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Is God causing Global Warming and is Obama a conspirator in the act?
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Jem is a monomaniac re taxation, thus AGW is an important battle for him.Quote from piezoe:
I disagree. People such as yourself have tried to turn this issue into a political football and succeeded. You have not done science any favor.
Had the media and politicians been left out of this issue, it would have sorted itself out far sooner at much lower cost. As it is, its going to take much longer for the correct science to hold sway. Politicizing a disagreement among scientists will delay the correct resolution. Frankly, the vested interests have once again made a mess of things by introducing politics where it does not belong.
The vested interests weighed in on the wrong side of the issue of smoking and lung cancer; the wrong side of the issue of freons and the Ozone layer; the wrong side of the issue of the economics of ethanol from corn. This time they may get lucky and their bias may put them on the correct side of the anthro. CO2 issue. They will probably end up one for four. They have contributed nothing of value to the resolution of science controversy; on the contrary, in each of these issues, their interference and attempts to politicize have delayed the proper resolution at great cost.
The vested interests have been wrong many more times than that. I can imagine their cries long ago when it was proposed to start filtering effluent into Lake Michigan, because the added costs would destroy Chicago business.
After reading literally thousands of papers, articles, and theories from hundreds of scientists and laymen I believe that I am on the right side and for the right reasons. That being, that is where the credible science points.Quote from piezoe:
Wouldn't you rather be on the right side for the right reason?
Except of course, your belief is not what is determining where the credible science is actually pointing.Quote from pspr:
After reading literally thousands of papers, articles, and theories from hundreds of scientists and laymen I believe that I am on the right side and for the right reasons. That being, that is where the credible science points.
I am against personal income taxes.
But deeper than taxes is the idea that things should be conserved and if consumed they should be allocated efficiently.
For instance I am an environmentalist.
I do not think we should be expanding nuclear power untlil we can price it properly.
We can't price it properly until we safely store the waste.
I am for cleaner oceans. When I was younger I volunteered as a plantiffs environmental attorney.
In short I am a libertarian who wants to see resources allocated efficiently for this and future generations. Hence I have major problems with big govt b.s. and the lies its supporters promulgate.
But deeper than taxes is the idea that things should be conserved and if consumed they should be allocated efficiently.
For instance I am an environmentalist.
I do not think we should be expanding nuclear power untlil we can price it properly.
We can't price it properly until we safely store the waste.
I am for cleaner oceans. When I was younger I volunteered as a plantiffs environmental attorney.
In short I am a libertarian who wants to see resources allocated efficiently for this and future generations. Hence I have major problems with big govt b.s. and the lies its supporters promulgate.
Quote from Ricter:
Jem is a monomaniac re taxation, thus AGW is an important battle for him.
The vested interests have been wrong many more times than that. I can imagine their cries long ago when it was proposed to start filtering effluent into Lake Michigan, because the added costs would destroy Chicago business.
I did not turn this into anything... your side did.
I did not even pick a side until I read the studies on the ice cores... probably posted by pspr.
I have been on side of liberty against big govt lies and destruction of rights. Its our side who has been consistently on the correct side of the issues... because we have been warning about big govt and its coercion and its corruption. Power corrupts and you can't trust govt people to look out for your rights. (the IRS scandal proves that.)
Throughout history big govt has destroyed lives economies and families.
We were warning against that here...
Then these scandals have proved our warnings correct once again.
The last thing in the world we need was carbon exchanges and carbon taxes run the way the left and the banks wanted them run.
I did not even pick a side until I read the studies on the ice cores... probably posted by pspr.
I have been on side of liberty against big govt lies and destruction of rights. Its our side who has been consistently on the correct side of the issues... because we have been warning about big govt and its coercion and its corruption. Power corrupts and you can't trust govt people to look out for your rights. (the IRS scandal proves that.)
Throughout history big govt has destroyed lives economies and families.
We were warning against that here...
Then these scandals have proved our warnings correct once again.
The last thing in the world we need was carbon exchanges and carbon taxes run the way the left and the banks wanted them run.
Quote from piezoe:
I disagree. People such as yourself have tried to turn this issue into a political football and succeeded. You have not done science any favor.
Had the media and politicians been left out of this issue, it would have sorted itself out far sooner at much lower cost. As it is, its going to take much longer for the correct science to hold sway. Politicizing a disagreement among scientists will delay the correct resolution. Frankly, the vested interests have once again made a mess of things by introducing politics where it does not belong.
