2 emission? Can you predict how it will affect the biosphere? Because simply reducing anthropogenic CO2 output has a very predictable result.

Question: are you willing to admit that anthropogenic CO2 emissions represent a non-significant impact on the earth?

Reverse question: What is the bad thing about CO2 again? Does it make the temperature go up... or is the reverse true... increased temperatures increases CO2 emission?

[Rocktar]

How about this: we have 97 gallons of water hooked up to a first class filtration system. We pour in 3 gallons of cyanide. Have a sip.

Who made the filtration system?

[Cephalopod]

Huh?

Actually, the more correct analogy would be: We have 97 gallons of water hooked up to a first class filtration system. We pour in 3 gallons of water. Have a sip.

Your response would be "NOOOO! THAT WATER WILL CAUSE DIABETIES BECAUSE IF WE TAKE A LOOK AT THE PAST 5 HOURS OF DATA, SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE GOT DIABETES AND HE DRANK SOME WATER! COINCIDENCE! I THINK NOT!!!!"

Let's be honest.. you suck at analogies.


I do suck at analogies, but I actually chose this one for a specific reason. Thank you for seizing on the analogy and not the general thought behind it. Amazingly, Rocktar bit on something I was thinking when I said this ('how good is the filter, really, since most RO filters remove cyanide?').

Since hydrogen cyanide is entirely miscible in water, we can look a bit closer at this analogy by imagining hydrogen in place of the greenhouse CO2, the remaining elements (oxygen, additional hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen) as other parts of the atmosphere. Obviously ratios are off, but we can focus on the amounts of naturally occurring HCN versus the amounts of artificially added HCN and imagine them as naturally occurring CO2 and artificially added CO2.

Now, all of these components are fine by themselves. We can take regular drinking water, which always contains trace amounts of cyanide (not always HCN, but for our purposes it will work) and add small amounts of additional HCN to it, and the biosphere acts as our RO water filter. Thanks to RO (nature), we are able to naturally siphon off almost all of this additional cyanide and keep our drinking water usable even with a steady trickle of HCN being poured into the water.

The faster we add HCN to the system, though, the more quickly we will overcome the ability of the RO filter to function adequately and remove proper amounts of hydrogen cyanide. At some point, the filter will not be able to maintain a balance sufficient to provide clean drinking water.

The point I'm making here is that we don't emit simply CO2. We emit CO2 bound to other compounds which make that CO2 more difficult for the earth's natural carbon sinks to process. Couple this with the fact that we are emitting CO2 but not providing our own natural sinks -- as nature does -- to offset it, then couple this with the fact that we are removing these same natural carbon sinks (deforestation, land use changes) and the system will reach a point where even natural CO2 cannot be offset appropriately.

I can add some math and give you exact ppm of H to corelate with CO2 if you want, but there's a limit to how many minutes I'll spend goofing off and arguing on the intrawebz from work. :)



Reverse question: What is the bad thing about CO2 again? Does it make the temperature go up... or is the reverse true... increased temperatures increases CO2 emission?

Okay, you didn't answer my question, but I'll answer yours.

As far back as 1896, scientists started speculating that CO2 acted as a greenhouse gas, absorbing infrared radiation. This is based on general physics and observational data. The net effect (not the localized effect) of this is temperature increase. We rely on this fact to survive on Earth. Without the greenhouse effect, we would all be popsicles. Delicious meat popsicles.

Additional CO2 in the atmosphere, which is one of the strongest radiative forcing factors, causes net temperature increase.

What I assume you're getting at with the specific phrasing of your question is the CO2 lag that we see in ice cores, where CO2 increases after a temperature increase. This is a well-known phenomenon where CO2 is liberated from the oceans after climate changes. This is only valuable on a timescale associated with the ocean response to atmospheric changes, mainly driven by wobbles in the Earth's orbit. We can certainly expect to see that in a few thousand years as a result of the current warming trend as well, but it's nothing we should be concerned with just yet. Our own anthropogenic CO2 increases from the last 150 years are far larger than the CO2 released in these past CO2 lags.

Also, I was wondering if you do have an answer to this, since it seemed relevant to your continued arguments that this is all just a scare to generate money:


What exactly do you think the IPCC, a collection of thousands of individual scientists, gains from getting meaningful climate change? They won't get it, but what do you think they'll earn if it does magically happen?

Do you see NOAA scientist Dr. Susan Solomon receiving a large, sweaty wad of cash somehow as a result of her heading the 2007 IPCC WG?

[Parkbandit]

I do suck at analogies, but I actually chose this one for a specific reason. Thank you for seizing on the analogy and not the general thought behind it. Amazingly, Rocktar bit on something I was thinking when I said this ('how good is the filter, really, since most RO filters remove cyanide?').

A useful analogy doesn't have to have a general thought behind it explained.



Since hydrogen cyanide is entirely miscible in water, we can look a bit closer at this analogy by imagining hydrogen in place of the greenhouse CO2, the remaining elements (oxygen, additional hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen) as other parts of the atmosphere. Obviously ratios are off, but we can focus on the amounts of naturally occurring HCN versus the amounts of artificially added HCN and imagine them as naturally occurring CO2 and artificially added CO2.

