TallDave wrote:...What one organism excretes as a toxin, another utilizes as food. CO2 is a perfect example of this...
.. i'll not dispute.
however, your reasoning seems to be that this is good and under our control.
whereas, it simply compounds the problem by introducing the food chain and the whole notion of complex systems.
we dont even know whats happening yet. no one can possibly argue that we are currently in a 'confident' position technically to control climate or the biosphere to our will. notwithstanding problems of political self-interest.
imo, the best we can do currently, is agree to moderate our excesses and attempt to convert economic costs into economic (and scientific) opportunity.
The ever present cry of the Utopianist.
If only all of life's problems could be converted to simple linear equations.
I agree about moderation: MORE PLANT FOOD. Why? Because 280 ppmv is too close to the lower limit.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Jccarlton wrote:...There are only a bunch of greedy fools who jiggled the numbers to commit a fraud and the even more foolish who continue to believe them.
..that is what i mean by a crisis of confidence in the science. an unholy position.
we must rediscover, and proclaim the real science (read, original data). you never know, it may even hide a worse anwser.
I expect so. It is very hard to grow crops under ice. Perhaps Michael Mann would like to have a go at it.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
though the concept of 'efficient' recyling seems something we could agree on.
Source recycling seems to be the only case of that. Otherwise you have to pay people to take the stuff.
Metals (Cu, Al) seem to be the exception under certain market conditions.
true, the market dictates.
we might add to that an emerging market in recycling solar panels and other high tech goods, eg cell-phones, computers, etc for precious metals.
though there was news recently that solar panels are exceeding originally expected lifetimes - now out to 30-40 years apparently (in accelerated experiments). enough to change the economics of them quite significantly.
That it is safe to emit CO2 is not some trivial thing that any school child would know the answer to...
CO2 has been up to 7,000 ppmv in geological time. No tipping point.
OTOH man made CO2 has special properties (caused by quantum entanglement with humans) that makes it prone to wild temperature swings and tipping points.
This is based on Mann's Determinism Theory. Which states "I have determined CO2 is bad. Fall in line or else."
So yes It is possible that things are really bad. It is even possible that they are worse than we thought. What are the odds?
But I agree. We should be doing something about CO2 where it is profitable to do so. Planting trees. Growing crops. Seem to work out well in that respect.
No tipping point??? Your talking geological time!!!!! 100's of millions of years over the those time periods there are plenty of tipping points, climatic phase changes, mass extinctions. Some life always survives and adapts to the new environment, but for most organisms a mass extinction isn't a particularly fun time to be around in..
Anyhow over 100's millions of years the Earth's temperaturre has been dramatically different (well 10 degrees anyhow).
You just trolling? Why do you use the fact that there was a geological precedent of far higher CO2 concentrations 100's millions of years ago to argue that changing CO2 will not cause climate to change when the climate has changed over that period and many organisms have gone extinct.
jmc wrote:
One link Jcarlton gave saying how tiny the size of the Carbon molecule was and how it was "physically impossible" a trace gas could affect climate really made me angry. Because doubling CO2 would cause an increase of 1 degree, maybe that's a factor of 3 away from a scary change in temperature, but its not a factor of 100. Maybe CO2 won't be a problem in 50 years time, but if we go on emitting and growing and relying on fossil fuels for energy we may well double or even treble the CO2 content in the atmosphere over the next 150 and amplification factor of 3 is inside the realms of possibility.
That it is safe to emit CO2 is not some trivial thing that any school child would know the answer to... its a serious question that needs serious investigation (which it seems the IPCC aren't doing) and we don't know what the results will be.
I looked a bit more closely at the credentials of the man who wrote that. I have every reason to believe he knows his stuff. The physics were right. It also looks like he is a heavy hitter in the field where i am currently employed mass spectrometry. I will find out how heavy a hitter tomorrow in my office, which is full of mass spec heavy hitters. In any case you cannot argue with facts. Like it or not these are the facts. A doubling of the CO2 is not likely to have much if any affect on temperature. There is no such thing as Mann made physics based on the Hansen model. There are no magic gases. There are only a bunch of greedy fools who jiggled the numbers to commit a fraud and the even more foolish who continue to believe them.
I thought even the skeptics agree that doubling CO2 concentration would cause a rise of 1 degree based on it radiative absorbtion in the absence of other negative feedback mechanisms.
jmc wrote:
I thought even the skeptics agree that doubling CO2 concentration would cause a rise of 1 degree based on it radiative absorbtion in the absence of other negative feedback mechanisms.
One thing that bothers me with all this:
Everything that we burn today, be it a plant, or a fossile fuel of some sorts, once used to be a plant (or plants). That plant got its CO2 out of the atmosphere. So all that CO2 that we are supposedly pumping into the atmosphere now, must have been in the atmosphere at some point, right?
Where does that leave us?
I looked a bit more closely at the credentials of the man who wrote that. I have every reason to believe he knows his stuff. The physics were right. It also looks like he is a heavy hitter in the field where i am currently employed mass spectrometry. I will find out how heavy a hitter tomorrow in my office, which is full of mass spec heavy hitters. In any case you cannot argue with facts. Like it or not these are the facts. A doubling of the CO2 is not likely to have much if any affect on temperature. There is no such thing as Mann made physics based on the Hansen model. There are no magic gases. There are only a bunch of greedy fools who jiggled the numbers to commit a fraud and the even more foolish who continue to believe them.
I thought even the skeptics agree that doubling CO2 concentration would cause a rise of 1 degree based on it radiative absorbtion in the absence of other negative feedback mechanisms.
The only place that the linear link between co2 and temperature is made is James Hansen's computer models. Which, when I saw it made me even more skeptical. Reality doesn't behave like that. there are no linear relationships. The relationship was an obvious artifact of Dr. Hansen wanting the model to behave the way Hansen thought it should behave, which can be a big mistake with computer models. Look if 90% of the radiation is already absorbed, as seems likely according to the satellite data then any additional CO2 can only act on that 10% remaining. That is simply the law if diminishing returns. That effect is going to be small because the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is so small and the possibility of heat transfer is also very small. In order to understand the atmosphere you have to look at heat transfer and thermodynamics, not temperatures as such.
