Global Warming: Examining the Evidence and Numbers

[Pythagorean]

Not particularly looking for arguments or why you believe, just looking at the numbers.

 

[wolram]

Undecided, and fed up with spin doctors (politicians) how can the pleb
find the truth in this turbulent flow?

 

[Evo]

For me, it's not a simple answer.

Global warming is a natural cycle and we are currently in one, that's an undisputed fact.

Solar activity is at an all time high and contributes to natural global warming. An undisputed fact.

Warming is happening on other planets in the solar system right now. Hysterically, the AGW's are claiming it's due to cyclical warming (like earth's) and/or volcanic activity (and this is on planets where volcanic activity has not been observed). So, according to AGW's, there is a normal explanation for the increased global warming on the other planets right now, but they refuse to consider the same for earth.

Cattle ranching has increased enormously in the past 150 years and the UN report states it alone is responsible for 18% of the warming that is not natural.

We don't know how much of the current warming is natural. Natural warming doesn't hit a ceiling and stop.

I have seen no real data saying how much man made pollution is actually in the atmosphere right now and exactly what impact it is having. All I have seen is guesses and predictions and disclaimers that the studies aren't accurate but...

 

[Ki Man]

I think this was going to happen anyways but we might be accelerating it

or maybe not

dont quote me on any of this, i can hardly remember what city i live in half the time

 

[Moridin]

Humans are contributing to changing their environment and general ecology for the worse. That is an undisputed fact. Carbon dioxide is a (weak) greenhouse gas. That is an undisputed fact.

However, There is a lot of things that needs to be thoroughly investigated, both the scientific background and predictions on the environment and mankind such as solar activity and CO₂ lag. I definitively agree with Evo on all points posted.

Some politicians are getting in the way of science and sustainable development. This is nothing new, it has happened frequently during the past 40 years and beyond.

I cannot stress enough what a gruesome mistake it would be to impose prohibitions on oil and coal usage for Africa on a whim without any realistic replacement(s). Wind and solar energy doesn't count, the development cost are far, far too large for the impoverished nations. One ultimate solution is of course, nuclear fusion.

 

[JasonRox]

I have seen no real data saying how much man made pollution is actually in the atmosphere right now...

Um... look outside you see it all going into the air from cars, industrial plants and etc...

You see it everyday. Look at the highways all over the world. Each one of them is pumping carbon dioxide into the air 24/7 same with all the big cities in the air.

Anthropogenic CO2 comes from fossil fuel combustion, changes in land use (e.g., forest clearing), and cement manufacture. Houghton and Hackler have estimated land-use changes from 1850-2000, so it is convenient to use 1850 as our starting point for the following discussion. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations had not changed appreciably over the preceding 850 years (IPCC; The Scientific Basis) so it may be safely assumed that they would not have changed appreciably in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000 in the absence of human intervention.

In the following calculations, we will express atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in units of parts per million by volume (ppmv). Each ppmv represents 2.13 X1015 grams, or 2.13 petagrams of carbon (PgC) in the atmosphere. According to Houghton and Hackler, land-use changes from 1850-2000 resulted in a net transfer of 154 PgC to the atmosphere. During that same period, 282 PgC were released by combustion of fossil fuels, and 5.5 additional PgC were released to the atmosphere from cement manufacture. This adds up to 154 + 282 + 5.5 = 441.5 PgC, of which 282/444.1 = 64% is due to fossil-fuel combustion.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html

And you say you don't see it?

 

[Mk]

Um... look outside you see it all going into the air from cars, industrial plants and etc...

Yeah, WE KNEW THAT, but that's far from quantization.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html

Anthropogenic CO2 comes from fossil fuel combustion, changes in land use (e.g., forest clearing), and cement manufacture. Houghton and Hackler have estimated land-use changes from 1850-2000, so it is convenient to use 1850 as our starting point for the following discussion. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations had not changed appreciably over the preceding 850 years (IPCC; The Scientific Basis) so it may be safely assumed that they would not have changed appreciably in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000 in the absence of human intervention.

