Anthropgenic Climate Change

[Lanx]

Besides, isn't McDonalds alone one of the biggest producers/consumers of beef on the planet? Think about how many problems we would get rid of if we got rid of them...

it'd create more problems cuz then ppl would have to find uses for dollar bills cuz there'd be no dollar menu! double cheeseburger for a dollar, what!
(i don't goto mcdees for their burgers, only for the fries and nuggets, one reason is cuz there is a 5gives next o my mcdonalds, literally 20ft away, i get my burgers there)

[Oqsy]

Maybe we should force everyone to keep their houses 10-20 degrees cooler to slow their metabolisms and make eating less frequent.

Sorry, but when the words "make" and "force" enter the conversation, it's obvious that you're not interested in fixing the problem, just in finding the people who are "guilty" and making them pay in whatever way possible.  Taxes, prohibitions, or banishment.

Just wait until something you do, or something about who or what you are becomes the target of these methods and you'll finally start to catch on.

[wellington1869]

i dont think any kind of force would work, but raising awareness of consequences and generating debate is the way to do it.

[ch_123]

Last I checked, "make" and "force" are the basis of laws in any civilized society.

And I eat red meat, so I'm not sure what the second bit is about. Haven't had a McDonalds for a very long time though...

[Rajagra]

Nuclear power - is based on the premise that one day we'll find a safe way of permanently disposing of radioactive waste. (Seems like a bulletproof concept, right...?)

Time to resurrect the 50-60 year old Project Orion, and use it to blast nuclear waste into the Sun.

I remember a documentary where one of the chief scientists involved in the project said he was glad Orion never came to fruition, because he calculated the radioactivity generated by one of these behemoth spacecraft taking off would, statistically speaking, be responsible for one person on the planet dying, and he didn't want that on his conscience. That seems to be a rather blinkered - dare I say even selfish - attitude to take. You need to weigh up all the pros and cons. If you used Orion to dispose of more dangerous matter than it generates, then you are saving lives as the net effect, and opening up all kinds of exciting possibilities.

[wellington1869]

Haven't had a McDonalds for a very long time though...

me neither, thank goodness. I'm an oatmeal fiend now. Feels great and I look better.

I still enjoy a good burger now and then but never mcd's and only once every week or two.

[Ekaros]

I don't think cutting down on meat production/consumption and vegetarianism are equivalent. As far as I know, people in Western countries are eating more red meat than is healthy anyway.

Besides, isn't McDonalds alone one of the biggest producers/consumers of beef on the planet? Think about how many problems we would get rid of if we got rid of them...

People would eat somewhere else and spend money somewhere else. Only realistic way to lessen the stress on ecology and output of CO2 is to lessen the population. Of course, in short run there is some ethical issues, with most people...

[Soarer]

I'm a sceptic. I really don't believe that science has made a strong enough case to warrant massive changes to the way we live. The theory is plausible, but not convincing. That various 'worst case' predictions have been found to be grossly exaggerated doesn't help any, and the way some scientists have conducted themselves has massively damaged the credibility of the science as a whole.

Fundamentally, I have a problem with the basic goal of measuring global temperature as a single value. Seems to me that it is impossible to calculate that with any reasonable accuracy. I mean that even if there were a million 'ideal' monitoring stations globally, I don't think it would be accurate to the level you'd need to spot changes, even over decades. What we actually have is far, far less ideal than that - only a few thousand, and many in debatable locations. And when you get into the realm of proxies for historical temperatures it all becomes very insubstantial. I'm not saying it's impossible to get useful information out of what we have, but I strongly disagree with the headline grabbing 'global temperature' notion.

Full size electric vehicles are a dead end I think. For the UK's fleet to go electric would need roughly 6 million tonnes of batteries per year, and 6 new large power stations to charge them up! To be efficient, the cars need to be made from more exotic materials to keep the weight down. It's a fine idea on the small scale, but it just wouldn't scale up well.

Sad truth is that while there is oil coming out the ground, we're going to burn it one way or another. Nothing else competes on the combination of price and convenience (even here in Europe where petrol prices are over double what they are in the States). The economics of it all is what will force change, not concern for CO2 levels. No matter how much extra we end up getting taxed in the name of CO2, it can never have as much influence as oil being, say, $1000 a barrel.

