Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting 387
bricko sends this news from The University of Texas at Austin:
Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it's being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where accurate information has previously been unobtainable. The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.
Let me get this straight (Score:2, Insightful)
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AGW has a straightforward reasoning behind it : 1/ the greenhouse effect of CO2, which you can test for yourself: see youtube. if you have other results, warn the nobel price committee. 2/amount of CO2 released can be estimated as well, by calculating how much oil, coal has been burned the last centuries. this amount is far larger than any removal of forest cutting has been responsible for, and far greater than volcanoes.
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"Do owls exist?"
"Are there hats?"
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
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So many people just seem to want some excuse to do nothing. It's not just denying that humans are contributing to climate change but an implicit denial that humans can do anything about it anyway. So, geothermal warning is contributing, woo-hoo, now I don't have to drive my Hummer under the speed limit to save gas.
Similarly we're probably going to have a major earthquake in California sometime, so it makes good sense to have a earthquake preparedness kit. Would this anti-AGW reject that and claim that it
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Re:Let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some parts of the Thwaites Glacier are melting because of geothermal heat, not all of it. In fact probably less than 10% is affected directly by the geothermal heat. Why should you be astonished when scientists report science?
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;)
You've done me a favor, I didn't even know Antarctica had volcanic areas. I've now looked it up and there are subglacial volcanoes!!!
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Everything is due to AGW and it is turtles all the way down...
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Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW?
No. It isn't. Read the paper instead of making inferences from a summary that is significantly lacking in details.
Scientists knew there was geothermal heat contributing to base melting of the glacier. Most places on Earth have a tiny amount of geothermal heat flux so underneath most glaciers there some small amount of melting due to this heat. On average, the geothermal flux on Earth is about 65 milliwatts/square meter.
This paper was looking to quantify the geothermal flux under the glacier so that they could model the behavior more accurately. It turns out the the average geothermal flux under the glacier is around 120 milliwatts/square meter with some areas going as high as 200 milliwatts/square meter. This adds a little bit more base melt and thus allows the glacier to move a little bit faster.
Keep in mind, these are milliwatts we're talking about, so it certainly isn't melting a lot. But since it is base melt it is contributing to glacier movement speed. This contributes to the ice loss already occurring due to warmer temperatures.
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I double-plus extra love the happy joy-joy feelings inspired when a comment dedicated solely to spin complains about spin. It's like there's a party in my colon!
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It's what the [climatedepot.com] scientists [globalresearch.ca] believe [thegwpf.org].
Really, there's a whole lot of weirdness going on in the IPCC. They come out and claim increasing certainty in global warming, while supporting scientists ask how there can be increasing certainty when their own experiments have lower confidence. The viewpoint from the United States is distorted due to inferior technology and medieval scientific procedures; the modern world has advanced far beyond the primitive tribes of the far west.
The Gods (Score:4, Funny)
It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods, sacrifice one or two goats and all be happy about it.
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It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods, sacrifice one or two goats and all be happy about it.
You have goats?
I ran out....
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*Pro tip*: From a distance. Dirty, long-haired dogs are surprisingly similar to goats.
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All I got out of the Illiad was that soldiers liked to grill and eat sausages and do weird stuff with thighbones.
Regardless (Score:2, Insightful)
of whether humans are the cause of global warming, we should stop pollution for it's own sake! Even if we are 0% responsible, we should still cut the amount of stuff we put into the air and water.
Re:Regardless (Score:4, Insightful)
In that case, we should be focused on pollutants rather than CO2. CO2 is a trace gas that is essential to life.
CO2 is not even listed among pollutants in the Clean Air Act. It was put into that category by EPA as an executive measure, after the Supreme Court authorized them in 2007 to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org] This was done for the sole purpose of furthering the global warming agenda.
Re:Regardless (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not funny, it's science. Our world, where we live, is currently not like the Cretaceous. Should it become like the Cretaceous, humanity would suffer massively, as we and our industry are simply not prepared for living in such a climate. We also don't have the luxury of the relatively-slow lead-up to the Cretaceous climate, as if we keep pumping out CO2 our climate will change very quickly indeed.
I guess it's easy to get confused if you use Nat Geo as your source for scientific learning.
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Walk towards Greenwich and turn left.