In the following calculations, we will express atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in units of parts per million by volume (ppmv). Each ppmv represents 2.13 X1015 grams, or 2.13 petagrams of carbon (PgC) in the atmosphere. According to Houghton and Hackler, land-use changes from 1850-2000 resulted in a net transfer of 154 PgC to the atmosphere. During that same period, 282 PgC were released by combustion of fossil fuels, and 5.5 additional PgC were released to the atmosphere from cement manufacture. This adds up to 154 + 282 + 5.5 = 441.5 PgC, of which 282/444.1 = 64% is due to fossil-fuel combustion.

Bystander posted this a bit ago:

Carbon cycle (singular)? Of course, there are a lot of them --- probably as many as there are people studying the carbon cycle:

1) break the Earth into reservoirs (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, carbonate rocks, fossil fuel deposits, marine sediments --- as much detail as you want);
2) for each of "n" reservoirs, there are n-1 fluxes between the selected reservoir and the other reservoirs, combinatorially, (n² - 2n + 1) total fluxes to measure;
3) measure those fluxes, and the chemistries (organic, inorganic, solid, liquid, gas, plus other details);
4) calculate residence times for carbon in each reservoir, residence time being defined as total C content of reservoir (assumed to be constant at some steady state) divided by the sum of rates at which C is added, or the sum of rates at which C is subtracted, to or from other reservoirs;
5) be consistent in the use of the reservoirs you define (Trenberth at NCAR is a good example of how not to do this --- atmospheric reservoir suddenly turns into all "mobile" C on the planet when calculating residence time of fossil fuel derived CO₂ in the atmosphere);
6) take up residence in the nearest padded cell when you find out that most reservoir and flux data are order of magnitude estimates.​

The C-cycle is a transport and mass balance game --- old-fashioned, smash-mouth physics, not the carny shell-game you see in the popular press. Tricky chemistry? No. Run away from sensors? Atmospheric mixing and general flow patterns are well enough known that those measurements are fairly reliable --- downwind from power plants, and surface measurements in California's Mammoth Basin are obvious outliers. Hidden reservoirs? Probably not significant --- "hidden" means low flux and little interaction --- might be a fair-sized hydrate reservoir to be considered for deep ocean studies, plus frozen tundra and peat bogs.

 

[ShawnD]

Um... look outside you see it all going into the air from cars, industrial plants and etc...

I'm not going to say these things don't create pollution, but most of those "pollution" clouds you see are actually water. The visible exhaust from your car is actually water; things like NO2 are invisible. When you see a chemical plant or an oil refinery with huge clouds coming out of the stacks, most of what you're seeing is water vapour.

Pollution emissions themselves are usually invisible. They become easier to see when they react with sun light and other things in the air to form things like smog, and this can happen at a significant distance from the source of that pollution.


Not trying to thread crap. Just setting the record straight that most of what people think of as pollution clouds is really just water.

 

[Andre]

I voted for Kirsten here, brilliant!

http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunder/index.html

Highly recommended.

 

[wolram]

I voted for Kirsten here, brilliant!

http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunder/index.html

Highly recommended.

I made up my mind after reading this and went for opption 2, in the
past i guessed it was more to do with sun than humans, this is the
best evidence i have seen so far.

 

[JasonRox]

I'm not going to say these things don't create pollution, but most of those "pollution" clouds you see are actually water. The visible exhaust from your car is actually water;

I'm not talking about visible literally. I meant it in a way such that we know crap is coming out of every car on the highway kind of thing.

 

[JasonRox]

The bottom line is... in my opinion.

Whether or not we contributed to global warming is irrelevant. The bottom line is we should be cleaner environmentally period!

 

[ShawnD]

Whether or not we contributed to global warming is irrelevant. The bottom line is we should be cleaner environmentally period!

The good news is that humans have always been in support of improving environmental conditions. The bad news is that we must create inefficient technologies before we can refine them into efficient technologies.

We previously burned large amounts of coal and created disastrous environmental problems; trees would turn black from all the soot. Eventually we made coal burn much cleaner, and although most of North America's power still comes from coal, the pollution we create is considerably less than it was before.

