Global Warming is hardly anything new
Go back about 55 million years and you will see some REAL global warming.
Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
ruveyn
Bingo. That is THE question (for which I do not have a sure fire answer). We have no guarantee that taking an Oath of Poverty and going back to being hunter-gatherers will stop the current warming trend. No guarantees at all. And with positive feedback mechanisms accelerating and amplifying the warming trend it may already be too late. Your grandchildren and mine should plan on moving inland as the oceans rise.
Please see the following article:
Scientific American Nov. 2012 p 50: Global Warming: Faster than expected? by John Carey
ruveyn
Last edited by ruveyn on 22 Dec 2012, 1:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Does carbon dioxide cause warming or does warming release lots of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gasses"
ruveyn
Tollorin
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Would going back to the stone age and becoming hunter-gatherers again reverse matters? Long before humans there was global warming AND global freezing. We are being urged by the Luddites and the eco-phreaks and the governments to become poor and humble. Which is nifty except that 95 percent of us will die if we do that. '
ruveyn
Would going back to the stone age and becoming hunter-gatherers again reverse matters? Long before humans there was global warming AND global freezing. We are being urged by the Luddites and the eco-phreaks and the governments to become poor and humble. Which is nifty except that 95 percent of us will die if we do that. '
ruveyn
http://worldview3.50webs.com/6temp.chart.n.co2.jpg
Source: his CV and Pub. record~~~~ http://www.scotese.com/ScoteseCV.htm http://www.scotese.com/scotesepubs.htm
Rising CO2 levels?
Increasing global temperatures?
Always question.
The only meaningful thinking is critical thinking.
What would you recommend to ensure a population reduction short of bloody murder or genocide?
Population will fall if the net birth-rate declines and that will happen when more people die than are being born or it becomes to expensive to hatch and raise kids.
ruveyn
There are "Luddites" on both sides of the fence. Anthropogenic climate change is a strange and abstract thing to believe in, and the evidence for it is indirect and requires mathematical analysis. A certain type of Luddite will reject it simply for that reason.
There are "Luddites" on both sides of the fence. Anthropogenic climate change is a strange and abstract thing to believe in, and the evidence for it is indirect and requires mathematical analysis. A certain type of Luddite will reject it simply for that reason.
Unseen causes are difficult to comprehend correctly. For starters one must have a -theory- which is well tested and corroborated.
Unfortunately "climate science" is based on no such theory. Climate is an emergent property of weather which itself is the result of chaotic dynamics, which is notably intractable to mathematical methodology. Hence "climate science" is based more on -models- (the result of fitting curves to data) than it is on solid physics. The problem with -model- is that there are just too many variable parameters at work and one will end up was a hodge podge like Ptolemaic cosmology filled with epicycles and deferents and crystal spheres. That was what astronomy was like before Copernicus and Kepler led to Newtonian gravity based theory of accounting for the motion of celestial bodies.
Weather and climate are currently in a pre-Keplerian, pre-Newtonian state (so to speak).
I think of myself as a rational skeptic rather than a Luddite and I am underwhelmed by the current "scientific" consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Please recall that at one time (and not that long ago) almost ALL physicists believed in aether (it does not exist) and almost NO physicists believed in atoms (they do exist, ask any survivor from Hiroshima).
ruveyn
There are "Luddites" on both sides of the fence. Anthropogenic climate change is a strange and abstract thing to believe in, and the evidence for it is indirect and requires mathematical analysis. A certain type of Luddite will reject it simply for that reason.
Unseen causes are difficult to comprehend correctly. For starters one must have a -theory- which is well tested and corroborated.
Unfortunately "climate science" is based on no such theory. Climate is an emergent property of weather which itself is the result of chaotic dynamics, which is notably intractable to mathematical methodology. Hence "climate science" is based more on -models- (the result of fitting curves to data) than it is on solid physics. The problem with -model- is that there are just too many variable parameters at work and one will end up was a hodge podge like Ptolemaic cosmology filled with epicycles and deferents and crystal spheres. That was what astronomy was like before Copernicus and Kepler led to Newtonian gravity based theory of accounting for the motion of celestial bodies.
Weather and climate are currently in a pre-Keplerian, pre-Newtonian state (so to speak).
I think of myself as a rational skeptic rather than a Luddite and I am underwhelmed by the current "scientific" consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Please recall that at one time (and not that long ago) almost ALL physicists believed in aether (it does not exist) and almost NO physicists believed in atoms (they do exist, ask any survivor from Hiroshima).
ruveyn
Well said.
Do you think that Science/Math(s)/Supercomputers will ever attain a precise predictive understanding of weather?
or are there simply too many variables?
Do you think that Science/Math(s)/Supercomputers will ever attain a precise predictive understanding of weather?
or are there simply too many variables?
Not really. To deal with chaotic systems one would need infinite precision which is clearly impossible for a real physical computer. We will have to be happy qualitative descriptions of where strange attractors and strange repelors are.
Just to give you a really clear idea of the problem, take a look at the behavior of a well lubricated triple pendulum sometime. The system is completely deterministic but there is no math that will predict the behavior more than a few seconds out given a someone approximate or indeterminate initial position. Two initial position can -look- extremely similar (or even the same) yet the behavior of the triple pendulum will be very different in the two cases.
I seriously doubt we will be able to predict weather much more than ten days out, no matter how powerful our computers are.
ruveyn
ruveyn