General Climate Discussion

[eagl]

It's colder than average today... put another log on the fire.

I drove my firebird 2 miles round trip to get dinner because it was drizzling and the chow hall was going to close.  Rather than making me an evil person, I think it proves I act on my beliefs and am therefore beyond criticism

[lazs2]

yep..  been a cooler than normal summer here..

lazs

[Overlag]

yep..  been a cooler than normal summer here..

lazs

yup, last two summer been terrible, funny how 2005 and 2006 hit almost 37c where as the last two years have struggled to get to 30c....

[Angus]

CO2 is not a very good "greenhouse" gas. Water vapor and methane are far more effective (by about 4 orders of magnitude). The intuition of "more greenhouse gas = better green house" is false. It is not necessarily true.

The "greenhouse effect" is usually described as: sunlight can penetrate but cooling infrared radiation emitted by the earth is blocked. This IS complete nonsense. If it was true the earth would get ever hotter and boil. Since the earth has only minor fluctuations in temperature (near steady state) it REQUIRES that the same amount of solar energy absorbed by the earth to be radiated away from the earth.

Most global weather models treat the atmosphere as a slab and calculate the AVERAGED radiation transfer function (as a function of wavelength). Put aside the wrong atomic physics and atom-photon interaction they use, this is a horrible horrible treatment of radiation transfer. Unlike your real glass greenhouse, the atmosphere is built in layers and each type of absorber tends to sit at a different layer. Keeping a steady state as described above requires that temperature gradients exist as the atmosphere below a certain layer must emit in such wavelength and flux that the net energy through the layer is ZERO. Change something in the middle (like more CO2) and you affect ALL layers below and above it and change the temperature distribution in the atmosphere. This in turn changes the molecular and atomic absorption cross sections (highly dependent on temperature and pressure) and your common averaging approximation is shot to hell. 

What this means is that adding CO2 may heat some part of the atmosphere and cool another. Recent calculations that solved the full radiation transfer problem showed that you can increase the CO2 content of the atmosphere by factor of 50 and the effect at low altitude will be less than 0.1 of a degree (centigrade).

The common atmosphere model used by almost all global weather scientists is simply wrong. Everyone was happy with it because it predicted the current earth temperature pretty well. However, when applied to other solar system planets it fails horribly and miserably. It works only on the current earth atmosphere because it was built this way - its power of prediction is nil. This is bad science at its "best" and this is going to backfire against the entire scientific community.

[Angus]

While co2 is not the best greenhouse gas, it is still one, and it works.
With enough you will be able to make impressive temps.
As for the planetary theories...well Mercury should be warmer than Venus and it isn't. And Mars (atmosphere is mostly co2) is warmer than it perhaps should. The moon is perhaps colder while being vastly closer to the sun.
All due to greenhouse effect.
BTW, newest of the news is masive iceshell breakups in Greenland. Must be because of the added weight because of the cooling effect causing massive ice to gather on the top, right?
 

[bozon]

While co2 is not the best greenhouse gas, it is still one, and it works.
With enough you will be able to make impressive temps.

No. That's the whole point - you can't, even if you multiply its atmospheric abundance by 50. The calculation used by global weather models are flat out wrong.

As for the planetary theories...well Mercury should be warmer than Venus and it isn't. And Mars (atmosphere is mostly co2) is warmer than it perhaps should. The moon is perhaps colder while being vastly closer to the sun.
All due to greenhouse effect.

It is the greenhouse, but the models miss it by a long shot - which just goes to show that they were tailored to fit earth results and have zero predictive power when you change something by more than a tiny fraction.

BTW, newest of the news is masive iceshell breakups in Greenland. Must be because of the added weight because of the cooling effect causing massive ice to gather on the top, right?
 

I never said there is no global warming. What I say is that CO2 has nothing to do with it and all this effort in reducing CO2 emission is wasted (well, there is the benefit of reducing other pollution that comes with the CO2 producing process).

The automatic assumption that "we are to blame" just derails any intelligent discussion of what to do about it. If it is not man made then the discussion and research should concentrate on how to deal with it - not how to prevent it! This is what I mean when I say that the CO2 nonsense is doing a huge damage. Not to mention the damage to science if we convince everyone to become Flintstones and still the temperatures go up - or if we do nothing, emit even more CO2 and the temperatures come back down on their own.

[Overlag]

exactly right bozon.

we are spending billions a year trying to stop "man made" global warming but what if it isnt us, and this money could be spent on the flood defences, and mass migration of populations instead?

[WWhiskey]

see angus and his bunch don't know how to figure a decrease in temp. over a long period of time, if co-2 levels continue too increase! that would totaly flaw there hopes of a man made problem! you can say man made co-2 has increased all you want but if that is not the cause of temp. change then what diff. does it make?

[Angus]

Did anyone notice that the same bunch that flat out refuse that co2 operates as a greenhouse gas also blame co2 from volcanoes for GW?
And by the way Whiskey, with the ice as an open system (so that co2 quantity can be debated) and a coffin as a closed system (so that it can possibly be proved that pollution is healthy), I'll give you a comparison.
It's about another "debunked hype", bird flu. Here comes a lesson.
"Scientists" (ahem) have apparently been claiming that the bird flu is related to the evil spanish disease which killed millions in 1918.
So, they dug for evidence in corpses that were buried in Spitzbergen. They did not manage to extract any useable matter so it was a failiure.
However, they found a useable corpse buried in ice, in Alaska, and presto, they were right, - more or less.
With the truth founded, they managed to trace down some survivors of the disease and insulate their antibodies which were then tested on active bird flu.
It worked very well, so a cure/vaccine is now in process.
Lessons to be learned:
1. Bird flu on the go would have been a global disaster, so precautions were right. (Asia)
2. Research lead to a result.
3. Denialists were wrong.
4 Ice is a much better system to store things from the past than a coffin 

Then comes the PS, question for you all:
Since the GW issue is related with CO2, there is an effort to reduce emissions. Now tell me exactly, what's good about it?

