I strongly disagree. Making a wrong assumption, and taking the wrong corrective action could be as disasterous, or more so then delaying taking action until we have sufficient information.
ice, we will always have a climate, and CO2 follow the warming, they do not preceed warming. And Climate is not destroyed by CO2 Now the rise in CO2 has been verified by the Vostock Ice Core samples. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V6/N26/EDIT.php Petit et al. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V2/N12/C1.php(1999) reconstructed histories of surface air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration from data obtained from a Vostok ice core that covered the prior 420,000 years, determining that during glacial inception "the CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years" and that "the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination." Likewise, working with sections of ice core records from around the times of the last three glacial terminations, Fischer et al. (1999) found that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions." http://www.co2science.org/articles/V2/N12/C1.php Simply put, changes in orbital forcing start the temperature moving either up or down, which then makes the air's CO2 content either rise or fall. To say that the correlation of temperature and CO2 "suggests that greenhouse gases are important as amplifiers of the initial orbital forcing" is just not correct. In fact, the authors are forced to admit that the real reason for their making this claim is that "results from various climate simulations [our italics again] make it reasonable to assume [our italics yet again] that greenhouse gases have, at a global scale, contributed significantly to the globally averaged glacial-interglacial temperature change."
Our sun probably won't Nova - it will grow to a red giant in 5-6 billion years. Basically if we don't live small the earth will FORCE us to live small in about 100 years. BTW there is no reason to accelerate the expulsion of methane hydrates, if northern "marshes" get un-frozen, we are really fucked. Still , China has to be on board. Since they will not voluntarily, we must not buy and more useless plastic shit from them(or anyone else). Make the cell phone last 5 years, you car last 10 and only buy well-crafted items that last. Enough bullshit.
what about parallel universe and a fourth dimension? if there are parallel universes time may not exist, as we know it. you wan t space to be infinite you stop time.
If the sun goes nova, there will be nothing, the earth would be blasted out of existance, aproxamatly 8 minuets after the event happened. But as a mater of fact the Sun doesn't have a mass big enough to go Nova, it would become a Red Giant, some were between 2 to 4 billion years from now.
So what exactly qualifies as "delaying taking action"? We (the human residents on earth) will be building more electrical generating capacity over the next few years, and repairing what we have already built. We will be establishing transportation infrastructure and constructing dwellings and factories. We will be doing all that and many other things based on assumptions about how our boosting of the atmosphere's concentration of CO2 and other gases will affect the climate. We will not have the facts to verify our assumptions beyond all doubt. When we do get verification, maybe a generation from now, it will be impossible to go back and undo all this that we have done. What should these assumptions be? Is the assumption that we can double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere without seriously affecting the climate a reasonable one?
Grow a brain. I'm sorry, I can only be so polite, for so long, but seriously, grow a brain. Go back, re-read my post, think about what you've said, and then hopefully realize that everything you've said, your whole entire objection to what you think i'm saying is totally, utterly, wholly and completely irrelevant. To give you a clue, the correct question is actually "What qualifies as the wrong corrective action".
I think the question "What qualifies as the best set of assumptions" (regarding the future effects of radically boosting the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere in couple of generations) is also worth asking.
is it not a touch dishonest for the GW proponents to keep using the average global temperature? I'm a lawyer not a scientist and to me it is misleading
The only point you have made is that taking wrong actions could be disastrous, and we should be prudent. I don't think anyone has missed that. Additionally, you seem to think we can delay taking action until we have better information for our assumptions. My observation is that we cannot, in point of fact, delay taking action. We will, ten years from now, be found to have taken action. It is an attempt to communicate with people, and the central notion of heat energy being trapped in the lower atmosphere is reasonably clear in consequence. How would you explain the circumstances? And what is a GW "proponent"?
I suggest you re-read my post, because that's not what I actually said. What I actually said doing the wrong thing could be worse than doing nothing.
And I pointed out that there is no such alternative as doing nothing. We can't. We can do the wrong things, the right things, the better things, the worse things, but not - in this matter - no things. So the assumptions guiding our choices among these alternatives are kind of important.
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Good god, i've said it before, and i'll say it again, grow a brain. In the context of the discussion, not taking any corrective action constitutes doing nothing. This nonsense that your spouting about doing nothing not being an option is precisely that - nonsense. The only thing that you've proven i sthat you're taking my post out of context. As an example, there are long term Geo-engineering projects that we could undertake, some of which are being considered, that have equally irreversable implications, undertaking one of these, and then discovering that we've made a wrong assumption in our models, could (potentially) trigger an ice age, which, over all, could potentially be more disasterous than a little bit of global warming. Get a grip. Grow a brain. Learn to read. Try to understand.
