The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: January 10, 2009

175 comments on DrumBeat: January 10, 2009

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Nowhere on January 10, 2009 - 12:05pm

People have never been able to control or change the climate or weather.
Examples - past ice ages, floods, storms, heat waves, droughts.
Another example - volcanos, earthquakes, and land changes have a drastic effect on the climate - i.e. Krakatoa, that cannot be matched by people. Mountains, deserts and seas have come and gone over time - Sahara region. There are many other reasons for climate change that people cannot control or stop. Thinking that we have control is a false idea.

People are able to adjust to climate change or we would not still be here today.
Switching to clean energy is still good for us because of pollution and health concerns,
but to expect to change the climate is not realistic. More deaths are caused by pollution than any other human controlled process. We can adjust to climate change, but not to dirty air that we breathe.

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woodychuck on January 10, 2009 - 12:19pm

nowhere,

We, that being the overall global biosphere, has survived some remarkable things. However, shellfish are not so adaptable to acidic oceans. The will find their shells dissolving as they are formed. Accordingly, the earlier statement is correct, that we should have that seafood dinner while we can, but we better do it quickly if we want shrimp, lobsster, or any other shellfish. There is a greater emphasis if you are eating seafood from oceans in the southern hemisphere since the acidification is higher there, although still seasonal.

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dohboi on January 10, 2009 - 6:09pm

Nowhere seems to be unaware of the fact that every established scientific body in the world has acknowledged the reality of anthropogenic (man-made) climate change.

If he has some information or analysis that these bodies have missed, he should share it with us (and with many others.) Otherwise, his off the cuff opinions are a good bit worse than useless.

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Nowhere on January 11, 2009 - 3:05am

Nowhere is not unaware of the scientific bodies. However, science of the future will prove that human impact on the climate is very small compared to many other factors. Humans being alive and breathing oxygen is an impact, but we have to breathe to live. Even if we reduce CO2 by some imagination, there is still a greater chance that some other event will occur to change the climate. What I am saying is that humans do not have any real significant amount of control over the climate. All of our atomic weapons could not even equal one volcano or one large meteor in terms of impact. We cannot fix the climate issues. The talk about lowering CO2 is just a way for someone to make more money on new equipment and new technology. Pollution (micro particles in air)in general is a larger impact on people than climate change anyway.

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ccpo on January 11, 2009 - 5:03am

Thank you for that science. Your outstanding citations of study after study supporting your claims were impressive. The logic rock-steady and impervious to argument.

We are moved.

Cheers

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jokuhl on January 11, 2009 - 10:04am

Nowhere, meet a scientist.
Maybe you should tell HIM what his great miscalculations are..

James E. Hansen (born March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa) heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies[1] in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Earth Sciences Division.[2] He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Hansen is best known for his research in the field of climatology, his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue, and his continuing advocacy of action to limit the impacts of climate change. He has been a critic of both the Clinton and current Bush Administration's stances on climate change.[3]

Hansen was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. He obtained a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics with highest distinction in 1963, an M.S. in Astronomy in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Physics, in 1967, all three degrees from the University of Iowa. He participated in the NASA graduate traineeship from 1962 to 1966 and, at the same time, between 1965 and 1966, he was a visiting student at the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Kyoto and in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen

If you think my call to authority is misplaced, and Hansen's creds don't give his argument more weight than yours.. please do tell me why.

And understand, I don't think his diplomas mean he's absolutely right, just that it's worth paying close attention to what he says, and then to check with a few thousand other climatologists to see if there's anything to be concerned about, anything that we ought to start doing to see if we can gird against the repercussions of our earlier actions..

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Nowhere on January 11, 2009 - 11:06am

Straight from scientist Hansen -

"When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature."[30]

It should be noted that Hansen stresses the uncertainties around these predictions:"

So if it happened 3.5 million years ago, then what made it happen at that time? It was not human emmissions. We cannot explain everything, and cannot fix everything. Hansen said we have had this problem before, and I am sure we will have it again no matter what people are doing. Humans may cause CO2 to rise, but there are so many other ways that climate change can occur. To say that one way out of thousands is the "one" is simple arrogance. Do you really think that the World will stop burning coal any time soon? Not until it runs out, and then the CO2 from coal burning will go back down. That change could result in an ice age????? But that does not mean that thousands of other changes will not still result in another climate change in the future. Sometimes the greatest scientists are wrong. An 80 year life is not enough time to gather all the facts about climate change over thousands of years. To think that people can actually control the climate is absurd. We cannot regulate the Galaxy, Sun, Moon, Stars, inner Earth, Asteroids, Comets, etc, all of which are factors. Some people actually think that this is the only time our climate has changed. One thing is clear - "We do not know the future of the earth."

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DIYer on January 11, 2009 - 1:10pm

Whew, what a relief! There are uncertainties. So let's keep doing our gigantic uncontrolled experiment!

Welcome to the Ohsh1tocene.

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dohboi on January 11, 2009 - 6:41pm

I really like your "science of the future" bit. It sound kind of like Bush saying that historians of the future will find him to be the best president ever.

I think I'll use that one, if you don't mind, the next time someone complains about second hand smoke I will declare: "Science Of The Future will find that second hand smoke is the healthiest thing you can breath!" I'm sure that will take care of any concerns.

Do you think that we haven't burned up a trillion barrels of oil since it was first used, and greater quantities of coal?

Do you think these activities didn't generate hundreds of billions of tons of CO2?

Do you think CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas (a fact established over 100 years ago)?

Do you think CO2 levels haven't risen by over 30%, from 280 ppm to 380 ppm since the 1800 when we started burning all those fossil fuels?

What parts of this don't you get?

It sounds as though you have made up your mind without seriously contending with any of the data.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

That a comet could hit the earth (an extremely low probability event in our lifetimes, in any case, and one almost completely out of our control) is completely irrelevant to the question of whether gw is real or dangerous. So please don't bring up such red herrings.

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ccpo on January 10, 2009 - 12:23pm

Thank you for that science. Your outstanding citations of study after study supporting your claims were impressive. The logic rock-steady and impervious to argument.

We are moved.

Cheers

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NeverLNG on January 10, 2009 - 12:41pm

sneer. sneer.

You will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, I think.

If there are compelling counterarguments, please present them. I'm all ears and eyes

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rainsong on January 10, 2009 - 12:58pm

All these problems seem trivial compared to the risk of a hypernova from Eta Carinae; a neighboring star in the Milky Way Galaxy:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/07/AR200705...

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Black_Dog on January 10, 2009 - 1:19pm

There may be other more immediate concerns. Yellowstone had 11 more quakes yesterday. Full moon tonight about 10 PM EST. I hope I don't get to say "I told you so"...

E. Swanson

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ccpo on January 10, 2009 - 1:34pm

Notice there are apparently no known faults under the lake where the previous swarm was, and that these new quakes were in a faulted area? Looks to me like the movement propagating as opposed to a new signal of danger.

Cheers

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Leanan on January 10, 2009 - 3:01pm

The moon is at perigee tonight. I was hoping to photograph it, since it's supposed to look bloody huge, but it looks like a blizzard is going to get in the way.

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rainsong on January 10, 2009 - 4:59pm

More likely cellulosic ethanol will collapse without massive funding from tax reciepts; with an Obama tax cut promised and first generation ethanol failing after massive subsidies from taxpayers. All this as the dollar sinks relative to the yen and European banks try to cope with failed U.S. mortgages on their balance sheets.

The earth is a temporal thing in an explosive universe.

Firewood for sale $200 a cord, more if you want it delivered long distance. It is solid cellulosic heating fuel. Requires no crusher or hydrocarbon powered still. Legal and contributing to the GDP and Federal treasury without government subsidies. Instead of bankruptcies, tax receipts. Instead of investors losing all their money, good solid returns. Green energy. No acetalaldehyde and formaldehyde ethanol fume pollution in the parking garages of D.C...

How many windmills will a trillion dollars buy?

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TrueKaiser on January 10, 2009 - 5:28pm

thats not even a concern. if it explodes tomorrow we won't know for 7,500 years. we don't even know if it exploded 7,499 years ago next week. it's one of those neat things that are of little concern because even when it does happen there is nothing we can do.

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enemy of state on January 10, 2009 - 8:04pm

Eta Car, is less worisome than Yellowstone. Eta Car, is pretty far away, and it would require one of the strongest gamma ray bursts, to be oriented just right to cause us any real damage. Even then, it would be a damaged ozone layer, not the direct effects that we would have to deal with. And it will hit the southern hemisphere much worse than the northern (where it never breaks the horizon north of the tropics). In any case, most likely it would be an ordinary supernova, quite an event, but not a death star for us. And even then, it might be a million years before it blows.

