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Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2011 12:43 pm
by Avid Reader
Maybe this isn’t the proper forum topic under which to express these particular thoughts, but they came to me while reading these posts, so I decided to post them here.

All the talk and speculation about new world-changing energy technologies reminds me of the efforts to invent a perpetual motion machine. The idea that somewhere out there a more-or-less inexhaustible source or method of creating energy must lurk, seems to ignore the fact that, at least so far, Newton has always proven correct: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I understand that this law does not directly address things like energy sources, however, it does address methodologies, which would have to be applied to any source in order to convert it into an efficient supply of usable energy. I can’t get too technical about this because, frankly, I don’t have the necessary background in physics. Rather, what I want to talk about is the common sense of how things work in the real world, either economically or scientifically.

For centuries scientists and inventors have sought the holy grail of perpetual motion; or, to put in terms more relative to this discussion, a source of unlimited energy without loss (here I might add, without consequence). And, though thousands of such devices and processes have been created, none have proven to result in energy creation even equal to energy consumption, especially when you include economics in the equation. Even the most promising things like solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels and the like, have their economic downside that makes them less than practical at today’s costs, and the only remedy (now pretty much agreed on) is to increase the cost of all energy to the point where some of these “unlimited” sources become practical alternatives to traditional sources.

There is always the chance, of course, that tomorrow someone will make a huge breakthrough and suddenly this historic failure will be overcome. However, it seems to me that nature is still telling us, “nothing is free;” that no matter what we do, there will be some price to pay, and that price will probably be more than the cost of whatever we can come up with.

In a way, it’s kind of like infinity, which can be approached but never reached. This doesn’t mean that continuing to try is unwise or futile, only that the populace should be aware of the reality, and not hang their hats on the idea that there is some kind of panacea out there just awaiting discovery.

I know I will probably get hammered for saying this by the more scientifically astute folks who post here because, like I said, I am not nearly as educated or knowledgeable in the sciences as the average contributor. And actually, I’d like to hear the arguments against what I’ve said, because I really hope I’m wrong about this. I do know that so-called “common sense” doesn’t always apply to things like quantum physics, so there may be something out there I’m not aware of or couldn’t comprehend if I was. I did hear that they’ve maybe found something that travels faster than the speed of light, which, I supposed might lead to an entire paradigm shift in the physical sciences, so maybe something really is out there waiting for us.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2011 8:52 pm
by geo
Avid Reader wrote:All the talk and speculation about new world-changing energy technologies reminds me of the efforts to invent a perpetual motion machine. The idea that somewhere out there a more-or-less inexhaustible source or method of creating energy must lurk, seems to ignore the fact that, at least so far, Newton has always proven correct: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I understand that this law does not directly address things like energy sources, however, it does address methodologies, which would have to be applied to any source in order to convert it into an efficient supply of usable energy.
This is all very well said and I think you're right on the nose. There's just nothing coming down the pipeline that comes close to the inexpensive and usable energy we get from fossil fuels. It seems likely that we're living in a bubble made possible by cheap energy that has allowed human population to grow exponentially. I used to worry about the peak oil scenario, but DWill mentions that we will become increasingly more efficient, not only at extracting oil from difficult places, but in how we use our energy. We certainly take our energy for granted. I think it would be fun and eye-opening to have a no electricity day just like the no drive day promoted in some communities. People would go home and not be able to use electric lights, TVs, computers etc. We used to call this camping.

I do think Robert's biofuel technology sounds very promising, but it would have to be built on a massive scale to make a dent in our energy needs. Biofuel replacing petroleum as our primary energy source sounds wonderful. But I also wonder what would happen if we did find some holy grail that yielded free and limitless energy. The earth would be able to accommodate a much larger human population and occupy an even larger ecological niche, displacing other life forms. Just how much of the earth are we entitled to?