[lazs2]

angus... first of all..   no one I know of is saying co2 is not a greenhouse gas.. they are all saying that it does not do what the algor acolytes say it does... most are saying that the effect of co2 on warming has about shot it's wad and it has been pretty much a non player.. further doubling will have little or no effect.. it can only do so much.  Like painting a room red.. the first coat doesn't do all that much  the second does all the work and every coat after that does not make it any more red.

The people talking about volcanoes and underground coal fires are pulling your chain.. they are saying that man is insignificant as is Co2.

As for the bird flu.. I dispute that it would even jump species.   I dispute that we could stop it if it wanted to get loose.   What that has to do with the whole man made global warming hoax tho... I don't know.

lazs

[WWhiskey]

the corpse in Alaska had bird flu?   
i wasn't talking about the corpse i was talking about the air around it!

by the way what ever happened to all the fluorocarbons  (aerosol propellent) that we supposedly trapped in the atmosphere for a thousand years?i don't guess the hole in the ozone had anything too do with it disappearing? before the hole itself disappeared. i was also wandering about r-12 so what is the count now that we don't use this anymore? apparently none of these things have made any difference according to you?
if they did then i think praise is in order! and then maybe you should go to the rest of the world and try to get them to go green, you know Libya, turkey, china, Russia, and get off our backs, we are doing the best we can,
 otherwise you could help out alot by turning off your power, nothing Say's going green like sitting in the dark!!

[Angus]

Point was, if you understand it, that matter trapped in ice, say alone in deep ice will stick there much better than in your "coffin" world.
(You could also look for smoke remains in mummy tissues, but I feel sure you don't get this one  )
Now, for the ozone-hole, - well that has completely nothing to do with GW. Nice to see you slip on that one as well.
And Lazs:
Volcanic CO2 is about 1% of human emission for quite some while. You wouldn't care, since you deny the theory anyway, so it always made me chuckle when the theory-denying camp grabbed for this straw.
And for the bird flu, well, Lazs, you may just not have read up. The bird flu virus was tested against antibodies from survivors from the Spanish disease, and it worked just fine. Just as vaccination against cowpox, and now challenge me by saying Jenner was wrong. If you understand at all what I am referring to 

[bozon]

Then comes the PS, question for you all:
Since the GW issue is related with CO2, there is an effort to reduce emissions. Now tell me exactly, what's good about it?

I like to drink beer. I noticed that when I drink, the more I go pee during the evening, the more drunk I am at the end of it. I don't know why I get drunk, but it seems to be related to my urination. Just to be on the safe side, I will stop peeing. To be even safer, I'll stop peeing during the day too because I need to drive and work.

Now seriously.
All scientists that I know that say CO2 is not the cause of GW are FOR reducing CO2 emission. They are concerned with the other pollution related with its production, regardless of GW. Hysteria is a bad adviser though. Reducing CO2 emission by quotas will create stupid things like low-CO2 power plants. The cost of treatment of the CO2 is a significant reduction is efficiency. This means burning even more fuel, depleting its resources and creating more pollution from the other by-products (CO2 is not pollution, it is processed within the ecosystem very well). Imposing CO2 emission restriction will prevent the 3rd world from developing. There are a hundred other bad implications of reducing CO2 emission "just in case" and without thought. In my eyes, the worst of them is the public lost of confidence in science, when nature does its thing regardless of man's ill-directed effort to stop it.

[WWhiskey]

I like to drink beer. I noticed that when I drink, the more I go pee during the evening, the more drunk I am at the end of it. I don't know why I get drunk, but it seems to be related to my urination. Just to be on the safe side, I will stop peeing. To be even safer, I'll stop peeing during the day too because I need to drive and work.

Now seriously.
All scientists that I know that say CO2 is not the cause of GW are FOR reducing CO2 emission. They are concerned with the other pollution related with its production, regardless of GW. Hysteria is a bad adviser though. Reducing CO2 emission by quotas will create stupid things like low-CO2 power plants. The cost of treatment of the CO2 is a significant reduction is efficiency. This means burning even more fuel, depleting its resources and creating more pollution from the other by-products (CO2 is not pollution, it is processed within the ecosystem very well). Imposing CO2 emission restriction will prevent the 3rd world from developing. There are a hundred other bad implications of reducing CO2 emission "just in case" and without thought. In my eyes, the worst of them is the public lost of confidence in science, when nature does its thing regardless of man's ill-directed effort to stop it.

good post

[Angus]

You have one thing good in there Bozon, - when the hysteria for co2 alone blurs the vision, in a case such as the catalyzator. Ok, you have less co2 in each unit of fuel burned, but end up with more fuel burned instead, so the total outcome is the same.
I recall a machine course I did in relation with organic growing. Those "green" guys were professionals in their job, and they were completely against the legalization of the catalizator.
You missed the main parts though, and hysteria BTW is not the only advisor....