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Well, if you're precisely at the South Pole, any direction is north. Fortunately, all of Antarctica is not precisely at the pole. Western Antarctica is the part of the continent that is in the western hemisphere. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
meaningless, unless the geothermal is new (Score:4, Interesting)
Usually (Yellowstone, Iceland, ...) geothermal sources are present tens of thousands, if not tens of millions, of years before present. Unless this is a newly-formed hot spot, the ice sheet has survived millions of years of it. Only the OTHER (read: us) source of heat is now exposing the ice sheet to more heat than it can withstand.
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The continents move over hotspots, which is why the Hawaii island chain exists. I don't know much about the Antarctic continental plate, whether it is moving or not, but it may have drifted over a hotspot some time in the last few million years.
Re:meaningless, unless the geothermal is new (Score:4, Insightful)
When the Panama Isthmus closed about three million years ago, changing the oceanic circulation patterns, the current galcial/interglacial climate began. Antartica has had ice for over two million years.
Ya' think? (Score:2, Funny)
Bring on the geothermal heat "deniers"
Is the sheet Increasing or Decreasing ? FUD! (Score:2)
There was an article here in /. just a week or two ago saying that the Antarctic Sheet is perplexing to climatologists because it is _increasing_, not decreasing. So a glacier sloughs off, why would it alone contribute to sea level rises, while the rest of the sheet is growing? Show me your models, tell me its assumptions and approximations, demonstrate its predictions when there are deviations from those assumptions and approximations, and you will likely be apologising or rationalising the results so th
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> There was an article here in /. just a week or two ago saying that the Antarctic Sheet is perplexing to climatologists because it is _increasing_, not decreasing.
Increasing in surface area but decrease in volume. This isn't complicated, but if you won't look stuff up then it is easy to say that all exaggeration is equal. Kind of like -1 and +10 are both numbers so they are really just the same thing.
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I think you're confusing Antarctic sea ice with the Antarctic ice sheet. The maximum sea ice extent has grown somewhat recently but the ice sheet has been losing ice.
Volcanos? (Score:2)
GeoThermal only a small part of the glacier's melt (Score:4, Informative)
It's worth pointing out that the increased geothermal heat estimate only contributes a few per cent to the melting of the Thwaites glacier [realclimate.org]. It's predominately AGW and natural calving. I'm not saying this paper isn't important (we all know about the straw that broke the camel's back), just pointing out that it doesn't provide an alternate explanation to AGW for the melting of the Thwaite glacier.
And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:2, Insightful)
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If CO2 curbing means more direct taxes on me, then I am against it.
Then quit pissing in the commons, disconnect your power, buy a solar powered (ONLY) car, avoid anything made with , well anything.
And then, after your satisfied your not increasing the risk to me and everyone else, I think it would be ok to not have any taxes go to cleaning up your mess.
Otherwise, quit freeloading off others, denialist commie.
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Then quit pissing in the commons, disconnect your power, buy a solar powered (ONLY) car, avoid anything made with , well anything.
And then, after your satisfied your not increasing the risk to me and everyone else, I think it would be ok to not have any taxes go to cleaning up your mess.
Otherwise, quit freeloading off others, denialist commie.
I'm a denialist commie (Well, socialist actually, but what's the difference.) who lives in a country with carbon neutral energy production.
Since I live close enough to work I don't own a car. I don't see how buying a solar powered one would help.
Now, if you are so concerned with carbon emission, how about you stop emission carbon instead of paying taxes for it. The taxes aren't used to stop the emissions anyway so in the end it is just a feel-good tax that you pay so that you can keep living you current lif
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I'm a denialist commie (Well, socialist actually, but what's the difference.) who lives in a country with carbon neutral energy production.
No [r] way!
Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:5, Funny)
No [r] way!
Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?
Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:5, Funny)
No [r] way!
Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?
Oman that's awful!
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No [r] way!
Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?
Oman that's awful!
I think you and Brunei will get along just fine. Honestly though, some of these puns will end up Jamaican me crazy.
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Iraq'n you should stop now.
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Why would he buy a solar powered car? Or any car at all? Is he going to drive it on the public roads?
Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:4, Insightful)
What is not curbing CO2 means 2 or 3 times the cost of curbing it? That's what a lot of economic analyses show.
