Article

2011-08-23 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by tu3031 2011-08-23 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11128 views ] Top

#1 THIS is not news.

Posted by Redneck Jim 2011-08-23 00:04|| 2011-08-23 00:04|| Front Page Top

#2 Goes?

Posted by DarthVader 2011-08-23 00:18|| 2011-08-23 00:18|| Front Page Top

#3 Note to Al Gore,

The reason we can't come to an agreement is you refuse to admit you are wrong about AGHGs causing catastrophic warming.

Actually one of the few things we know with reasonable certainty is that CO2 emissions aren't a problem.

There are about 20 other anthropogenic GHGs that we almost nothing about, except that governments are lying about their emission levels.

Posted by phil_b 2011-08-23 05:33|| 2011-08-23 05:33|| Front Page Top

#4 Ik zie dat we een forum van volledige milieu-experts.

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 06:12|| 2011-08-23 06:12|| Front Page Top

#5 Oh, so only experts are allowed to discuss this? What about other non-linear dynamical systems like the economy?

Posted by Glusoger Gruter1463 2011-08-23 06:27|| 2011-08-23 06:27|| Front Page Top

#6 Actually, global warming (greenhouse gases) is NOT non-linear. Nice try...

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 06:28|| 2011-08-23 06:28|| Front Page Top

#7 Clever bit of misdirection asshole. I said "systems". And you didn't answer my question.

The Climate System: An Overview
A.P.M.Baede, E. Ahlonsou, Y.Ding, D. Schimel

"The response of the climate to the internal variability of the climate system and to external forcings is further complicated by feedbacks and non-linear responses of the components."

Posted by Glusoger Gruter1463 2011-08-23 06:55|| 2011-08-23 06:55|| Front Page Top

#8 1. No ad-hominim attacks
2. Global warming via greenhouse gases is a linear system. The higher the net addition of CO2, methane added to the atmosphere, the warmer the average temperature a planet gets. Now, it can be regulated by absorption of these gases by photosynthetic plants and bacteria (CO2) and by absorption by the oceans (CO2 and methane) but it this theory is not non-linear. Granted, climate theory is non-linear, as in predicting the weather, but greenhouse theory is not. The warming of the planet effects the climate, but not the other way around. Well, how do we know all this
a) we have an example in our own solar system...Venus, which has a runaway greenhouse effect
b) Permian Mass Extinction (or 'The Great Dying') ~ 250 million years ago, which resulted in 90% of the species on the planet dying. Due to Siberia Traps basalt flood eruption, but principle is the same. Eruption caused large amounts of greenhouse gases (CO2, SO2, etc) to be emitted causing global warming, raising avg temp of planet by 5C. This was enough to raise ocean temperatures so that methane hydrates frozen under oceanic sediment to melt and be emitted to atmosphere causing another 5-10C rise. This is NOT theory, it is fact, because it has happened before.

Unfortunately, this is a case where the messenger (Gore) kills the message...

een prettige dag

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 07:13|| 2011-08-23 07:13|| Front Page Top

#9 Oh, as a addendum. Methane is 300 times as effective a greenhouse gas as CO2. Once you hit the 5C rise, we are done...

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 07:17|| 2011-08-23 07:17|| Front Page Top

#10 Trembling B4 G*d

It's logarithmic not linear. All insulating systems are.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2011-08-23 07:25|| 2011-08-23 07:25|| Front Page Top

#11 shhhhh... don't go confusing the troll with words like 'logarithmic' there BP. it's holy prophet, (or should we say profiteer) has spoken and the science is settled. we should all just bow down to our betters.

numbers and math is hard. just listen to the Goracle.

Posted by abu do you love 2011-08-23 07:51|| 2011-08-23 07:51|| Front Page Top

#12 Ad-hominim attack # 2

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 07:53|| 2011-08-23 07:53|| Front Page Top

#13 "It's logarithmic not linear. All insulating systems are."

You are right, Pebbles. My mistake.

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 07:54|| 2011-08-23 07:54|| Front Page Top

#14 Ice core data do show that CO2 levels and average temp are related, however as the CO2 spike always follows the temp spike by about 500 years, it is evident that the causation is reverse of that claimed by the AGW zealots.

Posted by abu do you love 2011-08-23 07:56|| 2011-08-23 07:56|| Front Page Top

#15 Typical Qbecer.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2011-08-23 07:56|| 2011-08-23 07:56|| Front Page Top

#16 No "Happy Ending" for this fellow I'm afraid.

Posted by Besoeker 2011-08-23 08:34|| 2011-08-23 08:34|| Front Page Top

#17 lulz..."my mistake" after arguing soooo convincingly

Posted by Frank G 2011-08-23 08:37|| 2011-08-23 08:37|| Front Page Top

#18 90% of the species on the planet dying.

