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BrianH
Trad climber
santa fe
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Lead the way by doing what?
Stop spraying our sh#t hither and yon?
Look at how we live and what we consume to Get Stuff Done?
Question most everything we are told?
I know it's rude to answer a question with a question, but please indulge me. At a certain point doesn't it make sense to stop crapping where you eat?
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WandaFuca
Social climber
From the gettin place
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Nov 10, 2009 - 01:31am PT
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If you want to make a difference, quit crapping out kids like they're little goddamned miracles. --Wildone
It's a small world after all.
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Nov 10, 2009 - 01:45am PT
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Brian - guess you mean Planet wide
does it make sense? Well of course not.
The problem is Civilization has got to crap,
and there are no means to toss the crap off the planet
(example: into the Sun).
Yet.
So bury it, recycle it, or sell it to China.
What other options are there?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
Monrovia, CA
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Nov 10, 2009 - 01:50am PT
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ydpl8s,
Nicely and succinctly put! End of discussion...
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Ray Olson
Trad climber
Imperial Beach, California
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Nov 10, 2009 - 02:09am PT
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corniss chopper,
check out Subaru USA's
web site for a peek at an
"option."
there you will see the Deming
model pretty much fully realized
producing powerful PZEV vehicles
with emissions cleaner than the air
in some cities.
Financing for hybrid/electric cars
is happening too, re: Fiskar.
and, I wouldn't be so sure the Asian
countries are as unaware of what's
going on as some might think...
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ydpl8s
Trad climber
Santa Monica, California
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Nov 10, 2009 - 12:06pm PT
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Ray, I'm not saying they're unaware. But when the majority of 2 1/2 billion people are using coal and wood for basic heating and cooking, even the idea of converting them over to a somewhat "cleaner" fuel of heating oil or natural gas is a daunting project of herculean proportions, not to mention getting them converted to greener sources.
I know that they have plenty of people who realize the problem and are working on it. Their top priority at the moment is economic growth, which hopefully in the future will enable them to have the luxury of a green conversion.
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Ray Olson
Trad climber
Imperial Beach, California
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Nov 10, 2009 - 12:18pm PT
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^^^
that's some really good info, thanks.
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rotten johnny
Social climber
mammoth lakes, ca
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Nov 10, 2009 - 05:17pm PT
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every cloud has a silver lining...when the ocean rises , it will flood most of newport beach and displace hundreds of thousand climate change skeptics that call reagan country their home....ha , ha ....
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crazygremlin
Trad climber
index, WA
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Nov 10, 2009 - 05:50pm PT
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its everybodys problem, but its a problem that isnt gonna affect us.. itll affect our kids blah blah blah rant rant rant you get the point...
course, it is still a magor problem grdd#mn sceptics
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213
climber
Where the Froude number often >> 1
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Nov 10, 2009 - 07:20pm PT
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"We have gone through cycles like this in geologic history, long before there were greenhouse gas emissions"
Whoa. So you are saying that in the past there were NO atmospheric constituents which were emitted from the Earth's surface that participated in radiative forcing processes?!?!?! No water vapor? No SO2? No CO2? No 03? In other words, the Earth did not have an atmosphere prior to the Industrial Revolution?! Based on that reasoning we can certainly through out the Miller-Urey experiment!
However, you are right on the money when you say that economics will drive all future change (simple argument based on externalities and marginal costs) as well as academia making tons of $$$ out of the whole dealio.
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Ray Olson
Trad climber
Imperial Beach, California
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Nov 10, 2009 - 08:37pm PT
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hmm, doesn't sound so bad really.
just need to know where the new
beachfront property's gonna be so
I can get some and cash in on the
disaster.
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ydpl8s
Trad climber
Santa Monica, California
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Nov 11, 2009 - 11:05am PT
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Sorry 213, should have read "manmade industrial greenhouse gases", and of course I'm excluding those fumes exuded from T-Rex after partaking in Sauropod Burritos:-)
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 11, 2009 - 11:19am PT
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"a mining of the geological record to show past episodes of warming were sharply coupled with rising CO2 levels, fell victim to a closer look that revealed that past warmings had preceded rather than followed higher CO2 levels."
here's the full text from wsj:
The Economic Uses of Al Gore
Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Last spring Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn asked Al Gore during a House hearing if his investments in green energy meant he would benefit personally from cap and trade.
