Do you believe global warming is taking place?

And it is much more difficult when you have the haves telling the have-nots what they can't have.

 

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Sure.

There are even theories that state that after a problem has progressed too much, it cannot be solved anymore, but that from a certain point on, things will simply get worse and worse, no matter what anyone does.

 

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So it is in our best interest to figure out how to consume but not pollute.

It's more an energy, recycling issue, but since I'm an optimist I see no inherent reason why we really can't do both.

The world has no shortage of energy available to it.
Given sufficient energy most everything can be recycled and made without polluting the environment.

 

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Medieval agriculture.

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The meteorologists as a group have done themselves no favours in gaining credibility from non-scientists.
Ordinary people have built in bullshit detectors, and they are constantly triggered, when scientists do the following:

1. They are too ready to make apocalyptic predictions.
We were told a few years back that the UK would shortly become ice bound in winter due to the reversal of the Gulf stream. It didn't.

2. They want to suggest that climate change will happen very quickly.
"The sea level will rise by a tiny amount each year, but that makes a big rise in a century", doesn't grab headlines. That's why they love "tipping points"

3. They are too ready to make projections from short time frames. If there are three warm Augusts in a row, some bright spark will come up with a theory of why that will continue, and why it is caused by man made global warming.

4. They fudge the figures. If the figures don't add up to the result that they want, they move the goalposts.

5. They pretend to know more than they do about the earth's climate.
Sometimes they should resist the urge to explain. Especially when they don't know what they are talking about.

 

Which is why it's better to listen to climatologists. Meteorologists are great at predicting weather but (generally) lousy at climate.

 

Climatology is a subset of meteorology, I think.
Could be wrong.

 

If anything it's the other way round, but the broad term is atmospheric science which includes meteorlogy, climatology, aeronomy... and stuff

 

Thanks for the responses.
Additional questions -

Is the greenhouse effect harmful under ordinary circumatances?
What occurence has made it dangerous to the global ecosystem?
What could each person do on a daily basis to cut down on the potential for disrupting the delicate balance of the earth?

 

Take only what they need, and thoroughly use that which they take.


Although I doubt this will save the planet - a clear conscience is like perpetual Christmas.

 

The majority of the greenhouse effect is natural and absolutely required for life to exist on the planet, so the opposite is true.

The idea is that we are adding additional Greenhouse Gasses (GHGs) to the atmopsphere, mainly by the burning of fossil fuels but also by things like rice farming and meat production, making of concrete etc and at the same time reducing the ability of the biosphere to remove these excess GHGs by our Land Use Changes (adding more pavement instead of planting greenery)

There is no indication that the Earth has a delicate balance.
Indeed just the opposite appears more likely, that the Earth tends towards an equilibrium and getting it out of that normal equilibrium takes enormous amounts of change.

That's not to say we aren't capable of enormous amounts of change, indeed we add ~30,000,000,000 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, or about twice what the biosphere of the globe can absorb and so there is a slow but steady accumulation of this Greenhouse gas.

What everyone would need to do to lower that 30,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year to managable levels (~15,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year?) would be to reduce their carbon footprint (note: About half the globe has a very tiny footprint and they should be allowed to increase it, so reductions, to be fair, should fall more heavily on the heaviest users to allow for this).

Everyone's is different, so what everyone could do is different.

http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/index.htm

Suggestions:

http://www.squidoo.com/Carbon-Footprint-2
http://green.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_reduce_your_carbon_footprint

etc

 

Not at all. It's why the earth is habitable. It would be much, much colder if not for the greenhouse effects of water, CO2, ozone and methane.

A dramatic increase in the amount of CO2 caused by burning of fossil fuels. It should be noted that although the concentration of CO2 has increased by 50%, the amount of warming that CO2 contributes has not increased by 50% - since the bands that CO2 absorbs are almost saturated already. That's why the effect has increased by only 1.5 watts per square meter instead of 30 watts (which would be catastrophic.)

Move closer to work. Eat local organically grown food. Go to a mostly vegetarian diet. Shop locally. Travel less.

 

Why do you persist in repeating this error?

Our current level of 390 ppm would bring the percent up to 39%. NOT 50%

And the use of 280 ppm as the preindustrial level as per the IPCC understates the average levels of pre-industrial CO2 as shown in more recent research:

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/41/15815.full.pdf

Which yields a 25% increase based on the average pre-industrial level. NOT 50%

?????
The rise in CO2 levels is pretty linear, and the rise in forcing is also pretty linear, but still since 1990, CO2 has increased about 10% but the forcing from CO2 has increased about 40%.

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http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/

Arthur

 

In this Information Age we have millions of cars running their engines everyday, we have coal power plants running everyday, we have nuclear power plants running everyday, ALL THIS HEAT MUST GO SOMEWHERE.

If the Earth is heating up it has nothing to do with the "green house effect" and everything to do with us heating the atmosphere one engine at a time.

Not to mention black top roads produce TONS AND TONS of heat converted from sun light.

 

Very wise. Very true. Global warming is a scam to enslave the planet's populations, yet consumerism is a self-enslavement that destroys the planet while the populations live out a meaningless existence. A different paradigm, one not based on lies, is definitely needed.

 

And of course, generalizing and stereotyping will also lead to correct conclusions. Take the word "capitalism". On one hand, it might mean entrepreneurial methodology, or economic health, or mom and pop's barbershop. On the other hand it means banana republicanism, intervention and exploitation of foreign lands and resources, economic shock therapy, paramilitary propaganda, martial law, torture, rape, murder, dictatorship, war, even genocide.

Global warming can mean elevated CO2, ice melt and warm oceans, all verifiable, or it can have a sinister "anti-capitalist" cap-and-trade connotation.

I, for one, see all the permutations and little or no hope for breaking the language barrier. Of course it's not the language that's lacking. Just the art of speaking itself, with reasonably correct information and plausible inferences. This is what seems to form that line drawn in the sand.

 

@adoucette:

In your graphs - the first two - there is ripple. Consider this:

Suppose there are a large number of widely placed measuring stations scattered around the globe in nearly perfect equally spaced locations. All are remote sites not influenced by proximity to human impact. The data from each station is collected daily and averaged, to plot a single point on a graph. After many years, this graph looks exactly like your first example.

What would you say causes the ripple?

 

I can not formulate a definite opinion.
What can I say I'm not worried about global warming or global cooling.
There are some who say global cooling. http://www.climatecooling.org/


Russian scientist predicts 100 years of cooling.

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Yeah, more snow for us!

I think that would be affected first Venice. The water level was raised in Venice?

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That's just from one station, the one atop Mauna Loa, and so it varys with the seasons because when the surface of the Pacific Ocean cools it sucks up more CO2 than it does in the Summer.

Here's an even closer look that shows the monthly correlation.

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Well, except for the fact that our TOTAL energy consumption is ~130,000 TeraWatt hours per year.

We produce energy at about 30% efficiency, so if assume all the energy we generate is released as heat, that's equal the production of ~400,000 TeraWatt hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Which is less than 10% of the energy we get from the sun in just one day.

or roughly .03% of what we get from the sun in a year.

Looking at the impact on Global Temp, well consider the average Global Temp in June is ~16.2 C.

An increase of .03% would be ~.005 degrees C, or ~16.205 C with our direct contribution from energy production.

As far as the black pavement you mention, yes that is considered in the equations as part of our Land Use Changes and yes, it (and other changes) does contribute a tiny amount to the overall warming trend.

Arthur