Posted on 05/12/2008 1:37:03 PM PDT by shrinkermd
I did not listen to Rush’s entire show. The part I did here, was a “look-down-your-nose-sneer” at Senator McCain’s concern and proposals about climate change. I know this is problematical with those believing we are on the edge of a catastrophe and those who feel this is all hokum.
Seemingly, faith has replaced all reason in assessing the problem.
In actual fact the problem is really quite simple. What the European and other governments want to do is to hold the concentration of carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million. Presently, it is 380 ppm. At the beginning of the industrial age it was 280 ppm. As far as I can tell these are facts. My source is a recent article by Fred Pierce in the New Scientist. That link is: here.
The actual problem is not clearly a scientific problem and there are disputes as to the meaning of the rise of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. A few excerpts from the above article include the following:
”…European governments are pressing for an agreement that would keep atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million. This compares with pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm and current levels of 380 ppm. This, they argue, will prevent warming by more than 2 °C, and so avoid "dangerous" climate change.
”Yet many climate scientists wince at this. First, because the European governments like to claim that the IPCC backs these targets, when in fact the IPCC goes out of its way to say that setting targets is a job for politicians. And second, because nobody knows either whether 450 ppm will hold warming below 2 °C, or whether this amount of warming will turn out to be safe. "It's horrifying when you see things boiled down to simple terms like a 2 °C warming. That will mean hugely different things for different places," Palmer says.
One reason the IPCC's official reports are slow to bridge this gap is the panel's policy of only considering published peer-reviewed research that is available when its review process gets under way. This means the current report, published last year, takes no account of research published after early 2005.
An increasingly scary debate about the state of the Greenland ice sheet is almost entirely absent in the 2007 report, for instance (see "What if the ice goes?"). Other recent research suggests that warming may be accelerating beyond IPCC predictions: first, because higher temperatures are releasing greenhouse gases from forests, soils and permafrost; and second, because the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 seems to have declined in the past decade.
"An increasingly scary debate about the state of the Greenland ice sheet hardly figures in the IPCC's 2007 report"
Equally worrying is the fact that climatologists are losing confidence in the ability of existing models to work out what global warming will do to atmospheric circulation - and hence to local weather patterns like rainfall. The most recent IPCC report made a number of regional predictions. It felt able to do so because it was generally assumed that if most models agreed on future climate in, say, the Amazon rainforest or western Europe, then they were probably right.
From my perspective Rush is more interested in pandering to his base with oversimplifications and relying on ridicule as argumentation.
I frankly, don’t know how serious this problem is, but there is a problem—within the lifetime of many reading this post atmospheric carbon dioxide will double. As cited in this article:
One of these unknowns was highlighted last month in the preprint of a paper James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has submitted to the journal Science (www.arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). Looking back 50 million years, to a time when falling CO2 levels in the atmosphere reached 425 ppm - a level we are likely to reach within two decades - he says that was the moment Antarctica got its ice cap. This suggests that the planet may have a tipping point at around that level, give or take 75 ppm, and that by going above it we could render Antarctica ice-free once again. That would raise sea levels by around 60 metres.
I think Senator McCain’s interest in this subject is based on factual considerations. What we don’t know, we don’t know but now is not the time to close off all reasonable consideration and debate.
Right. And we can’t afford these silly leftie whacko games any more. Times are getting harder.
They know even less and are therefore much more dangerous than your average know-nothing Liberal Idiot.
It’s not cooling, it’s just a pause in global warming.
Questions For McCain (George Will)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/136308/page/2
• You say that even if global warming turns out to be no crisis (the World Meteorological Organization says global temperatures have not risen in a decade), even unnecessary measures taken to combat it will be beneficial because “then all we’ve done is give our kids a cleaner world.” But what of the trillions of dollars those measures will cost in direct expenditures and diminished economic growth—hence diminished medical research, cultural investment, etc.? Given that Earth is always warming or cooling, what is its proper temperature, and how do you know?
• You propose a “cap and trade” system to limit the carbon dioxide that many companies can emit. Is not your idea an energy- rationing proposal akin to Bill Clinton’s BTU tax?
Greetings!
I cordially bid you a “look-down-your-nose-sneer” to a U.N. groupie not capable of seeing that the IPCC is a highly political body, and so many so-called “scientists”, especially those at pinko universities, dare not speak against the Scam of the Millenium for fear of losing funding.
Operation Chaos: Why Rush Limbaugh Was Right
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2011242/posts
I guess we know who’s ‘not in the tank’ for McCain, don’t we?
No, but your candidate certainly is.
And I seriously doubt that it is a coincidence that within hours (or even minutes) of McCain's big Climate Change speech yesterday (puke!), two very favorable posts appear on this board trying to rally support for his untenable position.
Yeah, his campaign staff and the RNC think we're pretty stupid, all right.
I believe there are more who realize but, don't want to acknowledge. They're afraid of being chastised and ridiculed.
Others simply close their minds to the obvious signs. These folks are confounded by the complexity of the situation.
A somewhat laymans oriented review is given here.
Anyone professing concern over AGW owes it to themselves, and more importantly those they might influence (for better or worse), to at least familiarize themselves with this paper.
sourcery, I wasn't sure if this information had made it into your list, hence the ping.
"...NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year. resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific research.
I guess Miskolczi took his football and went home since they didn't agree with his take. Seemingly, many arguments end up being based on some conspiracy theory that result in a few powerful people not permitting the masses access to the truth.
I have no real ability or knowledge that permits me to assess Miskolczi's work or any other mathematician.
What you state is correct but you seem to have missed the most significant aspect of his conclusion: the effect is self-limitting. This is a fundamental result of more properly accounting for the boundary conditions of the underlying governing equations. Although Misskolczi doesn't press the point, it is not lost on Hanson - those equations are the basis for a large component of the data supporting claims of AGW.
I guess Miskolczi took his football and went home since they didn't agree with his take. Seemingly, many arguments end up being based on some conspiracy theory that result in a few powerful people not permitting the masses access to the truth. I have no real ability or knowledge that permits me to assess Miskolczi's work or any other mathematician.
In this case it seems that Hanson wouldn't allow Miskolczi's ball on the field. In the intervening time, peer discussions on both the theory and the experimental evidence seem to favor Miskolczi by a notable margin, thus far.
Actually, that's incorrect. The current state of the global carbon cycle is such that if there were only natural processes involved, the net flux to the atmosphere would be exceeded by the net flux out of the atmosphere, and there would be a slow net loss of atmospheric CO2.
See point #5 in my profile.
The Suess Effect indicates that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to human activities. The Suess Effect is only one of several different data types indicating this. So the increase in atmospheric CO2 currently taking place is not due to increasing global temeperatures.
As I understand this “Suess Effect”, it’s saying that the added CO2 is made from “old carbon”, i.e. fossil fuels.
I would think that CO2 newly-made from old carbon would be indistinguishable from old CO2 that’s been cycling between the oceans and the atmosphere for millenia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.