I love TTAC's commentators. Whenever I'm scanning the net for stories or writing an editorial or editing a review, I've always got you guys and gals in the back of my mind. For one thing, your expertise keeps me on my toes. Without naming names, it's no secret that some of the writers published hereabouts have found themselves in possession of a new excretion-oriented orifice after confronting TTAC's best and brightest with half-baked analysis or factual errors. For another, you guys provide me a welcome anti-inflammatory. Whenever a commentator accuses the site of bias (comment which are removed as per our anti-flaming policy), I email the offender and challenge them to submit their "balancing" opinion in an editorial. Sensibly enough, most choose not to run your intellectual gauntlet. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of correspondents who rose to the challenge, and one of them regretted it to the point where I had to block him from my email. So thanks for keeping an eye on us. Those of us on this side of the e-fence depend on you for our honesty, integrity and, let's face it, entertainment. Oh, and this link says global warming is a crock of shit.
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Global warming is all about instituting policy by using short term “data” to one advantage. Those who question or disagree with the “data” are deemed heretics.
Thank goodness for the National Post! I wonder when Al Gore will be remembered as the Global Warming Chicken Little who also invented the Internet?
Someday I hope to have big enough brass monkeys to run the TTAC gauntlet. It would be great fun!
Nevermind these facts, as they are inconsequential to the overwhelming evidence supporting AGW. Wait…these inconvenient lies are surely the exceptions that prove the AGW rule. After all, we have scientific consensus, dammit!
Not intending to voice an argument for or against global warming, but….
I first heard the theory that sunspot activity is strongly correlated with global temperature in the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It would be nice if they’re right. I don’t consider the National Pest to be a particularly reputable news source though.
Also, I’m sure that jschaef481 was being sarcastic, but “the exception that proves the rule” is one of the most mis-used sayings in the English language.
As usual, people who wish to deny anthropogenic global warming (AGW) will grasp at any single article or set of data to assert “AGW is a crock of…”, while ignoring the overwhelming mass of evidence that it is real.
As the National Post article notes (but quickly minimizes rather than expanding upon it)..,b>“OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
This article also points up a fundamental logical flaw of AGW denial. A favorite AGW alternate explanation is that climate variability is due to solar activity.
Yet, we have been in a period of relatively low solar activity for the past couple of decades and the Earth has still warmed up. Think about that for minute, would you?
I encourage everyone to read as much as they can about this subject because until you grasp the overall science it is difficult to evaluate data like this.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/27/global_warming_deniers/
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/index/#Responses
To quote Fark.com
Time for Al Gore to trade in his carbon credits for Exxon stock.
Me? Sarcastic?
Hey Eric_Stepans, one questions for you.
What source are you using to say that the last couple years have had low solar activity? What I read says we have had much higher solar activity for the last 30-40 years versus the previous 70-90 years.
Solar activity, just from the shear radiative energy input hitting the surface of the Earth, logically has the biggest input on Earth climate than any other factor. Explains why the rest of the planets in the solar system are also warming.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
Try sourcing from something a little more respectable then salon.com
This article doesn’t really point to anything relevant. A .3 degree cooler January does not mean that global warming is not occurring. It like saying that summer will not come because some snow fell in may.
The scientists he cites to debunk global warming actually support it, and he’s twisting their words to support his own agenda.
For example Kenneth Tapping, a scientist misrepresented in this article had this to say about global warming.
The stuff on the web came from a casual chat with someone who managed to misunderstand what I said and then put the result on the web, which is probably a big caution for me regarding the future.
It is true that the beginning of the next solar cycle is late, but not so late that we are getting worried, merely curious.
It is the opinion of scientists, including me, that global warming is a major issue, and that it might be too late to do anything about it already. If there is a cooling due to the solar activity cycle laying off for a bit, then the a period of solar cooling could be a much-needed respite giving us more time to attack the problem of greenhouse gases, with the caveat that if we do not, things will be far worse when things turn on again after a few decades. However, once again it is early days and we cannot at the moment conclude there is another minimum started.
So here we have it, a conservative author using half-truths and misrepresentations to fuel his own agenda, who would have thought.
The solar cycle is variable, and if it dips, we may get some more time to fix global warming but its foolish to say that we should continue to emit more simply because we have been given a reprieve.
Its like racking up more credit card bills when you get an additional month to pay them off. Sure you have an extra month, but it will come back to bite you when its over.
