I'm not worried about Global Warming

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SUMMARY

The forum discussion centers on the concerns surrounding global warming and the potential drastic measures proposed to address it, such as geo-engineering. Participants express skepticism about the efficacy and safety of these interventions, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of climate science. The conversation highlights the geopolitical implications of energy dependence, particularly regarding oil, and the economic consequences of pollution on healthcare costs. The discussion concludes that while human-induced CO2 emissions are a significant factor in climate change, the solutions being considered may pose their own risks.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of climate science fundamentals, including CO2 emissions and their impact on global warming.
  • Knowledge of geo-engineering concepts and their potential environmental effects.
  • Familiarity with the geopolitical landscape related to energy resources, particularly oil.
  • Awareness of the economic implications of pollution on public health and healthcare costs.
NEXT STEPS
  • Research the latest findings on climate change from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
  • Explore the implications of geo-engineering techniques on ecosystems and climate stability.
  • Investigate the economic impacts of air pollution on healthcare systems and public health.
  • Study the historical context of energy conflicts and their relation to global warming issues.
USEFUL FOR

This discussion is beneficial for environmental scientists, policymakers, energy analysts, and anyone interested in the complexities of climate change and its socio-economic ramifications.

  • #31
junglebeast said:
For some reason I cannot find any global warming graphs / charts that show data up to 2009. They all stop at around 2000...what's with that? I want to see the trend...
I killed my computer last week, so don't have my bookmarks, but here is a graph through 2008 for the US.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/images/1208natltemp.png
 

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  • #32
Also here you can see that 2008 has dropped back near 1997 levels globally. The year 2005 was an unusual spike, as you can see from the list.

(Jan-Dec) Anomaly °C Anomaly °F
2005 0.61 1.10
1998 0.58 1.04
2002 0.56 1.01
2003 0.56 1.01
2006 0.55 0.99
2007 0.55 0.99
2004 0.53 0.95
2001 0.49 0.88
2008 0.49 0.88
1997 0.46 0.83

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/ann/global.html
 
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  • #33
well, IMO, i think scaling back how much energy we use, etc, as well as creating better, more efficient technologies is a good idea regardless of whether global warming exists and if it's getting worse.
 
  • #34
thomasxc said:
well, IMO, i think scaling back how much energy we use, etc, as well as creating better, more efficient technologies is a good idea regardless of whether global warming exists and if it's getting worse.

I totally agree...as long as oil is the lifeblood of our economy, the problems in the Middle East are our problems too :frown:.
 
  • #35
lisab said:
I totally agree...as long as oil is the lifeblood of our economy, the problems in the Middle East are our problems too :frown:.
Erm you do know where the US gets most of it's oil from?

ps - please don't spread it around - we don't want to be invaded.
pps - well if you stuck to bringing freedom and democracy to Alberta we wouldn't care too much
 
  • #36
There is no doubt that humans have contributed to global warming. Unless you believe that 98% of the world's scientists and all of the organizations listed below are part of a vast conspiracy. But then again I guess anythings possible. Big foot might even exist!

The following illustrates the growing consensus of scientific experts that believe climate change over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.

Organizations that concur:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007
InterAcademy Council
Joint science academies’ statement 2007
Joint science academies’ statement 2005
Joint science academies’ statement 2001
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
Network of African Science Academies
International Council for Science
European Science Foundation
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Federation of American Scientists
World Meteorological Organization
American Meteorological Society
Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
American Astronomical Society
American Physical Society
American Chemical Society
National Research Council (US)
Federal Climate Change Science Program (US)
American Quaternary Association
Geological Society of America
Engineers Australia (The Institution of Engineers Australia)
Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London
European Geosciences Union
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
International Union of Geological Sciences

Organizations with noncommittal statements:
American Association of State Climatologists
American Association of Petroleum Geologists

Dissenting opinion:
Michael Savage
(With the July 2007 release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate)
 
  • #37
wittgenstein said:
Tho to be fair, industry and special interest groups have been devoting resources to a disinformation campaign with individual scientists being payed to take an anti-global warming position. I can see why some people are confused as to what the facts actually are.


definitely.too much confusion. to start, the average joe is not a scientist. the confusion you speak of just adds to it, in a way.
 
