February 12, 2009 at 3:16 pm
If you came to me and told me that you had results from a test that showed something MIGHT be happening, but you could only rely on a small subset of a much larger population of data - 99% of which you will never know, I'd say you're reaching.
If you told me that I would have to put up my hard earned money AND tax dollars to support your theory, I'd tell you to take a hike.
Well, thats what we have here. We have a 4 BILLION year old planet (entire set of climate data) and only a tiny spec of research data to go with (the last 150 years of weather observations and whatever ice-core measurements they've done). Mind you, those temperature observations were all flawed. How much ACCURACY did that guy at the weather station in Tennessee, oh say, back in 1906, have with his readings? Hmmm... lets see.... "It looks here like its 94 degrees. Feels like it too. Ah. 94" Did he look at the instrument on an angle? Did he mess up the data as he recorded it? Were his instruments calibrated with precision? To a large degree, our instruments arent even that accurate today! I mean, they're taking readings behind jet runways of all concrete? Hmmm... gonna bit a TAD warmer over there. Or, next to the air conditioner units. Yea. Ever stand outside by a group of those in the summer?
Please. Spend your tax money but not mine. We've had enough of our government taking our tax dollars, our kids and their kids for a lifetime! And we're about to be robbed by our government AGAIN! Keep your global warming hoax to yourself. Thanks. 🙂
February 12, 2009 at 3:40 pm
TJ (2/12/2009)
Mind you, those temperature observations were all flawed. How much ACCURACY did that guy at the weather station in Tennessee, oh say, back in 1906, have with his readings? Hmmm... lets see.... "It looks here like its 94 degrees. Feels like it too. Ah. 94" Did he look at the instrument on an angle? Did he mess up the data as he recorded it? ...
because of course climate scientists wouldnt have thought of those sources of error - but thats right they are all liars and conspirators arent they
Keep your global warming hoax to yourself.
You seem like a person who like to rely on evidence, so where is your evidence that climate scientists are perpetrating a hoax? Put up or shut up. It isnt good enough to call people liars just because they put forward a theory you disagree with, if you think they are lying you need to show they are lying.
February 12, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Andrey (2/12/2009)
When floating ice melts, does the water level rise?
You are correct, ice floating on water that melts does not cause the sea level to rise. However ice on land that melts and flows into the sea does cause the sea level to rise, this is why the ice melting on Greenland is a problem, and why the ice melting on Antarctica is a problem (recent research has shown that yes Antartica is warming as well).
Water also expands when it gets warmer, so as the oceans get warmer some of the sea level rise will be from themral expansion.
This is not the only problem with the oceans. They act as a sink for CO2 but as they absorb it the acidity increases which is a problem for reefs and creatures with shells. At the current rate of increase in acidity reefs will not be viable by 2050.
February 12, 2009 at 3:56 pm
robertdorans (2/12/2009)
These guys can't even predict how much rain will fall in NYC next month. Which rain and snow have a great deal to do with the temprature of the planet as well. When you say 1 to 3 inches that is a huge diffrence.
predicting the weather is not the same as predicting the climate, they are completely different. You cant predict the patterns that cream swirling in your coffee will make with a supercomputer, but you can predict that in 5 minutes time it will be mixed evenly through.
It is just a power grab by the government.
You havent been paying attention to politics. Governments around the world have been resisting doing anything about climate change for about 20 years, the US government in particular.[/quote]
The planet must heated up before. New York isn't under a glacier anymore.
and your point is? the planet has heated up before and the consequences for life were dramatic, we want to avoid that. This time around we are the cause.
If global warming was also a real concern. Then why are we building roads. concrete capture heat very well.
Roads and concrete are not a particularly large source of CO2 emissions compared to the cars we drive and the coal we burn to generate electricity. A lack of action to prevent global warming does not mean it isnt happening, it means politicians have their heads in the sand.
February 12, 2009 at 4:02 pm
GSquared (2/12/2009)
It also should be pointed out that mankind and our symbiots (cattle, etc.) are responsible for less than one half of one percent of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere every year, and that volcanoes are the primary source of almost all atmospheric CO2.
