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Old 14-08-2013, 13:34   #496
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Nope... we all want a better world... its just the %'s that actually will versus the %'s that actually won't... ie the masses...
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Old 14-08-2013, 13:36   #497
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and power cables to the French Nuclear plants .
Actually the power travels via Switzerland, where it gets greenwashed.
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Old 14-08-2013, 13:39   #498
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Re: Climate Change

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Watch out DOJ, you're coming across as a nuclear supporter who clearly must have a vested interest. Oh, and obviously you "don't give a damn for the world or his [your] offspring.."

Sorry, couldn't resist. Must put filter back on...
Yeah, I own a Nuclear Power plant. It's in Japan...........

TBH, I don't fundamentally care about the planet or other people. Nor for other creatures - albeit I do treat them equally .........however I have always been against pooping in own backyard and recognise that the current capitalism system has some flaws - and can be improved so more people benefit (not by more capitalism - just smarter capitalism, and using it as a servant of man and not a master to which our children should be fed ).

But nonetheless I also abhor wilful stupidity, and that means I am an EOTW Denier .
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Old 14-08-2013, 13:40   #499
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Re: Climate Change

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Actually the power travels via Switzerland, where it gets greenwashed.
Ah yes, those famous numbered Swiss battery bank accounts.
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Old 14-08-2013, 13:43   #500
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Re: Climate Change

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Ah yes, those famous numbered Swiss battery bank accounts.
OMG Lake-Effect, you actually have a sense of humor!!! Extremely rare with the AGW crowd.
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Old 14-08-2013, 13:47   #501
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OMG Lake-Effect, you actually have a sense of humor!!! Extremely rare with the AGW crowd.
Don't wind me up again, or I'll have 20 or 30 of my smelliest hippie friends park their VW microbuses and old Volvo's on your lawn and hold a love-in.

Maybe you can explain why so many otherwise sensible people trust fossil-fuel lobbyists over an entire branch of science. You seem intelligent enough...
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Old 14-08-2013, 13:51   #502
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Re: Climate Change

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But nonetheless I also abhor wilful stupidity, and that means I am an EOTW Denier .
Yup

BTW, the world will always be just fine It's just our place on its surface that is in question .
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Old 14-08-2013, 14:33   #503
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Maybe you can explain why so many otherwise sensible people trust fossil-fuel lobbyists over an entire branch of science. You seem intelligent enough...
Month 1 - Scientists find that caffeine causes heart attacks

Month 2 - Scientists find that caffeine lowers the risk of colon cancer

Month 3- Scientists find that caffeine decreases the risk of heart disease by 30%

Month 4 - Scientists find that caffeine increases the risk of colon cancer

Month 5 - Scientists find that caffeine in moderate douses may cause heart irregularities

I am making up the above but I think you get it. As more data becomes available conclusions change.

We don't know everything. We are coming out of period of cooling. The Vikings farmed Greenland for 500 years until cold weather helped them decide to leave. Why was Greenland warm for so many years. I understand sheep dung from the Viking era has been thawing out in the last couple years.

If we really can't materially effect the world CO2 production we will just have to wait and see. IMHO the jury is still out on AGW.
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Old 14-08-2013, 15:06   #504
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Month 1 - Scientists find that caffeine causes heart attacks

Month 2 - Scientists find that caffeine lowers the risk of colon cancer

Month 3- Scientists find that caffeine decreases the risk of heart disease by 30%

Month 4 - Scientists find that caffeine increases the risk of colon cancer

Month 5 - Scientists find that caffeine in moderate douses may cause heart irregularities

I am making up the above but I think you get it. As more data becomes available conclusions change.
What you're expressing above is the result of press releases - which themselves can be a distortion, and media-outlets needing to amp up and oversimplify the story. US news outlets being all commercial enterprises, are the worst (best?) at this - they need stories that will keep people glued to that channel and returning as often as possible. Sensationalism, in other words.

