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...and/or Global Warming.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, (and spurred by a comment in the oil thread,) without going on too long or into too much detail, the essence of my curiosity is:
"So what? The Earth has never had a constant climate so why try to keep it constant? Would it not be more cost effective and realistic to adapt and evolve with any change than try (and possibly wastefully fail) to prevent it?"

Mankind has a history of misunderstood and failed conservation efforts.
Ice Age fears not so long ago.
The politicised agendas and religious type fanaticism.
Each time results are released based on a new computer model, they always seem to be incapable of taking into account the effects of clouds and the oceans.
Taxes, did we need them to move from horses to petroleum?

Your thoughts?

I don't think anyone is actually trying to keep earth's yearly climate a constant.

People are happy the climate changes in phases, however the issue is that there are signs that the effect of humans is causing the climate to change much more quickly than ever before (Aside from cataclysmic events like the one that probably wiped out most of the dinosaurs)

Whist a lot of humans can adapt to an accelerated climate change, some simply won't be able too and other living things, intelligent and not, simply will not cope.

This is probably not a good thing......

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

I'm one with the thought of we are still coming out of the last ice age. So of course it will get warmer.

Yes we are likely having an effect. But by how much? Realistically, to me any way we don't have enough of the info to say how the world would react on it's own as it changes naturally without our impact too.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

Never thought of it that way, but it's an interesting concept. My prehistoric geography isn't up to much, but before the last ice age, were there even polar ice caps?

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There is no theory of evolution, just a list of animals that Chuck Norris allows to live.

I think it goes something like this.

Planet frozen. Early "life" breathed Carbon Dioxide.

Volcanic activity and defrost which introduced oxygen into the air.

"Life" starts breathing oxygen

Animals start to evolve from the primordial soup.

Volcanoes die out and the planet cools.

Ice age

Warm up

Then us.

Tony Robinson Narrated a good show about it all a few years back.

Edit found the show

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastroph ... _series%29

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

Saying that I think we still should look for better ways of storing the energy other than coal or oil. This is how unrestricted growth ends. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21198265 Climate change is just one of effects on environment. Even if we don't cause or can't stop climate change, the new technologies can still vastly improve our standard or living. Air, water, ground quality are very important too. This is very complex issue, but I think we should try to find a balance between economy growth (we can't tell people in China to stop their development, they deserve it as we do) and our environment. There are no easy answerers.

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Renault!

2012 Planet F1 Prediction Competition Champion

Even in modern history there were 'frost fayres' on the frozen Thames, and in Roman times vineyards in England. (I believe the Doomsday book still listed 1200, but not sure)

Climate is and always has been up and down. The thermometer has only been around less than 3 hundred years, so anything older is pure guess work, and todays digital continual reorders wil average out enough to account for the so called 'warming trend'.

Having said that, I think we should be taking care of the environment, but due to political pressure, often from people who don't have a clue, we are going about it the wrong way. Then again, without the kick in the pants of the last 10 years, we may not have got started on it.

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

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I'm not sure scientist's would agree with it being pure guess work about how warm or cold it was prior to thermometers being invented. Give them some credit!

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

Well, logically we are getting hotter.

We have greater concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere which absorb more heat. This means venting out heat back is a little bit slower, leading to a net gain.

I must say though, to have accurate information, we'd need a control planet. I do suspect we have had a not inconsiderable effect upon the planet though.

To call it global warming is bit incorrect, but its an easyway to sell it. What is actually happening is the earth is storing more energy than its ever stored before. From what i understand we are only feeling small part of the effect, because the oceans are storing all the energy, and there is a long lag in this energy being released, so its gonna get worse long before it gets better. (think ice road trukers and the frozen lakes they drive over, and you'll there about month lag, which is normal, now apply to the whole ocean)

CO2 is a big problem and we produce bucket loads of the stuff, but heres the kicker, had we not destroyed 1000's of square miles of forrest, the earth could probably just about keep up with it.

