The North Pole Is Now a Lake

To the best of our knowledge, the Earth has never had an atmosphere like Venus.
Who is "our" do you mean your? Because Earth's early atmosphere was no where close to what we have today, while not as high a percentage of CO2 like Venus, it was pretty nasty from all the early out gassing of earth Earth. The reason why we don't have a CO2 dominant atmosphere today is due to water existing in a liquid state on the planet.
 
You know that sun spots and solar radiance aren't solidly linked. They are periods of trends that come and go. Otherwise solar radiance would be zero when sunspots are zero. It isn't. Therefore there is an underlying portion of solar randiance, a much larger portion, that is not connected to sun spots.

And that the earth's relationship to the sun in another factor as well.
Absolutely, and I'd rather use solar radiance/irradiance. The problem is that our record of irradiance is fragmented due to different observation platforms with different calibrations. While that can be corrected, I did not want to add an extra layer of complexity to the argument.

I won't embed another large image, but here is the correlation between corrected irradiance and sunspot number. They are more consistent than you imply.

http://www.climate4you.com/images/SolarIrradianceAndSunspots.gif
 
Who is "our" do you mean your? Because Earth's early atmosphere was no where close to what we have today, while not as high a percentage of CO2 like Venus, it was pretty nasty from all the early out gassing of earth Earth. The reason why we don't have a CO2 dominant atmosphere today is due to water existing in a liquid state on the planet.
The early Earth certainly did have more carbon in its atmosphere. I didn't mean to imply that. But Venus does not have the high concentration of nitrogen that the early Earth seems to have had. Perhaps that isn't an important distinction given N2's mostly inert nature, but it does differentiate the planets.
 
It's true that warming has leveled off in the past decade, but other metrics of climate change continue including receding glaciers, increase oceanic heat content, and sea-level rise.

And what are they finding under those receding glaciers?
In many places they are finding tree stumps and other remains of plants and animals, proving that some time in the past those glaciers where not there. Just like in Greenland, where you can find the remains of farms fro 500-600 years ago buried under 20 feet of ice.
 
And what are they finding under those receding glaciers?
In many places they are finding tree stumps and other remains of plants and animals, proving that some time in the past those glaciers where not there. Just like in Greenland, where you can find the remains of farms fro 500-600 years ago buried under 20 feet of ice.
Well sure, if you go back far enough you'd find that anywhere. Antarctica featured vast forests 30 million years ago. The argument has never been that humans are the only influence on the climate. The argument is that anthropogenic emissions are the main cause of the current warming.

As for Greenland, most evidence indicates that the warm period there was due to ocean circulation changes in the North Atlantic. (i.e., it was regional climate change, not global climate change that caused that)
 
So whats your point?What u think will happen with all that water if the glaciers melt?People living near the oceans will just move to the north pole because it has been proven u can live there? Rofl
 
Well, climate change isn't the only thing that the Green Movement is about ... humanity creates lots of waste (much of which is burned, buried, or thrown in the ocean) ... humanity consumes large amounts of natural resources (not all of which are renewable) ... in many ways we do seem to treat the Earth as if we had another planet to live on when we destroy this one ;) ... personally I don't think Climate Change is the most important thing from a Green perspective (Pollution and Waste Management are) ... I just find it interesting that some of the non-Green folks arguments against the changes are "if it kills us, it kills us ... something else will replace us" ... I am more in the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure camp (or gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure for our metric participants :D ) :cool:


I'm all for reducing waste and environmental damage in a reasonable way (ie, not reducing the US to a third world country) but let's get one thing straight, the "green" movement is primarily about money, not protecting the environment. Al Gore is just one of the most blatant examples of that.
 
I'm all for reducing waste and environmental damage in a reasonable way (ie, not reducing the US to a third world country) but let's get one thing straight, the "green" movement is primarily about money, not protecting the environment. Al Gore is just one of the most blatant examples of that.
Depends on who you are talking about. True environmentalists very much care about what we are doing to the Earth. But many corporations who spout off about how green they are just do it for the PR. I think Gore did a good thing by raising awareness about the issue, but since then he's had some not so good moments. The most hilarious being selling his TV network to Al Jazeera, which is mainly funded by oil money.

As for your first comment, following the example of Sweden would be a good start, and they are by no means a 3rd world country. Only 4% of their trash goes to landfills; the rest is recycled. In the U.S., more than 50% of our garbage goes to landfills.
 
I find it hilarious that people actually believe that humans can have any sort of "meaningful" impact on the climate.

