What happened to Global Warming?
When I put my first above ground pool in around the late 90's we were able to open it in April and start swimming in May.
Now my pool is just opened and still not warm enough to swim in
I'd like some global warming back...
Ha, ha. Your memory is failing you...
That is my fault. Sorry.
(Lame attempt to rationalize why I did that incoming).
I do that in case someone is too lazy to search for the info using Google; I also do not like taking things out of context or cherry picking, so I try to quote whole paragraphs.
I will be more judicious in the future.
Thank you. My grammar (and spelling, but then spell checkers help) really suck.
I did. But the working papers did not support the opinion. Perhaps you missed those (they were leaked).
Sorry no. Providing documentation showing that your statement is incorrect is not a red herring or misleading. It is how debates are won. If you can refute the evidence I have provided, please do. But creating straw men and introducing non sequiturs is not a defense.
No, you alleged that the "overwhelming majority" of scientists agreed with you. I proved they did not. I never refuted your allegation the IPCC and some bureaucratic organizations agree with you. I would be a fool to think you were alone in your opinion. I know there are many that believe as you do.
But then the scientists rely on data, and the data does not support your opinion.
However the IPCC summary was just released (the thread did seem to take a "hiatus" over the summer) which makes it topical. Perhaps no ones opinion will be changed. But the expression of ideas is what the forums are all about. Conversion is secondary.
Hope you had a wonderful birthday.
Sometimes people think this is a complex topic, but basically it's pretty simple: if you are cold, you put a blanket over your body to keep you warm. If you add another blanket, it gets warmers. If you add yet another blanket, it will get even warmer.
We are pumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, which makes the CO2 layer thicker and thicker, thus capturing more heat every year.
The yearly increase isn't that great, about 2 ppm / year (http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Trend/).
During the Triassic there were pretty high levels of CO2, about 2500 ppm.
I suppose it'll take us about 2000 years to reach those levels.
Life was still possible in those days, but the climate was apparently pretty hot, with no ice and with subtropical forests at mid-latitudes ...
I take it you didn't major in Mathematics....
You seem to like providing corrections when you have them ...
The trick to debating scientific research is to HIDE the flaws in logic from your opponents not openly fumble simple arithmetic...
How do temperatures on Pangea during the Triassic period get blamed on how much CO2 was in the air?
One tropical super continent dominated by inland deserts in the middle of a completely unimpeded global ocean. There was no Antarctica, there were no northern lands sheltering most of the Arctic from the oceans at large. If Pangea were the state of things today, no ice caps.
Quite frankly, the Triassic period is a pretty big wet blanket on AGW in general. Despite such radically different conditions, like a complete lack of massive quantities of ice, it was only averaging 3 celsius hotter than it is now at 6 times the current CO2 levels. The Sun was hotter back then too.
There was 1 supercontinent, sure, but it had mid-latitudes. Those were subtropical because of higher temperatures.
There were also no glaciers. There was no ice anywhere.
It's the other way around: the sun gets about 10% hotter every 1 billion years. It was colder in the past.
I don't know where you got that from. What about this "a temperature rise to lethal levels in the tropics: around 50-60°C (122-140°F) on land, and 40°C (104°F) at the sea-surface":
http://arctic-news.blogspot.nl/2012/10/lethally-hot-temperatures-during-the-early-triassic-greenhouse.html
Anyway, I don't understand why people ignore a simple physics principle that creating an ever thicker blanket of CO2 will increase temperatures (note: the blanket gets THICKER and therefore will capture more heat).
Also, an increase of 10 degr celcius for example doesn't sound like much, but it will make days that are hot now, unbearably hot in the future. And while we can take shelter in ventilated houses, just a few unbearably hot days are enough to destroy crops - after all, amino acids break down at high temperatures (above 40 degrees), it's comparable to a really hot and deadly fever. The first few super-hot days will take away all water from the plants, so that plants cannot cool down anymore. After that, the plants are as good as dead. They'll just burn up with a really high fever. This will probably happen near the equator, which will turn into a desert. People living near the equator will have to migrate north. Note that the northern latitudes are very small compared to the equatorial latitudes (in term of surface area). Everyone will have to move to a small piece of land. And the best piece of land (Europe) is already full of people. And how are we going to feed the world if there's a lot less land surface to grow crops on? Not to mention the sea levels that will rise a few hundred meters by then... and will flood most of Europe and parts of Siberia, leaving even less land to live on.