I sympathize. This is one of the few occasions where it's appropriate to blame the messenger. The best a serious person can do, if they want the straight goods, is to follow something to it's source, read it first-hand, and try to catch what others in the same field are saying about the story. To use your hypothetical example, you'd likely find that the observed effects of caffeine are much more subtle and complex than the 5 scare quotes you received from the popular press.

Have you followed any of the CC/GW stories you find incredible or dubious to its source? I've followed a few, but I've been mainly convinced that humans are materially affecting the climate by the sheer preponderance of the experts in the field saying so. I'm also persuaded because I can see clear evidence of other man-made changes - eg pollution, deforestation, and most shockingly, the measurable changes wreaked on the oceans in the last 100 years. We can't deny those, and the scientists in those fields have confirmed those changes... what makes climate change so deniable?

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We don't know everything. We are coming out of period of cooling. The Vikings farmed Greenland for 500 years until cold weather helped them decide to leave. Why was Greenland warm for so many years. I understand sheep dung from the Viking era has been thawing out in the last couple years.

If we really can't materially effect the world CO2 production we will just have to wait and see. IMHO the jury is still out on AGW.
There are natural cycles, and the human CO2/etc input is changing those cycles, according to experts.

"If we really can't materially effect the world CO2 production"...

You know that's flawed reasoning - denying something because you happen to think that the problem cannot be solved by us. Here's the problem with that line of reasoning: if a whole bunch of people think that Y (most likely caused by X) can't be fixed by us anyway, so we don't wanna discuss or acknowledge X, your pessimism helps block any forward action that might be done, by people who may very well have something to suggest regarding X and Y.

Big oil is of course tickled that so many think the "jury's still out" ...that is the plan behind their counter-attacks from their fake "science' think-tanks. The plan worked for big tobacco, delaying action by decades.

The jury on human-caused change to our climate is not out, they've returned with a verdict, which has passed numerous appeals, and we need to start monitoring the issue more closely to be more clear on the extent of change, and discussing ways in which we can be a little more thoughtful about what fuels we burn and when.
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Old 14-08-2013, 15:18   #505
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Re: Climate Change

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...We don't know everything. We are coming out of period of cooling. The Vikings farmed Greenland for 500 years until cold weather helped them decide to leave. Why was Greenland warm for so many years. I understand sheep dung from the Viking era has been thawing out in the last couple years...
If the following is too long for some to read, the basic conclusion, without supporting evidence, is mid-way down, in RED.

How does the Medieval Warm Period compare to current global temperatures?

Quote:
The Medieval Warm Period spanned between the 10th and 15th centuries, and corresponded with warmer temperatures in certain regions around the world. During this time, ice-free seas allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. North America experienced prolonged droughts. Just how hot was the Medieval Warm Period? Was the globe warmer than now? To answer this question, one needs to look beyond warming in a few regions and view temperatures on a global scale.


Prior temperature reconstructions tend to focus on the global average (or sometimes hemispheric average). To answer the question of the Medieval Warm Period, more than 1,000 tree-ring, ice core, coral, sediment and other assorted proxy records spanning both hemispheres were used to construct a global map of temperature change over the past 1,500 years (Mann 2009). The Medieval Warm Period saw warm conditions over a large part of the North Atlantic, Southern Greenland, the Eurasian Arctic, and parts of North America. In these regions, temperature appears to be warmer than the 1961–1990 baseline. In some areas, temperatures were even as warm as today. However, certain regions such as central Eurasia, northwestern North America, and the tropical Pacific are substantially cooler compared to the 1961 to 1990 average.



Figure 1: Reconstructed surface temperature anomaly for Medieval Warm Period (950 to 1250 A.D.), relative to the 1961– 1990 reference period. Gray areas indicates regions where adequate temperature data are unavailable.

How does the Medieval Warm Period compare to current conditions? Here is the temperature pattern for the last decade (1999 to 2008). What we see is widespread warming (with a few exceptions such as regional East Antarctic cooling)




Figure 3: Surface temperature anomaly for period 1999 to 2008, relative to the 1961– 1990 reference period. Gray areas indicates regions where adequate temperature data are unavailable (NOAA).

