On 12/11/2014 12:02 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 10:37 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[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.
Evasive. Your assertion, which you conveniently snipped, was that the RATE of temperature
rise was not unprecedented. That the Earth has been much warmer, the CO2 concentration
has been much higher, is not disputed. But it didn't happen while homo sapiens existed.
We, and our current economy and culture are adapted to the climate as it has been in last
hundred thousand years. We and other species could no doubt adapt to the much warmer
climate of the Carboniferous era - but not in a few hundred years.
> 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?
No it came to me reading about the Milankovich cycles.
> 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,
It's the 95% upper confidence bound of the IPCC projection for 2100. I don't know your
conception of "soon", but I'll have living grandchildren then. And again you spread the
slur that climatologists are "making a living feeding panic". All the climatologists that
I know of had secure academic or government jobs before the AGW debate became politicized
and the only monetary effect for them is that their government job may be cut if deniers
get control.
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;
Bullshit. You're just making up straw man "environmentalist". One of my close friends is
president of the Sierra Club and he's *for* nuclear power. And even those who are against
it only hold that opinion because they think solar and wind can replace oil. NONE OF THEM
think we can or should reduce overall energy consumption per captia.
Brent
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