RF I answered your e-mail. But never got an answer back (scrathes its head). Whatever
I am not going to read the link, but global warming is not a crock of shit. It’s for real.
Hey Eric_Stepans, one questions for you.
What source are you using to say that the last couple years have had low solar activity? What I read says we have had much higher solar activity for the last 30-40 years versus the previous 70-90 years.
Solar activity, just from the shear radiative energy input hitting the surface of the Earth, logically has the biggest input on Earth climate than any other factor. Explains why the rest of the planets in the solar system are also warming.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
Try sourcing from something a little more respectable then salon.com
And perhaps you should read the second part of your own link. The guy’s a crackpot and they debunk him throughly in the article.
Hell, they even give a link to debunk him.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060913-sunspots.html
To your point, Eric, everyone should “read as much as they can about this subject because until you grasp the overall science it is difficult to evaluate data like this.” The reading should not be confined, however, to published works supporting the AGW theory. We should read and consider legitimate alternative theories and studies.
I’m not a denier. I’m a skeptic, even a cynic. AGW is a tenable theory. It just isn’t the only tenable theory to explain climate trends. And I’m particularly suspicious of the certainty to which AGW is often argued.
I usually post this in any global warming, I feel that as a scientist with many friends/colleges in atmospheric chemistry that I have access to more data than is generally talked about in the media:
Here’s my usual rant, sorry for those who have seen it before, but there’s always someone new around that may not have seen it yet:
You need to remember that what you see in the media is filtered in some way. You may think that every scientist out there says that global warming is happening, and that it’s terrible and that the world’s going to end. But the only reason you see that is because that’s what the media is letting you see. I’m not going to go all crazy with conspiracy theories, but you need to remember that you really know only what “they” want you to know unless you read the primary literature.
I have read the primary literature, I have seen informal and formal talks given by scientists who work in this field, and they truly are split on what’s going on. Granted, when they write proposals to get more funding, they write it in a way that says the world’s about to end, that gets them more money to do research. But when you actually see a talk that describes the data, they truly are conflicted. I personally know scientists on both sides of the debate, they are all very smart and honest people, they want to know the truth, they are not out to make public policy.
The only reason we think that global warming is actually happening is because the media has blown out of proportion some select research. We _really_ don’t know what’s happening or if it’s actually a bad thing.
Regardless of whether we believe in global warming, the gripe I have with it is that it distracts from the emissions of pollutants in general, which are at an all-time high, and present dangers to our health and our environment.
Also, isn’t it funny that the commentator berates global warming advocates for data dating back only 25 years, when he uses the example of one single year to make his point?
# CSJohnston :
February 28th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Thank goodness for the National Post! I wonder when Al Gore will be remembered as the Global Warming Chicken Little who also invented the Internet?
Someday I hope to have big enough brass monkeys to run the TTAC gauntlet. It would be great fun!
Oh dear lord, not this crock of …. again. He may be right or wrong about global warming (time will tell), but he sure as heck never claimed to have invented the internet as many conservatives would have you believe.
He may be right or wrong about global warming (time will tell), but he sure as heck never claimed to have invented the internet as many conservatives would have you believe.
Well, if he was/is so smart, he should have worded his statement better. Al Gore said:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
Saying that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet is no more distortion than people use with George Bush most of the time.
That article looks almost exactly like another I saw, elsewhere. I’ll have to search around and see if someone’s plagiarizing someone else…
I can’t speak to the solar astronomy but insolation is considered in the IPCC report. Whether or not they got it all right… who knows? They do what they can to take it into account.
However, as regards, “the ice is back,” the ice always comes back (at least, so far). The problem is that it doesn’t get particularly thick where there was open water over the summer, and the thinner ice will disappear fairly quickly in the summer.
My reasonably uneducated prognostication is that you’ll see an alarming retreat in the sea ice over the course of the summer.
Sure, the IPCC report could be wrong. However, there’s not much to be lost by moving rapidly to green – really green – energy intiatives. Wind power is already cost-competitive with the other forms of electric generation. Solar power is nearly there. There’s nothing to be lost by expanding the use of solar space and water heat in new home construction, in conservation or in other sensible measures to reduce CO2 emissions, fossil fuel expense (natural gas is going to continue going up).
Yet, we see little of this in new-home construction. The race is on to build the tackiest McMansion. At least nowadays, they’re usually better insulated.
