RE: "Hottest Decade on Record"

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Sanity -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 7:52:03 PM)
Al Gore is your typical modern televangelist. He even has that old timey preacher's voice, doesn't he. "Repent! Change your evil ways, or prepare to face an eternal world of fire, hopelessness and despair!" [img]http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/al-Gore.jpg[/img] And yes julia, you and samboct and ken are all very much members of his proverbial flock of sheep. quote: ORIGINAL: juliaoceania I believe climate change is real. I also believe in plate tectonic theory. I have never seen a church of plate tectonics or a temple of climate change

Thadius -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 7:59:24 PM)
You forgot about his plan for receiving tithes.

Sanity -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 8:04:28 PM)
He is becoming incredibly wealthy off of his ministry, there is no denying that. But what do we know. We're just "deniers". [:D] quote: ORIGINAL: Thadius You forgot about his plan for receiving tithes.

DarlingSavage -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 8:07:01 PM)
Y'all are crazy. He's not preachin' hellfire and damnation, he's preachin' "straighten up you evil corporations, you're destroying the lives of others." Then again, corporations already knew that, they just don't give a fuck.

Sanity -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 8:28:20 PM)
He's only preaching hellfire and damnation towards American corporations though - and American jobs. How is it supposed to do the angry Earth Goddess any good to relocate all the jobs to China where they use things like dirty high-sulfurous coal and slave labor. quote: ORIGINAL: DarlingSavage Y'all are crazy. He's not preachin' hellfire and damnation, he's preachin' "straighten up you evil corporations, you're destroying the lives of others." Then again, corporations already knew that, they just don't give a fuck.

AnimusRex -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 8:49:57 PM)
See, they have to turn this into a referendum on Al Gore. If it actually became a discussion of how much we are trashing the environment, about say, the collapsing salmon population in California, the death of the Colorado River, the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer (which produces much of America's grain), the spread of female hormones in the food stream, the presence of toxic chemicals in the water we drink.... well, if it was about things like that, it wouldn't be fun at all. meanwhile, Al Gore is still fat. HA!

samboct -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 8:50:48 PM)
Wilbur " ORLY? Don't know what this is. However, here's the link that shows the CO2 data from the 1960s. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full The data clearly show some periodic trend on a monthly basis, but the overall trend of the curve is very easy to see- it's a nice upward slope and pretty clean- the data's not very spiky on a yearly time scale. It's much easier to measure CO2 levels because gases mix quite readily and CO2 is a major component in the atmosphere. Trace gases would be harder to measure and would likely show more variance with geography. Temperature on the other hand, is highly variable within a region and since heat flow in an atmosphere is much slower than gaseous mixing, there's a lot more noise in the data. Obviously a lot of the variation in the data depends on where you do your temperature sampling- too many places with big temperature swings will make the data look noisy, places with smaller temperature swings will show overall trends more quickly. Cloud cover and patterns affect temperature terrifically. Furthermore, nobody in the science community is denying that the anthropogenically caused changes are smaller than long term climate change due to orbital variation. Thus, it's not easy to see how much temperature change is due to anthropogenic activities and how much is due to long term geological and orbital processes. Consequently, and not surprisingly, there is not a lot of agreement on the absolute magnitude of the both the temperature changes seen and their causes. However, the overall trend is pretty clear- the temperature is going up and we have no idea of what kind of curve we're on. Once a system is perturbed from homeostasis, there can be larger and larger swings. It's like a buffer system, when the buffer is finally overloaded by acid- the pH drops like a rock with just an additional drop of acid, when it slowly decreases with the first 1000. We simply don't know- and this is where the largest uncertainty lies. Not to mention that what's going to happen as the climate changes is also guesswork and conjecture. The problem is if you wait till your sure- it may be too late to do anything about it. And as I've pointed out on numerous previous occasions- I don't buy the economic argument put forth by the ostriches of climate change denial. The doom and gloom of a collapsing economy is probably completely wrong- doing the R + D and building new power generation technologies will help our economy- not hurt it. Well, some of the firms pushing coal mining and running coal plants will be unhappy- but there will be more good jobs for the rest of us- at least that's what's happened when most technological progress gets implemented in the marketplace. Sam

