Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Thoughts on Climate Change. Anyone Willing to Give Opinion?

The increase in CO2 does have some effect on climate, but it's not clear how much and maybe not even the direction. It's also unknown if the change is harmful or beneficial for the majority of humankind. Increased CO2 levels may cause rising sea levels and more weather extremes, but may also make vast areas of North America, Europe and Asia arable and combined with the beneficial effects of CO2 on most plants, global food production could soar.

The real problem of climate change is political in that there will be winners and losers in the climate change lotto. The losers could be the U.S. in which case the world would say it was our own fault, but if the losers are mostly undeveloped nations then there will be growing calls for the developed world to pay damages.

The scientific unknowns open the door for various groups to use the climate change issue as a means of promoting their own views and agenda. Extreme environmentalism is a theology that uses what some term "junk science" to fight against human development by targeting its Achilles heel, which is energy production. Thus they push for CO2 reduction, but also are in opposition to nuclear energy, hydroelectric power, wind farms, solar farms in the desert, oil drilling, oil pipelines, and even the increased production of clean burning NG through hydraulic fracturing. The idea is to starve modern civilization of energy to force it to comply with their idea of how humankind should live.

At the same time industry and government are using the climate change issue to promote things like biofuels, alternative fuels for cars, high efficiency lighting, super insulated windows, stricter building codes, and energy saving appliances. Others, such as Al Gore, see an opportunity to make millions in the carbon cap and trade market.

Any science that fills in the unknowns, counters or even weakens main stream climate change orthodoxy is dissuaded through funding and publishing hurdles. Climate science is no longer seeking the truth, and in fact, it's afraid of the truth.

First of all you have to look at what the word "change" means. If we define it by a narrow window of 30 years, we can see that there have been all sorts of differences in weather patterns that we got used to as a kid.

I remember seeing snow on the ground in November that wouldn't leave until spring thaw in April. My norm as a kid was snow on the ground all winter, anything different was change. Then I realized I was using a few years as kid to be my base on which I judged what differences there were as I grew up, noticing "change".

My youth is an extremely short time to compare against what I have seen as I grew older, recognizing the need to have a broader sample to truly distinguish "change" from fluctuating patterns I had witnessed as I grew older.

Expanding that window to hundreds of years will show changes occurring in all sorts of ways that we don't recognize in a lifetime. Expand that to thousands of years and we again find evidence of climatic changes the caused drastic differences in what lived and died.

I also believe we as a scientific community have only had the ability to keep precise records of weather and changes within weather patterns for such an insignificant time, that it is hard to associate a catastrophic end to us and our environment as we are only witnessing a phenomenon that has cycled over and over for tens of thousands of years...

There are merchants of doubt on one side and merchants of fear on the other. The truth about climate change lays somewhere in the middle of both extremes.

In competing views of science, the ability to make the best prediction wins.

I was attempting to give Enrique something they could use. I didn't think denying climate change outright would be a good strategy for a college paper. Beyond the science are the ethics issues of a group using science to push its theology, and of science being afraid of the truth.

The Ethics are of greater import than the "change". The reason the religion of environmentalism has used this issue is that there's ONE society that will voluntarily be subject to self-imposed limiting of its power, on "moral" grounds. That's the USA. The science isn't the reason this got & became big- the opportunity to get the USA to voluntarily become weaker is the reason. The reason attention keeps being given to interpretation of the science is to keep attention OFF the ethical question, so it'll remain useful. This whole deal is some of the best recent evidence that man is a critter subject to
spiritual/intellectual/moral influences, and that does NOT change.

This planet has been through climate change for milenia.
We don't cause it, and we can't fix it

The only human-caused part of global warming is from the heated arguments about global warming.

If you do a bit of searching, you'll find that the polar ice caps on Mars have diminished in recent years. Apparently our excess CO2 has drifted clear out there.

Links to follow:

Mismatch between model and reality for radiation balance.

Scroll down to see graph of global temperature, 4500 years.

Another long term temperature graph.

Ah so, however, you make one sright...r will dissolve more CO2 than warm will.

debunking the hockey stick graph

Scroll down to graph. CO2 does not...oday's CO2 level is extraordinarily low.

global warming has stalled

That's about all I could come up with quickly. One that I failed to find is a 2000 year record of temperature that corresponds with what we know happened: Prosperous farms in Greenland around 1000 a.d., the River Thames freezing over in the Little Ice Age, etc.

