General / Off-Topic Is man made climate change real or not? Prove your belief here.

[Zak Gordon]

The permi-frost melts are well under way, as is the more widely publicized glacial melts. In terms of the later the main concern probably will be what happens to the Atlantic Conveyor:

Atlantic ‘conveyor belt’ has slowed by 15% since mid-20th century - Carbon Brief

The Atlantic Ocean current that brings warm water up to Europe from the tropics has weakened by 15% since the middle of the last century, new research suggests.

www.carbonbrief.org

Much of Northern Europe and North America's current climate 'norms' rely on that system to keep things stable.

As for the CO2 releases from the already underway permi-frost melts (the ones in Russia and Greenland are especially bad) that is an unknown quantity, but needless to say not something that is going to help slow AGW down:

'Melting permafrost in Arctic will have $70tn climate impact – study':

Melting permafrost in Arctic will have $70tn climate impact – study

Study shows how destabilised natural systems will worsen man-made problem

www.theguardian.com

We are right at the 'tipping point' for many of the earths current natural systems and all the extra CO2 AGW is about is having an effect too quickly for most natural systems to adjust to comfortably. It's going to be a wild ride over the next few hundred years.

 

[TheGaijin87]

Definitely a possibility that could lead to a quite severe drop in temperature, during a period. In the long run it seems that we end up in the same spot with about 4°C rise, after this effect has stabilized.

Here is a graph that shows the ice melt effect on some of the curves:

Spoiler: Graph

How likely or accurate this is, I don't know. It's probably better to avoid the ice melt and never find out.

should be obvious that when comparing data from the last 150 years to predict data for the next 300 years that this cant really be accurate. thats the problem with 99% of these graphs. they only show exactly the timeframe they need to validate their data. when looking at a bigger timeframe though they mostly get invalidated. and thats the point most dont understand.

 

[Han_Zen]

should be obvious that when comparing data from the last 150 years to predict data for the next 300 years that this cant really be accurate. thats the problem with 99% of these graphs. they only show exactly the timeframe they need to validate their data. when looking at a bigger timeframe though they mostly get invalidated. and thats the point most dont understand.

They don't just use data from the last 150 years, just because the graph is cut there. It's an illustration.

 

[jasonbarron]

Sound to me that you rather believe conspiracy theories frm those you agree with politically, than science from those you disagree with.

It's like if German scientists in 1944 reported a comet heading for earth and suggested taking a break from the war, so the US could use it's newly discovered nuclear technology to divert it.
The observation is confirmed by British, American and Russian scientists.
Some astronomers say the comet might miss earth. Some hobby astronomers say it's actually heading in the other direction. A priest says it's not a comet. It's Jesus returning to earth and if we nuke it, we kill the son of God.
You decision is that this is German propaganda, all the allied scientists are really German agents, Germans would use the break to rebuild(true) and it's better to risk the planet than it is to risk the Germans getting back on their feet.

Please read post #16 of this thread. Then check your premises concerning taking this tact with me.

 

[Han_Zen]

Please read post #16 of this thread. Then check your premises concerning taking this tact with me.

I have read that post. I was referring to your comments about 'one world government' and 'population control'. They seem like conspiration theories to me.

 

[jasonbarron]

I have read that post. I was referring to your comments about 'one world government' and 'population control'. They seem like conspiration theories to me.

Before I entered the conversation in the recycle or die thread several months ago people here favorably discussed such lovely topics for the "good of the planet" as population control (enforced by the government, in case the word "control" got by you), infanticide, invading sovereign countries to take control of their squandered resources, thought policing on the Internet and society in general, just to name some of the biggies without even getting into draconian regulatory provisions.

I entered the conversation and started calling out the more egregious stuff, and most of it has died down directly due to my involvement.

If you don't think the climate crisis community is moving us towards draconian regulatory models, then you really aren't paying as much attention as you think you are. Want a piece of proof? Look up everything you can on the proposed Green New Deal, and try to understand it from a practical standpoint as opposed to an empathic one.

 

[Morbad]

when looking at a bigger timeframe though they mostly get invalidated.

