OT: Climate Change Bullshit

It is already happening but not yet by enough to make any appreciable difference. Another factor is that obervations suggest that the arctic methane emissions are year round which is not what anyone expected:

Main side effect in Europe is that the footings for Swiss cable car supports are coming loose or hitting end of adjustement as permafrost ceases to be so and things start to move around.

Methane has a half life in the atmosphere of between 7 and 9 years at the moment. But if you get enough of it at once it would last longer.

Despite being a trace gas methanes structure means it is a more potent GHG and is responsible for about a fifth of the observed forcing.

It does eventually break down into CO2 which is what makes seeing methane on Mars so exciting. If only we could get a delta C13 measurement of that methane and some Mars carbonate rocks then there is a sporting chance of knowing if it came from photosynthesis.

And if the clathrates in the oceans were ever to thaw or destabilise then there could be a really huge and rapid methane spike.

Suppose so. The OP's bias would take far more correcting.

There was a smiley there - but at least my links lead to pieces informed by peer reviewed science, and open and exposed to comment.

One of the contributors explaining things:

:-)

How catastrophic /Sarc.

Yes. We know taht some European glaciers are retreating to expose tree stumps that were growing there a few hundred years ago

Those nasty polluyting V8 roman chariots!

No, it woudn't. A half life is independent of the amount.

There is no *observed* forcing. Ther are only calculations..

Anmd we could have deep sea gas instead of North sea gas!

No it isn't. The planet can accomodate upto a 4x positive feedback gain on net GHG forcing without even breaking a sweat (pun intended).

Radiative emissions with temperature scale as T^4 so for an equilibrium starting temp T0 and a net radiative input of E0 and extra forcing e.

E0 = kT0^4 or T0 = (E0/k)^(1/4)

E0+e = k(T0+t)^4 or T0+t = ((E0+e)/k)^(1/4)

Which for e had ice ages in the past and recovered, at least temporarily, from

The climate feedback is positive but it is very probably less than 4 which means that the simple linearised model is OK. The radiative energy equation is a sufficiently high power of T that high levels of positive feedback can be accomodated and settle on an equilibrium value. Whatever you do the planet cannot get hotter than the sun illuminating it.

It will be a very long time before the next ice age. The sea level rise will be the thing that attracts the most public attention when one or more of the most populous cities gets overwhelmed by rising sea levels.

A total idiot who doesnt know system theory

Its instructive to note that if you take other forcings - e.g. . pinatubo - the figures corresmpnd pretty well with a 'no such feedback' scenario.

More amusingly I have seen a paper where Pinatubo was used to demostarete the actual value of nalbedo chgange forcing and teh result applied to correct 'amplified' CO2 forcing.

The irony escaped the authors.

Indeed *you* are!

Ha, you got there first. Obviously Martin doesn't understand what "half-life" means.

No, as TNP says. What would happen is that the equilibrium amount of methane in the atmos would go up.

ROFL! No. *YOU* both display *YOUR* ignorance rather spectacularly!

Martin knows that the main hydroxyl radical pathway that removes methane from the Earth's atmosphere can be saturated by excess methane so that the "half life" of methane in the atmosphere is concentration dependent.

See Chapter1 section 1.1.1 Methane in the following EPA report

It is also available on the EPA site but their new web interface is so painful to use that it is not worth visiting the site any more.

Changes in land use is also mucking up the planets ability to oxidise methane as well also making the half life longer.

"These results are opposite of what modelers have been assuming..."

Fun. Get used to it.

Side effect of global-warming methane? Or of bad structural design?

Sounds like permafrost on a slope creeps like a glacier creeps. Ice does that under stress.

What I meant is that the amount of positive feedback that causes a system gain increase of 4 is close to the feedback needed to make gain go infinite, namely run away.

If positive feedback makes small forcings cause ice ages, a little more feedback would lock us up.

The west side highway in NYC was scheduled to be under water by 2000.

New Orleans is in trouble, not because the water is rising, but because the land is sinking.

Relax and design some electronics.

Then it's not a half-life is it and shouldn't be called one.

It can be done with technology that we have. It will just become cheaper.

The modelers have a numerical dilemma. They need positive feedback to increase CO2 sensitivity enough to be alarming, numbers like 0.8 positive feedback to get 5x CO2 sensitivity. But anything over 1.0 latches up, melting or frozen forever. The last ice age would still be here.

So they are squeezed into a small feedback gain range for their models, namely the value they need to make their point.

And people keep discovering unexpected effects.

If they were to use a smaller feedback gain in their models, they'd have to accept larger forcings to explain the ice ages, and the whole political thing would collapse.

Sure it can be done, but how many times cheaper will it need to be to break even? it seems unlikely that any iteration of current technology could make asteroid mining worth-while.

why the assumption of malice?

Nudging an asteroid into a near-earth flyby doesn't need much energy, just some very good aiming and timing. That can be done for momentum transfer, to change earth's orbit. Landing or mining is a different problem.

A solid gold or diamond asteroid, if we could mine it, would just crash the prices.

Solid diamond heat sinks would be nice.

True, but it would certainly explain how Al Gore got the figures for that scary chart of his.

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Enthusiasm and profiteering isn't malice.

The alarmists probably believe what they are shrieking about, and the journalism majors and politicians are happy to praise the "science" of simulating poorly understood chaotic systems. They are mostly sincere, but the easiest person to fool is yourself, especially when believing offers power and wealth.