Another data point in the Global Warming saga

Just FYI...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/methane-tt1029.html

It makes one wonder just how much of this is natural and how much is Man made.

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Water vapor is a very powerful "greenhouse gas" yet nobody talks about it much.

Why is that?


Source: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

 

Water Vapor is a powerful green house gas. When in low concentrations in the air it acts as a greenhouse gas, when it builds high enough it forms reflective clouds which bounce energy back into space cooling things off. It is self regulating.

I don't give a shit about a little more methane of co2, it is nothing to the contribution water makes to makign this planet bearable.

 

That's my point, Meredith. Everybody that talks about global warming never talks about water vapor, which is the most influential gas that contributes to "global warming" yet the vast majority of it in our atmosphere is due to natural causes.

The synthetic contribution is miniscule.

Welcome to the changing climate of planet Earth, where fossilized sand dollars can be found in the limestone of central Florida, and fossilized dinosaurs dug up in the polar climes.

To coin a phrase, "All of this has happened before, and it will happen again."

AG

 

And then everyone is going how driving cars on hydrogen is going to solve global warming; even the so-called global warming exports.

Yep, several billion cars pumping water into atmosphere, that's really going to solve Global Warming. More like CAUSE it.

 

In other news, an engineer working on methane detectors worldwide quietly corrected a bug this year without telling anyone.

Probably.

 

Modern day cars contain water as part of their exhaust already. The amount is nearly the same as a hydrogen engine according to the US department of energy.

 

Do note the assumption they made to get there: hydrogen gets more than twice the mileage. If that's not so...

 

And the number they used is inside of the projected fuel efficiency of fuel cell powered cars. Check out some of these cars: some of them have an mpgge better then the one used by the DOE, some worse but neither by a significant margin. The number they used is clearly a good baseline average.

I don't know if hydrogen based cars are the best solution or not; I do know that your claim that they will be pumping significantly more water into the atmosphere is incorrect.

 

...maybe in another 30 years this business will cycle again and we'll be worried about the "coming ice age."

 

We should build huge solar power satellites and put them between the earth and the sun so they can help cool the planet and help generate power that is beamed down to earth via microwaves.

The microwave antennas could be build over farmland with no effect on the land below only huge power line structures in a grid pattern overhead.

Maybe make a huge ass computer linked to weather control satellites that could then manipulate the weather on earth and turn billions of acres of desert into lush green farmland.

 

Why waste the effort? We're going to space, it should be a concentrated effort to get off this planet.

Solar panels on the ground, will eliminate our need for fossil fuels within the next decade. Germany is already generating 20% power through renewable sources, most of it solar. Solar is undergoing an industrial revolution; technology allows them to build ever bigger, more efficient, and cheaper solar panels.

Every half hour, the Earth is bombarded with enough solar energy to power us an entire year.

There is no need to cool the planet; the middle ages were hotter by several degrees than we are. All those doom's day scenarios if Earth gets so much hotter? The middle ages were hotter even than that, and no doomsday happened then.

 

The ultimate ebnvironmental goal would be to move all humans into space to live in cool rotating space colonies

 

No, we go to space because we're not safe living on one planet in just one solar system. Too many things that can wipe us out in one go.

 

This positive feedback mechanism was predicted by many computer models. This is is so-called natural process, it's natural according to some Bush lackies but when reality bites it might not be so natural.
Have mankind dump a few hundred thousand tonnes of a Greenhouse gas like CO2 into the air, planet warms a little but then thanks to pollution - the Canadian and Russian Tundra start to melt...and WHAMO the Methane(CH4) gets out, it spends a decade in the atmosphere and is 19 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Methane = Global Warming on Steroids
Ok some ask
Why take it handy on water(H20)?

Well although there is much water(H20) in the atmosphere, its recycling process is much faster. Yes our planet has way more Water than Methane but its path going from the glaciers, to the oceans, to the clouds and rain back to the glaciers/seas can be measured in hours while a nasty global warming on steroids gas like CH4 can remain suspended as a nasty IR absorber will stay in action for 10 years!! Moisture or water vapor, the absorber of IR radiation spends only a short time in the atmosphere before being precipitated out. Whereas the life time of Methane in the atmosphere may be longer than 10 years and for CO2 pollution we have to live with it for a century.

Staying with the news

Arctic sea ice thinning at record rate
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMTGPRTKMF_index_0.html

Anyhow as Meredith says it we all enjoy a little global warming, our IR absorbing atmosphere is what stops our planet from being DeadCold.
What gets it wrong is when we set ourselves on a path to overdose on greenhouse gasses from an unnatural man made process. With this kind of direction expect more drought from heatwaves, and maybe say goodbye to Florida and the Gulf Coast as sea levels rise and large parts of Asia, Europe start saying hello to the Ocean.

 

Except for those annoying problems that;

1. the middle ages were several degrees hotter, and no nasty methane came out to destroy the planet.

