Global Warming

[USMC the Almighty]

Your thoughts. Personally, I believe that it really isn't occurring, or if it is -- it's just natural climate changes unaffected by humans.

I'd prefer to respond to some global warming alarmists. Your thoughts?

 

[saggyjones]

In 2007, as part of its Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC concluded that human actions are "very likely" the cause of global warming, meaning a 90% or greater probability. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of 2500+ scientists/experts on climate, 800 contributing authors, 450 main authors, all from 130+ countries.
http://www.ipcc.ch/

^^^http://whyfiles.org/211warm_arctic/images/1000yr_change.jpg

Carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years, the latest study of ice drilled out of Antarctica confirms.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm

Carbon dioxide output, caused by humans burning fossil fuels, have drastically raised in recent years, as shown by the graph and two quotes.

Increased levels of carbon dioxide will increase the capture of heat in its absorption band to some, perhaps significant, extent. The result of this is that less heat is lost to space from the Earth's lower atmosphere, and temperatures at the Earth's surface are therefore likely to increase.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip24.htm

Greenhouse gases like CO2 directly affect global warming, and with a higher amount of greenhouse gases, the earth is getting warmer.

The last graph explains it very well.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

Earth's Atmosphere
N2: 780,000 PPM
O2: 210,000 PPM
Ar: 1,000 PPM and H2O 700 PPM
CO2: 370 PPM
Making gullible people believe that mankind is causing Global Warming: Priceless

First, let me tell you why there is global warming alarmism:
Eighty-five percent of Americans say warming is probably happening, and 62 percent say it threatens them personally. The National Academy of Sciences says the rise in the Earth's surface temperature has been about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century. Did 85 percent of Americans notice? Of course not. They got their anxiety from journalism calculated to produce it. Never mind that one degree might be the margin of error when measuring the planet's temperature. To take a person's temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.

Because if you're a scientist trying to get funding from the government, you're better off telling the world how horrible things are. And once people are scared, they pay attention. They'll even demand the government give you more money to solve the problem. Usually the horrible disaster never happens. Chaos from Y2K. An epidemic of deaths from SARS, mad cow disease, or the Avian bird flu. Cancer from Three Mile Island. We quickly forget. We move on to the next leftist alarmism.

The scary claims about heat waves and droughts are based on computer models. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. They were unable to anticipate the massive amounts of heat energy that escaped the tropics over the past 15 years, forcing modelers back to the drawing board. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

The fundamentalist doom-mongers ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season.

Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument?

It's the money. Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

Carbon dioxide output, caused by humans burning fossil fuels, have drastically raised in recent years, as shown by the graph and two quotes.

As I noted above -- most of these numbers are based on models, which are poor indicators of the acutal numbers.

The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975

After this the "scientific community" realized that it just sounded ignorant to get people all concerned about global cooling so they pivoted and focused solely on CO2.

Also, how does anyone in their right mind accept that the Sun is responsible for "only 10-30%" of the current warming because that's what some computer model spit out?

But as a percentage of the total atmosphere, CO2 represents only about .03 percent of the molecules that make up the air or 355 parts per million. Even so, it has always played a critical role as a greenhouse gas that triggers enough warming to increase the amount of water vapor that evaporates from the oceans into the atmosphere. This extra water vapor, in turn, traps nearly 90% of the infrared rays radiated from the surface of the Earth back toward space.[/QUOTE]

 

[Nammy]

Global warming is happening. There's no way of denying it.

It's just the matter of who's causing it.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

The fact of the matter is theif you warm the earth, you make more clouds --
and those clouds correct earth's temperature by reflecting back to space the heat/energy that is attempting to warm it.

Water vapor in the atmosphere is a net increase of albedo -- open water is about .2 while clouds range from .65 to .85.

If you warm the planet, more clouds are formed increasing total global albedo.

the energy that tries to excessively warm the planet is reflected back to space, by the increase in albedo. The Earth thus regulates itself and cannot excessively warm itself or cool itself without correction sometime later.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

Global warming is happening. There's no way of denying it.

