by leavingwt 41 Replies latest social current
villalobo,
Obviously, you didn't read the NASA link Big Tex provided.
beks,
:Whooooooooooot!!! Let's fire up the Hummers and invade another oil producing nation!!!
I say forget another oil producing nation! How about an oil producing State? I said we invade the heck out of Oklahoma! Nobody cares about Oklahoma, anyway. Not even Okies.
Yeah. Let's do that.
Farkel
Farkel: "Obviously, you didn't read the NASA link Big Tex provided."
Farkel, I'm familiar with the issue but it doesn't mean what you think it does. That is something that the sun does from time to time and it cools off things on earth whether it's in a tropical mood or in the middle of an ice age. We are in the bare beginning, from a geologic perspective, of man made weather and if a lack of sunspots temporarily cools things off mankind is going to continue to add carbon dioxide and things will get worse when the sun decides to go back to it's normal state. We could even mess things up before the sun returns to normal by pumping up co2 like mad in the following decades and then suffering global warming even with a cooled off sun. If there's one thing that humanity is good at is making excuses and being irresponsible.
Assuming that the sun stays quiet for 20-30 years the wise thing to do during those years would be to have a crash program to substitute all combustion of oil, coal and natural gas. We should have done this 20-30 years ago instead of hoping for rare solar events to temporarily rescue us. Something tells me though that that won't happen
villabolo
villalobo,
Trivia question here: if the earth is say, a 100 yard football field which measures all the stuff in the atmosphere, how many yards of those 100 yards is represented by CO2 as opposed to say, nitrogen, oxygen, et. al.?
Just a rough estimate will be good enough, villa.
What say you? We are talking about serious problems here, and serious problems require serious answers, so what say you?
Farkel
Antarctica is losing ice shelves at the edges and regaining some of it at the center both because of global warming. Lest you forget, or perhaps did not know in the first place, the warmer water gets the faster it evaporates. Therefore the same water that is eating away at Antarcticas edges is causing an increase of snow in those areas deeper inland. Antarctica is so big that it could create its own weather and climatologists do not see it as a major or immediate threat to the global predicament.
Sea ice at the other end of the world has been making headlines in recent years for retreating at a breakneck pace. Satellite measurements show that, on average, Arctic sea ice has decreased by four percent per decade since the late 1970s, explained Claire Parkinson, a cryospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who has been tracking the movements of the ice for 30 years. Antarctic sea ice, in contrast, has expanded northward by about 1 percent — the equivalent to 100,000 square kilometers (38,610 square miles) — per decade.
Why is there such a drastic difference in the behavior of the two poles? Scientists from Goddard and the University of Washington, Seattle, recently described three theories — ozone depletion, changing ocean dynamics, and the flooding of sea ice — for what's happening in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=40042
So what if there was one exception due to flukish conditions in a small part of the world. If the temperature is rising in a complex planet or system of any kind some places will be warmer than others and a few, for a short period might be temporarily cooler for now.
Maybe because predicating planetary temperatures is a dicey thing, particularly since we have detailed data that extends, at best, only as far back as a century or two. Global temperature change has happened before, and will happen again. What we currently know is that such changes often last for a brief time (such as the Little Ice Age that last only a few centuries) to millenia.
We really don't know what is happening for absolute certainty.
I say forget another oil producing nation! How about an oil producing State? I said we invade the heck out of Oklahoma! Nobody cares about Oklahoma, anyway. Not even Okies.
No argument from me. I lived 4 years in Woodward, near the panhandle. Look at a picture of Afghanistan, or the surface of the moon. That's what western Oklahoma looks like.
You can have Oklahoma Farkel. Please invade.
Happiness is a warm gun. bang bang shoot shoot
Farkel said:
"Trivia question here: if the earth is say, a 100 yard football field which measures all the stuff in the atmosphere, how many yards of those 100 yards is represented by CO2 as opposed to say, nitrogen, oxygen, et. al.?"
Sorry I couldn't get back to you earlier Farkel, I had to hit the sack.
The question is poorly phrased. I assume that you want to know what proportion of our atmosphere Carbon Dioxide is as opposed to the main two gases in our atmosphere. Current CO2 is measured in parts per million-I'm surprised you don't know that. It is currently at about 380ppm. It used to be roughly 270ppm in the 1950s. Now what's the point of that question. Perhaps you want to claim that a gas which accounts for so little of our atmosphere cannot affect the weather? If that is what you think-correct me if I'm wrong-then you need a physics professor to explain what was proven to be a fact in the 19th century with basic science and experimentation.
Carbon Dioxide, Methane (with 20 times the greenhouse effecct of CO2) and the very gases that we use in our refrigerators and Air Conditioners (with several thousand times the greenhouse effect of CO2) act out of proportion to their presence in our atmosphere. You can roast this planet with atmospheric trace gases.
Nitrogen and oxygen have very weak green house effects.
villabolo
For global warming to be real, it must be GLOBAL, but it isn't.
Average global air and sea temperatures are both rising. 'Average' implies many locations are included. Not all of these locations are warming, otherwise the average rise would be greater than it already is. Nonetheless the average global temperature is rising. The planet is getting warmer. NASA says:
Antarctica is not melting. It is growing.
Net, it is growing by 1% per annum. It is also simultaneously melting. Land and sea ice are behaving differently in different regions of Antartica. Net, the Artic is melting by 4% per annum.
Theories to explain all this include climate change as a primary factor.
The big flaw in global warming projections is that it depends upon computer projections.*
Something else is at work in the Arctic and it ain't just Co2.**
To my knowledge nobody has produced a general circulation model that hasn't included CO2 as a warming agent - the difficult thing (which is why no other theory has gained widespread acceptance) is to create a new hypothesis that stands scrutiny - saying "its all computer nonsense and in any case, its not us what are doing it" is not good enough.
EDIT - * Hindcasting validates the accuracy of existing climate models.
EDIT - ** Accepting that CO2 is rising whilst denying that global temperatures are rising creates another problem to answer. Scientists have demonstrated since the 1860's that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Of course one could also argue that CO2 ppm are not rising but that would lead one to a new level of irrationality.
Thank you V and Besty
Thank you for the details and graphs besty.
You're welcome beksbks.
villabolo
The science is not in doubt.
The magic thinking it takes to believe warming is not happening due to human added ghg's is stunning. You have a well understood process for warming the earth, and then you add additional warming elements to that process; by what magic exemption is that not going to result in warming?
As villabolo and besty have both mentioned, this science is over 100 years old by now.