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2011 8:39 pm
by DWill
I heard Joel Achenbach, the Washington Post science writer who has just written a book about the BP Gulf oil gusher, at the National Book festival today. He said that the magnitude of that disaster drives home the point for him that we humans don't just occupy a niche in nature. To say that we do sounds nice, but it's far off the mark. We are attempting to engineer the planet according to the needs of our civilization, and that involves bigger and bigger projects, meaning ever greater effects when something does go wrong. That role seems to be opposed to living in accordance with nature in any way. I'm not saying that we should "go back to nature," only that we can be up front about the kind of role we're playing. Even if we could use algae or waves to satisfy all our energy wants, these technologies would have their negative environmental effects, too, if only because so much much infrastructure and production would be needed. And if limitless energy did enable us to fit 50 billion people on the globe, how many thousands of additional species would need to make their exits?

On the way home, I was totally astounded to hear the NPR report that today the U.S. produces half of the oil it uses, importing the other half. Less than 10 years ago, the percentages were 33 and 66. In a short time, our hemisphere will eclipse Russia and then the Middle East in oil production. A good deal of that increase comes from us, with huge oil reserves (and gas, too) now accessible through fracking in North Dakota, Colo., Wyo. Louisiana, and several other states. This will be a bigger economic stimulus than anything the government could do. However, some are also saying it means game over as far as slowing climate change.

The question is, how can we possibly not take advantage of new technology to find oil and gas? Is there really any other option? It can make us feel good to say we need to invest in alternatives instead, but that's what we need to while we continue to exploit fossils, isn't it? We're necessarily all about the short-term, after all. We have an imperative to keep what we have going.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 11:38 am
by geo
This Associated Press article discusses the social and psychological reasons why people deny global warming. The article ran in our local paper with the headline something along the lines of you can't really deny global warming any more.

The link to the article is here.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... 49d13b180c

EDITOR'S NOTE: Climate change has already provoked debate in a U.S. presidential campaign barely begun. An Associated Press journalist draws on decades of climate reporting to offer a retrospective and analysis on global warming and the undying urge to deny.

The American `allergy' to global warming: Why?

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.

"I don't think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that," the author recalls.

But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of "global warming" didn't set off an instant outcry of angry denial.

In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the "greenhouse effect" is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened.

What's going on?

"The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.

He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democratic gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.

From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.

"The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger," the 79-year-old "grandfather of climate science" said in an interview. "But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized."

The solution: "Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit..." He stopped and laughed.

"Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up."

The basic physics of anthropogenic - manmade - global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.

"As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It's the physics that convinces me," said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, "to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world."

The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on.

In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland's buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.

By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists.

But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist's remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear.

That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain's Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts.

In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," the world's nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well.

"The statement that we'll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact," oil executive William F. O'Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto.

The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired.

"I'm not really surprised at the political reaction," the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. "I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner."

In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition's own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.

Kyoto's final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn't even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million - just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted - compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.

Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.

Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed - all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor.

The impact has been widespread.

An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared.

The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes.

From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world's seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere.

"We are scared, really and truly," diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific's Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.

Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.

The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world's coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.

The greatest fears may focus on "feedbacks" in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

The Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra's permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.

In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.

"Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee.

Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?"

The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change."

In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry' parts of the United States."

"Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism."

An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.

On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.

A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.

The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions.

Boehlert, the veteran Republican congressman, noted that "high-profile people with an `R' after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, are saying it's all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad."

The quarterly study's authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America's hardening left-right gap.

"The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension," they wrote.

Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says "ferocity" in defense of false beliefs often increases "as the evidence proving them false builds."

In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history - the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation - when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached.

"This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer," Gore said. "As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, `How long? Not long.'"

Even Wally Broecker's jest - that deniers could blame God - may not be an option for long.

Last May the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It's happening.

Said the pope's scientific advisers, "We must protect the habitat that sustains us."

(This version CORRECTS Changes 50th paragraph to correct first name of Congresswoman Bachmann to Michele (with one 'l').)

