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Doesn't seem like a water tight argument at all to me. How about the alternate theory that heating up causes CO2 to be released from the Ocean - the extra CO2

Doesn't seem like a water tight argument at all to me. How about the alternate theory that heating up causes CO2 to be released from the Ocean - the extra CO2 is not the cause of heating, but the result of it. Way too much energy is being spent on this. Far more imminent threats to peoples lives and freedoms.

thaumaturgy 17y ago
It took only the merest effort to find this: http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm You are right though that there are "far more imminent threats to peoples lives and freedoms". I would place willful ignorance to be chief among those threats. (See also http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/idiot_america.php http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/idiot_america.php)
- bumblebird 17y ago
  I was talking about threats that actually kill people day to day. If I'm ignorant about the finer points of green house effects, it's not really that big a deal to my life, or that of my children. Perhaps every generation has to have a "catastrophe is just around the corner". I remember being taught at school how we'd run out of oil, coal, etc by the year 2000.
  - lawn 17y ago
    What if it turns out it'll kill 90% of all humans in say a hundred years? And what if we could have saved everyone if we just wasn't so ignorant? Now it doesn't really matter if you and I are ignorant, but if everyone is then that's potentially disastrous. You could draw similarities to medicine I think. What if nobody would've taken the first seemingly unnecessary steps towards creating the first vaccine, the first medicine etc etc. Where would be now? Sure there would be more acute things for these first "doctors" to do, but thanks to them we've now saved countless of people.
    - bumblebird 17y ago
      I find it extremely far fetched that if it was that imminent (Next 100 years), that there's anything we could do to prevent it.
      - lawn 17y ago
        You're missing the point. In our little what if scenario, the point isn't how long it would take, but that it would happen and we had the power to prevent it.
        bumblebird 17y ago
        How are we going to prevent it?
        lawn 17y ago
        Still not getting it. It doesn't matter how. Just imagine for a while that we could. Please reread what I said without focusing too much if it's really going to happen and if so how and to what extent. Is it so wrong to focus some effort in studying the climate change? After all we all depend on it and we definitely don't want to loose our home, however probable or improbable.
        bumblebird 17y ago
        Given the lack of consensus about what is or isn't happening, I'm really extremely skeptical that we could reach consensus on a way to prevent it. Sure, it's nice to spend some money researching potential threats, but this one seems to have been blown way out of proportion. Although it's probably been overtaken now by swine flu.
  - thaumaturgy 17y ago
    You and many, many other people, are not merely ignorant about the finer points of greenhouse effects. On the contrary, you are all too willing to jump into a discussion about the finer points of greenhouse effects -- a subject which you admittedly are ignorant about -- with counter-arguments based only on a quick gut feeling or guess on your part, and which have already been answered in the conversation that you're jumping into. Please understand, I'm not just singling you out here; this is an observable and strange pattern of behavior in many different social gatherings, including HN. Instead of coming up with a question about what you had read, and then doing even a few minutes' diligence to see if there was an answer, you stopped after coming up with the question and pronounced that it "didn't seem like a water tight argument at all". The flaw in thinking that causes that kind of behavior surely carries over into other aspects of your life and career, so it is a big deal to your life. And furthermore, your children likely learn first by your example. If you think that way, your children are more likely to also, and that's going to have a negative impact on their lives. If nothing else, it will destroy their curiosity, and curiosity is something that should be revered on a forum like HN: it is one of the greatest drivers of human inventiveness and ingenuity. And ignorance does kill. There are numerous other countries where the example is so blatantly stark that it shouldn't even need citing. In Uganda, for one example, simple water quality improvements would save numerous lives every year [1]. But there's ignorance, and there's willful ignorance, willful ignorance being the more evil of the two. It disregards and dismisses the efforts of those that would advance human society and promote peace. It values its "gut feelings" over research, study, and experimentation. It believes that its "freedoms" are being trampled every time its environment changes, with no acknowledgement of history or context, and no forward thinking for the future. Those things are a big deal, and they do kill people. [1]: An in-the-field look at some of the water quality problems in Uganda: http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html
    - bumblebird 17y ago
      Come on. All I said was that the argument didn't seem water tight. For me, it was like observing that a server stops responding to pings, and concluding there must be a memory leak in the kernel. I want water tight isolated tests that prove categorically what is happening. And my main point is that I'd far rather spend effort on things like water quality which you mention, that have a direct measurable impact on peoples lives, rather than spending so much time, effort and money researching climate change.
Tuna-Fish 17y ago
> In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite that measured infrared spectra between 400 cm-1 to 1600 cm-1. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Harries 2001 compared both sets of data to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period. The resultant change in outgoing radiation was as follows: > What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect". Direct experimental evidence. Good enough for ya?
- bumblebird 17y ago
  No, I can imagine there being many reasons for that (I'm no expert, but you have to admit there's quite a leap there between what was observed, and the explanation).
  - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
    Actually, as a physicist, I see no leap there. We know the absorption spectra of CO2. We measure an increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere. We measure the how well light penetrates the atmosphere, and we find it does so less well at the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs. At this point, we have a simple theory that is well supported by direct experimental evidence. What more do you need?
    - bumblebird 17y ago
      Well for a start, you need to know absolute numbers. Are the numbers big enough to make a difference.
  - dejb 17y ago
    It is nearly always possible to imagine alternative explanations for observations in complex systems. Sometimes the only way have any high level of confidence in a theory is to spend years studying the area and then more years researching the specifics of the particular theory. If you have a passion for this area then why don't you go down this path. Otherwise, like most people, you will often have to resign yourself to relying on the opinions of 'experts'. Choose your 'experts' wisely.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
The fact that CO2 is emitted from the oceans as they warm may explain long term trends in temperature. It would not explain short term trends in radiative transfer, or laboratory measurements of CO2's absorption spectrum. Note that you could write the exact same article replacing "CO2" with "H2O", though you might need to cite slightly different papers.

