I eagerly look forward to your proof they do not.
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Trace gases are in no way to be dismissed. Pollutants like nitrogen dioxide or sulfur dioxide only need traces to cause major damage. More to the point in this case, the ozone concentration of the atmosphere is some 0.3 ppm, and yet thatâs what blocks nearly all the UVB from the sun.
It takes comparably little carbon dioxide to block certain frequencies of infrared from the Earth. That can only work out to a few percent shift in the energy balance; but then a percent change in temperature is already 3 K. If youâre neglecting that scale of change, youâre neglecting the difference between now and the Mesozoic.
The appeals to ignorance are a really tired excuse. Yes, itâs entirely true we donât know all the variables; thatâs why climate models have error bars on them. It doesnât mean the basic principles are all questionable. To simply suppose all our understanding is uncertain, even as people work at improving it, their models converge better and better, and their predictions start unfolding around us, is not at all reasonable.
And one more time: climate changes throughout prehistory, for the most part on a very slow scale that many ecosystems and species have been able to adapt on, save relatively local effects. That in no way argues for being blasé about how our present environment and its dependent people would handle a global shock on the scale of a few decades. As I said at the beginning, this kind of casual dismissal is extremely specious.
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Iâm new to this notion of approaching climate change debates shouting matches from the backdoor of anti-pollution. I know a fair few people who are âskepticalâ about anthropogenic climate change and go into full-blown denialist rhetoric when they hear the words âglobal warmingâ but who are reliably opposed to pollution and understand that it often has far reaching consequences.
I never said that and thatâs a shot at changing the position I made. climate, can you prove climate changes due to human kind?
You donât need to rely on computer models to understand atmospheric carbon pollution any more than you need them to understand evolution. We have 800,000 years of atmospheric carbon data from polar ice cores, with over 400,000 years of it from multiple sites, along with records from Mauna Loa of atmospheric carbon samples taken continuously since 1958. Those are the most complete records, and they correlate with other less complete sources, and with dendrochronological data (tree rings) and historic records from many global cultures. So just as you can see that the Liverpool moths evolved in real time, as they were being observed, you can see that global temperature averages change in response to carbon in the atmosphere. This is not a matter of opinion or of computer modeling, it is observed fact.
I studied the data personally over 20 years ago and it was irrefutable at that time. I am sure it is even more so now. You can get personal access to this data if you donât believe me, itâs not spectacularly difficult or expensive to do so (unless you want to actually go to the Antarctica sites and drill your own cores, which you can do, but itâll be big bucks).
The computer models are just good-faith attempts to predict the future; you donât have to believe they are particularly accurate (I certainly donât) in order to understand that pollution affects weather, and humans evolved to live in a world that was much less polluted than ours is now.
I prefer to ignore politicized arguments. If you believe in cause and effect, and if you believe your own eyes, you can do simple experiments instead. Take two mirrors, paint one flat black, and set them both in the sun - which one gets hotter? The black one. Changing the reflectivity of something makes it absorb more heat. Common sense tells us that the earth is obviously less reflective due to pollution (since weâre actively pumping trillions of tons of smoke into the atmosphere) so the sun heats it up more. When we say âweatherâ what we are talking about is solar heat being distributed by air and water vapor, and now thereâs more heat, so the weather systems are necessarily more energetic than they were before and thus theyâve changed. A simple, common sense based deduction. No computer modeling required.
The same thing happens during species-destroying natural disasters - the difference being that we are providing our own smoke instead of waiting for a meteor strike or supervolcano eruption. Again, this is not computer models or theories; we have eyewitness records of the results of Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Pinatubo, St. Helens, and other atmosphere-changing events. We know it happens, because people have seen it happen, and written about it. This stuff about computers and politics is just unnecessary flimflam, in my opinion; my take on it is that air pollution is bad for humansâŠ
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Yes. Simply look at the records, as referred to in my post directly above. The data is easily analyzed if you believe in simple things like cause and effect.
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Thanks for joining BB 3 hours ago and thanks for your insightful first post. Looking forward to hearing more!
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Unfortunately a lot of those people draw the line at regulating gases such as carbon dioxide as a âpollutantâ since it occurs naturally and isnât especially harmful on a small scale.
Lock someone in a closed room with a running car and theyâll die as soon as the Carbon Monoxide reaches 35 parts per million. Itâs a clear threat that has immediate effects which are easy to see. By contrast humans can safely breathe Carbon Dioxide at ten thousand times that level. Itâs only worrisome when you look at the long-term effect it has on the climate.
This rationalization is why people like Mitt Romney have argued that the E.P.A. has no authority regulating Carbon Dioxide or other greenhouse gases.
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Do you believe in modern medicine? That how a lot of that process starts.
How about flying in planes or occupying buildings?
Oh, itâs just the climate computer modeling that sucks. Right. Why? Exactly?