The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomenon. Warmer conditions were concentrated in certain regions. Some regions were even colder than during the Little Ice Age. To claim the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today is to narrowly focus on a few regions that showed unusual warmth. However, when we look at the broader picture, we see that the Medieval Warm Period was a regional phenomenon with other regions showing strong cooling. What is more, and as can be seen in Figure 4, globally, temperatures during the Medieval Period were less than today.


Figure 4: Global surface temperature reconstruction from Mann et al. (2008)


A seminal paper on this subject was published in Nature Geoscience in 2013 by the PAGES 2k team, with 78 researchers contributing as co-authors from 60 separate scientific institutions around the world. PAGES (Past Global Changes) is a scientific network which supports research aimed at understanding the Earth’s past environment in order to make predictions for the future. It's funded by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.


In 2006, scientists in the PAGES network decided to organize an initiative to reconstruct the climate of the last 2,000 years, which they called The PAGES 2k Network. This network consists of scientists from 9 regional working groups, each of which collects and processes the best paleoclimate (past climate change) data from their respective region. It's a clever approach because it allows the experts in their local proxy data to contribute to a much larger global project.


The PAGES 2k team found that a global surface cooling trend over the past 2,000 years has been erased by the global warming over the past century. Current temperatures are hotter than at any time in the past 1,400 years, including during the Medieval Warm Period (Figure 5).



Figure 5: a) Previously published Northern Hemisphere 30-year-mean temperature reconstructions relative to the 1961–1990 reference period. b) Standardized 30-year-mean temperatures averaged across all seven continental-scale regions. Blue symbols are area-weighted averages, and bars show 25th and 75th unweighted percentiles to illustrate the variability among regions; open black boxes are unweighted medians. The red line is the 30-year-average annual global temperature from the HadCRUT4 instrumental time series relative to 1961–1990, and scaled visually to match the standardized values over the instrumental period.

They also found that the warming occurred at different times in different geographical areas.
"the period from around AD 830 to 1100 generally encompassed a sustained warm interval in all four Northern Hemisphere regions. In South America and Australasia, a sustained warm period occurred later, from around AD 1160 to 1370."


"Our regional temperature reconstructions also show little evidence for globally synchronized multi-decadal shifts that would mark well-defined worldwide MWP and LIA intervals. Instead, the specific timing of peak warm and cold intervals varies regionally, with multi-decadal variability resulting in regionally specific temperature departures from an underlying global cooling trend."
see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
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Old 14-08-2013, 16:04   #506
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Re: Climate Change

Number of deaths from Three Mile Island incident compared with those from coal?
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Old 14-08-2013, 16:05   #507
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Re: Climate Change

I've been following this thread and finally decided to add my two cents. I did a stint as a biologist and did some environmental work. Maybe you could even call me a greeny, but I like to think that I'm one who used his brain rather than his knee. I came to the conclusion many many years ago that the biosphere as we know it is doomed. While many people would be willing to change their life styles to save the planet for future generations, most will not. Some just don't care but most are just too busy trying to survive the next month to worry about 100 years from now. I actually get a bit of a laugh about all of the hoopla over climate change. There was an old story in the aviation community about a famous stunt pilot. He asked another pilot to review the 9th maneuver in his air show plan because he was concerned that he might have a problem completing it. The other pilot looked at his whole plan and told him that the 9th maneuver wouldn't be a problem, because he would crash on the third maneuver and if he changed that he would be ok on number 9. Being a bit arrogant the famous stunt pilot blew him off and did the show anyway. He was killed in a crash on number 3. Climate change is pretty much maneuver number 9 in this analogy. There are many problems likely to get us before climate change and all of them can be linked to too many people. Humans are no different than any other species. It will reproduce, grow its population, and use its resources until they become limiting. This is seen in ecology (the science, not the political movement) in predator prey relationships. Predator species will eat as many prey species as they can catch, and in doing so have more offspring that survive which in turn catch more prey species, until there's not enough prey species to support the population then most of the predator species dies off. Without predators the prey specie's population now skyrockets and there is again abundant food for the predator species and the cycle starts all over again. Every other animal on earth is limited by other living resources in this way. 10000 years ago humans started agriculture and stepped out of this natural limiting cycle. The population grew a bit because there were natural limitations on how effective agriculture could be. Then humans discovered how to use fossilized energy to supplement the natural cycle and again broke out of the limitations. Modern medicine made it worse as more and more people survived to reproduce. In the past most people died in child hood. If you made it to adult hood you actually had a pretty good chance of living a long time. Now we are dependent of finite resources rather than cyclic resources. We will run out and like the predator species our population will collapse. Any number of potential resource crisis' are likely to get us before climate change will do us in. Climate change is more likely to have an economic impact rather that a species level catastrophic impact. Sure some Islands will be submerged and people will be displaced or die. My opinion is that they will be more likely to dies since in a world with 10 or 15 billion people there will be nobody who wants to take them.