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Indeed. But nobody ever wants to talk about population. If simply 'curbing' CO2 is so hard, wouldn't it be easier to just have one big ass war? Sure it would be messy at first, but the long term benefits of nixing a few trillion people would be worth considering.
Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:2)
Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:5, Funny)
I agree. We need to kill a few trillion people.
Kif: "Sir." *whispers* "There aren't that many human beings."
A thought occurs. There aren't that many humans.
Lrrr: "We're willing to wait a few weeks while you shore up the numbers."
Hmm. Nine hundred and ninety three billion babies in a few weeks. We'll need an army of super virile men scoring 'round the clock! I'll do my part. Kif, clear my schedule!
Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people want to talk about population. In fact, it's a major topic. There are plenty of ways to decrease the global population without resorting to killing people. The easiest way is to increase the quality of life for people in countries which are experiencing a large population growth. Happy people whose children are likely to grow up tend to have fewer children. After a few generations of that, the population stabilises.
I know it's easy to think "too many people = we should kill some", but that's beyond childish.
Re:Queue the deniers (Score:5, Insightful)
And queue the alarmists that will take every little thing and blow so moronically out of proportion that it bears no resemblance to the data or science.
Both sides are enemies of reason and science. If you have a vested emotional interest in a given conclusion and are inclined to ignore evidence that contradicts that position or inclined to exaggerate/fabricate evidence that supports your position then you're an enemy of reason and science.
And BOTH sides of this issue have lots of those people.
There is a moderate middle that just wants to hear the science and deal with this in a reasonable fashion. But they're shouted down by the fanatics on either side that scream "YOU"RE WITH US OR AGAINST US" while foaming at the mouth like diseased animals.
That is what needs to stop. This issue have been hijacked by political interests... left and right when really it should supersede the factional struggles in our political system.
Global warming is not an issue to be used to profit the political ambitions of democrats or republicans. Socialists or capitalists... or any other label you'd prefer.
Global warming must be an issue that is dealt with in a respectful, bipartisan, and transparent fashion.
Anything short of that and any claim to scientific purity is GONE. Utterly irrelevant. It becomes nothing more then a political struggle with the issue of truth being irrelevant to the process. Power politics against power politics. One screaming stupid face against another screaming stupid face... the winner being decided by who can shout louder and longer.
Choose.
Do you want this to be about science or do you want this to be about who can yell louder? Because if you want it to be about science, the politics need to be put away.
And for that, you're going to have to stop trying to twist people's arms and ACTUALLY convince them. Which will mean compromises and respect for contradiction. It will mean going through a long drawn out process where there is no roughshodding, steamrolling, or other terms for the attempt to push things through without going through due process.
Will this take awhile? How fast is the currently process going? What we have no is sort of like stop and go traffic. Everything rushes forward for a moment and the alarmists think they've suddenly broken through. Only to have the whole thing either stop or outright reverse itself taking away most of those gains. Graph the progress over time and its not going fast if its going at all.
So why not try something else? It can't be slower then what you already have and you might find it more pleasant to actually talk respectfully with people rather then try to undermine their very right to participate in the process at all.
Re:Queue the deniers (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all reducing the AGW debate to "both sides" with a neutral "middle ground" is disingenuous - in the count of number of people the balance is very strongly in favor of accepting AGW to degrees ( e.g. this recent set of studies arriving at between 91-97% consensus [theguardian.com]). The denialists get disproportionate attention, which is actually a known type of political manipulation (e.g. argument to moderation [wikipedia.org]) and this type of attention has been shown to disproportionately affect people who aren't specialized in the subject matter to moderate their position when no such moderation is required (more on this subject, though I can't find the scientific paper about it right now [bmj.com].
Second, appeal to "scientific purity" is overshooting. Science is constantly advancing, improving models, replacing wrong assumptions with less wrong assumptions. There is nothing "pure" about it, and in no way does it need to be to advance the cause and be useful to our lives. Words such as "purity" are much too loaded to be used, exactly because of the scientific approach. There's no need to deny - the scientific world does not have all the T's crossed and the I's dotted on AGW, just as it doesn't on gravity, physics and quantum theory, but we still happily cross bridges every day. The degree of certainty has long reached sufficient levels to warrant seriously looking at how to realistically (not politically, stupid carbon credits) mitigate instead of discussing a black and white position on AGW's existence.
