Al Gore "Chickens Out"

DonQ

Joined May 6, 2009
321
So, if CO2 prevents heat from leaving the planet, wouldn't also prevent it from entering as well?
Nope. Energy comes in riding the whole electromagnetic spectrum, including frequencies for which CO2 is completely transparent. When it strikes the Earth, much is converted to heat and then re-radiated at a much lower frequency. At the lower frequency, CO2 is not nearly so transparent.

It is a cascade of mis-interpretations like this that fuel much of the debate. It's easy to say such a thing, and "common sense" would say that it is so, but it often is not.


Like the "natural" sources of CO2. Natural measures have handled the natural causes for quite a while, and can even handle a quantity of unnatural additions. How many? I know that I don't know. But it may be a case of "the straw that broke the camels back". Once it breaks, taking the straw off won't fix things. It's not the first 20 feet of water behind the levee that floods the town, it's that last 2 inches. Then the town doesn't get just 2 inches of water!

One of the larger natural sources of free CO2 is the natural decomposition of wood. For eons, this was a balanced system, subject to relatively minor fluctuations, as the carbon released from dead trees became available to be reabsorbed by new trees incrementally taking the place of the dead and dying. More recently, large trees are cut to be replaced by small trees, not in a gradual, natural of birth and death, but in millions of acres at a time, across the face of the planet. These are often not replaced by new trees. Where forests once stood, with their huge load of carbon locked up in (mostly) living trees, now there are farm lands, and cities, and factories discharging carbon, and lumber and paper rots.

So a once stable system has had a huge impulse input. No, I'm not complaining about "trees make oxygen", because in the large picture (time and space large), they had a net effect of zero, in that overall, living trees absorbed the same amount of carbon as dead trees released. But now, the dead side of this equation has been very unnaturally increased.

Should we still call this a "natural" source?

Lots of other over-simplifications are easy to rant about, but I find that many of them are base on "facts" that simply are not so.
 

Mark44

Joined Nov 26, 2007
628
Lots of other over-simplifications are easy to rant about
Including the one that an increase in CO2 causes an increase in global average temperature.

And yes, I understand the difference between heat and temperature, and that it takes 80 calories to change 1 cc of ice to water. Got that.

A comment you made in an earlier post concerned the difference between ice area and ice volume. The evidence I've seen is that ice volume in Antarctica has been increasing over the past few years, and there is evidence that the volume of the ice sheet in the interior of Greenland is increasing, as well. You can find a link to the reference in the long thread that Bill Marsden gave a few posts back.

It is indisputable that the CO2 concentration has been rising for some time. What is disputable is a causative link between CO2 concentration and global average temperature, which seems to cycle up and down, sometimes warmer, and sometimes cooler, without too much variation over fairly long periods of time. If the CO2 concentration has been steadily rising, and as many people believe, causes the global average temperature to rise, why hasn't the global average temperature gone up? In fact it has gone down over the last 10 or 11 years, and we have seen temperatures in the northern US in the last couple of years that were much colder than usual. This is not mere anecdotal evidence.

What this whole CO2 thing appears to be, in my humble estimation, is the latest gambit of folks who want to control our every behavior. In this and in other so-called crises, the mantra is "We must act now before ____ (fill in the blank) happens!"

There are thousands of actual climate scientists (as opposed to, say, Al Gore) who aren't buying into this. There are plenty of real problems out there that deserve our attention. I'm not convinced that the .039 % of the atmosphere that is CO2 is one of them.
 

studiot

Joined Nov 9, 2007
4,998
balanced system,
There is nothing 'balanced' about geoproceses and never has been.

There are too many fluctuating variables like vulcanicity and solar output and downright random ones like meteoric impact and axis wobble at work.

Additionally there are the natural variations of techtonic processes. These occur because as the plates move over the surface the relative distribution of land masses varies, as does the position and severity of vulcanicity.
The importance of the position of the plates is not fully recognised. It allowed the 'snowball' in past times when all the land was concentrated at the south pole.
 

studiot

Joined Nov 9, 2007
4,998
Studies have shown that whilst carbon dioxide concentrations lag surface temperature variations by several hundred years, the correlelation with solar activity (the amount of solar energy falling on the earth) is exact "even to the fine structure" in the Lassen study which provides my graph attached.
The evidence from arctic and antartic cores all agree with this over millions of years and many ice ages and warm periods.

