Global warming up

A majority of climate scientists agree. I would expect nothing else. But what about physicists and meteorologists. There are two quoted in the article but there are no published stats about where there is a consensus amonst them.

I don't see how anything good can come from this. On one side I see people using this as a justification to continue pouring pollution into the atmosphere. It's pretty much a disaster.

I also see this as justfication to slow to stop the transition to more renewable energy. IMO there are many compelling reasons to transition to renewable energy sources that have nothing to do with carbon and global warming: economic diversity, employment opportunities, exporting technology and products, energy security, reducing pollution to name a few.
Unfortunately the political and polarising debate about global warming, it’s extent and causes has overshadowed all of this. The politicisation of the environment through climate alarmism has caused immeasurable damage. I find it very disheartening.

 

Organic farmers have their own agendas too. They have to convince themselves and their customers that the extra trouble they go to justifies the outcome, and the higher costs to produce. I understand that. I just wish that they would give a little bit of credit for where all their nutrients originated from and how they got there.

I wonder what it is that he's been battling?


UK wheat yields.




US corn yields.





Wheat yields in developing countries.





Wheat and Rice yields in India.


I could go on and on.

This is the green revolution. It's why the population of the world can still be fed after quadrupling in number. All that nasty modern farming practices.
The soil is not buggered. It's just getting better and better. You just have to replace what gets taken out. Doesn't matter if it's organic or artificial. There is no magic involved.

See ya's.

 

I was referring to the destruction of the planet at a resource and condition level.

Not the human influence on the weather; however - if folks are so worried about our influence on the weather as a species; decreasing the population by a lot would be a good start.

Everyone seems to ignore that bit.

 

What about them? Their areas of specialty are different from climate scientists, which is why their views are given less weight.

It'd be like asking an anaesthetist what he thought about the latest developments in brain surgery. Sure, some of his expertise in anaesthesiology may be relevant to the surgery (e.g. how to property sedate a patient during surgery), but if the anaesthetist were to come out and criticise all brain surgeons for their support of a particular technique, his/her expert knowledge would have very little to do with the brain surgery technique.

The burden of proof would (and should) be on the anaesthetist to show why his/her view was correct over the evidence-based, mainstream knowledge by the experts. Not for the brain surgeons to rebut every single silly point made by the anaesthetist, who again is not the expert.

Do not take these guys seriously! Their links to lobby groups and extremely disingenous astroturfing organisations are well documented and should cast doubt on anything they claim.

Here's some info about both of them:

William Happer

According to SourceWatch, Happer is "Chairman of the Board of Directors of the George C. Marshall Institute and is on the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a denier think tank." According to DeSmogBlog, he's produced one paper on climate change. One.

He has been called out by media watchdogs for claiming in op-eds that he has no ties to groups funded by the oil industry. He does, and did - he was a Director at the oil industry-funded Heartland Institute.

Richard Lindzen

According to SourceWatch, Lindzen is also a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (on the Academic Advisory Council), and part of the now-defunct Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy and the still-running Cato Institute (which were both funded by fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil). He also acted as "a witness for tobacco companies decades earlier, questioning the reliability of statistical connections between smoking and health problems."

But all this aside, why would anyone give credit to organisation called the Global Warming Policy Foundation which has the sole purpose is to claiming global warming isn't real? Seriously, if an organisation is intentionally misleading, it should be given as much credibility as the Australian Vaccination Network (which was forced to change its name to the Australian Vaccination-skeptics Network, since that what its members actually believe).

As a extra, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report this month that showed what it described as "Decades of Corporate Disinformation", aimed at "[deceiving] the American public by distorting the realities and risks of climate change, sometimes acting directly and sometimes acting indirectly through trade associations and front groups."

Why, if the science is not settled and the counterarguments are legitimate, do these companies need to spend so much time and money deliberately spreading misinformation and confusion? Why not just use evidence to show that their ideas are better than climate scientists?

**EDIT Re-arranged some parts of the post **EDIT**

 

I dont know why you think there should be 100% consensus Science is not a North Korean election. Science is supposed to be critical, peer reviewed and falsifiable. Kinda what separates science from religion/mysticism.

Anyways..Lindzen beleives in climate change but thinks the clouds will save us

Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point “nutty.” He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate.

But for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/s...ange-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html?_r=0

Happer things we are treating Carbon like the Jews and seems to be the WSJ aka Murdoch go to skeptic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer#cite_note-27


and lastly

You will love this list

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...tream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

 

According to the EPA we only started burning them in quantity in 1950s. There is clearly no correlation between consistent sea level rises between 1850 and today, and CO2 emissions rising significantly since only 1950.

 

That's not what the EPA have written in that graph. They write:

"Line graph of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels for 1900 through 2008. The line graph shows a slow increase from about 2,500 teragrams of carbon dioxide emissions in 1900 to about 5,000 teragrams of carbon dioxide emissions in 1950. After 1950, the increase in carbon dioxide emissions is more rapid, reaching approximately 32,000 teragrams of carbon dioxide in 2008"

Where does it mention sea levels?

 

am i the only person who saw the thread title and thought "oh crap here come the flat earthers with their theories and anecdotes?"

