Official Global Warming thread (merged)

[VolsNSkinsFan]

There were plenty of facts. facts.

The "facts" are adjusted by bureaucrats in DC.

 

[K-town Vol Fan]

If youre concerned, I can help. I will gladly accept your car, appliances, central heat/air con, lawn equip, grill, etc. By giving these up, you will rest peacefully knowing you are no longer damaging our planet. Jlmk.

While these do damage the planet, it pales in comparison to the huge chunks of rain forests were cutting down and burning or the tons and tons of coal we use for electricity. Both release more carbon into the atmosphere than you or I could in 100 lifetimes.

 

[Orangedogsrule]

I agree, it does make Leo and anyone else who believes man is the cause look foolish as hell.

Hog, go to...

images earth Aral Sea

and

How the Soviet Union Created Central Asia?s Worst Environmental Disaster | The Diplomat

Yes, mankind actually did disappear a whole sea.....
its like magic, I know....
.
.
.
really really hard to understand

 

[McDad]

While these do damage the planet, it pales in comparison to the huge chunks of rain forests were cutting down and burning or the tons and tons of coal we use for electricity. Both release more carbon into the atmosphere than you or I could in 100 lifetimes.

If you hand over all electrical items, it will be a start, right?

 

[Grand Vol]

If you hand over all electrical items, it will be a start, right?

I call dibs on the grill.

 

[Orange_Crush]

While these do damage the planet, it pales in comparison to the huge chunks of rain forests were cutting down and burning or the tons and tons of coal we use for electricity. Both release more carbon into the atmosphere than you or I could in 100 lifetimes.

You know, a cob house minimizes wood use and also heats/cool largely via passive-solar. Not sure you can continue to post here on VN and completely cut out electricity, so that'll be a decision for your own personal ethos. But I say, "be the change you advocate".

 

[K-town Vol Fan]

If you hand over all electrical items, it will be a start, right?

Obviously thats not the solution. We need to find better ways to produce electricity. More wind and solar. Theres a reason the US has not invested in wind and solar as much as other countries such as china, and that is purely money. Too many people stand to lose too much money if we move away from fossil fuels. Germany, Italy, Japan, China. They use far and away more renewable energy resources than we do. So why cant we? Because we have billion dollar fossil fuel companies lining the pockets of politicians to tell the public that climate change isnt a real problem

 

[McDad]

Obviously thats not the solution. We need to find better ways to produce electricity. More wind and solar. Theres a reason the US has not invested in wind and solar as much as other countries such as china, and that is purely money. Too many people stand to lose too much money if we move away from fossil fuels. Germany, Italy, Japan, China. They use far and away more renewable energy resources than we do. So why cant we? Because we have billion dollar fossil fuel companies lining the pockets of politicians to tell the public that climate change isnt a real problem

Excellent. Better to go after the biggest first. Dissimilar to how you are concerned about the cost for Trump to move between NYC and DC instead of worrying about military and entitlement spending.

Also, I am not trying to help with the climate change solution, im trying to help you be more at peace by alleviating any guilt you may have when using energy dependent items.

 

[tumscalcium]

Anyone seen Leo's new documentary, "Before the Flood"

Honestly it makes Americans looks foolish. Anyone skeptical of clinate change should watch it. You can see the damage first hand and there really is no denying it.

I also heard today Trump has changed his stance on climate change after saying it was a hoax during his campaign.

Is this the one where he and a film crew travel the world on private jets and burn more fossil fuels and do more damage to the environment than I ever will while he tells me I need to start doing my part?

No thanks.

 

[BigOrangeTrain]

Obviously thats not the solution. We need to find better ways to produce electricity. More wind and solar. Theres a reason the US has not invested in wind and solar as much as other countries such as china, and that is purely money. Too many people stand to lose too much money if we move away from fossil fuels. Germany, Italy, Japan, China. They use far and away more renewable energy resources than we do. So why cant we? Because we have billion dollar fossil fuel companies lining the pockets of politicians to tell the public that climate change isnt a real problem

Wind and solar arent the answer.

 

[BigOrangeTrain]

Hmmm, so if humans stopped ALL activities that are associated with "climate change", would the sun still shine at its normal rate? Would nature still give us rain? Snow? Would we still see seasons?

 

[MG1968]

Anyone seen Leo's new documentary, "Before the Flood"

Honestly it makes Americans looks foolish. Anyone skeptical of clinate change should watch it. You can see the damage first hand and there really is no denying it.

I also heard today Trump has changed his stance on climate change after saying it was a hoax during his campaign.

Is this the same Leo that will fly his closest friends on a private jet to wherever in the world he is filming his next movie?

 

[AM64]

Is this the same Leo that will fly his closest friends on a private jet to wherever in the world he is filming his next movie?

Probably, but Barry and Michelle will still have to go in separate airplanes. Gore isn't going to pool. Travolta will fly his own. And anybody who is anybody will attempt to have the biggest and most lavish airplane parked there because that's how it's ranked. Oh, and Barry will be handing out Extra Special Presidential Gold Medal Participation awards which will necessitate another cargo plane.