Scientists in future millenia will look back at our small blip in CO2, and possibly a corresponding small blip in temperature, and say 'yep, that's when they burnt all the oil'.

[ch_123]

What's the latest on the Hydrogen Fuel Cells? They were sounding relatively promising the last I heard.

[Rajagra]

The global warming theory is bad science presented fraudulently.
http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre.ee.2005.pdf

[Ekaros]

What's the latest on the Hydrogen Fuel Cells? They were sounding relatively promising the last I heard.

I think the fuel-cell tech it self is pretty solid. H part of equation is the harder. Way to safely store, produce and distribute it are issues, production in mass scale is hard from clean sources. Making it inself with ways like electrolysis from di-hydrogenoxide isn't too efficient.

[ch_123]

For the lulz, I wonder if you could argue that the inefficient processes are offset by the huge energy consumption involved in getting oil out of the ground in the first place... Sounds like the sort of thing that an economist would do

[Lanx]

Time to resurrect the 50-60 year old Project Orion, and use it to blast nuclear waste into the Sun.

Rocket would fail and fall down back to earth sooner or later, i mean look at the challenger disasters and such, we're having the lowest bidder build million dollar vehicles.

[Soarer]

The global warming theory is bad science presented fraudulently.
http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre.ee.2005.pdf

And Climategate was investigated (in part at least) by a cozy chat over a cup of tea...
The Oxburgh report
McIntyre's comment
Orlowski's ridicule (he's utterly biased, but amusing)

[Soarer]

For the lulz, I wonder if you could argue that the inefficient processes are offset by the huge energy consumption involved in getting oil out of the ground in the first place... Sounds like the sort of thing that an economist would do

BP would be the first to tell you that it's far more expensive to get it to stay in the ground!!!!

[quadibloc]

The global warming theory is bad science presented fraudulently.

No, it isn't. The leading opponents of global warming fall into two main categories:

Oil company shills.

Fundamentalist religious types who consider all this ecology stuff an attempt to deny that the world won't end until God says so.

It is true that mainstream scientists are being, as they would perceive it... responsible... in presenting this to the public. So they are avoiding saying anything, even though it is true, that might, if misunderstood, confuse a naive person into thinking "oh, that global warming stuff isn't all that serious". So, yes, in their public communications, they have been... tidying things up.

Based on their own past experience of science news stories getting garbled (i.e. the "Mars Hoax" E-mails, deriving from a close opposition of Mars, that claimed it would look like the full Moon - without a telescope) and their perception of the urgency of this issue, they're trying to ensure that one slip of the tongue doesn't doom the planet to catastrophe.

But one is damned if one does and damned if one doesn't, and naturally this lends itself to accusations of dishonesty.

[Oqsy]

No, it isn't. The leading opponents of global warming fall into two main categories:

Oil company shills.

Fundamentalist religious types who consider all this ecology stuff an attempt to deny that the world won't end until God says so.

So which am I?

[Daniel Beaver]

So which am I?

Probably not a "leading opponent".

[Oqsy]

Oh, I'm way ahead of the rest, bro.


And by the way, I'm sure he meant leading opponents of the "theory", because opponents of the process would be most everyone, even people who didn't believe in the "theory".

It would be nice if people like quadcocklove would actually post information that supports his position, instead of just trying to assassinate the character of those opposed to the theory he supports, but then again this is no surprise, and is the way garbage like this gets so popular in the first place.

[quadibloc]

actually post information that supports his position,

There's tons of it already out there, from the best and most reputable sources.

I realize that Scientific American, for example, does sometimes carry articles on nuclear disarmament issues, for example, that show a liberal bias. But what about Nature or Discover? Just to start with popular sources.

It's not rocket science. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas - that's a fact. So is methane. And human activity has put more of those into the atmosphere.

Yes, water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. It gets into the atmosphere naturally. But guess what controls how much water vapor there is in the atmosphere? Temperature. So it's a feedback mechanism that boosts the effects of man-made greenhouse gases, not a reason for saying they're irrelvant.

Also, the Sun is currently in an unusually quiet period, not an unusually active one. So the Sun isn't making the Earth warmer than usual.

And it is warmer than usual. Ice is being lost from the Arctic, grizzly bears are moving north and annoying the polar bears, and, as well, the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean is rising - causing other problems because of increased ocean acidity.

