Posted on 02/10/2006 9:43:29 AM PST by CreativeRandom
I would like to hear "The Other Side" of the argument on Greenhouse gases and global warming. I've heard the normal liberal rant, and have taken a few classes on the subject as well.
So, do greenhouse gases exist because of humans? I have heard faintly that animals and bonfires cause more gas, but I'm unknowledgeable on the exacts. Also, I would appreciate numeric info on US contribution to global warming / greenhouse gas compared to other countries - France, Former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, third world countries like Zimbabwe....
And of global warming. Is it caused by industrialization? Should we be worried? Is it a risk? Is the artic circle going to be gone by 2070 like the UK newspaper stated?
All input appreciated.
"Don't ask me. I am still trying to figure how all the glaciers that covered Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinios and Wisconsin 20,000 years ago went. Seems there must have been a lot of global warming going on, but no sign of man."
They are all in a series of large holes in liquid form. Today we call them the great lakes. Of course some must have spilled into the ocean right over Niagra Falls.
Cute huh? :o)
I suppose a strong case could be made that the banning of CFC has accelerated global warming.
agreed, but the big ones IPCC, NAS, AAAS, AMS aren't funded by environmental groups. They're the ones to trust
So these huge bodies of ice just melted and became liquid? Why would they melt though? Did they anticipate man would invent the combustion engine in 19,000 years and forever turn the world in an unstoppable upward spiral of warmth?
A recent study has concluded that our increased use of fuel efficient vehicles, unleaded gasoline, and other technological improvements to reduce pollution have cleaned the air so much that far more of the suns energy is reaching the earths surface, accelerating global warming.
What we need to do is mandate that everyone drive muscle cars that run on leaded gas without catalytic converters and remove scrubbers from smoke stakes to save the planet!
Ya, but funding from Government and the UN is just as much reason to question their findings as when "big oil" funds them.
If I had to pick a study to trust, I would take a big oil study over a UN study.
It is a slim article, and I wouldn't want to be the volcanologist assigned to sample an eruption like Pinatubo.
However, the basic composition of volcanic emissions doesn't change with volume. Volcanic volatiles are water, SO2, and HCl, primarily. If Pinatubo had been a significant source of CO2, the measurements of CO2 at Mauna Loa on Hawaii (where the famous Keeling curve of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is compiled) would have shown an effect. Pinatubo didn't directly affect the atmospheric CO2 composition a whit -- however, the cooling effect that Pinatubo's eruption caused, due to SO2 in the stratosphere, actually affected the seasonal change in CO2 in the Keeling curve over the next two years.
COSPEC is used to monitor SO2 emissions to detect precursory volcanic activity. If CO2 was useful to monitor in such a fashion, they'd monitor it, too.
Ol Doinyo Lengai, the one carbonatite lave volcano on Earth, probably emits more C02 than all of the other volcanoes on Earth in an average year.
Here's another article:
You and I should get together and write a book.
We could call it, "Sarcasm for Dummies."
What do you think?
You would think. I mean if global warming is the greatest threat to civilization we should do everything we can to stop it including polluting more. I still think re-opening up those ozone holes would be a positive step too. And then there is nuclear power, that would help. Of course the only solution greenies seem to want is a heavy tax on rich countries. Not sure how that solves global warming.
I don't know if CFCs had much of an effect. As you may know, there are indications that "cleaner air" (i.e., less SO2 and soot) is allowing an more rapid surface warming. So the case could be made that reducing acid rain contributes to global warming.
All we really need is a several centuries long period of flood basalt volcanism. But I wouldn't want to live near where it was happening:
When I get in a debate about the subject I ask, What caused the Ice Age? Global Cooling, right. OK, what ended the Ice age? That right, Global Warming. OK now if man had no impact on those events the conclusion I have is that the Earth Temperature has never been constant. It warms and cools without our help.
