What Do We Think About Climate Change

Discussion in 'All Things Boats & Boating' started by Pericles, Feb 19, 2008.

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  1. masalai
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    masalai masalai

    Rick, I think the global economy and confidence needs to slowly return first and anal-ysts vary between 6 mos to 6 + years to show we are in recovery mode and then being less intelligent than lemmings or yeast - probably back to the old disastrous ways of exponential growth...... and or total war.... before starving to death having consumed all the resources and poisoned everything else..
     
  2. Jimbo1490
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    Jimbo1490 Senior Member

    This is the problem; they used computer models to 're-establish' the likely lifespan (half-life, really) instead of trusting the VERY GOOD studies that had already gone by that showed CO2 only lasts a few years, at most.

    Why did they do this? Because the GCM's could not produce any scary (or at least not scary enough) predictions based on the true life of CO2 in the atmosphere. Another way to look at it is that warmers looked at recent CO2 increases, assumed that this was the cause of recent warming, then tuned the models to make this so, given all the other modeling parameters. The only way the models could replicate the observed warming was if they were programed to show CO2 lasted a lot longer in the atmosphere than ACTUAL SCIENTISTS said that it did.

    C02 last a few years; not 100, 200 or 400 years as some warmers say. Without long-lived CO2, there is no scary warming scenario in our future. Without a positive feedback with water vapor, there is no scary warming either; CO2 can't warm the whole atmosphere by itself since it only comprises a tiny % of the total greenhouse effect.

    Jimbo
     
  3. marshmat
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    marshmat Senior Member

    I'm curious where you're getting a figure of "a few years", Jimbo. Most papers I've come across in the last few years are using a half-life of 30 to 55 years for the atmospheric CO2 decay function. Would you mind citing the studies that have found shorter lifetimes?

    I would likely agree with you that natural carbon sinks would likely be able to absorb a significant fraction of the carbon released from fossil fuel reserves, if we weren't decimating those sinks so rapidly. Deforestation is a huge problem in many countries; bit by bit we are wiping out the forests and other natural systems that would ordinarily serve to balance out the system.

    (Feel free to dispute the following data if you believe any of it to be inaccurate:)
    Current atmospheric CO2 concentrations are around 385 ppm (Mauna Loa readings- NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory - Dr. Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/cgg/trends ) . The Vostok and EPICA cores for the last 800,000 years show a range of approx. 175 to 300 ppm (Lüthi, D et al. (2008): CO2 record from the EPICA Dome C 1999 (EDC99) ice core (Antarctica) covering 650 to 800 kyr BP measured at the University of Bern, Switzerland, dataset #710901 (DOI registration in progress),Siegenthaler, Urs; Stocker, Thomas F (2006): EPICA Dome C carbon dioxide concentrations from 650 to 413 kyr BP, Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bern, doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.472481 ,
    Siegenthaler, Urs; Stocker, Thomas F (2006): EPICA Dome C carbon dioxide concentrations from 423 to 391 kyr BP, Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l`Environnement, Saint Martin, doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.472482

    Reviewing these data sets, minus the political hype from both sides, allows one to draw some interesting observations.
    Some of what I see in the numbers:
    - Sometimes a temperature change leads a CO2 change, and sometimes the other way around; it's impossible to definitively give a "cause and effect" statement
    - Historical major CO2 concentration changes typically take on the order of 1000 years or more per 100 ppm change; average temperature changes are on the order of 10 degrees per 1000 years, at most. Usually, the changes are both smaller and more gradual, apart from a few relatively major changes where major ice ages start and end.
    - The current concentration of atmospheric CO2 is almost 100 ppm higher than anything in the last 800 millennia of ice cores, and this has occurred in the course of a bit over a century.

    I tend to agree with the many climatologists who interpret that last observation to mean that we are so far outside the bounds of what has happened in previous cycles, the CO2 concentrations and water-vapour feedback effects that may have been involved in the past, that we cannot predict with any reasonable degree of accuracy what can happen next. All we can do is to try our best to understand what is going on, refine our models to the point where we can get a general idea of various possible scenarios, and figure out what we can do if one of those scenarios ends up actually happening.

    Maybe our societies ought to give more attention to the deforestation issue.... that problem isn't doing any good for AGW activists, AGW skeptics, biodiversity proponents, or just about anyone else right now.
     
  4. Jimbo1490
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    Jimbo1490 Senior Member

    Matt,

    I'll address each point you've raised in order.

