Is global warming even real?

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Ilikeponies579, Dec 16, 2014.

  1. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    You give the denier political movement a lot of ammunition to claim that alarmists make absurd, unsupported assertions and should be ignored.
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The denier claims have nothing to do with "ammunition".

    Trying to edit or curb discussions of climate change risks and possibilities so that deniers cannot somehow find "ammunition" in them is wasted effort.
     
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  5. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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  7. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    I disagree. For example, the sensationalism with which the "global cooling" studies were reported in the 1970's has damaged, and continues to damage, the cause of public education on the topic of climate change. Newsweek, to their credit, apologized for their sensationalism later - and admitted it led many to draw the wrong conclusions about climate change.
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Which goes to show that nothing you do can prevent the denial operation from finding "ammunition" in whatever you say.

    Are supposed to ignore the incoming glaciation prospects, or the methane burst hazard, or the increased odds of a short-term limited runaway hydropowered warming, or the chances of a Gulf Stream shutdown leading to arctic weather in Ireland, and the like, because such concerns can be misrepresented by the unscrupulous and dingbat?

    Are we supposed to edit our statistical discussions to avoid using the word "trick", so that people who steal our emails cannot lie about what we meant?

    Let's rather leave the propaganda considerations to the propagandists.
     
  9. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. And in fact I don't think there's anything you can say to a true denier that will convince him. (Indeed, at least one study has shown that they become more entrenched the more information is presented to them.)

    However, the vast majority of Americans are not deniers - nor are they the sort of alarmists that think that 90%+ of humanity will be killed by climate change. These are the people who hear the argument "well, scientists once predicted an ice age - and now they are predicting a heat wave! They'll probably change their minds again in a few years" - and think that's a reasonable argument. And Newsweek, Time et al gave deniers the ammunition to make that argument.
    Not at all. We should, rather, present the science that we can support, rather than the more spectacular/sensationalist guesses about our future.
    Agreed. And predicting events where "half of humanity will die in less than a month" or "the temperature rises to the extinction level" is propaganda rather than science.
     
  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    NE Brail has 56 cities, most relatively small with out water, except that delivered by potable water trucks.

    Here is Sao Paulo things are looking better. The month of March dumped more water into our main reservoir than any year since 2008 and it holds 19% of capacity now. - way up from the ~5% low of a few months ago. There have been many large floods in the low areas of Sao Paulo - worst I have seen in 22 years. - Cars rolled down the street by the run off waters. Yesterday a man died in one.

    I have started to use some of the 90 liters of bottled water I bought.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 2, 2015
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    No I don't. I give information extremely well supported with EVIDENCE. I admit evidence will not open well closed mind, but did not realize yours was.
    See the evidenc in this less than 10 minutes, then comment on the evidence or correct my comments on it below:

    "Boiled" refers to video's violent rise of CH4 bubbles, not 100C.
    This is the most complete SCIENTIFIC investigation yet done of the cause of the "Great Extinction"

    See highly qualified author extracting from sediment cores tiny pieces from the worse ever known mass extinction period and how he processed them to come to his conclusion. Did you see the huge storage rooms with tens of thousands of racks of long core tubes? He is an expert - otherwise would never have been allowed to extract almost irreplaceable data in these ancient sea bottom cores.

    The conclusions ARE "substantiated" - It is your claim they are "absurd" that is without any basis than OPINION. Fact that they are not commonly held by other experts is probably due to fact these "other experts" have not had access to the ancient mud cores, they are based on.

    This conclusion is his, not mine. The most complete EVIDENCE yet analysized, does indicate we are starting the same surge up in CH4 that made extinct 95% of all creatures, - main difference is with at least ten fold more rapid CO2 release that has already driven the CH4 concentration levels three times higher that at any time in the last 800,000 years. (That comes from ice core data, not the much more distant past recorded in the sea sediment mud.)

    Not only does his chemical and fossil changes (found in sediment cores) analysis lead to the same conclusion many others have reached: that the "Siberian traps" were bad for life on earth, but not the primary cause of the 95% extinction, which as most experts now agree via a CH4 surge lasting a few thousands of year with rapid and about a 10C temperature increase.