Now, all of these components are fine by themselves. We can take regular drinking water, which always contains trace amounts of cyanide (not always HCN, but for our purposes it will work) and add small amounts of additional HCN to it, and the biosphere acts as our RO water filter. Thanks to RO (nature), we are able to naturally siphon off almost all of this additional cyanide and keep our drinking water usable even with a steady trickle of HCN being poured into the water.

The faster we add HCN to the system, though, the more quickly we will overcome the ability of the RO filter to function adequately and remove proper amounts of hydrogen cyanide. At some point, the filter will not be able to maintain a balance sufficient to provide clean drinking water.


It's still a dumb analogy, unless you have 97 gallons of cyanide and you add another one... and even then it's dumb. It's not even remotely resembling the created myth of global warming, er I mean climate change.



The point I'm making here is that we don't emit simply CO2. We emit CO2 bound to other compounds which make that CO2 more difficult for the earth's natural carbon sinks to process. Couple this with the fact that we are emitting CO2 but not providing our own natural sinks -- as nature does -- to offset it, then couple this with the fact that we are removing these same natural carbon sinks (deforestation, land use changes) and the system will reach a point where even natural CO2 cannot be offset appropriately.

I can understand your point.. I just don't think it's as dire as "scientists" like Al Gore make it sound... ie:

"Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years."

No one is saying that we should do nothing or to use a WB quote "to do whatever the fuck we want environmentally." but we also don't have to bankrupt the entire country by "doing something" either. 150 TRILLION dollars is a shitload of money to spend on this "science" that has remains unproven, with plenty of hints that it's less about science and more about politics.



I can add some math and give you exact ppm of H to corelate with CO2 if you want, but there's a limit to how many minutes I'll spend goofing off and arguing on the intrawebz from work. :)


I don't know.. you haven't shown a real limit so far...



Okay, you didn't answer my question, but I'll answer yours.

As far back as 1896, scientists started speculating that CO2 acted as a greenhouse gas, absorbing infrared radiation. This is based on general physics and observational data. The net effect (not the localized effect) of this is temperature increase. We rely on this fact to survive on Earth. Without the greenhouse effect, we would all be popsicles. Delicious meat popsicles.

Additional CO2 in the atmosphere, which is one of the strongest radiative forcing factors, causes net temperature increase.

What I assume you're getting at with the specific phrasing of your question is the CO2 lag that we see in ice cores, where CO2 increases after a temperature increase. This is a well-known phenomenon where CO2 is liberated from the oceans after climate changes. This is only valuable on a timescale associated with the ocean response to atmospheric changes, mainly driven by wobbles in the Earth's orbit. We can certainly expect to see that in a few thousand years as a result of the current warming trend as well, but it's nothing we should be concerned with just yet. Our own anthropogenic CO2 increases from the last 150 years are far larger than the CO2 released in these past CO2 lags.

I'm no scientist.. but a pretty quick google search brought up this site:

http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth



Also, I was wondering if you do have an answer to this, since it seemed relevant to your continued arguments that this is all just a scare to generate money:

Let us assume that the leaders of the world have decided to leave reason and logic behind and sign up for whatever idiotic measures the IPCC determines will "SAVE MOTHER EARTH!!!". Do you believe that the IPCC has no vested interest in pushing through this global climate change legislation? Where does the money come from to run the IPCC? Would this support increase if Climate Change legislation was brought forth to bear on all countries?

[Gan]

Because I'm discussing human survival. If your doctor takes into account which single-celled organism humanity descended from, or how the Earth condensed from the proto planetary disk, or which supernovae seeded the sun with heavy elements, your doctor is a twit.

Way to totally miss the analogy. :(

[Latrinsorm]

I can't believe I missed the chance to use an æ! Apparently it's called an "ash", or in technical parlance "that thingie that looks like an a got caught mid-coitus with an e".

[Cephalopod]

I'm no scientist.. but a pretty quick google search brought up this site:
http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to point out with this link. He confirms that CO2 lags temperature change, although he is missing the key fact that temperature change and CO2 increases happen simultaneously, and that the lag shown is just CO2 out-gassing persisting after the temperature change ceases. This is on the scale of tens of thousands of years, which many people ignore when they look at these graphs, failing to account for the fact that the CO2 increase is concurrent with the temperature increase.

Research shows "both CO2 and ice volume should lag temperature somewhat, depending on the characteristic response times of these different components of the climate system. Ice volume should lag temperature by about 10,000 years, due to the relatively long time period required to grow or shrink ice sheets. CO2 might well be expected to lag temperature by about 1000 years, which is the timescale we expect from changes in ocean circulation and the strength of the “carbon pump” (i.e. marine biological photosynthesis) that transfers carbon from the atmosphere to the deep ocean."

Overall, though, this is basically restating what I said (CO2 increase lags temperature change), but then referencing his earlier theory of cosmic rays as the generation of global warming rather than anthropogenic CO2 emissions. While I think Dr. Shaviv is a good scientist that should be listened to, his 2003 and 2005 papers regarding cosmic ray theory have already been refuted fairly solidly (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217075138.htm), although it was somewhat recent (last year), so we can probably expect further discussion on this.

