Discuss: How to Be a Climate Hero

Interesting analogy. The smoke in the experiment was fake; there was no fire. The smoke was used to try to trick the people into doing something that there was no need to do. Whether or not carbon dioxide has much influence on temperature, there are groups using ridiculous hyperbolic alarmist conjectures to try to force people to do what they want.  Most do it for their own interests, either making money from grants or selling fake solutions, or to advance their political agenda of more government control over your life.  If they honestly believed there was any real chance of danger from heat or tipping points they would be advocating immediate steps or research to lower the temperature directly like orbital sails or atmospheric aerosols to reflect sunlight.  Trying to reduce the acceleration of our CO2 release has got to be the slowest and most inefficient way possible to affect temperature, so people who advocate for it are de facto admitting that they don’t think there is any prospect of real danger.  When a flood is coming you put up sandbags or move to higher ground, you don’t start emptying the ocean with a bucket.

carbon compounds in the atmosphere are the earth’s surface’s insulation. removing them lowers the temperature. eliminating human carbon pollution and using whatever means are at our disposal to put carbon back in the ground are the most cost effective ways we have to reduce the temperature.

you should be embarrassed not to know that. the greenhouse effect itself is one of the most important life-giving aspects of this planet.

ok, so, other sandbags. research into geoengineering—as opposed to geogardening, aka stewardship—is ongoing but effectiveness, costs, and known side effects so far are pretty big obstacles. removing insulation from the atmosphere is the best first thing to try.

now, as to the other thing, compared to warrantless wiretaps, weakening habeas corpus, militarization of civil affairs, and other executive branch idolatry—not being a big civil liberties geek myself, i’d have to guess installing windmills, using farming methods that are better for the soil and the water systems, making air conditioners more efficient, and requiring better insulating windows—would not be high on any government watchdog’s list of anti-democratic conspiracies. not in this day and age.

the debate about whether or not CO2 emissions effect earth temperature is no longer a debate. it has been basically proven. the debate is what they effect of an increased earth temperture will have on the human population. there is no simulator for the earth’s climates so the idea is to prevent significant increases in green house gas emmissions. why? because we don’t know what the outcome will conclude but every scientist can image that the conclusion will not be pretty. its not our position here on the earth to mess with overall natural climates…

hapa -
I understand the greenhouse effect well enough to know that it has no similarity whatsoever to insulation which works by suppressing convection. You should be embarrassed to try to discuss it in those terms. By the way, carbon is a very small part of it compared to water vapor and its effect is logarithmic.  It is also clear that none of the remedies suggested by the author or by yourself would have any measurable effect on temperature.
On the political side, neither the Kyoto Protocol, its successor, nor any of the global warming bills being considered in congress are about windmills, farming, air conditioners or windows.  They are all methods to use taxes, cap and trade, and regulations to control and to redistribute wealth to areas the politicians feel are worthy.

i was being like the wizard of oz.

the windmill stands for power systems that do not burn hydrocarbons and therefore do not add hat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, for nearly the same cost.

the farm that’s good for soil and water includes soil management—keeping carbon locked in plants and soil—and reforestation to draw more carbon out of the air, along with creating less pollution, for nearly the same cost.

the air conditioner stands for devices, including cars, with lower energy use, to speed up the elimination of fossil fuels and thus carbon pollution among other things, and to reduce their total cost of operation.

and the window stands for greening our buildings, so less energy is needed to heat and cool them, light them, heat their water, and run their appliances. they also use less fresh water, are made of recycled or renewable materials, have less poison in them, and cost less to live in.

i think several of the mitigation-and-adaptation bills in congress are reprehensible—promising both environmental and economic damage—but what else is new. it’s been a while since the government spent money that created more money in the economy instead of rewarding friends and, lately, punishing political opponents. and i don’t think cap-and-trade is a good strategy, because of that.

but we know now that there’s such a thing as too much carbon dioxide in the air, the same way there can be too much mercury in a fish.  eat that fish, it hurts your body; leave that, yes, insulation in the air, and it cooks water and nutrients out of the soil, wrecks the food cycle, acidifies the ocean, melts the snowpacks and glaciers that provide much of our drinking water, turns the weather against us, and eventually floods our coastal cities. among other things.

it’s your future, though. you should be more worried about the moral hazard: people who sell dangerous fuels, spending their big profits to prevent the danger from being prevented. those people are much more powerful, dishonest, and dangerous to you than anyone here is.

