Bad scientists: you have given bad info on global warming

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Possible but unknown. The problems with that claim fall into two major categories. First, the question of whether we're measuring correctly. CO2 is a gas. We can't measure it with great accuracy because it's a gas. Plus, too much of our measuring is being done around cities, which will naturally produce higher CO2 readings because there are cars nearby.

You honestly don't think stuff like this is controlled for? Jeez, talk about your arguments from ignorance.
 
Well considering it requires creating a miniature Sun, it's no wonder that nuclear fusion is hard to master. But, we HAVE produced reactors that can be self-sufficient, that is, power themselves, but nothing can be extracted from it. If we can break even, we're not too far away from being able to getting something out of it.

Of course, it's not worth investing (numbers used just for example) one million dollars to earn one dollar a year in profit, even if that's better than breaking even. Scale is important to make it worth the time, energy, and cost.

There're some decently big fusion projects underway, they're expected to work, but the idea of whether it can be cost-effective is still unknown. In order to stay up-to-date on fusion, I'd recommend subscribing to the "Science Friday" (it's NPR) podcast on iTunes. You can filter for just 'fusion' and download recent discussions of fusion projects. It's intended for a lay audience. After subscribing to a podcast, you have 'potential' episodes to download, and you can search among them without downloading them first. In case it needs to be said, iTunes is a free program and so are the podcasts I recommend

A more indepth look at our energy needs and global warming concerns is best handled (imo) by using the Long Now Foundation podcast series - especially the Saul Griffith seminar titled "Climate Change Recalculated".

What we really need is to realise that burning oil is done to create money (er, wealth, but I use money as a proxy), and that what is necessary is to convert a portion of that wealth into mitigation (to reduce damages) and into R&D so that we have solutions for when oil becomes less available. The rest of the money, of course, is spent how we want. Now, normally, we spend the money from our oil consumption the way we want anyway but any long-term thinker knows we need that mitigation and R&D
 
Choxorn said:
Doesn't that break one of the laws of thermodynamics?

Nope. The laws of thermodynamics don't have a lot to say about how economically viable a power source is, but fusion is definitely capable of releasing more energy than is required to sustain the reaction. The sun is all the proof you need of that - it's just not all that easy to scale down. Fusion I regard as something of a wild card - it seems to have been 40 years away from being a viable power source for at least 40 years. Maybe ITER will be a step forward, maybe not, but it isn't a great idea to assume they'll get it working until the first practical fusion generator is produced. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for research in this area, but when power generation is being planned for the future governments should assume fusion isn't going to be available. If they do finally crack it, then that's a bonus.
 
We can't measure it with great accuracy because it's a gas.
I certainly hope they could measure the gas composition in the engine of the bus I'm riding, otherwise the fuel wouldn't burn well and it might not even start in the first place.

Plus, too much of our measuring is being done around cities, which will naturally produce higher CO2 readings because there are cars nearby.
The appropriately named Alert, Canada certainly is the site of a major urban aggregation.
800px-NOAA_-_Alert_observatory.jpg


And apparently large cities are found on Ascension Island, Mauna Loa, and the near deserts of Qinghai province. There are more sites listed on Table 1 of
Conway, T. J., P. P. Tans, L. S. Waterman, K. W. Thoning, D. Kitzis, K. A. Masarie and N. Zhang (1994), Evidence for interannual variability of the carbon cycle from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory Global Air Sampling Network, Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, 99(D11), 22831-22855, JD01951.

Which make up the NOAA's Global Air Sampling Network.

Second, assuming we are measuring correctly, we have no way to be sure where that CO2 actually came from, largely because the people actually living in the early times of the Industrial Revolution didn't have the technology needed to find out. Undersea volcanic rifts spew CO2 into the water all the time, in unknown amounts, and God knows where the gas ends up.

Ugh, you really do have no idea about the tools scientists use to determine sources of material. You think that emissions by volcanoes and emissions by humans would have the same isotopic and trace element composition. In addition, monitoring stations near sinks and sources can be used to calibrate the net flow of CO2 (Conway et al, 1994).
 
