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Posted by J. Clarke on October 26, 2008, 6:46 am
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> Twibil wrote:
>>>
>>>>> The real debate about man-caused global warming is over. And it
>>>>> changes nothing that you don't care for the idea. Deal with it.
>>>>
>>>> the debate is most deff not over.
>>>
>>> Uh, because a twit like you doesn't want to admit the truth, it's
>>> supposed to impress anyone?
>>>
>>> Please.
>>>
>>>> only the libs are trying to stuff the unproveable notion down
>>>> our
>>>> throuts.
>>>
>>> Uh, no, I -along with millions of others- am a life-long
>>> conservative.
>>> And unlike you, we know truth when we see it.
>>>
>>> The planet's in trouble, and it's mostly our own doing.
>>
>> Have you seen the data from the Vostok ice core? It should scare
>> the
>> living crap out of anybody who wants to stop doing whatever it is
>> that we've been doing.
>>
>>>> The idea that the tiny crap we do
>>>> can change the climate is just about laughable but idiots believe
>>>> it
>>>> just the same.
>>>
>>> (A) It isn't "tiny" at all. (B) The idiots who believe it start
>>> with
>>> the guys who study climatology for a living: climatologists. (C)
>>> Your
>>> opinion doesn't count unless you're one of them.
>>
>> There are two groups of climatologists. There are the ones who get
>> all the attention with their unvalidated computer model that works
>> from data going back a few hundred years who are telling us "the
>> sky
>> is falling, the sky is falling", and there are the
>> paleoclimatologists who work from a dataset going back half a
>> million years who are wondering "why hasn't the sky fallen?". The
>> paleo guys don't have fancy computer models though, and their
>> message isn't one which can be explained in a sound byte, and in
>> any
>> case there's nothing there for the politicians to grab onto to
>> pretend to be Doing Something, so nobody pays any attention to
>> them.
>>
>
>> Something that gets forgotten in all this is that in its _normal_
>> state as measured over hundreds of millions of years, the planet is
>> substantially ice free and significantly warmer than at present.
>
> During those hundreds of millions of years we had a lot different
> layout of continents, as well as a lot more water in shallow seas.
> See Plate Tectonics.
Sorry, but there have been brief periods of glaciation before, with
that "very different layout of continents". They lasted for a million
years or so and then went away. There was not "a lot more water",
there just wasn't any ice. When Antarcta melts we'll have those same
shallow seas.
The current period of glaciation started about a million years ago
when the layout of the continents was substantially as it is now.
Prior to that there had been many millions of years with pretty much
the same layout and no glaciation.
>> It
>> just happens that the tiny period of time during which humans have
>> existed
>
> It's a lot more than that. The current theories now on Dinosaur
> extinction are that while a comet slamming into the Earth was
> very likely the trigger, the fact was that the environment had
> steadily been getting cooler for hundreds of thousands if not
> millions of years prior to the comet strike. Reptiles do not do
> well in the cold, and if the Earth's environment was as extremely
> favorable to reptiles as it had been when the dinos first appeared
> on the scene, the dinosaur populations would have survived a
> comet strike.
Uh, that was 65 million years ago. After the strike there was no
glaciation for about 62.5 million years.
>> has all be during an unusual set of conditions, which may very
>> well be ending--now this is the sort of thing that most people want
>> to believe is pie in the sky that isn't going to happen in their
>> lifetimes or their great grandchildrens' lifetimes, but it is going
>> to happen in _somebody_'s lifetime unless we take radical action to
>> stop it and it looks like we might be elected.
>>
>
> Since our reserves of Fossil Fuels, oil, coal, and natural gas,
> were built up due to hundreds of millions of years of plant material
> being compacted into the Earth, during the warmer part of the Earth,
> and once a considerably huge amount of carbon had been removed
> from the Earth's atmosphere by this process the Earth started to get
> colder, it seems to add weight to the idea of global warming being
> caused by carbon release.
"Adding weight to the idea" is not sufficient. DID YOU LOOK AT THE
DAMNED ICE CORE? If the current cycle follows the last five then the
glaciers should be on the way to Manhattan already. They aren't. If
those carbon emissions are what is stopping them then we bloody well
better not stop the carbon emissions.
>> So there are three possibilities. One is that we're due to be in a
>> period of deep glaciation (in the last one the glaciers covered
>> most
>> of New England--Long Island is the pile of rocks they dropped when
>> they melted) and something is keeping it from happening--if that
>> something is _us_ then we bloody well better not stop doing
>> whatever
>> it is that we're doing. The second is that the ice ages are over
>> and
>> the planet is returning to its normal state and we better get ready
>> to either live with it or take really radical and really expensive
>> action to stop it. The third is that we are causing some kind of
>> problem that wouldn't exist otherwise and aren't preventing any
>> other kind of problem, in which case we need to figure out
>> _exactly_
>> what we are doing and correct the problem.
>>
>> The latest estimates are that we need to cut emissions to 5 percent
>> of the 1990 levels by 2050 in order to "solve the problem". If
>> we're
>> busy doing that and the planet decides to warm up anyway then we're
>> screwed because at that level we won't have the technological
>> resources to reverse nature. If we're what is keeping the next
>> glaciation from coming then we're screwed again because we won't
>> have
>> the resources to deal with that either. The only _safe_ approach
>> is
>> to assume that it's the planet that's doing it, not us, and put the
>> pieces in place to deal with _that_ problem by controlling the
>> Earth's albedo, which will be hideously expensive but once done
>> we'll be able to handle warming or cooling. Nobody is proposing
>> doing that though becuase it's not going to mean pulling down the
>> US.
>>
>
> That isn't true, it has been proposed.
What "isn't true"? There was quite a lot in that paragraph, I am
curious as to what,s specifically, you believe to be untrue.
> However, be realistic. There
> is not the political support for doing anything about Global Warming
> at
> this time OTHER than moving from fossil fuels to renewable fuels,
> and
> the big reason that there is support for that is that it will unhook
> us from MidEast oil.
Your point being?
McCain has the right of it--the fix is to replace all electric
generation with nuclear then we can start going to hydrogen based
vehicles, either hydrogen burning in conventional engines or in fuel
cell electrics (and don't yammer at me about efficiency--if the
doomsayers are right then cutting the carbon emissions is far more
important than maintaining a high level of thermal efficiency in the
operation of motor vehicles).
If emissions are going to be cut to 5 percent of the 1990 levels then
we need to start doing things right now that we know will work. We
know that nuclear works, we know that we can run cars on hydrogen. We
don't have the luxury anymore of starting some highfalutin' research
program that may give us a payoff 20 years down the road.
> There will not be support for any other solution until something
> spectacular happens such as the sea level rises 10 feet and New York
> City is flooded.
At which point if the doomsayers are right it will be WAY too late.
> Just as there was no support for increasing the security inspections
> at
> the airport before 911 even though people had been complaining about
> it for the previous 30 years.
People complain about all kinds of things.
--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
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