Of course when the sun shines a natural process (life) abounds.

http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
 

Attachments

HarveyH42

Joined Jul 22, 2007
426
Back to the 'core' of the GW theory, the ice cores... Still think there are some huge holes and gaps. Can Al Gore proved that past warming events didn't erase several hundreds of years worth of data, which of course wouldn't help his arguments anyway. Also, would it be possible for some years not to have left much, or any ice layers. There really needs to be some other supportive evidence to go with the core samples. Unfortunately, there really isn't anything similar to match up with core samples, so it purely a matter of interpretation. And as the movie goes... can we really afford not to believe.

The part that really turns me away the most, is the marketing aproach used to convince me of the facts. It's not science as I know it. What I do know, is that Global Warming killed my coffee plant this past winter. Three years, and was hoping it would have produced this year. Haven't a killing frost in over ten years, what the hell...
 

DonQ

Joined May 6, 2009
321
Actually, as far as "balanced systems" go, everything is always in balance. There is no more carbon on the earth now than there has been for the last billion years. It's just a matter of where it is at. The balance was that a relatively constant amount was bound up in vegetation. Much of that particular source is now decaying, or burning its way into the atmosphere. Same carbon, different location. Add to that the coal, oil and gas that is being taken from the ground an put into the air at historic rates...

This was from the "what is natural" branch.

And besides, my particular example was "this was a balanced system, subject to relatively minor fluctuations". The most recent fluctuation in this particular system is not minor.



Cold at your house, hot somewhere else. Thus the definition of a heat engine.

10 years of this, embedded in 100 years of that. The valley down the street from my house proves that the entire world is concave.

"past warming events didn't erase several hundreds of years worth of data". Supported by tree ring data for about the last 2000 years, and carbon dating before that. And requiring proof that something didn't happen is a standard fallacy. (Can you prove that I didn't fly by just flapping my arms?)

"It's not science as I know it." -> "So, if CO2 prevents heat from leaving the planet, wouldn't also prevent it from entering as well?" I believe you completely that it is not science as a lot of people know it, but it is science as I know it.

And as for the marketing... It is the media, the dolts that don't know the difference between heat and temperature, that promote it with things like "it snowed in podunk yesterday. That proves that global warming is wrong".


This all follows a standard methodogy. Argue the point as long as you can. When it becomes obvious to even the most hardheaded, change to another argument. Repeat.

CO2 isn't increasing!
Ok, it is, but it isn't caused by humans!
Ok, it is, but it isn't causing global warming!
Ok, it is, but it won't make the seas rise!
OK, it is, but it isn't flooding anywhere important!
Ok, but Bangladesh can move into somebody elses' backyard.

What! 1/2 of Indonesia too? And more? Well, uh... uh... well, it's too late to do anything about it now. Why didn't those hoitey toitey scientists give us some sort of warning. Aren't they supposed to know about things like this? Stoopid scientists.
 

Mark44

Joined Nov 26, 2007
628
And as for the marketing... It is the media, the dolts that don't know the difference between heat and temperature, that promote it with things like "it snowed in podunk yesterday. That proves that global warming is wrong".
I agree with you completely about dolts in the media. If they could do mathematics, they might have gone into some productive field, like engineering or electronics. Unfortunately, almost all of the dolts in the media have bought into the GW scam, about which they are stunningly uncritical.
This all follows a standard methodogy. Argue the point as long as you can. When it becomes obvious to even the most hardheaded, change to another argument. Repeat.
What you are describing applies very well to the GW crowd. When it becomes obvious that the computer models on which the climate projections are based are severely flawed, and were completely wrong in predicting the changes that have happened since 1998, change to a different argument. Many on the GW bandwagon have changed their tune to now talk about "climate change" instead. Even the very politicized UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has changed its tune, recognizing that the global average temperature has not increased in the past ten years. They further project that the global average temperature will continue to decrease for at least another ten years. I will stipulate that ten years is a drop in the bucket, but inasmuch as all or most of the computer models predicted ever-increasing global average temperatures, it is news when that doesn't happen. I maintain that there are other greenhouse gases (notably water vapor) and other mechanisms at play here, many of which are not well understood.