Quite the opposite really. Significantly longer time periods turn the 1850 to conservative predictions for 2100 level temperatures into an essentially vertical wall on the graph...about the only thing that's useful for is showing how phenomenal and unprecedented current changes are.

The reason for cropping the graph is so the relevant portion is more visible. There is really little point in showing eight or ten thousand years of smaller and slower changes on that graph. You can go back at least five thousand years and see less than 1C deviation in either direction from the 1850 levels, and not see a rate of change approach what's going on now, let alone what we expect to see, going back as as far as we have fairly granular climate data (almost a million years of ice cores and several million years of sediment cores). Other fossil evidence goes back much, much, further, but cannot be dated precisely enough to provide a detailed timeline at such a granular scale.

 

[MAAD DAWG]

Mankind's impact on climate change is relatively small. And in which direction? Warmer or colder? Short-term or long-term?

There are 3 major factors that rule the Earth's weather:
1. The Earth's orbit around the sun varies. When elliptical, the Earth is warmer. When more circular, the Earth is colder.
2. Our sun's intensity is not constant. It pulses, both short-term (~11 years), and longer term (hundreds and thousands of years).
3. Volcanic activity. Significant volcanic eruptions have preceded most, if not all, ice ages.

Because this planet has many climate balancing mechanisms, no one can accurately foretell if mankind's relatively minor contributions to climate change will cause significant global warming or cooling. There are too many factors at work on this planet to know the ultimate outcomes of increased CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere. Short-term changes? Maybe. Longer-term? Unknown.

For instance, will these gasses trigger a near or complete shutdown of the Deep Ocean Conveyor Belts? If they do, will the Earth cool, maybe back to recent norms, or into another Ice Age? No one knows.

If global warming persists, will it ultimately be beneficial for mankind? Plants thrive on CO2 and the rate of photosynthesis increases as the CO2 increases. Will plants produce significantly more plant material (food) and oxygen on Earth? No one knows.

During one of the dinosaur ages, the Earth was ~8F warmer than it is today, and the entire Earth was covered with coniferous forests, from pole to pole. Plants thrived. Oxygen comprised nearly 30 percent of the atmosphere vs. the current level of ~21 percent. You have to ask: How did it come about that there were so many plants that thrived so vigorously? Before this milestone, was there a significant increase in CO2? Maybe.

(An aside: Increased O2 is one of the reasons the dinosaurs were so big; fuel (O2) was plentiful. Also, fire was everywhere on Earth; everything would burn with only the slightest provocation.)

Fellow commanders, I do not lose any sleep about the subject of global climate change. I recommend that you do not lose sleep about it, either.

The Earth's climate has been ever-changing since the Earth's atmosphere first appeared nearly 3-4 billion years ago. I trust that it will continue to do so.

o7

 

[MAAD DAWG]

With such a pish-posh under my pillows I certainly would sleep a lot better...
Have a look at the article I linked in my last post if you want a more "exciting" night time!

I read the article. I was not terrified.

 

[MAAD DAWG]

I think you misunderstand me. I am not taking a position about the Earth getting warmer or colder. I am fully in agreement with the fact of climate change. The climate has always been changing and I'm fairly certain it will continue to do so.

I read the article at the link you posted and I'm in agreement with its observations and conclusions. (Of course, I didn't actually witness any of the climate changes it documents. Like most people, I mostly know what I read.) If you wanted to provide good evidence of climate change and some of its consequences, the article you provided did that excellently. But it doesn't foretell the end of life on Earth or even the end of the human race.

One of the hallmarks of our species is its ability to adapt to change.

Examples:
The human race survived a near extinction about 40-50 thousand years ago caused by an estimated 10 year winter on the entire Earth brought about by a major volcanic eruption in the Indonesia area. At that time, it's estimated that there were maybe only 10,000 or less human beings on the entire planet. Humanity almost died out. These circumstances substantially reduced our genetic diversity. This is theorized to be the main reason our genetic diversity, as a species, is so narrow.