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In response to the two posts above about CO2, I am not dismissing it. I do think we should try to limit it in general, though it is the developed nations leading the way on this, and the worst offenders are just staring to get going. I think the ice cores are some of our best records. Though I do wonder how precise they are. That is if there was a short time period with a large spike (say ~50 years) would that have been recorded or would it have averaged out? But again even though we have seen a massive increase in CO2, we havenât seen the massive spike in temps. While I think it definitely has an affect, I still think it is a manageable change. But again, to reiterate, I do think we should make an effort to reduce emissions.
I do think the political bullshit like carbon taxes is just that, and crap like that has helped turned what should be an scientifically objective issue to a political one. Once that is done you will have people fight you tooth and nail because the other team is for it so you, naturally, are against it.
I expanded on that above. We donât understand the whole process so we canât possibly hope for an accurate model. I think we can get close, but simply put there is a lot we donât know and a lot of variables out there that affect climate and weather in general. We canât even accurately model short term weather consistently.
Serious question: do you have a better idea for how to incentivize reducing carbon emissions without attaching some kind of tax/fee/cost/whatever to dumping carbon into the atmosphere? You say you support limits of some kind, but what should that look like?
The reason carbon pollution is so rampant is that the costs are largely externalized. Attaching a tangible cost to pollution is exactly the right way to get the free market on board with finding solutions.
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Iâm predicting an inability to reply until well after the point where itâll make a difference, given the level of discourse exhibited so far. Lunch for a certain furry animal soon, innit blud?
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Um, we donât understand the basic organic chemistry behind a lot of biochemistry, and even synthetic organic chemistry. Ask anyone at any level of the profession exactly how a Grignardâs reaction really works and theyâll mumble something about radical intermediaries before shrugging and going, âI dunno.â Thatâs not something we rarely use, either, itâs a fundamental reaction that is used every single day. We can still build computer models around it. As for short term weather predictions, thatâs a completely different ball of wax. The interrelation between climate and weather is not as direct as you seem to think it is, but we can predict long term astronomical trends much better than we can short terms ones. We can predict with a higher accuracy whether an asteroid will hit us, than whether a comet will. Our level of prediction for related mechanics differ for different reasons. In some ways climate is much less chaotic than weather. But I will say something that you surely know: Climate and weather are not the same.
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Do you have proof of their existence? I never see the eaten posts afterwards, were they ever really there?
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I could be mistaken, but I thought the last big idea proposed wouldnât have reduced emissions, but charged companies that created more than a base line, while giving credits for those who were below it. But if you were over the base line you could buy more credits. It was a shell game. Giant conglomerates could game the system by âbuyingâ credits from their cleaner companies. It would give money to the feds but not actually do a lot to reduce emissions (I am going from memory, so mea culpa if I am wrong on that.)
Just straight EPA regulations like we have for other pollutants I think is what is called for. Not some fancy scheme. What those limits look like, I donât know, I am not qualified for that.
Just a note, there is progress for cleaner coal power plants. In China, of all places, they have a pilot plant churning out much cleaner energy.
Thatâs the point; you attach a financial cost to carbon emissions and a financial incentive to reducing them. You donât stifle innovation by mandating HOW companies limit those emissions, you just give them a damn good reason to WANT to and theyâll eventually work something out on their own.
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Just to add to that, looking at the spectrum of earth and the sun from space, and at the spectrum we get on the surface, we can directly measure the extra irradiance from the greenhouse effect, which (combined with Venus being hotter than Mercury) would be extremely convincing evidence even if statistical thermodynamics werenât the single most well-understood theory in all of science, with no known exceptions and incredible predictive and explanatory power.
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Iâm a physicist. Nobody with the faintest grasp of statistical thermodynamics doubts that we can predict, at least roughly, the degree to which CO2 precipitates a greenhouse effect an increases equilibrium temperature. Only an ignorant jackass would use a computer to post on the internet about how he (explicitly or implicitly) doesnât believe in statistical physics.
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A good place to start would be to take more math than is required for chem, and take a year long intro to statistical thermodynamics in the physics department. P-chem deals a whole lot with applications of it, and should probably be enough to get slightly deeper than basic understanding of how the greenhouse effect works, but if you want to really understand it, itâs better to get the physics treatment, with a lot of emphasis on the statistical derivation. Schroederâs âThermal Physicsâ is a very good introduction, but any course like that would be pretty difficult for self-study unless you have a whole lot of math.
Edited to add:
If you want to get into a good PhD program in climate science, you should start looking at their requirements now, since you will likely need more math (at least through vector calculus and linear algebra), physics (thermodynamics), and scientific computation (you can teach yourself this part just fine, I recommend starting with Python rather than MATLAB) than are required for a chemistry degree.
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You donât need modeling to understand the greenhouse effect. Itâs basic thermodynamics. We know pretty much how much that will raise the equilibrium temperature. The models are to try to predict things like how fast weâll get there (a much more difficult problem than where weâll wind up) and how that extra energy will propagate. e.g. water is a greenhouse gas, and higher temperature leads to higher concentrations of water vapor, which acts as a feedback effect until it makes clouds, and then itâs not so obvious.
In short, there is very little question about the effect of CO2 taken in isolation. Itâs much harder to predict the ultimate way that known initial effect will propagate.
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