Global warming...

[Burgerman]

Well I poked a stick at imaginary freinds, and at politics, etc already. So heres another!

I think that HUMAN influence on global warming is absolutely insignificant. And a I have studied this stuff in great detail. And I entirely agree with 99 percent of this http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html so please read this page with care, especially if you are one of these "save the planet" types!

It says it in more detail and more clearly than I can.

[Martin O Refurbisher]

Interesting!
Shows how to prove anything with figures!

Best,

Martin

[TwoTeasChris]

I'm not sure. The other day I read of a coming mini ice-age due to the sun. 10yrs or 70yrs apparently.
Frost fairs are where the clever money is at.

[Burgerman]

More than interesting. It just shows real science, rather than the overpaid ipcc "scientists" distorted view.

It goes back further, shows clearly that todays temp change isnt unusual, and shows how unimportant C02 actually is compared to the real hugely more important water vapour is.,.

[ex-Gooserider]

To me the big question is not whether or not "climate change" is occurring, but whether or not it is due to human activities...
(Though it is a rather interesting point to notice that the current Politically Correct term has changed from Global Warming to Climate Change - says to me that even the people that believe in it aren't sure what their numbers mean...)

I think it is quite reasonable to say that we can expect climate change, as change is possibly the only constant this planet has known, so why should we expect any different... I am far less certain that it is correct to blame people for it.

One of the interesting things to look at is the sources of all the various "greenhouse gases" and ask how much of each one is coming from human activities, vs. how much is from natural sources, such as volcanoes and other similar "acts of god"... Seems like for pretty much every gas, the amount contributed by people is on the order of under 1% of the total coming from all sources - thus to blame human activity for any resultant change seems a bit out of whack...

Another fun exercise is to look up the list of books published by Paul Erlich (not sure on the spelling) who is generally listed as a "major speaker" warning of coming global eco-disasters... One of the early titles he put out was warning about the coming ICE AGE!

I have also seen some serious scientific argument that suggests that past historical patterns of planetary warming and cooling suggest that we are "past due" for another ice age - with the possibility that human activity may be what is keeping it from happening...

ex-Gooserider

[Neal]

It has been interestsing to me to see recently some of this analysis of what the "real" contributions of the arious greenhouse gases are but i need to see more of where these data are from before agreeing with this arguement. I wholely concur that we must base our decisions of our energy and resource use based on undrstanding what we know is actuallyn going on. Ultimately that means having good data. i don't think we have enough yet to have complete picture for such a complex thing as climate but i think we are getting to the point where we will have the critical data to know for sure. No matter what there is no way we can have any big impact on CO2 rise for some time because we can't live without the energy.

It is rather interesting to look at the past (Pliestocene) climate compared to the past 10,000 years. The rather stable warm climate we have been experiencining for 10,000 yrs seems to be the anomoly and variable and even abrupt extreme change is normal for Earth. Maybe not coincidence for rise of human civilization in this time...The Mt. pinatubo eruption in 1993 had a immediate and significant cooling impact on a global scale. Could be we will end up managing Earth climate by use of various gases. SO2 in the stratusphere blocks solar radiation.

[Burgerman]

One of the interesting things to look at is the sources of all the various "greenhouse gases" and ask how much of each one is coming from human activities, vs. how much is from natural sources, such as volcanoes and other similar "acts of god"... Seems like for pretty much every gas, the amount contributed by people is on the order of under 1% of the total coming from all sources - thus to blame human activity for any resultant change seems a bit out of whack...

ACTUAL figures for this are on that site. Carefully read that page in the link. And instead of the 1000 years "hockey stick graph" that the warmists keep ranting about it goes back much further to show todays warming is not remotely unusual too.

Our addition to co2 about 1 percent of the planets addition of co2. Which is about 1 percent of all the greenhouse gasses anyway... Which is 99 percent water. Anyway plants grow much better as co2 increases, and they just lock it all back up again... Its all bull. Seriously, read that site. And watch "the great global warming swindle" documentary -- download as a torrent.

[Lord Chatterley]

Here's a funny one from Charlie Booker in the Telegraph.

