Bad scientists: you have given bad info on global warming

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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?

Yes, it was a few pages back I believe.

See? They didn't mention anything about abrupt changes in seasonal patterns, just that life doesn't adapt well to really fast changes

Oh come on.

Now you can explain how our co2 would cause abrupt seasonal changes

As much as I can gather from your posts you won't believe it anyway.

Life adapted to 0-100 degree changes in 6 months but 2-102 will be just be too much? :crazyeye:

There's this thing called a life cycle that different species have, which they have adapted to over time, you know, migrational patterns, temperature ranges, and so on.

With the exception of volcanic winters (which, normally, at worst only cools the planet by a degree for one or two years, and even that was rather problematic for us), average temperatures usually don't just rise or lower by 2-5 degrees (Celcius, 'cause it's superior) in a century or two. When that happens, you rapidly change the climate and seasonal patterns, which normally takes millions of years to develop. Only the most adaptive of lifeforms can quickly adjust and thrive with this kind of change.

Take corals. Coral reefs in the tropics or subtropics are habitats for thousands of species. They're rather sensitive to changes in temperature. If they die, they take all the other species which depends on them with them.

How do you think we got mass extinctions in the past? Noah's Flood?
 
Yes, it was a few pages back I believe.

Go find it :rolleyes:

Oh come on.

As much as I can gather from your posts you won't believe it anyway.

Thats another cheap shot, now back it up. And dont try to pin this on Chox, what you said is :crazyeye: than what he said.

There's this thing called a life cycle that different species have, which they have adapted to over time, you know, migrational patterns, temperature ranges, and so on.

Thats nice, now lets try this again - how does our co2 cause abrupt changes in seasonal patterns of temperature? And why cant life adapted to a 0-100 degree seasonal range handle 2-102 degrees?

With the exception of volcanic winters (which, normally, at worst only cools the planet by a degree for one or two years, and even that was rather problematic for us), average temperatures usually don't just rise or lower by 2-5 degrees (Celcius, 'cause it's superior) in a century or two. When that happens, you rapidly change the climate and seasonal patterns, which normally takes millions of years to develop. Only the most adaptive of lifeforms can quickly adjust and thrive with this kind of change.

When what happens? The year without summer was an abrupt change in seasonal patterns, and it wasn't caused by co2 induced warming from humans... Is someone missing a winter? Life here doesn't adapt to averages and we aint talking 2-5 C, we've warmed maybe 1-2 F since the little ice age (imagine that) and we do have records of larger and faster changes without blaming humans or co2.

Take corals. Coral reefs in the tropics or subtropics are habitats for thousands of species. They're rather sensitive to changes in temperature. If they die, they take all the other species which depends on them with them.

How do you think we got mass extinctions in the past? Noah's Flood?

Corals and the tropics are not subjected to a 0-100 degree seasonal range, but if "Noah's Flood" is linked to rising seas when the ice age ended, how did corals survive?

:rolleyes: Stop playing with straw
 
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.

You misquoted me; that was Choxorn's post. :p

We need a central storage facility for nuclear waste, ideally, in my own opinion, at the original nuclear test sight in New Mexico.

There's a lot of controversy due to NIMBY.

Not to mention, a very liberal person I know raised a point: what if during transit, there was an accident? You'd contaminate an entire area with the crap.

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".

Sure, but they'd be heavily mitigated by that point; you must also show good use of statistics. Find the natural level of substances in the air - by averages if we must - and make it so cleanup doesn't occur below those levels. Some contaminants are perfectly natural, and we must use statistics to support this.

But at the same time, we should try to reduce unnatural emissions; the planet will do just fine with its own. But we need not contribute to it if we can find a way to make things cleaner.

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

I'm sure they'll lose a lot of their base once the basic green measures are taken; I doubt most eco-minded people are complete fanatics.

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.

