No such thing as normal weather any more

[Corey]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...ry/TPNational/

"The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."
- Bruce Cockburn, 1983

[Intrigued]

Here in P.A. I have (and I'm sure just about everyone else too) noticed that temperatures are higher than our "normal" summers. It was 1000 days since we had been at or over 91 degrees... until recently.

[Corey]

Weather across Canada has been off the map for a few years now. Compared even to the weather of my youth, things here have changed radically.

I've read up on it a tiny bit. The good news is that there is an emerging belief that the earth possibly undergoes a natural warming/cooling cycle during which the glaciers melt but then refreeze. The bad news is that it appears a few massive Superquakes will probably change North America first, particularly along the San Andreas faultline.

I don't scare easily but I have to admit this shakes me up a bit. Things sure seem to be accelerating faster than anticipated.

[Intrigued]

Weather across Canada has been off the map for a few years now. Compared even to the weather of my youth, things here have changed radically.

I've read up on it a tiny bit. The good news is that there is an emerging belief that the earth possibly undergoes a natural warming/cooling cycle during which the glaciers melt but then refreeze. The bad news is that it appears a few massive Superquakes will probably change North America first, particularly along the San Andreas faultline.

I don't scare easily but I have to admit this shakes me up a bit. Things sure seem to be accelerating faster than anticipated.

Wait till there is a super volcano from the Yosemite Park!
( http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs...llowstone.html )

[Corey]

Wild.

[HMMurdock]

What amuses me is that so many people make the leap from "the weather sure is wacky lately" to "greenhouse gasses are causing global warming" Personally I'm of the opinion (as Corey aluded to above) that the earth goes through temperature cycles, and all of the data I've seen points to the fact that we are still "recovering" from the last ice age.

And the people that choose to ignore that data and insist on blaming people, (either becasue they belive that "man" is inherently bad or industrialized capitalist are bad, or whatever their particular agenda dictates) have come up with the (in my opinion) the most assinine theory I've heard in a long time. Greenhouse gases??? That's the best they can come up with??? If they want to blame people for global warming how 'bout the fact that there is now about 6 billion of 'em walking around radiating heat. If they want to blame the burning of fossil fuels, how 'bout the fact that there are billions of automobiles, factories, light bulbs, and appliances and other untold devices that are all radiating heat.

Lets take the amount of power (electricity) consumed by the world in a year (which all ends up as heat, one way or another) add that to the amount of fossil fuels consumed in a year multiplied by the avearge amount of energy released by the burning of said fossil fuels... and your telling me that *that* much energy dumped into our atmosphere won't raise the global temperature a few degrees??? Am I crazy or is everybody overlooking the obvious??? (this also goes to my belief that a large part of the scientific comunity has completely abandoned the scientific method for the rather flawed "I'll come up with a theory, then try to prove it" method of thinking... but that's another rant)

(and I'll do a little research and see if I can find some rough numbers to fill in the above equation)

[Corey]

I'm 100% certain that we are contributing to climate change, no question about it whatsoever.

[HMMurdock]

Well, just based on rough calculations of global electricity consumption and global crude oil consumption, we're currently releasing about 136,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules annualy into the atmosphere. Call me crazy, but I'm guessing 136 quintillion joules a year would do *something*

[Corey]

Yep...

[Adam]

I am no expert but I have taken some environment/geology courses and two facts emerged that stuck with me on this issue:

1) The earth naturally heats and cools in cycles.

2) The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is higher than it has ever been. This does not directly link Carbon to Global warming but most scientist will admit that there is a strong case for Carbon accelerating this process.

In the past (ie 10 000+ years) there have been natural fluctuations in the level of carbon in the atmosphere but there has never been a spike like in the past century so nobody really knows what all this extra carbon will effect. We are going into uncharted times.

my belief that a large part of the scientific comunity has completely abandoned the scientific method for the rather flawed "I'll come up with a theory, then try to prove it"

I agree. I think that Science and politics/business are meshed together too much. As with so many things in life it is all about presentation. How the information is presented overshadows the actual data.

My 2 cents. This is my opinion of course.

Adam.

[Intrigued]

I'm 100% certain that we are contributing to climate change, no question about it whatsoever.

I agree fully, whether we do it directly or indirectly. It would be acting nieve to believe otherwise.

If a car running in a closed off garage can kill people... just think what the 100 million (on avearge) vehicles in JUST USA are doing to change the climate, life on earth, etc. etc.

Hey, I love my car and driving (when the clunker works ), but some changes on a big scale are needed and needed NOW!

*steps off podium*

[HMMurdock]

I'd also like to note that I do agree there is more CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, it seems a lot of people seem to miss the difference between correlation and causation.

Reminds me of the piece I saw on Good Moring America once.... they had someone on there who was citing some statistics and saw an increase in behavior problems in children who were spanked, moreso than in children who were not. So they concluded that spanking caused bad behavior.


...so by that logic we can deduce that:
1) Warmer daytime temperatures cause the sun to rise in the sky.
2) Death is one of the leading causes of gunshot wounds in the US.
3) Divorce is one of the leading causes of infidelity.

[Intrigued]

Continuing from my previous post to drive home the point...

Even the human body can handle only so much of a substance.

Examples:

Exercise to much and your muscles get a build up of lactic acid (waste)

The liver can be destroyed from to much consumption of spirits.

The colon can eventually be cancer laden from eating to much meat, especially if not chewed up as much as possible before injesting.

All that I have put forth are from various sources that anyone can get from public sources.

Soooo...

It would make sense that to much consumption of, for example, gasoline by our cars will make for "sickness" on one or more levels.

[Corey]

Exercise to much and your muscles get a build up of lactic acid

It's not a case of excercising "too much". There's a lot of myths about lactic acid (http://www.brianmac.demon.co.uk/lactic.htm) but to be clear there's no such thing as excercising "too much" however there is such a thing as "excercising wrong". Take a look at the old farmers, their entire days were spend doing some form of work/excercise or the other. From sun up to sun down. And they're the healthiest people within our society, i.e. the Amish have obesity of less than 4% despite eating lots of meat, potatoes, pie, etc. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...rce_login=true

Anyhow as to the greater issue here, here's my take on it. The fact that the world and society have both never been in worse health than right now is not a "shooting down" of whatever personal theories anyone may have accumulated. It's not personal, and we all have the identical stake in the solutions. Debating causation is often counterproductive to creating solutions depending on the politics du jour. But I'm always amazed by how long the line up to debate causation is, in light of how short the lineup to develop solutions is.

At the end of the day we're all wildy inaccurate anyhow. No matter how much our brains convince us that we're "right", we still miss most of the picture. *Especially* on the topic of nature, and weather. What we actually know about nature is almost infetismal, as is well evidenced by our historical relationship with it.

As to the relationship between business and science, it's part and parcel with the society we've made. You can't like one part of it and dislike another part, because it's all one machine. You either buy it or you don't.

[Adam]

Everything hinges on electricity. They can make clean running hydrogen vehicles that produce next to zero waste, but the energy (electricity) needed to create the hydrogen does not solve the problem since most electricity is created by burning fossil fuels.

So the solution ultimately is a clean source of electricity. I've read a little about Nuclear Fission as the possible solution but I think that is still some time away.

There now I have contributed 4 cents

Adam.