The Great Global Warming Scam - The Ice Age is Coming
- EmpressFelicityposted 13 years ago
0 Republicans? I thought it was Osama and Kim
I just did.
The "new" House Republicans will have big oil supporters as new committee chairmen.
How do YOU think they will act on global warming?
Just like Koch and Exxon want them to, that's how.
And, do you eve hear the issue discussed without mentioning ALGORE?
I just said the US military thinks global warming is a real threat--in more ways than one. Doesn't that address it for you?
Now excuse me, I have to go read about how the Democrat Obama is wasting money on a vacation and how Democrats are so much stingier than Republicans. Phew, glad there's no partisanship there, boy
- it remains so hot in India we would love to go back to the ice age.
- Home Girlposted 13 years ago0
Personally, I don't care. Finally I've bought winter boots! As soon as I've done that temperature outside went up considerably. Nice. Now I can enjoy walking. regarding climate changing...
WHO REALLY KNOWS ???????????????????????????????????????
- The Taco Taggerposted 13 years ago0
- Toby Hansenposted 13 years ago0
Oh Please!!!
Everyone knows that place is sinking because it's people have doubled in weight over the last 10 years... as a result of Fast Food diets!!
Why is it that whenever this subject comes up the shouts of Bah Humbug and Do Nothing all seem to come from the US of A ?
A country that per head of population, Imports more, consumes more, eats more, wastes more than any other country in the world.
Should we therefore be surprised that as a mass consumption group obsessed with their own selfish well being above all else; that even when their own scientists and Government suddenly realise the world might just have a problem they collectively either ignore it or try to belittle the obvious?
Not that I think it will make a tiny rat's ass to the overly noisy minority in here but have a look at the graph below and then ask yourself how is that with such a rapid growth in the human population, that mirrors our increased use of crude oil by the way, how is it that this is NOT having an adverse effect on our climate ?
You may also like to ask yourselves, if the world population continues to grow at the same rate where is all the food and fresh water going to come from to sustain life.... and I don’t mean just your life ! Just for once I’d like you to see past yourself and out toward the rest of the world.
PS Just in case any of you are remotely interested “Climate” and “Weather” are related but they are not the same thing. For Climate you have to look at the world as a whole not just what is happening in one isolated place....
So, I guess the question should be, "Is the Theory of Global Warming Correct?" Oh, never mind, it's a scientific theory, it has to be correct.
That is exactly where the problem is Barry.
Real science has nothing to do with beliefs. It deals with hypotheses and theories. Once science get reduced to beliefs, you get scams like GW.
GW is not even a theory, it is a hypothesis, and making any kind of far-fetching moves based on a not proven yet hypothesis is stupid at best and evil at worst.Cool, so since the ACTION of implementing new measures and policies requested by GW gang is going to HARM the public by the way of wasting limited resources that could have been used more efficiently elsewhere - for example for feeding hungry or developing cure for cancer or re-educating unemployed or saving endangered species - the burden of proof is on the side of said gang, according to precautionary principle
Huh? Where exactly my intellectual dishonesty is? Come on Kerry, you are quite a lovable lady and I admire you - but not to the extent of remembering your exact position on every conceivable issue. I am just a human with limited memory abilities, and there are quite a few lovable ladies around.
BTW, I would really appreciate if one of the proponents of AGW will explain to me how greenhouse effect works, exactly? Thank you.
Oh, and please don't send me to wiki or another source, I want to hear your own explanation, in your own words.Barry, I never said lobbyists are angels. Neither I said scientists are evil. I do agree climate is changing. But, I do not think it is scientifically proven that climate is changing because of humans. More, I do think that Sun changes and other naturally occurring events influence our climate immeasurably more than whatever humans do, and this was before humans existed, and will be after humans seize to exist. And I do think that AGW, as promoted by AG and gang, is yet another attempt to rip the people of their money, nothing else.
BTW, you did not answer my question from the quoted post, about greenhouse.
