Global Warming

[Rorschach]

You mean like an Ice Age?

[boxy]

So goes the science, but la la laaa.

[IQS.RLOW]

So goes the science, but la la laaa.

The only place the science is going is where the smell of money is strongest.

[Super Nova]

You mean like an Ice Age?

Only in the northern hemisphere due to the large land masses and the lack of warm water flow.

Look at the map of the globe. Land almost circles the north pole.

Australia will enjoy more extreme weather.

[Rorschach]

I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.

You mean those extremes... BAU SN, BAU.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Does the fact that agriculture has contributed to the warming of this planet go against your religious beliefs? Is that why you deny it? If you admit that one human activity has led to climate change you would be forced to admit that another might as well ...

Who are you talking too and if it's me why are you lying about me and my beliefs which I even recently reposted?

Oh and please feel free to post some real facts re your agriculture claim.
I did comment on that or did you miss that too?

Pre-industrial revolution agriculture raised the temperature of this planet. Agriculture is a human activity. Therefore human activity raises the temperature of Earth. Of course, all this won't matter in 600 million years. Life will go on. Or not. But in the meantime things can get ugly for humans.

[Super Nova]

Does the fact that agriculture has contributed to the warming of this planet go against your religious beliefs? Is that why you deny it? If you admit that one human activity has led to climate change you would be forced to admit that another might as well ...

Who are you talking too and if it's me why are you lying about me and my beliefs which I even recently reposted?

Oh and please feel free to post some real facts re your agriculture claim.
I did comment on that or did you miss that too?

Pre-industrial revolution agriculture raised the temperature of this planet. Agriculture is a human activity. Therefore human activity raises the temperature of Earth. Of course, all this won't matter in 600 million years. Life will go on. Or not. But in the meantime things can get ugly for humans.

Didn't know that and here is an article on it.


Wednesday, February 5, 2014

New paper finds pre-industrial farming caused more global warming than the entire industrial revolution

A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters finds pre-industrial farming caused more global warming than the entire industrial revolution. According to the authors, pre-industrial agriculture caused 0.9°C global warming, which is greater than the 0.7°C global warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1850.

The paper demonstrates land-use changes may be more significant as a primary climate forcing compared to the trivial effect of man-made CO2 on the climate.

Pre-Industrial Farming Sprouted Global Warming


By Becky Oskin, Live Science

Date: 05 February 2014 Time: 01:51 PM ET

Early farmers boosted Earth's temperature by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) over a period of 8,000 years, a new study suggests.

"This is almost as large as the global warming in the past 150 years," said Feng He, lead study author and a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "That means early agricultural is as powerful as the whole Industrial Revolution."

However, the study concludes that the net warming caused by early humans was only 1.3 degrees F (0.73 degrees C), thanks to a slight cooling of 0.31 degrees F (0.17 degrees C) due to more sunlight reflecting from cleared land.

The new work suggests that early cultures were global warming turtles, slowly raising temperatures by adding carbon dioxide and methane (both greenhouse gases) to Earth's atmosphere over thousands of years. In contrast, post-Industrial Revolution societies are climate change rabbits, with temperatures rising about 1.53 degrees F (0.85 degrees C) between 1880 and 2012, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [Actually 0.7C since 1850 according to HADCRU]

The study adds to an ongoing debate over the influence of pre-industrial humans on Earth's climate. While 1850 is often picked as the kickoff for global warming, human activities such as deforestation and agriculture could have shifted the climate earlier. Ice cores suggest this is the case: carbon dioxide and methane levels over the past 8,000 years don't follow their usual post-ice age trends. The gases go up as human population booms, instead of their usual decline [uh no, CO2 lags temperatures by 800-1000 years in ice core data, and increases with warming due to ocean outgassing]. But some scientists say this is simply natural variability.

The idea that pre-industrial humans significantly affected Earth's climate "is still a hypothesis, but it has huge climate implications," He told Live Science. "The climate has some inertia, and what has happened in the past 150 years may not be long enough to tell us what will happen in the future."

He and his co-authors estimated past global temperatures with climate models that calculated the effects of land-cover changes such as deforestation and irrigation. Their findings were published Jan. 24 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The study compared climate models of a human-free Earth to a planet crawling with hunter-gatherers and farmers. The researchers used estimates of past land-use from a 2011 study led by Jed Kaplan of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who built a detailed model of land-use over time based on historical and archaeological data.

After the last ice age ended, carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere should have dropped to about 245 parts per million (ppm) and 445 ppm without human influence on the planet, He said. (Parts per million denotes the volume of a gas in the air; in this case, of every 1 million air molecules, 245 are carbon dioxide.)