Note that he doesn't outright deny anthropogenic climate change, he just believes it is being overstated.



Let us assume that the leaders of the world have decided to leave reason and logic behind and sign up for whatever idiotic measures the IPCC determines will "SAVE MOTHER EARTH!!!". Do you believe that the IPCC has no vested interest in pushing through this global climate change legislation? Where does the money come from to run the IPCC? Would this support increase if Climate Change legislation was brought forth to bear on all countries?
Well, I've already said I don't think any meaningful change will come out of Copenhagen. Whatever is done will almost certainly be done just to get money into the hands of someone, although I couldn't begin to speculate on who. Buuut... the money to run the IPCC comes from the UN (via UNEP (http://www.unep.org/)) and WMO (http://www.wmo.int/pages/index_en.html).

I guess I'm just not seeing a funnel of money going to the scientists who participate in the IPCC that would explain why they would manufacture a 'global warming myth'. On the contrary, scientists have been offered money to debunk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange) the IPCC reports.

We can compare this to, say, Dr. Timothy Ball (mentioned in the climate threads here before), who works for the "Friends of Science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Science)" and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Stewardship_Project), both of which have received funding overtly or covertly from gas, oil and other energy lobbies. Or Dr. Ian Plimer, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Plimer) director of three mining companies. Do you think these folks have a vested interest in preventing global changes that would impact their core businesses?

I just don't see this sort of direct money-for-science link with the IPCC, but I'm willing to admit its there... somewhere.

[Cephalopod]

Irrelevant:
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1332.gif

[Parkbandit]

Note that he doesn't outright deny anthropogenic climate change, he just believes it is being overstated.


I agree with him. I never said man has no impact on the environment... I think a crisis is being created for political means and has nothing to do with climate at all.



Well, I've already said I don't think any meaningful change will come out of Copenhagen. Whatever is done will almost certainly be done just to get money into the hands of someone, although I couldn't begin to speculate on who. Buuut... the money to run the IPCC comes from the UN (via UNEP (http://www.unep.org/)) and WMO (http://www.wmo.int/pages/index_en.html).


Which country is the biggest supporter of the UN again? And where does that country get it's money? Follow the money.. it's not that difficult.



I guess I'm just not seeing a funnel of money going to the scientists who participate in the IPCC that would explain why they would manufacture a 'global warming myth'. On the contrary, scientists have been offered money to debunk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange) the IPCC reports.

We can compare this to, say, Dr. Timothy Ball (mentioned in the climate threads here before), who works for the "Friends of Science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Science)" and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Stewardship_Project), both of which have received funding overtly or covertly from gas, oil and other energy lobbies. Or Dr. Ian Plimer, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Plimer) director of three mining companies. Do you think these folks have a vested interest in preventing global changes that would impact their core businesses?

I just don't see this sort of direct money-for-science link with the IPCC, but I'm willing to admit its there... somewhere.

This entire crisis is about two simple things: Money and power. Figure out who is/will be profiting from this junk science.. figure out what government body will gain the most power.. and you will have all the answers you require.

[Gan]

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.

World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.

Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.

Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling. British officials said they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change while the draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened.

Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. Negotiators are also unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.

He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6956783.ece

________________________________________________

OOPS? :lol:

And yet this has failed to make any US headlines that I can find. :(

[Cephalopod]

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.


I started writing this post with "This is one of the reasons I have yet to see An Inconvienent Truth, and why I admire Al Gore's determination, but wish he would shut the hell up. He's really not doing anyone any good with this sort of faux-pas."

Then, having said that... I poked around, and found this work is from 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm), where Maslowski theorized we could see a near ice-free summer as early as 2016 +/-3 years. The BBC, in 2007, even quoted '2013', and Al Gore referenced this in his Nobel acceptance speech. So, Maslowski is dodging the '75 percent chance', which Gore seems to have pulled out of his ass, but the rest of Gore's statements follow Maslowski's publication.

More conservative estimates have this ice-free summer happening further out, 2015, 2030, 2060.

So, does this constitute a bald-faced lie on Gore's part? A mis-representation of data? Ignorance? Could be any of the above, but the fact is that his statements aren't that far off. From the Times article:



“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.


Does the Times Online's attempt at characterizing this as a colossal blunder count as a bald-faced lie? A mis-representation of data? Ignorance?

[Parkbandit]

OOPS? :lol:

And yet this has failed to make any US headlines that I can find. :(

That's a lie:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hGkx5ED3BxWScLRJuzhDFRm9wAzwD9CKCV3G1

http://www.examiner.com/x-17336-Midland-County-Public-Policy-Examiner~y2009m12d16-Al-Gore-lies

(The AP one is awesome btw... "Al Gore 'Misspoke'"

[Gan]

Still waiting to see the regular news outlets carry the story. :(
ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/MSNBC
And the myriad of major US Newspapers.

[Gan]

Long read, found this while browsing a new site I stumbled across (Libertarian). Liked it so I thought I'd share.
http://reason.org/news/show/the-scientific-tragedy-of-clim
__________________________________________________ _________

The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate

Can climate change science recover from the damage done by leaked emails?

