global warming

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Buckwheat
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Re: global warming

Post by Buckwheat »

Alex123 wrote:
Buckwheat wrote: What matters is how fast it's changing right now.
It is not changing fast at all. In fact some reports suggest that it has stopped getting much warmer. And even IF, even IF, it is getting warmer - how do we know that it is our "0.0014664%" contribution of a gas to the atmosphere that doesn't even cause global warming? Sun and weather events on Earth are much more powerful than us and can easily cancel out any (if any) effects we have made.


I can find more graphs like:

Image
Um... did you notice that the black line is in an upward trend? Climate models have come a long way for improved accuracy in the last decade, and you seem to be using old data. What is the source for this document?

Image I can find more graphs like this.

http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/
Sotthī hontu nirantaraṃ - May you forever be well.
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Buckwheat wrote:Even without humans, there is death. Does that make murder OK?
So are you equating producing carbon dioxide with murder?
Buckwheat wrote: Please find me a quote from reputable climate scientists saying that human contribution of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere is insignificant.
So, Kim's site is NOT reputable?!!! http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-c ... ssions.htm
??

Can you say something about my calculations? You and Kim seem to have one type of argument:
  • "You are wrong Alex. You are using junk science. We have the Truth".
Please avoid ad hominem.


I also did some more calculations:
Person breath out ~1kg of C02 per day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2#Human_physiology

1kg x human population (7.073 billion) x 365 = 2,581.645 Billion of kg of CO2 humans exhale per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

So even IF, even IF, we would stop ALL industrial emission of CO2 through great sacrifice of living standards , humans would STILL produce 2,581.645 Billion kilograms of C02 per year. What would you propose then? Stop breathing?!
Last edited by Alex123 on Tue Mar 19, 2013 3:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Buckwheat
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Re: global warming

Post by Buckwheat »

Dan74 wrote:...
:goodpost: Thanks, Dan. :anjali:
Sotthī hontu nirantaraṃ - May you forever be well.
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Buckwheat wrote:Um... did you notice that the black line is in an upward trend?
The short term "trend" seemed to have stalled at year 2000. Considering that we are close to ICE Age, it is great that temperatures bounced back a bit, a bit.

When we look at charts of greater and more important scale, the trend is still down. We are closer to Ice age rather than hothouse a more usual temperature for earth.

Judging a future trend of weather by few decades or even 133 years is like trying to see the trend of a game by first 1/100th of a second.

Anyone trades stocks/currencies? If the trend on a daily chart is down and trend on 1 minute chart is up. What is long term trend? Down, of course. Same is here.
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Dan74
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Re: global warming

Post by Dan74 »

"It's good that children are encouraged to be critical thinkers. But it would've been great if they were taught how to do so."

---Anon
_/|\_
Buckwheat
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Re: global warming

Post by Buckwheat »

Alex123 wrote:
Buckwheat wrote:Even without humans, there is death. Does that make murder OK?
So are you equating producing carbon dioxide with murder?
Buckwheat wrote: Please find me a quote from reputable climate scientists saying that human contribution of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere is insignificant.
So, Kim's site is NOT reputable?!!! http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-c ... ssions.htm
??

Can you say something about my calculations? You and Kim seem to have one type of argument:
  • "You are wrong Alex. You are using junk science. We have the Truth".
Please avoid ad hominem.


I also did some more calculations:
Person breath out ~1kg of C02 per day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2#Human_physiology

1kg x human population (7.073 billion) x 365 = 2,581.645 Billion of kg of CO2 humans exhale per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

So even IF, even IF, we would stop ALL industrial emission of CO2 through great sacrifice of living standards , humans would STILL produce 2,581.645 Billion kilograms of C02 per year. What would you propose then? Stop breathing?!
I am saying this: do you want human activity to an abrupt shock to the natural system, or should we live in harmony with the global ecosystem that is the foundation for our lives on Earth? Yes, there have been 5 mass extinction events in 600 million years since the Cambrian explosion. There is also a mass extinction event in the 10,000 years since humans started congregating into larger societies.

