Hi everyone!
I just thought you should know that you have a meteorologist here. I did some of my graduate study looking into climatology, and I've read a lot of literature on climate change. I'm a programmer now so I'm a bit out of date -- roughly 10 years -- but the consensus on climate change hasn't really changed in that time, because, of course, we had all decided that it was a real thing back in the 1980s. But if you do need to know something or want some evidence interpreted, I'd be happy to help out.
skyefire2020 Wrote:What is the highest ever temperature in the billions of years of earth
history (I'll be generous and only count the years after the existence
of liquid water) Was it more than 4C higher than today's temperature?
The web sites I've read (all the links are at the end of the article)
say it was much much hotter (20c+) but if you can show otherwise then
please do so.
The greenhouse effect keeps Earth's atmosphere about 30K warmer that it would be without greenhouse gasses, putting our global average for the 20th century around 15°C. (Your #1 greenhouse gas: water.) It was significantly hotter in the Cretaceous -- maybe 4-5K warmer, but we've had a long cooling period since the Miocene due to a lot of factors. For instance, this is about when Australia separated from Antarctica, causing the southern continent to be thermally isolated from the rest of the world. It's a giant ice-colored reflector now, as you're aware, which helps keep the whole world colder.
As far as the highest ever temperature? Well, there's the Hadean era, in which there were a lot of lava flows as the Earth's initial crust formed. Due to the large amount of molten rock everywhere and dense atmosphere, surface temps were around 230°C, even in the oceans.
Jones was there, you can ask her about it.
skyefire2020 Wrote:It is historical fact that Oxygen was a trace gas until plants and
microbes started producing more. I was taught in school that early
earth had lots of C02 and very little O2. The C02 caused lots of plants
who used up lots of C02 and produced lots of 02. The fall in Co2 hurt
plants, but the rise in O2 created animals who used O2 and produced C02
and so started the great oxygen cycle.
What was the Co2 level at the time? My websites say CO2 levels were
much higher (5x) at the time but again if you can prove otherwise let me
know.
Uh, I don't even know, but there were times that CO2 were thousands of hectopascals higher. Which is to say entire atmospheres worth. There were also times the O2 levels reached 35%, which is in the spontaneous combustion region with our current pressure. We do not really want to go back to either of these extremes.
The fall in CO2 did not really hurt plants in the long run, because, of course, plants need O2 to burn sugar just like everyone else. In the short run, a lot of organisms died of oxygen poisoning. Life eventually got very good at keeping oxygen away from important things like cell nuclei (eat your antioxidants people!), but some archaea remain that are still prone to oxygen poisoning. Like your botulism or deep sea bacteria.
skyefire2020 Wrote:I have read the arguments on both sides and compared them with the real
world. It is now 2017. You still can't sail to the North Pole without
an icebreaker (if at all) and it still snows in the UK. how many global
warming scientists correctly predicted that this would still be the
case? I bet it wasn't 95%.
Nope, it was 100%. Geez, it's like you think we're all terrible at our job, when we're totally not. Outside of the alarmists who aren't really climate scientists, no one really thought we'd have a fully melted Arctic Ocean by now. We thought we might have a seasonally ice-free north pole, which is not saying that not to take an icebreaker, because the Arctic remains super-treacherous. But by the end of this century, I'd put money on Santa's Workshop ending up in the drink. Most predictions have been for 2050 or 2100, and you're not treating scientists fairly when you take them out of context and apply them to today.
And no one thought we wouldn't have snow in the mid-latitudes. The atmospheric conditions are built on waves -- gravity waves and Rossby waves, primarily. So what happens when you add more energy to a wave? The median value increases, but so does the amplitude. The peaks grow farther apart, which means you have more energy available means having more fuel for large storms. And heck, it still snows on Kilimanjaro? No one actually seriously thought that we would have no snow in the U.K., which is far closer to the pole. What might be possible: a snow-free month, or season. But the whole idea about climate change is that in terms of the atmosphere, the extremes matter the most, and we will have more extremes. (In the ocean, the median matters, because gravity, but that's another story).