Ronald Bailey (http://forum.gsplayers.com/experts/show/ronald-bailey)
December 4, 2009


Climategate. What a hot mess. Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and their colleagues around the globe may have fiddled with historical climate data and possibly the peer review process to ensure that publicized temperature trends fit the narrative of man-made global warming—then they emailed each other about it. Now those emails and other documents have been splashed all over the Web. Revelations contained in the leaked emails are roiling the scientific community and the researchers may be in pretty serious trouble. But the real tragedy of the Climategate scandal is that a lack of confidence in climate data will seriously impair mankind's ability to assess and react properly to a potentially huge problem.

Consider researcher Tom Wigley’s email describing his adjustments to mid-20th century global temperature data (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1016&filename=1254108338.txt) in order to lower an inconvenient warming "blip." According to the global warming hypothesis, late 20th century man-made warming was supposed to be faster than earlier natural warming. But the data show rapid "natural" warming in the 1930s. Adjusting the 1940 temperature blip downward makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. Collecting and evaluating temperature data requires the exercise of scientific judgment, but Wigley's emails suggest a convenient correction of 0.15 degree Celsius that fits the man-made global warming hypothesis. The adjustment may be reasonable—changes in instrumentation might need to be accounted for—but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check them to make sure.

In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419&filename=.txt) scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt) journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature. The world's policymakers rarely enjoy access to complete information, but the Climategate emails suggest they have been robbed of the chance to get the best information available.

In the wake of the Climategate leaks, some researchers are openly decrying the scientific censorship exercised by powerful gatekeepers associated with the CRU. Climatologist Eduardo Zorita at the German Institute for Coastal Research has publicly declared (http://coast.gkss.de/staff/zorita/) that "editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed." Zorita adds, "In this atmosphere, PhD students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'." Zorita evidently believes even after the email scandal that he will be punished by editors and reviewers for denouncing the CRU crew: "By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication."

Now under pressure, the CRU has finally agreed to publicly release all of its temperature data. Just how valuable this will be has been thrown into doubt, however, since the CRU has admitted, (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece) "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data." This raises legitimate scientific questions about how the lost original data were manipulated to produce the "value-added." The Times (London) reported that Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.


Phil Jones, the embattled head of the CRU tried to put to rest concerns about the integrity of his center’s data by issuing this statement (http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate):
Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Center in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.
It is reassuring to think that even if the CRU data are shown to be distorted (either wittingly or unwittingly) other independent sources of data are at hand. But that belief may not be entirely accurate. Besides the CRU temperature data, there are two other leading sources used by the IPCC, one created by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and the other by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).

While it is true that the scientific groups are independent, as University of Colorado climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. (http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/) (father of Pielke Jr.) observes, the temperature data sets are not all that independent. Pielke cites the 2006 U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, which noted (http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-chap3.pdf), "Since the three chosen data sets utilize many of the same raw observations, there is a degree of interdependence." The report further observed, "While there are fundamental differences in the methodology used to create the surface data sets, the differing techniques with the same data produce almost the same results." In 2007, Pielke and his colleagues reported, (http://www.climatesci.org/publications/pdf/R-321.pdf) "The raw surface temperature data from which all of the different global surface temperature trend analyses are derived are essentially the same. The best estimate that has been reported is that 90–95 percent of the raw data in each of the analyses is the same (P. Jones, personal communication, 2003). That the analyses produce similar trends should therefore come as no surprise."

One of the leaked emails from CRU’s Phil Jones appears to confirm (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1046&filename=1255298593.txt) this data interdependence: "Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center." Given this interdependence, Jones’ appeal to correlation with other data sets to support the validity of the CRU data is less convincing than one would hope. To the contrary, the fact that the three data sets correlate so well may instead provoke concerns about the validity of all three.

In an email to University of Alabama climatologist John Christy I asked, "Is there a possibility that the teams that compile temperature data could all be making the same set of errors which would result in them finding similar (and perhaps) spurious trends?" Christy replied that he believed this was possible and cited some recent work (http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008JCLI2726.1&ct=1) he had done on temperature trends in East Africa as evidence. In that article he found that using both the maximum and minimum temperature rather than the mean temperature (TMean) used by the three official data sets gives a better indication of actual temperature trends in the region.

Christy found that the maximum temperature (TMax) trend has been essentially zero since 1900 while the minimum temperature (TMin) trend has been increasing. In his email to me, Christy explained, "As it turns out, TMin warms significantly due to factors other than the greenhouse effect, so TMean, because it is affected by TMin, is a poor proxy for understanding the greenhouse effect of 'global warming'." Or as his journal article puts it, "There appears to be little change in East Africa’s TMax, and if TMax is a suitable proxy for climate changes affecting the deep atmosphere, there has been little impact in the past half-century." So if Christy’s analysis is correct, much of the global warming in East Africa reported by the three official data sets is exaggerated. Christy has found similar effects on temperature trend reporting for other regions of the world.