If you choose to believe the people saying that global warming is bunk, instead of listening to the broad mainstream of the relevant portion of the scientific community... you're in the same position as someone who believes in flying saucers, or says that Einstein was wrong, or that Genesis was right instead of Darwin.

Instead of me writing a textbook just for you, the advice you need is this - stop listening to the kooks, crazies, and conspiracy theorists, and start listening to the people who actually know what they're talking about.

[Rajagra]

mainstream scientists ... in their public communications, they have been... tidying things up.

the advice you need is this - stop listening to the kooks, crazies, and conspiracy theorists, and start listening to the people who actually know what they're talking about.

Yes, listen to the people who are talking down to us. We don't need to understand the facts, we need to have faith and blindly follow what they say we have to do. Follow the global warming religion.

Just remember when they wheel out the tired old hockey stick graph that dramatically shows when we started causing global warming, that they are STILL unable to deliver the data it was based on.

[quadibloc]

Yes, listen to the people who are talking down to us. We don't need to understand the facts, we need to have faith and blindly follow what they say we have to do. Follow the global warming religion.

Nobody's stopping you from reading the literature.

To explain how they figured this stuff out, they'd have to use math; like algebra and calculus. Most people don't follow that, so, yes, they "talk down" in their public communications. Quacks don't have that problem - they don't know more than ordinary people, so whatever reasoning they used, they can indeed explain it in full, and it might even sound impressive to people who don't know any better.

The Wikipedia page on the subject

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

might be a good place to start if you want to pursue the topic more seriously. Note that the page is locked.

And I saw what looked like a "hockey stick" graph there - they give five references for it, though.

[Rajagra]

Nobody's stopping you from reading the literature.

They are. They are doing worse than that. They are refusing to release their source data to the scientific community (let alone the public), claiming it would be "inappropriate." How can it be inappropriate to do that? Did the data come from an anonymous source whose life would be in danger if the secret was revealed? No. They are just afraid of how bad they would look if they revealed the truth in full.

[ricercar]

Ripster, do you know if the original movie was significantly cut for the Western World?? That preview has a number sequences that don't appear in my English-subtitled region 1 version, for example the small creature crawling between the human legs on yellow terrain at 1:24.

[quadibloc]

In my web search after watching that trailer, to learn more about Nausicaa - although I had heard of it before - I had seen a claim that the first English version was changed into something much more oriented towards younger children. The original Japanese movie was about how Nausicaa stopped a war between two surviving groups of humans on a devastated Earth.

[Oqsy]

The truth does not have to be complex, unless it's being twisted to serve a purpose.

The water vapor argument has many more facets that you completely glossed over, including CLOUD FORMATION, which in fact, COOLS the planet, and decreases the amount heat reaching the surface from sunlight.  I realize weather and climate systems are much more complex than will ever be done justice here, but just realize that for every little "IT'S A FACT BECAUSE OF THIS!" there is an example of why it doesn't work that way, and why you should question the logic and purposes of those treating you as heretics for daring to ask.

[Lanx]

The baby ohmu is in the Disney version.  Actually, the Disney version isn't all that bad - Patrick Stewart and Uma Thurman did a good job on it.

If I remember right Miyazaki managed to get all his films released uncut.

makes me vomit to hear anyone give praise to anime dubbing.
Please watch anime w/ subtitles!

[quadibloc]

The truth does not have to be complex, unless it's being twisted to serve a purpose.

Sometimes the truth is simple and easy for everyone to understand. Sometimes it's complex. If the truth wasn't complex some of the time, the Norman Conquest would have been fought with jet airplanes.

I can see oil companies having a purpose in damping down public concern over global warming.

But I can also see leftists trying to encourage concern over global warming or any other sort of pollution issue so as to cripple the U.S. militarily. A lot of college-educated people - even engineers and scientists, not just arts grads - are against the Iraq war. So I don't deny that some caution is warranted.

But when you've got the scientific community weighing in, not just advocates like Al Gore and friends, for global warming to be a deliberate hoax is as implausible as for the Apollo moon landing to have been a hoax.

Do we really know that the last few warm years weren't just due to the El Nino/La Nina natural oscillation? Well, in fact, they were due to exactly that... but they were warmer than the last bunch of warm years from that cause, and it's the difference that is being blamed on greenhouse gases. Which are known to be at an elevated level in the atmosphere. And we know we're putting them in the atmosphere at a faster rate than ever before, so it isn't the warmer temperatures that are causing the carbon dioxide or methane levels, except perhaps as an additional feedback mechanism.