InvisibleBlack -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:01:40 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sanity Al Gore is your typical modern televangelist. He even has that old timey preacher's voice, doesn't he. "Repent! Change your evil ways, or prepare to face an eternal world of fire, hopelessness and despair!" [image]http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/al-Gore.jpg[/image] And yes julia, you and samboct and ken are all very much members of his proverbial flock of sheep. quote: ORIGINAL: juliaoceania I believe climate change is real. I also believe in plate tectonic theory. I have never seen a church of plate tectonics or a temple of climate change To be fair, the personal merits or failing of a leader or a zealot do not necessarily reflect the justice or rightness of the cause. I personally dislike Al Gore and have for years. I regard him as the ultimate opportunist. His family made big money off of Occidental Petroleum and then Big Tobacco - until such things became liabilities. His wife was the leader in banning and censoring lyrics without a word of criticism from him - but that's all water under the bridge now. Somehow he's evolved into running, along with Hank Paulson, a firm dedicated to writing derivates and being a market maker in carbon offsets. The fact that he's behind AGW and the Green movement, to my mind, isn't an indication of it's rightness or wrongness - it's simply an indication that it's a trendy popular movement and a way for him to make a lot of money.

InvisibleBlack -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:09:53 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: AnimusRex If it actually became a discussion of how much we are trashing the environment, about say, the collapsing salmon population in California, the death of the Colorado River, the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer (which produces much of America's grain), the spread of female hormones in the food stream, the presence of toxic chemicals in the water we drink.... well, if it was about things like that, it wouldn't be fun at all. But, actually, none of those things have anything to do with CO2 emissions causing the Earth's climate to heat up. One could easily say that the loss of wild salmon is a travesty that needs to be reversed and that CO2 emissions have a negligible effect on the climate and so do not need to be regulated or controlled without contradicting oneself. I personally think that cap & trade is a terrible idea but I'm horrified by the abuses many industries get away with when it comes to chemical and toxic waste spills. I don't believe we know enough about how the Earth's climate operates in a global sense to really have a clue how to accurately model and predict temperatures decades in the future but that doesn't mean I don't think we need to preserve the water table or that the excessive use of growth hormones in beef cattle is a very bad idea in the long run. It's not an either/or proposition. Sometimes there are egregeious abuses (like the Love Canal) that need to be stopped. Sometimes there are environmental regulations that penalize industries without providing any tangible benefit to the environment. The trick is finding the balance - which is not something I would trust either Al Gore or Dick Cheney to be able to do.

Thadius -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:14:04 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: AnimusRex See, they have to turn this into a referendum on Al Gore. If it actually became a discussion of how much we are trashing the environment, about say, the collapsing salmon population in California, the death of the Colorado River, the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer (which produces much of America's grain), the spread of female hormones in the food stream, the presence of toxic chemicals in the water we drink.... well, if it was about things like that, it wouldn't be fun at all. meanwhile, Al Gore is still fat. HA! I have no problem with discussing any of those issues, and I wasn't trying to turn it into a bash Al Gore thing. I simply commented on how some folks follow the global warming theory like it is a religion. They have never ending faith that what the proponents are saying is correct. They faithful deflect anybody that disagrees with the theory, or anybody that provides some contrary evidence without even evaluating it. For some it is very much a religiion and has nothing to do with science. Hope that makes sense.

juliaoceania -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:19:53 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: AnimusRex See, they have to turn this into a referendum on Al Gore. If it actually became a discussion of how much we are trashing the environment, about say, the collapsing salmon population in California, the death of the Colorado River, the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer (which produces much of America's grain), the spread of female hormones in the food stream, the presence of toxic chemicals in the water we drink.... well, if it was about things like that, it wouldn't be fun at all. meanwhile, Al Gore is still fat. HA! I ignore the slams on Gore, I am not all that attached to him, first of all... But more importantly, those who bring up Gore to debate climate change get the same treatment from me that Sarah Palin got from the media when she debated Biden, lowers the bar for my expectations in their responses... so in that way it helps them to bring him up

jlf1961 -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:24:15 PM)
Personally I believe in climate change, as to whether it is because of humans or nature, I am not sure of. I know that when Eric the Red discovered Greenland, you could farm AND raise cattle there, until the climate got too cold for that to happen. As to Al Gore, he is still a politician, and therefore has a motive for everything he does.