Apparently, you only read the paragraph where John Cook states the skeptic position, before dismantling it as a false view:
Before the industrial revolution, the CO2 content in the air remained quite steady for thousands of years. Natural CO2 is not static, however. It is generated by natural processes, and absorbed by others.

As you can see in Figure 1, natural land and ocean carbon remains roughly in balance and have done so for a long time – and we know this because we can measure historic levels of CO2 in the atmosphere both directly (in ice cores) and indirectly (through proxies).

But consider what happens when more CO2 is released from outside of the natural carbon cycle – by burning fossil fuels. Although our output of 29 gigatons of CO2 is tiny compared to the 750 gigatons moving through the carbon cycle each year, it adds up because the land and ocean cannot absorb all of the extra CO2. About 40% of this additional CO2 is absorbed. The rest remains in the atmosphere, and as a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years (Tripati 2009). (A natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20,000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken just 120 years).

Human CO2 emissions upset the natural balance of the carbon cycle. Man-made CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by a third since the pre-industrial era, creating an artificial forcing of global temperatures which is warming the planet. While fossil-fuel derived CO2 is a very small component of the global carbon cycle, the extra CO2 is cumulative because the natural carbon exchange cannot absorb all the additional CO2.

The level of atmospheric CO2 is building up, the additional CO2 is being produced by burning fossil fuels, and that build up is accelerating.
As for your calculations, they don't really say anything, so it's hard to criticize them. I agree, the concentration of CO2 is low when compared to nitrogen. But Nitrogen (in the atmospheric form of N4) is an incredibly stable, inert gas. Nitrogen is the water, CO2 is the cyanide.
Last edited by Buckwheat on Tue Mar 19, 2013 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Dan74 wrote:Some years ago I've worked with a scientist who was a co-author of one of the UN Reports on Climate Change who's also written several pamphlets debunking common myths and misconceptions (more on that below). He was the first to admit that the precise extent of the warming is very hard to predict. A lot of uncertainty still exists but not in the actual fact of warming, just in the extent.
So how can "Climate Change" scientists predict that the weather will increase by 0.5 degree or so in few years or so?

How do we separate HUMAN activity (which is unproven to cause GW) from natural fluctuations. Our 0.0014664% contribution is NOTHING. Nature can easily in a day cancel out what we produced in years.
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Dan74
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Re: global warming

Post by Dan74 »

Alex123 wrote:
Dan74 wrote:Some years ago I've worked with a scientist who was a co-author of one of the UN Reports on Climate Change who's also written several pamphlets debunking common myths and misconceptions (more on that below). He was the first to admit that the precise extent of the warming is very hard to predict. A lot of uncertainty still exists but not in the actual fact of warming, just in the extent.
So how can "Climate Change" scientists predict that the weather will increase by 0.5 degree or so in few years or so?

How do we separate HUMAN activity (which is unproven to cause GW) from natural fluctuations. Our 0.0014664% contribution is NOTHING. Nature can easily in a day cancel out what we produced in years.
Trends.

PS Our contribution is far from nothing. It is consistent, increasing and significant.
_/|\_
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Buckwheat wrote:I am saying this: do you want human activity to an abrupt shock to the natural system, or should we live in harmony with the global ecosystem that is the foundation for our lives on Earth? Yes, there have been 5 mass extinction events in 600 million years since the Cambrian explosion. There is also a mass extinction event in the 10,000 years since humans started congregating into larger societies.
What do you propose? That we go to pre-industrial world? DO you know what that means? Have you lived in a world without trucks and cars? How will you feed cities with multi-millions of people living in them?

As for C02. My basic position is that we contribute TOO small amount. Nature can easily cancel it out any day. Not only that, it is questionable if C02 causes warming itself.

