Do people actually take these guys seriously? I thought they had been pretty thoroughly debunked as a front group for Canadian oil companies that has political ties to the current Conservative government (Cite 1, Cite 2).
Man has changed the climate many times.
In Australia, the aborigines burned the forests and created deserts.
The same is probably true about the Mayans and the Carthaginians and the Easter Islanders.
And of course the clearing of the vast forests of Michigan and Minnesota changed the weather in those states. With natural windbreaks gone, many changes ensued, including a sharp increase in tornados.
All I know is we used to get ball-worthy snowfalls several times a winter, and now, we’re lucky to get one. Fuck that shit.
Ayuh. Astroturf. The same is true of the [the [url=Cooler Heads Coalition - Wikipedia]Cooler Heads Coalition,](]Advancement of Sound Science Center,[/url) the Global Climate Coalition, the Greening Earth Society, the Information Council on the Environment, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, and the [url=]Scientific Alliance.
Just a preemptive post, in case Leaffan was thinking of citing a “study” from any of those.
Crap. My browser just barfed after many minutes of typing, and I can’t respond immediately. Stay tuned tomorrow when I inform you that only 0.037% of the atmosphere consists of C02, and that our nearest heat source is 93 million miles away, and that it’s not politically correct to oppose environmentalists (considering your funding (Universities) may depend upon it).
I’m a little skeptical about this one.
I can maybe understand how a vast forest would present differing thermal characteristics as opposed to agricultural land, but I’d be surprised if a reduction in tornados was due to any ‘windbreaking’ from trees. 
Tornados don’t really care too much about trees as windbreaks; they don’t even qualify as speed bumps. Huge areas of virgin forest were mowed down in northern Minnesota a few years ago by tornados. The trees didn’t seem to slow them down much, if at all.
Got a cite for the more trees/windbreaks = less tornados assertion?
And why just Minnesota and Michigan? Why not Wisconsin, too…or are they still a bunch of tree-dwellers as I suspect they are?
Here, Here.
More junk science. Just like the rest of it.
Every person has their own standard for when action is necessary. Consider: the Netherlands has already evacuated over 500,000 acres of land due ot rising sea levels. In the United State, 400,000 acres. In the Maldives, a string of islands of the Indian Ocean, they’re in the process of evacuating several low-lying islands and building massive barriers around others. The people who’ve already had to abandon their homes and move elsewhere probably think that action should have been taken a long time ago.
(And yes, I do have a cite.)
Now we might ask at what point will everyone agree that action is necessary? For a person who lives well inland and not in the path of the severe weather events that are growing more severe due to global warming, who’s willing to put up with a ten-degree increase in temperature and various local effects, that day may never come.
Several insurance companies have already gone bankrupt due to the increasing frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic. That increase in hurricane activity is caused by global warming. To meet the changes, insurance rates will have to go up not just along the coast line, but at many places around the world. In some places, there will be calls for the government to step in and save the insurance companies, as happened after Hurricane Katrina.
Depends on the place. For small farmers in many parts of the globe, droughts are pushing them out of business. In other places, it’s storms and flooding. For the major corporations in the first world, changes have not yet been big enough to affect their business structure much. That may change.
There’s also the philosophical side of the equation. The United States is the country closely associated with capitalism, and the American government has disgraced itself by denying the basic facts about global warming and deliberately spreading information. Furthermore, many corporations, particularly in the oil industry, have funded numerous efforts to undermine real science and spread junk science. (Brainglutton has already kindly provided us with a host of examples.) All of this has damaged the credibility of capitalism and will continue to do so.
Not much effect. You can kill people and get killed by people regardless of rising temperatures.
Remember that in the third world, most of the population is still small farmers. As extreme weather hurts their livelihood, many of them will be forced to abandon their farms and move to cities, exacerbating a trend already in progress. With this increasing influx of poor, third-world cities will be forced to house most of them in slums.
