The real purpose of global warming?

[Nihilanth]

Quote from jeafl:

Carbon emission rates will not continue to rise if we were engage in 1970s-style conservation efforts while increasing our reliance on non-fossil fuel alternatives.

We could deal with the atmosphere’s existing carbon levels by planting more trees. Something like Kyoto need not be our only option even if it is the only option the global warming fanatics want to accept. If you say there is nothing we can do to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere, you don’t know how the earth operates. [/B]

It's pointless. Today we are emitting about 27 billion tons of co2 a year into the atmosphere. Ten years ago we were only emitting about 23.5 billion tons a year.

As the world population grows and china and india's industry grows that number will continue going up for the forseeable future.

Minor efforts such as Hybrid cars and planting trees or kyoto would only cancel out a very insignificant part of that co2 emission rate. There is nothing simple that can be done. And I mean that politically. Of course turning everything off would theoretically cancel out the co2 increase. But I mean that nothing practically can be done that people will accept.

 

[jeafl]

Someone here is confused by what can really cause global warming. It's not caused by the heat from burning things. That heat is only a tiny fraction of the solar energy the earth receives. The vast majority of the solar energy is released by earth to the space in the form of the infrared radiation. When the amount the earth receives from the sun everyday approximately balances the amount the earth radiats to the space, the global temperature stays a constant. If the earth radiats less than it receives, the temperature goes up. If it radiats more than it receives, the temperature goes down.

I haven’t said otherwise. Supposedly global warming takes places because the greenhouse gases that humans put into the sky prevents solar heat from returning to outer space. But, this doesn’t explain how and why the last ice age ended.

Why is Venus the hottest planet in the solar system? Mercury is closer to the sun but it doesn't have an atmosphere. Venus has a thick atmosphere full of greenhouse gases. It traps all the energy it receives and hardly any energy gets radiated out.

According to Velikovsky part of the heat on Venus is a residue of the heat that was involved in the planet’s creation.

 

[jeafl]

As the world population grows and china and india's industry grows that number will continue going up for the forseeable future.

Then why is China exempt from Kyoto? Shouldn't the Free World, whose economies are more efficient than China's economy, tell the Chinese they should give up their industry?

 

[james_bond_3rd]

Quote from jeafl:

I haven’t said otherwise. Supposedly global warming takes places because the greenhouse gases that humans put into the sky prevents solar heat from returning to outer space. But, this doesn’t explain how and why the last ice age ended.



According to Velikovsky part of the heat on Venus is a residue of the heat that was involved in the planet’s creation.

First of all, it wasn't you who got confused on this - it was someone else but I was too lazy to quote the original post.

Second, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense and explains the cyclic warming and cooling periods perfectly. The earth orbit around the sun is changing slowly with time. It does not return to the same spot in space every year. Instead, its orbit drifts periodically closer to or farther away from the sun over many years. This is probably the one of causes of the periodic warming and cooling in the climate.

There had also been changes in the CO2 amount in the atmosphere. This is also well-established in science (no, it's not dogma, it's science). Clearly there had to be climate changes associated with such CO2 changes.

The only problem is, that the CO2 change in the past 200 years was the most dramatic and the fastest since the beginning of the green plants on earth. If we know for a fact that in the past even a small change in the CO2 can change the climate, is it hard to reason what a much bigger change in CO2 would do? Combine that with the fact of the rapidly rising temperature in the past 200 years - not in the cities, but at the bottom of the ocean and underneath glaciers, anyone with a half a brain should be able to conclude what happened.

Velikovsky may be right but the main point is, once you have the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it's awfully hard for heat to escape. It's very likely that Venus never got a chance to cool down to begin with. But if we keep putting greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, earth may get that hot eventually.

 

[james_bond_3rd]

One thing that the socalled evironmentalists in this country got it wrong, is how to reduce greenhouse emissions. The best solution with current technologies is nuclear. Forget biofuel, solar cell, hydro or wind power. They may be nice complementary energy sources but not cost effective without major technology breakthroughs. Nuclear energy is the most cost effective and the cleanest.

Unfortunately, no politician in this country has the courage and forsight to support nuclear energy. We haven't built a new nuclear power station in decades. We have probably forgotten how to build one.

 

[kjkent1]

Quote from jeafl:

Burning something is simply releasing the solar energy that nature has stored on earth. It does not lead to a net increase in energy.

Your dodging the issue in my opinion. If you heat the biosphere with continuously increasing human industrial activity, the temperature of that biosphere will rise along with that activity and the environment will change.

If the environment changes, then humans will need to adapt to whatever changes occur. It's easy to say that human activity is adding a trivial amount of heat energy to the biosphere and that most of that energy is radiated away from the Earth. But, it's irrelevant, because human industrial activity is not stop and start -- it continuous without interruption, just like the heating element in the pot of water. And, when the amount of heat generated by human activity increases beyond that which is radiated away, regardless of the reasons, the end result will be a higher temperature biosphere, and that will cause substantial biospheric changes which will require adaptation by humans.

So, if you want to maintain the status quo in the biosphere, then you need to prevent this inexorable rise in heat production from human industrial activity.

If tomorrow, the sun were to suddenly drop in its heat radiation output, and the Earth were to suddenly start to cool into a new ice age, then we might be screaming that we're not producing enough heat energy to stave off an ice age, and suddenly human heat producing industrial activity would be a good thing.

But, at the moment, the sun is chuggin' right along and so are we humans, and if ya'll think that the effect is non-trivial, then be my guest. My gentleman's bet to all of you is that 50 years from now, the water level on planet Earth will be about 6 feet higher, and that the resulting change will be pretty dramatic, considering places like Florida are mostly no more than 6 feet above sea level.