A drive to develop and use solar energy might put us into a position to increase our exports to, for example, India. China’s already allegedly got quite a program in place, so maybe we’ve missed that boat. Certainly, investment in solar power and electric transport (EVs or mass transit) could reduce our balance of trade problems, insofar as we can reduce oil imports.
The last I knew (a few months ago), well over half of our SPV production was being exported. Green tech is already working in favor of our economy.
Had we gotten serious about this some years ago, we might be in the 5th year of a plan to develop technologies and industries that would put us in green leadership, politically and economically, in the world. As it is…
Global warming is a crock of sh*t!
I’m quoting an authority.
BTW – today the big news here in Europe is that this is the warmest winter in 100 years. Who to believe, who to believe? February, which is usually supercold up here in the north, has had floods – and plants and trees are budding.
We’re set for the warmest spring ever experienced in living memory — will keep you posted!
Thanks, Robert, for disseminating pertinate information.
I could go on about a few things I think of about climate change, but I am a geologist for a coal company so therefore I have absolutely no crediblilty.
Good read, though. My boss handed me a copy earlier this week. We must accept data supporting both sides of the issue. To not do so would be a crock of shit for sure.
I’ve been trying to find much data there is on “global temperature” which I believe popularly referrs to the global average surface temperature gained initially by land based thermometers sporatically placed around the globe beginning around 1850 and then grew to include SST’s placed in the oceans and seas around 1950’s and many more land based thermometers. There are also NOAA satellites that have been in orbit since 1979 and measure the atmospheric temperature, but I don’t believe this data is used as it shows a general cooling trend. Balloons are also used but I don’t believe they are considered very reliable.
Is there reliable global temperature data from before 1850? Why is the surface temperature warmer than atmospheric temperature if greenhouse gasses are trapping and radiating heat down to the earth’s surface?
My educational background is in mathematics and physics (though I am now an analyst in the financial sector), so I too have a better than average grasp of the underlying science (in fact I did some research as a student heavily relying on the absorption spectra of among other gases carbon dioxide and water vapor). In short, I am far from an expert on the subject, but far ahead of the average person.
I am in no way decided on the subject. I do, however, reject the notion that there is a ‘consensus’ on the matter (nor is ‘consensus’ terribly meaningful scientifically, as Newtonian physics illustrates). Is the (relatively) recent warming trend anthropogenic? To what extent can we expect future warming? What will be the negative (or positive) impact on the planet and mankind? I have not yet seen any definitive answer to any of the above questions. Therefore, given the dire economic consequences of proposed countermeasures to AGW, I believe it would be prudent to further explore these questions before taking action.
Therefore, given the dire economic consequences of proposed countermeasures to AGW, I believe it would be prudent to further explore these questions before taking action.
That’s a great point, but on the other side of the spectrum, it could be argued that given the dire environmental and therefore human and economic consequences of not acting if global warming is indeed a reality means it would be prudent to take measures as soon as possible to:
– prevent the worst
– spread the damage to the economy, or even circumvent it as new processes mean new business opportunities.
I love TTAC’s commentators.
I’m going to be the first one to take the bait for self-aggrandizement and say “why thank you”.
Nice one though, Robert, throwing that acorn at the end and watching everyone scurry after it.
I’ve been trying to find much data there is on “global temperature” which I believe popularly referrs to the global average surface temperature gained initially by land based thermometers sporatically placed around the globe beginning around 1850 and then grew to include SST’s placed in the oceans and seas around 1950’s and many more land based thermometers. There are also NOAA satellites that have been in orbit since 1979 and measure the atmospheric temperature, but I don’t believe this data is used as it shows a general cooling trend. Balloons are also used but I don’t believe they are considered very reliable.
You mean this satalite data?
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7/7e/Satellite_Temperatures.png
Is there reliable global temperature data from before 1850?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
The sources cited all check out.
Why is the surface temperature warmer than atmospheric temperature if greenhouse gasses are trapping and radiating heat down to the earth’s surface?
The surface of the earth must emit enough heat to balance out the heat absorbed from solar flux as well as heat bounced off of greenhouse gasses. Since the amount of heat radiated is dependent on T^4, the surface must be hotter to emit the additional heat.
@ Kixstart:
“there’s not much to be lost by moving rapidly to green – really green – energy intiatives.”
Actually there is alot to be lost. The cost of moving to these technologies rapidly is huge. Just think of changing the whole oil feuling infrastructure or having every car in America suddenly charging off the electric grid or constructing all new power plants/wind farms, etc.