Roger Pielke Jr. notes, "If it turns out that the choices made by CRU, GISS, NOAA fall on the 'maximize historical trends' end of the scale that will not help their perceived credibility for obvious reasons." On the other hand, Pielke Jr. adds that Climategate could dissipate if probing by outside researchers finds that CRU, GISS, and NOAA researchers made temperature data adjustments "in the middle of the range or even low end, then this will enhance their credibility." The good news is that a truly independent set of temperature data (http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt) has been produced over the past thirty years by NOAA satellites. In general, the global satellite temperature trends tend to be on the low end of the climate computer model projections.

The more benign interpretation of what has been going on in climate change science is that as the man-made global warming narrative took hold among climatologists, research that confirmed the dominant paradigm had a much easier time getting through the peer review process. Meanwhile research that contradicted the paradigm was subject to much greater scrutiny and thus had a harder time making it through the peer review sieve. Scientists are human too and not free from confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias).

But for now, regardless of the motivations of the researchers, damage has been done. How can the world of climate science recover? First, carry out independent investigations of the activities of the researchers involved. Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will investigate (http://www.ems.psu.edu/sites/default/files/u5/Mann_Public_Statement.pdf) the activities of researcher Michael Mann, who worked closely with the CRU and several times expressed in the leaked emails his desire to stifle the scientific work of researchers with whom he disagreed. In Britain, Nigel Lawson, former chancellor of the exchequer, has called for an independent investigation of the CRU. Tireless journalistic global warming scold George Monbiot has declared (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/23/global-warming-leaked-email-climate-scientists), "It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow....I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign."

Another important step to recovering from the tragedy of Climategate is to institute the kind of research transparency that should have been happening in the first place. "Climate data needs to be publicly available and well documented," argues (http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/) Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry. "This includes metadata that explains how the data were treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data was omitted and why."

In a BBC News article, Michael Hulme, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia, and Jerome Ravetz, who is associated with an institute at Oxford University, warn that the tribalism (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8388485.stm) revealed in the leaked CRU emails is damaging public trust in climate science. In addition, they believe that the usefulness of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which relied heavily on the work of CRU scientists, may have run its course. Hulme and Ravetz worry that the IPCC’s "structural tendency to politicize climate change science…has helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production—just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive."

And greater transparency should not be limited to just temperature data, but to all aspects of climate science. In an email response to me, climatologist Pielke Sr. argues, "I completely support the view that the computer software [of climate models] must be available for scrutiny by independent scientists. Otherwise these models should not be used in climate assessment reports." Only through such transparency can other researchers determine whether or not climate models are adequate forecasters of future climate change or are merely prejudices made plausible.

One thing more transparency won't fix: the complications and uncertainty inherent in the policy debate about global warming. "In the end, I would hypothesize that the result of the freeing of data and code will necessarily lead to a more robust understanding of scientific uncertainties, [and] that may have the perverse effect of making the future less clear," emails Pielke Jr. "The inability to tolerate dissent has unfortunately destroyed the credibility of climate change science and I don’t know how it’s going to come back," laments climatologist and free-market Cato Institute fellow Patrick Michaels (http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels), who was frequently reviled in the CRU emails. "I don’t know how the public and policymakers will ever trust what climate scientists say in the future."

In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers. That’s the true tragedy of Climategate.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is available from Prometheus Books. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

[Rocktar]

And China weighs in on the idea of an outside authority telling them what to do. Nice. Exactly the take we should have, but hey, China is the new United States, only with indentured labor and a much more active slave trade.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/17/2774676.htm

[Latrinsorm]

In the wake of the Climategate leaks, some researchers are openly decrying the scientific censorship exercised by powerful gatekeepers associated with the CRU. Climatologist Eduardo Zorita at the German Institute for Coastal Research has publicly declared that "editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed."Were people confused what "peer-review" meant? It means if you're wrong and/or stupid you don't get to publish just because you're a unique and beautiful snowflake.
To the contrary, the fact that the three data sets correlate so well may instead provoke concerns about the validity of all three.This is as far as I could get. People who have those concerns are not being scientific. c.f. COBE, & stfu.

[Cephalopod]

I like the thought of climatologist bullies.

[Gan]

Were people confused what "peer-review" meant? It means if you're wrong and/or stupid you don't get to publish just because you're a unique and beautiful snowflake.
Especially if whats being reviewed does not fit within you or your cohorts paradigm. Wrong or stupid is only relative to those who are reviewing the subject matter. Fruit of the poisonous tree, so to speak. Thats what's being alleged - in case you missed it...

[Clove]

Were people confused what "peer-review" meant? It means if you're wrong and/or stupid you don't get to publish just because you're a unique and beautiful snowflake.This is as far as I could get. People who have those concerns are not being scientific. c.f. COBE, & stfu.Apparently the CRU is confused about peer-review as well.
In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature. The world's policymakers rarely enjoy access to complete information, but the Climategate emails suggest they have been robbed of the chance to get the best information available.The article was talking about how the data sets weren't actually independent, so it's difficult to come to any trend that doesn't correspond. You really should have read the entire article Latrin.

