The Environment Thread

[kelownabomberfan]

 

 

On a personal note, I have to say that I find it somewhat irksome and insulting when you refer to scientists as fear-mongers, telling whopping stories and creating scams. It's nothing like that - it's simply attempting to come up with the best theories based on the best currently available data.

 

 

BB - thanks again for your response.  Let me clarify - I'm not saying that all scientists are fear-mongers, and definitely not you, that's for sure.  I was referring to the two guys that I mentioned, Hansen and Schneider.  Both of those guys I find incredibly irksome as their fear-mongering is/was off the charts.  Hansen in particular.  His projections are always bordering on the lunatic, and none of them have ever come true.  His editorials are always over the top, calling coal trains "death trains" etc.  If you don't think that what Hansen does is fear-mongering, then I'm sorry, but you're a bit too close to the action I am afraid.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal

 

So while there are many, many credible people like yourself working on the "science" here, there are many more clingers on, hangers on, and pure shysters that are spreading lies, hysteria and lunacy, and the motivation is pure profit.  Al Gore has become a billionaire in the past few years, all thanks to the general public and taxpayers continuing to pour billions of dollars into his "Green" renewable energy.  And kudos to him.  He worked hard to create this hysteria and bring these rivers of cash flowing into his coffers.  I just think that a lot of those billions going to "fight" this issue could be better spent elsewhere.  That's where I agree with 17 to 85 and Bjorn Lomborg.  If this is actually happening, ie man-made climate change, then let's get off fossil fuels and on to nuclear as fast as possible.  At least nuclear is another form of energy that actually has a pay-back, and isn't a total drain on public coffers.

 

The UN has also played a huge role in fear-mongering, with absolutely zero accountability.  In 2005, they said that by 2010 there would be 50 million "climate refugees" roaming the earth looking for a new place to live, as man-made climate change would make their homes unlivable.  That never happened, and the website was just quietly taken down, with no repercussions, and no punishment for the perpetrators of this massive lie.  And that's what I really find "irksome" - if the "science" on AGW is so "solid", then why do all of these shysters have to create these massive lies, and why is there such repression and cruelty directed to anyone who questions this hypothesis?  Why? 

 

So there you go.  I have to say that the discourse on this thread has been fantastic and the respect shown to both sides is admirable.  Usually on other sites I visit, within seconds of anyone stating "I see that this man-made climate change thing isn't panning out as per what we were told" and within minutes they are descended on and called all the usual stupid names like "denier" and "right wing nutjob" etc.  So it's good to see that we can separate the debate from the personalities here, and refrain from insulting each other.  That being said, I will still refer to Al Gore and David Suzuki as "warm-mongers", because I really have zero respect for either of those two, especially since they talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.

[kelownabomberfan]

 

Are you seriously telling me that because we didn't directly observe an event, we can't know anything about it?

 

 

No, what I said was that we've only been able to accurately map and study the earth's climate, weather and ice at our polls for an extremely brief period of our entire history.  That's why it "irks" me whenever there is a hurricane that manages to make landfall (and for some reason, there haven't been that many, though I was told in 2005 by all of the "scientists" that hurricanes and tornadoes were only going to get more frequent and bigger in intensity, so weird that didn't happen) that this hurricane was "the strongest in recorded history".  That just smacks of politics to me.  How long has mankind even cared about how intense an hurricane was.  Hurricane Katrina was seized upon by the AGW fanatics as proof that man-made climate change must be real.  Yet it wasn't the strongest hurricane recorded to hit New Orleans, one in 1969 was stronger, and actually, no one even knows how strong it was as it ripped up and destroyed the only weather station that could monitor it.  No one cared about recording the strength of these storms even 20 years ago, as there was no political gain to exploiting the fear of their intensity.  So to me, whenever a "record" hurricane or storm hits anywhere, it's just bogus fear-mongering to me.

 

Your point though about ice cores is well taken though and it is my hope that these studies are actually used to try and prove what is actually happening, instead of just providing more fodder for fear-mongering.  The polar bears are banking on that - weren't they all supposed to be extinct by now?

[The Unknown Poster]

I assume that stronger Hurricane in 1969 was the direct result of the impending ice age.  Good thing we over-came that.

[kelownabomberfan]

I assume that stronger Hurricane in 1969 was the direct result of the impending ice age.  Good thing we over-came that.