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 1:03 pm
by geo
DWill wrote:I heard Joel Achenbach, the Washington Post science writer who has just written a book about the BP Gulf oil gusher, at the National Book festival today. He said that the magnitude of that disaster drives home the point for him that we humans don't just occupy a niche in nature. To say that we do sounds nice, but it's far off the mark. We are attempting to engineer the planet according to the needs of our civilization, and that involves bigger and bigger projects, meaning ever greater effects when something does go wrong. That role seems to be opposed to living in accordance with nature in any way. I'm not saying that we should "go back to nature," only that we can be up front about the kind of role we're playing. Even if we could use algae or waves to satisfy all our energy wants, these technologies would have their negative environmental effects, too, if only because so much much infrastructure and production would be needed. And if limitless energy did enable us to fit 50 billion people on the globe, how many thousands of additional species would need to make their exits?

On the way home, I was totally astounded to hear the NPR report that today the U.S. produces half of the oil it uses, importing the other half. Less than 10 years ago, the percentages were 33 and 66. In a short time, our hemisphere will eclipse Russia and then the Middle East in oil production. A good deal of that increase comes from us, with huge oil reserves (and gas, too) now accessible through fracking in North Dakota, Colo., Wyo. Louisiana, and several other states. This will be a bigger economic stimulus than anything the government could do. However, some are also saying it means game over as far as slowing climate change.

The question is, how can we possibly not take advantage of new technology to find oil and gas? Is there really any other option? It can make us feel good to say we need to invest in alternatives instead, but that's what we need to while we continue to exploit fossils, isn't it? We're necessarily all about the short-term, after all. We have an imperative to keep what we have going.
Thanks, DWill.

It does sound quaint to say we occupy an ecological niche when in fact we're taking over the planet. The Bible says we were made in God's image to have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Well, it seems we've done that. Now what?

Realistically, I don't think there's anything we can do about our population growth. We're programmed to survive and procreate. And as has been discussed elsewhere, our birth rates are already falling dramatically on a global scale. Supposedly sometime in 40 years or so, we will begin to experience negative birth rates. Until then human population is expected to grow by 1-3 billion. I think it's far from given that we will survive this period. If, indeed, we are changing the climate, we might go out in a blaze of glory and take half of the world's species with us. If we ever get to the point of fighting over diminishing resources, there's a pretty good chance we'll utilize nuclear weaponry and render our world inhabitable for most life forms.

In previous centuries, European settlers devastated indigenous population in North America and in other parts of the world. Some of it was willful extermination, but a lot of it was simple displacement. It must have been difficult for the Europeans to see that what was happening at the time and even more difficult to see its significance. Throughout our history, humans have migrated to other parts of the globe and fought for domination, always easily justifying our actions. I wonder if a few hundred years from now, we will look back with regret at how our own success as a species has displaced other life forms, look back on their ancestors and easily see our speciesist attitudes.

Our situation seems bleak. Maybe I'm just cynical, but honestly it's hard to put a positive spin on what's happening right in front of us.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 1:56 pm
by geo
Perhaps relevant to the Associated Press article, there have been some interesting studies on how birth order affects personality traits and I've heard it said that firstborns tend to be more conservative than latter borns. Of interest, psychologist Frank Sulloway evaluated the stances of nearly 4,000 participants in 28 scientific controversies dating from 1543 to 1967 and found the likelihood of accepting a revolutionary idea is 3.1 times greater for latter borns than firstborns. For radical revolutions the likelihood is even higher. This is no statistical anomaly. Opponents to Newton, Einstein, and Lavoisier (all firstborns by the way) were predominantly firstborns and converts tended to be latter borns.