You're right in that nuclear fusion does take lighter nuclei (e.g. deuterium and tritium) and fuses them into something heavier (like helium). The real trick is to get nuclear fusion to produce net energy that we can harvest. It takes insane pressures and temperatures (= high energy input) to get nuclear fusion in the first place, and we to this day haven't figured out how we would get net energy out of the process. It's been "decades away" since the 1950s and still seems that way - we still haven't gotten close to a solution. Hence, fossil fuels and nuclear fission are still the main mode of energy generation for both now and, probably, the near future.

The trick is not to get nuclear fusion to produce net energy, that was managed decades ago. The trick is doing so without blowing an entire island apart as bombs based on fusion usually do. You have to make it small enough to be containable, but big enough to produce net energy and that is the tricky part.

edit: Oh yes, tritium is radioactive. As are the fast neutrons that get produced by nuclear fusion. But it doesn't produce a bunch of random radioisotopes the way that fission does. I don't think there's much in the way of radioactive waste to store.

Those fast neutrons tend to hit the walls of a fusion reactor and transmute the elements in there, which means that those walls get radioactive. Overall the radioactive waste produced by a fusion plan is not much less than the waste produced by a fission plant. The advantage of fusion is, that you can choose the material of the walls, so that the radioactive isotopes produced in the wall have a much shorter half-life than the long-lived isotopes produced in fission reactors. (And I fear that for this reason building a fusion plant will be not much easier politically than building a fission plant).

In my opinion, the best way to go forward is solving the nuclear waste issue, so that we can enjoy the benefits of nuclear fission without having to worry about storing the waste. If fossil fuels run out one day, there even might be popular support for this...
 
We need a central storage facility for nuclear waste, ideally, in my own opinion, at the original nuclear test sight in New Mexico.
 
If you actually read what El_Mac posted, higher CO2 is beneficial to plants but not to us. We don't care if the plants feel good, we care about their food yield.

Ah! I knew I had brought this information forward before!

El_Mac said:
To head off some objections: we're improving carbon intensity (i.e., GDP/GHG), so wealth can continue to rise without CO2 rising. If this isn't true, we're screwed. Additionally, CO2 is about more than global warming. Ocean acidity and decreased food yields are problems that, themselves, require mitigation. The costs of these mitigations are going to be dealt with regardless of the rate at which we slow CO2 emissions.

Yeah, it's there in the link. No wonder I couldn't find it. I thought I'd started a thread on this new information, but I guess not.

Additionally, that bit about oceanic acidity is pretty important. Firstly, because coral reefs are essentially the rainforest of the ocean. Secondly, because it hurts shellfish farming. AFAIK, farmed mussels are one of the most efficient ways of sustainably harvesting seafood protein. The acidity hurts mussel growth.
 
The trick is not to get nuclear fusion to produce net energy, that was managed decades ago. The trick is doing so without blowing an entire island apart as bombs based on fusion usually do. You have to make it small enough to be containable, but big enough to produce net energy and that is the tricky part.
Yeah, I meant harvestable, economically viable net energy. Obviously releasing energy in the form of uncontrolled fusion reactions (H-bombs) is much easier.


Those fast neutrons tend to hit the walls of a fusion reactor and transmute the elements in there, which means that those walls get radioactive. Overall the radioactive waste produced by a fusion plan is not much less than the waste produced by a fission plant. The advantage of fusion is, that you can choose the material of the walls, so that the radioactive isotopes produced in the wall have a much shorter half-life than the long-lived isotopes produced in fission reactors. (And I fear that for this reason building a fusion plant will be not much easier politically than building a fission plant).
I didn't think about that, but that does make sense. How long would the walls last, and would they then have to be stored as radioactive waste? Also, what do they make them out of, and how long would the half-lives of the radioisotopes in the wall material be? I need to read more about fusion research!

In my opinion, the best way to go forward is solving the nuclear waste issue, so that we can enjoy the benefits of nuclear fission without having to worry about storing the waste. If fossil fuels run out one day, there even might be popular support for this...
Is that a problem for any reason other than political ones? As I understand it, it's relatively easy to safely store nuclear waste; it's just that people don't like radioactive waste being transported through their area or stored near them.
 