That is a gross error. Volcanoes produce about 200 millions tonnes of CO2 each year. Human activity produces about 24 billion tonnes per year. Yes, we produce over 100 times as much CO2 as volcanoes every year. Refer to Scientific American this months online issue.
February 12, 2009 at 4:08 pm
David Reed (2/12/2009)
There's an army of snowmen on my lawn who'd like to have a word with you about so-called "global warming" (whether anthropogenic or some other unicorn-type):
There are over 1000 homes burned to the ground and about 200 people burned to death here in the worst bush fires in our history. Most of our country is still in a drought that has lasted a decade.
February 12, 2009 at 4:12 pm
AspiringGeek (2/12/2009)
Good BI will do little to help us get to the truth, because the truth doesn't matter very much. The IPCC is not a scientific organization, it is a political organization.Something as important as the future of mankind oughtn't be relegated to politics. Unfortunately, good science is taking a back seat to--no, getting stuffed into the trunk--when it comes to the political agendas being promulgated by devotees of global warming.
You are right the IPCC is a political organisation, but it also includes a lot of scientists. The politicians invariably attempt to water down the conclusions put to them by the scientist members. If you look at the science itself the prognosis is worse than the IPCC would have us believe.
So I agree, we shouldnt let politicians put their short term career goals ahead of the real need to do something about global warming.
February 12, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Steve, if you are worried about the emissions of your Porsche there is any easy solution. Eat less beef.
The process of producing a steak produces the equivalent of several hundred kilometres driving emissions.
February 12, 2009 at 4:29 pm
As far as BI and global warning is concerned I would say that it tells us that there is a lot of money to be made out of climate change.
There is a lot of political incentive for pushing climate change agendas. If the public can be persuaded to use transport that is less dependent on fossil fuels that have to be harvested in hostile lands then that means we are no longer hostage to the whims of unstable dictatorships.
There is a belief that we are at the end of a very long term economic cycle, the last one being in the crash of the 1930s and as a result we are in dangerous times with revolutions afoot. These could be political and/or technological but now would be the time to push next gen technologies that offer significant fuel savings.
To give an example, the lights on my bike last 2 hours on a large 9 volt battery. At the time of purchase it was a recommended buy in most cycling magazines.
10 years on an LED equivalent will last 5,000 hours on a much smaller battery.
Honda has demonstrated that a hydrogen fuel cell car is a practical proposition provided you have a hydrogen distribution grid. Hyrdogen is just an explosive gas, you can move it around pipes just like you can with domestic gas.
Porsche are actually quite fuel efficient for what they do, certainly more so than Aston-Martin, Ferarri and Lamborghinis, plus you can get more than 2 people in a porsche if you squeeze a bit.
Material science is such these days that we don't have to build vehicles out of heavy steel. We could build them out of plastics, aluminium and other materials and save massive amounts of weight and the resulting fuel to propel them. My Dad's Caterham could do 40+mpg and yet do 0-60 in under 5 seconds. The acceleration is due to the power to weight ratio.
The Audi A2 is an example of what can be achieved for an efficient small family car.
The opportunity to move on to the next generation of technology is here today.
February 12, 2009 at 4:54 pm
So what kind of temperature data do you use for the last 100,000 years?
February 12, 2009 at 5:05 pm
So what kind of temperature data do you use for the last 100,000 years?
Ice core samples from glaciers and ice packs. They are like tree rings. Will not give you an exact temperature, but it will tell you the length of melt and freezing spells.
February 12, 2009 at 5:09 pm
David.Poole (2/12/2009)
The opportunity to move on to the next generation of technology is here today.
Hi David, I agree with what you say. I would like to add that there are dangers with focussing on technological solutions. The most obvious one being that the more efficient we do things the more likely we are just to do more of them. It is similar to the well known effect that building roads has on traffic. The number of cars increases to fill the available space, congestion doesnt improve people just make more trips.
