“Big ideas for reducing the impacts of climate change are being evaluated by an international line-up of leading scientists from the US, mainland Europe and the UK at a symposium in Cambridge this week. The scientists are coming together to evaluate which large-scale bio-engineering, geo-engineering and chemical engineering ideas to combat global warming are worthy of further investigation, and which are best left on the drawing board. The meeting is being jointly hosted by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Cambridge-MIT Institute.” Link
Question: Will it ever come to stage where we give up on tackling the root causes of global warming and concentrate more of our efforts into helping the planet cope with the effects of global warming?
I don’t think that “giving up” on the root causes would be a terribly good idea, though investing some into combatting the effects is.
What I presume you’re basically talking about is low level terraforming. We have to look at what they are specifically proposing.
The article mentions the criteria; reversability, environmental impact, public opinion, etc, which are all important. I don’t know what the debate is, since they do not yet have any concrete proposals. Sure, invest some into research. Better than investing nothing and standing by waiting to see what happens.
Doubtful. Speculation is much more fun and gets you government grants.
The fact is we don’t have any root causes, since we don’t know what might be causing any alleged global warming. The real problem is trying to find a cause for something using only data gathered in the last 150 years.
I have no affiliation with any political organization, any lobbyist organization, or anything like that. I’m just a person that did some research on my own. And I found the argument FOR human-influenced global warming severely lacking.
The best example we have that CO2 is NOT a causal effect of temperature increase are ice core samples, both from Antarctica and Siberia. The data shows temperature rise well before (sometimes by thousands of years) CO2 increase 99% of the time. This would make sense since there would be more animal life in a warmer environment. Many global warming alarmists show the same data on a much less granular scale, where you’re looking at an entire 250k year time frame on a small graph. Shown in such a way it would appear that temperature and CO2 rise simultaneously. This could not be farther from the truth. There were even cases where temperature dropped and CO2 rose. There simply has been no causal relationship demonstrated to show that CO2 increases cause temperature increase. Period.
We’re still recovering from an ice age, so of course temperature is still rising, of course the glaciers are receding. What do you expect? How about 1000 years ago when the estimated global temp was at least 10 degrees F higher than it is today? Seemed a prosperous time in human history. At least as compared to the Little Ice Age of the 17 and 1800s, when there was large-scale strife.
CO2 is consumed by plants, and emitted by mammals and other animals. Why would there be a problem? More CO2 means healthier plant life and more plant coverage.
Studies show that CO2 is being removed naturally from the atmosphere - in part thanks to the plant on your desk but to a much greater extent thanks to the Amazon rain forest - at a rate of about 3 parts per million. the same studies show that fossil fuel burning is dumping 6-7PPM of CO2 into the atmosphere.
So all the other plants on the planet don’t matter one hoot? And what exactly is the “proper” amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Where is the proof that CO2 causes temperature rise? How about forest fires? A good forest fire dumps a helluva lot more CO2 into the atmosphere than fossil fuel burning, and they’re completely natural. How about Volcanoes?
You know, Methane supposedly retains much more heat than CO2, and Water vapor is the worst culprit of all. Why are there no proposals to cut back on Methane or Water vapor in the atmosphere? Reducing these would surely have more of an effect than CO2.
There was recently an article on the BBC’s front page describing a study that the earth was becoming measurably, “greener”, that is, the proportion of the earth covered in plant growth and the speed of that growth has increased measurably recently.
The findings of this study were presented at a confrence on global warming, and the spin of the article seemed to suggest that this was further evidence that immediate action needed to be taken to stop global warming/CO2 emissions.
Hm. I am not a… whoever the hell studies this kind of stuff… ecologist, I guess, but my impression of the whole trees thing was that the trees absorb the CO2, but eventually they release it - so they are more of a CO2 sink than processing plants (no pun intended). In the event of a forest fire and decay, the release large amounts of it back into the atmosphere, making their overall usefulness lower.
Not that I’m speaking out against trees or anything, but that’s just how I understood it.
Funny, that you refer to the Amazon as being the largest synthesizer of oxygen. I recently read/heard (can’t remember where) that the sea weed that grows in and near coastal areas produces about 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, which would seem to make sense seeing how there is a much larger proportion of water to land.
