None of the following charts are in dispute by serious scientists, the difference in opinion is solely if you elect to consider the data recorded after 2006. If you do, there is no global warming; if you don't, there is.
Now, it is certainly true that the debate started before 2006. In that case, the difference was people who said the data was inconclusive and thus could turn at any moment (and it did), and those who said the trend could not change because the cause was auto emissions.
Since it is impossible for a pot to cool below it's starting temp if the cause of measured warming over that time period is a flame consistently applied to it, even for an instant, the 2007-2008 temperature dive has scientifically ruled out auto emissions as causal. That said, a several million year trend of warming is almost certainly in place. And that said, absolutely anything can happen over the next few thousand to a few hundred thousand years; we could go way up, way down, or stay the same.
Here is the factual global temperature change since we've been able to measure micro-changes rather accurately, note, the Earth is currently a little cooler than it was in 1988.
That places us right smack on the zero line, we are currently dead average since 1900:
Global temperature macro-changes:
![[globaltemp.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQv9_JoTl5capDlI3_Nkw3KxgtWsfiRbBigiMNa2Tks-U6biT5vDCL_BSU9ZMrpbAvGc12C2KjlkFSMXbIIzY2tX13YZPibaxm2qp6GTweaBQaP_4JKIGfx4eVD3fPyY503VCHPFoXmA/s1600/globaltemp.jpg)
Side note: I find it interesting how quickly the macro changes seem to occur. That could be due to chunky sampling resolution, or it could at least be possible that rare dominating factors, such as an asteroid strike that rains down hellish incendiary debris, or a massive volcanic eruption that fills the atmosphere with Sun-blocking soot, are what spur the major swings.
It's scary. Government is embarking on a couple trillion dollar refit of the economy with "green" technologies and carbon credits, on a theory that could be wrong. In Mexico City, two unique reasons were responsible for increasing the air quality. Shutting down an inefficient refinary and then actually getting "more cars" on the road. As it turns out the new cars were 10% as polluting as the older technology cars. Prosperity and new technologies solved a problem that car restrictions could not.
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting possible manipulation. Have you looked into AIDS research? Turns out the epidemic has not materialized and scientists are trying to find explanations for this. Yet, when you scratch deeper you find that the causaility of HIV/AIDS has never been truly proven. It is quite interesting. We could be spending billions on a disease that does not exist.
Best,
Armagedon
They need a new organism to launder there money through. Lets see, tech is dead, housing is dead, finance is dead, auto is on life support.
ReplyDeleteHow about going green on a massive scale. I suspect after a few hot days over summer they will claim a global warming crisis and create an immediate carbon neutral plan to save our world and launder lots of money.
Please FDR, for the newbee &lay people on here, can you explain this in a little more detail
ReplyDeleteFDR quoted
"If you think gold is going to become more valuable, as I do, than you should short the dollar price".
Someone will kill you for a 1 oz gold piece at $50/oz, while no one cares about gold at 1000/oz.
It's funny, but one of the reasons I've never bought the global warming thoery goes back to an 8th grade science exercise we had to do.
ReplyDeleteWe were given a roll of paper about 50 feet long and about as wide as a roll of toilet paper (think of wide adding machine tape). Our assignment was to make a time line of the Earth's history and draw drawings of everything science knew about the periods.
The exercise was pretty enlightening. The Precambian eon is about 4 billion years and we hardly know enough about it to fill it with drawings. That's most of the 50 feet of paper. When we got the the last 10,00 years - - the recorded human history part (i.e. the only time we have any real depth of knowledge about) shows up as a pencil line with no room to draw anything. A million years ends up being about 1/8".
My point? We have about 100 years of relatively accurate chronological, non-randomly disbursed data and people take minor changes in it and try to make massive extrapolations of this non-statistical data to prove we have man-made global warming. We might, but the science is seriously flawed in its application.
FDR wrote: "Since it is impossible for a pot to cool below it's starting temp if the cause of measured warming over that time period is a flame consistently being applied to it, even for an instant, the 2007-2008 temperature dive has scientifically ruled out auto emissions as causal."
ReplyDeleteUm, no.
It's possible for a pot to cool below its starting temperature if you change the characteristics of the pot.
