Is global warming even real?

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Ilikeponies579, Dec 16, 2014.

  1. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Due you have a reference for that? My experience and understanding is the breezes from the ocean climb up to the plateau Sao Paulo is on, cooling and making a small rain forest along the coastal mountain chain slope. Unfortunately they are now warmer when they start their climb and don't seem to have much water for Sao Paulo left when they get here - Why not "more" I don't know, unless they were much less humid when they started.
     
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  3. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    How so? I am just repeating what I have read , in the IPCC et. al reports - THEIR predictions for Brazil. As far as deforestation being the cause of the drought it is much less now than in prior years:
    If deforestation were the cause, the worst drought should have happened more than a decade ago, not now.

    Brazil has made great progress in reducing deforestation. Mainly because the unemployed poor man living in the Amazon can now get a permit to cut a very valuable mature hard wood tree so no longer needs to set fires that burn many square miles to hide his crime as before when the government foolishly thought they could police that vast area. One large mahogany tree, cut into about 10 foot sections and delivered to the saw mill is worth several times the minimum salary for a year. He had to cut and then burn vast expanse of forest years ago.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The effects of deforestation are incremental and cumulative, and hit tipping points (this drought may be one) - not the process, but the ever-increasing (at any rate, slower is as sure) consequences of ever-increasing amounts of deforested land, are the key factors.

    A decade ago, Brazil harbored significantly less deforested land. Forests do not grow back in ten years.
     
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  7. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    All true, or almost so, I think. In 2005 the Amazon was a net source of CO2, not a sink. I don't have more current data, but think Brazil's now more inteligent forest management policy has it as a sink for carbon again for quite a few years. That does not mean the tall trees that were lost have retuned, but that the total forest's wood mass is increasing again; however, the current drought may have it back like 2005 - a net source, not a sink for carbon.

    My main concern is the same as for California's forest: The drought, while not killing all the trees, has made them much more prone to fires that grow large. I think I have read that California's forest are in that mode - more and bigger fires. - do you have data?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 25, 2015
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Fortunately the redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens, secrete acid into the soil. Most plant life requires an alkaline medium, so redwood forests have little underbrush. Forest fires occur rarely in redwood forests (or perhaps never; I haven't looked up the statistics). This is how they get to be so old and tall.

    The only well-known plant that thrives in an acidic medium is Cannabis sativa. Many marijuana gardens are planted out in the redwood forest.
     
  9. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Interesting, thanks; however I think redwood grove will support a "crown fire" and most of CA's forests do have underbrush. A crown fire in them could spread to redwoods. Fact that they are so old / large means it doesn't happen often, I assume, but then one must wonder why redwood groves are not more common?
     
  10. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    And I regret it.
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I wondered why redwood trees got so high.

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  12. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    After reading the last responses directed towards me...
    Highschool indeed.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism

    Anyways No one disputed the math involved with this link:

    http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/09/ocean-heat-content-relentless-but.html

    What surprised me was no one pointed out But thats 2000 meters, its warmer at the surface!! and it is. Covered in the above link and put out there for review:

    Side note and memorable quote (from JoNova comments by reader)
    Back to orders of magnitude and Joules. We have a wiki page that gives some outline.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)

    Fun read.
    3.8×10 4 J energy released by the metabolism of 1 gram of fat
    4–5×10 4 J energy released by the combustion of 1 gram of gasoline

    So If I push my car for 1 mile on a flat surface How much weight will I lose?

    1.2×10 6 J approximate food energy of a snack such as a Snickers bar (280 food calories)
    4.2×10 6 J energy released by explosion of 1 kilogram of TNT

    4 snickers = 2 lbs of tnt?? so if a bite sized snickers blew up in my hand How many fingers would I lose?

    Yes I am laughing at joules.

    5x10 -20 J total world annual energy consumption in 2010
    5.5×10 -24 J total energy from the Sun that strikes the face of the Earth each year

    Isnt that 1000 x more energy from the sun vs mankinds annual consumption (in joules)?
     
    Last edited: Jan 29, 2015
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    You're being played by a propaganda site.