Short of setting off a whole bunch of nulclear bombs all over the world at the same time, we really have no way to impact even the near future climate.

The Earth heats and cools in cycles. It has for all of history.

What we are seeing now is nothing that is not expected.

Plus, the green freaks claim "global warming" and "climate change" every Summer and try to scare everybody into falling into line with what they want everybody to do.
 
About the arctic ice melting, it does this over time and has been doing it in 10k-15k year cycles
( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/23/antarctic_peninsula_ice_core/ ). Ice core samples taken in 1950 further provide co2 data and ice sheet data going back 800,000 years. ) http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html )

This is nothing out of the norm and CO2 levels LAG temperature changes, which means the level of CO2 mankind produces has nothing at all to do with causing temperature changes.

The 800,000 year chart stops at 1950. Since 1950 the CO2 levels have hit 390+ ppm and the chart is showing it's never been above 300 ppm in the last 800k years. It's literally off the chart. That certainly seems out of the norm to me.
 
The Earth is a lot bigger than we are, even all put together.

It's not really. There's only about 5 acres of land per person. If we all set out to intentionally destroy the Earth acre-by-acre by clear cutting and burning, we could probably render the planet totally uninhabitable in about 3 months.
 
From Article:

Fact: This summer in July, the average temp was 1-3° C higher.

Fiction: The melting snow is proof of global warming.

The average modern temperature at the North Pole is right at the melting point for snow, 0°C. Sometimes it gets as warm as 5°C. 1-3°C are within normal variation.

Plus, there's the whole "Earth cycles through hot and cold periods over thousands of years regularly" thing to remember, as well.
 
It's not really. There's only about 5 acres of land per person. If we all set out to intentionally destroy the Earth acre-by-acre by clear cutting and burning, we could probably render the planet totally uninhabitable in about 3 months.

Ha ha ha good one. What, your being serious?
Do you understand human grouping, society and food? Have you ever been in an aircraft and looked down? Have you ever realized no human has been to %99 of the planet? Willingly?
The world, isn't your hallucination of how a planet should be, but how it is.
The only way Earth is uninhabitable in three months is we are all replaced media replicating clones like you.
 
I find it hilarious that people actually believe that humans can have any sort of "meaningful" impact on the climate.

Short of setting off a whole bunch of nulclear bombs all over the world at the same time, we really have no way to impact even the near future climate.

The Earth heats and cools in cycles. It has for all of history.

What we are seeing now is nothing that is not expected.

Plus, the green freaks claim "global warming" and "climate change" every Summer and try to scare everybody into falling into line with what they want everybody to do.

If you assume that carbon dioxide from combustion is the only thing that affects the climate you might be right ... but all those forests that have been eliminated over the last 500 years didn't just cut themselves down ... also, we change local climates all the time since we like to grow food in savanna type climates and we eliminate tropical rain forest climates to create them ... these localized climate changes can have significant effect on the water cycle which affects weather ... so I would say that humans can have an impact on the climate at some level ;)

Our larger cities also change the thermal footprint and the air quality (not carbon dioxide but just plain old regular pollution) of their surrounding areas ... it is as of yet unclear what the cumulative impacts of all these little changes might be ... changes from forest to savanna and savanna to desert (when we over farm), changes in air movement and water cycles, returning carbon to the atmosphere without the normal regulating processes in place (trees, healthy ocean, etc) ... as I said earlier, I think our propensity for polluting the environment and other side affects like deforestation and strip mining are bigger concerns than climate change for now but some of the behaviors needed to live cleaner would also benefit carbon so we could kill two birds with one stone :cool:
 
Absolutely, and I'd rather use solar radiance/irradiance. The problem is that our record of irradiance is fragmented due to different observation platforms with different calibrations. While that can be corrected, I did not want to add an extra layer of complexity to the argument.

I won't embed another large image, but here is the correlation between corrected irradiance and sunspot number. They are more consistent than you imply.

http://www.climate4you.com/images/SolarIrradianceAndSunspots.gif
Total irradiance up to 2009 is still at its maximum according to this.

http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/tsi/historical_tsi.html

captures heating trend through most of the century with the temp decline in the 60's-70's and increase again in the last part of the 20th century.
 
I'll just mention that extinction events as we know them don't happen at once, they happen over a period of decades or centuries. Currently, species are going extinct at a rate about 4 times as frequently as they did during the biggest previous extinction event.

You may not believe it, but in technical terms, we are living during an extinction event right now, and people are the biggest cause of it.
 