I understand it's a common act to misread what someone says(especially in politics where our human biases like to simplify it and assume what the person's argument is), but I never said we did better before factories. I said we did just fine in terms of environment before factories, i.e. the ecosystem was a-okay pre-industry. This means if we can keep the current factories but make their emissions near-zero, wonderful! Clean industry.

I'm not one of those eco-nuts. But nor am I exactly content to let needless pollution continue if we can clean it up.
 
Go find it :rolleyes:

No you go find it yourself.

Thats another cheap shot, now back it up. And dont try to pin this on Chox, what you said is :crazyeye: than what he said.

Back what up. There is nothing to back up.

I have a word for what you're doing, but I'm trying to be civil here.

Thats nice, now lets try this again - how does our co2 cause abrupt changes in seasonal patterns of temperature?

I am arguing from the position that anthropogenic carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas that effect temperature and climatic patterns. If you don't hold that position that I'm not going to waste my time convincing you.

And why cant life adapted to a 0-100 degree seasonal range handle 2-102 degrees?

1. Because it's evolved to handle that range?
2. we are talking more than a rise of 2 degrees Celcius.
3. It's not all about temperature. It effects weather patterns, precipitation, crop yields...

When what happens? The year without summer was an abrupt change in seasonal patterns, and it wasn't caused by co2 induced warming from humans...

Of course.

But it was a one-off. A year of half a degree C lower global average temperature is not the same as a century of warming trend of 1 deg C.

Is someone missing a winter?

Strawmanlicious.

Corals and the tropics are not subjected to a 0-100 degree seasonal range

No...

But what is your point. Not Everything That Matters lives in the United States, FYI. We're talking a global phenomenon.

but if "Noah's Flood" is linked to rising seas when the ice age ended, how did corals survive?

I'm not an expert, but we do know they're sensitive to temperature changes. Want to dispute that?
 
:dubious:

Yes. Yes it does. Why wouldn't it?

Our temps generally range from 0-100 F, thats what life around here has adapted to, not the average.

No you go find it yourself.

:lol: Unfortunately the mods would nail me for responding appropriately to your BS, but you made the claim and its your responsibility to support it. I'll take your refusal as evidence you screwed up and lack the honor to admit it. :goodjob: Bye bye...
 
Yes folks, clearly all the people concerned about the impacts of climate change on ecosystems, economies, extreme weather events, and so forth, didn't just stop and think "wow it's hot in summer and cold in winter, that's a bigger change than 1 or 2 degrees, why did we think this was an issue?" Thank god we have random barely educated people to point these things out! Someone ring the world's scientific institutions and government departments with this wonderful news!
 
Um, lots of biology is adapted to cyclical events. Mating cycles, for example, can be temperature dependent. Sure, the invertebrates or lizards suffer deca-degree temperature fluctuations in their lives, but their hormonal responses are tuned to specific temperatures. This is one reason why we're seeing some suffering already: the sexes are maturing to sexuality at different rates.

As well, while I recognise that adaptation will be essential for the ecosystem to survive, I don't know why people would think it's as easy as it's been historically. I mean, we've co-opted 50% of the land. We have oceanic deadzones along our coasts. The most essential tool for adaptation (which is migration) is obviously limited.
 
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.
Ah, I think I see the problem now. There's something about measurement that I don't think you understand: measurements of these non-discrete functions are never exact, but that does not mean that those inexact measurements can't be useful. Take your thermometer example. You're right that my thermometer may say 98.7 F, but that's never exact. In fact, let's say it's kind of crappy - I take my temperature a hundred times in quick succession and I get a mean result of 98.7 F, with a standard deviation of 0.2 F, and the points appear to be distributed normally. Now what I can't say is that my body temperature is exactly 98.7 F; what I can say is that it appears that, with 95% confidence, my oral temperature is between 98.3 F and 99.1 F (I've used +/- 2 sigma). Furthermore, using established empirical relations between oral temperature and body temperature elsewhere, I can figure out approximations to what my temperature is in other parts of my body.