CO2 isn't itself a warming device. It's an insulator and an energy absorber. Because the earth is essentially floating in space, the only type of heat transfer that can occur is radiative. CO2 absorbs energy in the infrared region of the spectrum, while the atmosphere is otherwise largely transparent to it. With a greater concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, more energy from the sun is absorbed as a whole (and then transferred via conduction/convection to the rest of the climate system) than would be otherwise.
Introducing CO2 in large quantities into the atmosphere has the same type (though not necessarily the same degree) of effect as changing the paint on your car from glossy white to flat black does on the interior temperature of your car: the car absorbs more energy and as a result reaches a higher temperature.
Now, the primary driver of the energy in the earth's climate is the sun, of course. It is *entirely possible* for a decrease in the sun's output to overpower the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. I expect that's what we're seeing currently.
And what this means is that the fact that we may be in a cooling trend right now does not, itself, imply that we're not seeing any effects from the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. It's entirely possible that the cooling trend we're seeing now would be significantly stronger if mankind hadn't been making heavy use of fossil fuels during the past century. But this has a flip side: if the cooling trend we're seeing now is dampened, the warming trend that must surely follow will almost certainly be stronger than it would be otherwise.
Now, all that said, I have no reason to believe you're wrong about the way people have been reacting to this. It's certainly being used as yet another way to fleece people of their money. They will certainly go for the most expensive means of attacking this perceived problem regardless of the effectiveness of doing so, as long as the money in question winds up in their hands.
But it's important to treat the issue itself as a completely separate thing from the reactions people are having to it. Unlike economics, the issue itself (global warming) is a matter of physics, not of psychology. It behaves the way it does regardless of what we think.
My personal thoughts on the matter are twofold: first, reduction of CO2 emissions is probably a wise thing to try, but it should be done as inexpensively as possible -- we shouldn't sacrifice the economy for this, but we should take it as seriously as we would any other normal problem. Second, the issue itself almost certainly needs quite a bit more study before any truly definitive conclusions can be drawn, but the basic principles behind the theory (in particular, the insulating and absorptive properties of CO2) are rock solid.
"CO2 isn't itself a warming device. It's an insulator and an energy absorber. Because the earth is essentially floating in space, the only type of heat transfer that can occur is radiative. "
ReplyDeleteNot quite, the reason that Mars lost its insulative atmosphere so quickly is because it is a little bit smaller in diameter, which makes its core cool much faster. The heat from the Earth's much hotter core is a significant contributing heat source. Juptiter is technically a very low energy star since it still produces more internal heat than it absorbs.
All that said, my statement is true with respect to Probablistic Causality. With respect to Emergent Causality, you can hypothesize that autos can change the atmosphere which can create more complex effects that in turn may warm or cool the earth, but that certainly does not make cars causal to warming.
So again, allocating funds based on an assumed causality is a bubble.
Just to add more fuel to the fire, over 30,000 scientists want to sue Al Gore, the poster child for the green movement, for fraud.
ReplyDelete"As it turns out the new cars were 10% as polluting as the older technology cars."
ReplyDeleteIf memory serves, I think modern cars have more like 99.5% fewer emissions, at least compared to the oldest cars on the road. As long you are not talking about electric cars.
Electric cars pollute like crazy, because piping electricity down 100s of miles of high voltage copper wire, then storing it in a battery, is a terribly inefficient way to use a majority coal powered grid.
If you accept the objective of producing fewer carbon emissions, electric cars are the worst polluters on the showroom floor, by an order of magnitude.
60's muscle cars are cleaner.
Forgive me if I think the conversation to be counting trees. It is a basic equation: each human x, creates a negative environmental impact y, on the planet which you can measure however you want. As long as x increases, our environmental resources fall (oxygen, arable land, clean air, sea-life, land-life etc. etc.)
ReplyDeleteOK. Maybe the climate-change fear might be overblown, I'm not convinced but am OK conceding I could be dead wrong.
Regardless, the fact that survival of the planet is even entering the sphere of debate, in my mind, is a good thing. Assuming a good portion of the money spent is relatively inefficient, it will still reward technologies that will provide some balancing of the above equation.