*heat-trapping. if it also traps hats, nobody’s told me.

I thought climate-disruption denial had finally died.  I’m impressed to see you all still have your thumbs in your ears and are humming loud about bad science to yourself.  If you are honestly curious about the science then don’t look to us but turn to the scientists.  Go to any peer-reviewed science journal and type in “climate change” for a search. 

Try http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

Read the abstracts.  Not one scientist will deny it’s happening.  They will only argue about where and who will get hurt worst. 

The emotion you skeptics are experiencing is fear.  Your response is to sit in your seats and think the woman is pretending and the kid isn’t really upset and that they really just want some money from us or the government. Or instead you can accept the possibiity that this might be a true emergency.  You can act like true humans and step up and care for them. 

Psychologically, I can tell you it is much more healthy for you to do the caring for others.  You will experience less anger, less anxiety, less fear, if you just step forward and help out.

Jenn

No, the hypothesis of carbon dioxide-caused climate warming is not proven.  In fact, the point of my first post was that the hypothesis has failed a critical test; thirty years of high quality satellite data have shown that the troposphere at elevations from 1 to 10 km is not warming faster than the surface.  This failure, if substantiated by other researchers, will constitute proof that carbon dioxide is not the cause of the great majority of the warming that we have observed. 

The reason that this observation is so critical is because of the mechanism by which carbon dioxide warms the surface of the earth.  During the day, the surface of the earth receives energy from the sun faster than it can radiate heat back toward the sun because the sun is hotter; and the surface and atmosphere warm.  At night, the surface radiates heat through the atmosphere into outer space faster than outer space radiates heat toward the earth because the earth is warmer than outer space; and the surface and the atmosphere cool.  What we call greenhouse gases, primarily water, but including methane, nitrous oxide carbon dioxide and several other minor players absorb some of the photons of infrared radiation (heat) that the surface of the earth emits. 

Each molecule absorbs specific wavelengths of outgoing infrared radiation.  Carbon dioxide absorbs in a few relatively narrow bands of infrared wavelengths.  Water vapor absorbs in broad bands of infrared wavelengths.  That and its relatively higher concentration- tens of thousands of parts per million, vs. 380 parts per million for carbon dioxide- means that water vapor does about 95 percent of the heat absorbing work and the remainder of the gases do the rest.

When a molecule of carbon dioxide (or other gas) absorbs a photon of infrared radiation, two things happen.  One the molecule increases its speed, and the second is that it emits a photon of infrared radiation at a slightly longer, i.e. less energetic wavelength.  The re-emission direction is random.  On average, just over half of the re-emission will be toward outer space and just less than half will be back toward the earth.  If the earth were flat and infinite, the distribution would be exactly 50:50. 

The result is that heat must accumulate in the troposphere and the troposphere must warm more rapidly than the surface in order to have enough heat to warm the surface.  The data show that the surface is warming faster than the troposphere, which means one of two things.  Either the surface temperature record overestimates the warming; a very real possibility given the poor estimation of urban heat island effects or the contribution of carbon dioxide to the warming is a small portion of the total warming. 

If we change the surface temperature record so that it shows warming at a slower rate than the troposphere, the model projections of future temperature increases will lessen by an order of magnitude.  If we accept that the carbon dioxide-caused portion of the warming is as small as the data show it to be, then the re-formulated models will show future temperature increases to be modest, i.e. a few tenths of a degree.  In either case, there is no cause for concern.