Is man causing global warming?

Quote: boymimbo

Good thing that your opinion is now clear, AZ. Let me say however that I do like you as a fellow citizen of the world. I don't want to get into an argument with you online as there are facts to support both sides of the equation. And this Canadian whack-job lefties don't want to get into any discussion online about the merits of government funded health care.

It's never anything personal. I do often warn people, "you ask my opinion you will yget it." Ah, the benefits of not running for office.

Cheers

The Wizard is wrong! If he is correct then the Chinese are the villans here. Their population is 4X ours.

To briefly illustrate: The Chinese produce 4X the amount of greenhouse gases than the U.S. just in flatulance for starters. India is a close second at about 3X more than us. Both are continuous and ongoing without any relief in sight.

Lastly when Mt. Saint Helens erupted the "pollution" spewed forth exceeded our total output of greenhouse gases by a huge number, yet there were not any real adverse effects globally that were permanent or still remain. It seems that this good old earth of ours can cope with real natural disasters quite well, thank you.

tuttigym

Global warming is a red herring. It's a distraction from the real problem: oil is finite and we're running out.

The world produces 84 million barrels of oil per day, and 5 million of that comes from one single oil field: Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. Ghawar went into production in 1951, and no other oil field on the planet even comes close to its size: it originally had reserves of 170 billion barrels. (For comparison, the most optimistic estimate of the size of ANWR in Alaska is 11 billion barrels. The pessimists believe ANWR has only 5 billion.)

All of us Americans alive after 1951 owe our modern lifestyle (cars, airplanes, fertilizers, plastics, WalMart) to Ghawar. If (God forbid) Ghawar dried up next week and oil production dropped from 84 million to 79 million overnight, I assure you that gas will no longer be $2.75 per gallon. A six percent decline in supply will not magically produce a six percent rise in price: inventories are way too tight and oil demand is inelastic (people still need to commute to work). The price spike will be MUCH higher!

Ghawar has been in decline since 1981, and it will probably take another century or so before it's completely dry. But the point is that it can't continue to produce 5 million barrels per day forever. As it slowly declines to 4 million then 3 million then 2 million barrels per day, other oil fields will have to boost output just to fill that gap. It's like running to stand still.

The problem is that Ghawar isn't the only field drying up. For example, Alaska's Prodhoe Bay field production is down 75 percent from its peak in 1987, Mexico's Canterell field is also down 75 percent from its peak in 2004. Texas' oil production peaked in 1974 at 3.5 million barrels per day. Today, Texas produces less than 1 million barrels per day. The oil fields in Venezuela, Indonesia, Syria, Egypt, Malaysia, Norway, Britain, Iran, Yemen, and Columbia are all in decline.

Sarah Palin and the GOP keep chanting "Drill, baby, drill!" as if Alaska's 11 billion barrels were somehow enough to solve the problem. It's not. The nicest thing I can say about the pro-drilling crowd is that they're not good at math. The heroin junkie won't conquer his addiction by finding a new dealer.

And did I mention that in 2009, more cars were sold in China than in America? This isn't sustainable...

The power of economics is that it will "solve" the problem for us. Unfortunately, the outcomes of increasingly scarcer petroleum resources range from a renaissance of technology as alternative fuels are developed, to a "Mad Max" scenario as those with power take resources from those without. Is Nevada going to be able to keep the nuclear waste dump out of Yucca Mountain forever? No. It might not be our generation, but it will have to be dealt with eventually.

I would just like to say, in general, that global warming is both real and false- it is real in the sense of the average global temperature is going up, and has been going up steadily since man arrived on the planet, but false in almost every single way it is popularized and exploited by political environmentalists. It is very fun to explain to people that global warming is totally real, but that Al Gore is a clueless, manipulative ass who has exploited this topic for personal gain.

Also, pretty much anything that the media says on the topic, one way or the other, is wrong or at least grossly misleading. That is a group of people who don't know any better picking up the same misinformation from each other, treating it like it is science, and circulating it. Most of them don't even know the difference between the words "weather" and "climate" (I'm looking at you, FOX). Every year there is a new article based on something taken grossly out of context. Take, for instance, the "global warming will cause an ice age" fiasco. Reporters saying "see, scientists said earlier that global warming would make the earth hotter and now they've flip-flopped." The truth behind all this comes from a single TIME article, where a scientist discusses how, because of so many variables, it is unclear as to what will ultimately happen because of temperature increases, and that if the environment is effected in certain ways by higher global temperatures, such as creating excess deserts, reflecting more sunlight out, it may eventually reverse the cycle, bringing about an ice age.

This has always been true. Climatology is so complex that increasing temperatures could cause a positive, negative, or neutral cycle and, while there has been speculation, only political heads and the media have been so crude as to say they know what will happen. On youtube, there is a series of informative videos on potholer54's YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54) that discusses these matters greatly. If you are interested in the topic, it is worth a glance. He also discusses the most recent media stupidity, involving the "global warming is a hoax!!!" e-mails and how disgustingly misunderstood they are. It's, unfortunately, all politics to the general public. Nobody seems to actually know anything about real climatology and most people don't care to know because it's difficult. I, personally, became fascinated with the topic when we had to learn about it for academic decathlon years ago.

***SHORT VERSION***: sorry for talking so much, global warming is real, though what it means to our future is unknown, check out the vids I linked, and don't listen to pundits, especially not on scientific matters.

