Could Global Warming Make Life on Earth Better? 923
mikee805 writes "A lengthy article in Spiegel explores the possibility that global warming might make life on Earth better, not just for humans, but all species. The article argues that 'worst-case scenarios' are often the result of inaccurate simulations made in the 1980s. While climate change is a reality, as far as the article is concerned, some planning and forethought may mean that more benefits than drawbacks will result from higher temperatures. From the article:'The medical benefits of higher average temperatures have also been ignored. According to Richard Tol, an environmental economist, "warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu." Another widespread fear about global warming -- that it will cause super-storms that could devastate towns and villages with unprecedented fury -- also appears to be unfounded. Current long-term simulations, at any rate, do not suggest that such a trend will in fact materialize.'"
But most Slashdot readers would enjoy... (Score:5, Insightful)
40,000 fewer deaths in Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
More heat related illnesses? (Score:5, Insightful)
Life finds a way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, since you are so sure, riddle me this: we can calculate our CO2 output (it dwarfs natural emissions). We know the physics behind CO2 absorption of solar radiation. What makes you think that this is affecting the earth?
I'm always amazed by how easily people believe things they want to believe.
Models (Score:5, Insightful)
this is where I lose karma. bring it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Milder winters are going to open up trade routes through the arctic.
I will potentially be able to grow stuff in my garden that won't grow there today. My tomatoes may become perennials as they are in their native habitat. And I could do with some citrus trees in my yard.
If the ocean levels rise, landmass on the North American continent will shrink as populations rise. The equity in my real estate investments will grow at an unprecedented rate.
Living in Raleigh, I will be much closer to the coast than I am today.
OK yes this does mean I will have less buffer from hurricanes, and the hurricanes may be more frequent and more violent than is typical.
Inuit may lose their traditional way of life, but they are sitting on vast chunks of currently frozen land that will become desirable temperate areas that the yankees will pay good money to move to once they start experiencing the kind of weather that is more typical of the southeastern US.
It's not all doom and gloom, folks. There will be extensive collateral damages, whole species will be lost, but life has a way of moving on. And Homo sapiens is one of the most adaptable vertebrates on this planet, so I'm sure we'll find a way to thrive through this.
And? (Score:1, Insightful)
The issue is not that it's gonna get hotter, damnit. It's that we're changing the world drastically in unpredictable ways. That means a mass exodus of people from the coasts, from the new deserts, from swampland that used to be permafrost. Global warming is a practical and moral issue for the world about whether they want to move a significant portion of their population, and everyone else's population, somewhere else, with all the horror that being forced off your land entails.
Lengthy article, yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that I don't see it citing many sources, and when it does, it seems to selectively quote them, such as limiting it's considerations to "gradual thawing of the Greenland ice sheet" only when considering sea level changes. I'm not going to call this a whitewash, but it seems to be a sales job for a point of view, rather than a well-founded findings of a respectable research effort.
Ryan Fenton
You! Shut up! It's HAPPY THOUGHT HOUR! (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't you see the pictures in the article of pretty young ladies enjoying the sun?
Eliminate the negative! Accentuate the positive!
Visualize palm trees in Germany, and put out of your mind the massive droughts and desertification in the torrid and equatorial zones.
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the math gets a lot more complicated once we start counting tropical type diseases which will increase in prevalence.
Not to say there aren't good things from global warming, but I would rather deal with what we do know (the climate we have now) rather than hoping that things will be better with whatever climate we get later.
what about heat related problems? (Score:2, Insightful)
But what is the author's point? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of my biggest annoyances with people who question global warming isn't that they think it's not happening or that it isn't us who are contributing to it, but rather the fact that they use these previous statements as an excuse to not do anything about it.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that carbon dioxide emissions really don't have any effect on global warming... does that mean that we should keep driving SUVs and not care about how much pollution we dump into the environment?
Although people who announce that the earth is doomed because of global warming and come across as being panicky appear to be crackpots to all them skeptics, it doesn't mean that we should ignore them. we should do what we can to conserve what we have. It's worth it.
Re:More paid-for "research" from special interests (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, a German media outlet, Der Spiegel, a German author, Olaf Stampf, and a Swedish physicist, Svante Arrhenius. You really didn't read the article before you jumped on the Anti-Americanism bandwagon, did you?
