On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 4:22 PM, <ghib...@gmail.com> wrote: > you said somewhere you weren't bothered about the 0.8C rise to date >
That's right, the Human race has never been more numerous, longer lived, better educated or richer than it is today so global warming seems to have caused little harm and may even have been helpful. That shouldn't be a big surprise, after all we don't know what the perfect temperature to maximize human happiness is, but I doubt it's exactly .8C less than it is right now. > I didn't catch whether you are concerned about the projections by 2100? > No I am not at all concerned by the 2100 projections, I say this for 5 reasons: 1) I have little confidence in long term climate models. Anybody reading them would think CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas, but it isn't, water vapor is. And they can't answer one important question, if the world's temperature increases will that create more clouds or fewer clouds? It's a very simple question with profound consequences because clouds regulate the amount of solar energy that runs the entire climate show. Increased temperature means more water evaporates from the sea, but it also means the atmosphere can hold more water before it is forced to form clouds. So who wins this tug of war? Nobody knows, its too complicated. Water vapor is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 and unlike CO2 it undergoes phase changes at earthly temperatures, it can be a solid a liquid or a gas which makes it astronomically more complicated than CO2 which is always just a gas, at least on this planet. And then there is the important issue of global dimming, the world may be getting warmer but it is also getting dimmer. For reasons that are not clearly understood but may be related to clouds, during the day at any given temperature it takes longer now for water to evaporate than it did 50 years ago; climate models can't explain why it exists today much less know if the effect will be larger or smaller in 2100. 2) Even if the climate models are correct it is not at all clear if on the global scale the increase in temperature would be a good thing or a bad thing; however I do know that far more people freeze to death than die of heatstroke. 3) Even if it's a bad thing, as of 2014 no environmentalist has proposed a cure for global warming that wasn't far worse than the disease, although some non-environmentalists may have. 4) Even if it is a bad thing there are plenty of worse problems that will hit before 2100 to worry about. Most science stories are under reported in the mainstream press, but global warming is almost as over reported as ancient astronauts or stories about Nostradamus. 5) In 2100 if we find that global warming is causing us serious trouble we can deal with it then when out toolbox for fixing things will be vastly larger than it is now. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
