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To the 34% of American Adults Who Are "Worried a Great Deal" about "Global Warming"
Preface: A recent Gallup poll showed that 34% of American adults worried “a great deal” about “global warming”. This essay is written for that 34%.
Many well-intentioned people are desperately trying to stop climate change …
And yet they are proposing things that will put more C02 and methane into the air and otherwise do more harm than good.
Frack That
Many propose nuclear and fracking as a way to reduce carbon emissions.
In reality, scientists say that fracking pumps out a lot of methane … into both our drinking water and the environment.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas: 72 times more potent as a warming source than CO2.
As such, fracking actually increases – rather than decreases – global warming.
Are Nukes the Answer?
It turns out that nuclear is not a low-carbon source of energy … and funding nuclear crowds out the development of better sources of alternative energy.
Mark Jacobson – the head of Stanford University’s Atmosphere and Energy Program, who has written numerous books and hundreds of scientific papers on climate and energy, and testified before Congress numerous times on those issues – notes that nuclear puts out much more pollution (including much more CO2) than windpower, and 1.5% of all the nuclear plants built have melted down. More information here, here and here.
Jacobson also points out that it takes at least 11 years to permit and build a nuclear plant, whereas it takes less than half that time to fire up a wind or solar farm. Between the application for a nuclear plant and flipping the switch, power is provided by conventional energy sources … currently 55-65% coal.
Scam and Trade
One of the main solutions to climate change which has long been pushed by the powers that be – cap and trade – is a scam. Specifically:
- The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won’t work for global warming
- Many environmentalists say that carbon trading won’t effectively reduce carbon emissions
- Our bailout buddies over at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and the other Wall Street behemoths are buying heavily into carbon trading (see this, this, this, this, this and this).
As University of Maryland professor economics professor and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission Peter Morici writes:
Obama must ensure that the banks use the trillions of dollars in federal bailout assistance to renegotiate mortgages and make new loans to worthy homebuyers and businesses. Obama must make certain that banks do not continue to squander federal largess by padding executive bonuses, acquiring other banks and pursuing new high-return, high-risk lines of businesses in merger activity, carbon trading and complex derivatives. Industry leaders like Citigroup have announced plans to move in those directions. Many of these bankers enjoyed influence in and contributed generously to the Obama campaign. Now it remains to be seen if a President Obama can stand up to these same bankers and persuade or compel them to act responsibly.
In other words, the same companies that made billions off of derivatives and other scams and are now getting bailed out on your dime are going to make billions from carbon trading.
War: The Number One Source of Carbon
The U.S. military is the biggest producer of carbon on the planet.
Harvey Wasserman notes that fighting wars more than wipes out any reduction in carbon from the government’s proposed climate measures.
Writing in 2009 about the then-proposed escalation in the Afghanistan war, Wasserman said:
The war would also come with a carbon burst. How will the massive emissions created by 100,000-plus soldiers in wartime be counted in the 17% reduction rubric? Will the HumVees be converted to hybrids? What is the carbon impact of Predator bombs that destroy Afghan families and villages?
The continuance of fighting all over the Middle East and North Africa completely and thoroughly undermines the government’s claims that there is a global warming emergency and that reducing carbon output through cap and trade is needed to save the planet.
I can’t take anything the government says about carbon footprints seriously until the government ends the unnecessary wars … all over the globe.
So whatever you think of climate change, all people can agree that ending the wars is important. (War also destroys the economy.)
Anyone who supports “humanitarian war” by the U.S. is supporting throwing a lot of carbon into the air.
Dumb as a Mongoose In Hawaii
Many scientists suggest “geoengineering” the Earth’s climate. But that could actually worsen climate change. It could also increase the risk of drought.
Moreover, geoengineering would increase ocean acidification and decrease available sunlight for solar power.
And once we started, we could never stop.
Some of the geoengineering proposals are downright nuts. For example, “government scientists are studying the feasibility of sending nearly microscopic particles of specially made glass into the Earth’s upper atmosphere to try to dampen the effects of ‘global warming.’ ” Others are currently suggesting cutting down trees and burying them. Other ways to geoengineer the planet are being studied and tested (and see this and this), involving such things as dumping barium, aluminum and other toxic metals into the atmosphere.
