Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[couchcommander]

Let the earth take its natural course until we have sufficient knowledge to shape the macro climate to our wishes without devastating consequences. In other words, for right now, our goal should just be not to screw up the environment by introducing a bunch of unnecessary and climate changing human waste.

 

[Kirkhill]

CC:

I apologize for the "premature emission".  I hit the post button before I was ready.

My point is that if we "let the earth take its natural course" we are just as likely, if not more likely to end up dead like dear old Uncle Homo Erectus and Auntie Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis.

By some estimates the environmental catastrophes that occured around 10,000 years ago while all that ice was melting reduced Homo Sapiens Sapiens to a global population of 5000 (based on genetics and language) of which as few as 80 may have been living on the North American side of the Bering Sea.

 

[LakeSup]

You can find lots of info on the net economic benefit of tar sand oil and even shale oil in the Colorado Utah area (even more energy locked up in a 3 state area than in Alta but the net is it takes more NET energy to extract it than it yields).  We tend to neglect the effects of huge amounts of water going into the Ft McMurray project.  The BIG story of the future is not oil....it is WATER.  Do some reading about water shortages in the world and learn.   Per Sharon, the 1967 Israeli War was more about water rights than anything else.   Oh, global warming will raise ocean levels, all right but that is salty, non potable water (desalination is expensive and energy intensive)....the groundwater is what is depleting, as well as problems due to dam building and improper irrigation.  If you have no oil, life gets tough and wars start....if you lose WATER, life ends.  Read about it.

 

[Kirkhill]

(desalination is expensive and energy intensive)....

Desalination is cheap and amenable to solar solutions.  Desalination happens every minute of every day around the world wherever rain falls.  And rain hasn't stopped falling.  It just isn't falling where it used to.

Solar stills are immensely simple.  To take sea water into a solar still would solve the problem - it just requires surface area and no pumps.

Most deserts of the world, the Sahara included - and Israel for that matter,  the problem is less a lack of water than a surfeit of heat.  The water available in the atmosphere is too hot.  If the air is cooled it can release water - frost forms in the same deserts and snow falls at high altitudes.

Sorry - the world isn't coming to an end.

It is changing as it always has.

We have to adapt - as we always have - or die - as many have.

 

[a_majoor]

Capping the volcanos and draining the earth's swamps and wetlands will certainly do far more for climate change than Kyoto:

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11408/an-inconvenient-truth-sos-from-al-gore-page2.html

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.

They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it’s a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, by the way, is described by one source as “the most renowned climatologist in all the world.”

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

Of course, I suspect that capping the volcanos, eliminating all ruminant animals, draining all the swamps etc. might have a few adverse effects on the ecosystem as well..........

 

[couchcommander]

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man.

Not inconvenient at all. Of total CO2 emissions per year, yes indeed. However, natural emissions are by and large balanced by what are called natural sinks.

Thus unfortunately for us, the 5% input from human sources is enough to throw this completely out of whack, and actually increase the concentration of CO2 by more than 30%!

"The observed increase of CO2 in the atmosphere from about 280 ppm in the preindustrial era to about 364 ppm in 1997 has come largely from fossil fuel combustion and cement production" - Friedli et al ., 1986; Hansen et al. , 1998; Keeling and Whorf , 1998

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL66903.pdf

With that we start see a number of positive (positive as in positively correlated, not good) feed-back loops, including increasing amounts of water vapour.

All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Yup, plus and minus a bit depending on who you talk to, but regardless, with that you get about... 0.3 to 0.6 degree increase.

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

False. Humans are responsible for .1%-.5% of greenhouse emissions when water vapour is put into the mix. However, as I stated above, this is more than enough to throw off the balance and increase the concentrations of important greenhouse gases so dramatically, both directly and indirectly, that in actual fact humans, as several reports I cited pages back pointed out, are actually responsible for 50%-80% of the changes in our climate depending on when precisely you are looking.

Car and driver maybe isn't the place for reliable analysis...

Kirkhill,

Indeed the earth changes quite drastically naturally. And indeed, when that happens, we either adapt or die. However, we don't need to exacerbate the situation in an unhelpful direction. Once we know enough so that we can modify the macro scale environment to suit our needs, sure. Right now, we know enough so that we can tell we're messing something up, but we certainly don't know enough to start playing with it.

