Must Have Been All That Hot Air
on 03/25/2008 at 10:56 PM
What ails these idiots? Please explain this to me, it’s just all too much.
What the hell’s the problem here.......The sky’s been falling tooooooooooooooooooo
OH NO Chicken Little..........HELP...................
His name is Scambos folks.
Yep, Global Warming alright.
OK, Is there anybody that really thinks trying to protect the environment we live in is a bad idea? Or is it more like just a waste of time and money!
lateforwork2 - no, there is nothing wrong with protecting the environment. But you’ve got to have rational limits. Nobody litters anymore, everyone drives a car or truck that puts out nearly no pollution, everyone recycles, and we all try to cut back on electric consumption because it’s so damn expensive. Everyone is pissed off when some schlemeil gets caught illegal dumping, and most folks are in favor of clean burning power plants and factories, scrubbers in the smokestacks, etc.
However, we aren’t naive, and many of us have figured out that the human contribution to planetary heat levels is miniscule, compared to insolation variances caused by sunspots and cyclical wobbles in the earth’s orbit, along with increases in volcanic and tectonic activity - do the math, you’ll see that well over 95% of the planet is molten rock. And ice cold space, the ultimate heat sink, is right there at the top of the atmosphere. There’s a lot LOT LOT of heat there. And ice cold space, the ultimate heat sink, is right there at the top of the atmosphere. So yes, we live on that “finely balanced” littoral in between, but we can figure out the masses involved, and realize our puny efforts aren’t going to overcome a planet’s worth of thermal momentum. Can’t be done, even if you set the whole surface of all the land on fire. Fire would burn out in a week at most, and inside a month things would be right back to normal.
And we paid extra special attention to the weather this past winnter, and noticed it was one of the more severe winters in a long time. Coincidently sunspot activity continues to be at near-zero levels, as the arctic and antarctic ice sheets reach record sizes in record short times.
So when “protection” becomes “crazed knee-jerk reactionism”, we call BS and say “stop the presses!”
Drew458, I hear what your saying there and agree with ya. But when I look at the problems of smog in California that can’t make it over the mountains, and after driving through Chicago and seeing factory after factory spewing out nasty black exhaust and then I vacation to Maine and visit Arcadia National Park and there is a picture from the fifties about how you could see all the way up to Canada, but now you rarely if at all can see that far through the view finder on location, one can not ignore the presence that we humans have had on our environment. The thing that is so hard to size up is what impact does this really have in its relation to the whole picture, I am not a scientist and not many are, so how do we really know.
Who here noticed the huge cracks in the ice field inland of the part that broke up? As time goes by and it flows towards the sea, expect more, and larger, break ups in the near future.
BTW; yes, the ice fields inland are getting thicker. However, the ice is flowing towards the sea faster than before, and ice near the sea is actually thinner than in times past.
The situation is more complicated than the view we get from the media.
I’m all in favor of being kind to our environment.
BUT....
Even someone who is not a scientist, merely fairly well read, can figure out that *GLOBAL* temperature fluctuations over the entire system must take a long time. When Krakatoa exploded, it was one of the largest disturbances ever recorded on the Earth’s crust. If memory serves, it was a larger energy release than every nuke ever set off in the history of mankind. And yet it was over a year I believe before anyone noticed any effects on the other side of the equator, and within a decade there were no measurable effects at all. That’s one factor to take into account.
Another factor is that, in a practical sense, ALL of the data collection on a global scale is *since* the space age, that is there is no *direct* evidence that is older than I am, and the vast majority of that data collection is since 1979. So for direct evidence, we aren’t even at the half century mark yet, arguably not even at 30 years. Basically ONE generation.
Factor 3 is that all the climate change hype is being pushed by politicians and the MSM. Yes, there are climate scientists on board with the idea, we hear about them all the time, but there are also many scientists with evidence to say man is NOT causing this trouble either. The MSM and the politicians who preach global warming try very hard to make sure you never hear about them, but they exist. It is documentable that those on the “yes, there is man made global warming” are trying to treat the issue as already proven when the *facts* suggest that it is a hotly contested THEORY with plenty of evidence to be sifted on both sides. One thing that *does* appear to be provable is that climate modeling is much more complex than either side thought.
