State of the Union

Status
Not open for further replies.

JoeJester

Joined Apr 26, 2005
4,390
We should invest. The arguement concerns private or public.
Should people be forced to invest in alternative energy? I say no.

Government funding comes from the people via taxes. I am not opposed to anyone investing their own money in whatever they wish.
 

spinnaker

Joined Oct 29, 2009
7,830
Where was the outrage from 1910 to 1950 where there was a 0.5C change?

Climate change will always be with us. The arrogance of humans will not change that.

It's about funding and who receives it.
Not to mention that we have never been able to record with precision the way we do today. Nor did we have near the data points that we do today. I just cannot understand how any reputable scientist can ignore those simple facts.

How do you form an opinion on data that you can't trust?
 

JoeJester

Joined Apr 26, 2005
4,390
We only recently been recording temperatures. Prior to that, it's been guessing based on the current knowledge base.

Then, we place blame when uncertainty exists. There are unreconilable differences.

People are free to invest their funds in anything ... even over unity projects.

Where are those battery plants that got millions... oh yeah, they went under.
 

Metalmann

Joined Dec 8, 2012
703
And as far as 'climate change' goes. Isn't the planet still warming up FROM THE LAST ICE AGE. I mean, the glaciers covered almost 50% of the liveable surface area of this planet just a few thousand years before written history began and they took almost 20,000 years to get that way!

With a time scale like that, I imagine the year to year flux of temperature doesn't mean diddly. We slide from frozen ball of ice to about where we are now, and have done so many, many times before this last ice age.

To me, this is indicative of a CYCLE. We cool off, we warm up. Over and over and over again. The planet has been doing this all by itself for 100's of thousands of years. I am doubtful of the mechanism of fossil fuel production being our big problem maker in this cycle. I am placing my bets on THE SUN being responsible for our bouncing back and forth between ball of ice and the way it is now.

The sun is currently experience a very mellow, quiet period. Sunspot cycle is supposed to be peaking now and the surface of the star is absolutely devoid of sunspots. VERY quiet. WE ALSO are experiencing the coldest January in 100 years. I think this is very interesting corollary and I'm puzzled by the dogged resistance of critical thinkers to consider such things.

A single large volcanic eruption can put more 'Greenhouse' gasses into our atmosphere in a day than our entire industrial output can produce in several years. Yet some people are insisting that only MAN is responsible for this planets good weather fortunes. Man is undeniably arrogant, but also seems to be irresponsibly stubborn and blind to long term mechanisms. Blinded by the short term goals and day to day repetition of our fleetingly short lives to all the grandeur of these huge long term cyclical changes of this solar systems heat engine(sun) and the little rock, on whose surface we live and die so quickly.

I also don't think this is a political topic. It is a very scientific, economic, and fiscal one. $$$ concerns and power grabs by our elected leaders have turned this into a political concern, but nothing political will change the physical dynamics of our solar system and Earth's cyclical temperature variations. We simply do not have the historical depth of field to know how wide the year to year variation of global temperature deviates over the long stretches of time between ice ages. Nor do we know how much deviation in solar output varies over those time scales. The solar heating of this planet is also affected by the density of dust and gas in the areas our solar system travels through on its long orbit of the galactic center of the Milky Way Galaxy. So many long time scale factors are involved in the solar mechanisms of how our planets temperature is maintained that the puny short term length of 100 or 200 years is scientifically unfit for making any sound predictions about global temperature mechanisms. So far, we can determine that temperatures have not deviated so far as to kill ALL life on the planet at any time in the past, but they have come close. All of it WITHOUT any human contribution at all.

Now rest your eyeballs, and rap out a heated dissenting point of view if you must. You will not change my mind, but others might be persuaded to believe in human contributions being the only factor we should be considering. I mean, after all, we can't change any of the other deciding dynamics of this Earths warming and cooling cycles. Might as well make some $$$ deluding the populace that lowering a gas percentage currently measured in parts per million by a few percentage points can 'save our planet'. :rolleyes:

Actually wish I'd thought of it. I wouldn't mind being rich and living the lifestyle of the guys who are profiting from this scheme. But then again, I'm just a critical thinker, not a crook. :p


Excellent explanation, Kermit2.
 

Sparky49

Joined Jul 16, 2011
833
Interesting argument Spinnaker.

However, I believe that even in the turn of the century, thermometers were made to quite some degree of accuracy.