As for your minority dissent argument (A few "scientists" must be heretics, because the majority disagrees), you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the article, because I don't think we have a clue one way or another what the future holds, but you've completely written off a possibility simply because it doesn't fit in with your political agenda -- kinda like the oil companies from the other direction.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:1, Insightful)
Start citing sources for data, because on this case, you're dead wrong.That's funny, none of the scientists see said spike. Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me what year(s) this spike is over, which CO2 measurement you see it on, where the CO2 is (since no such measurement is ever made without an atmospheric segment,) and what the change rate is? (Of course, if you were making the data up, you'd insist that I do the research for myself, that I'm being lazy to ask you to cite data to back up your false claims, but that's what I'm expecting, since I've never seen a pseudoscience book make your claims, and since it's sure as hell not coming from actual planetary data.)Where do you get this stuff? Humanity is responsible for less than one tenth of one percent of the CO2 in our atmosphere. We are positively dwarfed by rotting vegetation, dead animals and the tundra. However, the vast bulk of atmospheric CO2 (~72%) is released from the ocean CO2 reservoir.I don't think it's affecting the earth. Why do you? Don't pull what you did above, making up data and spouting things you expect. If you can't explain with references to data, accept that you have no idea.Imagine how that would sound if you found out I was actually operating on good, solid science. Next, go watch the video I posted.
You're in for a dry shock.
Catastrophic Migrations (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, it's not a bug (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like a politician caught in a lie trying to turn it to virtue.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you'll find that over the past few years the average number of hurricanes may be unusual, but it isn't unusually high.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:5, Insightful)
And, speaking of Katrina, some scientists studying global warming believe that it is responsible for the more-active-than-usual hurricane seasons of the past few years. Which makes sense since the main cause of hurricanes is -- wait for it -- heat. Who paid these shills?
Is it also responsible for last year's dead hurricane season? Really, these things are far too complicated to generalize in that manner. While I do believe global warming is anthropogenic, I don't think it serves any purpose to use half-baked, unreasearched theories to blame everything short of a supernova on global warming.
Sigh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that this is akin to talking about the positive effects of smoking: weightloss, fewer old people to draw down retirement benefits, etc. It's disingenuous and generally only used to mask the drawbacks. Is it a necessary part of the discussion? Of course. Does it change the negative aspects of Global Warming? No. Do the negative aspects of Global Warming outweigh the positive aspects? Yes. The cost of Global Warming is still going to be in the trillions, because people generally already accounted for this.
Fewer deaths from flu spells will be offset by increasing deaths by malaria (which is already migrating north). Actually, reading through the article, it seems that the author has no idea about what has already happened, and is content with merely posting speculation about what could happen. I'm reminded of the troll piece recently posted on C|Net about intellectual property. Same lack of content, same latching onto vague promises that have not materialized, same complete lack of evidence for their position.
I'm off to tagging the article flamebait.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:1, Insightful)
The simple fact of that documentary is that it panders to two things an ignorant audience LOVES. Firstly, the viewers can feel smarter than those silly scientists because there's actually one simple answer that they've overlooked and secondly, joy of joys, that answer is that everything's going to be all right. I hate to break it to you, but science is messy and it's hard, but it's not about conspiracies, just getting to the truth.
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, preparataion would help us deal with global warming. However, the fact remains that humans are tightly bound to geography and environment by our infrastructure. While individuals may uproot and move without too much complication (although there certainly is an economic cost to do so), our infrastrucure doesn't. Furthermore, the simple cost of relocation makes it completely infeasible in many locations. Look at Bangladesh. Something like 60 million people there live within one meter of sea level. They expect a country as poor as Bangladesh to uproot and move a third of its population? And to where?
Just because global warming has the *potential* to, say, transform Siberia and Canada into a new breadbasket, doesn't mean that such a transition would go smoothly. Even in the best case in which the warming is a net positive to world climate (which is doubtful), this simple fact means hardship for humanity.
Re:this is where I lose karma. bring it! (Score:4, Insightful)
i notice that the ones that are comfortable with "collateral damage" are the ones who won't be -- or at least believe they won't be -- "collateral damage".
note that i'm not necessarily talking about, just making an observation in the general.
mr c
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue isn't that I want us not to clean up our mess. The issue is that we are using the spectre of a problem which doesn't exist to prevent the development of the non-industrialized world, and the effects of our preventing that development on the environment alone are far worse than allowing the development would be (and that's before you look into the starvation, the disease, the horror, the menial labor and so on involved in living like it's the 1700s.)
Industrialization is important for a whole lot of reasons. Lots of those wars going on in Africa would never have happened if they had had the kind of reasonable food supplies that you get from electrified irrigation, refridgeration, and cooking without animal dung.
