Nasa says no global warming

We can't even agree in which direction they are lying. At least we agree they are lying.

 

we probably agree on at least one other thing, the environmental movement has failed completely. We are going to agree in two different directions again but they have failed. For the most part scientists prided themselves on doing "pure" research, often times the less application the research had in the real world the more prestigious the position was considered. Species were dropping like flies and some fool was spending hard to come by conservation dollars building a luxury home for an x curcus elephant cause little Billy and Jimmy would beg there parents to take them to the Zoo and buy them a snow cone. City's loved to fund there big fluffy animals. Meanwhile we were developing a point of no return situation like we are in now. We are going to loose a lot of species even assuming we can turn this thing around. Where was mainstream science when all this was happening. Failing to scream loud enough they were so worried about there reputations if they predicted to high. The IPCC has consistently predicted low, generally you can find that across the board the actual data sits at the top end of previous predictions. When they predict say a 3~4°C rise in temps by the end of the century you can take a pretty safe bet we're going to see those increases by about mid century.

There's lots of numbers to predict that in 20 years all large species will be on the red list, there's even more to suggest that 30 years after that 1/2 of those will be extinct. Even right now 70% of flowering plants are in decline and 100% of arachnids are on the decline. 100% of amphibians, nearly 100% of corals and the list just seems endless. But where were the scientists/biologists when the crisis was young, they should been out screaming at the top of there lungs and not glossing **** over like most of them are still doing.

 

Species have always been "dropping like flies", even flies.

Except this one: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9008000/9008585.stm

Earth is God's test tube.

 

which is the major sticking point I've been trying to get across for some time now. Its the rate of extinctions that is increasing and fast. I believe it surpassed the rate of species loss in the last great extinction about twenty or thirty years ago, been increasing steadily since Roman times but lately its really taken off. Went from about 1 species every 20 minutes 15 years ago to about 1 every 12 or something like that just last year. Granted those are estimates and the precise numbers are difficult to know but from numerous sources and using multiple methods of calculating it seems generally correct. If you go back say 25 years the numbers are something like 1 every 35 minutes. So the rate of species loss is going up in a nonlinear curve that can be pretty well tied to the human population.

I started a paper that I didn't have time to finish called "the failure of trickle down environmentalism" a while back. A lot of these numbers and there sources are in that work. Some of it at least is in a thread somewhere in this thing

 

This planet will eventually be snuffed out like a match-head. Get your affairs in order.

 

Everything has an end. But I have no doubt the planet and civilization will outlast me, doomsayers notwithstanding.

 

your right Troy, in your lifetime you probably won't see the ecosystems collapse. Most extinction events took place over thousands of years. This one is highly accelerated, rememeber that part about how we are changing the atmospheric chemistry 10 times faster than in the last extinction event, likely to take only a few hundred years this time. which means, if you listen to folks like DR J Jackson the oceans have about max 20 or so years left before going aerobically stratified, from there its just a mater of if we curb CO2 output or not. Probably not, which means maybe till the end of the century. Still extraordinarily fast but no, not in our lifetimes. Or at least thats what the basic prediction is. I'd be more inclined to say things will progress a bit faster. The IPCC predicts +3~4°C by end of century and they are historically estimating low, so its probably a safe bet to say it will either get hotter than that by the end of the century, or that it will get that hot sooner. Same difference and the outcome is the same. Mid century some time. Not in our lifetimes but our kids will sure wonder what the hell we were thinking.

 

No argument from me, Boston. There's no question the world will still be here for my grandchildren. The question is what kind of shape it will be in.

There's a big difference between believing it'll outlast me, and believing it'll do so in the condition I'd like my grandkids to get it in....

 

Might I suggest, gentlemen, that you both consider an extreme to this discussion.
God or nature gave up on the dinosaurs, might that be what is starting to happen here?

Roger

 

Cant speak for Troy but I Don't believe in that kinda God mate. Seems pretty clear we've screwed up the atmospheric chemistry beyond repair. Granted we used the same gasses to do it as ole mother nature herself has used in the past but we speeded up the process at least ten times by feeding all, or at least a lot of the fossilized CO2 back into the atmosphere. If you want to look at it from the angle that its just going to wash us off the planet then by al means, feel free, at least your recognizing the most likely outcome. We've got members who flat out cant get there heads around the idea.

cheers and welcome
B

 

The atmosphere is just fine here. Perhaps if you pulled your head out of your ... .