This, of course, doesn't have anything to do with whether AGW is real or not. But if it was real, you'd expect that conservatives would in fact tend to resist the idea.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 10:14 am
by Robert Tulip
geo wrote:This Associated Press article discusses the social and psychological reasons why people deny global warming. The article ran in our local paper with the headline something along the lines of you can't really deny global warming any more.
The link to the article is here.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... 49d13b180c
The American `allergy' to global warming: Why?
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent
Thanks Geo, great article. It shows how the politics has gone toxic. My view is that the link between climate science and left wing politics is unhelpful, although the Republicans have gone insane. We won't fix the climate by measures that increase the intrusion of governments.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention. "I don't think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that," the author recalls. But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of "global warming" didn't set off an instant outcry of angry denial. In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the "greenhouse effect" is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened.
You might recall I cited Broecker's book Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It in the Climate Apocalypse thread. He is brilliant. The idea he promotes in that book for artificial trees to suck carbon from the air has to be a big part of the solution. Fixing Climate would be a good Booktalk selection.
What's going on? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.
I know Hamilton, and unfortunately he is a leftist who frightens the horses. He has supported authoritarian solutions to climate change, and also calls for a reduction in affluence. These ideas make him politically marginal.
He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democratic gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.
Perry is an evil idiot, somewhat similar to Adolf Hitler. The USA would become a danger to the world if he got elected.
From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve. "The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger," the 79-year-old "grandfather of climate science" said in an interview. "But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized." The solution: "Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit..." He stopped and laughed. "Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up."
This comment about God illustrates the apocalyptic currents in this debate. But if we wait for God to save us it will be too late. The first step is to recast climate change as a conservative security issue, solvable by capitalist ingenuity, with the government in a non-intrusive supportive role for business. The solutions exist, they just have to be de-linked from left wing politics.
The basic physics of anthropogenic - manmade - global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising. "As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It's the physics that convinces me," said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, "to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world."
"Refining models" is not going to influence politics. What will influence politics is ability to speak to people in simple terms that convince them to change their minds, and moving ahead with investment ideas that are practical and profitable. Scientists are not very good at that, and nor are environmentalists, with all their left wing baggage.
The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on. In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland's buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.
By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists. But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist's remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear. That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain's Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts. In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," the world's nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well. "The statement that we'll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact," oil executive William F. O'Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto. The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired.
"I'm not really surprised at the political reaction," the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. "I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner." In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition's own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.
Just like the tobacco industry knew in the 1950s that smoking kills, and just like the asbestos industry knew in the 1930s that asbestos is a killer. For energy firms to be allowed to corrupt the public debate in their naked commercial interest is a total scandal.
Kyoto's final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn't even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million - just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted - compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution. Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record. Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed - all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor. The impact has been widespread. An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared. The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes. From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world's seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere. "We are scared, really and truly," diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific's Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.
This is a really good summary of the clear and present danger. There is also the risk that climate could hit an unforeseen tipping point, causing a sudden phase shift like an earthquake.
The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world's coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.
Some climate scientists have commented that the effects on the ocean are the big sleeper in climate change, storing up heat and acid in a sort of diabolical planetary experiment.
The greatest fears may focus on "feedbacks" in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. The Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra's permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.
This concept of the "feedback loop" is very important. It shows how a tiny global input, billions of tons of carbon, can be enough to change the whole system. To understand how CO2, such a small factor, 0.04% of the atmosphere, can have such a big impact, a friend commented that we can see dyes in extremely small concentrations, and we can also use colored lighting to show how they're visible in some wavelengths and not in others. That you can't see its effect in the visible range doesn't mean CO2 doesn't have an obvious effect in the infrared range at those concentrations.
In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles. "Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee. Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?"
I don't find it perplexing, I just think that the science of climate change has been used as a stalking horse for big government agendas, and conservatives naturally react against being deceived like that. Climate science should link itself to small government advocates like Hayek to purge the socialists.
The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change." In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry' parts of the United States." "Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism." An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis. On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly. A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.
And this shows again that people detect a political subtext regarding a desire by totalitarians like Hamilton to infringe their liberties. They think when he calls them 'angry' he really means they are stupid. They resent being patronized by egg heads.
The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions. Boehlert, the veteran Republican congressman, noted that "high-profile people with an `R' after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, are saying it's all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad." The quarterly study's authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America's hardening left-right gap. "The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension," they wrote.
It won't be until climate response is reconciled with liberty that this polarized paralysis will be overcome. My view is that this is possible through large scale ocean based algae biofuel production as a profitable capitalist private enterprise.
Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says "ferocity" in defense of false beliefs often increases "as the evidence proving them false builds." In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history - the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation - when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached. "This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer," Gore said. "As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, `How long? Not long.'" Even Wally Broecker's jest - that deniers could blame God - may not be an option for long. Last May the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It's happening. Said the pope's scientific advisers, "We must protect the habitat that sustains us."
The problem here is that Gore has not advocated for real solutions. An Inconvenient Truth says "each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands." This is just syrupy garbage. All this stuff, and windmills and carbon taxes, might delay global warming a week. We need industrial scale new technology to reverse CO2 increase in the air. A global problem requires a global solution. Personal responses of the type proposed by Gore are worse than useless, because they deflect attention from real solutions that could actually fix the problem.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 3:07 pm
by geo
Here's an experiment on Mythbusters that apparently shows C02 and methane in a controlled environment to produce a warming effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRd5GT0 ... r_embedded