I am not saying we shouldn't try to do the ecologically sound thing. All I'm saying is we have no idea what that is, and we're not doing things we should be doing out of a culture of fear spawned by 1960s science which has long since been disproven to a degree that would have scuttled any other movement in modern politics today.
It's time we started the science from scratch, and then looked a second time at the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty is well meaning, misguided, ecologically driven international scale murder.
Re:More paid-for "research" from special interests (Score:5, Insightful)
Galileo was considered a heretic (in a literal sense!) by the Church rather than his fellow scientists. This was because other scientists, after reading his arguments, were agreeing with him!
Re:More heat related illnesses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hurray! The Rich will have fewer sniffles... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:2, Insightful)
You seem to be confused. Allow me to help you. Nobody said "humans aren't warming the earth." Nobody said "we have no part in global warming." Was was said was "our current climate models are so poor as to be unusable, and the international treaties we've made to stop this phenomenon are based on bad science."
Is there a problem? Yes. Does the Kyoto treaty address it in any way? No.
Carl Wunsch is well known for being excitable. I'm surprised he hasn't lambasted any of his own out of date work as clueless and reprehensible yet. He's a brilliant scientist, but he has completely lost the ability to interface with normal people. If you can show Carl, or anyone else, pointing out specific flaws in the science, I'm all ears.
That said, when you get right down to it, the carbon dioxide we're introducing into the atmosphere right now is NOTHING. Canada's tundra farts more CO2 than this on a semi-regular basis. Every single Russian earthquake scares more CO2 out of the taiga than this.
Am I saying we're not pumping anything awful into the atmosphere? God, no. But the CO2 isn't the problem, and our current treaties don't address the problem.
I believe that CO2-driven Global Warming is a hoax, and it's not just based on that documentary; you can dig through my comment history and see me pointing out many of these things long before that documentary was made. I'm basing my beliefs on clear science: the CO2 levels are way below planetary norms even after human involvement, there's a much stronger predictor of temperature data, and there's a clear proof that CO2 is an effect, not a cause.
Without making vague claims that "such and such" has been debunked or that "some scientist [I just learned about] says that documentary didn't waste half its running time listening to me vascillate," can you point to any actual science that shows any good reason for the CO2 to have that lag, or why the current CO2 rate should be a disaster when it's roughly half the level it was just four hundred years ago?
You can make personal attacks until you're blue in the face. Science laughs at ad hominem. Cite data or stop feigning familiarity.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:2, Insightful)
A warmer climate would definitely spread diseases in Europe that are normally very rare here, as both microbes and large animals migrate. Everything from snakebites to sunburns could cause problems, not because they are bigger issues than the ones related to cold, but because the people are not adapted to them. Here in Stockholm, -20 degrees Celsius is mostly just a cause for annoyance, but if it would strike Madrid, people would die like flies. Sure, in due time, people would adapt. But after how many deaths?
Re:Life finds a way (Score:3, Insightful)
How much war, pestilience, and famine would you cheerfully endure in this process? Oh, right, you'll be dead for most of it. I hope your kids enjoy themselves.
I hear this attitude a lot, but it just reflects nihilism and/or a lack of compassion for the rest of us, spatially and temporally. Or perhaps more likely, a lack of careful reflection before adopting these attitudes.
Re:You! Shut up! It's HAPPY THOUGHT HOUR! (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, global warming, whether true or not, could not signifigantly affect trade winds which are governed by the spin of the Earth, and it is they that drive the major weather in many tropical and subtropical regions.
Global warming may or may not happen. If it does, it may or may not be a bad thing. Humans don't have any fundamental data on the subject, so human nature takes over: we fear change. The whole global warming scare across the world smacks of a very human fear of change. Most people don't even realize that the temperature on Earth now is, as far as we can tell, below the lifetime average for Earth, and below the lifetime median as well.
Re:Give me a break... (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop claiming to know things you don't. Either cite actual data, or shut your mouth. All you're doing is spreading environment FUD. The problem is, this kind of FUD can do us all very real, very permanent damage.
Cite data next time, or consider yourself called a liar in public.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it's not just you. Many people believe that all change must be bad because change, by definition, means things will be different. Some things will be better and some things worse, but all things will be different.
Different != Bad
That said, if I had to chose between between global warming vs global cooling, I'd take the warming 100% of the time! When the climate changes, it's going to go one way or the other.
Re:More paid-for "research" from special interests (Score:1, Insightful)
http://webexhibits.org/calendars/year-text-Galile
-Will
Global Warming? Feh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just about every story is about how the world is ending, mostly because of man-made global warming. Yesterday, I heard that dams and hydro-electric power release more greenhouse gases than coal-fire electric plants. If they keep on like this, the only option for humanity will be mass suicide. Though, only if a decomposing corpse releases less methane than a living person, I guess.
