Friedman is quite absurd. He begins his column by mocking people who are saying "because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes."
But then he turns around and says "The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever."
So weather is not climate — which, duh — but he still wants to use weather as climate. And he even gets to say that cold is evidence of heat, because we shouldn't be saying heat anymore, we should be talking about weirdness.
Come on, that's really weird.
***
I see the analogy between global warming and the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the Iraq war. Those who planned the war believed there were other good reasons to go to war with Iraq, but they made a decision to use weapons of mass destruction as the reason to go to war, because they thought people could understand this reason and unite behind the war effort. But then, when the WMD were not found, the war looked like a big mistake.
Now, think about the analogy. Think about how people support the policies that are supposed to deal with global warming — renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc. — and what other reasons they have for wanting those policies. Think about why they would decide to rely on the global warming prediction rather than those other reasons, and how they will need to scramble if the global warming theory proves untrue or is no longer believed.
If global warming were the only reason for doing the things that are needed to deal with global warming, then no scrambling is required. We can simply be happy about it. But the scrambling... that's what shows that people wanted the policies anyway. And maybe they are right! Maybe going to war in Iraq was right even without WMD.
So why not stress the other arguments for renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc.? Because it's not scary enough! Running low on traditional fossil fuel — the old energy crisis — just isn't crazy-making enough to get the public to accept great sacrifice and pain.
Posts
310 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 310 of 310You can always count on garage to invoke his magic words "scientist" and "thermometer" in a discussion like this.
If only he knew how those scientists come up with their "thermometer readings".
@AJ: I've always been a skeptic. As a scientist, I can see how blasted hard the problem is. But I assumed good faith on the part of the climate science community. It is now clear that some of them were not behaving ethically. That's where my sense of betrayal comes from.
I don't mean to insult lawyers, the difficulties in dispensing justice are huge, but journalism is not that hard, if you are fair, honest and do a little homework before you write.
Professor...The Greenhouse gases effect was from experiments in a closed system in a laboratory. No one knows what happens when Co2 is released into the AIR around the Globe. That is why they wanted experiments that could show a rising temperature when C02 was rising the last 160 years. It was not there, so the faked it every which way that they could. The E-mails disclosed that the fakery was intentional. The science they relied upon for the past temperatures was tree rings. The current data showed that it was totally unreliable when compared with accurate temp readings today and the "Hid The Decline". Then the warming trend up half of one degree from 1978 to 1997 that was supposed to be from continuing CO2 gone wild disappeared. In 2008 the half of one degree rise was erased. We are now back into 1978 temperatures. The best scientists now predict is for a 30 year cooling/freezing trend. Yet the "CO2 causes warming Big Lie crowd" goes merrily along asserting that the coming 30 years of cold is only a masking of underlying warming caused by the never proven Greenhouse gas effect of rising levels of trace CO2.
@Maguro: Yes. Garage, knock of the "thermometer" crap. You look like an effing fool.
Looks like Global Warming is the new Sarah Palin.
Because you sad goof-ball IF the Carbon Dioxide is absorbed by Plants or the Oceans, it's no longer a GREENHOUSE GAS, causing Global Warming, that's why? Geeeeeez, is that too complex for you, Mr. Smart-Guy?
The problem with this kind of over-simplistic dismissal is that plants don't just “absorb” CO2, they turn it into their own plant material. Since fossil fuels consist of carbon that has been sequestered away from the biosphere for eons of time, it would require a major expansion of the vegetative biosphere to cope with all the added CO2, and where are those additional plants going to grow?
Rain forests and oceans are already pretty much saturated with plants (with nutrient limitations being the major limiting factor to more oceanic plants), while the rain forests are being destroyed in great swaths to make room for grass pastureland for cattle (not much carbon to be held there). The Sahara has too little water to support additional plants, etc. etc.
Thus the CO2 from burning fossil fuels simply piles up in the atmosphere, where it produces its known insulating effect.
And yet I read that there is no evidence that the amount of CO2 has increased....
Professor...The Greenhouse gases effect was from experiments in a closed system in a laboratory. No one knows what happens when Co2 is released into the AIR around the Globe.
What, like Venus? Isn't Venus the poster child (planet) for runaway CO2 greenhouse effects? Of course, their atmosphere is practically all CO2 (now, at least), whereas even at its worst, I don't think it's ever even hit 1%on Earth. Well, maybe back before life began.
FLS - Friedman says, "it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail." Nothing about renewable energy. China may be, but Friedman doens't claim that.
I'm all for all clean, renewable energy but panic driven change is not the best approach. How much mercury will end up in our water supply because of energy effecient light bulbs? Do you really think those bulbs will get recycled properly.
The global warming/climate change "science" is scare tactics as much as anything.
Re: Joe:
And yet I read that there is no evidence that the amount of CO2 has increased....
The question is where did you read that?
@Joe: Over what time period do you believe CO2 has not increased?
Even with the oceans’ massive uptake of CO2, the past decade was still the warmest since modern record-keeping began.
This is the part that always bugs me. Coincidentally, “modern record keeping” coincided with the end of the little ice age. Shocker of shockers, temps have gone up! Oh my gosh, it’s a crisis. Feh.
@Alpha Liberal -- You can choose to respond to legitimate scientific critiques of AGW (and legitimate ethical and political critiques that accompany it) or you can choose to score cheap political points.
You prefer to score cheap political points.
Which is a big waste of time.
Let me offer an analogy. Nobel Prize Physicist Murray Gell-Mann is a dedicated environmentalist. He admits, in his writings, being occasionally flabbergasted by the new-agey beliefs of others in the movement.
Now if I were debating Gell-Mann about sustainable development I could say "Look Murray, look at all the animists in your corner. Can you deny they're wacky?" And then Gell-Mann would say, "Why are you wasting my time?" and walk away.
31 December 2009
...In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm
Original Mike, the last 150 years, it would seem.....
As Phil Jones, He Who Can Not Be Disputed on AGW, has declared there has be NO warming since 1995....I hope Shanna's reference to the warmest decade refers tot he 1990's.
To toady, but to give credit where due Prof Althouse hits it exactly right. We rely on experts. And these "experts" ahve been shown to be less than truthful or accurate or peer-reviewed....and so it calls into question, rightly or wrongly, all their "science."
Global Weirding is precisely what the scientists of the 70s predicted (during my days as a science editor).
They based their work not on atmospherics but on historical climate patterns. Turns out the period from WWI until the late 70s was the *most moderate* climate during the entire Holocene. The prediction was that we would slowly return to a *more normal* pattern of climate variability--summers that were hotter and cooler, wetter and drier, and winters that were colder and warmer, wetter and drier.
