Runaway Global Warming Possible!

oðin wrote:
OK. Do you think that first world people will generally be willing to
sacrafice energy-based comfort so that third world people *might* not
have to die 100 years from now?

Firstly, this is a false dichotomy. There are more choices than just
"burn oil, live in comfort" and "don't burn oil, live in discomfort". But
to take your question at its face, no, I don't. People are far to
selfish. So what's your point?


Good point. My comment was is a false dichotomy. It may be possible to
reduce CO2 emissions and still keep a good level of comfort. But I am not
certain that it is possible. And I do not know for sure if we have too much
or too little CO2 now.

Another stupid statement. I know for sure you are going to die. I sure
don't know when.

josh halpern

oðin wrote:
To some extend there will be problems even without global warming, but it
will make those problems a lot worse. Global warming would be a problem
even if population growth stopped today.


How do you know if we are set to enter another ice age?

Yes. Just like 65 million years ago, and to an even bigger extent, 248
million years ago. Even just 20,000 years ago, we had an ice age that
kicked a few species out of the game. Global warming over the next 100
years will not result in those kinds of extictions, IMO. **** happens.

**** happens occasionally, but that doesn't mean that we should cause it.
Everyone will die eventually, but if you shoot someone that argument is
unlikely to impress the court.


Good point. But do we know what the best course of action actually is?

No, but I know several very bad ones, and what we are doing now is one
of the bad ones.

Did you really go to school to learn how to ask these dumb questions?

josh halpern


It may not fly in USA at the mnoment for political reasons, but that
doesn't change the fact that USA could reduce its emissions a lot at a
small cost, according to some calculations even with a net profit. Since
the third world already emits a lot less per capita we don't really have
any exuse for putting caps on them at the moment. On the other hand, if
industrialized countries develop efficient technologies to meet their own
obligations to reduce emissions that technology will trickle down to
poorer


Good point.

oðin wrote:
How do you know that reducing C02 would not lead to another ice age?

IMO, reducing CO2 should only be done to minimize the heavy human
footprint on the environment. At no other time in the history of Earth,
has humanity released so much CO2 into the air.


Why single out "human footprints"? We are part of nature.

Because unlike nature we can alter our behavior at will.

Let us start the odin asks a stupid question count. 1.

josh halpern

oðin wrote:
I agree heartily. Let's change our social and economic dependence on
unsustainable and self-destructive usages of fossil fuels.


How?


Folks could start by using solar/hydro/wind/geothermal electric where
possible. They won't solve the whole problem but could help.


None of those ideas give you what fossil fuels give you.

Marginally true under some constructions.

One word: biodiesel. Or entirely bio-ethanol powered cars. (And no, you
don't really need petrol-based fertilizers/pesticides/huge farm machinery
to grow corn.)


You must be joking! Diesel and ethanol (bio or not) generates CO2. You do
know that right?

Stupid count goes to 2. Irrelevant. Diesel gives higher milage, so in
autos and cars you produce less CO2 per unit of travel. Biodiesel and
ethanol
recirculate carbon that is already at the surface in the atmosphere,
soil, or top layer of the ocean. This carbon circulates between those
three reservoirs ever few years anyhow. Fossil fuels bring deeply
buried carbon to the surface that has been isolated for millions of
years. It then enters the surface carbon cycle, and only leaves it
in a time period of several hundred years.

josh halpern

oðin wrote:

I agree heartily. Let's change our social and economic dependence on
unsustainable and self-destructive usages of fossil fuels.


How?


Folks could start by using solar/hydro/wind/geothermal electric where
possible. They won't solve the whole problem but could help.


None of those ideas give you what fossil fuels give you.

Huh? Around here, the biggest consumer of fossil fuels are the
electrical power plants, burning coal, natural gas and oil. All fossil
fuels. Generate electricity using non-fossil fuel, you save fossil fuel.
QED.



One word: biodiesel. Or entirely bio-ethanol powered cars. (And no, you
don't really need petrol-based fertilizers/pesticides/huge farm machinery
to grow corn.)


You must be joking! Diesel and ethanol (bio or not) generates CO2. You do
know that right?

Sure. But that was not the question. The question was: how do we wean
ourselves off fossil fuel. Simple. Use non-fossil fuel.

