Warning: This may be disturbing to the youth and/or self-righteous

[DubiousKB]

People have caused Global warming

The industrial revolution MAY have caused an unnatural imbalance which we, as the catalysts, must attempt to stabilize.  At the very least we as a species (not just particular areas or groups)  need to be educated on our inputs and outputs. 

Perhaps when we realize that ~90% of useless trinkets sold in WalMart are manufactured in the east, and that the east has some of the worst air pollution, we won't buy useless trinkets... But alas, we are all self absorbed humans.... 

[zack1234]

your talking gibberish!

Get off the forum and that will save a tree in Uganda.

The amount of  electricity you have made me use to type this has killed nine polar bears

[DREDIOCK]

I dont know. I only know that when i was a little kid (in the mid-90s), there was a lot of snow in the winters. From early December, it did not really melt til early March. In '99, we got 3 yards of it in January, couldnt get out from the village for 3 weeks. I will never forget that, 3 weeks of silence, peace, was something unique.
There was absolutely no snow in 2007-2008, 2010-2011 and only a very little in the rest of the time, except this year. Mostly rain.
If this rings the bell.

Everything gets smaller the older you get.

Was there really that much more snow? Or was it you were small and the snow seemed big? And was it that you remember specific snow events and those are the ones that stick in your mind.

My Mother and I were just talking about this a few months ago. she remembers thee being more snow when she was a kid.
I remember there being more snow when I was a kid. and together we wondered what I just discribed

I also remember when i was a kid a Cul de Sac that we used to play stick ball,kickball,touch football, etc on. It seemd huge. Large enough to chalk draw an entire base ball diamond comeplete with bases, pitchers mound (we used brown dirt clumps). Foul lines and a line to represent an outfield wall.

I happened to be in the area doing a job just before having that conversation with my mom (which is what prompted the conversation) And man that thing shrunk. The entire thing was only a few car lengths wide and I could have walked from where we had home plate to where we drew the outfield wall in less then 30 seconds.

Same area there is an old old cemetary with a patch of woods we would go into to play soldier.. Seemed very large and covered a alrge area when I was a kid. visited that too. Its only a couple hundred feet square.

Everything shrinks with age

[zack1234]

I stopped reading newspapers and Wikidiot years ago

I have more coin now

[Tank-Ace]

Humans breathing creates more CO2 than ask our cats and factories combined. Just because they're so damn many of us

The fact of the matter is that if humans have in fact significantly impacted the climate, we would have done so at any technology level, and population control will be more effective than green technology.

Volcanic activity (combined) does in fact put our much more co2 than we do. So do cows, and pigs, and other farm animals.


The human impact alone is minuscule, and at most could only exacerbate or mitigate natural climate change. More than the thermometer, we should be watching how polluted our air and water are, and how much garbage we're burying, and how many trees we cut down.

[BuckShot]

Don't y'all know? There was a "scientific consensus" on this...from the same guys who brought us global cooling and the giant snowball theory in the 70s.

[dedalos]

Just a side note:

Trees take in CO2 from the air. That atmospheric CO2 is stored inside the timber. When that timber is turned into a forest product (lumber, paper, etc.), a lot of atmospheric carbon is still locked into the product. If the timber/forest product is burned, no new atmospheric CO2 will be returned to the air. (The net effect is 0 at worst. Think of drawing a bucket of water from a pond and then pouring it back in). Oil and fossil fuels, however, have been stored underground for centuries. When these forms of carbon are burned, new CO2 is added into the atmosphere.

Conclusion - use more forest products. Timber functions as a natural CO2 container. The more trees we grow, harvest and replant to start the cycle over again the better. The only new carbon from fossil fuels needed is  to generate the chemical reactions and mechanical operations required to create the wood product. Fortunately, many paper and lumber mills can take off some of the strain by combusting scrap wood for energy.

    OMG lol.  I lose faith in our species every second lol

[Zoney]

Humans breathing creates more CO2 than ask our cats and factories combined. Just because they're so damn many of us

The fact of the matter is that if humans have in fact significantly impacted the climate, we would have done so at any technology level, and population control will be more effective than green technology.

Volcanic activity (combined) does in fact put our much more co2 than we do. So do cows, and pigs, and other farm animals.


The human impact alone is minuscule, and at most could only exacerbate or mitigate natural climate change. More than the thermometer, we should be watching how polluted our air and water are, and how much garbage we're burying, and how many trees we cut down.

Yeah, and we should start "bleeding" people who are sick too !!!

[Tank-Ace]

Yeah, and we should start "bleeding" people who are sick too !!!

You rather miss the point....

[Zoney]

You rather miss the point....

Actually, no, I didn't miss the point, I was just being obstinate & obtrusive.

[bozon]

Sigh...

Ask yourself this question.  Is Co2 more opaque in infrared than in the visible spectrum?