What's the option? At this rate life for our great-grandchildren is going to suck unless lungs evolve such that they filter out the increasing amounts of shit entering them. No fish and chips...
"each human x, creates a negative environmental impact y"
ReplyDeleteOk, so changing the argument away from warming, which is scientifically not occurring, at least not from autos, to just plain polluting...
Are you labeling carbon a pollutant?
Why? Carbon is essential to sustain lush plant life; the more carbon the better from a "green" perspective.
That's like all of our plants deciding they like humans, so they are going to try to stop producing oxygen.
My only point is that the national-global "green movement" is about one thing: stealing your money. There is no other agenda. They couldn't care less about the Earth, just like Bush invading Iraq didn't care a bit about Iraqi citizen prosperity - it is ALL about profits. That's it.
You can trade it, or you can pay for it.
FDR wrote: "Not quite, the reason that Mars lost its insulative atmosphere so quickly is because it is a little bit smaller in diameter, which makes its core cool much faster. The heat from the Earth's much hotter core is a significant contributing heat source."
ReplyDeleteI was referring to heat transfer between the sun and the earth and, more importantly, from the earth back out into space.
The heat from the Earth's core accounts for a small portion of the total energy contribution, less than 10%. The energy from the sun dominates the equation by far.
As I understand it, the current working theory on Mars' loss of atmosphere is the lack of a strong magnetic field to shield the atmosphere from solar winds. The solar winds stripped the bulk of the atmosphere from the planet, and the process took quite a long time. It may be that Mars had a strong magnetic field at one time, but the evidence suggests that it was billions of years ago.
Keep in mind that not only does Earth have a relatively strong magnetic field, but it masses quite a lot more than Mars. Mars' gravitational pull at its surface is only 38% that of the gravitational pull on the Earth's surface, and that's despite the fact that the radius is half that of Earth's (gravity drops proportionally to the square of the radius). The mass difference is what makes up for it: Earth is ten times as massive as Mars.
Gravity is the only force that binds the atmosphere to the planet.
Anyway, the bottom line is that fluctuations in the sun's output can, if they're sufficiently large, overcome the changes in the Earth's absorptivity due to changes in CO2 concentration, and thus account for the current cooling trend.
The problem with arguing against the global warming hypothesis in its basic form is that you're arguing against well-established physics that has been proven multiple times in multiple ways. If you hypothesize that an increase in CO2 concentration will *not* increase the Earth's absorptivity (and result in a corresponding temperature increase), you must show some sort of counterbalancing mechanism. Merely handwaving it away won't do. I agree that it's foolish to panic about it as the powers that be are encouraging (panic induces foolish spending, which is good for those on the receiving end), but it's equally foolish to dismiss it out of hand.
I do agree with you about the motives of those who are driving the "movement".
A quick answer on the gold thing.
ReplyDeleteDeflation causes physical in your hand US dollar debt notes to gain purchasing power. Each physical US dollar buys more as there are less credit based US dollars in the system competing for limited resources. This means a physical US dollar buys more of all things and deflation means the issuance into the system of more dollars becomes difficult because there are no credit worthy borrowers for whom to produce credit based counterfeit cash. So the main source of currency production(credit) is turned off in deflation. Thus, one physical US dollar will buy more gold and more and more as deflation continues which it will until all the excessive leverage(credit based false currency) is removed from the system. At which point, the powers that be, likely the only ones with money left at that point will be looking to buy up all the assets from the broke fools(us.. sorry no offense) for pennies on the US dollar debt note.
Gold will rise in value but the money will gain in purchasing power. So shorting the gold should pay as most instinctively expect gold to rise in value yet fail to understand the monetary side of things which will have the price fall as the value increases meaning your dollar buys more gold. fwiw
FDR wrote: "Electric cars pollute like crazy, because piping electricity down 100s of miles of high voltage copper wire, then storing it in a battery, is a terribly inefficient way to use a majority coal powered grid."
ReplyDeleteThe efficiency of energy transmission in the U.S. is around 92%. The efficiency of battery storage is roughly 90%, but varies greatly due to factors such as storage time. So getting the energy to the drivetrain from the power source is about 83% efficient. Most automobile internal combustion engines made today have efficiencies in the 20% range. Coal plants have conversion efficiencies in the 30% range.
