There are two studies that I regard as the absolute worst science of the twentieth century: the first was the ozone hole. These idiots postulated a question that had only one possible answer and then acted surprised when it turned out to be true. Running a close second to that insult is side-show Global Warming. Having the same lack of factual support (grounded in biased data collection and patently stupid experimentation), global warming has systematically used correlation to imply causality. The only two things that are known for certain is that Average global thermal count has been increasing in the timespan of the measurements. Human CO2 production had been increasing in the timespan of the measurements. That was seemingly all the linkage these people needed to construct a vast and complex mechanism for them to actually be related. They then back is up with measurements taken 10 miles downwind from and active volcano to show the horrors that civilization is bringing to the poor defenseless planet. There are perhaps 30 people on the planet who are making a honest and truly scientific investigation, and sadly, they are getting lost in the static generated by the people whose most compelling arguement is "can we afford to wait?" My own response to that would be "do we even get a choice?" With the numbers they create their own studies would indicate that we're already fucked, so why bother? The reduction of CO2 production is probably going to be a good thing, but for absolutely none of the reasons the global warming supporters would have you believe. I have ignored them (as opposed to attacking them) based on the strength of this belief alone. Global Warming is absolutely happening. Humans have absolutely nothing to do with it. Just like the ozone hole, global warming will die a quiet death in the coming years and will undoubtedly be replaced with something else. We've seen this kind of long term faddish nonsense before and it has yet again taken on a different form. I've have been singularly unimpressed by their preformance this time around.
Andre, I can see that you hate global warming theory with all your might, I’m ok with that, but I get the idea you think burning fossil fuels is a good idea for infinite time of constant progress and growth. Obviously if this is so then reality is a very hard concepts for conservative like you to understand.
I have nothing against of for global warming: it is base on simple logic CO2 and CH4, we produce a lot of this stuff, global levels of this gaseous are up, so therefore one would expect world temperatures to go up, unfortunately the weather has proven its self to be beyond complicated, the side effects of pumping out this gaseous could be anything, including nothing at all. Even so it does not matter naturally or not the earth is changing. I prefer to look at more eminent problems like what going to happen when we out demand are supply of fossil fuel, Kyoto treaty helps answer problems like that.
I just thought I'd point out that CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, as seen in the geological record. The levels today are nothing unusual. I don't have a definite opinion on the matter as I don't really know enough about the subject, but I think this is an interesting point.
Andre, Thank you for reinforcing what I was just saying: the basic premise of global warming though simple is a nightmarish complex thing in reality that has totally unpredictable result (at this time. Second of all fossil fuels will not run out, but they will not match are demand for them soon! Mining Deep-sea methane could cost more energy then is mined up! You try dredging the sea floor at several km down. Finding new oil reserves has dropped sense the 1960, demand for oil goes up exponentially yet production has gone up linearly. The human race will be 12 billion strong by 2020, are demanded for energy will increase 7-10 fold! At that rate of exponential growth Oil (by the most pessimistic measurement) would no long be able to supply our demand by 2006+-2, estimates based of all possible energy positive minable oil reserves in existence projects that it will not be economical to mine oil by 2020-2030. And there is a serious problem with your Venus theory and that is that you did not account for mercury! Mercury also has a very slow spin, the idea was the earth and mars were hit by very large asteroid at slated angles late in their development and thus give them their high-speed spin. Also boiled off most of there volatiles which made our atmosphere nice and thin, Venus though was left with one 91 times earth pressure and made out of gaseous that you refuse to believe can trap heat at all, such as CO2 and SO2 those having a ~860 degree air surface temperature. I advice the book “Venus Revealed” by David Harry Grinspoon.