[Latrinsorm]

Especially if whats being reviewed does not fit within you or your cohorts paradigm. Wrong or stupid is only relative to those who are reviewing the subject matter. Fruit of the poisonous tree, so to speak. Thats what's being alleged - in case you missed it...Being in the minority isn't what makes them wrong - being wrong is what makes them in the minority. If someone wanted to publish a paper proving the existence of the ether, or a medical article about the interaction of the four humors, they would get just as "frozen out". The scientific establishment is in many ways like Muhammad Ali: it's not arrogance if you can back it up.
The article was talking about how the data sets weren't actually independent, so it's difficult to come to any trend that doesn't correspond. You really should have read the entire article Latrin.Actually the article said that the data matched up exactly, giving it the appearance of dependence, and that the underlying observations were to some degree interdependent, which is not the same thing as non-independent.

And while we're on the subject, data never entails a trend. It is always and only human induction that connects the dots. Even the most incredibly perfect data to model match in the history of humankind has and will continue to have doubters. The point is that the doubters are being idiots, and scientific forums like journals are not obligated in any way to propagate their idiotic statements.

[Tsa`ah]

Especially if whats being reviewed does not fit within you or your cohorts paradigm. Wrong or stupid is only relative to those who are reviewing the subject matter. Fruit of the poisonous tree, so to speak. Thats what's being alleged - in case you missed it...

I think what you're missing (and kept missing considering some of the people mentioned and quoted by the author) is that at times one's associations speaks directly to one's credibility. In this case it would be employer/funding.

If you had the choice between three "consumer driven" reports on automobiles, two compiled independently and funded by consumers and the third compiled and funded by Ford (and incidentally rated Ford the best or one of the best in each class year after year) ... which would you put more stock in?

[Gan]

I think what you're missing (and kept missing considering some of the people mentioned and quoted by the author) is that at times one's associations speaks directly to one's credibility.

Yea, we said the same thing about Obama... Funny how thats a one-way application.

[Parkbandit]

I think what you're missing (and kept missing considering some of the people mentioned and quoted by the author) is that at times one's associations speaks directly to one's credibility. In this case it would be employer/funding.


:rofl:

So the "at times" would be when it's convenient for you?

I'm amazed that someone like you would even bring this point up... given the context merely a year ago.

[Daniel]

You guys are retarded.

No one ever said Obama's official relationships with people, i.e. who he got money and guidance from was not unimportant. People said some guy he may or may not have had dinner with 10 years ago is not important.

Slight difference.

[Parkbandit]

You guys are retarded.

No one ever said Obama's official relationships with people, i.e. who he got money and guidance from was not unimportant. People said some guy he may or may not have had dinner with 10 years ago is not important.

Slight difference.

Are you being serious?

Who was the person Obama had dinner with once, 10 years ago, that we deemed important enough to bring up?

You are funny.

[Daniel]

Are you being serious?

Who was the person Obama had dinner with once, 10 years ago, that we deemed important enough to bring up?

You are funny.

Like ayers?

[Parkbandit]

Like ayers?

So the only connection to Obama and Ayres is a dinner they had together 10 years ago?

You might want to brush up on that a little bit..

Do you have anything else that remotely makes sense?

[Daniel]

So the only connection to Obama and Ayres is a dinner they had together 10 years ago?

You might want to brush up on that a little bit..

Do you have anything else that remotely makes sense?

Okay. Literal man.

[Parkbandit]

Okay. Literal man.

Ok, make shit up to suit your purpose boy.

[Parkbandit]

Back on topic now:

Not many people understand climate change. But they can recognise hypocrisy when they see it, and are also likely to count their spoons whenever wild-eyed politicians invoke the impending end of the world.
On Tuesday, Prince Charles flew to Copenhagen to attend the climate change summit, where he delivered a keynote speech.

He informed his audience that 'the world has only seven years before we lose the levers of control'. Not at all long, then.

For the Prince this was an important speech with an important message.

If we have so little time, and man-made climate change is such a terrifyingly imminent threat, he might have taken a boat or train to Copenhagen, or even, as a symbolic gesture, decided to walk.

But he commandeered a jet belonging to the Queen's Flight, generating an estimated 6.4tons of carbon dioxide, 5.2tons more than if he had used a commercial flight.

Meanwhile his fellow prophet of doom, Gordon Brown, was making his own way to Copenhagen the same day.

This is the man who proclaimed in October that we had '50 days to save the world'. Before leaving he conjured up on a television programme the certainty of 'floods and droughts' with 'climate change evacuees and refugees' if agreement is not reached in Copenhagen.
Mr Brown chartered a 185-seat Airbus to take him and 20 aides to Denmark. Was a smaller plane producing less carbon dioxide not available?

Could he perhaps have shared an aircraft with Prince Charles? Might he have considered taking a scheduled flight to the Danish capital, of which there were 16 on Tuesday?

Evidently not. It is odd, isn't it, how climate change doomsayers such as Prince Charles and Mr Brown are so often unprepared to make the smallest sacrifice in their own daily lives to address a threat which they assert is literally deadly.
Presumably any contribution would be helpful. And it is not easy in life to persuade people to give up things if you are almost ostentatiously unwilling to do so yourself.
The Copenhagen summit, supposed to produce an agreement limiting greenhouse gases, has, according to experts, the same carbon footprint as a medium-sized African country such as Malawi.