Remember, the mongoose was introduced to Hawaii in order to control the rats (which were eating the sugar cane used to make rum). It didn’t work out very well … mongeese are daylight-loving creatures while rats are nocturnal. So the mongeese trashed the native species in Hawaii, and never took care of the rats.
Similarly, the harm caused by many of these methods have not been thought through … and they could cause serious damage to our health and our ecosystems.
So – whatever you think about climate – you can obviously agree that we should approach climate change from the age-old axiom of “first, do no harm”, making sure that our “solutions” do not cause more damage than the problems.
So What’s the Answer?
If nuclear, fracking, cap and trade and geoengineering aren’t the answer, what is?
There are 3 main strategies which both climate activists and climate skeptics can agree on, because they have big upsides whether or not the Earth is warming:
(1) Reducing soot will quickly reduce melting of ice and snow. Reducing soot will be cheaper than the “decarbonation” which many policy-makers have proposed. And it would increase the health of millions of people worldwide
(2) Use specific smart combinations of solar, wind and geothermal energy
(3) Decentralize power generation and storage. That would empower people and communities, produce less carbon, prevent nuclear disasters like Fukushima, reduce the dangers of peak oil (and thus prevent future oil spills like we had in the Gulf), and have many other positive effects
We don’t need fascism to make this happen … We just need a sound plan.
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"YA BUT the problem with global warming, and with Fukushima, is "everyone" (all humans) die all before a certain date that's very, very near.
That's kind of bad."
And what date would that be?
Very near? Next week? 12 years?
100 years?
Wait, let me check my plastic Magic 8 Ball. Dammit, it sez "better not tell you now"
http://magic8ballonline.net/
200.
100 is a chance but that depends on how people panic & re-learn how to migrate and work the land both migrating and in settlements.
If too many people die off who know how to work the land to live off it where it is not polluted by Fukushima ... 100. Then complete removal of all humans on Earth. Forever.
100 is the % certainty an asshat is going to show up and say something idiotic about something he knows next to nothing about, like the climate or how fast humans will disappear from the earth due to some preposterously fabricated story.
Just hold your breath and wait for the next asteroid, man.
http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/tharriso/ast110/globaltemp.jpg <<I found a couple of temperature charts that suggest we are in a cool period of our history and that 'warming' is inevitable.
Climate change topic is a means to divide us into camps again. To distract us from the more pressing issues of our time.
At this point, im just ready to roll with the punches...
You are going to have to do better than a newspaper clipping from 2007....
Starting by explaining these figure...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/1_GCRsvsTemps.jpg
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/cosmic_clouds.gif
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/NeutronMonitor.GIF
Taken from peer-reviewed papers summarized and cited here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/cosmic-rays-and-global-warming-advanced.htm
interesting, you cite a website created by a cartoonist who adamantly censors [opposing] opinions...
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/03/truth-about-skeptical-science.html <<link in new window
Yawn...
They present peer-reviewed papers. And more than a few of the contributors have peer-reviewed publications...
global warming & Fukushima are the 2 single most pressing issues of all to the entire human species. Period. Of all the things facing us ONLY those are world-enders.
Item 3 which is a near-world-ender is the yellowstone caldera if it explodes: we can't stop it but it's not due for "a while".
Good stuff as always, George. My one quibble is that I think liquid fluoride thorium reactors would be quite a lot better than the pressurized vessel uranium reactors we use now. Safer, more efficient, using a much more plentiful, easily acquired fuel source.
It's sad that we're stuck with the terrible reactors we have today. But painting all nuclear energy with the same broad brush isn't fair.
Yeah, and if we only had a working design....
\facepalm.....
wasn't it Oak Ridge National Laboratory that had a working reactor? 1965 to 1969? Surely its design is still stored somewhere.
Earlier IIRC, and it was Uranium design run uisng a Thorium cycle...
LOL. Neither of us entirely agreed with each other and just for trolling fun 3 dumb shits gave us both -1's. Or 1 troll with 2 additional sock-puppet fuckmonkey accounts.
... Bitchez!
Sorry to inform you but solar and wind won't work and even if they did you could not run the world as we know it on those power sources.
Gail Tverberg has this excellent piece on why renewables are an exercise in futility:
Ten Reasons Intermittent Renewables (Wind and Solar PV) are a Problemhttp://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/21/ten-reasons-intermittent-renewables...
