OT: Too late to save the Earth

Our civilization won't last another 100 years. And when we fall, we're likely to take much of the world with us. Yes, it's going to be very warm, and cloudy.

"Bill Bowden" wrote in news:mtdd49$19f9$ snipped-for-privacy@adenine.netfront.net:

Goofy. The CO2 level has been over 3000 PPM at times, and life survived. Thrived, actually.

We are now at an unprecedented low level of CO2. We need more.

Of course the sun was less bright back then.

The most recent episode of global warming

managed to kill off a lot of ocean species. Life on land merely diversified, which is to say a lot of new ecological niches opened up, and new species evolved to exploit them.

The life that thrived wasn't the life that was around when the climate started to go haywire.

Preferably concentrated in the living quarters of denialists. 100% CO2 in John Larkin's office may be an impossible dream, but it is physically feasible, and John Larkin might be silly enough to believe his own propaganda.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Nah, those folks are natural allies. If it's all over, why do anything about it? ;)

After all, Malthusians have an absolutely unblemished record--they're wrong every single time. It doesn't seem to produce any self-awareness.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Yeah, we have missed the too-late-to-save-the-Earth deadline so many times, I was sort of hoping they would settle into silent despair.

I guess doom sells newspapers and political careers. It's not fasionable to be optimistic. This week, people are staying up all night worrying about turtles.

"First placed on the Internet June 2004, updated June 2008"

"SCIENTISTS who spend their lives in the Arctic have been estimating for several years that ALL the Arctic ice may be melted by September 2013..."

FUD.

Mark L. Fergerson

Very alarming.

But not so if one realises that the whole CO2-discussion is set up to be able to levy more taxes and to make huge gains on carbon rights certificates (or whatever they call it), preferably respectively by the UN and Al Gore.

joe

You said something like this before, no? Who is the "we" civilization in this thought that is not the greater global community?

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Rick

The guy is a bit of a crackpot. He claims that the crust is a terrific insulator and so the thermal inertia of the earth won't be in play for

143 years. But if it isn't in play, what is holding back global warming? He seems to be saying it is insulation the core from the warming, but not the warming from the core or the other way round, not sure.

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Rick

That is one hypothesis. It's pushed by the denialist propaganda machine, who are primarily interested in letting their backers keeping on selling the fossil carbon they can dig up.

It's the same machine set up by the tobacco lobby a few decades ago, to help tobacco growers sell more of their product.

In fact the history of anthropogenic global warming goes back to Fourier, and the earth had warmed enough by 1990 for objective observers to become sure that the effect was real.

I've commented on your capacity for serious thought before - my doubts are unabated.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

I think that the argument is that the body of the earth - and the deep oceans - are currently colder than they will be after the system had equilibrated, so they are currently holding back global warming.

Keep in mind that temperature in the ground, 18" below your feet, lags the surface temperature by 180 degrees - it's highest in late winter.

What makes the argument dubious is that a 143 year lag implies a very large thermal resistance, so it's unlikely that the deeply buried thermal mass is holding back global warming by all that much.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

I've got news for you:

No problem, no offence taken.

joe

y e y l e , g s

You haven't got news for me there. As John Larkin reminds us all too freque ntly, "The Register" publishes a lot of denialist rubbish.

That particular piece seems to be even stupider than usual, since they appe ar to be deliberately misunderstanding what the UK Met Office is saying.

Global warming hasn't been absent for the past fifteen years - they include a number of the warmest years on record - but quite a bit of the extra hea t has been going into the oceans, which can't - and won't - go on forever. In the Pacific we are finally expecting an El Nino this year - in fact it's already under way.

The Atlantic Multidecal Oscillation is slower and correspondingly less well understood (and even less predictable) but it is also an oscillation (thou gh not a particularly regular one) and will eventually reverse.

Since you can't think, and don't seem to care who knows this, one can under stand that you might not be worried by such an observation.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That is exactly the point I am making. The large thermal mass is impacting AGW or the high thermal resistance is isolating the thermal mass and so it isn't impacting AGW... pick one.

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Rick

I'm not worried about anything that comes from an establishment shill like you, don't worry.

joe

Sloman has turned into a full-time-droning-lame-insult machine. Some sort of dementia I suspect. He and Fields and other assorted obsolete gits turn almost every thread into an endless cycle of childish bickering.

Right, don't take offense; ignore him.

John Larkin has become fond of posting his "full-time-droning-lame-insult machine" insult at every possible opportunity.

This is a trifle ironic. If nothing else, he should find a few more insults to add variety to a somewhat restricted repertoire.

He also posts stupid denialist propaganda items from "The Register" more frequently than he should.

One would like to ignore him but the person who posts here more frequently than anybody else does tend to set the tone, and it's not one that I like.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

As usual, reality is somewhere in the middle, and finding out where takes a lot of tedious measurement and calculation.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

But you were perfectly happy to recycle stuff from "The Register" which is a fossil-fuel-extraction industry shill, so it's fairly clear which establishment has bought your loyalty.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney