Global Warming?
A little non-mainstream snow-filled humor for the liberal town of Groton in the People's Republic of Massachusetts
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This is one thing that's not Bush's fault, its ALGores.
Global warming, I think is just variance in weather patterns. We are doing a lot of things that probably increase weather severity (look at a picture of the sky over the US from the 1980s or so versus today - but its not smog, its contrails from the 5000'ish commercial jets in the air at any given time). Is that pollution / global warming? No, its a bit of a greenhouse effect from creating obscurity in visibility - its obvious.
What we have in the East Coast though, is really just a change in the jet stream pattern. It varies all the time, and over seasonal changes can be pretty significant. Whether or not Georgia has snow or not, has nothing to do with its latitude, its about where the jet stream curves. When I grew up in Minnesota along the Canadian border, I remember regularly having -45 degree temps. How cold is that? It's not really cold until the vulcanized rubber on your car tires loses its elasticity, that happens around -30, and you develop a flat spot on your tires that will last for about 5 miles down the road wherever you parked it - in your garage, parking lot, whatever. It goes thump-thump-thump as that flat pancake circles around and rigidly hard where the "circular" rubber doesn't curve with the road contact. It doesn't "get better" they just heat up a little from friction and it isn't as bad, until you park the car again.
The last few years in Minnesota (as I watch from the comfort of northern California on TV), it has been relatively mild at home. Maybe -10 or -20. It's not global warming though, it's the shift in the jet stream. It's -40 to -50 a few hundred miles north in Winnipeg.
We do see very pronounced effects of global warming around the arctic circle, its pretty hard to deny. I think humans impact it, but I don't think we cause it. The earth has obviously had cycles in the past, as you don't get oil without vegetation and animal fossil material decaying - and there is a heck of a lot of oil on the north slope... way too much to have always been an ice sheet. In fact, so much, it was probably tropical at one time. We also know there were wooly mammoths there, which are way too large to have survived purely on a scrub brush on the tundra. There would have had to have been a significant amount of vegetation to feed a 10,000 lb animal.
We are also growing as a species at probably an uncontrollable rate, which will consumer a lot of the planets resources. We don't notice this in the US, but we also kind of do. When I was a kid, it seemed like food and gas were cheap compared to the family budget. Now, its a significant part of the middle class budget, which is probably caused by both the fed printing money, and also by population overrunning the resources (just look at a third world country and their inability to afford the scarce resources).
I'd advocate, particularly in the Gulch - that there is nothing wrong, and indeed, noble with being good stewards of our environment - but also realize, we are rather helpless to avoid whatever damage is being done on a global scale by people that don't give a hoot (China, India, Brazil, etc.) To say that America has ownership in it is BS as well.. without our economy and power, we would have fought WWIII, IV, and V by now. Our economy consuming those resources and our resulting military strength has been a stabilizing force in the world and we should be thanked, not criticized.
I do however, do my part to minimize damage - much like my approach to hiking in California's redwoods - leave only footprints behind.
'We do see very pronounced effects of global warming around the arctic circle,'
Seven years ago, Al Gore said
‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,' ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’
Gore wrong again-
The Arctic ice cap is expanding. The summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres more than 2 years ago
for real figures see
http://www.climate4you.com/SeaIce.htm
Thank You! . we leave nothing but footprints in
the Smokies, also! -- j
But this is how Marxism works. You create a problem and focus on plans that will redistribute wealth.
If it is a scientific truth that global warming is happening,, then by all means, find a scientific solution, Shut up or put up.
C02 comes out of the ocean water when it is warm, well so do hurricanes feed off of warm water. No hurricanes have hit the USA in 6 years because the Atlantic is to cold to support them, so no C02 comes out of the ocean. The jet stream is and has for several years gone south during the winter so that allows the cold air to drop down to florida etc. the very idea that the earth is warming is a serious joke. what we are experiencing and have been for 30 years is going to continue and the next 5 years will be worse than this year. I wonder if canada will be able to get a wheat crop this summer and how much of our crop will be effected. check via the internet about the weather in places like siberia. putin wants the ukrain for their wheat otherwise he could careless about the place. you might want to get a copy of DARK WINTER by JOHN CASEY. He does explain how the sun is the primary culprit in causing the cooling. Some Russian climatologists do believe that we have already started the process going towards the ice age. the general conversation should not exist because there is no man made global warming, there is simply the earth doing what ever it does as a course of its existence. Get a good sleeping bag and outerwear and store food and fuel.