Not only that but in the rush to “green” those with alternate goals and good marketing and/or political clout are finding it easier to push their agenda. Even some who are truly trying to save the earth are using untested, and potentially harmful in other ways solutions.
Instead of rushing, it would be ideal to take a measured approach so the most resources possible could be dedicated to the best solution possible. Of course conservation and courtesy are always beneficial but there has got to be some logic and balance against the downsides which include lost jobs and decreased mobility.
@Stein X Leikanger – When I moved to Colorado in 2000, that winter was the coldest on record in 100 years. Fluctuations are normal, and there can be many rates of fluctuations. Local data doesn’t help, you need _reliable_ temperature measurements over geologic time (10’s of thousands of years) for anything to mean anything.
@guyincognito – There are no reliable temperature measurements period. First, we have to worry about technical issues like the thermometers in 1850 were no where near as accurate as today’s thermometers. Then we need to worry about what we’re measuring the (average) temperature of: The ground? the atmosphere at ground level? The seas? Etc, there are too many ways to measure temperature and there’s too much variation in the data for it to be meaningful. The best we can do for data before 1850 is to look at ice core samples and correlate dissolved CO2 to atmospheric temperature, but that’s not a great correlation. Basically, with all the different fluctuations in the temperature, the best you can really do is get an average temperature over thousands of years. I.e. on the scale of geologic time is the temperature changing? – and we know that it does happen (Ice ages and whatnot), but on human time frames, I dare say it’s impossible to know. And by impossible, I mean the time it would take to measure the temperature with small enough error bars would be longer than a human lifetime.
@ KBW,
Thanks for the link. Still
“It is unknown which, if any, of these reconstructions is an accurate representation of climate history; however, these curves are a fair representation of the range of results appearing in the published scientific literature. Hence, it is likely that such reconstructions, accurate or not, will play a significant role in the ongoing discussions of global climate change and global warming.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
AKM :
February 28th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Regardless of whether we believe in global warming, the gripe I have with it is that it distracts from the emissions of pollutants in general, which are at an all-time high, and present dangers to our health and our environment.
I don’t believe this is true, although it could depend on your defintion of ‘we’. For example traditional forms of pollution (NOx, SOx) have declined over the last 20 years and are far better then they were in the 70’s for the United States and Europe. Worldwide those rates continue to climb due to vast increases in emissions from Africa, Russia and developing Asia. However, for the majority of us commenting here, the present dangers to our health from pollution are far less today then 30 years ago. And 30 years ago that danger was miniscule compared to the beginning of the 20th century due to much better sewage treatment and water supplies. The cities of the early 1900’s were horribly polluted with animal and human waste and choked with coal heating. If anything the health danger from pollution continuously declined for the majority of the western population over the last century. Yet today we are still told that the threat is at it’s greatest ever. Bullocks!
That the predicted warming from CO2 emissions could ever have as dire a direct impact on health as what our ancestors lived with in the past seems like the definition of alarmism.
OK, Mr. Farago, we’ve figured out your game. You throw out a chunk of red meat in the form of an article doubting global warming, we beagles in the kennel all come howling, and page view statistics jump. Devilishly clever, I must admit. It’s like a Dixie newspaper running a letter to the editor that claims Robert E. Lee wore women’s underwear: circulation immediately soars as readers check to see if their furious rebuttals got printed. Just don’t use the words “domestic bias;” we don’t want TTAC’s server to have a meltdown.
Thanks, trk2, for a nice perspective. By most all objective measures, we’re better off than ever. Yet oddly, there’s a nagging feeling that things are bad and bound to get worse. Robert Samuelson explored that paradox in “The Good Life and Its Discontents.”
OK, I’ll go over this one last time:
The planet Earth is governed overwhelmingly by negative feedback systems; that is, things that return less than what was put into them. This makes intuitive sense, as a system that generates more than what came in can be destructive and unsustainable (think nuclear chain reaction). If positive feedback was the norm, we would see runaway reactions all over the place.
For catastrophic global warming to be a viable theory, the ManBearPigs of the world need to show that the climate is governed by, or can be nudged into, a state of positive feedback. Given that the new great Satan (CO2) reaches a saturation point after which it ceases to have an additional greenhouse effect (negative feedback!), they need to show that it:
1. is possible in practice (not just in theory)
2. is happening (not might happen)
3. that we are causing it directly
4. exactly how this mechanism is working (not might work in theory maybe), so we can correct the problem and not just throw billions of dollars at whatever some politician wants.
