Mal4Prez nails the climate change debate...
POSTED BY: kpo
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 04:17
VIEWED: 12057
PAGE 5 of 11
I'm I the only one that finds it funny that DT will argue against pretty hard science of climate change but then expect people to listen to him about a drinking water contamination conspiracy?
I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
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How about we get real as to what's actually behind all this and why?Quote:
Not too long ago, belief in climate science wasn't a political issue. Honestly! As recently as the 2008 U.S. presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates professed belief in the threat of global warming, and each advanced policies designed to curb U.S. carbon emissions. Senator John McCain had even co-sponsored one of the first congressional bills to create a carbon cap-and-trade system. And it wasn't just McCain; Mitt Romney, runner-up for the GOP nomination last time around, supported a regional cap-and-trade program while he was governor of Massachusetts. There was still a wide gap between Democrats and Republicans on the severity of the climate-change threat and on how ambitious carbon-cutting policy should be, but at least there was a general agreement that global warming was a real thing.
Not anymore. With the exception of Jon Huntsman — who barely registers in polls — you can't find a Republican presidential candidate who unequivocally believes in climate science, let alone one who wants to do anything about it. Instead of McCain — who has walked back his own climate-policy realism since the 2008 elections — we have Texas Governor Rick Perry, who told voters in New Hampshire over the weekend that "I don't believe manmade global warming is settled in science enough." And many Republicans agree with him: the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering yes to the question of whether the effects of global warming were already being felt fell to 30% or less in 2010, down from 50% in 2007-08. Meanwhile, liberals and Democrats remained around 70% or more.
That's deeply troubling. It's one thing when people disagree on the effectiveness of different approaches to fix a problem; it's worse when they refuse even to believe that a problem exists — despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that says it does. One of America's major political parties has, in effect, adopted denial as policy. How did we get here?
As the sociologists Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and Aaron McCright of Michigan State University suggest, climate denialism exists in part because there has been a long-term, well-financed effort on the part of conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science. That's the conclusion of a chapter the two researchers recently wrote for The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. "Contrarian scientists, fossil-fuel corporations, conservative think tanks and various front groups have assaulted mainstream climate science and scientists for over two decades," Dunlap and McCright write. "The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine."
For those who've followed the seesaw of the climate debate in the U.S., there's not much new in Dunlap and McCright's chapter, but they do lay out just how long and how intensively some conservatives have been fighting mainstream climate science. Fossil-fuel companies like Exxon and Peabody Energy — which obviously have a business interest in slowing any attempt to reduce carbon emissions — have combined with traditionally conservative corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative foundations like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, to raise doubts about the basic validity of what it. That message gets amplified by conservative think tanks — like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute — and then picked up by conservative media outlets on the Internet and cable T.
All of the naysayers seem to be following the playbook written by the tobacco industry in its long, ongoing war against medical findings about the dangers of smoking. For both Big Oil and Big Smoke, that playbook is lethally simple: don't straight-up refute the science, just raise ske
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...
What is with all the buckshot I keep getting hit with...
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Niki, I see that the argument I'm about to make has become adopted by Republican candidates, which makes me feel filthy, but I also see there's a bit of effort being put out to deny it and discredit it by various members of the news agency, which is dangerous, because they also support the status quo and big business (including oil) etc.
Fortunately for me, the avalanche of right versus left nonsense hasn't yet dropped the information so far down on google that I can't find it.
I'm just going to post this here, and ask people take a notice of the date.
http://www.env-econ.net/2009/02/cap-v-tax-bp-v-exxonmobil.html
Exxon support for one measure and BP support for the other does not fill me with supreme confidence that either measure is on the up and up.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
The air is never going to be so warm as the average 25 degree Celsius temperature coming off the ground, and within the first hundred feet or so you can affect the surface temperature of the ground through weather, biome, and climactic effects.
Byte,
It's like GW temp graphs, you can get much finer tuned charts of geothermal in the top few hundred feet. The standard temp at 300 feet IIRC is about 57F. At least around here. There's a clear relation going on here.
Outside, you're competing with space, solar or the void. The water drawn up from the roots of trees is likely to be at some geothermal temp, not because the roots are 300 feet deep, but because they're drawing on a subsurface body of water that is going to be close to uniform temp because it's a body of water, and so it's dragging towards geothermal as well, which is why you always have groundwater instead of ground ice unless you're in the arctic tundra. That and pressure. But it's pressure that's creating the geothermal ultimately anyway.
