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More proof

By Buster   Follow   Tue, 24 Jul 2012, 6:30am   1,567 views   25 comments
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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz21XvEh9w8
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719?rc=fbp

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1. CaptainShuddup Follow Befriend (1) 247 threads 4,702 comments

   1   7:04am Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike (2)   Oh Goodie another Rollingstone rag article. What band is that, "Gore and the Hot airs"?

2. bmwman91 Follow Befriend (7) 37 threads 1,526 comments Mountain View, CA bmwman91's website Premium

   2   10:41am Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   Hey Buster, Just FYI 3.7x10-99 is a tiny fraction whereas the number of stars in the universe is some very large integer number. Maybe you meant "(1 / 3.7x10-99) > # stars in universe". That isn't really all that striking though since the reciprocal of all sorts of probabilities produce numbers that exceed the count of stars in the known universe. Second, there are very few people that dispute the documented fact that average climactic conditions have been getting warmer in recent history. The big point of contention is in the cause.

3. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

   3   1:17pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   Yes, getting the sign wrong leads to big problems. ;-)

4. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

   4   2:10pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   Protected   Sadly, the only proven way to slow CO2 emissions (w/o a politically-impossible drastic reduction in lifestyles) is to replace coal power plants with nuclear ones. Wait...you mean they just closed down Yucca Mountain? Crap. Silly politicians.

5. New Renter Follow Befriend (3) 13 threads 2,206 comments San Jose, CA Premium

   5   3:03pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   wthrfrk80 says Sadly, the only proven way to slow CO2 emissions (w/o a politically-impossible drastic reduction in lifestyles) is to replace coal power plants with nuclear ones. Wait...you mean they just closed down Yucca Mountain? Crap. Silly politicians. That's OK. there's always sub-seabed disposal for high level nuclear waste.

6. Peter P Follow Befriend (4) 117 threads 17,655 comments Premium

   6   3:04pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   CaptainShuddup says Oh Goodie another Rollingstone rag article. What band is that, "Gore and the Hot airs"? Global warming is hot air. At least hotter air. Can't say I am wrong. LOL. :-)

7. Buster Follow Befriend (7) 22 threads 325 comments

   7   6:54pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   wthrfrk80 says Sadly, the only proven way to slow CO2 emissions (w/o a politically-impossible drastic reduction in lifestyles) is to replace coal power plants with nuclear ones. Wait...you mean they just closed down Yucca Mountain? Crap. Silly politicians. Simply not true even with today's technology; http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-solar-idUSBRE84P0FI20120526

8. Peter P Follow Befriend (4) 117 threads 17,655 comments Premium

   8   7:06pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   Let's have mid-day all day then solar power will save the world. Hurray!

9. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

   9   7:11pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   Protected   Peter P says Let's have mid-day all day then solar power will save the world. Hurray! Thank you. When Germany generates enough solar power for the entire country in December I'll be impressed.

10. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    10   7:12pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   Buster says Simply not true even with today's technology; Buster, Check out the following website from a guy who actually crunched the numbers: http://www.withouthotair.com/ He believes in AGW and believes we need to slow our emissions of CO2.

11. APOCALYPSEFUCK is Shostakovich Follow Befriend (28) 170 threads 4,185 comments Premium

    11   7:30pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   Flaming Cannibal Anarchy! Hoards of staving neonazi cannibals running from raging, out of control wildfires and surviving home owners standing their ground and opening fire! What's not to love !?

12. New Renter Follow Befriend (3) 13 threads 2,206 comments San Jose, CA Premium

    12   8:42pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   Buster says wthrfrk80 says Sadly, the only proven way to slow CO2 emissions (w/o a politically-impossible drastic reduction in lifestyles) is to replace coal power plants with nuclear ones. Wait...you mean they just closed down Yucca Mountain? Crap. Silly politicians. Simply not true even with today's technology; http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-solar-idUSBRE84P0FI20120526 That very same article says solar accounts for only 4% of Germany's total consumption. "Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone." And again I have to ask how do proponents of solar intend to solve the problems of night, clouds, snow and ice buildup?

13. New Renter Follow Befriend (3) 13 threads 2,206 comments San Jose, CA Premium

    13   9:38pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   wthrfrk80 says Buster says Simply not true even with today's technology; Buster, Check out the following website from a guy who actually crunched the numbers: http://www.withouthotair.com/ He believes in AGW and believes we need to slow our emissions of CO2. Nice resource, thanks!

