Climate Change, 'Greenhouse' effects, Environment, etc part II

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Message 1196672 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 5:43:36 UTC - in response to Message 1196669.  
Last modified: 18 Feb 2012, 5:46:56 UTC

well lets see, Toba knocked humanity down to 1 familial genetic pool, of which we all share a common ancestry...

how insignificant was that?

Wiped out down to one family ... eeek. almost gone.

And all from one tiny, insignificant, compared to our vast civilization... volcano
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Message 1196685 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 5:58:09 UTC - in response to Message 1196672.  
Last modified: 18 Feb 2012, 6:00:47 UTC

well lets see, Toba knocked humanity down to 1 familial genetic pool, of which we all share a common ancestry...

... And all from one tiny, insignificant, compared to our vast civilization... volcano

Ahhh... Wikipedia to the rescue: Toba

And, to use your style of argument, that lists a "one-off" of a mere 6 Giga-tons of gas emission into the atmosphere. Compare that to the 30 Giga-tons of CO2 alone, excluding all the other crap, that Mankind is polluting our atmosphere with every year, and now increasing.


Insignificant?

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Message 1196707 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 6:40:47 UTC - in response to Message 1196627.  

For more of the story of ancient climate and some of what changed the ancient climate, take a look at: Climate during geological ages. Note also how you see different effects across different scales.

My oh my. Look in there. We might have an answer.

Black line is sea temperature so it will be a bit different.

Same time scale and similar temperature variation trends. But the red line isn't CO2. It is another factor. If the CO2 line is correct, and you say it looks okay, then it looks like this other factor swamps CO2 as a cause.

However, the temperature plot looks to be highly "diagrammatic" and set to no real values. Can you say where that part comes from?

On the plot itself it says data from http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm CV C. R. Scotese

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Message 1196820 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 13:53:36 UTC - in response to Message 1196685.  
Last modified: 18 Feb 2012, 13:56:33 UTC

"And, to use your style of argument, that lists a "one-off" of a mere 6 Giga-tons of gas emission into the atmosphere".

yeah, an insignificant source of CO2 nearly wiped out humanity...

Seems CO2 really isn't important after all..

thanks for clarifying my point.
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Message 1196920 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 18:25:39 UTC - in response to Message 1196820.  
Last modified: 18 Feb 2012, 18:27:11 UTC

OK... You seem to have a strange way of discussion...

I replied:

well lets see, Toba knocked humanity down to 1 familial genetic pool, of which we all share a common ancestry...

... And all from one tiny, insignificant, compared to our vast civilization... volcano

Ahhh... Wikipedia to the rescue: Toba

And, to use your style of argument, that lists a "one-off" of a mere 6 Giga-tons of gas emission into the atmosphere. Compare that to the 30 Giga-tons of CO2 alone, excluding all the other crap, that Mankind is polluting our atmosphere with every year, and now increasing.


Insignificant?


To which you randomly reply:

"And, to use your style of argument, that lists a "one-off" of a mere 6 Giga-tons of gas emission into the atmosphere".

yeah, an insignificant source of CO2 nearly wiped out humanity...

Seems CO2 really isn't important after all..

thanks for clarifying my point.


If you engaged a little thought, your answer should be very different. There's some good leads in my comment there but not with your random sarcasm rubbish.

Looks like you're just scoring against your own made up points rather than engaging in anything meaningful. Please troll your nonsense elsewhere.


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Message 1196923 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 18:33:09 UTC - in response to Message 1196707.  
Last modified: 18 Feb 2012, 18:33:58 UTC

For more of the story of ancient climate and some of what changed the ancient climate, take a look at: Climate during geological ages. Note also how you see different effects across different scales.

My oh my. Look in there. We might have an answer. ...

Indeed that is an interesting one... And one that continues to be looked at across the long timescales of millions of years.

However, note that what we are unnaturally seeing at present is on the timescale of just a few years for what normally happens over a much longer timescale of millennia...


On the plot itself it says data from http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm CV C. R. Scotese

To be looked up later, but note the significant differences to other more expected plots... Again, also note that is a different story to waht is happening in the here and now. We were not around back then, nor even were our present continents!


Still our only one world,
and we're still polluting it ever more quickly,
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Message 1196965 - Posted: 18 Feb 2012, 20:12:00 UTC - in response to Message 1196923.  

However, note that what we are unnaturally seeing at present is on the timescale of just a few years for what normally happens over a much longer timescale of millennia...

