Human Related Global Warming

[Leilani57]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10375161#post10375161 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Boomstick
As a reefer, seeing the worlds coral reefs decline due to warming ocean temps, rising levels effecting lighting - and pollution killing coral and marine animals, itis sad to me that people in this community are even debating this fact - and yes it is a FACT!

i agree. the sad thing is at the rate that the temperatures are rising, more and more reefs are going to bleach and it is an extremely sad reality that in not too many years lots of the species in our tanks will exist only there, in our tanks. as an avid scuba diver, the thought of this is crushing.

time is ticking: NASA Scientist: "We have a very brief window of opportunity to act"

 

[Sk8r]

I never said that tossing the carbon storage of the Jurassic into the atmosphere in the last dozen decades was benign. However, the discovery of the process of 'charcoaling', which became a major industry in Europe in the middle ages [all those guys living in cottages in the woods in fairy tales] stripped a lot of trees out of the picture and produced a lot of woodsmoke, on an industrial level, and prior to that was the population rise in Europe and Asia that took axes to the forests and slash and burned the forests of 2 continents, among other carbon disasters of the post-glaciation period, plus Thera, and several volcanic disasters---none of these alone was capable of pulling the trigger: try as we would, we could't wreck the atmosphere, but we could shove the big rock a little further toward the downhill skid. What I'm saying is that the turnaround can be fast, it can be difficult to deal with, and there are things we can do about it---possibly. Or possibly not. We could use more research, but that's not going on, on any large scale. The fact is that points rack up both on the side of the 'natural causes' people and on the side of the 'its all our fault' people---and everybody's so busy lining up on their 'side' we haven't yet accepted that we ought to be doing anything in an organized way to deal with the result of it.

 

[billsreef]

Christa,

One of the things that long ago convinced me that we could indeed have an impact on the atmosphere was not science, but offshore cruising. Going far offshore (I'm talking over the edge of the continental shelf) the air pollution over major cities becomes very apparent. It shows as on obvious thick yellow/brown haze over the location of the city. Far enough offshore that no land is in sight, yet you can precisely pin point the location of a city from the haze. It's very hard to look such obvious pollution and think we're not having an effect with our air pollution. And that's without looking at scientific data or publications, or even the media.

 

[christa]

Yes, you all make me think and have great input. The thought of our coral reefs dieing off is what made me really think about this over the past year. That just breaks my heart. It is very interesting reading everyone's thoughts on this. I think I might represent alot of people who are confused about this issue. Thanks for all the valuable information.

 

[HippieSmell]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10375475#post10375475 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Sk8r
I never said that tossing the carbon storage of the Jurassic into the atmosphere in the last dozen decades was benign. However, the discovery of the process of 'charcoaling', which became a major industry in Europe in the middle ages [all those guys living in cottages in the woods in fairy tales] stripped a lot of trees out of the picture and produced a lot of woodsmoke, on an industrial level, and prior to that was the population rise in Europe and Asia that took axes to the forests and slash and burned the forests of 2 continents, among other carbon disasters of the post-glaciation period, plus Thera, and several volcanic disasters---none of these alone was capable of pulling the trigger: try as we would, we could't wreck the atmosphere, but we could shove the big rock a little further toward the downhill skid. What I'm saying is that the turnaround can be fast, it can be difficult to deal with, and there are things we can do about it---possibly. Or possibly not. We could use more research, but that's not going on, on any large scale. The fact is that points rack up both on the side of the 'natural causes' people and on the side of the 'its all our fault' people---and everybody's so busy lining up on their 'side' we haven't yet accepted that we ought to be doing anything in an organized way to deal with the result of it.

An important thing to remember about burning trees is that if you let the trees grow back, it's essentially carbon neutral. The same massive deforestation that happened in the US during the 1800's is why they think the US is actually a carbon sink . Oil, on the other hand, is much different because it doesn't renew nearly as fast as plants.