It's just the matter of who's causing it.

And Earth can just as easily take a turn for the colder.

A general characteristic of your is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough.

Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

People who blame humans for global warming do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change.

Paraphrased from Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

 

[USMC the Almighty]

Another fact of the issue is that even if the earth is warming, there's nothing we can really do about it. If Earth wants to purge humans -- it's going to do it and anyone who thinks that we have control over the earth is ignorant.

However, since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 37 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

 

[USMC the Almighty]

In 2007, as part of its Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC concluded that human actions are "very likely" the cause of global warming, meaning a 90% or greater probability. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of 2500+ scientists/experts on climate, 800 contributing authors, 450 main authors, all from 130+ countries.

The "science" you cite gives only mean temperatures on greater than centennial scales; heck there only accurate on millennial scales due to mixing of gasses in the ice to begin with. Funny how your scientists ignore all of this to make their "findings" after those same scientists are the ones who admit the data is unreliable for the same reason I have just stated. The MO seems to be one study says this is the "best guess" we can come up with given the reliability of the data and then future studies site it as if it was gospel. More studies are built on the same faulty premise on top of faulty premise on top of inconsistent and unreliable data and then the scientist claim the findings are incontrovertible because of the number of studies in agreement. Completely ignoring the fact that the data they are citing to begin with is unreliable at best.

The AGW crowd says that man's emissions have to be reduced 20-25% or we are doomed.

There are about 800,000 cars in the world. Each car puts out as much CO2 as a cow does (CO2 equiv. Methane). There are 1.6 Billion cows on the earth right now.

The human population is a bit over 6 billion and if the growth rate slows to 1/2 the current rate then in 2050 there will be 9 billion. If the rate stays close to the same there will be 12 billion. The population of cattle parallels the population of humans.

To have a reduction of 25% the reduction per person has to be about 40% to compensate for the increased human population (@ 50% growth).
If you removed all of the cars from the world the increase in cattle (parallel to human population) would be 800,000 in 2050. So the CO2 from cars is replaced by emissions from cattle. Cars are gone.... emissions just as high.

Now methane is more powerful as a greenhouse gas. Over a 100 year period it is 23 times more powerful. Over a 20 year period it is 62 times more powerful. Living plants produce 10 to 1000 times more methane than decaying plants or compose. To feed the growing population you are going to have to increase crop production... more plants.

Getting back to the cattle..... livestock farming, estimated methane emissions rose from 25.6 million metric tons in 1860 to 113.1 million metric tons in 1994. Add population growth and you have about 170 million metric tons in 2050. That is 4 gigatons increase... CO2 equivalent. About 16% of our current CO2 emissions.

The numbers for rice farming are about the same... so add another 16% of current to the figures.

The other "crops" are going to add at least another 16%. While increasing at a steady rate when we get to 2050 the CO2 equivalent from feeding the increased population will be 48% more. If the population growth stays at the current rate then that is doubled.... 96% more. Just to feed the world.

Their calls to reduce emissions by 20-25% is hollow and bogus. If they were successful in reducing emissions from fossil fuels by that much we would still have double the emissions in 2050. Actually more than that.

Instead of all this hollering and waste of money on the phony cures and plans they should look at and talk about the realities. They keep on the doomsday path and some nut might come to a conclusion that the best thing to do is reduce the population back down to the level it was at in about 1800.

 

[saggyjones]

Earth's Atmosphere
N2: 780,000 PPM
O2: 210,000 PPM
Ar: 1,000 PPM and H2O 700 PPM
CO2: 370 PPM
Making gullible people believe that mankind is causing Global Warming: Priceless

That proves nothing because all gases are different. Less CO2 doesn't mean it's not a lot. Actually 370 ppm is a lot of carbon dioxide. I suggest taking a chemistry class.

First, let me tell you why there is global warming alarmism:
Eighty-five percent of Americans say warming is probably happening, and 62 percent say it threatens them personally. The National Academy of Sciences says the rise in the Earth's surface temperature has been about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century. Did 85 percent of Americans notice? Of course not.

