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| Authored by: eric76 on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 06:05 AM EST |
Just what is the guy's scientific credentials? He is making statements that are
just flat wrong.
Early on, he claimed that for the past ten thousand years the climate has been
remarkably stable -- that temperatures have only fluctuated by +/- 1 degree
Celsius. That is nonsense. In fact, about 8,000 years ago during the Holocene
Climatic Optimum, the Northern Hemisphere was something like two to three
degrees warmer than today!
In other words, he thinks we will be in danger if the temperature rises two
degrees when the climate that helped mankind stop being hunter-gatherers and
begin farming on a major scale was when the temperature was that much or even
more higher. It was hardly a disaster.
I don't believe his panic-mongering at all.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: ailuromancy on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 07:17 AM EST |
At 405 seconds, there is a chart of the effects of a 4
Centigrade increase.
One bullet point is "drought over 40%
of inhabited land". Here is an article in
Nat
ure titled: "Little change in global drought over
the past 60 years". In
short, previous estimates of global
drought used a simple model that often
gives an over
estimate of the amount of drought.
At 660 seconds, an
increase of 12 Centigrade causes
places that were 80 Fahrenheit to become 170
Fahrenheit.
An increase of 12 Centigrade is an increase of about 21
Fahrenheit, so I can see 80 Fahrenheit going to 101
Fahrenheit. Where does
this 170 Fahrenheit come from?
Personal opinions:
- You can
measure the amount of light that gets absorbed
by CO2 and CH4. These are green
house gasses.
- Intense radiation in the upper atmosphere converts
some
nitrogen into carbon 14, which is radioactive. The
amount of carbon 14 in the
atmosphere is constant - the
decay rate matches the rate at which it is
produced.
- Carbon 14 trapped in ice decays, but is not replaced.
The
ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 14 tells you how long CO2
has been trapped in
ice.
- You can go somewhere cold, take samples of ice,
measure the
amount of CO2 and the time when the CO2 was
trapped. You will find a rapid
increase in the amount of
CO2 that correlates with sales of coal.
- The
IPCC has a hockey stick graph of global
temperature against time. Flat with a
sharp rise in recent
decades. You can go to the IPCC and ask for the raw data
and the algorithms used to make that graph. You can go
home with a bunch of
excuses: "the data is copyright, you
have to buy a license", "the algorithms
are secret" and so
on. Some determined guy got a load of funding from the
anti-global warming crew, and repeated the work with
publically available data
and an open source method. The
result was a hockey stick graph I have some
confidence in.
- Climate models are secret, so you cannot download one
and run it on a cloud youself. Every month I see another
article showing that
current climate models have a new
flaw.
- A decade ago, the future
perils of global warming were
not certain, but the recommendation was to do
something
anyway as a precaution. I have no problem with that either
back then
or now. Somehow in the last few years the
dangers of global warning have been
portrayed as a
certainty, but I do not know what evidence led to this
certainty.
There are plenty more places I could pick holes in
that
video. The sad thing
is that there is plenty of
evidence to support precautionary measures.
There
are good reasons outside climate science/religion
to reduce dependence on
fossil fuels.
There may well
be utterly convincing evidence of an impending
global
warming disaster - hidden amongst a pile of alarmist
exaggeration and
references to outdated scientific papers.
Here<
/a> is an article from the Register about how
dumbing down the arguments about
global warming has
led to such poor quality reporting on climate issues.
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| Authored by: symbolset on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 04:39 PM EST |
Actually Eric is correct. Think about how all this carbon came to be in the
ground. It wasn't there when the Earth was formed. It didn't fall from the sky
in a meteor bombardment. It was once plants. Plants on a wet, verdant Earth
using photosynthesis to fix atmospheric carbon. Plants on an Earth warmer than
it is today.
Before the industrial revolution the temperature was declining.
If it had continued to decline the feedback mechanisms referenced in the video
would be accelerating the decline. New York might already be covered in
permafrost, and Canadian glaciers be on the march to scrape all evidence of
mankind into the Atlantic. America's heartland would not be as good for growing
crops. Crops don't grow well on a glacier. And the process might be
irreversible. When the Earth freezes, it usually does so for hundreds of
thousands or millions of years. It has nearly killed off our ancestors multiple
times.
This is a balance of benefits thing. Russia and Canada, New York and
Chicago will benefit. India, southern China, equatorial Africa, Arizona, Texas
and Florida will suffer. Eventually we run out of carbon fuels, and it stops.
Putting dollar figures on it is as absurd as pricing a thunderstorm.
Yes, the
global climate changes. In response men migrate whether they want to or not.
Such is as it ever has been and ever will be as long as there are Men.
But we
don't have enough fossil carbon to make the Earth uninhabitable. Because that
fossil carbon once was plants. The Earth is a sphere, and there is plenty of
land closer to the poles.
More to the point since some benefit and some
suffer and the cure is to get everybody everywhere working together to prevent
it, that is not going to happen. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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