Global Cooling

[dr.placebo]

And, for the more literate:

http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/press.html

you can, at times, seem so pretentious and conceited,, if not narcissistic
.........

just sayin'............

I do what I can to fit in here.

[unjonharley]

From that report;
"To stabilize climate, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases need to reach near-zero well within this century, the report states."
Well, we better jump right to it. Shut off all the volcanoes, sea-algae, cow farts, composting bio-mass. Then figure what to do about all the water vapor in the air. That should get us to near-zero.

just how far can i drive the VW van to equel= one hell fire, delivered by a super jet, launched from a super carrier???

[ygmir]

And, for the more literate:

http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/press.html

you can, at times, seem so pretentious and conceited,, if not narcissistic
.........

just sayin'............

I do what I can to fit in here.

chuckling.......good one..........

[can't sit still]

Harley, in 2004, GOV used 144 million barrels of oil. I'm sure that it is much higher now. Reportedly, the forward bases in Afghanistan incur an expense of $400 a gallon. GOV uses over 400,000 barrels a day. Your V-Dub is out of it's league.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199

[unjonharley]

Harley, in 2004, GOV used 144 million barrels of oil. I'm sure that it is much higher now. Reportedly, the forward bases in Afghanistan incur an expense of $400 a gallon. GOV uses over 400,000 barrels a day. Your V-Dub is out of it's league.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199

my point is..... This thread, Coponh and Al Gore is pointless..

Eat,drink and make mary for the morrow we die..

[can't sit still]

It looks like Copenhagen is going to be a bust. It doesn't really have a legally binging framework. Kyoto had/has this framework but, India, China and US are not signatory to Kyoto. The developing countries believe that they are going to get the shaft so they have walked out. It's now referred to as "Nopenhagen"
http://www.troymedia.com/?p=6662

[can't sit still]

I won't swear by these graphs. I don't know the source. The important thing is , when you stretch out the time factor, the planet is usually in an ice age. Look at the warm peaks. they are VERY short lived.
http://www.rense.com/general88/warming.htm

[dr.placebo]

One thing to watch out for in these graphs is locality. The Medieval Warm period was certainly quite warm in Greenland, but not so much over the globe. See:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieva ... period.htm

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hockey- ... hange.html

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate ... period.htm

Let's take a look at the vertical scale for Figure 2 (Temperature in Central Greenland over last 450,000 years). We are roughly 3 C away from the max temps in the past 450k years. The IPCC most likely estimate for the temperature response to a doubling of CO2 is also 3 C. In other words, with business as usual we will likely tie or even beat the warmest temperature in 450k years. And we may have the sea levels that we saw then as well (the last peak in sea level was about 6 m higher than now, 120k years ago).

Here's another link for the linkage between CO2 and temperature, as reconstructed for the past 500 M years:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-has ... -past.html

When one factors in the gradually increasing energy from the sun, the numbers track pretty well. So we have about 500 M years worth of proxy data that point to a CO2 to temperature link. One of the unsettling quotes from that article, though, is the following

The most recent period when CO2 levels were as high as today was around 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene. CO2 levels were at about 400 ppm. What was the climate like at the time? Global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today. Sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher. There was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.

Now, I realize that I've exclusively quoted www.skepticalscience.com in this post. From my reading they seem to be both accessible and accurate. Check it out, and make your own decision, though.

[ygmir]

it seems, somewhere, I read about certain "break over" mechanisms......
carbon cycling in the environment that changes at certain "thresholds"?
I wish I were smarter......

It was something like:

at a certain point, the lack of ice and snow in the northern latitudes, allows huge blooms of grass, lichen, moss, and algae, which, soak in and lock up, vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere, creating a cooling effect.

I wonder, if the high you refer to, over the last 450K years, could be an indicator of that point? It will be interesting (since, I'm sure florescent light bulbs won't change it enough) to see if that occurs this time....and, how fast.

It seems to me, the author had said it was a pretty rapid response, since, the plants are already in place, just getting more heat and sun made them work faster.

[Ugly Dougly]

Me wishes everyone was smarter! (But especially you!)

There's a lot of rotting vegetation in the tundra that is not emitting as much methane as it might, since it's frozen. Thaw that out and who knows what you'll get?