Earlier this week there was a story about RFID devices in trash cans, to measure and control the amount of garbage thrown out by Britons. If this were in support of the George Bush's Global War on Terror, the masses would be out on the streets, but any invasive authoritarian measure can be justified in order to "Save the Earth" (tm).
I'm over it. Bother me no more with stories of global warming. At this stage, it's become a catchphrase to justify all sorts of bureaucratic intrusion and control, instigated by the watermelon left (green outside, red inside).
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, why would global warming stop at the optimum, for Germany, or for Sweden, or for the world?
Even if we recognized the optimum temperature when we reached it, overshoot seems very likely. Once we decide to stop warming the planet, it would take decades to change to non-carbon power sources. There would be more decades of warming already built into the increased CO2 levels, due to the thermal inertia of the oceans.
Very much warmer temperatures are very likely to less than optimum.
Oy vey (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm always amazed by supposed scientists being so confident in predicting future states of chaotic systems so far in advance. I'm even more amazed by claims that certain changes to the present state will lead to a specific changes in future outcome. I believe this is called Hubris.
Now then, "Oy vey" is Yiddish for "Oh woe is me". This is a bit premature. Let's save it for when Nemesis gets his revenge.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Insightful)
Flat-earthers can prove themselves wrong with 2 sextants and a friend, or by using "American Practical Navigator" by Bowditch, among many other possibilities. Things easily accessible to anybody with a calculator and a library or a marine hardware store. Flat-earthers are exceedingly rare and inexcusably stupid. Although maybe not rare enough.
Creationists . . . I don't even know where to start. Creationism is more reasonable than Flat-earth theory, but not much. The only real defense there is it is hard to make your own experiments to test evolution. You could see how you are a combination of your parents and extrapolate from there. I suppose you could take a weak antibiotic once a month until you develop some resistant bacteria or something, but that is a whole different variety of bad idea.
How is any individual supposed to measure global climate change? Assuming they don't have access to a world-wide network of observatories and whatnot. Last I checked, most people don't. Factor in things like urban heat island effect and local weather variations, and things become even more difficult for the amateur scientist. Add in that the sea level is changing both at a slow enough rate that people don't personally notice it (maybe in places with extremely small tide action?) and the fact that sea level charts matched against global temperature charts don't correlate the way you would expect (sea level has been rising at a pretty much constant rate over the last 120 years, while temperature has decreased for 10 years or more at least 4 times).
I believe that there is indeed global warming, and I suspect that people are at the very least part of the cause, but I can't personally convince myself to care about it, one way or the other.
Stop it? Meh.
Slow it down? Meh.
Reverse it? Well, that seems like a bad idea, but still; meh.
Re:More paid-for "research" from special interests (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm, no. Galileo was referred to the Inquisistion by a scientist he had accused (baselessly) of plagiarism. Apparently, Galileo was a bit of a curmudgeon (a rude asshole might be a better description), with no social skills to speak of.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Insightful)
So even assuming that Germans will be healthier when the weather is warmer, there could be other problems when the forests are destroyed by parasites and the top soil washes away.
Whether we caused it seems a bit academic. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is completely false, and quite dangerous. Furthermore, I think that the debate over what has caused global warming, has really just become a distraction to the real issue, which is quite simply "what the hell are we going to do about it?"
It doesn't really matter whether the cause of the warming is anthropogenic or not; unless you're going to debate that the planet is not getting warmer -- and it doesn't seem like you are -- we still have a serious problem on our hands. It's a little academic to most people whether it's caused by power production, or automobiles, or cow farts, or energy fluctuations in the Sun, or a lack of pirates.
Telling people in Bangladesh who are up to their knees in seawater that "hey, we're just coming out of a geological cold phase!" isn't particularly useful. Or when the power grid and water supplies in the whole Eastern half of the U.S. fail because the average summer temperature is up in the mid-to-high 90s [nwsource.com] (or higher), saying "it was a lot worse a few million years ago" isn't getting us any closer to a solution.
The causes of the warming phenomenon are only interesting insofar as they give us possible solutions for dealing with the problem -- because it's not CO2 that's the problem, it's the warming that's the problem. If you don't think it's anthropogenic CO2 that's the cause of the warming, fine, but that doesn't mean that the actual problem just goes away because we didn't cause it, which seems to be the attitude taken by many of the anti-anthropogenic-global-warming side. We still have to deal with the same consequences even if the cause isn't anthropogenic. (And if it's not anthropogenic, then we're probably screwed even further, because it's probably a lot more difficult to reverse the process.)