As a result, the trees around here are transpiring around that temperature. The water in the amazon is warmer than here, but not radically.
As for the atmospheric behavior of co2, it's complex, as you say, certainly not as simple as portrayed in the GW argument. This argument is simple panic created for simple people. It's political, and never going to hedge its bets, temper its language or admit to multiple factors having various impacts or systems having dynamic feedback.
Nick
I have on this forum, on several occasions, *shredded* the rather bogus "science" of mainstream GW theory. There are a number of people who agree. It's a political football, and it's relation to science is loose. I don't disagree with it politically, as an environmentalist, it's actually useful to me. I disagree with it scientifically because it is wrong, as in incorrect.
Niki,
Nah, it was before 2008. Al Gore made it into a partisan issue, but he had help from John Kerry who said in in the 2004 campaign. The motive there was simple: Bush got a lot of funding from oil companies. But behind that is more of the same end of the world panic-mongering.
What I really don't get is that at the same time you had people on the right going off about the rapture and on the left going off about catastrophic runaway GW that would turn the Earth into Venus... and neither one of them could see that what they were peddling was the exact same thing: completely bogus end of the world panic.
Byte,
I pegged early on that Obama and BP were close bedfellows. You're right of course neither is on the up and up. They both want a scheme that allows them to tax the opposition while giving themselves a loophole to get off with not only no tax but open license to pollute and some sort of monetary bonus.
It's a global derivatives scheme. They both are.
And don't feel dirty for agreeing with a republican, it happens. Consider it this way: I've been trading mortgage derivatives. Think how I feel ;)
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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Quote:
dragging towards geothermal as well, which is why you always have groundwater instead of ground ice unless you're in the arctic tundra.
Yeah, tundra and permafrost is what I was thinking of. Anyway, while this is a big factor, I'm not sure this is the only factor, at least around the surface. Deeper than 100 feet, yes, you're going to start seeing that gradient more. As you go down each kilometer rock and soil (being primarily Silicon) adds about 30 degrees Celsius temperature, excepting the hot spots and the cold spots you mentioned. Ambient temperature has an influence towards the surface, as does groundwater temperature, around 1 km that influence is negligible.
Probably the biggest air temperature factor is the angle of sunlight, followed by air and ocean currents. Otherwise I don't think we'd ever see permafrost.
Quote:
You're right of course neither is on the up and up. They both want a scheme that allows them to tax the opposition while giving themselves a loophole to get off with not only no tax but open license to pollute and some sort of monetary bonus.
Thought so.
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Quote:Um - isn't it obvious? Because I'm interested in what happens over the next couple thousand years. That has a little more effect over us humans than what will happen in the next coupled million.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
I don't know why you stick with the millions of years time scale.
I added it to the data set because you excluded it. I don't know why you excluded it.
Choose your time scale a little more wisely my friend. See this is what I mean about your assumptions - you choose to focus on the wrong time scale, then you kvetch about the rest of us worrying over the sun going supernova. You chose the wrong time scale, not me.
Quote:Well, technically, my PhD is in geophysics, not geology. So I'd have to say that I haven't blown him or anything, but we're passing acquaintances.
Have you even *met* geology?
You?
Yes, there are geothermal areas. There is a heat budget of thermal energy conducting up through the crust, the cause of which is pressure and radioactivity. And this has what to do with the climate? I know: you found a pretty picture and it got you all excited. Right? And that means you know "the fuck" about the climate? You have lots of scientific studies showing that variations in radioactivity in the earth is tied to climate variations? And it fits observations as well as Milankovitch cycles? Do show. Do.
And where exactly did you study this? The same place you learned that heat comes out of the earth through convection? To quote you: "The median temperature of the earth is drawn to a geothermal mean, as per the gradient, by means of convection."
I'll just be sitting here pointing and laughing while you go google "convection" and look into those time scale issues. I won't waste time with the rest of your post.
-----------------------------------------------
hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left
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Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
I have on this forum, on several occasions, *shredded* the rather bogus "science" of mainstream GW theory. There are a number of people who agree. It's a political football, and it's relation to science is loose. I don't disagree with it politically, as an environmentalist, it's actually useful to me. I disagree with it scientifically because it is wrong, as in incorrect.
