Global Warming

[PeterZ]

I caught the tail end of Al Gore on Oprah yesterday, and I have to guess that he never took Earth Science in high school. We're about the same age, and I learned the following in the ninth grade.

The Arctic Circle has almost no land. It is just ice. The glaciers will continue to receed until it is mostly water. Then warmer water will circulate up through the Bearing Strait and the North Atlantic, resulting in very moist Arctic air. This will fall as snow across northern Canada, northern Europe and Siberia. The snowfall will be so immense that it will not all melt off during the summer. This will occur year after year, forming glaciers over the land up north. The glaciers will spread both north and south as a result of the sheer weight of the snow and ice. This will continue until the glacier spread to the north covers the pole. Now the moisture is no longer available to the arctic air.

At this point the summer melt exceeds the winter snowfall and the glaciers start to receed. We are in the late part of the warming cycle, which started about 20,000 years ago. It's about a 50,000 year cycle, and has been going on for at least the last 600,000 years. We don't make it happen, and we can't stop it.

 

[Mike777]

Hey Peter. Have you had a chance to see his movie yet? If not you should check it out. It addresses what you are saying about the cycles, and then goes on from there. He has 30 or so years into it.

The part of the whole issue that has never been addressed is that almost all the damage was done a hundred or so years ago when coal dust and smoke was heavy in the air. This settled onto the glaciers in a dirty layer and collects heat every year melting them more than would normaly build up from the snows. I have seen this layer myself both in the North and in the South. Where snows don't stay, it of course went into the 17 inches of dust we get every hundred years. I have a hard time placing much stock in researchers that do not demonstrate knowledge of the coal dust layer since it will eventualy be the demise of every current glacier.

Still it is a good movie, so rent it (not a buy by any means) if you get a chance.

Edited by: Mike777

 

[BrianD]

Peter, I took Chemistry in college in 1975. I just took it again in order to apply for a nursing program, as a prerequisite. It was a requirement that the science prerequisites be taken within the past five years. In my opinion, there was a substantial amount of new material and reprioritization of concepts in introductory chemistry in 2007 compared to 1975.

In my opinion, it is a terribly unfortunate thing that our government is unable to fund good science and rely on the results of that science to make decisions in this area. Politics, economics and belief systems seem to get in the way of that link between knowledge and action.

I will never have the personal knowledge that will allow me to know who is right. I am no more inclined to trust Al Gore to be right than I am to trust studies conducted by Exxon, et al. That is why I believe a representative government is our best hope in discerning the truth on such topics as global warming. While common sense tells me that breaking chemical bonds of half the world's endowment of recoverable hydrocarbons over the space of 150 or so years must be having an effect, I am only left to speculate on what the effect is. I wish and pray for more wisdom for the worlds leaders every day. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing a result to the wishing and praying. But the sun rises again tomorrow and every day we have is a miracle.


Brian



Edited by: BrianD

 

[JWMINNESOTA]

I saw Al Gore recently, I think he may of been around 20,000 years ago.

 

[geocorn]

My only question is "when did science become decided by consensis?" I thought science was based on FACT. To the best of my knowledge, the perspective that global warming is man-made has not one shread of factual basis. There are a lot of theories and inuendos, but nothing that is based on imperical evidence. All of the evidence supports Peter's position, not Al Gore's. When there is a factual basis that man is the culprit behind global warming, I will examine it.


As an aside, our "representative government" is full of polictics and has lost touch with the people they represent. Besides the military, name one thing that our government does for us better than private industry.

 

[BrianD]

Besides the military, name one thing that our government does for us better than private industry.

That's hard, isn't it.

I do think that resource stewardship and environment protection is something that is a role of government. I don't see how those roles can be entrusted to private industry except in some areas of monitoring and enforcement of regulations. But again, it has to be a government that has, at its heart, the interest in long term good of the governed.

I don't know what it's going to take to get our bickering two party polarized system back on track in that regard for our own country. I'm 99% certain that the founding fathers didn't expect 'majority rule' on issues to mean voting by strict political party lines. I often wonder what they'd have tweaked if they could have looked this far in the future and seen what they and God hath wrought.

Enough of my soapbox on this thread. I definitely respect everyone here and especially you, Peter, on topics of science. I think most of our hearts are in the right place and we speak on such topics because we are concerned that we keep doing the right thing in all things.

Brian

 

[Mike777]

Follow the money trail to find the root of the deceptions. Polarizing the public lines everybodys pockets. The poles and glaciers are melting. but I don't believe its related to global warming. Any extra large volcanic displacement could cause the same effect in an even shorter amount of time. Dirty snow melts fast, when the sun hits it. that is repeatable science.

Even in my yard

 

[Waldo]

I was skeptical about the validity of "Global Warming" until I got home from work yesterday evening and the temp inside my home was at 82 degrees with the air conditioner just a humming!! Checked filters...OK...Checked Coils on unit......No freeze up.....Damn.....must be Global Warming !!!

 

[grapeman]

Is global warming real - of course it is- and so is global cooling. It's part of the life cycle of the world. Like Peter says, it cools down and then warms up- a little at a time. Does mankind contribute to it? Of course it does - along with every other living and breathing organism on Earth. Are we causing global warming - no we are contributing, but are not an almighty supreme being able to create it. Can we slow it down - probably not much if at all, but we can all try to leave it a little cleaner and healthier than we came into it by doing our part as good stewards while we are here.