Fortunately this is still a few thousand years into the future, but imho it's not something to look forward to.
You fail to grasp how a greenhouse gas such as cO2 works. It's not a blanket. It traps infrared at a certain narrow frequency, and via a logarithmic scale. More co2 doesn't add more heat trapping, it flattens out at a certain level. And that flattening part has begun a while back. So you can add as much as you want, but until you don't reach toxic levels (about 12%) it will hardly make difference except make plants grow abundantly and conserve water better making them more drought resistant.
Petrossa ... the CO2 layer grows THICKER as you add more CO2. At sea level it won't make much of a difference if the density of CO2 increases. But at high altitudes, it will add extra insulation just like adding an extra blanket.
As an example of an extreme end-scenario, take Venus. If you would keep adding and adding CO2 you'd end up with a very thick atmosphere with a lot of CO2. Having a very high concentration of CO2 doesn't matter, as it flattens out. But the CO2 layer is very, very thick and almost no heat can escape from that hellhole.
Why let Physics get in the way of a cute parable to describe your belief.
I'm not sure to which school you went, but i'd get my money back. Layer??? You actually imagine co2 to be a concentrated layer in the atmosphere? Venus doesn't have a 'layer' of co2, it has a practically only co2 atmosphere. about 96%. All oxygen breathing live dies at 12% co2 concentration, so a warm planet will be the least of your problems.
Furthermore it's not the co2 which causes the heat, (impossible because Venus has a 100% cloudcover so a very high albedo, so hardly any sunlight can enter) but the fact that the Venus atmosphere weighs 90x more then our atmosphere. The pressure of the atmosphere causes the heat.
At 100% co2 the earth would warm up roughly 25 degrees celsius given our atmospheric pressure.
The atmosphere is a layer... what should I've called it then, "The CO2 in the atmosphere gets thicker" ??? That would make no sense. The atmosphere (and CO2) isn't really a layer anyway, I just used it in a manner of speech so that it's easier to understand. There is no real upper bound, it just fades away gradually. I will phrase it differently then: the CO2 density high up in the atmosphere will ALSO increase, just as it does near the surface. But while it won't have an additional effect at the surface, it will create extra insulation at high altitudes because the CO2 density there is low and the heat capture is not saturated there yet. Satisfied?
The pressure of an atmosphere doesn't cause heat. Without an external source of heat, it'll cool down very quickly because of its efficient heat transport (wind). Check the Titan example: thick atmosphere, but very very cold. Even the earth's core will eventually cool down, whether it has a high pressure or not, once the internal radioactive decay process stops.
Petrossa, I think you've picked up a few physics concepts here and there, but you don't know what they really mean. You should take some time to learn more about them.
Exhibit A:
As you can see, the relationship between atmospheric pressure and temperature is very linear...or logarithmic...or whatever math equation seems to fit that shape...personally I'm thinking some sideways combo of a Gaussian, sine wave, and square root function but to each their own...
Exhibit B:
This diagram very nicely demonstrates the grand physics law known as Conservation of Arrows (a corollary of Conservation of Energy). Apparently when a planet (or any "body") is at equilibrium, the heat going in is equal to the heat going out. I'm not entirely sure I buy into that since my microwave doesn't get colder when it cooks food but, hey, that's a story for another time.
Exhibit C:
I'm no expert on geophysiclimatology, but I've researched the subject extensively and I dare say my sources are very credible. I also have a college degree and can ride my bike with no hands, so I'd say I comfortably fit somewhere between world-renowned expert on climatology and frenzied reader of Mr. Biggle's Webpage on Climate Change.
