Eaarth

[NeilBlanchard]

Some of the 6 Billion other people we share the Earth with:

[Thymeclock]

Originally Posted by t vago

You know, it takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume that mankind is singlehandedly "destroying" the planet by burning fossil fuels.

No, that's playbook Leftist ideology. The only problem is that this is 2010 and we'll point out that the old hoax is 40 years behind the times. Also most people aren't as gullible as they were then.

Then again, it would probably take the same kind of arrogance to push this idea down our throats by claiming we're myopic/ignorant/greedy/etc...

There is no limit to guilt mongering. Don't you feel guilty for being alive and taking up space on this plaanet?

Whatever happened to global cooling, Neil? You know, the idea that mankind was somehow hastening the onset of the glaaaaaaaaaaaaaaciers by burning fossil fuels?

That was exactly the premise of the first convenient hoax in the 1970's: Global cooling, expounded in the book written by Paul Erlich. Every good Leftist (and gullible, useful idiot) bought a copy and became a zealot.

See, "everything old is new again". "This too shall pass".

[Thymeclock]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Is that any different from the arrogance of assuming combustion has no side effects?

First, before you assume that anyone else is making any assumptions, you get to define "side effects".

[Thymeclock]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Some of the 6 Billion other people we share the Earth with:

Hey! When all else fails, it's time to play the GUILT card! Awwww, don't those big brown eyes make you feel guilty?

If you don't fall for the playbook guilt trip (and if you expose it for the emotionally manipulative ploy that it is) you'll be called callous, uncaring, hard-hearted, mean-spirited, racist, bigoted, insensitive, etc., etc.

Time to say it again: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

[t vago]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Carbon dioxide is an heat insulator -- this is shown several times in the video I posted earlier.

Then explain why the deserts have such wild temperature fluctuations as they do. I understand that they only have carbon dioxide as the prevalent greenhouse gas.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

We've got the same exact water that we had when Earth was formed. The air is the result of life balancing out. How could adding back all that carbon *not* throw things into a tizzy?

No, you don't know that. Comets, for example, are big balls of dirty ice. Are you to tell me that not one single comet has ever hit the Earth during its history?

And did you even pay attention to that graph? CO2 has been declining for the past millions of years. Are you now going to utter that the Sun has been steadily dimming or brightening or what? But somehow, man-made CO2 production must be the sole and single cause of all this wonderful global warming we're having!

[NeilBlanchard]

Plants have been "packing" carbon into the Earth's crust for lo these billions of years. So, sure, carbon dioxide has been reduced.

And what is the oil, do you think?

Here's the big picture: for the 12,000 years that humans have done agriculture, the climate and the carbon dioxide have been pretty darn stable. Now, in the last 150-200 years, starting with coal, then natural gas and oil, we have released 100's of millions of years worth of carbon dioxide back into the air.

Yes, the whole situation has been in flux. Hell, there used to be just one continent and one ocean. There used to be NO oxygen in the air; only carbon dioxide and water vapor -- it was a furnace in every sense of the word. The lifeforms ate chemicals and used the heat as energy.

Cyanobacteria came along and used the sunlight instead, and they produced oxygen as waste. All the oxygen in the atmosphere came from plants consuming water during photosynthesis. And they are pulling carbon dioxide from the air, and some of that ends up in the Earth.

Early life forms made the Earth what it is. Along with all life forms, we came into being and evolved based on being part of this cycle. Every single life form on Earth depends on the fine balance that has come about. For hundreds of millions of years this is how it has worked. Slow changes are fine, in the big scheme of things.

We humans have existed for a mere 200,000 years. We have had agriculture for only 12,000 years. We worked our way into a relatively comfortable place within the cycle of life.

Then we discovered this amazing store of carbon fuel. Each gallon of oil = something like 92 tons of biological material -- the amount of stored energy in oil is staggering. And we have burned through about half of it -- say 200 million years worth, in less than 200 years.