Since CO2 and temperature is disproved over the time scale of millennia, it is also disproved over the time scale of years. Something other than CO2 is in control of global warming. It may be a different greenhouse gas or it may be something else, but we know it isn't CO2!

What we are seeing is the timescale of millennia happening. Time for another Azolla event after it gets warm enough to support the bloom. It is a natural cycle.

The only way it is otherwise, you have to put man at the center of the universe and that has been disproved. We happened to evolve into existence at the very end of the cool cycle or just after. The warming started well before we learned how to control fire. That is how we know it is the natural millennia cycle happening. Got another 50 to 75 million years of warming coming before it starts to cool again.

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Message 1197242 - Posted: 19 Feb 2012, 11:21:54 UTC - in response to Message 1196965.  

However, note that what we are unnaturally seeing at present is on the timescale of just a few years for what normally happens over a much longer timescale of millennia...

Since CO2 and temperature is disproved over the time scale of millennia, it is also disproved over the time scale of years. Something other than CO2 is in control of global warming. ...


... And so says you with no evidence whatsoever. So says you going against consistence science on this very issue since the days of Tyndall some hundred and fifty years ago.

Noone who knows the subject says that CO2 has only ever been the one singular driving force throughout the millions of years of earth history. Your personal claims of that are just so much more FUD. What is demonstrated is that for the first time in earth history, well known and long established physical effects of the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere, put there by our ever expanding vast industrial burning of fossil fuels, is for the first time driving rapid climate change as the most significant effect.

CO2 in various previous examples has aided or acted as an amplifying feedback to other instigators of climate change. However, for the here and now, the present, we ourselves are the primary driving force. As proven by the measured increase in CO2 concentration. As proven by the radioisotope composition of that CO2 showing the additional CO2 to be directly from fossil fuel. As proven by various other aspects of Man's activities. Quite a smoking gun.


Note that we need a certain level of CO2 to keep us nicely warm. That has been stable for the last few thousand years and is what our civilisation is used to. 'Too much' of a 'good thing' is quickly 'spoiling the party'.

There are indeed various other effects at play. However, the recent and rapid change in atmospheric CO2 concentration is by far the greatest significant change and driving force...


Still our only one planet regardless of how you might claim we can hide in the mists of time. Shame is, we haven't and couldn't have lived through those mists of time...

Regards,
Martin


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Message 1197251 - Posted: 19 Feb 2012, 12:28:09 UTC

Another snippet on the problems of good science.

Attacks paid for by big business are 'driving science into a dark era'
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Message 1197379 - Posted: 19 Feb 2012, 18:16:27 UTC - in response to Message 1197242.  

Noone who knows the subject says that CO2 has only ever been the one singular driving force throughout the millions of years of earth history.

So why do you insist it is today? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Warmists offer none.

You claim that CO2 absorbs heat, yet with concentrations 100 times higher than today, the planet was cold. Sure it absorbs heat in the lab, but something else happens in the real world atmosphere of planet earth. Or do you deny the data?

You offer a circular logic claim that both temperature and CO2 are going up that CO2 is the reason temperature is going up. The data set of the last 500 million years puts the lie to that circular logic, zero correlation factor.

You say to throw out the long term data because man wasn't there. That puts man at the center of the universe. I thought that was disproved when the sun stopped going around the flat earth.

Again you insist that history be thrown out and we only look at the last couple thousand years. That is an extraordinary claim. Where is your extraordinary proof for this claim?

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Message 1197952 - Posted: 20 Feb 2012, 19:38:05 UTC - in response to Message 1197379.  
Last modified: 20 Feb 2012, 19:39:36 UTC

Noone who knows the subject says that CO2 has only ever been the one singular driving force throughout the millions of years of earth history.

So why do you insist it is today? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Warmists offer none.

You claim that CO2 absorbs heat, yet with concentrations 100 times higher than today, the planet was cold. Sure it absorbs heat in the lab, but something else happens in the real world atmosphere of planet earth. Or do you deny the data?

... Again you insist that history be thrown out and we only look at the last couple thousand years. ...

Wow! What a fantastic claim for a selective denial of science and reality...

So, please do tell me how CO2 can behave one way for scientists in the lab and yet according to the denialists, somehow magically different things happen with CO2 when outside of a laboratory! Indeed fantastic claims need some very hard evidence...


You seem to have missed the very loud clue that I gave to you for your historical anomaly about 550 million years ago and your more recent example of a massive volcanic eruption. I'll give you a very big hint... You've confused your gasses. Also note that CO2 is not the only gas to influence the temperature of our planet...


