Is global warming even real?

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

  1. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    You want a picture of an Apocalypse?


    I agree, but one is a "cause" (GW), the other a "result" over which we have no control and therefore we don't have to do anything. The term GW may be politically incorrect, but it is scientifically correct and demands action.
     
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  3. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    Global warming is being erroneously equated to manmade. This creates the impression this is one thing, even though it is two things. This is based on a PC language game. It is like calling lying, spin, so lying sounds like a subset of truth.

    The earth has warmed in the past, many times according to science. The modern era globally warmed from an ice age, all by itself, without human intervention. This is something the earth does. There are many data points for the earth cooling and warming itself.

    Manmade global warming has no precedent in history or science. Even if this was true, for the sake of argument, this is a unique and the first occurrence of this, phenomena, ever. This would be the one and the only data point. Only in politics is one data point enough data to spin into a dogma for the mindless minions.

    Even if manmade global warming was true, being unprecedented and unique, it has only one data point. All you can do is guess since you can draw any curve through one point. This is why very few, if any predictions of the consequences, ever seem to materialize. These predictions all sound scary and are often as plausible as any movie script, but few never seem o happen as expected, when expected; poles melt. Just like in movies.

    The political work around for having the proper science based curve through one data point, is analogous to a rhetoric effect, where you generalize and blow smoke up people's skirts. The rhetoric buzz word has become climate change to covers everything, connected or not to the curve du jour. It is a type of magic trick. Ask for a hard prediction with a career consequence for not getting it right. All will back off, since this exposes the one data point limits of science and the need for spin to make it appear to work.
     
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  5. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I cannot disagree, but there is no longer a single data point, there are now measurable affects and effects over a fairly long period of time now. We are already discussing the immediate impacts of drastic climate change and have been able to trace them to GW as the causality of these changes.

    Because of the single point of reference these projections may be divergent, but where there is concensus of certain fundamental changes in our ecosphere, it is imperative that those must be studied by every school, doing research in these areas. Scholarships would help to get good minds working on this problem on a smaller scale, looking for more subtle changes which occur during long term and persistent weatherpatterns to the ecosystem and its effects on fauna and flora as well.
     
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  7. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    wellwisher,
    The earth has never before produced a species with capabilities like us, both in creativeness, as well as destructiveness.
    No other organism has become soo far removed from living in the natural cycle, without having been selected by the grim process of Natural Selection. You can fool with nature as much as you want, but when you create a natural global imbalance , the results may be catastrophic.
     
  8. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Plants(primary producers) consume CO2 and produce oxygen
    Animals consume oxygen and produce CO2

    In a nutshell, that is precisely "living in the natural cycle".

    We are just phenomenally better at it that any known predecessor animals.
    And this is something of which we have become aware.
     
  9. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I agree, with one caveat. Apparently our awareness of our abilities has only made us more wasteful and has not made us take precautions to leave our environment in a relative pristine condition.

    The intentional uncontrolled (and unwise) use of our exceptional abilities are causing the destruction of the natural cycles.
     
  10. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    8,466
    Perhaps
    Perhaps not
     
  11. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    I am willing to bet on it.
    GW is real (see all the trends), Climate Change is a result of GW (see the link), GW is in no small part influenced by human activity.
    http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/causes.html
     
  12. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    8,466
    That makes one of us.
    (from your link, they seem to have ignored the recent grand solar maximum)
    That claim would most likely be news to solar physicists.

    Politics and science make for strange bedfellows.
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2015
  13. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    I don't see where solar activity (on the sun) has much to do with the rising greenhouse effect from CO2 on Earth.
    Strange that they should talk about 11 year cycles, when this chart shows a 50 year trend and it is still rising.

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    http://www.worldometers.info/
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2015
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    The most recent solar maximum was in 2014, and was one of the weakest on record. Yet it was also the warmest year on record. We are now heading into the next solar minimum - and so far 2015 is the hottest six months on record.
     
