jurisb:

Milwaukee averages 52.6 inches of snow per year. We hit that two weeks ago, and we can get snow here well into April, and sometimes May (and we got 3 more inches today). Latvia not getting much snow this year no more indicates global warming than Milwaukee’s unusually high snowfall indicates global cooling. Neither does a couple of decades of higher temperatures. Remember, Earth: 4.5 billion years old. 30 years is nothing, and neither is 3000 years.

The US, Canada, China, and others are in the middle of their coldest winters in decades. The Earth is a non-deterministic system. Sometimes you get extremes, and those extremes can last a long time (many human lifetimes). We know this from the geological record. Beyond that, we are only guessing.

David Holzman:

The mainstream (scientists and the great unwashed) once believed the Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. As for technological advances, I have no problem with any technology that is cleaner or better for the environment in some way, provided the government keeps its hand out of my pocket in the process. Products that use less energy are a good thing in the long term if for no other reason than they are cheaper to operate.

And how in the world do we know what changes will mitigate global climate change (they don’t call it warming anymore; you can cover both bases this way) if we can’t even agree on what is causing the warming to begin with. Maybe we are causing it, maybe we aren’t. Maybe this is a part of the normal cycle of behavior for this particular system, a system so complicated we have barely scratched the surface of understanding it.

Actually, given that, don’t you find it odd that such a complicated system could be pushed out of alignment so easily? I’m not saying it’s impossible, just… odd.

And if it’s true, you better get ready for more, because the US and Europe “greening up” will do nothing to stop India and China, whose populations dwarf ours, from dumping more stuff into the atmosphere as they develop into first-world countries. I’d be more worried about running out of oil than warming the planet; it seems a more immediate and definite problem.

I’ll take the credit for half-assed ideology unfounded in concrete facts! You can name names when it comes to my mistakes! I’m a Weapons Officer, I can take it….

Now I have to go lick my wounds from these awesome-o commentators. They keep me on my toes more than my superiors on the jet!

The planet Earth is governed overwhelmingly by negative feedback systems; that is, things that return less than what was put into them….

Pfingst, it is not at all clear that your assertion is true.

From the Salon.com article:

“As famed climatologist Wallace Broecker wrote in Nature in 1995:

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing,the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.”

I can think of several positive feedback forcings right off the top of my head:

CO2 causes temperature rise, warmed oceans can’t store as much CO2 as cold oceans, CO2 persists longer in atmosphere, causes more warming.

CO2 causes temperature rise. Polar ice caps melt. Earth’s net albedo (reflectivity) goes down. More solar radiation is absorbed, causes more warming.

CO2 causes temperature rise. More water vapor evaporates from the oceans. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere causes more warming.

It is true that there are some negative feedbacks that dampen climate change, but I believe the preponderance of evidence is that those negative feedbacks are being overwhelmed by the CO2 forcing and the positive feedback mechanisms.

The Earth has greatly cooled in the last year, as many scientists predicted, due to a reduction in activity from the Sun.

http://tinyurl.com/2z8dux

You just saved my having to make this argument, which should be obvious to anyone giving it rational thought.

For literally hundreds of millions of years, the sun’s energy was stored in the form of biological detritus, which was transformed into hydrocarbons. We are speaking of eons of stored energy.

Millions of years later, human beings learned how to poke a straw into the earth and suck out that wonderful oilshake. But we’re not spending hundreds of millions of years on returning that energy to the biosphere. We’re doing it in a hundred, and will have done it in maximum a hundred more.

Positive feedback? The thermostat is on max, and has been stuck there for a while.

In addition, you’d need to know what the partial pressure of CO2 is and the volume of the oceans, but it wouldn’t be too hard to calcualte the derivative of P(CO2) with respect to pH(Oceans) along with the derivitive of P(CO2) with respect to burning hydrocarbons. I guarantee you that that number is very very small. Maybe when I get home from work, I’ll run through the numbers, but it’s nothing to worry about.

If you remember your high-school chemistry, you’ll remember all about buffers. H2CO3 (H2O+CO2) is a good acidic buffer, that means that it takes lots of CO2 to make a small change in pH. (Another good negative feed back mechanism)

The problem is the earth is more crowded than ever, and the wheat grown per person has been declining for over 20 years . The glaciers that keep the Yellow River and the Yangtse (on which much of agriculture in China and India depend) are projected to be gone now by 2030–due to global heating. That, on top of cars running on plant biomass is going to send the cost of food soaring, so that much of the world is likely to starve.

The planet Earth is governed overwhelmingly by negative feedback systems; that is, things that return less than what was put into them. This makes intuitive sense, as a system that generates more than what came in can be destructive and unsustainable (think nuclear chain reaction). If positive feedback was the norm, we would see runaway reactions all over the place.

For catastrophic global warming to be a viable theory, the ManBearPigs of the world need to show that the climate is governed by, or can be nudged into, a state of positive feedback. Given that the new great Satan (CO2) reaches a saturation point after which it ceases to have an additional greenhouse effect (negative feedback!), they need to show that it:

1. is possible in practice (not just in theory)
2. is happening (not might happen)
3. that we are causing it directly
4. exactly how this mechanism is working (not might work in theory maybe), so we can correct the problem and not just throw billions of dollars at whatever some politician wants.