    First here's the citation of the studies about the life of CO2 in the atmosphere along with some apropos verbiage from the OISM website:

    "Carbon dioxide has a very short residence time in the atmosphere. Beginning with the 7 to 10-year half-time of CO2 in the atmosphere estimated by Revelle and Seuss (69), there were 36 estimates of the atmospheric CO2 half-time based upon experimental measurements published between 1957 and 1992 (59). These range between 2 and 25 years, with a mean of 7.5, a median of 7.6, and an upper range average of about 10. Of the 36 values, 33 are 10 years or less."


    The oceans are the major sinks (and sources) of nascent CO2. Right now the ocean is a source; if we stopped all anthropogenic CO2 tomorrow, the oceans would still cause atmospheric CO2 to rise.

    More interesting verbiage to wit from OISM:

    In 1957, Revelle and Seuss (69) estimated that temperature-caused out-gassing of ocean CO2 would increase atmospheric CO2 by about 7% per C* temperature rise. The reported change during the seven interglacials of the 650,000-year ice core record is about 5% per C* (63), which agrees with the out-gassing calculation.

    "So great are the magnitudes of these reservoirs, the rates of exchange between them, and the uncertainties of these estimated numbers that the sources of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 have not been determined with certainty (58,59). Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are reported to have varied widely over geological time, with peaks, according to some estimates, some 20-fold higher than at present and lows at approximately 200 ppm (60-62)."

    58. Jaworowski, Z., Segalstad, T. V., and Ono, N. (1992) Science of the Total Environ. 114, 227-284.
    59. Segalstad, T. V. (1998) Global Warming the Continuing Debate, Cambridge UK: European Science and Environment Forum, ed. R. Bate, 184-218.
    60. Berner, R. A. (1997) Science 276, 544-545.
    61. Retallack, G. J. (2001) Nature 411, 287-290.
    62. Rothman, D. H. (2002) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 4167-4171.
    63. Petit et. al., (1999) Nature 399, 429-436.
    69. Revelle, R. and Suess, H. E. (1957) Tellus 9, 18-27.

    CO2 increases NEVER lead temperature increases; not in the paleoclimate and not recently on smaller time scales. Never happened. Temp increases always lead. Some 'warmers' insist that the ice core data must be wrong somehow (contaminated, homogenized, etc.) so that's why ice cores never seem to reveal the cause and effect relationship they expected. But it's quite easy to debunk that hypothesis using the more reliable parts of the ice core data, namely temp and CO2 concentration.

    Again, from the OISM site:

    "The hypothesis that the CO2 rise during the interglacials caused the temperature to rise requires an increase of about 6 C* per 30% rise in CO2 as seen in the ice core record. If this hypothesis were correct, Earth temperatures would have risen about 6 C* between 1900 and 2006, rather than the rise of between 0.1 C* and 0.5 C*, which actually occurred. This difference is illustrated in Figure 16."
    Slide16.png
    The assertion that present CO2 concentrations are unusual is based on suspect data, where the mid 19th century spike was considered 'anomalous' and tossed out like yesterday's newspaper, instead of included. This is very similar to what Mann, Briffa and Hansen tried to do with the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, in order to bolster the idea that the climate had been remarkably stable before anthropogenic CO2 came along, and that recent temperature increases are "unprecedented". But the real data on historic CO2 look more like this:


    bhonnef1e.jpg

    Again, there is nothing unprecedented about either today's climate or today's atmospheric CO2 concentration.

    Now you are a 100% right on your last point in that here is absolutely no downside to re-foresting the planet. I've mention no less than six times on this thread that we never hear about increasing CO2 fluxes through reforestation when the whole AGW alarm question is discussed. Why is this? Could it be that there is no great political power to be had with implementation of a big tree planting program?


    The US has been re-foresting for many decades now, mostly due to modern farming methods. This happens to touch on another area where the 'greens' have spread misinformation that will actually hurt efforts to re-forest. You see the greens are vehemently against high-yield farming methods, the very methods that have allowed thousand of farm acreage to be idled and returned to forest. For instance a ban of high-yield farming methods in Europe in favor of 'organic' farming methods, as the greens desire, would necessitate Europe cutting down ALL it's forests, and then still import some grain and vegetables, as there would still be a shortfall.