  15. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    There is a significant difference between a solar maximum and a grand solar maximum.
    Picture, if you will, a cross country trip in a slightly underpowered truck. When going up hill, you slow down, when going down hill you speed up.
    If you measure your speed climbing up into a mountain range, and extrapolate that out onto the entire trip, you will have an "average speed" which is misleading.
    The same is true if measuring only the downhill speeds.

    The approximately 11 year solar cycle has little effect on the climate from maximum to minimum------------think of the earth as a flywheel. During maxima/maximums energy is applied to the wheel. During minima/minimums energy is dissipated.

    Grand maxima or minima have a much more pronounced effect on the climate------eg the maunder, dalton, sporer, etc...
    Conversely, we should expect the reverse for grand maxima/maximums. Much like constantly going uphill, or constantly going downhill.
    ..................................
    If we knew the expected effect of the recent grand maximum, then we could more closely approximate the effect of added CO2.
    Unfortunately-------------we don't have anything close to a close approximation for the one and are therefore left to guess at the other.
    ...................
    The old sayings, warmer and wetter, or colder and dryer come into play.

    As the atmosphere warms, it holds more h2O vapor. Water vapor is a much more potent green house gas than CO2.
    That is one more variable for which we must account to estimate the effect of CO2 alone. Some AGW folks seem to think that a warmer world will be a dryer world, some think wetter. If there ever is a consensus, then, maybe, just maybe, we'll have a better handle on the subject.
    ....................
    Does the atmosphere have a self regulating density equilibrium?
    Do we have an approximation of this?
    Where, in our atmospheric layers, is the CO2 concentrating?
    From CO2 alone, are we radiating much more heat/energy out into space?
     
  16. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    Now visualize the brakes on your truck fail while going downhill (or uphill for that matter). What do you get? A runaway truck!
    What to do. Shall we try to find a way to stop the truck or bail out?

    The natural cycle has its own natural braking system (balancing forces). When that fails, you get runaway GW, which results in drastic climate change. Unfortunately we won't have the option of bailing out and we'll have to find a way to stop the truck, somehow.

    True, the system eventually will balance itself, but question is at what point and after how much damage to the ecosystem?
    It seems unwise, to even travel up and downhill in a truck which has shown signs of failing brakes.
    And IMO, that's the point we're at.

    My greatest concern is the effects of climate change on countries with climates which are already on the margins of habitability. Afghanistan just recorded a temperature of 165 F .
    One might survive a few days in such heat, but what if such conditions last a few months?

    But as Bartlett observed, if man does not curb its appetites and voluntarily put the brakes on (the truck), nature will surely do it for us, and that won't be pretty.
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2015
  17. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Where did you read that?
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    We have considerably better than guesswork at hand. We can, say, compare the effects during the day nearer the equator and up high with the effects during the night nearer the poles and lower down - solar flux affects daytime and equatorial and high altitude temps more, greenhouse gases show their effects at night near the poles and lower down.

    Actually, all AGW folks think that some parts of the world will be drier and others wetter. There is an alarmist possibility that a runaway warming will raise overall air temps too high to allow enough condensation of water vapor, in which circumstance the planet goes to a state inhospitable to carbon/protein based life forms. But barring that it's agreed that what goes up must come down - somewhere, somehow.
    These are all being measured and have been for some time, research done in geological time, etc. The IPCC has been compiling these numbers for quite a while now. Google is your friend.

    The density issue is kind of interesting, because - as recent research shows - it helps explain how the planet in the past occasionally maintained lower overall temperatures than physics predicts in some eras of high CO2 concentration. http://www.reportingclimatescience....ging-oxygen-levels-affected-past-climate.html

    Unfortunately, we are in an era of somewhat lower Oxygen partial pressure - so no help from that quarter.
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2015
  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2015
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    This may illustrate. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=82142

    It also explains that CO2 allows sunlight radiation to pass, but absorbs the reflected infra-red heat from the earth. This clears up my own question about the actual trapping function of atmospheric CO2.