The vested interests weighed in on the wrong side of the issue of smoking and lung cancer; the wrong side of the issue of freons and the Ozone layer; the wrong side of the issue of the economics of ethanol from corn. This time they may get lucky and their bias may put them on the correct side of the anthro. CO2 issue. They will probably end up one for four. They have contributed nothing of value to the resolution of science controversy; on the contrary, in each of these issues, their interference and attempts to politicize have delayed the proper resolution at great cost.
I believe it is. Many scientists and others without a dog in the money game believe the same.Quote from stu:
Except of course, your belief is not what is determining where the credible science is actually pointing.
Global Warming is a scam. Just changing the narrative to Climate Change because there was no global warming is enough to show you that something isn't right with the AGW crowd.
There's more Climate Change coming. But probably not in the direction you expect.
Quote from pspr:
I believe it is. Many scientists and others without a dog in the money game believe the same.
Global Warming is a scam. Just changing the narrative to Climate Change because there was no global warming is enough to show you that something isn't right with the AGW crowd.
There's more Climate Change coming. But probably not in the direction you expect.
Many scientists also without a dog in the game along with the general scientific consensus based on the scientific evidence, confirms AGW.
It sounds like you're ok with cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Believing there is no AGW because why?. You don't trust big government and big government agrees there is AGW, is hardly a plan.
Many scientists who don't agree with models do so to test and better the predictive science, not to say AGW doesn't exist. It is a process.
Grand scale pollution of the atmosphere, changing the natural balance takes matters in a far worse direction than big government.
Big government can in principle be reversed or removed.
You won't get to control the effects of AGW that way.
There are many lines of evidence which clearly show that the atmospheric CO2 increase is caused by humans. The clearest of these is simple accounting - humans are emitting CO2 at a rate twice as fast as the atmospheric increase (natural sinks are absorbing the other half). There is no question whatsoever that the CO2 increase is human-caused. This is settled science.
Simple Accounting
The easiest way to prove that the atmospheric CO2 increase is man-made is through a simple accounting approach (i.e. see Cawley 2011). The equation for the change in atmospheric CO2 (ΔCatm) is
This says that if we âemitâ a ton of carbon by, say, triggering a volcano then the atmosphere will gain a ton. If we âabsorbâ a ton of carbon by growing a tree, then the atmosphere loses a ton. We can expand the equation by counting human emissions (HE) and absorption (HA) and natural emissions (NE) and absorption (NA) separately.
This works because carbon is additive. If a volcano emits a ton of carbon and a factory emits a ton then the atmosphere has gained two tons. This is a very simple balance sheet for the carbon cycle and fortunately there are âaccountantsâ who have measured some of these values for us.
Recently the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising at ~2 parts per million per year, or around 15 billion tons/year. Meanwhile human emissions excluding land use change (like clearing or planting forests) are 30 billion tons per year. In billions of tons per year we have:
We can rearrange this:
Humans are also clearing rainforests and changing land use, but here we'll assume that human effects on absorption (HA) are not much different from zero, i.e.
So Natural Absorption (NA) must be bigger than Natural Emissions (NE). Nature is absorbing more CO2 than it is emitting. It is not causing atmospheric CO2 to rise at all - in fact it is acting to try and reduce atmospheric CO2, and thus the long term rise is entirely because of humans.
Ocean Acidification
The oceans are the Earth's largest carbon storage medium, so if the atmospheric CO2 increase were "natural", it would likely be coming from the oceans. But we know the CO2 increase is not coming from the oceans, because the pH of the oceans is dropping (a.k.a. ocean acidification).
When CO2 is absorbed into a solution, it binds with a water molecule to form a molecule of carbonic acid:
CO2 + H2O = H2CO3
H2CO3 has a rather strong acidifying effect in that 95% of it turns into HCO3-. This loss of an H+ ion causes the ocean pH to decrease (for more details on ocean acidification, see the OA no OK series).
In short, the fact that the pH of the oceans is decreasing tell us that they are absorbing more carbon than they are releasing, not vice-versa.
Oceanic CO2 Rising Fastest at the Surface
If CO2 were being driven into the ocean from the air, the oceanic concentration would rise fastest at the surface. If CO2 were being expelled from the oceans, we would expect to see the opposite - decreasing concentrations at the surface.
The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) has observed that as we expect for CO2 being driven into the oceans, concentrations of CO2 in the oceans are rising fastest at the surf
Simple Accounting
The easiest way to prove that the atmospheric CO2 increase is man-made is through a simple accounting approach (i.e. see Cawley 2011). The equation for the change in atmospheric CO2 (ΔCatm) is
This says that if we âemitâ a ton of carbon by, say, triggering a volcano then the atmosphere will gain a ton. If we âabsorbâ a ton of carbon by growing a tree, then the atmosphere loses a ton. We can expand the equation by counting human emissions (HE) and absorption (HA) and natural emissions (NE) and absorption (NA) separately.
This works because carbon is additive. If a volcano emits a ton of carbon and a factory emits a ton then the atmosphere has gained two tons. This is a very simple balance sheet for the carbon cycle and fortunately there are âaccountantsâ who have measured some of these values for us.
Recently the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising at ~2 parts per million per year, or around 15 billion tons/year. Meanwhile human emissions excluding land use change (like clearing or planting forests) are 30 billion tons per year. In billions of tons per year we have:
We can rearrange this:
Humans are also clearing rainforests and changing land use, but here we'll assume that human effects on absorption (HA) are not much different from zero, i.e.
So Natural Absorption (NA) must be bigger than Natural Emissions (NE). Nature is absorbing more CO2 than it is emitting. It is not causing atmospheric CO2 to rise at all - in fact it is acting to try and reduce atmospheric CO2, and thus the long term rise is entirely because of humans.
Ocean Acidification
The oceans are the Earth's largest carbon storage medium, so if the atmospheric CO2 increase were "natural", it would likely be coming from the oceans. But we know the CO2 increase is not coming from the oceans, because the pH of the oceans is dropping (a.k.a. ocean acidification).
When CO2 is absorbed into a solution, it binds with a water molecule to form a molecule of carbonic acid:
CO2 + H2O = H2CO3
H2CO3 has a rather strong acidifying effect in that 95% of it turns into HCO3-. This loss of an H+ ion causes the ocean pH to decrease (for more details on ocean acidification, see the OA no OK series).
In short, the fact that the pH of the oceans is decreasing tell us that they are absorbing more carbon than they are releasing, not vice-versa.
Oceanic CO2 Rising Fastest at the Surface
If CO2 were being driven into the ocean from the air, the oceanic concentration would rise fastest at the surface. If CO2 were being expelled from the oceans, we would expect to see the opposite - decreasing concentrations at the surface.
The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) has observed that as we expect for CO2 being driven into the oceans, concentrations of CO2 in the oceans are rising fastest at the surf
Isotopic Signature
Carbon is composed of three different isotopes: carbon-12, 13, and 14. Carbon-12 is by far the most common, while carbon-13 is about 1% of the total, and carbon-14 accounts for only about 1 in 1 trillion carbon atoms in the atmosphere.
CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere, because plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes (carbon-12 and 13); thus they have lower carbon-13 to 12 ratios. Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same carbon-13 to 12 ratio â about 2% lower than that of the atmosphere. As CO2 from these materials is released into, and mixes with, the atmosphere, the average carbon-13 to 12 ratio of the atmosphere decreases.
Reconstructions of atmospheric carbon isotope ratios from various proxy sources have determined that at no time in the last 10,000 years are the carbon-13 to 12 ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the carbon-13 to 12 ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase â around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning beginning in the Industrial Revolution.
These isotopic observations confirm that the increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from biogenic carbon, not from the oceans or volcanoes.
Some "skeptics" like Murry Salby argue that the carbon-13 ratio isn't unique to fossil fuels. However, because the carbon-14 ratio has also decreased significantly (Figure 4), we know it's from old (fossil fuel) sources, not modern sources. This is not new science either, it's something we've known for over half a century (Revelle and Suess 1957), and there have been many studies confirming these results. For example, Levin & Hesshaimer (2000):
Carbon is composed of three different isotopes: carbon-12, 13, and 14. Carbon-12 is by far the most common, while carbon-13 is about 1% of the total, and carbon-14 accounts for only about 1 in 1 trillion carbon atoms in the atmosphere.
CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere, because plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes (carbon-12 and 13); thus they have lower carbon-13 to 12 ratios. Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same carbon-13 to 12 ratio â about 2% lower than that of the atmosphere. As CO2 from these materials is released into, and mixes with, the atmosphere, the average carbon-13 to 12 ratio of the atmosphere decreases.
Reconstructions of atmospheric carbon isotope ratios from various proxy sources have determined that at no time in the last 10,000 years are the carbon-13 to 12 ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the carbon-13 to 12 ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase â around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning beginning in the Industrial Revolution.
These isotopic observations confirm that the increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from biogenic carbon, not from the oceans or volcanoes.
Some "skeptics" like Murry Salby argue that the carbon-13 ratio isn't unique to fossil fuels. However, because the carbon-14 ratio has also decreased significantly (Figure 4), we know it's from old (fossil fuel) sources, not modern sources. This is not new science either, it's something we've known for over half a century (Revelle and Suess 1957), and there have been many studies confirming these results. For example, Levin & Hesshaimer (2000):