CO2 isn't increasing!
Who is making this argument? I haven't seen any serious arguments to this effect.
Ok, it is, but it isn't caused by humans!
Some of it is, and some of it isn't. Volcanoes and undersea "smokers" put out huge amounts of CO2, but so what? Show me the evidence that CO2 causes the temperature to increase. CO2 concentration has been increasing for at least 200 years, while the evidence seems to show that the global average temperature goes up and down, with little evidence of a trend.
Ok, it is, but it isn't causing global warming!
What global warming? As you mentioned earlier, it has been colder some places and warmer others. That sounds to me like local warming and local cooling. As I mentioned earlier the IPCC recognizes that the last ten years have been cooler, on a globe-wide basis, and projects more of the same for the next ten.
Ok, it is, but it won't make the seas rise!
From what? The north polar ice is sea ice. When it melts, as it is wont to do from time to time, there is no attendant change in sea level. None.

The south polar ice is increasing in volume, by and large, and is for the most part not melting. The figures I've seen indicate a sea-level rise over the past century of 1 inch. I guess I better start building a dock at my house, which is only 600 ft. above sea level.
OK, it is, but it isn't flooding anywhere important!
Ok, but Bangladesh can move into somebody elses' backyard.
And where exactly is the one inch sea level rise in the last century flooding?
What! 1/2 of Indonesia too? And more? Well, uh... uh... well, it's too late to do anything about it now. Why didn't those hoitey toitey scientists give us some sort of warning. Aren't they supposed to know about things like this? Stoopid scientists.
There are lots of climate scientists, some of whom buy into the GW scare, but there are many others who are at the head of the line saying this GW business is the biggest con ever perpetuated on humankind. This doesn't sound quite like the consensus that Gore told us about. I can supply you a list of names if you're interested.
 

HarveyH42

Joined Jul 22, 2007
426
I think they ignore a few self regulating factors, and that the planet seems to be self healing. Wouldn't a rise in temperature also increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which would definitely block solar energy from entering. Cool and cloudy, rain would wash some of the crap out of the air. Guess that's where all the inland flooding comes from. Don't see how the seas will rise dangerously though, may dry up a little though.

Gas, oil and coal are the product of decomposed vegetation. So where did all those prehistoric plants get all that carbon? It was a long time before mankind start burning anything, cutting down rain forests, or anything else Al Gore is trying to sell us. Most all life on this planet is carbon based, shouldn't matter much what we do with it, just as long as it's available. Save the planet, plant a tree... simple enough.
 

DonQ

Joined May 6, 2009
321
When it becomes obvious that the computer models on which the climate projections are based are severely flawed, and were completely wrong in predicting the changes that have happened since 1998, change to a different argument.
The world is flat!
No, the world is round!
No, the world is an ellipsoid!
No, the world is an oblate spheroid!
No, the world has local deviations from an oblate spheroid at these locations.
No, these locations, and they're bigger... no, smaller.

Well, since the scientists keep changing their minds, it's obvious that the world must actually be flat.

Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Einstein. They keep changing their mind, so it must be true that the whole universe actually does revolve around us.

These are simply variations on the same argument based on refinements as more data is gathered. Each has errors, but each is closer to the truth than the previous. And they are all better than what was believed at the time. Same with "Global Warming" [sic].


Many on the GW bandwagon have changed their tune to now talk about "climate change" instead.
Simply trying to find a term that the 2-second attention span masses can use to refer to a multifaceted, complex, evolving model.


I maintain that there are other greenhouse gases (notably water vapor) and other mechanisms at play here, many of which are not well understood.
Exactly! So when there is a complicated, extremely powerful, inherently unstable situation that we don't fully understand, and that controls our destiny, we should "poke it with a stick" exactly why?

Who is making this argument? I haven't seen any serious arguments to this effect.
No one.. now. This was a ways back. The "argument" is in the process of moving through these steps. It is now pretty much at the "it's not getting warmer" stage (heat≠temperature). Soon, all will be saying:
I haven't seen any serious argument that the world isn't getting warmer
and then the "argument" will move to the "Ok, it is, but it won't make the seas rise!" stage, i.e.:
And where exactly is the one inch sea level rise in the last century flooding?
Exactly on cue!
But wait, we aren't completely done with the previous stage of the argument yet:
Show me the evidence that CO2 causes the temperature to increase.
HEAT ≠ TEMPERATURE!
As you mentioned earlier, it has been colder some places and warmer others. That sounds to me like local warming and local cooling.
More power into the Earths heat engine. Already covered that. Do you suppose these temperatures get separated without requiring energy to do so? And once again.. heat≠temperature.