    He, with his better time resolution, was able to show it was really three separate surges. The first mass of CH4 released died way, making CO2 at least one molecule of CO2 for each of CH4 that was destroyed. That surge of longer lasting CO2, was probably, like the present being initially absorbed in the Oceans (my guess, he does not say). But the Global Warming of that CO2 surge made a second CH4 surge and process repeated to make a third. If history repeats, our "2nd CH4 surge" should begin about 2050 as more of the oceans stored CO2 comes back into the air.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 2, 2015
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    So did Time Magazine and Newsweek back in the 1970's. It took them decades to apologize, but they finally did.
     
  13. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks. I agree. Here is small part of the "causes" section:

    "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations, concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet. ... The panel also concluded there's a better than 90 percent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years.

    They said the rate of increase in global warming due to these gases is very likely to be unprecedented within the past 10,000 years or more. The panel's full Summary for Policymakers report is online at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf."

    It is my opinion that the ICCP has strong tendency to understate the AGW problem, in part because governments get to review their report, even edit, before they are released. Slowly AGW will force the government to spend more than they like. For example, Governor Brown of CA, yesterday announce a billion dollar program to address CA's water problem - today noting that the snow levels in mountains from which half* of CA's H2O consumption comes from has never been so low in the 65 years that records have been keep.

    When ICCP first's report estimated when Arctic would be ice free at end summer / early fall it was a few decades into the 2100s. I think that will have happen before 2020, as do some others. Their "consensus" track recorded is terrible!

    Also IMO, they are grossly underestimating the longer term danger of CH4 - seem even to be ignorant of fact the half-life of this very powerful GHG is now increasing at the rate of 0.3years each year; in large part because now its release rate is greater than rate harsh solar UV can can make the OH- radical which is mainly what removes CH4 from the air (mutual destruction reactions) Now the CH4 is rising - is 3 times greater in the last few decade than even the highest concentrationin the last 800,000 year as concentration of OH- is falling. For more than 800,000 year solar UV could make OH- faster than CH4 was release, so the "surplus" OH- held CH4 concentration low - now the reverse is true - greater release of CH4 is driving the OH- concentration down. Now each CH4 molecule remains in the air longer before it finds an OH- to react with. Soon, 1 Kg of CH4 will cause more GW than 100 Kg of CO2 during the decade following "puffs" of them released simultaneously.

    * The other half of CA's water consumption is being "mined" from the ground (paired satellite data - one trailing the other in LEO, so relative motion give measure of mass concentrations in near surface ground - They have been "seeing" the ground water decrease quantatively for more than 5 years.) This falling "water table" is no news to many now whose wells have gone dry.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 2, 2015
  14. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    That is not a comment on the video or my comments on it. Yes 45 years go man did not have either the data or the understanding of global warming he does now. So this is just a "duck and weave" to avoid commenting on the evidence or substance of the conclusions, and not even a good one.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Right. But they did understand global cooling from high altitude aerosols, and accurately described the phenomenon. Journalists then extrapolated from those facts and predicted calamity.

    "But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies...The longer the planners (politicians) delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality. . . . the resulting famines could be catastrophic" -"drought and desolation" - "the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded" - "droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons" - "impossible for starving peoples to migrate" - "the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age."

    You are doing something very similar by posting facts about the forcing properties of methane, then extrapolating to state that "the temperature rises to the extinction level" and the possibility that "half of humanity will die in less than a month."
     
  16. zgmc Registered Senior Member

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  17. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    I'll ask some of my buds. Hell, Trippy might be able to get a copy, but he wouldn't be able to share it here.
     
  18. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    Its out there. I read it. But you will need to read skeptic blogs to find it. Linked in comments.

    Or you could email the author himself and see if a copy is available.

    One of my fav comments so far:
     
  19. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, I am saying: "History* can repeat." And the less than 10 minute video of post 638, the latest and most complete analysis of the "Great Extinction" (~95% of all creatures dead) tells why that is to be expected, without drastic changes in man's energy systems.