In the first world, some farmers will also be driven out of business, though they can depend on governments for some aid. First world cities are mostly immune to the effects of climate change for the time being, though as any ex-resident of New Orleans could tell you there are exceptions.
Long-term political effects are hard to predict. The effects of global warming will cause unhappiness among the poor, which can lead to political unrest. Increased volatility can be good or bad for democracy, but don’t doubt that global warming will have effects. It already has. In Ecuador in 2005, severe drought linked to global warming ruined many small farmers. They turned their anger against the current government, and leftist Alfredo Palacio rose to power.
Just FTR…I’m not debating nor denying the existence of global warming.
Hell, I’m all for it! I like brown Christmases.
Indeed - most of it is nitrogen and oxygen. These are not greenhousing gases (their diatomic structure does not absorb or emit infra-red wavelengths). There is also a lot of water vapour, a strong greenhousing gas. However, this crucially remains in equilibrium due to its ability to condense into a liquid at everyday temperatures and pressures. So, that fraction of a percent of atmosphere actually accounts for up to a quarter (will fish out citation upon request) of the greenhousing effect of the atmosphere, and it has been boosted by an entire third in mere decades (do you deny this?).
Of what relevance is this if the energy output so vast, even accounting for an inverse square law?
This is utter rubbish - if anything, university climatology departments get more funding from PR-conscious fossil fuel companies than from environmental lobbyists (and have you ever heard of tuition fees?)
I’d be very interested in us simply following the numbers of digging up, say, a kilogram of coal (a safe carbon store) and burning it to produce an amount of CO2, then scaling up these numbers for the estimated global output in the last two centuries. Would you care to do this with me?
Then let us explore it honestly and earnestly, admitting that either of us might be wrong. Agreed?
I ask again, directly, Leaffan. Do you think that a CO2 concentration of, say, 600ppm - more than twice the level it was for millennia before the industrial revolution - will have “insignificant” consequences?
I would be interested in taking a greenhouse and gradually increasing the percentage of CO2 in it, while observing its internal temperature. I would also like a control greenhouse.
I would also be interested in where the carbon in coal and oil came from, since it was captured by photosynthesis it must have been atmospheric at some time.
Interestingly most of the energy we produce finally lands up as heat (exceptions being when it lands up as steel, aluminium etc). It makes one wonder where all that heat is going.
Yep, it was sucked out of the atmosphere several hundred million years ago and locked up in the earth’s crust until the industrial revolution incented humans to dig it up and burn it. Incidentally, this caused a global cooling event, which is fortunate for us, because the earth of a few hundred million years ago was somewhat inhospitable to humans, and certainly the process of reverting to that climate would cause quite a bit of pain for life adapted for Earth’s current climate.
It radiates into space. It’s also a very small amount of heat relative to that the sun provides.
I’ll say this much for you global warming skeptics. While you may not have much support from actual climate scientists (none at all, in fact), you continue to maintain a large majority among internet users who recently read results somewhere but can’t quite remember where.
Let’s have a look at your claim:
Global carbon dioxide concentrations have been rising dramatically since the 1950’s. (Cite )
Global temperatures have been rising only since the 1980’s. (Cite )
You claim that rising in CO2 concentration resulted form rising temperatures, which means that the result occurred thirty years before the cause. After all, the 1950’s occurred before the 1980’s, or at least that’s what I was taught in school. Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the 1980’s actually happened before the 1950’s, and this fact has been covered up because it’s not politically correct. That would certainly make as much sense as anything else that you’ve asserted in this thread.
Revisit the 19th century if you must, but you could simply look at the spectroscopic reading of heat absorption for infra-red wavelengths. You’ll see that oxygen and nitrogen let such wavelengths though, while water vapour and CO2 absorb and “keep” them readily.
Into space, eventually. But that time lag in getting there is what causes all the trouble (and also explains why we’re only now seeing the consequences of CO2 released decades ago, ie., we’re already in for a world of shit, the question is how much worse we want to make it for our grandchildren).
