Global warming basics.

[Subduction Zone]

Soooo...how much has the globe warmed since Al Gore started making millions of dollars promoting this nonsense?





Sooo...how much has the troposphere warmed up since Al Gore started making millions promoting this nonsense?

Please, this thread was inspired by your ignorance. I am not an Al Gore fan either. You as much as admit that you are wrong with bogus ad homs.

 

[Valjean]

Isn't it true global warming causes an ice age? Most people will survive global warming but most people don't survive an ice age. Can you speak to this point please?

I must be missing something.
How does warming cause an ice age? Would you explain your thinking on this?

Most don't survive an ice age? I think you've got that backwards. The challenges of the recent glacial periods made our species -- and a couple of others.
Without the 'ice age' we'd still be naked apes.

Not that I know of. In fact we still are in an ice age. Global warming may end it. That would mean no more Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets and massive sea level rise. But that would take hundreds of years. We won't be around for that but our great great grandchildren might see it.

I think the ice sheets are disappearing a lot faster than this. Every time the data's reassessed the old predictions are found to be too conservative and needing readjustment.

 

[BSM1]

Please, this thread was inspired by your ignorance. I am not an Al Gore fan either. You as much as admit that you are wrong with bogus ad homs.

Can't answer the question, can you? Global warming my backside. Prove it!

 

[Valjean]

I don't understand your skepticism, BSM. Why do you doubt the data, observations, and physics?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Can't answer the question, can you? Global warming my backside. Prove it!

They were stupid questions. Surely you can do better than that.

Go back to the start of the thread and read up on the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. There is nothing at all controversial there. Or are you the same as the creationists? Science scares them too.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I don't understand your skepticism, BSM. Why do you doubt the data, observations, and physics?

I understand somewhat. I could not stand Al Gore either. I still don't like him. But hating someone is a very poor reason to oppose a scientific idea. I got over my dislike of Al Goer enough to see that he was right as far as AGW goes.

 

[Misunderstood]

Thank you very much. To understand it one must first understand the Greenhouse Effect, as I already mentioned. And to understand that it is best to understand the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.

To keep it really simple, if one places an object in a vacuum and exposes it to energy that object will heat up. That is obvious. The question is how much? And the Stefan-Boltzmann Law is an attempt to explain how much an object heats up or loses heat in a vacuum. The Earth is after all just a large object in space, or a vacuum. It receives energy from the Sun. What we are concerned with is the average temperature. The Moon's temperature varies widely as it rotates since it rotates slowly and it is in a pure vacuum so its daylight side gets straight undiluted sunlight and its night side has nothing to keep the energy in.

Before I get too far here is a link to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law:

Stefan–Boltzmann law - Wikipedia

In its most basic form it deals with an ideal black body. An object that absorbs all energy that hits it and is the same temperature everywhere. Physics quite often simplifies problems by dealing with the ideal first.

The energy hitting the Earth is easy to calculate. I am not going to copy and past, but it is in the linked article. That starts here:

Stefan–Boltzmann law - Wikipedia

If the Earth was a perfect black body its temperature would be about 6 C. But the Earth is not a perfect black body. One can adjust the Stefan Boltzmann Law to take that into account by adding a factor for the albedo, the amount of energy reflected back out to space without being absorbed. Using that the average temperature of the Earth is -18 C. Most people are quite aware that the Earth is not that cold. Right now it is about 14.6 C or 32 degrees Celsius warmer than that predicted by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. Clearly something is wrong.

Any questions before we go on?

Can we go on?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Can we go on?

Okay, so we know that even without AGW that the Earth is warmer than one would predict with just the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. Something is keeping heat in. And that "something" would be greenhouse gases. The way they work is that greenhouse gases are transparent to some wavelengths of light but opaque to others. Greenhouse gases tend to be transparent to visible light, but opaque to infrared light. The Sun's energy output peaks in the visible spectrum. Greenhouse gases tend to be transparent to that part of the spectrum. The light that is not reflected from the surface of the Earth is absorbed and later reradiated at a much lower frequency. In the infrared part of the spectrum. That is the energy that is trapped by greenhouse gases. Energy gets in but it can't get out. As a result temperature goes up. Here is a simple lab experiment that demonstrates the infrared absorbing tendency of CO2:

Going to bed soon. But hopefully this explains how CO2 can trap heat.

 

[Jumi]

Look. Nobody actually believes the climate can't, or isn't, changing.

Actually there have been some people who've said that. I actually knew one of them, died of old age recently.

If Al gore was correct back in the 1990's, then the oceans should probably have boiled off the planet by now....

Al Gore is a politician. If what politicians predict is a criteria for something being right, then it's hard to ever be right.

 

[Jumi]

Apologies for derailing the thread, but @Regiomontanus you're a Christian and a socialist?
That's not something you see everyday.
Most Christians vehemently oppose Socialism.
What a weirdo!

It's not that rare in some places of the world.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

I must be missing something.
How does warming cause an ice age? Would you explain your thinking on this?

Most don't survive an ice age? I think you've got that backwards. The challenges of the recent glacial periods made our species -- and a couple of others.
Without the 'ice age' we'd still be naked apes.
I think the ice sheets are disappearing a lot faster than this. Every time the data's reassessed the old predictions are found to be too conservative and needing readjustment.