Out immediate needs are for technological fixes for power generation and transport, and the political will to do so. But in the longer term this will not be enough, there is also a need to deal with issues such as the idea that we can have never ending economic growth.
It is obvious from the current financial crisis that our society is totally dependent on continual growth in the economy. But the world is like a disk drive - it has limited space. But unlike a disk drive we only have one world. It would be a poor DBA who expected to be able to have a database that grew exponentially forever on a single disk, but that is what we assume we can do with our economy.
February 12, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I am disheartened by the responses to this topic. There is plenty of climate change denialism going on here, and for people purportedly in the higher percentile of intelligence, that really goes a long way to demonstrating something. Most of you seem to forget that Climate Science is actually backed by science. Denialism is backed by speculation, conjecture, conspiracy, hearsay, opinion... sweet nothings by scientific comparison.
Here are some facts:
**CO2 IS A GREENHOUSE GAS**. It re-radiates infrared/thermal radiation. This has been scientifically replicated and has been known for at least the last 100 years. The Swedish physicist/chemist Svante Arrhenius first put forward the idea that CO2 has a blanketing effect. In a sense, we are lucky because without it, life as we know it on this planet would not exist.
**WE HAVE BEEN BURNING FOSSILS FOR OVER 150 YEARS**. Fossils are a high source of CO2. Not only have we been burning them but the amount we have been burning has increased exponentially. We are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere and are seriously disturbing the natural carbon cycle (which takes centuries or millenia to do a round trip). History has demonstrated that when things are altered without a clear understanding of repercussions we set ourselves up for failure (we can all draw parallels to the computer industry here).
**SCIENCE NEVER PROVES ANYTHING**. Proof is a property of mathematics, not science. Accepted science is that which holds a majority view from scientifically related peers. With that said, there will always be dissenters to any theory but the way we measure certainty of a theory is by the process of peer review. This theory has an overwhelmingly strong level of peer support, whereas the opposing viewpoint has no such consensus or peer support.
**9.6 OUT OF 10 CLIMATOLOGISTS AGREE WE ARE SHAPING OUR CLIMATE**. So which side of the experts will you sit? Do you go with the opinions of the majority of domain experts, or will you side with the fringe scientists, non-related scientists, journalists, deniers, shills, lobbyists and conspiracy theorists? To put that another way, would you go to a mechanic to fix a toothache?
**THERE IS NO PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE THAT REFUTES ACC**. If there were, it would be all over the media like a rash and the scientists involved would be governmental poster-people. For the conspiracy theorists, governments would save more money demonstrating that climate change theory is wrong and hence stopping any preventative action, than they would by agreeing with it and going down their respective chosen paths.
**BELIEF SYSTEMS DON'T REFUTE THE SCIENCE**. What is arrogant is believing we have no net effect on our environment. We work in tandem with natural processes not in place of them. There is no doubt that climate works in cycles, but the chemical composition of the atmosphere plays a strong role. This can be seen by the chemical analysis of the Vostok ice cores which go back 800k years. Believing that we don't have an effect is just not enough, you need to back it with something of substance.
Steve, sell the Porsche. Your children will love you for it.
February 13, 2009 at 5:23 am
if anyone of you grew beside the sea, if anyone of you had a river beside your family's farm?
my location is close to the equator, i am close to my fourth decade now.
my grandfather's beach we used to go to during weekends, its halfway eaten up by the sea now.
February 13, 2009 at 6:46 am
Here are some facts:
**CO2 IS A GREENHOUSE GAS**. It re-radiates infrared/thermal radiation. This has been scientifically replicated and has been known for at least the last 100 years. The Swedish physicist/chemist Svante Arrhenius first put forward the idea that CO2 has a blanketing effect. In a sense, we are lucky because without it, life as we know it on this planet would not exist.
Cite the experiments that were used to prove this. How has this been "scientifically replicated". You're asserting as proven fact something that every scientist I've ever read anything about has stated is unprovable.
I want the names and publications of the papers, the dates of the experiments, and the names of the researchers.
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