"George" wrote in message
news:Wa%Jd.22673$yY6.10868@attbi_s02...

"jonathan" wrote in message ...

"oðin" wrote in message
...
"Some iterations of the models showed the climate cooling after an
injection
of CO2, but these were discarded after close examination because the
temperature fall resulted from an unrealistic physical mechanism, says
Stainforth. In these scenarios, cold water welling up in the tropics
could
not be carried away by ocean currents because these were missing from the
models.

There are no obvious problems with the high temperature models, he says.
The
climateprediction.net team were left with a range of 1.9?C to 11.5?C.
"The
uncertainty at the upper end has exploded," says team-member Myles
Allen."

Discarded only the cooling models? Sounds like fudging to me...

If you know good reasons why the model is broken in some scenarios, it
makes
sense to discard them.

Pffft. Well that is not science. Ever heard of The Michelson-Morley
Experiment? The problem most people had with it was that it *seemed* wrong.
The strength that Einstein had over others was that he took the experimental
result at face value. There were many others as smart or smarter than
Einstein, but Einstein was not entrenched in preconceived notions. Others
wasted time trying to see how the experiment must be flawed. It was not
flawed.


The problem with these models is they don't include
Darwin. Life is becoming a primary driving force
for global climate change.

What the **** are you babbling about now, Jonathan? Becoming? Life has been
changing the global climate, the ocean chemistry, and the very ground you walk
on since the fist microbe released it's first puff of gas into the atmosphere at
least 3.5 billiob years ago. Becoming? Life has been a primary driving force
on the planet nearly since it first coalesced into a planet.


This just shows you don't understand the orders of magnitude greater
effect and influence the emergent property of intelligence has on
this planet. The effect life has is related to the level of niche filling
that has taken place. Life is a far larger variable, by leaps and
bounds, than ever before and is becoming the primary force
for change.

That is a good thing, since it means we are ever more being
placed into the steady hands of Nature.


Jonathan

s

"Landy" wrote in message
...

"jonathan" wrote in message ...

"oðin" wrote in message
...
snip

Number crunching climate change is little different
than number crunching a thunderstorm.

What a wonderful analogy! Can I use that or is it copyrighted?


Sheez~



cheers
Bill

Joshua Halpern wrote:

It was my impression from the article that they stepped the CO2 from
x to 2x. I imagine the ramp up in temperature was from the response
of
the ocean. Are there significant differences if you ramp up the CO2
rather than
having it jump.

Yes, in the real system there is a larger time lag due to the deep
ocean taking a long time to warm up. Eg currently we are generally
regarded as being about half-way to equilibrium with the current CO2.
The slab ocean models generally warm up faster, and therefore probably
don't do that great a job at estimating the shape of a transient
simulation. But as I said, in practice a 2xco2 steady state is probably
a fairly reasonable 100 year transient forecast (noting that a huge
amount depends on the emissions scenario). IIRC the IPCC estimates for
these two values are substantially overlapping ranges.

James

You must be joking! Diesel and ethanol (bio or not) generates CO2. You do
know that right?

Stupid count goes to 2. Irrelevant. Diesel gives higher milage, so in
autos and cars you produce less CO2 per unit of travel. Biodiesel and
ethanol
recirculate carbon that is already at the surface in the atmosphere, soil,
or top layer of the ocean. This carbon circulates between those three
reservoirs ever few years anyhow. Fossil fuels bring deeply buried carbon
to the surface that has been isolated for millions of years. It then
enters the surface carbon cycle, and only leaves it
in a time period of several hundred years.

Very good point about the length of the carbon cycle.

Folks could start by using solar/hydro/wind/geothermal electric where
possible. They won't solve the whole problem but could help.


None of those ideas give you what fossil fuels give you.

Huh? Around here, the biggest consumer of fossil fuels are the electrical
power plants, burning coal, natural gas and oil. All fossil fuels.
Generate electricity using non-fossil fuel, you save fossil fuel. QED.

Where I live, it is all hydro-electric. I hate the idea of using cole to
generate electricity. But not many places are lucky enough to be near water
power potential. solar and wind are dynamic, with no good way to store
energy. Geothermal electric is a great idea for Iceland, but not many other
places...