It's like a luser with a computer. They know when they've messed it up, but they certainly don't know how to make it work.

*edited to be much clearer*

 

[exsemjingo]

Desalination is cheap and amenable to solar solutions. 
Solar stills are immensely simple.  To take sea water into a solar still would solve the problem - it just requires surface area and no pumps.

Most deserts of the world, the Sahara included - and Israel for that matter,  the problem is less a lack of water than a surfeit of heat.  The water available in the atmosphere is too hot.  If the air is cooled it can release water - frost forms in the same deserts and snow falls at high altitudes.

We have to adapt - as we always have - or die - as many have.

Oops, you still have to transport the water from the ocean to where your crops are.  That can get expensive.  It is true you could also make rain fall in the desert with a large enough air-conditioner, but once again, too expensive to be economical.

The problems we are facing to not have to do with the annihilation of our species, but with maintaining our economy and our society near or at present levels.  There will definately be water shortages in the near future, but our water will not dry up until there is none
left and we all die of thirst.  A more likely scenario is that the price of water will increase until North American agriculture, especially in the American West and Mid-west, will no longer be viable.  We won't all starve, we'll just be poor and have to import food from elsewhere.

Al Gore's recomendations would not be catastrophic.  They would be damaging economically, but they would not bankrupt us comepletely.  Kyoto is a little more severe, but it would not mean complete economic ruin either.  We've all been blasting them, however, because they would do more economic harm than environmental good. 
These are bad ideas, but it's still all marginal.

 

[Kirkhill]

ex:  Correct. You do still have to move the water - or else move the people.  My point exactly.

Pay me now or Pay me later. TANSTAAFL. Choose your cliche.  If you want to spend money trying to achieve a stasis that has never existed then feel free to do so. I prefer to keep my money in my pocket so I can move to high ground when the time comes.

To both you and CC.  There is no point of control for all of these analyses. There is no baseline from which you can extrapolate change and infer cause because we haven't a clue what mechanisms were acting to what degree that generated the numbers that you see at any given time.

By some estimates global warming occurred at the rate of about 27 Fahrenheit degrees in less than a decade. That occurred between the Latest Glacial Maximum of 18,000 years ago and the onset of the Younger Dryas of 12,000 years ago.  See levels rose by up to 13.5 in a similar period about 14,200 years ago. Then they rose another 7.5 m in a burst about 11,500 years ago.  And again 6.5 m about 7,600 years ago.  That last one would have been about the time that the Black Sea was breached.  Tell me again about a rise of a degree in a century and half a meter or sea level rise.

While you are at it - can you tell me when the next el nino is due, where it will form, how intense it will be and how long it will last?  We have one on the rise just now.  It should be easy enough to predict the next one.

In actual fact there isn’t as much ice left now as there was then so the prospect of catastrophic flooding is reduced from that time.

 

[couchcommander]

To both you and CC.  There is no point of control for all of these analyses. There is no baseline from which you can extrapolate change and infer cause because we haven't a clue what mechanisms were acting to what degree that generated the numbers that you see at any given time.

See that's the point though, we do have a fairly good idea.

Many methods can tell us what the temperature was, sea levels, atmospheric composition, sun activity, etc.etc., not to mention you can conduct labratory experiments to determine the radiative influence of various gasses and aerosols. So once again, no, they aren't just pulling these numbers out of a hat, there is decades upon decades of supporting research.

We know that certain greenhouse gases are IR active, using that information, we can predict what should happen when these levels go up and down, and then we find that observations of past climate change are in line with these prdictions. Yes, there are other causes of climate change, but it's been rather consistently found that when CO2 goes up or down significantly, you get a glacial or interglacial period - no this isn't just a positive correlation, there is a causative link in the gases IR absorbtion and re-emission.

And it's not so much sea levels I am worried about but the disruption to the weather patterns that concerns me... mostly because I like where I live, I don't want it become a waste land because of my actions

 

[Kirkhill]

CC - we are going to dance around this Maypole forever aren't we? ;D

You believe there is a reference point.  I don't.

You want things to stay as they are.  I'll be surprised if they do.

"Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth's surface - an area of around 25 million square kilometres or 10 million square miles - has been swallowed by rising sea levels since the end of the Ice Age. (Glenn Milne, Department of Geology, University of Durham). That is roughly equivalent to the combined areas of the United States (9.6 million square kilometres) and the whole of South America (17 million square kilometres).  It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined." (Graham Hancock: Underworld).

I am willing to bet that the Bedu with their tents have a racial memory of their city dwelling brothers having to pick up and move every millenium or so as their cities ran out of water, were flooded, swallowed by earthquakes, covered by volcanoes or flattened by meteors.  A lot easier to replace a tent and a couple of camels. 

 

[exsemjingo]

Nevermind.

 

[Kirkhill]

Nevermind.

;D

 

[exsemjingo]

What's that for?  I had a reply for you, but on second glance it did not look right, so I deleted it. 
Since you are interested in what I have to say, here it is:  I do not know why you concern yourself with such a large time-frame.  It is really irrelevant to us now to consider what the climate might be like 100, 200, or 1000 years from now, but that is what you seem to be focusing on. 
The point of this thread originally was to show how Al Gore's arguments cannot even stand up on their own terms, since they are based on lies and half-truths.  Looking at a time-frame so large as to loose all relevance is exactly the practice this discussion meant to discredit. 

These Lobbyists have a very real intent, even though their ideas are pie-in-the-sky.  If this discussion looses sight of what is relevant here and now, it becomes just a lot of hot air.

 

[couchcommander]

I don't quite understand what you mean, are you trying to argue that global warming isn't something that we should be concerned about because it won't affect us? In which case I disagree, see the last 4-5 pages, its very relevant to us in our lifetimes, or are you trying to say we shouldn't be that concerned with natural changes the earth is going to go through over the next few millennia, in which case I'd largely agree.

 

[Kirkhill]

Being unaware of your deleted post I assumed the Nevermind post was an "Its not worth the effort" statement.

I was agreeing.

 

[couchcommander]

Damn people who just won't see reason.... 

 

[a_majoor]

There is a price for everything (emphasis in origional post):

http://www.dustmybroom.com/?p=4650

So much caring, so little compliance
Jay Jardine on climate change:

I would concede right off the bat the fact that the earth is warming, that the consequences could be disastrous and that human action is responsible for it. It is 99.999% likely that the person you are debating is a statist and is urging government action to reverse or mitigate the process. Put him on his heels by asking for specifics of his Plan - how long it will take to implement, how much it will cost, how will success be measured, who will implement it and how confident he is that the Right Solution will be put in place - on time - in spite of the inevitable political compromise along the way. It is far easier to cast doubt on the competence of a democratically-driven government process than to cast doubt on reams of scientific data and scholarly journals.

[..] is it more likely or less likely that the very same institution will be able to successfully manage the restoration of the earth’s climate to its “correct” level? What, specifically would cause this institution to be more competent in the task of changing the earth’s climate than running the roads, registering firearms or “helping” poor people?

A report prepared by PricewaterhouseCooper recommends halting economic growth, although this would result in an increase in general poverty. The good news is that for the bargain rate of $1,000,000,000,000, the greedy rich nations can give something back to the global community. (HT: Drudge Report.)

The report, byPricewaterhouseCoopers, lays bare the potential damage to the environment of the industrial revolution in China and India. It puts a price of $1 trillion (£526bn) on the cost of sorting out the problem spread over the next generation. The bill is equivalent to a year’s output of the economy of Canada, and less than half of the total stock of debt that has been built up by Britain’s households. But it is less than the cost in terms of environmental catastrophe and loss of life that scientists fear will happen as temperatures and sea levels rise. “It is implicit from our findings that a trillion dollars certainly is a cost worth incurring,” said John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC and author of the report.

Turbo-charged growth in emerging economies is helping to drag billions of people out of poverty across Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe.

But according to PwC, the price will be paid by sharp rises in global energy consumption and carbon emissions. They say it means the rich nations that have done most to cause the problem must take more drastic action to reduce their environmental impact.

The report comes as the environmental community awaits a key Treasury-commissioned report on the economic cost of climate change. Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, is expected to conclude that it will be cheaper to act now to curb energy use than to pay for the cost of symptoms later.