    It's time to admit we are NOT being told the truth about CO2 and climate; powerful political forces are at work trying to convince us to turn over unprecedented powers to the political class in an 'endless war' (a fool's errand, really) against anthropogenic CO2 that will have NO IMPACT WHATSOEVER on climate.

    Jimbo
     
  5. Boston

    Boston Previous Member

    who is that web site funded by Jim
    and who is the guy doing the research being paid by
    if its one of the energy companies
    isnt that like having the tobacco people writing studies about how cigarettes are good for us
    ;-)
     
  6. Jimbo1490
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    Jimbo1490 Senior Member

    Try to bring something relevant to the table this time, instead of the usual trivial innuendo that has so characterized your posts in the past. And use spellcheck, please :D

    From their home page:

    "The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is a non-profit research institute established in 1980 to conduct basic and applied research in subjects immediately applicable to increasing the quality, quantity, and length of human life. Research in the Institute's laboratories includes work in protein biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine, and aging. The Institute also carries out work on the improvement of basic education and emergency preparedness.


    The Institute is entirely supported by donations and grants from private individuals and foundations and by the independent earnings and resources of its faculty and volunteers. It does not solicit or accept tax-financed government funds. The Institute has a modest endowment, no debts, and a policy of incurring none. It is classified by the IRS as a 501(c)3 public foundation. "

    Their position on global warming is anchored by citation of 132 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Do you think the evil oil companies funded all that research too? Golly how did they do it without anyone noticing? :p

    Jimbo
     
  7. Boston

    Boston Previous Member

    in what way is agnotology irrelevant

    if someone presents evidence saying that cigarettes are bad for you
    and they are from the AMA ( American Medical Association )
    and some one else argues that cigarettes are good for you
    and they are from the tobacco company
    who do you thinks argument holds more weight
    and how relevant is there funding and background to the debate

    ( hows my spelling today, girl says Im beyond spell check eh )
     
  8. Knut Sand
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    Knut Sand Senior Member

    Jim, I took a small search, "CO2 lifespan atmosphere"

    If WE assume an average of 50 years, we're conservative egough for you, or what?

    "CO 2 har a long life span in the atmosphere : several centuries"
    http://www.aeronomie.be/en/topics/earth/layers/tropo1.en.pdf

    50-200 years (slide 7 in the presentation).
    http://www.slideshare.net/millerco/a1-08-earth-atmosphere-presentation

    "Variable"
    http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/climate/page/3060.aspx

    "somewhere between 100 and 500
    years. Obviously, not all carbon dioxide molecules
    will stay in the atmosphere that long, but on average
    the duration may be around 200-300 years. Some scientists
    believe that it could be longer than that, others
    believe that the duration is shorter."
    http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00296.htm

    Probably they're also biased, but they operate with some other, higer numbers for the lifespan of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    Ok, in my opinion, at least an average of 50 years of 3% abuse, will remain in the atmosphere, thet equals to x 4,38 the level of CO2, right?
    Sea will take care of a lot of it.
    Plants will do the same.

    But, if we had something that resembled equlibrium before, how much can we push into the storage of air, plants and sea? When will the scale trip over?

    CO2 in fixed, liquid, or gas form has certain mechanical/ chemical/ physical properties, well known, tested and generally accepted. Shall we just neglect/ ignore these? (I mean; adding/ removing any gas to any atmosphere will cause a change in the physical properties).

    Also; as Meanz have stated sometimes (If I recall correctly, something like it anyway): "We are close to running dry, when it comes to the amount of oil available". Will it then no be a sensible thing to alter our behavior earlier, than to continuing to act like a runaway train heading for a gravelpit?
     
  9. Knut Sand
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    Knut Sand Senior Member

    There are some that are rather critical to the statements and scientifical papers from Jaworowski;

    http://www.someareboojums.org/blog/?p=7

    And they seem to hack into his arguments/ statements with an iceaxe....

    Quote:

    "The study of the history of Earth system parameters is an on-going process; an increasing number of laboratories have become involved and interact with each other. As it is the case in any field of science, the state of art is continuously critically assessed and attempts are made to improve the quality of the research. Ice-core information is fundamental for the assessment of one of the most urgent problems of our time. Based on my experience during decades of involvement in this field, I consider the chances as very small that the major findings from greenhouse gas studies on ice cores are fundamentally wrong; and I find the publications of JAWOROWSKI not only to be incorrect, but irresponsible. "​

    Quote end...