In other words, we'd return to the more normal experience of weirder weather... precisely what we are witnessing now. You can even see it on climate graphs that show annual summer highs and winter lows--zig-zag lines that jump around until you get to around 1915 and then much less amplitude until around 1980 followed by increasing variation.
There is no point worrying about our present climate--it's the norm.
Thanks. For those trying to access Joe's link, here it is with HTML (first time I copied, I could not find, because it was truncated from my view). That just makes it an open question. Doesn't support your earlier statement that there's NO evidence that CO2 is increasing (or at least, has increased). On balance, I still think most measures indicate that CO2 has risen outside of the historical range, but I see that it is at least a disputed point.
@Joe: The link appears broken. However, to my knowledge, rising atmospheric CO2 levels is very well documented. Also, it's a LOT easier measurement to make than planetary temperature.
For those several of you throwing up your hands that climate claims cannot be proven one way are the other, they can.
The scientists who made near-perfect entrance exam scores (e.g. physicists) are now starting to comment on the work of those who barely eked into grad school (e.g. climatologists). Turns out the global warming model based on greenhouse gases violates the second law of thermodynamics among other shortcomings.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
So now it's another "open question" not "settled science" or a "consensus."
"I see the analogy between global warming and the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the Iraq war. Those who planned the war believed there were other good reasons to go to war with Iraq, but they made a decision to use weapons of mass destruction as the reason to go to war, because they thought people could understand this reason..."
I lived through that period and distinctly recall that it was the talking heads of the establishment media who seized on WMDs "as the reason to go to war" as they condescendingly dumbed down their coverage for the masses. I won't go so far as to assert that the establishment media elites focused on WMDs in order to aid the overt leftists chanting "Bush lied, people died" but it sure worked out swell for them, didn't it?
OK, I used Balfegor's link and went to the paper. It is not saying what you think it is saying, Joe. He does not dispute that CO2 is rising. He is attempting to answer the question "Is the earth losing it's ability to sequester carbon (e.g. is the ocean absorbing less CO2 than it used to? Is the ocean getting "full"?) and he concludes that the answer is no, there has not been a decrease in carbon absorption rate by the planet.
But one of the concomittants of that is that the percentage of CO2 is NOT increasing in the atmosphere, it's being absorbed.
… In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The Science Daily article misreads Knorr's article in Geophysical Research Letters which one can read the abstract to here.
What the author is actually saying does not deny the increasing proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere — which measurements show has gone up by about a third since the dawn of the industrial era and continues to shoot up on an increasing curve — but that the annually released portion of CO2 that remains in the atmosphere has not particularly increased.
That CO2 concentrations in the air are rapidly increasing has been measured many times at multiple stations, but perhaps the longest at NOAA's observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii for over a half century's time, where the CO2 graph shows a pronounced upward trend with ever increasing slope, as can be seen here.
The abstract to Knorr's article reads:
Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?
by Wolfgang Knorr
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
“Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.
“Received 18 August 2009; accepted 23 September 2009; published 7 November 2009.
“Citation: Knorr, W. (2009), Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613.”
I laugh when I hear former Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colorado) whine about mocking he and other global climate change/warming/weirding true believers are getting since the cold weather set in. Why? Because when a senator, warming alarmist Wirth deliberately scheduled his committee's hearings on the global warming claims in hopes they would coincide with a Washington D.C. seasonal heat wave. He admitted as much to NPR host Terry Gross on her show Fresh Air some years ago.
No, Joe. A fraction (he references 40%) of newly emitted CO2 stays in the atmosphere:
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl0921/2009GL040613/
But the overalll increase in CO2 is statistically insignificant....we may be pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere but it's not staying there.
No, Joe.
Give it up.
...because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change....the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.
As a further primer for those of you struggling here, atmospheric CO2 has been measured since the mid-1800s. It has recently increased to an average of around 385 ppm. For three other decadal stretches in the last 160 years, it has approached that level, two times without any associated warming.
Indeed, it is difficult to understand how a case can be made that CO2 can cause greenhouse warming of the planet. It is a so efficient as a greenhouse gas (though only within three narrow bands) that the present concentration is sufficient to trap near 100% of all infrared photons in its ranges within 50-100 meters of the earth's surface. All the heat it can trap, it already is trapping.
At the peak of ice ages (into which we are headed again, conceivably beginning at any moment) CO2 concentration falls to 200 ppm, a level at which plants struggle to survive.
Plant life thrives in the range of 5000 ppm (a point a which we can begin to detect CO2 as stale air) to 15,000 ppm (a point at which brief exposures can be fatal for us). That would tend to indicate that plant life evolved in such conditions, and such conditions are theorized as when the Himalayas were forming, crushing millions of tons of limestone daily. It was a time when the earth was lushly green and inviting with palm trees from the equator to near the arctic circle. It was a time when flowering plants also first appeared.
Satellite sensing has correlated our latest rise in atmospheric CO2 to increases in plant biomass, in other words, a greener, more plant-friendly planet. And who's not for that?
So OM, please explain why I need to give it up....40% stays in the atmosphere...that fraction has NOT changed in 150 years...so the amont of CO2 is NOT increasing in the atmosphere.
Joe, I read (well, skimmed) the whole paper. You can do the same at the link I provided. Your problem is in understanding the concept of "airborne fraction"
From wikipedia:
The airborne fraction is a scaling factor defined as the ratio of the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 to the CO2 emissions from anthropogenic sources. [1] It represents the proportion of human emitted CO2 that remains in the atmosphere. The fraction averages about 50%, meaning that approximately half the human-emitted CO2 is absorbed by ocean and land surfaces. There is some evidence for a recent increase in airborne fraction, which would imply a faster increase in atmospheric CO2 for a given rate of human fossil-fuel burning.[2] However, other sources suggest that the "fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades".[3][4]
Changes in carbon sinks can affect the airbourne fraction.
aaaaaah...I see the amount of carbon absorbed remains constant, but more is put in so more remians, even if the proportion remians constant. I see.
So OM, please explain why I need to give it up....40% stays in the atmosphere...that fraction has NOT changed in 150 years.
40% of an annually increasing amount. I take it that's what "airborne fraction" meant. I confess, the abstract was a bit confusing to me too.
I'm not sure there is an argument for carbon taxes...
China, of course, understands that, which is why it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is betting on them.