It would still have have its fluctuations in tempretature, but at the momemt we are vastly aggrivating it.

But we have other problems too, we use 102% of the resourses each year, eg say a hundred fish are born each year, we use 102, you see where this is going.

Also there is lots of other nasty crap we fire into the air and the oceans, we're poisoning ourselves.

It'd be nice to blame all the big nasty companies, but its supply and demand. If we all turned around and said we only accept green energy and refuse to swith our heating/tv etc on, bp would soon turn their attention to that rather than oil.

But like you, i like me comfy car with aircon, and my house with its central heating and 42 inch tv's.

But i do fear for our children, as i see no will to change the path we are going down.

Mankind is responsible for 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions. If the climate is changing because of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there's little we can do about it.

Generally the whole climate change debate annoys me. It is no longer a scientific theory, it has become political and mainstream and therefore everyone has a view on it, whether they have any understanding of science and/or meteorology or not. I find most people make up their mind first and then just pick out the statistics that support their opinion (as some may argue I have done above )

Well you assume that 4% doesn't matter. 4% of pole lap time of Monaco is almost 3 seconds! In Q1 whole filed (excluding NK at HRT) at Monaco has been covered within 3 seconds!

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Renault!

2012 Planet F1 Prediction Competition Champion

Exactly. If the world can cope with say 10 billion tons of co2, adding 4 percent more is quite a bit extra especially as we are directly responsible for removing the very things that clean it all up......

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

Whether or not you believe in global warming is a cause of humans, we as humans do need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere. The majority of CO2 released is absorbed into the oceans (not to mention all the other crap released into the oceans by humans), which over time leads to ocean acidification decreasing the pH levels making the water more acidic, which kills organisms vital to sustain marine life.

When people speak of global warming they think that the planet is only going to get hotter, but the real problem is the amount of CO2 and the effect it has on fragile environments.

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I'm with you on that. Exactly my thoughts.

The world changes, animals die out, the world moves on. We're coming out of an ice age still. When people post pictures of polar bears stuck on shrinking ice chunks like "save the polar bear, the ice caps are melting" I just think "well it'd the bear's predecessors' fault for evolving into an arctic based animal when the frozen regions are retreating. Eventually, with human intervention or not, the ice will shrink back to a point where polar bears can't cope, and they'll die out like the mammoth. To survive, the polar bear must evolve to cope in more normal climates (which people don't realise they can do anyway, the polar bear lives in non-frozen parts of the world for part of the year)."

So the global warming doomsday preachers can suck it.

Though we do need to clean up the sh*t we pump into the world too. Humans have some disgusting habits.

PS - this is why I'm not a politician.

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"You are the universe expressing itself as a Human for a little while..."

Something that usually kills off conversations of this sort when I mention it, but Co2 is not just 'created' it is already in existence. It is only released, or rather re released to the environment from which it originally came.
Carbon mixtures have been on earth from day one, it is oxygen that was introduced. and that is a poison.

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Marx (Groucho)

But it depends where the co2 is that's important, not the quantity that exists within earth's atmosphere.

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

The earths Atmosphere was once CO2 based. So much so organisms breathed CO2 not oxygen.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

Most of those who call themselves 'climate scientists' dont do any measuring. They dont even get the original results, just processed results. If you know any stats you know how far off the mark 'rounding off' can put you, and these people are making their 'guesses' within these limits of error.

I was a test engineer for 30 years and despite being considered among the best in the world, we could not sensibly estimate results from 50 years ago within the band they are using for a MILLION YEARS.

They estimate temperature by the remains fond there. This is fair enough at say 2deg, but because they use (someone else.s ) processed results they feel they can use .2 of a deg as gospel, so no, I dont believe most of them deserve that credit, well not those I have talked to or read up on.

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Marx (Groucho)

Not quite sure that's particularly relevant unless you think we'll all evolve to being able to do that again.....

