The Environment Thread

[Wanna-B-Fanboy]

I can't believe I am even making this Thread... 

 

But, it seems to have taken over the politics Thread so I figured we can hash this out here (though the way the conversation was heading about AGW, maybe it should have stayed in the Politics thread...

 

 

So here we go, let's have at it!

 

 

I believe there is overwhelming evidence in AGW and it is a vocal, self-serving minority of the scientific community that derail and muddy up the issue so we can not act in a constructive manner to curtail this global thread.

Edited January 2, 2023 by Wanna-B-Fanboy

[iso_55]

Maybe if you defined the term & give us a bit of background behind it that would help. 

[kelownabomberfan]

I believe that the climate is always changing. I also think that billions upon billions of dollars already spent have been a massive waste of resources that could have been spent in many many other ways to benefit mankind. Is man generated CO2 affecting the climate? Maybe. Let's actually prove it first, then see if we can slow or stop it. Meanwhile millions of Africans can be brought out of poverty. Save them first. Then waste money on unproven hypotheses.

[The Unknown Poster]

One of the problems is you either hve to embrace it or be called a denier. No in between.

And I think they've hoodwinked some people into thinking we can stop the ice from melting. The earth has been hit and cold many times and will continue to be so. No matter what we do eventually the ice will melt. And eventually it will freeze again.

[RagingIce]

Maybe if you defined the term & give us a bit of background behind it that would help. 

 

Basically global warming caused by humans

[RagingIce]

One of the problems is you either hve to embrace it or be called a denier. No in between.

And I think they've hoodwinked some people into thinking we can stop the ice from melting. The earth has been hit and cold many times and will continue to be so. No matter what we do eventually the ice will melt. And eventually it will freeze again.

 

There is plenty of evidence that the current warming trend is both more severe and more rapid than the natural cycle of warming and cooling that the Earth has undergone historically.

 

I find this defeatist attitude very depressing. Did not humanity act quickly to save the ozone layer from CFCs? Granted that was a much smaller issue as our lives weren't dependent on CFCs, but the point still stands that humanity can act with self preservation in mind when we put our minds to it.

[The Unknown Poster]

I'm not opposed to reducing emissions in a reasonable way.

But when we accept that the earth is also experiencing a warming trend independent of human impact, to what end do we spend billions? We cannot stop the earth from warning.

[kelownabomberfan]

One of the problems is you either hve to embrace it or be called a denier. No in between.

And I think they've hoodwinked some people into thinking we can stop the ice from melting. The earth has been hit and cold many times and will continue to be so. No matter what we do eventually the ice will melt. And eventually it will freeze again.

 

There is plenty of evidence that the current warming trend is both more severe and more rapid than the natural cycle of warming and cooling that the Earth has undergone historically.

 

I find this defeatist attitude very depressing. Did not humanity act quickly to save the ozone layer from CFCs? Granted that was a much smaller issue as our lives weren't dependent on CFCs, but the point still stands that humanity can act with self preservation in mind when we put our minds to it.

No there isn't plenty of evidence. This just isn't true. And the fact that people like you have swallowed this malarkey wholesale is what is truly depressing.

[iso_55]

I'm not opposed to reducing emissions in a reasonable way.

But when we accept that the earth is also experiencing a warming trend independent of human impact, to what end do we spend billions? We cannot stop the earth from warning.

When Third World countries buy in, then I'll support it. 

[RagingIce]

 

 

One of the problems is you either hve to embrace it or be called a denier. No in between.

And I think they've hoodwinked some people into thinking we can stop the ice from melting. The earth has been hit and cold many times and will continue to be so. No matter what we do eventually the ice will melt. And eventually it will freeze again.

 

There is plenty of evidence that the current warming trend is both more severe and more rapid than the natural cycle of warming and cooling that the Earth has undergone historically.

 

I find this defeatist attitude very depressing. Did not humanity act quickly to save the ozone layer from CFCs? Granted that was a much smaller issue as our lives weren't dependent on CFCs, but the point still stands that humanity can act with self preservation in mind when we put our minds to it.

