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Posted

I see my attempt to say something as boring and as non-controversial as possible failed. Well, I guess my initial impulse to leave these things to people who're informed was a good idea and my mental congress really screwed up not voting for that option. I surrender my skepticism to science.

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Posted

ain't no problem dawg

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Posted

The most inspirational thing I've ever heard on how we should react to climate change is this. The whole 'save the planet' idea is about conserving the planet for future generations. But the thing is: Who cares about future generations? They're going to be looking back on us and thinking we're idiots; calling us barbarians and giving us a hard time for how we live. And the tragic part is that we wont be there anymore to give them a hard time in return. But by destroying the planet we can get the planet to give them a hard time on our behalf. All they'd have to do would be to step outside and their skin would fall off. And in that small way we can live on through dear old mother earth.

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Posted

There are consistent major climate changes every 20,000 years. There are major cooling periods and major warming periods. What people are calling "the ice age" was just the most recent cooling period. Now we are in a warming period. Carbon dioxide emissions from humans don't even compare to the emissions from volcanoes around the world. It doesn't mean that I am any less of a good person for driving a hybrid, though.

 

source: puppying community college


The end

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Posted

The links below are better, with actual answers from people who know more than a single paragraph they found on Wikipedia

This is interesting me so I'm going to go looking around for info and then post it here, without really being certain of it's validity because this is just spontaneous.

 

Most of the atmosphere's carbon is stored in the lithosphere. This carbon is put back into the atmosphere either through volcanoes, hot spots, or the burning of fossil fuels by humans.

Speculation: If you think about it, before we started taking carbon out of the earth in the form of fossil fuels, the planet had it's own balance of carbon entering the lithosphere to carbon being taken out. We're taking out more on top of what volcanoes emit, and so increasing the rate at which carbon enters the atmosphere. There isn't anything to balance out our own contribution, since carbon returns to the earth through dead things, and other constant mechanisms set in place however long ago. There's no way that can speed up to match increased carbon emissions through the artificial removal and burning of fossil fuels by humans. So you can imagine that carbon ends up building up in the atmosphere, since the rate of carbon returning to the earth doesn't get any greater. You get me.

 

I guess you could think of it less in terms of just carbon emissions and rather our impact on the carbon cycle.

 

Though this is just me speculating based on some info I found.

 

 

I also found some site called skepticalscience just now, and it has a bunch of replies for common climate myths.

Full list: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

 

"Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?": http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

"How does the Medieval Warm Period compare to current global temperatures?": http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period.htm

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Posted (edited)

I don't think any of us are really experts but I think it's fun and informative to put my also-community-college(-albeit-in-an-engineering-physics-course) education to actual use. Disclaimer: I screw up my math sometimes, so I may screw this up.

 

"Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually."

- Hawaiian Volcano Observatory

 

So looking at that chart up therefor yearly human CO2 discharge:

 

TrendsGlobalEmissions.png

 

- United States Environmental Protection Agency

 

it says we recently pumped out 30,000teragrams. A metric ton is 1000kilograms. Doing some math, 200 million metric tons of CO2 is 2.0 x 10^5kg, our CO2 discharge is 3.0 x 10^13kg. So if I'm doing this right, volcanic CO2 comprises .0000006% of their combined output, and human CO2 production has 150,000,000 times more output than all the volcanoes on earth for that year.

 

So, the energy required to change the temperature of a 1kg substance is given by Energy = (specific heat)(mass)(temp change). For dry air, it's 1.006 Joules of energy. For CO2, it's .856J. So it's actually easier to heat CO2 by .0012%. If you wanted to heat the whole 5.0 x 10^18kg of atmosphere (assuming it's all made of just dry air) by one Kelvin, you would need 5.03 x 10^18 Joules. If you wanted to heat the earth's atmosphere by one Kelvin when 3.0 x 10^13kg of it is CO2 (.0006% of it-- that's just for one year of emissions) it would take 5.02 x 10^18 Joules.