When I die, I want my epitaph to be "Correlation does not imply causation"
Still no takers? It's disheartening, really. OK, I am out with kids, will be back by the evening. Hope somebody will answer "Misha's challenge" by then. Or I will have to conclude you guys have no idea what you are talking about, so much for credibility of your opinion on the issue.
I knew I have reasons to like you Kerry, you seem to be the only person on this thread who actually try to approach the issue from a logic standpoint, not from beliefs.
Let's see what we got there. I seriously want to understand the mechanism of that thing how you see it, so I would ask you to clarify a few points for me please, OK? So,
The Earth naturally reflects about 50% of incoming sunlight back towards space.
Which exactly part of Earth does the reflection? Is it surface or some layer(s) in the atmosphere, or both? If both, what is an approximate breakdown of amounts reflected and absorbed?
Some of that is absorbed in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane and reflected back down to the surface and lower atmosphere, raising the temperature higher than it would be if the earth were heated by direct radiation alone. Changes in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases can therefore affect the surface temperature of Earth by reflecting more or less of the sun's energy back to the surface.
Several questions here.
I thought that what is absorbed cannot be reflected. Like there are absorbing surfaces and reflecting surfaces. They do both of course, yet the part that is absorbed does not get reflected, and vice versa. I think it most likely is just a slip of the tongue, just want to make sure we are on the same page here
Now, you are talking about gases reflecting a portion of already reflected from the Earth surface sunlight back to Earth. Do those same gases reflect the direct sunlight back into space, or their action is anisotropic? If later, what exactly is the mechanism of this anisotropy?
Then, based on the molar weight of CO2 in comparison to other atmospheric gases (44 vs 32 for O2 and 28 for N2) one would expect CO2 to concentrate mostly right at the earth surface. How come it takes part in forming a reflective layer above the surface?
Thank youSorry, I was trying to avoid paraphrasing too directly, but caused confusion instead. Some things "reflect" and others "radiate" and they're not as interchangeable as I implied above.
Basically, the sun's energy reaches the Earth in the form (mainly) of visible light. I'm a little vague on exact percentages, but my impression is that about 30% is reflected directly back into space by clouds and never reaches the Earth's surface at all. About 50% is absorbed by the surface, and the rest (I think - this is the part I'm most vague about) is absorbed by the atmosphere on the way in.
The ~50% of light absorbed by the Earth's surface warms the surface by radiating outward in the infrared wavelengths through thermal radiation, sensible heat, and latent heat transport.
The greenhouse effect is semi-anisotropic because greenhouse gases absorb relatively little energy in the visible light wavelengths, but relatively high amounts of energy in the infrared wavelengths. They radiate the energy in all directions and each layer of the atmosphere absorbs and re-radiates some of the energy moving up from below, so although some energy is radiated back into space from the upper levels of the atmosphere, a higher percentage is trapped down in the lower levels of the atmosphere because less energy is getting radiated directly outward at every level. This is what causes the greenhouse effect.
Concerning your question on why CO2 doesn't stratify down by the surface due to its heavier molecular weight, the atmosphere is divided into two major sections: the homosphere and heterosphere. The homosphere consists of the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. It is the part involved with the greenhouse effect and the composition of the atmosphere in these sections doesn't depend on molecular weight because the gases are getting constantly mixed around by turbulence.
The heterosphere consists of the thermosphere and exosphere and does stratify by molecular weight. The heavier gases are present only at the very lowest levels of the heterosphere (circa 100 km/62 mi/330,000 ft) and the upper levels consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.
I hope this clarified your questions.
- EmpressFelicityposted 13 years ago0
- Anything to avoid having to examine your beliefs, eh?
<rest of irrelevant ranting snipped>No, I just have a short fuse
Well no body is perfect - in temperament or ethnicity
You probably will - you certainly know yourself better. Most won't.
I find it kind of hilarious how obsessed AGW deniers are with Al Gore. Y'all pay way more attention to him than any AGW proponent I've ever known. Most of us could care less what he says or does.