 

[Weezy]

Even with Germany throwing gobs of money at wind and solar, they still can't get past 30% energy production penetration. The only countries to actually decarbonize have been France and Switzerland with nuclear and hydro. Yet those countries are reversing course in the name of "renewables." The game is obvious. Renewables are being pushed by people heavily invested in those technologies, governments looking for more control of markets, and (primarily) natural gas lobbyists who know that when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, which is more often than not for most of the country, natural gas is the only power source that can economically load follow.

Germany replaced nuclear with renewables...and they sold it as some kind of decarbonization plan. Meanwhile, their CO2 emissions have not gone down, but merely held steady. Despite having electricity costs twice as expensive as its neighbors.

Sorry if people just aren't buying the propaganda of governments solving climate change.

 

[TennesseeJet]

I love Global Warming!!!!

 

[AM64]

Even with Germany throwing gobs of money at wind and solar, they still can't get past 30% energy production penetration. The only countries to actually decarbonize have been France and Switzerland with nuclear and hydro. Yet those countries are reversing course in the name of "renewables." The game is obvious. Renewables are being pushed by people heavily invested in those technologies, governments looking for more control of markets, and (primarily) natural gas lobbyists who know that when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, which is more often than not for most of the country, natural gas is the only power source that can economically load follow.

Germany replaced nuclear with renewables...and they sold it as some kind of decarbonization plan. Meanwhile, their CO2 emissions have not gone down, but merely held steady. Despite having electricity costs twice as expensive as its neighbors.

Sorry if people just aren't buying the propaganda of governments solving climate change.

The problem with wind and solar is that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. That leaves backup generation and storage - back up generation is expensive because there's a lot of capital invested in equipment idling so that it can meet sudden demand, and that backup generation is generally fossil fuel of one sort or another, so it's not as clean as nuclear. Backup generating plants have to be staffed whether they are actually producing or in standby. A plant running at standby is like your car idling at a traffic light - still takes fuel, so in a way solar and wind power are as disruptive to power production as traffic lights are to traffic flow.

The other thing required to make solar and wind reasonable is battery backup - that's expensive and the manufacturing and disposal have their own ecological problems. Stuff too much capacity in too small a package and you have mini fireballs - so space is an issue, too.

 

[Orange_Crush]

The problem with wind and solar is that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. That leaves backup generation and storage - back up generation is expensive because there's a lot of capital invested in equipment idling so that it can meet sudden demand, and that backup generation is generally fossil fuel of one sort or another, so it's not as clean as nuclear. Backup generating plants have to be staffed whether they are actually producing or in standby. A plant running at standby is like your car idling at a traffic light - still takes fuel, so in a way solar and wind power are as disruptive to power production as traffic lights are to traffic flow.

The other thing required to make solar and wind reasonable is battery backup - that's expensive and the manufacturing and disposal have their own ecological problems. Stuff too much capacity in too small a package and you have mini fireballs - so space is an issue, too.

Not to mention the production and disposal of the solar panels.

Solar/Wind is really only a viability on small scale, for the select few who want to get off grid through alternate energy production that supplies a drastic lifestyle change. It's a lifestyle change that is only possible at the micro-level, and will never produce at the macro level for the majority of people and industry.

 

[Vols4us]

First, I was kidding.

Second, your effort to equate the inability to forecast a particular storm's path to failure to be able to quantify global warming causation and effect is mind-numbingly, and even tragically, dumb.

Enlighten us dumb rubes as to why, please.

 

[BartW]

Enlighten us dumb rubes as to why, please.

We’ve covered the weather vs. climate topic several times so forgive my laziness. I’ll just leave a couple of links with some good analogies:

Initial value vs. boundary value problems

Chaos and Climate

Imagine a pot of boiling water. A weather forecast is like the attempt to predict where the next bubble is going to rise (physically this is an initial value problem). A climate statement would be that the average temperature of the boiling water is 100ºC at normal pressure, while it is only 90ºC at 2,500 meters altitude in the mountains, due to the lower pressure (that is a boundary value problem).

The difference between weather and climate

A good analogy of the difference between weather and climate is to consider a swimming pool. Imagine that the pool is being slowly filled. If someone dives in there will be waves. The waves are weather, and the average water level is the climate. A diver jumping into the pool the next day will create more waves, but the water level (aka the climate) will be higher as more water flows into the pool.

In the atmosphere the water hose is increasing greenhouse gases. They will cause the climate to warm but we will still have changing weather (waves). Climate scientists use models to forecast the average water level in the pool, not the waves.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBdxDFpDp_k[/youtube]

 

[BartW]

Solar/Wind is really only a viability on small scale, for the select few who want to get off grid through alternate energy production that supplies a drastic lifestyle change. It's a lifestyle change that is only possible at the micro-level, and will never produce at the macro level for the majority of people and industry.