thaumaturgy 17y ago

It took only the merest effort to find this: http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm You are right though that there are "far more imminent threats to peoples lives and freedoms". I would place willful ignorance to be chief among those threats. (See also http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/idiot_america.php http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/idiot_america.php)

bumblebird 17y ago
I was talking about threats that actually kill people day to day. If I'm ignorant about the finer points of green house effects, it's not really that big a deal to my life, or that of my children. Perhaps every generation has to have a "catastrophe is just around the corner". I remember being taught at school how we'd run out of oil, coal, etc by the year 2000.
- lawn 17y ago
  What if it turns out it'll kill 90% of all humans in say a hundred years? And what if we could have saved everyone if we just wasn't so ignorant? Now it doesn't really matter if you and I are ignorant, but if everyone is then that's potentially disastrous. You could draw similarities to medicine I think. What if nobody would've taken the first seemingly unnecessary steps towards creating the first vaccine, the first medicine etc etc. Where would be now? Sure there would be more acute things for these first "doctors" to do, but thanks to them we've now saved countless of people.
  - bumblebird 17y ago
    I find it extremely far fetched that if it was that imminent (Next 100 years), that there's anything we could do to prevent it.
    - lawn 17y ago
      You're missing the point. In our little what if scenario, the point isn't how long it would take, but that it would happen and we had the power to prevent it.
      - bumblebird 17y ago
        How are we going to prevent it?
        lawn 17y ago
        Still not getting it. It doesn't matter how. Just imagine for a while that we could. Please reread what I said without focusing too much if it's really going to happen and if so how and to what extent. Is it so wrong to focus some effort in studying the climate change? After all we all depend on it and we definitely don't want to loose our home, however probable or improbable.
        bumblebird 17y ago
        Given the lack of consensus about what is or isn't happening, I'm really extremely skeptical that we could reach consensus on a way to prevent it. Sure, it's nice to spend some money researching potential threats, but this one seems to have been blown way out of proportion. Although it's probably been overtaken now by swine flu.
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  You and many, many other people, are not merely ignorant about the finer points of greenhouse effects. On the contrary, you are all too willing to jump into a discussion about the finer points of greenhouse effects -- a subject which you admittedly are ignorant about -- with counter-arguments based only on a quick gut feeling or guess on your part, and which have already been answered in the conversation that you're jumping into. Please understand, I'm not just singling you out here; this is an observable and strange pattern of behavior in many different social gatherings, including HN. Instead of coming up with a question about what you had read, and then doing even a few minutes' diligence to see if there was an answer, you stopped after coming up with the question and pronounced that it "didn't seem like a water tight argument at all". The flaw in thinking that causes that kind of behavior surely carries over into other aspects of your life and career, so it is a big deal to your life. And furthermore, your children likely learn first by your example. If you think that way, your children are more likely to also, and that's going to have a negative impact on their lives. If nothing else, it will destroy their curiosity, and curiosity is something that should be revered on a forum like HN: it is one of the greatest drivers of human inventiveness and ingenuity. And ignorance does kill. There are numerous other countries where the example is so blatantly stark that it shouldn't even need citing. In Uganda, for one example, simple water quality improvements would save numerous lives every year [1]. But there's ignorance, and there's willful ignorance, willful ignorance being the more evil of the two. It disregards and dismisses the efforts of those that would advance human society and promote peace. It values its "gut feelings" over research, study, and experimentation. It believes that its "freedoms" are being trampled every time its environment changes, with no acknowledgement of history or context, and no forward thinking for the future. Those things are a big deal, and they do kill people. [1]: An in-the-field look at some of the water quality problems in Uganda: http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html http://gondauganda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html
  - bumblebird 17y ago
    Come on. All I said was that the argument didn't seem water tight. For me, it was like observing that a server stops responding to pings, and concluding there must be a memory leak in the kernel. I want water tight isolated tests that prove categorically what is happening. And my main point is that I'd far rather spend effort on things like water quality which you mention, that have a direct measurable impact on peoples lives, rather than spending so much time, effort and money researching climate change.

Tuna-Fish 17y ago

> In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite that measured infrared spectra between 400 cm-1 to 1600 cm-1. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Harries 2001 compared both sets of data to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period. The resultant change in outgoing radiation was as follows: > What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect". Direct experimental evidence. Good enough for ya?

bumblebird 17y ago
No, I can imagine there being many reasons for that (I'm no expert, but you have to admit there's quite a leap there between what was observed, and the explanation).
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago
  Actually, as a physicist, I see no leap there. We know the absorption spectra of CO2. We measure an increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere. We measure the how well light penetrates the atmosphere, and we find it does so less well at the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs. At this point, we have a simple theory that is well supported by direct experimental evidence. What more do you need?
  - bumblebird 17y ago
    Well for a start, you need to know absolute numbers. Are the numbers big enough to make a difference.
- dejb 17y ago
  It is nearly always possible to imagine alternative explanations for observations in complex systems. Sometimes the only way have any high level of confidence in a theory is to spend years studying the area and then more years researching the specifics of the particular theory. If you have a passion for this area then why don't you go down this path. Otherwise, like most people, you will often have to resign yourself to relying on the opinions of 'experts'. Choose your 'experts' wisely.

yummyfajitas 17y ago

The fact that CO2 is emitted from the oceans as they warm may explain long term trends in temperature. It would not explain short term trends in radiative transfer, or laboratory measurements of CO2's absorption spectrum. Note that you could write the exact same article replacing "CO2" with "H2O", though you might need to cite slightly different papers.