In other words, extraordinary claims should require an extremely high standard of proof, and right now we just don’t have that.
This planet has survived millions of years of volcanic activity, magnetic poles switching polarity, intense radiation, and several ice ages (one of which, say scientists who study such things, we have only recently emerged from). Our paltry data from 1975-now is nothing in the lifetime of the Earth, and to believe otherwise is pure human arrogance.
Imagine, BTW, if we lived during the end of one of the really bad ice ages, what we would think about the “higher-than-usual” temperatures. It would have turned out that our “usual” temperatures were not normal at all, but unusually low. Given our limited ice cap data, we should refrain from passing any judgments about what the “normal” amount is, as we really just don’t know.
As for ending life on earth, well, life has a funny way of adapting to meet the conditions it is faced with. And humans, for better or worse, are the most adaptable species of all.
@pfingst – Thanks for the negative feedback comment, I forgot about that. About 4-5 years ago I was at an atmospheric/oceanic chemistry talk about a really neat negative feedback mechanism in the Atlantic. It seems that as the polar icecaps melt, they put more fresh water into the Atlantic, the addition of the low density fresh water (compared to higher density salt water) slows down the warm gulf stream bringing heat up from the equator which in turn cools down the poles (at least the north pole because the study was done in the Atlantic). That’s just one study, but you are right, there’s lots of stuff on the earth that corrects for displacements from equilibrium (whatever that is – as you say we don’t really know what the equilibrium state of the earth really is).
Even if global heating isn’t happening, the increasing CO2 is making the oceans more acidic, which will kill the fish. Even without the heating, CO2 is pretty scary.
As for ending life on earth, well, life has a funny way of adapting to meet the conditions it is faced with. And humans, for better or worse, are the most adaptable species of all.
The problem is the earth is more crowded than ever, and the wheat grown per person has been declining for over 20 years . The glaciers that keep the Yellow River and the Yangtse (on which much of agriculture in China and India depend) are projected to be gone now by 2030–due to global heating. That, on top of cars running on plant biomass is going to send the cost of food soaring, so that much of the world is likely to starve.
@David Holzman: I was going to do a full analysis of how much CO2 would be needed to change the pH of the oceans, but I don’t have the time right now. Here’s a good link to the first part of the information you’d need: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kinzie/documents/470/CO2%20solubility.doc
In addition, you’d need to know what the partial pressure of CO2 is and the volume of the oceans, but it wouldn’t be too hard to calcualte the derivative of P(CO2) with respect to pH(Oceans) along with the derivitive of P(CO2) with respect to burning hydrocarbons. I guarantee you that that number is very very small. Maybe when I get home from work, I’ll run through the numbers, but it’s nothing to worry about.
If you remember your high-school chemistry, you’ll remember all about buffers. H2CO3 (H2O+CO2) is a good acidic buffer, that means that it takes lots of CO2 to make a small change in pH. (Another good negative feed back mechanism)
@pfingst
You just saved my having to make this argument, which should be obvious to anyone giving it rational thought.
For literally hundreds of millions of years, the sun’s energy was stored in the form of biological detritus, which was transformed into hydrocarbons. We are speaking of eons of stored energy.
Millions of years later, human beings learned how to poke a straw into the earth and suck out that wonderful oilshake. But we’re not spending hundreds of millions of years on returning that energy to the biosphere. We’re doing it in a hundred, and will have done it in maximum a hundred more.
Positive feedback? The thermostat is on max, and has been stuck there for a while.
pfingst wrote
OK, I’ll go over this one last time:
The planet Earth is governed overwhelmingly by negative feedback systems; that is, things that return less than what was put into them….
Pfingst, it is not at all clear that your assertion is true.
From the Salon.com article:
“As famed climatologist Wallace Broecker wrote in Nature in 1995:
The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing,the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.”
I can think of several positive feedback forcings right off the top of my head:
CO2 causes temperature rise, warmed oceans can’t store as much CO2 as cold oceans, CO2 persists longer in atmosphere, causes more warming.
CO2 causes temperature rise. Polar ice caps melt. Earth’s net albedo (reflectivity) goes down. More solar radiation is absorbed, causes more warming.
CO2 causes temperature rise. More water vapor evaporates from the oceans. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere causes more warming.
It is true that there are some negative feedbacks that dampen climate change, but I believe the preponderance of evidence is that those negative feedbacks are being overwhelmed by the CO2 forcing and the positive feedback mechanisms.