Mass extinction can't come soon enough. It's depressing how dumb said people are becoming... In large masses.
 
The early Earth certainly did have more carbon in its atmosphere. I didn't mean to imply that. But Venus does not have the high concentration of nitrogen that the early Earth seems to have had. Perhaps that isn't an important distinction given N2's mostly inert nature, but it does differentiate the planets.

You are correct from earlier that the Earth has never had an atmosphere like Venus, but it does have an enormous amount of nitrogen.

It's important to keep in mind that Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere. There's so much air on Venus that the surface pressure is ~92x higher than sea level pressure on Earth. Nitrogen only makes up 3.5% of the total Venusian atmosphere, but the atmosphere is so dense that that it amounts to roughly 4x the atmospheric nitrogen on Earth.

Venus is interesting from a climate science perspective because it represents one of many possible stable atmospheric states: the end result of a runaway greenhouse effect. Venus has an extremely slow rotation (a day on Venus is longer than it's year), and this probably led to high evaporation rates on the daylight side leading to total cloud cover, and eventually all of the water that might have formed oceans ended up in the air. The higher temperatures and air pressure led to increased outgassing, further increasing the temperature and pressure until Venus stabilized as it is today. We don't really know where that cliff from water world to desert world begins. If you're wandering around in the dark and you think there might be a chasm somewhere nearby it's a good idea to pay attention to what you are doing.
 
I find it hilarious that people actually believe that humans can have any sort of "meaningful" impact on the climate.

Short of setting off a whole bunch of nulclear bombs all over the world at the same time, we really have no way to impact even the near future climate.
So you say its impossible for humans to influence the climate and then go and give an example of what you think humans could do to cause climate change...

I mean you gave as your example a large scale event...just what do you think releasing gigatons of extra carbon and aerosols into the atmosphere for around a hundred years is?

You sure you're thinking things through here?

The Earth heats and cools in cycles. It has for all of history.
But not as rapidly as it is doing now. Also previous instances of large temperature changes for sustained periods of time (ie. 10's - 100's of thousands of years) have resulted in massive die offs of much of the life on planet.

Plus, the green freaks claim "global warming" and "climate change" every Summer and try to scare everybody into falling into line with what they want everybody to do.
Actually the "green freaks" point to long term trends such as avg. increased global temps, increased severity of global drought, receeding glaciers, and vastly reduced amounts of ice at the polar caps. There is plenty of real world evidence to back up the idea of global warming happening rapidly right now. You just have to be in denial to ignore it.
 
Ha ha ha good one. What, your being serious?
Do you understand human grouping, society and food? Have you ever been in an aircraft and looked down? Have you ever realized no human has been to %99 of the planet? Willingly?
The world, isn't your hallucination of how a planet should be, but how it is.
The only way Earth is uninhabitable in three months is we are all replaced media replicating clones like you.

You've convinced me of the error of my ways with your eloquently written and well thought out argument.
 
You know, with a quick image search, I see quite a few pictures of the north pole and open water is showing- and some of the pictures are in black and white. How about that.
 
Global climate is effected by solar activity and pacific decadal oscillations, not CO2.
The environment can be effected by humans and CO2, “urban heat island effect”.

Core samples going back over 200 thousand years ago reveal that CO2 levels lag behind the rise in temperature, up to 1000 years or more.

As the climate becomes more applicable for life, i.e. plants, animals and only recently humans flourish in those warmer climates.

Dont forget that Volcanoes also contribute to CO2 and while less than human output, it shows that CO2 is necessary for life.
Remember, plants thrive on CO2, higher CO2 allows plants to exist in climates with less water.

To say that "CO2 causes global warming", is like saying that, "Cancer causes smoking".

The little ice age and the medieval warming period show that the climate can change without man made emissions.

The earth is like a wave on the ocean, as humans are surfing, they can only ride the wave not control it. How you ride the wave is up to you.
 
Short of setting off a whole bunch of nulclear bombs all over the world at the same time, we really have no way to impact even the near future climate.

That wouldn't impact the planet much either. The effects are only surface deep and last only a few thousand years out tens or hundreds of billions of years. We are not really going to hurt anyone but ourselves. When we go away, it's just course of nature, after all, everything we know simply boils down to but one little temporary inconsequential product of nature.

Now who's the boss?

This is all just an argument about self importance, the need to feel eternal. In the end, does anyone out there really think the human race will survive forever?