The first models of cars were rather crude and polluted heavily by not burning all of the fuel. Today's cars have computers and sensors in them which help to reduce the amount of unburned fuel. The result is better gas mileage, more power, and a reduced impact on the environment by lowering the amount BTEX being released into the environment (gasoline contains BTEX). (BTEX stands for Benzene, Tolene, Ethylbenzene, Xylene; you don't want these in your water supply)There's nobody out there who wants to pollute the environment because they hate the earth. Realistically there are only two sides of the environmental issue - 1) those who want to keep current luxuries while lowering their environmental impact, and 2) those who want to get rid of all technology and go back to the days of scurvy and a 30-year life expectancy.
If you're using a computer and are on the internet, you are part of group 1

 

[Andre]

I made up my mind after reading this and went for opption 2, in the
past i guessed it was more to do with sun than humans, this is the
best evidence i have seen so far.

Excellent choice, amice.

More people are starting to listen to high school student Kirsten:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL0229065720070404

...Likely headlines predicting a global warming "catastrophe", "disaster" or "cataclysm" after a U.N. report due on Friday risk sapping public willingness to act by making the problem seem too big to tackle, some experts say.

The world's leading climate scientists, meeting in Brussels, are set to warn of more hunger in Africa, rising seas, species extinctions and a melting of Himalayan glaciers in the April 6 report about the regional impacts of climate change.

But the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), grouping 2,500 scientists, does not use words to sum up the forecasts -- unlike some politicians or headline writers who describe it as a "crisis", "terrifying" or "Armageddon"...cont'd

 

[SpaceTiger]

I don't know a great deal about the global warming debate, but the scientific community seems to be strongly in the anthropogenic camp. Faced mostly with politicians, non-specialists, and high school students in the other camp, I didn't really need my critical thinking philosophy class to decide which side to support.

We collectively pay for people (scientists) to perform this research so that we don't have to make the judgement call ourselves. However much research we do in our spare time, we still can't hold a candle to the knowledge and intuition of the professionals. It's always good to be aware and informed, but it's also good to recognize our limitations.

I'm not sure that global warming is anthropogenic, but I am sure that the scientific community is the most reliable source on the issue. The majority scientific opinion is sometimes wrong, of course, but not nearly as often as the majority (or minority) popular opinion.

 

[Mk]

I don't know a great deal about the global warming debate, but the scientific community seems to be strongly in the anthropogenic camp. Faced mostly with politicians, non-specialists, and high school students in the other camp, I didn't really need my critical thinking philosophy class to decide which side to support.

Whoa there, I think that goes both ways. I think plenty of politicians, non-specialists and high school students are in the AGW camp, and plenty of scientists are also in the skeptics camps.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Whoa there, I think that goes both ways. I think plenty of politicians, non-specialists and high school students are in the AGW camp, and plenty of scientists are also in the skeptics camps.

A large majority of the scientific community is in the AGW camp. In my experience, the loudest proponents of non-anthropogenic global warming are either not scientists or not climatologists. As for the general public (including high school students), my impression is that people favor a human source, but I don't think that should be weighted very heavily. My reference to high school students was an indirect response to Andre's link, not a suggestion that all high school students disbelieve AGW.

 

[ShawnD]

It's hard to get a straight answer either way since both sides have a lot of bias for their case. For example, the idea that we cause global warming gives humans a sense of power in that we are in control. If you say it's all caused by the sun and you have absolutely no control over any of this, it removes that feeling of power and we're left with a sense of helplessness. I guess the counter-bias would be "global warming isn't my fault, so I don't need to change anything".

It seems entirely possible that people on both sides will look at an idea attached to a particular conclusion, like that idea, then try to support that idea with science. This is against the scientific method, but it happens all the time.

 

[Pythagorean]

I voted for 'not enough evidence'

I'm not particularly concerned about global warming. I'm leaving it in the hands of climatology, and I trust them to iron it out; they can't ALL be just out there for grant money. Since the whole purpose of science is rationale and logic, I think it generally attracts those sorts. They will check and balance each other as they always have because they're a diverse enough community (remember we're talking international collaboration here.) Also, the fact that it's international means there could be a lot of error and bad statistical assumptions when putting the data together, but this is really out of my league since I don't understand the journals published on the subject.

Anyway, I don't think it's the end of the world at any rate. I haven't gotten my hopes up about worldwide disaster since high school.