From what? The north polar ice is sea ice. When it melts, as it is wont to do from time to time, there is no attendant change in sea level. None.
Floating ice... Archimedes... right! got it! You would think that scientists would know such things. It wasn't me that didn't make the distinction between floating and land ice. Iceland, Greenland, Antarctica... The melting of floating ice is merely an indicator of heat content. heat≠temperature. Where will the excess heat go when the last of the floating ice is gone? Quick, change the argument back to some other stage.

And where exactly is the one inch sea level rise in the last century flooding?
This is somewhere between the "Ok, it is, but it won't make the seas rise!", and the "...but it isn't flooding anywhere important" stages. So if I understand this correctly, the river is rising but it hasn't breached the dike... yet. So I guess we shouldn't start sandbagging until after we see if it breaches the dike?

I can supply you a list of names if you're interested.
Thanks, but no. Actually, most of my time is spent exploring the substantial evidence that the world is flat (respected scientists say that space is curved) and that we actually are at the center of the universe (the end of the universe is infinity miles in every direction, right?). It's all just common sense :D.
 

Mark44

Joined Nov 26, 2007
628
DonQ,
I think you seriously believe what you're saying, but you continue to bring up ridiculous counterarguments to the points I make.
The world is flat!
No, the world is round!
No, the world is an ellipsoid!
No, the world is an oblate spheroid!
No, the world has local deviations from an oblate spheroid at these locations.
No, these locations, and they're bigger... no, smaller.
IF the GW proponents were making a sequence of statements that were getting closer and closer to the actual truth, then the above would be pertinent. Instead, what we have seen are predictions that global cooling is coming (in the 70s and 80s) and later (starting sometime in the 90s) that global warming is coming. Now we are starting to get some evidence that the globe is cooling. These are not statements that are getting more and more precise.

You have repeatedly made the statement that heat ≠ temperature. I get that, as do many in this forum. However, all of the arguments and all of the data seem to be couched in temperature, as in global average temperature, or deviations from it. Do you know of one piece of data that measures the global heat? If not, please refrain from continually bringing this up.

So here's where we are at the present time:
  1. If greenhouse gases are warming the earth, we should see the first signs of it 10 KM up in the atmosphere between 30 degrees north and south of the equator. Weather balloon data for the years 1979 to 1999 (when warming is known to have occurred) detects no such hot spot. Reference:Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1,
    Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), 2006. Hadley Centre weather balloons 1979-1999, p. 116 , fig. 5.7E, from Thorne et al., 2005.
  2. The Vostok ice cores going back 100,000 to 150,000 years ago indicate that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds (800 +/- 200) of years after temperatures change. In the last 500,000,000 years, there is no evidence of a runaway greenhouse effect, despite evidence that the CO2 concentration at that time was ~20 times the present concentration. Reference: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center http://cdiac.ornl.gov
  3. Satellite data show that the world has not warmed since 2001. This is despite the fact that the CO2 concentration has steadily increased. Per the UN IPCC, the global average temperature is projected to remain flat or decrease for the next ten years. If GW were caused by increases in CO2 concentration, we should not see the global average temperature stay flat or even decrease. Reference: http://www.junkscience.com, which has links to all sorts of satellite data.
  4. CO2 is already absorbing about as much light as it can absorb. The absorption curve for CO2 is logarithmic, so that a relatively large change in CO2 concentration results in a very much smaller warming effect due to absorption. Based on ice core evidence for a long period of time, the role of CO2 in determining temperature is very small. It's interesting to note that the temperatures on Mars were increasing at the same time as those on earth, with a temperature increase of 0.5 degrees C between 1970 and sometime before 2007, when this article appeared in the Sunday Times in the UK (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece).
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,408
Last I heard, water vapor is another greenhouse gas, unless it shows up as clouds. The two don't necessarily follow.

One of the effects that have been hiding global warming is global dimming. Last I heard there was a 8%-11% decrease in solar making it to the earths surface, which has the effect of cooling everything down.