However, I was discussing this whole topic of global warming with my grandfather, an ex-geologist for the USGS, the other day. Basically, he told me that the warming that we are experiencing coincides with geologic trends in the past, and that there is no evidence for CO2 having a direct impact on the warming process. In fact, once we reach our peak temperature, the climate will subside, reverse tracks, and then proceed to fall into the next ice age.
Trends or Global Warming.
You decide.
However, until we have concrete evidence that this is not just a geological trend that cannot be reversed we should not take on any large scale terraforming projects, or likewise.
Y’know, it was a little before my time, but I seem to recall the buzz in the '70s being about global cooling. I mean, science finds new stuff all the time, but it is interesting to see how these kind of things can easily be misunderstood. I’ve certainly heard the “trends” argument before, and it could very well be true.
I still say that our best bet is combating the causes of global warming. Even if there is not a crisis of our making, it is still much healthier. Los Angeles is a much nicer place today than it was in the '80s. Last thing we want to do, though, is embark on a massive terraforming project and destroy the atmosphere unintentionally. Wouldn’t be the first kind of time we’ve done that (see gasoline additives).
Well, from everything you’ve contributed to this thread, it is clear that where you looked for your research was not the peer-reviewed scientific literature or even summaries of the peer-reviewed literature by organizations such as the IPCC or the NAS (National Academy of Sciences). Rather, it appears you looked at a lot of pseudoscience websites or something…
Okay, this is one case where there has been some confusion because some people have shown the correlated graphs of CO2 and temperature and implied that there is causation when the reality is more complicated. The point is that in the absence of humans, there was not a direct mechanism increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Thus, the actual triggers of previous increases in temperature were subtle changes in the earth’s orbit (caused by gravitational interaction with other planets). By mechanisms that are not entirely understood, this then led to the release of fairly large amounts of CO2 (and methane too, I believe) into the atmosphere which in turn appears to have then considerably magnified the warming. For a fuller discussion of this, see James Hansen’s extended web article (1.4MB PDF file) in Scientific American.
This is mainly just hogwash. The “Medieval Warm Period” and “Little Ice Age” that you refer to were likely mainly regional events and of considerably smaller magnitude than you claim, see here. I have no idea where you pulled that 10 F figure from! See this page for proxy temperature reconstructions of the last 1000 years for the Northern Hemisphere.
All these questions and a lot more could be answered if you actually read things like the IPCC reports or the Hansen’s Sci Am article rather than random crap meant to convince you of certain things rather than explaining the state of the peer-reviewed science. Here are very quick answers:
(1) “Proper” amount of CO2: Well considering that we are now at the highest level in 420,000 years (from ice core data) and likely at least the last 20 million years and are still rising quite rapidly, one can surmise that the proper amount is lower unless we enjoy playing uncontrolled experiments with the earth’s climate system.
(2) Forest fires: How did you measure the amount of CO2 released in a forest fire to compare to the amount from fossil fuel burning or did you just guess? Also note that fossil fuel burning is releasing stores of carbon that have long been sequestered. The natural cycle of trees growing and eventually burning or decaying is essentially just recycling the same carbon over and over again.
(3) Volcanoes: While they do release some greenhouse gases, they also release lots of aerosols and such that have a cooling effect. The net effect overall is generally cooling and, in fact, modern climate model simulations that reproduce most of the major features of the climate record over the last ~130 years rely on inclusion of natural forcings such as variations in the solar irradiance and volcanic activity as well as natural forcings such as greenhouse gases and aerosols. Neither natural forcings, as currently understood, alone nor human forcings, as currently understood, alone can reproduce this temperature record but the combination of the two reproduces it quite well. See here.
Actually, methane is one of the greenhouse gases that is covered under the Kyoto Protocol and also under the proposed McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act. (There are 6 gases in total.) The part about water vapor is deceptive. Yes, water vapor has the effect of being a greenhouse gas in the sense of causing the atmosphere to retain more heat. However, it is not one that we humans have significant direct over. This is because the amount of water vapor we emit is small compared to the amount in the atmosphere and because the timescale for equilibration of water vapor in the atmosphere is much shorter than CO2 (for which the timescale is on the order of 100 years)…i.e., it just “rains” out.