2. CO2 probably isn't even a greenhouse gas, at least it has NO discernible impact upon temperatures. In fact, all the temperature and CO2 curves (including the one in A Convenient Pile of Bullshit as I'd like to call it) has CO2 rising (and lowering) 8 full CENTURIES AFTER the temperature rise or fall. This is CO2 that comes out of the oceans; the largest reservoir of CO2 in the world. The warmer water, the less CO2 it can dissolve and releases it in the atmosphere.

3. A single volcanic eruption pumps more nasty stuff into the atmosphere than we've managed to pump into the atmosphere in the entire last century. Multiple such volcanic eruptions have occurred - nothing happened.

4. If man-made global warming as a result of our CO2 was occurring, their would be a characteristic temperature gradient going up into the atmosphere. Every measurement made showed this temperature devision does not exist.

5. Take Convenient Bullshit's temperature / CO2 chart, and add in solar intensity chart. You'll find it maps EXACTLY on the temperature. That which defines our temperature is the SUN. And what a shocker - not really - in the past 60 years, the sun has been increasing its output every year, and starting 60 years ago; output an amount of solar energy in 1 year that is greater than the output of solar energy in the 1150 years before that COMBINED.

Now take guess as to why temperatures are rising on the planet.

 

So... Gore is gonna invent Sunshine Credits next?

Man has done alot both good and bad, but if Earth is gonna turn into Venus, it won't be because of man.

 

That's because it was not warmer during the middle ages.

You are confusing what goes on during natural climate change with what is going on now. Normally, the dominant driver of short-term climate change is solar variability (related to orbital changes). The carbon cycle is the dominant long-term control on climate, through changes in carbon burial/weathering and silicate weathering. Carbon is cycled through a number of systems with different residence times - the biosphere (residence time of years to decades), hydrosphere (residence time on the order of thousands of years), and lithosphere (residence times of millions of years). Major perturbations in climate can really only be achieved by perturbing the geosphere system (either through enhanced carbon burial or carbon weathering) because the residence times of the other systems are too short.

However, what is going on now is not natural. As we know from events like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, abrupt releases of large amounts of greenhouse gases can drive climate change. Coincidentally, that is what we are doing know - rapidly releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide.

Of course, this is completely false. Anthropogenic CO2 output is on the order of 100 times greater than volcanic fluxes.

No - the temperature trends are exactly as predicted from increasing greenhouse gases (and in fact opposite from what you would expect if solar radiation was the cause).

Aside from the complete idiocy of claiming that the sun now puts out more energy in 1 year than in the previous 1150 years combined (!), the fact is that solar intensity has been basically flat since 1960. That time (1950s or 1960s) seems to be the tipping point where anthropogenic forcings first overtook natural forcings as the dominant driver of climate (here's an interesting story about the Asian monsoon). Now anthropogenic contributions are approximately 10 times as important as natural variability for the overall trend. The graph below is from this paper (I don't know if it's freely accessible, sorry).



-MEC

 

That's not the right temperature graphs. I've seen graphs where the middle ages temperature are higher.

Nope, all those releases of gases, are SHORT TERM. It's the SUN that is long term. The sun burns hotter, you have higher temperatures. It's that simple. You can go back as far as you want, you map the temperature to solar activity, you find they match perfectly; with a few tiny short term aborations where there's enough dust pumped into the atmosphere from impacts or volcanic eruptions where the sunlight is blocked.

A volcano has the power of 10 thousand Hirsohima nuclear bombs. The amount of polution pumped into the atmosphere of one, makes all our efforts look insects in comparison.

I'm starting to think, global warming experts now start to manufacture date out of thin air. Less than a few years ago, there was nothing of the sort, and most likely, there still isn't today caused by our CO2 emissions.

Yeah, except it's all wrong. For one thing, go look at those papers you'll find NOTHING of it, is about the actual intensity of solar radiation reaching our planet.

And again, either the wrong graphs, convenient choosing of wrong data, or outright manufacturing by "global warming experts". Anyone who actually studies the sun, knows it's been doing things, like firing off ever bigger solar flares, more powerful radiation, and even not adhering to its 11-year-cycle the way it should.

But then, that's not surprising. "Global warming experts" never bother to add the solar intensity in with their useless 8 centuries later CO2 graphs either. And it's obvious why. They have to do that just once, and everyone will stop paying attention to the idiots and stop paying them money to come up with the next ridiculous doomsday scenario. (Especially considering how starkly it then also shows that if CO2 was the culprit for our higher temperatures, temperatures in the past should never have been able to come down BEFORE the CO2 came down, and yet, it did so all the time.)

And the 1150 years is not my claim, it's a scientific fact, and calculated by a scientist. Of course, some scientists would happily ignore it, because it'd interfere with their cash cow, but eh.

 

Pretty charts.

I wonder how accurate the temperature estimates are for the times before man happened along, and then happened to create reasonably accurate measuring devices?

What's that? Plus or minus 4 degrees celsius AT LEAST?