Man Made Global Warming - yet another opinion

Ben84

geordie_joe wrote: »

So, what you are saying is we only have samples from those parts of the world that were frozen a thousand years ago and have remained frozen until the present day.

How do you find the average for the planet from such a small section of the earth?

Carbon dioxide disperses well in the atmosphere, you can sample it pretty much anywhere and get the same figure. We do encounter areas with slightly elevated levels, but they are areas where the carbon dioxide is being emitted rather than areas where it collects. It doesn't hang around. Many of the ice cores come from Greenland and Antartica, but there are other areas too. Fortunately for us, areas that have retained ice this long are not normally areas with either geothermal emissions of CO2 or areas likely to be affected by significant plant growth.

geordie_joe wrote: »

But the truth is we don't actually know what the temperature ranges were. We can guess that a particular thing must have lived in a temperature between x and y decrees, but we don't actually know. Man can live in the tropic, as can many other things, but those same things have also survived ice ages. So how can that tell us what the temperature was just by looking at what was alive at a certain time?

This is only one of many methods, we're not basing the whole thing on just this. However, we do use organisims with fairly sharp temperature ranges. Modern humans who are so good at adapting to their environment would be a bad choice.

geordie_joe wrote: »

No, what is so compelling is simply the fact that you want to believe it.

You could say that to anyone regarding anything.

geordie_joe wrote: »

Just as you accuse me of reading rubbish, I can accuse you of reading rubbish.

When did I say that?

Ben84

geordie_joe wrote: »

Name six of these means, describe how they are done and show me the result. If you can't do that then you are only repeating a sentence you have heard/read somewhere else.

You expect others to go to great lengths to present their reasoning in deep detail, which would be fair enough if you were sharing anything on this level of detail and well supported by evidence, but when I asked you earlier if you had seen any evidence against global warming that wasn't from the mass media this was really your best reponse?

geordie_joe wrote: »

Yes, I've been outside at least once every day for the last 49.5 years (not counting 5 days I stayed in hospital a couple of years ago) and I have seen it is not increasing. If anything it is getting colder!

cepheus

Yes, I've been outside at least once every day for the last 49.5 years (not counting 5 days I stayed in hospital a couple of years ago) and I have seen it is not increasing. If anything it is getting colder!

This is the sort of insane response from the scientifically illiterate public the marketing gurus of the fossil fuel industry were looking for. Thy realise people wan't to believe in conspiracies especially when taxes are involved.

Temperatures in the UK are irrelevent, even more one particular place, so are your perceptions of them. So far the difference is hardly going to be noticable except at the North pole were warming is more substantial and critical. However if we must.

punamulta

an historical context on belief in global warming

' we find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it , till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.''
'' men it has been said, think in herds;it will been seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.''

from the preface to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds ; Charles Mackay published 1841 and 1852

remain sceptical don't run with the herd !

Cardew

cepheus wrote: »

I don't pretend to know who is correct in the 'man made global warning' debate.

However if I gave you the same graph with the instead of the blue line representing CO2 concentration, it represented, say, banana production, would you conclude that banana production was the cause of global warming?

Ben84

Cardew wrote: »

I don't pretend to know who is correct in the 'man made global warning' debate.

However if I gave you the same graph with the instead of the blue line representing CO2 concentration, it represented, say, banana production, would you conclude that banana production was the cause of global warming?

No, I wouldn't connect the two because banana production doesn't make any sense as the cause. Carbon dioxide however does make sense. It's one of the planet's atmospheric gases, which gives it a plausible method for affecting the climate.

Carbon dioxide is also well known for absorbing and retaining energy in the wavelengths emitted by the sun. It's not a theory, it's well observed. We can recreate this in the lab (I've done it myself) by shining a steady rate of infrared radiation from a hot object through a glass jar filled with air, and using an infrared camera to display the energy passing through on a TV screen. As we add carbon dioxide to the jar the heat patch on the TV screen gets smaller and dimmer, until eventually it's hardly visible. The carbon dioxide is absorbing the energy.

These two things were our starting point to suspect it, and comparison of the past carbon dioxide levels and temperature has found a very strong relationships between the two.

I have already linked to this, so apologies for not showing anything new, but it shows what I'm talking about extremely well:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/pastcc_fig1.html

Although we mostly see the very end of this graph, the connection of the two trends is a very strong one and has been reproduced many times in the past. The graph itself was not the original evidence however, it was never a case of two unrelated things happpening at the same time, the connection was suspected before the graph was plotted.

geordie_joe

Ben84 wrote: »

Carbon dioxide however does make sense. It's one of the planet's atmospheric gases, which gives it a plausible method for affecting the climate.

It only makes up 0.35% of the atmosphere, therefore it's effect on the climate is negligible.

cepheus

However if I gave you the same graph with the instead of the blue line representing CO2 concentration, it represented, say, banana production, would you conclude that banana production was the cause of global warming?

There is one thing in common to increases in Banana production and CO2 concentration, both have anthropogenic causes. Hence if something has happened in the last hundred that hasn't happened for thousands of years I would conclude that a human based cause is likely due to the rapid increase in human population and affluence. To be reasonably certain one would also additionally need some theoretical basis to distinguish between causation and association, and of course there is plenty of information to support this.

cepheus

from the preface to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds ; Charles Mackay published 1841 and 1852

remain sceptical don't run with the herd !

Very few people are truly 'green', they are still driving their cars and buying the latest gadgets. Now if you don't really want to be different, how about questioning the insatiable craving for growth and the 'rat race' and why we continue to work harder to buy more and more of what we quickly tire and throw away so we can replace it with something else to keep up with the Joneses?

Consumerism and greed is the ultimate herd instinct, really clever people focus on happiness and well being rather than materialism. To be honest I have some way to go myself.

Ben84

geordie_joe wrote: »

It only makes up 0.35% of the atmosphere, therefore it's effect on the climate is negligible.

I think it's more like 0.04% by volume, your figure is ten times too high. However, don't let the seemingly small quanitity of carbon dioxide mislead your understanding of the effect is has on the atmosphere.

Only some of the gases in the atmopshere are able to absorb and retain solar energy as heat in the atmosphere, while the rest have no effect.

Nitrogen (aprox. 78% of atmopshere), oxygen (aprox. 20%), and noble gases (about 1%), which in total are about 99% of the atmosphere on average have no ability to absorb and trap heat. The only reason earth is not extremely cold (minus more than 100c) is due to the ability of greenhouse gasses that make up some of the the remainder of the atmosphere to absorb and retain solar energy as heat. These gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and other less important ones. Carbon dioxide, as I hope you can now see while not a large fraction of the total atmosphere is a significant fraction of the greenhouse gases.