He may be right. Can't tell. So let's work on being in the other 10%, since global humanity WILL burn whatever can be burned (rain forests, peat bogs, coal, oil, gas) and no government can do more than slow it down a little.

The methane hydrate angle is interesting though - methane is a substantially more effective GHG than CO2, so maybe our best defense is to figure out how to extract and burn it before it melts and leaks out on its own...

Posted by Glenmore 2011-08-23 08:39|| 2011-08-23 08:39|| Front Page Top

#19 a) we have an example in our own solar system...Venus, which has a runaway greenhouse effect

Not comparable. You do realize the Venusian atmosphere is nearly 100% CO2 as well as being 100 times denser than earth's? If all the near surface carbon (most of it trapped as carbonates - e.g. limestone) were magically converted to CO2, the atmospheric CO2 level would approach 8000 ppm or .8%.

Posted by Eohippus Phater7165 2011-08-23 09:55|| 2011-08-23 09:55|| Front Page Top

#20 Also take into the fact that throughout Earth's history, this is one of only two times that the atmosphere has been so carbon-poor. The other time was during snowball earth some 400 million years ago.

The rest of earth's history C02 has been far more plentiful in the atmosphere.

Posted by DarthVader 2011-08-23 10:07|| 2011-08-23 10:07|| Front Page Top

#21 b) Permian Mass Extinction (or 'The Great Dying') ~ 250 million years ago, which resulted in 90% of the species on the planet dying. Due to Siberia Traps basalt flood eruption, but principle is the same. Eruption caused large amounts of greenhouse gases (CO2, SO2, etc) to be emitted causing global warming, raising avg temp of planet by 5C.

Wrong. Temperature did rise, but it wasn't an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels that triggered the extinction. Prehistoric CO2 levels.
The Permian-Triassic epochs were at a CO2 minimum.

Posted by Eohippus Phater7165 2011-08-23 10:32|| 2011-08-23 10:32|| Front Page Top

#22
Digging back into my memory of highschool, the pressure of any system is:

p=mt/v

(pressure, number molecules, temp, volume)

Of course the earth isn't a solid, the as the temp goes up, the water and atmosphere expand.

Since the gravitational forces loose their pull exponentially, the outer layers of atmosphere boil off easily taking heat with it.

Watching this debate, the pro greenhouse crowd is trying to make their case with scary movies and precious little hard science.

If they want to make their case, I'd like to see absorbtion rates of the various atmospheric gases by spectrum, then atmospheric compositions (estimates would be ok) from today going back for the last few thousand years.

No Science, no Dolla Dolla Bills.

Posted by flash91 2011-08-23 10:33|| 2011-08-23 10:33|| Front Page Top

#23 IS it just me, or are the Soros-Trolls out in greater force of late?

Posted by Iblis 2011-08-23 11:45|| 2011-08-23 11:45|| Front Page Top

#24 Flash91, somebody just noticed that a lot more heat is lost to space from the upper atmosphere than was previously thought. They also seem to have noticed that, along with other gasses having a greater greenhouse effect than CO2 -- I haven't noticed AGW proponents talking about H2O, f'r instance, which, although having a small per molecule effect, makes up for it by being such a large percent of the total molecules -- there are a number of factors which thus far have not been accounted for in the "settled" calculations.

But I'll leave the discussion of those details to those who know more about them. I just wish to raise the point that weather, as opposed to climate, turns out to map to Chaos Theory, according to my brother the perfessor, who has done some consulting work with the National Weather Service.

Posted by trailing wife 2011-08-23 12:23|| 2011-08-23 12:23|| Front Page Top

#25 Almost all, 99.x%, of ocean methane hydrates are below the Thermocline.

Which means we would have to see dramatic warming over many centuries for the deep oceans to warm enough to cause their release.

Thus they can not be a cause of warming over the next century or so.

Posted by phil_b 2011-08-23 12:39|| 2011-08-23 12:39|| Front Page Top

#26 I was referring to this,

Fudging GHG stats

For example emissions of HFC-23, with an atmospheric half life of approximately 270 years an extremely long-lived GHG and with a global warming potential 15,000 times greater than CO2 a particularly potent one. HFC-23 is produced as a by-product in the manufacture of chlorodifluoromethane (HCFC-22), which is used as a cooling and foaming agent and in Teflon production.

Posted by phil_b 2011-08-23 12:44|| 2011-08-23 12:44|| Front Page Top

#27 TW, indeed H2O feedbacks dominate our climate over timescales of a few minutes to generally less than a day.