[ygmir]

how could it be rotting if it's frozen?.......
and, would not it become mulch that feeds other plants?.....

[Ugly Dougly]

The process of rotting increases as it melts. There's the rub.
Plants? It's not exactly the Amazon. Not yet anyway.

[dr.placebo]

The roughly 100k year cycle in glaciation is not fully understood. The leading theory, as I understand it, has to do with variations in the earth's orbit being the lead cause (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles), but it's not at all settled. In particular, we don't know where we are with respect to the next decline, although there is a current minimum in the orbital eccentricity that may make this peak last longer than recent previous peaks.

I don't understand the cause of the sharpness of the peaks from the Vostok samples. Having a dramatic loss of CO2 due to the greening of the tundra is, on the surface, at least plausible. But if you look at the shape of the current interglacial peak it does not have the same shape as the previous 3. It is cooler and flatter, and I've not yet seen a good explanation as to why that is so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vosto ... -petit.png

Another monkey wrench is the CO2 data. In the previous 4 peaks we get a maximum CO2 concentration of 280-300 ppm. We are already above 380 ppm, which is unexplored territory for the Vostok data.

If the tundra greening mechanism is dominant, then I can speculate on one ironical point. By increasing the CO2 so much we may well have hastened the tundra greening. Then, when we have used up the easily accessible fossil fuels (peak oil followed by peak coal) we may have increased the tundra greening so much that the temperature peak is much higher, and the temperature crash is much steeper, then in previous cycles. In other words, we get to both fry and freeze, and we will have amplified the effects. If we have a similar level of technology in the next interglaciation at least we won't have the oil and coal to do it all over again. This particular scenario is all just speculation, though, suitable for science fiction, not real science.

[Ugly Dougly]

At some point it will become neither science nor science fiction, but history.

[can't sit still]

I've been on the tundra a lot. It all depends on where you are. In Barrow for instance, the ground is frozen -30 F for about 3000 feet. The tundra is a very thin layer of soil that defrosts in the summer. I don't believe that the roots go down more than 1 inch. A 100 y.o tree is about 1/8 inch in diameter. There wasn't any rotting matter that I could see. There was an absolute minimum of photosynthesis going on.
There might be areas of tundra that are more like peat but, I haven't seen any. The tundra that I've seen is nothing like the the low and very dense vegetation in Scotland.
Much of the northern part of North America is not tundra but,,,, permafrost. The roots go down about 1 foot,,, depending. There is no growth while the soil is frozen,,, same with tundra, except for the lichen.
There is so little photosynthesis in places with frozen ground, i doubt that CO2 is much affected.

[can't sit still]

Dunno, if you've been following Moncton. Evidently, his message is so controversial that the Dems won't allow it to be heard;
"Twice this year he has testified before the US Congress, but on a third occasion, when the elected Republican minority had chosen him to respond to testimony by Al Gore before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US Congress, the Democrat majority rejected the ranking Minority member's chosen witness for the first time since Congress was founded, precipitating a constitutional crisis"
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldn ... ckton.html
Gore, on the other hand is much in demand to tell his lies;
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/e ... 956783.ece

[dr.placebo]

Monckton is a complete twit, suitable material for a Monty Python sketch. His most recent "accomplishment" was to get caught at Copenhagen, railing against protesters and calling them Hitler Youth, then denying his words to the AP.

http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4724

And then he goes and brings his crap to a booth of students (SustainUS):

[youtube][/youtube]

He also accused them of killing millions. Twit.

[Isotopia]

At some point it will become neither science nor science fiction, but history.

That's so dismissive Ugly.

Seriously, why not shut up - or contribute.

[unjonharley]

AP
If they fail to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen, world leaders flying in their private jets and huddling in five-star hotels will have little to show for their efforts beyond a big, fat carbon footprint.


The U.N. estimates 40,500 tons of carbon dioxide will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference - 90 percent of it from flights. The rest comes from waste and electricity related to transport to and from the conference center and lodging in and around the Danish city.
Most of the leaders were flying either on commercial airlines or government-owned jets and Sweden was one of the few to announce plans to offset those aviation emissions - something it does routinely. Most are doing nothing to boost their green credentials and some saw no reason to treat their trip to the U.N. climate talks any differently.

