10 minutes to put the whole debate in perspective.
I normally detest cheap youtube videos. But I may transcribe this at some point, because it makes the best arguments about the whole debate itself.
Whether or not you believe global warming is real, you should still watch this, because this guy has it nailed.
I am all about risk management.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 11-08-2008 at 08:11 PM.
Well RG, I watched up to the point of the "action" "inaction"
on the white board.
I want to know where all the cat five hurricanes are that they
predicted?
I also want to know, how come the sun cant cause things to
heat up here on Earth?
I also want to know how come it takes three or four or five
computers to track the weather daily, but the doomsayers
can use one computer program to tell us that people are
causing the earth to heat up. How come?
someone is faithful ditto head. geez ray hush's show has been over 5 minutes and you are already repeating his stuff?
Ahhhh, you listened, didn't you?
But you are wrong, it is not his stuff. I have often thought
why some our most wonderful scientist, like RNR, and others
think that a damn computer model of Earth warming is
so much better than the others than takes about humpteen
programs to figure out what the weather will be like
the next few days. Like Steve on channel 12. Of
course here on the SpursTalk we got Manny. Maybe he
can answer that question.
Irrelevant. Either we cover our risk or we don't. It is that simple. It doesn't matter which side of the argument you are on, one should still mitigate the risk, and do something about it.
Like the guy in the video said, you can't always avoid car accidents, but you can avoid the financial disaster by buying insurance.
Sure you can toodle along without insurance, and quite possibly never need it, but is it responsible to do so?
RRG, some are saying we will be in a cooling period in
less than a decade. Do we cover that risk factor also. How
bout we let old Mother Nature take it's course and realize
mankind is just that mankind. We can change little and
only on a temporary basis.
That isn't the way it works, and this is alluded to in the video when the guy talks about light switches.
As for cooling, one should use the same logic that structures the matrix that the guy gives.
One has to cover for worst case scenarios that are somewhat likely. The thing about cooling is that there is little evidence to support it that I am aware of at the moment. I am sure you or Cobra can find a link, but I simply defer to the general scientific consensus on this for now.
Agreed when they are tempered with probability too.
Now riddle me this. If the world is so concerned with greenhouse gasses, then why aren't all nations treated equally under Kyoto?
I have seen enough evidence to convince me we (the USA) cannot make a dent in global warming with our current regulations. However, SE Asia is not only expelling more greenhouse gasses than us, they don't use current technology for pollution control. If you want me to believe the world leaders believe in man made global warming, then apply the rules equally. The way they go about it, I only see it as elitists trying to bring down the economic powers.
As for the risks? Again, the only evidence I have seen that man has caused any global warming it the black carbon from Asia melting the polar ice. Everything else is clearly disputable through reputable science.
Get Asia in line, then we can talk.
Where is this 'evidence' that China and SE Asia are propelling more greenhouses gasses into the air than the U.S?
It's already old news and I listed a source in a different posting somewhere. I'm not going to look for it again. China alone exceeded us by 8% in CO2 I think in 2006. They have been building coal powered plants like crazy.
If you are all about risk management then think about this for a second...the GW debate can be wrapped up in to choices...I am all about risk management.
1. Either GW supporters are right and working to reduce GW gasses is a worthy cause - therefore spending money to regulate industry or raising taxes to reduce GW gases are a worthy cause because the alternative is war, famine, and lots of death....
or
2. the GW supporters are wrong and spending tax money and regulating industry are a big waste of money and we all live happily ever after....
so, your risk-management choices are 1) spend money that you don't necessarily have to spend 2) or war, famine, and death........
Thing is, with CO2, it may contribute as much as 36% of the greenhouse effect, and that is the worse case of a controversial number. It is more likely about 12%. It is already blocking in the high nineties of what it is capable of blocking by spectra. I'm not sure what that amount is, but let's assume 98%. The greenhouse effect is approximately 32 C. 36% of that is 11.52 C. Doubling the CO2 would then trap 98% of the remaining 2%, or another 0.226 C maximum, worse case scenario. This would be changing the CO2 from about 370 ppm to 740 ppm. Only a 0.226 C theoretical maximum change.