Yeah, that's why China is constructing coal-burning, carbon-spewing plants at the rate of one a week. And how "efficient" can it afford to become with over a billion people to keep employed? I'm sure there are many reasons why China is laughing at us, but our lack of high-speed rail isn't one of them. What is it with this guy and his love affair with China?
Yea, that "airborne fraction" is unfortunately named. When it increases the CO2 in the atmosphere can actually go down. Yet, an increase in the "airborne fraction" sounds like, in regular English that the fraction that's airborne increased which is just not necessarily true.
Indeed, it is difficult to understand how a case can be made that CO2 can cause greenhouse warming of the planet. It is a so efficient as a greenhouse gas (though only within three narrow bands) that the present concentration is sufficient to trap near 100% of all infrared photons in its ranges within 50-100 meters of the earth's surface. All the heat it can trap, it already is trapping.
I've been told that what you say is true for water vapor, which is why additional water vapor does not have a warming effect, but I have never heard that for CO2. Frankly, I'm skeptical because if what you say is true, it's game over. Can you point to a source for that?
Yea, that "airborne fraction" is unfortunately named. When it increases the CO2 in the atmosphere can actually go down. Yet, an increase in the "airborne fraction" sounds like, in regular English that the fraction that's airborne increased which is just not necessarily true.
"Science is Hard" [The Onion]
AL- I had to work for a while, I hope you come back to this. Let me put this simply for you, since you are still in the dark. There are many greenhouse gases in varying concentrations. Some, such as water are potent and in high concentration. Some, such as methane, are potent but occur ion small concentrations. Some such as CO2 are very weak. Co2 also is in miniscule concentrations. The discussion of greenhouse effect in this thread involves only CO2, since that is what the Pro-AGW crowd has used as their villain. Any idiot knows that a "heat trapping gas" i.e water vapor will......trap heat. C o2, the centerpiece of this argument, traps heat poorly. This is what people are saying. They are not discussing the other gases, because no idiot has tried to come up with a plan to tax them yet.
As a science guy, I think that you clearly do not have the background to have a proper discussion on this topic. For the same reason, I rarely comment on the legal threads since I am not a lawyer and cannot offer good insight. A small cadre of climate scientists found themselves on a runaway train and were too caught up in themselves to get off. Even Phil Jones is changing his tune. He believes in AGW, which is fine, but acknowledges the problems related to our incomplete understanding of the very complex climate system, and that there are things happening which are contrary to the prediction of the models.
I have to assume you didn't read Dr. Beck's article. He is just a happy chemist with no ax to grind here other than setting the record straight.
Also, do not offend people by lumping them together. Just because you say something stupid, doesn't mean all the other liberal minded people here are stupid, and vice versa. Any remarks which aren't directly cogent to the discussion are a waste of time and detract from any perceived validity in your remarks. I know many liberals who are alike in their beliefs with me on AGW and many conservatives who agree with you. Don't assume the orientation just on the comments on one topic.
(The other Joe)
Do you accept or reject the greenhouse effect as settled science?
It's not science, period. Greenhouse don't work according to the idiotic theories expounded by global warming proponents and the atmosphere doesn't work like either the fictional greenhouse effect or how real greenhouses work.
As a side note, I just want to say thanks to all the science minded folks who post here, because I greatly enjoy when the threads go this direction... they get far less political and far more interesting (coincidence? I think not!).
Some such as CO2 are very weak. Co2 also is in miniscule concentrations. The discussion of greenhouse effect in this thread involves only CO2, since that is what the Pro-AGW crowd has used as their villain.
I think that a lot of that is because the environmentalists have been against using hydrocarbons for a long time, just as they are against nuclear power. I suspect that this whole CO2 based AGW push is more that burning hydrocarbons for energy releases CO2 than anything really to do with CO2 itself. After all, as pointed out above, plants thrive in higher CO2 environments, up to a very high limit, the more CO2, they better they grow, and plant growth is key to feeding the Earth's population.
It's not science, period. Greenhouse don't work according to the idiotic theories expounded by global warming proponents and the atmosphere doesn't work like either the fictional greenhouse effect or how real greenhouses work.
One of the more humorous simplifications was linked to yesterday at realclimate.org by one of our resident warmists. Yes, this is the site that the Cabel/Hockey Team used to further their warmist agenda (according to those notorious emails). After making the point that CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas, the site went on to hypothesize five more ever more highly questionable theories, concluding with QED.
BTW, Did we ever find out who hacked and dumped the emails and other data from East Anglia. That dude is my hero. He may have literally saved the world trillions of dollars in economic depression and the many lives that will be saved by that development. A god damn hero!
There are many greenhouse gases in varying concentrations. Some, such as water are potent and in high concentration. Some, such as methane, are potent but occur ion small concentrations. Some such as CO2 are very weak. Co2 also is in miniscule concentrations.
Elliott - Can you provide a value for the optical depth of the atmosphere for radiation absorbed by water, methane, and CO2?
"Friedman is quite absurd."
Or, as MoDo puts it so eloquently, "Thomas Friedman is off today".
"So why not stress the other arguments for renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc.?"
Maybe because there aren't any, really? Even Picken's ill-fated entry into renewables was mostly about the subsidies.
That some people who accept "the science" have been behaving badly was known all along. The scandal now is that the set of people who have been behaving badly has been shown to include many of the scientists (for lack of a better word).
I agree with your first sentence. Regarding your second sentence, I think you're blowing the IPCC scandal out of proportion. There are discreet findings that have been properly challenged because they were not based on data in peer-reviewed journals: for instance, that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 and that climate change has led to increased precipitation and storms.
But the complaint that a certain piece or set of data was not appropriately peer-reviewed by definition cannot undermine data that has appeared in peer-reviewed journals. And obviously peer-reviewed journals themselves operate outside the auspices of the IPCC.
I really do recommend watching the videos that I linked to in my original post. I was just as much of a skeptic as you are before I saw them, but now I'd say that, at least by a preponderance of the evidence standard, I agree with the AGW hypothesis.
Optical depth: D = ∫0xa(z)dz
Greenhouse
Gas Global
Warming
Potential
for 100 years
H2O Not Given
CO2 1
CH4 23
N2 275
CCl4 1800
CCl3F 4600
CCl2F2 10600
CClF3 14000
In the sense of Karl Popper wherein a science is not a science if the conjectures put forth do not admit of falsifiable tests. Climatology is not a science. Nuclear Physics is a science since we can and have done experiments to test the conjectures.