I agree completely. I think their argument, which I reject, is if it's anthropogenic, then we could simply stop doing the activities that are causing the change. I reject that b/c a) everything I've seen suggested is a drop in the bucket, and b) even if we had a 100% solution to stop the anthropogenic components, we'd still have to deal with the costs of the normal cycle of glaciation/deglaciation.
Carbon dioxide in a plant nutrient not a pollutant.
http://yellowhammernews.com/business-2/b...
Obummer.
Obooboo.
O = 0.
His Excellency El Presidente Zero
Liar-In-Chief
A POS POTUS.
There is no problem unless it is the good chance of a cooling earth.
The solution to that is more coal powered generators. There is plenty of coal. That will produce more CO2 which is good for plant growth and may mitigate the effect of decreasing grain production from lower temperatures.
The science of modeling global warming and the political discussions arguing in support of it suffer from a comprehensive list of logical fallacies.
First the science part.
Any mathematical model can suffer from mistakes in reasoning which lead to invalid predictions. That is why validation of the model against actual data is critical. The UK’s Met Office has acknowledged that global warming has been on pause for the last 15+ years (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/new...). I do not believe that any of the models predicted this, and in fact had almost uniformly predicted a 0.5+ degree C rise. Since the consensus of the models have been wrong since the mid-1980s, I believe that there must have been a fundamental flaw in the premise.
Two logical fallacies feed into this; they are Measurement and Anchoring fallacies. Measurement fallacies are unwarranted inferential leaps in the extrapolation of raw data to a measurement based value claim (global mean temperature vs CO2). Anchoring is a cognitive bias that places too much importance on the first piece of information in a deductive chain. In this case the assumption that CO2 is “the principal” driver of global warming. Then what follows, all based all based upon the non-existent global warming, are dire predictions of the effects of global warming on increased volatility in weather patterns yielding droughts and torrential storms. These in turn are concluded to yield famines, floods and property damage. Next those effects lead to disease outbreaks, increased mental disorders and stress.
The chain of effects is quite long. And apparently these effects are, according to many people in all forms of the media, happening today. But if there hasn’t been any recorded increase in mean global temperature over the last 15+ years how can these current effects be assigned to increased levels of CO2 which has in deed increased?
This whole logical chain also encompasses the naturalistic that more is either better or worse. More CO2 might improve crop yields (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_cha...).
Secondly the arguments in support of global warming also suffer a wide range of logical fallacies.
Sadly apart from modelers’ general fallacy of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (presenting a false cause and effect), are the following arguments:
• card-stacking (the selective use of facts) – reporting high temperature weather extremes as “climate”, report that some glaciers are receding while ignoring that others are growing, etc.
• bandwagoning (asserting that everyone agrees) – the use of Google searches on article about global warming; most of which assign current effects to non-existent warming
• non-sequitur (making jumps in logic) – asserting that pretty much any malady can be caused by global warming. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.ht...
• petitio principi (assuming they are right) – politicians, media, celebrities, and many others speak as if they are a genuine authority and want to been known for having the right opinions.
And most disturbing all are the ad hominem attacks on the character of anyone who, in any small degree) dissents from the “group think.” Some of those who support the theory of global warming are suggesting punishing or imprisoning dissenters (https://theconversation.com/is-misinform...) & ( http://gawker.com/arrest-climate-change-...).
In conclusion; I have provided the logical basis for my opposition to the theory that CO2 is the principle driver of global warming, and that the political discussion in support of it has degenerated into “petitio principi” argument using vicious “ad hominem” attacks.
And by the way, “the science” is seldom settled. The Standard Model’s prediction of a plethora of additional supersymmetry particles have yet to discovered(http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/06/higgs-boson-physics-hits-buffers-discovery). We’ve come a long way from Niels Bohr’s model of the atom, and westill have farther to go.
Jeff Crump
We probably build 1 power plant every 4 or 5 years in the US, and China opens a new COAL-BURNING plant every 3 weeks on average. They are also doing oil & gas, but just in coal-burning, its one every 3 weeks. It's pretty hard to get your head around the air pollution level that causes... its way beyond what we can imagine from our viewpoint.
When I was in the Middle East, people don't bother to maintain (like oil changes) on their cars. They buy new ones, drive them until they die on the road, then go buy a new one again.
In Mexico, the public water supply will be a creek about 10 feet across and 2 feet deep. 500 yards upstream, they are dumping raw sewage into the creek, 500 yards later, they are pulling it out and pumping it to the town. No one drinks the water, there is a thriving bottled-water business despite the fact they can barely afford shoes.