JFerio Wrote:We've started getting things like snow in MAY in Denver here. And the
snowfall stuff... let's just say the past 10 years have been
increasingly unpredictable as to whether or not we'll get city-closing
snowstorms and snow lingering in more than the shadows; ...
This whole story speaks to the point above: increasing extreme events. Increasing unpredictability is a part of that, because extremes are harder to predict, and weather models are of course calibrated against past data.
JFerio Wrote:I think part of the problem, ultimately, is the idea that "climate
change reactions are going to keep these industries closed", when the
reality is generally much more complex than that; some of those
industries (and their workers who don't feel like they should adapt to a
changing world) that are arguing AGAINST climate change being a thing
are industries that have other factors against them, or are against
competing industries that just have so many advantages over them that
they are eating their breakfast, lunch AND DINNER, and going back in
time and wiping away the environmental laws they claim hamstrung them
actually won't change the overall picture of the present of their
industry anyway.
Well, the coal industry is in it's death throes, and it's entirely for economic reasons. Natural gas, solar, and wind are all cheaper than coal. All of these industries receive government subsidies in the U.S., so it's not like it's unfair competition. No one wants to live next to a coal power plant, either. So there's no future for coal outside of metallurgical purposes.
Black Aeronaut Wrote:Because WE DIDN'T EVOLVE IN THOSE CONDITIONS.
I mean, really. 20 degrees CELSIUS hotter than what we normally
experience now. Nowhere on Earth gets that ungodly hot
now.
Well, um, places get pretty hot. My father is from Yuma, so
I'd know. But the majority of warming should happen in the high
latitudes. Most regions around the equator will simply evaporate more
water to cool the surface.
We didn't evolve in those conditions isn't a strong argument against anthropogenic climate change IMO.
No, the Persian Gulf won't be uninhabitable by the end of the century.
We currently live on the equator and on a pole. We're gonna survive
somehow. But the rapid change in climate has only previously happened
from other somewhat disastrous occurrences, like getting hit by a huge
freaking asteroid or the Deccan Traps erupting. On a geological time
scale this is a full-scale disaster. The amount of degrees of change is
pretty trivial. The speed with which it's happening is not. This is
mass extinction territory, and it's already happening.
The main
point about climate change is that everyone talks about the
climatologists. But that's not where the proof comes from. It comes
from the tens of thousands of papers from fields like ecology, agronomy,
enology, oceanography, soil science, hydrology, veterinary science,
biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics. And I keep hearing about
this as a con, and I'm like
what? A con played by literally
millions of scientists in hundreds of countries where we're all sucking
the teat of Al Gore and decreasing government funding. Like go ahead
and hold this view, skyfire2020, but realize that it's not based in
anything that could be considered reality.
Science is refuted all
of the time, and people are praised for disproving others. But to say
that anthropogenic global warming is not happening and is not
dangerous? That an extraordinary claim, which thus required
extraordinary evidence. Not any of the "scientists didn't account for
X" arguments, because every time I hear one of those, I know for a fact
that we have accounted for X for decades. Y'all are welcome to
criticize us, but do the research first please instead of assuming
you're smarter than people who literally do this for a living.
skyefire2020 Wrote:Finally my local council arranged 3 climate change marches in the early
2000's. Every one of them was cancelled at least once because of snow.
Strangely enough they stopped arranging them after that. I'm no devout
church goer but you don't need to be Moses to hear God's laughter at
the idea that mankind controls the weather.
But God explicitly handed control over this to us (as tenants):
Genesis 1:26 Wrote:Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and
let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over
the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move
along the ground.'
robkelk Wrote:And if you want to invoke God, then I ask that She appears and speaks for Herself.
Sure thing, man.
Revelation 11:18 Wrote:The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come
for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and
your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great —
and for destroying those who destroy the earth.
This is what I stand for. I mean please, actually read the Bible before making these arguments. God has given us great powers, he made us in his image. Even if our powers are a pale reflection of the divine, for sure we can influence the whole world. We have covered it in wires and steel and glass and asphalt. 2.7% of the world's land is urban. We have built a great storehouse to keep us safe, but in the process we are despoiling and destroying the Earth, and living against God's law. The time has come to put a stop to that, before it is too late.
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