It seems nobody bothered to spend more than a few minutes skimming through the extensive set of information BuddhaBing just provided. I just read the FAQ (actually read it, not skimmed through to look at the pretty pictures) at http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html after reading the first few pages of one of the 800 page chapters.
Amazingly enough, the FAQ alone deals with every objection that was just raised by the EDIT: (two of the three, sorry Nodo ) posters before me. Yet you all missed it. Go figure
I hope there aren't too many people that seriously believe climate scientists are so naive as to have not thought about or investigated such simple, obvious points, and reported on them extensively. (The sun's radiation has an effect on the thermo equilibrium of our planet and thus on climate? Gee... Why didn't anybody tell that NASA scientist? Thanks for setting me straight U4IK ST8! )
Do your homework, guys. And thanks for the links, BuddhaBing. There's a lot of enlightening information there. I will learn a lot there on a subject I clearly know very little about compared to your run of the mill climate scientist, Ph.D..
This is the quote of yours that I was responding to. There was a good portion in the particular FAQ I was referring to dealing with it specifically, and the first paragraph or two of it laid out the groundwork for it. Specifically, the difference between "climate" and "weather" in terms of definition as well as predictability. Weather is generally not well predicted more than a few days in advance, but climate, even over many hundreds or thousands of years, is.
I do agree with the rest of what you said in that post. I just had to pick it apart and anally focus on the only negative thing I could find
Global Warming causes more problems than its ever existance.
E.G
Trees make O2 for us giving them CO2. We aparently make too much of it. Ok then.... Ethanol is a better fuel than Crude Oils... ok, where do we find it? We find it on plains that have been created by deforestation because people want to plant crops for Ethanol in 3rd world countries. ANYONE who things Global Warming is a problem, needs to be shot, i am not being fed anything. nobody needed/s to tell me that it doesn't Exist, i thought it before it was publically mentioned. As for GW, everyone that 'believes' in it, had to be TOLD it, they didn't think about it, before it was 'fashion'. so just SIT down.
You GW people, are the kinda people to believe in Evolution, if you knowed SH** you would know we evolved from Sea creatures... More Sea, more Sealife.... A rise in Sea levels just means we will end up living in Scotland, whoopdie ****ing do, we are living in the best and most well preserved country in the world!, it was only 10.000 years ago there was a glacier here!. You GW people have so many theories that you have been fed, they all contridict each other. The worlds climate changes, all the time. Global warming was just thought up by one guy who doesn't like cars. And we are sitting here on a RaceSim forum, debating on how we should kill motoring? Eventually some people agreed with this man, now its Propaganda for Companies. Everyone brags they save energy like Vauxhall (oh, we have cut down on our Ellesmere Port Factory Energy savings) YOU CAN'T SEE THAT? YOU CAN'T SEE, THAT people are making MINCE meat of you. Yet you get angry at us smart ones, us people who don't need to be told what to do, or what to believe, before we do it.
Well thanks for your intelligent insight into the debate, that was most enlightening.
It's good to get emotive about stuff, but you need a bit more logic and reasoning behind your rantings before anyone takes you seriously.
I agree 100%. I was going to use some of your colourful language but people switch off when someone gets abusive when they are explaining stuff to them. So, try keep a lid on it and get this across in the right way. Most people may not listen but those who are not easily suggestible will eventually see through this global warming scam...
Thanks, thats a good suggestion, but it angers me, people think they have an opinion that is their OWN, when those people had to be 'TOLD' its just like alot of things. Things to do with Crime, people need a statistic before they can agree, and i think its sad. Go in with 2 feet people, don't try to weasel the ball away.
Some people prefer to look for and refer to facts when investigating matters of importance. Others prefer to use The Force.
Channeling, meditation, telepathy with supernatural entities, and sorcery are equally common techniques in the non-scientific community for forming arguments for or against phenomena of interest to scientists. Direct communication with God, Allah, etc., about the inner workings of the universe via prayer is right up there. These approaches work especially well for people who don't like to be told what to think, especially by some guy in a lab coat with an IQ of 180 that spent 12 years at MIT earning his PhD. Why do we trust our medical doctors, but not other doctors in science?
These methods are plenty good for most people, but I still think the best way to find out how tall I am is to measure my height and write it down for later reference.
