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Post by Richard S. » Fri. May. 18, 2012 4:46 pm

DavidStang wrote: And are you saying that the mining industry is not responsible for abandoned mines? Who abandoned them?
Is Ford responsible for an abandoned factory in Detroit owned by a company that went out business 100 years ago?

Having said that it's one cost imposed on the coal industry I support, it's too bad things like the billions of dollars we're going to needlessly spend on mercury mitigation weren't spent more wisely.

 
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Post by Richard S. » Fri. May. 18, 2012 5:26 pm

DavidStang wrote:
It is easy to understand that humans are adding heat to the earth. We burn coal, oil, natural gas, and the combustion creates heat. Hard to build a cold fire.
Are you suggesting that the heat itself produced from fossil fuels is having an effect on global temperatures?
And we can show how greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane insulate.
Yes but it's only one variable of many variables, the total effect is unknown.
The headline findings of the fourth IPCC assessment were:
This would be the same organization that published the hockey stick. yes? The same organization that has had to retract many things in these reports, yes? This would be same organization that has been widely criticized both internally and externally for for the inordinate way in which they have been compiled outside of the typical scientific process? David the IPCC is political organization, it's not a scientific one. For example the head of the IPCC specialty is economics and soft *censored* novelists on the side who just happens to have vast investments in many companies that would benefit from climate change legislation.
Wikipedia is written by everyone, not just anti-capitalists.
Interesting you have mentioned Wikipedia as a reliable source.......
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/st ... 78af9cb409

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known -Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia's articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug. 11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world's most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn't like the subject of a certain article, he removed it -- more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred -- over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley's global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia's blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
In case you're interested Connolley was banned by Wikipedia eventually but the damage was done at that point.

You're going to have to come up with something more that the IPCC and Wikipedia to back up your claim 97 to 98% of scientists in the climate field agree humans are causing warming.
What is the benefit in believing that humans have had nothing to do with what is happening on this planet? I'm curious.
I don't believe we are or aren't, there simply isn't enough evidence to fully support either position.

 
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Post by SMITTY » Fri. May. 18, 2012 9:33 pm

coaledsweat wrote:...... Asthma was almost unheard of prior to WWII. It's a little odd that it showed up after the country switched to oil after a century of burning coal.
And just to back this up ........

I have asthma - had it my whole life. I moved from MA to Phoenix, AZ in May '99. After a couple months of living there, I found that for the first time in a decade or more I was able to function without an albuterol inhaler in my back pocket. Upon returning to MA 2 years later, I was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack within a month of returning, and have had the same symptoms since.

Nobody uses oil heat in Phoenix. Nearly everyone uses it in MA. In winter, my asthma is always worse. Always.

I never breathed nor felt better than when I lived there, yet, Phoenix had a brown cloud hovering over the valley every single day from "pollution".

Bottom line? DON'T believe the leftist propaganda that "pollution" causes asthma. That's HORSESHIT! So are all the "scientific" studies on it. No scientist would last a day in my shoes. That, I can assure you.

I think whatever they are putting in aerosol inhalers these days is more of a contributor than the environment is.

I have so much more to say, but I need to sleep now ....

 
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Post by samhill » Fri. May. 18, 2012 10:10 pm

Smitty, what bothers one person may not bother the next, all fossil fuels when burned & at times even before emit some form of pollution. It could just be that your nemesis is from burning oil fumes that don't bother others just as some pollens bother only some people but not all. I know this spring I came back from my normal walk to the lake & had a reaction to something, never had one before or since go figure. I know it isn't fun when you can't breathe.


 
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Post by Pacowy » Sat. May. 19, 2012 11:56 am

DavidStang wrote: It is easy to understand that humans are adding heat to the earth. We burn coal, oil, natural gas, and the combustion creates heat. Hard to build a cold fire. And we can show how greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane insulate. Drive from city to country, and watch the temperature drop: our cities are warmer than the countryside. Even capitalists should be smart enough to see this.

But intelligence doesn't aid our intuition about what the climate is doing, or why it is doing it. Take any time scale, and we will find change. Choose one scale, and we'll see the earth cooling; choose another, and we'll see it warming. The time scale of our own memory doesn't get us very far -- even though we haven't had cold winters where I live in quite a while, that doesn't prove anything. That's where we need science, and good records.

The records are now pretty clear, the science better than ever. The earth's temperature does fluctuate up and down. It was much warmer, with more atmospheric CO2, when coal was being formed. The poles were warm enough for plants to grow. It was much colder during the last ice age. The past two thousand years have been somewhat anomalous -- warmer than the planet normally is -- and we were on the way to cooling when the industrial revolution came along. Right now, all the records point to warming. See Wikipedia for samples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_o ... 1000_years

But your main point is that scientists don't agree that humans are causing the warming. You are wrong. Anyone who agrees with you on this is wrong. The headline findings of the fourth IPCC assessment were: "warming of the climate system is unequivocal", and "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report and read the entire page. Wikipedia is written by everyone, not just anti-capitalists.