And thirdly the AGW debate is much bigger than the USA. I understand that you have bipartisan issues across the board (not just AGW, and to be clear: I think both parties are in the wrong) but that doesn't extend to the rest of the world and this is a global issue.
So I think that while I don't entirely agree with your argumentation, I agree with your position. AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree. The challenge is to find solutions, and that's also with science.
Finally, I find the actual article very intriguing and somewhat challenging to my own views on AGW, as evidenced by my first thoughts on this: could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity? But that's a conjecture from an explanation that wouldn't challenge AGW, and real science must of course also look for other hypotheses.
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You're just trying to justify the ongoing politicization of the issue.
Which is fine. The price of that is that the science is irrelevant and that the issue becomes one purely of politics.
That is the price. And that is not a decision I can make for you. You must make that decision yourself for yourself. But I do think its important that you understand that this choice has a cost.
You are calculating that it is more expedient to attain your goals by applying political pressure rather then go through the tediou
Re:Queue the deniers (Score:4, Insightful)
The science is settled.
I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
Re:Queue the deniers (Score:4, Insightful)
The science is settled.
I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.
Example: I accept that in normal everyday life, that light obeys the "Law of Reflection." That is SETTLED science. When I'm driving my car, I don't wonder: "Gee, maybe I should do another experiment with the rearview mirror just to be sure," nor do I worry, "Oh, maybe the Law of Reflection won't work today, so I should be careful and not rely on my mirrors to tell me where things are."
More importantly, if something goes wrong with my mirrors in the real world, my first thought is definitely NOT "Oh, the Law of Reflection is probably wrong." Instead, I assume the mirrors are damaged or poorly designed or something else. At this point, that's the ONLY reasonable conclusion to come to -- as a scientist.
The science is settled.
That's what we mean by "settled" in everyday life. When we say a disagreement is "settled," for example, we don't mean that we are denying the possibilityof ever disagreeing again. We mean that we've reached a practical stability point, and it's not worth continuing the discussion further at this time.
From a scientific standpoint, it's necessary to establish these core assumptions within a research paradigm so that we can work on actually refining our work without running around questioning fundamental assumptions all the time. If you think Thomas Kuhn's notions of paradigms and scientific "revolutions" [wikipedia.org] is too extreme, a very reasonable alternative is Imre Lakatos's notion of research programs [wikipedia.org], which was developed in response to Kuhn. From the Wikipedia article:
A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the 'hard core' are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme - they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to 'protect' the 'hard core'. Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme's explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely.
For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.
I suppose there are a few scientists who would continue to debate this issue specifically about global warming. But you simply cannot deny that actual scientific research in general necessarily has to accept "core assumptions" as "settled" in order to make any progress.
Re:Queue the deniers (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.
The level of ignorance is astounding. "questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about. Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions. And this gets modded up. It's no wonder the current climate debate is so off kilter.
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I don't know what that can possibly mean.
It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.
Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified
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It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.
The biggest problem with this argument is that our level of understanding of the "climate" system on this planet is miniscule when compared to the complexity of the system. This discovery is just another example. The other problem is that anything that challenges the theory of global warming seems to be either twisted to fit the current theory or ignored. The theory is supposed to be changed to fit the evidence.
That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.
You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledg
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Re: Queue the deniers (Score:3)
It doesn't mean, "the science is complete".
It does mean that the results so far show with confidence that humans are responsible for the majority of global warming. This conclusion is deemed strong enough to act on.
There is still much more work to be done on nailing down mechanisms, reducing error bars etc, but none of this is likely to change the above conclusion. That would require both strong new evidence and a counter-explanation for all the results so far.
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1. The science is settled
I know right? and the world is flat, I mean the science is settled!
Re:Cue the radical activists (Score:3)
I will believe the science is settled when the journals that carry articles about climate stop rejecting articles that are not "in line" with the alleged settled science, especially those articles that are brought forward by scientists who don't put the word "climate" in front of "scientist" or "researcher" when they describe themselves.