Possible but unknown. The problems with that claim fall into two major categories. First, the question of whether we're measuring correctly. CO2 is a gas. We can't measure it with great accuracy because it's a gas. Plus, too much of our measuring is being done around cities, which will naturally produce higher CO2 readings because there are cars nearby. Second, assuming we are measuring correctly, we have no way to be sure where that CO2 actually came from, largely because the people actually living in the early times of the Industrial Revolution didn't have the technology needed to find out. Undersea volcanic rifts spew CO2 into the water all the time, in unknown amounts, and God knows where the gas ends up.
There's nothing about gases that makes it impossible to measure concentrations. We certainly do have the ability to measure CO2 concentrations with more than enough precision to show that there's been a marked and ongoing rise in CO2 levels everywhere, including extremely rural areas (e.g. the stations that SS-18 mentioned). We also do have samples of gases that go back extremely far; gas bubbles get trapped in ice all the time and show up in ice cores. We can then measure what the concentrations of gases were like in the past. Much more recently, air samples have been collected from all over the world over the past several decades and are stored for later sampling. These samples also show a rapid rise in CO2 levels over the course of the last few decades. Most of this increase has happened since 1950, and we have lots and lots of data over this timespan.


No. For three reasons. First, there's the basic physical law of diminishing returns. Each successive unit of CO2 in any given space produces less warming than the previous unit. Second, a warmer body (such as a planet) radiates heat faster, thereby cooling down faster. Which is actually part of the reason diminishing returns works as it does, so maybe this second one is actually part of the first one. Whatever. And the third reason is that the aforementioned positive feedbacks are insignificant compared to the initial effect.
First, the law of diminishing returns isn't a physical law. Something like that might apply here, but you'd have to show that the rate of temperature increase, as CO2 levels go up further, will slow so markedly that it won't produce much more warming than we've already seen. I don't think there's any evidence to support that - do you know of any?

It's true that there are negative feedback effects (such as increased radiation into space) as well as positive ones. Of course, on the positive feedback side, there's increased water vapor as well as increased methane release. There are other effects too. The magnitude of these feedbacks is, as I understand it, poorly known. This is part of the reason why, although there is a very strong scientific consensus that anthropogenic warming is occurring, the eventual magnitude of it is unknown.

What we do know are the following:

- CO2 levels have dramatically (from ~280 ppm to ~380 ppm) increased from preindustrial times, and most of this increase (at least 60 ppm of it) has happened since 1960. As an example, take a look at the Keeling Curve for the measurements of the Mauna Loa Observatory since 1960. That's just one of many such stations with similar stories to report; there really isn't any data contradicting this. The increase has been gradual and steady, unlike what you'd see from volcanic eruptions or the like. The CO2's isotope ratios further indicate an anthropogenic source: we tend to produce CO2 deficient in carbon-13, and the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 has been decreasing just as we'd expect it to if humans were producing this extra CO2. Additionally, concentrations of other greenhouse gases have also increased.

- CO2 absorbs infrared radiation well, making it a good greenhouse gas. Thus, we would expect that an increase in atmospheric CO2 would result in increased temperatures.

- A temperature increase of ~1 degree F has already occurred, and there's no reason to suspect that this will slow down. Part of the reason we didn't start seeing the rise sooner is, as you pointed out somewhere earlier, that particulate pollution causes a cooling effect by blocking sunlight. We've managed to get particulate pollution under control to some extent, which has had a number of positive effects (e.g. much less acid rain) but has also helped to unmask global warming.

I mean, there's a whole lot about global warming that isn't well understood, but I don't think anyone who understands the data objects to any of the points I listed above.
 
Oh 'cause their natural cycle have adapted to the daily or seasonal variations in weather over millions of years of evolution so should that climatic pattern change dramatically they'll have no trouble adapting at all right right? :rolleyes:
They've had no trouble adapting for the past few million years. So, no--there's no reason to assume things would be any different today.

Talking loud and endlessly repeating the same tired and incorrect argument does not make you a good debater.
It got Obama elected. :lol:

Plus, removing those things from the air returns the land to its natural state. If temperature shifts too much, stop cleanup efforts. Simple. Science and reason-based ecology.
Right. So, if some guy gets on television and tells you and all the other citizens of whatever nation you happen to live in, that you need to dirty up the atmosphere a bit?? Please. Nobody in this thread would buy that for a New York minute. You'd think it was some corporate scammer trying to boost his stock options. I know how environmental nutcases think. Their agenda is cast in stone; to them, there's no such thing as "too clean".

