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ORIGINAL: Moonhead

That's why nobody uses them.
The point of a nuclear reactor is to produce weapons grade plutonium, not electricity.

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

Here are six graphs of ice core data that are of interest.

Here is the link to the article. Apologies for not uploading the graphs directly. I tried but failed. Something about a false path??

Anyway, the first graph shows that indeed there has been a warming since 1880 of about one degree Celsius.

The second graph supports warming since 1980

The third graph shows the current temp is higher than any of the last 2000 years. Maybe it is the beginning of the Apocalypse. Sorry, couldn't resist. The devil made me do it [:D]

The fourth shows variations during the 10,000 years of the Holocene (Earth's most recent epoch) which shows a general cooling trend. The current warming is a blip up in that trend.

The fifth shows the last 800,000 years with four warmings (interglacials) equal to or warmer than the current one.

The sixth shows an increase in the magnitude of variations that began 3 million years ago. "This deepening phase, and the accompanying cycles, largely began approximately 3 million years ago with the growth of continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. Gradual changes in Earth's climate of this kind have been frequent during the Earth's 4500 million year existence and most often are attributed to changes in the configuration of continents and ocean sea ways."

Is this the End Times? I don't think so.

So, wtf is going on? 97% of published climatologists are supporting the alarm?

Information cascade? Political hysteria?

The sky is not falling, CL.

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ORIGINAL: Moonhead

Myself, I'm more concerned about water shortages than flooding.

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So you ignore some basic facts to reach your conclusion.

The land based ice is melting very fast. That will inevitably lead to a rise in sea levels, in excess of 1.5 meters by most recent estimates. A large percentage of the human race lives within that 1.5m above sea level zone. Those people will be displaced when the land they live on floods.

The staple food crops for the majority of the planet's people are temperate zone plants and as the temps rise the areeas those plants will grow in shifts towards the poles. There is less potentially arable land towards the poles so as there will be less land available to farm which will likely result in disruptions and decreases in the fod supply.

So we're looking at mass migrations on scales we have never seen before coupled with disruptions in the food supply. Does that sound like a forecast for happy times?

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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So you ignore some basic facts to reach your conclusion.

The land based ice is melting very fast. That will inevitably lead to a rise in sea levels, in excess of 1.5 meters by most recent estimates. A large percentage of the human race lives within that 1.5m above sea level zone. Those people will be displaced when the land they live on floods.

The staple food crops for the majority of the planet's people are temperate zone plants and as the temps rise the areeas those plants will grow in shifts towards the poles. There is less potentially arable land towards the poles so as there will be less land available to farm which will likely result in disruptions and decreases in the fod supply.

So we're looking at mass migrations on scales we have never seen before coupled with disruptions in the food supply. Does that sound like a forecast for happy times?

I do not ignore these possibilities. I have simply pointed out that massive changes in climate, more extreme than today, have occurred throughout the past 800,000 years. Tis the nature of earth and its climate. The continents are moving; the climate is ever changing. It is you who ignore reality because you cannot see beyond the human experience.

The fact that the human species is subject to the fickle but mindless vicissitudes of the planet upon which we evolved is inconsequential in the long run of geohistory, where violent climate changes and massive extinctions have been the norm. It is estimated that more than 99% of species have gone extinct. It is only hubris that permits humans to think our species is so special that we cannot conceive of the possibiity that we are not eternal. We are ubiquitous on this planet. However, so is the cockroach. Having filled every niche does not guarantee our survival.

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I'm puzzled.

You're basically saying I'm right but it doesn't matter because we as a species do not matter. Well I'm going to disagree, we matter a great deal to us and speaking as part of the species I'd sort of like us to survive past the end of the century.

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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I'm puzzled.

You're basically saying I'm right but it doesn't matter because we as a species do not matter. Well I'm going to disagree, we matter a great deal to us and speaking as part of the species I'd sort of like us to survive past the end of the century.

I did not say you are right. I cited evidence that glaciation and warming have been natural cycles that had nothing to do with human activity. You wish to ignore that evidence. The ice core graphs are there for your study.