Climate officials officially unhappy

I was naturally intrigued to see the Sunday Telegraph quoted online as reporting that the Department for Energy and Climate Change is showering money on consultants to come up with ways of raising the morale of its staff, because they are “too ashamed to admit where they work”. Although they are “responsible for some of the government’s most important policies”, their ministry is held in such low esteem by the public that this has left them feeling “miserable and disengaged”.
Why had I not read this remarkable story before? Then I noticed that the Sunday Telegraph in question was the one published in Australia. It was reporting on collapsing morale not in our own climate change department but its equivalent in a country where the Labour government’s obsession with solar panels, wind turbines and other green policies has recently led, in Queensland, to the greatest electoral rout in Australian history. This is viewed as a portent for the defeat at federal level of the government of Julia Gillard, whose swingeing “carbon tax” – the one she promised she would not introduce – has been a major factor in its declining fortunes.
Australia is thus the first country in the world where unpopular environmental policies have become a political game-changer, an opportunity we here in Britain have so far been denied by the greenie unanimity of all our major parties.
As for our own Department for Energy and Climate Change, I enjoyed the story of the passer-by who recently saw two of its staff smoking outside in the street. “I thought that contributed to global warming,” he observed to them. “Oh, you don’t have to believe all that tosh to work here,” they replied.

[Sully]

I have to agree that even though this phenomenon is happening, just how much is actually contributed, by mankind? When we look at industrial areas at the turn of the 20th Century the smoke stacks spewed carbon to the extent that often laundry at that time had to be dried indoors so it wouldn't look dirty. Today an awful lot of that is captured.

I don't necessarily think it is bad to attempt to clean up our messes locally and perhaps regionally. But to forfeit all the things that we as humans think we need to continue our existence, is lunacy.

I think it is sheer human arrogance to think we as humans can affect huge changes in the atmosphere of our planet. But then that is simply my opinion, for what little that means.

[ex-Gooserider]

Another interesting point is that ANY technology starts out very dirty and inefficient, and then improves with development regardless of gov't intervention - pollution really represents "waste" so it is in the interests of the manufacturers to improve their processes to reduce that waste, and turn it into a saleable product, or make their product more efficient because your customers will pay more for it... Gov't mandates can cause improvements in specific areas, but are of arguable overall benefit, as they can (and do) divert resources away from other areas where it may have been possible to get greater benefits for the same amount of effort / money...

If you go by traditional law, pollution would also mostly be ILLEGAL - as it is against the law for you to dump your trash on my property, and thus I "should" have the rights to seek legal actions and injunctions / compensation if you are dumping your trash on my land, or my airshed, or in the river that I have fishing rights on, etc... However instead of the traditional approach, we have governments (who are often the worst polluters of all!) that grant permission by law for certain "acceptable" amounts of pollution...

Lastly, it is really increased wealth in a society that leads to concern about pollution, conservation efforts and the like... If you are struggling for survival, the only place you think Bambi looks good is on a plate, but if you are well fed and rich it's kind of cool to watch him, so lets limit hunting.... It's only when people started to be able to afford "back to nature" vacations that we really started to worry about preserving nature... So anti-technology efforts are counter productive, as it is high tech that produces the wealth...

ex-Gooserider

[Burgerman]

It also depends on your definition of a polutant. I have heard warmists regularly call C02 a polutant. Tell that the every bit of moss, green algy, tree, plant or blade of grass. Its their "oxygen"! There is now only a tiny fraction of 1 percent C02 in the atmosphere. Down from some 15 percent+ a very long time ago! Where did it go? Plantlife sucked it all out of the atmosphere and spread over much of the planet, giving out OXYGEN that we need to breath.

All that happens as any canabis plant grower knows is that when you add C02 to the air, the plantlife grows fast and takes it out again locking it away into the wood/leaves. So the greenery on the planet regulates this very well. We burn the oil/coal that it locked away which re-releases the C02. Only for the planets trees, crops, etc to lock it all away again by accelerated growth. All this C02 global warming bulshit is exactly that.