AnimusRex -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:37:10 PM)
Thadius and IB- It is true that global warming has become the proxy war for all environmental issues, and so positions have hardened into religious dogma on both sides. What complicates matters is that science can't EVER offer hard and setled answers; evolution is still just a theory, and gravity is still a theory, (with anomolies that can't be explained!). Science still isn't sure if dinosaurs were warm or cold blooded, Pluto may or may not be a planet, and so on. What the evidence shows- and why I brought those other issues in- is that we have been pumping gazillions of tons of shit into the atmosphere for about 400 years, in exponentially increasing numbers. It seems reasonable that this is having some sort of effect on the climate globally. Its kind of a fun parlor game, to argue about micrograms of carbon measured on a mountaintop in the Andes, or a thermometer reading in East Anglia. But the fact is that burning 100 million barrels of oil every fucking day, 4 Billion tons of coal per year, means that all that smoke and soot is going somewhere. Where? Into the air we breathe. What are all those billions of tons of Co2, CO, sulphur, and a dozen other chemical compounds doing to the air, and what happens when they react with all the other chemicals? Well, no one knows for sure- what we do know, it isn't good. Nothing on earth was designed to process this much smoke and soot- no living thing ever evolved or adapted to this much of these chemicals. So what we do know is that a coal plant in Michigan does have an effect on a forest in Siberia, and a marsh along the Nile, and a grassland in Argentina. We just don't know for a fact the exact effect, but there is not one shred of evidence that any of the effects bode well for our survival. People keep trying to turn this into a straw man about saving a snail darter fish, but its about the grains we rely on to eat, the water we need to drink, the air we breathe. We are the endangered species.

PenOnBeadedChain -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:41:36 PM)
It's just fascinating how many self-styled experts in climatology there are here - and so many other internet boards. For some reason, this subject somehow magically transforms WalMart greeters, dentists, receptionists, stockbrokers, parking cops, English teachers, construction workers and all other manner of people into the equivalent of PhD's in physics, geology, atmospheric science and all the other disciplines that make up the field of climate science. Suddenly equipped with not only the smarts, but the knowledge base that normally takes years of pouring over the scientific literature with a fine-toothed comb. All gained through some magic pill, swallowed at some blog they found on the internet because they were looking for someone to tell them some comforting, flattering lies. Would that creating cancer researchers were so magically easy - we'd have every form of that disease licked in a matter of months! All because 97% of the best scientists of our time who are studying the subject are begging our species to start acting in a responsible way, because we are fucking things up for ours and future generations: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119210532.htm Please, homo sapiens. Grow up soon. You're running out of time.

jlf1961 -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:46:48 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: PenOnBeadedChain It's just fascinating how many self-styled experts in climatology there are here - and so many other internet boards. For some reason, this subject somehow magically transforms WalMart greeters, dentists, receptionists, stockbrokers, parking cops, English teachers, construction workers and all other manner of people into the equivalent of PhD's in physics, geology, atmospheric science and all the other disciplines that make up the field of climate science. Suddenly equipped with not only the smarts, but the knowledge base that normally takes years of pouring over the scientific literature with a fine-toothed comb. All gained through some magic pill, swallowed at some blog they found on the internet because they were looking for someone to tell them some comforting, flattering lies. Would that creating cancer researchers were so magically easy - we'd have every form of that disease licked in a matter of months! All because 97% of the best scientists of our time who are studying the subject are begging our species to start acting in a responsible way, because we are fucking things up for ours and future generations: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119210532.htm Please, homo sapiens. Grow up soon. You're running out of time. Pen, trust me, the human race is not going to have much more time to screw things up, some lunatic is going to launch a nuke and then the entire planet is fucked.

TheHeretic -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:51:46 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: AnimusRex See, they have to turn this into a referendum on Al Gore. If it actually became a discussion of how much we are trashing the environment, about say, the collapsing salmon population in California, the death of the Colorado River, the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer (which produces much of America's grain), the spread of female hormones in the food stream, the presence of toxic chemicals in the water we drink.... well, if it was about things like that, it wouldn't be fun at all. meanwhile, Al Gore is still fat. HA! Yep. So how smart was it to hand over the reins of the environmental movement to a bunch of power crazed, lying, manipulative assholes with an unrelated agenda? Dumbasses.