The human race survived the last major ice age that ended roughly 10,000 years ago. That was a trial, too.

My point is this: Climate change is a constant on this planet and if you live here, you must adapt or become extinctified. (I know, it's not a word yet, but I like it so I use it whenever I can. Eventually, it will be a real word in a dictionary, somewhere.)

I am fairly confident that our species will deal with any climate change that is not too extreme (like the Siberian Traps eruptions, or Snowball Earth). Having to adapt will not make us happy but we will do it.

But will you or I have to do the adapting? Unknown. Nobody knows how fast the climate will change or the exact direction, hot or cold, wet or dry, it will take.

In the meantime, enjoy your life. I do, one day at a time. We will see what the future brings. Right now, I have the present.

If you're inclined to be concerned about something, think about the next recession, or if/when you will be mugged, or if you will die in an automobile accident, or how you will fare if a major war erupts on the planet. The most immediate possibilities of dire things in our lives are likely to be the most challenging.

For anyone who thinks they might need a tranquilizer to cope with all this, I've read that Valium is excellent. It's a generic, low-priced, very effective, and was once (may still be) the most prescribed drug in the world because it treated so many different ailments.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

Mankind's impact on climate change is relatively small. And in which direction? Warmer or colder? Short-term or long-term?

There are 3 major factors that rule the Earth's weather:
1. The Earth's orbit around the sun varies. When elliptical, the Earth is warmer. When more circular, the Earth is colder.
2. Our sun's intensity is not constant. It pulses, both short-term (~11 years), and longer term (hundreds and thousands of years).
3. Volcanic activity. Significant volcanic eruptions have preceded most, if not all, ice ages.

Because this planet has many climate balancing mechanisms, no one can accurately foretell if mankind's relatively minor contributions to climate change will cause significant global warming or cooling. There are too many factors at work on this planet to know the ultimate outcomes of increased CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere. Short-term changes? Maybe. Longer-term? Unknown.

For instance, will these gasses trigger a near or complete shutdown of the Deep Ocean Conveyor Belts? If they do, will the Earth cool, maybe back to recent norms, or into another Ice Age? No one knows.

If global warming persists, will it ultimately be beneficial for mankind? Plants thrive on CO2 and the rate of photosynthesis increases as the CO2 increases. Will plants produce significantly more plant material (food) and oxygen on Earth? No one knows.

During one of the dinosaur ages, the Earth was ~8F warmer than it is today, and the entire Earth was covered with coniferous forests, from pole to pole. Plants thrived. Oxygen comprised nearly 30 percent of the atmosphere vs. the current level of ~21 percent. You have to ask: How did it come about that there were so many plants that thrived so vigorously? Before this milestone, was there a significant increase in CO2? Maybe.

(An aside: Increased O2 is one of the reasons the dinosaurs were so big; fuel (O2) was plentiful. Also, fire was everywhere on Earth; everything would burn with only the slightest provocation.)

Fellow commanders, I do not lose any sleep about the subject of global climate change. I recommend that you do not lose sleep about it, either.

The Earth's climate has been ever-changing since the Earth's atmosphere first appeared nearly 3-4 billion years ago. I trust that it will continue to do so.

o7

You are wrong on many, things, here's a list:

1° Weather != Climate

2° Mankind's impact is the biggest contributing factor to climate change.

3° The heating produced by the greenhouse effect outweights the cooling contributions of aerosols.

4° We already observe our contributions on climate, i.e., there's no need to wait though the effects and the warming will only become more evident.

5° The effects of CO2 and methane are well know, their relative contributions are even know (so well known to be in highschool textbooks).

6° The negatives of warming and the positives have been estimated, the negatives outweight the positives.

7° The rest of your post is the often seen "the climate has changed before" fallacy.

 

[MAAD DAWG]

I'm not going to debate your set of facts with my set of facts, nor am I going to disparage you for your beliefs about climate change.

You seem to take climate change seriously and personally. So, I have a question:

How do you see climate change affecting you personally? How do you think it is going to affect your life? What do you envision?

And what are you personally doing to mitigate what you foresee, both for yourself and others?