"Science" is about exploring boundaries and ideas, and a "memory hole" has no place at all in science. "Science" is about evaluating the data and resulting theories, not
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As I made clear, your two options here are as follows:
1. Make this about science and abandon the politics. Discuss things with people. Be patient. Do not attempt to compel people to comply. Accept that there will be differences of opinions. Work for mutually agreeable solutions.
2. Make this about politics and render the science irrelevant. Try to force people with law. Do no argue. Do not negotiate. Test your political will against their political will. Shout them down. Shut them down. Take no prisoners and
Re: Queue the deniers (Score:4, Insightful)
meanwhile they fundraise on global warming and these other issues while our bridges rot away, our people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more, and no one wants to talk about those issues seriously
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meanwhile they fundraise on global warming and these other issues while our bridges rot away, our people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more, and no one wants to talk about those issues seriously
The future and the present are both relevant. They're talking about global warming not because it's not a real problem, since it is, but because they can make a buck pretending to do something about it.
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I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term. I would think that most scientists would be more reasonable in the approach. We do need to get off fossil fuels, even if you dont believe in global warming but because eventually they will run
Re: Queue the deniers (Score:4, Informative)
I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term.
I imagine you meant the long term? Or for the short term?
it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor.
We all breathe. Reducing pollution actually means more jobs. Doing things right is harder.
just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks.
Driving on petrofuel is unsustainable. You haven't done anything to change your habits on your own, so now you're being forced.
but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does
Yes there is, and the excuse is that you have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's a good idea to be burning oil as fuel. It's too valuable to burn, and the secondary effects are harmful to our very existence. We have no need to burn it. For example have the technology (and have at least since the 1980s) to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption with biofuels in a way which is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. As ever, I refer you to this DoE report [nrel.gov] and information on AIWPS [sdsu.edu], as well as on Butanol [wikipedia.org].
I'm tired of your the dichotomy between economic development and ending the wasteful, harmful, and completely unnecessary refining and subsequent combustion of oil. By all means, make plastic out of it. It saves an enormous amount of energy as compared to making plastics from other sources, and the plastics can be recycled. You're repeating this logical fallacy solely to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions, and you're only impressing others suffering from the same brand of cognitive dissonance. In fact, it is wholly possible to reduce and perhaps even eliminate harmful emissions, or at least account for them (e.g. by carbon-fixing schemes) such that there is effectively zero negative impact to human health and biosphere persistence, the latter currently being an absolutely irreplaceable requirement for the former. We have numerous (one might even be tempted to say innumerable) solutions which we are not putting into place for political-economic reasons which boil down to protection of profit for a privileged class of self-entitled robber barons.
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Renewables are only profitable if they are subsidized.
Oil is only profitable if it is subsidized. Besides all the usual subsidies to oil companies, there's also being permitted to ignore externalities. For example, the EU requires companies to deal with their waste, which most of them are handling by making it highly recyclable. If the refineries were required to deal with the inherent waste of selling their product, it would cost vastly more than it does today.
What's really pathetic is that I don't even advocate doing anything other than charging the cost of
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Let me phrase it in science-fiction-y terms for you: We must maintain our life support system at all costs. If we don't do something significant and positive about CO2 (or looked at another way, negative about carbon, ho ho) and other major climate-changing activities like deforestation, then the economic impact will be the very last thing on your mind, or on anyone else's. Oddly enough fixing one problem will help fix the other problem, but nobody important seems to give a shit.
Hey, I could be wrong, this
Re: Queue the deniers (Score:4, Insightful)
Which means you're justifying not negociating but imposing your will. Which means you're going for the political option.
Which means the science under your policy will be irrelevant as to whether you succeed or fail to impose your will. It will come down literally to whether your faction is more politically powerful then your opposition.
The right or wrong of it will be irrelevant.
Do the logical math. Watch Variable1 interact with Variable2 through EquationX.
Check your premises and think the issue through.
What you are saying is "I think I'm right so everyone should do what I say"... that's great but you have to convince people not only that you're right but that your solutions to the problem are right.
If you refuse to go through that process then what you have to do is overwhelm/strong arm people into bending to your will. And that means whether you are right or wrong won't matter. You can strong arm people into saying the sun is made of puppies that way. Look at what is going on in the Islamic world for a good example of what I'm talking about. Do you think things work that way over there because someone convinced everyone that was the best way to run a society? No. They just threatened to kill anyone that disagreed with them. They've fought literally hundreds of wars over that over the last 400 years. You have no idea the bloodshed. But they got what they wanted.