1 degree is a lot, and the temperature is rising exponentially because the rate at which it rises is also going up. Did you look at my graphs?

They got their anxiety from journalism calculated to produce it. Never mind that one degree might be the margin of error when measuring the planet's temperature.

1 degree isn't the margin of error. Where did you get that?

To take a person's temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.

Actually it doesn't, because they have temperature stations everywhere and simply average them every year.

Because if you're a scientist trying to get funding from the government, you're better off telling the world how horrible things are. And once people are scared, they pay attention. They'll even demand the government give you more money to solve the problem. Usually the horrible disaster never happens. Chaos from Y2K. An epidemic of deaths from SARS, mad cow disease, or the Avian bird flu. Cancer from Three Mile Island. We quickly forget. We move on to the next leftist alarmism.

Except global warming has been proven and isn't the same as a disease epidemic because it doesn't pass. And if scientists were funded by the government they would discredit global warming because Bush doesn't want to admit he was wrong.

The scary claims about heat waves and droughts are based on computer models. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. They were unable to anticipate the massive amounts of heat energy that escaped the tropics over the past 15 years, forcing modelers back to the drawing board. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

I'm not talking about predictions, I'm talking about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere compared with any other time in history and the rise in temperature directly proportional to the rise in CO2 and how we are pouring CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels in cars and power plants.

The fundamentalist doom-mongers ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season.

Global warming doesn't help crops grow. In the short term the rise in CO2 helps the quantity (though diminishes the quality) of crops, but changes in rainfall and more storms caused by this very same rise will greatly hurt agriculture. Also many crops in Africa are already straining to thrive because of high temperature and little rainfall, and global warming would make this worse.

Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument?

Because it's not true.

It's the money. Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it.

You never provided evidence that global warming isn't happening.

 

[saggyjones]

As I noted above -- most of these numbers are based on models, which are poor indicators of the acutal numbers.

No, they are based on past temperatures. I'm not predicting anything and neither are those graphs.

The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975

After this the "scientific community" realized that it just sounded ignorant to get people all concerned about global cooling so they pivoted and focused solely on CO2.

Also, how does anyone in their right mind accept that the Sun is responsible for "only 10-30%" of the current warming because that's what some computer model spit out?

Do you have any evidence otherwise?

But as a percentage of the total atmosphere, CO2 represents only about .03 percent of the molecules that make up the air or 355 parts per million. Even so, it has always played a critical role as a greenhouse gas that triggers enough warming to increase the amount of water vapor that evaporates from the oceans into the atmosphere. This extra water vapor, in turn, traps nearly 90% of the infrared rays radiated from the surface of the Earth back toward space.

Water vapor is completely natural, and we aren't adding more of it to the atmosphere. We are however adding a great deal more CO2, and as my first post states more than there has been in 800,000 years.

 

[saggyjones]

The fact of the matter is theif you warm the earth, you make more clouds --
and those clouds correct earth's temperature by reflecting back to space the heat/energy that is attempting to warm it.

Water vapor in the atmosphere is a net increase of albedo -- open water is about .2 while clouds range from .65 to .85.

If you warm the planet, more clouds are formed increasing total global albedo.

the energy that tries to excessively warm the planet is reflected back to space, by the increase in albedo. The Earth thus regulates itself and cannot excessively warm itself or cool itself without correction sometime later.

Source? I'd like to see the logic behind this ridiculous statement.

We are putting more greenhouse gases into the air, so by your reasoning more clouds would trap our greenhouse gases.

 

[saggyjones]

And Earth can just as easily take a turn for the colder.

A general characteristic of your is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough.

Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

People who blame humans for global warming do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change.

Paraphrased from Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

How do you explain this graph and the rise in temperature then?

 

[saggyjones]

Another fact of the issue is that even if the earth is warming, there's nothing we can really do about it. If Earth wants to purge humans -- it's going to do it and anyone who thinks that we have control over the earth is ignorant.

