Climate change?

Status
Not open for further replies.

ikendu

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 30, 2001
Messages
1,853
Location
Iowa
ABC news reported tonight that the snowfall in New York City is the largest on record.

This was preceded by:

1. The warmest January on record
2. The coldest December on record?
3. The largest hurricane ever recorded
4. The most large hurricanes on record
5. The most Atlantic storms on record

It does seem a little co-incidental.
 

jtr1962

Flashaholic
Joined
Nov 22, 2003
Messages
7,506
Location
Flushing, NY
Add in the fact that the three of the five largest snowstorms on record in NYC occurred in the last 10 years. Yes, I'd say something is unusual by the looks of it.
 

Sub_Umbra

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
Messages
4,748
Location
la bonne vie en Amérique
So, what is the actual span of time involved that makes these new records significant? If it's just a span of 200 or 250 years it might not seem like such a big deal in terms of how old the earth is. A few hundred years isn't even very significant when one considers how long humans have been here.

We need to keep in mind the fact that we haven't been keeping these records for 100,000 years. If we had, those records would be much more meaningful.

There might have been a few points on earth 500 years ago where meteorological data was recorded but they wouldn't represent much of a sample to build a climate database on. On a global scale that number of points has increased greatly in the last 40 years.

It's such a politically charged issue that many won't be moved by such a small data pool. It is ironic that we know even less about the cycles of varying output of the sun, let alone the fact that many who hype Global Warming even refuse to factor in our orbit cycles which periodically take the whole planet closer to the sun.

Look for more surprises as mankind does more than scratch the surface on this.
 

warmo

Banned
Joined
Feb 13, 2006
Messages
53
Location
Portsmouth UK
i do not believe there is enough evidence to show that global warming even exists...we do not know enough about our planet to be sure that this is the effect of pollution thinning the ozone layer or not. i think everyone should just sit tight and see what happens...

as far as dodgy weather goes... this time last year it was snowing in portsmouth uk and it has not snowed there for years, also the same region has taken to flooding annually as well, which never happend in the past
 

nikon

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 5, 2004
Messages
1,164
Location
Another time, another place.
Earth is living planet and climatic change is one of the things which keep it healthy. We'll likely have another ice age, another magnetic shift between the poles, and so on.
 

Mark2

Enlightened
Joined
Apr 10, 2003
Messages
577
Location
Europe
nikon said:
Earth is living planet and climatic change is one of the things which keep it healthy. We'll likely have another ice age, another magnetic shift between the poles, and so on.

Agreed, but we (human society) cannot handle even a moderate increase in temperature well, which makes such a change undesirable for us, even so it might actually be a good thing for the Earth as a whole as the ecosystem is way out of balance with one species threatening everthing else.

As you probably know, the Sun will swallow the Earth in the end anyway, so why worry? On the other hand... :)
 

zespectre

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
May 21, 2005
Messages
2,197
Location
Lost in NY
Mark2 said:
Agreed, but we (human society) cannot handle even a moderate increase in temperature well, which makes such a change undesirable for us, even so it might actually be a good thing for the Earth as a whole as the ecosystem is way out of balance with one species threatening everthing else.

As you probably know, the Sun will swallow the Earth in the end anyway, so why worry? On the other hand... :)

Reminds me of an argument I was having with someone because they said we "wasted" all of this money on the space program when it should go towards important stuff like conservation.

My response was essentially, well the space program is really the ultimate conservation program because right now we've got all our eggs in one basket and if something does happen to the earth...pfffffft, that's all she wrote!
 

magic79

Enlightened
Joined
Nov 7, 2005
Messages
737
Location
The Evergreen State
Mark2 said:
Agreed, but we (human society) cannot handle even a moderate increase in temperature well, which makes such a change undesirable for us, even so it might actually be a good thing for the Earth as a whole as the ecosystem is way out of balance with one species threatening everthing else.

I'ver never seen any scientific study indicating this. Humans are incredibly adaptable. What's the source of this information?
 

magic79

Enlightened
Joined
Nov 7, 2005
Messages
737
Location
The Evergreen State
Sub_Umbra said:
So, what is the actual span of time involved that makes these new records significant? If it's just a span of 200 or 250 years it might not seem like such a big deal in terms of how old the earth is. A few hundred years isn't even very significant when one considers how long humans have been here.
Great question Sub Umbra. Weather records have only been kept since the 1860s or so; later in some places. Thus, with this tiny sample of weather years (compared to the age of the earth) a single year can produce statistically large skews, and records occur nearly every year.