And then here's the same experiment with an accommodation for expanding gases.

http://myweb.cableone.net/carlallen/Sit ... dered.html

The second experiment doesn't prove that C02 and methane don't contribute to warming, but it goes to show that nothing is as simple as it seems.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 5:14 pm
by Interbane
Avid Reader wrote:There is always the chance, of course, that tomorrow someone will make a huge breakthrough and suddenly this historic failure will be overcome. However, it seems to me that nature is still telling us, “nothing is free;” that no matter what we do, there will be some price to pay, and that price will probably be more than the cost of whatever we can come up with.
Good post, I like your thinking. A sustainable Earth would need supplement to renewable energy sources. Currently space economy isn't an issue, but I think economics will replace land-based solar energy collection devices. They would be spaceborn if anything. Nuclear is the best guess, with energy being taken indirectly from matter. They need to start putting them below sealevel with emergency flood gates though. A bullseye for terrorism, so we'd need to get our 'animal' under control first.

There is also the nature of the byproduct. Our ignorance is slowly becoming illuminated, so we see the consequences of past actions. I think that while that is a good lesson, we are also better at forecasting the side-effects of our actions. We have large blind spots still, so must heed our wisdom for a long time yet. But my point is that we're progressing.


Imagine if cars could capture all but one part per billion of the CO2 it produced as well as eliminating all other toxins. Imagine if we could use that compressed CO2 in some manner that consumed a ton of it along with harmful byproducts from landfills to produce carbon nanofibers and more gasoline. Whatever the byproducts, the rest would need to be inert. It's an interesting thought experiment. There are assumptions of course. The oxygen byproduct would be measured to keep the atmosphere at stable levels. That the use of the other byproduct is responsible and considered in energy loss calculations.

Imagine if we could track each and every byproduct(someday we will), to include energy loss. Someday you'll be able to pull up a real-time overview of how much the temperature changes over Los Angeles from the cumulative heat produced by each and every vehicle's brakes. Well, that would be possible if we weren't already recapturing that energy. But it's a good example. The daytime temp over a specific region would be 0.00001 degrees warmer(or some other ridiculously low number). Every second the number would change, and the further ahead we look for our prediction, the less accurate it becomes due to the complexity of nature. A wind speed change of 1 mph would have a greater effect.

Everything we do changes something around us. But we're getting better and better at figuring out what changes.

With regards to CO2 emissions, we were driving faster than we could see. Our consumption outpaced our ability to see it's effects. But we're stepping deeper into the information age with every passing year, and our vision is getting clearer at a rapid rate. I hope that means we'll make less harmful or disastrous mistakes. Being unable to resolve past mistakes may still be our doom.

Re: Global warming or carbon cult?

Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 10:00 pm
by tat tvam asi
Here's an experiment on Mythbusters that apparently shows C02 and methane in a controlled environment to produce a warming effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRd5GT0 ... r_embedded

And then here's the same experiment with an accommodation for expanding gases.

http://myweb.cableone.net/carlallen/Sit ... dered.html

The second experiment doesn't prove that C02 and methane don't contribute to warming, but it goes to show that nothing is as simple as it seems.