Much of the data on the web was put there by people who make their living predicting climate disaster. If there is no global warming, their rice bowl is broken. So they selectively edit what we see, and they apply inappropriate statistical techniques. You really have to read the material closely to see what is legit and what is scareware.

In 50 years, people will regard our period of global warming panic as a huge mass hysteria, fomented by dishonest politicians who paid scientists to prostitute themselves and feed the hysteria.

What do you want to hear? I can tell you I'm glad it's 8 degrees of Fahrenheit warmer this morning than the last three morings, a good thing since this is Spring break for our kids and we hoped to bring them from the coast over to the Yukon, see some of the Iditarod mushers, etc. But we still have 50 degrees of frost (which is better than 58 degrees ) So we'll probably ride in the daylight anyway. I haven't seen as much stable ice on the sea as we have this year, for quite a few years. The Earth doesn't seem worried. We won't be here forever and it'll still turn after we are gone. We don't change the rules even by thinking we aren't playing by them.

I forgot to mention, beer and soda consumption are the cause of excess global climate change.......they 'create' too much CO2.

Beer and soda are excellent sources of carbonation in your diet.

Give them time; the 'gooders' will have burping banned...

Kique, I think the most interesting paper you could write would be one analyzing the reflexive, knee-jerk reactions from both sides of the debate. That's what is most interesting to me... or you could show that if indeed we have changed the climate via CO2, it's a done deal. There's no practical way to sequester what we've put out, nor will we (humanity) be cutting emissions. To the contrary.

Either approach might make your prof's head explode, though.

Do us a favor Jeff O and sequester your CO2 for us. After all, its the right thing to do.

Controversial opinion to voice here, but I do believe that human presence on the planet does have an effect on the climate.

From the web site "Population Growth over Human History" (see: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html#Past ) I've copied "The human population growth of the last century has been truly phenomenal. It required only 40 years after 1950 for the population to double from 2.5 billion to 5 billion. This doubling time is less than the average human lifetime. The world population passed 6 billion just before the end of the 20th century. Present estimates are for the population to reach 8-12 billion before the end of the 21st century. During each lecture hour, more than 10,000 new people enter the world, a rate of ~3 per second!

The existence of 7 billion (and growing), each exhaling CO2 and defecating and producing garbage must have an effect of the climate. These multitudes are driving cars and using energy at prodigious rates. We know that CO2 does increase warming and there is just so much that the earth and its atmosphere can absorb.

I am not saying that this is the only cause, but it certainly contributes.

I don't know how anyone can consider themselves "green" and still be against CO2. CO2 has a wonderful stimulative effect on plant growth. Some greenhouses use it for exactly that effect.

Here's one other interesting link.

It's pretty well understood that water vapor is by far the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect, accounting for 95-97% of the total in our atmosphere. But you see a lot of tables listing CO2 as the top contributor. Why? Well, you can't do anything about water vapor... the stuff is always coming off the top of the oceans, lakes, and rivers. So, since it's fairly constant, and since we can't do anything about it, some workers have taken it off the top of the chart, and put it in a footnote that says "excluding water vapor". Those charts get copied and pasted, and the footnote either carelessly or on purpose vanishes. So you get a plethora of tables listing CO2 as the main greenhouse gas. It's not. It's not even close. Its contribution is very minor. In research terms, it's a woosle. (Look up the story in Winnie the Pooh.) It has been repeated so often that it is an established part of the lore, but it sprang into being without substantiation and became established by numerous repetitions. 16,123 repetitions make a truth.

Follow this link to some opening polar ice cap data.
http://www.real-science.com/greenland-alaska-ice-1979

Given the fact that there are climate cycles, it makes sense that at any given time we are either heading towards or coming out of an ice age, a warming cycle, etc. My Suburban is not the cause. Triton has warmed. Mars has warmed. Pluto has warmed.Many other bodies have warmed. Seems to me that orbits and Sun cycles would be a logical place to begin.

Check out Lord Monckton on the subject.

Here's a good start.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/10/moncktons-schenectady-showdown/