Climate Change: Are Humans to Blame?

[Achilles]

Another addition to the series (link in the post above) was posted yesterday.

Part 4

[Agincourt]

Hi, I don't mean to post something that otherwise should have been left alone, but I actually wanted to add something to this thread.

Originally Posted by SkinWalker

To be honest, I'm not an expert on climate change and haven't followed it more than a moderate degree. Assuming others participate, and using this thread as a vehicle for education, I intend to evaluate the issue objectively. I truly have no bias one side or the other. If the data are sufficient to sway one way or the other, thats where provisionally draw my conclusions.

If others have evidenced based arguments for one side of this or the other, please feel free to post them here. A google search for "climate change" yielded this image from Wikipedia, which is a graph based on the data compiled by Meehl et al. (2004). It correlates both modeled and observed temperature changes with the fluctuations in greenhouse gases.

I wouldn't call myself an expert either, but I have come to see many scientist who have established a more direct link between solar cycles and climate change than greenhouse gases. I would not say humans don't have an impact on the global climate, but I think it is more likely due to the sun than what is emitted by human activity.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/scien...l-climate.html

http://blogs.discovery.com/earth/200...s-climate.html

I remember seeing Al Gore's movie and seeing how his model seemed to fit that of global temperatures, but it didn't quite fit right. If these greenhouse gases were so intense over the last century, the global impact would have been enormous. Like over an average of one degree every year.

When mount Tambora exploded in 1816, the world instantly suffered global climate changes. 1816 was called the year without a summer because the effects of the volcano were able to cause frosts in summer months over the first year and the global temperature almost instantaneously changed drastically. I don't know how significant our CO2 production is compared to a massive volcano, but the change in emissions over the last century compared to the millennium was astonishing compared to what global temperatures would have to be. If we are responsible for climate changes, I find it hard to believe the Earth isn't warmer than it should be.

[Agincourt]

I've noticed something of an irony recently. It seems that a UK supercomputer that they use to crunch all the scientific numbers and all the calculations of every climate station and weather center in the world happens to use 1.2 megawatts of electricity to operate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz0PPPxmQF3

It's an interesting irony that the power plant ends up putting out 12,000 tons of CO2 in order to power this monolith. Still with 15,000 Gigabytes of system memory, I don't think the power consumption was what they thought of when they built it. I wonder how much that computer cost compared to what the electric bills are.

[Totenkopf]

So.....how many of the MMGW crowd are re-evaluating their postions in light of the recent emails from East Anglia? Seems a LOT of prominent MMGW "scientists" have been caught in a conspiracy to cook the results to push their phony consensus on global warming. They're looking more like bought "political" scientists than actual scientists.

[Q]

I'm shocked.

[Samuel Dravis]

I am certain that man-made global warming is occurring. It is pretty easy to understand the physics. Carbon dioxide traps heat. Methane traps heat. I don't think necessarily that the world will end immediately because of it, but it's just not forward-thinking policy to poison your own well. Especially since our sort of poison doesn't go away for a really long time (one estimate I read was about 500-1000 years, and perhaps even longer than that).

The climate change debate has never been about whether man-made global warming is occurring; it's been about how much warmer it is getting as a result. It may be less of an immediate problem than was thought; I don't know. But that doesn't make CO2 harmless. With the time scales in question here, it would be easy to do something irreversible (and very bad) and we wouldn't know it for sure for many years. I think it's best to err on the side of caution.

Would being cautious hurt industry? Sure. But I think it's important to note that industry is subject to regulation for a reason: industry is primarily motivated by short-term interests, those being the profits of the company RIGHT NOW. Because of that, it is often incapable of acting responsibly in matters with time scales like this has; the feedback loop is too long. The continued good of pretty much everyone living on the planet is a damn good reason to regulate in my book.

[Q]

While I agree with most of what you've said, SD, I'd also like to point out that on the flipside there is a ****ton of money to be made and power to be gained by cooking figures in order to push a worldwide political agenda.

If this fraud is even remotely true, then the scientific community as a whole will lose credibility if these people aren't appropriately dealt with.

[Achilles]

Originally Posted by Samuel Dravis

I am certain that man-made global warming is occurring. It is pretty easy to understand the physics. Carbon dioxide traps heat. Methane traps heat.

Side note: one particularly troublesome concern is all the methane which is currently trapped which could/will be released if global temperatures get too high. If/once that happens, we're done.

Originally Posted by Samuel Dravis

I don't think necessarily that the world will end immediately because of it, but it's just not forward-thinking policy to poison your own well. Especially since our sort of poison doesn't go away for a really long time (one estimate I read was about 500-1000 years, and perhaps even longer than that).

Correct. The idea that conservation, etc is only a good idea if global climate change is "true" seems...fallacious, to say the least.

Originally Posted by Samuel Dravis

The climate change debate has never been about whether man-made global warming is occurring; it's been about how much warmer it is getting as a result. It may be less of an immediate problem than was thought; I don't know. But that doesn't make CO2 harmless. With the time scales in question here, it would be easy to do something irreversible (and very bad) and we wouldn't know it for sure for many years. I think it's best to err on the side of caution.

Would being cautious hurt industry? Sure. But I think it's important to note that industry is subject to regulation for a reason: industry is primarily motivated by short-term interests, those being the profits of the company RIGHT NOW. Because of that, it is often incapable of acting responsibly in matters with time scales like this has; the feedback loop is too long. The continued good of pretty much everyone living on the planet is a damn good reason to regulate in my book.

Quoted for awesome.

[Achilles]

Originally Posted by Achilles

Another addition to the series (link in the post above) was posted yesterday.

Part 4

A couple more updates:

Part 5

Part 6