So just to recap, we have the beginnings of an Industrial Revolution and John Tyndall makes a remarkable find and conclusion. So far, his conjecture is proving to be true, including the subsequent cooling of our upper atmosphere as a consequence.

Something extraordinary not anticipated by Science is the unbelievable anti-science lobbying and outright attacks:


Canadian government is 'muzzling its scientists'

... "You can't have an informed discussion if the science isn't allowed to be communicated. Public relations message number one is that you have to set the conversation. You don't want to have a conversation on someone else's terms. And this is now being applied to science on discussions about oil sands, climate and salmon."


Canada threatens trade war with EU over tar sands

... "It is extraordinarily naive for ministers and officials to take the special pleading by Canada as though it were gospel truth, rather than what it is – an attempt to protect narrow financial interests." In 2009, Simon Hughes MP, and now deputy leader of the Lib Dems said: "World leaders must work towards a treaty that will outlaw tar sands extraction, in the same way they came together to ban land mines, blood diamonds and cluster bombs."...


The inside story on climate scientists under siege

... Those opposed to climate change began accusing Mann of overlooking important data or even manipulating the records. None of the allegations were ever found to have substance. The hockey stick would eventually be confirmed by more than 10 other studies.

Mann, like other scientists, was just not equipped to deal with the media barrage. "It took the scientific community some time I think to realise that the scientific community is in a street fight with climate change deniers and they are not playing by the rules of engagement of science. The scientific community needed some time to wake up to that." ...




All is fair in love and war and politics and global warming denial so as to burn yet more fossil fuels?

Still our only one planet,
Martin


ps: I'm interested to see if you can see the difference between your chart for 550 million years ago and now. An obvious hint is that you've missed a little something off your chart...
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Message 1198168 - Posted: 21 Feb 2012, 10:31:43 UTC

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Message 1198361 - Posted: 22 Feb 2012, 1:44:21 UTC - in response to Message 1198168.  
Last modified: 22 Feb 2012, 1:44:51 UTC

A little more about the Heartland leak.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/21/peter-gleick-admits-leaked-heartland-institute-documents


Thanks for that and...

Ouch... Looking nasty. Also looks like the "Heartland Institute" are embarrassed enough to try going crying to their lawyers...

Will they burn and boil or freeze in the additional glare?...


Still all on our only planet,
Martin
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Message 1198362 - Posted: 22 Feb 2012, 1:50:53 UTC - in response to Message 1197952.  
Last modified: 22 Feb 2012, 1:51:44 UTC

... ps: I'm interested to see if you can see the difference between your chart for 550 million years ago and now. An obvious hint is that you've missed a little something off your chart...

I was going to leave this to allow a little further research and ripost, especially concerning the very well misused denialist abuse of two separate charts that have been conveniently combined from over ten years ago...

Turns out that very chart is so famous that a certain very famous denialist star has used it for one of his 'classic' presentations. Excellent stuff!

This demonstrates the case far better than a few random typings from myself:

Youtube: Monckton ... Correlations and Himalayan glaciers


All very gently presented.

Comments welcomed,

Still our only planet,
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Message 1198903 - Posted: 23 Feb 2012, 18:30:05 UTC

Most young children have great difficulty staying at the task for distant rewards and usually choose the more immediate, reward. Childhood, it seems, lasts a lifetime for us humans. Our world leaders have dragged their feet on Climate Change, 'Greenhouse' effects, for decades. They have long been aware of the global warming threat but they have usually invested little to combat it. They have usually chosen the more politically palatable course, the easy road of the status quo. I hope we humans are finally starting to united our world against this global threat. If we must have wars, this kind of war is my kind of war . In the end everyone wins -- and I mean everyone -- all life on the planet.

History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us We must not let it happen again! we know who speaks for the nations, but ............. who speaks for the human species ? who speaks for planet earth ? we speaks for Earth! Our loyalties are to the species and the planet Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos ancient and vast from which we sprang.




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Message 1198962 - Posted: 23 Feb 2012, 20:17:08 UTC - in response to Message 1198903.  

Byron,

Good to see you on forums!

And very good comment. I just hope that can stir the conscience and sympathies and positive action for all who read that.