Of course we matter to ourselves as a species. But we may not matter to Nature. Our lineage has existed for only a few million years while the earth has been here for 4,500 million years and the Universe for about 13.7 billion years. Are we essential to Being? Only in our own minds and in our own limited field of vision. It is so difficult to shake the idea of a human-centric Universe. What makes us so special that we must survive? There have been at least five mass extictions. Maybe our species will be in the sixth, and the roaches will inherit the Earth.

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

I am not a Conservative by any stretch of the imagination but I wonder how Interglacial Periods occurred before humans were much on this planet, to generate CO2.

And I am also bothered by the ice core evidence that reports the continuation of high CO2 in the atmosphere for 15 thousand years AFTER the earth COOLED 130,000 years ago. How could the earth cool if CO2 remained high?

These anamolies nag at my acceptance of a causal link between CO2 and warming.

Vincent

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ORIGINAL: OokieWithaC

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

I am not a Conservative by any stretch of the imagination but I wonder how Interglacial Periods occurred before humans were much on this planet, to generate CO2.

And I am also bothered by the ice core evidence that reports the continuation of high CO2 in the atmosphere for 15 thousand years AFTER the earth COOLED 130,000 years ago. How could the earth cool if CO2 remained high?

These anamolies nag at my acceptance of a causal link between CO2 and warming.

Vincent

I looked up ice-core evidence for a research paper I was writing a few weeks ago and it doesn't state that. It only has risen exponentially very recently (1800s and up). The earth goes through its own cycles of warming and cooling, but it has never been this high before.

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No one is claiming climate change is always caused by humans, just that this one is definitely being caused by our activities. You're simply repeating a strawman the climate denialists have hoisted up. Maybe you don't understand that something like a global climate shift can have more than a single cause?

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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No one is claiming climate change is always caused by humans, just that this one is definitely being caused by our activities. You're simply repeating a strawman the climate denialists have hoisted up. Maybe you don't understand that something like a global climate shift can have more than a single cause?

No, the issue is whether CO2 causes temperature rise. Have a look at the graph I posted in #53. The graph clearly shows even a lack of correlation while the alarmist claim cause and effect.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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No one is claiming climate change is always caused by humans, just that this one is definitely being caused by our activities. You're simply repeating a strawman the climate denialists have hoisted up. Maybe you don't understand that something like a global climate shift can have more than a single cause?

No, the issue is whether CO2 causes temperature rise. Have a look at the graph I posted in #53. The graph clearly shows even a lack of correlation while the alarmist claim cause and effect.

So now you're denying that CO2 is a photon trap. Do you have any idea how much of physics has to be wrong for CO2 to not function as a phton trap?

What your graph shows is that some other variable, which we have yet to identify but there are plenty of possibilities, had a larger effect on the climate than the CO2 level.

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

The ice is melting and the oceans will rise. We are all going to die...NOT

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ORIGINAL: Moonhead

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

The ice is melting and the oceans will rise. We are all going to die...NOT

Not all of the icecaps' mass is floating and already displacing its own mass in the oceans. The Greenland ice melting, for instance, will raise the sea level a little, and even a slight rise is bad news for the Dutch or anybody else who lives on a flood plain.

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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No one is claiming climate change is always caused by humans, just that this one is definitely being caused by our activities. You're simply repeating a strawman the climate denialists have hoisted up. Maybe you don't understand that something like a global climate shift can have more than a single cause?

No, the issue is whether CO2 causes temperature rise. Have a look at the graph I posted in #53. The graph clearly shows even a lack of correlation while the alarmist claim cause and effect.

So now you're denying that CO2 is a photon trap. Do you have any idea how much of physics has to be wrong for CO2 to not function as a phton trap?

What your graph shows is that some other variable, which we have yet to identify but there are plenty of possibilities, had a larger effect on the climate than the CO2 level.

It may be a heat trap but apparently a minor one. Rigorous science requires that if events don't fit the theory the theory must be modified or abandoned. Here is a graph published by the Sierra Club , hardly a den of skeptics, which shows the anomaly at 130,000 years. Make what you wish of it.