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qui_est_ce
Guest
Remember, it’s CC now!!As I sit here, it’s about nine degrees outside.
If they ever put global warming to a vote, my vote will be “aye”.
:winter:
And anyway, cold is cause by global warming.
Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level
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:winter:
And anyway, cold is cause by global warming.
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Theo520
Guest
Are you claiming there has been a marked increase in tropical cyclones?
Link please
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Peter_Plato
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Michael_Mayo
Guest
The earth is a beautiful, wonderful gift that we should always care for with extreme caution. If we err let us err on the side of caution. Our children and children’s children will be grateful.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
Erring on the side of “caution” sounds good, in principle. Unfortunately, there are costs to caution when millions of people’s lives and a great number of resources are placed at risk even when implementing “extreme caution.” There are costs both ways that are not always brought up in discussion.
For example, steering away from fossil fuels when there is no comparable replacement on the horizon – especially if fossils fuels don’t really have the kind of negative impact they are presumed to have – may prove very costly in terms of lives, well-being and the possibility of sustainable employment in the long run.
Caution might be just as advisable in terms of jumping into environmental alternatives such as “green energy” with both feet.
Personally, I would like to see as much funding going into disproving anthropic global warming as proving it. That way we can be more certain that the conclusions are accurate and true. Merely trying to prove the positive case comes fraught with the dangers of observation bias. How about “caution” with respect to buying into the whole idea to begin with?
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
I only had to watch the first 4 minutes of this to see that this is not a compelling argument. It is cherry-picking of irrelevant data and misinterpretation of data.
The most glaring example of this misinterpretation is Dr. Easterbrook’s “proof” that CO2** cannot** cause global warming. He says this is because CO2 is in such small concentration in the atmosphere that it could not have that effect. At one point he says “double nothing is still nothing”. Does he honestly think that the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a fact that all the atmospheric scientists who recognize global warming have somehow overlooked? It says a lot about Dr. Easterbrook’s own understanding of the situation that he thinks such a simplistic explanation is “proof”.
The fallacy in his argument can be easily demonstrated by considering an Olympic size swimming pool filled with 660,430 gallons of nice clear clean water. You can easily see to the bottom of the pool because water is almost perfectly transparent to light. Now add just a “trace” amount of black India ink - the same as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere - ~400 parts per million. That comes to just 264 gallons of ink. According to Dr. Easterbrook’s argument, such a “small trace” amount of ink could not have much effect on blocking light, since the ink is in such a trace amount. Or course if you really did dump 264 gallons of ink into a swimming pool, you would not be able to see the bottom any more.
But the situation with the atmosphere is even more marked than with the swimming pool, because Nitrogen and Oxygen are more transparent to IR radiation than water is to visible light. And CO2 - although it is transparent to visible light - is opaque to IR radiation. So it is a lot more like the ink in the swimming pool, even though it all looks like air to us since our eyes can’t detect IR radiation.
That Dr. Easterbrook would undertake such an amateurish stunt to prove his points undermines his whole credibility as a scientist. I would not trust him now even if he told me that the sky is blue.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
It’s the same thing.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
No it isn’t.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
I suppose the fact that you only watched the first four minutes and didn’t permit him to explain and support his point with data shows something about your willingness to understand his position completely.
The sky isn’t blue.
Your swimming pool example assumes a whole lot about the similarity between ink and CO2, an assumption which is far more simplistic and amateurish than Dr. Easterbrook’s entire case, which you didn’t permit him to make in the first place before writing him off after four minutes as “amateurish.”
He makes the later point regarding saturation of CO2 that sinks your ink analogy. In other words, the impact of CO2 on warming is reached very quickly and exponentially more of it would need to be dumped into the atmosphere to make any appreciable difference after that threshold is reached. In terms of your ink analogy, the effects of the ink making the water opaque, will be reached very quickly, so no matter how much more ink you dump in, you can’t make the water MORE opaque. Similarly, with CO2, once a threshold is reached, more of it won’t make much of a difference. His claim is that that threshold for CO2 is reached very quickly so more won’t substantially change anything.
His case is far more elaborate than I can detail here. I suggest you watch the entire video rather than prejudice your conclusion by your assumptions. The segment of the video starting at 37:46 and forwards addresses this, specifically.
I would assume that most climate scientists would agree that water vapor has a far greater impact on warming than CO2.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
His introduction of the argument for why CO2 could not cause global warming is totally at odds with the argument you state here. In his introduction he indicated that the smallest of the CO2 concentration was the point. He leads us to believe CO2 could not cause global warming because there is not enough of it to do much. Now you are stating that the real argument is that there is already so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has already done its worst, and any more CO2 cannot trap more heat than is already being trapped.
If that is the case, I should not have to take the word of this anti-climate change crusader. There should be a scientific article you could cite that says exactly what the parameters of the CO2 heat-trapping effect are. If it is an inverse exponential, it would be good to know if 400 ppm is 1% or 10% or 50% or 75% or 95% of the way to its asymptotic maximum effect where the effect would be truly saturated.
No, I am not going to sit through any more YouTube videos. If you cannot cite an actual scientific result, they you do not have a case.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
Actually, if you understand his further point that CO2, at the very most, can only account for 3.6% of the greenhouse effect at its maximum – and we are nowhere near that – you might understand where your argument goes awry from the beginning.
In other words, to use your ink in the pool analogy, CO2 “ink” can never possibly darken the water appreciably - at the very most, it can only tint it very very slightly.
The fact that you won’t even consider actual scientific data in your refusal to assess the problem “scientifically” shows you aren’t interested in whether or not there is an actual case to be made.
You see, the positive case is not the same as the negative case. You demonstrate that quite adequately here.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
I think he is misrepresenting that 3.6% figure. Do you have any independent confirmation of what it means?
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Ridgerunner
Guest
No analogy is perfect. I get Leaf’s point, though I would be hesitant to say 264 gallons of ink in a large swimming pool would prevent one from seeing the bottom. 264 gallons seems like a lot when we think in terms of one gallon milk cartons, but it really isn’t when it’s all in one container. That’s about half the capacity of a sprayer tank I use for brush, and it’s not very much at all. I’m not sure 264 gallons of ink would perceptibly tint the water in an Olympic size swimming pool once it got stirred in, let alone obscure a view of the bottom.
And it would need to be a swimming pool with a leak and a constant inflow of water, because CO2 is constantly being sequestered by a number of forces, as well as being generated from a number of sources. And both of those things vary from time to time.
But again, all analogies limp, just as all charts and graphs can be adjusted to seem to show more drama than they really do.
One of my complaints about the whole MMGW argument is that those who argue for it or purport to demonstrate it never take anything else into account; things that can have a significant local effect on atmospheric temperatures as well as CO2 sequestration over huge areas.
One small example (and no, I can’t prove its planetary effect) is the ongoing desertification of north China. I think experts are in agreement that it’s caused by abusing the land. But it’s an enormous area, and desertifying it removes a lot of plants that once sequestered CO2 but don’t any longer, and causes greater heat radiation. A great deal of the Russian Republic has been desertified through poor practices. The same is true of a lot of Africa. People talk about deforestation in the Amazon and southeast Asia due to logging and slash-and-burn agriculture. That’s a lot of formerly sequestered CO2 that goes into the atmosphere.
Even in the U.S., which is fairly good when it comes to the environment, there have been huge changes since the end of the “Little Ice Age”. One small example. I recall reading that the eastern Great Plains were almost impossible to farm at first, until the invention of the disc plow. Why? Because of the buildup of tall grass prairie over centuries, farmers couldn’t remove grasses like Big Bluestem without an axe. When the disc plow came, it was remarked that the plows, pulled by multiple teams, rang like bells when they cut through that dense and heavy root structure. What a tremendous change in carbon sequestration that wrought! But nobody takes account of things like that. Oh, but that same land now grows mostly small grains. Well, but does it take in the CO2 that Big Bluestem did back when it was so huge that if a man on horseback rode by, one could only see the man, and not necessarily all of him? I have my doubts. And do small grains permanently sustain a huge volume of root structure? Of course not.
Not enough is taken into account, so the “experts” and those who believe them only consider fossil fuels. And is the world warming or not, and if so, why? I would not accuse this month in my state as evidencing global warming. Nor can I point to a single thing in my environment to support the notion. People go further and further afield to find out where the heat really is. Again, admitting that analogies have limited usefulness, red “Fox” squirrels are larger than ordinary gray squirrels. Fox squirrels can, and sometimes do, drive gray squirrels out of some piece of habitat. Now, if I counted squirrels in a given area and, over a period of time noted that the Fox squirrel numbers were exceeding those of gray squirrels, I might conclude that the change is due to the strength and aggressiveness of Fox squirrels. But would it be true, or might there be other things happening that encourage the Fox squirrels’ reproduction over the others?. If walnut trees are increasing in the area, and knowing that Fox squirrels tend to predominate in walnut groves, would I more properly conclude that the greater gnawing power of Fox squirrels is the answer?
Might not be. Maybe I ought to consider the number of hawks and owls and coyotes, and the habits and vulnerabilities of both kinds of squirrels before arriving at conclusions.
There is a lot of alarm over this issue, but it’s largely about things we don’t know much about and much of which is theoretical. And the “cures” are largely theoretical. Well, we could reduce fossil fuel use by 50% by “year X” if we do this and that. But rarely does anybody consider what that would mean in North Dakota in the winter. And so, the whole argument is unbalanced in a number of ways.
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Theo520
Guest
I thought the argument was that CO2 feedbacks caused most of the warming, or most of the tinting in the analogy.
The problem is there is mostly conjecture but very little science behind these assumptions.
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Ender
Guest
I don’t think I buy his argument either, although some of it is valid. CO2 is not exactly opaque to IR: it absorbs IR at very particular frequencies and once all the IR at a particular frequency is absorbed the addition of more CO2 makes no difference whatever - for that specific frequency.
While I’m sure there are other things going on, this chart does expose the difficulty of convincing people that CO2 is responsible for global warming.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
- monthly lower tropospheric satellite temperature for the Tropics-Land component in blue and the monthly CO2 concentration in red after removal of the seasonal variation so as to match the residual temperature series.*
Ender
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Peter_Plato
Guest
Easterbrook addresses that point. He says 95% of possible greenhouse warming could only come from water vapor. That would mean the feedbacks have to do with CO2 “levering” water vapor to create the warming. He dismisses that, however, for a number of reasons which he explains in the video. There were several other scientists who spoke to that same committee in 2013 that made the same or similar claims with regard to CO2.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Another source that water vapor is responsible for 95% of greenhouse effect.
pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/ci/31/special/may01_viewpoint.html
That only leaves 5% for all other contributors. I don’t suppose you want to argue that CO2 is responsible for all that remaining 5%?
The first link provides the breakdown to obtain 3.6% (72.36% of the remaining 5% not attributable to water vapor.)
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
I don’t think you understand the difference between a primary source of facts and an agenda-laden analysis of the facts. Both of the references you cited were of the later category. Please try again to find a totally factual reference that proves that CO2 cannot cause global warming. And then try to explain to me why so many smart people are unaware of this fact that is so simple that the average person can understand it.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
Are these “agenda-laden analyses” wrong on the facts or just the analyses? Hard to tell since you don’t bother analyzing the analyses, do you?
Can you explain to me why every post you write shouldn’t be taken as an agenda-laden analysis of the facts?
I am sure you are sufficiently competent to find your own facts, then, and analyze them according to your own agenda, if you can’t be bothered to analyze the “agenda-laden analyses” of others for their correctness rather than just dismiss them out of hand.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
Actually, I cannot understand how the analyses of Dr. Easterbrook follow from the facts. Perhaps you could explain it to me.
I’m afraid your confidence in my abilities is not well-placed.
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