In other words, extraordinary claims should require an extremely high standard of proof, and right now we just don’t have that.

This planet has survived millions of years of volcanic activity, magnetic poles switching polarity, intense radiation, and several ice ages (one of which, say scientists who study such things, we have only recently emerged from). Our paltry data from 1975-now is nothing in the lifetime of the Earth, and to believe otherwise is pure human arrogance.

Imagine, BTW, if we lived during the end of one of the really bad ice ages, what we would think about the “higher-than-usual” temperatures. It would have turned out that our “usual” temperatures were not normal at all, but unusually low. Given our limited ice cap data, we should refrain from passing any judgments about what the “normal” amount is, as we really just don’t know.

As for ending life on earth, well, life has a funny way of adapting to meet the conditions it is faced with. And humans, for better or worse, are the most adaptable species of all.

Thanks, trk2, for a nice perspective. By most all objective measures, we’re better off than ever. Yet oddly, there’s a nagging feeling that things are bad and bound to get worse. Robert Samuelson explored that paradox in “The Good Life and Its Discontents.”

Regardless of whether we believe in global warming, the gripe I have with it is that it distracts from the emissions of pollutants in general, which are at an all-time high, and present dangers to our health and our environment.

I don’t believe this is true, although it could depend on your defintion of ‘we’. For example traditional forms of pollution (NOx, SOx) have declined over the last 20 years and are far better then they were in the 70’s for the United States and Europe. Worldwide those rates continue to climb due to vast increases in emissions from Africa, Russia and developing Asia. However, for the majority of us commenting here, the present dangers to our health from pollution are far less today then 30 years ago. And 30 years ago that danger was miniscule compared to the beginning of the 20th century due to much better sewage treatment and water supplies. The cities of the early 1900’s were horribly polluted with animal and human waste and choked with coal heating. If anything the health danger from pollution continuously declined for the majority of the western population over the last century. Yet today we are still told that the threat is at it’s greatest ever. Bullocks!

That the predicted warming from CO2 emissions could ever have as dire a direct impact on health as what our ancestors lived with in the past seems like the definition of alarmism.

Thanks for the link. Still

“It is unknown which, if any, of these reconstructions is an accurate representation of climate history; however, these curves are a fair representation of the range of results appearing in the published scientific literature. Hence, it is likely that such reconstructions, accurate or not, will play a significant role in the ongoing discussions of global climate change and global warming.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

@guyincognito – There are no reliable temperature measurements period. First, we have to worry about technical issues like the thermometers in 1850 were no where near as accurate as today’s thermometers. Then we need to worry about what we’re measuring the (average) temperature of: The ground? the atmosphere at ground level? The seas? Etc, there are too many ways to measure temperature and there’s too much variation in the data for it to be meaningful. The best we can do for data before 1850 is to look at ice core samples and correlate dissolved CO2 to atmospheric temperature, but that’s not a great correlation. Basically, with all the different fluctuations in the temperature, the best you can really do is get an average temperature over thousands of years. I.e. on the scale of geologic time is the temperature changing? – and we know that it does happen (Ice ages and whatnot), but on human time frames, I dare say it’s impossible to know. And by impossible, I mean the time it would take to measure the temperature with small enough error bars would be longer than a human lifetime.

“there’s not much to be lost by moving rapidly to green – really green – energy intiatives.”

Actually there is alot to be lost. The cost of moving to these technologies rapidly is huge. Just think of changing the whole oil feuling infrastructure or having every car in America suddenly charging off the electric grid or constructing all new power plants/wind farms, etc.

Not only that but in the rush to “green” those with alternate goals and good marketing and/or political clout are finding it easier to push their agenda. Even some who are truly trying to save the earth are using untested, and potentially harmful in other ways solutions.

Instead of rushing, it would be ideal to take a measured approach so the most resources possible could be dedicated to the best solution possible. Of course conservation and courtesy are always beneficial but there has got to be some logic and balance against the downsides which include lost jobs and decreased mobility.

You mean this satalite data?
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7/7e/Satellite_Temperatures.png

Is there reliable global temperature data from before 1850?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

The sources cited all check out.

Why is the surface temperature warmer than atmospheric temperature if greenhouse gasses are trapping and radiating heat down to the earth’s surface?

The surface of the earth must emit enough heat to balance out the heat absorbed from solar flux as well as heat bounced off of greenhouse gasses. Since the amount of heat radiated is dependent on T^4, the surface must be hotter to emit the additional heat.

I’m going to be the first one to take the bait for self-aggrandizement and say “why thank you”.

Nice one though, Robert, throwing that acorn at the end and watching everyone scurry after it.

That’s a great point, but on the other side of the spectrum, it could be argued that given the dire environmental and therefore human and economic consequences of not acting if global warming is indeed a reality means it would be prudent to take measures as soon as possible to:
- prevent the worst
- spread the damage to the economy, or even circumvent it as new processes mean new business opportunities.