OT: Greenland is literally cracking apart and flooding the world

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Minamata disease doesn't fit anybody's religious doctrine.

There have been lots of cases of irresponsible industrialists dumping mercu ry and other pollutants in places where they get into the human food chain. If 100 year-old frozen fish had the same mercury levels as modern ones, th ere's a good chance that some circa-1900 industrialist was responsible.

There was less industry around 100 years ago, but a lot more irresponsible behaviour by industrialists who would have had to work quite a bit harder t han their modern equivalents to be aware of the damage they might be doing.

There are many other factors, as the above articles show.

AGW theory shows adding CO2 to the atmosphere increases global temperatures.

There are many positive and negative feedbacks. For example, increasing ocean temperatures forces CO2 out of solution. Melting permafrost releases CO2 from the soil. Warmer temperatures allows trees to grow faster, pulling CO2 from the air.

I don't understand your question.

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Heroes and leaders know enough to be scared, and have the courage to do wha t's necessary despite being scared.

It's the foolhardy who aren't scared, and they get themselves killed before they can do any good at all.

Perfectly correctly. There are a lot more real threats to be frightened of.

Any sensible person is nervous of the prospect of another asteroid hitting the earth - it hasn't happened for 65 million years, but we didn't know tha t it had happened until a few decades ago. Anthropogenic global warming is a more immediate, if less severe, threat and we can do something about it. In fact we are doing something about it, but we could do more if the idiot fossil carbon extraction industry wasn't spending so much on lying about th e nature of the threat, and gullible idiots like John Larkin had enough sen se to realise that they were being lied to.

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You have to realise that denialists use variation in solar output to explai n the warming we are seeing at the moment, which means that the extra CO2 i n the atmosphere actually isn't having any effect, and the fossil carbon ex traction industry can go on making money by digging up fossil carbon and se lling it as fuel. Obvious self-serving nonsense, but good enough to fool gu llible suckers like John Larkin.

A quibble, here: that's not related to anthropogenesis, it's thermodynamics 101 applied to our planet, atmosphere, and sunlight.

It only becomes 'anthropogenic' when we account for human-caused inputs and outputs in addition to knowing the sensitivity. If human action reduced greenhouse gasses, we'd have anthropogenic global cooling, but the thermodynamics of radiative heat transfer would be exactly the same.

Okay, then take the creation (from a storm) of a hurricane: in some conditions, a storm that grows large enough to persist overnight will get enough energy gain from sunlight and water to grow exponentially, becoming a hurricane or typhoon... That's positive feedback. it does happen that way.

not AGW vocabulary, just colloquial American English.

Huh? Radiative heat transfer causes CO2 sensitivity relevant to this discussion. What is a good panic? The tippling idea, though: yep, a brandy after dinner would be nice.

We had one at school and it caused mayhem from time to time. The best one was when it got into a tin of green paint overnight.

Tipping point is where there is significant positive feedback moving the planets weather to a new attractor. More like the effect of hysteresis in comparators or magnetic media once you go past a certain point it flips and you have to pedal in the other direction hard to flip it back.

The classic ones known to affect climate significantly are:

Insolation at 70N when it falls below a certain value more snow builds up on the large land masses reflecting more sunlight into space making it colder and forming glaciers. That is the initiation of an ice age.

In the other direction once you start warming up the same large land regions of permafrost you unlock huge quantities of sequestered carbon in the tundra as methane and carbon dioxide.

We are doing the same thing by burning vast amounts of fossil fuel.

Because we have satellite monitoring of solar flux and have had since the 1970's. It hasn't changed by enough to explain the observations!

Only lying dittohead sites try to pretend that the solar variation can be used to explain away AGW. Roughly half of the temperature changes seen since 1840 can be allocated to solar variation but no more than that. The sunspot cycle represents a 0.1% ripple with period 11 years.

The suns output slowly increases over geological timescales - it was dimmer in the distant past but its rate of brightness change is so slow as to be imperceptible except over billions of years. There are minor fluctuations in output but the delay time for a photon to get from the core reactions to the photosphere is of the order of a million years.

Killing almost all the things that relied on a reducing atmosphere was a pretty big step as was laying down what are now our most valuable iron ores as the oxygen increased iron(II) stopped being water soluble.

Tipping point means hysterisis in the system so that the chaotic attractor that drives our weather shifts to some other position. If that happens then things will be different - some ocean circulations will no longer work making some places colder but in a globally warmer world.

You can safely ignore the ultragreens who think that the Earth is fragile. It isn't and neither are the simulations. It is very hard to make the planet uninhabitable but it is quite easy to add 10m to sea level if you follow business as usual policies for too much longer.

This is a game where you control the acceleration and changes now will take considerable time to have their full effect on the climate.

I don't think we have much choice but to find out what lies beyond the next tipping point since there is no political will to prevent it. I am equally sure that when the chickens come home to roost the politicians will blame scientists for not explaining clearly enough what AGW means.

Radiative losses are determined by R = kT^4

Which means that for an increase in temperature dT that dR = 4kT^3dT

So provided that the AGW gain of the planet stays under 4 the whole system is unconditionally stable but with more water in the oceans. It is this longer term sea level rise that will hurt humanity the most if we are stupid enough to continue trashing the planet.

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Of course you have to have enough land close to the poles to build up the i ce sheets on. Geologically speaking, this happens infrequently, which is wh y there aren't that many ice ages in the geological record.

We've had them for the last 2.6 million years. Before that we had the Karoo Ice Ages from 360 to 260 million years ago. The one before that - the And ean-Saharan Ice ages, ran from 460 to 420 million years ago. They aren't th at common.

The tundra around the Arctic Circle is releasing quite a bit of methane at the moment. Nothing significant as yet - we are dumping about 10 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year, and the Arctic methane emissions were estimated at 17 million tonnes of methane per year in 2013, up from 3 .8 million tonnes estimated in 2006. There seems to be some 50 gigatonnes o f methane up there that could come out fairly quickly with a bit more warmi ng, out of a reservoir of perhaps 1400 gigatonnes.

Others have claimed about 100,000 years. It's not exactly accessible to dir ect measurement, but there are a lot of photon scatterers along the route.

There is not a lot I can do, but I do what I can. As improve the insulati on in my house, lower the temperature the thermostat is set to at night, an d use leds lamps instead of incandescent lamps. Also replacing an central air coditioning system with a heat pump.

There is not a lot I can do, but I do what I can. As improve the insulati on in my house, lower the temperature the thermostat is set to at night, an d use leds lamps instead of incandescent lamps. Also replacing an central air coditioning system with a heat pump.

There is not a lot I can do, but I do what I can. As improve the insulati on in my house, lower the temperature the thermostat is set to at night, an d use leds lamps instead of incandescent lamps. Also replacing an central air coditioning system with a heat pump.

There is not a lot I can do, but I do what I can. As improve the insulati on in my house, lower the temperature the thermostat is set to at night, an d use leds lamps instead of incandescent lamps. Also replacing an central air coditioning system with a heat pump. And I believe that PV cells will become more cost efficient with time. When they clearly provide cheaper p ower than natural gas everyone will start using them. So there are a lot o f little things that will reduce the energy used per capita and also reduce the number of people. These are things that will happen because there are economic reasons for them to happen.

I do not think a carbon tax will have a lasting effect over say forty years . A carbon tax would provide for more public spending , which will require the use of more energy. So I am with George H. Continue on as we are goi ng for another ten years and see where we are.

Dan

Call the movie "Beaks."