Not so with climatology since it seems that all possible tests confirm the conjectures. Therefore climatology is a religion since tests of the underlying conjectures always confirm the theory.
Climatology is a religion by definition. Arguing facts is useless when trying to convert someone from one religion to another.
Other pseudo sciences also exist. Economics, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Nutrition and Diet and a multitude of things we all think are scientific but aren't.
"Because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff."
There, fixed it.
The Macho Response
@bagoh20: I'm on my way out the door, but I want to know more. Where did you get these values? Can you provide a link?
Thanks!
Here you go Mike: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/radiativeff2.htm
The journalists are just bozos on all sides. Nothing communicates through them. Only the poets know anything at all.
I'm in touch with a few Iraqi poets. One told me he thinks all we did was replace one Saddam with hundreds more Saddams, and unleashed terror on their country so that now they no longer have libraries or museums.
We get the image from the journalists that the Iraqi people are dimwits. They never talk to their poets or academics, probably because they aren't qualified to do so.
The media is just a huge chunk of dead wood with the wit of a pile of carpenter ants.
You can't find out anything by reading the MSM of any persuasion. the blogs are a lot better.
but if you really want to find anything out, you have to talk to actual individuals on the ground with brains. No one else knows anything, and if they did, no journalist would ever talk to them, and if they would, the people with brains would never talk to the journalists.
@ Pogo - 11:38
That is all bullshit of the purest ray serene.
As an atheist and conservative/libertarian, I am a living example of the fallacies of your examples.
Religion does not dictate common sense. In fact, the opposite is true.
Throwing the IPCC under the bus is certainly an increasingly popular way of wishing away this scientific scandal. But even leaving aside the fact that the UEA CRU will need to be thrown under the bus as well, the very reason why IPCC was accepted by so many people (including me) as authoritative concerning the state of the scientific debate is that it included such a large cross-section of climate scientists. Even if they, who kept quiet about so much for so long, are still to be considered individually trustworthy, who will now synthesize their results for us? The same people who've been telling us up to now that there is a consensus, the IPCC is it, and anyone who doesn't believe it is a denialist?
200+ comments in less than 12 hours by a bunch of idiots who not only don't know how to construct a critical argument, but cannot consider a dissenting one, and are so blindingly politically motivated that they don't see their ignorance of science as any impediment to forming a strong opinion on a scientific matter.
BTW, technological change always produces the fastest economic growth and snow is a form of precipitation, which results from the air warming enough to hold excess moisture. Not to get in the way of your little protest party or anything.
While we're at it, I'd love to see what your collective "opinion" is on punctuated equilibrium. And how do you "feel" about neoplastic epigenetics? Surely your gut instinct on those matters is worth airing on a political blog.
Opinions! Impressions! Feelings! Science is meaningless without them!
Good 10:25 post by Alan. Like him, I am a skeptic of alarmist AGW, but not locked into an ideology that makes me reject all evidence and data of the Earth posibly being degraded by too many people and too much nonrenewable resource use and attendent pollution effects.
Dust Bunny - "CO2 is not a pollutant!". Sure it is. Everything is a pollutant if it is "in the wrong place" or in "objectionable quantities".
Nitrates, phosphates, CO2, sulfates, trace amounts of some 19 metals inc. copper, potassium, arsenic, cobalt, iron are essential for life. As are non-metallics like selenium, silicon, boron.
The argument with CO2 is at what concentration is it harmful? Same routine analysis that are applied to other essential elements and compounds...the argument is always "where would it be a pollutant? Inside the lead mine?" and "how much makes it excessive to the point of not being beneficial on balance, but a pollutant?"
================
Alpha makes the standard brainless liberal Greenie arguments.
They are being deployed. Capitalists are making money of of them and workers are making a living. It's an opportunity to grow our economy and make a buck.
Other technologies are coming but we needn't sit on out hands: a wide variety of biomass to liquid fuels, more EE tech all the time, solar electric, wind.
Fossil fuel costs are going up. Clean energy costs are going DOWN.
Al Qaeda and those Saudi F*cks gets richer off of oil revenues, not off of solar or wind.
We need to leave as many carbon fuels in the ground as possible until they can be safely used.
1. We are finding as Spain did that the bountiful, "exciting green jobs" are a myth. One reason the CHinese are described as "world leaders" is other nations are outsourcing green manufacture to them as the low cost leader. Lefty fantasies of the unemployed going to their "great new green jobs" in windpower and solar energy factories nonwithstanding...
2. Energy technology, except unproven fusion, is fairly well understood. We haven't really improved on thermodynamic efficiency since the 30s in fossil and hydro plants. Biomass to liquid fuel has proven a bust since the Greenie-Agribiz "miracle Ethanol!" debacle.
3. Yes, 50 dollar a kw-hr solar is coming down in cost compared to 8 cent a KW coal or 12 cent a KW nuclear. And wind is only 18-26 dollars a kw away from competing with 4 cent a KW mature hydro....with those evil dams Lefty lawyers want torn down for better kayaking...
4. The Saudi F*cks were blessed with oil just as the US was blessed with water and lots of other resources that make US prosperous - and since 2004 have worked to deprive AQ a cent of that revenue. And will continue to sell oil at a good price no matter what we do, just as we will sell wheat no matter what they do. THe only thing that would help is the US committing to drill like crazy for nat gas, oil, synthfuel, oil from bituminous tars, oil shale. Every new domestic source means jobs, internally kept wealth.
5. Leave oil and nat gas and coal in the ground until they can be "safely used"??? What do you think humanity has poured trillions and the latest technology into the last 200 years? Safe exploitation of accessible, concentrated high energy fossil resources...thats what.
And before I catch heat on this, I see that not all of you are incapable of considering the actual science behind the arguments for taking AGW seriously. But my complaint is with the majority of one-trick pony/pot-shot commenters who could care less about what science is and how it informs AGW, or any case against seeing it as a real phenomenon.
As a further primer for those of you struggling here, atmospheric CO2 has been measured since the mid-1800s. It has recently increased to an average of around 385 ppm. For three other decadal stretches in the last 160 years, it has approached that level, two times without any associated warming.
Reference please! I know of no instance during the last million years and more when CO2 concentrations exceeded 300 ppm, much less the present approx. 385. (It did reach 300 ppm some 330,000 years ago, according to Antarctic ice core records.)
Indeed, it is difficult to understand how a case can be made that CO2 can cause greenhouse warming of the planet. It is a so efficient as a greenhouse gas (though only within three narrow bands) that the present concentration is sufficient to trap near 100% of all infrared photons in its ranges within 50-100 meters of the earth's surface. All the heat it can trap, it already is trapping.