It was, and over the course of many millions of years it was gradually put into the ground. Now it’s being released back into the atmosphere over a period of mere decades. See any practical difficulties with that?
Well, have a look here perhaps.
:dubious: The organizations noted in post #24 are astroturf. Steven Milloy’s “Junk Science” is a plastic nematode gnawing at their roots.
You got nuttin’.
Don’t bother. It is true in the past that the strong correlation between temperatures and CO2 levels seems to have worked both ways. I.e., rises in temperature triggered by orbital oscillations seem to have caused rises in CO2 which then further increased the temperatures.
However, in the current case, we know it is our emissions that are producing the increase in CO2 for the following reasons:
(1) CO2 levels have, in the course of about 100 years shot up to levels not seen on the earth in at least the last 750,000 years (which is how far ice core data goes back, and takes us through something like 6 or 7 ice age - interglacial cycles) and likely in the last 10 million years or more. It would indeed be a remarkable coincidence if the CO2 levels just happened to shoot up like this when we just happened to start liberating large amounts of carbon, long-locked-away in the form of fossil fuels, into the atmosphere!
(2) The amount of increase in CO2 is closely correlated with the amount of CO2 that we have liberated by burning fossil fuels. In fact, the CO2 rise is about 1/2 of what would be expected if all of the CO2 from burning fossil fuels were to remain in the atmosphere, showing that so far the oceans, land, and biosphere have been able to take up some of the excess…although there are reasons to believe that some of these sinks will start to saturate and that some positive feedbacks (such as melting permafrost releasing CO2) will start to come into play.
(3) By looking at the isotopic distribution of the carbon in the CO2, it can be seen fairly directly that the CO2 increase is due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Well, this may be your point of view and, in one sense, it is technically correct in the sense that science is inductive and thus nothing is ever proven. The evidence just continues to accumulate to the point where those scientists who do not believe the theory is correct die out or continue to make noises at the margins.
However, the evidence has convinced people who actually matter, such as the U.S. National Academy of Science (NAS) and the corresponding academies in 10 other major countries (U.K., France, Russia, China, Germany, …) which issued this statement last year. [Note that part of the charter of the NAS is to provide the U.S. government with advice on scientific issues.] The councils of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society have issued similar statements. Hell, even oil companies like BP and Shell have accepted the scientific consensus on climate change and committed to some serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Yes, you can find people, some of them at least vaguely scientists, usually with close links to fossil fuel companies, conservative / libertarian think-tanks, or both who often have nifty websites spouting various contrarian claims about climate change. However, that does not mean these views represent the vast majority of the scientific community…and in fact their views represent only a tiny fraction of the refereed scientific literature.
Wow. Frankly the interwoviness of all this stuff is somewhat comically surprising.
I’m perplexed and amazed.
On a different note, what about the shrinking polar ice caps on Mars? You can Google it. I’m afraid to provide cites.
As has been noted by another poster, the spectral absorption of CO2 is well-known. As for this particular experiment, however, it would not really be that easy to demonstrate the effect. It turns out that the mechanism by which the increased absorption and re-emission of radiation by CO2 causes the earth to warm involves the fact that the temperature in the troposphere gets colder as you go up. Effectively, what the increase in CO2 does is cause an increase in the effective level from which the earth is emitting radiation back into space and because it is colder as you go up and the amount of radiative emission goes as the 4th power of the temperature, less radiation ends up being emitted and radiated away from the earth creating a radiative imbalance that is eliminated only by raising the temperature of the entire troposphere. So, you would need a really tall column of CO2 to really demonstrate the “greenhouse effect” in a simple experiment…although simply demonstrating the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2 would presumably be easier to do.
As another poster noted, this amount of heat is very small compared to the amount available from the sun, which is why our changing of the chemical composition of the atmosphere (and thus the amount of the sun’s energy that the atmosphere retains) turns out to be a much more important effect than this direct heating due to the energy we produce.