While it is easy to see that you are wrong, it is not so easy to see why you would have such an opinion. What is the benefit in believing that humans have had nothing to do with what is happening on this planet? I'm curious.
Your flippant comments to wsherrick on how people heat cities, like the climate models to which you bow, conveniently ignore the obvious and major role of solar forces and the less obvious but important role of water. I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe recognition of the "urban heat island" effect occurred about 200 years ago- i.e., before any of the assertions of meaningful man-made impacts on greenhouse gasses - and that studies have consistently found that it arises mainly from the thermal and absorptive properties of the materials used to build cities and the loss of evaporative cooling that occurs on undeveloped land. The burning of fossil fuels by people is at most a secondary consideration.

If all scientists really have reached an eternally unassailable agreement about man-made global warming, it would probably be the first time in history that such an agreement could be reached on any subject. Science is about learning and improving the understanding of things, and in my view the man-made global warming proponents haven't put forward credible information to make their case persuasively. It's pretty clear that CO2 concentrations and global temperatures were correlated for much of the 1980's and '90's, but after that CO2 went up and temperatures generally didn't, so whatever the earlier models said about the relationship between the two needed to be set aside and reassessed. If you want a "man-made" explanation, one that seems to fit the data pretty well is the way SO2 emissions from human activity appears to have contributed to increased cloud formation. Before the initial efforts to curb acid rain, scientists had expressed concerns about global cooling. Our successful efforts to curb acid rain simultaneously decreased cloud formation and increased solar gain, leading to the pattern of temperature increase that set off the global warming concerns. All of the burning of high-sulfur coal in developing economies like China and India may have started the same cycle over again, but, like the urban heat island, it is driven primarily by solar power and water vapor, and not CO2.

If you have any real information that would contribute to meaningful dialogue, I'd be glad to hear it. If all you've got is "everybody else agrees you're wrong but I don't have a single way to show it" you probably should save your breath. As a mobile source of CO2, water vapor and methane (let's not forget that one), your own theory says you should manage your personal emissions more carefully.

Mike

 
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Post by wsherrick » Sat. May. 19, 2012 12:47 pm

There have been times in the past where there has been a scientific consensus. Let's see; here's a few: The Earth was the center of the Universe and the Sun and Stars rotated around Earth. Earth was a fixed body. Life was created by, "Spontaneous Generation." That one is sort of like Evolution. The Universe was filled with a mystical element called Ether. The Human Body was composed of four basic fluids called, "Humors," You fixed people's humors by bleeding them. The blood circulated through the body like the ocean tides.
I could go on but I have to go to work.
Any time you have a consensus in science, the consensus is wrong. You can't have fact by popular vote. Facts are absolute, and determined by the scientific method.
The Global Warming, "Consensus," goes in the list along with the Earth being the Center of the Universe.

 
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Post by Richard S. » Sat. May. 19, 2012 1:31 pm

Pacowy wrote: I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe recognition of the "urban heat island" effect occurred about 200 years ago- i.e., before any of the assertions of meaningful man-made impacts on greenhouse gasses -
As far as man made heat being an issue I'll wait until David responds to my query before replying. There is one effect the urban heat island has had on climate change, it's skewed the data. These weather station may have been existence for 100 years or more and when they first built them the area may have been sparsely populated or not populated at all. As more man made structures are built and other man made influences are introduced the rise in temperature can be attribute to the local effect. In some cases you can have some ridiculous examples:

Image
Image

What they try and do is find these stations with weird anomalies and adjust the data accordingly. Both the effect of the urban heat island and the methodology of the adjustment is hotly debated issue. Here is one example of where there is an issue with the data:

Image

The blue line is the raw data and there is obvious issue around 1940 where the readings shift downwards. Something like this might be caused by something as simple as changing the location of the thermometer. You need to either throw the data out or adjust for it. The red line is what it has been adjusted too which quite obviously has a warming bias. You don't have to be a rocket scientists to look at this graph and see it was poor adjustment.

 
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Post by wsherrick » Wed. May. 23, 2012 4:52 pm

Richard, I think you might have scared him away?!


 
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Post by Ctyankee » Wed. May. 23, 2012 5:58 pm

All the work on climate change uses very complex mathematical computer modeling to arrive at their conclusions about the warming of the planet. I been wondering...was the same modeling concepts used to evaluate financial risk in the banking industry a few years ago?

 
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Post by Richard S. » Wed. May. 23, 2012 7:21 pm

Ctyankee wrote:All the work on climate change uses very complex mathematical computer modeling to arrive at their conclusions about the warming of the planet.
Ahhh..... the modeling topic. You can make a better comparison with hurricanes. They actually do some pretty good predictions. They achieved that with two decades of very good and unquestionable data. Most importantly they were able to test and refine their model again,and again, and again against known results.

 
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Post by Richard S. » Wed. May. 23, 2012 7:31 pm

wsherrick wrote:Richard, I think you might have scared him away?!
Maybe, I was hoping he was going to claim it was the heat itself also contributing to global warming. It certainly appeared that way from his post. That's just as ridiculous as claiming windmills are causing global warming. Do you hear me Fox Nation? You're not doing yourself an favors making yourself look foolish.

That at most is local affect just as it is with the heat generated from fossil fuels, the fact of the matter is within about a half an hour the sun delivers as many BTU's to the earth's surface that man has produced burning fossil fuels within the last century.

 
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Post by SMITTY » Wed. May. 23, 2012 8:39 pm

wsherrick wrote:Richard, I think you might have scared him away?!
That's the hit & run tactics of the left: stir the pot, offer no rebuttal, and troll the next site spewing your leftist propaganda. :roll: What a life, aye? Wonder how much Obama pays these people? :gee:

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