Since we don't have an exact, complete, and full understanding of all the feedback systems in the Earth's ecology - prudence demands that we refrain from doing anything to the system the consequences of which we don't understand. We've been lucky so far, because human activity has been on a small scale relative to the environment.

But going back to nature isn't an option. Millions - no, billions - would starve if we gave up modern technology. If, as is more likely, the advanced Western democracies did this, even on a limited scale, the result is that the world would likely descend into an eternal night of slavery, as dictatorships retained their technology and the military might which technology grants.

This would be hopeless. But we have one alternative left. Nuclear power. We can save all our oil for making plastics - and fueling our tanks and personnel carriers and the like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Let the joke be on the eco-freaks who protested against nuclear power long before they worried about global warming.

We don't have to take a chance on creating warmer weather that would cause some species to become extinct and lead to some Third World nations having crop failures, which would get them disappointed with us. We can avoid that risk entirely, and move towards restoring the historical natural concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that live evolved under for tens of thousands, if not millions, of years - while still keeping our nation strong, both economically and militarily.

Energy independence (although not burning coal either doesn't affect that) would make us stronger. And my taste runs to the most risk-averse behavior possible as being the most rational, provided it's enlightened risk-averse behavior, as opposed to being driven by emotions or panic.

[Rajagra]

move towards restoring the historical natural concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that live evolved under for tens of thousands, if not millions, of years

Yes, this is an important point.

Plants, and our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were at least 1000 ppm ... far above our current level of about 380 ppm.

Current CO2 levels are less than half of when we evolved.

Did you know that we need CO2 in the air we breathe, otherwise we suffocate? Hemoglobin needs it to allow transfer of oxygen. In tests where they pumped pure oxygen into rats' lungs, they suffocated. One theory behind asthma is that insufficient CO2 is the cause, and correcting the problem gives relief.

[wellington1869]

One theory behind asthma is that insufficient CO2 is the cause, and correcting the problem gives relief.

so what you're saying is, our air pollution will give us asthma, but our global warming will fix it!

[itlnstln]

so what you're saying is, our air pollution will give us asthma, but our global warming will fix it!

Yin and Yang.


Cue ripster's LEGO pic.

[wellington1869]

frankly i dont know why we bother fixing anything. After all the moon is moving away from the earth at the rate of an inch/year, which will devastate earth's magnetic fields, tides, and weather patterns at some point when its stabilizing gravity is lost to us. Not to mention the sun will go supernova and die out at some point too. At that point the earth will be a cold lifeless world drifting in the universe forever or until it smashes into jupiter.  All that will remain of our species and our civilization will be one last final spectacular planetary collision as all traces of us and our earth are lost forevermore.  The universe has no memory.

right?

think i'll go suck on a tailpipe right now. same difference.

[quadibloc]

so what you're saying is, our air pollution will give us asthma, but our global warming will fix it!

Not surprising. I just read a news item today that said the use of low sulfur coal was eliminating natural particles that helped promote extra rain... which was shielding the Amazon from drought caused by global warming.

So going to cleaner coal has drawbacks; but going away from coal to nuclear will keep our silver from tarnishing and protect the rainforest too.

[Ekaros]

Only drawlable conclusion is that there is side to everything and you shouldn't belive most of researches... Or atleast they are all right, with messed things up...

[wellington1869]

Only drawlable conclusion is that there is side to everything and you shouldn't belive most of researches... Or atleast they are all right, with messed things up...

well, i think the lesson is that we have a choice between tarnished silver or breatheable air.  And I loves me untarnished silver.

[Oqsy]

I like boobies and nascar.

[Oqsy]

Thank you Ripster.  Once again, always right on cue.

[itlnstln]

I would look for the George Carlin bit on pollution and how the earth will continue on without us and all that, but I'm lazy.  I will reward someone handsomely with a metric ass-ton of nothing if they post it.

[Rajagra]

I would look for the George Carlin bit on pollution and how the earth will continue on without us and all that, but I'm lazy.  I will reward someone handsomely with a metric ass-ton of nothing if they post it.

What's the link for LetMeGoogleThatForYou?
I can't be bothered to find it. :rofl:

[itlnstln]

Here's your prize: