OT; Widespread Global warming

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You really are pig-ignorant. Oil is relatively cheap at the moment because we are still digging up as least as much as we can burn. The rate of discovery of new oil fields is now slower than the rate at which we are getting through existing oil fields, so we are going to have to adapt to a situation where oil becomes progressively more expensive - to the point where eventually it will only be used as a feed-stock for the chemical industry rather than wasted by burning it for fuel.

Getting ahead of the rest of the world in making this transition would be a worthwhile investment.

Short term thinking is always against investment, and you are giving a particularly dramatic example of this particular weakness. The subsidiary fact that burning oil for fuel raises the CO2 level in the atmosphere also has long-term implications, but I've as much chance of implanting that idea in your brain as I would have in teaching a pig to sing.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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No. You asked for an explanation simple enough for even you to understand. You haven't ynderstood these in the past, so posting another is a waste of bandwidth.

It's different. Organisms are best adapted to the temperature they are used to.

It's different. Organisms are best adapted to the conditions they are used to.

It's different. Weeds and pests often survive milder winters, when more severe weather killed them off.

It depends which plant's growth is most enhanced. Weeds do better than crop plants when the climate changes.

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The explanations are easy enough. You won't understand the content because the concept that a crop plant has been optimised to do well when the climate was as it used to be is a little too complicated for what's left of your brain.

You want agricultural production to be a simple linear function of temperature, when is fact its always going to parabolic - enough heat is always going to kill a plant.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Use prisoners.

Create huge sealed reservoirs above the tropic line (and below the other)and again some degrees above those. Fill them with polar fresh water ice (water).

One look at the amount of water on this globe leaves one wondering how we ever made it this far. If we store any water, it should be from the poles so that any evaporated from the oceans would end up there, so we can keep collecting it.

The whole planet should have big tan stripes around it being the caps over the water.

Otherwise, we will drown as the planet performs its natural cycles.

There is not much else we could do about it, and even that may not be enough.

That, or perfect a rail gun that can fire a few million tons of it up to the moon.

It seems that way to you because you're a first-order thinker, just a nudge above being stimulus-bound and into some foggy, fearful realm of ill-defined things you don't understand.

For example, you think raising the cost of everything we sell will increase our exports. To a first order that would be great because it's all sustainable, except to a 2nd order it's a disaster because _no_one_ would buy our stuff.

Sure, no problem so far.

Even better--we could've made the transition 100 years ago and all stayed in renewable our huts. Wouldn't that've been clever? Think how much better off the whole world--not just the US--would've been if we'd never had all this industry, medicine, etc.

You've had plenty of chances to convince and all you offer is pablum.

SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM IS UNKNOWN

--I'm not at all convinced that we know how much the earth is warming, how much man is to blame, that we can do anything about it, or that it matters.

--Most of it is natural. 18,000 years ago we were covered in a mile of ice and it's been warming ever since. Good.

--There's no convincing argument that warming would be a problem, or even undesirable. Right now millions of New Yorkers flock to Florida every winter to escape _cold_, not heat.

--According Hansen's earlier shrill warnings thank heaven for CO2-- it's saved us from the next glaciation, which is overdue.

PROPOSED REMEDIES INEFFECTUAL

--The most draconian remedies offered by the global cooling deniers such as yourself don't make a fig's difference in the outcome, at the expense of causing literally the deaths of hundreds of millions, or more.

--Climastrology has zero ability to project the phenomenon, and yet you'd gladly pay the above costs (with someone else's labor), for nothing.

SUPPOSED EFFECTS LAUGHABLE

--If it is to be a doomsday event, it's going to happen so slowly we could all just slowly migrate north, over generations. That should perfectly suit you who despise wealth and private property, as all those acquired from previous generations would have to be abandoned. If destroying cars (Cash for Clunkers) is good, abandoning towns is even better. Think of all the Keynesian jobs that will create!

--Right now we have no alternative. We _are_ fossil-fuel dependent, there simply is no viable substitute.

--If there were a viable substitute, greedy businessmen and evil corporations and the wonderful system you hate would be dumping money into it. The fact that they aren't reflects the reality--there is no alternative to fossil fuel.

