Runaway Global Warming

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Facial, Jul 11, 2014.

  1. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The DNA that became NOAA was a "perfect storm" of four key players: oceanographer, naval officer and head of the Scripps Institute Roger Revelle; his protege, geochemist David Charles Keeling, who first measured the rising levels of CO[sub]2[/sub]; National Bureau of Standards solar irradiance expert Ralph Stair, who was met by accident by Robert Simpson, US Weather Bureau meteorologist who at the time was working from Mauna Loa, and who convinced Stair to come to the site to overcome dust contamination which was interfering with Stair's measurements. Stair applied his Bureau of Standards demand for precision to address the specifics of the building plan of the Mauna Loa Observatory, and Roger Revelle was instrumental in convincing the military that monitoring the atmosphere was within the scope of monitoring Russian testing of nukes, securing funding to buy equipment and to finance construction. Lore has it that Revelle managed to get troops to assist with the labor. But he had other career objectives and left the observatory to the able hands of Keeling, Simpson and Stair. By that time Revelle had already demonstrated that ocean uptake was not keeping up with emissions. He also authored a study ordered by LBJ which first elevated the issue of anthropogenic CO[sub]2[/sub] to the political arena, leading to Nixon's reorganization of government agencies like those represented above into NOAA. Revelle's report was carried to the UN by a Democratic senator who had bothered to read it, and this set the stage for the formation of the IPCC. Revelle also happened to teach a young Al Gore about global warming while a visiting professor to Gore's college campus. At that time, the Right Wing wasn't even aware of the science.

    Thus the denialist disparagement of Gore is a disparagement of these four visionary scientists, as well as thousands of others who actually bothered to study the material the denialists couldn't even pass the entrance exams to enroll in.


    The more important issue, as far as denial is concerned, is that short term averages are not monatonic. We have a roughly 100 year record of local minima and maxima. Thus, using this argument as a basis of denying the scholarship is moronic. No one cares about short term variance, but rather the overall trend, which has a positive slope. And of course the quickly disappearing global ice paints that long term trend dismally, without the need for the denialists to choke on their hockey sticks.
     
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  3. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks for the lore. Really interesting folks. Al Gore spent many years as a senator trying to get a bunch of ideologue politicos to wake up to the science. What a bunch of cement heads.
     
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  5. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    He demonstrated that he not only paid attention to his college lectures (for some, the bar is just bothering to drag their lard-asses into class) but that the lesson taught to him by Revelle left a lasting impression, one that developed as a cause. I actually never cared one way or the other about Gore until the Right started attacking him. After piecing this together, I see him as the kind of person who champions a cause after intelligent deliberation about the consequences of abandoning it. That's similar to a lot of the liberal attitudes, whether coming from the political sector, the academics, or elsewhere. Which is why is seems so bizarre to me that people actually vote Republican. It seems to indicate that something went seriously wrong with their own education--how else can they abandon the consequences associated with a given set of evidence? Of course mere ignorance is way better than all the kicking and screaming that goes with denial. But just think of how the folks I mentioned above could practice their craft without any of the interference so prevalent today. It's as if we are living in a Stalinesque Brave New World, 30 years after 1984, in which the machinery of the New Politburo are foul mouthpieces like FAUX/Limbaugh, programming their mindless robots by the simplest kinds of lies that can quite simply be debunked by a little research. They're just too dumb to pull it off, hence bullshit has become the opiate of the people. It's a world even Marx wouldn't have envisioned, since he probably thought the proletariat would at least be able to pass a GED at this juncture in the progress of human civilization.
     
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  7. zgmc Registered Senior Member

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    THe average person really has no idea about any of this. They are just as likely to buy into the deniers faulty arguments as they are to believe the real science. I have talked to people that claim to understand the science, but they refuse to believe it because of politics. You would think that this must mean they there is something wrong with science education in this country. I think that is certainly part of it, but for a lot of people politics trumps science.
     
  8. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    siberian traps caused by bolide impact
    nice hypothesis
    any supporting evidence?
     
  9. Facial Valued Senior Member

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    A good read. Didn't know about this history, maybe I missed it on Spencer Weart's website.
     
  10. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    The reason for post #65 is that is supposedly the trigger for the closest we've come to "runaway global warming"
     
  11. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Citation required. On Wikipedia, there are several sources cited for the extinction event and none is singled out as the actual trigger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event#Causes_of_the_extinction_event So not everyone is going to follow the breadcrumbs you leave reaching the same conclusion.

    http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/ancient-whodunit-may-be-solved-microbes-did-it
    http://www.pnas.org/content/111/15/5462.full
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    So? Why is that a "reason", adn why is it here?
     
  13. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Extinction event---hmmmm, seems kinda drawn out ---if the traps 2 million year reign of terror was started by a massive bolide event on the opposite point on the globe(in the panthalassic ocean off the coast of antarctica?), then we have another "smoking gun". Extinction causation remains hypothetical. (note the use of the word "supposedly"). Curiously, the extinctions seem to have been mostly within the oceans--panthalassic and paleo tethis, and much less so on pangea.
    Which seems to preclude the concept of "runaway global warming. Also, it seems that the oceans were become more acidic, and warm water gives up CO2 rather than absorb it. Contradictions abound.

    Reason---discussion.
    Here because of the title of the thread.

    ..............
    Mostly, i was looking for supporting or contradicting discussion as/re the bolide trigger.
     
