hurricanes

Global warming, you know.

Hey they call it Climate change now. But I dont see the Hockey stick in that chart.

Cheers

Looking at the number of storms that hit the CONUS is disingenuous. With the exception of 2006 and 2009, every Atlantic hurricane season in the past ten years has been significantly above average. It's only luck that say, Hurricane Gustav in 2008 didn't make landfall in Louisiana as a category 3 or 4 storm, rather than striking Cuba first and weakening.

If it is indeed the case that statistically, more bullets are being fired, you're going to be hit more often. That it hasn't happened to the US yet doesn't say anything profound about climate change, only her standing with the Fates. The 8 year US drought is probably cold comfort to the residents of the Caribbean and Central America, who are getting drilled by Cat. 3s and 4s every other year.

LOL, of course it is, but when you're grasping at straws to combat a mountain of scientific evidence, you take what you can get.

Climate change deniers don't care about evidence. They have spent their lives avoiding the examination of evidence because it might contradict what they've been told to believe.

The reality is that many of them really don't deny what's happening, it's just that what's necessary to mitigate it is not something they are interested in doing.

Weird. Counting hurricanes by president is a bit odd because the terms served by each president varies. FDR served 3 terms and therefore had the most hurricanes. Jimmy Carter and G.H.W. Bush only served one term, and therefore had fewer hurricanes. Unless the author was trying to demonstrate that Republicans or Democrats cause hurricanes, the graph makes little sense.

It's been my contention that the majority of climate change deniers are denialists on ideological grounds, due to the implications of the scientific evidence presented when followed to its ultimate conclusion, i.e. that fossil-fuel based capitalism is an unsustainable long term economic model. "Green is a front for RED."

If we had had more hurricanes during Obama's presidency then the Tea Party lunatics would be insisting that it was somehow Obama's fault.

No one would think any less of them if they would simply state "yes, we understand the evidence but we care only about ourselves."

They don't understand that if they are _really_ worried about the government exerting more control over their lives then they shouldn't be advocating policies that will eventually lead to the government telling them where they can live, how much energy they can use, how much water they can use, and what they can eat.

Capitalism with a lightly regulated free market would be perfectly sustaina ble, if you charged people who burnt fossil carbon for energy enough to cov er the long term damage the CO2 produced was going to do to the environment and spent that money on subsidising less damaging energy generators.

talks about the ideological stance of the of the anti-regulation enthusiast s and makes the point that what they objected to was *any* government inter vention in the free market - confusing the lightly regulated free markets w e've got in pretty much every advanced industrial country with the centrali sed state planning that worked much less well in the USSR and its satellite states.

It's the same kind of idiocy that confuses socialism (which works rather be tter in Germany and Sweden than US capitalism works in the US) with communi sm, which utterly failed in the USSR and survives in more-or-less Communist China with a lot less central control and a lot more almost-free market th an the USSR was ever willing to tolerate.

We're still getting the shaft.

How is the Soviet Socialist Republic communist?

By much better reference (from people who actually study these things), I understand the USSR was as fully socialist as anything we've seen so far; Europe is only fractionally there, considering they are still fairly capitalist on the whole. The US is still stuck in the 'dark ages', so to speak, that is, if one assumes for better or worse that there is an inevitable march from realist capitalism to socialism and communism.

Tim

But, if we have fewer hurricanes during Obama's presidency, he would insist that it was the result of his administrations forward thinking policies on climate change.

It comes down to understanding how a hurricane is formed. Hurricanes are formed when hot and moist air rises and begins to circulate. Human breath is quite moist, and hot air is the most common byproduct of political discussions. To determine which party causes the most hurricanes, it is only necessary to measure the temperature, humidity, and volume of both Republican and Democrat hot air, and massage the results to reflect your political persuasion.

But don't forget, global warming causes pirates!

All hail the FSM,

Tim

There must be hundreds of terrible things, thousands maybe, that have been blamed on AGW. Sheep shrinking, droughts, floods, crop failures, forest fires, storms, blizzards, pests, whatever. How come nothing good is ever reported?

All bad, bad, and bad.

I did see one paper about the increased rate of growth of California redwood trees in the last 100 years.

But the authors said the cause is unknown and conjecture all sorts of improbable stuff; except they didn't seem to want to even mention that CO2 might be good for trees.

Russians and Canadians are all for it. How about a nice villa on sunny Hudson Bay? ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Because there's no government research funding for good things in climate change, only for bad.

It's also safer to predict doom and disaster, than to predict success and improvement. It's much like what happens if you ask a doctor for a prognosis. The answer is usually "You are going to die" which does tend to be rather disconcerting. There are 4 combinations of predictions and outcomes.

1. Predict success and it succeeds. => Nothing much happens.
2. Predict success and patient dies. => Doctor gets sued for malpractice.
3. Predict disaster and patient recovers. => Doctor is a hero for saving the patient.
4. Predict disaster and patient dies. => Doctor says "I told you so".

Of the 4 combinations, the safest is to predict disaster as it has the lowest risk of repercussions. Same with climate change predictions. If you predict disaster, you are either a hero for warning the public or a visionary for saying "It told you so" if things go awry.

Although this one usually goes more like "Thank God!" and the doctor gets no credit.

Tim

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Read an article some time ago that says excessive CO2 is toxic to plants as it is to animals. So scratch that.

But it leaves me to wonder... suppose you took the chimney of a clean coal power plant -- you know, pretty much 100% CO2, not much heat left, minimum of toxic bric-a-brak (SO2, fly ash) -- and piped it into a very wide greenhouse.

The greenhouse is constructed of cheap, reasonably hail-resistant windows, sealed well enough together so the air inside doesn't mix very quickly with the outside air. Probably some means of allowing rainwater to pass would be a good idea. This covers a massive area, many miles let's say, with the power plant in the center, greenhouse radiating out for many square miles. Instead of walls, it's open on the outer rim, so atmosphere can diffuse in, and CO2 out. Probably, the outer rim should be screened to prevent animals from wandering in and dying, and louvered to control airflow as winds shift.

At first, planting begins around the outer edge. Plants will be chosen according to rapid growth, minimal fertilizer application, and fecundity. The field will be mowed or harvested frequently to remove biomass and encourage new growth; this will be extracted for useful byproducts (oil, ethanol, etc.), or spread in the as-yet-unplanted inner areas to dry before burning in the power plant. In any case, seeds should be spread among the interior, so if there happen to be any mutant seeds that sprout, they're proven to tolerate high CO2.

Combined with genetic engineering, the combined evolutionary pressure should breed plants with much more rapid growth, assuming the limiting factor is indeed CO2. The tropical temperature and humidity of the greenhouse plus residual chimney heat will drive rapid growth. And selection for high CO2 means anything inside probably won't survive outside, so you don't even have to worry about hippies complaining about GMO and cross-breeding.

Downsides include the risk of CO2 toxicity and asphyxiation, and the expense of breathing apparatus (SCUBA, rebreathers, etc.) for all workers inside the greenhouse.

Tim

Greenhouses are sometimes pumped up to 1000 PPM CO2 to make plants grow faster. Indoor office levels can get that high.

Human physological effects start at around 1% (10,000 PPM) and 5% (50,000 PPM) is dangerous. Your exhaled breath is around 4% CO2.

I bet you could get impressive levels by sleeping under a blanket or in a tent.

I agree that plants will adapt, probably quickly adapt, to higher CO2 levels, and that will help agriculture... feed more poor people.