More realistic, say 18% for the CO2 contribution make the CO2 effect half of the maximum worse case scenario.
Take the sun now. Scientist have shown a pretty good change from 1900 in average solar radiation to today. I think amount 1.6%, but I'm not sure by just looking at the graph. It's about 2.5% from 1700 to today. There is an almost linear relation between the solar intensity and the earths average temperature. The mildest case we can make for the sun would be to say that the earth would be at maybe 200 K (K = Kelvin, which has the same slope as Celsius. 0 C = 273.15 K) with no solar radiation. We currently enjoy an average of about 288 K. Therefore, a 1.6% change in solar radiation is a 1.41 C change. A 2.5% change would be 2.2 C change in temperature. 100 K with no solar radiation is more likely I think. Therefore, a 1.6% change in solar radiation would be a 3.008 C change. A 2.5% change would be 4.7 C change in temperature. These 1.6% and 2.5% are based on C14 proxies as these ratios change proportional to solar radiation.
The sun has far more effect on our temperature than greenhouse gasses, and we have no way or controlling it.
Now before you ask why we don't see the dramatic 3 degree change from 1700 to now, the oceans carry and store most the heat changes. The lag time is at least 800 years I think.
Note that the Carbon 14 readings lag by 60 years. It takes that long for them to settle from the upper atmosphere, which also means it is a 60 year smoothing for the graph.
probability is probability.
He is using the same logic that some people used to prove the existence of God in the 13th Century b/c the best rational decision when faced with risk of burning in for eternity. It is convincing because of the scare tactic.
he could be right, but hey we live in a live now society, i don't think people are going 2 change overnight. they are worried about their 9 to 5's and have no time for decisions like theese.
My God. You found the root cause. I applaud you. It has so much more credibility than what the alarmists propose with CO2!
The answer to the riddle: Politics is messy. It is a comprimise between what should happen and what is possible to end up with what happens.
The future of debate on this will be per capita emissions. By that measure, China and India can contribute roughly 3 times what the US does, and that is pretty fair. That measure DOES treat all countries equally.
The trick will be reducing per capita carbon emmissions world-wide.
As for everything else, yes it is disputable, but disputable is irrelevant, as the video points out.
We will not have certain data to act on and must choose a course of action based on incomplete data, as is often the case in anything.
If one really wants some perspective, one should watch the videos by Hans Rosling. He has two main videos that should be watched in order, although the second one is where he starts talking about carbon emissions.
The main thrust of this is a presentation about economic data of all sorts in a global perspective. Each presentation is about 20 minutes, but is VERY VERY worth watching. It is not your normal dry, boring presentation and is quite engaging and informing.
The second one has an ending that one would not expect from from any normal economist, and made me absolutely determined to get this guy's autograph, because I am that kind of nerd.
2006 presentation
2007 presentation
Couldn't find the second one on youtube, but if you like the above, I am sure you can find them if you put your mind to it.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 10-25-2007 at 08:03 AM. Reason: Minor formatting changes to make it more readable.
That is so very wrong.
This is not logic that "proves" anything. This is logic that defines courses of actions, based on incomplete information.
This is, again getting into the specifics of the debate, and that is covered in other threads. Did you actually watch the video in the OP?
Politics is sometimes just flat out wqrong too. Take the same aspect and apply it to Christianity. On the very slight chance that a consencuc of people could agree that souls would be lost to if they do not accept Jesus, should we force such an action?
Political and public consensus is manipulated when it comes to global warming. When you look at the facts, it is clear than man is not the cause of warming to any scale cited.
Does it? I would agree with that assessment of the forces of world governments required the developing nations to use the latest technologies, but they dont!