14. Peter P Follow Befriend (4) 117 threads 17,655 comments Premium

    14   10:02pm Tue 24 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   New renter says And again I have to ask how do proponents of solar intend to solve the problems of night, clouds, snow and ice buildup? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

15. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    15   6:48am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   Pete, At first glance I assumed the article was about a new type of vacuum cleaner. ;-)

16. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    16   6:57am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   Protected   New renter says Nice resource, thanks! I think so too. He actually "does the math" instead of just pontificating. His conclusion seems to be that renewables are nowhere near enough energy to support the first-world lifestyles we take for granted. For example, if Britain was covered in wind turbines it wouldn't be anywhere near enough energy. We'd have to use at least some nuclear power if we wanted to completely stop burning fossil fuels. I can't help but think the problem of nuclear waste is a smaller problem than putting CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate we presently are. The amount of waste (in pounds) if far less for nuclear than for CO2. Places subject to large earthquakes and tsunamis might want to stick to the traditional coal and nat gas plants.

17. thunderlips11 Follow Befriend (13) 51 threads 2,632 comments Premium

    17   8:10am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   And say goodbye to the car. If we can't generate electric for residential and industrial use, we can forget generating enough to power millions of cars for commuting everyday on top of that from solar or wind. What's interesting is the futurists always try to envision some technological solution, no matter how "vaporware" it is, that allows Americans to keep their cars, an important part of our national mythos. More likely, Americans will have to embrace "Real Change" and not "Substitute Goods" like Hydrogen-fuel powered cars and learn to take the bus or trolley. As for GW, I found this article interesting and basically this guy advances what I think on the situation: Lindzen, the ninth speaker in Sandia’s Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series, is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology in MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is the lead author of Chapter 7 (“Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks”) of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. For 30 years, climate scientists have been “locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level. … That climate should be the function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Lindzen said. For major climates of the past, other factors were more important than carbon dioxide. Orbital variations have been shown to quantitatively account for the cycles of glaciations of the past 700,000 years, he said, and the elimination of the arctic inversion, when the polar caps were ice-free, “is likely to have been more important than CO2 for the warm episode during the Eocene 50 million years ago.” There is little evidence that changes in climate are producing extreme weather events, he said. “Even the IPCC says there is little if any evidence of this. In fact, there are important physical reasons for doubting such anticipations.” Lindzen’s views run counter to those of almost all major professional societies. For example, the American Physical Society statement of Nov. 18, 2007, read, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” But he doesn’t feel they are necessarily right. “Why did the American Physical Society take a position?” he asked his audience. “Why did they find it compelling? They never answered.” Speaking methodically with flashes of humor — “I always feel that when the conversation turns to weather, people are bored.” — he said a basic problem with current computer climate models that show disastrous increases in temperature is that relatively small increases in atmospheric gases lead to large changes in temperatures in the models. But, he said, “predictions based on high (climate) sensitivity ran well ahead of observations.” Real-world observations do not support IPCC models, he said: “We’ve already seen almost the equivalent of a doubling of CO2 (in radiative forcing) and that has produced very little warming.” That is because CO2 and temperature don't have a linear relationship. IE 100ppm more CO2 may make the temp go up 1/10th degree C, but then it takes 300ppm more CO2 to raise it another 1/10 degree C. So going from 400ppm to 600ppm may not mean very much. Another interesting thing is despite massive waves of industrialization (and car adoption) in the 60s and again in the 90s, CO2 seems to rise in a steady fashion. Shouldn't there be 'big jumps' as a nations or regions industrialize and it's people start driving en masse? He disparaged proving the worth of models by applying their criteria to the prediction of past climatic events, saying, “The models are no more valuable than answering a test when you have the questions in advance.” Modelers, he said, merely have used aerosols as a kind of fudge factor to make their models come out right. (Aerosols are tiny particles that reflect sunlight. They are put in the air by industrial or volcanic processes and are considered a possible cause of temperature change at Earth’s surface.) Then there is the practical question of what can be done about temperature increases even if they are occurring, he said. “China, India, Korea are not going to go along with IPCC recommendations, so … the only countries punished will be those who go along with the recommendations.” He discounted mainstream opinion that climate change could hurt national security, saying that “historically there is little evidence of natural disasters leading to war, but economic conditions have proven much more serious. Almost all proposed mitigation policies lead to reduced energy availability and higher energy costs. All studies of human benefit and national security perspectives show that increased energy is important.” He showed a graph that demonstrated that more energy consumption leads to higher literacy rate, lower infant mortality and a lower number of children per woman. Given that proposed policies are unlikely to significantly influence climate and that lower energy availability could be considered a significant threat to national security, to continue with a mitigation policy that reduces available energy “would, at the least, appear to be irresponsible,” he argued. Responding to audience questions about rising temperatures, he said a 0.8 of a degree C change in temperature in 150 years is a small change. Questioned about five-, seven-, and 17-year averages that seem to show that Earth’s surface temperature is rising, he said temperatures are always fluctuating by tenths of a degree. As for the future, “Uncertainty plays a huge role in this issue,” Lindzen said. “It’s not that we expect disaster, it’s that the uncertainty is said to offer the possibility of disaster: implausible, but high consequence. Somewhere it has to be like the possible asteroid impact: Live with it.” To a sympathetic questioner who said, “You are like a voice crying in the wilderness. It must be hard to get published,” Lindzen said, adding that billions of dollars go into funding climate studies. “The reward for solving problems is that your funding gets cut. It’s not a good incentive structure.” Asked whether the prudent approach to possible climate change would be to prepare a gradated series of responses, much as insurance companies do when they insure cars or houses, Lindzen did not shift from his position that no actions are needed until more data is gathered. When another Sandia employee pointed out the large number of models by researchers around the globe that suggest increases in world temperature, Lindzen said he doubted the models were independently derived but rather might produce common results because of their common origins. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-climate-flawed-speaker-sandia.html#jCp

18. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    18   8:18am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   thunderlips11 says More likely, Americans will have to embrace "Real Change" and not "Substitute Goods" like Hydrogen-fuel powered cars and learn to take the bus or trolley. LOL. Good luck running for office on that platform. You'll need it! (But you're probably right in principle.)

19. thunderlips11 Follow Befriend (13) 51 threads 2,632 comments Premium

    19   8:19am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   Buster says the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99 Black Swan, buster, Black Swan. Many wall street financial models deduced that the likelihood of Real Estate collapsing nationwide simultaneously was on the same improbable order based on historical prices and sales dataover the past century. As Han Solo said "Never tell me the odds". I heard that the IPCC was pushed by Thatcher to help crush the coal miners and replace them with nuke plants in the UK. Tory-voting nuclear engineers instead of pesky Labor-voting coal miner's union members.

20. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    20   8:24am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   thunderlips11 says I heard that the IPCC was pushed by Thatcher to help crush the coal miners and replace them with nuke plants in the UK. Tory-voting nuclear engineers instead of pesky Labor-voting coal miner's union members. Politics has muddied the waters of the AGW issue from the very beginning, yes. Sad but true.

21. Auntiegrav Follow Befriend (5) 7 threads 228 comments Belgium, WI Premium

    21   8:30am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   Protected   thunderlips11 says And say goodbye to the car. If we can't generate electric for residential and industrial use, we can forget generating enough to power millions of cars for commuting everyday on top of that from solar or wind. No great loss. Most people spend their time driving to a job to be able to buy a car to drive to the mall to buy a TV to tell them to buy a new car to drive to the mall to buy new clothes so they look good enough to get laid and marry someone who has a better car. There is a lot of energy-wasting activity that we take for granted as "necessary". The whole concept of "recycling", for example. It implies we need to make stuff that is disposable, so it's really an excuse to make crappy containers for our stuff and then burn energy to process them into something equally as crappy. You could probably say the same thing about our colleges..... ;-) One quick way to drop our energy use by probably 5% would be to ban video signals on the internet. In what universe is it necessary to the future of living things for other living things to watch their confined animal feeding operation (cats and dogs) run into a screen door? ;-) As energy prices rise, I think we could find many ways to stop using it. Anyone who has tried to live off-grid knows that the first step is reduction of demand. Sales taxes to pay for remediation might help. (a tax on energy to pump CO2 underground or spray ice crystals into the stratosphere). Oh yeah...that would involve gov't employees being required to DO their job ("I know he can GET the job...")

22. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    22   8:38am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   Protected   Auntiegrav says There is a lot of energy-wasting activity that we take for granted as "necessary". Yesterday at Target there was a large unoccupied Escalade idling in the parking lot with the AC on. No, I don't live in Phoenix. Energy is too cheap.

23. thunderlips11 Follow Befriend (13) 51 threads 2,632 comments Premium

    23   8:45am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   Protected   Auntiegrav says No great loss. Most people spend their time driving to a job to be able to buy a car to drive to the mall to buy a TV to tell them to buy a new car to drive to the mall to buy new clothes so they look good enough to get laid and marry someone who has a better car. Right on. And getting fat because they don't walk anywhere. Or worse, driving an hour to walk around a park for half an hour. ;) Wasting premier agricultural land: Most of our best ag land, that needs the least artifical fertilization and irrigation, is on the coast - and has been paved over by suburbs.

24. freak80 Follow Befriend (4) 52 threads 4,416 comments Corning, NY Premium

    24   8:51am Wed 25 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (1)   Dislike   Protected   thunderlips11 says Most of our best ag land, that needs the least artifical fertilization and irrigation, is on the coast How is it possible to do large-scale agriculture anywhere in CA without irrigation? There's almost NO rain during the warm season.

25. thunderlips11 Follow Befriend (13) 51 threads 2,632 comments Premium

    25   7:53am Thu 26 Jul 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Protected   wthrfrk80 says How is it possible to do large-scale agriculture anywhere in CA without irrigation? There's almost NO rain during the warm season. Make that the East and Gulf Coasts (and the NW too). California is "Special" ;) I can't believe some rivers in CA are privately owned, and it's amazing that in Colorado, you may not have water rights, including the right to store rain in barrels.