The same holds for black activists and ********s as well--ONE act of discrimination is one too many, and so these idiots will be waving their protest signs for all eternity. A thousand years from now, they'll STILL be going "we've still got a lot of work left to do".

The planet will never be natural enough or agrarian enough. The environmentalist nutcase lobby will never, ever be satisfied.

We did just fine before factories in terms of the environment, so
No, we certainly did not. Without said factories, you wouldn't have that nice Pentium II with which to read this thread. Which was built in a factory, of course. You're not going to go back to your "natural" state. Ever. You're not willing to.

What in the? I'm sorry, but any gravitas that you once had are now gone. If you're banding about this chronically unfounded myth as science, then how I can I believe anything else you're saying?
No myth. Think it over. Where does lava come from?? UNDERGROUND. What the hell do you think happens when a lava patch hits an oil deposit? Next time the lava patch erupts, all that oil comes up to the surface as really nasty smoke. Everything down there eventually comes back up again. The big unknown is when.

You honestly don't think stuff like this is controlled for?
By assuming they are, you violate a very basic rule of science.

Until you start following those rules, please do not reply to my posts. Yes, I just anti-trolled you. Bet ya never saw that before! :crazyeye: A demonstration of the scientific rule you broke is forthcoming immediately. Keep reading.


There's nothing about gases that makes it impossible to measure concentrations.
Yes there is. Specifically, the fact that CO2 is a gas. It's a basic mathematical rule.

You've got your discrete functions (such as integers) which are limited to specific values, and your non-discrete functions (such as temperature, gas density, and volume of a solid). The basic mathematical rule is that the value of a non-discrete property can never be measured perfectly. It can only be approximated. Next time you take your temperature, and the thermometer says 98.7? Your body temperature is never exactly 98.7. Ever. It's a little more or a little less. And, what's more, that's only the temperature inside your mouth. If you measured at the other end, I don't want to know about it. The temperature of other parts of your body is most certainly not 98.7--your arms and legs, for example, are almost always colder.

In order to measure the Earth's temperature (or its CO2 levels) exactly, the measurement must be made at an infinite number of points--and all at the same time. Which is physically impossible. We can only guess. And today we can certainly measure more accurately than we could in the past. But we will never be able to measure perfectly. And the level of accuracy we need is a lot more than we're using, especially when it comes to measuring ocean temperature.

One thing we have been able to measure is this: in and around cities, oxygen levels are lower and CO2 concentrations are higher than in rural areas. That has been verified. So we know that CO2 tends to linger around the emission point.

And on that note, SS-18, I have a perfect explanation for why Alert, Canada is seeing high CO2 levels: look at the photograph (which YOU posted!) and you'll see why--BECAUSE THERE ARE NO FREAKING PLANTS TO ABSORB THE STUFF.

Sheesh.

We also do have samples of gases that go back extremely far; gas bubbles get trapped in ice all the time and show up in ice cores. We can then measure what the concentrations of gases were like in the past. Much more recently, air samples have been collected from all over the world over the past several decades and are stored for later sampling.
And these, too, are only approximations. From a small number of points. I told you--you need a whole lot of points from different locations to measure the entire planet.

First, the law of diminishing returns isn't a physical law.
Yes. It is.

Put on that first shirt, and you get the most insulation. Put on a second shirt, and you'll be warmer than with just the one, but the second shirt doesn't insulate as much as the first. Eventually, the temperature under your first shirt, just outside your skin, reaches your body temperature; after that, every further shirt you put on does nothing.

Add that first teaspoon of milk to hot coffee, you get the most cooling. The second teaspoon of milk provides less cooling than the first, the third provides less than the second.

Pour more CO2 into the atmosphere, and each successive unit produces less greenhouse effect than the previous. First: the teaspoon-of-milk effect. Second: as the CO2 blanket thickens, CO2 up high gets to absorb first, and CO2 down low absorbs less. Third: CO2 up high has a habit of catching the heat up high, and radiating it back into space.