There are an amazing 34,000 delegates attending the event, and the grander among them are forced, says my colleague Robert Hardman in Copenhagen, to park their private jets in Norway because Denmark has run out of Tarmac, and to procure their gas-guzzling limousines from Germany.

Show me a climate control zealot and I can often show you a hypocrite, and a hypocrite, moreover, who speaks in apocalyptic terms about the world coming to an end - at a time not long hence and usually implausibly specific - if the rest of us do not immediately curb our lifestyles so as to produce fewer greenhouse gases.
The double standards and the grotesque exaggeration go hand in hand.

Some, at least, of the zealots do not really, honestly believe that things are as bad as they say. If they did, they might not go on serenely generating carbon emissions on such a scale.

They are trying to shock us into action by employing emotive language and invoking terrible dangers. In other words, they are treating us as fools.
Politicians shamelessly twist the facts to scare us witless. There has been an appalling case in Copenhagen this week.

Former U.S. Vice-President and climate change zealot Al Gore attributed to Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, an eminent climate change scientist, the belief 'that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years'.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has previously stated we have '50 days to change the world'
Dr Maslowski promptly denied that he would ever 'try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as that'.
Seven years left in which we can tackle the problem. Fifty days to save the world. The North Pole melted within a few years.

Such outrageous claims, repeated by hundreds of politicians, and amplified by uncritical journalists whose brains have been captured by the climate change lobby, not a few of whom are to be found at the BBC, are bound to foster growing doubts in the public mind.
When he stated there were '50 days to save the world', Mr Brown spoke of a looming 'catastrophe' which, if not dealt with, 'would be greater than the impact of both World Wars and the Great Depression combined'.
Such talk is a debasement of language. The world does not stand, as it did in 1940, at the very edge of an abyss, and to suggest that it does (as has the prominent scientist James Lovelock) would be an offence against history if it were not so ludicrously overblown.
Mr Brown embraces the extremism of climate change zealots partly by way of displacement.

There are the pressing political problems such as the state of the public finances that are extremely difficult to solve, and there is climate change, where the most hair-raising predictions are eagerly endorsed by most in the media and political class, and can scarcely be countered now.

What will the public think of politicians and climate scientists if in ten or 20 years' time their wildest forecasts should prove unfounded?
We should listen to more measured voices - not those who rule out the possibility of man having any role in climate change, or pretend that global warming is not happening, but those who think the hysterical political response is disproportionate to the severity of the threat.
One such voice is the world-renowned British-born physicist Freeman Dyson, who has written that 'the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated' and decried 'the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models'.

We may not understand climate change, but we do know when we are victims of fraudNor should we forget that little more than 30 years ago the scientific and political consensus was exactly the opposite of what it is today, as the BBC2 programme Earth: The Climate Wars reminded us on Tuesday in what was an unusual spasm of climate change objectivity on the part of the Corporation.
In 1972 a group of distinguished scientists wrote a letter to the U.S. President, Richard Nixon, expressing their fear that the world was entering a new Ice Age.

If those scientists were so completely wrong then, it is not an affront to reason to question whether the more outlandish climate scientists and their supporters might not be overstating their case now.
Does this make me a 'flat earther' - a term of abuse recently employed by Gordon Brown to describe those who, unlike him, do not claim that Armageddon is around the corner?

If the avoidance of lunatic historical parallels or apocalyptic forecasts makes one a flat earther, I accept the charge gladly.

But I can't help wondering whether the real flat earthers may not turn out to be those like Prince Charles and Gordon Brown who count the months to disaster while merrily generating more carbon dioxide than a small African town does in a year.
Should we be surprised that the British public, confronted by this ugly combination of myopic hypocrisy and doommongering, is becoming increasingly sceptical?

As I say, we may not understand climate change, but we do know when we are victims of a fraud.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1236497/STEPHEN-GLOVER-50-days-save-world-I-listen-doomsayers-werent-ludicrous-hypocrites.html#ixzz0a68RVISw

[Cephalopod]

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2009/12/the_bottom_line/betterworld.jpeg

[Gan]

http://admin.moguling.com/Upload/180people.com/2007-05-18Gore.jpg

[Gan]

http://angryseafood.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/future01.jpg

[Cephalopod]

http://angryseafood.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/future01.jpg

I think there's a spanking about to occur in that picture, and I approve.

[Parkbandit]

http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/j/g/1/warming_chickens.jpg

[Gan]

I think there's a spanking about to occur in that picture, and I approve.
More than spanking if you look closely. ;)

[Tsa`ah]

Yea, we said the same thing about Obama... Funny how thats a one-way application.


:rofl:

So the "at times" would be when it's convenient for you?

I'm amazed that someone like you would even bring this point up... given the context merely a year ago.

You two are so sadly predictable.

Ayers and Wright don't line Obama's pockets, nor do they get rich off of Obama or his policies. Though it's nice to know that over a year later you two are still running full speed down a dead end road.