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:3, Insightful)
Flunked statistics did you?
Re:Sigh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? It would be nice to live in such certainty, however, that certainly smells like something from the genus Factus Internetis Sphincterum to me. For every negative you can think of, I can probably think of an equal or greater net positive. That makes one of us either a Pollyanna or a Cassandra. Personally, I expect the reality will fall somewhere in the middle, as usual.
Here's a little quiz:
Take any point in history.
Now, what are the odds that the world's climate on that day will be exactly the same as it is 100 years later?
To put it another way...if you plop a city down somewhere, and then move forward through time, the odds that city will suffer some catastrophic event - from earthquake, to war, to flood, to famine, to plague - reaches near-unity. Put it on a coastline and you've probably DOUBLED your odds of 'something bad' over time.
Climate has never stood still. It was historically both warmer and colder than today. It will be both warmer and colder in the future. Accept that the world in which our society is built (and that includes infrastructure, national boundaries, etc.) is all just ephemera compared to the natural processes of a planet.
Suddenly, this hairless ape that infests almost every corner of the landmass of this planet thinks that it's his fault. Cute, but kinda pathetic.
Re:I wish "laymen" would stfu about global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
This guy is a layman, huh? Or the journalists who write ALL of the articles?
People who complain in knee jerk fashion without reading TFA set off my bullshit alarm. Can't touch the argument, attack the credibility of the researcher - standard procedure.
Truth is, you wish the opposition to your viewpoint would stfu, otherwise you would have had nothing to say. It's not ignorance, its another valid point of view on the phenomenon of climate change - and in the vast sea of apocalyptic points of view being spat at the entire world on a daily basis, I find it a refreshingly more level headed one.
Re:Sigh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll just point out that the problem at hand is not change, but man-made change that will hurt. A lot.
NOT POSSIBLE (Score:3, Insightful)
The most simple definition of "weather" is water in the air. The weather is all about water in the air. The force and fury of storms comes from differences in temperature and water in the air. If you have even paid a LITTLE attention to the news during hurricane season, you would have learned that the forces that power a hurricane are differences in temperature and the temperature of the water. (That's why hurricane season is during the months that they are and not during the winter season.)
A global climate change will kill many species and cause others to flourish. This will create an unpredictable change in the global eco-system. We don't have the knowledge or computational power to take into account ALL known factors (let alone all unknown factors) to form a prediction. But one thing is pretty certain when it comes to global events like these. A lot of life is lost and it takes millions upon millions of years to bring the planet back to the level that we know it to be today. We won't see what happens. Our kids... our great great grandchildren will not see what happens. Humans may well be extinct when it happens and not necessarily for reasons we bring on ourselves. (In the grand scheme of things, very few species last THAT long, but given that we have effectively halted human evolution, it's quite possible we'll survive.)
But back to the possibility that global warming might HELP the planet? No way... it will destroy anything close to the oceans, and areas identified as "tornado alley" such as an area close to where I live, will see expansion and intensification of those danger zones.
Again: more heat, more water in the air, more intensely violent weather.
I'm not a climate expert, but I stayed a weekend at some hotel that somehow makes you really smart.
You're right, change isn't bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the melting glacial ice has volume that correlates directly to rising ocean levels. Rising ocean levels correlates directly to displaced populations.
Warmer earth includes warmer oceans. Warmer oceans mean stronger, more frequent tropical storms. I imagine you're also familiar with the meteorological phenomenon known as El Nino and La Nina. These terms describe the effects on weather caused by variations of surface water temperatures in the Pacific. The changes caused are observable, predictable and bad. Changes include flooding in areas unused to flooding, causing landslides, and drought in areas unused to drought, causing wildfires and failed crops. El Nino is not related to Global Warming. However, Global warming by definition will create surface water conditions similar to El Nino in more places around the globe.
So again, you're right, change isn't bad. However, too much change too fast can be bad. In this case, our change seems to indicate bad consequences.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:5, Insightful)
And which historical climate do you propose maintaining? The Little Ice Age [wikipedia.org]? The Medieval Warm Period [wikipedia.org]? With or without human intervention, climate is constantly changing. We need to learn to deal with it.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you are a shill or dumb. But I reject the weather vs. climate argument, and the coin-flipping analogy is a pretty good one.
Predicting weather is about forecasting the dynamics of a system on time- and distance scales on which the system is chaotic. This is coin flipping. It's possible to predict the distribution of the results, but it's impossible to do much predicting the next flip.