If you're going to use coal to generate your electricity, you get no real efficiency benefit from using electric cars, but relative to ICE automobiles, you don't really lose any either. ICE automobiles win in many other respects, however.
No, the big win with electic cars is when they're used in conjunction with nuclear power plants, which produce many orders of magnitude more power from the same mass.
I'm all for solar power... fossilized solar power that is!
ReplyDelete"As I understand it, the current working theory on Mars' loss of atmosphere is the lack of a strong magnetic field to shield the atmosphere from solar winds."
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly right. Since Mars is smaller in diameter, it only took about 600M years for the core to cool to the point of losing the dynamo effect which produces the magnetic field that still shields the Earth. After that, Mars was defenseless against the solar wind.
As far as electric car systemic carbon efficiency vs gas, Car and Driver published an excellent article in the early 90s that concluded electric cars produced between 3 and 3.5x more pollutants than modern (90s) gasoline powered cars. I remember the time period based on where I was living at the time. I can't pull up the article online, it has either been purged or their database isn't populated back that far.
ReplyDeleteThere are some decent sources online that suggest electric can be 80% as efficient as 25 mpg gasoline, but they don't account for losses during transmission, which C&D fingered as the primary loss. Obviously we wouldn't step up voltage if it wasn't important.
So even if you figure electric is only about twice as bad as gasoline, why are politicians pushing it?
Money.
They are more than willing to pollute much more if it mean dollars in their pocket.
But some probably know that producing more carbon is essential to becoming more green. And others probably prefer to consume more coal than less oil from a national security perspective. So it's not necessarily evil as they see it, just plain thievery, lies, and intentional mis-allocation of taxpayer funds.
Unrelated to trading: I am all for electric cars.
Producing carbon like you are driving an M1 battle tank back and forth is doing God's work for gasping, helpless green plants. And I would love to see us switch to 100% American coal.
FDR wrote: "As far as electric car systemic carbon efficiency vs gas, Car and Driver published an excellent article in the early 90s that concluded electric cars produced between 3 and 3.5x more pollutants than modern (90s) gasoline powered cars. I remember the time period based on where I was living at the time. I can't pull up the article online, it has either been purged or their database isn't populated back that far."
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame the article's gone. I'd love to read it.
I already stated the transmission losses from power station to receptacle, and they're *not* that high, so I don't know what C&D was referring to when they said the transmission losses were high -- they're not.
FDR also wrote: "There are some decent sources online that suggest electric can be 80% as efficient as 25 mpg gasoline, but they don't account for losses during transmission, which C&D fingered as the primary loss. Obviously we wouldn't step up voltage if it wasn't important."
High voltage is used over long spans to allow transmission of much greater power over lines of the same thickness, and resistive losses are proportional to the square of the current flowing through the wire, *not* the power flowing through the wire. Since the voltage across these high tension wires is in the low hundreds of kilovolts, it's not surprising that the resistive losses would be low as a percentage of the power going through them.
Just because transmission losses are a large factor in the design of the power transmission system doesn't mean that the transmission losses will be large in the final design. They aren't in this case.
In any case, in the end if you run all the numbers, electric cars that derive their electricity from coal sources are going to be approximately as efficient as gasoline-powered automobiles are. Perhaps a little more efficient, actually, since an all-electric design can dispense with most of the drivetrain that in a typical automobile extracts a roughly 15% penalty.
But nothing says you have to use coal. You can use any electricity generation method you like.
Right now I think the downsides to electric cars more than outweigh their advantages. The energy density of even the best batteries isn't nearly what gasoline's is. Until that changes, I'll have to give the nod to internal combustion automobiles.
I'd much rather see us go all nuclear than all coal. It's far cleaner in the end.
And yes, the politicians are hyping it because of money. I think they're hyping it up, like they are the rest of the green movement, in an effort to start yet another bubble. And yes, it'll be another bubble because the investment will be very inefficient.
Here is a sales pitch for reference:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.carseek.com/articles/car-emissions-compared.html
Note, they say the two are about the same (comparing at 25mpg), but they also do not account for electricity transmission and they do not account for battery storage losses, both are significant.