Never the less ... go ahead and accept the "scientific" opinions of those funded, bought, or working for the oil and mining companies ... they obviously have your best interests at heart.

[Parkbandit]

You two are so sadly predictable.

Ayers and Wright don't line Obama's pockets, nor do they get rich off of Obama or his policies. Though it's nice to know that over a year later you two are still running full speed down a dead end road.

Never the less ... go ahead and accept the "scientific" opinions of those funded, bought, or working for the oil and mining companies ... they obviously have your best interests at heart.


"ANYONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE AL GORE IS IN THE POCKET OF BIG OIL!"

You are sadly predictable... and a pathetic hypocrite. FFS, Shit4Brains, at least TRY to hide it!

[Gan]

You two are so sadly predictable.

Ayers and Wright don't line Obama's pockets, nor do they get rich off of Obama or his policies. Though it's nice to know that over a year later you two are still running full speed down a dead end road.

Never the less ... go ahead and accept the "scientific" opinions of those funded, bought, or working for the oil and mining companies ... they obviously have your best interests at heart.

Like I said, funny how thats a one way application.

[johnamold]

Copenhagen conference has ended with minimum consensus...in spite of the boycott by some countries. But many people are still suspicious that the major
carbon emmitors would do much seriously in this regard.

[Atlanteax]

http://cagle.com/working/091219/asay.gif

[lindawood]

I think it is not the responsibility of any single country or even two or three. I can only show some results when it would be collectively pursued by the developed and under developed countries.

[Warriorbird]

Hippy bot is super conscious.

[pabstblueribbon]

Diesel engines. NEW multi-stage Nuke plants.

Problem solved.

Its been estimated that if 1/3 of the population of America switched to high efficiency diesel engines we would save 1.5 million barrels a day. I agree with 'green tech' but none have the efficiency to make a dent in anything, ie solar panels and wind energy. I think its time we tried something we know can work.

I've read somewhere that the Canadians have been 'recycling' nuclear waste for some time in different stage nuclear plants (I'm not an expert and haven't looked this up so, take it with a grain of salt). Basically reuse it until its almost inert. Why we haven't adopted this? Probably because we can't / won't build new ones in 'our backyard'.

There are always drawbacks though. We can significantly reduce our carbon emissions by using nuclear energy instead of coal... but coal is cheap and a LOT of railroads would suffer big time if it weren't for hauling coal.

It kind of cracks me up how everyone wants 'electric cars' cause they're 'green' but don't realize that the power would largely come from big nasty coal plants. Diesel cars, thats what we need.

[Mabus]

Diesel engines. NEW multi-stage Nuke plants.

Problem solved.

Its been estimated that if 1/3 of the population of America switched to high efficiency diesel engines we would save 1.5 million barrels a day. I agree with 'green tech' but none have the efficiency to make a dent in anything, ie solar panels and wind energy. I think its time we tried something we know can work.

I've read somewhere that the Canadians have been 'recycling' nuclear waste for some time in different stage nuclear plants (I'm not an expert and haven't looked this up so, take it with a grain of salt). Basically reuse it until its almost inert. Why we haven't adopted this? Probably because we can't / won't build new ones in 'our backyard'.

There are always drawbacks though. We can significantly reduce our carbon emissions by using nuclear energy instead of coal... but coal is cheap and a LOT of railroads would suffer big time if it weren't for hauling coal.

It kind of cracks me up how everyone wants 'electric cars' cause they're 'green' but don't realize that the power would largely come from big nasty coal plants. Diesel cars, thats what we need.
The Canadians use "heavy water (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water)" plants (HWP). With a combination of HWP and re-breeder reactors we could safely produce all of our electrical needs. It is my belief that these should be run by the military, with the power then sold to the public (no middlemen, and no commercial nuclear industry)

As to diesels:
"The fact that fat oils from vegetable sources can be used may seem insignificant today, but such oils may perhaps become in course of time of the same importance as some natural mineral oils and the tar products are now." -Rudolf Diesel

Diesel engines were first publicly demonstrated to run on vegetable oil at the 1900 World's Fair. Bio-diesel is a growing alternative fuel, and is replenish-able.

[Mabus]

Suppression of Science Within Science - by Henry Bauer (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/bauer1.1.1.html)
An excerpt:

I wasn’t as surprised as many others were, when it was revealed that climate-change "researchers" had discussed in private e-mails how to keep important data from public view lest it shake public belief in the dogma that human activities are contributing significantly to global warming.

I wasn’t particularly surprised because just a few weeks earlier I had spoken at the Oakland Rethinking AIDS Conference about the dogmatism and strong-arm tactics that are rampant in a seemingly increasing range of fields of medicine and science. PowerPoint presentations of most of the talks at the Conference are available at the Conference website. Here’s a slightly modified, more readable, text version of my own talk. The theme in a nutshell:

For several centuries, modern science was pretty much a free intellectual market populated by independent entrepreneurs who shared the goal of understanding how the world works. Nowadays it’s a corporate enterprise where patents, pay-offs, prestige, and power take priority over getting at the scientific truth, and the powers-that-be have established knowledge monopolies.

Full article worth the read.

[Warriorbird]

Contradictory bot = reality.