Also, I'm curious as to why you don't think there's any research going on?

 

[Boomstick]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10376010#post10376010 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by HippieSmell
An important thing to remember about burning trees is that if you let the trees grow back, it's essentially carbon neutral.
......... Oil, on the other hand, is much different because it doesn't renew nearly as fast as plants.

Hippiesmell - you could take this one step further and say that Mother Nature (God / Allah / Buddha or whom ever...) designed underground sequestion (oil wells) to hold these excess Carbon deposits to allow her (him) to slowly work through them so as not to screw up the atmosphere and humans using them up are screwing up this plan - but then, if i was to say this, i may be hung.......

Love the Avatar!

 

[Leilani57]

Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science.

~Donald Kennedy, editor in chief, Science Magazine (speaking of global warming being caused by human influence)

 

[HippieSmell]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10376087#post10376087 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Boomstick
Hippiesmell - you could take this one step further and say that Mother Nature (God / Allah / Buddha or whom ever...) designed underground sequestion (oil wells) to hold these excess Carbon deposits to allow her (him) to slowly work through them so as not to screw up the atmosphere and humans using them up are screwing up this plan - but then, if i was to say this, i may be hung.......

Love the Avatar!

Sorry, I'm not sure I follow you, although I am pretty tired right now.

 

[Leilani57]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10376599#post10376599 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by HippieSmell
Sorry, I'm not sure I follow you, although I am pretty tired right now.

Carbon sequestration is the term describing processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Currently, to help mitigate global warming, a variety of means of artificially capturing and storing carbon (while releasing oxygen) â€" as well as of enhancing natural sequestration processes â€" are being explored.

What Boomstick is saying is that mother nature designed the oil sinks as a way to store the carbon and keep the planet in a state friendly for life. And now that humans have tapped into that storage and released the carbon (turning it into CO2), we have messed with the ultimate plan.

I must say Boomstick, I can tell you are an engineer!

 

[BCreefmaker]

lol, i know exactly what your all taking about. thats why i started this post in the first place I'm not really sure what to think. however, even after all these posts i haven't really heard anything really shocking, or something i haven't heard before. it seems to me that this is really more about rallying support of certain views of our worlds future then anything climate oriented, but that aside. I'm still partially leaning toward the side the sun is the cause of most of global warming, I'm not saying that were not making it worse, i'm sure we are by releasing "toxins" like co2 that took 1000's of years to become package into hydrocarbons. but isn't it true that we are only a tiny percent of the earths annual co2 production? and what about this i hear about the sun being in a period of high solar activity? is this just coincidence? Solar Output
i just really want to know whats going on for real, you know?. but no matter what the answer is, something tells me just limiting co2 inst enough. i think control over what happens to our solar input is whats really needed like sk8r said earlier. clean, efficient, climate preserving, power generating stations that transfer solar input into something other then direct heat. but to make a impact great enough to have an effect on our climate would take a level of global cooperation i doubt is possible, and I'm not even a pessimist.

 

[scottras]

I hope this website is good reading for you. If not I have others.

http://www.realclimate.org/

The story on the front page is a good start.

Also if you would like a few websites that go through the myths in "The Great Global Warming Swindle", I am happy to help out.

 

[HippieSmell]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10376655#post10376655 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Leilani57
Carbon sequestration is the term describing processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Currently, to help mitigate global warming, a variety of means of artificially capturing and storing carbon (while releasing oxygen) â€" as well as of enhancing natural sequestration processes â€" are being explored.

What Boomstick is saying is that mother nature designed the oil sinks as a way to store the carbon and keep the planet in a state friendly for life. And now that humans have tapped into that storage and released the carbon (turning it into CO2), we have messed with the ultimate plan.

I must say Boomstick, I can tell you are an engineer!

I understand what sequestration is, I just wasn't sure how he was trying to link a divinely created oil well with burning trees. Anyway, it doesn't matter, I'll chalk it up to me being slower than usual.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10376979#post10376979 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by BCreefmaker
but isn't it true that we are only a tiny percent of the earths annual co2 production?