SIMPLE, COMMONSENSE REMEDIES

--To the extent global warming ever is a problem, the solution is going to be adding a little pixie dust to jet fuel to modulate the solar input, not doubling the cost of everything and causing a billion people to starve and/or freeze.

THE TRANSITION TO OTHER FUELS WILL COME WHEN IT MAKES SENSE

--Oil's limited supply will handle itself. As oil runs out the price will run up, and smart people will cross over and get ahead on the next energy source. Hundreds of thousands have been pouring their best efforts into the question for centuries--they'll choose the point to cross over when it makes sense. Is that optimum? No, but it's close. Could you do better? NO.

At bottom, the only reasonable thing we can do immediately is radically conserve, which I've been doing my entire life. You've (and Al Gore) said you're not willing to do because it would inconvenience you. So, you're hypocrites.

My thermostat's at 42=BAF. Yours?

-- Cheers, James Arthur

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

I like the idiot "degree character" he chose to use.

I can understand underlining a six or a nine.

Same idiots that brought us RoHS.

That's probably about the same delta_t as I have--roughly 10=BAF above average ambient temp--you're a conservationist!

I just wear a jacket and have a small space heater for the office. I spent $15 on heating last month. Trips to the bathroom and getting out of bed are a bit chilly, but it's all perfectly livable. Shoot, it's only for two months or so. When it's bitter cold outside baking sourdough bread warms the place up a bit, and it smells good too.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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I'm sure that you would like to think so.

Whatever gave you that idea? The obvious effect of moving your economy over to sustainable power sources would be to reduce your dependence on imported oil - and your balance of payments deficit is pretty much what you pay fpor that imported oil. I would have thought that that was going to be obvious even to a zero-order non-thinker like yourself.

Since the point I was making was all about imports - and specifically about oil imports - this is an obvious irrelevance.

As usual you are missing the point. Today wind energy is close to being as cheap as energy from fossil-fueled power stations, and solar energy is on course to break even in a decade or two. This does depend on economies of scale, and getting stuck into developing and installing sustainable energy sources gets you into economies of scale earlier than sitting back and waiting for someone else to do it for you.

This wasn't true in 1911, and wasn't true in 1951 either.

Thinking deosn't seem to be an activity you know much about.

You like to think that it is pablum. If you knew a little more you might be in a position to understand that there is a strong scientific case for anthropogenic global warming, but you dismiss the whole structure because of what some acquaintance told you at a dinner party.

Fine. You aren't an expert on climate. 97% of real experts on climate

- 291 0f the top 300 climate scientists if PNAS is to be taken seriously - find the evidence for anthropogenic global warming to be persuasive.

It hasn't been warming ever since. The temperatures seem to have been at their peak between eight thousand years ago and two and a half thousand years ago, and had cooled off a little since before we started pumping extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Sea levels were a little higher back then, as you'd expect.

We are talking about climate change here - not a uniform warming right around the globe. If we do manage to get Greenland warm enough to destabilish the ice sheet we are talking about six metres of sea level rise and an appreciable chance of re-instating the Younger Dryas.

During the warm up at the end of the last ice age, some 12,800 years ago, the Gulf Stream turned itself off for 1300 years. If that happened again we'd probably be looking at a population crash.

That was Bill Ruddiman. As our understanding of the way the Milankovitch cycle work has improved in recent years it has become clear that the current interglacial is likely to be one of the long ones, and might well have lasted 50,000 years even without our hellp.

What "draconian remedies"? The gradual weaning of the economy off fossil carbon as a fuel source and the substitution of wind- and solar- power would roughly double the price of energy - a much less dramatic perturbation than the 1973 oil crisis, when the proce of oil quadrupled in a few months.

This - on its own - should hold the CO2 levels in the atmosphere low enough to avoid getting the climate into dangerously unpredictable areas. It wouldn't kill anybody, unless Exxon-Mobil and its friends take up funding armed insurrection - which would be silly, but they haven't exhibited much sense so far.

You lack of faith in climate science is noted. Since you chose to believe that banks can do no wrong, your grasp of reality isn't up to much, and I'm sure that your opinion will be given the weight that it deserves.

