I figured I would just jump right out and say how I feel on this subject. GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT PROVEN. Global Warming, and Man Made Global Warming, and CO2 Based Global Warming are theories. This is not a religion, and those who are skeptical are not heretics. It is not certain, or likely, but plausible.
I thought about linking scientific papers, but I have some 1200 links, and that would be foolhardy. Let us just take some of the basic parts of the Global Warming Orthodoxy.
First that it is warmer now than EVER before. By now, almost everyone has seen the hockey stick from Al Gore’s film. What many do not know is that was statistically proven flawed more than a year before Al Gore filmed it. It was warmer in 1000AD than it is now, and was warmer for several hundred years. It was FAR warmer in the Holocene period around 4000BC, for almost a millennia. I’m sure it was all the automobiles and industrialization the Babylonians did that caused that.
More over, neither time did CO2 cause it. In fact the only time in that period when CO2 was spiking up was near the peak and during the fall in temperatures, past the peak so to speak. That leads me to talk about CO2 and how it effects global warming.
CO2 is the single largest component that allows plants to grow. There have been MANY studies that show more CO2 in the air allows plants to grow faster, and stronger (Berkley, and University of Florida were reports most directly relating CO2 in the air to plant growth). CO2 is only 0.03811% of the atmosphere today. If you look at it in the geologically context it has been more than twice what it is now, and more. More over, Water vapor is on average about 1% of the atmosphere, and is 3x better radiator of solar energy. So here you have something that is 25x more common in the atmosphere, and 3x stronger at releasing solar energy in the form of heat. A 1% change in water vapor is equal to a 75% spike in CO2.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it. So what causes water vapor to fluctuate in the atmosphere? Cosmic rays, and the solar wind. So a single sunspot can equate many hundreds of years of total earth CO2 output. Is my SUV really all that bad?
That leads to another question. If CO2 isn’t even all that bad, how bad is human caused CO2 (all the planes, trains, cars, and power plants combined)? Well the oceans produce somewhere between 20x and 50x as much as humans on any given year, and for example animal droppings in New Zealand produce more than the human populations of New Zealand and Australia combined.
So why are people so hip on CO2? Today it has to do with being anti-capitalisms and Anti-West. Who produces the most atmospheric CO2? The USA. Side effect of this is preventing much of the developing world, specifically Africa from developing. Africa has oil and coal, but the UN is politically preventing them from exploiting this fully. Also in the middle east where oil is abundant they use it as an excuse to pursue Nuclear Power and Weapons. The only reason they want Nuclear Power is to produce weapons but CO2 emissions are a perfect cover and excuse. South America are the only ones smiling at the issue since they spent 14 years building, and are now upgrading the worlds largest hydrodynamic power plant. It produces All the power needed for Argentina, Paraguay, and most of Brazil. This is a clean, alternative and has cleared most of the pollution around Sao Paulo and Rio. Combine that with their use of Ethanol and Brazil is leading the world in many clean fuel areas, and little or no dependence on fossil fuels.
I’m all for removing our dependence on fossil fuels, and I don’t just mean Ethanol. I mean Hydrogen or some form of Fusion (there are many theories but no one has yet spent the money needed to research them properly.). I think the United States needs to begin a Manhattan Project style research project for commercial fusion power. That would end the whole debate. Someone would still say we are polluting the atmosphere with Oxygen or something tho.
Anyway, that is just a small part of how I feel on the subject. Basically Al Gore is nuts, and needs to give back the Nobel Prize because he is wrong.
4 comments:
Jon,
We are going to do a Manhattan style fusion effort if this stuff turns out to be possible. Read "Bussard Fusion update" to get the latest news.
Leave an comment at any of the below posts if you want answers to any questions. I'll do my best to answer.
Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
It has been funded:
Bussard Fusion Reactor Funded
Bussard Fusion Update
The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and abundant Boron 11 which does not.
The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.
If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame. A much better investment than CO2 sequestration.
BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.
The Japanese and Australians also have programs.
If you want to get deeper into the technology visit:
IEC Fusion Technology blog
Start with the sidebar which has links to tutorials and other stuff.
I haven't really looked into it, but sounds promising. I'll certainly favorite some of those sites.
i understand what you are saying, but in science a theory is quite different than what one would think of it as being in everyday life...
in science a theory is a combination of facts, laws, and hypothesises, now you are going to say "those can change" and that is true those CAN change but a theory is at the "top of the food chain" in scientific organization. Meaning that a theory has such overwhelming evidence that they can be sure enough in its validity to call it a theory. They have PROVEN that carbon traps energy inside the atmosphere, they have PROVEN that heat is a form of energy. they have PROVEN that temperatures are rising, so people debate why, well, since we have PROVEN that carbon12 traps energy and we also know the massive amounts of carbon dioxide that humans are producing so we can infer that we are causing global warming.
i think that global warming might be a natural occurrence as well, but even if it is it is bad for us, since when has something being natural stopped us from "fixing" it? even if it is natural there is no question that we are speeding it up.
But Global Warming is not a theory. It is a hypothesis. It remains to be tested.
So far the warmists have not corrected their estimate of CO2 induced warming for the known effects of the PDO and other ocean currents. Currents that have been known since 1997. One model that was adjusted (parameters not yet made public) shows cooling until 2015 or 2020.
And in any case - because climate systems and the computer models themselves are chaotic no prediction is worth anything. We don't know all the interactions and we do not know the initial conditions well enough.
I discuss chaos and climate at: Strange Attractors
Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been funded by Obama?
Post a Comment