 

Tornado activity and intensity spiked immensely in the 1970's, probably due to the ice age that was occurring at the time - LOL.  In fact the 1970's suffered a lot more intense and weird weather than we are experiencing now, from what I've been able to read and find - it's tough to find stats as most people didn't really care at the time, like they do now, as we are all hyper-sensitized to any weather trends and storms, given the billions of dollars of funding on the line and the incessant need of media outlets and money-grubbing shysters to play up every single weather event as "further proof of the scourge of AGW".  The lack of hurricanes must really be perplexing to people like Obama, who was going to stop the rising of the oceans during his presidency.  Who knew they didn't need him around, they would stop rising themselves.

 

 

[The Unknown Poster]

Another expert weight in:

 

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio attracted widespread derision from the people of Calgary after he cited the city’s famously unusual weather as “terrifying” evidence of climate change.

 

“We would come and there would be eight feet of snow, and then all of a sudden a warm gust of wind would come,” DiCaprio told Variety.com, describing it as a “scary” vision of things to come.

 

“It’s terrifying, and it’s what people are talking about all over the world. And it’s simply just going to get worse.”

 

While Alberta winters do seem to be getting warmer lately, sudden shifts of temperature have been a Calgary winter staple for centuries. Known as Chinook winds, they are sudden gusts of warm, coastal air that coarse over the Rocky Mountains, leaving a trail of instant snow melt.

[kelownabomberfan]

[kelownabomberfan]

Another expert weight in:

 

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio attracted widespread derision from the people of Calgary after he cited the city’s famously unusual weather as “terrifying” evidence of climate change.

 

“We would come and there would be eight feet of snow, and then all of a sudden a warm gust of wind would come,” DiCaprio told Variety.com, describing it as a “scary” vision of things to come.

 

“It’s terrifying, and it’s what people are talking about all over the world. And it’s simply just going to get worse.”

 

While Alberta winters do seem to be getting warmer lately, sudden shifts of temperature have been a Calgary winter staple for centuries. Known as Chinook winds, they are sudden gusts of warm, coastal air that coarse over the Rocky Mountains, leaving a trail of instant snow melt.

Well that does it for me. I would expect that Leo is going to give up his private jets and his wild supermodel parties and live like a monk now, given what he saw happening in Calgary. I mean, warm winds are coming in and melting snow in the middle of winter. The world is definitely ending.

[The Unknown Poster]

Financial Post (From October)

 

Details of two international agreements were released on Monday. One, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which reduces trade barriers between 12 signatories, including Canada, got lots of ink. The other, which purports to control global weather, end the era of fossil fuels, and place all human activity under bureaucratic control, got very little.

 

The pretensions of the latter text, released by the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, ADP, which is assigned to come up with an agreement to put to the vast UN climate meeting in Paris in December, are mind-boggling. The fact that they attracted little attention means either that the media and public have no idea of the climate agenda’s implications, or that nobody takes the agenda seriously. Probably both. After all, the UN has been promoting the “urgent threat of climate change” for more than 25 years.

 

The Paris text’s most significant feature is its lack of detail. It starts with the suggestion that the parties recognize “the intrinsic relationship between climate change, poverty eradication and sustainable development.”

 

But although the relationship may be intrinsic, it is far from clear. Insofar as the promoters of the agreement seek to starve poor countries of financing for “maladaptive” fossil fuel development, they are promoting poverty. Developing countries want nothing to do with having wind and solar foisted on them. They are gung ho for coal. They are also interested in the annual US$100 billion of handouts, starting in 2020, that was promised six years ago at Copenhagen but that, true to form, has not materialized.

 

Many countries, including Canada, have committed, with fingers crossed, to emissions reductions targets, but few have specific plans.

 

Not only will a giant interlinked series of new bureaucracies oversee programmes to regulate the climate and encourage appropriate technology and development to end poverty. They will negotiate these joint wonders while ensuring sensitivity to women, natives and the disabled. Their call to action claims to be based on “the best available scientific knowledge,” yet it also incorporates “traditional” — that is, distinctly non-scientific — knowledge. Among additional “preambular paragraphs” being considered is a reference to “Mother Earth.” This is not just a spiritual add-on. As a provider of “environmental services” Gaia needs to be paid. Since she has no bank account, the UN is more than prepared to act as her proxy.