[Oldguy]

IMHO, carbon offsets are the new real estate debt derivatives. Big business does business as usual by bequiling the witless. If noone replants a forest, the carbon derivatives are worthless and more than not counter productive to gas emmision reduction. Only if the world finances the changeover to renewable energy from maintaining fossil fueled energy production will the CO levels be reduced. I see the chinese have their own pipeline now through Turkministan through Asia Minor. The center of the world is moving East. Jus' sayin'.

[dr.placebo]

I basically agree with Oldguy. While I don't think that carbon offsets are completely worthless, since I think that we could use some help to counteract deforestation, they don't do nearly enough, and do not affect the consumption end in the carbon chain.

I also agree with unjon. Using private jets and limos sends a message that just screams corruption and indifference.

If you agree with the IPCC climate estimate then what we need is simple to state and hard to do. We need to cut carbon emissions, improve energy efficiency, and drastically ramp up "green" energy production. It takes political will, general understanding, and an ability to take a short-term hit for long-term gain. All of which is endangered these days, and not just in the US.

[Token]

Data from the AIRS sensor on the Aqua satellite is available on the NASA site here:

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/

Since I lack the scientific craft to do anything useful with raw data, I just look at some of the pretty pictures and movies in the multimedia section.

I like this one:

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/ ... overs_CO2/

Also, Goddard Space Flight Center has all sorts of spiffy stuff in their Visualization Center:

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html

This series of still images is also cool, or hot ...

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3653

♦

[Token]

Someone asked a while back who was making the big bucks from AGW theories other than Uncle Al; why the head of the IPCC of course.

I'm afraid that all this hoopla is not about the science anymore. Greed rules again.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227 ... hauri.html

Very good read.

[Ugly Dougly]

At some point it will become neither science nor science fiction, but history.

That's so dismissive Ugly.

Seriously, why not shut up - or contribute.

OK.

[dr.placebo]

That some people who warn about global warming hare profiting from their warnings does not surprise me. That some climate deniers are profiting also does not surprise me. That Tiger Woods plays something other than golf does not surprise me.

How does any of this change the data? Are we now to believe that thousands of scientists have been bought off?

Get back to the data.

[theCryptofishist]

Are we now to believe that thousands of scientists have been bought off?

Now, now, dr. p., you are forgetting the fact that Dr. Pachauri is so beloved by his fellow climatologists that each and every single one is willing to put reputation and livelihood on the line in order to line Pachauri's pockets--with no expectation of any reward but that warm, fuzzy, christmassy feeling deep in their hearts.

[ygmir]

Are we now to believe that thousands of scientists have been bought off?

Now, now, dr. p., you are forgetting the fact that Dr. Pachauri is so beloved by his fellow climatologists that each and every single one is willing to put reputation and livelihood on the line in order to line Pachauri's pockets--with no expectation of any reward but that warm, fuzzy, christmassy feeling deep in their hearts.

do you mean throats?...............

[unjonharley]

Are we now to believe that thousands of scientists have been bought off?

Now, now, dr. p., you are forgetting the fact that Dr. Pachauri is so beloved by his fellow climatologists that each and every single one is willing to put reputation and livelihood on the line in order to line Pachauri's pockets--with no expectation of any reward but that warm, fuzzy, christmassy feeling deep in their hearts.

do you mean throats?...............

Ha Ha, is to laugh

[Token]

How does any of this change the data? Are we now to believe that thousands of scientists have been bought off?

Get back to the data.

No one said anything about payoffs or bribes. Just that the head of IPCC is a self serving greedy SOB.

This is data. Perhaps the most important data available. Climate change has transcended it's scientific origin a long time ago. Now it is in the domain of socioeconomics and *gasp* politics.

Just look at Cop15. Thousands of dignitaries bickering over how much money the industrial world owes them, industrial nations licking their chops over the multiple-trillion $ market in cap-n-trade funny money. Etc.

It's good to see every now and then what greases the gears.

[ygmir]

* in stern, antiseptic British tennis referee accent*

Point,............ Token