 

But it's freezing this week!

 

I agree that yields are up - no argument about that - due to the widespread use of artificial fertiliser that add only specific, narrow range of nutrients to the soil that force plant growth.

Artificial NPK fertiliser is water soluable - and hence when water is applied the plant has no choice but to "take the fertiliser up" and therefore growth is forced upon it whether the conditions for growth are suitable or not ... such as hydropondic farming ... naturally occuring NPK is not water soluable so the plant has to the choice to take up the nutrients when it requires them and the conditions suit growth.

http://www.cleanairgardening.com/npkexplanation/

But what about all the other nutrients that plants require for healthy growth - like boron and sulphur and calcium and magnesium and zinc and chloride and soil carbon and cobolt ... I could go on ... and the mircrobes (most of which are as yet unidentified) that enable the uptake of these micro nutrients.

http://www.ncagr.gov/agronomi/pdffiles/essnutr.pdf

If you look at the charts I posted before - yes, yields are up but nutritional value in the produce is significantly down due to the lack of minor essential nutrients that are not being replaced in the soils.

And it's not just about the nutrients in the soil - there are also issues with salinity caused by bare fields (fallow between crops or over grazing) and over irrigation displacing the salt layer, erosion caused by bare fields (water runoff and wind), vast mono-culture crops that destroy insect and bird diversity (both of which are essential as the bee issue is teaching us) and these mono-culture crops survive by the overuse of insecticides, fungicides ... and reports from the USA that they spray their wheat with herbicides to kill the leaf matter before harvesting, to reduce wear on the equipment ...

I am not having a go at you and your farming methods - the population needs to be fed and I know you do so as sensitively as possible with your no-tilling and incorporating any waste from cropping back into the soil ... I just believe that those who have the option, should consider going further.

Have you read "Back from the Brink"? If so, what were your unbiased thoughts?

 

I dunno. I just seems like asking a real estate agent if real property outperforms shares or a stockbroker if shares outperform real property. You know what answer you are going to get.

Don't worry, I don't take them seriously. I was merely quoting an article from a publication that was identified above as being non-partisan.

Don't worry, I don't take him seriously. I was merely quoting an article from a publication that was identified above as being non-partisan.
I'm not touching the other thing you said but in internet lore, you automatically lost the argument.

 

Seems pretty clear to me. According to IPCC sea levels have been rising consistently since 1900, but according to EPA CO2 emissions only really started in 1950s.

 

The other thing in science, correlation does not prove causation. Say the increase in sea levels exactly matched the increase in CO2 emissions. That would not prove that the increase in sea levels caused the increase in CO2 emissions or that the the increase in CO2 emissions caused the increase in sea levels. Here are some examples of why you should never assume that correlation proves causation.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3030529...-graphs-prove-that-correlation-isnt-causation

 

ok, no worries...thats not what the EPA wrote and if its now "clear to you" from those two graphs then best to leave you in your little happy place.

 

Issues from modern farming methods:

Soil nutrition depletion = food nutrition depletion

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/
http://soils.wisc.edu/facstaff/barak/poster_gallery/minneapolis2000a/

Salinity

http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/salinity/
http://www.nova.org.au/earth-environment/dirt-our-soils

Erosion:

http://www.natsoc.org.au/our-projec...nd-principles/ecological-issues/soils-erosion
http://www.mdba.gov.au/about-basin/basin-environment/challenges-issues/land-degradation

Maybe this discussion needs to be moved to it's own thread discussing soils in Australia and it's contribution of global warming

 

Lindzen, may well be right, once again I personally don't have the knowledge to critique his argument

As for 'the other thing" that was Happer losing the argument not I.

And the last link was for a list of scientists who don't believe in climate change.

 

That is very interesting language, "scientists who don't believe in climate change". "Believe", as in "to have faith"?

Anyway, cheers for the link. I missed that. Having a read now. I note that most of the people on the list are under the first heading: "Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections".

I don't see that questioning the accuracy of current global climate modeling is inherantly unscientific. If anything, it is inherantly scientific to do so.

I find it interesting that you equate scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections as "scientists who don't believe in climate change".

 

oh jeez perthguy..seriously...unlike many, I am not a binary person. Read believe as in 'accept to be true'

 

Something else I find interesting is government policy responses to climate change. Exactly what is an appropriate response to climate change? Personally, I find some of previous Australian Federal Government's response ridiculous. For example, if you were trying to reduce pollution, would you give Australia's most polluting power plants $1 billion?

http://paidtopollute.org.au/ptp-fossil-fuel-subsidies

P.S. I have no idea if this web site is a credible source but as far as I know, the information is accurate.

 

You do realise that correlation does not prove causation, right?
I'm sure that advanced farming techniques, pesticides, fertiliser, new strands of crops and so forth all have contributed to this.

I once read a study on the effect that CO2 levels have on growth rates in plants. The conclusion was that it did increase growth rates for some plants, but not for others. The ones that it did increase growth rates for wasn't a very drastic increase at all.

I think you'll struggle to find a lot of people that advocate unprecedented levels of genocide in the name of reducing global warming. Or at least I hope so.