We have almost no useful measurements of these effects on a global scale.

For example, one of the two primary means of heat transport upwards on its way to space in the Earths climate is ocean evaporation resulting in rain.

Increasing rainfall would be strong evidence the climate is warming.

However, we have no idea whether rainfall is increasing or not.

Posted by phil_b 2011-08-23 13:14|| 2011-08-23 13:14|| Front Page Top

#28 Thank you, phil_b. And I see that a new deep-ocean cold current has just been discovered flowing south from Iceland into the Atlantic, part of the ocean circulation which regulates climate, it seems. Something else to factor into the climate change calculations... Link

Posted by trailing wife 2011-08-23 14:27|| 2011-08-23 14:27|| Front Page Top

#29 Rates of radioactive decay were once thought to be constant. Very small variations on a 33-day cycle have been observed and have not been refuted. There is no accepted theory to explain this. The cooling of the earth from its ancient molten state has been greatly slowed by radioactive decay. [In 1862 the future Lord Kelvin calculated the earth's age as between 20 million and 400 million years based solely on thermodynamics, as radioactivity decay wasn't known then. Geologists didn't believe him.] If small variations irrefutably occur, why not larger and less frequent ones?

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-08-23 14:56|| 2011-08-23 14:56|| Front Page Top

#30 TW
IIUC super-convecting equatorial cells (thunderstorms) transport surface heat 60,000+ feet up. In other words, on the other side of all that evil CO2 in the troposphere.

And in other news, CERN is now doing good work investigating solar wind/GCR interactions with atmospheric ionization and cloud levels.

Whatever effect anthropogenic CO2 may or may not have in 200-300 years, it is NOT the cause of the warming that took place back in the 20th century

Posted by My two cents 2011-08-23 14:59|| 2011-08-23 14:59|| Front Page Top

#31 So far ZERO evidence that anything puny humans do (starting today) will affect global temps on anything less than a 300 year time frame. Except maybe an all-out nuclear war.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-08-23 15:35|| 2011-08-23 15:35|| Front Page Top

#32 AGW only happens in (some) computers.

The Earth's climate is too big to fit inside a computer.

Posted by Free Radical 2011-08-23 18:58|| 2011-08-23 18:58|| Front Page Top

#33 My two cents, well explained, and good to know about CERN. :-). I sigh for the good old days when contrails were going to precipitate the next ice age. How times have changed.

All in all, a thoroughly satisfying thread, my dears. Dank je wel for the challenge, Trembling B4 G*d. One most sincerely hopes you, too, have learnt from this discussion.

Posted by trailing wife 2011-08-23 21:43|| 2011-08-23 21:43|| Front Page Top

#34 Ik heb. Dankzij

Though the jury is out about the link between contrails and global dimming :)...but that's another debate for another post..

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 21:52|| 2011-08-23 21:52|| Front Page Top

#35 TW. The CERN CLOUD experiment is an expansion of prior test both at CERN and in a particle accelerator in Denmark. Henrik Svensmark has been doing yeomanlike work developing this theory with a coterie of astrophysicists, geologists and other scientific disciplines. I think he has hit the nail right on the head.

I just finished reading the book "The Chilling Stars" which outlines his theory and the historical evidence. I highly recommend it to anyone who seriously wants to find out the truth about climate change.

You can also view a 1 hour documentary on the subject here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMTPF1blpQ

Posted by DanNY 2011-08-23 22:27|| http://nygoe.wordpress.com/ 2011-08-23 22:27|| Front Page Top

#36 I have never heard of the CERN Cloud, but I will take a look at this doc. Thanks.

Posted by Trembling B4 G*d 2011-08-23 22:32|| 2011-08-23 22:32|| Front Page Top

#37 DanNY, thank you. I learn so much from these discussions, undertaken by such a wonderfu mix of serious amateurs and equally serious professionals. I'm going to look into the book for either Mr. Wife or trailing daughter #1 for Christmas.

Posted by trailing wife 2011-08-23 23:58|| 2011-08-23 23:58|| Front Page Top

23:58 trailing wife
23:53 tu3031
23:48 trailing wife
23:47 JosephMendiola
23:39 trailing wife
23:19 JosephMendiola
23:16 trailing wife
23:07 JosephMendiola
23:06 tu3031
23:01 Frank G
22:57 Anonymoose
22:49 trailing wife
22:39 Sherry
22:37 Sherry
22:34 badanov
22:32 tu3031
22:32 Trembling B4 G*d
22:27 swksvolFF
22:27 DanNY
22:26 Trembling B4 G*d
22:19 Trembling B4 G*d
22:18 tu3031
22:17 badanov
22:12 Trembling B4 G*d