Yes it is.  Google for the graph yourself if you doubt this.

Thus, does its presence in the atmosphere serve to trap heat?

Yes it does.

Thus, will putting more in the atmosphere trap more heat?

Yes, it will.

There is a lot more to consider, and CFC may well be another contributor, but the basic connection between CO2 emission and global warming is not rocket science.  Alas, a lot of people find even ordinary science difficult.

The part I boldfaced is not exactly correct and most climate models get wrong. CO2 absorbs light at specific wavelengths and almost non between these wavelengths. This effect is called absorption lines. Once these lines are saturated, i.e. all photons very close to the lines wavelengths are absorbed, absorption of more photons, between these wavelengths becomes very inefficient - meaning, a very large additional column of CO2 is required.

How much more, involved a bit more complicated physics and knowledge of the detailed vertical structure of the atmosphere - temperature and pressure, that itself is affected by the radiation transfer through the atmosphere. The basic connection between CO2 and global warming is far from trivial and this is why it is debated. I have seen detailed 3D atmospheric calculations that claim that increasing the abundance of CO2 by factor 50 will result in barely 0.1 degree (centigrade, 0.18 F for the Americans), assuming all other conditions are constant.

We are fortunate to live in a world where we all have in our desktop systems the processing power of what would have been a supercomputer not so long ago.  So if you doubt that human CO2 emissions are warming the planet, or if you doubt that this will have drastic long term effects on the climate, please download and run NASA's climate model software for yourself, play with the inputs, outputs and baseline assumptions, and understand for yourself the various forces at play, the timescales they operate over, and the impact they have.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelii/  Columbia university has a more user friendly version at http://edgcm.columbia.edu/software2/edgcm-climate-modeling/

The basic problem with using computers to solve very complicated problems is referred to as "garbage in - garbage out". Models need to make a very large number of simplifying assumption and choose which physics to model and how. So yes, the code runs and spews out an answer, but did you ask the correct questions? As we all know the correct answer is 42, but what was the question?

More than the thermometer, we should be watching how polluted our air and water are, and how much garbage we're burying, and how many trees we cut down.

I can't believe this, but I actually agree with Tank-Ace.
Something HAS gone wrong with this world!!

[doright]

The part I boldfaced is not exactly correct and most climate models get wrong. CO2 absorbs light at specific wavelengths and almost non between these wavelengths. This effect is called absorption lines. Once these lines are saturated, i.e. all photons very close to the lines wavelengths are absorbed, absorption of more photons, between these wavelengths becomes very inefficient - meaning, a very large additional column of CO2 is required.

But CO2 is not the final heat sink this seems to imply. The CO2 absorbs photons coming from the earth and then re-radiates a photon in a random direction, so it is once again free to absorb another photon. It's the re-radiation in a random direction that decreases the cooling of the surface, since some photons that would have radiated out to space get re-radiated back to the surface. If CO2 absorbed and re-radiated the entire visible spectrum then cooling would be a massive problem since significantly less energy from sunlight would reach the surface. But the reality is that visible sunlight warms the surface, the warm surface radiates infrared, and some of that infrared is the frequency that CO2 will absorb and then re-radiate.

[bozon]

The direction of the emitted photons is not the issue. A small amount of CO2 will already absorb all photons near its molecularlines wavelengths. The energy is re emitted , some as similar photons and some at different wavelenghts. It may as well be directed back to earth, but the point is that this is only a small fraction of all the spectrum emitted as cooling radiation from the earth. It order to absorb the photons at wavelengths not aligned with the absorbtion lines, a significantly larger column of CO2 is required.

[Debrody]

Humans breathing creates more CO2 than ask our cats and factories combined. Just because they're so damn many of us

The fact of the matter is that if humans have in fact significantly impacted the climate, we would have done so at any technology level, and population control will be more effective than green technology.

Volcanic activity (combined) does in fact put our much more co2 than we do. So do cows, and pigs, and other farm animals.


The human impact alone is minuscule, and at most could only exacerbate or mitigate natural climate change. More than the thermometer, we should be watching how polluted our air and water are, and how much garbage we're burying, and how many trees we cut down.

Nonsense.

I mean, its certain that we are in a natural warming up period, but the human impact, industrial activity is enforcing, enlarging it as greatly, the Earth have never been warming up this quickly before.
You can deny it - you wont get anywhere.

Everything gets smaller the older you get.

Was there really that much more snow? Or was it you were small and the snow seemed big? And was it that you remember specific snow events and those are the ones that stick in your mind.

Look, youre right, i was a kid and 3 yards seemed unbelivably huge, as the average was about 1 yard in the previous years. That was a LOT too.
But there is a difference between winter after winter with snow that does not melt for months and no snow at all for many years.

[DREDIOCK]