jsbowden | Global warming...

Now, I have to come clean on this. I'm a skeptic on global warming. Always have been. The worst that can happen is the planet becomes uninhabitable for 6+ billion people all at once, but with massive reductions in human population, the ecosphere would recover pretty damn quickly, and the fact is, the planet has been far warmer for tens of millions of years at a stretch since long before we came along.

So, I present another view on global warming (it's from The Telegraph, which by US standards is a conservative bias, but the author makes all of his references and calulations available as a PDF for anyone in the world to download right there).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml

My thing with global warming is the minor fact that ~70% of the planet is covered in water, which is still the magic molecule. It's an acid, it's a base, it absorbs heat, it moves heat, it dissipates heat, it's a buffer, it's a catalyst...in short, it's fucking amazing stuff, and it's more prevalent than stupid people in evangelical churches.

Now, deforestation, overfishing, polluting, these things I have real problems with, as they directly affect my quality of life and are just stupid things to do that will make the planet uninhabitable (note to BigCorp Inc: poisoning your customers is not going to increase sales...in fact, you might notice the opposite if you pay attention). Not to mention just plain ugly. I'm all about aesthetics.

So, I'm curious what my faithful readers think of the homey from the UK's take on this issue.

no subject

Well, his logic and arguments seem pretty well-reasoned, overall, but I'm still shading a little more toward global warming, personally. One thing I don't like about his article is (in the references .pdf) he uses a graph extrapolated from data in a Nature article[1] (picture here), to say that "changes in temperature would be seen to precede changes in CO₂ concentration by 400 to 4,000 years." However, the authors of the Nature article give a +/- of 15000 years on the time scale for the graphs in question (because they're extrapolated scales), so you can't make those sorts of conclusions. There's definitely correlation between the CO₂ concentration and the temperature, but the data aren't precise enough to identify causation one way or the other. (I think he makes a little too much of the lack of a scientific consensus, also, since for most scientific theories, consensus is only arrived at after the theory's been around for a generation and not been knocked over. That's a direct response/rebuttal to the UN claim, though, so it's not as big a deal to me.)

My thing with global warming is the minor fact that ~70% of the planet is covered in water, which is still the magic molecule. It's an acid, it's a base, it absorbs heat, it moves heat, it dissipates heat, it's a buffer, it's a catalyst...in short, it's fucking amazing stuff, and it's more prevalent than stupid people in evangelical churches.

I think that the Earth is capable of fixing the global warming trend on its own, given time. (See also, ozone hole, now predicted to close back up by ~2050.) The problem is that we (as a species) are not giving it the time, and are continually producing *more* CO₂, so if there *is* a causal connection between them, we are making the problem worse. (From the same Nature article, in the abstract, the authors state "Present-day atmospheric burdens of [CH₄ and CO₂] seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years." Anyone who believes we aren't the cause of that is a little shortsighted.)

I don't think we should be alarmist about the situation, but I think we should make the effort to curb the CO₂ and CH₄ emissions. Maybe not to the levels of the Kyoto protocol, but we shouldn't continue letting the emissions increase unchecked. If only more people could be convinced that a) wind power is a viable alternative and not an eyesore, and that b) nuclear power is actually safe, and about the least polluting form we can use (for mass production), when proper safety measures are taken into account. (While I'm at it, I'd like a million dollars, and a pony.)

[1]Nature, volume 399, pp 429-436 (1999).

Date: 2006-11-08 12:49 pm (UTC)

jsbowden.livejournal.com

Oh, I don't doubt that we have some effect, but I've always thought the numbers were WAY outside of reality on the alarmist side.

Date: 2006-11-07 08:21 pm (UTC)

skwidly.livejournal.com

If you missed it, there's a pretty extensive Slashdot discussion on the issue. Reading at a high moderation threshold still leaves you with lots of info, much of it readable.

Date: 2006-11-08 01:25 pm (UTC)

I set the moderation to high, and what I got was a bunch of inspired debate, and a few actual people with appropriate backgrounds weighing in...on both sides. So, nothing resolved there.

I still think the global warming folks are overstating their case by quite a bit.

Are we having an effect? Of course; everything we do has consequences. I'm just not convinced we're as big a factor as normally claimed.