Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

Hardly. Big cat mostly, perhaps big dog sometimes. In my usual haunts the regulars are just as likely as not to wipe the floor with me unless I stick to topics I really know about. And sometimes even then.

Energy balance is indeed the correct way to look at it.

The claim that the increase in temperature and overall energy is nowhere to be seen is incorrect. The average temperature of oceans has been rising. Coral die-offs are the primary evidence for this but not the only things. The northern ice caps melting is more. That we are seeing such apparently small increases in the ocean temperatures may seem no cause for concern, but this is a deceptive and dangerous notion.

The mass of the planet's oceans is several hundred orders of magnitude more than the mass of the atmosphere. The atmosphere has been warming up by a few degrees. The first ten feet of water in the oceans weighs the same as the atmosphere. There are roughly 300 times 10 feet in one kilometer, and most oceans are several kilometers deep. The fact that we are seeing measurable increase in their temperature should be a pretty damned scary statistic. There's a lot of mass, so it can absorb a lot of energy, but it also means that restoring the energy balance to the previous norms will also be slower and far more difficult.

I'd love to continue this further, but I have to go get some sleep. Night...

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

Your link says nothing about warmer weather being 'worse', only that rapid change is potentially bad. Hardly the case you are representing.

Further your data is incomplete, it ignores 2007 and 2008.

You are indeed repeating the same thing quite a bit, but it's not providing the answers you seem to think it is, which is why I continue to pose the questions.

"
Grist: it's gloom and doom with a sense of humor. So laugh now -- or the planet gets it."

Err... so this is actually a rather biased site, and you are quoting to us from blogs.

Now there's nothing de facto wrong with that, but it should be put in the open.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

-edi

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=88520025

Your comments please?

It is as I have claimed. The 'heat' is missing from the equation.

Well unless you accept the fact that its really all the suns fault and stop persisting with the notion that the unproven correlation of temperature to CO2 is meaningful. Unless it's to note that CO2 concentrations LAG temperature as has also been shown in the literature.

By the way... warmer ocean also means greater CO2 sink...

The planet is really quite remarkable at the ways it can seemingly balance itself (not that I'm a Gaiaian)

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

licker, I guess maybe you missed my last post in the flurry that followed it, but I'd really be honestly interested to hear - what, in your opinion, is the reason that so many scientists (certainly the enormous majority, but if that's in dispute let's just say really a lot) are concerned about global warming and think that taking action would be helpful. I'm just interested to know if you think they're all dumb, or they're part of a conspiracy, or they're over-excitable, or what.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

Anyone remember Lord_Bob and his monkey PD? I think he was a Ferrous Cranus.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

Did you even read the article, or did you just jump on its title line and ignore the rest. Do you even understand how science works?

It's pretty clear that the scientists are working within the paradigm of global warming. The robots provide data that tests the paradigm and allows it to be further refined. nothing the robots said conclusively leaned one way or the other, in fact, in the light of other data, their reports seem very confusing. This either means they are faulty, the methodology of their deployment and recording is incomplete, or the theory of global warming needs to be further nuanced and additional variables accounted for.

While the theory is available to be nuanced, the rote "warming of the sun" is an irrelevant variable because it presumably effects all other variables, assuming its even true. Further, it smacks of a deus ex machina that just solves all problems, and forecloses the need for any further science (which is basically your tactic here). But let's take it seriously for a moment.

Here the oceans are rising, the air is getting warmer, but for some reason the oceans are cooling slightly. Yet you would eagerly jump on a theory that says "the sun is getting warmer" and then switch to a "the oceans are getting cooler" without realizing the salient inconsistency between the two. It is so entirely clear you only select data that supports your viewpoint, even when the bricolage of data you select contradicts itself. internal consistency of your data means nothing to you, only that each individual piece when taken alone seems to contradict GW. You've already decided a priori what you want to see, and you only look for data that supports it. Of course, this data inevitably contradicts itself.

Basically what you suggest is...

...lets just stop doing science and accept this one very marginal theory as true because it supports my viewpoints the best. It would be akin to the church telling Galileo to stop looking through his telescope and trying to solve eternal mysteries because he might disprove the Ptolemiac Astronomy system the church favored. Except in this instance the theory you're suggesting is already marginal.

so no scientists, don't continue investigating the mystery the robots posed, or trying to solve the problems they raised. just stop looking through your telescopes and trying to understand the world around you. we already have a theory that best supports those with power and money. anything else is just wrong. wag the dog.

Licker seems to lack the reflexivity to understand the game he is a pawn of.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

Holy Crap! Louisiana is Quebec, I never knew that. No wonder it's fun there. Besides the hurricanes, I mean. Are there Louisiana separatists too?

And was there really some sort of snowball lawsuit in the news or something? I'm slightly news (and lawsuit) deprived over here.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

I cannot provide a link. However, a place to start would be Gore's movie. Many of the scientist quoted as supporting the theory of global warming have recanted.

The pedigree's of the people opposing global warming is significant. The director of NOAA atmospherics studies, Dr Gray of Colorado State, if I recall.

There have been several documentaries on both sides of the issue. One of these documentaries amassed a contrarian point of view to show that scientific opinion was hardly monolithic.

To say that it is categorical fact that CO2 emissions cause global warming, is frankly, ridiculous. To my knowledge, the theory hasn't even been tested; nor is it readily apparent how to test it.

But it doesn't matter, at least to me. Gravity is a theory. It fights the observable facts better than any other theory.

The theory of global warming gives suggests avenues to attack. Should these avenues not work, then the theory of warming caused by man made actions (notably co2 emissions) will be revisited. Or, if global temperatures start to fall.

However, people that propose CO2 warming like a religion scare me. We have thousands of years of history. I would bet that our present climate is WELL within statistical variance.

Hell, our planet has both been a hell hole - and ice covered - several times, in the not too distant (geologically speaking past).

But wouldn't be willing to take no action against global warming either.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

Can we shut up about 2007 and 2008 or "blah de blah, I want to look for an incrdibly short period of time, and say, THERE, it wasn't as warm right there!" .....



So, by studying the crust of the Earth, we can estimate global weather conditions going back at least 1000 years. I would tend to think this is more evidence of a trend than 1, or 2, or even 10 years in any specific point.



And just to clarify, if the Earth's temperature rises very much at all, very quickly, we also know through fossil evidence that this can cause -mass extinctions-. That is to say, entire food webs can collapse, and this can very profoundly effect the prosperity of the human race. You don't have to give a damn about those other species - beyond the fact that your very existence, in some way is reliant on the great majority of them, and the content of their life-cycle.

Re: Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!
 

WHAT!?!?

Where's your data for the last 3 hours? It dropped a couple of degrees here at my house in tha time alone. that's HUGE relative to the magnitude of change those quack scientists blaber on about. GLOBAL WARMING IS A SHAM!!!