Climate Change

[jobberone]

We are approaching 400 ppm of CO2 which has been rising. That is not debatable and is almost certainly related to the use of fossil fuels. A lot of other data is difficult to assess as there are potential problems with its collection etc. The loss of glaciers are important although some are not affected are even growing. The net balance is negative.

Whether or not the rise in CO2 is tempering a period that would place us in a cooling period or is accelerating a warming period is not clear.

Warming is one problem but the sink for the excess CO2 is another. If the oceans become too acidic then we have a planet changing problem; a huge huge one.

 

[iceberg]

then again, 3 days ago deep in the heart of texas, we were at a high of 70* due to a cold front. we're back to the 90s now but nothing that makes me sweat beyond measure. other than working on my 01 truck.

i'm sorry - the radicals have called DOOM far too many times for me to take them seriously *now*. it wasn't long ago we were going into a mini ice age (70s was it?) and now we're all melting and are gonna die?

like spicoli said "make up your mind dude, are we gonna freeze, or are we gonna fry?

the undying need of a "liberal" group of people to blame man for the worlds problems prevents me from taking them seriously. as burm said, it was global warming and when that didn't pan out it was climate change.

fyi - it changed long before we put a car on the road. many many many times. how come now it's us being bad and avatar evil to the planet vs. just another opportunity to understand the planet we live on?

i *do* agree we can and should do more to work with our environment. i disagree that cow farts and mankind are killing the planet.

i think it's another way for fanatics to try and "normalize the extreme". vs accept it as extreme.

 

[iceberg]

Lol

I know really that long ago, much of northern Alaska had fern trees.

and the arctic was a meadow.

what changed it at the time? no man was around to blame. the earth just ... did it.

 

[burmafrd]

Just to counter that "anyone talking about temperature rises from the last 100 years are full of crap"

http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-measurements-advanced.htm

BS. There is NO ACCURATE WAY TO CHECK TEMPERATURES 100 years AGO. NONE. Your BS little website is full of crap. The conditions of the world were very different 100 years ago. So its all BS.

 

[burmafrd]

We are approaching 400 ppm of CO2 which has been rising. That is not debatable and is almost certainly related to the use of fossil fuels. A lot of other data is difficult to assess as there are potential problems with its collection etc. The loss of glaciers are important although some are not affected are even growing. The net balance is negative.

Whether or not the rise in CO2 is tempering a period that would place us in a cooling period or is accelerating a warming period is not clear.

Warming is one problem but the sink for the excess CO2 is another. If the oceans become too acidic then we have a planet changing problem; a huge huge one.

so what if we are at a high CO2. This planet has had high CO2 before and will again. At least that is the theory. The whole hockey stick thing would be hilarious if so many were not trying to make it the most important thing of all time.

 

[BrAinPaiNt]

Tread VERY carefully...ban hammer is waiting for those that can't keep their political opinions to themselves.

 

[Hoofbite]

Climate change discussions always focus on temps. What of the air quality and water supply?

Something tells me there'd be a lot more agreement on the issue if the air quality of Beijing where common in US cities, day-in and day-out.

 

[Hoofbite]

BS. There is NO ACCURATE WAY TO CHECK TEMPERATURES 100 years AGO. NONE. Your BS little website is full of crap. The conditions of the world were very different 100 years ago. So its all BS.

Mercury thermometers have been around for about 300 years.

 

[DFWJC]

Climate change discussions always focus on temps. What of the air quality and water supply?

Something tells me there'd be a lot more agreement on the issue if the air quality of Beijing where common in US cities, day-in and day-out.

I think that hits on more of my concern.

However, that is exactly what has allowed this to take off as much as it has---most people would prefer clean air and water, so they hang their head when the term global warming is used because they don't want to be labeled an environment hater.

The good news on water supply is that, ironically, former natural gas explorationists and groundwater geoscientists have found enormous amounts of fresh water underneath the Australian, New Zealand, China, and North American offshore....and other places as well. The fresh water reserves are projected to be so vast that they are 100x larger than what has been extracted from the sub-surface in the last 100 years.

Further irony is that much of this fresher water was trapped only 20,000 years ago during one of earths many warming phases following an ice age.

 

[CyberB0b]

Climate change is real but overwhelmingly natural. Climate has been changing for a couple billion years, I don't know why anyone thinks the past century should be any different.

Well, because of the expansion of the industrial and technological industries. They've expanded exponentially over the globe in the last century. We have lakes in Dallas where there's a ban on eating fish, due to pollution from electrical plants.

 

[jobberone]

so what if we are at a high CO2. This planet has had high CO2 before and will again. At least that is the theory. The whole hockey stick thing would be hilarious if so many were not trying to make it the most important thing of all time.

So what?! Every time CO2 has been high the earth gets hot. That doesn't mean 100% it will get hot if CO2 gets to 450 but it's likely. But, for me at least, the high CO2 may acidify the ocean too much.