In another biological example one can take the example of a bacteria culture growing on a Petri dish of nutrient agar. This is a resource limited example because the bacteria have no access to resources outside of the dish, like we do not have access to resources outside of the planet. The population of the colony starts growing slowly, but it soon reaches a state of logarithmic growth. This is what the human population did in the early 1900s. Once in this growth phase the population increases dramatically until all of the resources are consumed. They at the same time are converting those resources into toxic waste products (sound familiar?). In any case, when the population reaches a point that it has few resources available and is stewing in its own toxic waste the population collapses. This doesn't mean that all of the bacteria die, but the population tends to level out at about 10% of it's pre-logarithmic growth level. With humans this would be less than 200 million.

I worked for the state of Florida back in the 80s as a biologist when there was a problem with an over population of deer in a section of the Florida Everglades. There were about 4000 deer in an area that had food resources to support about 2500. The state wanted to cull the herd by about 1500 animals and was prepared to do a special hunt. The hunt had to be completed by the end of June or the food would be gone by the end of July and almost all of the animals would starve. Well the knee jerk greenies and animal lovers filed a suit and got an idiot judge to issue an injunction while they do gooders tried to capture the deer to relocate them. Well as I remember they managed to capture around 30 of which only 3 survived the capture process. Wildlife biologists knew that deer did not handle the stress of capture well and few would survive. By this time the hunt was delayed past the time it would do any good. Just as predicted the food was gone and only 200 out of the 4000 deer survived. When this was going on there was not a do gooder or newspaper/TV reporter anywhere to be seen.

In the 70s there was a book called the population bomb. Well that bomb has gone off. Just like the deer there are too many people consuming too many resources and it's only a matter of time until they are gone. Just like the deer, no one is willing to stop consuming so that others may have enough to survive. It wasn't in the nature of the deer and it's not in ours. The climate bomb has already gone off. Even if we stop producing CO2 from fossil fuels right now we will still suffer most of the effects of AGW. Just because it's taking a long time does not mean it hasn't happened. Even if a billion people die due to AGW over the next century you'll barely be able to see it on a population graph.

Mike Oreilly says that Nuclear is the solution to our power issues. I happen to agree with him, with some caveats. The light water/Uranium cycle nuclear approach is definitely not the way to go. It makes no economic sense when the nuclear waste problem is included in the equation. The only reason we have these now is because governments wanted them because the produce plutonium as a byproduct which can be used for weapons. The better civilian system for power production is the Thorium cycle reactor. Google it and read about it. The wastes are low level and safe after only 300 years, not a quarter of a million years. These reactors can be fed high level wastes from Uranium reactors and reduce it to low level wastes similar to what the thorium reactor produces, so it can also help with the legacy uranium problem. The US DOE experimented with such a reactor about 40 years ago, but since it didn't produce weapons material as a byproduct there was no government interest. There's more than a thousand years supply of thorium in just the tailings from uranium mining. I could go into a diatribe about how these reactors are inherently safe, but that would detract from my current diatribe.