Ok Kerry, so I was pondering it for a while, and now am ready to ask for a few more clarifications, please
Cool, we are good with that. I can argue of course that there still has to be a difference between the percentage of CO2 right at the surface and on say 20 miles altitude, but that seems to be really marginal, and therefore immaterial. So we accept it as a working approximation that composition of air does not change with altitude.
Well, I did not really ask for exact numbers, at least for that stage of our conversation a rough approximation should be enough, so don't worry about it.
Umm, this part seems to be a bit hard to understand to me. If you could elaborate on your understanding of what exactly "thermal radiation", "sensible heat", and "latent heat transport" mean and how they differ from each other, I would be grateful. Also, I can't really see how radiating outward would warm the earth surface? I would rather think that radiating outward would cool the source of this radiation, am I wrong? And the most difficult part to grasp here for me - you seem to imply that earth absorbes the visible light and converts it into heat, gets heated by this, and then emits this heat outwards? Did I understand it correctly?
This part was giving me the hardest time to wrap my mind around until I realized that if we remove the earth converting light to heat - you are just describing on a micro level a regular mechanism of any kind of energy stream going through any kind of matter. Part gets reflected, part gets absorbed, and part goes through - if we take it to macro level. Nothing special here, why would it need a special name "greenhouse effect"? So, at that point it seems to me that the cornerstone of the whole thing is soil converting energy from visible wavelength to infrared wavelength - do I read correctly? BTW, do you know how a real greenhouse operates?"Also, I can't really see how radiating outward would warm the earth surface? I would rather think that radiating outward would cool the source of this radiation, am I wrong?"
Ah, sorry, that was me not being a scientist (or even a science writer) and overlooking a mistake in my explanation.
The surface of the Earth warms up when it absorbs the energy. It cools when it radiates the energy outward.
That's why the greenhouse effect is necessary to maintain the Earth at its current temperature. If there were no greenhouse gases, the heat radiated by the Earth's surface would just vanish back into space and the Earth would be substantially cooler than it is.
Does that clarify the issue or do I have to explain thermal radiation, sensible heat, and latent heat transfer, too? I can if you want, but they're just different ways of moving heat from the surface to the atmosphere. The specific mechanisms aren't really that important to a basic understanding of the process.
"And the most difficult part to grasp here for me - you seem to imply that earth absorbs the visible light and converts it into heat, gets heated by this, and then emits this heat outwards? Did I understand it correctly?"
More or less. It's the atoms that make up the Earth, not the Earth itself, but I assume you know that. If you need an explanation of how light is transformed into thermal energy, I'm sure there are plenty of basic physics sites on the web that can explain it better than I can.
"This part was giving me the hardest time to wrap my mind around until I realized that if we remove the earth converting light to heat - you are just describing on a micro level a regular mechanism of any kind of energy stream going through any kind of matter. Part gets reflected, part gets absorbed, and part goes through - if we take it to macro level. Nothing special here, why would it need a special name "greenhouse effect"? So, at that point it seems to me that the cornerstone of the whole thing is soil converting energy from visible wavelength to infrared wavelength - do I read correctly?"
It's possible I'm just not understanding your point, but I don't see why giving a particular name to a particular process is in any way unusual or out of line from a scientific perspective. The greenhouse effect deals specifically with the effect of atmosphere on surface temperature and it's one of the foundations of climate science. This is not some controversial new theory we're discussing here - it was first proposed in the 1820s and has been widely accepted since the 1890s, though the theory has been refined in its particulars since then. It also does not apply exclusively to Earth. Venus is well known for its spectacular greenhouse effect thanks to an atmosphere consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide.
"BTW, do you know how a real greenhouse operates?"
Mainly by preventing heat loss through convection. The result is similar to the greenhouse effect, but the mechanisms are different, so the term "greenhouse effect" is more an analogy than a direct comparison.Cool, thank you Kerry.
No, you don't have to explain the details of sensible heat and such. I was just wondering where latent heat transfer takes place in the absense of a phase change - yet it is really irrelevant to the topic as you rightly noticed.
