[quote=“FoolishOwl, post:36, topic:36073”]
Honestly, I’m quite pessimistic at this point. [/quote]
Understandable. But one of the great capacities of the human race is our ability to persevere past the point of diminishing returns and win anyway. Don’t let the craziest person in the room control your reality!
That’s a cop-out. Elon Musk started with just about nothing, and capitalism is working for him! He’s giving thousands of other people the opportunity to change the world for the better and get rich at the same time.
Really, a well regulated capitalism is a beautiful system when all the regulatory agents are composed of self-actualized, well socialized human beings. And usually, blaming capitalism (or socialism, or any other -ism) is just an easy way for someone to avoid taking any personal responsibility for the problems that person encounters.
Of course I don’t know you well enough to say if that last sentence applies to you personally, but in any case I still say blaming “the system” is a cop-out. If the system’s no good, fight it - but don’t blame capitalism or communism or whatever, blame the people who are actually responsible, and/or the useless drones who lay on the couch and don’t do anything about it.
Just that it’s actually something with a very clear answer that clearly being ignored by people who assert that increasing CO2 conc. won’t increase equilibrium temperature.
I never tried to say it wasn’t a complex system, just that increasing Co2 will clearly force it in one direction. There are many, many other effects that cascade from that initial forcing, which push the system in both directions, depending on the effect.
You will note that I said “increasing the CO2 concentration.” The stuff the plants take back out doesn’t contribute to the increase in concentration, and we are clearly, unambiguously increasing the concentration right now, demonstrating that that effect is minor compared to the effect our emissions are having.
What? This is one of those assertions that really requires a link to the dataset, and the statistical analysis used to conclude that there’s been cooling. I just pulled the full (land and sea) global temperature anomaly dataset from NASA to check. (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt)
Running some very basic tests (I used the scientific python stack and Seaborn for the plot, which are free and open source, so you can easily check for yourself) I found that mean anomaly for the past 15 years was 56.3 degC/100, for the 15 years before that it was 30.2, and a t-test gave a p-value of 6.8*10-46, indicating that it is not random chance, and the last 15 years were warmer than the preceding 15 years. I also did a quick regression plot of the month by month data for the past 15 years:
You can clearly see that the 95% confidence interval (shaded) does not include a flat line, much less a line with negative slope, indicating that the temperature has, in fact (p=2.7e-05), been increasing for the past 15 years. You had better believe that, if I got it into my head that I knew better than every specialist in the relevant field, as you seem to have, I would give a lot more scrutiny to my analysis than these quick, back-of-the-envelope, calculations.
Your making a bizarre assertion like that without even referencing the dataset or the analysis means I can’t even tell whether it was a bald-face lie, or whether you simply decided to believe some random crackpot over the scientific establishment without checking any of his assertions for yourself.
Perhaps relevant to the politicization of the debate, but completely irrelevant to whether global warming is occurring.
I’m guessing not one of the natural sciences but please feel free to correct me on that if I’m wrong.
Perhaps I could elucidate that a little bit better to make the difference between these two assertions clear:
If, in a matter covered by a great deal of established theory in one of the natural sciences, you find yourself espousing a position that is incompatible with that of the huge majority of specialists in the relevant field, the burden of proof is on you.
And, just in case that is somehow not clear enough, my position the mechanisms involved in the greenhouse effect is the one that you’ll find in any statistical thermodynamics textbook. If you’re trying to say that you know more about that subject that every physicist alive, the burden of proof is on you.
Umm… just to step in for a second here. You’re actually WAY oversimplifying (and making a common error) when you make the claim that, “More CO2 also means more plant life.” (and thus would mean more CO2 is automatically healthy for the Earth).
It really doesn’t work like that.
First of all, we humans are clear cutting forests faster than they could possibly grow back to accommodate our growing population. We don’t have the option for everyone to just keep using fossil fuels at the same rates they do right now because while our global population is growing, land mass covered by forested areas is shrinking. There’s an inverse relationship. Currently deforestation in Madagascar is estimated at 94% with resulting desertification - rain forests, once cleared, don’t have soils that propagate grasses and plains well. Some areas of mainland Africa are as bad or worse. In Ethiopia, 98% of forested regions have been cleared - in just the last 50 years! Most of it was cleared for livestock or agricultural use.
So if we’re clearing forests, where do the plants grow?
That’s actually another problem.
Fast growing plants, like algae, take advantage of the CO2 in the air, and they also take advantage of having lots of space to spread out ---- on top of waterways, lakes, and oceans. Normally, the reflectiveness of our planet’s water (about 71% of Earth is covered by water) helps to maintain our temperature. That stops happening once you put a layer of non-reflective, solid plant material on top of the water. Not only does the reflectiveness stop, the plant layer also insulates the water - warming it. So, just by altering where plants grow, we affect climate.