We have a house there (er, my wife's family does), we go and use it from time to time. You can't drink the water, can't wash dishes in it, and you certainly can't brush your teeth in it. You only use it to bathe your body in, but not your hair - use bottled for that too or, well, let's call it brown streaks, but you are blonde.
Is it dirt-poor along the border, no, that's midway between Guadalajara and Mexico City - part of Mexico's industrial zone with 'high incomes'...
They'll say US went through this period of industrialization, at the expense of the environment, but US doesn't want them to have the same benefit.
This is why I say it's an enormous problem. There is a ratio of emissions to lifestyle that's hard to overcome. Denmark has a tenth of the emissions per unit GDP of inefficient industrialized countries, but they can't with present technology go more than an order of magnitude. Asking people to live an agrarian lifestyle and have a lower fertility rate is a solution much worse than the problem. I support conservation, but I think it's a drop in the bucket. There has to be a way to have opportunity for an affluent life available to all humans without pushing a huge cleanup cost on future generations.
Are you a believer in human caused climate change, or just thinking we need to deal with a natural climate change that is going to be a future problem? It is not clear to me that the trend has legs and/or that it will not simply stabilize at a new point close to where we are.
I see how that was confusing. I was trying to say adopt nuclear and keep hydrocarbons as a backup and to get us through the transition, not b/c we might want it once nuclear is working. My thought is don't wait for it to be a crisis in some form or another.
"Are you a believer in human caused climate change, or just thinking we need to deal with a natural climate change that is going to be a future problem? "
I accept the evidence that humans are having a significant effect on the cycle of glaciation/deglaciation. Regardless of the cause, I think this will incur significant costs to humans in the form of changing farming conditions (in some cases for the better, other times for the worse) and coastal flooding. If we could control it, we could avoid these costs and manipulate things in our favor.
If the countries want to develop, they can/should do it responsibly. We did, obviously, or at least we paid for our cleanup where we didn't.
Is this correct? My understanding is if you're filtering soot, that's easy, but if recapturing the CO2 that comes from O2 + HxCy --> CO2 + H2O + energy is difficult. Is that not true?
Getting CO2 back in the box is easy. Just wait for the plants to do it.
Yes. They did it before. They can do it again.
I don't believe in any of that coal soot recapture BS. Doesn't matter anyway, those ash ponds are a real issue (with coal).
It has to be not burning stuff, even natural gas. It has to be nuclear. And there has to be a vehicle to store the energy and release it rapidly.
Maybe the difficulty level lies between easy and enormous.
global warming. I remember reading in the 1970's
about a "nuclear winter"; if one lie doesn't work,
they try another.
re: the Smithsonian Graph...
>> Most humans graph things with the time arrow pointing to the right, not left... Bleah.
MMGW?
>> Ok, EXACTLY WHAT caused Each and Every One of the RECURRING Major Ice Ages?
<crickets...> still, always waiting for an answer to that one... from Anyone! .... nada.
Nuclear?
>> Japan shut theirs down after the tsunami and now imports hydrocarbon-based stuff to provide their electricity. Smart move?
Europe also shut down nukes to go Green...
>> and discovered that electric power usage has TWO components... base loading and peak or varying load. Nukes are PERFECT for base loading.. They're discovering that in Europe today, now that their cleanest base-load plants are being taken offline.
Solar/Wind/Green Power?
>> Are ALL INTERMITTENT and literally Require base-load generation from 'non-green' sources! Even if wind or solar could provide enough Total Energy needed by the grid, the sun Still Don't Shine at night, so ya still gotta store the excess peak production somewhere somehow, and batteries, flywheels and pumped storage just can't hack it ... YET. Some of the latest developments in battery technology are starting to look promising on that front (including for electric vehicle propulsion (!), but I suspect that large-scale commercial applications are at least 5-20 years off.
So the question Should Be: "How do we best deal with these problems UNTIL the pie-in-the-sky gets delivered to our doorsteps?"
.... crickets.... people would rather fix the blame than the problem.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/huma...
This is from Smithsonian - and it is Not About global warming. It is about temperatures since the Miocene...and it just happens to show that as humankind evolved (and grew in numbers) two things happened to the climate: it got warmer; the amplitude of weather patterns increased. The graph covers about 9 million years, and neither the use of fire nor the Neolithic revolution (which marked human species success) made a bit of difference.
Global Warming is akin to Geocentric Universe. It is an attempt to say, We Are Important - What We Do MATTERS. Guess what: we are still just a tiny piece of the universe. And the more we know about the universe, the smaller we get.
Jan, happily self-important