Conclusion:
It appears that no one here is actually an expert on thermodynamics or atmospheric physics. Rather, we just have two sides quoting other sources or summarizing other people's watered-down summaries. Dr. Behatin says CO2 traps bands of infrared radiated from the surface...Dr. Betrippin says the pressure alone causes the temperature differences. What we have here is a case of bias -- people believe the sources they want to believe.
"It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are." ~Ovid
Titan doesn't have a thick atmosphere, and it's not very cold considering it's location. It gets about 1% of the solar radiance that Earth does, and manages an 11K temperature increase over the black body norm. Quite toasty really, considering there's almost no water on the planet.
It's atmosphere is only around 10 times as dense as ours. Venus is over 90 times as dense. Venus is also near the sun, the amount of heat being transmitted into the atmosphere is relevant to what the density of the atmosphere means for heat generation.
Titan has relatively low volatility, and a vastly less dense atmosphere, heat generated by air movement is insignificant compared to on Venus, where the atmosphere is basically on fire and extremely volatile compared to Earth. Heat generated by friction in the atmosphere is immense.
Um....
WTF has extraterrestrial atmospherics got to do with AGW?
Is the cause simply "minds immeasurably superior to ours...."? [little green martians]....
In this thread, logic has been excepted, producing this:
I thinks its started hear or their.
still has alot more relevince than a MP video does ...
I'm adding some water vapor to the air, I hope it will help cool the earth even if only briefly.
To be frank, I don't give two %$@!# about the whole global warming debate, but pumping less CO2 into the air is a good thing as it means humans breathe it in less and less of that crap gets adversely absorbed by stuff we care about such as water. Add to that the fact that petro has a large variety of uses outside of fuel, such as in the manufacturing of polymers/plastics, and it will either eventually run out or become horribly expensive to produce. Also burning fossil fuels tends to release gases other than CO2 which can be extremely nasty, such as CO, which doesn't paint a healthy picture in the slightest.
This leads me to argue that non-fossil fuel powered cars are simply a net benefit for humans and the world in general. If they can be improved to the point of filling a person's regular usage, whether that be simply city driving, which current electric cars arguably can fill, or longer range driving, I can't see many arguments against moving away from fossil fueled cars even if one assumes that global warming is an elaborate hoax.
The problem, and I think the real crux of the AGW debate, is that we will get off of fossil fuels eventually. The market and technology are going that way, it's just going to take time (decades, probably). AGW proponents are insisting that there is no time to wait for it to happen through natural technological evolution. The problem is too immediate. We need a massive shift to save us from going of the AGW cliff. However those programs will harm 1) the world economy, potentially severely and 2) harm developing nations with the most quality of life to gain in particular.
So the question isn't "should we look for an alternative". That's happening naturally. The question is should we harm the progression of the quality of life around the world. In order for that answer to be "Yes" AGW proponents need to prove two things. Firstly, they need to prove that the human component of global warming is significant. Secondly they need to prove that we can actually do something about it.
If the globe is warming to dangerous levels, but the human contribution is 1% or 2% of the root cause, then it's not really worth potentially upending the world economy. By the time our changes had any real benefit we'll be off petro-fuels anyway and we should be focusing on figuring out how to survive on a hotter planet rather than trying to solve a problem out of our control. If the human contribution to warming in 95% of the root cause AND the warming is actually a serious threat in the near-term, then we have a reason to discuss options for fixing the problem.
I've personally never seen a compelling argument that 1) humans are the primary cause and 2) the problems caused are going to be catastrophic in the next few decades. Maybe the evidence exists, but I've never seen it and the "We must do something NOW!" attitude of AGW proponents, without actually answering those two questions, makes them hard to take seriously.
Especially since many pretend that we can fix the problem with just a little will power and a tiny amount of sacrifice. The real solutions to AGW that have been put forward either 1) don't actually do anything because they let 3rd world development continue unabated or 2) the put serious brakes on the global economy and 3rd world development, thus harming quality of life growth around the world.
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