  • #38
Andre said:
Fair enough, but wasn't the scientific method about testing predictions against reality? How would the old predictions, that triggered the alarms, do nowadays?

Well the B and C predictions look pretty darn good to me...although it seems silly to even bother trying to predict the exact curve, like trying to predict the stock market exactly. I would rather see a monte carlo analysis. But I don't know, are these predictions even based on global fluid dynamics? If not, if they are just "charting" predictions, then I would not give them a second thought...

hansenlineartrend.jpg
 
  • #39
mgb_phys said:
Erm you do know where the US gets most of it's oil from?

ps - please don't spread it around - we don't want to be invaded.
pps - well if you stuck to bringing freedom and democracy to Alberta we wouldn't care too much

Wow, did you just give us Alberta?!? We're reciprocate by giving you Alabama...we'll throw in Mississippi too, just since your're such good neighbors :smile:!
 
  • #40
Oh man. Canada can have Alberta. While you're at it, we'll give you everything east of New Mexico and south of Northern Virginia. It's rich plantin' country down there. Never mind the hicks.
 
  • #41
Not that all Southerners are hicks; I have been privileged to know some well-educated, intelligent Southerners. But they are clearly not in the majority.
 
  • #42
wittgenstein said:
Unless you believe that 98% of the world's scientists and all of the organizations listed below are part of a vast conspiracy.
Do you always blindly buy into the politically correct "consensus" of the day? Just because people throw their hat into the ring doesn't mean they aren't wrong.

No different from the completely wrong scientific consensus in 1989 vehemently endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences and the Surgeon General that trans fatty acids posed no danger to Americans, that "the levels of trans fatty acids found in a balanced diet are safe". and that the Dutch study claiming that trans fats were harmful was rubish.

Well, we know now that the consensus was wrong.

I don't get sucked in by politically correct "consensus".
 
  • #43
lisab said:
Wow, did you just give us Alberta?!? We're reciprocate by giving you Alabama...we'll throw in Mississippi too, just since your're such good neighbors :smile:!

I have been informed that I don't have permission to give away provinces (although if you wanted to take Quebec off our hands I'm sure people wouldn't mind too much)

Not sure about Alabama, is Alaska available?

Have you tried giving California back to Mexico? They might not get the WSJ down there and don't know about the deficit
 
  • #44
Evo, the data on the non-AGW side of things seems awfully deficient compared to the pro-AGW side of things.
 
  • #45
"Do you always blindly buy into the politically correct "consensus" of the day?"
Evo

I never claimed that every scientific organization in the world is 100% correct 100% of the time. However, when the entire world's scientific community agrees on something, I would say that that something is very very likely.
Your examples only prove that with a vast scientific community, an error or two may occur.
 
  • #46
Evo said:
The IPCC? I thought it was agreed that most of the people that created these reports were not actually scientists.

...
Amusingly, the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, started out as a Locomotive engineer. He's certainly not a climate scientist.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/bios/pachauri.htm
 
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  • #47
Evo what guidelines have I violated.
Perhaps you should read them.
"Do you always blindly buy into the politically correct "consensus" of the day?"
Evo
Personal attacks are allowed? Anyway, let's not get petty.
 
  • #48
kldickson said:
Evo, the data on the non-AGW side of things seems awfully deficient compared to the pro-AGW side of things.
That's not what I'm sayiing. It's the fact that scientists have decided that the public is too stupid to understand the real problems of pollution and instead throws out "facts" that aren't facts. They're models, and they are, as has been repeatedly shown, flawed models. That is why we have people driving around in cars all day passing out flyers about polar bears. :eek:

wittgenstein said:
Evo what guidelines have I violated.
You didn't receive a warning.
Perhaps you should read them.
"Do you always blindly buy into the politically correct "consensus" of the day?"
Evo
Personal attacks are allowed? Anyway, let's not get petty.
Blindly, as in ''without question".
 