Solar, wind, geothermal power generation will help. These are insignificant to the needs of future power. If the powers to be are really concerned about the greenhouse gasses rather than taking the reigns of economic power, then why is there a push for things like ethonal and carbon credits. Ethanol creates even more greenhouse gasses, and carbon credits are just a tax that really is more for show than making a difference.
We need to build more nuclear plants and generate hydrogen fuels from them. Otherwise, the only way to reduce greenhouse gasses is to stop the usage of fossile fuels and go dark.
If they had a valid concept, I would agree. However, the idea that we are generating greenhouse gasses to a level of causing problems is flat out false. Nobody who understands the sciences behind greenhouse gas emmissions agree that we are causing the problems with CO2. Only the people who stand to gain power or money from the scare are promiting it, except those who remain ignorant of the facts.
What data. I have so far been able to dispute everything. I', not so good at the black and white of the law, but I am at the physical sciences.
The only man made global warming I have seen any evidence of is the black carbon (soot) that traps the suns energy on ice, melting it rather than reflecting the energy back into space. Once we lose the ice cap over the arctic, the ocean then absorbs about 90% of the sunlight rather than reflecting about 90%! This is pollution, in the form of unburned carbon, not CO2 as an anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
First world nations have limited pollutions, methane, and other gasses as good as practical. Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas on earth. To take CO2 to levels that might start having a measurable effect on the temperature, you have to increase it to lethal levels first. Considering how much the biosphere and oceans absorb, we would likely have to burn 20 to 30 times as much fossil fuels as we do today to achieve that, and we might then raise the average temperature by 0.3 C
The sun clearly has a greater effect on the earths temperature than CO2. Consider this graph:
The red graph is temperature. It has fluctuated from about a -1 C to a +2 C over the last approximate 11,000 years, Notice how it most closely resembles the pattern of the upper of the two orange lines, which is another isotope proxy. Oxygen-18. Like Carbon-14, it is created in the upper atmosphere by the solar radiation. The stronger the solar radiation, the more atoms get converted.
When you look at atmospheric concentrations closely of CO2 and CH4, it becomes clear that their levels roughly follow temperature changes. As life grows more abundant, so does the gasses that are part of the cycles of life. Notice how CO2 and CH4 levels for the most part follow each other with the cycle of life.
Another thing to consider. Now if memory serves me, this is a 2004 graph. It shows CO2 at about 285 ppm to the far left. Today, it is well over 350 ppm. At the same time, about 11,000 years ago, our temperature went into the approximate 1,500 year cycle from the +2 to -2 C, CO2 is still rising without having an effect on this cycle. Now if temperature followed CO2, shouldn’t, by this graph, temperatures today be more like +4 of the right temperature scale?
Oh… one more thing to consider. The Solar Proxies, C-14, O-18, Be-10, etc. all track close to the solar activity. They are not created by temperature changes, but by solar radiation levels.
Some wiki references:
Berylium Isotopes:
Carbon 14:10Be is produced in the atmosphere by cosmic ray spallation of oxygen and nitrogen. Because beryllium tends to exist in solution at pH levels less than about 5.5 (and most rainwater has a pH less than 5), it will enter into solution and be transported to the Earth's surface via rainwater. As the precipitation quickly becomes more alkaline, beryllium drops out of solution. Cosmogenic 10Be thereby ac ulates at the soil surface, where its relatively long half-life (1.51 million years) permits a long residence time before decaying to 9B. 10Be and its daughter products have been used to examine soil erosion, soil formation from regolith, the development of lateritic soils, as well as variations in solar activity and the age of ice cores.
Carbon-14 is produced in the upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere by thermal neutrons absorbed by nitrogen atoms. When cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, they undergo various transformations, including the production of neutrons. The resulting neutrons (1n) participate in the following reaction:
1n + 14N → 14C + 1H
The highest rate of carbon-14 production takes place at al udes of 9 to 15 km (30,000 to 50,000 feet) and at high geomagnetic la udes, but the carbon-14 readily mixes and becomes evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere and reacts with oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide also dissolves in water and thus permeates the oceans.