(Another) reference please! Here one can see a graph (from Sherwood Rowland at U.C. Irvine) showing that CO2 acts like a blanket insulating against infrared emissions across a wide band of temperatures which just happen to be representative of the Earth.
And this idea that CO2 is somehow “saturated” in its insulating effects is belied by the planet Venus, which would not subsist at its present temperature of 735 K (863 degrees F.) vis-a-vis Earth's average temperature of 287 K (57 deg. F.) if carbon dioxide did not act as an insulator at far higher concentrations than anything seen on Earth.
Nor can Venus's extraordinarily high temperature be explained as due to the planet's closer approach to the Sun. Venus orbits at a distance 72% as far from the Sun as the Earth does; and as a matter of fact, due to Venus's far higher albedo (reflectivity), without the super-greenhouse effect due to its nearly 100 atmospheres of “air” pressure, almost all of which is CO2, Venus would actually repose at a considerably colder “blackbody” temperature (to wit, −41 degrees C, or −42 deg. F.) than would Earth (−17 degrees C, or +1 deg. F.)!
These calculations aren't difficult, but there's insufficient room in the margin to include them (g). However, if anybody's really curious, reply with a request to that effect and I'll post them in a follow-up.
I'm curious to see what Cedarford's opinion on the bountiful (and certainly non-mythical) "service-sector economy" looks like.
Every non-third world economy has to find ways to maintain a manufacturing class and keep it happy. But acknowledging that fact might make his head spin, as the opposition parties in 1933 Berlin unfortunately found out.
Sadly, Cedarford's understanding of global and national politics seems to have not progressed past that point.
No matter what he wants to say about Spain, it's still technological innovation that is the strongest driver of economic growth. And always is. Why we should decree that to be a myth when it comes solely to energy R & D is anyone's guess. But primarily Cedarford's.
But then again, his inspiration for political conventions comes from a country that drove out Jewish physicists (and denouncing "their" science) while striving to perfect a weapon that would allow them global domination. Just before the U.S. developed the A-bomb.
These are the lessons of history that he (and the crowd) are foresaking.
But the complaint that a certain piece or set of data was not appropriately peer-reviewed by definition cannot undermine data that has appeared in peer-reviewed journals. And obviously peer-reviewed journals themselves operate outside the auspices of the IPCC.
Obviously peer reviewed journals operate outside the auspices of the IPCC, esp. since every day we find another of their findings having come from bogus sources, many of them environmental advocacy groups.
But on the other hand, peer review is no guarantee of accuracy. First note that the AGW proponents were able to control the peer review process in the central journals over recent years. Their stuff got published, and the competing stuff did not, or heads rolled. And with such a small universe of "experts", the lack anonymity of the peer review process was an inside joke.
But even discounting that, peer review, esp. as we have seen it here, has been no guarantee of accuracy. Partly that is because the peer review process does not guarantee reproducibility of results, but rather, that the methodology looks right to the peer reviewers (who just happened to also be friends here, but that is another story).
Part of the problem is that there has not been near enough disclosure so that someone on the outside can reproduce the results. No outside disclosure of the source code, no outside disclosure of what data points were utilized, which ones weren't, and why, and no outside disclosure of how the data was massaged, and why.
Apparently, in order to facilitate reproducible results, many peer reviewed scientific journals require just that - disclosure of all of those elements before an article will be considered for publication. Apparently though, that was too restrictive for the Cabel/Hockey Team that was controlling the AGW science until just recently.
In this case, there is no assurance that any of the "science" here is valid, since the only people who have had access to all that information were on the inside. We have to trust in their integrity, and that has become increasingly hard to do, as more and more hanky panky on their part has come out.
bagoh20, regarding the identity of the person responsible for the release of the emails, I've been fascinated by the utter silence on that question. If a hacker really got into CRU's servers with such catastrophic results, wouldn't the police be involved? Wouldn't we be seeing at least an article here and there about some kind of investigation? But no -- there's nothing but crickets.
I think that means it was not a hacker, but a leaker -- some kind of whistleblower inside the organization. I've read that the format in which the computer files were released supports that interpretation. I've also seen some speculation that the release may have been a simple accident resulting from poorly-designed differentiation between the organization's internal and external servers -- apparently there was some earlier incident where one of the FOIA requests that had been being ignored was accidentally fulfilled when somebody posted data on the external server that wasn't supposed to be there.
Anyway, I don't think it's likely that it was a hack.
former law student: Useless ordnance left over from the Iran-Iraq war proves what?
Among other things, it proves you wrong.
former law student, apparently the precision of my syntax eludes you.
I do not use the word 'libtard' to refer to 'liberal,' because the two are not interchangeable.
For example: Professor Althouse is a liberal.
You are a libtard.
Starting to get it?
Generally, the problem with the Iraq War was that there were abundant reasons to get rid of SAddam and his sons. There weren't reasons for nation-building other than BUsh and the neocons convinced that there was a Zionist-friendly, pro-West typical Iraqi just begging for his "inner-middle class American" persona to emerge.
As other nations grew wary of the American and Brits plans to not just get rid of Saddam, but transfer power to the Shia and guarantee civil war and voiding of all the economic arrangements they had - BUsh was forced to amp up his "ace in the hole" reason - the WMD! The WMD!
Lost in that were the reasons even Russia and the ME nations supported as reasons to depose the Saddam Hussein family - provided Iraq itself was not thrown into chaos and upheaval the Neocon vision guaranteed. And into Shiite Iran's lap.
1. Saddam's defiance of 16 UN Security Council resolutions.
2. Most nations, inc. ME ones, believing that Saddam and his sons were loose cannons after his various ill-adventures and best gone.
3. Human rights violations even the Euroweenies not bribed by Oil For Food said was intolerable. Iraq's actions against Kurds, Shiites, Marsh Arabs, Shiite pilgrims was widely denounced.
4. Outside the ME, Saddam's paying a 40,000 dollar bounty to the families of Leb and Palestinian suicide bombers was deemed beyond the pale.
But with the invasion, the occupation the Army never expected and which the Bushies and Neos told them not to "waste precious time and resources preparing for" - then finding no WMDs...
Bush failed miserably.
A. He lacked the drive or intelligence to try and articulate that even without his hyped WMD threat, the war was justified.
B. In doing that, he ceded the argument to the Left and EuroLeft that the war was illegitimate. He never made a forceful case to allies or the American public that even without WMDs or a shred of evidence that the war was a necessity to stabilize the ME, remove loose cannons, end human rights violations, and prove UN Security Council Resolutions aside from the ones Jewish money induces the US to regularly veto, have teeth.