    Switching liquid fuel requiring cars to sugar cane based alcohol, being an excellent way to start as:

    (1) It is renewable, not finite.
    (2) All needed can be grown only using abandoned pasture land.
    Much of that is in poor countries and cutting cane is a low skill job. Many now with no salary would get jobs and become customers for first world products.
    A win/win change for all but big oil.
    (3) Switching to sugar cane based fuel, not only greatly reduces the amount of CO2 annually released, it actually REMOVES some from the air. (All the carbon in cane's roots, ocean tankers filled with alcohol, large storage tanks at ports, and millions of smaller ones in cars, was earlier removed from the air by the growing cane.) I. e. sugar cane alcohol is a slightly "net negative CO2 release" fuel.
    (4) Cane based alcohol is cheaper per mile driven that gasoline when petroleum cost >$70/ barrel without ANY government subsidy. (or > $65/barrel if big oil's "depletion allowance" tax subsidy were ended. Big oil has other subsidies too. Their lobbyist are well paid and good.) Sugar cane alcohol has more than 100 independent producers, competing with each other, with no government subsidy**
    (5) Sugar cane alcohol gives slightly more power than gasoline, in same IC motor and significantly more in one designed with higher compression as alcohol does not "knock" as easily.
    (6) A minor advantage is it is clearer burning - and reduces need to change spark plugs, get other repairs.

    Only disadvantage vs. gasoline is that a full tank will only have 70% of the driving range that gasoline does. So you will need to fill tank more often.

    * I never said "half of humanity will die in a month." - That is non-scientific "alarmist talk" - I don't do that; however, there will be locally heat waves where thousands die in a month - Wet bulb temperature of 35C (95F) is lethal to humans in less than an hour. For every 1 degree C of ocean surface temperature rise there is 7% more water vapor in the air in equilibrium with salt water's increased vapor pressure.

    At time of the great extinction, the temperature was already about 5C higher than now and in less than 1000 years went up about 8 degrees more at the peak, but most were already extinct. There are several ways to estimate the temperature back then and not all agree on these values, given in the video, but all do agree that the rise, if three surges of CH4 concentration do again occur - there will be a lage extinction again. 99+ percent of humans now are part of some social structure, and may not be able to survive with out it.

    I like to note that the Bible is correct: "The meek will inherit the Earth."
    I.e. tiny mice with large surface to volume ratios for cooling and habit of staying in their burros during the heat of the day, are the most probable "meek" - The most advanced survivors inheriting the earth, but humans living north of the arctic circle, probably will live decades longer than most. Heat & humidity will not kill them - Acidified oceans and lack of food locally grown probably will be the cause of their deaths, if they too go extinct. However, there will be thousand of un-buried bodies (not just human) and plagues may get them instead of lack of food.

    ** Actually in Brazil, until a few days ago alcohol competed and won, with gasoline, even with price of gasoline suppressed by the populist government, which owns more than half of PetroBrass. They could not suppress the price of alcohol too as it is produced by dozens of independent producers. All the government could do was remove some alcohol supply by requiring gasoline to have 25% alcohol content.

    Brazil's socialistic government has done so much damage to the economy that collapse is a real concern of many and finally price of electricity and gasoline has been increased, both by more than 10%. This of course has dropped the president's approval rating to ~20% despite having won re-election just a couple of months ago. ~60% think she is doing a "terrible job" now. I was one of the more than one million who marched down Sao Paulo's most important street (Av. Paulista) three Sundays ago in massive protest against the socialistic government (~3 million total marching in all of Brazil that Sunday.) The presidential "spin" on the marches was: "This shows the world how strong Brazil's democracy is."
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 2, 2015
  20. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    The Great Extinction (P-Tr) took over a million years. If your claim is that, over the next million years, 95% of all currently-existing creatures will become extinct (with new ones evolving to fill the gap) then I would not only agree with that, but I'd say we are hastening it. Indeed, mankind as we know it will almost certainly be extinct, replaced by whatever humanity evolves into. (Keep in mind that a million years ago, Homo Sapiens did not exist.)

    However generally you are not saying that. You are saying that it could happen in a month or so. You say that forests are drying out, and that might lead to large forest fires. And from the resulting soot "about half of humanity will die in less than a month." (And since you don't believe you said that, here's the link to the post: http://www.sciforums.com/threads/runaway-global-warming.142102/page-26#post-3250191)

    THAT is the kind of non-scientific "alarmist talk" that will make you (and by extension, other people promoting both climate change education and altenative fuels) a laughingstock. In a few years, if your posts were to get any sort of real-world traction, a denier publication would state "remember when Billy T claimed that forest fires from the drought would have half of humanity dead in a month? Check out the weather in Brazil - floods! And now climate scientists are saying that the storms might be due to climate change. What a bunch of clueless alarmists!" And while that will do nothing to convince people on either side, those statements (backed up by quotes from both you and climate scientists) may convince some moderates that climate change scientists are essentially always wrong.
     