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

But it's not about knowing how hot or cold it used to be to within a couple of degrees. Science has proven within reasonable doubt that the earth's temp has altered over millennia. This has had a significant effect on life as far add they can tell.

I'm not some environmentally claiming the world is doomed sometime soon, however if enough people believe that temp change is happening at a rate faster than possibly ever before aside from say a meteor strike, then surely it's worth trying to look in to avoiding human interference being a significant contributing factor. After all, if in centuries to come it's proven correct and no one bothered to do anything about it then that's rather a shame. If it turns out humans have no control over climate change then we will have lost little or nothing and gained a lot of knowledge along the way.

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

We are but a parasite on the planet. I would describe us as bacteria or mould on the earths surface. Man will likely come and go just like any other species on the planet before us. The planet will recover in her own way and will continue on. If we don't adapt or evolve we will die. End off. What happens if the planet its self decides to dump a load of noxious fumes into the air via mass eruptions world wide? No doubt all the protect the planet stuff will be dumped as we try to stop nature taking its course for our own self preservation.

All the stuff about protecting the planet etc is BS. It's not about the planet It's self preservation.

Let things take their course. Sure mankind might die off but then in the grand scheme of things we are minuscule. That's one thing we have to realise.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

Is that bad thing?

How do you know that we aren't altering the climate? All these artificial emissions don't change anything at all, so we are doomed anyway? You conclude that all these vows to stop pollution are nonsense? Without taking steps to stop pollution we would have been dying due to lung cancer. Look at my link about Beijing.

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Renault!

2012 Planet F1 Prediction Competition Champion

Exactly. I'm happy that at some point humans may not be able to live on earth any more. However, what's the problem with self preservation? What's the problem with trying to preserve other life on earth? Should we look to inhabit another planet in another solar system if earth is running out of resources? Of course we should. Life is all about preservation regardless of level of intelligence.

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

Because we don't know we are or if we are by how much because of lack of a control planet.

Even if we weren't on the planet or never evolved past monkeys the climate would still be changing. Just as it has from day 1. The climate has constantly changed on the planet.

The self preservation bit is to point out that deep down it's not being done to save the planet it's being down for our own self centred needs and wants to keep the planet a hospitable place for us. It's a two faced saying. When someone says "Save the planet save the ice caps them melting will do this and that" What they are really saying is "Stop the natural evolution of the planet so it stays the way we like it" . The ice caps have been melting for millennia. What right have we to stop mother nature taking her own course?

If it moves the Gulf stream and plunges us into an ice age. Well isn't that just the cycle restarting again? If it wipes us out, well isn't that the planets way of ridding herself of the bacteria on her?

Thats the way I see it anyway. We're just the pussy scab on her surface and sooner or later she'll come along with the antiseptic to sort the problem.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

OK, so it may be us accelerating the change but as we can't prove it for sure we'd best just ignore it.

Blimey, if that was our policy on all things scientific we'd have died out years ago....... lol

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

Yeh ignore everything.

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Renault!

2012 Planet F1 Prediction Competition Champion

This is a bad analogy, but the best I can come up with in the time I have.
I liken the situation to a human standing on a train track. A huge train is heading towards the human. Does the human try to stop it, or just step out of the way.

This is bad analogy. There is no need for analogy. Everyone knows that we will run out of natural resources. Maybe we should consider that there will be future generations living on our planet. Instead of carelessly using all coals as long as we can and cutting all Amazonian rain forests, forgetting about recycling we can do something, before it;s too late. Is it that hard? What do we lose by doing that? The switch to alternate energy sources is matter of time anyway.

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Renault!

2012 Planet F1 Prediction Competition Champion

I didn't state my meaning well enough. And when I get to a PC I'll maybe comment further.
Walking the train track would be our behaviour. Stepping off would be changing behaviour, but that doesn't stop the train coming. Nor can we assume walking on the track caused the train to come along, it may/will have come regardless of our actions.

