APOD and General Astronomy Discussion Forum
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Ok Babarino, let's see your "thousands". That would be at least two thousand credible scientific studies that refute the idea that humans are having a significant impact global warming. At least two thousand rational pieces of evidence vetted by peer review that are somehow being ignored by the vast majority of the scientific community?Bobarino wrote:I'm sorry but you are wrong. The"evidence" does not support that, or there would be no question. It would be fact not debate.
I posted one out of many possible (thousands really).
Crichton admits that bacteria producing oxygen waste products billions of years ago caused a mass extinction in the past and that it could happen again and then says that a hundred and a million years are nothing. A hundred years is definitely something to me. It's something to all of the humans alive. It's the difference between slavery and freedom. It's the difference between the Milky Way being the entire Universe and spiral nebulas becoming distant galaxies. It's the difference between children needlessly dying or becoming crippled by a devastating poliovirus. A million years makes the difference between our evolutionary ancestor and human intelligence which was nearly wiped out only a few hundred thousand years ago.Nayrb01 wrote:You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
― Michael Crichton
Rational argument is often a hard sell. The fact is, there are politically and economically powerful interests that place their own self interest over things like less pollution or better water quality, and those interests are skilled at utilizing social engineering tools to maintain the appearance of scientific disagreement, and to generate fear about the results of mitigation efforts. It is their goal to maintain the argument as long as possible.bystander wrote:I'm not at all sure what the AGM deniers are up in arms about. The solutions to alleviate it make sense from a resource management point of view. Surely we can all agree less pollution, clean air, clean water, and effective management of scarce resources are goals worth achieving. If they can also alleviate global warming (man-made or not) then that's a bonus. Quit arguing over what the experts agree on and let's get started on preserving those resources we still have left to us.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't see slowing the rate of extinction of other species of animals and plants as simply a matter of resource management. As John Muir said, when you try to isolate any one thing in nature, you find out that it's connected to everything else. We're in the middle of the sixth global mass extinction of complex organisms in the past 500 million years, and the first one that is being caused by a single species with the ability to know what we're doing and modify our behavior. While preserving the diversity of life on our planet has numerous human benefits, on a more fundamental level I believe it's a moral imperative.bystander wrote:I'm not at all sure what the AGM deniers are up in arms about. The solutions to alleviate it make sense from a resource management point of view. Surely we can all agree less pollution, clean air, clean water, and effective management of scarce resources are goals worth achieving. If they can also alleviate global warming (man-made or not) then that's a bonus. Quit arguing over what the experts agree on and let's get started on preserving those resources we still have left to us.
Yes. And that's a sin in my book.Chris Peterson wrote:Rational argument is often a hard sell. The fact is, there are politically and economically powerful interests that place their own self interest over things like less pollution or better water quality, and those interests are skilled at utilizing social engineering tools to maintain the appearance of scientific disagreement, and to generate fear about the results of mitigation efforts. It is their goal to maintain the argument as long as possible.
No at one time it was a green lush land mass ... then it was ice and according to some research - core samples - it was green a 2nd time and then ice again ... Wait?? OMG - that looks like a CYCLE. Naw, must be a mistake in the core samples taken.owlice wrote:This used to be all ice.
[attachment=0]UsedToBeIce.jpg[/attachment]
Of course, there are climate cycles. There is nothing to suggest that the current trend is part of any previously seen natural cycle, however. It is a mistake (or strategy of the science denier) to conflate long term natural cycles with recent global warming. No science connects the two.Guest wrote:No at one time it was a green lush land mass ... then it was ice and according to some research - core samples - it was green a 2nd time and then ice again ... Wait?? OMG - that looks like a CYCLE. Naw, must be a mistake in the core samples taken.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. How can we respect ourselves if we do not respect all life in the same way? I also completely agree with bystander. It's not necessarily climate change itself that we need to stop. Global warming is only a single symptom of our sickness. We, as an intelligent, empathetic species need to understand that and we need to change some very fundamental ways that we think about and treat Earth's natural resources, which affects all known life. We've accumulated enough knowledge to understand it now. It's only a matter of capitulating to the conclusions we are able to draw from that knowledge.Anthony Barreiro wrote:While preserving the diversity of life on our planet has numerous human benefits, on a more fundamental level I believe it's a moral imperative.
The mistake is to assume human activity does not affect the earth.Guest wrote:No at one time it was a green lush land mass ... then it was ice and according to some research - core samples - it was green a 2nd time and then ice again ... Wait?? OMG - that looks like a CYCLE. Naw, must be a mistake in the core samples taken.owlice wrote:This used to be all ice.