 

[TheGaijin87]

I think it's the other way around and you misunderstood me. You feel so smart that you can't imagine that others probably understand this last point you made very well. Earth climate and basically all weather phenomenons are basically chaotic processes and will never be exactly calculable. The point you apparently don't understand is, that we still can make some very informed predictions based on developments from the far past of earth history. We also need to ask the right questions e.g. what exactly has triggered the examined climate changes and in what periods of time. Also, what many people struggle to understand is, that both weather and climate predictions are always and inherently a matter of probability ranges and can never be exactly to the point. Your big fallacy is that you think that's a reason to consider these predictions as worthless and ignorable.

We probably can adopt to a sea level rising of say 4 meters in a time period of several thousand years, but never ever when it happens in a few hundred years, let alone decades. We're basically talking about revolutionary, explosive developments that we don't know much about versus evolutionary processes we do know. Though that is not quite correct, as the few revolutionary processes we do know from the distant past were absolutely devastating to all life. That's what these papers you hopefully read and understood are all about.

All signs currently point to a situation that is terribly getting out of hand and even if it turns out to be futile, it's definitely worth to at least trying to mitigate this development. Anything else would be like a rabbit watching these interesting spotlights approaching just a little bit too fast...

BTW, I do enjoy my life, don't worry.
I just care about others that will come after me can do the same as well. Call me an atheist, but I'm still a humanist. I don't know about morale, it's a natural feel that I just can't betray.

and why not? what needs 900 years more to do?

and on a side note: in earths history the sea level changed for more than 200m already. and many here think that mankind will vanish from this planet when the sea level rises 10m... i mean seriously? the people from nepal wouldnt even notice if it rises 1000m....

 

[TheGaijin87]

I've read a lot of scientific papers but never seen one talking like you do. Most scientists thoroughly care about their reputation, besides those few exceptions that obviously couldn't resist the big paycheck. Maybe you was a scientist - and then fired perhaps? Still active, can you prove it?

I'm not paranoid btw, but I have a strong sense for inconsistencies.

why would i care about my scientific reputation in an anonymous online forum?
maybe you got a sense for inconsistencies but obviously not enough intelligence to use it effectively.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

Post a single paper you have published TheGakin87 and provide some evidence that you indeed wrote it, otherwise, you're speaking tosh.

 

[Six6VI]

All this is interesting to discuss, but not as important as the problem it self. If accelerating human made global warming is real, we are probably better of cutting the emissions causing them.

Agreed, with a caveat. It might be wise to examine the generalised term "emissions" to quantify which components actually are industrial pollutants, which can be recycled or filtered and what is beneficial.

Indiscriminately hefting the Luddite club based on incomplete data may cause more harm than good.

 

[Six6VI]

If he is talking about the earth turning into a Venus like planet, he is probably a few hundred million years off.

Comparing Earth to Venus is a bit disingenuous as she has significantly different orbital and axial rotation. Venus spins retrograde (the other way) with a day / night cycle of 243 Earth days and an annual Solar orbit of 224.7 days. One daily cycle on Venus is longer than her annual orbit, lasting about 2/3rds of an Earth year.

Any single point on the surface of Venus is in Sunlight for over 17 weeks or, about 4 Earth months.

[Having said that a large enough NEO could have the potential to change this near instantaneously.]

 

[jasonbarron]

Nah, he isn't smart enough to make an alt without the mods noticing it.

I wouldn't know, because I respect the rules. You, on the other hand, sound as if you have some experience in this matter. Struggling to see any connection between what you and your buddies have been talking about and the thread topic, btw.

 

[Patrick_68000]

It's weird not having all of the toxic enmity of the forum laser focused in on me for a change.

It's normal, you have not shown a picture yet.

 

[Patrick_68000]

then explain to me why its wrong. you seem so smart (sarcasm) so give it to me bro (also sarcasm cos you are old as hell)

btw. i imagine you like this:

It looks like my grandfather who is a trucker, dressed fresh one Sunday morning before going to Mass, and playing ED a few minutes before leaving.