    There has never been a conspiracy of the scientific world to inculcate ignorance and ineptitude in you. Your unfamiliarity with standard terms and analysis reports is not the result of a conspiracy among the researchers reporting their findings.

    The JoanNova site, on the other hand, is a product of such a conspiracy - more commonly labeled "marketing" or in this kind of case "swindle", in political terms "propaganda".
     
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Not surprising, since you seem to not understand units of energy.
     
  15. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    10,890
    :Shrug: I don't know about the US curriculum but it's a statement of fact - I can (probably) even point you to the specific parts of the school curriculum that deal with specific heat if you really want me to.

    Laugh all you want - the comparisons are the same no matter which energy units you use - mind you, the rest of the world using SI units probably doesn't care about your opinion.

    If you want to see a ridiculous unit, look at ergs.
     
  16. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    1,654
    And again neither disputes the math, choosing to stick to In-group / out-group psychology.

    So I am left with:
    "...Nevertheless, we still obtained the averaging warming just by 0.2 Celsius degrees per century! Even if you were assuming that only the upper 350 meters "do something" while the temperature of the lower 350 meters "remains the same", you could justify a trend by at most 0.4 Celsius degrees per century..."

    However, shortly (like 30seconds) after posting #289 I began to wonder if I had made a math mistake here:
    It appears the correct answer would be 10,000 x's more energy. But I wanted to see if the PeanutGallery would have the integrity to reveal my mistake, regardless of where it put the sun vs mankinds consumption. Or maybe they just didnt see the mistake because they are not paying attention to detail. Nah, they are quite sure I am making a mistake and it was just sooo obvious.

    Interesting post on Curry's site (truncated of course):

    ‘Cognitive-dissonance avoidance will steel individuals to resist empirical data that either threatens practices they revere [1] or bolsters ones they despise [2], particularly when accepting such data would force them to disagree with individuals they respect [3]...

    Applying this to the climate domain, we find: [1] In just one example of many, empirical evidence on ‘The Pause’ was acknowledged very late and very grudgingly, even then with implausible caveats that (in so many words), “it doesn’t really make any difference”. This powerful resistance is because the data gets very close indeed to invalidating the climate models (a core scientific ‘practice’ underpinning climate orthodoxy itself). Plus [2] it bolsters the arguments of the despised skeptics and bolsters the despised practices (e.g. fossil fuel consumption) that are opposed by climate culture. [3] A very wide range of environmental topics are tied to the central narrative of imminent (on decadal to one century scale) catastrophe, and accepting skeptical data upon any of them these days, has come to be seen by climate culture as a betrayal of (depending upon country and affiliations), government leaders and policy, many celebrities, scientific leaders and bodies, moral leaders (the Pope may be the latest), even one’s children and one’s grandchildren plus most of the life on Earth and the planet itself....

    A very long read but interesting. And as a caveat he isnt a social psychologist:

    http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/30/climate-psychologys-consensus-bias/#more-17678

    And finally:
    Model(nasa)



    Reality(nasa satellite data)

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  17. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    Nah, I am still having fun with Joules
     
  18. zgmc Registered Senior Member

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    I've been seeing this argument more and more over the past few months. When you can't beat science with science, try to beat it with psychology.
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Playing pattycake with one's abysmal ignorance - little mudpies, and they look almost like something one could eat!.

    But on a science forum?
     
  20. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    gee:
    what a pity
     
  21. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    So, we just had the hottest driest January on record, so, if snowmageddon disproves global warming then surely that must prove it, right?
     
  22. zgmc Registered Senior Member

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    831
    I just came across this:



    From here: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/201...increasing-carbon-dioxide-co2-on-temperature/

    I have not heard of this before. If anyone can shed some light on this, please do.
     
  23. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    That's well known; the CO2 absorption band is almost saturated. That's why we can increase CO2 concentrations by 50% and change the radiative heat balance by only .12%. (This is both well understood by climate scientists and fortunate. If the CO2 bands hadn't been close to saturated, our increases in CO2 would have already killed us through very rapid temperature increases.)
     

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