We can research alternative energy sources for cars, and switch to nuclear power for energy. It would be expensive, but new breeder nuclear reactors produce more fissile material than they consume and fusion technology is being discovered. Also new nuclear plants put out no greenhouse gases.

However, since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 37 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

Source?

What does this have to do with global warming? I'm talking about CO2 and methane (CH4), the real threats to our environment.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

Source? We are deforesting in third world countries mostly, and I'll provide one example.

Certain areas such as the Atlantic Rainforest have been diminshed to less than 10% of their original size and the Amazon Rainforest is awaiting the same fate at 600 fires daily.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

Global warming creates wetlands. That's why more are being formed.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

What does this have to do with global warming?

 

[saggyjones]

The "science" you cite gives only mean temperatures on greater than centennial scales; heck there only accurate on millennial scales due to mixing of gasses in the ice to begin with. Funny how your scientists ignore all of this to make their "findings" after those same scientists are the ones who admit the data is unreliable for the same reason I have just stated. The MO seems to be one study says this is the "best guess" we can come up with given the reliability of the data and then future studies site it as if it was gospel. More studies are built on the same faulty premise on top of faulty premise on top of inconsistent and unreliable data and then the scientist claim the findings are incontrovertible because of the number of studies in agreement. Completely ignoring the fact that the data they are citing to begin with is unreliable at best.

Can you prove that ice core samples are unreliable? You seem to discredit scientists everywhere who know much more than you do about the subject.

The AGW crowd says that man's emissions have to be reduced 20-25% or we are doomed.

What's your point?

There are about 800,000 cars in the world. Each car puts out as much CO2 as a cow does (CO2 equiv. Methane). There are 1.6 Billion cows on the earth right now.

Livestock (a human created thing) is a big problem, so we need to find a way to reduce the methane output from farms.

The human population is a bit over 6 billion and if the growth rate slows to 1/2 the current rate then in 2050 there will be 9 billion. If the rate stays close to the same there will be 12 billion. The population of cattle parallels the population of humans.

Livestock is a big problem, like I said. What's your point?

To have a reduction of 25% the reduction per person has to be about 40% to compensate for the increased human population (@ 50% growth).
If you removed all of the cars from the world the increase in cattle (parallel to human population) would be 800,000 in 2050. So the CO2 from cars is replaced by emissions from cattle. Cars are gone.... emissions just as high.

Once again we need to do something about cattle.

Now methane is more powerful as a greenhouse gas. Over a 100 year period it is 23 times more powerful. Over a 20 year period it is 62 times more powerful. Living plants produce 10 to 1000 times more methane than decaying plants or compose. To feed the growing population you are going to have to increase crop production... more plants.

Source?

Getting back to the cattle..... livestock farming, estimated methane emissions rose from 25.6 million metric tons in 1860 to 113.1 million metric tons in 1994. Add population growth and you have about 170 million metric tons in 2050. That is 4 gigatons increase... CO2 equivalent. About 16% of our current CO2 emissions.

The numbers for rice farming are about the same... so add another 16% of current to the figures.

The other "crops" are going to add at least another 16%. While increasing at a steady rate when we get to 2050 the CO2 equivalent from feeding the increased population will be 48% more. If the population growth stays at the current rate then that is doubled.... 96% more. Just to feed the world.

Their calls to reduce emissions by 20-25% is hollow and bogus. If they were successful in reducing emissions from fossil fuels by that much we would still have double the emissions in 2050. Actually more than that.

Exactly. That's why we need to stop burning fossil fuels for energy, which is the main cause of greenhouse gases.

Instead of all this hollering and waste of money on the phony cures and plans they should look at and talk about the realities. They keep on the doomsday path and some nut might come to a conclusion that the best thing to do is reduce the population back down to the level it was at in about 1800.

I agree. We need to focus on alternative energy, controlling livestock methane outputs, and alternative fuel for cars, not reducing output, because that only prolongs it.