Solar depends on scale & how you use the power. If I wanted solar heating for a water tank that works very well. Same with solar cooking with a foil-lined box. It's not gonna run everything but why pay for fuel when the sun's giving energy at the same time?
I notice politicians shy away from the dreaded "C" word, I find it a shame that none of them have the guts to mention any real innovative initiative concerning energy conservation.
Public officials seem almost afraid to talk about conserving energy, it is as if they will offend someone or that big business and their lobbyist have made the subject taboo. Maybe they just don't care about America or the planet on which we live. More about this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2012/01/candidates-shy-away-from-c-word.html
On nuclear putting out more CO2 than wind, that is because it relies on fossil fuels for things like mining, uranium enrichment, etc... Something like 60% of our CO2 output comes from power generation. If you're using electricity to enrich the uranium, for example, you are on a grid that is being powered by something putting out CO2. The greater the percentage of electricity generated by nuclear, the less CO2 this process would account for.
That being said, I'm not a fan of light water reactors.
Do you mean more per time period or more per kilowatt? Or both?
And if we mined less but got more power, using thorium, what do you think the answers would be? There's a lot of thorium that's already been mined and dumped together, able to be trucked at will. That will cost some fuel to do but truck/train and then turned to gigawatts ... we may turn out to do OK on that.
Drones. Bet they don't help carbon emmissions, or life if a suspected 'terrorist'.
"34% of American adults worried “a great deal” about “global warming”. "
They'd be a lot more worried if global warming was actually happening, which it hasn't been for the last 18 years, according to the IPCC.
I nearly fell over today - the IPCC came out in favor of fracking, claiming it would slow down global warming! (I'm not joking - it was in the London Daily Mail).
The IPCC made no such statement...
Quit making shit up....
..it was in the London Daily Mail
Well then it must be right
The statement is out of context... a propaganda tactic... here is what the report says in context.
"We have in the energy supply also the shale gas revolution, and we say that this can be very consistent with low carbon development, with decarbonisation. That's quite clear. But it is important to understand that the shale gas revolution has a different impact in mitigation or baseline scenario. In a baseline scenario if you have an additional supply of fossil fuels this will not help in the end, because if somebody deploys gas so other parts of the world might increase coal and in the end you're back in the business as usual scenario, and shale gas will not help. But gas can be very helpful as a bridge technology in mitigation scenarios, and this has been explained in the energy supply sector. "
and to put it in a more context this is a paragraph that proceeds it
"GHG emissions from energy supply can be reduced significantly by replacing current world average coal?fired power plants with modern, highly efficient natural gas combined?cycle power plants or combined heat and power plants, provided that natural gas is available and the fugitive emissions associated with extraction and supply are low or mitigated (robust evidence, high agreement). In mitigation scenarios reaching about 450 ppm CO2eq concentrations by 2100, natural gas power generation without CCS acts as a bridge technology, with deployment increasing before peaking and falling to below current levels by 2050 and declining further in the second half of the century (robust evidence, high agreement)."
Then why are the glaciers missing around here?
Except it has been warming every year compared to when you say it stopped.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2011-temps.html
NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2010-warmest-year.html
2010 and 2005 tied for warmest years EVER on record
"the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2009, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880."
"Except it has been warming every year compared to when you say it stopped."
Plot monthy temperatures on chart.
There was a record heat wave a few years ago. However not one state high temperature record was broken.
BUT not all the states of the USA comprise the entire planet. Since this is global warming the entire planet gets equal consideration. America is not Earth.
And a lonely -1 showing one American is brave enough to believe America IS EARTH but not willing to comment to show precisely which brave Murrikin this is. Amereeeeekaaa FUCK YEAH!
Flat change in temp for the last 17, going on 18 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997...
IPCC models failed compared to real observations:
https://g3itqa.dm2303.livefilestore.com/y2pr3ucO5i-uhACPVWUozsoFPHc_HcA8...
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwtXRW-Aa_s
I do know.
Warming is happening and as predicted.
Nothing happening today is off from what was predicted more than 10 years ago. I was paying attention then and I am now.
Link?
Do I need to bitchslap you again?