Just to make the mix especially interesting (in the chinese proverb sort of way) we may be entering another Mauder Minimum. The atmosphere is hard to predict, the sun, while cyclic, might be even harder. Of course, perusing this site I did find articles saying the exact opposite about the sun, time will tell.

Other stories of interest.

http://www.physorg.com/news119627556.html

http://www.physorg.com/news119267989.html

One of the points brought up in my last debate was there isn't a consensus, a consensus being defined as 100% agreement. This will never happen, ever. So what is a reasonable number of agreement, 90%, 80%, before it is agreed there is a problem?

From what I see there are several groups.

1. No way, no how humans can cause this kind of change. Have to disagree with that one, we are in the middle of the biggest species extinction since the end of the dinosaurs, by way of example. Given the industrial techniques we employ all over the earth I have no problem with humans causing large changes on this planet, as our number increase and the resources we use also increase it won't get better.

2. OK, maybe we cause a little change, but there is nothing we can do about it. This one is disingenuous. The people who can cause the most change stand to lose the least. It is the people who really have no power over this that will pay the price, in misery and death.

3. OK, we are causing major changes, but the earth will adjust. Again, this is disingenuous. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but if I kill someone because I don't maintain my car I'm going to jail because I am responsible. There is no scientific law that the earth will adjust in a way we can live with. Venus is Earths twin in mass and basic composition, but we will never live there.

4. We have to change now, even if it is by fascist means. This is not going to happen folks.

Personally, I think where we can make a difference is stop denying, and encourage the changes we will have to make anyhow. We don't have to burn every drop of oil before we move on to another source. Oil is useful stuff, it might be a good idea to save it for other things in the long run anyhow.

If we continue to burn petroleum products, figure out ways to make it using atmospheric resources. Close the carbon cycles.

I totally agree with the russian roulette analogy. It may be nothing bad will happen, and #2 scenario is correct, but if we're wrong the consequences are pretty dire.

The same argument about not being able to make a difference is why a lot of people don't vote. You have to start somewhere.
 

Mark44

Joined Nov 26, 2007
628
Bill,
You make some good points, as you did also in our debate a year or so ago. One nit--that's the Maunder Minimum. I'm all for ridding the air of noxious pollutants such as CO, soot, sulfates and so on, but this thread is concerned primarily with CO2 and its effects on the climate.

Regarding consensus, I can't give a number for what is effectively a consensus. It would have to depend on the merits of the arguments of those who disagree with the majority. In the case of the GW controversy, I would estimate that among climate scientists, as many as 40% to 50% don't go along with what seems to be the received wisdom.

Many on the GW side use ad hominem arguments rather than logic to promote their cause, calling those who disagree with them "deniers", clearly attempting to link their targets with Holocaust deniers. Others falsely claim that climate scientists have consensus in their views, and so the debate is over.

The choices you list at the end of your post are incomplete. If nothing bad comes of this, yet we spend trillions (more) to fix it, that is also a wrong decision, and the consequences are also dire.
 

HarveyH42

Joined Jul 22, 2007
426
Mark44, some good points. It does make a strong case against GW, if the professional scientist are almost equally divided. Wouldn't expect all to agree, they think too much anyway, and pretty stubborn as well, but the vast majority should agree with the findings, if it had any merit at all.

We have so many problems that do require attention, and can be fixed, doesn't seem rational to focus on a maybe. Even the GW crowd aren't sure that we can definitely make a difference, only that we are all going to die, if we don't do something. Reducing CO2 is just a first step, when that doesn't work, they'll come up with another, and another... Not to mention a hell of a lot of CO2 will be produced, in the manufacture of the newer CO2 friendly machines, and the recycling of the old and CO2 dirty. This isn't to fix or remove anything we might have already done, just buy more time for our grandchildren. Yeah, we are being asked to follow blindly, as we we, and our children will have passed.

Humans survive by by adapting to the environment. We build structures to protect us from the elements, design clothes, create tools. It's worked well for thousands of years, why stop now.
 

studiot

Joined Nov 9, 2007
4,998
and our children
Someone I know says that he has made a bigger contribution to the effort against GW than most because he has no children so his carbon dioxide output is limited to his lifetime.
 
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