[dba-Tech] OT: Global Warming

Where do I start?

On 28 Jul 2012 at 11:26, Dan Waters wrote:

> Sorry Stuart - I have a high IQ and know the difference between a periodic
> event like the short term melting of ice across Greenland, and the
> continuous increase in earth's average temperature caused by an increase in
> CO2 due to human activities.  Global warming due to our activities is very
> real.  

AFAIK there is  NO proof that recent increases in temperature were cause by "an increase in 
CO2 due to human activities".   Please cite your references. 

There has been no increase in "earth's average temperature for the last 15 years.

> 
> I remember my father, a professor of fisheries and wildlife at the U of
> Minnesota, telling our family 40 years ago about global warming.  He and his
> colleagues had begun to observe unexpected changes in the trends of their
> data, or unexpected variation.  At the time, they knew what the cause was
> but no one then was collecting data to prove it.  Today, we have an
> overwhelming amount of data.  

40 years ago the most respected climatologists where warning of a coming ice age because 
temperatures had been declining for 20 years.

Look at the trend from 1945 to 1975 here: 
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850

> 
> Rapid global warming has happened in earth's history before.  Last year
> National Geographic published an article about an event that happened about
> 150M years ago where the sea levels rose over 200 feet.  The geologists who
> wrote the story were able to determine that it was caused by a release of
> CO2 into the atmosphere equal to the amount CO2 being released by all the
> fossil fuel that we know exists. We have currently burned about 10% of all
> the fossil fuel we know about.  It took about 150,000 years for the excess
> CO2 to be absorbed back into the earth and out of the atmosphere.  The story
> is titled 'World Without Ice'.

You must be  talking about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum  - that was 50, not 150 
million years ago.  

During that event, temperatures rose by about 1 degree C every 3000 years over a 20,000 
year period.   i.e. much less than the recent rate during the recovery from the  the Little Ice 
Age over the last 150 years.

There is also a reason why the climate at the end of that epsiode is generally known as the  
"Early Eocene Climatic Optimum"  - you might like to consider the meaning of that last word.
.

> 
> I don't think that geologists who publish well-researched articles in
> National Geographic would be called 'alarmist'.
> 

A matter of opinion.  NG is well known for publishing alarmist GW articles, going right back to 
it's puffery about An Inconvenient Truth 


> It's also important to remember that global warming is global, not local.
> All meteorologists today will say that local weather will change, but they
> don't know how.  The key measure for global warming is earth average
> temperature.  Compared to what we've been able to determine back hundreds of
> thousands of years, earth's average temperature today is absolutely
> skyrocketing.
> 

Over the last several hundred thousand years, the earth has gone through a servies of  
roughly 100 year long ice ages interspersed by shorter interglacials. We are living towards 
the end of the most recent interglacial - the Holocene.  Temperatures now are on below the 
average for the Holocene and there have been many occassions in the past when the 1.5 
degree rise over the last 150 years has been dwarfed - see for instance the rate of change 
during the Younger Dryas 15000 years ago.


> So Stuart - stand by.
> 

I'm standing by  - 
with warm clothes nearby waiting for the coming temperature decline :-)

-- 
Stuart