    Believe that...Irresponsible..... And that doesnt seem to be a statement from a lightweighter; Quote:
    Dr. Oeschger suspected that the air breathed by the mammoths was there as well, trapped in bubbles for scientists to evaluate.
    He analyzed bubbles of fossil air locked deep into the layers of polar ice in Greenland and Antarctica and developed new methods for gaining information from the ice, including applying radiocarbon dating to this process. He invented the Oeschger counter, a contraption that measures tiny amounts of natural radiation.​
    Quote end.
     
  10. Knut Sand
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    Knut Sand Senior Member

    and how relevant is their funding and background to the debate

    :p

    But your message gets through... Thats the main thing in here, I just get sooooo tired of stating obvious facts. So: Screw the spell check. I have a problem with understanding how some can fail to grasp that what we do; may, or probably will, affect our environment/ climate. Its like drilling a hole in a stone with tap water.....:rolleyes:
     
  11. Jimbo1490
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    Jimbo1490 Senior Member

    But Revelle and Seuss came to the same conclusion back in 1957. This is not wacky stuff; it is a fact that the natural sources and fluxes (oceans) are far greater than incidental CO2 by two orders of magnitude. Does it not make sense to look at these as causes of recent changes?

    Does not the history of both the climate and CO2 concentration tell us the same? What about the spike in CO2 back in 1850? Why did that happen? Did we do that too?

    Jimbo
     
  12. Knut Sand
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    Knut Sand Senior Member

    In -57 was when the books were printed and I learned about CO2 leverl from... Datas not valid today....:(

    Spike of CO2 in the 1850's, Well St Helens did ring a bell.
    Check:
    http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/find_eruptions.cfm
    tick in the year2 1845-1850.

    Prior to these years there were approx 20 years between each recorded eruption, (some lost due to insuffisient reports probably, but anyway...) then in a short period of 5 years there are 15-17 eruptions reported...? This might be enough to give a peak measure, and the nature would be able to handle it pretty quickly (plants/ sea)
     
    Last edited: Jan 15, 2009
  13. Jimbo1490
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    Jimbo1490 Senior Member

    Then why not attribute all the increases to volcanic eruptions? No, you only want to use them as an excuse to explain what is unexplainable within your hypothesis. Global atmospheric CO2 spikes are not caused by Volcanic eruptions, which are basically large local events. Furthermore, if you look at the years around 1850 at the site you provided, there was not an unusually great amount of volcanic activity. I'll play the ******** card here, Knut. Nice try, though

    Jimbo
     
  14. Knut Sand
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    Knut Sand Senior Member

    Did a check on Revell and Seuss, seem they wer in a nice crowd with pretty bright people, to quote:
    Revelle did not at first recognize the full significance of his work. He made a calculation in which he assumed that industry would emit CO2 at a constant rate (like most people at the time, he scarcely grasped how explosively population and industry were rising). This gave a prediction that the concentration in the air would level off after a few centuries, with an increase of no more than 40%. Revelle did note that greenhouse effect warming "may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially." He also wrote that "Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future."​
    Unquote.

    That last lines there...?

    Check here for further information:
    ( http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#N_2_ )
     

  15. marshmat
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    marshmat Senior Member

    Hi again Jimbo and KnutS :)

    My opinion, Jimbo, is that you're entitled to believe whatever you like. After 126 pages I think it's fairly obvious that you believe that human impact on the global climate is negligible. There are plenty of people who share your belief on this issue. But the planet doesn't care what any of us believe; it's only affected by what we do.

    The odds are- simple demographics- that I will still be around in 2060, probably longer. I'm not sure how many of the other forum members can say that. But it's a major factor in how I approach issues like this. If I decide to have kids, they'll have to live with whatever we've left for them in 2090 or so. To me, that's enough of a reason to invoke the precautionary principle: Since we can't prove that our emissions are harmless (indeed, the general consensus is that our emissions are at least somewhat harmful), we have an obligation to do everything we can to minimize whatever unknown, unpredictable effects we might be having.

    I'm doing what I can to help. My carbon emissions right now are about half the Canadian average. I'm working to promote renewable energy sources, efficient buildings, etc. I insist on responsibly harvested wood for my projects.

    I don't try to convince 20th-century skeptics anymore- it's not worth the time or effort. I just do my part to find solutions that will allow our society to survive into future generations. I don't think anyone can oppose that goal. Can you?
     
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