Uh, right. Sure. But there remain a few questions. Does building more coal plants count as doing nothing? Does setting up DC transmission capability from the Southwestern deserts of the US to LA count as doing nothing? Does choosing between insulating houses in the Northeast or subsidizing a new-design nuclear power plant on Lake Huron count as doing nothing, or would doing neither and putting the money toward monetary relief for fuel oil users be the actual "nothing" option? How do you classify the various doings of the next few years into the "nothing" and "something" categories? Inquiring minds want to know.
I can't work out if you're genuinely stupid, or simply trying to be aggravating, and i've already explicitly set out what I meant. The context of the discussion, seeing as how you're apparently incapable of retaining it is "Corrective action" Allow me to spell something out. In the context of corrective action, taking no action means taking no corrective action, so then clearly in the context of this discussion, unless your reading age is below about 5, and in the context of my original statement "Taking no action" then clearly means "Taking no (corrective) action. Clearly then, most of your post is completely irrelevant to my original statement, which was "Making an incorrect assumption and taking the wrong corrective action could be as disasterous, or more so then delaying taking action until we have sufficient information." Minor point. Notice that the statement is a single sentence. The subject of the sentence is corrective action. The second part of the sentence is a qualifier for the first part of the sentence - it's comparing the consequences of delaying taking corrective action with taking the wrong corrective action. Quite clearly the, your assertion that "Continuing to build coal fired stations represents a kind of action" is off topic, fallacious, and irrelevant. Why? Because nothing in my statement even remotely implies that. Technically then, your entire argument represents a strawman argument - namely the point that you're arguing against is not the actual point that I am making. This is not the first time you have done this in a debate with me. Once again, we come back to my basic point which you have yet to actually address: Making a wrong assumption, and taking the wrong corrective action, could potentially be more disasterous than taking no (corrective) action at all. There we go, I even included the unneccessary additional qualifier seeing as how you are apparently unable to retain complex and correctly infer a message from a sentence (even though you have previously criticized other users ability to do precisely this).
The actual context of your contribution to any discussion here involving me is this: What you disagreed with there was my observation that the engineering template for decisionmaking was unlikely to be applicable, and my observation that the consequences of the boosting of CO2 concentration by fossil combustion were only available to inform our decisions via judgment of likelihood in the face of uncertainty. So that our assumptions - what we accept as the likely future to be prepared for - are critical. These assumptions determine what actions acquire the label "corrective", for example, or the designation "worthwhile". Meanwhile: is not a direct quote of my post. Nor is it fallacious. If you truly find it irrelevant, then that answers the question that was the direct quote, and we have narrowed down this category of yours - "corrective action" - that you have introduced as being important somehow, in a useful manner. Now, about the installation of DC power transmission capability into the best solar power areas, the measures to reduce fuel oil dependence in the Northeastern US, etc - corrective?
If you had tried actually reading my post, you might have discovered that the part of your post that I was specifically objecting to was the implication that has come through quite clearly in your posts that doing nothing - IE taking no corrective action - IE not taking any steps to reduce CO2 production is the worst thing we can do. It isn't, making a wrong assumption, and taking the wrong kind of corrective action could potentially lead to worse scenarios then continuing to increase CO2 production at the current rate. I could have sworn that was perfectly clear in my original post. This paragraph is completely meaningless. Clearly you (for a start) haven't understood the context of the word 'assumption'. Show me where I stated or implied that it was a direct quote of your post. Oh that's right, you can't because I didn't. Yes, I put it in quote marks, but you did however ask the question "Does building more coal plants count as doing nothing?" Which in the context of our discussion has the same meaning as our statement. I've been asserting That doing the wrong thing could be worse as doing nothing. You've been interpreting that statement out of context and in the most literal fashion you can, and asserting that my statement is nonsense (to paraphrase you, and use an example) because even building a coal fired power station counts as an action. Meanwhile, in response to this I havem this whole time, been simply pointing out that you were, have been, and still are, taking my statements out of context, and making arguments against them that are wholly irrelevant. And we haven't narrowed down anything because it was perfectly clear right from the start, and I've said the exact same thing several times now. I've already told you, I'm not addrerssing these points because they're irrelevant and still don't address the point that I was making.