[attachment=0]UsedToBeIce.jpg[/attachment]
You can cherry pick any two sections of data and say that there is cooling but that doesn't change the fact that the overall trend remains up. What will you say in another 15 years if the temperature rises? Will you restart the count as soon as there is a year cooler than the previous and say "There has been no warming over the past 1 year." and so on for as long as it fits your opinion?relax wrote:No warming over the last 15 years. Despite China and India pumping out CO2 at all time highs. Relax and have a drink or something...just not the kool-aid.
The temperatures have remained fairly flat for the last 10 years, although still at record historical highs. A number of excellent and solid papers have been published explaining reasons for this, and why we expect it to be temporary. Note that if you look at the temperature trend over the last century, there are several decadal periods of flat or even decreasing temperature. This is to be expected given any noisy signal. The trend remains, and there is no reason not to expect temperatures to continue rising. This is not a good time to relax.relax wrote:No warming over the last 15 years. Despite China and India pumping out CO2 at all time highs. Relax and have a drink or something...just not the kool-aid.
great, just great. We should just sit back with our tv remotes and drive our Hummers and keep overpopulating the land, pushing out any animals that get in our way? It's a huge rock!... with an excruciatingly thin "life-zone" to run around in.Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us.
I'm not going to call your first sentence naive (it's just the way you are framing your comment is all), but I would venture to say that the deniers have a monetary stake in the status quo (aka OIL), don't like change, or are ignorant of the facts and lazily don't care to follow where the facts have lead to so far. TO ARMS PEOPLE!bystander wrote:I'm not at all sure what the AGM deniers are up in arms about. The solutions to alleviate it make sense from a resource management point of view. Surely we can all agree less pollution, clean air, clean water, and effective management of scarce resources are goals worth achieving. If they can also alleviate global warming (man-made or not) then that's a bonus. Quit arguing over what the experts agree on and let's get started on preserving those resources we still have left to us.
I would say that the subject has become politicized. The science itself hasn't.Eamon Shute wrote:Unfortunately the science has become politicised, and there is a massive campaign to sow doubt in people's minds and to spread misinformation.
I did not say there was cooling, and I don't think it's cherry picking. It's just that the models predict warming with rising CO2 levels, and it is not happening. The hard fact that warming has stopped, while CO2 emissions skyrocket, proves at a minimum that the current AGW models are flawed. Yet these models are quoted as justification to alter society at great cost. Again I say relax... And this doesn't mean I'm for pollution in case anyone is wondering. I drive high mileage cars (mostly so I don't send money to the middle east) and I recycle the bottle after drinking some good wine. Speaking of which...geckzilla wrote:You can cherry pick any two sections of data and say that there is cooling but that doesn't change the fact that the overall trend remains up. What will you say in another 15 years if the temperature rises? Will you restart the count as soon as there is a year cooler than the previous and say "There has been no warming over the past 1 year." and so on for as long as it fits your opinion?relax wrote:No warming over the last 15 years. Despite China and India pumping out CO2 at all time highs. Relax and have a drink or something...just not the kool-aid.
That's where you are mistaken. Most models predict warming over any 10-year interval with low confidence. You can find quite a few 10-year boxcars over the last 150 years that show no increase in temperature; you cannot find a 30-year boxcar that shows that.Guest wrote:It's just that the models predict warming with rising CO2 levels, and it is not happening.
No. The climatic effects of volcanic dust only extend a few years- certainly less than 10 even in the case of Krakatoa. Also, if what we were seeing today were indicative of the long term norm (for at least the last few centuries) there would have been an open northwest passage back when people were trying to find such a route, and it would be apparent in the ice core record.Rick wrote:Didn't the Supervolcano Krakatoa explode in 1883? Could this 130 year span simply show global cooling then re-warming?
The oldest and thickest Arctic ice seems to be vanishing faster than the younger, thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean's floating ice cap, a new NASA study finds.
Typically the thicker, older ice survives through the summer melt season (hence, it's called multi-year ice), while the younger ice that forms over the winter melts as quickly as it formed. That's what makes this new finding worrisome; if the ice that usually sticks around is rapidly disappearing, the Arctic sea ice is more vulnerable to further disappearance during the summer, said study researcher Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
In the new study, Comiso and colleagues looked at multi-year ice that had made it through at least two summers. They wanted to see how it diminished with each passing winter over the past three decades. Results showed that the extent of multi-year ice, which includes areas of the Arctic Ocean where multi-year ice covers at least 15 percent of the water's surface, is shrinking at a rate of 15.1 percent per decade.