You seem to think that science is some sort of exact endeavor. I hate to break it to you, but that's not actually true. We can't really know anything with 100% certainty; as an extreme example, we can't do anything that will prove that gravity won't just stop working tomorrow. All we can do is amass reams of evidence that shows that, in all situations we've seen so far, gravity works in a particular way and never simply switches off, or deviates from the predictions of Newton (except as corrected by Einstein).

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.
We can't have an infinite number of data points, but we do have far more data than I think you realize. There are thousands of meterological stations around the world, in all types of climates and levels of human habitation, and there have been for many decades. Many of these stations are in extremely rural locations that haven't seen any increase in human habitation. We also have satellite observations going back to the '70s. And basically all of the data we've ever seen indicates that an anthropogenic CO2 rise has happened, and that the global temperature average has also increased. And we can make extremely good predictions of what this global temperature average is based on all the data we've collected, even if it can't be known exactly. Now the temperature increase has been nowhere near uniform; it's much higher in polar regions, and has been negative in a few isolated spots. But the overall trend is decidedly up.

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.
You're right that CO2 levels are higher near emission sources (e.g. cities) than they are in rural areas. But this has been satisfactorily corrected for. Even if you don't believe that, you should still note that measurements in extremely rural areas still show a marked increase in CO2 levels. Again, take a look at the Keeling curve at Mauna Loa, and then note that this is just for illustration and that this has been demonstrated independently at a number of other locations.

And now for a comment: I'm actually not much of an environmentalist myself. Some of what the environmental movement has helped to do (e.g. getting DDT banned, opposing nuclear power plant construction, opposing intensive agriculture, etc) sickens me. If anything, I would tend to be skeptical of anthropogenic climate change without reams of evidence on its side. But the evidence is actually there, and I have to yield to that.

I just recently spent a term in a Ph. D. program in applied physics, and the people I had the most contact with were climatologists. I really hated research and discovered that I loved teaching, so that's why I quickly dropped out. But what was interesting was seeing some of this data for myself. I didn't even know about some other pieces of information backing anthropogenic climate change, such as the decrease in relative abundance of carbon-13 that comes from burning fossil fuels.

So the takeaway message is this: science is an inherently messy business, and we do have to make statistical inferences from limited data. But as data pours in, we can increase our confidence in certain hypotheses to the point where it's extremely unlikely that those hypotheses are correct. And AGW is something that has met those criteria in recent years. As somebody who thinks scientifically, I have to yield to the data and go with that. It doesn't necessarily mean that some of the behavior you see in environmentalists makes any sense. No, life as we know it is not going to end, and humans will almost certainly adapt to climate change, although it may cause some hardship and it will probably drive some more species extinct. But this is all just a cost of developing our economies in the way we have.
 
...you know what guys, I think I finally understand why you grow weary of arguing with this guy.

I think I do too.

Welcome to the club, guys. In fact, I made a public resolution in an earlier thread never again to discuss climate change with Basket, but backslid. I hereby renew that resolution! It's just a waste of time...

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.

I tried to make that very point earlier in the thread but got ignored. Seconded!

As well, while I recognise that adaptation will be essential for the ecosystem to survive, I don't know why people would think it's as easy as it's been historically. I mean, we've co-opted 50% of the land. We have oceanic deadzones along our coasts. The most essential tool for adaptation (which is migration) is obviously limited.

A very good point! Humankind (and other animals) has adapted to climate changes before, but those changes took place over thousands of years and were countered by migrations and/or quite radical changes in lifestyle.
In our present crowded world, rapid climate change will cause massive hardship to many, especially to the already poor who have no reserves to buffer them.

The world won't end with climate change, nor is humanity facing extinction because of it. BUT the larger the change and the faster the rate of change, the worse our problems adapting to it will become. THAT is the whole reasoning behind the attempts to limit our emissions and slow global warming.
It beats me why so many people have a problem with that position and prefer to grasp at any straw to discredit the scientific consensus.
 