I know enough about global warming and climatology (with a major in Physics, post graduate work in Meteorology, and studying the phenomena on my own) and know enough honest people in the 'industry' to know that the phenomena of global warming is more than likely quite real. I understand how radiation enters and leaves the atmosphere and what the major factors of the global energy equation are. I really can't see any better fit in causes of the average temperature rise trend than the increase of Carbon Dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and you can easily link the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere to our industrial activity. And there is enough evidence to show that the science is changing.

Gore may be a buffoon and have had personal gain from it, but he popularized the idea and put enough scare in anyone to at least keep thinking about it. True scientists never say "it is real" unless they are 100% sure. They say "likely" "very likely" "with a xx degree of confidence" to back their ideas. Politicians say they are sure without really knowing the facts.

When scientists say that the earth will likely rise xx degrees in temperature by the year xxxx, they are assuming a steady-state atmosphere without other factors and are just looking at the radiation equation. What will actually happen is not totally understood; it is just their honest best guess based on what they know (which is very little because they've only had one planet to study).

That said, if your brightest and best said that the plane has a 95 in 100 chance to crash unless the plane was fixed, would you get on the plane? This is the same. You can only hide under the uncertainty for so long before you do something about it.

I believe purely as a wager, the side of man made global warming is the best bet.

As far as I can tell, the worse case scenario of the skeptics is expensive costs of retooling industry, the costs to oil producers, although other industries could gain. Or that it's a big waste of time.

The worse case scenario of man made global warming, is the flooding, displacement of populations and all the possible chaos that could cause. And least case -- maybe we invest in green technology long before we really need it, but otherwise a big waste of money or effort.

So which is the better bet?

I suppose if you're a dedicated skeptic you can claim all references that we might be sailing on the Titanic (worst case) is just ridiculous. But is a skeptic postion so overwhelmingly sure that any of them can make such a powerful claim that we can dismiss all calls for alarm and sit back and laugh at people like Gore? I get the feeling the skeptic position may poke problematic holes here and there at best but it's not so strong, that we can be so dismissive.

But that's my layman's perspective.

Quote: rxwine

I suppose if you're a dedicated skeptic you can claim all references that we might be sailing on the Titanic (worst case) is just ridiculous. But is a skeptic postion so overwhelmingly sure that any of them can make such a powerful claim that we can dismiss all calls for alarm and sit back and laugh at people like Gore?

Yes. I for one and many others realize man cannot change the climate of the earth at will. We also realize that historically warmer is better in any case. Finally, we realize that the earth has warmed and cooled over time naturally and everything is still here.

As a skeptic what really POs me is the hysteria. Rmemeber that movie? "The Day After Tomorrow?" Complete with a Dick Cheney look-alike VP it was pure science-fiction. But I knew college-educated people who took it as real. As if someone saw a 1950s "Mars Invades" type movie and thought the Martians were coming. Or that they shoud sell their WWE Stock when a storyline had Vince McMahon kinned onscreen.

Then there is the media who jump on Hurrican Katrina and scream "GLOBAL WARMING." (A German Government Offical joined in there.) Same for *any* weather pattern that is something other than what happened the last few years. Even with record snowfalls here in the northeast the AGW crowd said, "SEE, It's happening!"

At some point the sky isn't falling, it was just an apple that hit you onthe head.

AZDuffman, I'm sympathetic to your complaint that scientists in the 1970s made some dire ecological predictions that later turned out to be completely wrong and therefore these scientists lose their credibility in your eyes. But that's how science works: new data is collected, new interpretations are made, and theories change. Either a hypothesis withstands the test of time, or it is discarded. Yes, scientists made mistakes in the 1970s, they make mistakes today, and they'll continue to make mistakes in the future. But the competent ones will learn from their mistakes, and science will continue to progress.

National Geographic magazine has been measuring the size of the polar ice cap in the Northern Hemisphere since 1980, and the numbers don't lie. The ice cap is shrinking:

1980 - 3.01 million square miles of ice
1985 - 2.66 million square miles
1990 - 2.39 million square miles
1995 - 2.36 million square miles
2000 - 2.43 million square miles
2005 - 2.16 million square miles
2007 - 1.67 million square miles
2008 - 1.81 million square miles

Yes, ice ages come and go, and perhaps the shrinking ice cap has absolutely nothing to do with the millions of tons of CO2 that humans are adding to the atmosphere year after year. Perhaps it's all just a coincidence. NASA reports that atmospheric CO2 went from 285 parts per million in 1950 to 388 ppm in 2010. The scientists at NASA seem to believe that the warming can't be a coincidence, because one of the properties of CO2 is that it traps heat very very well. (I encourage every curious skeptic to spend some time at http://climate.nasa.gov). If I were a betting man, I'd wager that these rocket scientists know what they're talking about.

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In my earlier post, I mentioned that I was actually more concerned about finite oil supplies than I am global warming. That's because I think the finite oil problem will be unavoidable within the next 10 years, whereas climate change might not be catastrophic for humans in my lifetime.

AZDuffman: "plus have 500+ Billion barrels in the oil sands of Canada plus possibly a trillion more in the oil shale here in the USA."

Agreed. Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming probably have over a trillion barrels in oil shale. The problem is that separating the oil from the rock requires MASSIVE quantities of water (at least 3 barrels of water for each barrel of oil). I'm not suggesting it will be impossible to achieve daily production of, say, 2 million barrels of oil in a dry arid place like Utah. But it won't be easy, and it won't be cheap.