Your trend has no statistical signifigance, you can draw no such conclusion:
----
could you explain the following fitted trends GISTEMP
1970 to 1997: 0.146 +/- 0.067 C/decade (2 sigma)
1970 to 2014: 0.163 +/- 0.031 C/decade (2 sigma)
If the warming "stopped" why has the rate of warming increased if I add the last 17 years in?
It is mathematically impossible for what you claim to be true...
So shit for brains, what are you going to say now?
IIRC this is in reply to 42 not MDB
For some reason, the ZH server screws up the order of posts near the page boundary...
LINK? Holy shit, we're talking about almost every paper ever produced on the topic. GO link it yourself, they all agree.
I could easily find more than 1000 links but I'd need a week off work to do it.
And then you'd say "nope" regardless which makes the entire effort pointless. It's not my job to think for you. It's my prerogative to make it clear you're wrong with minimal waste of my time.
You are a proud liar. What I correct of your lies is for the benefit of others reading, not you.
That may or may not be true, but this current blip is a flea on an elephant's back...
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Still peddling that chart that goes to only 1855...
This is what it looks like when you include all the data
http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GISP210k480.png
And here is the data
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/is...
Compare the citation in in the lower left hand corner....
=======
My fuck you love to flog that dead horse...
your chart is missing the rate. The rate is more important than the actual temperature. Given time many species can evolve to tolerate new conditions but this is happening too fast for our food crops or our offspring.
My eyeballs can see the rate, tell me where it was significant to evolution please?
Your eyeballs can see no such thing. Indexes aren't marked as they need to be with at least 100x more resolution and rates need to be plotted to 3 decimals. Otherwise there's nothing to see. The picture is too zoomed out and one could easily mistake 2 rates as identical which are actually 10:1 ratio in comparison.
The singular most important comparison is the actual rate and for all recent data compared to all the past we can discover millions of years back. The problem is the rate is now so fast all living things which are food for us, and also us in particular, can't evolve fast enough to tolerate the heat increases. We'll die first as will many mammals which don't burrow. We can't just air-condition our way out of it: our crops can't be so sheltered as the area is too vast (the volume above included, to be clear) and our fuel for running air-conditioners is running out (peak oil, fracking-gas / shale gas being very limited).
"warmest on record" tell me more about that record. How long have we been monitoring, where, with what?
To repeat - it really doesn't matter whether there is warming or there isn't, the whole issue is whether or not any climate change that is occurring is primarily due to a natural process or is human caused.
And that, from everything I've read, simply can't be determined with any certainty with anything close to our current levels of knowledge. There are far too many past, present, and future climate-affecting unknowns and far too few data points.
It wasn't that many years ago that we thought we knew of everything that comprised the universe. Then dark energy and dark matter were discovered and we found that we only knew about 4.9% of what comprised the universe and the other 95.1% consisting of dark matter and dark energy was and still is a mystery.
Scientists should never be arrogantly certain. I'm uncertain about the cause of any climate change, but I am certain that those who aren't uncertain should be.
It's no mystery the warming happens faster over the industrial areas of earth emitting CO2 and methane daily from fuel burning. This is clearly visible with infrared satellite images.
" It's no mystery the warming happens faster over the industrial areas of earth emitting CO2 and methane daily from fuel burning. This is clearly visible with infrared satellite images."
Cities are heat islands. Black top is going to absorb more radiation than a grassy field.
Very true.
The heating, however, is dissipating into the atmosphere and spreading out into gas clouds. I would like to see some way of checking to see how much heat is truly leaving, not holding, not just infrared intensity but showing the actual watts leaving vs watts on the surface. Can we do this effectively? That would help figure out how much is stuck in clouds of CO2 visible in infrared.
yes, because UHI is 100% attributable to co2 and fossil fuel burning
/s you moron
That was the motivation for my article...
That doesn't make any sense. You're normally good on the fact-checking but on this you're wrong. The facts are we have warming, measured, and it will continue to be measured all around the world. How are you missing this?
"That doesn't make any sense. You're normally good on the fact-checking but on this you're wrong. The facts are we have warming, measured, and it will continue to be measured all around the world. How are you missing this?"
Where is the warming on a monthy chart of the lower tropsopheric global temperature?
It's on this link http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/
and this may be of use to you http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
within it I found this:
Combined Land-Surface Air and Sea-Surface Water Temperature Anomalies (Land-Ocean Temperature Index, LOTI)