The current levels of greenhouse gases are one thing, but that is not in itself what's setting off the alarm bells over at NASA and elsewhere, even if it's the only thing the general public and news media seems capable of grasping. They usually aren't very good at math. Rather, the rate of change (the steepness of the slope) is what would be foolish for us to ignore. This is roughly some 50-60 times steeper than any period in recorded history, including the data from the polar ice caps going back many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of years, predating the last ice age by a long shot. Whether or not in some prehistoric era there was a higher CO2 concentration than we have today is not important or worth investigating unless you want to figure out how to turn Antarctica into a tropical paradise again. In that case, we can make our great, great, etc., grandkids super rich by investing in polar real estate now while the gettin's good.
In addition to this graph, if you'll look elsewhere in the IPCC data that shows this over a smaller time frame leading up to the present, the curve's steepness is accelerating in a manner that's just as, if not more alarming. (That means it's steep now, but it's getting steeper and steeper at a rapid rate). We've got a classic exponential acceleration here that correlates quite nicely with human industrial era activities, just as the leading NASA scientist from the video I posted earlier said.
(As for the causal aspect to this correlation, perhaps the never before even approached, "naturally occurring" CO2 acceleration caused humans to begin the industrial era rather than the other way around. In that case, we should all hope CO2 skyrockets to the moon some day, the sooner the better, because it obviously makes us a more technologically advanced society. I wonder how that works. Sadly, I couldn't find any mention of a single of the dumb scientists even investigating this possibility. Rats. So much for my Nobel Prize dreams.)
Project that data over the next few hundred years if you care about our decendents at all.
This is in fact done using multiple models and scenarios elsewhere in the report. I'll leave the search for that up to you. Somehow I think you won't bother yourself with that sort of nonsense though. I understand it's time consuming and a pretty tough read. All those fancy numbers and scientific lingo. Ugh. Besides, it would seem your imagination and intuition are so highly developed that the universe communicates its innermost workings directly to you with zero error. Some of us don't have these incredible channeling capabilities so need to refer to measured data and mathematics. Do you have a decent grasp on quantum loop gravity as well? If not, could you think about it for a few minutes? I'd love to learn (be told) more about it, and how it agrees or conflicts with string theory's multidimensional interpretations of gravity, or lack thereof.
Other data shows volcanic eruptions in the timeline, the greatest natural greenhouse gas emission event we'll hopefully ever witness (a huge meteor strike would be worse). They give a little blip in the data, but are relatively small compared to the backdrop of human industrial era activities. They pretty much just blend in with the rest of the noise on the rapidly climbing slope many non-climate scientists would have everyone believe is caused naturally. If you don't believe me, try to find the major volcanic eruptions in the chart in my attachment. There were quite a few over the last 2000 years.
Whether or not this recent acceleration in the CO2 and other greenhouse gas atmospheric introduction rate is caused by human activities is not a question in the scientific community any more than evolution or Einstein's GT and ST of Relativity are. The latter two issues were settled by investigation and consensus in science before most of our grandparents were born. The implications of both are not pleasant to many people, especially those of faith, but the universe does not appear to care whether it works in a way that gives you a warm and cozy, safe feeling about it. The world isn't flat, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, and time is not constant. Whether those are uncomfortable ideas to some people and deflate their human superiority/divine egos does not change reality.
Thankfully, scientists don't let it bother them too much when the general public uses one or two hundred year old arguments in their "scientific debates" with one another (head over to sci.physics to see how many physics students are still trying to rebut what Einstein came up with over a hundred years ago, simply because the ideas shake the foundations of their sense of reality), and spring them forth as great new ideas that somehow must have slipped by the same people that designed and launched the GPS satellites into orbit so we don't get lost or have to learn to read a map and road signs. (The GPS satellites use full relativistic corrections for time deviations from velocity and gravitational effects, by the way. If they didn't they'd be rather useless and inaccurate.)
Public master-debater: "Hey, man, what about the effects of the sun changing it's output over time and all that, dude? Did you guys think of that yet? Haha, I've got you right where I want you and just blew a big hole in your GW scam!"
Scientist: "Umm... Yeah. Actually, that did occur to us. It was at about the same time Sir Isaac Newton published his law of cooling, describing heat transfer via radiation, convection, etc.. The year was 1701. You're over 300 years late on this new insight, but thanks anyway. If we need your help, we'll call you."
There's a reason the general public is not usually invited to scientific conventions for debates and discussions on such topics, while physicists and the like, are.
Have a wonderful day, good luck racing, and may The Force be with you.
Here's an opinion piece from Ian Dunlop. A "...former senior executive with the international oil, gas and coal industry. He chaired the Australian Coal Association in 1987–88 and the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading from 1998–2000 and was CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors from 1997–2001. He is a Deputy Convenor of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil"
Prompt action required on sustainability and global inequity
From Ecos magazine- an Australian online magazine dealing with sustainability and environmental issues worldwide. It's a good, science based read, digestible enough for the non-science minded.