That's true, but it's annual, so it builds up. Until recently, the CO2 that nature would create would be reabsorbed, so atmospheric levels stayed relatively constant. Now, a lot of that little annual increase that we create stays in the atmosphere.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10376979#post10376979 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by BCreefmaker
and what about this i hear about the sun being in a period of high solar activity? is this just coincidence? Solar Output

The article itself says that the effect of solar output is being exacerbated by emissions. Go to the link scottras posted, or click my little red house. The first article (today at least) talks about solar influence.

 

[BCreefmaker]

That's true, but it's annual, so it builds up. Until recently, the CO2 that nature would create would be reabsorbed, so atmospheric levels stayed relatively constant. Now, a lot of that little annual increase that we create stays in the atmosphere.

Isn't the production from volcanoes, decaying matter, other natural natural sources, and co2 producing bacteria also an annual production?

 

[HippieSmell]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10380048#post10380048 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by BCreefmaker
Isn't the production from volcanoes, decaying matter, other natural natural sources, and co2 producing bacteria also an annual production?

Yes, but the planet's ecosystem has balanced itself to those additions. Those natural additions are sunk back into plant matter, oceans, etc, so that the net increase in our atmosphere is close to zero. Our additions have created an imbalance that the ecosystem can not fully negotiate, hence the increase in atmospheric CO2.

 

[Sk8r]

THere is research, absolutely, and I apologize to anyone in this thread who's busting his tail on research: kudos, and you're a hero. But it's not where the public emphasis is going, and for that reason we're not focusing the amount of attention on research that I think ought to happen---not the attention, not the budget, and not the [and here's the heart of my point] not the congress critter willpower it takes to say, let's get moving on this. We need more money on research, more grants, and more focus, much as there is going on already: I don't think it's enough.

That said---there's not going to be a miracle direction overnight: there are going to be a lot of projects that don't pan out. If this were easy, we'd have done it. I remain an optimist we will do it: I just think it's useful to quit dithering between 'we did it' and 'it's the sun', accept it's happening, and figure a 'what can we do now?' I'm not willing to write us off, and I'm not for scaring people worldwide into a state of denial or blame game. I think we can do something.

 

[Boomstick]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10380048#post10380048 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by BCreefmaker
Isn't the production from volcanoes, decaying matter, other natural natural sources, and co2 producing bacteria also an annual production?

Ah this is true, but in nature a tree keeps growing (annually as it were), or a new one germinates and starts sucking up all that CO2 you mentioned above to keep the cycle - an algael blume or two also does its part them some happy whale chomps down on it, dies and heads to the bottom of the ocean where it turns into oil of sorts and keeps the carbon out of the atmosphere - yep nature had a great way of keeping things in check until we came along and started driving Hummers.....

Hippiesmells point is valid also, this is not caused by Human actions in the last couple of years - that is only when we really started paying attention to it, it started big time back in the industrial revolution era when they cut down all the trees in England/Europe to fuel fires and boilers and the use of coal became main stream - and that started in the late 1700's. So not only have we increased the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere, but we have also reduced the planets ability to remove it - 90,000 to 100,000 acres of rain forest around the world is lost every day due to human activities.

 

[imsocool5609]

It isn't real anyone who belives in global warmin is a nub

 

[Sk8r]