"All we really need is a several-centuries long period of flood basalt volcanism. But I wouldn't want to live near where it was happening":
What are global warmers going to argue when sunspot activity goes down in the next decade and we start to cool?
There is general agreement that the global climate warmed between about 1880 and 1940, following several centuries of the "Little Ice Age," which in turn was preceded by the "Medieval Climate Optimum" around 1100 AD. There is less agreement about the causes of this recent warming, but the human component is thought to be quite small. [See BOX] This conclusion seems to be borne out also by the fact that the climate cooled between 1940 and 1975, just as industrial activity grew rapidly after WWII. It has been difficult to reconcile this cooling with the observed increases in greenhouse gases. To account for the discrepancy, the 1996 IPCC Report has focused attention on the previously ignored (direct) cooling effects of sulfate aerosols (from coal burning and other industrial activities), reflecting a portion of incident sunlight. But this explanation to support the "discernible human influence" conclusion is no longer considered as valid. Leading modelers [Tett et al., 1996; Penner et al., 1998; Hansen et al., 1998] all agree that the aerosol forcing is more uncertain than any other feature of the climate models. Models have not yet incorporated the much larger indirect cooling effects of sulfate aerosols (by increasing cloudiness), or the quite different optical effects of carbon soot from industrial and biomass burning and of mineral dust arising from disturbances of the land.
The temperature observations since 1979 are in dispute. On the one hand, surface observations with conventional thermometers show a rise of about 0.1°C per decade, less than half that predicted by most GCMs. On the other hand, satellite data, as well as independent data from balloon-borne radiosondes, show no warming trend between 1979 and 1997 in the lower troposphere, and could even indicate a slight cooling [Christy and Spencer, 1999]. Direct temperature measurements on Greenland ice cores show a cooling trend between 1940 and 1995 [Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998]. It is likely therefore that the surface data are contaminated by the warming effects of "urban heat islands." Some data support this hypothesis [Goodridge, 1996], others do not [Peterson et al., 1999].
While it is certainly true that human life is affected by temperatures at the surface, the GCMs are best validated by observations in the troposphere. It should be noted also that GCMs predict a warming trend that increases with altitude up to about 250 millibars (~12 km), rising to about 0.5°C per decade [Tett et al., 1996] -- in clear disagreement with all observations, whether from the surface, balloons, or satellites.
"Global warming" is a cyclical phenomenon. Some millions of years ago, an object entered and broke up in the inner Solar System, leaving an annular ring of dust that reaches from beyond Earth's orbit to somewhere between us and Venus. Because Earth's path around the Sun is tilted relative to the Sun's equator --the "plane of the ecliptic"-- we pass through this equatorial ring only once every 800 years. Earth remains within the dust-belt for about ten - fifteen years, before exiting for the next eight hundred.
Passage through this "dust belt" is a well-defined event, having nothing to do either with Solar cycles (alternating, long-term heating and cooling spells as the Sun rhythmically pulsates, for some reason expanding and contracting at intervals of some 120,000 years) or with planetary episodes, where geological-scale temperature changes derive from axial tilts --"precession of the equinoxes"-- and land-mass configurations due to plate tectonics ("continental drift") facilitating or impeding ocean currents.
For all of human history, certainly through the 12,000 years of our current Interglacial Epoch (the Holocene, dated from a glacial rebound known as the Younger Dryas), these 800-year weather-cycles --too short-term to count as climate shifts-- have wrought periodic havoc on all civilizations. The most recent cycle began in AD 1313, when the 400-year "Medieval Warm" (c. AD 900 - 1300) abruptly ended. Worldwide, a decade or more passed with virtually no growing seasons. The reigning Chinese dynasty; Medieval European culture; Meso-American empires from the Andes to Rio Grande-- all cratered simultaneously. Grim necessity sent Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes hurtling South and West into the Indian subcontinent, broad reaches along the Silk and Jade Roads through Turkistan to the Adriatic, destroying Kievan Russia to an extent from which those peoples have never yet recovered. Then came the Plagues...