Yes the planet warms and cools quite drastically over eons. If you take a tiny bit of the graph right near the end and point to warming, then so what? Go back a LOT further which the dont show and its significance vanishes in the noise... And this planet spent most of its billions of years massively colder rather than the brief life giving warm periods.

[woodygb]

Yes the planet warms and cools quite drastically over eons.

You don't even need to go back eons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Thames_frost_fairs

[Burgerman]

Yes quite. But I meant masses of thick ice covering much of the US for eg... New york was a huge deep ice field glacier for eg. http://www.newyorknature.net/IceAge.html

[Sully]

Having lived close to those described areas and operated those great tools of destruction like backhoes, excavators. bulldazers etc. I have had the pleasure to dig and paw the earth in a few places in the north eastern USA. Much on my own land back some 30 years ago. Since I am quite inquisitive and working on my own dime I did take the time to look at the earth I disturbed. It is amazing what you can see if you have enough knowledge that your mind is not corrupted by an absolute excess of that knowledge.

I dug through some ancient outfalls from the mountains and glacial till on either bank, I pawed through some mountain streams and found tracks fossilized in rock. Even flown over the Application Mountains looking at the north south troughs then when going through Pennsilvania seeing the general direction of those hills change generally to east and west.

Later a dear friend who got his Bachelors and Masters degree from Harvard for geological studies further explained to me what I described, your thoughts are validated. The CO2 thing the glaciers all took milleniums to occur, and we are at the end (guessing here) of an Ice Age. This planet will not stay static but continue to evolve as it revolves. I think it is sheer arrogance that man thinks he can truly affect this evolution in much more than a minimal way, and that is a stretch.

It is truly unfortunate some scientists think they have to explain every phenominum that occurs rather than study what they have found and record it, let those that come later validate their findings, if the human race continues to exist. And we don't make our own kind extinct trying to validate our own scientific prejudices.

[Lord Chatterley]

Climate rapturists claim evidence contrary to their faith is unimportant-

http://blogs.forbes.com/jamestaylor/

There are two very important implications to this story.
First the bad news - when science was politicised in the US back in the 1960's it suffered a tremendous blow to its objectivity. This was a great loss to us all as science naturally became diverted to the pursuit of politically-driven trivialities.
The good news is - there have been so many scientific reports since the 60's that have been subsequently proven to be nothing more than rent-seeking nonsense that science has lost its credibility - so the threat of a totalitarian society based on the authority of some scientific 'consensus' is now negligible.

LC

[ex-Gooserider]

Only trouble is that since science has lost credibility, seems folks are falling back on religion...

ex-Gooserider

[Burgerman]

Only the stupid ones.

Sir clive sinclair (mensa chairman at the time) said that religion was incompatible with intelligence.

[Lord Chatterley]