And finally we have factor 4: It is documentable, easily provable, that both politicians and the MSM will not hesitate to lie to anyone for personal advantage (to get more votes, to sell more papers, to get more viewers, etc.) It is also easily provable that rarely does any politician or journalist have any kind of realistic vision extending any farther than the next election. With journalists it tends to be shorter still, extending only to the next edition/episode.So, where does that leave us? We have compelling evidence saying that global climate has an immense inertia, not to be changed easily or quickly. We have absolutely inarguable evidence that our data on the subject does not go back nearly far enough with the accuracy needed to give us any confidence in the conclusions we draw from that data. We have compelling evidence that current knowledge of climate modeling is FAR too simplistic compared to the real thing to count as more than a wild-ass guess. And we have the utterly incontrovertible evidence that those who are trying hardest to have people accept this as proven fact are those who 1)do not have the scientific background to know in the first place, 2) can be counted on absolutely to blatantly lie to us if it serves their immediate purposes, and 3)consistently think in too short a time frame to make a realistic assessment of anything that takes place over such an extended time scale.
And on that basis we are supposed to panic to such a degree that we will agree to ANY abrogation of rights and freedoms, and allow those same politicians we know we can’t trust to completely redesign the global economy. All the while blandly assuming, in the face of the historical record, that they are only doing it because they care about what’s best for us.
If someone were to ask me what’s wrong with this picture, I would have to reply with “How long a list do you want?” And yet the very fact that I can see the flaws in this argument apparently makes me an ignorant selfish redneck who is not competent to decide anything of importance, not even concerning my own life.
I too am in favour of not shitting up the place I live, the moonbats just use the enviroment to control us and steal our money, the only place I have heard of with a realistic idea is the USA, where businesses can get a tax break if they reduce energy usage without impinging on production! If people really care DO NOT BUY from the evil empire of socialist china.
Posted by Chris Edwards
03/27/2008 at 02:11 PM
I like your case you bring to argument, we really have not been studying this long enough to have all the answers, or comparable statistics. Two thirds of the earth is covered with water and that is not adding to the pollution in our air, so how much the one third can do to the whole really is questionable. Buy the way your name you picked sounds like a good fit.
A couple of questions? 1 how come there was 200 feet of ice over the WW2 planes left on greenland for 60 years yet the mammoths have been popping out of the permafrost, are the poles shifting a lot more than is suggested?
2 can we use the globall warming question as a go/no go test of common sense?Posted by Chris Edwards
03/27/2008 at 05:14 PM
Chris, the liberals already DO use it as a test of common sense. By their standards, if you don’t buy into every word spoken by the Goreacle, you don’t have any.
Chris,
Permafrost is some interesting stuff. From what I understand, which is limited and possibly wrong, it’s a layer of ground that stays frozen all year. Mostly marshy ground IIRC. It’s got to be a fairly thin subsurface band; Summer temps will thaw the dirt at the surface, and perhaps a couple feet down. Go down any significant distance into the ground and things start to get warm.
Any farmer or home gardener will tell you that the first crop to come up in the Spring is rocks. Always! I swear they grow. But the reality is that the differences in thermal expansion between the stones and the soil, along with the force of expanding ice in the soil, push rocks to the surface. So what we think of as solid ground is really in a very slow churn. My guess is that this churn runs even slower in permafrost areas, but eventually things will break through. Intervals of warmer weather might just speed things along, so we’re seeing more mammoths coming up. Of course, I’d also say that they’ve been coming up for the past 10,000 years, but there hasn’t been anyone looking for them until recently. Another “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there, does it make a sound?” situation. So they would have come up eventually, climate change or not.
I’ve been reading the evolving story of that P-38 in Greenland for several years now. I think glaciers have their own kind of churn; they roll as they move. So an airplane on top gets pulled down, at the same time as it gets covered over with ice and snow accumulation. I don’t know how to judge how much of the plane’s depth is due to either aspect, but if we were having serious global warming I think the glaciers would be getting thinner from the top and bottom at the same time.
“The only thing constant in life is change” is an old truism that applies to the weather too. My common sense tells me that the climate is always changing, always has and always will. I think the Chicken Littles who blame it on mankind’s minor contributions have been snorting too much fairy dust.
Oh, and just for the sake of fairness, “selfish” I will cop to, and “redneck” I will halway cop to. “Ignorant” however..... well, you’ll have some convincing to do if you want to show me that my ignorance is even of the same order of magnitude as that of Al Gore.
If the glaciers are melting, can we have some of the water here in the SW? We’ve got quite the drought going in NM/TX/AZ.
Good point cmblake6, I have to ask myself what’s wrong with having to much good clean water coming our way, open up a Desalination plant and start selling it to Mexico, and use it yourself. California could probably use some too.
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