However, there is an important way in which we can indirectly affect the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Namely, if we emit the long-lived gases like CO2 into the atmosphere and warm it, then the warmer atmosphere has a higher equilibrium value for water vapor and thus the amount of water vapor increases. This then leads to additional warming. In scientific terms, this is called a “positive feedback” and the estimate is that it magnifies the warming that occurs as a direct consequence of CO2 by about a factor of 3. However, there is still considerable uncertainty about this magnitude (e.g., because it is not clear how increased condensed water vapor…i.e., clouds…also play back into the system). The link I gave to the NAS page shows a recent full report on better understanding these climate feedbacks.
Zagadka: I don’t really see how that is contradicting what I said. In fact, it is basically saying the same thing from a slightly different viewpoint. I.e., I was explaining why there is only a limited amount of carbon one can release into the atmosphere by burning these trees and Cecil was explaining why there is only a limited amount of carbon one can remove from the atmosphere by planting trees.
This is one of the more frequently propagated pieces of fiction coming from those who prefer an ostrich approach to the environmental disaster. Methane blocks more infrared light from escaping the earth than carbon dioxide, so why do environmentalists focus on CO2 rather than methane?
Well the answer is pretty simple. Methane does not trap more infrared light than CO2. CO2 traps more infrared light than methane. The argument being propagated by steel rat is a lie, and anybody who spreads it is either a liar or else has not studied the issue very deeply.
To be more precise: a molecule of methane retains more heat than a molecule of carbon dioxide. Our friend steel rat jumps directly from there to a statement that methane is a bigger overall factor on global temperatures than CO2. However, to make that leap of logic, you have to assume that the number of molecules of the two gases in the atmosphere is exactly the same. That’s a pretty big assumption, wouldn’t you say? Indeed, when we check the actualfacts , you’ll see that the concentration of carbon dioxide is more than 200 times higher than the concentration of methane atmosphere. Thus even though methane retains more heat per molecule, carbon dioxide has a larger overall effect.
No need to thank me for fighting your ignorance, steel. It’s all part of a day’s work.
That would be correct. The plankton and sea weed in the ocean are responsible for roughly 80 percent of all CO2 absorption. (Anyone who needs cite can check any decent oceanography textbook.) Even if it is true that the amount of land territory covered by green plants is increasing, the effect on total worldwide absorption would be trivial, because land plants matter so little.
Hopefully you’ll forgive me if I don’t reply to each point individually.
The research I did wasn’t rigorous by any stretch of the imagination, but I did not use web sites except to get up to date data, since the books I had access to were relatively old.
What I’m hearing is that before man, fluctuations in CO2 were “normal”, after man, they are not? Why is this the case? Could it be because of the increased population?
I have still seen no historical data that shows CO2 causing global temperature rise. It simply doesn’t exist.
I’ve read parts of the IPCC reports. Even after they revised it to downplay their earlier portents of doom, because they were simply wrong and the facts weren’t supporting the assumptions. And even the parts they deleted in the recent revisions in order to make it conform to their agenda.
You have to show me. And all the links I’ve seen are not convincing. They are based on assumptions and computer models that are notoriously wrong. And if they were right, then by their own admission there is nothing we can do to stop the increase.
Conversely, I do think we should seek the use of alternate energy sources, but for other reasons, not because of the imaginary effects of CO2.
Here is one problem I have with the pro global warming data:
Taken from this source provided by another poster:
Define “recent”. How do they know it’s anthropogenic? Maybe there’s been an increase in the termite population that’s caused an increase in methane, or the cow population, or the people population. So everyong stop farting!!
Increased from what? What baseline? What’s the anthropogenic source? Is it becuase I’m eating too many onion rings?
And here is some more information on the Medieval Warm Period
Last thing we want to do, though, is embark on a massive terraforming project and destroy the atmosphere unintentionally. Wouldn’t be the first kind of time we’ve done that (see gasoline additives).