"If you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don't know me," Mr. Gore responded (and, yes, according to two reporters present, he sighed).
Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He's wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.
Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?
Ms. Blackburn's challenge was in a sense late. Mr. Gore long ago jumped over to the side where salesmanship, by whatever means, was the trumping priority. As far back as 1989, he insisted there was "no dispute worthy of recognition" about the danger of manmade climate change. By now, he titularly heads a vast establishment with a stake in one side of the argument.
Notice, for instance, after a decade in which the earth appears to have stopped warming and even cooled, that global warming advocates have rushed to embrace a computer simulation that predicts this cooling (in retrospect, of course) and allows for indefinite future cooling, even while assuring that the world is destined to face disastrous warming anyway. Isn't this what forecasters of doom have done since time immemorial when their deadlines for doom haven't been met?
Mr. Gore's own predictions of a climate catastrophe have not lessened, but every time he opens his mouth, the costs of meeting the emergency become easier and easier to swallow. They aren't even costs anymore; as he says in his new book, they are "profits."
All policy salesmanship naturally defaults toward the proposition of huge benefits and negligible costs (i.e., free lunchism). Isn't that where Al Gore is today?
Mr. Gore notes that he has poured his own money into two climate action nonprofits, but, whatever his self-felt motives, aren't these nonprofits functionally propaganda arms (i.e., advertising) that benefit his for-profit investments?
The truth is, evidence of man's impact on climate remains maddeningly elusive, in part because man's impact on climate is so small as to be hard to disentangle from natural variability. This is not Mr. Gore's position, of course. If anything, however, the case for action has become less closed since he pronounced it closed in 1989, if only because of the huge sums and manpower poured into the subject to little avail.
In retrospect, a significant moment was the falling apart or debunking of two key attempts seemingly well-suited to clinch matters for a scientifically literate public. One, the famous hockey stick graph, which suggested the temperature rise of the past 100 years was unprecedentedly steep, was convincingly challenged. The other, a mining of the geological record to show past episodes of warming were sharply coupled with rising CO2 levels, fell victim to a closer look that revealed that past warmings had preceded rather than followed higher CO2 levels.
These episodes from a decade ago testified to one important thing: Even climate activists recognized a need for evidence from the real world. The endless invocation of computer models wasn't cutting it. Yet today the same circles are more dependent than ever on predictions made by models, whose forecasts lie far enough in the future that those who rely on them to make policy prescriptions are in no danger of being held accountable for their reliability.
For a while the media could patch over the scientific shortfall by reporting evidence of warming as if it were evidence of what causes warming. Inconveniently, however, just as temperature-measuring has become more standardized and disciplined and less reliant on flaky records from the past (massaged to the Nth degree), the warming trend seems to have faded from the recent record.
We could go on. But from our first column on this subject, we have been convinced that the scientific questions are interesting and irrelevant, since it was never in the cards that Western societies (or Brazil or India or China) would sacrifice economic growth for the uncertain benefits of fighting climate change. Unable to do anything meaningful about climate change, policy would therefore default to satisfying the demand of organized interests for climate pork.
Isn't that, however much he may be distracted by feelings of sincerity, exactly the economic function of Mr. Gore today?
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213
climber
Where the Froude number often >> 1
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Nov 11, 2009 - 08:34pm PT
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Ah thanks for the clarification, ydpl8s. I'm partial to the triceratops tortas myself.
Interesting wall street article with some respectable points.
Not sure if has been mentioned here yet, but if you read the recent IPCC report chapter on modeling and downscaling, all of the suite of gcms (global climate models) used for future predictions have been set with the initial conditions of the past 20 years and spun-up through this period. Hmm, given that these were anomalously warm years (why has yet to be determined), is it not surprising that the future outcomes are of course going to show future warming when compared to the past several hundred years mean temperatures? Endless invocation indeed...