An average of 1 million years worth of carbon stored away by every single plant and cyanobacteria that lived during that million years -- is released into the atmosphere each year that we have been burning oil and coal and gas.

So, on average the carbon that was stored away over a million year period -- which is 5X longer that humans have existed -- is released each year for the past 200 years.


How could that *not* affect the entire Earth, and every life form on it?!


So, whether or not you individually decide to keep being blind and greedy, the reality -- the situation we are all in, is real. You are being affected, and the sooner we all realize this, the better.

My brother Nathan had a tee shirt ~35 years ago, that had a motto:

"If you are not part of the solution, then you are the precipitate."

[t vago]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Plants have been "packing" carbon into the Earth's crust for lo these billions of years. So, sure, carbon dioxide has been reduced.

And what is the oil, do you think?

Here's the big picture: for the 12,000 years that humans have done agriculture, the climate and the carbon dioxide have been pretty darn stable. Now, in the last 150-200 years, starting with coal, then natural gas and oil, we have released 100's of millions of years worth of carbon dioxide back into the air.

Yes, the whole situation has been in flux. Hell, there used to be just one continent and one ocean. There used to be NO oxygen in the air; only carbon dioxide and water vapor -- it was a furnace in every sense of the word. The lifeforms ate chemicals and used the heat as energy.

Cyanobacteria came along and used the sunlight instead, and they produced oxygen as waste. All the oxygen in the atmosphere came from plants consuming water during photosynthesis. And they are pulling carbon dioxide from the air, and some of that ends up in the Earth.

Early life forms made the Earth what it is. Along with all life forms, we came into being and evolved based on being part of this cycle. Every single life form on Earth depends on the fine balance that has come about. For hundreds of millions of years this is how it has worked. Slow changes are fine, in the big scheme of things.

We humans have existed for a mere 200,000 years. We have had agriculture for only 12,000 years. We worked our way into a relatively comfortable place within the cycle of life.

Then we discovered this amazing store of carbon fuel. Each gallon of oil = something like 92 tons of biological material -- the amount of stored energy in oil is staggering. And we have burned through about half of it -- say 200 million years worth, in less than 200 years.

An average of 1 million years worth of carbon stored away by every single plant and cyanobacteria that lived during that million years -- is released into the atmosphere each year that we have been burning oil and coal and gas.

So, on average the carbon that was stored away over a million year period -- which is 5X longer that humans have existed -- is released each year for the past 200 years.


How could that *not* affect the entire Earth, and every life form on it?!


So, whether or not you individually decide to keep being blind and greedy, the reality -- the situation we are all in, is real. You are being affected, and the sooner we all realize this, the better.

My brother Nathan had a tee shirt ~35 years ago, that had a motto:

"If you are not part of the solution, then you are the precipitate."

Tell that to the residents of New York City, which has ground to a standstill due to AGW (and tell me when was the last time Arizona received a blizzard warning). Or the residents of England, who could experience their worst AGW in 300 years. Or to the residents of Europe, who continue to feel the effects of the current AGW snap.

And you still haven't answered my questions!

How does a variable star like the Sun affect global climate, and to what extent compared to mankind?

Why do deserts have such wide fluctuations in temperatures on a day-to-day basis, given that they should be blanketed with the same carbon dioxide as the rest of the planet?

Why is it that Antarctic ice experienced a net increase in mass over the last few years?

Why don't you go about banning dihydrogen monoxide, given that it's also a greenhouse gas produced by combustion of fossil fuels, and given that it affects global temperatures much more strongly than carbon dioxide?

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by t vago

Yup, we're just a bunch of knuckle-dragging [Neanderthals]...

Actually, everybody outside of native Africans have ~1-4% Neanderthal genes...

Hey Good Lookin': Early Humans Dug Neanderthals : NPR

More snow in some places is not contradictory to anthropogenic global climate change. Is is somewhat warmer overall on average, but things are also scrambled because of the greater heat energy changes the patterns, and the greater amount of water vapor in the air (because of more evaporation) means more precipitation, of all sorts.