Something like that might apply here, but you'd have to show that the rate of temperature increase, as CO2 levels go up further, will slow so markedly that it won't produce much more warming than we've already seen. I don't think there's any evidence to support that - do you know of any?
You're standing on it.

With no CO2 in the atmosphere, Earth would be around thirty degrees colder than it is now. If the alarmists can be believed, CO2 levels have approximately doubled from normal. Have we seen another thirty degrees of warming during that time? Nope.
 
Ah but you see people, the scientists who spend years studying this are wrong and cannot be trusted...
 
And on that note, SS-18, I have a perfect explanation for why Alert, Canada is seeing high CO2 levels: look at the photograph (which YOU posted!) and you'll see why--BECAUSE THERE ARE NO FREAKING PLANTS TO ABSORB THE STUFF.

Sheesh.
There are no "FREAKING PLANTS" on the island of Hawaii, where Mauna Loa is located? Why do you keep ignoring large parts of my posts? The source I posted has a table of the monitoring locations, several of which are near jungles and various other biomes.


And these, too, are only approximations. From a small number of points. I told you--you need a whole lot of points from different locations to measure the entire planet.

The hell with it. Commencing data dump.
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...you know what guys, I think I finally understand why you grow weary of arguing with this guy.
 
They've had no trouble adapting for the past few million years. So, no--there's no reason to assume things would be any different today.

Oh yeah, 'cause a few million years and a few centuries are really the same thing.

The planet will never be natural enough or agrarian enough. The environmentalist nutcase lobby will never, ever be satisfied.

Right then. Fraque the nutcases. But there's no need to bring them up. None of the people you're talking to here can be said to be "environmentalist nutcases".

...you know what guys, I think I finally understand why you grow weary of arguing with this guy.

I think I do too.
 
The trick is not to get nuclear fusion to produce net energy, that was managed decades ago. The trick is doing so without blowing an entire island apart as bombs based on fusion usually do. You have to make it small enough to be containable, but big enough to produce net energy and that is the tricky part.

You also have to keep it controlled, so that it doesn't blow itself up.

They've had no trouble adapting for the past few million years. So, no--there's no reason to assume things would be any different today.

Yes. That is a timescale of a few million years. Life does not adapt well to REALLY FAST CHANGES. See? I can make points by bolding things and capitalizing them too! It must make me right. They adapted to a cycle that's more or less regular. If the cycle changes, bad things happen.

It got Obama elected. :lol:

I don't think I hear him making his points by shouting very often.

The same holds for black activists and ********s as well--ONE act of discrimination is one too many, and so these idiots will be waving their protest signs for all eternity.

While some people may make a big deal over a little thing, I think that even one bad thing (like an act of discrimination) is still bad.

No myth. Think it over. Where does lava come from?? UNDERGROUND. What the hell do you think happens when a lava patch hits an oil deposit? Next time the lava patch erupts, all that oil comes up to the surface as really nasty smoke. Everything down there eventually comes back up again. The big unknown is when.

Alright, you're correct that volcanos spew carbon dioxide, among other things, but they don't spew that much at once. They also fill the atmosphere with volcanic ash. Do you know what that does? It blocks sunlight and cools the Earth until the ash leaves the atmosphere.

By assuming they are, you violate a very basic rule of science.

But... it is... he's not assuming anything, that's the way the scientists actually collect data. They know what they're doing.

Yes there is. Specifically, the fact that CO2 is a gas. It's a basic mathematical rule.

You've got your discrete functions (such as integers) which are limited to specific values, and your non-discrete functions (such as temperature, gas density, and volume of a solid). The basic mathematical rule is that the value of a non-discrete property can never be measured perfectly. It can only be approximated. Next time you take your temperature, and the thermometer says 98.7? Your body temperature is never exactly 98.7. Ever. It's a little more or a little less. And, what's more, that's only the temperature inside your mouth. If you measured at the other end, I don't want to know about it. The temperature of other parts of your body is most certainly not 98.7--your arms and legs, for example, are almost always colder.

In order to measure the Earth's temperature (or its CO2 levels) exactly, the measurement must be made at an infinite number of points--and all at the same time. Which is physically impossible. We can only guess. And today we can certainly measure more accurately than we could in the past. But we will never be able to measure perfectly. And the level of accuracy we need is a lot more than we're using, especially when it comes to measuring ocean temperature.