His findings, which will be presented to G8 environment ministers during a closed-door session at a summit in Mexico next week, will also outline the financial impact of global warning. Sir Nicholas will reject the alternative argument that the world should maximise economic growth to build reserves to meet the costs of the final reckoning.

PwC said it had attempted to put a price on slowing the growth in carbon emissions because it was impossible to calculate the cost of climate change. “If sea levels rise and a lot of people in Bangladesh drown do you calculate the loss of their lifetime earnings, even though they will be lower than for the UK? It is a difficult moral question,” Mr Hawksworth said.

If tax rates continue to rise and a lot of people in London perish waiting for a doctor, do you calculate the loss of their lifetime tax contributions, or do you celebrate the longevity of the tasmanian devil?

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin

Originally posted at London Fog

You’ve been told.

One trillion dollars would pay off our national debt and the unfunded liabilities of Canada (CPP, government pensions etc.), which should give you some perspective of what is being demanded. Leaving everyone in poverty (except for the people who already have made it; this is the mark of the Silver Spoon socialist set), has vast long term direct and opportunity costs as well.

And while we do this the sun continues to warm........

 

[Kirkhill]

I don't quite understand what you mean, are you trying to argue that global warming isn't something that we should be concerned about because it won't affect us? In which case I disagree, see the last 4-5 pages, its very relevant to us in our lifetimes, or are you trying to say we shouldn't be that concerned with natural changes the earth is going to go through over the next few millennia, in which case I'd largely agree.

I am trying to argue that I accept that global warming is occurring, has occurred and will occur.  The same is true for global cooling but right now the trend seems to be a warming one. Stipulated.

I am also arguing that because we are on a roller coaster replete not only with known knowns, assumed knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns (pace Rumsfeld) that I am not yet convinced that there is a baseline of comparison from which to infer cause and effect well enough to definitively state conclusions.  (If Rumsfeld couldn't figure out the actual situation in Iraq what makes you think we can figure out the realities of global change?  ).

Further I am arguing that regardless of what we do or might have done change will happen and based on the historical record and the near term prehistorical record (in a 4.5 billion year record of the planet 18,000 years is an "augenblick" - blink of an eye) it can be rapid and catastrophic.  Far beyond any of the calamities that make the 6 O'Clock news.  More to the point such events are unpredictable - precisely because we don't know enough.

Far from believing that global warming is something we should be concerned about I believe it is something that we should be concerned about as we should be concerned about any other potential disasters.  As such we should prepare to mitigate the effects.

This is, ultimately I think, where we have our disagreement.  I would rather horde resources to deal with actual effects as they occur rather than spend them on speculation that they may prevent some calamitous events.

I am quite willing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the name of cleaning up the environment - as long as the cost is not prohibitive.  I am still not convinced that taking such steps will prevent catastrophes.

Having said all of the above - I have to give the Liberals credit.  I believe that the party of MacKenzie-King, prevaricator extraordinaire, prevaricated long enough to allow us to dodge the bullet.  In this instance I am talking about the economic bullet.  With the delay the Europeans have seen that meeting targets is hard if not impossible.  China and India have now moved into the anti-Kyoto column properly (they always were but were given a pass as was Brazil).  They US has demonstrated and is demonstrating that non-Kyoto technologies and incentives are moving them ahead of us.  Strategic imperatives are driving the search for non carbon fuel sources.  And nobody wants to send free money to Russia just because their economy has collapsed to such an extent that their industries are no longer in business.

The world of 2012 looks a lot different than the world of 1992.

The risks of natural disaster however, IMHO, remain undiminished and should concern us.

Now, next question, although you are not concerned about sea level rise, should we spend our billions on new cars and nuclear reactors,  windmill farms the size of Nova Scotia, or build New Orleans and Morden, Manitoba style levees and ring-dykes round the existing cities and islands like the Maldives, or should we start abandoning the low lying parts of the cities and move to higher ground?  We could also consider building on stilts and commuting by boat (a personal favourite of mine  )

Cheers.

 

[Kirkhill]

PS I consider myself rational if not reasonable.  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

PS I consider myself rational if not reasonable.  ;D

We could also consider building on stilts and commuting by boat (a personal favourite of mine  )

And I thought your idea to commute by hang gliders was way out there............