Here's another analogy. Take a cup of coffee. Pour milk in it. Can you predict the precise way in which the milk swirls around? No, that's weather. Can you figure out what the average temperature and milk concentration of that cup will be in five minutes? Yes, depending on your ability to measure the thermal conductivity of the cup, the ambient temperature and humidity, etc.
Modeling climate sure isn't easy or particularly precise. But it is a false premise to reject such activities based on the fundamental constraints of weather prediction. Weather and climate are obviously governed by the same dynamics, but they differ fundamentally in terms of their time and distance scales.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:2, Insightful)
an aside (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the data is there. All I have is your word that what you say is accurate - and from the brief googling I've done on some of your claims (like the volcanoes - hah!) they're just patently wrong. You make pompous claims about your knowledge, about how science is supposed to work, about how everyone needs to support their claims with data, and then fail every last one of your own boastful demands and statements.
As for real scientists.... I sure hope you don't consider yourself one of them. I've worked with them, and you are so far out in crackpot land that you don't even qualify as an amateur scientist in the Scientic American sense, nor even as someone who has any idea how to interpret data. All you are is a complete waste of time whose only method of debate is intimidation. Shoo.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:3, Insightful)
What does that teach you?
Well, for one, you might start reading the damn papers. There's a reason that the two claim an order of magnitude difference in the carbon deposition rate: one counts underwater volcanoes, and the other doesn't. Underwater volcanoes release a hell of a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere, because there are so damned many of them (that shouldn't come as a surprise, considering how much more seafloor there is than land shelf, as well as the better proximity to the mantle, the higher thermal stresses and the placement of fault lines.)
For two, one paper counts total human CO2 output, whereas the other counts CO2 outgassing. There's a huge difference. Human CO2 output counts all the CO2 trapped inside plastic, all the CO2 used to treat timber, all the CO2 baked into bricks, all the CO2 captured and sold industrially, all the CO2 bound into salt, all the CO2 used to crack gasoline, all the CO2 used in treating steel, et cetera.
Does it really surprise you that less than one percent of the CO2 we create is lost to the atmosphere? It's an extremely useful industrial gas, and using it typically consumes it by binding it into the material.Not quite.I wouldn't know. If you had been reading what I wrote more closely, maybe you would have found the data I cited, and had the good sense to try to figure out the differences before going into attack mode.
If you want to reply to this, wait until you've calmed down. You seem to think you're an information bully, out to strip people of their childish beliefs by throwing data at them which you briefly googled up. When you learn that a brief glance over data isn't the same thing as an understanding thereof, lemme know.
If you don't wait until you've calmed down and started to behave as an adult before replying, I will simply ignore you. I'm sure you'll claim it's because I'm wrong and flee-ing, but it's actually because I find conversation with agressive people unpleasant. Yes, I know I'm aggressive too. You don't need to mention it. The difference is that I'm not just blindly pasting data I got off of Google. I'm citing things I actually understand.
Settle down, or find someone else to talk to. There's making your case, then there's being a dick about it.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The total CO2 output of all the volcanoes in the world in any given year is still less than 2% of annual anthropogenic emissions.
You are probably getting CO2 confused with aerosol precursors.
As the previous poster pointed out, there are large non-anthropogenic sources of CO2, but until recently they have been essentially balanced by non-anthropogenic sinks of CO2, so that net CO2 concentrations remained pretty much constant on timescales of millennia. We are now sourcing CO2 at a much greater rate than it can be sunk, leading to a rapid rate of accumulation.
Out of curiosity, what do you believe is responsible for the current rapid increase in CO2 concentrations?
Not only is that not true, it's also not as relevant as you would have it appear: even if our CO2 output leveled off (which it most definitely has not), it would still continue accumulate in the atmosphere because we would still be sourcing it faster than it can be sunk. (Unless we go in for sequestration in a big way.)
Incidentally, you say:
Furthermore, the paleo T/CO2 record does not contradict anthropogenic global warming, nor does it explain the current temperature or CO2 trends.
Re:Head in the sand (Score:3, Insightful)
Way to dismiss all thoughts and opinions that don't agree with you.
I think it is pretty much an agreed-upon fact that earth temperatures are rising, and I think that it is naive to think that human activity can't have an effect on climate. However, this does not mean we all have to have are eyelids glued open and be forced to watch An Inconvenient Truth until we believe the polar ice caps will melt away, the sky will turn to water and fall on out heads and we'll all drown unless we all live like the Amish. Global climate modeling is mind-bogglingly complex and there most certainly is room for debate on the magnitude and nature of human-activity-induced climate change.
