Climate models for dummies

Vader,

I agree. But my liberal side adds one more point. That in and off itself the anthropogenic addition of carbon dioxide to the air has unknown and unforeseeable consequences and thus reducing carbon emissions makes sense even if it turns out to be unrelated to global warming.

(This is essentially Stephen McIntyre position if I understand him correctly, which I probably don’t. I mention that name since Stephen McIntyre is a well known anti-global warming advocate, but I believe still is against filling up the environment with man made carbon dioxide.)

Incidently, I consider the whole argument beyond current scientific knowledge. We don’t actually have a way to take 100 alternate earths and do a lab test on them.

I have heard one argument that mars is warming up proportionally to earth. That *would* very quickly disaprove the man-made global warming theory (though it would do nothing to the argument that we should not pump out large quantities of carbon dioxide to the environment). However, I have been unable to find any source for that claim of mars warming, so I’m not ready to believe it yet.

My children are going to drown!

My Sharona,

Your local pool probably offers excellent Red Cross beginner swimming classes to children. Enroll early.

I don’t know what to think about this. On the one hand, I’ve seen some interesting data, including some work from a professor at the U who attempts to reconstruct old temperatures and CO2 levels using core hole data. He’s found an interesting correlation between rising temperatures, rising CO2 levels, and rising levels of population and industrialization.

On the other hand, you have things like this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090714124956.htm

Dunno. At the end of the day the position I find most persuasive is the Jim Manzi/Sceptical Environmentalist position that takes the Anthropogenic Global Warming position as given and shows that we’re much better off spending the money on research, ameliorative measures, and public health measures than on cap-and-trade or carbon tax measures.

Temps have been cooling over the past 10 years, contrary to the models used by the global warming crowd:
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/07/15/epa_cover-up

If there really is a need to reduce atmospheric CO2, a much cheaper solution would be to plant more trees (as in tree farms) where the trees would be harvested for long-term uses (thereby creating long-term carbon sinks) such as lumber (for homes), or recyclable uses which would keep all that carbon busy and out of the atmosphere for many years.

(However, I still don’t agree that man-made CO2 is a significant, or even a noticeable portion of total atmospheric CO2. And, it is a lie that atmospheric CO2 causes global warming. The stats don’t match up between atmospheric CO2 and temps. The temps more closely follow solar radiation levels.)

The side benefit is that the tree farms would produce O2.

Another sink, though short term, but quick to cycle, would be cellulosic ethanol from growing more sugar cane, which is what Brazil is doing. Cane takes CO2 out of the air, puts out O2, creates a usuable product, sugar, and leaves enough cellulose to make ethanol much cheaper than corn.

Growing more cane would lessen demand on corn for ethanol production, thereby reversing the price hikes in corn due to the diversion of much corn to ethanol production.

Yes, ethanol is burned, and the carbon is put back in the atmosphere, but equal amounts would also have been put in the atmosphere from burning oil. The sink is short term before it goes through the cycle again, but the volume of the sink would lie in the huge biomass of cane and liquid ethanol that would exist in the system at any one time, and be greater than the current biomass of cane.

Gore let the cat out of the bag, when he said that regulating carbon was going to be the means to institute global governance. The object isn’t to control CO2, the object is to control people.

Global warming is a manufactured problem for which the proposted solution gives power to the statists. It’s an example of the use of the Hegelian Dialectic. If people won’t initially accept what you want to implement, create a problem for which the thing you want to implement is the solution.