Climate Change - Man made or not?

[Topcat]

Global warming is WOMAN made. There knicking all the

peebles of the beeches and sticking them in little piles all over the house for men to trip over. Then they stick candles every where.

 

Result millions of candles buring and heating the climate, melting the artic, more water and no fecking beech defense to stop local flooding..lol

[Robokid]

There is a polar shift (of 23 degrees I think) every 10,000 years or so. The Last time it happened shifted the Old North Pole to the left to what is now Hudson Bay. It caused the current south Pole to freeze right over where there had been a thriving landmass in previous times (Columbus era mapmakers showed detailed coastal edges copied from ancient maps, that were only verified by the U.S. navy in the 1950's by use of sonar technology) possibly Atlantis.

 

i've run out of thoughts.... sorry

[JamesA]

Hi guy's I think everyone is entitled to their own opinion whatever that may be. I have my own opinions on an awful lot of things in life but I wouldn't expect anyone else to see things the same way. I can however recomend watching Al Gore's video titled An Inconvenient Truth I watched it recently and although I dont agree with everything covered by it it does have an awful lot of fact's relevant to this post.

[Dagmar]

Gore make millions from this piece of fantasy, both directly from the film and from the companies he is involved in to attempt to assuage the conciences of the gullible. Gores film has little truth in it! His mangling of research, misinterpratation of statistics, ignoring evidence and use of discredited science makes his film as credible on the subject of climate change as 'Finding Nemo' is to oceanography.

 

"On the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperature, United Kingdom astrophysicist Piers Corbyn said, "There is no evidence that carbon dioxide has ever driven or will ever drive world temperatures and climate change. Worrying about carbon dioxide is irrelevant."

 

There is so much evidence that we, as humans, have no real influence on the climate system that it is a wonder that anyone bothers to watch this drivel , let alone think that it could be true.

[Log-ologist]

Live life.

 

The world will still turn when we are drowning in boiling seas.

 

Who says we are the top of the evolutionary tree.

 

 

Surf tsunami.

[Jack-Arb aka Tiago Sinclair-Julio.]

Hello Dagmar,

 

Yes I do agree with you and that info you found in the net about these new schemes to reduce peoples carbon foot print.

 

A lot of those programes are not affective and dont even work, what they really do is nothing to do with protecting the enviroment but play with people's conscience.

 

So for example the flying issue, instead of making people fly less what they do is send a message of, if you fly remember your carbon foot print, so if you paying this little tax we'll plant a few trees to offset your foot print.

Then as you rightly pointed out most of these schemes have little research done and later found that they have little positive affect or even negative consequences.

So people are not flying less and there conscience is ok with it because they feel they've done the right thing by paying for a scheme like this.

 

I know little about carbon and its affects on climate but I expect theres lots of organisations out there that are cashing in on the fact that carbon is this monster we make out.

 

Now the world is changing along with its climate, we should not ignore facts like the quantities of poluted rivers, dipleted seas, the rate of deforestation in some places in the world. So lets not make the mistake or confuse the causes of climate change and the actions to tackle it, whether we are directly responsible and or is carbon so bad we all need to do alot more for our planet!

 

My view is that carbon is not what some try to make out to be and that theres no link between carbon and climate. But lots of the measures goverments and organisations are trying to implement are a good thing regardless of climate.

 

Dagmar to call Gore's film fantasy's I think it's a little harsh! I cant remember if I've seen it or not but Im aware of its content and Im sure theres real worrying stuff that one would hope indeed to be fiction.

 

Interesting article on this subject.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/03/01/do0102.xml

 

Tiago

[Dagmar]

Dagmar to call Gore's film fantasy's I think it's a little harsh! I cant remember if I've seen it or not but Im aware of its content and Im sure theres real worrying stuff that one would hope indeed to be fiction.

 

 

Tiago

 

I refers to Gores film as a fantasy because he draws conclusions that cannot be logically justified, and cannot be scientifically verified. He has used selected data that suited the required result and ignored anything that that disagreed the results that he required.

 

Why would a warmer climate be a bad thing?

 

 

Global warming lengthens growing seasons. Carbon dioxide, the cause of (part of the) warming (dormant for 11 years now) clearly improves crop yields in a world where stupid global warming policies (like burning our food supply in cars) are increasing food scarcity.

 

Even the EU, never the most switched on of organisations, are rethinking their devotion to the addition of bio-fuels to forecourt supplies in the face of the evidence of the damage it can do. This is both to eco-systems and humans.

 

More CO2 does not mean that we will get warmer!!!

 

Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time

 

There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 1800 ppm or about 4.7 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Cambrian Period, nearly 7000 ppm -- about 18 times higher than today.

 

The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.

 

Today, at 380 ppm our atmosphere is CO2-impoverished.................................................