And if you have a sufficiently large amount of data that all tells you the same thing, it's probably correct. You may not be measure it exactly, but you should be able to get a decent approximation. There's not much difference between 330 ppm and 333 ppm, and either way, it's higher than these other data points from the past that say 280, or 278, or 284...
 
Right then. Fraque the nutcases. But there's no need to bring them up. None of the people you're talking to here can be said to be "environmentalist nutcases".
Oh, there are definitely environmentalist nutcases on here. And one of the worst problems is radicals is, they never consider themselves radicals.

Yes. That is a timescale of a few million years. Life does not adapt well to REALLY FAST CHANGES.
Good. I like it. However, I understood you fine the first time. And you're wrong. Life all over the planet adapts just fine to the sudden changes in climate that happen every single freaking year (it's called WINTER, dude). And here's the other thing. Climate change is really slow. On the order of several years to decades.

Ah but you see people, the scientists who spend years studying this are wrong and cannot be trusted...
Oh, they're definitely trustworthy. Most of them, at least. But here's the thing. Lots of you people in this thread are not hearing what the qualified scientists are saying. They have the same problem with you people that I have: YOU GUYS ARE NOT LISTENING.

They're saying it's extremely difficult to prove a link between human greenhouse emissions and current temperature trends. Note the boldface word there. Science depends on proof.

There are no "FREAKING PLANTS" on the island of Hawaii, where Mauna Loa is located?
See what I have to put up with? This guy is NOT READING MY POSTS. I said very clearly that I was referring to your photo of ALERT, CANADA. The land is obviously tundra. And there's almost no plants anywhere in it.

Why do you keep ignoring large parts of my posts? The source I posted has a table of the monitoring locations, several of which are near jungles and various other biomes.
Yeah, I saw the table. Unlike some other people in this thread, including yourself, I don't have a reading problem. When I ignore part of your post it's always for a good reason. Here's the reason why I ignored that impressive-looking list: before you posted that great big huge data dump, I had already said it's impossible to measure gas concentrations perfectly unless you use an infinite number of measuring points. Do you have an infinite number of measuring stations? Or, at least, several thousand? Didn't think so. Oh, and how many of those measuring stations are over ocean?? Next to none. I've seen the maps of where the measuring stations are. I knew the answer to your argument before you made it.


And, just so I'm real clear: the relative lack of monitoring stations does not prove CO2 concentrations aren't going up. Just that it's not clear if they are.
 
Yeah, I saw the table. Unlike some other people in this thread, including yourself, I don't have a reading problem. When I ignore part of your post it's always for a good reason. Here's the reason why I ignored that impressive-looking list: before you posted that great big huge data dump, I had already said it's impossible to measure gas concentrations perfectly unless you use an infinite number of measuring points. Do you have an infinite number of measuring stations? Or, at least, several thousand? Didn't think so. Oh, and how many of those measuring stations are over ocean?? Next to none. I've seen the maps of where the measuring stations are. I knew the answer to your argument before you made it.

Why would we need to know the movement of every particle in the Earth's atmosphere to know the conditions of certain gases there? "You don't know everything about X therefore your assertions about X are wrong". That's the most ridiculous argument I've read in a while.

Do you not have better arguments other than red herrings? Ignoring biology, ecology, chemistry...and now statistics.

I'm certainly glad you're not my doctor, since your blood work would ask the lab techs to perform infinite pricks at every location of the body.
 
For the last time, annual adaptation to seasonal change is not the same thing as adaptation to abrupt change in the pattern of seasonal change.

I was responding to someone else, who in the hell are you? And dont you mean for the first time? Or was that the 2nd or 3rd or 4th or 5th time you told me that nonsense?

Life does not adapt well to REALLY FAST CHANGES.

See? They didn't mention anything about abrupt changes in seasonal patterns, just that life doesn't adapt well to really fast changes - I offered a rebuttal. Now you can explain how our co2 would cause abrupt seasonal changes :eek: and why life couldn't handle it, or just save your BS for someone else. Life adapted to 0-100 degree changes in 6 months but 2-102 will be just be too much? :crazyeye:
 
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