Glad to see I'm not the only way who disputes the one basic assumption upon which the whole of AGW theory stands...or falls Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It is difficult to be sure, but it seems likely that CO2 was ten times as high during the Mesozoic as it is today. Gradually carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere, and incorporated into sedimentary rocks... some of which is naturally recycled, but the long term trend for CO2 in the atmosphere is probably downward. This might be a cotributory factor to the formation of first, the Antarctic ice sheet, and more recently the Arctic. Admittedly the variability of the Sun, the circulation in the Great Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, and the Milankovitch cycles also contribute to tempreature changes, and are no doubt responsible for the pattern of glacials and interglacials. But as CO2 goes down the Earth will get colder. Anthropogenic Global Warming may be the only thing which is keeping the ice at bay... as I have mentioned elsewhere, the Sun will gradually get warmer as it converts its H into He... so the cooling trend of the Earth will eventually reverse itself... but again, it is difficult to be sure. I think that the first candidate for terraforming in our galaxy will be the Earth; with careful management of the carbon and other cycling materials, the Earth can remain at a comfortable temperature for more than a billion years. __________________ SF worldbuilding at http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
I'm not going to jump in to the debate, at least not yet. But I did want to point out that www.climateprediction.net is starting up a DC project in this vein. If you're so inclined...
Andre, I did mention mercury in one of your (or was is some other guys?) Venus threads (there were so many!) the moon and mercury have very little in common historically because mercury is a planet while the moon is a spin off of earth and another planet that no long exists. No you do not understand what I meant by large asteroids perhaps planets would have been a better word: Earth and Mars were hit by planets! Earth it self took an impact from a planet the size of mars, as a result earth has its high-speed spin and the moon. Also again you do not acknowledge the fact that CO2 does trap heat (at lest better then Nitrogen)
The moons origins from earth is quite well proven also the physics works out fine. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/moonwhack_side_000901.html http://www.studyworksonline.com/cda/content/article/0,,NAV2-78_SAR1279,00.shtml you want more? type it in on google I got more then 1000 links here all saying the same stuff.
Although the Moon and the Earth are geochemically very similar, they have very different densities; the Big Collision theory explains this by separating the denser rocks from the lighter crustal rocks, some of which splashed into orbit during the impact and became the Moon. This implies that the Earth is more dense than other planets of its size, and I believe this prediction is in line with the lower density of Venus. However, I am not absolutely convinced... it turns the early solar sytem into a game of pool. __________________ SF worldbuilding at http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
But it was a game of pool. You had planets and planetoids whizzing around, coalesing, colliding and re-forming. It must've been a chaotic system until it settled down. It only seems stable to us on our meagre timescale of vobserving things for a few millenia. The formation happened over hundreds of millions of years, so viewing things on this time scale, one or two early collisions are not unexpected. Remember, there was a huge meateorite bombardment in the early solar system history. This just shows the chaos that was going on, even after the planets had formed!
The linked articles specifically address that argument and provide the argument and evidence which shows that they could not have.
The idea that the moon and Earth formed togeather in close proximety was one of the leading hypothesis until after Apollo. Most of the Moon's material was found by Astronauts to be identical to that which is found on Earth. Mercury is a completely differnt world. While the surfaces of the Moon and Mercury appear to be very similar in terms of their color and abundancy of cratering, a closer look just at the surface reveals immidiately how differnt they are. The Moon has great massive spots of Mara, or "seas" as they were called in ancient times - ancient volcanic lava beds which covered up sizeable parts of the moons surface and erased the impact craters in those areas, leaving relatively smooth surfaces. Mercury has no such places on it's surface, save one (IF I remember correctly), and that particular basin was caused by a massive impact melting a part of the surface, not volcanic activities. Cutting the two worlds in half and looking at them like apple-slices, one quickly sees the heart of the matter, as it were. The Moon once had an active core of Magma, causing active volcanism at one time. Over 60% of Mercury as a whole is taken up by a massive core of solid iron - the denses material formed by nuclear fission in super-active giant stars. We should not blame Andre for his ideas or his confusion. Many Astronomy books, including College textbooks and some of the best books period on the subject of the Solar System, present Mercury and the Moon togeather in one chapter and thus imply they are related similar objects. His questions are very typical of many of the Astronomy students I once taught and entirely understandable - even logical based on the knowledge he has.