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Black_Dog on January 10, 2009 - 1:10pm

And your half truths aren't quite lies, but the result is still disinformation. To be sure, humans have been very adaptable. Some were even able to survive the Ice Ages. But, civilization is an entirely different matter, having only been around for about 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age. The present world population is an entirely new situation compared with the few millions of years of previous human adaptability.

The climate of the past 8,000 years has varied little, with global temperature variations of only a few degrees C over rather short periods, often the result of volcanoes or slight changes in solar output, as you mention. But what we are doing to the environment is much greater than anything previously seen by civilized humanity. While it's unlikely that all humanity will die as a result, it's also unlikely that the population levels we now have will be able to continue. This will be especially so as the oil peaks out and other less favorable energy sources are tapped to replace it.

What you are missing is the fact that we ARE changing climate, it's just that what we are doing is not a planned change. That is to say, our activities are "out of control". The problem is, it looks like our lack of control is going to have serious negative impacts, which will move the Earth's climate away from the wonderful "Goldie Locks" climate enjoyed for the past 8,000 years or so.

But I do agree that it's likely that we won't be able to CONTROL climate because we won't be able to CONTROL ourselves. Human greed and ignorance appears to be boundless...

E. Swanson

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ccpo on January 10, 2009 - 1:18pm

Had any arguments been put forward, I might have. As I said, thanks for the science.

Tell me, how many mass murderers are caught with honey? How many torturers? How many Skillings, Keatings, Cheneys? You may pretend the sneer is not deserved, but never forget you are fooling only yourselves. Sui-genocide is all you are accomplishing. Do not expect praise or gentlemanly exchanges for either knowingly or unknowingly engaging in actions I consider to be crimes against humanity.

But, since you asked, here's a treat to go with your sneer. Both are free. Since you are impervious to intelligent scientific inquiry, I'm sure you will survive reading the following, but please do be careful: Cognitive dissonance may ensue.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090109115047.htm

Jeers (<-- No down arrows, so... )

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woodychuck on January 10, 2009 - 9:12pm

The IPCC report, for all of its shortcomings and less than complete reporting of the absolute severity of Climate Change Undeniably caused by negotiations to get unanimous approval of all member nations, including of course the United States of America), did report very accurately on the acidification of the oceans. Do you need the reference to that or can you google it yourself?

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tstreet on January 10, 2009 - 4:51pm

Human beings have survived the weather, obviously, that has occurred while there have been human beings. Not a very useful observation, however, if the weather reverts to a level with much higher temperatures than have been experienced during the existence of homo sapiens. Further, there is a huge difference between survival and a tolerable, prosperous, comfortable, happy human existence.

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absitively on January 10, 2009 - 5:22pm

True, humans have never experienced the warmth that is headed our way, but our species did evolve during the period of greatest climate swings in earth's history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record

Our evolutionary history has made us supremely adaptable, the ultimate noxious weed.

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ccpo on January 10, 2009 - 5:47pm

As has been pointed out way too many times for anyone to zone on, I will repeat here for clarity:

1. It is not the amount of change, it is the time frame.

2. It is not survival of the species (necessarily), but of civilization.

Cheers

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Sterling925 on January 10, 2009 - 7:51pm

"volcanos...have a drastic effect on the climate - i.e. Krakatoa, that cannot be matched by people."

If you are speaking of CO2 your comment is false. Human generated CO2 emissions dwarf those of volcanic activity. Aerosols, on the other hand do create "short term" cooling.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-volcanoes-affect-w

There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity.

Now, I am no climate change expert but I am firmly in the "humans are screwing the pooch" camp. In recent weeks, I encounter the same ole, same ole, same ole skeptic arguments day after day after day, the root of many(not all)can be traced back to ExxonMobile and the American Petroleum Institute. This link is most enlightening as many skeptical papers can be traced back to some very interesting people and organizations:

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-...

It goes back (in part) to this "1998 Action Plan" describing how to create uncertainty a la tobacco companies "smoking doesn't cause cancer" campaigns:

http://www.edf.org/documents/3860_GlobalClimateSciencePlanMemo.pdf

Anyone can find thousands of pages of legitimate peer reviewed studies on line, the VAST majority recognize AGW/climate change as "very likely" to have some nasty consequences.

But the skeptics are keeping the debate going with absurd and irrelevant comments like yours. This will insure that nothing significant will be done.

Power down and circle the wagons.

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