No there isn't plenty of evidence. This just isn't true. And the fact that people like you have swallowed this malarkey wholesale is what is truly depressing.

 

 

The scientific consensus doesn't really support your view.

 

The scientific consensus is that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, and that it is extremely likely (meaning, of at least 95% probability or higher) that humans are causing most of it through activities that increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels. In addition, it is likely that some potential further greenhouse gas warming has been offset by increased aerosols.^[2][3][4][5]

[The Unknown Poster]

What's the over/under on this thread being locked?

No ones mind is going to be changed.

[kelownabomberfan]

Here's one of the many reasons that I think the IPCC is just another corrupt money-sucking UN organization, bent on grabbing as much power as possible without holding those nasty things called "elections":

 

[The Unknown Poster]

Well yeah, their whole schtick falls apart without the fear mongering.  When I was a kid, we were told we were entering an ice age.  Go figure.

[Atomic]

An over abundance of greenhouse gases will cause global warming. Of course, that's obvious.

Humans are producing more and more greenhouse gases.

Therefore we are contributing to global warming.

What's the debate?

[kelownabomberfan]

Well yeah, their whole schtick falls apart without the fear mongering.  When I was a kid, we were told we were entering an ice age.  Go figure.

 

I was told we were all going to die of acid rain.  If we even lived long enough, as Reagan and Thatcher, those evil right-wing capitalists, were going to destroy the world with nukes.

[The Unknown Poster]

MYTH:  Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus causing most of the earth's warming of the last 100 years.

 

FACT:  Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO₂ content of the atmosphere has increased by about 120 part per million (ppm), most of which is likely due to human-caused CO2 emissions. The RATE of growth during this century has been about 0.55%/year. However, there is no proof that CO₂ is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO₂ levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO₂ as a result.

[kelownabomberfan]

An over abundance of greenhouse gases will cause global warming. Of course, that's obvious.

 

 

Is it, though?

 

Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer: In Defense of Carbon Dioxide The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature.

 

 

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

 

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA's and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn't the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

 

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a "pollutant" in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants.

 

Using energy from sunlight—together with the catalytic action of an ancient enzyme called rubisco, the most abundant protein on earth—plants convert carbon dioxide from the air into carbohydrates and other useful molecules. Rubisco catalyzes the attachment of a carbon-dioxide molecule to another five-carbon molecule to make two three-carbon molecules, which are subsequently converted into carbohydrates. (Since the useful product from the carbon dioxide capture consists of three-carbon molecules, plants that use this simple process are called C3 plants.) C3 plants, such as wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and many forage crops, evolved when there was much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today. So these agricultural staples are actually undernourished in carbon dioxide relative to their original design.

 

At the current low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, rubisco in C3 plants can be fooled into substituting oxygen molecules for carbon-dioxide molecules. But this substitution reduces the efficiency of photosynthesis, especially at high temperatures. To get around the problem, a small number of plants have evolved a way to enrich the carbon-dioxide concentration around the rubisco enzyme, and to suppress the oxygen concentration. Called C4 plants because they utilize a molecule with four carbons, plants that use this evolutionary trick include sugar cane, corn and other tropical plants.

 

Although C4 plants evolved to cope with low levels of carbon dioxide, the workaround comes at a price, since it takes additional chemical energy. With high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, C4 plants are not as productive as C3 plants, which do not have the overhead costs of the carbon-dioxide enrichment system.

 

That's hardly all that goes into making the case for the benefits of carbon dioxide. Right now, at our current low levels of carbon dioxide, plants are paying a heavy price in water usage. Whether plants are C3 or C4, the way they get carbon dioxide from the air is the same: The plant leaves have little holes, or stomata, through which carbon dioxide molecules can diffuse into the moist interior for use in the plant's photosynthetic cycles.

The density of water molecules within the leaf is typically 60 times greater than the density of carbon dioxide in the air, and the diffusion rate of the water molecule is greater than that of the carbon-dioxide molecule.

So depending on the relative humidity and temperature, 100 or more water molecules diffuse out of the leaf for every molecule of carbon dioxide that diffuses in. And not every carbon-dioxide molecule that diffuses into a leaf gets incorporated into a carbohydrate. As a result, plants require many hundreds of grams of water to produce one gram of plant biomass, largely carbohydrate.

