Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mathematical Musings on Global Warming

COSteve: Very good post, "our impact may be as little as 4% of the change" "China and India together make up 34% of the Global CO2" "the US share is next at 15%". That leaves 51% to countries that probably along with China and India will pick up the slack if we could cut our 15% emissions to zero. All the while as you stated we will "cripple the world's economies and cause the death of millions of the poor and impoverished". Something needs to be done about over population but I hope starvation and disease isn't the solution, which more and more seems to be the plan. And I believe the deaths would be billions not millions.

ABSOLUTELY! Another unintended consequence came from the spotted owl debacle a couple of decades ago that crippled the lumber industry in this country by making it illegal to harvest trees from old-growth forests - which were thought to be critical to the survival of this bird.

As a result, other, less developed countries jumped into clearcutting to take advantage of the sharp increase in the price of lumber, destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of natural forests. A study by the US Forest Service estimates that more than 1,000 species went extinct as a result of trying to protect one bird - that was later shown to NOT need old-growth timber to survive!

Absolutely right. You can't make a model of the future without knowing exactly where you're starting from, and we just don't have precise information for large areas of the ocean (especially for deep water temperatures where much of the earth's warmth is stored) or at many remote land areas (where atmospheric scientists simply GUESS what conditions are, based on surrounding data often hundreds of miles away), much less measurements for every point in the atmosphere in 3 dimensions across the globe at one given time.

But there are a couple of other reasons, too. One is that the calculations themselves are immensely complicated and can't help but getting some answers wrong to some degree, introducing chaos theory to the whole mess.

The second is that weather - and climate - is immensely more complicated than any mathematical equation can adequately represent except in a very crude form. Think of this statement: “If my barrel is straight, I should be able to fire a 120 grain bullet at 2,950 fps that will hit exactly HERE at 100 yards.”

We could start a very, very long thread on all the variables that could cause a bullet to NOT hit that exact spot at any given distance. How much more complex is climate?

Another is that water vapor variability is not part of any equation in any current climate model, and it is hundreds of times more influential as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.

Finally, there are far more influences on climate than are included in any climate model. The wobble of the earth as it rotates (as has been mentioned in another post), how cosmic rays ionize our upper atmosphere, increasing or decreasing high clouds that block incoming sunlight, variations in the amount of the sun’s radiation reaching the earth and changes in the direction and strength of ocean currents are all important influences on climate and are routinely ignored because they are too difficult to include in any mathematical model.

Yes, of course carbon dioxide levels influence temperatures. But then you can also accurately say that you are contributing to global warming every time you light a match. The REAL questions are, how much effect does it have, is that effect good or bad, how much will it cost to make a change, can I reverse the change if I find it is harmful in some unexpected way and is it worth it?

These questions have never been seriously addressed.

You fellows can debate the minutiae of why, but regardless of the cause there is incontrovertible fact that gives pause. Sea levels are rising and have been doing so for quite some time. The records I am aware of date back to around 1930. It is slow of course and at the end of the day will not precipitate abrupt catastrophe. It is the result of rising temps in the oceans which cause expansion of the mass of water that surrounds us. I'll leave it to you to debate the why, it does not present as settled science to my eye. The only constant in this universe is change and we are experiencing some of that.

Al Gore is an idiot. -Fact-
There was a time long past when the Florida peninsula was several hundred feet below sea level. -Fact-

Have fun,

DD

Interesting point about where the earth's heat is stored. So, what percentage of the earth's mass is the atmosphere itself? I' could look it up, but I don't care what the figure would be...I just know it's probably pretty damned insignificant. But then I start to think about just how much heat is transferred back and forth between the atmosphere and the rest of the planet. And from that point, I can only say to myself "I wonder WTH really is going on."

The Mississippi river sends 550 metric tons of silt into the gulf, by itself.

Put a buncha mud in the bottom of the ocean, guess what, the water rises!

Oh, the horror.

Not even countin undersea volcano formation, uplift from tectonics, etc.

It's the voodoo effect.

Simple minds attribute whatever observed condition exists to their curse of choice.

Is that a per/day figure?

This^^^, mostly.

More co2 begats more veggies to produced more o2. God figured things out pretty well, and Jupiter sucks in most meteors.

Who took the mud off the bottom to allow for the sea level to recede back before Ingwe was born?

Good catch on that.

Per year.

While on a ferry from Anacortes, Wa to see friends on Orcas Island, we read up on the geology of the Puget Sound area. 10,000 years ago (not long in geologic time) Seattle was under 3,000 feet of ice. It must of warmed up a bit from then.

It's established science at this point, in 2018 it's not even a debate.

https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Horseshit. Why did IPCC falsify data? This was exposed YEARS ago, and the "settled science" claim was debunked then. Nothing but socialist politics.

This.

Rome fell during a period of global cooling.

Make that 550 MILLION metric tons, annually, and you've got it.

550 Metric tons isn't even a train load.

What is really, really interesting is this graph of CO2 over (geological) history.

As you can see, over the history of life on earth, CO2 has been steadily decreasing. This is primarily caused by sequestration of CO2 by crustaceans (think the white cliffs of Dover; all that chalk was made by little shellfish).

Objectively, we were coming pretty close to the point where there was not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to support plant life -- a few million years, perhaps, and in geological time, that was not very much time at all!

Without the intervention of man and the release of fossil carbon, plant life on earth might have come to a dramatic halt....

Well, fcked that one up twice.

Not my day.

Good catch.

Want to reduce climate change then reduce the population.

1) The hole in the ozone layer is a vent. It opens larger when the earth warms, and shrinks when the earth cools.
2) If CO2 was so bad for the environment, why do folks pump it into greenhouses?
3) Climate is cyclical in nature.
4) As to rising sea levels, the entire planet was at one time covered in water.
5) As to melting ice causing sea level rise, try this experiment. Fill a glass with ice. Then fill it with water. Watch as the ice melts. Did this cause the water level in the glass to rise?

Al Gore and others invented a new religion to try and scam dumbazzes out of a lot of money.

The ice is only floating on the water on the Artic. On Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic the ice is on land, and the run off most definitely raises the sea level.

Interestingly enough, as the ice melts, the LAND that had been covered with ice actually RISES. Many parts of North America and Northern Europe are still rising, since ice has been melted off rather recently.

Florida,however, is still fIIcked.