Also, in my/the OP I alluded to the lack of a politicised incentive being required to change our habits. Horses<Petroleum fueled transport<...whatever comes next.

Both analogies are flawed. In the end, we don't know for sure what is down to our behaviour, and what is down to natural behaviour. So analogise all day long, but both of your views on this are so coloured by your own opinions that the whole this is irrelevant.

Are not all analogies flawed though?

What I was leaning towards:

Which is the biggest question I have over the whole thing, and as far as I can tell, no one has properly discussed or covered this (either in this thread) or elsewhere.

Entities which fail to evolve to fit the environment will die out.
It's difficult to keep up to date on the topic because there's so much 'news' and political stuff in the media which drowns out the real science (compared to a new technology for example, where it's relatively easy to see what's happening in the future). Needle in a haystack.

Current computer models fail to accurately hind-cast, and no model correctly takes into account clouds. Largely because we don't even know what effect clouds will have anyway, let alone what will happen to them.

Scientists will find what they expect to find, confirmation bias, there was an experiment where a group were told that some mice were genetically engineered with above average intelligence, and asked to compare their maze solving abilities to those of 'normal' mice. The fake clever ones were found to be quicker. In the current political/social/media climate, I expect confirmation bias to play a large part.

Personally I'm bored of the 'Will it? Won't it? We're causing it! No we're not!' type talk, it doesn't get us anywhere, and it's a moot point, we know that climate varies. What we don't know is the speed and causes. We don't know what will happen, but we think we know what to do to stop it?!

So why not save all this money now, and use it to adapt to suit whatever situation we may find ourselves in later?
We don't know what will happen, so how do you stop it from happening? We could end up making it worse by trying to prevent it. Lots of science fiction is based on that outcome.
History has shown that we don't need religious type fundamentalist fears to develop and embrace better technology.

Now this is the point I am making. They dont. They can come quite close to establishing the average temp over a period. Now I dont know how short a period, but I doubt that it is less than a hundred or even a few hundred years.

Now as you probably know, an average temp is over 24 hrs for some period. This can go up or down by a small movement on either end. Moving our model to a workable scald (on here) lats call it a week. Week one, the highest day temp is 80deg days are clear and bright, nights are clear and little cloud the temp falls to 15deg in a linear fashion as expected.

Week 2 the same until thursday when it starts getting a little cloud at night but clearing with sun- up.
The cloud holds the night time temperature up by half a Deg for 4 hrs. Without very accurate digital measuring, this week will be as much as a half Deg hotter than the last one just by 'rounding errors'.

Even todays results from satellites are 'processed' (ie rounded out and 'corrected' by a person's eye) before they are passed to places like Hadley. (They NEVER get the raw data, which to be fair to them thay always ask for)

Once they receive them it goes through another set of rounding to plug into their model.

So even with the best will in the world it is not going to be as accurate as the results they put out.

An example of personal experience. 1940's constant measurement was done with paper on a clockwork drum which a pen rested against while it turned.

Like this



looking back through a set of them, I found the data off one was consistently higher than the other 4 in the set.
(Dont remember which country, but it was possibly Singapore). So I went to the storeroom and examined the instrument. At some time it had been knocked over and a small buildup of spilled ink from the marking pen had built up at one spot on the drum. I needed a magnifier to find this, but it had the effect of lifting the paper strip up a fraction which when the figure was 'rounded' it moved up one digit.

This recorders results (processed) has for ever been added to the records for that place and time.
These were operated by professional trained RAF personnel. Remember that much of our data until a couple of decades ago came from schools and monks and bases where a person had to put on their coat boots and gloves and go out with a lamp to look at a glass tube and decide where the reading was with a blizzard in their face.

In short, what I am saying is that todays limits are being applied to instruments that can not be that accurate.

BTW, I am all in favour of cleaning up the planet. As I said in another recent thread, Where I grew up I was surrounded by spoil heaps and the air was thick with crap. Now it is a lovely green area with pure fresh air. I gladly give the environmentalists my thanks and support for this.