 

The document is a compendium of parentheses, that is, wording or issues that have yet to be decided. One parenthesis suggests that the famous 2 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures (since before the Industrial Revolution) that will put us at an existential tipping point might be changed to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Could that be a recognition of the inconvenient fact that global temperatures are refusing to rise despite unprecedented increases in the CO2 that is meant to drive them?

 

The desperation to negotiate a deal is obvious in provisions that signatories may be able to pull out after three years, and that there are no penalties for non-compliance.

 

 

And:

 

As the Paris climate summit approaches activists are gearing up for the final push through November and into December, although the movement suffered a bit of a downer over the weekend. Hurricane Patricia, building as a major hurricane of unprecedented proportions, fizzled as a climate mega-disaster into a mere tropical storm, leaving behind no opportunities for media and negotiators to use it as a pre-Paris PR bonanza.

 

As news of Patricia reached Europe at a climate change negotiating session in Bonn on Friday, the head of the Mexico delegation, Roberto Dondisch, said Patricia was evidence the frog was already in the boiling water. A reporter for Climate House quoted Dondish saying “I don’t think I need to say more about the urgency to get this deal done.”

[Mr Dee]

And the scientists have left the building....

[bigg jay]

 

Another expert weight in:

 

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio attracted widespread derision from the people of Calgary after he cited the city’s famously unusual weather as “terrifying” evidence of climate change.

 

“We would come and there would be eight feet of snow, and then all of a sudden a warm gust of wind would come,” DiCaprio told Variety.com, describing it as a “scary” vision of things to come.

 

“It’s terrifying, and it’s what people are talking about all over the world. And it’s simply just going to get worse.”

 

While Alberta winters do seem to be getting warmer lately, sudden shifts of temperature have been a Calgary winter staple for centuries. Known as Chinook winds, they are sudden gusts of warm, coastal air that coarse over the Rocky Mountains, leaving a trail of instant snow melt.

Well that does it for me. I would expect that Leo is going to give up his private jets and his wild supermodel parties and live like a monk now, given what he saw happening in Calgary. I mean, warm winds are coming in and melting snow in the middle of winter. The world is definitely ending.

 

 

Since it's the holiday season, I'm willing to help look after things while he makes that transition! 

[kelownabomberfan]

And the scientists have left the building....

or in other words, the people saying things that confirm your biases haven't responded.

[kelownabomberfan]

[johnzo]

The world warms and cools. What is very disingenuous is the information provided to the general public does not generally include this information. It doesnt say "at some point, the ice caps will melt no matter what humans do, at sea levels will rise, and coastal cities will be under water. It is inevitable that this will happen at some point in the life of the planet.

The Earth is going to last a lot longer than human civilization on it will. Barring a visit from Galactus, our planet has about five million millennia ahead of it. Humans have been doing agriculture and building cities for less than ten millennia and we've already faced at least one extinction / mass die-off event. There are going to be many more in our future, and we're going to roll a deuce at some point.

So who cares if the seas will rise dramatically at some point in the life of the planet? The germane question is, will the seas rise dramatically while the Earth is still populated by humans?

[The Unknown Poster]

Well the Climate Change people make it seem like this is going to happen imminently.  What's the "scientific consensus" on when we can expect mass deaths from rising oceans and mass refugees from areas where it becomes too hot to survive?  And more importantly, will this 1.5 degree increase that is so horrific going to make us nice and comfy all year long in Manitoba?

[johnzo]

Another expert weight in:

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio attracted widespread derision from the people of Calgary after he cited the city’s famously unusual weather as “terrifying” evidence of climate change.

Should we discredit the consensus of ninety-five percent of the world's climate scientists because Leonardo DiCaprio is ignorant about how Calgary's weather works?

If not, then why the **** does this matter?

[The Unknown Poster]

 

Another expert weight in:

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio attracted widespread derision from the people of Calgary after he cited the city’s famously unusual weather as “terrifying” evidence of climate change.

Should we discredit the consensus of ninety-five percent of the world's climate scientists because Leonardo DiCaprio is ignorant about how Calgary's weather works?

If not, then why the **** does this matter?

 

Is it relevant?  Ofcourse it is.  Because Dicaprio (who I love as an actor) is an environmentalist who uses his celebrity to influence average people.  And its am example of people getting fed information that is either wrong or they misconstrue and then the misconceptions and/or lies get re-told.  We know he's wrong.  We can laugh at how wrong he is.  How many people think he's right?