Global temperatures are probably slowly rising overall. If we do not adapt to the changes, it will probably be detrimental overall too, but overall does not mean universally. Some places will be cooler, some will be wetter, some will be drier too. It seems to me that where I live, winters have gotten warmer over the years but summers are actually COOLER and a bit wetter. This might improve yields for some types of crops. In other parts of the world, productive land may become deserts. There is NO WAY we can know with certainty HOW bad (or good) how changing climate will affect related issues like food production.
I think dialogue needs to be kept open and opinions of all types must be considered. As far as reducing our CO2 emissions to slow global warming goes, however, I think we've reached a point where even severe reductions will be akin to trying to stop a speeding, fully-loaded freight train using the mass and power of a Smart Car: it'll make a small, essentially meaningless impact immediately and unless we turn off the train engine (akin basically to voluntarily wiping out the human population) the train will just keep rolling along. Whatever good intentions the Kyoto accord was intended to address, it has done something quite dangerous I think--it has shifted the focus on environmental issues very heavily towards one single issue to the detriment of all others (especially as the deadline to meet targets looms). Projects to install scrubbers on smokestacks to remove pollution that endangers our health are being cancelled in order to purchase emissions credits or invest in CO2 capture, but in the meantime we still get smog, acid rain and asthma-inducing particulates belching into the air! Expansion of nuclear power is being seriously discussed as a solution to the Kyoto problem--what is the environmental impact of uranium mining, and what about safety and security around the handling of nuclear fuel and waste?
I am not sure of the motives behind the huge effort to control the nearly uncontrollable (global climate), but it is getting in the way of true environmentalism--an approach based around conservation and sustainability. Reducing oil consumption isn't just needed to keep global warming in check--it just makes common sense to make more judicious use of a resource that is expensive to extract and refine, is non renewable and of finite supply. Thankfully, much of what is done in the name of CO2 reduction does in fact help sustainability, but it is not the whole picture. What is important to keep in mind though is the TOTAL impact of what we do: What'll we do with all the mercury in spent CF bulbs once incandescents are banned? What is the environmental impact of creating the batteries (energy consumption, chemicals and metals used, etc) used in your Prius? What about loss of habitat and damage to wildlife caused by hydroelectric dams and wind power farms (both Kyoto-friendly but they have a large negative impact on the environment nonetheless)?
Anyway, it is always good to give opinions "on the fringe" the benefit of the doubt.
Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've just managed to browse through the tedium of your entire body of posts in this thread, and I found only two relevant links: the documentary on google video, and the umich.edu page, which you summarily dismissed as supporting your points anyway.
I now officially think that you're batshit fucking crazy, and just forgot to take your meds. I've said it before, I'll say it again - it's nice to know that the opposition to global warming seems to to be comprised almost entirely of paid whores or nutbags off their meds.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:3, Insightful)
You've stated a number of unsubstantiated "facts", but other than one link to a chart, and your heavy and embarrassing reliance on the Swindle show, no independently verifiable references. A reference means providing a mechanism so I could evaluate your statements. Just throwing out "data" that I know to be wrong is not sufficient.
Or did I miss something?
BTW your chart showed more or less the same data that I had already cited here [globalwarmingart.com].
I've known about Arrhenius and CO2 for over a decade; my MS thesis at MIT concerned oceanic carbon cycles, so I read up on him then.
If you can point out the errors in his 1896 paper, that would be a good start.
And I actually have done my homework on this topic, beyond watching a "documentary" that I would be embarrassed if my 5-year-old referenced as a source for anything.
By the way, did you know that Durkin admitted that the volcano argument is wrong? [msn.com]
Here's a poorly worked reference that provides some data about Mt. St. Helens. [und.edu] It contradicts your claims. They screwed up on which numbers are sources and which are sinks (some units should be kg/year), but you get the idea. Volcanism is not the current driver of the spiking CO2 trend. Period. End of story. Find a new talking point.
Your turn- please, please, please provide a scientific reference that demonstrates that humans are not the primary cause behind the current atmospheric CO2 trend. As to why that matters, see: Arrhenius (and yes, I know about the Arrhenius equation; I took high school chemistry too).
You just hit all the standard talking points, don't you? Show me that this theory was anything other than a footnote (as opposed to a broadly held consensus view).
Re:Global Warming? Feh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Truthfully (Score:3, Insightful)
Wasteful (Score:1, Insightful)
The population density of europe is much higher than that of the US so people care more about how they affect others as well.