If you live close to a power production station it is better, because a 2 mile wire has double the resistance of a 1 mile wire, and 4 mile wire doubles the resistance of 2 miles, and 8 doubles the 4, etc...
But even if you could transmit and store electricity magically, there are gasoline cars with much better range and performance (plus A/C) than 25mpg.
A good hybrid (meaning 100% gasoline power) can get up to 50 mpg, so even the "magic electric" above produces double the carbon as gasoline. Plus that electric "car" has a top speed of 25 mph and a range of 35 m. A real electric car would be a much worse polluter than double, even according to the salesman.
Don't get me wrong, I favor electric because huge carbon emissions are more plant friendly.
It still shocks me that people can talk about this 'green' crap with a straight face.
ReplyDeleteWe can't begin to prove any of these theories scientifically yet all the socialist elites including our very own socialist monkey want to throw trillions of dollars at imaginary solutions to fake problems by taxing the hell out of every man every woman every child every business every shop every car every truck every airplane every home air conditioning. EVERYTHING is going to be subjected to a carbon tax. FOR WHAT?
WHAT A SCAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, truth is stranger than fiction.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,513242,00.html
Thanks Russ,
ReplyDeleteWow. I guess the temperature cooling to below when we started measuring isn't near good enough.
Wow FDR. I thought you'd be smarter than being just another run-of-the-mill dupe to the right-wing propaganda machine.
ReplyDeleteHere, take a look at the *real* HadCRUT data through 2008:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
Gee, I guess selectively picking out a particular wiggle from a noisy graph can be highly deceptive... Surprise!
Yeah that's real live satellite data measuring the global average air temp to within 0.01 degrees back in 1860.
ReplyDeleteThanks but I've already established that the pre-satellite temperature estimates (wild guesses) rule out auto emissions as casual to warming beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Or are you are saying that we've been doomed by cars since 1855?
And you do realize that "green" requires as much carbon and warmth as possible, right?
FDR wrote: "And you do realize that "green" requires as much carbon and warmth as possible, right?"
ReplyDeleteYep. Like you'd find on Venus: 96% CO2, 480 degrees C surface temperature.
A haven for plants, for sure.
:-D
Seriously, though, I think that if we're truly serious about removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it may be much less expensive to do so directly than by reducing emissions. And I happen to think that we're real idiots for using oil for electricity generation: oil is a limited resource by its very nature and as such its use is best limited to those things for which it is a clear winner, such as automobiles (as cool as electric cars are, the energy density of the best batteries is no match for that of fossil fuels) and aircraft.
I happen to think that nuclear power is the way to go for electricity generation because of its cleanliness (waste is highly recyclable, easily transported, and easily stored compared with the waste of any other fuel-based method) and energy density (many orders of magnitude larger than anything else currently in use). Solar is okay for supplemental generation as long as the panels are really cheap and require no real maintenance.
Early Earth did have about 10,000 times as much carbon in the atmosphere as we have today.
ReplyDeletePhotosynthetic bacteria forming stromatolites and photosynthetic plant life were so happy and green, that they produced our world's oxygen supply. We are still breathing it down from the original 50% O composition they left us.
Complex animal life paid them back by eating them down.
With any luck, CO2 levels will again rise to help these thankless, gasping heroes, to which we owe our existence. Why starve the survivors? They can't catch a break.
My point is that carbon is not a pollutant, it is the essential element supporting all green life.
The goal of reducing carbon is aimed at one thing: making the planet less green in exchange for selfish human comfort (though I disagree that we would even notice, since it was about 7 degrees warmer during the middle ages and only Dante called it hell).
I am not saying the grass roots "green" movement is evil, I'll bet 99% don't know that green plants breath carbon. Regardless, the "green" thing to do is to drive a truck in low gear with the parking brake on.
In April 1974 US News and World Report published an article on global cooling---one solution drop soot on the ice cap to melt it. In 1976 the encyclopedia Britannica discussed a coming global glaciation that could possilby lead to the extinction of the armadillo. In 1977 on the TV Show In Search narrated by Leonard Nimoy the episode depicted the coming ice age. What did scientists in the 70's know that today's politicians and scientists fail to include in their hypotheses?
ReplyDelete