Glad we are on the same page with a regular greenhouse, too
Minor things aside, let me just summarize my understanding of your understanding of greenhouse effect, OK?
About 50% of the light from the Sun, mostly visible wavelength, passes through the atmosphere and reaches the earth surface. Earth surface converts this light into heat and emits big part of it back. While passing through the atmosphere, the bigger portion of the infrared light is being absorbed and reflected back to earth by the atmosphere than it would have been if that energy were still in the form of visible light. This discrepancy is mainly due to the amount of CO2 and other "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere and leads to higher heat being retained by earth with the amount of said gases increasing.
Did I grasp it right?LOL Silly me, I forgot about water. Sure, full understanding here.
OK, so I took my time to understand your position in detail, and to satisfactory sum it up in my own words. Isn't it the example of civilized discussion?
Need a little more help from you though - as hard as I try I cannot find any meaningful materials or data on earth surface (soil and water) converting visible light into heat and/or infrared. Here are the examples of what i receive:
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy& … &cad=b
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&&s … 14bc218727
Bloody Google again, grrr. Can you help me on this? Thank youI think you missed my point altogether. I'll wait for Kerry's reply
I guess I did. I thought your point was that you couldn't find any meaningful material on soil and water converting light into energy.
Misha, how can you know enough physics to know that latent heat transfer requires a phase change and not know how atoms convert radiant energy to thermal energy? I'm willing to play along in case someone who really doesn't know this stuff happens to read it and get educated, but I find it hard to believe you are as ignorant as you claim, and if you're not, can we just cut to the chase? Translating scientific terminology into layman's English is time consuming and hard work, I'm not that good at it to begin with, and as much as I enjoy forum discussions/debates, I do have other things I need to do too.
Basically, atoms and molecules naturally move around a certain amount at temperatures above absolute zero. When radiant (light) energy from the sun hits them and is absorbed, it excites them and makes them move faster. The increased vibration gives off thermal energy.
In reality, it's much more complicated - light must be at the the right wavelength to be absorbed, for example, which is why black objects, which absorb all wavelengths, get heated more than white objects, which reflect all wavelengths - but that's the basic explanation.I know, I just like science and figure there's surely somebody around who slept through HS physics and might learn something as a result.
The scientific principles behind the greenhouse effect are pretty well established, so if you understand the greenhouse effect at the scientific level it becomes much harder to claim that raising CO2 levels from ~280ppm to almost 390 makes no difference to the climate.
So, you could not find any legible source either. That was expected, cause such sources do not exist. I just wanted you to find this out on your own.
Yesterday night I put a flashlight next to a cup of water. Today it is still the same temp it was yesterday, and the flashlight battery is running out. Obviously I am using wrong wavelength for heating water. What do you think is the right wavelength interval, approximately? I can simplify your task, giving you a three choice quiz:
1. UV
2. Visible
3. Infrared
Yep, obviously black surfaces absorb more heat, no question about it. As for the light nature, I would try to avoid having this discussion here, cause it is quite a complicated stuff and will put us way off topic. I totally agree with Kerry that for the purposes of this discussion we need to talk about light as waves.
Come on Barry, are you serious? You don't have opinions on brain surgery that you publicly promote on these forums, do you? I certainly don't. So far we are talking pretty basic school level physics and chemistry, no need for a climatologist. And what is wrong with actually trying to understand what your opponent is talking about?
I guess I was not clear enough. Let me spell it out as best as I can. Kerry and myself are discussing greenhouse effect on the level of basic physics and chemistry. Instead of bickering around it, for a change.
Good luck with that!
I am personally more persuaded by the opinion of scientists not funded by or tied to petroleum companies, and all but a few kooks among them, they agree that global warming is a very real phenomenon.
That said, what can we do about it? I don't believe there is much we can do in terms of reducing greenhouse gases. Even if we could pass some sort of legislation here in the US (very unlikely; the petroleum lobby is far more powerful than the health insurance lobby...), where would that get us? We'd use less carbon-rich hydrocarbons...and the developing world would use more, through the Jevons Paradox phenomenon.
