Global Warming - Moved

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Moved from Crunchers Corner - as there is likely an interest in continuing this topic. Keep it civil! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

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No, it's getting bigger. And that's the rub in the debate on climate/anthropogenic change/warming etc. As you can choose example and counter-example to suit the stance, opposing sides then often defer to 'playing the man and not the ball', and eventually wind up reading only their own output. Simple factual stuff get's lost, and conclusions then pivot on preconceptions rather than any realistic input. Just like litigation, if an adversarial debate continues there is a hardening/polarization of attitudes with time - and particularly groupthink ( ie. what matters is that we think alike, rather than be right ) evolves.

So while Al Gore says that the Greenland ice sheet is a key indicator of warming, he didn't complete the sentence by mentioning that it's over 1 metre thicker and several thousand square km's broader than ~ 20yrs ago. Oh, and by the way - he is carbon credit broker.

Similiarly the concept of 'clean coal' is proposed by those who sell it, obviously, but the true CO2 output of burning depends on the method as well as the coal itself. So if you have coal with a high water content then you could either leave it to dry for a while before chucking it in the firebox, or throw it in straight away - thus some of the coal is burnt merely to dry out the remainder, which is less efficient and hence leads to more coal use ( and CO2 emission ) for a given power delivery.

Proponents of climate change like to use the vision of melting ice, but don't like to mention the very same Antarctic ice ( deep drilled cores ) have shown far greater variations in all the climate parameters of mention ( temperature, CO2 et al ) - all preceding any human ancient/dug-up carbon use. Neither is there the theory put forward, no more or less soundly based, that humans have knocked off quite a few enormous herds of farting methane producers without inducing cooling. For consistency of argument IF carbon up -> temperature up THEN carbon down -> temperature down.

Conversely the idea that one can keep pumping ancient carbon into the air and not affect long term weather patterns is patently absurd. It must. First principles alone requires this ( quantum properties of molecular electronic states ). Energy carried by incoming light from the Sun gets down converted in frequency ( by 'greenhouse' gases ) to remain under the atmospheric blanket rather than readily re-radiated to space.

Then there's the Chicken-Little/Cry-Wolf Factor : if you run around saying the sky is falling, and then it doesn't : you quickly acquire a credibility problem due to short attention spans of the audience. Terrific to talk of future generations, great nobility and what-not but in the end "all politics is local" applies in time as well as space.

But one can't say nothing will go wrong if mankind keeps pumping the well dry as there is no shortage of better supported examples from history. Chernobyl, Silent Spring, American Midwest Dust Bowl in the 1930's, Easter Island, deforestation disasters .... and remember those CFC's?

Cheers, Mike.