    And a little update on polar activity and NASA's new mission.
    http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/29893655/omg-its-a-nasa-mission-to-measure-sea-level-rise
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2015
  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    The cost of man's CO2 release is growing too:
    This is data from before the September & November (the peak fire months, I think) fire cost are included. Thus not only will 2015 be the warmest year ever it will, very likely, be the most costly fire fighting one too - Should exceed the all time high of 2002. Large fires spread soot around the world and these high latitude ones "enjoy" a strong positive feed back as the black soot falls on snow and ice - huge reduction in albedos.

    In Greenland the induced surface melting is now exposing soot from decades ago - a positive feed back riding on a positive feed back. (I don't think the second one is counted in the 24 positive feed backs known.)


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    Figure caption was:
    "Experts say they were stunned by the pictures, which show ice covered in soot - causing it to melt more quickly near Kangerlugssuaq on the Arctic Circle (67 degrees north latitude at 1,010 meters above sea level)."

    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2761349/The-darkness-descends-Experts-use-drone-photograph-dark-snow-Greenland-caused-forest-fires-say-sign-massive-glacial-change.html#ixzz3kzrWRG29

    AFAIK, none of this "secondary feed back" (decades old soot being exposed) is included in the estimates of rate seas will rise due to rapid (compared to ALL estimates) rate of Greenland's ice cap melting.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2015
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It's not just that older soot is exposed, but also that soot deposited throughout the ice column becomes concentrated at the surface - soot doesn't evaporate, neither does it easily run off, soak through, or percolate downwards, and flow away.

    I believe that may have been overlooked. It's not easy, looking at a blinding white ice field, to remember how dirty snow is - even without fire and industry deposition.
     
  23. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    In this case, we are only climbing a hill - the increase in atmospheric absorption of CO2 is monotonically increasing. It ends in decimation of the biosphere as we know it, so "averaging" (over the present and future geologic eras) is meaningless.

    No, not at all. Energy is retained by the greenhouse effect, in an amount more than would be retained if there were no burning of fossil fuels.

    No, we will see no reversals from the heat added to the Earth and its atmosphere due to greenhouse gas emission until such emissions come to a dead halt.

    We know with sufficient precision (and have known since about 1958) that the effect of a given amount of GHGs produces an acceleration of global warming.

    Nope. We have 200 years of science telling us that GHG emission speeds global warming. Today the extensive network of measurement stations only confirms the same data first released from the founders of NOAA.

    It has been known since about 1850 that water vapor absorbs heat more than CO2. You are missing the point: there is a fixed amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold (locally) before it saturates and condenses into rain, sleet or snow. There is no equivalent shedding of CO2- it simply accumulates. It is therefore adding to global warming, whereas water vapor is not by itself adding any additional heat over time. Where water vapor adds heat is in its multiplication of the harm of adding CO2- that is, for every degree increase in average temperature due to CO2, there is a rise in the saturation point of water vapor. Once again, CO2 is the chief concern of all GHGs, and the one we must curtail if we are to "reverse the trend" as you put it.

    That has more to do with predicting climate change. A rise in average temperature reduces the probability of precipitation in some regions and increases it in others. I don't think consensus here is even relevant. A rise in CO2 is harmful - that's the consensus.

    For water vapor? Yes - precipitation. But not for CO2.

    Yes. John Tyndall, 1864, correctly predicted that water vapor absorbs more heat than CO2. By 1900, Svante Arrhenius showed that CO2 was the chief driver for reasons I gave above (water vapor condenses at the saturation point). He approximated a rise in temperature after a doubling of CO2, and was slightly off, since he did not know about some of the mitigating effects (such as emissions from geothermal vents/volcanoes).

    It has doubled in the troposphere since the onset of the Industrial Age - the same layer where 99% of the water vapor is stored.

    It matters not. We are accumulating heat under the troposphere due to the greenhouse effect of our industrial CO2.
     

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