And being right or wrong doesn't matter if you're forcing people. You're just forcing them. End of story.
I'd like to think my society is better then that. That we can arrive at common action through a less coercive policy. But that will require patience and flexibility on everyone's part to arrive at action that a plurality feels acceptable.
Any such policy is not going to make radicals on either side happy. The radicals on the right and radicals on the left will not like it because they both want the reciprocal extreme options.
What shall it be? Are you willing to try to go through a rational dialog on the issue or do you want to use power politics to compel people?
Because the choices you make there will have consequences as how things are run and maintained.
If you maintain your authority at gun point you can get people to comply. But the instant the gun wavers.. is dropped... things can shift very quickly and possibly violently.
This is an appeal for moderation, patience, and civility.
The environmental movement has damaged itself by allowing itself to be hijacked by political factions that seek to use it for their own selfish political gain. That said, if those same political forces dominate they will probably give you everything you want.
So that's a calculation you'll have to make. Of course, if you lose politically... you'll find no cooperation in the political organizations that struggled to shut it down. They'll oppose you reflexively.
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It wasn't stating that AGW is real that generated the controversy but rather the proposed solutions to it.
If you told the world "AGW is real but no one has to do anything about it" then you wouldn't be getting the blow back you're seeing now. The various factions you are dealing with are mostly undermining the validity of AGW as a proxy to attack the proposed fixes for AGW which is really what they have a problem with in the first place.
Once you understand that, you can grasp that what you really have here
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If you make this a political struggle then your arguments are ultimately political ones.
What will matter is who supports you, how many of them there are, and how much political will and force you can bring on the issue.
You will also need to sustain that effort because you will have only attained your goal by overwhelming other factions that will likely come back for reprisals later if they feel you slighted them.
Which is what you have happening now. Look at all the reversals the AGW lobby has faced lately.
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That's not what those studies actually say. Furthermore, even if that were true, pre-20th century, there was nearly universal agreement on the validity of classical physics, but then QM and GR came along, so consensus doesn't tell you about truth.
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Any problem which requires cross-the-board action to resolve will quickly become political, and will never be separated from politics. In more sane countries where the them-vs-us mentality isn't so pronounced, the politics doesn't degrade into a yelling match. That seems to be reserved for developing countries and the US.
Now, that being said, that does not reflect on the science one bit. The science is sound, the problems are real, and the time to implement solutions is now. How loudly people argue over
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You can't have a balanced discussion when the people involved want to remain willfully ignorant of the science. Check that, you can't have a balanced discussion when the people involved want to deny reality (hence the term "denier"). If science and reality can't convince someone that something is happening, you're just wasting time and resources that could be better put to use elsewhere.
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I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:
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I never said anything about carbon credits. Kindly don't put words in my mouth or assume you know all my positions simply because I said we should do something about it.
Something is an extremely vague statement. Something could be just talking about it. Something could be a great deal more. You can't assume what I would do simply because I said "something".
As to my preferred means of dealing with the issue. I'd like to move more to closed loop fuel systems. That is, rather then taking oil out of the earth,
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Your closed loop system doesn't work as it's woefully inefficient, and as energy demands increase, the amount of temporary CO2 in the atmosphere will increase. It will help (slightly) but is rather short-sighted, and is no long-term solution. Also using electricity to create fuel from the atmospheric CO2 suffers from the same issue - it will not reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will continue to rise even if everyone used your system.
The real solutions are:
1. Carbon sequestration (a fair
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The system I'm offering would be powered by systems that don't power the grid efficiently as it is or systems that generate so much power that no one cares if they're used efficiently.
That would be renewable energy which is all but useless because its unreliable. However, if you're using it to power a fuel generation plant then the unreliability doesn't matter so much. Grid power must meet demand at all times. No exceptions. Supply cannot go up or down randomly. It has to be meet demand period. Renewable en
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If you honestly believe carbon is bad, than you need to go for broke, if
Unless we built power plants on Mars, it's both (Score:2)
Quick fact: earth has warmed more than the neighboring planets have.
