It is not being dense, the media blitz you are talking about is irrelevant when policy makers of the past consulted with the scientists then about that badly remembered “blitz”, the result: it was ignored, the evidence was not accepted by the people that counted.
:rolleyes:
And the voters believed that huh?
I do remember that I pointed out to you the evidence that McCain had virtually the same idea and that is why the whole “Obama will kill coal” deal was misleading, the problem here is that you refuse to acknowledge you were had by the right wing media on this and regarding AGW.
When one becomes a teacher one has to.
BTW I’m becoming a history teacher here, I have to say that I will never teach English for 2 reasons, one: English is my second language, and two: I already said that my grammar is a crime against nature so I think it is good to make amends to nature in a more meaningful way.
Oh come on now. McCain NEVER talked about burying coal (pun intended). And he wasn’t thought of fondly by the right wing. He was running as a liberal Democrat to the right of Obama.
As I grow older I’ve come to hate the English language. It’s retarded, at least the spelling side of it.
I totally agree. CAGW has all the red flags of BS. That alone doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, but any reasonably intelligent person over the age of 30 should be intensely skeptical.
I basically agree, and look forward to people pointing at the weasel language which is contained in all these “consensus statements” which have been bandied about. I imagine the argument will go something like this:
“The NAS wasn’t actually predicting terrible things would result from CO2 emissions. They were just saying it would be a good idea to consider reducing those emissions and looking for alternative energy sources. Which it was. Just look at how popular solar [or whatever] has become. There was never a consensus that CO2 emissions would lead to runaway warming.”
I’ll give you benefit of the doubt, and assume you are talking about degress Fahrenheit? Cause even this last century, where we started out below average and ended up above average, it was only a .7 Celsius difference, or about 1.3 Fahrenheit.
I’m not sure 1.3 counts as ‘degrees’ (plural) or not, but it seems to me, you lost this proposition before you even started.
Are gadgets (i.e. electronics) really that significant a part of the problem? It seems to me that the cost of using many of these things is traded down from the greater cost of not using them–for instance if you can use your cell to avoid some driving. Similarly, you need electricity to write an email on your computer and send it, but the impact has to be minimal to that of using a piece of paper to write a letter, and then having it physically carried to the recipient.
:dubious: “Red flags”? Such as hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific research articles and strong warning statements from multiple national and international organizations of scientists?
Sure, scientific consensus doesn’t equal certainty, and any newly-emerging theory could be wrong no matter how many people believe in it. But it’s amazing to see how many self-confident amateurs are so willing to put their faith in their own personal instincts of “bullshit detection” rather than in the conclusions of actual science.
When people trust their own ill-informed gut instincts over scientific credentials on subjects like UFO’s and the paranormal, we call them “woo-woos”. But when people trust their own ill-informed gut instincts over scientific credentials on climate change, they call themselves “skeptics”.
“Skeptical” about what, though? A lot of otherwise intelligent laypeople seem to be priding themselves on their skepticism with regard to the findings of professional scientists, while remaining totally oblivious to their naive lack of skepticism about their own qualifications and competence to evaluate scientific issues. That’s not “skepticism” they’ve got there, it’s just ignorance buttressed by complacency.
It seems to me that he may have been talking about a shorter time period. To illustrate, if global surface temperatures increased 0.1C between 1997 and 1998, one could characterize it as an increase at the rate of 10C per century.
Similarly, if global surface temperatures dropped 0.2C between 1998 and 2003, one could characterize it as a decrease of 4C per century.
So the denominator is arguably important, which is why I asked for it.
So Chronos, what denominator are you using? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?
I thought I was clear enough the first time: A change over a century measured in degrees. And yes, 0.7 degrees is a quantity measured in degrees, as opposed to decidegrees or centidegrees. But if you want it more precisely: Find me a continuous span of 3.15569*10[sup]9[/sup] seconds, properly prior to the span of that duration ending now, during which the average temperature of the planet Earth increased by an amount greater than 0.7 Kelvin.
If the tipping point is inevitable, wouldn’t we be better served by using our resources to handle global warming and mitigate its consequences rather than trying to prevent it?
Has anyone mentioned that buffered environments do not change linearly? (I didn’t find any mention).
Buffered environments (and the earth is very large, with lots of variable influences, and ‘buffered’) change on an S-curve. Change from 0 to 10% and from 90 to 100% is gradual and linear. Change from 10% to 90% is very rapid and functionally impossible to reverse.
Anyway, since the denominator is 100 years, your challenge is rather challenging since there is no candidate 100 year period for which there is instrumental data. Instead, one must use proxies and there is a lot of room for debate about how good temperature proxies are.
From 0 to 1000AD the climate appears to go fairly linearly from -0.4C to -0.2C. This is significantly less climb per century than 0.7C.
Even going from the lowest (red) line to the highest (pale green), the range is only from -0.8C to -0.2C for a full range of 0.6C, and there’s no particular reason to think that the real temperature jumped around from one line to another. Most likely it was at a midpoint of the three, which was–like said–a fairly lazy linear climb between 0 and 1000AD.
Not necessarily. Even if we can’t prevent going over the tipping point (which is still debatable), we can certainly delay it. Every year that we delay it is another year to work on ways to deal with it, should we cross it. And who knows? Maybe the horse will sing, and some time in that year we’ll figure out some unexpected solution to the whole shebang.
What none of the GW people ever consider: what if a global temp. increase leads to a NEW equilibrium? This has happened in the past, and it would involve some scenarion like this:
-CO2 levels rise
-biomass (oceanic plankton, tropical forests, grasslands increase in area)
-biomass increases transpiration rates (more water vapor pumped into atmosphere
-snaowfall increases in winter, at high latitudes
-new equilibrium point reached
The alpine glaciers are prooff of this. In the 15th century, they were advancing (they destroyed hundreds of villages). Now, they are melting back (oh the Horror!) to where they were in Roman times.
McCain never said he would bankrupt coal plants. Obama is advocating a 100% auction on the cap and trade systemwhich is essentially a tax on coal plants. He is also calling for an 80% reduction of GHG by 2050 versus McCain’s 60%.
By reducing our carbon emissions, maybe? I would have thought that was obvious. Switch to more fuel-efficient cars, and use them less. Insulate homes better. Be more vigilant about turning lights and appliances off when not in use. Put more windmills into the electrical grid (yes, I know that they’re not reliable enough to be the backbone of the system, but we can get a heck of a lot more use out of them than we are). If there’s time, build more nuclear plants (and start building them anyway, since we don’t know how much time there is).
You didn’t happen to notice the high food prices last time you were at the grocery store, did you? That’s partly a consequence of changing climate patterns, which is in turn partly a consequence of carbon dioxide-induced anthropogenic climate change.
Yes to all. If any set of people, no matter how large or small, reduces their carbon emissions, that will delay, by at least some finite amount, the time when cumulative carbon emissions are enough to put us over the tipping point. What’s the difficult part to understand about that?