Check out the Younger Dryas. The Gulf Stream turned off within a decade, and seems to have turned back on again - some 1300 years later

- equally quickly.

At the moment a great deal of tundra around the Arctic circle is thawing out because global warming is particularly intense up there. Methane is being released on a large scale every summer, not enough to match our greenhouse contributions of CO2 but in impressive volumes.

There seem to have been two brief episodes of methane release - less than a thousand years each - which show up as changes in the carbon isotope ratios in the sediment layers involved. There are any number of theories about where the methane came from - methane hydrates do seem to be a leading candidate.

Whatever it was that happened, we'd prefer that it didn't happen again.

Why do you think I despise wealth and private property? I've got quite enough of it myself to appreciate it value.

And even the most socially minded Fabian socialist is going to object to devaluing useful infractstructure. The whole point of trying to slow down anthropogenic global warming is to prevent this kind of forced migration.

Don't be silly.

Nonsense. If you took the hit of doubled energy prices - and spent the next decade building the windmills and the solar plants - you could be much less dependent on fossil fuel. Becoming indpendent - relying on biofuels to power your aircraft (where there really doesn't seem to be a practical alternative to burning hydrocarbons) - might be a bit more expensive, but the economy would survive and wouldn't actually look at that different - energy costs now represent about 7% of your GDP and while pushing that up to 15% would make for some readjustments, it isn't going to make the sky fall.

There's no cheaper way of getting energy at the moment - provided that you ignore the long term damage to the economy that will flow from unbridled anthropogenic global warming. This doesn't mean that somewhat more expensive energy sources won't work.

One of many half-baked ideas that have been put forward - each one as likely to create disaster as it is to prevent it. What would work would be mining and crushing a lot of olivine. We'd have to spend as much on it as we now spend of finding an extracting oil, but we could do it. Puttng the same kind of investment into not having to find and extract the oil in the first place would seem to be more sensible.

The problem is that the cross-over point that suits the money men is a little too far away to avoid the extra costs involved in coping with continuing anthropogenic global warming.

Melting the Greenland ice sheet is going to raise sea levels by six metres - destroying every port around he world. Slowing down anthropogenic global warming before the Greenland ice sheet can't be stopped from sliding off into the sea would be a very good investment

- albeit a little too long term to get your attention.

About 70=BAF. As long as half-wits like you are blocking effective action to slow down anthropogenic global warming, anything I do is going to slow down the first persuasive catastrophe by a few milliseconds. I see absolutely no point in futile gestures.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.... Oil is relatively cheap at the moment

YES!!!!!

Now THIS IS a good reason to develop alternative energy..

I fear that the AGW scam will distract us from this.

Mark

Looks like some common ground between people in the know and the pig-ignorant. Ironic.

Get over it. It's not a scam.

Jon

No, they got only so far and stopped looking themselves. Have you seen the latest and greatest? At some point the science stops and the politics takes over.

For purposes of people planning their lives, smoking should be assumed to be horrible. For public policy? Not so much.

This cannot be done realistically, absent a defacto dictatorship. Even then, it'll produce a completely unknown equilibrium, and arguably the single largest rent-seeking that's ever occurred.

The reason that AGW is Usenet-meat at all is precisely because there's no coherent way to know which datasets to pick. Hence my statement "it's early days yet."

That's something I can easily believe. But it doesn't help much that it's that way...

I am an "I don't know". You've rounded up to denier. The science could all be perfectly sound, and outside of a few experts ( and there's no canonical list of those ), people are pretty much invited to make up their own story.

Think again.

-- Les Cargill

Smoking became just one more well-known way of screwing up your health, like getting too fat, but worse.

Only in passing. Smoking comes up as a known risk factor for some of the problems I've got.

Takes over what?

It worked for the ozone hole and it worked for SO2 emissions. Dealing with CO2 is going to cost more money and upset richer interested parties, but it's well within the capacity of a modern democracy. The USA probably does need to become a modern democracy, and this might be the issue that provokes you into cleaning up your act.

Rubbish. Rising oil proces work just the same way.