 

[jobe05]

All I know is that it's 103 degrees with a heat index of 108 out there right now and I had nothing to do with it....................

As a matter of fact, yesterday I put my order in for 75................... didn't get it!

 

[Waldo]

I found out that $178.50 can resolve the Global warming problem...I am typing at a cool 70 degrees right now

 

[JWMINNESOTA]

If the great analytical minds only knew the answer lives in Arkansas!

 

[PeterZ]

Brian, it is not so unfortunate that the government (my employer) does not fund scientific research, because that, too, has become politicized. The tax code has been used almost since its inception to drive social change, which is why there is a home mortgage deduction for the interest. It is to encourage people to buy homes. In the 60's they wanted people to spend money they didn't have to fuel the economy, so al;l interest was deductible. When the population's debt ceiling got too high they cut the interest deduction on everything but home mortgages.

They are doing the same thing with science. Ever wonder why countries like France and Spain and Japan, with much higher smoking rates, have fewer smoking deaths? It's because C. Everitt Koop, a former Surgeon General, figured out a way to cook the books using statistics.

First, you define who is a smoker. If you smoke from 15 years old until you are 30 years old and then quit, you are not a non-smoker until you are 45 years old. You have to be smoke free for the same time period you were a smoker to be considered a non-smoker.

Next you redefine the smoking death. In the US, any illness that has a 10% higher incidence in smokers than in non-smokers has a smoking involvement. So let's make up some stats. Take a disease that on the face of it doesn't look like it would be smoking related. I choose pancreatic cancer (PC), and every number that follows is made up. Let's say that 50 non-smokers out of 1 million die of PC, and 55 smokers out of a million die of PC. That meets the 10% threashold.

So how many of those smokers died because they were smokers? Logic would say 5 did, because if there were no tobacco 100 out of 2 million would have died of PC. C. Everitt Koop decided that all 55 died because they were smokers, and that method of counting is still in use today.

One of my favorite examples goes like this:

A 5'10" 400lb man, with a cholesterol level of 450 and a blood alcohol level of .09 is speeding down the highway in his Ford Explorer at 95 miles per hour and he's not wearing his seatbelt and smoking a cigarette (2 packs a day). He suffers a very mild cardiac occurance, but that causes him to lose control of the vehicle, which rolls several times. He is ejected from the vehicle and killed instantly. He death will be recorded as caused by:

Not wearing a seatbelt, by the seatbelt people
Driving an SUV, by the anti-SUV crowd
Alcohol, by MADD
Elevated cholesterol, by the trans fat police
His weight, by the fitness police
Speeding, by the speed kills crowd
A heart attack, by the American Heart Association
Smoking, by the United States Government

Every one of these organizations will add him to the list of people killed by doing what their particular interest doesn't want us to do. If people really died at the rate all of these special interest groups say we do, there would only be 12 of us left.

I lost faith in the government's science objectivity when the New England Journal of Medicine - a peer reviewed journal - published a study that "proved" that if you had a gun in your house you were 8x more likely to die from gun violence in your home. The fact that all four urban areas surveyed for the study were infested with gangs, and that most of the victims were gang bangers or innocent bystanders, somehow didn't seem significant to either the authors or the reviewers. Political correctness was more important than science.

Sorry about that. If Masta or George want to kill this thread I will not be offended.

Edited by: PeterZ

 

[jobe05]

Shouldn't kill the tread, this is pretty interesting for me, a new prospective on certain things. So far everyone has been somewhat middle of the road and on topic of the thread.

 

[grapeman]

All I know is that it's 103 degrees with a heat index of 108 out there right now and I had nothing to do with it....................

As a matter of fact, yesterday I put my order in for 75................... didn't get it!

You didn't get it because it's up here Jobe. The high today was about 75 with a nice light breeze. It is really quite nice this year. A few degrees above normal from time to time and then a few degrees below normal from time to time.

 

[geocorn]

Since I am chiming in and since I am learning more and more about this topic, I do not want the thread killed, yet. If it gets out of hand, I will.


As a follow up to Peter's last post, I was taught a very early age that "figures never lie, but liar's know how to figure." Being a bean counter, I know how true that statement is.

 

[jobe05]

We have been above our normal so far this year. A normal year gets an average of 23 - 90+ degree days, with the record being 27 90+ days. We past that on Tuesday and the forecast (9 day), with the exception of 89 on Saturday is all 90+ degree days with no rain.

I like nice sunny 75 degree days, don't care for 75 degree rainy days as much, but like the sunny ones. Pretty soon, we'll be back to that weather, if not, we are looking for a mountain home. The Blue Ridge is just west and north of me (in the foothills) and is always 15 to 20 degrees cooler than here. So next year, thats were I'll be spending my hot days!

 

[Waldo]

I agree with Peters rationale. Like thestats that state that of the 4,780 traffic related accidents last year, 42% were caused bt people who were driving while drinking. That tells me that the other 58% were caused by people driving while they were sober so wouldn't it be safer for everyone to drink and drive ?

 

[Angell Wine]

You are more likely to be in an auto accident with in a 20 mile radius from your home. I'm moving to Arkansas so I will be safer.

 

[Waldo]

Come on up Angell...We'll go down in my cellar and listen for it thunder