Also, plants need C02 for photosynthesis. It is NOT a "bad" gas.
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Dan74 wrote:PS Our contribution is far from nothing. It is consistent, increasing and significant.
0.0014664% is very significant...
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Buckwheat wrote:The level of atmospheric CO2 is building up, the additional CO2 is being produced by burning fossil fuels, and that build up is accelerating.
This is to be expected when we are at a tiny 396.80 ppm, while it was almost as high as 7,000ppm before. Earth can't be so unbalanced to maintain unnaturally LOW levels of CO2 and temperature.
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Dan74
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Re: global warming

Post by Dan74 »

Alex123 wrote:
Dan74 wrote:PS Our contribution is far from nothing. It is consistent, increasing and significant.
0.0014664% is very significant...

Yes, it is. You are not listening. And I'm not interesting in continuing. Believe what you wish, Alex. The information is out there. Kim's provided it, Buckwheat's provided it and I've linked some good stuff too. If people actually want to understand, they can. And if they just want to spout ill-informed nonsense, they can too. It's a free world!
_/|\_
Buckwheat
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Re: global warming

Post by Buckwheat »

Alex123 wrote:
Buckwheat wrote:I am saying this: do you want human activity to an abrupt shock to the natural system, or should we live in harmony with the global ecosystem that is the foundation for our lives on Earth? Yes, there have been 5 mass extinction events in 600 million years since the Cambrian explosion. There is also a mass extinction event in the 10,000 years since humans started congregating into larger societies.
What do you propose? That we go to pre-industrial world? DO you know what that means? Have you lived in a world without trucks and cars? How will you feed cities with multi-millions of people living in them?
Right, because the only options are to continue down our globally suicidal path, or resort to hunter-gatherer society.

There is a third option: We carefully consider our impacts on the globe (everything we do is done by 7 billion other people) and try to reduce them. This means walking instead of driving. This means forgoing the social reward of a job that feeds on pollution for a humble job that sustains life efficiently. These are indeed hard choices, but that is no excuse to do nothing.
Sotthī hontu nirantaraṃ - May you forever be well.
Buckwheat
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Re: global warming

Post by Buckwheat »

Alex123 wrote:Image
7000 ppm was over 500 million years ago, and if memory serves, during the Cambrian period, the biological forefront was to become multi-cellular. The life that existed at that time was radically different than the current biome.

Even looking at the age of dinosaurs, when CO2 levels were in the low thousands, global temperatures were much higher than today. So much so, that if we suddenly revert back to those conditions, there would be a mass extinction event. Do you want to live through the end of the human race?

If we want to look at life on Earth at the time scale of hundreds of millions of years, then the discussion is totally different. In a few hundred million years, humans will likely be extinct, and our discussion are moot. But if we even want to survive a few hundred more years, we need to address the pressing issue of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sotthī hontu nirantaraṃ - May you forever be well.
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Alex123
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Re: global warming

Post by Alex123 »

Buckwheat wrote:There is a third option: We carefully consider our impacts on the globe (everything we do is done by 7 billion other people) and try to reduce them. This means walking instead of driving. This means forgoing the social reward of a job that feeds on pollution for a humble job that sustains life efficiently. These are indeed hard choices, but that is no excuse to do nothing.
What should a person living in COLD climate do? Ever tried to walk many miles to work when it is freezing (below - 10F) outside?

Do you realize HOW the food gets to the supermarket? Large trucks deliver it nearly daily to shops in the city. Without using gasoline, how do you expect large cities to be fed?
Buckwheat wrote: ... the only options are to continue down our globally suicidal path, or resort to hunter-gatherer society.
Human population is estimated to be 1 million people in 10,000BC while today it is about 7.073 billion.
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/history ... growth.htm

Times are different. Do you want many people to die off in order for us to maintain low enough population to live like hunter gatherers?
Last edited by Alex123 on Tue Mar 19, 2013 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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