Time will tell

LC

The weatherman caught in a media storm

Rogue forecaster brands Met Office 'lying scum' after spat over his latest apocalyptic warning
Michael McCarthy
Saturday, 21 April 2012
It's surely one of the more sensational weather forecasts of the last few years – the prediction that next month will be the coldest May in Britain for a century.
It was splashed all over the front page of the Daily Express on Thursday and doubtless sent a shiver down the spines of many people already fed up with the chilly spring.
But it didn't come from the Met Office. No, this prophecy of a truly out-of-season wintry month came from an independent weather forecaster, Piers Corbyn, using what he terms his "solar weather technique" which involves calculating how solar particles will interact with the Earth. However, Mr Corbyn, 65, who has a degree in physics and runs a company named WeatherAction from an office in south London, declines to disclose his methodology in detail.
He specialises in long-range forecasts, especially those concerned with extreme weather events, and four days ago, in dramatic headlines on his website, he prophesied "the coldest or near coldest May for 100 years in central and east parts with a record run of bitter northerly winds ... spring put into reverse." He added that his confidence regarding mean temperatures in east and south-east England was 80 per cent for them being the coldest in 100 years, and 90 per cent for them being in the coldest five years of the century.
Contrast this with the current Met Office 30-day forecast, which says that temperatures up to mid-May "will generally be close to or slightly above the seasonal average". This is arrived at by using numerical weather prediction, the technique employed by all the world's meteorological services – running mathematical models of the weather on supercomputers.
There doesn't seem to be a meeting point between the Met Office and Mr C, and indeed, if you mention him to the chaps down in Exeter, the response is a world-weary sigh. "Piers Corbyn has never been able or willing to publish," says a spokesman, "detailed analysis of how he forecasts the weather".
Mr Corbyn's response to this is robust. "They're lying scum!" he snorts. "Because basically, whenever I've had meetings and invited them along, they've refused to come."
On his methods, he says: "We've published detailed results, or others have published detailed results..."
But the methodology...?
"We have published certain ideas..."
But not the whole thing in detail?
"Well why the f**k should I? The methodology is owned by the company, right? Why the hell do you drink Coca-Cola when the recipe is secret?"
Mr Corbyn will, though, give a generalised outline. "It's based on the fact that the weather and climate are controlled by activity from the Sun, and its modulation by the orbit of the Moon," he says. "It's a solar-magnetic-lunar system."
Reminded that all the world's national weather services use numerical weather prediction, he says: "Well, what they're doing there is delusional nonsense, because the weather is not controlled by the weather. It's controlled by other things, ie external factors.
"Their calling for more money to be spent on computers is just theft. All it will enable them to do is get the wrong answer quicker."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-weatherman-caught-in-a-media-storm-7665925.html

[ex-Gooserider]

If he's been putting out stuff for a while, should be possible to compare his results with both the "official" forecasts and the actual weather for the time - the key question is who gets it right (or gets closest) most often.... That is really the only thing that matters....

ex-Gooserider

[Burgerman]

Theres a few scientists actually logging weather/global temp/sun output and seeing extremey good corrolation. And getting better at predicting trends rather than localised weather, than the warmists...

[Fulliautomatix]

Science/superstition/fudged figures aside...I fail to see how cutting down 1/3 of the trees, burning the fossil fuels, moving the planets mass around, injecting energy by the use of explosives, driving ecosystems to extinction - and whatever else there is - can not have some effect on the weather/natural order of things.
Mined ewe, most of this is in the last 200 years as humans learned to do really big stuff.

[Burgerman]

Some of it might. But the world a big place and nature is self stabilizing. EG cutting down ALL of the forrests doesent really amount to much compared to all the grasses, lichens, seas, and other things that eat C02 and make oxygen.

And of course, burn all the trees, and it just frees up a little co2 that allows the greenery to grow better/faster and lock it back up again. And if it does cause temp warming that too helps the plant life grow faster/better and further north/south... Its self stabilizing. Same as releasing any energy. It all came from the sun anyway. And who says warmer is worse?

[Lord Chatterley]

Science/superstition/fudged figures aside...I fail to see how cutting down 1/3 of the trees, burning the fossil fuels, moving the planets mass around, injecting energy by the use of explosives, driving ecosystems to extinction - and whatever else there is - can not have some effect on the weather/natural order of things.
Mined ewe, most of this is in the last 200 years as humans learned to do really big stuff.

Of course it has an effect - existence is a plenum - everything effects everything.

The question is - is the relationship causal i.e. is the effect of man's activity a sufficient cause - i.e. a necessary and sufficient condition - to pose a significant threat to man's survival on Earth?

The answer to that question is obviously no.

But let us assume,for the sake of argument, that the planet WAS under threat from man's activities.
Let us ignore all the evidence, the effects of water vapour, and the positive effects of cardon dioxide, the positive and negative effects of solar activity etc..
Let's ignore the threat other catastrophic events, a change in the Earth's magnetic field, asteroid strikes, mega solar bursts, mega gamma ray bursts from an exploding star, let's ignore the hazard of global pandemics and the threat of a looming ice age etc..

Let us just imagine that we did have conclusive and overwhelming evidence that man's activities did pose a threat to man's survival on Earth - we would still face the problem of what should we do - should we ban industry and regulate all economic activity at a cost of trillions and trillions of dollars with no discernible benefit or should we set industry free to provide local solutions to local problems and thereby improve the Earth's conditions that way?

