On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 10:37 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> What evidence can you cite that in the past the Earth's temperature has > risen more than 0.7degK in 40yrs? > Except for the Ordovician period 450 million years ago and a few very brief ice ages during the last few hundred thousand years the last billion years has always been warmer than now, occasionally MUCH warmer. In the last billion years it has never been warmer than during the Carboniferous Era 360 million years ago, and I don't believe life has ever been quite that lush and plentiful again. > > > But in this case we don't need to look for "super complex factors". We > know exactly how much CO2 we've added to the atmosphere and we know exactly > how it traps heat. > And yet we don't know why during the Ordovician period 450 million years ago there was a HUGE amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, about 4400 ppm verses 380 today, but the world was in a severe ice age, much colder than the more recent ice ages we are more familiar with. > > The only uncertainties are in the positive feedback factors, like water > vapor, snow cover, > Don't misunderstand me, I'm perfectly willing to concede that human activity has had a effect on global climate and will have a even bigger effect in the future, but predicting exactly what things will be like in the future or explaining why there were as they were in the past is not as simple as you seem to think. Cloud cover and snow cover determines how much energy is available to run the entire global climate machine, so uncertainties about them means uncertainties about everything. > methane production > And methane is 30 times as effective at producing a greenhouse effect as CO2 is. > > The main factor for the temperature variations on the scale of millions > of years is the change in solar intensity and the Earth's orbit. > Did that revelation come to you in a dream? You know why the Earth was super cold 450 million years ago and super hot 360 million years ago and everything in-between since? > Do you have any evidence that raising the temperature 4.5degK will not be > disastrous for many millions of people? > No person who doesn't make his living feeding environmental panic says the global temperature is going to rise 4.5degK anytime soon, but never mind, do you have any evidence that raising the temperature 4.5degK will not be beneficial for many millions of people? Do you have any evidence that the temperature things were at a century ago is the exact temperature things should stay at forever? > > >> It was not a coincidence that the megafauna of North America and South >> America and Australia that had existed for many millions of years >> disappeared almost immediately after humans visited those continents for >> the first time. And today there are over 7 billion people on the Earth, >> never before have there been that many large animals of the same large >> species, nothing ever even came close. To keep that many animals alive >> radical things are going to be needed to be done, to also keep them happy >> even more radical things are going to be needed, like directly or >> indirectly diverting nearly 40% of the planet's photosynthetic output to >> human use. It would be astonishing if that sort of intervention did not >> cause global changes of some sort to the climate, but short of asking 5 or >> 6 billion people to kill themselves there is simply no alternative. >> > > > Stupid hyperbole. Nobody is asking anybody to kill themselves. > They'll never have the guts to come right out and say it, or perhaps they just don't have the brains to think things through, but In effect that is exactly precisely what those moral paragons called "environmentalists" are calling for! They say we should stop using fossil fuel, tear down hydroelectric dams, and don't even think about using nuclear power; of course with all those energy sources gone we could no longer make artificial fertilizer, but that's OK, environmentalists say we shouldn't be using them anyway. And we shouldn't use pesticides or herbicides either. Oh and we shouldn't use genetically modified crops either even though none has ever hurt anybody, even though they have higher yields than unmodified crops, even though they need much less fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides. So forget about making them prosperous and happy, if we did all that how could we even keep 7 billion people alive? We couldn't, no way no how. But that wouldn't be a problem if 5 or 6 billion people would just have the good manners to die. 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
