Thursday 22 November 2007

Global Warming

At the risk of sounding like an idiot, I am still not convinced that man is causing climate change.

Below is a graph from longrangeweather.com and below that, another graph from Illinois State Museum.





http://longrangeweather.com/images/GTEMPS.gif

Earth Ice Over Last 700,000 Years

Over the past 750,000 years of Earth's history, Ice Ages have occurred at regular intervals, of approximately 100,000 years each. Courtesy of Illinois State Museum


These are both very interesting.

The top one shows that the day to day temperature (a thousand years or two is really only few days in the time scale of the existence of weather as we know it on Earth) is influenced by all kinds of things, from volcanic eruptions to solar activity.

This has been going on since Earth existed.

The climate changed so dramatically 74,000 years ago, because of a huge eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra, that man’s population crashed to fewer than 10,000 adults. (Basically, a six year nuclear winter and a 1,000 year ice age. Now wouldn't that would be fun with Earth’s present population levels.)


And I don't know where you live on this still wonderful planet of ours, but in my area, weather forecasting is interesting. Maybe accurate over the next 24 hours. Interesting for the next 2 days. But after that, it's a bit shaky.
But Climatologists have these fabulous computers that tell us what is going to happen over the next hundred years. Accurately! Don't they?
So why don't they lend them to our forecasters to see what is going to happen tomorrow? Or next week? And then we could see how accurate they would be for the next hundred years.
(Is that my tongue in my cheek, or did I eat something that wasn't dead yet?)

And it seems that water vapour is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect.

Not Carbon Dioxide. Really ? Yes, really.

But the long term trends are the coming and going of the Ice Ages every hundred thousand years or so. And we are due for another one. And I don’t think driving your car or not can influence the next one.

Get an Ice Age in you back yard and see how you like it.

Bugger Global Warming.
Lobby the Government to stop the next big freeze.

And if there is an election due they’ll promise to do just that.

(It won’t be a ‘core’ promise of course. But a Politicians Promise'. Funny how normal people and Politicians both use the same word to mean different things. Like Truth in Advertising. And there's an oxymoron if ever there was one.
I guess it is the same as when we talk of morality and truth , and when a lawyer does.
Same words, different meanings.)

In my whale huggers heart, I believe we should be planting more trees, stop clearing the jungles, use less fossil fuel.

Because we need to preserve what we have left.

A richer, more diversified Earth is a better Earth, a better place to live.

Til the next Ice Age.

Isn’t it ?


2 comments:

RobC said...

You're in no danger of looking like an idiot. None of this stuff is simple.

First, the graphs you're showing all come from proxy data and shouldn't be taken literally. Second, interesting as they are, they don't tell the whole story.

It's plain enough that changes that happened before, say, 1900 were caused naturally. But none of the natural factors explain the warmup since 1980. CO2 does explain it. I've posted the best data I could find on a web page called Global Warming: A Guide for the Perplexed.

I would like to know where you got the notion that water vapor accounts for 95% of the greenhouse effect. Sources I've seen, such as this one show it accounts for about 76%. CO2 accounts for about 15%, which is more than enough to explain the temperature rise.

Meriki said...

Hi RobC,
thankyou for your comment. I checked out you information and a lot of your bibliography. It seems you are affiliated in some way with the Nuclear Industry. Not that negates you comments, but does mean you may have an axe to grind. (Get rid of fossil and go Nuclear.) I have seen a lot of that data before. And I don't have your cavalier attitude to proxy data. The gist of my argument is that a lot of our information gathering technology is very recent and long term trends are impossible to predict from such a short sample period. We all pick and choose statistics to bolster any position we might have. I have tried not to be biased, but acknowledge that that is pretty well impossible to some extent . I have gone back to original sources whenever possible. For example, the sea levels are supposed to be rising globally. But I checked the raw data provided from a link provided by The Australian Weather Bureau. Looking at that data, one would have to be very brave to draw publicly any conclusion at all.
The press doesn’t help either. There was a story several months ago, about an island in the Pacific that had waves crashing over the roads and peoples gardens. The story said that this was an example of what was happening because Global Warming causes increased sea levels. The real story was somewhat different. The locals had built a causeway out from the island. When the monsoon winds arrived early (please don’t blame that on Global Warming!) they unfortunately coincided with high spring tides. The result of the wind pushing these tides against the newly built causeway was flooding. But that doesn’t make as good a story as G W.
As I stated initially, I am a conservationist. I believe that Thorium reactors could solve a lot of our energy needs.
Imagine a world where non-carbondioxide producing power stations provided enough power to run cars on compressed air. The technology is there. But it seems the political will to stand up to the oil companies isn’t.