Think about it this way. Baseball teams play 164 game schedules...about the same number as weather record years. If an expansion team enters the league, we all know that "team records" are going to be established virtually every game. A guy may hit 5 HR in a game in that first year, but no one ever do that again. No one may hit a grand slam for a couple of years.

With only 150 +/- years of records, statistical projection is quite rough.
 

ikendu

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 30, 2001
Messages
1,853
Location
Iowa
magic79 said:
With only 150 +/- years of records, statistical projection is quite rough.

Although, we shouldn't forget that it isn't just TV station weather logs that provide a record of change.

There is arctic and glacial ice (which stores 1000s of years of atmospheric history).

There is the fossil and geologic records (which contains millions of years of history); like... the sediment layers in the earth, how big and what is in them?

"Carbon dioxide levels are now 27 percent higher than at any point in the last 650,000 years, according to research into Antarctic ice cores published on Thursday in Science."

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1124-climate.html
 

greenLED

Flashaholic
Joined
Mar 26, 2004
Messages
13,263
Location
La Tiquicia
Guys, once again, taking isolated (time and space) event such as this as evidence for climate change is not appropriate. You can do the very same thing to support global cooling. You have to look at loooooong time records (which are called "proxies", come from several independent sources and are indeed available) and entire global patterns to make a proper assessment, which, in a nutshell is: yes, global climate change is real, it is hapenning, and the trends we're observing in the last few hundred years are most likely due to human intervention (yes, there are publised studies showing human intervention affecting most of Earth's systems).

The issue now is: what do we do about it? The answer to that has serious worldwide socioeconomic and political implications, which is why it is such a heated debate.
 

ikendu

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 30, 2001
Messages
1,853
Location
Iowa
greenLED said:
The issue now is: what do we do about it? The answer to that has serious worldwide socioeconomic and political implications, which is why it is such a heated debate.

I can think of one thing for sure, switch to renewable energy.

Wind energy will definitely decrease CO2 emissions.

Why build any more coal plants? Build wind instead.

Stimulate biofuels (that recycle CO2). We spend over $300 billion/yr importing oil with is full of CO2. Why not start spending that $300 billion here at home on renewable energy? It can be self-funding. It will take a long time to make happen, even with an aggressive plan, so the world's energy producing countries will have plenty of time to adapt.
 

Sub_Umbra

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
Messages
4,748
Location
la bonne vie en Amérique
greenLED said:
...yes, global climate change is real, it is hapenning, and the trends we're observing in the last few hundred years are most likely due to human intervention (yes, there are publised studies showing human intervention affecting most of Earth's systems).

The issue now is: what do we do about it? The answer to that has serious worldwide socioeconomic and political implications, which is why it is such a heated debate.
No one is saying that climate change is not real. We are not in agreement as to the cause. Many think that the very idea that humans may be responsible for such huge changes borders on the megalomaniacal. Likewise, those same individuals question whether man is at all capable of changing the climate back.

Many feel that there is much more proof that we may enact laws and regulations that will destroy our economy, encourage thuggery and corruption and drive already runaway Socialist governmental trends into an even higher rate of acceleration.

Many will also disagree with your final assumption.

The issue for you now should be: How are you going to convince the masses that these assertions are not just junk science, as so many have been shown to be in the past?

As an example, when knee jerk environmentalists in the early 70s cried over and over that we were losing "10% of the rain forest every year," it obviously struck a chord with their audience. While those same souls were continuing those cries into the 80s they should have been studying math instead. I'm no scientist but I know that if what they said were true there would be only one tree left standing in Brazil today. And the media gave these people the face time to say it over and over and over.

As I said, the issue for you now should be: How are you going to convince the masses that these assertions are not just junk science?

I think for now we'll just have to agree to disagree. :D
 
Last edited:

greenLED

Flashaholic
Joined
Mar 26, 2004
Messages
13,263
Location
La Tiquicia
Sub_U, I don't think we're disagreeing at all. I think you re-stated my premise in a more adequate way.

There are a couple of causes for climate change. For simplicity you can group them in two categories: natural and anthropogenic. Then, there are the scales at which they both operate. At large temporal and spatial scales, natural mechanisms control climate. Take for example solar cycles - they are indeed responsible for some of the climatic variation our planet has seen - and there isn't much we can do about it, and the effects are world-wide (largest spatial scale). At a global spatial scale, coupled atmospheric/oceanic/terrestrial phenomena (ocean currents, atmospheric currents, evapotranspiration, etc.) control climate. This is the scale at which we get to estimate long-term climatic trends, as it integrates global processes.