How does a variable star like the Sun affect global climate, and to what extent compared to mankind?

Why do deserts have such wide fluctuations in temperatures on a day-to-day basis, given that they should be blanketed with the same carbon dioxide as the rest of the planet?

Why is it that Antarctic ice experienced a net increase in mass over the last few years?

Why don't you go about banning dihydrogen monoxide, given that it's also a greenhouse gas produced by combustion of fossil fuels, and given that it affects global temperatures much more strongly than carbon dioxide?

The climatologists have the data on the sun output, and it is included in their models. Of course it affects our climate -- it is the ultimate source of most of the energy we have.

Antarctica is a desert -- in fact it is the driest desert on Earth.

I think your source on increasing ice on Antarctica is mistaken. The NOVA program I linked to earlier, and every other source I have ever come across says that it is reducing. By the way: how much of the Earth's fresh water is frozen on Antarctica? How much of it is frozen on Greenland?

Water vapor? There was a recent study that showed that it takes an increase in carbon dioxide to trigger the increase in water vapor. So it is an amplifying effect; not a primary one.

[t vago]

Here's a little scientific paper for you, Neil. I doubt you'll read it, or if you do, you'll find some little thing about it that you will claim invalidates it.

For the rest of us knuckle-dragging mouth breathers, the paper states that a. Mankind produces about 3% of the total annual carbon dioxide output that goes into the atmosphere, b. carbon dioxide as a whole contributes about 8% to the greenhouse effect, and c. Mankind's contribution to the greenhouse effect is a whopping 0.24%

Furthermore, the paper contains this nifty little gem:

The oceans act as a huge heat energy buffer; the global climate is primarily governed by the enormous amount of heat stored in the oceans (total mass approx. 1.4 x 1024 g), rather than the minute amount of heat withheld in the heat-absorbing part of the atmosphere (total mass approx. 1.4 x 1018 g), a mass difference of one million times (Peixoto & Oort, 1992). Most of the atmospheric heat absorption occurs in water vapor (total mass approx. 1.3 x 1019 g), which is equivalent to a uniform layer of only 2.5 cm
of liquid water covering the globe, with a residence time of about 9 days (Peixoto & Oort, 1992).

The total internal energy of the whole ocean is more than 1.6 x 1027 Joule, about 2000 times larger than the total internal energy 9.4 x 1023 Joule of the whole atmosphere. Note that this energy is defined with respect to 0 Kelvin (Peixoto & Oort, 1992).

Furthermore the cryosphere (ice sheets, sea ice, permafrost, and glaciers; total mass of the continental ice is approx. 3.3 x 1022 g) plays a central role in the Earth's climate as an effective heat sink for the atmosphere and oceans, with a large latent heat of melting on the order of 9.3 x 1024 Joule, a hypothetic energy equivalent to cooling the entire oceans by about 2°C (5.8 x 1024 J/°C). For comparison, the energy needed to warm the entire atmosphere by 1°C is only 5.1 x 1021 Joule (Oerlemans & van der Veen, 1984).

Hence it will be impossible to melt the Earth's ice caps and thereby increase the sea level just by increasing the heat energy of the atmosphere through a few percent by added heat absorption of anthropogenic CO2 in the lower atmosphere.

[t vago]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

I think your source on increasing ice on Antarctica is mistaken. The NOVA program I linked to earlier, and every other source I have ever come across says that it is reducing. By the way: how much of the Earth's fresh water is frozen on Antarctica? How much of it is frozen on Greenland?

Your sources claimed that ice sheets in Antarctica are shrinking, which was true enough. However, you missed that Antarctica is much more than a couple of ice sheets.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

You just want to ignore the inconvenience of their results.

You seem to have nailed this one right on the head... for you.

Did your religious figures mention that they included a static Sun output for their flawed computer models? Why didn't they predict the decrease in cyclones or hurricanes? Why didn't they predict the cold snap most of the world is now enjoying?