All on our only planet for ALL of us,
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Message 1199089 - Posted: 24 Feb 2012, 1:14:46 UTC
Last modified: 24 Feb 2012, 1:17:04 UTC

So... For a brief recent summary from what I see in this thread:


We have Canada trying to gag all science about their oil/tar sands, pollution, dead salmon, and most likely anything else they consider politically inconvenient;

We've got the furor about the Heartland Institute and their subsequent embarrassed squirming, FUD, deflection, and threats of counter-attack;

We've got the 'revelations' that the Heartland Institute is determined to undermine any science that doesn't convey the message they want, apparently by any means including foul, and they are not beyond subverting education materials for school children;

We've had the resurrection of a misleadingly compiled pair of charts from a decade ago or so, for which the "Lord of Climate Denial" Lord Monckton has been very gently but thoroughly undone for his claims for that chart;

And the main two climate denialists on these forums attempting to convince everyone that we can pollute our planet to hell have gone strangely quiet.


Is the New Heartland strategy to let the firestorm quickly burn out to then soon after sneak out new tendrils of flame and FUD?...


Thanks to Byron for a timely reminder of what our planet looks like.

All on our only planet,
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Message 1199135 - Posted: 24 Feb 2012, 4:32:08 UTC - in response to Message 1198362.  

... ps: I'm interested to see if you can see the difference between your chart for 550 million years ago and now. An obvious hint is that you've missed a little something off your chart...

I was going to leave this to allow a little further research and ripost, especially concerning the very well misused denialist abuse of two separate charts that have been conveniently combined from over ten years ago...

Turns out that very chart is so famous that a certain very famous denialist star has used it for one of his 'classic' presentations. Excellent stuff!

This demonstrates the case far better than a few random typings from myself:

Youtube: Monckton ... Correlations and Himalayan glaciers


All very gently presented.

Comments welcomed,

Did you see the large error in your video?
http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~ajs/2001/Feb/qn020100182.pdf
Brener re CCM-3:
For the effect of changing paleogeography on the temperature of weathering, rather than use the results of our CCM-3 modeling here, we rely on the earlier data of Otto-Bliesner (1995). Her results are for flat, ice-free continents, computed at several times over the Phanerozoic, which provide a first-order guide to changes in land temperature as a result of changes in continental size and position. This approach allows for the exclusion of glacial and periglacial land areas, which affect global mean land temperature, but which exhibit very little chemical weathering.

You video:
Snowball earth.

OOPS! To get the result from the model that is wanted -- note CCM-3, the subject of the paper, is a model not observed data -- you must assume no glaciation and no snow. You video assumes a 100% ice covered world to start. Something isn't matching here.

BTW your video starts cold, but the data on the chart starts hot. Something else isn't matching here.

Wait a second, your video uses a conclusion from a model, not observed data, to claim that CO2 and temperature track. Of course they track. That was the assumption made in building the model! (Circular logic)

As for suggested future carbon cycle modelling work, besides the usual plea for more data from all sources, there is a special need, in both carbon cycle and climate modelling, to consider only those land areas that have sufficient rain and are sufficiently warm to exhibit appreciable chemical weathering. This entails closer interaction between GCM models and carbon cycle models, with an attempt to look at weathering on a paleogeographic, not just global, basis. In addition, because of the importance of plants to weathering, many more experimental studies under natural conditions are needed to determine how much different plants accelerate weathering and how the plants respond to change in atmospheric CO2

Translation, we know we don't have enough data to draw a conclusion.


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Message 1199207 - Posted: 24 Feb 2012, 13:25:54 UTC
Last modified: 24 Feb 2012, 14:06:57 UTC

to conclude from the article ...

These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.

In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.

"Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee.

Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?"

The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change."

In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry' parts of the United States."

"Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism."

An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.

On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.

A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.

The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions.

Boehlert, the veteran Republican congressman, noted that "high-profile people with an `R' after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, are saying it's all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad."

The quarterly study's authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America's hardening left-right gap.

"The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension," they wrote.

Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says "ferocity" in defense of false beliefs often increases "as the evidence proving them false builds."

In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history - the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation - when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached.

"This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer," Gore said. "As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, `How long? Not long.'"

Even Wally Broecker's jest - that deniers could blame God - may not be an option for long.

Last May the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming caused by CO2 --- It's happening It's happening.

Said the pope's scientific advisers, "We must protect the habitat that sustains us."
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Message 1199210 - Posted: 24 Feb 2012, 13:29:57 UTC
Last modified: 24 Feb 2012, 14:10:32 UTC

to continue from the article ...

Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.

Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed - all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor.

The impact has been widespread.

An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared.

The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes.

From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world's seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere.

"We are scared, really and truly," diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific's Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.

Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.

The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world's coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.

The greatest fears may focus on "feedbacks" in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

The Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra's permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
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Message boards : Politics : Climate Change, 'Greenhouse' effects, Environment, etc part II


 
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