At shorter scales, human influence can override natural influences. In fact, human intervention can be so overwhelming, though, that it can affect the global scale too. This is what seems to be hapenning since the beginning of the industrial revolution - due to increases in CO2.

So the gist of the story is: climate does change, it has done so in the past (we can track these changes based on proxies when we don't have met. records), and the magnitude of change observed in the last hundred years or so is out of scale. This latest change correlates strongly with increased CO2 concentrations, which are due to human intervention. Obviously, "science" is open to other plausible explanations, so our understanding of the phenomenon may change.

BTW, there was a paper some time back carefully analyzing how the economic assumptions/models that imply control= more cost are flawed. I should dig it out one of my piles if you're interested in reading it. The paper went through the major assumptions of modern economic theory and gave arguments as to why they're not valid.

A lot of how this gets communicated to the "public" go through severals levels of "interpretation" (and some times politication), so it takes a while to sort through things sometimes.
 

Steve K

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 10, 2002
Messages
2,786
Location
Peoria, IL
human causes for global warming??

It'd be interesting to see a list of studies argueing for and against it, and who funded which studies. I did a quick google search, and this popped up:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2023835.stm

"Monday, 3 June, 2002, 21:58 GMT 22:58 UK
Humans cause global warming, US admits

The US Government has acknowledged for the first time that man-made pollution is largely to blame for global warming.
But it has again refused to shift its position on the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to mitigate global warming which the Bush administration rejected last year.

In a 268-page report submitted to the United Nations, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endorsed what many scientists have long argued - that human activities such as oil refining, power generation and car emissions are significant causes of global warming.

The White House had previously said there was not enough scientific evidence to blame industrial emissions for global warming. "

Was this before or after Christine Todd Whitman left the administration due to a difference of philosophy? And did the administration distance itself from this report?

at this point, it doesn't matter if humans are just adding to the problem, or causing it. The important thing is that there is a demand for energy that doesn't produce greenhouse gases (or pollution), and it would be nice if the US didn't get left behind in the development of these technologies.

In any case, when you can see that the fossil fuels are finite, and that there is a continual increase in demand for energy, it seems that it would be prudent to use the existing fuel to develop an infrastructure of renewable energy. I'd hate to run out of oil and coal, and only then decide that I should start building windmills/solar panels/nuke power plants/etc. I'd be stuck using wood fires to refine iron ore and horses to transport the goods.


Steve K.
 

magic79

Enlightened
Joined
Nov 7, 2005
Messages
737
Location
The Evergreen State
Steve K said:
The important thing is that there is a demand for energy that doesn't produce greenhouse gases (or pollution), and it would be nice if the US didn't get left behind in the development of these technologies.

Unfortunately, the U.S. is already WAYYYYY behind. While Europe and Asia have embraced nuclear power, the U.S. has not built a new plant in 28 years! All that because we've let our policies be dictated by a miniscule group of environmental extremists.

The U.S. generates 20% of its power using nuclear energy, compared to:

Lithuania, 79.9 percent; France, 77.7 percent; Slovakia, 57.4 percent; Belgium 55.5 percent; Sweden, 50 percent; Ukraine, 45.9 percent; Slovenia, 40.4 percent; Republic of Korea (South Korea), 40 percent

Japan is at about 1/3, but most of their plants have been built SINCE the last U.S. new plant was built!

Not only that, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute,

"The average electricity production cost in 2004 for nuclear energy was 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour, for coal-fired plants 1.90 cents, for oil 5.39 cents, and for gas 5.87 cents"

Nuclear energy is by far the cleanest per kWHr, and cheapest, yet it somehow has some "evil" albatross put around its neck by a tiny fringe of our country.
 
Last edited:

MScottz

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Dec 13, 2005
Messages
175
Location
Littleton, CO
There are so many things posted above to address!


Kyoto was a joke. It had NOTHING to do with the environment and EVERYTHING to do with controlling trade by penalizing the US corporations and allowing other countries to pollute more than ever. I don't have a link to the report, but I heard recently that the countries that did sign Kyoto ended up with more pollution than before. And the US? Our level of pollution decreased in the same time peroid. Also, if forecasters can't accurately predict what will happen with the weather 1 week from now, why should we believe they can predict it out 200 years? Recent studies at Stanford, I believe, have found that increases in forestation actually INCREASES global warming due to solar radiation absorbed by the foliage instead of reflected back.