[kelownabomberfan]

Should we discredit the consensus of ninety-five percent of the world's climate scientists

No, but we can discredit the completely bogus study that gave birth to the above false stat, and state the fact that the above stat is not true, because it's not.

[kelownabomberfan]

How many people think he's right?

I would think a lot of people think that his Calgary story is accurate. If you've never been to Calgary in January and experienced a Chinook, why would you doubt what he's saying? You would swallow it wholesale, kind of like how people swallow the completely false statement that "97%" of scientists are in agreement on AGW. That's just not even close to true. And there basically is no will or desire to correct DiCaprio in the mainstream media, as anyone who does will just get dismissed as a "right wing nutjob" and a "Denier", even though what he said is just complete and utter crap. And that's what "irks" me about the whole AGW movement, they can basically get away with murder, and never get called on anything.

[The Unknown Poster]

Im going to repeatedly claim, everyday that 54% of scientists believe Global Warming is not happening.  Im just going to keep saying it to people.  Do you think it will eventually catch on?

[The Unknown Poster]

Cbc

With human-caused climate change, we puny creatures are having some powerful effects on our entire planet, including one you might not imagine was possible — making it spin more slowly.

The melting of glaciers near the Earth's poles and the resulting rise in sea level is slowing down the Earth's rotation and making each day a little longer, a new study confirms.

Glacier melt in B.C. mountains reaches shocking levels

Photos show Patagonia's massive, melting glaciers

Scientists had predicted it would happen, but to their puzzlement, they couldn't measure much of an effect.

Glaciers contain a huge amount of mass near the poles, close to the Earth's axis of rotation, which runs from pole to pole. When glaciers melt, the meltwater ends up in the oceans, which have most of their volume near the equator, farther away from the Earth's axis.

Just as a spinning figure skater slows down as she extends her arms out from her chest, moving mass away from the Earth's axis of rotation should slow the Earth down, says Mathieu Dumberry, a physics professor at the University of Alberta who co-authored the paper published today in the journal Science Advances.

Study co-author Sabine Stanley talks to Quirks & Quarks

Scientists measure changes in the speed of the Earth's rotation over thousands of years by looking at records of ancient eclipses recorded by civilizations such as the Babylonians, Dumberry said.

Because astronomers know the Earth's orbit very precisely, they can predict exactly what date and time eclipses should have been visible if the Earth were always rotating at the same rate as it is today. But if the Earth were rotating at a slightly different speed, the part of the Earth facing the moon at a given point during the eclipse would be different.

The eclipse records showed the Earth just wasn't slowing down as much as scientists expected as the glaciers melted, based on our most recent understanding of different factors that affect the Earth's rotation. Those include:

The rise in the Earth's crust near the poles once it was no longer pressed down by the weight of ice sheets from the last ice age – a phenomenon called post-glacial rebound that tends to speed up the Earth's rotation.

The pull of the moon, which tends to slow down the rotation.

The numbers just didn't add up, and scientists couldn't explain why.

'Like a hamster in a wheel'

The new study, led by Jerry Mitrovica, a professor of geophysics at Harvard University, found there was a piece missing. We only directly observe the rotation of the Earth's surface, but the Earth's liquid core doesn't rotate at the same rate.

"It's like a hamster in a wheel," Dumberry said. "The hamster runs in one direction and the wheel [turns] in the other."

Changes in the rotation of the Earth's core can be detected by changes in the Earth's magnetic field.

"Earth's core has accelerated," Dumberry said. "It has been moving slightly faster in the past 3,000 years."

The researchers added that missing piece of information to their calculations, along with the latest tide gauge and satellite data about the amount of sea-level rise and post-glacial rebound. They found glacier melt due to climate change since the industrial revolution has caused the Earth to slow down exactly as they had predicted.

How much? Don't expect too much extra time on your hands — researchers predict that a century from now, Earth's slower rotation will make each day 1.7 milliseconds longer.

[kelownabomberfan]

Im going to repeatedly claim, everyday that 54% of scientists believe Global Warming is not happening.  Im just going to keep saying it to people.  Do you think it will eventually catch on?

No, you will be just shouted down and called names.

Now if you walked around saying that man-made climate change was causing 20% of people to spontaneously combust, and you produced a bogus "study" to back up your claim, you could probably have Obama tweeting it by sundown and NASA posting it on their website by Monday.