There's the sunspot cycle. We haven't had adequate instruments long enough to know if the 500 year cycle is real. Other people are claiming a 200 year cycle. I've observed, through reviewing ancient documents and historical records, that an event happens bigtime every 500 years plus or minus 50 years---it's fudgeable, in other words, not due to volcanic activity, never correlated with that, but it's been true since about 4000 bc, which is about as long as we've had reliable written records of nomadic movement. Going back 13000 years you're reliant on stones-and-bones archaeology and on the oral history of indigenous peoples, plus the geological record of events related to the last ice melt. Post 300 BC we have some fairly complete written histories, including weather records, and the British Navy turns out to have given us some really invaluable stuff by taking observations every few hours all over the globe in the days of the wooden ships. So we have a lot of sources, not all of which jibe well with each other, but I still, after reading all of it, tend to the 500 year cycle. The year 2000 did produce a bit of Event on and either side of it, and the Tarim basin [Asia] did produce the predicted dry spell, etc.; but there's a lot of observation of minutiae yet to go before we have a real picture. If it is a 500 year oscillation it should calm down in the next 25 to 50 years, but it's never been this bad before, not in the last 4000 years, that we know about: so it argues that it's not going to behave like the other 500 year oscillations, and that it will persist. Next question, are we now talking about events, be they solar or environmental, leading to a glaciation, of which 13000 years was the endpoint, the point of meltdown, not the beginning. So we can't count the 13000 years except as phase one of what we have been undergoing for that 13000 years, leading to pretty close to a max heat-up. Which leads to a max cooldown. Since we weren't in great abundance in 13000, there is another cycle operating, but the point remains that we haven't helped outstandingly.

 

[BeanAnimal]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10375340#post10375340 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Leilani57
Fact: 2006 is the warmest year on record.
Fact: 2005 is the second warmest year on record.
Fact: 2007 is already well on it's way to beating 2006 for the record.

Fact: 12 hottest years on record have occured within the last 16 years.

This past winter, european ski resorts faced the warmest winter in 1300 years-- some shut down and had to cancel ski tournaments. Some filed for bankruptcy. Insurance companies are refusing to cover ski resorts below a certain altitude because of global warming.

Daffodils and cherry trees were blooming throughout the northeastern United States on New Year's Day this year.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations on Earth continue to skyrocket (see graph, below). In fact, we have managed to get them higher than they have ever been in the past 450,000 years. These concentrations have proven to be a linear relationship with temperature over hundreds of thousands of years. This is fact, check the science.

<img src="http://leilanimunter.com/Images/blog/co2.jpg">


AND THIS.... this graph is Population and Global Warming (CO2 concentration and mean global temperature verses log-population) CO2 concentration (circles) and mean global temperature (squares) plotted relative to their absolute scales, ppm on the left and oC on the right, respectively. Vertical dashed line at 1995.

<img src="http://www.strom.clemson.edu/becker/prtm320/commons/gaslgpop.gif">


My degree is in biology, I am a scientist and the scientists of the world have agreed: global warming is caused by humans.

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. ~ Ralph Nader

Sorry man... but this is the exact problem that this thread talks about. Your entire post is full of half truths and cherry picked numbers. The scientists of the world? Good grief.

Now for the part that strikes me as funny. You appear to be very motivated to prove to folks that we are wrecking the environment. But the catch is that you drive a race car Kind of strikes me as convenient when the rest of us are supposed to be looking that the "inconvenient truth"

 

[Leilani57]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10388970#post10388970 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by BeanAnimal
Now for the part that strikes me as funny. You appear to be very motivated to prove to folks that we are wrecking the environment. But the catch is that you drive a race car Kind of strikes me as convenient when the rest of us are supposed to be looking that the "inconvenient truth"

I offset my carbon footprint, you can read my statement here:

http://leilanimunter.com/change.htm

Check out CoolEarth.org where you can be active in protecting the rainforest. My brother-in-law (Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead) has played concerts where all the proceeds went to Rainforest Action Network (RAN) which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect rainforest. I care deeply about the Earth and conserving the biodiversity of the Earth- I volunteered for three years at a Wildlife Rehabilitaion center. I also use my ability to speak out to people to educate them, I have had almost 2 million unique visitors to my website, and I have an Earth Watch section dedicated to conservation and clean energy education.

The IndyCar series uses ethanol and I am a very vocal and public supporter of NASCAR making the switch. And cellulostic ethanol plants are coming soon...