That’s not all — plants may help in the long term (if we give them room on land), but just like we can’t breathe pure O2, they have problems overdosing on CO2. Studies have been done on the effects of increased levels of CO2 on plant respiration, and what was found was this:
Plants exposed to doubled CO2, shrank their stomata (tiny pores) and released less H2O when they evapotranspirated — which is the plant equivalent of sweating. Less H2O in the air means less cooling (up to a point).
“Carnegie scientists Long Cao and Ken Caldeira doubled the level of carbon dioxide in their model and found that globally the reduced evapotranspiration was responsible for 16 percent of the land warming; the rest was due to CO2’s heat-trapping effects. In North America and Asia, more than 25 percent of the warming was due to the impact of increased CO2 on vegetation.”
So you may have more plants, but they’re breathing and sweating less efficiently, and that results in increased temperatures. Just force feeding plants all the CO2 you want to produce doesn’t solve it.
I was in a very pessimistic mood when I made that comment, but I’m standing by my point that capitalism, as such, is the real problem. There are, to be sure, different definitions of capitalism.
But I was just reading this movie review of Snowpiercer, and it sounds like the filmmakers have something in mind much like what I do.
NB: That review drops a major spoiler, apparently.
I wrote this in response to another post, but its relevant here, please let me know where you’re coming from: Liar or gullible idiot? Inquiring minds want to know.
What? This is one of those assertions that really requires a link to the dataset, and the statistical analysis used to conclude that there’s been cooling. I just pulled the full (land and sea) global temperature anomaly dataset from NASA to check. (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt)
Running some very basic tests (I used the scientific python stack and Seaborn for the plot, which are free and open source, so you can easily check for yourself) I found that mean anomaly for the past 15 years was 56.3 degC/100, for the 15 years before that it was 30.2, and a t-test gave a p-value of 6.8*10-46, indicating that it is not random chance, and the last 15 years were warmer than the preceding 15 years. I also did a quick regression plot of the month by month data for the past 15 years:
You can clearly see that the 95% confidence interval (shaded) does not include a flat line, much less a line with negative slope, indicating that the temperature has, in fact (p=2.7e-05), been increasing for the past 15 years. You had better believe that, if I got it into my head that I knew better than every specialist in the relevant field, as you seem to have, I would give a lot more scrutiny to my analysis than these quick, back-of-the-envelope, calculations.
Your making a bizarre assertion like that without even referencing the dataset or the analysis means I can’t even tell whether it was a bald-face lie, or whether you simply decided to believe some random crackpot over the scientific establishment without checking any of his assertions for yourself.
Unfortunately the head of IPCC (who you hold so highly) disagrees with you.
Finally you get my point!
And again I agree with you! Fortunately I have nowhere claimed to know more about this subject than (I assume you meant than instead of that) every physicist alive, although you seem to think you do. So please provide evidence there is not one physicist who disagrees with you in stating that there are no other factors involved in GW than thermodynamics.
But we both know you will never do that. So I’ll end this pointless debate here. We will see in the coming years what will happen, and in the meantime we will keep believing and throwing billions into the pockets of smart businessmen such as Al Gore.
I never said that, please point out where I did. It is the most important factor and it gives us a very clear answer about which way increasing CO2 conc. will push the system. If some physicist thought they understood those mechanisms better than every other physicist, they’d make a career out of it. If you think it doesn’t show that, show me with some numbers, equations, etc. rather than just spouting more meaningless bullshit. It seems like you’re deliberately avoiding that issue with clumsy sophistry. This is an issue that demands a quantitative treatment, which you are deliberately avoiding despite my repeated requests for numbers and data to support your position.
What the fuck?!? Seriously, now I know you’re just lying. Leaving aside that that article doesn’t even link to or cite any actual peer-reviewed articles, where the claims are dealt with quantitatively, and that I never mentioned the IPCC head or my regard for him one way or the other, it mentions that the IPCC head seems to have said different things on the subject at different times, most recently “I don’t think there is a slowdown (in the rate of temperature increase),”. At this point, I’m inclined to think that this is a deliberate lie on your part, rather than that you simply didn’t read the article you linked to, which said the opposite of what you claimed. I note that you decide to link to an article that’s not even in a peer-reviewed journal (Forbes is not my go-to for articles about science) to contradict the analysis I just ran, rather than actually taking issue with anything in my numbers or the data. I’m getting more sure as time goes on that you’re not a natural scientist here.
Most importantly: You said, and I quote:
NOWHERE in the article you just linked does it even suggest that this is the case. Your continued refusal to provide a source for that, frankly ridiculous, assertion, or admit that it is completely fucking wrong, leaves me with no choice but to conclude that it was a deliberate lie.
Seriously. If you’re not willing to discuss the issue in terms of quantitative data and peer-reviewed articles, you’re just blowing hot air.