I wasn't going to bother dissecting this one, but I'm really bored tonight and this is just too amusing!
Trees take away CO2, but one tree doesn't just gobble up all CO2 that's in the atmosphere every day. A certain number of trees will remove x amount of CO2 every year. Consider it a CO2 "sink" (referred to in the report as a one of many "negative forcings" effecting the level). If we put more CO2 than that in the air the trees will not suddenly kick up their O2 production to whatever level is required to restore the CO2 balance any more than you'll actually eat all the food put on your plate without limit. Trees take what they can and the rest remains in the air. The more trees, the better.
The IPCC report covers the effects of deforestation in quite some detail. It's a good read.
We grow it (corn is one source). If done through deforestation I don't know if the crop itself acts as more of a CO2 sink (absorber) than the trees that were in the field in the first place were, but I suspect not. The report details changing land use as an influence (some cooling, some warming) and had some things to say about farming. I don't recall the details now, but if you really want to know, it would make sense to stop theorizing about something people have already studied extensively and read the reports yourself.
The third world countries comment is confusing. Brazil is probably the biggest producer of ethanol. This or last year in the US we had record crop production specifically grown for bio-fuels. If I recall correctly, the area was about the same size as the entire state of Nebraska. However, I don't know that this has so much to do with global warming as getting off foreign oil. When you burn alcohol you still produce a lot of CO2, but I don't recall now how it really compares to gasoline.
Anyway, these aren't third world countries, obviously.
I must admit that while reading your post up to this point I though you were a GW believer.
Oops, you're not a GW believer after all. My bad.
The folks that need to be shot are the ones who can't be bothered to properly research something before spouting off about it, especially if it's opposite to what scientists are finding and is highly detrimental to the environment. When your doctor tells you that you have the flu because all the medical science to date indicates that you have the flu, do you argue and give him your own second opinion?
I had to be told the world was round. I was dumbfounded by this crazy "big ball theory." I pondered that idiotic possibility for some time before my parents finally showed me a globe.
Of course. More credit to us. Shows you what sort of mind it takes. I also believe in the "big ball theory" now. I probably wouldn't believe it today if I hadn't see evidence to support that crazy idea. The pictures from space were good enough to convince me, but who knows? Maybe it's all an elaborate sham and conspiracy by the evil corporate machine to scare me.
Err... Do you believe in evolution or not?
Name one.
Indeed it does.
1) Some are natural causes that tend to warm things.
2) Some are natural causes that tend to cool things.
3) Some are human made causes that tend to warm things.
4) Some are human made causes that tend to cool things.
Climatology is the field of study of these things, primarily, and is where this global warming stuff is coming from. It didn't come from some pissed off loner that hated cars.
Who could possibly benefit financially from having people believe in global warming? Why make something like that up? I can think of lots of reasons certain groups would want the public to NOT believe it's real, but can't say the same for the other side.
Shen Kuo was the first person we have a record of to hypothesize that climates naturally shifted over time. He figured this out somehow by studying petrified bamboo from underground (beats me). That was the start of the field of paleoclimatology which is where all this global warming research is coming from. There probably wasn't much talk about cars, emissions, or any man made global warming in his day though.
He died over nine hundred years ago.
Helmut Landsberg is another noteworthy name in the history of climatology. From his Wikipedia page:
"Helmut Landsberg's contributions to the field of climatology are considerable. As early as 1941 in his book on physical climatology, he began to raise the status of climatology from one of geographic classification to a well-developed applied physical science. This book stressed, for the first time in English, the use of statistical analysis in climatology. His work over the next twenty years elevated the study of climatology to the quantitative science it is today......... Beginning in 1964, Dr. Landsberg served continuously as the editor in chief of the World Study of Climatology through 15 volumes."
It's interesting to hear that this guy published a book on climatology before my mother was even born. This isn't stuff that was just made up out of the blue five years ago. The recorded history in the field is almost 1000 years old now. When measurements finally became capable of showing these trends, scientists saw them, became concerned, and let the public know. Sort of like the scientists manning stations around the world to watch for tsunamis and earthquakes.
My, how sinister. I wouldn't be surprised to find tsunami and earthquake conspiracy theories too involving mad scientists in secret government labs deep underground.
Heavens no! I hope not! Take heart though. It's not just the cars producing all the nasty stuff.
One rather amusing part of the report actually went so far as to discuss the increase in methane in the atmosphere that can be attributed to the upbringing of cows for food.