Having said that, I'm not a 'OMG we have global warming' person. As I said, we don't know that the small amount of warming so far may not be keeping the earth from going into a cooler phases and I think The Little Ice Age when I say that. That is far more damaging to mankind than being in a Medieval Warm Period as far as food production goes. But there are other consequences I've yet to read about. Warmer means more mosquitoes from more standing water as well as hotter. And that means more malaria and death for many. How does this affect the Sahara and inner Australia?

I'm not convinced of anything yet but higher CO2 levels is of concern. Whether that helps or hurts mankind in the short and intermediate time frame is really unknown.

The lost of glacial runoff in more than one area is already affecting millions whose way of life and existence depends on that water.

Global weather patterns and its affect on humanity is not a simple topic.

I think instead of wasting resources on all alternative fuels and lawsuits yada mankind should throw money at fusion. The industrial revolution has more than doubled the lifespan of humans and made their quality of life immensely better. Fusion will allow man to make the next jump in civilization. Then we can proceed to make our own weather and terraform the planet.

 

[jobberone]

and the arctic was a meadow.

what changed it at the time? no man was around to blame. the earth just ... did it.

Yes, but mankind as it is wasn't around to be affected. Weather on earth is always changing and it has killed off much of life on several occasions. Again, I don't know what the bottom line is but we would be foolish to ignore rising CO2 levels. That doesn't mean lawsuits for every bug and tree on the planet esp at the long term expense of mankind.

We've got to be smart and rarely are extremists who have tunnel vision smart in the long term.

Fusion will solve so many problems. Why aren't we throwing enough money at it to truly solve the problem quickly?

 

[TwoCentPlain]

Some things I recall hearing or reading:

1) 165 million years ago, Pennsylvania was a tropical area. That's too bad for me as a kid growing up in the 1970's in PA. It was bone-chilling cold when I was there. Too bad it didn't stay tropical.
2) 10,000 years ago man could walk from England to France. Something caused the glaciers to melt (or something) and now you have to swim. That's too bad because I can walk 22 miles but I can't swim 22 miles. I guess I could always take the chunnel.
3) Mt. Pinatubo released more greenhouse gases in a few days than man has combined since the Industrial Revolution.
4) Early settler diaries speak of a very barren, treeless coast when they arrived in the US. I hear there are a lot more trees today in the US than back in the 1600's.
5) A single hurricane has more potential energy than all of man's nuclear weapons combined.
6) The Indonesian earthquake which caused the tsunami about 10 years ago was huge. It was the size of a mountain from NYC to Atlanta rising up 250 feet in a matter of seconds.

Don't know what those nuggets mean. If I had to guess, I'd say the power of Mother Nature is roughly about a billion times more powerful than man. I highly doubt man and woman could change the weather even if he or she tried. As Dennis Miller said, "Personally, I'm a little chily. I won't mind if the world got a little warmer." I wish we could make it a little bit warmer.

I just finished a nice book by physicist Michio Kaku called Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. As he says, the future of the world is cold, and lots of cold, like North America being covered with a mile of ice. Those left on earth are going to freeze to death many billions of years from now. The universe is getting colder.

The three biggest variables affecting climate, to me, are the sun, the earth's orbit, and the earth's core. Just so happens, we humans can't do a single thing to change the sun, the orbit, or the core.

 

[jobberone]

There were more trees when the settlers arrived than now; just saying. They shipped wood back to Europe like crazy as Europe was getting deforested. There wasn't anything else to burn for cooking and warmth but wood.

When the colonials arrived they also were dumbfounded by the amount of fish and wildlife. The rivers were teaming with fish and they were caught by the barrels to be shipped back to Europe. Tobacco, potatoes, wood, and salted fish poured into Europe for goods to be shipped back.

We are a greedy species that's no doubt but there will be ways to have all we want and live in harmony with the earth. There is no need to take either extreme IMO or even just fall on one side or the other.

Your other points are well taken. And yes volcanoes and the like do put out a lot of CO2. But the earth is generally able to buffer it. In time it can go into the sea and the rocks of the land. That takes a little time. We can't add too much too fast without tipping the scales. If we warm the oceans too much it may release methane gas and that would be another huge huge problem. That is likely the major cause of the Great Dying at the end of the Permian.

At least people here can talk about the topic. There are places where the environmentalists turn on you if you try to come at it in a balanced fashion.

 

[honyock]

then again, 3 days ago deep in the heart of texas, we were at a high of 70* due to a cold front. we're back to the 90s now but nothing that makes me sweat beyond measure. other than working on my 01 truck.

i'm sorry - the radicals have called DOOM far too many times for me to take them seriously *now*. it wasn't long ago we were going into a mini ice age (70s was it?) and now we're all melting and are gonna die?

like spicoli said "make up your mind dude, are we gonna freeze, or are we gonna fry?

the undying need of a "liberal" group of people to blame man for the worlds problems prevents me from taking them seriously. as burm said, it was global warming and when that didn't pan out it was climate change.

fyi - it changed long before we put a car on the road. many many many times. how come now it's us being bad and avatar evil to the planet vs. just another opportunity to understand the planet we live on?

i *do* agree we can and should do more to work with our environment. i disagree that cow farts and mankind are killing the planet.

i think it's another way for fanatics to try and "normalize the extreme". vs accept it as extreme.