As far as nuclear, it's not very realistic to compare the US to the countries you listed, 1 nuclear plant contributes a LOT more to the total energy needs of those tiny countries than it would in the US.

Fossil fuels? That is a misnomer. Scientists still have no clue how petroleum is formed, with the "fossil" origin being only one of the theories, still unproven.

For some interesting reading, go to http://www.michaelcrichton.com/ and read some of his speeches.
 
Last edited:

Sub_Umbra

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
Messages
4,748
Location
la bonne vie en Amérique
greenLED said:
...So the gist of the story is: climate does change, it has done so in the past (we can track these changes based on proxies when we don't have met. records)
While I agree that we may make inferences from those proxies (which in and of themselves are very subjuct to interpretation) they do not invalidate the points I brought up in my first post. Even more importantly, there is no way to use that proxy data to beef up the OPs very specific, initial claims about the coldest, warmest, least, most, etc., -- to make them stretch back beyond a couple hundred years, and in most places, not even that. It's all way too fuzzy and disconnected to even be considered scientific.

The claims about the proxies certainly have their place in this discussion but no one may interpret them in such a way that they could say, 'ABC news reported tonight that the snowfall in New York City is the largest in the last 350,000 years.' A claim like that would actually do more than preach to the choir. But there is no there, there.

Usually claims like those in the original post do not mention that their conclusions are drawn from an incredibly small data sample. That was the point I was trying to make. Without ever addressing the valid issues these arguments make Global Warming a much harder sell by decreasing the signal to noise ratio and alienating many in the modern world who are already awash in far more information than they may assimilate.

Do you see what I'm trying to get at here? Assuming that all of you're conclusions about proxy data are correct, it still can't pump any depth into the claims made in the initial post. Their addition to this thread is be like saying, 'Yeah, we knew that claiming that the rain forest was shrinking by 10% per year was obviously false after thirty years -- but it's for a good cause -- here, look at this.'

The truth is that all of the time I was growing up our brilliant scientific community raved on and on for decades that we were experiencing Global Cooling. Their understanding of these complex issues was anything but complete. This lack of understanding will continue into the foreseeable future.

On the positive side, at least Man didn't overreact to what the scientists were all saying 40 years ago by destroying our economy and the tattered remnants of our remaining freedoms by implementing draconian policies that totally contradict what our learned men of science are so sure about today. There is an appropriate Yogi Berra line that is applicable... :D

There's no way around it, the scientists were wrong 40 years ago. The Scientists. Since humans haven't changed much since then I'd say that there is a very good chance that the emotional claims of today should be toned down quite a bit so that the issues may be looked at -- looked at beyond the last 200 years.

That's what this thread is actually about -- the last 200 years. While the OP didn't state that for reasons I've already covered, that is the data set that all of his claims were based on. The reality is that the last 200 years of weather really doesn't mean very much in the context of Global Warming.
 
Last edited:

magic79

Enlightened
Joined
Nov 7, 2005
Messages
737
Location
The Evergreen State
MScottz said:
As far as nuclear, it's not very realistic to compare the US to the countries you listed, 1 nuclear plant contributes a LOT more to the total energy needs of those tiny countries than it would in the US.

That is true, but the fact that we haven't built a new plant while all these other countries have raced past us the the real point.
 

ikendu

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 30, 2001
Messages
1,853
Location
Iowa
Sub_Umbra said:
Many feel that there is much more proof that we may enact laws and regulations that will destroy our economy, encourage thuggery and corruption and drive already runaway Socialist governmental trends into an even higher rate of acceleration.

Hmmm... laws and regulations that will destroy our economy?

So...if we switch $300 billion/yr from imported oil to locally produced biofuels and wind energy so that the money stays home and creates 3 million new jobs...how will that destroy our economy?

See my web site at:

http://www.itsgood4.us/biodiesel.ht..._wont_that_hurt_our_economy_and_lose_us_jobs_


Sub_Umbra said:
The issue for you now should be: How are you going to convince the masses that these assertions are not just junk science, as so many have been shown to be in the past?

Why is that the issue? Switching to renewable energy is inevitable (even nuclear will run out). The only issue is how soon. Why does stoping the $300 billion bleeding wound from our economy have anything to do with convincing the masses about global climate change. Heck, you get global climate change insurance "at no extra charge".
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top