So far, the UK government's 'green agenda' has added billions of pounds to the cost of production, billions that could have been spent on higher wages, better pensions, better jobs, better health, greater scientific research, improved services etc., etc., etc..

The fact is - the imagined threat of global warming is having an actual current economic effect that is killing people now.

This cult of climate change is creating such vast misallocations of capital that it makes tulip-mania seem sensible by comparison.

LC

[Burgerman]

Agreed. X10

Its mad.

[ex-Gooserider]

One of the things that I look at when people are trying to blame human actions for climate change is to compare what people put out to what NATURE puts out... As one example, check what comes out of a volcano (and there's one in Hawaii that has been pumping it pretty constantly for the last several years) in terms of "climate change gases" and compare that to the human output...

Do the same thing for all sorts of other natural processes... Sure, "The Earth is our Mother" but she's also got a real problem with farting...

ex-Gooserider

[nandol]

interesting.,.,..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYUYzYdL1E4

[Lord Chatterley]

It's just the New Left - they've been preaching this nonsense for decades, the energy pessimists have been selling their doom since the Roman era when they thought they running out of timber.
Well, we are not running out of timber, coal, oil, fish, food or any other material resource - we have a whole universe full of resources and we are not likely to run out of universe anytime soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DMS7n-KTnc

"Ecology as a social principle . . . condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands." - Ayn Rand

An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their “natural environment,” but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: “Should one do everything one can? Of course not.” Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.

Ayn Rand, The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 166

In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man’s life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s population grew by 300 percent—which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great masses of people a chance to survive.

If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company):

1900
47.3 years
1920
53 years
1940
60 years
1968
70.2 years (the latest figures compiled)

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “Thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.
[Ibid 278]

The dinosaur and its fellow-creatures vanished from this earth long before there were any industrialists or any men . . . . But this did not end life on earth. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of “equilibrium” that guarantees the survival of any particular species—least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.

[Ibid 276]

Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears . . . .

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

[Ibid 277]

Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.

[Ibid 288]

It has been reported in the press many times that the issue of pollution is to be the next big crusade of the New Left activists, after the war in Vietnam peters out. And just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one.

[Ibid 167]

The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred—many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.

[Ibid 280]

If, after the failure of such accusations as “Capitalism leads you to the poorhouse” and “Capitalism leads you to war,” the New Left is left with nothing better than: “Capitalism defiles the beauty of your countryside,” one may justifiably conclude that, as an intellectual power, the collectivist movement is through.

[Ibid 170]

City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

[Ibid 282]

LC

[Burgerman]

Absolutely true. So why are kids not tought this? They come out of school brainwashed by the ecological bulshit, and absolutely believing that CO2 from my car is destroying the planet!

If anything IS destroying the planet its the population rise from under 3 to 7 billion in my lifetime alone. And I am still alive. And this is a measure of the success of the industrial revolution that is the only way to feed them all.



This shows that we are a plague or infestation. In the end if this rate of increase continues we are doomed! See where you think that graph will be in say 200 years.

[Lord Chatterley]

More people means more traders which means more capital which means more capital goods which means more wealth which means a higher standard of living.

This planet - and humanity - would be better off if the human population increased ten-fold because that would facilitate a greater division of labour - the division of labour is limited only by the size and intensity of the distribution of population [this is basic economics, see Adam Smith - "The Wealth of Nations" 1776].

The greatest threat to developed countries is a declining population not over-population.

People are good - more people is better.

LC

[Burgerman]

Not convinced. Fuel IS running out gradually. It gets harder to obtain, more costly over time. And land is limited. We already couldnt (and cannot) feed the 7 billion here now. As energy gets more expensive, the power needed for industrialised intensive farming required to feed these masses become ever greater problem. Mostly through lack of suitable food growing area. In ONE lifetime (mine) the planet has increased its population from 3.5 to 7 billion. The previous 100 lifetimes went from 1 to 3 billion.

So projecting forwards a few generations will see starvation, wars, and massive fuel/energy needs than cant be met.