They fart so much methane it's measurable around the world! It's up there in the ballpark scale of CO2 production from cars, believe it or not. I'll never look at a cow the same way again.
Ah, the lighter side of GW Fight global warming. Eat a cow. (Take that, vegetarians )
Anyway, the point is, there wasn't "some guy" that thought up global warming. Climatology is a vast field with lots of scientists involved, just like any other other field in science. There also wasn't some individual guy somewhere that thought up "obesity is unhealthy" out of the blue just to piss off fat people and cost the food industry money.
That's a bit like saying some biologists and geneticists agreed with Darwin, and some astrophysicists agreed with Einstein and Maxwell. Bring on the conspiracy theory.
And there it is. Right on cue.
A company will do things to reduce their own costs, naturally. However, I can think of no greater enemy to an energy company than public outrage over pollution, and especially global warming. Making things more efficient and clean costs considerable money that a company would much rather not spend in the first place. They're responding to demand just like any other industry in a free market does. Why on Earth would an energy or fuel company actually promote GW themselves, creating a "clean/efficient demand" in their own customers, as well as inviting governments to force emissions regulations on them? They do nothing for an energy company other than drive up their costs. R&D costs (somebody has to figure out how to make things cleaner), production costs (you have to retool the place with new equipment), and the whole gamut. I'd bet that global warming is a big, painful sliver in the side of the energy industry they wish would just go away. Auto manufacturers would probably prefer not to have to spend the resources they do on fuel economy either.
If anything, I'd expect them to do just the opposite. Minimize the risks of GW in the public eye to the point you're ridiculed for "believing in it." Hire a couple of scientists for really big bucks to repute things publically. Much like what was done when scientists started telling the public that smoking was actually very bad for us. Here in the US, tobacco companies hired scientists to go to Congressional hearings and tell everyone that smoking was not unhealthy in the slightest, and later that nicotine was not addictive (I'm a smoker. It's addictive). There are some rather amusing videos of this floating around online, but to me it's the same thing all over again with global warming. If you're in the fossil fuel business or energy business, you don't want the public to think the science is right. If either of us are getting duped by somebody on this topic, I'm betting it's not me
Ah, global warming.. The "smoking is bad for you" of the 21st century has finally begun
Todd's posts are great to read again, hopefully blueflame actually reads them
I don't understand how he has got impression of killing motoring when here has been discussion about how effect of traffic is exaggerate great deal by media and also government here is making most of their actions to traffic when trying to meet new CO2 limits from European Union (which by the way are ridiculous to us, our country produce less CO2 than real big city or something like that).
But anyway there has been points that there is lot more things making more CO2 and probably he has not read them at all to come up to such conclusion.
I just realized that I haven't posted my favourite GW link in this thread yet. It's from New Scientist and it's basically a summary of the IPCC reports that BuddhaBing linked to. I'll even do it in form of seperate links to encourage people to actually click and read:
jtw62074 Your American. So things are different. You go to Scotland, and tell me, something is wrong.
Fresh air. The problem is Cities, too many people sitting in 1 spot, the CO2 emissions aren't consistant enough around the world but saying the Trees aren't doing their job, is like saying Nature doesn't exist.
We wouldn't have a decent climate today, if Ice Age people wanted to keep it the way it was. Climate change will happen if it supposed to. Nothing anyone tries to do will stop it, so stop cutting down our trees and spread yourselves out across the globe. Which is exactly what 'GW believers' are doing. Ok maybe not cutting down trees to that extent, but you want Ethanol? Why not use Rape Seed ffs, it explodes under compression, so you can use it as a diesel fuel. Truth is. Your in the worst place, America doesn't know squat about anything. Yea, put a V8 in here, with NO ammounts of horsepower WHAT so ever, yet crank up the Cylinder capacity to 5000cc just cos it sounds better.
The actuall truth IS, which ever side of the pickett line your on, both of the points for either argument , cancel each other out, so the world is staying the way it is, so the non GW followers win anyway.
The world doesn't run according to who believes what. Or, maybe those cheezy popular quantum physics books are right, and the observer really does influence the outcome of things. ?
Actually, why don't we all simply choose to believe that GW doesn't exist, then maybe it will go away...
IQ? lol, do a couple of test's and your IQ will raise exponential "on the paper". Those test are not complex enough and got nothing to do with the actual intelligence. Its just a test to get a clue, a tiny fragment about the capability of our brains. But...whatever, just judge every person by its IQ...lets see how far you get with this attitude.
) posters before me. Yet you all missed it. Go figure 
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