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  • #49
junglebeast said:
Well the B and C predictions look pretty darn good to me...
The Hansen paper shows the results of his '88 model. The model had an input A,B,C and an output A,B,C as models do. The inputs were guesses at the future of man made emissions which has nothing to do with climate physics. B and C were small and no growth emissions scenarios. That didn't happen (even though Hansen though B emissions would). What undeniably happened was A, a large growth in emissions, so Hansen's model predicts outcome A, and as you can see that prediction was substantially wrong.
 
  • #50
"That is why we have people driving around in cars all day passing out flyers about polar bears."
Evo
I'm confused. So you are saying that the polar bear environment is not diminishing?

"Amusingly, the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, started out as a Locomotive engineer. He's certainly not a climate scientist."
First of all the chairman does not decide a consensus. It would be like saying," Bush is incompetent and in charge of the military. The military says that missiles can shoot down planes. Therefore it is questionable if missiles can shoot down planes." However, I will provisionally accept that Rajendra Pachauri is incompetent to decide about global warming and has the power to make that the position of the IPCC.
So you are saying that the following organizations are part of a conspiracy? Or are you saying that all the scientists that belong to these organizations are incompetent?World Meteorological Organization
American Meteorological Society
Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
American Institute of Physics
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
 
  • #51
"You didn't receive a warning."
Evo
whether I did or not has nothing to do with this thread. Years ago I drank while in High School. Are you going to warn me not to drink while posting? ( I haven't had a drink in decades). This all seems very petty and a red herring that is used when losing an argument. Besides in this thread you have violated far more guidelines then I. But as I said, let's not get petty. The only reason that I mentioned it is to defend myself.
 
  • #52
ideasrule said:
...
It's also very misleading to say that the planet has been cooling since 2005. Three years have passed since 2005 ended: 2006, 2007, and 2008. 2008 was the tenth warmest year on record, exceeded only by years that are within the 1998-2008 period. And you can't do meaningful statistics on the remaining 2 data points.

Evo said:
And each of those years were cooler than 2005.

ideasrule said:
Yes, that's called doing statistics on small numbers. Once you actually plot the data, you get something like this: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

seycyrus said:
Uhm, do you see what your data is doing at the end of your graph?

jgens said:
It's fallacious to draw conclusions based upon two or three data points!

junglebeast said:
For some reason I cannot find any global warming graphs / charts that show data up to 2009. They all stop at around 2000...what's with that? I want to see the trend...

Evo said:
Also here you can see that 2008 has dropped back near 1997 levels globally. The year 2005 was an unusual spike, as you can see from the list.

(Jan-Dec) Anomaly °C Anomaly °F
2005 0.61 1.10
1998 0.58 1.04
2002 0.56 1.01
2003 0.56 1.01
2006 0.55 0.99
2007 0.55 0.99
2004 0.53 0.95
2001 0.49 0.88
2008 0.49 0.88
1997 0.46 0.83

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/ann/global.html[/URL][/QUOTE]

If one does a linear regression on the temperature (satellite) for only the last eight years the slope is slightly negative. That's simply a fact, just as it is a fact that the linear slope was positive for the several decades prior. The words being used around the climate literature now are 'pause', 'lull', or 'interrupted', 'slightly cooling'. The discussion now is about natural variability and background cycles, and how likely the latest temperature lull(?) is likely to be explained by such.
[URL]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/pdf/nature06921.pdf[/URL]
 
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  • #53
wittgenstein, could you use the Quote button when you quote someone, please?
 