The point is, that the low-point of the current cycle occurred in 1715, when wine froze in Louis XIV's goblets in Versailles and even wolf-packs in the German forests perished of the cold. This was the Little Ice Age, which began in the Renaissance and lasted through about 1880. Since 1715, Earth has experienced a pronounced "warming trend"-- in fact, a 400-year cyclical upswing from 1715, plus the inevitable regression-to-the-mean that fits baseline "norms" in 1515 and 1915, respectively.
On this basis, the fifty years from 1890 to 1940 were the warmest in almost 100,000 years. Then for forty years, from 1941 - 1980, we noticeably cooled again. (Remember the scare headlines?) Now from 1981 to 2010, thirty years, we should be in a warming phase-- which apparently we are. Thereafter, for twenty years (2011-2030), we chill again... but the near-term "thermostat" is fibrillating uncontrollably, and we are already some 2,000 years past-due to end the Interglacial. By all odds, if Earth does not tip into a new glaciation before 2113, when we hit the dust again, it almost certainly will then. Ice sheets three miles thick will cover North America to latitudes below the Great Lakes; along a line drawn on the Mediterranean, all of Europe and Asia to the Pacific Coast will become strictly uninhabitable; and these conditions will persist 120,000 years.
"Global warming" is a fool's hypothesis. Scratch the surface of its arguments, you find precisely no astronomical factors ever mentioned or considered. What long-term "measurements" exist are of surface temperatures, not atmospheric-- invariably extrapolated from ridiculously small and place-specific samples. One "major study" even bases its entire "catastrophic warming" argument on dendro-chronologic (tree-ring) data from one --yes, ONE-- tree in Northern Canada (!), and a serious scandal erupted just last year (2005) when it emerged that a "baseline climatological effect", the so-called hockey-stick pattern, was nothing more than a statistical artifact, an aberrant result due to KNOWING misuse of standard statistical procedures-- shamelessly propagated nonetheless since 1999.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens alone, an extremely modest geophysical event, put ten times more "greenhouse gases" into the high atmosphere than humans have in all our history. Result: Eighteen months of Global Cooling, as when Tambora erupted about 1815, disrupting crops for years-- in New England, you still hear of "the year without a summer." Krakatoa in the 1880s did the same... by comparison, 70,000 years ago the Toba Eruption in Indonesia left a crater 80 miles long by 50 miles wide. Atmospheric acids and dust exterminated all but about 2,500 breeding humans, all in equatorial regions behind Central African massifs (which is why today's "genetic diversity" is so low-- humans derive from many centers, but only the African one survived the Toba bump).
To conclude: Pay no heed, none, not any, to politically-motivated squeals adducing "global warming." We are indeed "warming", but neither on a linear basis nor in response to any human activity. Beyond 2010, "warming" will
seem as quaint as Newsweek Magazine's 1970s "new Ice Age" articles do now. But our great-grandchildren, if not grandchildren themselves, will face a new reality that is grim indeed. Let's hope technology by 2113 will have developed --with commensurate Common Sense-- to move sufficent non-Muslims off the planet before the equivalent of Toba strikes again.
I find this impossible to prove.
That reminds me of my favorite Stephen Crane poem.
"A man said to the Universe:
"Sir, I exist.
"However," replied the Universe
"The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
And so it is with "Global Warming." The Earth will do what it's been doing for Eternity -- warming, cooling, shifting continents, wobbling on its axis, taking hits from asteroids and comets, adjusting to changes in solar radiation, observing creatures prosper for a brief cosmic moment, then become extinct, etc.
The Chicken Littles can cluck all they wish but until they can quanitify and separate their claimed anthropogenic contributions to warming from natural causes; and put forth specific, demonstrable, feasible methods of dealing with temperature and climate fluctuations, it's all just a futile exercise.
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.