I wish I could remember exactly, but when the school had a trip to the Royal Museums at Greenwich they showed us some very precise thermometers used to help with astronomy.

I presume (hehehe) that scientists today could verify the accuracy of equipment by comparing them against modern standards, and also by the tried and tested means of ice sampling from the Arctic.
 

shortbus

Joined Sep 30, 2009
10,049
Not to mention that we have never been able to record with precision the way we do today. Nor did we have near the data points that we do today. I just cannot understand how any reputable scientist can ignore those simple facts.

How do you form an opinion on data that you can't trust?
This has been one of my arguments. I would love to see our current temperatures measured with the same instruments used in 1860.
 

spinnaker

Joined Oct 29, 2009
7,830
Interesting argument Spinnaker.

However, I believe that even in the turn of the century, thermometers were made to quite some degree of accuracy.

.
But the datapoints were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today. In addition you were relying on the fact that the person recording the temp is going to go so with accuracy AND the recordings won't be misinterpreted years later. With my writing, if I were the one making the recordings, scientists would have thought that we had some rather unusual and varying weather.
 

Brownout

Joined Jan 10, 2012
2,390
I just cannot understand how any reputable scientist can ignore those simple facts.
They don't. The measurements have been qualified via comparisons with updated methods. As stated earlier, the rise in temperature cannot be attributed to inaccuracy of the earlier measurement methods. Temperature proxies have likewise been qualified. The science continuously qualifies and refines measurements. In the final result, the picture gets more clear that this warming is unnatural and never before observed in 10,000 years.
 

Sparky49

Joined Jul 16, 2011
833
I have said a couple of times, Joe.

Ice from the poles is used. They drill a section up from ice undisturbed for thousands of years, and through reassuringly modern techniques can analyse factors of the environment such as temperature, salinity, atmosphere composition.

One source of publications on this technique and the results taken from them can be found from a number of publishers, e.g the Royal Geographical Society

http://www.rgs.org/HomePage.htm
 

Thread Starter

GopherT

Joined Nov 23, 2012
8,009
We are simply in a warming period for the last 150 years. It is not clear what caused the warming but the fact that billions of tons of coal, oil and other fossil fuels have been burned during that time while the radiative emissions of earth (black-body radiation) has remained constant points to a human influence. You cannot convert chemical energy to heat and just expect the heat to dissppear. Mass-energy balance doesn't allow it and claiming it does go away is the absurd polar opposite of claiming over-unity devices exist.

I would not object to changes in the TOS of this site to say, "obvious claims of thermodynamically impossible feats are banned."

The energy put into the system tends to yield synergistic effects - more CO2 and soot and asphalt islands (cities) tend to capture more radiant energy and release less.
 

bountyhunter

Joined Sep 7, 2009
2,512
Isn't this thread blatantly about politics or am I missing something?

I'm genuinely asking here.
It actually depends how you define politics. Global climate change should not be a political issue itself, but it was politicized during the Bush admin because their position was that it did not exist... because if it did, they would need to do something and that something would impact businesses and the profits they make which strikes at the core of their support base. It became essential that they ridicule and attack any sources who claim climate change is real.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17926941



So, the issue itself is not political but it has been hijacked for that purpose by the GOP because they use it as a rallying cry to show how the dems want to "regulate" business and hurt them. They use the issue to attack incumbents.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/ener...ing-regulations-for-political-fodder-20130922
 
Last edited:

loosewire

Joined Apr 25, 2008
1,686
This was a good poll and didn't get changed ,has the increase in radio waves ever been

considered as a cause for any thing other than cancer. We can measure sun rays ,what

about radio waves ,you can detect them you can use them. What about the combined

effect of them. We know that animals behavior have a proven effect ,what about

humans. Do they direct our behavior in any way.
 
Last edited:

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,363
Yes, climate change is real and recently partly human caused but the historic extent of these changes over periods longer than a human lifetime are not unusual. When I hear something like "Current climate change is unprecedented in the history of the earth" I have to think, what are they smoking? Ask any North American megafauna that actually died from it instead of being hunted to extinction in popular lore.

http://faculty.washington.edu/grayson/jas30req.pdf
 
Last edited:

loosewire

Joined Apr 25, 2008
1,686
Is there any proof that man killed the large animals ,weapons found at the kill.

I like the comet theory ,since the close call witnessed last year. Thanks to radio

waves it we have proof , thanks to lots of cameras all over the world.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top