For The First Time, Solar Will Be The Top New Source Of Energy This Year

For the first time ever utility-scale solar projects will add more new capacity to the nation’s grid than any other industry this year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Tuesday.

Natural gas and wind energy follow somewhat closely, according to the EIA’s monthly report, which notes that solar, gas and wind energy will make up 93 percent of all new energy. Solar projects will generate about 9.5 gigawatts of new energy. Natural gas, meanwhile, will add 8 gigawatts while wind is poised to create 6.8 gigawatts.

 

[BartW]

Environmentalists get a dose of good news.

The primary cause of the sharp decline in power-plant emissions is clear: Utilities are rapidly abandoning coal for cleaner-burning natural gas and zero-emission renewables. It’s also clear that this shift, driven by rising prices for coal and falling prices for climate-friendlier alternatives, is happening independently of Obama’s controversial climate rules, which were only finalized in August 2015 and then suspended by the Court six months later. Even if President-Elect Trump fulfills his pledge to withdraw from the Paris climate deal, the U.S. is on track to fulfill its pledges under that deal, a glimmer of good news for environmentalists mourning his election.

What is not clear is whether Trump, who has vowed to undo the Clean Power Plan and end Obama’s “war on coal,” can reverse the decline of coal or even slow it down. Trump has called global warming a made-in-China hoax, and the energy section of his transition website reads like an ode to fossil fuels. But since his election, Trump and other pro-coal Republicans, including Senate Majority Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have tried to lower expectations of a coal-country renaissance, acknowledging that coal’s problems extend beyond Obama’s EPA.

Those problems have gotten even more severe this year. An analysis of government energy data provided to POLITICO by the Sierra Club, which has led a national Beyond Coal campaign to try to kill the industry, shows that U.S. power plants are on track to emit 1.76 billion metric tons of carbon this year, a 27 percent reduction from 2005. That’s already below the Clean Power Plan’s interim goal for 2024, and most of the way to the 32 percent reduction the plan envisions for 2030. If you subtract emissions from the 71 operating coal plants that already have announced retirement dates, the electric sector has just about met the plan’s final emissions goals 15 years early, even though the plan does not now have and may never have any legal teeth to compel compliance.

 

[BartW]

US House Science Committee tweets Breitbart climate misinformation
"Global temperatures plunge," the article falsely exclaims.

The article was written by James Delingpole, a columnist who has made a career out of insult-laden polemics against climate science. (In an episode of BBC’s Horizon, Delingpole famously admitted that he never reads scientific papers and called himself “an interpreter of interpretations.”) In this case, Delingpole mostly tacked a few put-downs onto quotes from a Daily Mail story written by David Rose—who also has a long history of writing deeply misleading stories about climate science.

Rose’s Daily Mail story used satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures over land only to argue that a temperature drop since the middle of the year "proves" that the warmest-year records set by 2014, 2015, and (soon) 2016 have nothing to do with global warming.

Instead, Rose claims it was all due to the El Niño conditions in the Pacific—a claim that is very clearly false since the long-term warming is much larger than the year-to-year variation caused by El Niño and La Niña. Even Rose’s chosen dataset shows the long-term warming trend.

After a particularly strong El Niño in 1997 and 1998 drove the global average surface temperature to a major record, those who reject the conclusions of climate science spent years claiming that global warming stopped in 1998. When the long-term warming trend started surpassing the old 1998 record again, the popular excuse was “Well, that’s just because this is a warm El Niño year!” After 2015 absolutely crushed the record, some climate scientists joked about how long it would take for someone to claim that now global warming had stopped in 2015. If you had “less than 1 year” in an office pool, congratulations.

LMAO! What do I win? This is absolutely incredible. Embarrassing. Shameful. Hilarious. I can hardly put it into words. This is the most spectacular instance of cherrypicking I’ve seen, and that’s saying a lot considering this thread. Clearly global warming is over because one particular model of satellite-based temperatures (UAH) showed a large drop in temperatures over land only for one month. Peel back one layer of cherrypicking ("over land only"), and it turns out that same satellite dataset actually had a record warm month! It’s pretty sad when The Weather Channel has to put you in your place.

Not only was that a record warm, now 2016 Almost Certain to be Warmest in 38 Year Satellite Record. And how about surface temperatures?

Ouch. Even the lower 48 just experienced it’s hottest autumn on record. Add to that both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice are at record lows…

Lamar Smith should be tarred and feathered

 

[golfballs]

Obama Admin Fired Top Scientist to Advance Climate Change Plans

A new congressional investigation has determined that the Obama administration fired a top scientist and intimidated staff at the Department of Energy in order to further its climate change agenda, according to a new report that alleges the administration ordered top officials to obstruct Congress in order to forward this agenda.

 

[BigOrangeTrain]

Obama Admin Fired Top Scientist to Advance Climate Change Plans

Not surprised at all.

 

[FLVOL69]

Not surprised at all.

#BS