EGOTISM= A case of mistaken Nonentity

Grendel,

Let's get back on track. Did you see "The Great Global Warming Swindle", and do you broadly agree with what it says?

tallowood wrote on Dec 8^th, 2008 at 5:50am:



The point I was making is that it's not just a simple issue of population. You seemed to be under the impression that third world emissions would be much more significant in the scheme of things than they are simply because of population.

I agree with Prof Garnaud in that everybody, including India and China must start looking at ways to reduce emissions. Unless we all achieve this, we're only going to slow down the inevitable.

China has already passed the US as the world's largest CO2 emitter, but in terms of per capita emissions, they are still well down on the US.

Like it or not, rising temperatures will result in dramatic reductions in yield for major food crops. There is no other conclusion possible other than major world famines. Crops have failed in the past, but when you're talking about many crops failing at the same time, the impacts will be global.

The segment of the world's population that will suffer most will be the poorer countries. Many people will die as a result, but if we continue with a business as usual approach, even that tragedy will have negligible effect on carbon dioxide emissions.

It's a pretty horrible scenario, but all the numbers stack up.

locutius wrote on Dec 8^th, 2008 at 6:08pm:


Yeah, he never seems to stick around long enough and make deep enough arguments. He reminds me of my dog. When somebody comes to the door, he barks, sneaking his head around the corner, but when they actually come in, he runs away and hides.

Grendel you sook, come back here and let me get my teeth into you properly.

locutius wrote on Dec 8^th, 2008 at 6:08pm:


Pollution is bad, but how do we know we are creating global warming via this CO2 stuff? We don't.

If the fat cats were behind it, you would never have politicians running on it as a platform. Why would groups like the UN, who crave world domination, be so anti-global warming? Seems like more of a thirst for power and domination than anything else.

easel wrote on Dec 9^th, 2008 at 6:02pm:


Easel,

I've been trying to explain why we know we are creating global warming via the 'CO2 stuff'.

Let's take an analogy. You have a gas burner and you keep it on exactly the same flame. You have a pot of water that's being stirred on top of it. If you plot the temperature against time on a graph and you should get a straight line.

If the temperature suddenly starts going up at a much higher rate than normal, one of two things must have happened. You've either turned up the heat or you've changed something that affects how quickly the heat is transferred to the water. (Actually three - you could have remoned some of the water.  

Energy is conserved. You don't get something for nothing.

The sun provides a fairly constant source of heat for the Earth. There are some slight variations - for example the Earth is slightly closer to the sun once a year and the energy received from the sun varies a bit on an annual basis. The sun itself varies a little bit over 11 and 22 year cycles. It's not much variation, and we can account for it.

We can actually measure the radiant heat coming from the sun using a satellite outside the Earth's atmosphere. This is a very accurate measurement that includes changes in orbit and changes in heat output of the sun.

In the past 50 years there have been one or two blips in the temperature record. Major explosive volcanoes can cause these. Generally they cool the planet slightly because of the gases they give out. They are nothing to worry about because they are short -term - about a year's worth of influence.

Remember I said we can measure how much heat we're getting from the sun? Well that has been very constant. During the middle of the 20th century, that 'irradiance' actually went up slightly, causing a slight increase in global temperatures, but between about 1950 and today,  the temperature increase has not been explainable by the output of the sun.

It's like hey, we're not in Kansas any more.

The only explanation is what's known as the Greenhouse Effect. That has nothing to do with Greenhouses by the way.

If you increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we can work out how much of an effect it will have on retaining the heat in the lower atmosphere. It's actually very easy to predict this, especially since the cloud cover in the atmosphere has not changed all that much from the 1950's - and that's something we have records of.

So - the only thing that could have caused the increase has been the Greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

That's as good a job as I can do of explaining the situation. I've tried to keep it as non technical as possible.

That's certainly not the whole picture - there is a lot more evidence of  Global Warming from other sources, but the one I explained is probably the easiest to understand.

It's important to realise that Business and Industry operate on fairly short term objectives. If you were to say that 20 or 30 years from now that your business would go down the tube because of global warming trends, most economists and business managers wouldn't really care, because it's too far down the track.  

So they are going to fight tooth and nail against any changes to the laws that forces them to reduce fossil fuel burning. The problem is that it's all too convenient to use petrol and diesel, and they are quite cheap at the moment.

They fight by basically spreading lies by any way they can. The lobby groups employ scientists who are prepared to spread more lies and confuse the issue - but only in the public eye.

There is no actual debate among climate scientists. Scientists generally 'debate' by publishing papers. There are no papers that state that anthropogenic global warming is not occurring.

All that you have is a few very corrupt individuals selling stories to newspapers and spreading confusion within the public, who don't have the technical knowledge to understand the issues.

So the only place there is a debate is in the public eye - and that's a problem, because people elect politicians and determine policy to a greater extent. If there was a real debate, you would expect to see a balanced number of scientific papers on both sides. That just isn't happening.

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yawn fd...  there is no debate.
Nor is your last post factual.
Just more ad hom...  I have no interest in that.

http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/107533.pdf

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