Dont go getting the idea I am a 'denyer'

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Marx (Groucho)

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Marx (Groucho)

I don't think anyone has mentioned ignoring the problem. I know I don't. We do what we can.

Personally I have mixed thoughts about ignoring it though. In a way I think we should. That way we die out and the earth can repair herself to her former glory.

When you think of it who is thinking more about her? Those that want to limit our pollution so we can stay on being mould on her surface, or those quite willing to see the end of the human race through self destruction so she can repair herself? We will always have an impact on the planet for as long as we have large cities and concrete structures. If mankind was really serious about saving planet earth we would have to drastically change our ways and I don't think that as a species we are willing. We would rather continue damaging her to save our own existence.

Mankind is a blight on nature, it always will be and the only way to remove our effects is for mass genocide to limit our number. For the sake of the planet maybe us causing our own demise is the best thing for it.



But how do we know it is? Most people I talk to seem to have the impression that the temps should be at a constant or at least linear. However how do we know that there is not a point in the cycle towards the end of an ice age where the affects of things like the ice melting cause the temps to start to rise at a higher rate than before? That there is no tipping point where it starts to rise drastically?

BTW every time I try and post someone else has posted so this might be out of sync a little.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

I did a module on this - if anyone in the UK saw the news on the climategate scandal a couple of years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_hacking_incident I was taught by the guys at the centre of the controversy!

Basically they taught the module with a very pro-anthroprogenic climate change slant. They had data that included the reconstruction of the past climate of the last 2000 years and made future projections. The data they gave was very convincing, but as an analyst myself I know it's not hard to present data in a way that highlights your point of view. We were fed loads of temperature charts from the last 2000 years with a relatively flat line which spikes in the late 1900s and early 2000s. What wasn't obivous until closer inspection was the scale - that spike was equivalent to 0.2-0.3 degrees, and while thatis significant, it looks much more dramatic on a graph.

Something they weren't so public about was temperature data from the last holocene. I can't get the chart to upload on my work computer but it effectively shows that average global temperatures today are slightly below the mean of the last ~12000 years

I'm a slight sceptic, I think climate change is happening but it is largely a natural occurence and while there is some acceleration by anthroprogenic causes, it is not as critical as we are led to believe. This doesn't mean i don't care. I'm all for greener environmentally friendly technology pollution is never a good thing and increased C02 levels will have an effect.

People also forget that the Medieval Warm Period lasted 300 years! and would have had very little to do with humans, it could be that we are undergoing a similar phase, and if so, 20 or so years of warming temperatures would not be unusual.

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My main concern in this area is that 'we' are making kneejerk reactions and politicians are using it for , erm, political ends.
Ill considered reactions are doing as much harm as good. I'll give a couple of instances to show what I mean.
Gas boilers. big fuss and big money to change your gas boiler if its more than a few days old.
All the resources put into a new boiler must be many times that saved by installing a new one.

For example, my recent boiler was manufactured in Italy and weighs at least 40lb. Just the fuel and other resources getting it to my house will probably outweigh any benefit through its whole life when balanced against the old ones inefficacy, and thats without the actual fitting and the crew getting there.

The rushing through of 'cat converters' a couple decades back. Despite manufactures wanting a few years to perfect 'clean burn'. At the time I had a 2.0 Cav CDI which on my regular trip to and from work gave me close to 40 mpg (UKgal that is). My wife had a Metro HLE which gave high 50's per gallon for the same trip.

These were replaced with a Vectra, which was the immediate replacement for the Cav, which on the same run fell by probably 20%, not to mention the mess obtaining the components for the cat converter created.

My wife changed to a different make, but still lost out 10 mpg or more for an equivalent car.

Politicians and 'activists' actually made things worse. This is repeated over and over in other areas.

Things need to be done, but the right things, not ill considered headline actions

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Marx (Groucho)