 

another issue is that some folks don't think before they speak

From the open access site, Realclimate

Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm). The fact that this is due virtually entirely to human activities is so well established that one rarely sees it questioned. Yet it is quite reasonable to ask how we know this.


One way that we know that human activities are responsible for the increased CO2 is simply by looking at historical records of human activities. Since the industrial revolution, we have been burning fossil fuels and clearing and burning forested land at an unprecedented rate, and these processes convert organic carbon into CO2. Careful accounting of the amount of fossil fuel that has been extracted and combusted, and how much land clearing has occurred, shows that we have produced far more CO2 than now remains in the atmosphere. The roughly 500 billion metric tons of carbon we have produced is enough to have raised the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to nearly 500 ppm. The concentrations have not reached that level because the ocean and the terrestrial biosphere have the capacity to absorb some of the CO2 we produce.* However, it is the fact that we produce CO2 faster than the ocean and biosphere can absorb it that explains the observed increase.

Another, quite independent way that we know that fossil fuel burning and land clearing specifically are responsible for the increase in CO2 in the last 150 years is through the measurement of carbon isotopes. Isotopes are simply different atoms with the same chemical behavior (isotope means “same type”) but with different masses. Carbon is composed of three different isotopes, 14C, 13C and 12C. 12C is the most common. 13C is about 1% of the total. 14C accounts for only about 1 in 1 trillion carbon atoms.

CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has quite a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere. This is because plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes (12C vs. 13C); thus they have lower 13C/12C ratios. Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same 13C/12C ratio – about 2% lower than that of the atmosphere. As CO2 from these materials is released into, and mixes with, the atmosphere, the average 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere decreases.

Isotope geochemists have developed time series of variations in the 14C and 13C concentrations of atmospheric CO2. One of the methods used is to measure the 13C/12C in tree rings, and use this to infer those same ratios in atmospheric CO2. This works because during photosynthesis, trees take up carbon from the atmosphere and lay this carbon down as plant organic material in the form of rings, providing a snapshot of the atmospheric composition of that time. If the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 goes up or down, so does the 13C/12C of the tree rings. This isn’t to say that the tree rings have the same isotopic composition as the atmosphere – as noted above, plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes, but as long as that preference doesn’t change much, the tree-ring changes wiil track the atmospheric changes.

Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning. Furthermore, we can trace the absorption of CO2 into the ocean by measuring the 13C/12C ratio of surface ocean waters. While the data are not as complete as the tree ring data (we have only been making these measurements for a few decades) we observe what is expected: the surface ocean 13C/12C is decreasing. Measurements of 13C/12C on corals and sponges — whose carbonate shells reflect the ocean chemistry just as tree rings record the atmospheric chemistry — show that this decline began about the same time as in the atmosphere; that is, when human CO2 production began to accelerate in earnest.***

In addition to the data from tree rings, there are also of measurements of the 13C/12C ratio in the CO2 trapped in ice cores. The tree ring and ice core data both show that the total change in the 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere since 1850 is about 0.15%. This sounds very small but is actually very large relative to natural variability. The results show that the full glacial-to-interglacial change in 13C/12C of the atmosphere — which took many thousand years — was about 0.03%, or about 5 times less than that observed in the last 150 years.

For those who are interested in the details, some relevant references are:
Stuiver, M., Burk, R. L. and Quay, P. D. 1984. 13C/12C ratios and the transfer of biospheric carbon to the atmosphere. J. Geophys. Res. 89, 11,731-11,748.
Francey, R.J., Allison, C.E., Etheridge, D.M., Trudinger, C.M., Enting, I.G., Leuenberger, M., Langenfelds, R.L., Michel, E., Steele, L.P., 1999. A 1000-year high precision record of d13Cin atmospheric CO2. Tellus 51B, 170–193.
Quay, P.D., B. Tilbrook, C.S. Wong. Oceanic uptake of fossil fuel CO2: carbon-13 evidence. Science 256 (1992), 74-79
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the lack of rational in denying these simple truths is astounding

its also hard not to notice the lack of civility, whats funny is that a friend of mine who is a pastor, and who occasionally reads over my shoulder on this thing, mentions that some folks simply require more forgiveness than others.

 

Do you mean rationale?

Uncivil? I posted a smilie.
The sun went down so the shades are off.

 

thats what I meant