Thanks… 
I’ve been living in the same city for 14 years now… and the climate 10+ years ago was never this hot here in summer. I remember thinking the climate was quite temperate here… was…
I do hope Bush will be kindly remembered like Chamberlain... as someone totally blind to the obvious disaster in the making. "There is no Global Warming in our times..."Well your assumption of a flat 10% reduction is equally ad hoc. What I was really trying to get across is that conservation can make a significant impact on energy policy and to reject that out of hand is irresponsible.
If you look you’ll see that the 2% reduction in use is tied to the energy used 2 years prior. Any newly developed energy consumer is likely to be made more efficient over time correct? Well I’ve modeled that as 2%. Since my model only speak to a 15 year period, not 100 years, a 2% increase in efficiency over 15 years doesn’t have enough time to run off into too many errors. Roughly speaking a product at the start of the period would have to reduce it consumption by a third by the end of the model. That is hardly wildly out of line and in the case of Canadian electrical consumption can save 54 billion dollars within the context of my numbers. Change the numbers to a 1% conservation factor and a 1.5% growth in electrical consumption and you wind up with an 8% increase compared to 23% increase. The economy still reaps a total of 25 billion dollars in savings, not counting the cost associated with building electrical plants etc.
It comes down to reducing the number of required plants and so being able to build the least intrusive kind.
Energy consumption seems to be exponential, making small changes immediately allows for greater time to adjust. Time to better perfect C0[sub]2[/sub] sequestering, nuclear plant installation, investigate the C0[sub]2[/sub] holding capacity of the oceans etc…
Actually the vast majority (more than 80%, at a guess) of the ice core data that I have seen shows the opposite, that temperature rises before greenhouse gases. The problem is that most of this data is presented in a high-level view, where all you see is CO2 and Temp rising at the same time. If you get granular you see that simply isn’t the case. In some cases greenhouse gases rose significantly and temp dropped. In other cases the opposite occurred (greenhouse gases dropped and temp rose). Sometimes the time difference was hundreds of years, sometimes thousands. But the change was almost always abrupt.
SR
The opposite of what? I said that the initial trigger is the orbital oscillations that lead to warming that lead to the release of greenhouse gases that lead to more warming. This is in fact compatible with the idea that the warming starts before the release of greenhouse gases (although it would imply that a lot of the warming occurs after the release of greenhouse gases).
By the way, I believe that there are issues with the exact aligning of the temperature and CO2 data so you may be believing you can differentiate which came first beyond the extent to which the data warrants. There are a few good articles by the people who actually analyzed the ice core data. I’ll try to dig them up when I get the chance.
For example, from here:
And, here is what the IPCC report says:
The opposite of the implication that CO2 and other greenhouse gases trigger any warming at all. The warming was already occurring, most likely due to solar variations and orbital oscillations, as you mentioned, how can it be said with any certainty that any continued warming is triggered by increases in greenhouse gases?
Your subsequent quotes are reducng the time span significantly. 20,000 years is still a very small period of time. Even 420,000 is a small point in the scale. The fact remains that warming on the scale that we may be currently seeing HAS occurred in the ancient past.
Let’s say that we significantly reduce the use of fossil fuels, I’m all for that, if for no other reason that to get out from under the middle eastern thumb of oppression. Will it really significantly reduce the rate at which atmospheric CO2 increases or decreases? How about all the breathing living things on the planet? They’re increasing at an exponential rate as well. why not just get rid of more humans, then they won’t breathe OR drive cars.
SR
Well, I mean plants DO use CO2 as a primary food source, and sunlight to synthesize it. So it’s pretty much an established fact. Plant nuseries sometimes use CO2 generators to promote plant growth. And it’s also why people believe talking to plants helps them grow. It’s not the talking, per se, but the burst of CO2 from the mouth of the speaker.
So, we could all strap flower boxes to the backs of our cars and the CO2 will go right into the plants!
See ya, gotta make a run down to the patent office 
SR
I’m not so sure. I read somewhere of a theory that says global warming could lead to more ocean evaporation which could lead to greater cloud cover which could led more sunlight being reflected back into space which could lead to lower temperatures worldwide.
Well, it depends what you mean by “any certainty”. If you really mean with “absolute certainty” then, no, we can’t be sure because science is not deductive but inductive and all knowledge is technically tentative. But, if you mean, what is the evidence that the CO2 and other greenhouse gases account for much of the warming, I’ll give you what I know of the evidence (with the caveat that a climate scientist could probably tell you more):
(1) The idea that these gases should cause warming follows from very basic chemistry and physics. I.e., it is in their very nature to absorb infrared radiation such as that which the earth is re-radiating back into space. Admittedly, how this effect then gets magnified or reduced by various feedback mechanisms is still the subject of debate.
(2) Best estimates of the amount of warming that should have occurred if the greenhouse gas increases were a major factor in the warming are in the right ballpark.
(3) Estimates of the temperature rise that should occur due to the known variations in sunlight hitting the earth due to the orbital variations are too small to account for the warming that was seen. There have been attempts to propose amplifying mechanisms (other than through the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations) or other mechanisms for how changes in solar intensity or sunspot activity or whatnot could lead to sufficient warming alone but these have not panned out.