C. His agreeing to disband the Iraq Army and civil service of Sunni guaranteed civil war and tens of thousands of American deaths or severe maimings. As well as a power vacuum the AQ forces and Iran ably exploited.
D. Bush refused to use good strategic communications to diffuse Abu Ghraib and other scandals - leaving them mired in slow legalistic "investigations" languishing without a strong response pending "trial of suspects".
The result of the Bush inability to explain it was about more than WMDs, his stupid fixation on how noble the Iraqis were and willing to be transformed by 100s of billions spent each year on their most ungrateful asses (except Kurds) - was a withering of the Colaition of the "Willing".
The Jews, using the war as an opportunity to plant more Zionist colonies and engage in fresh brutalities was hated even more and isolated even more after the war. A war the neocons thought would help their beloved Israel.
We have a trillion spent, over 30,000 dead or severely wounded....most Arab Iraqis hating us, severe diplomatic damage to the USA, and China and well-placed Euros that were against the US neocon maladventure swooping in to get the oil contracts.
And evidence that once we leave, the Arabs will be promptly backsliding to killing one another. (So much for their "inner American screaming to get out and Love Freedom!)
All the Petreaus Surge may get us is that we left "the stronger horse" and didn't slink away defeated. That may be worth the 90 billion and 2200 casualties the Surge cost. Face-saving. Even if 3 years later, Iraq returns to barbarous ways and means.
A fiasco. A fiasco that became one in the postwar after a masterful US invasion. And one that properly should go to a President who miserably failed to lead, make good decisions on, or properly defend.
I think that means it was not a hacker, but a leaker -- some kind of whistleblower inside the organization.
I agree. The possibility that it was a hacker appears ever more remote. Someone seems to have spent a fair amount of time going through the data eliminating stuff that was less relevant. There is almost none of the sort of every day garbage that you find in normal email dumps. And, thus, either the hacker downloaded huge amounts of data, and then edited it offline, or spent huge amounts of time online editing it there. Neither alternative seems realistic.
Of course, we don't know right now. But, my bet is on a whistle blower.
What's missing from Friedman's foolish article is the following: (1) precisely what are the climatic conditions he regards as "not weird" and (2) how much money is he willing to spend to move the present climate there and freeze it in place?
Jason is so enamored of precision and his purported skill with language that he forgets that syntax has to do with the ordering of words in a sentence; it has nothing to do with the meaning of any one particular word.
In fact, you could say that this insight eludes him!
Fascinating!
Oh, and the only liberal thing about Althouse is how liberally she chooses to apply the talents of P.T. Barnum to the arena of political commentary!
apparently the precision of my syntax eludes you.
From someone who apparently cannot tell a junkyard from a new car dealership, the concept of "precision" would seem to be meaningless.
And the professor is slightly right of center.
Ritmo - Last I looked, my post had nothing about a pack of socialists in the 30s that championed the environment, the forests, outdoor recreation, animal rights, and smoking cessation.
If one must make a Hitler argument, consider the likelihood of:
1. Hitler as a right wing tax protestor.
2. Hitler as a committed Greenie eager to seize power and control over others "in a good cause". Who would call the death of millions from lack of DDT, insistance on non-GM crops, depriving them of food and industry in the name of global warming, and a pervasive Green Police regulating every aspect of life under color of Rule of Law..
My guess is Hitler, one of the 1st environmental fascists...would be more like you, Ritmo, than me or most other posters....
There is differing opinion on historical CO2 levels from analysis using other methods both historical and chemical
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1806245/posts
Also, I don't think we can take much from the Venus atmosphere: Although it's very hot there, and 96% CO2, Venus atmosphere is also 90 times the density of our atmosphere, no magnetosphere and many other differences. It's just too many variables.
Much of this debate of the specifics of the very complicated systems of climate and the likely misdirections caused by that complexity seem unlikely to me to get very "settled" anytime soon.
I think we should really concentrate on getting the measurements both current and historical to be settled first. Good honest data sets, widely available and heavily scrutinized. That data would be a shortcut to much of the truth that is currently debated and unsettled.
I find when I research this that many of sites seem entirely accepting of the AGW argument in it's most extreme form. That's disappointing. Right or wrong it is clearly not a given. Probably only about 20% even question what is obviously still a question.
One more comment to go with my previous thoughts: The IPCC scandal indicates that the effects of global warming may have been exaggerated--a fact that, as Paul Zrimsek has noted here, was not really in doubt anyway.
But the scandal does not affect the debate on the cause of global warming--that is, on whether the recently-recorded global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions--as distinct from the debate on its effects.
I never realized that Tom Friedman was a disciple of the "Weirding Way". He still acts a bit clumsy if you ask me.
There's a difference. The Bush administration made no effort to create evidence to cover up the hole in the WMD theory. They didn't plant WMDs. They didn't fake data to hide the decline. They may have leaned hard on the data they had, but they didn't invent stuff out of whole cloth afterward to cover their tracks.
Of course he's right. Climate change (the new euphemism for "global warming") predicts warmer seasons, it predicts cooler seasons; it predicts more hurricanes, it predicts fewer hurricanes; more El Ninos, fewer; ... Whatever happens, it's due to "climate change", and the only way we can stop this juggernaut is to ramp down our ways of life, send large fractions of our GNP to the UN, and keep putting nickles and dimes into Al Gore's PayPal account.
But the scandal does not affect the debate on the cause of global warming--that is, on whether the recently-recorded global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions--as distinct from the debate on its effects.
But then, have we recently had global warming? There appears to have been about 20 years of global warming up to maybe 1998. But since then? There is evidence that the global temperature was somewhat stable during the decade after that, and has maybe dipped a bit in the last year or two.
Of course, there is also some evidence that there has been warming over the last decade. But I would suggest that the preponderance of the evidence is to the contrary - that GW ended a decade or so ago.
Another thing you see a lot of when researching this stuff is how circular the evidence is on the pro-AGW side. That side of the argument always leads back to the same stuff that created the hockey stick and the clearly fraudulent IPCC report. Then when you realize that some crazy made up fact is the basis for this, and that's the foundation for the next thing that then is the justification for the other - it really falls down with a crashing thud in ones mind.
I'm both disgusted with how far that got and happy that the terrible future it predicted is not likely.
I do wonder why pro-AGW people seem so disappointed that we are NOT going to, fry, drown, starve, and die of horrible diseases in our flooded cities. Isn't that a good thing?