You know, if you don't space your words out a bit, it's going to look like a plain, boring wall of text and nobody will read it.

Alternatively, make shorter posts.

I can't find any non spaced word in my post. Maybe you could have just said you can't read an articulated post? Sometimes it's better to just not post if you have nothing to say. I can't dismiss this topic with a few words, if you can, kudos, but I haven't seen you do it.
 
I mean, hit the enter key some times.

Like this.

Okay, not as often as this, but you get the picture. It breaks up the wall of text a bit and makes it easier to read.
 
It is a very useful technique.

Anybody else agree?

;)
 
Well, to answer those questions: the glaciers near me are smaller than they were when I was younger and the aquifers are lower than when I was younger.

River depth is more complex than just global warming (irrigation is a giant factor). However, the glaciers are decent enough proxies. Obviously, you'd want to compare them to other glaciers.
Tell me, how exactly does this happen? A warmer world is a wetter world. That's just basic physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air. So why on earth would hotter temperatures lead to lower acquifers?
 
Tell me, how exactly does this happen? A warmer world is a wetter world. That's just basic physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air. So why on earth would hotter temperatures lead to lower acquifers?

Well, as I mentioned in the post you've quoted, irrigation is a big reason for aquifer depletion. I have a link to a popularised science podcast (in my sig) that discusses this issue. Specifically with precipitation, what is best monitored is the intensity of rains. A hard rain will stay mostly at the surface and will thus go to rivers instead of soaking into the ground at aquifer recharge locals. Steady rains, obviously, will have a greater proportion of the water soak. All things being equal, though, more precipitation would help the aquifers. I guess issues regarding the steadiness of rivers (i.e., through winter melt) will matter too.

However, I didn't say that aquifers will be depleted because of global warming. I merely responded to the question that was asked (my personal experience on glaciers and rivers).
 
The part you left out is this: people have tried to prove me wrong. Many times. I've always pointed out where their attempts failed. Yet you and others simply claim (time and time again....) that I've been proven wrong when I haven't. Your claim that I've been proven wrong is either mistaken or a flat-out lie, I have no idea which and don't really care.

One of the ways in which people fail to prove me wrong is that they misunderstand what I'm actually saying, because they're not reading the words I write. Or maybe they ignore my words intentionally. That's a pretty common debate tactic. If you can't bust down a wall, go around it.
As you went around your volcano mistake?
Volcanoes.

Too easy. :king: A bit of trivia: ONE volcano spews as much carbon dioxide as the entire human race does in a YEAR.


Global annual anthropogenic CO2 atmospheric emissions: 26.8 billion tonnes (2003)
Global annual volcanic CO2 atmospheric emissions: 200 million tonnes (est.)


So I don't know where you got that from...
 
A warmer world is a wetter world. That's just basic physics.

Except basic physics also predicts complicating factors such as rain shadows. Global climate dynamics is not as simple as you think it is.
 
The world won't end with climate change, nor is humanity facing extinction because of it. BUT the larger the change and the faster the rate of change, the worse our problems adapting to it will become. THAT is the whole reasoning behind the attempts to limit our emissions and slow global warming.
It beats me why so many people have a problem with that position and prefer to grasp at any straw to discredit the scientific consensus.

A lot of people have a political and psychological problem accepting that the crazy hippie environmentalists turned out to be right, and now governments and much of the population accept what those loons have been saying for 30 years. It's quite galling for them.
 
It's hard to say that the "environmentalists were right", because the mainstream environmentalist organisations still don't have a way of increasing their credibility. On AGW, yeah, that prediction was correct (you can tell something was up, since governments started believing the data 20 years ago).

What we need is an IPCC type organisation for other envirornmental issues that can be successfully brought into the mainstream as reputable.
 
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