  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know the time scale for different creatures to go extinct, but think for most the time between there population be reduced by 50% until they were extinct was on the order of a few thousand years, at most, but that is just my guess.
    Yes I have noted that a much more rapid and wide spread death than normally is considered possible MIGHT BE POSSIBLE, via Hadley cell circulation (between + & - 30 degree latitude) pumping huge amount of soot into high clouds, cutting their reflectivity in half (effectively same a "step function" in increased of solar absorption heating of the atmosphere). I have speculated that IF for example Amazon's routine fires did not burn out as they normally do but spread in the increasing drought conditions* and merge to burn 50% of the Amazon rain forest in a week or so, many at least in the tropics would die in a month or so. That is a SPECULATIVE POSSIBILITY, I have invented, mainly to show, how uncertain and serious AGW may be in the near term - not 30 to 90 years form now. This is very different from the near certainty (without drastic change in man's energy system,) of wide spread deaths, if not eventual extinction (a repeat of history with same mechanism) as the video makes clear.

    *56 Brazilian cities, quite a few in the Amazon rain forest, I think, now have no water to distribute in the distribution system pipes. Potable water trucks are preventing wide spread deaths.

    Here quote of the full paragraph from your link where I discussed the "Hadley cell / large forest burning" theat. with two parts you seem to have missed now made bold and larger:

    "The forests are drying, and trees are dying - more CO2 released than taken up, but the worst thing is that large part of the Rain Forests may burn - sending soot high up via Hadley cell, that cover half the earth (From -30 S to +30 N latitude). Currently at least 2/3 of the solar energy on them is reflected back into space but with only about 1 soot particle in ~1000 water droplets their absorption would double - 100% increase in solar energy being absorbed by them! If that happens, about half of humanity will die in less than a month. "

    That is an indication of a POSSIBILITY not any prediction. I other posts I have suggested the AGW problem is so complex, the mankind may not have even recognized the main threats. Hell, I was able to think of this one, which as far as I know, no one else has mentioned the potential of the Hadley cells to greatly amplify the danger of wide spread forest fires in the tropics. Most discussion of soot being a positive feed back mechanism refers to it speeding the melting of ice on Greenland etc.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 2, 2015
  22. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    No.

    Benton has suggested that there were extinction events at the beginning and the end of the Guadaloupian epoch leading to a decline in biodiversity, or that biodiversity failed to recover in the leadup to the end permian event - in the same vein as Erwin and Teichert who seperately suggested that the extinction was prolonged throughout the Lopingian epoch. Rampino et al suggest, using high resolution cyclostratigraphy, time scales on the order of 10^3 - 10^4 for width. Wang and Everson suggest, based on Chinese Ostracod data that there were two pulses seperated by 720,000 - 1,200,000 years. The width proposed by Rampino seems to be supported by Twitchet who says in addition to that that it took a further 10^5 years full the full faunal effects to play out, and that the collapse of terrestrial and marine ecosystems began at the same time and precedded the delta[sup]13[/sup]C excursion. There is an older theory that there was a pulse at the end of the guadloupian followed by the larger pulse at the end of the permian that recently seems to have been regaining some traction.

    So, to me at any rate, it looks like the way the evidence is playing out is that the end permian extinction was the result of a sequence of events that played out over a period of at least ten million years starting with at least one extinction pulse at the end of the Guadaloupian (which may or may not have been preceeded by one ten million years earlier at the start of the Guadaloupian), followed by an enhanced extinction rate in the last ten million years of the Permian (during the Lopingian) which terminated in two more extinction pulses of duration 10^3-10^4 years seperated by a period of 10^5-10^6 years.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    And those people will hear such arguments from deniers regardless of how people genuinely discussing issues edit themselves.

    So editing actual discussion, in an attempt to prevent misrepresentation by deniers and the like, is vain.

    So you are sure that such events are so very, very unlikely the possibility of them need not be even considered? You are completely sure of that?
     

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