The only thing certain is the human is merely a physical body. I believe it's one that is inhabited, but only temporarily, by an eternal being, a spirit if you will. This may be nothing more than a vacation for the spirit, or a testing ground. Much like a video game, physical life as we know it may be nothing more than an Olympic sport in which the self importance spirits feel can use to judge their worth against one another.

In short, my spirit wins, yours loses.
 
Global climate is effected by solar activity and pacific decadal oscillations, not CO2...Core samples going back over 200 thousand years ago reveal that CO2 levels lag behind the rise in temperature, up to 1000 years or more.
This is funny because if you go back millions of years then you'll find this isn't true. You're arbitrarily limiting your data set if you're only looking at the last few hundred thousand years as your baseline.

Dont forget that Volcanoes also contribute to CO2 and while less than human output, it shows that CO2 is necessary for life.
A lack of CO2 is not our problem and no one disputes that it has a role in maintaining life. Too much CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere is the problem.

Remember, plants thrive on CO2, higher CO2 allows plants to exist in climates with less water.
This is false and was shown as such years ago. The increased global temperature caused by the green house effect from extra CO2 more than offsets any gains in plant growth due to decreased soil moisture and rain fall.

To say that "CO2 causes global warming", is like saying that, "Cancer causes smoking".
Saying crap like this doesn't make it true. Scientists however have huge amounts of data they can point to that demonstrates that global warming is happening at a historically unheard of rate that coinsides with the increased levels of atmospheric CO2 which is directly related to human industrial activity. That deniers won't accept this data does not show this data to be false.

The little ice age and the medieval warming period show that the climate can change without man made emissions.
It also doesn't disprove that humans can effect the global climate and the idea that the climate changes over time wasn't in dispute anyways so gj on the double non-sequitur I guess.

The earth is like a wave on the ocean, as humans are surfing, they can only ride the wave not control it. How you ride the wave is up to you.
You have to demonstrate this as true if you want to convince anyone much less any scientists. Just saying it means nothing.
 
Oh noes!! We gonna die! Hopefully Sculelos won't see this thread.

On a serious note, this is a problem that I think is to late to fix.

Oh no it's pretty simple, Bill Nye showed how carbon Dioxide increases the heat of the planet, it's on Youtube somewhere, now since America doesn't make much of anything anymore, that only leaves US coal burning power plants, and China (Because they make everything).
 
Yesterday we hit a record low for Green Bay in the month of July, 61F. By the global warmers logic we can conclude that we are headed for the next ice age VERY SOON!
 
This is funny because if you go back millions of years then you'll find this isn't true. You're arbitrarily limiting your data set if you're only looking at the last few hundred thousand years as your baseline.


A lack of CO2 is not our problem and no one disputes that it has a role in maintaining life. Too much CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere is the problem.


This is false and was shown as such years ago. The increased global temperature caused by the green house effect from extra CO2 more than offsets any gains in plant growth due to decreased soil moisture and rain fall.


Saying crap like this doesn't make it true. Scientists however have huge amounts of data they can point to that demonstrates that global warming is happening at a historically unheard of rate that coinsides with the increased levels of atmospheric CO2 which is directly related to human industrial activity. That deniers won't accept this data does not show this data to be false.


It also doesn't disprove that humans can effect the global climate and the idea that the climate changes over time wasn't in dispute anyways so gj on the double non-sequitur I guess.


You have to demonstrate this as true if you want to convince anyone much less any scientists. Just saying it means nothing.


and saying that "scientist have tons of data" proves what?

Here is some more crap.. i guess.

The notion that our atmosphere acts like a greenhouse — that is, so-called atmospheric “greenhouse gases,” like water vapor and CO2, “trap” incoming solar radiation to warm the atmosphere — is wrong. Not only doesn’t the atmosphere work that way, greenhouses don’t either.

Greenhouses work by physically blocking heat transfer (by convection) from inside to outside — the same effect that heats the inside of your car when it’s parked in the sun on a hot day. Opening the doors and windows allows air currents to flow and the heat to dissipate.

But neither the atmosphere nor “greenhouse gases” block convection, so there is no literal atmospheric “greenhouse effect.”

Since “greenhouse effect” terminology has long been used to refer to the natural warming of our atmosphere to a habitable level, we’ll stick with that incorrect, but commonly-used, terminology for ease of discussion. So how does the “greenhouse effect” actually work?

Atmospheric flows of energy are complex, but a simplified explanation is as follows.