I don't believe any good will, government action, or international treaty will solve this. The Kyoto Protocol was a way for the developed world to absolve itself of responsibility when several island nations go underwater, developing world farmlands turn into deserts, etc.
Is there a solution? I think it will have to be one of geoengineering, something that will simply cool the world down. There have been some interesting proposals (seeding the ocean to grow plankton that will sequester carbon, seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide in order to increase the albedo effect, etc.) - who knows which will pan out? I hope some do, because otherwise our descendants will be dealing with some serious problems.
Kerry, you better delete this answer and think a bit more. There is no rush. If you do, I will delete this post, too.
LOL I know about flashlight, I used a LED one
Though it is certainly silly and needs several modification to be able to actually prove the point. But sunlight with optical filters is good enough.
Well, I have to leave now to pick the kids from school, and then will have some family time, etc. - so I will take my time to pounce. One of your character traits I admire is bravery. See you in the eveningLOL Evan, you might want to read a few last pages, and than return here. Nobody denies that Earth has some kind of heat retaining mechanism. However, Kerry presented the model with greenhouse gases, and it did not withstand the peer review (at least I think so
). This does not even mean that greenhouse gases do not take part in the Earth heat retaining mechanism, it just means that this particular model does not describe this mechanism properly.
However, since no other model was presented for review, one can reasonably suspect that Global Worming scare was built on this faulty model, and therefore is a scam. I would have called it a hoax if no money were involved, but there are huge money here, so this is a scam.
Oh yeah, I am back to you Kerry, sorry for delay. I managed to upload a few glasses of red already, so bear with me please
*pouncing on*
I was going to go through your post and step by step illustrate with examples in detail where and how you seriously deviated from your original model in an intellectually dishonest () attempt to save your face, but then I thought - WTF? it is not fun, seriously. We both understand that your initial model did not withstand the scrutiny of the peer review, why don't we just accept it and move on? Though if you still insist, I will go through this heap of boring work as a sign of appreciation for your courage.
*pouncing off*
Much more interesting seem to speculate about the right model, whatever it could be. Cause we certainly cannot deny that atmosphere plays a key role in keeping our planet from temp extremes on both sides of the spectrum. The results of direct measurements on the Moon and spacecrafts prove the point quite conclusively. Frankly I have no idea where you dug those 33C/91F numbers so I just gonna leave them alone until you elaborate on them. Your last question is interesting though.
Let's see what I can come up with. First I would venture to assume Mercury does not have atmosphere or just has a marginal one, based on what you said. Then I think I read several times that Venus is completely covered with clouds, is this right? Also, I personally observed, and folk wisdom agrees to it, that on Earth nights are much warmer when the sky is covered with clouds vs clear skies, other things being equal, and days are cooler.
So I would suggest as a hypothesis to consider the greenhouse effect to be working much closer to a real greenhouse, with clouds acting both as a reflector of a part of IR radiation back to whichever way it came from, and an obstacle to convection. How is that for a rough model?I'm going to do more research on the visible light vs infrared question, because now I'm curious. Everything I'm reading says that sunlight warms the surface when it gets absorbed but nothing specifies which part of the spectrum is responsible for it. Additionally, several of the (only moderately reliable) sources I've seen have mentioned that the infrared that manages to make it down through the atmosphere can only account for about 49% of the observed heating. The Earth demonstrably emits infrared radiation, so it has to be getting it from somewhere. So. I think some trips to the library and/or consultations with my physicist brother-in-law are in order.
The current calculation is that the average temperature of the Earth would be "more than 30 degrees C" cooler without the greenhouse effect. (Source) Wikipedia says 33 degrees cooler, or about -18 C. (It's actually a difference of about 60 degrees F - I converted the 33 instead of the 15 and -18 yesterday. *facepalm*)
Mercury has almost no atmosphere but Venus has a very dense one (more than 90 times the mass of Earth's) that's over 95% CO2. It's also covered completely in clouds of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, which reflect about 60% of the sun's radiation but presumably also trap heat in.