[17to85]

 

 

There was tree core studies done as well to learn about climate over long periods of time.  But ofcourse, both sides believe the results serve as evidence to their claims.  Someone made the point that we only have concrete weather studies for a pretty brief period of time.  I think thats an important point.  And KBF's links to the "Ice Age" stuff from the 70's....its exactly what we were taught in school.  I was very young and terrified.  I remember going home and asking my parents if we were really going to all die in an ice age and could we please move south.

 

I think we all agree we should be kind to the earth and attempt to develop better technology to this end.  But Im still on the side that the Climate Change guru's accept speculation as fact and we should temper the zeal a bit.

and when there are two sides arguing about what the data means and one side has 90% of the support then you simply write off the 10% as quacks. Science isn't opinion, if the 10% had valid interpretations they would be taken more seriously. This is how science works. For a hypothesis, test hypothesis and data either confirms or refutes hypothesis, other scientists try and replicate the data gathered and determine if your experiment was good or bad. Science is always questioning everything and it's always adapting. That's why the ice age stuff from the 70s disappeared. Not because science is wrong, but because science is always searching for the correct answer. Always. Your arguments really do sound a lot like the creationists, which is arguing from a point of not understanding the scientific process. 

 

Well I suppose we could employ the "he who yells loudest is right" or the "I say you suck so Im right" methods.  But realistically, there is science on both sides.  if you're saying you'd write off 10% of scientific study or result, I'd say you're simply being very closed minded.

 

Scientists can certainly tie lay people up in knots.  But there has been plenty of easy to understand opinion and information in this thread that makes it pretty silly to swallow the Global Warning stuff without a second thought.  By that token, if we were able to have this discussion in the 70's you'd be telling dismissing me and others when we questioned if we really were entering an Ice Age.  You'd say ofcourse we are, the "scientists" say so.

 

The world warms and cools.  What is very disingenuous is the information provided to the general public does not generally include this information.  It doesnt say "at some point, the ice caps will melt no matter what humans do, at sea levels will rise, and coastal cities will be under water.  It is inevitable that this will happen at some point in the life of the planet.  So anyway...we sill think we can hold that off for awhile by doing this...."  they dont frame it like that.  They frame it like "we can stop this from happening."  You cant stop it from happening. 

 

So at what point do you think there is a limit to the expense of trying?  Especially versus (as others have pointed out) saving lives right now at a fraction of the cost?

 

Do you really think all life on earth will end due to man-made global warming in the next 100 years?  I dont.  I hope I live for another 100 years and you do too...so I can say I told you so. 

 

Are you paying attention? I've already said my piece on the idea of doom and gloom and the politicizing of it, but you really come across like you have no concept of the scientific method and how people can claim to have science on their side but are doing it wrong. Here's an example, first year chemistry lab we were doing an experiment meant to show the conservation of matter, well my results came back and the thing lost some matter somewhere. Now I coulda tried to say "see the principle is bunk, I scienced the **** out of it and here's the results" Instead the prof gave me a poor mark for ******* something up. This is why I bring up the creationist comparison. There's  people who think they have science on their side when they say evolution doesn't happen, but it's bad science. It's the same when people deny that global warming is happening. Hell let's not even call it global warming, that's an old term, the correct term is climate change because lots of things happen when the climate changes it's not just warming. We can argue about the impact CO2 has on it, we can argue about what should be done about it, but arguing that it's not happening is a fools argument that has no sound basis in science. 

 

Here's the thing, the climate could start to cool all on it's own despite the increased number of greenhouse gases, that doesn't make the science wrong, just means something else happened. 

[The Unknown Poster]

Sorry stopped reading when you started insulting me. Don't need a science lesson from you. As far as paying attention I don't care nearly enough to recall which poster posted what other then a couple. By the same token i assume you don't pay attention to what I post either considering the direction your post was going. So we're even!

[kelownabomberfan]

I wanted to add that if you did put out a study about AGW causing spontaneous combustion, you can bet within hours Al Gore would be out peddling carbon credits to cover the CO2 released when you are on fire, and within two weeks he'd have a billion dollar "spontaneous combustion" insurance fund and Apple Computer buying insurance for all of its employees.

[The Unknown Poster]

#BREAKING: #Parisagreement adopted by nearly 200 countries glbn.ca/VO54d