But the scandal does not affect the debate on the cause of global warming--that is, on whether the recently-recorded global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions--as distinct from the debate on its effects.
Are you talking only about the IPCC WG2 part of it? Detecting a human signal depends crucially on paleoclimate reconstruction-- and the CRU e-mails are right at the epicenter of that debate.
If Hitler was, at least according to Cedarford, the "1st environmental fascist", one wonders what he thinks of Theodore Roosevelt.
Probably nothing positive.
Keep nurturing that forever-growing enemies list, guys.
I'll go along with the "global weirding" as a threat worth taking action against!
And Ann, you are correct; there are plenty of reasons to "conserve and recycle" and strive for energy efficiency - and efficiency in all other things - that have nothing to do with the fraud that is "global warming".
We ought to conserve fossil fuels and switch to "renewable" energy sources and nuclear because fossil fuels are too valuable to just burn up for heat. We ought to be concerned about energy efficiency because no matter how much we generate, we're going to want more. Ditto for conservation; conserve what we can, and economize, and we'll be able to afford MORE stuff, some of which will be really neat.
But all of this has to make sense, and a lot of the lefty religion does NOT make sense.
I don't think we can take much from the Venus atmosphere: Although it's very hot there, and 96% CO2, Venus atmosphere is also 90 times the density of our atmosphere, no magnetosphere and many other differences.
Sure we can “take much” from Venus's atmosphere and the planet itself: Venus is a virtual twin of Earth in size, and closest to our planet in its position in the Solar System. The lack of a magnetosphere has exactly zero to do with how much heat it receives and retains from the Sun, and its high temperature combined with an extremely dense CO2 atmosphere means that carbon dioxide ain't saturated as an insulator at almost 100 atmospheres and nearly 100% concentration — and thus also isn't saturated at 0.04% in Earth's 1 atmospheric pressure. QED.
Michael, any atmosphere 90 times thicker than earth's would hold in heat no matter what it was made of. The magnetosphere does reduce radiation reaching the earth, although I don't pretend to know what effect that adds up to.
Just because some may call it a twin, does not make it so. The differences are more important than the similarities, obviously, since it is 475 deg there.
Of course there is the possibility that man's use of fossil fuels is what keeps the earth cooler than it's twin. Since you are suggesting so much similarity in these planets, this must be the magic variable keeping us from vaporizing.
What???
All of these comments and not a single Dune reference to Friedman's use of "wierding"?
There is differing opinion on historical CO2 levels from analysis using other methods both historical and chemical
Sorry, bagoh2o, usually I enjoy your posts, but the idea that during the early 1800's — not long after the discovery of separate gases in the atmosphere — techniques were advanced enough to make “accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air” is absurd. (Are you sure your moniker shouldn't be “bago420” in this case? grin! Not that there's anything wrong with that….)
However, the nature of the issue can very easily be determined — as with Antarctic ice cores that show CO2 concentrations going back more than 800,000 years at this point, simply (gasp!) measure what the concentrations were during the last two centuries. Care to make a little wager as to what those proportions turn out to be?
Someone was asking how it is we can do those measurements. It's not very mysterious: bubbles of air get trapped in the loose crystalline structure of snow and snowfalls. As deeply buried snow gets compressed to ever denser ice, those bubbles survive, and even many hundreds of thousands of years later the samples of ancient air they contain can still be extracted, examined, and analyzed.
Here's one such chart of the experimental measurements (hat tip to Daniel Schrag at Harvard University), going back “only” 400,000 years, carried up to the present day, then extrapolated to 2040 to 2060. Notice that during that entire immense span of time, CO2 proportions never exceeded 300 parts per million — until very recent times (a couple centuries ago) when CO2 levels began rocketing up into territory not seen for millions of years. (The sawtooth shape of the graph reveals the “breathing” of CO2 concentrations during the ice ages.)
Capiche?
All of these comments and not a single Dune reference to Friedman's use of “wierding”?
You're not reading closely enough.
Michael, any atmosphere 90 times thicker than earth's would hold in heat no matter what it was made of.
Who says? Any ordinary insulator would be as effective at holding heat out as holding it in. Only a “greenhouse effect” type of insulator freely allows heat to enter — then blocks it as it's about to leave.
The magnetosphere does reduce radiation reaching the earth, although I don't pretend to know what effect that adds up to.
The magnetosphere has zero effect in blocking the light and heat of the Sun (visible light and infrared photons). What it blocks are charged particles like electrons — which carry essentially no heat energy to speak of.
Just because some may call it a twin, does not make it so. The differences are more important than the similarities, obviously, since it is 475 deg there.
That's only a single variable; and hardly the most important one. For instance, there's just about the same amount of carbon on both planets.
Of course there is the possibility that man's use of fossil fuels is what keeps the earth cooler than it's twin.
Now you're being silly. It's not man's use of fossil fuels that keeps the Earth cooler. What keeps the Earth cooler is life's creation of fossil fuels (coal, oil, shale oil, etc.), as well as of carbonate rocks like limestone, in enormous quantities — which then get laid down and deeply buried within the crust of the Earth — reducing the CO2 proportion from almost 100% in a 100-atmospheres atmosphere down to 0.04% in one atmospheric pressure.
Voila! A cooler Earth.
Since you are suggesting so much similarity in these planets, this must be the magic variable keeping us from vaporizing.
Nonsense. Life is the magic variable.
Ritmo is correct. The word syntax refers to word order and structure.
His point, however, is irrelevant. Former Law Student is still a moron.
And one who doesn't know when to acknowledge he's been corrected.
By the way: "slightly right of center" does not mean "not liberal."
Ann is a REAL liberal. A fine, admirable set of quality you progressive libtards wouldn't recognize if it bit you on the ass.
Michael,
Did you read the reference I linked. It sounds like you didn't but maybe skimmed and then thought: how can I dismiss this. I'm not suggesting it's correct, just that people like you assume that there is no view other than what matches your preconceived idea. That's how we got here.
The Venus stuff is really obvious. The 475 degree temperature is not "just one variable", it's the result. Isn't temperature what this discussion is about? The systems and their history are so different that to use it as some kind of proof about our systems here is just more likely to be incorrect than not. It's certainly not scientific, but you need it to make your picture complete. so have at it. But it is just playful what if.
You obviously think I don't understand the pedestrian stuff you point out, but I do and knowing that stuff does not lead me to your conclusions, because I'm not trying to build a road to a preset destination. I'm looking for where the science leads.