Driven by the need to conserve water, plants produce fewer stomata openings in their leaves when there is more carbon dioxide in the air. This decreases the amount of water that the plant is forced to transpire and allows the plant to withstand dry conditions better.

 

Crop yields in recent dry years were less affected by drought than crops of the dust-bowl droughts of the 1930s, when there was less carbon dioxide. Nowadays, in an age of rising population and scarcities of food and water in some regions, it's a wonder that humanitarians aren't clamoring for more atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead, some are denouncing it.

We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth's atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

 

Mr. Schmitt, an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico. Mr. Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and a former director of the office of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.

 

 

[The Unknown Poster]

MYTH:  CO2 is a pollutant.

 

FACT:  This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is.  CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government has included  CO2 with a number of truly toxic and noxious substances listed by the Environmental Protection Act, only as their means to politically control it. 

[Atomic]

MYTH: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus causing most of the earth's warming of the last 100 years.

FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO₂ content of the atmosphere has increased by about 120 part per million (ppm), most of which is likely due to human-caused CO2 emissions. The RATE of growth during this century has been about 0.55%/year. However, there is no proof that CO₂ is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO₂ levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO₂ as a result.

Interesting argument. I'd like to read more. What's the source on this?

[The Unknown Poster]

Our government is more concerned with fighting the Sun than with fighting ISIS.

[The Unknown Poster]

 

MYTH: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus causing most of the earth's warming of the last 100 years.

FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO₂ content of the atmosphere has increased by about 120 part per million (ppm), most of which is likely due to human-caused CO2 emissions. The RATE of growth during this century has been about 0.55%/year. However, there is no proof that CO₂ is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO₂ levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO₂ as a result.

Interesting argument. I'd like to read more. What's the source on this?

 

That was one of the few points that did not link to additional information though I'd assume one could google to see what other sources might back it up.

 

I got the information from http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=3(I didnt immediately link it because I was hoping to just slip in some myth busting for awhile until someone inevitably found the source and attacked the source rather than the information :-)

 

To be clear, Im no scientist.  So Im not so much taking a side as I am saying the Global Warming people seem damned determined to paint those with questions as negatively as possible rather than be open to different opinions, which raises a red flag for me.  When politicians say "everyone agrees"...its not true.

 

And full disclosure, this is the FOS mission statement:

 

 

Our Goal: To educate the public about climate science and through them bring pressure to bear on governments to engage in public debates on the scientific merits of the hypothesis of human induced global warming and the various policies that intend to address the issue. 

 

Our Opinion: It is our opinion that the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change.   - See more at: http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=1#sthash.X5IVg7Ld.dpuf

[The Unknown Poster]

I would freely admit that on global warming we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.

Charles Alexander, Time magazine science editor

 

A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.

Richard Benedick, deputy assistant secretary of state, USA

[Mark F]

http://www.desmogblog.com/harrison-schmitt

[kelownabomberfan]

http://www.desmogblog.com/harrison-Schmitt

 

LOL - Desmog blog - dedicated to discrediting anybody, especially scientists, who doesn't fall in line with the cultist doom-saying AGW apocalypse.  Oh no!  A scientist who says AGW fear-mongering is nonsense has a brother in law who once pumped gas at Exxon in high school, so therefore he is "in the pay of Big Oil!"  Just a load of total crap.

[The Unknown Poster]

If 97% of scientists thought this and if the evidence was so clear and obvious and if governments around the world were so committed...why such a desire to silence the vocal minority? 

 

Wasnt Harper criticized for "muzzling" scientists?  He didnt throw anyone in jail for not agreeing with his position.

 

I find this the most distasteful element to the left - the "we know better and if you disagree we will silence you...for your own good".  Its okay to stifle free expression when it's supporting a left agenda.  They tried it with Sun News and it was hilarious in it's audacity.  And now Climate Change?

 

Maybe we need to build a Dyson Sphere if the goal is to win a war with the Sun.