  • #54
I have always wondered what the average temperatures would look like if we removed all of the temperature readings from locations that weren't recorded 100 years ago. Let's go back and only show readings from the same locations during this time period in order to get an accurate picture of temperature changes. We now include temperatures from thousands of locations including over oceans, and much more accurate than ever. Has anyone created a graph to correct for this?
 
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  • #55
Evo said:
Well, we know now that the consensus was wrong.

I don't get sucked in by politically correct "consensus".

The politically correct consensus--and the popular consensus--is that global warming is still not proven yet. I don't get sucked in by political consensus, but when all scientists in a given field say that A is true and I know nothing about that field, I don't go around saying the experts are wrong and that I'm right. If I do happen to know something about the field--as is the case for planetary science and evolutionary biology--I tend to become boiling mad at the people who do that.

Global warming is not the only reason to worry about fossil fuels. Most of our oil comes from the Carboniferous era some 300 million years ago, when oxygen levels and temperatures were high and ecosystems were extremely productive. Once the existing oil reserves run out, I don't think many people will want to wait for another carboniferous era, then for another 300 million years, before getting more. As we--meaning humans--become more dependent on oil due to the improving economies of China, India, and other developing countries, it will be harder to switch to alternative energy sources, and the economy will be more heavily affected when existing oil runs out.
 
  • #56
mheslep said:
If one does a linear regression on the temperature (satellite) for only the last eight years the slope is slightly negative. That's simply a fact, just as it is a fact that the linear slope was positive for the several decades prior. The words being used around the climate literature now are 'pause', 'lull', or 'interrupted', 'slightly cooling'. The discussion now is about natural variability and background cycles, and how likely the latest temperature lull(?) is likely to be explained by such.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/pdf/nature06921.pdf

By "doing statistics on small numbers", I didn't mean that the temperature measurements for 2006-2008 were wrong; I was implying that it's fallacious to conclude global warming has stopped and we must therefore pump in more CO2 to prevent an ice age.
 
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  • #57
wittgenstein said:
World Meteorological Organization
American Meteorological Society
Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
American Institute of Physics
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics

Good start! But add in the national academies of science of all major industrialized countries, and we'll have a list that's less remotely far away from completion.
 
  • #58
Well once we get all of our CO2 production down, we should go help out our solar neighbors with their global warming problem. Unless you want us to believe that our CO2 is traveling across the vast distance of space to warm up mars.

And yes I do have proof to back up my claim that Mars is also experiencing a warming trend.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html"
 
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  • #59
ideasrule said:
The politically correct consensus--and the popular consensus--is that global warming is still not proven yet. I don't get sucked in by political consensus, but when all scientists in a given field say that A is true and I know nothing about that field, I don't go around saying the experts are wrong and that I'm right.
It was the climate scientist I dated a few years ago, an expert that testified before congress every year, that alerted me to the fact that he was '"forced' by his superiors to slant all of his reports and requests for grants to be pro-AGW. He was infuriated. I didn't have any interest in the debate before then, and I learned that a lot of the hype on AGW is misleading. There are problems with the computer modules, there are problems with data being cherry picked. This is why an increasing number of scientists are risking their careers to come forward and raise these issues.

Someone earlier summed it up nicely that the real concern here is pollution, practises of agriculture, etc... and the need for alternative fuels. I don't like the excuse that the majority of humans are too stupid to grasp the real issues, so scare tactics need to be used, and it's ok to exaggerate because it's for a good cause.
 
  • #60
Argentum Vulpes said:
Well once we get all of our CO2 production down, we should go help out our solar neighbors with their global warming problem. Unless you want us to believe that our CO2 is traveling across the vast distance of space to warm up mars.

And yes I do have proof to back up my claim that Mars is also experiencing a warming trend.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html"

The Martian atmosphere is thinner than Earth's, about 95% carbondioxide, and has a far lesser amount of ozone. I believe the Earth's atmosphere is supposed to be much better at deflecting heat and radiation from the sun. And if AGW is correct then the martian atmosphere would quite easily trap a lot of heat with all of that CO2 yes?
 
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