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Why is that curious? The oceans cover most of the planet, and most of the life on the planet resides in the oceans. Thus if an extinction event hit all species equally, you'd expect most extinctions to occur within the oceans.

    Again, why is that a contradiction? As the oceans warm they give up CO2 (or more accurately do not absorb it as rapidly) and thus increase the rate of warming.
     
  15. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Perhaps my use of the word "curious" is misleading. It was the percentage of extinctions that seem to have been higher in the oceans.
    Which may tell us something of the state of the planet at that time.

    If ocean acidification were causal to the ocean's extinctions, and warming was assumed to be associated with the extinctions, then we have a potential contradiction.

    Luanne Becker vindicated?
     
  16. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    6,152
    As you probably know there are multiple extinction events, although only a few are known to be massive. There is no definitive proof of cause although finding cinders at the outset of a mass extinction is one clue. Acidity is also sometimes cited. But since we are living through an era of many extinctions related to anthropogenic global warming, that's one more cause to worry about. They were talking about this species this morning on NPR:

    http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/319092192/shifts-in-habitat-may-threaten-ruddy-shorebirds-survival

    The Great Coral Reef probably will crash within, say a century or so, as tropical waters essentially boil the critters out of existence. And who knows if there will be any more polar bears. And by the time it gets to them, presumably thousands of other species will be long gone.

    But we need not speculate. We can just account for the species already known to be wiped out by excessive heat, and consequent shifts to the timing of seasons which is particularly harmful to migration and other cycles within ecosystems.
     
  17. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks and yes Spencer Weart has done an excellent job. I stitched those facts together from a few documents I found while tracing the continuity backward from Gore to the real culprit the Right Wing would like to smear, GS Callendar. If they could just do the right banishing ritual, to erase him from the timeline, they could probably elect Sarah Palin after all. Just to whet your appetite, below is Roger Revelle's report to LBJ. This is really what triggered IPCC's creation, since it went to the UN and everywhere the politicians said "Let's study climate as a global undertaking." It's the brilliance and tenacity of these early folks which makes the attacks on them and/or their work so telling about the pathos of the Right Wing. In the future folks will look back at us as Neanderthals for allowing these knuckleheads to gain power. Also this doc triggered the formal creation of NOAA by Nixon (really just a doggie biscuit to the hippies) even though they had been operating at Mauna Loa in some capacity for about 20 yrs: first Weather Bureau meteorologist Robert Simpson, who used to fly into hurricanes, set up a rudimentary weather station there, then later brought in Bureau of Standards solar irradiance expert Ralph Stair, and I think that's Roger Revelle caught wind of it, and he must have suggested it to Charles David Keeling, the geochemist who made the startling graphs of CO[sub]2[/sub] levels rising (by about 1958). And during those 20 years until Nixon got the conservatives behind "air pollution" (well sort of) they were operating out of "found money" thanks to Revelle (initially, then he went off to other pursuits) and Stair, who seems to have learned the technique from Revelle. So here's the doc that sort of brought them out of their skunkworks an agonizing 8 years after Revelle wrote it:

    http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldei... Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.pdf

    note page VII indexes to Appendix Y4 "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide". That's on sheet 9 of the PDF. Of course Roger Revelle is just the defacto protege of GS Callendar. That makes Gore Callendar's ideological grandson, great-grandson of Arrhenius, great-great grandson of Tyndall, and great-great-great grandson of Fourier. Hell, even Jesus didn't have a lineage that impressive. But it helps the denialists to put this all in a Biblical perspective.

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    Not that this will cure them, after all they probably still want to claim that Revelle made a deathbed confession that his life's work was a fraud:

    http://www.kickthemallout.com/article.php/Video-Revelle_Admits_CO2_Theory_Wrong

    I guess you have to really love the Lord to know how to blow so much smoke up so many hydrogen sulfide emitters. And of course they have vast congregations of them to work with.

    I don't exactly understand the topic here. We are in a runaway condition, and have been since the last ice age. We are just accelerating the dates of various impending crashes. I may have missed the point, but to me this is all another coded version of denialism. The other level of runaway, which tries to consider what would happen if we stopped dumping GHGs, whether the acceleration would continue unabated, seems like a kind of duplicity. The end is coming; there is nothing we can do about that (other than weird ideas like seeding the atmosphere with sulfuric acid). All we can do is to try our best to slow the emissions. So I don't understand the thrust of this. There is a problem which urgently needs our attention, but because there are infants in the room that need their butts swabbed, we have to stop and mollycoddle them. That's the only real issue; the rest is all data, inferences and conclusions. Something's gotta give, and it won't be Nature. That puts the onus on all the cry-babies to grow up and leave Science the hell alone.
     
  18. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    The 'mollycoddled' believe Jesus would approve of such self serving intellectual dishonesty.
     
  19. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    ?? Why? Increased atmospheric CO2 both causes warming and ocean acidification.
     
  20. Pronatalist Registered Senior Member

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    Even if it did happen, which appears highly unlikely to me, it would be for the good. Earth would become more like a warm Garden of Eden again, even more supportive of dramatic human population growth.

    The way people are clustered up near the equator, tells me that the planet is too cold. It would also save on people's heating bills, although the free-energy technology that the NWO criminal elitists stole from Tesla and the American people, would also ave on our energy bills.
     
  21. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    And then we could dance with all the pixies!

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  22. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Dywyddyr, You still need to work on those people skills babe.
     
  23. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    How about some intellectual honesty from you? When you exercise it in a group setting it becomes a people skill. You should consider taking your own advice.
     

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