 

I just did a bunch of crazy math and I figure the earth gets about 2.74 x 10^14 Joules every second on average. So if we plug stuff in, with that amount of energy, if our atmosphere were entirely air, it would raise the temperature by 0.000054 Kelvin (or Celsius). If 3.0 x 10^13kg of it were CO2, the temperature would go up by 0.00012K (or C), which is actually nearly twice the amount we'd normally get, and an order of magnitude higher. That's per second, and obviously there are other factors at play; this is just for temperature gain per second from full sunlight, or I might have screwed up my math (this took a lot of steps; I actually broke out paper for it) but holy goodness. That's a lot more than without CO2, from a mathematical standpoint. I don't think I even factored in the volcanoes.

 

I don't want to pile on more stuff like how this would effect ocean evaporation, because I'm tired of all this arithmetic, but that's a thing too. Once water is heated, it retains it much much better than air or CO2. There's this thing called the "specific heat", which I've been using for my calculations, which pretty much tells you how easy it is to change something's temperature in general. The higher the specific heat, the harder it is to warm or cool the object. CO2's is .846, dry air's is 1.006, and water's is a whopping 4.186. So the thermal energy lingers even longer, causing a feedback effect; energy goes in due to CO2, it heats up the water, water is in the air, air gets hotter longer. About the only upside is that higher temperatures lower CO2's specific heat, but you need to go up 25C to get it up by .03, and I think we'd all agree on global warming by then.

 

I'm also too tired of research atm to look up what's up with climate cycling. But hey-- 2010 was the hottest recorded year in all of Earth's recorded history. So that's something. Teto's link also provides stuff to say on that subject.

Edited by Sahaqiel (see edit history)
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Posted

The fact that there is still a debate about climate change shows the resounding success of anti climate change lobbyists.

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Posted

there really isn't-- it's mostly in the general public, rather than the scientific community

 

which is actually the worst part because the general public has control over lawmakers

 

Petroleum companies have also been known to sink money into anti-climate change skepticism and propaganda. It's fo real sad when someone would literally put the fate of the entire planet before making money.

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Posted

Thats what I'm saying. And it is a massive success for them, because action needed to be taken years ago, it needed to be done massively, and incremental change is doing puppy all. But we're at the stage at the end of 2013 where it has been accepted in the scientific community for YEARS that climate change is occurring and that it is something happening as a result of our actions. And yet the change is barely occurring, if it occurs it's happening too slowly, and it needed to be done yesterday, not tomorrow.

 

http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change/

 

This is a good article outlining some stuff.

 

 

 

As you can see, the 2 degrees C "guardrail" that separated acceptable from dangerous in 2001 is, in 2009, squarely inside several red zones. Today, the exact same social and political considerations that settled on 2 degrees C as the threshold of safety by all rights ought to settle on 1 degree C [1.8 degrees F]. After all, we now know 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous.
Indeed, as we'll see, stopping at 2 degrees C is getting close to impossible as well. There is no longer any reasonable chance of avoiding "dangerous" climate change, so 1 degree C vs. 2 degrees C is a somewhat academic debate. At this point we're just shooting to avoid super-duper-dangerous.
Right now, global emissions are rising, faster and faster. Between 2000 and 2007, they rose at around 3.5 percent a year; by 2009 it was up to 5.6 percent. In 2010, we hit 5.9 percent growth, a record. We aren't just going in the wrong direction -- we're accelerating in the wrong direction.
As you can see, if we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor strike that shuts down industrial civilization, that's unlikely.
Just to give you a sense of scale: The only thing that's ever pushed emissions reductions above 1 percent a year is, in the words of the Stern Report, "recession or upheaval." The total collapse of the USSR knocked 5 percent off its emissions. So 10 percent a year is like ... well, it's not like anything in the history of human civilization.
With immediate, concerted action at global scale, we have a slim chance to halt climate change at the extremely dangerous level of 2 degrees C. If we delay even a decade -- waiting for better technology or a more amenable political situation or whatever -- we will have no chance.

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Posted

Preach, sister!

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