Because we are at a solar minimum. The solar equivalent of winter. Current models already account for these factors. To blow off global warming as a result of this would be exceedingly foolish.
bluecon you should always hand your money over to the government because they know best, NOT. I get tired of being told what to do and how to live my life by hypocrits in high places who have no interest in leading by example. If Global Warming is so bad and is going to kill us all tomorrow, start making changes at the top and let society follow. Reduce the size and waste in the government and make my tax burden smaller. Reduce the amount of energy the governement uses, make all government buildings and publicly funded buildings be LEED Gold or Platinum. Quit promoting the buy buy buy and waste waste waste mentality all in the name of GDP.
RF,
I’ll take the credit for half-assed ideology unfounded in concrete facts! You can name names when it comes to my mistakes! I’m a Weapons Officer, I can take it….
Now I have to go lick my wounds from these awesome-o commentators. They keep me on my toes more than my superiors on the jet!
I live in Latvia. not that you should know that, but.. today is february 29. And we don`t have snow. Actually throughout all the winter we have had snow for a couple of days only, and even then it was 5 cm, not more. Every year we break a new record of temperature, whether for median monthly, or the highest for the season. My parents told me and showed me pictures of their 70ies when snow was abundant and winters were cold. ( an average temperature for february in Latvia should be minus 15 degrees celsius, but it is now outside plus 8 celsius, with average for february plus 6.2)those who think that earth`s temperature is increasing naturally, should take into account that earth`s rather hot or cool periods have changed in eons, not decades. We have managed to push up median world temperature by 0,5 degrees just in 2 decades. That is alarming! And those who think, a couple of degrees here, or a couple there don`t matter,, should watch national geographic`s documentary ` 6 degrees changing the World`.
Death of the planet aside, I love that acorn-chasing critter from the movie. Kind of ironic, as no matter the cataclysmic events unfolding around him (all of the ice melting), he maintained his focus, his desire on that big, fat acorn, and all else be damned.
I was just at the annual meeting of th eAmerican Association for the ADvancement of Science. I went to several sessions on climate change. It’s accepted in the mainstream. Like cigarettes and lung cancer, and cigarettes and heart disease. I predict that those of you who are skeptical will be singing a very different song within ten years. Nonetheless, I hope you are right. Nonetheless, the tech advances that could mitigate global heating would be generally good for the planet and good for the balance of payments, and for geopolitics, even if global heating isn’t happening. And it would be good for the US to develop these technologies, rather than China or India or Europe.
If positive feedback ruled climate, we would have had heat problems well before this. The geological record shows worldwide evidence of periodic glacial activity going back millions of years. Glaciers form in cold, not heat.
jurisb:
Milwaukee averages 52.6 inches of snow per year. We hit that two weeks ago, and we can get snow here well into April, and sometimes May (and we got 3 more inches today). Latvia not getting much snow this year no more indicates global warming than Milwaukee’s unusually high snowfall indicates global cooling. Neither does a couple of decades of higher temperatures. Remember, Earth: 4.5 billion years old. 30 years is nothing, and neither is 3000 years.
The US, Canada, China, and others are in the middle of their coldest winters in decades. The Earth is a non-deterministic system. Sometimes you get extremes, and those extremes can last a long time (many human lifetimes). We know this from the geological record. Beyond that, we are only guessing.
David Holzman:
The mainstream (scientists and the great unwashed) once believed the Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. As for technological advances, I have no problem with any technology that is cleaner or better for the environment in some way, provided the government keeps its hand out of my pocket in the process. Products that use less energy are a good thing in the long term if for no other reason than they are cheaper to operate.
And how in the world do we know what changes will mitigate global climate change (they don’t call it warming anymore; you can cover both bases this way) if we can’t even agree on what is causing the warming to begin with. Maybe we are causing it, maybe we aren’t. Maybe this is a part of the normal cycle of behavior for this particular system, a system so complicated we have barely scratched the surface of understanding it.
Actually, given that, don’t you find it odd that such a complicated system could be pushed out of alignment so easily? I’m not saying it’s impossible, just… odd.
And if it’s true, you better get ready for more, because the US and Europe “greening up” will do nothing to stop India and China, whose populations dwarf ours, from dumping more stuff into the atmosphere as they develop into first-world countries. I’d be more worried about running out of oil than warming the planet; it seems a more immediate and definite problem.