No agrument can be made that CO2 is not a significant heat retainer with the right conditions. Venus for example, cooks in extrordinatly high temperatures, because it's atmosphere of 98% Carbon Dioxide traps nearly all of the energy it recieves from the Sun. This process may never stop - Venus has volcanoes on it's surface which are thought to have errputed as recently as within the last few thousand years and might still have active volcanism increasing the CO2 levels in it's atmosphere. However, Mars clearly shows an example of CO2 not functioning in this role in differnt conditions. The atmosphere of Mars is around 1 / 3 as thick as ours, and obviously many times thinner than the atmosphere of Venus. Nonetheless the atmosphere is primarily CO2. Apparently, even at being purely CO2, the Martian atmosphere cannot seem to retain significant amounts of heat... or can it? During the Martian summer, temperatures can reach an Earth-like 60F during the daytime. Nighttime temperatures however, are still well below zero. Clearly, Mars recieved a great deal of solar energy - enough to reach Earth-like temperatures during the day despite being nearly twice Earth's distance from the sun. But at night, the atmosphere cannot retain enough of that energy to maintain a comfortable night-time temperature. Considering however that CO2 is not a particularly abundant gas in our atmosphere compared to say 76% nitrogen, then I do not see it as a significant cause for global warming. Mars probably has more despite it's smaller size and it can't retain half the heat it gets. Venus has many times as much as Earth does. I do not feel the conditions that Earth has, based on what I know CO2 does in the atmospheres of other planets, are sufficient for CO2 to be a significant heat retainer.
The atmosphere on mars in not one 1/3 as think as ours: that’s a very gross understatement! Earth sea level pressure is 1000mbars, Mar’s is at 7mbars or less then 1/100 our pressure! The Moon does not rotate because it is a Moon! Almost all the satellites in the solar system do not rotate but remain fix pointed to the planet. Very parabolic orbits decay to a more circler one; Mars and Earth have parabolic orbits, not nearly as round a Venus.
What relationship? Orbits do decay mind you, but the parameter of a orbits control by many factors. What conclusion? Was I suppose to have one?
I personally cannot find any fault in your statements reguarding Venus's orbit. However, I am unsure how this ties into the conversation of Global Warming on Earth. Venus has no life, liquid water, or any other known mechanism found on Earth which would keep the CO2 in check. It also has from whaw we know, no way of filtering out all the energy it is recieving from the sun and it retains it until the atmosphere is stimply too satturated to hold any more. Furthermore, Venus is though to still be volcanically active. If true this would mean CO2 levels on Venus are still increasing. Venus has no atmospheric convection, no changing weather patterns near it's surface, nothing, nadda, zilch. It's a dead world which has accept for it's size and perhaps it's functional core, little to nothing in common with Earth. All Venus contributes to our discussion is what CO2 CAN do when their is sufficient quantities of it, left in a static enviornment. Even with solar activity increasing, Venus's atmosphere should not undergo any kind of global climate change, because it seems Venus is already at the maximum temperature it's atmosphere can retain. Now, I am somewhat in your courner with reguards to how significant or insignificant CO2 is to Global Warming on Earth. However, I think you are useing a very poor example to make your point. It is far more profitable to compare Earth and Mars, which both have water, convecting atmosphere, similar day / night lengths, similar geographic features if not totally similar geology, and of course Mars has a very thin atmosphere compared to ours (Thank you WCF for correcting me on the Martian atmosphere - I looked it up and will conceed my error) and thus finding Global Warming on that world is very important to the discussion particularly if you want to invoke Solar Activity as the common dunominator.
Actually Venus may have life, no internal analyzes of Venusians cloud particles has yet been done. Once again I advice the book “Venus Revealed” by David Harry Grinspoon. By ya this is off topic.