Instead, the models suggest that carbon dioxide rose about 40 ppm, to 285 ppm, and methane jumped to 790 ppm, a 345 ppm rise, as early humans chopped down trees and irrigated rice fields.

"In terms of long-term climate change, the last several thousand years are unique because of this human factor in it," He said. "It's almost like we're on a speeding train without a brake, but we are continually putting in the coal into the engine."

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/201 ... rming.html

[Super Nova]

This is thought provoking.

Act on Climate Change, but Tackle Other Global Problems, Too

Should action on the climate be just another line item in the budget?

Jul 15, 2014 |By Michael Shermer



In the year 2393 a historian in the Second People's Republic of China penned a book about how scientists, economists and politicians living in the 21st century failed to act on the solid science they had that gave clear warnings of the climate catastrophe ahead. As a result, the world experienced the Great Collapse of 2093, bringing an end to Western civilization.

So speculate historians of science Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University and Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology in their book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (Columbia University Press, 2014), a short scientific-historical fantasy. During the second half of the 20th century—the “Period of the Penumbra”—a shadow of anti-intellectualism “fell over the once-Enlightened techno-scientific nations of the Western world ... preventing them from acting on the scientific knowledge available at the time and condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.”

Why the failure to act? The authors' future historian posits several causes: blind optimism; religion; reductionism that prevented scientists from understanding holistic systems; disciplinary narrowness that restricted cross-field communication between scientists; adherence to avoiding type I errors (believing a hypothesis is real when it isn't) over type II errors (not believing a hypothesis is real when it is); and insistence on a 95 percent confidence limit for statistical significance that caused scientists to dismiss as unproved climate effects caused by warmer weather, such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Between 1751 and 2012 more than 365 billion metric tons of carbon was released into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to increase, the historian notes. Another century of warming devastated the populations of Australia and Africa, and those of Europe, Asia and North America had to move inland from flooded coastal regions.

This science-historical fantasy is thought-provoking, but is it prescient? Global warming is, of course, real and caused by human activity. But predicting how much warmer it is going to get and what the consequences will be is extremely difficult because estimates include error bars that grow wider the further out the models run. The precautionary principle states that we should act, just in case. But act on what? Climate change is not our only problem, and we do not have unlimited resources. Which problem should we tackle and how much should we spend?

In the second edition (2014) of his book How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, Bjørn Lomborg reports the findings of a study sponsored by his Copenhagen Consensus Center 2012 project in which more than 50 economists evaluated 39 proposals on how best to solve such problems as armed conflicts, natural disasters, hunger, disease, education and climate change. Climate change barely rated a mention in the top 10, which included, in order, malnutrition interventions, malaria treatment, childhood immunization, deworming of schoolchildren, tuberculosis treatment, research and development to increase crop yields, early-warning systems for natural disasters, hepatitis B immunization, and low-cost drugs for acute heart attack. Number 12 was R&D for geoengineering solutions to climate change, and number 17 was R&D for green energy technologies. The rest of the top 30 were related to disease, water and sanitation, biodiversity, hunger, education, population growth and natural disasters.

The ranking is based on a cost-benefit analysis. For example, an investment of $300 million “would prevent the deaths of 300,000 children, if it were used to strengthen the Global Fund's malaria-financing mechanism.” Another $300 million would deworm 300 million children, and $122 million would lead to total hepatitis B vaccine coverage and thereby prevent another 150,000 annual deaths. Low-cost drugs to treat acute heart disease would cost just $200 million and save 300,000 people.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't do more about climate change. But what? Both books posit technological solutions: Lomborg's Copenhagen experts recommend spending $1 billion for research on planet-cooling geoengineering technologies; Oreskes and Conway have humanity saved by the creation in 2090 of a lichenized fungus that consumes atmospheric carbon dioxide. Whatever we do about climate, we should recognize that the world has many problems. If you are malnourished and diseased, what the climate will be like at the end of the century is not a high priority. Given limited resources, we should not let ourselves be swept away by the apocalyptic fear generated by any one threat.

This article was originally published with the title "ClimeApocalypse!."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... blems-too/

[IQS.RLOW]

How do you manage to get through life without pissing your pants at every scare the government throws at you? Not that it worries me, but when you start advocating that I have to pay to alleviate your guilty complex and anxiety syndrome it means that you are working against me and my life.

[Rorschach]

SN are you saying you've never heard of Lomborg before or his views or never had them yourself?