willbeurdaddy -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:56:44 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: samboct Wilbur " ORLY? Don't know what this is. However, here's the link that shows the CO2 data from the 1960s. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full The data clearly show some periodic trend on a monthly basis, but the overall trend of the curve is very easy to see- it's a nice upward slope and pretty clean- the data's not very spiky on a yearly time scale. It's much easier to measure CO2 levels because gases mix quite readily and CO2 is a major component in the atmosphere. Trace gases would be harder to measure and would likely show more variance with geography. Temperature on the other hand, is highly variable within a region and since heat flow in an atmosphere is much slower than gaseous mixing, there's a lot more noise in the data. Obviously a lot of the variation in the data depends on where you do your temperature sampling- too many places with big temperature swings will make the data look noisy, places with smaller temperature swings will show overall trends more quickly. Cloud cover and patterns affect temperature terrifically. Furthermore, nobody in the science community is denying that the anthropogenically caused changes are smaller than long term climate change due to orbital variation. Thus, it's not easy to see how much temperature change is due to anthropogenic activities and how much is due to long term geological and orbital processes. Consequently, and not surprisingly, there is not a lot of agreement on the absolute magnitude of the both the temperature changes seen and their causes. However, the overall trend is pretty clear- the temperature is going up and we have no idea of what kind of curve we're on. Once a system is perturbed from homeostasis, there can be larger and larger swings. It's like a buffer system, when the buffer is finally overloaded by acid- the pH drops like a rock with just an additional drop of acid, when it slowly decreases with the first 1000. We simply don't know- and this is where the largest uncertainty lies. Not to mention that what's going to happen as the climate changes is also guesswork and conjecture. The problem is if you wait till your sure- it may be too late to do anything about it. And as I've pointed out on numerous previous occasions- I don't buy the economic argument put forth by the ostriches of climate change denial. The doom and gloom of a collapsing economy is probably completely wrong- doing the R + D and building new power generation technologies will help our economy- not hurt it. Well, some of the firms pushing coal mining and running coal plants will be unhappy- but there will be more good jobs for the rest of us- at least that's what's happened when most technological progress gets implemented in the marketplace. Sam So supposedly reliable CO2 data for 50 years is being used with unreliable (per your post) temperature data for centuries to try to come up with a causal relationship. Very solid science, this AGW thing. (And btw, since even the zealots graphs show CO2 increases following, not leading, temperature increases, its irrelevant anyway.)

willbeurdaddy -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 9:59:37 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: juliaoceania quote: ORIGINAL: AnimusRex See, they have to turn this into a referendum on Al Gore. If it actually became a discussion of how much we are trashing the environment, about say, the collapsing salmon population in California, the death of the Colorado River, the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer (which produces much of America's grain), the spread of female hormones in the food stream, the presence of toxic chemicals in the water we drink.... well, if it was about things like that, it wouldn't be fun at all. meanwhile, Al Gore is still fat. HA! I ignore the slams on Gore, I am not all that attached to him, first of all... But more importantly, those who bring up Gore to debate climate change get the same treatment from me that Sarah Palin got from the media when she debated Biden, lowers the bar for my expectations in their responses... so in that way it helps them to bring him up LOL. If you go by tallying misstatements she crushed Biden in that debate. Not that that takes much.

willbeurdaddy -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 10:01:26 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: PenOnBeadedChain It's just fascinating how many self-styled experts in climatology there are here - and so many other internet boards. For some reason, this subject somehow magically transforms WalMart greeters, dentists, receptionists, stockbrokers, parking cops, English teachers, construction workers and all other manner of people into the equivalent of PhD's in physics, geology, atmospheric science and all the other disciplines that make up the field of climate science. Suddenly equipped with not only the smarts, but the knowledge base that normally takes years of pouring over the scientific literature with a fine-toothed comb. All gained through some magic pill, swallowed at some blog they found on the internet because they were looking for someone to tell them some comforting, flattering lies. Would that creating cancer researchers were so magically easy - we'd have every form of that disease licked in a matter of months! All because 97% of the best scientists of our time who are studying the subject are begging our species to start acting in a responsible way, because we are fucking things up for ours and future generations: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119210532.htm Please, homo sapiens. Grow up soon. You're running out of time. 97% of the best scientists who werent intimidated into not saying what they really thought about AGW, you mean. That % is changing daily.

PenOnBeadedChain -> RE: "Hottest Decade on Record" (2/17/2010 10:01:38 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Thadius Uh just curious, for those of us that aren't that well adjusted. When water evaporates does it provide a cooling or warming effect? When water evaporates it absorbs energy (what's typically called "heat of evaporation") turning the liquid into a gas. That's why we sweat, by the way. It then releases the same amount of energy when it later condenses, and falls. The net energy equation is a wash (so to speak). The point is that this happens much more when there's more energy around to drive the cycle. That's why climatologists for years have been saying - to anyone not too busy watching American Idol to listen to them - that we will get more frequent and more intense storms with a gradually warming planet. Last week's record-breaking snowstorms in DC were neither surprising nor counter-intuitive to the climatology community. It was only contradictory to fools like Jim De Mint and James Inhofe and the FoxNews pundit gang, who apparently haven't picked up a science book or journal in their godforsaken lives.

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