Mercury, Earth, and Venus have gotten warmer. What do Mercury, earth, and Venus have in common? The sun, of course. Sun cycles are probably the cause of this warning.
Earth has warmed more the other two. What's special about earth? A) our atmosphere b) humans and c) water. The additional warming of earth probably has to do with our atmosphere being more affected by the increased solar output, by water holding the heat, by human activity, o
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Nope - the sun's influence has been shown to not be as important as CO2 when it comes to global warming.
You can't use such simple, childish logic to try to establish the cause of a phenomenon in such a complicated system. You end up looking incredibly foolish, and learning nothing in the process.
Think for 2 seconds before knee jerk (Score:2)
You've posted the automatic, chat-bot response that you've been trained to go to whenever anyone mentions the rest of the solar system. Now take two seconds to actually think about what you just said.
I said:
by a combination of these
You replied:
Nope - the sun's influence has been shown to not be as important
Then you went on with childish attacks. Think about the phrase "not AS important". That's a comparison. That phrase means one thing is important, and the other thing is more important. In other words,
Re:Think for 2 seconds before knee jerk (Score:4, Informative)
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your theory on solar system warming? Aliens? (Score:2)
Do you have a theory as to what is causing Earth, Mars, and Venus to warm? Certainly not invisible aliens building invisible power plants on Mars.
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We don't have much more than a few data points on Martian temperatures, so it is not really possible to know whether there are any long term warming or cooling trends. Mars has no oceans and only a very thin atmosphere, which means there is very little thermal inertia. This makes Mars more susceptible to large swings in temperature. Orbital eccentricity contributes far greater changes to Martian climate than to
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The problem isn't climate change. the problem is that glacier melts every 5,000 years or so. guess when it last melted? 5,000 years ago, Maybe it melted back then because the pharaohs were putting out too much CO2 with their slave labor in building the pyramids.
Is CO2 having an affect and should we try to curb it. Of course. is the planet getting warmer, Of course. Do we Want clean air to breath, of course. Those are good reasons why to clean the air. The planet however under goes constant temperat
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Queue the climate change deniers, who will try to skew this as meaning it's geothermal activity and not our CO2 contributions that are causing ice melt, not realizing that this really means curbing CO2 emissions is that much more important so we don't accelerate it.
Queue the anthropogenic climate change zealots who will claim that all climate change is the fault of us evil, evil humans who are a plague on the planet--who will attempt to discredit this study.
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Well, at least our children (we?) are not fucked, as the previous generation managed to thwart the nuclear apocalypse.
Should we do any less with the threat of the apocalypse we are facing now?
Re:Queue the deniers (Score:4, Informative)
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We were at the end of the last ice age thousands of years ago (Holocene Optimum). Rather than begin the next cooling cycle, we've been adding energy to the biospere at an almost-unprecented rate, other than mass extinction events such as the PermianTriassic Mass Extinction.
Given that we started burning forests for cropland at about the middle of the Holocene Optimum, it is not true to say that the natural state is hot. On occasion, in fact, the globe has been totally iced over. Since the closing of the P
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Your lack of scientific literacy is astounding, as are your hand-waiving of problems which will affect many millions of people (and important cities which can't be walled in) severely hurting the global economy in the process.
You, and those who think as lazily as you, are dangerous.
Re:It doesn't matter. (Score:4, Informative)
"People on the coast can move or build sea walls or something.
It's not that big a deal. There is plenty of uninhabited non-coastal land."
Sea level rise is not the biggest problem of climate change/global warming.
In recorded and pre-recorded history, the weather/climate phenomenon thst has killed the most people is drought.
While there may be some regions in the north that are able to grow more crops due to the warmer weather, most of it won't be suitable for farming.
The world won't be able to support N billion people if we let it warm by 5 degrees
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Is that a typical example of your logic, or are you trolling, or just hoping to fool stupid people? On a continent that's 5.4 million square miles, with 11,000 miles of coastline, you pick the stats for the far inland south pole station -- probably one of the coldest places on Earth at that altitude -- and conclude that since no melting can occur there, it can't occur anywhere on the whole continent?
Here's a little hint for you: you know that 11,000 miles of icy coastline I just mentioned? Guess what's ru