There was a fringe theory in the (iirc) '70s that a major decrease in global average temperature was imminent. It never gained any traction with climatologists, but, as fringe theories sometimes do, it gained something of a foothold in the media and popular consciousness. ~40 years later, "a new Ice Age" kinda gets conflated with the whole climate change issue.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

I don't understand your skepticism, BSM. Why do you doubt the data, observations, and physics?

Ideology dictates reality for some people.

 

[stvdv]

I see many people denying anthropogenic global warming

Some people deny God, others deny global warming. I think it's a human thing to deny. Some people are "just in denial".

About global warming I do not know. But about Holland warming I know. At least 2 degrees UP since the last 20 years
And I love this "Holland warming". I am quite skinny and these extra 2 degrees I welcome very much. No complaining
Less rainy days, but more intense. Snow and ice almost finished here. No snakes/sharks/spiders/Hurricanes, so here
it's very relaxed living. Recently we do have quite a lot of immigrants, that is our challenge. Nature is easy on us so far

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

Some people deny God, others deny global warming. I think it's a human thing to deny. Some people are "just in denial".

About global warming I do not know. But about Holland warming I know. At least 2 degrees UP since the last 20 years
And I love this "Holland warming". I am quite skinny and these extra 2 degrees I welcome very much. No complaining
Less rainy days, but more intense. Snow and ice almost finished here. No snakes/sharks/spiders/Hurricanes, so here
it's very relaxed living. Recently we do have quite a lot of immigrants, that is our challenge. Nature is easy on us so far

Climate change is going to mean more immigrants for you.

 

[DanishCrow]

Apologies for derailing the thread, but @Regiomontanus you're a Christian and a socialist?
That's not something you see everyday.
Most Christians vehemently oppose Socialism.
What a weirdo!

You must be American.

Look up Levellers, anabaptists, catholic worker movement, Godwin, Tolstoy etc. etc. etc.

 

[stvdv]

Climate change is going to mean more immigrants for you.

The water is rising in Holland. They better take swimming lessons before coming here

No, the immigrants are only coming here because F.Timmermans decided that Europe needs to become multi-racial
and he decided that in the coming years 60 million are invited to come to Europe (so population increase of ca. 20%)
That is for real. Climate change will not change that. I hope common sense will be put in his mind soon.

 

[exchemist]

That's just a wee bit presumptuous.


Depends. Are you actually interested in explaining and answering questions in detail? Or are you simply promoting environmentalism as a religion?


You're not off to a good start if you want to seriously give answers. What Al Gore said is quite on record. And I would think a reasonable person should be able to tell the difference between what he said and a flippant comment in extrapolation of what he said.


I have ALWAYS been in favor of the discovery of cleaner and more efficient sources of energy. The problem is: Aimless taxation is the government norm. And it's being promoted by the environmental groups at the expense of the industries that are best qualified to perform that very same research and development.

This thread is supposed to be about the science behind the climate change hypothesis, not about taxation. The fact that you start on taxation, before any discussion of science has taken place, shows you have a political rather than a scientific agenda.

This seems to be typical of those who attack climate change: they start with a political stance and then try to massage the science to fit their political position.

If you intend to argue with integrity you should be prepared to listen to the science first. Then by all means point to what, about the science, you think is faulty or open to question and why.

The discussion of policy responses is another question and not the subject of this thread.

 

[Mindmaster]

I don't understand your skepticism, BSM. Why do you doubt the data, observations, and physics?

I don't doubt that spewing carbon into the air is less than idea, but I also am against it to some degree because it's exceptionally difficult to remove from the air. It is, however, less than ten percent of the greenhouse gases and human output is just a fraction of that. If we were going for solutions to this we'd have to switch off all fossil fuel and murder all/most cows. (They emit ridiculous quantities of these gases as all ruminating livestock do.)

My concern isn't in a global shift of temp a few degrees higher, that'd have no drastic non-survivable effect. My concern is that the oil and coal supply are finite and the cost scale will inflate to astronomical country-destroying proportions as time goes on. Right now, we have time to deal with this, but even something as simple as going all electric on vehicles and switching to clean power takes over 25 years to take effect. Most vehicles last 20 years in the wild, so there is a significant lag between implementation and the desired goal.

 

[Regiomontanus]

Soooo...how much has the globe warmed since Al Gore started making millions of dollars promoting this nonsense?





Sooo...how much has the troposphere warmed up since Al Gore started making millions promoting this nonsense?

Hello. I would agree that Gore's lifestyle does not always align with his professed concerns. Of course we are all hypocrites in some way, to some degree. But the world would be a better place today, I think, if the US Supreme Court did not install GWB as President.

Anyway, the internet is a very useful way of finding out stuff:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2016-07/temperaturefigure2-2016.png


By the way, as for the money made from his movie (Wikip):

Al Gore has stated, "Tipper and I are devoting 100 percent of the profits from the book and the movie to a new bipartisan educational campaign to further spread the message about global warming." Paramount Classics is committing 5% of their domestic theatrical gross for the film to a new bipartisan climate action group, Alliance for Climate Protection, dedicated to awareness and grassroots organizing.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

The water is rising in Holland. They better take swimming lessons before coming here

No, the immigrants are only coming here because F.Timmermans decided that Europe needs to become multi-racial
and he decided that in the coming years 60 million are invited to come to Europe (so population increase of ca. 20%)
That is for real. Climate change will not change that. I hope common sense will be put in his mind soon.

They're coming there because their own countries are becoming less livable. If you don't like the current trickle, just wait until the floodgates open.