I’m not exactly sure what you are trying to say here. Are you seriously trying to argue that we need to understand every last detail about climatic variations over the last 4.5 billion years in order to be able to have some confidence about what might happen in the next few hundred years? These are the sorts of times when naysayers on anthropogenic climate change begin to sound a lot like creationists in the way they attack the science and say, “But, noone was around to see what really happened” and so forth.
There is, by the way, evidence going back much further than 420,000 years (and some ice core data now goes back over 700,000 years I believe), but that data is much less detailed and much more sporadic than the ice core data.
You seem to be claiming that the CO2 increases might not be due to burning of fossil fuels. This is a view that you will find no support for in the scientific community, even among those who are naysayers on anthropogenic climate change. There may still be some uncertainties in the carbon cycle, but the basic evidence that fossil fuel emissions are leading to the rise in CO2 levels in not one of them. (Actually, the rise in CO2 levels has been such that thus far about 1/2 of the fossil fuel emissions are being uptaked by the biosphere and the hydrosphere…So, CO2 in the atmosphere is rising at about 1/2 the rate it would if there was no ability of the biosphere and hydrosphere to respond to these increases. However, at some point there is expected to be some saturation of the ability to re-uptake this CO2…And, perhaps, even some release of CO2 into the atmosphere, like happened during previous warming event.)
As for human respiration, first off, the amount of CO2 that a human emits is pretty small compared to that of a car or other machine that runs on fossil fuels. Secondly (and see the discussion of your next point too), the thing about fossil fuels is that we are releasing a source of carbon that has long been locked away. Some of the other things that we do are just recycling carbon that has been transitioning back and forth between the atmosphere and organic material on shorter time scales.
Land use policies can in fact have an effect on uptake of CO2, which is why the destruction of the tropical rainforest for example is a contributor to the rise in CO2 and why reforestation practices can help to some degree. Unfortunately, the amount of compensation that can be done this way is somewhat limited because plants just store carbon…They re-release it into the atmosphere when they die and decay.
Well, you are talking about a feedback effect. I.e., that warming would lead to a negative feedback through the mechanism you mention. This would not lead to net cooling but would lead to a stabilizing effect that would reduce the amount of warming that would occur.
The biggest proponent of this idea is Richard Lindzen who has something called the “iris” effect whereby the earth’s climate is stabilized by this effect of warming leading to more clouds that lead to more sunlight being reflected back. However, most scientists don’t buy into this being a very important effect for a number of reasons:
(1) It tends to predict a climate system that ought to be a lot more stable than what has historically been seen with the glaciation-deglaciation cycles and so forth.
(2) The effects of clouds are quite complicated and depend on their geographic location, their height, the size of the water droplets in them and so forth. Intuitively, one can see this by realizing that clouds can act as a blanket too, reflecting back heat radiated from the earth…This is why in the winter, the coldest nights tend to be those with clear skies. At any rate, Lindzen made some specific statements about cloud cover in the tropics that he showed some data to support but subsequent studies have not tended to bear out his theory.
(3) It is important to note that while the net feedback effect of clouds remains controversial, what is better understood is that the increase in uncondensed water vapor in the atmosphere due to the increased evaporation due to warming is a positive feedback effect because water vapor is, in a certain sense, a greenhouse gas. In fact, it is quite a potent one. [It is important to recognize that while water is a greenhouse gas in this sense, it is not one that it is easy for us to directly effect very much…i.e., unlike CO2, it doesn’t have a long residence time in the atmosphere so we don’t need to be too concerned about our direct emissions of water. The way we can affect its concentration in the atmosphere is through this indirect effect of putting long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2 into the atmosphere, causing warming, which then increases the equilibrium amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.]
And, by the way, the talk of nuclear winter involved all the particulate matter kicked up which is a different issue and goes back to the known fact that large volcanic eruptions does tend to lead to cooling on the scale of months to a few years because of the particulate matter that can block solar radiation.
By the way, in regards to what scientists think the evidence from the past says about future climate, and particularly, the climate system’s sensitivity to CO2 concentration, here is the summary of a very recent article that appeared in Science. (I think everyone can get access to the summary, at least with free registration but you likely have to have a AAAS membership, or find the journal in the library in hardcopy form, to read the full article.) These scientists argue that the evidence from paleoclimate over millions of years suggests that the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 concentration is likely on the high end of what the climate models indicate:
From the summary:
From the article itself:
Of course, in the really long term we’re headed for the heat death of the universe, but I doubt there’ll be any of us around to worry about it.
Change hurts. But we need to do it. Not for the sake of change itself, but obviously we have been chopping up trees and burning stuff willy nilly and we can’t expect that to have no consequences whatsoever.
And of course the US gets a giant bullseye on its back because we’ve sold ourselves the idea of a lifestyle that is completely unrealistic, both from an economic and environmental viewpoint, and we’re so unapologetic about it. We can’t stop consuming goods tomorrow, but we can try not to buy large, gas-guzzling cars to show off our manhood, curtail urban sprawl so we don’t destroy what greenery we’ve got left, and be a little nicer to our neighbors while we’re at it.
…of course, the chances of that happening has about a snowball’s chance in hell, and I hear their heat index has hit historical highs…
Here, from the Technical Summary of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) on “The Scientific Basis” is some more info on CO2: