WSJ: Whatever Happened to Global Warming?

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lynnvinc said:
I like sci fi, but reality is so much worse…
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I will be praying for you.
To be locked into a view of the future as you are must be a horrible existence.

The earth is not dying.
The oceans are not boiling.
The sky is not falling.
And it is a very comfortable 70 degrees F outside right now.

The world is not the horrible thing you see.
I pray the scales will fall from your eyes.
 
weller2 said:
So, there – yes, you could fit everyone inside Texas, but you’d still need to use 50% of the planet’s surface to grow food which would then be shipped to Texas.
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That is a ridiculous statement. Dry land is only 30% of the Earth’s surface. The arable portion is far less than that and yet we manage somehow to feed the vast majority.

I think your response here says much about your tendency toward alarmism and I am an alarmist myself so I can spot them quite well. 😃
 
Ender said:
Why should we make such an assumption? According to a new NASA paper, a doubling of CO2 from the current 390 ppm to 780 would lead to an increase of…1.64 deg C. If correct this means we could go a couple of centuries at the current rate of increase in CO2 without any dangerous warming at all. And surely in a couple of centuries time scientists will have resolved the problems of generating energy from fusion reactors.

Again, where’s the problem?
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In your inability to understand the exponential function.

World GDP is growing at 3.5% per year, which means it doubles every 20 years. But making GDP takes energy. So, if the energy efficiency of the economy remains constant, and the amount of energy released from burning of 1 ton of carbon remains constant, then it follows that there is a linear relationship between the GDP value and the amount of carbon burned. Since burning carbon directly translates to CO2, then it means that CO2 emissions must grow in line with GDP growth (absent improvements in energy efficiency and deployments of non-carbon energy sources).

As the world GDP grows 3.5% per year, our simple model dictates that CO2 emissions must also grow 3.5% per year. Meaning, as world GDP doubles every 20 years, the amount of CO2 emitted must also double every 20 years. It follows that the amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere must also double every 20 years.

Curiously, this part has been ommitted from the IPCC report, and relegated to an appendix. Probably because once you realize the above, then the conclusion below is both inescapable and unacceptable for politicians.

So the difference between 2C and 3C climate sensitivity is this: at 3C sensitivity, you will trigger a 6C warming in 40 years. At 2C sensitivity, you will trigger it in 60 years. (At 1.5C sensitivity, it will be 80 years.) It’s a far cry from hundreds of years.

Next, 40-60 years is less time than you think. You have to take into account that both the design lifetime and depreciation period of a power plant is, coincidentally, 50 years. Worse, the plants are usually built with credit, so they will have to keep running for their whole design lifetime, so they can be paid back.

Taking this into account, you realize that the only way you can have both power and limited CO2 is by instituting a total ban on construction of new power plants right now. The amount of CO2 which can be safely emitted into the atmosphere (with a quite liberal definition of safely) is roughly comparable to the amount of carbon which will have to be emitted anyway during the phase out period of the old power plants.

A corollary is of course that postponing this decision will mean either forced premature shutdown of coal-fired plants (and related economic costs) or bigger warming (and related economic costs).
 
RGCheek said:
That is a ridiculous statement. Dry land is only 30% of the Earth’s surface. The arable portion is far less than that and yet we manage somehow to feed the vast majority.

I think your response here says much about your tendency toward alarmism and I am an alarmist myself so I can spot them quite well. 😃
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Jesus. Of course I meant planet’s land surface. I have even quoted a source which said just that.
 
estesbob said:
What shows we’re not even close to being overpopulated
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Only because your faction lost the battle over the population control policies back in 1960s.

In 2014, we need 50% of all the land there is to feed 7 billion people. Which means we could theoretically feed 14 billion people if we planted wheat everywhere, including Sahara. (Or outlawed production of meat, but I don’t like the idea and probably you wouldn’t as well).
 
weller2 said:
Jesus. Of course I meant planet’s land surface. I have even quoted a source which said just that.
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Hey, I can only go by what exactly you say on this topic, where hyperbole is the lingua franca of the AGW alarmists.

And ocean areas can be put to use generating food so 50% isn’t completely irrational anyway.
 
lynnvinc said:
***What would you propose doing about people who kill and incite to kill? Do we just remain silent and let them kill?

I don’t have answers myself, only questions. I don’t like imprisoning people, esp since our prison system is so extremely horrible. Maybe community service of some type, like something with alt energy or planting trees for professional CC skeptics who incite people to kill thru AGW 🙂

Maybe since it is all about money for those professional CC skeptics, hit them were it hurts with huge lawsuits that amount to more than the get from the fossil fuel industries.***

As the article said, “You still can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year, all saying the same thing: This is a problem, and we should take some preparations for when it becomes a bigger problem.”

I’m not sure what the punishment or fine is for people who “yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater when there is no fire” that ends up in a stampede that kills people. Maybe something along the lines of that level of punishment, fine, or slap on wrist.
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So someone like Joe Bastardi for instance, who is outspoken in his opposition towards MMGW would be forced to convert, keep his opinions to himself, or slammed with a huge lawsuit because as you claim, he falls under the category of “people who kill and incite to kill?”…Interesting. A very Catholic way to handle these people who, as Robert Kennedy Jr. has called those who don’t accept MMGW; ***“contemptible human beings.” ***You like to quote the Pope when it suits your opinions, but can you give me a quote from the Pope that says that those who’s views differ from yours on this issue should be dealt with in the fashion that Kennedy and yourself have stated? It’s become real plain for me to see that for some, the Catholic Faith plays second fiddle to their real religion…global warming. It’s become an obsession.

Peace, Mark
 
vz71 said:
I will be praying for you.
To be locked into a view of the future as you are must be a horrible existence.
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It is, esp knowing I’m also part of the problem, but struggling to reduce. However, it is a great blessing to be a Catholic, knowing that Jesus is with us, helping us, and forgiving the repentant. It is a very humbling experience.

I guess if I had children, I’d be stark-raving mad…or perhaps I’d have my head buried in the sand like most here (whom I assume have children and/or grandchildren)
The earth is not dying.
The oceans are not boiling.
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It’s true that the oceans are not expected to boil away during this episode of climate hysteresis or hyper-warming. That will only come in a billion years or so as the sun gets hotter & hotter on its way to self-destruction.

However, if we do not mitigate AGW – now and in a very serious way, since we’ve been dithering for decades – there will be a tremendous human cost, human sacrifice zones and sacrifice generations. I don’t know how many will be harmed and die from AGW effects. 25 yrs ago when I started mitigating I only thought it would be in the tens or hundreds of thousands and only for a few decades, but that was enough to get me going. Now, as the years and decades went by and the science was coming in “it’s worse than we thought” I understand it will be much more than that and for 100 and maybe 1000s or 10,000s of years on up 100,000 years, as it had lasted in other past great warmings.

If you only understood the truth, you’d also be concerned.

Luckily I got into studying the issue in the 1980s well before it had become a political hot potato, when there was some modicum of respect for science and scientists. And luckily I’ve known about the GH effect since the 60s when I read a general science book re the universe and the earth, so it wasn’t much of a problem for me to understand global warming. And luckily I teach research methods (in social sciences) and understand how scientists usually underestimate problems in their efforts to avoid the false positive of making untrue claims. And luckily I’ve been in contact with climate scientists since 1990 (well before I even had internet access) and I know and trust them a whole lot more than blog pundits.

I regret terribly that there are any Catholics who would be so dissuaded by the lies and deceit of the fossil-fuel-funded CC Skeptic Industry and their evil henchmen. This is pure evil. I suppose it is our fallen human nature, but it looks ever more like the Devil’s work…tho I don’t think that lets anyone off the hook of responsibility.

I’ll pray that you and others understand this is a very serious problem we are causing other people on into the future, and luckily we can mitigate it by over 50% reductions in our GHG emissions cost-effectively. It will take years, perhaps decades just to do that. At that point we can reassess and see if we need to actually make some type of sacrifice, reduce our living standard a bit or something.
 
Mark121359 said:
So someone like Joe Bastardi for instance, who is outspoken in his opposition towards MMGW would be forced to convert, keep his opinions to himself, or slammed with a huge lawsuit because as you claim, he falls under the category of “people who kill and incite to kill?”…Interesting. A very Catholic way to handle these people who, as Robert Kennedy Jr. has called those who don’t accept MMGW; ***“contemptible human beings.” ***You like to quote the Pope when it suits your opinions, but can you give me a quote from the Pope that says that those who’s views differ from yours on this issue should be dealt with in the fashion that Kennedy and yourself have stated? …
Peace, Mark
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This is not a matter of opinions, but of science, and people refusing to accept robust and settled science. It is a much stronger case than the L’Aquila seismology case in which the scientists who did not present the correct scientific information about an impending earthquake, resulting in the death of 309 and destruction of the town, were imprisoned. The case of AGW involves many orders of magnitude greater deaths and property destruction. And unlike some 10 years ago, they are now able to attribute (at high scientific confidence) a portion of some “natural” disasters (heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires, disease spread, storms, etc) to AGW. This attribution will likely increase very greatly as the decades go by, esp if we continue to dither and not face up to the problem.

Don’t know about Joe Bastardi or what impact he has on dissuading people from becoming alerted to AGW and its harms and from mitigating it. I don’t know whether he even knows of which he speaks or if he’s being paid for his lies by the fossil fuel industry. This is the first time I’m hearing of him.

No person is a “contemptible human being” in God’s view. However, a person’s behavior could be contemptible. Gandhi said, “hate the sin, not the sinner.” Bastardi’s behavior (such as his speech) would be contemptible if it is having impact on dissuading people from accepting AGW and mitigating it and he KNOWS or suspects AGW is happening or should know bec of his education and access to information, but lies about it. That would be highly contemptible, given the great harms and risks from AGW. If he also benefits financially from his spreading lies, that would make his behavior all the more contemptible.

Unlike the author of the article, I would not consider Rush Limbaugh’s behavior as contemptible as much as pathetic, heart-breaking, and downright irresponsible. Rush is not someone who should know better, since he really doesn’t have the background to understand climate science…he just parrots those who are acting in a highly contemptible way. I think that would go for most of his followers as well. Nevertheless there should be some way to prevent him from spreading dangerous lies that lead to harm and death, esp since he does influence a great number of people.

I appreciate those skeptics who simply keep silent rather than spread lies & deceit which would dissuade others from mitigating, or do honest research and publish it in peer-reviewed science journals aimed at a discussion among climate scientists to figure out what are the scientific facts. That, BTW, is being a true skeptic, and not a denialist or contrarian, as the others are.

I appreciate those who say they don’t accept that AGW is happening, but do those things that would mitigate AGW because they do mitigate many other problems.

And I especially appreciate those who say they do not think AGW is happening, but are not sure, so they mitigate it anyway out of prudence, because its threats (were they to come about) are so dire.
 
In the case of L’Aquila, there were many contradictory opinions about the ability to forecast (predict) an earth quake. The ultimate judgment was a result of the perception that a low risk was being communicated, after which an earthquake occurred. It was a problem of not knowing how to communicate what they did know to the public. This is not the same thing as failing to predict an earthquake will or will not happen.

Since no one to date has a robust method of earthquake prediction, it is not surprising that there are many competing and contradictory opinions, which is as unsurprising as the fact that populations persist in living in geological unstable areas. The one thing that appears to be clear is that our obsession with risk, and the array of low skill predictive models that are meant to mitigate risk is effectively reducing our resilience and the ability to see things that could really harm us. The real risk is that in our search for that crystal ball and the control we think it will give us, we blind ourselves to the wisdom of not knowing what we don’t know. Maybe Rumsfeld was right.
 
weller2 said:
In your inability to understand the exponential function.

World GDP is growing at 3.5% per year, which means it doubles every 20 years. But making GDP takes energy. So, if the energy efficiency of the economy remains constant, and the amount of energy released from burning of 1 ton of carbon remains constant, then it follows that there is a linear relationship between the GDP value and the amount of carbon burned.
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Yes, I can see your assumptions lead to the conclusion that CO2 doubles every 20 years. Unfortunately, conclusions based on data rather than assumptions are markedly different.*Plotting the NOAA ESRL Global Annual Mean CO2 mole fraction increase (PPM) Data shows a relatively flat trend in the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, with the mean from 1980-2009 (thru 9/09) of 1.65 Parts Per Million (PPM). At this rate, the time required to double CO2 levels from the current 386 PPM to 772 PPM is 234 years. The IPCC and alarmists assume CO2 levels are increasing exponentially, predicting CO2 levels will double as soon as 2050, but that is not what the data over the past 30 years show:
hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/time-to-double-co2-levels-467-years.html
*Ender
 
Ender said:
Yes, I can see your assumptions lead to the conclusion that CO2 doubles every 20 years. Unfortunately, conclusions based on data rather than assumptions are markedly different.Plotting the NOAA ESRL Global Annual Mean CO2 mole fraction increase (PPM) Data shows a relatively flat trend in the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, with the mean from 1980-2009 (thru 9/09) of 1.65 Parts Per Million (PPM). At this rate, the time required to double CO2 levels from the current 386 PPM to 772 PPM is 234 years. The IPCC and alarmists assume CO2 levels are increasing exponentially, predicting CO2 levels will double as soon as 2050, but that is not what the data over the past 30 years show:
hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/time-to-double-co2-levels-467-years.html
Ender
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This is incorrect thinking in several ways.