Incoming solar radiation is partly absorbed by the Earth’s surface, partly absorbed by various atmospheric gases (particularly oxygen and ozone) and partly reflected back out to space. Solar radiation isn’t significantly absorbed by greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere and so doesn’t directly cause the greenhouse effect.

For our purposes, the greenhouse effect is largely caused by energy emitted by the Earth’s surface, most of which is subsequently absorbed by greenhouse gases and clouds. Very simply expressed, the greenhouse gases and clouds transform that absorbed energy into heat that warms the lower atmosphere and into energy that is radiated back to space and also back to the Earth’s surface.

These radiative processes, if they acted alone, would warm the Earth’s atmosphere to about 77 degrees Centigrade — much warmer than the 15 degrees Centigrade the Earth actually is. Fortunately, other atmospheric processes — including updrafts and circulation carrying heat upwards and toward the poles — facilitate energy escape into space so that our atmosphere cools to around 15 degrees Centigrade.

Putting aside the cooling convection and circulation processes mentioned above, the limiting factor with respect to greenhouse warming isn’t the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; it’s the energy emitted by the Earth’s surface.

Different greenhouse gases absorb different wavelengths of energy emitted by the Earth. The fact that only a limited amount of the Earth’s emitted energy is available for absorption by CO2 and that CO2 has to compete with water vapor and clouds for that energy, results in a crucial (but little publicized) relationship between CO2 and atmospheric warming.

The relationship between CO2 and temperature is logarithmic in nature — that is, as CO2 increases in the atmosphere, it absorbs less and less additional energy to produce correspondingly less and less additional warming. At some point, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere doesn’t significantly change atmospheric temperature.

So what is the point at which more CO2 doesn’t cause more warming? Are we near it? The commonly-used range of estimates of CO2’s impact on global temperature should help put any worry into perspective.

A doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-Industrial Revolution days (280 parts per million to 560 ppm), might increase global temperature from between 0.5 degrees Centigrade to 1.5 degrees Centigrade — that is, not much.

The current atmospheric CO2 level is about 380 ppm and the estimated temperature increase since 1880 (when regular temperature recordkeeping began) is estimated to be about 0.60 degrees Centigrade.

Since at least half of this temperature increase pre-dated 1950 — prior to any significant increase in atmospheric CO2 levels — we can estimate that the 30 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution is associated with a temperature increase of about 0.30 degrees Centigrade. This supports the idea that doubling atmospheric CO2 from pre-Industrial Revolution levels would cause less than a one degree Centigrade increase — and we’re not close to such a doubling.

Since this small variation in global temperature is well within the historical climate record, panic hardly seems warranted.

Basically, CO2's ability to trap more heat radiated from Earth's surface has almost maxed out. Per the laws of physics, adding more CO2 will very little warming effect.
 
Is it a problem for the Earth? No.

Is it a potential problem for living being on Earth? Well, potentially.

I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
 
"The relationship between CO2 and temperature is logarithmic in nature — that is, as CO2 increases in the atmosphere, it absorbs less and less additional energy to produce correspondingly less and less additional warming. At some point, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere doesn’t significantly change atmospheric temperature."

i know, its all crap!
 
Somebody ought to use this information to curry political favor, advance their political friends phony industries, spend tax-payer dollars on paybacks to industries designed to fail, get a bunch of sheeple (er... people, sorry) excited and worried who really need something better to do, and make a bunch of money...

Oh wait, already happening. :D
 
and saying that "scientist have tons of data" proves what?
That climate change is happening and is due to human activity. Virtually no scientist worth a damn disputes this and the only questions they have now are: how quickly is it going to change?, how much exactly will the temp. go up? and: is there anything we can do to mitigate it before things get truly awful?

Here is some more crap.. i guess.
Why yes it pretty much is. Or rather to be more precise (you do get some stuff factually wrong, ie. "commonly-used range of estimates of CO2’s impact", the scientific consensus is already that we'll see around a 2C avg. global temp increase with current CO2 levels FYI) the conclusions you're drawing are, which BTW are pretty much denier propaganda BTW. We know this because we can see the actual effects on the earth which have already been mentioned before and if what you were saying is correct than none of that would be happening. QED.
 
Somebody ought to use this information to curry political favor, advance their political friends phony industries, spend tax-payer dollars on paybacks to industries designed to fail, get a bunch of sheeple (er... people, sorry) excited and worried who really need something better to do, and make a bunch of money...

Oh wait, already happening. :D

hey its science.. dont argue, just buy your carbon credits, ride the buss, walk or bike and shut up. :D
 
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