Oxygen 18
Now here is a copy of a past argument I made:Paleoclimatology
In Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, O-18 is used to retrieve the original temperatures of the precipitation during different years by analyzing the isotope ratio of the respective annual layers of ice.
Now I later supplied graphs of the finer resolutions of CO2 spectra:That doesn't debunk anything I said. I never implied the 2x M&M theory. In fact, I always said it is not a linear function. Why does the IPCC treat is as a linear function, along with other climatologists that are in line with you?
Notice how little more of the band a four-fold increase by that link gives. My contention is that CO2 has the ability to trap about 16% of the radiated heat at current levels. Your link suggests a four-fold increase changes transmission from about 66.2% to about 59.8%. I can live with that, although I know of some finer nuances that will reduce the change. For the sake of argument, I will accept those numbers.
OK, 33.8% absorption and the maximum argued amount of 26% that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is estimated to be 32 C. That equates to 8.32 C warming by CO2. A fourfold increase and we now have 40.2% absorption. That is 19% more absorption and now the CO2 effect on temperature is 9.9 C. So it takes a fourfold increase in CO2 to increase the global temperature by 1.58 degrees C!
Now remember, I'm allowing for worse case numbers which I don't agree with. That 26% only applies at a humidity of ZERO! H2O is already trapping half the spectra, so the effect this can cause is about half, or only 0.8 C for a four-fold. If we linearize that small segment, then that amounts to 0.088 Celsius for every 100 ppm worse case.
The truth of the outer range of the absorption spectra is that it is not smooth. It is averaged on most any graph you see. When you look at the data in 0.1 micro-meter resolutions, it peaks and goes to 100% transmission for hundreds of micrometers. Those outer areas cannot peak at 0 transmission, only about 50% because of that nuance.
If I were to accept that data, I will say that when you consider the common spectra absorption with H2O, out industrialized CO2 can only account for 0.06 C increase in temperature.
More on the atmospheric saturation of heat trapping.
Please note that in the Real Climate link describing the spectral data, it gave calculations and a nice graph for CO2. It is similar to this. Note that each mark of the left side are factors of 10. It is not a linear graph, but logarithmic:
Now remember what I said about looking at the data in finer resolution? I said 0.1 micrometers, but you actually need to look finer than that. My mistake, sue me. Also note that you need equipment sensitive enough to make true measurements. Here are refined views of the area in question:
Consider how the narrow bands are so discrete. They really never get to 100%. Equipment measurements that cannot discern such resolutions give false reading. This is another indication that CO2 does not trap as much heat as you guys suspect.
Molecules vibrate at pure frequencies. As an electronics expert, and operating several types of Frequency Selective measurement equipment, I know how the sensitivity and bandwidth affects a graph. There are not really any curved areas when dealing with molecular vibration frequencies. What you see is the lack of the equipment to give clear resolution. The higher the bandwidth that the receiver, the smoother the signal looks. Often to the point of making the changes invisible from zero to maximum.
Link for above data from CalTech:
Carbon dioxide images from HITRAN 2004
Heh. You haven't actually watched the video have you?
I did. I find the theory sound when dealing with possibilities that actually exist.
BUT
For the record: nuclear power sucks sweaty monkey balls, for a lot of reasons.
Not that I am against nuclear per se, I just don't see it as very practical.
Distributed solar and wind will step up to the gap, as will very clean coal.
Long term, nuclear will fall by the wayside for things like this:
Space-based solar power
The sun puts out more energy in 2 second than mankind has ever used.
Solar power in space offers 24 hour power uninterrupted by clouds/storms.
It might not even be horribly efficient, but when you can build a collecting array 200 miles long by 200 miles wide, it doesn't have to be.
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