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/Basic_Informati
On top of that, a more dense population usally also means a better education infrastructure. Historically, the conservative areas of the US have had very poor schools as compared to the liberal areas. In other words, many are just ignorant.
Re:Sigh.... (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you know this? You seem to be missing the point that you CAN'T know this, as it hasn't happened yet. The data is not sufficient to make his sort of hyperbolic claim, yet there you are making it.
The reality is exactly what GP said, somewhere in the middle. You seem somewhat attached to the idea that it will be catastrophic, and completely averse to admitting that it may not be.
grass clippings=practical (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Head in the sand (Score:1, Insightful)
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun.
Re:Oy vey gevault. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well here is a newsweek article from 1975 which states that global cooling is(was) coming:http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling1.pdf [numberwatch.co.uk]
Does it matter what the scientific consensus was in 1975 if the public was made to believe a certain view based on "scientific evidence"? No, the only thing that matters is that global cooling was credited as legit in the mainstream press, albeit it's not the wide spread panic / money making machine that global warming is today.
So that's where the skepticism comes from. It's not baseless or a simple talking point, it's real history. Shocker, science has been wrong before and the public was made to believe the wrong thing. So that's where you get the skeptics from.
Honestly I don't understand why people so involved in science are outright angry at global warming skeptics. If anything they should embrace skepticism within their own work and prove with testable evidence that it actually is man made, instead of just calling someone a idiot in so many words because they don't believe.
Re:Could Global Warming Make Life Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's proof that the levels were higher when the Dinosaurs were around, and hey, guess what, there's also evidence that the climate is in a cycle. Meaning you're ignoring that this could be happening normally.
Like I said originally, the human mind LOVES to think that it's the most important thing in the universe, and while it is kinda cute, it's going to be our downfall. The sun doesn't go around us, and to think that a species that is outweighed by certain insect species could change the global climate of a planet is just silly.
Re:Here we go again (Score:1, Insightful)
Realize that humans are responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm to a modern day value of 380 ppm, an increase of over 30%.
Please explain to me what equipment was used to measure 280 ppm in preindustrial times. Are we using the same equipment now? As a scientist, can you repeat this experiment? Instead, are you relying on indirect evidence such as ice core samples instead of actually measuring the atmospheric content at that time? Are there other reasons that these core samples could have varying CO2 levels? Should you have any doubt about the 280 versus 380 ppm numbers you quote?
if it is a natural cycle it sure is hiding). Yes, CO2 values have fluctuated in the past, as have global temperatures, and yes, the two have risen and fell in concert (although there is intriguing evidence that CO2 lags temperature...
You'll concede that the temperature and CO2 has risen and fallen before. Has the world wide climate ever been hotter before the last two thousand years? If so, you've got a much tougher argument to "prove" that we're causing the problem. (Although I do tend to believe that we *are* adding to the CO2 and temperature, my beliefs don't matter to good science.) If it was hotter before 2000 years ago, why did it cool down again? If it did cool down before, you've got a much tougher argument to prove that it won't cool down again. Perhaps the system is quasi-periodic and slightly damped.
2. It rankles many people... especially the "conservative" ones... that a lot of people are BLAMING HUMANS for something. Such as, those bleeping environmentalists (liberals, bleeding hearts, etc.) are blaming humans for climate change, just as they love to do for everything else. Some people just reject the idea out-of-hand because it doesn't fit with their own (hugely distorted) worldview.
It must be convenient to think that those of us who don't step in line with your beliefs are either uneducated or politically motivated. I'm neither, and I think this area of science is "squishy". I suspect it is very likely that the climate, like the weather, is mathetmatically chaotic. As such, I think any simulations and models used to make predictions should be treated very skeptically. Orbital mechanics is a much better understood area of science, and modeling arbitrary three body systems any significant distance into the future is pointless. Tell me again why I should trust the umpteen billion body system for the atmosphere... Sure, you think (but can't prove) it's stable and non-chaotic.
Here is a flip side of your argument that explains why the overwhelming majority of climate scientist are in agreement: I think it is entirely possible that the subset of the population that goes into environmental science is more than likely to be of the "tree hugger" variety. The field appeals to people who care about the environment. They go into the field looking to support beliefs they already have.
If I'm right, I wish the environmentalists would quit using mediocre science to support their political agenda. I'm completely in favor of reducing/elliminating pollution. I would completely support extreme legislation to quit polluting the air and the water. However, I am enough of a scientist that I'm sick of environmentalists claiming they've got the climate all figured out and that's why we should follow their agenda. They're just supporting a good cause with a bad lie.
Planning ahead? (Score:2, Insightful)