First of all, the rate of CO2 increase is much higher now than the 1980-2009 average (the rate has been increasing). It’s been over 2 ppm averaged over the past 10 years. See co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Trend/acceleration-of-atmospheric-co2.html

Second there are other things that impact this increasing rate, with industrial emissions still the biggest factor at this point.

For one thing, the amount of our CO2 emissions has been increasing over the years and decades, esp with developing nations now becoming more developed. Note that they also have a right to have higher levels of well-being and prosperity, which are still nowhere near the developed world’s levels. Rich nations like the US should be helping them to develop in a less carbon- and less pollution-intensive way…not the harmful path we took.

For another thing as the world warms more carbon is being released from permafrost and ocean hydrates. This is expected to increase greatly on into the distant future until the “methane shotgun” is fully discharged (note that methane degrades into CO2 in about 10 years), IF we choose to let this happen by our continued and growing GHG emissions and the warming these cause. Some say we have maybe 15 years to avert this spiraling out of our control by drastically reducing our GHG emissions, and others think we may have already passed the tipping point.

Another important issue is that the natural carbon sinks – forests, oceans, etc – are losing their ability to draw CO2 down from the atmosphere. Saturation, forest fires, die-out of plant life from droughts, heat waves, flooding, etc.

A good portion of CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a long time. They used to say 100 years, but a small portion can remain there up to 100,000 years, which is why some of the past great warmings lasted for over 100,000 years, like the end-Permian extinction. In other words, it just keeps compounding, and the warming tends to lag behind (giving us a false sense of “not much problem”) and the warming itself impacted by various factors beyond GHGs that make it surge higher or remain flat over short terms, again giving us a false sense of “‘no problem so far,’ said the falling man, as he passed the 10th floor.”

It’s always better to check things out first with real climate scientists, r/t rely on bogus, meant-to-deceive (meant to allow serious harms to human well-being) blog sites.
 
lynnvinc said:
This is incorrect thinking in several ways.

First of all, the rate of CO2 increase is much higher now than the 1980-2009 average (the rate has been increasing). It’s been over 2 ppm averaged over the past 10 years. See co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Trend/acceleration-of-atmospheric-co2.html

.
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Yet we have seen no temperature increase. Now we have been given, to date, 57 different excuses as to why this didn’t occur but we were told(before the 57 excuses ) that there was a direct correlation between co2 increase and temperature increase. that is evidently not true
 
The answer is it became a “selfie distraction”. Scaring children about loosing polar bears and penguins got old. People started following the money and found out its all a big con!😛
 
grotto said:
The answer is it became a “selfie distraction”. Scaring children about loosing polar bears and penguins got old. People started following the money and found out its all a big con!😛
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Two things happen.

The East Anglia leaked emails showed a concentrated effort to falsify data and supress opposing views.

The world quit warning
 
Ender said:
Yes, I can see your assumptions lead to the conclusion that CO2 doubles every 20 years. Unfortunately, conclusions based on data rather than assumptions are markedly different.Plotting the NOAA ESRL Global Annual Mean CO2 mole fraction increase (PPM) Data shows a relatively flat trend in the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, with the mean from 1980-2009 (thru 9/09) of 1.65 Parts Per Million (PPM). At this rate, the time required to double CO2 levels from the current 386 PPM to 772 PPM is 234 years. The IPCC and alarmists assume CO2 levels are increasing exponentially, predicting CO2 levels will double as soon as 2050, but that is not what the data over the past 30 years show:
hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/time-to-double-co2-levels-467-years.html
Ender
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There’s a problem though:



If atmospheric CO2 increases less than emissions, then the excess CO2 must be going somewhere. If, for example, it is going into the ocean, then it is contributing to ocean acidification, which is also not good. More to the point however, if emissions continue to increase exponentially, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the sink we are talking about will be continue to accept increased CO2 forever.
 
estesbob said:
The East Anglia leaked emails showed a concentrated effort to falsify data and supress opposing views.

The world quit warning
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Sure, sure. Meanwhile, could you finally answer my question about coal:
  • What is going to power the US economy after all the coal is used and/or sold to the Chinese?
 
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