 

 

http://floatingleaf.rediffiland.com/blogs/2008/08/30/Global-Warming-Geologist-s-point-of-view-II.html

 

................... the debate continues over the Science paper which suggested that North America naturally absorbs perhaps all of its human emissions of CO2 (human emissions of CO2 in the US are estimated to be around 1.7 to 2.0 billion tons annually- 1.87 billion tons in 2004. See here). Pieter Tans is quoted as stating, "The North American land surface appears to be absorbing possibly as much as between one and two billion tons of carbon annually, or a sizable fraction of global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning". This appears to further weaken the ecological footprint arguments for fully one half of the human footprint to be allocated to CO2 sequestration. Bill Rees dismisses this evidence.http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/pr98/oct98/noaa98-67.html

[Arob]

Quite a can of worms been opened up here, as has already been mentioned it seems a shame to hang on other poeples words and project them as though that might actually help, much better tested and tasted and either rejected or assimilated.

 

 

On p7 Jason says "I think motivation is a useful question to level at any two sides of an argument."

 

This is a vital and valid point, consider what treesurfer says on p2 of this thread "OK, so man may be contributing to the warming of the earth but it's nothing new. Mankind, animals and trees will need to adapt or die."

Now I am not personalising this, it is not directed towards treesurfer (and as Dean has pointed out elsewhere the written word is open to misinterpretation) but to all who are genuinely interested; are we really wanting to discover something new? To learn about this, or are we, perhaps dismissively, saying "it's nothing new" then "mankind...will need to adapt or die"

Are we really applying ourselves to this as if we believe that we truly must learn to "adapt or die"?

 

 

Dagmar has posted quite a lot of info here but I believe that it is not contextualised within basic scientific fact to make it useful and this discredits her overall argument

"Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Ed

Not consuming is definately the best policy. But recycling what we do use is the next best thing...

 

{Dagmar's reply] "Can you give this statement more substance?"

Please allow me to provide the required substance; its the Law of Thermodynamics, a fundamental Law of Physics.

 

 

 

The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

 

So if we cut a tree down we still have logs, brash and sawdust.

 

 

The Second Law of Thrmodynamics tells us that entropy is at work; that (in a closed system) energy moves from states of greater to lesser availability.

 

So having cut the tree down we can't put it back together; as any wise cracking customer knows

 

 

This is what informs us of the hierarchy represented by the 3R's of Waste Management (Reduce, Re-use, Recycle - sing-a-long Jack Johnson) and answers Dagmars question.

 

 

 

Now going from there to what Tom D says on p1 "One interesting fact regarding sustainable fuels; in one year we burn 300 years worth of fossil fuels: ie it took 300 years to lay down one years worth of oil and coal."

When we consider the Laws of Thermodynamics we must remember that the Earth does not operate within a closed system, we get energy inputs from the sun (solar energy), this is our basic allowance (speaking as life on earth not as a mammal or a human or as a human or any sub-section of humanity). And as Tom points out, we are massively exceeding allowance.

 

As has also been pointed out in the thread we humans sit at the top of the pyramid, but we are inherently dependent upon a range of other life forms (which may be more, or less basic, than ourselves) for our survival. The evolutionary process is a long one and we are new-comers to this party and would do well to respect our fellow attendees and benefactors.

For this party hasn't happened just by chance but by the hard work of these benefactors; life has evolved and adapted.

But life is forever changing and adapting, one reason that we explore the moon is because it is devoid of life, we know more about it than of the ancient forests of the earth because they are so incredibly complex. And this complexity is a great measure of evolution, complexity which has evolved over unimaginable time; this is a measure of natural wealth. This is why some people value biodiversity and it's what science tells us; you can have it backed up - from the quark upwards - by Murray Gell-Mann winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

 

 

However, with our very young, naive society with its rudimentary economy we often don't treasure and value this. We have not yet developed the appreciation and subtlety, so rather than consider the many beneficial attributes of a rainforest, the potentials which may exist are sacrificed for a quick buck, it's logged, or cut and burnt to allow mining or ranching, soils which supported vast storehouses of complexity, the diamonds of life formed over unimaginable time, are exhausted within four or five years. Some people say that this is development, or that it creates jobs, or whatever.

 

Look at the lessons learnt by Forester Jack Westoby. The same applies at home, with different levels of biological complexity.

 

 

 

Our economic system is rudimentary, it is up to us to apply common sense, we don't have to be provocative or reactionary and become polarised and entrenched in opposition, instead just see sense and make use of our education, of that which we understand;

 

"One example is our lass came home yesterday with a plastic bag with chopped onions in it, how f@@@@ lazy can you be!!

 

Buy a bleeding fresh onion, no wrapper and chop the blinking thing ya sen."

 

 

Why aren't growing your own onions Dean? Instead of picking on your poor lass like that!

 

 

 

 

Common sense isn't so common, we de-value others at our peril; that's the problem. And whether you think climate change is man made or not is unimportant!

 

 

[Arob]

I refers to Gores film as a fantasy because he draws conclusions that cannot be logically justified, and cannot be scientifically verified. He has used selected data that suited the required result and ignored anything that that disagreed the results that he required.

 

 

He is not alone in doing this!

Would you like me to justify that?

[Jack-Arb aka Tiago Sinclair-Julio.]

Common sense isn't so common, we de-value others at our peril; that's the problem. And whether you think climate change is man made or not is unimportant!

 

Hey Arob,

 

Absolutely right - Good point!

 

Good night

 

Tiago