One huge issue facing us is lack of adequate sources of phosphate fertilizer. Modern agriculture is totally dependent on this. Plant growth depletes it from the soil. In natural systems plants tend to die and rot where they grew or fairly near by if transported as animal wastes. Modern agriculture tend to strip most of the plant material off and send it to human population centers where it becomes part of the human sewage problem instead of being recycled into the soil locally. This phosphate is another finite fossil resource and is in much shorter supply than oil. The other issue is that unlike nitrate fertilizer it cannot be manufactured by bacteria or genetically engineered plants. It depends on the element phosphorus and you can't make any more phosphorus. When the phosphate runs out the modern agricultural miracle will come to a screeching halt. When this happens on a planet with between 10 and 15 billion people, well someone already said it wouldn't be pretty. It will be very much like the deer in the Everglades.

My reaction to climate change is simply so what. I am probably am old enough that I’ll be dead before most of the major catastrophes happen. If by some miracle people manage to figure out how to survive the resource limitations, they will curse us for burning up petroleum as fuel. It is much more valuable as a petrochemical feedstock than being wastes as fuel.

I’ve written enough, I expect to get change back for my 2 cents.
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Old 14-08-2013, 16:08   #508
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Re: Climate Change

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If we really can't materially effect the world CO2 production we will just have to wait and see. IMHO the jury is still out on AGW.
Bill, you're absolutely correct that there is no Truth to be found in science. Absolutes are the realm of religion. In science all truths are contingent on verifiable data, research, and theory. But this does not mean conclusions cannot be drawn using the best current data, research and theory.

I know you know all this ...

If you haven't done so already, I urge you (and everyone) to read the latest IPCC report. Another excellent one is the Berkeley Earth studies. Both sites offer multiple levels of reading. You do not have to be a scientist, or even a "know-it-all progressive", to access the info.

This research clearly shows that humans HAVE materially effected CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Clearly we can also effect change in our production -- if we so choose. But I agree with you, it is very unlikely that humanity will voluntarily reduce it's CO2 production.
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Old 14-08-2013, 16:14   #509
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Re: Climate Change

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Actually, population reduction only address part of the problem. The core issue is the amount, and rate, of the Earth's resources that are being consumed. High population (mostly in the so-called 3rd or developing world) contributes to this, but so do we in the rich industrialized world. On this side of the equation our per-capita usage -- our intensity of usage -- is equally (probably more) to blame.

So yes, population reduction is necessary, but we also need to take responsibility for the problems the planet is facing. We need to reduce. But as I keep saying, this seems to be the one idea which really is impossible.
The higher a standard of living we desire the fewer people Earth can support.

One Idea I kicked about a bit was to come at this from the other end, what is ther OPTIMUM human population for Earth? Obviously there is no one right answer but evaluating the question brings up some interesting observations about why we are here and what we are about.

I agree with your final statement, it is a problem for which I can see no solution.

As you say, impossible.
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Old 14-08-2013, 18:45   #510
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Re: Climate Change

The Difference Between Global Warming Skeptics And Normal People

I've begun pleading people to read and understand the facts. It's a bell curve like all social issues. Draaaaaaaaaaaaaag the ignorant slooooowly up hill. Feed them bits at a time to open their eyes. They respond better to their own financial gain than any altruistic attempt to help mankind, let alone their offspring's survival. They believe trust funds will be adequate survival technique.

Ten years ago gay marriage was unaccepted. Ten years ago we didn't have countries protesting in the streets for civil rights in many countries. Times and circumstances change. Some grasp them, adopt change, carry on. Others cling fearfully to their tradtitions. It is human nature to resist change. It upsets their world. As has been witnessed on this thread. But it seems to me that the majority of people in the western world are wanting some change on the environmental front. I only hope it doesn't take 10 years.
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