NASA has some interesting stuff about the effects of clouds on Earth. The clouds+atmosphere reflect about 23% of incoming solar radiation on Earth but do also act as a warming blanket, and which role dominates apparently depends on what type of clouds they are! Hadn't known that and thought it was interesting.
The role of water vapor on the greenhouse effect in general is one of the biggest uncertainties of global warming science as I understand it. Water vapor is a very powerful greenhouse gas, but thanks to its role in forming clouds it has the potential to have a net cooling effect and you have to wonder if Gaia is hitting some emergency switches.
BTW, Mars also has has an atmosphere of about 95% CO2 but it is so thin (less than 1/100th the mass of Earth's) that it only warms the planet by a few degrees. (You kind of feel like Goldilocks reading some of this stuff. Too hot, too cold, just right. )Okay, I managed to get in touch with my brother-in-law the nuclear physicist.
Please bear in mind that I am in so far over my head here that it's not even funny, and also my eyes are crossing from some of the equations, but I THINK what he said on the question of visible spectrum light being absorbed by the Earth and re-emitted as infrared is the following:
The wavelength emitted by any given body does not depend on the wavelength absorbed. Instead, it's a function of temperature (Planck's law). Higher temperatures produce shorter wavelengths, thus the Sun radiates mainly in the shortwave spectrum. Lower temperatures produce longer wavelengths, hence the Earth radiates mainly in the infrared. So that would explain how visible light gets "converted" to infrared by soil, water, plants, etc. on the surface.
Elsewhere (not from my b-i-l) I found this graph demonstrating the principle with a comparison between solar radiation (the 5780K curve) and terrestrial radiation at temps ranging from 260K (-13°C) to 300K (27°C) at 45' zenith and typical albedo:
(It's hard to tell, but the wavelength measurements are in μm, not um.)
The peak value of radiation for the earth is ~10μm, while for the sun it is ~0.5μm.Cool.
I did not have any doubt that sun and earth emit in different wavelengths intervals, because of their different temps. So what? It does not prove conversion.
PS I am not sure exactly what questions you asked him, may be you better just forward to him a link to this thread?I don't know what gets done to it. Electron orbit changes? Isotopes creation? This is irrelevant. It does not get converted into any noticeable amounts of heat, that is clear, and that is all what is relevant to this case. All heat that comes to the Earth surface from the Sun comes with IR. And the part of heat that gets later emitted by Earth comes exclusively from that IR that came from the Sun - well, if we leave Earth internal heat aside.
I don't have optical filters, although I'd love to experiment around with them if I did. I feel like we're both missing something here, because it does seem plausible to me that on a small scale you'd be correct, but on a planetary scale you're obviously not because you can't just keep dumping energy into a system without it either being released or causing the system to warm up. That violates the laws of thermodynamics. And by definition, any radiation being released by the Earth would have to be concentrated in the IR region of the spectrum regardless of what wavelength it came in on, so. I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
Oops, sorry, somehow I missed this one.
Well, it is certainly up to you to perform this experiment or not. Based on our life experience we both know the outcome even without doing it. Unless of course you boil yourself coffee with a help of a LED flashlight LOL. I personally don't think I am missing anything here. I never said this energy just gets lost, so no violation of conservation laws. Yes, I don't know where this energy goes, and it does not bother me a tiny bit - there are literally millions of things I don't know, so what? What I do know - visible light coming from the Sun does not get converted into IR by soil and water, and this is enough to conclude that your model does not work.
Since you obviously don't want to admit it and prefer to hold to your beliefs despite of the evidence that they do not match the reality, I am perfectly OK to agree to disagree with you - as long as you stop telling me I have to change my lifestyle based on your irrational beliefs. Yes Kerry, if you cannot prove it, it is an irrational belief. Global Worming belongs to Religion forums.
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