So, you can argue about the environmentalist's desire to destroy economic prosperity, and that this is some leftist conspiracy all you want, but in the end, assuming you're young enough to be here in 50 years, you will have an opportunity to witness who will win this bet.

I'm fairly certain that I'll be long dead by then, so I really don't give a shit either way. But, if you are young enough to care, and you want to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, then be my guest. If you happen to have a house on a bluff by the coast, you may do just fine, when your neighbor blocking your view down below is underwater.

But, I'll wager that you will not be a happy camper if the state takes your home and splits it with your neighbor in the "public interest."

Only time will tell.

 

[jeafl]

Second, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense and explains the cyclic warming and cooling periods perfectly. The earth orbit around the sun is changing slowly with time. It does not return to the same spot in space every year. Instead, its orbit drifts periodically closer to or farther away from the sun over many years. This is probably the one of causes of the periodic warming and cooling in the climate.

More sudden climate changes could be caused by catastrophic events such as a pole shift or asteroid impact. Even the Christmas earthquake that caused the tsunami in Indonesia altered the earth’s orbit around the sun which could allow more or less solar heat to reach the earth.

There had also been changes in the CO2 amount in the atmosphere. This is also well-established in science (no, it's not dogma, it's science). Clearly there had to be climate changes associated with such CO2 changes.

That human production of carbon-dioxide is causing global warming is dogma because there is no bona fide way to test the hypothesis. Both carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global temperatures have fluctuated in the past- long before the earth’s human population amounted to anything.

The only problem is, that the CO2 change in the past 200 years was the most dramatic and the fastest since the beginning of the green plants on earth. If we know for a fact that in the past even a small change in the CO2 can change the climate, is it hard to reason what a much bigger change in CO2 would do? Combine that with the fact of the rapidly rising temperature in the past 200 years - not in the cities, but at the bottom of the ocean and underneath glaciers, anyone with a half a brain should be able to conclude what happened.

I’ve seen graphs that were put out by the University of East Anglia showing changes in global temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere since 1850. The two don’t line up. Carbon-dioxide levels spiked about 70 years before we saw a sustained warming trend and the temperature fluctuations have been within a narrow range (roughly 0.6 degrees Celsius below and above “normal”) thus suggesting a natural cycle than humans cannot alter.

Velikovsky may be right but the main point is, once you have the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it's awfully hard for heat to escape. It's very likely that Venus never got a chance to cool down to begin with. But if we keep putting greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, earth may get that hot eventually.

Does a maybe sometime in the future warrant something as drastic as Kyoto when there are other actions we could take that would help deal with problems we know we have now?

 

[jeafl]

Forget biofuel, solar cell, hydro or wind power. They may be nice complementary energy sources but not cost effective without major technology breakthroughs.

Back in the early or mid 1990s Popular Science had a story about a company that had developed photovoltaic solar panels that could generate electricity as cheaply as any conventional technology could. However, the company was going to limit the supply and market its product to NASA and people in remote regions that would pay a premium price for the panels because they couldn’t get electricity otherwise. The company wanted to make back its R&D costs before putting the panels on the general market. But, I’ve never heard anything else about it.

Furthermore, we don’t need any technology breakthroughs to make biomethane from sewage. That technology is tried and tested and has been in limited commercial use for at least 30 years.

We also have the technology needed to produce vegetable oil that could replace diesel fuels- it's called farming.

 

[jeafl]

Quote from jeafl:

Burning something is simply releasing the solar energy that nature has stored on earth. It does not lead to a net increase in energy.



Your dodging the issue in my opinion. If you heat the biosphere with continuously increasing human industrial activity, the temperature of that biosphere will rise along with that activity and the environment will change.

The only known source of heat on earth is the sun. Burning organic matter and thus releasing the solar heat that is stored therein does not add any more heat to the earth-sun system. Whether or not that released heat is able to return to outer space, from whence it came, is the issue here.

 

[james_bond_3rd]

Quote from jeafl:

That human production of carbon-dioxide is causing global warming is dogma because there is no bona fide way to test the hypothesis. Both carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global temperatures have fluctuated in the past- long before the earth’s human population amounted to anything.



I’ve seen graphs that were put out by the University of East Anglia showing changes in global temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere since 1850. The two don’t line up. Carbon-dioxide levels spiked about 70 years before we saw a sustained warming trend and the temperature fluctuations have been within a narrow range (roughly 0.6 degrees Celsius below and above “normal”) thus suggesting a natural cycle than humans cannot alter.



Does a maybe sometime in the future warrant something as drastic as Kyoto when there are other actions we could take that would help deal with problems we know we have now?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Human production of CO2 is not dogma, it's a fact. You don't need to test the "hypothesis" because we know that we're producing large amount of CO2. Is it causing global warming? Of course it is! We know how past CO2 fluctuations have caused climate changes. We know how much CO2 we have produced. Why is it so hard for you to admit that increased CO2 from human activities causes temperature rise, just like past CO2 changes (not human related) caused climate changes? Your obsession with "control experiment" is unreasonable.

I didn't see the plot you mentioned so I have no way to verify it. Even if I take your word for it, it doesn't disprove the connection between CO2 level and the global temperature. How long should the temperature change lag behind CO2 level change? I don't know. If I dig hard enough I'll probably find an answer somewhere. Shouldn't one expect a time lag? Earth is a large place and it takes time to heat it up. Again, using a time lag to argue against the evidence just exposes your bias.

There is no maybe here. It's a fact that we have released a large amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. It's also a fact that we will release much more of it in the future. It is scientifically proven that greenhouse gases will raise the global temperature. The other actions you suggested won't be able to address the problem. (The "maybe" I was using was refering whether Venus' heat was from the sun or from its internal source. You shouldn't confuse that with the heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases, which is clear-cut.)