If you could shred climate change (what it is called now) you would not be talking to us here but you would preparing you peer reviewed article.
I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
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"There are. I'll dig them out when I get a chance."
That would be cool (so to speak). I'll wait.
As an aside, this is what I was thinking:
The major reason for land clearing in the Amazon is for cattle grazing. Grazing takes a lot of land per person (it's a very inefficient use of land for food production). And b/c it's the Amazon, the soil is worn out within a couple of years, so they have to go and do it all over again. They carry this out with chainsaws and bulldozers - a high technology method dependent on fossil fuels. There is so much that has to be in place for a few million humans to have that kind of impact.
What humans DO seem to be able to do in a short time with relatively small numbers and primitive technology is wipe out animals. In N America the extinction of a lot of animals comes after human settlement - oh - and a large meteorite that seems to have struck somewhere in - Illinois ? I think. But you see the same pattern in other places - Europe, Australia, NZ etc. However, I can't think of a way that would affect the climate. And it's waaaayy off in terms of timeframe.
So, I'm at a dead-end with my question. How could humans have caused climate change in those time periods?
Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?
Yeah, me neither....
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Kiki
You're right about the grazing, but most the Amazon that was destroyed was cleared with regular fire set by regular arson. Overwhelmingly, I forget the percent, but my recollection was aroun 70-80%.
What humans have done to the forest cover of the Earth is pretty pronounces, but until recently it has happened at a much slower pace. The first documented decline is Egyptian descriptions of the desolation of the Sahara. We know that the Sahara began to decline from its native rain forest state about 3 million years ago, but didn't go into full collapse until the end of the last ice age, just at the beginning of Egyptian civilization. There are obvious ecological factors at work here having to do with dynamics of the water systems, rivers, lakes, rain, etc., but there's also a pretty clear human impact. stone axes and fire by themselves don't make a catastrophe until you have a lot of time, but they did. There's also pretty good documented evidence of the decline of the middle east and china, as well as india, but we have an excellent record of the deforestation of europe and north america, and now the ecological collapse of eastern brazil.
So, yeah, it can and does happen, though the sort of practices that are being done now in Brazil, Africa and S.E. Asia. It doesn't take the level of technology the we see in the Athabascan disaster to make an ecologist desert, or even hell on Earth, given enough constant dedication to destruction.
The sobering thing is that even in Brazil, it's just a handful of people driving the force of habitat destruction, which, yes, does push the extinction of massive numbers of animals and insects, but does also extinct some plant species. And in this case, the people driving it overwhelmingly aren't brazilian, the majority, about 70% is coming from Texas-owned businesses.
Of course, we're not the planets only bad guy by any means, a quick look at investors in the athabascan project shows that every hyper-industrial nation has its arm in the destruction of the environment.
I agree with a lot of what people say, including that the oil companies need to be stopped, and we should look at alternative sources of energy. My personal choice is biofarming, because it requires no major technology, so there's no energy cost in production, it can be stored forever, and it's solar derived energy. Also, almost everything we already have can run on it. I like Algae because of the high yield per acre. For smaller consumptions (a car being about 20,000 watts, a cell phone being about 2 watts) I think we should go solar, and for those who can, community-based wind looks good. For hardcore industrial projects I like nuclear, which puts me at odds with some of my fellow environmentalists, but I would argue "maximum output for minimum impact" but only when you actually need that max out, and that the sane solution would be to place nuclear plants and industrial robotic factories in some place people couldn't live anyway, like the middle of the desert.
Life, biodiversity, is the one resource that we can't replace on this planet, or anywhere. Ergo, it should not be traded for anything. It's like I say about time not being money, because you can spend your time earning money, but you cannot take your money and buy more time.
Mal,Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
Um - isn't it obvious? Because I'm interested in what happens over the next couple thousand years. That has a little more effect over us humans than what will happen in the next coupled million.
I feel as though you already lost this one, and you lost it on this point. You don't know you've lost it yet, but you will in time. It takes a while for these to stick. At least, that's what I've found when I've lost arguments. I've lost many here on the forum. Probably if you track back you'll find that I lost this very argument we're having, which has brought me to my present position.
Understanding how ideas evolve is of course more important than the specifics of gradual atm
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