My man's fossil fuel impact was supposed to be a joke, but density has it's challenges and that's my point.
The biggest problem we have is lack of scientific rigor and open mindedness, in a word: honesty. Your approach is to convince others of something that nobody on this planet knows even remotely.
Please excuse me, if I don't buy it.
And Michael,
My background is Environmental Science, and much of what I was taught in college as settled science has since been disproved. That's why I'm skeptical in general and of this field in particular. Many of those teaching then had the same faith-driven perspective I see today in a lot the people in charge of the research and the politcs.
291 comments? I guess Thomas Friedman is the new Sarah Palin. Can a deglamorizing photoshopping be far behind?
Use of the term "global weirding" indicates that the actual underlying beliefs about global environment have nothing to do with actual science.
He's such an asshole, he makes people want to burn shit. Every time he writes a column, I litter just a little bit just so he doesn't get his way.
Modern conservatism is an ongoing temper-tantrum.
Ann is a REAL liberal. A fine, admirable set of quality you progressive libtards wouldn't recognize if it bit you on the ass.
Yes, the kind of liberal who subscribes to Rush Limbaugh.
You still don't get it.
You don't define a real liberal by what they listen to. And Rush Limbaugh is far more liberal than the vast majority of progressives.
Liberalism, quite simply, is the belief in the primacy of the rights of the individual.
A libtard is anyone who THINKS they are liberal, or holds a set of beliefs associated with Progressivism, who hasn't figured that out.
Michael said: [Venus'] high temperature combined with an extremely dense CO2 atmosphere means that carbon dioxide ain't saturated as an insulator at almost 100 atmospheres and nearly 100% concentration — and thus also isn't saturated at 0.04% in Earth's 1 atmospheric pressure.
Pretty convincing argument and it may take the day, but it's not complete yet. The fact that Venus is much hotter than Earth means that there is a lot more infrared available to absorb.
Bagoh20, thanks for last night's link. I haven't had time to study it yet, but it speaks exactly to the issue. However, skimming it reveals something odd. The number I want is what he calls the "radiative efficiency" of CO2 (in my field we call it the areal density), however in his table the value of radiative efficiency for CO2 is "not given". I'm going to study this more when I get the time. Hopefully, I'll have it figured out for the next post where AGW comes up.
Liberalism, quite simply, is the belief in the primacy of the rights of the individual.
A libtard is anyone who THINKS they are liberal, or holds a set of beliefs associated with Progressivism, who hasn't figured that out.
THIS.
Things invented by humans, including internal combustion engines and boilers that turn steam turbines to produce electricity, are just as natural as trees. Humans are a product of this planet. Any products of humans are likewise products of the planet. We should take care as best we can but ought not lament our existence or the fabulous things we have created and continue to create. Regards.
I accept the saturation of CO2 may not be total at any concentration, but my point is that the density of the Venus atmosphere is much more powerful than the chemical composition. Even a poorly absorptive gas near saturation at that density and thickness would do it.
The Venus atmosphere was never at the earth's current state. That's the problem: extrapolating that it would get there from here on a living planet.
Jason helpfully informs us that "liberal" means "reactionary."
Haven't had time to review this (I have to do the science I get paid for, first), but it is obviously very relevant to the CO2 saturation discussion.
@Michael
All of these comments and not a single Dune reference to Friedman's use of “wierding”?
You're not reading closely enough.
You are correct, sir. I did a quick skim and a word search (Dune, Paul, Paul Mua'dib, etc), but came up with goose eggs. I'll look again.
Venus and the Earth are practically twins? Not so much, no.
ASIDE from the fact that the surface temperature of Venus is upwards of 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and the fact that the thick atmosphere of Venus is predominantly CO2, I can think of a number of MAJOR differences that make any "twin" comparison meaningless.
1. In the context of global warming, it might be worth noting that Venus is about 25 million miles closer to the Sun than the Earth is.
2. Venus has no moon. Earth's Moon is quite remarkably large for the size of the Earth.
3. Earth is more dense than Venus.
4. Earth rotates quickly, while Venus scarcely rotates at all.
Points 2, 3 and 4 may all have to do with the same event, a massive impact with another Mars-sized planet with the proto-Earth. The iron core of the other planet probably merged with the Earth's, and the impact threw off enough mass from the combined bodies to coalesce and form the Moon. If the impact was slightly off-center, that would explain Earth's spin and axial tilt.
Well Ann, never let science get in the way of what you think.
Does your choice of selective intellectual curiosity extend also to the law or is it limited to the make believe world of justice?
I did a quick skim and a word search (Dune, Paul, Paul Mua'dib, etc), but came up with goose eggs. I'll look again.
Search for “Weirding Way” — a couple of people have posted references to that.
Venus and the Earth are practically twins? Not so much, no.
I specifically said that they're virtually twins in size — and twins in size they are.
In the context of global warming, it might be worth noting that Venus is about 25 million miles closer to the Sun than the Earth is.
Which is 72% of Earth's distance from the Sun, as I noted before. This is the closest to Earth of any planet in the Solar System, including Mars.
"Jason helpfully informs us that "liberal" means "reactionary.""
No, moron, you still don't get it. I just told you what liberal means, and you didn't listen. You can't grasp what the word 'liberal' means. Which is why Althouse can be a liberal... and much of Limbaugh's audience is liberal, and Limbaugh himself is more liberal than you are, and why you're not a liberal, but a libtard.
Michael McNeil said..."I specifically said that they're virtually twins in size — and twins in size they are."
Ken said: "In the context of global warming, it might be worth noting that Venus is about 25 million miles closer to the Sun than the Earth is."
and Michael responded: "Which is 72% of Earth's distance from the Sun, as I noted before. This is the closest to Earth of any planet in the Solar System, including Mars."
A classic non-sequitur. All human beings share 99% of our DNA; by this standard, you and I are more "twins" than Earth and Venus.
Radiation intensity varies by the inverse square of the distance. If Venus is 72% of the Earth's orbital distance, it receives 92% MORE sunlight.
Radiation intensity varies by the inverse square of the distance. If Venus is 72% of the Earth's orbital distance, it receives 92% MORE sunlight.
A “classic non sequitur.” Venus receives 92% more sunlight — and its high albedo (reflectivity) of 0.75 (versus Earth's of 0.29) reflects more than twice as much of it away. As noted earlier, Venus's “blackbody” temperature (eliminating both its and Earth's greenhouse effect) would be −43 degrees F. (−24 degrees C) colder than Earth.
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