With something like global warming/global cooling/climate change, t's a little tricky separating the science from the cultural and political and emotions of it all. Just with respect to the science, the global cooling theory of the 1970's was a very different animal from the last 20-25 years of global warming/climate change theory.

Even when the notion of global cooling got popularized in the 1970's, it didn't have a lot of traction within the scientific community. The scientists did what ideally they should do with any theory like that. They tried to test it out and poke holes in it. And the more attention it got, it fell apart and was gone within a couple of years. That's what they are supposed to do. That's what good science does, test out theories and discard them if they don't hold up. In fact, even back then I believe there was more traction for global warming than global cooling in the scientific community, and a growing number of predictions for future warming.

The same thing hasn't happened yet with climate change theory (and yes I'm using that term). Apart from all the public conversation about it, so far the science on climate change has shown legs. There is controversy about it, yes, there is extremism on it even within the science world as well as in the public arena. But so far, from what I can tell as a layman, it hasn't fallen apart quickly at a more rigorous look, like global cooling theory did.

It's hard to weed out the tremendous amount of noise at either end of the spectrum, but that's about all you can do on a subject so fraught with emotions as this.

 

[Rockport]

I'll agree with the 98% of world scientists who say it's man made and going to get worse. You can't dump the amount of polution into the air since the industrial revolution and not expect to have a negative reaction. It's one of those "duh" questions.

 

[CyberB0b]

Fusion will solve so many problems. Why aren't we throwing enough money at it to truly solve the problem quickly?

Probably because of this reason:

It's hard to weed out the tremendous amount of noise at either end of the spectrum, but that's about all you can do on a subject so fraught with emotions as this.

In this country, we tend to get entrenched into one ideology, and stick with it. It is very difficult to change hearts and minds on a global scale. That, combined with our combative nature, makes for a very difficult journey to the path of enlightenment. Maybe I should be come a Buddhist!

 

[jobberone]

With something like global warming/global cooling/climate change, t's a little tricky separating the science from the cultural and political and emotions of it all. Just with respect to the science, the global cooling theory of the 1970's was a very different animal from the last 20-25 years of global warming/climate change theory.

Even when the notion of global cooling got popularized in the 1970's, it didn't have a lot of traction within the scientific community. The scientists did what ideally they should do with any theory like that. They tried to test it out and poke holes in it. And the more attention it got, it fell apart and was gone within a couple of years. That's what they are supposed to do. That's what good science does, test out theories and discard them if they don't hold up. In fact, even back then I believe there was more traction for global warming than global cooling in the scientific community, and a growing number of predictions for future warming.

The same thing hasn't happened yet with climate change theory (and yes I'm using that term). Apart from all the public conversation about it, so far the science on climate change has shown legs. There is controversy about it, yes, there is extremism on it even within the science world as well as in the public arena. But so far, from what I can tell as a layman, it hasn't fallen apart quickly at a more rigorous look, like global cooling theory did.

It's hard to weed out the tremendous amount of noise at either end of the spectrum, but that's about all you can do on a subject so fraught with emotions as this.

Great post. Healthy skepticism is the heart of science. Bring a theory then try to disprove it. Changes are there may be some holes in the end even when most agree you've got something.

The data is a bit suspect and I can't tell what's real and not although for me the CO2 is a hard number. You can't get around that. I just don't know what it means overall to humans and the planet.

 

[jobberone]

Probably because of this reason:



In this country, we tend to get entrenched into one ideology, and stick with it. It is very difficult to change hearts and minds on a global scale. That, combined with our combative nature, makes for a very difficult journey to the path of enlightenment. Maybe I should be come a Buddhist!

It was mostly a rhetorical question as I know many of the whys. Most of them revolve around lunacy. You bring up get energy independence and solve fusion; some say that's great....propose to solve the problem by using more fossil fuels. And that's putting it nicely. They can't/won't get out of their mindset. And the other side is not as vocal but just as stuck.

 

[DFWJC]

I'll agree with the 98% of world scientists who say it's man made and going to get worse. You can't dump the amount of polution into the air since the industrial revolution and not expect to have a negative reaction. It's one of those "duh" questions.

It may in fact be real.
But the lie about 98% of the world's scientists saying so is 100% for sure not true. In fact, the vast majority won't say one way or the other without further evidence. You may wish to research that 98% figure AB. That keeps getting used as if it's fact, when it is not the case at all.
Again, that is not to say man-made warming is not a real thing....it's just that the 98% (actually 97%) figure for sure is not.
That figure comes from a poll of 79 UN Climate Change board "approved scientists". 79 scientists out of the 100s of thousands out there.