Since the data-sets all tell the same story, the fact that you don't know a coherent way to pick one is scarcely a problem, and it is certainly long past early days when it comes to working out what we need to do, now.

No, you are a "don't know enough".

No. That's you. You've decided that you want to doubt the science, but you aren't prepared to find out enough about the science to find out if y9our doubts are reasonable.

The denialist propaganda machine is designed to spread doubt, and they've spread it to you.

I've known about Freeman Dyson for some yars now, and his comments about global warming have always struck me as bit silly.

"[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it=92s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."

He seems to agree that it is happening and that it is going to get worse, but he thinks that there are problems that need solving more urgently ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They're now denying that exposure level matters at all to cover up the shenannigans about passive smoking. Sheesh.

Both the science and the politics.

Those are an order or eight of magnitude smaller problems. They also involve six or seven orders of magnitude fewer players.

I think the US is a modern democracy - just not a *post* modern one.

Well, except for little things like returns that can be used for R&D or whatever.

Having Exxon invest in alts is fundamentally different than redirecting Exxon profits to GE to have them do it.

No, they don't. Jeesus.

"There are ongoing efforts to resolve differences in satellite temperature datasets."

"There are ongoing efforts to resolve differences in satellite temperature datasets."

I don't have a problem with "resolving differences", but get* the bleeding science in a row before quantifying damage estimates, at the very least.

WTF difference does that make? If I read even more divergent reports, it does no good.

I recognize the "no true Scotsman" fallacy when I see it... I'm not claiming expertise here.

Ah, so I Am Infected Now! Rot.

Well, he sort of invented it :)

I couldn't agree more.

Exactly.

-- Les Cargill

In , Bill Sloman wrote in part:

Solubility of a gas over a liquid is generally and roughly proportional to the partial pressure of the gas.

Suppose we double atmospheric CO2 concentration and achieve global warming of IPCC's high-end figure of 6.4 degrees C warming this century, which is mentioned by the Wiki article on "global warming":

The doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will double or roughly double how much CO2 the oceans can hold while in equilibrium with the atmosphere. That outweighs a warming from say, 14 to 20.5 degrees C, reducing solubility of CO2 in water by looks-to-me about 29%.

If we double atmospheric CO2 and warm the oceans by top end of the range of IPCC prediction of global warming this century, removal of CO2 from the atmosphere into the oceans will increase rather than decrease.

Meanwhile, as for CO2 staying in the atmosphere for 800 years: Most anthropogenic addition of CO2 to the atmosphere occurred after 1958, and already somewhere around 55% of that added by humans to the atmosphere is in the oceans or in the earth. Each year so far since 1959, the oceans and land are taking on-average roughly 55% of what we are adding each year to the atmosphere.

Atmospheric increase is running generally roughly 55% of CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning and cement production. Ocean sinking of CO2 is equal to most of the other roughly 45%.

With almost half of anthropogenic CO2, most of which was added after

USA is already low on exports. I think the strategy mentioned was to decrease USA's massive imports in order to reduce its trade deficit.

llSlomanwrote in part:

al

CO2 solubility in sea-water is tolerably complicated

as was splled out in Roger Revelle's 1957 paper.

The 800 years comes from the ice core data - it seems to take this long for CO2 levels to equilibrate after signficant temperature excursions.

by

al

Check out the ice core data, or read this

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

When CO2 change was result of global temperature change as part of a set of positive feedbacks, the lag from temperature to CO2 was indeed ~800 years. That was enough time to change the temperature of most of the ocean volume that has, so far, much variability in temperature.

However, a much shallower layer of ocean is capable of sourcing/sinking CO2 in response to even a dramatic change in the similarly small amount of CO2 that the atmosphere has, in comparison to what even the "upper ocean" (top 600 meters IIRC) has.

would

AGW is far worse than a scam. It is political posturing trying to reduce industrialized countries to central African levels of development. It is a multi-trillion $ per year burden on the say so of seriously anti-scientific demagogue wanna-be's. It is jack stupid teradollar anti-life "gambling" on the BIG BIG LIE.

Yeah, it's called the consensus of current science result. Oh, well.

Jon