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 11, 2009 - 08:40pm PT
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Everyone Out of the Water!
Damn the pesky models! Full speed ahead.
By George F. Will | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009
In last week's NEWSWEEK, the cover story was a hymn to "The Thinking Man's Thinking Man." Beneath the story's headline ("The Evolution of an Eco-Prophet") was this subhead: "Al Gore's views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself." Which was rather rude because, if true, his views have not advanced for 11 years. (Click here to follow George F. Will)
There is much debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased for that long. What we know is that computer models did not predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillions of dollars and diminished freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data. Soon after the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man's Thinking Man—reported that global warming is "unequivocal," there came evidence that the planet's temperature is beginning to cool. "That," Ball writes, "has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect."
Models are no better or worse than their assumptions, and Ball notes how dicey these assumptions can be: "The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet." It gets worse: "The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation—and how clouds in turn affect temperature—remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently."
Some scientists say the cooling is a product of what Ball calls "the enigmatic ocean currents." Others say that even if the cooling continues for several decades, as some scientists think it might, warming will resume.
And if it does not? A story in the April 28, 1975, edition of NEWSWEEK was "The Cooling World." NEWSWEEK can recycle that article, and recycling is a planet-saving virtue.
Meanwhile, however, the crusade against warming will brook no interference from information. With the Waxman-Markey bill, the House of Representatives has endorsed reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 83 per-cent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is surely the most preposterous legislation ever hatched in the House. Using Energy Department historical statistics, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have calculated this:
Waxman-Markey's goal is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83 percent reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capita emissions of 1910, a level probably last seen when the population was 45 million—in 1875.
Such nonsense is rare, but nonsensical fears are not. In their new book, SuperFreakonomics, Steven D. -Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner revisit the great shark panic of the summer of 2001. Eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast was playing in the surf near Pensacola, Fla., when a bull shark bit off his right arm and gouged a piece of his thigh. The country, with an assist from the media, became fixated on the shark menace. Time's cover proclaimed "The Summer of the Shark"; Time's story began:
"Sharks come silently, without warning. There are three ways they strike: the hit-and-run, the bump-and-bite and the sneak attack. The hit-and-run is the most common. The shark may see the sole of a swimmer's foot, think it's a fish and take a bite before realizing this isn't its usual prey."
Jeepers. Everyone out of the water!
Or not. Time, to its credit, let the air out of its story by noting that the numbers of shark attacks "remain minuscule." They were small during all of 2001, all over the globe. That year there were 64 shark attacks, only four of them fatal. Between 1995 and 2005, shark attacks worldwide varied between a high of 79 in a year and a low of 46, averaging 60.3. Fatalities averaged 5.9, about 50 percent higher than in 2001. The unfortunate Jessie Arbogast became an occasion for the fun of experiencing a frisson of synthetic fear. The real thing arrived in late summer 2001, on September 11.
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Nov 11, 2009 - 09:51pm PT
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99% of the people said the world was flat at one time
also. They were wrong as you are now on CO2 linked GW.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Nov 11, 2009 - 10:12pm PT
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I wonder how many months, years of record low temps is it going to take for some to admit maybe it is a little more complicated than they surmised?
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 18, 2009 - 09:07am PT
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the goracle doesn't know what he's talking about; last night, he told conan that the earth's core is "several million degrees"...it's actually around 6000 C
so is this debatable or is the "science" done?
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dirtbag
climber
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Nov 18, 2009 - 09:24am PT
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the goracle doesn't know what he's talking about; last night, he told conan that the earth's core is "several million degrees"...it's actually around 6000 C
so is this debatable or is the "science" done?
Wow, you're so brilliant.
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Reeotch
Trad climber
Kayenta, AZ
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Nov 18, 2009 - 09:34am PT
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Yep, and a lot of people are going to get really rich off the proposed cap and trade system (which is so full of loopholes its like a piece of swiss cheese).
I accept that climate change is a human caused problem, at least in part, but what is currently being proposed will do next to nothing to solve the problem.
Climate change is now being used to fear-monger us into accepting this new legislation which will essentially turn pollution into a commodity.
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