Gore's climate claims melt under scrutiny...

The immediate effects of global warming would be to melt the ice caps. Sometime during this process there would be a shut down of the gulf stream and the various other ocean streams that try and create thermoequiliberiam the our local black (physics and not a racial term) body, Earth.

When the Northern and Southern hemisphere can not longer transfer heat to the equator (air is a poor mover of heat, as in winds) the surface and deep return routes of these great streams will stop. Basically this means that they will become closer in temperature. Less heat energy difference equals less work.

The loss of the warm water in high Northern and Southern latitudes will cause an ice build up, instead of the ice melting in these regions each year due to the influx of warm water they would get larger and larger until we enter another ice age, due to the loss of the warm water.

The reason the ice age would ensue goes back to the heat problem. Once the ice does not melt it only grows and reflects more
sunlight. It can grow to envelop most of the planet, that happened a very very long time ago, long before the dinosaurs. That was the mother of all ice ages.

Scientists (I read a lot and am only a tradesman) that have studied ancient ice core samples in antarticia have revealed that soon after a CO two build up an ice age follows that has been traced to the gulf stream. And sometimes can be rather rapid, a few thousand years!

After all of this millinia, people would still have forums slamming SGS and wondering if PCGS or NGC was better.

 

Very interesting reading. Well, a few thousand years you say! Guess I can quit thinking about this and start collecting coins again.

Gosh! Al Gore had me thinking all this would happen sometime around the 4th of July.

 

Boy I'll say you do! But when you are 'forteing' would you either leave the window open or go outside.
Thank you Tex.

 

No surprise there. The sun will reach it's maximum energy output for this cycle in a few years and there is every expectation for a cool period, perhaps eventually another ice age. What the global warmists can't understand is that they confuse cause and effect. About 96% of carbon dioxide output is from plant decay, and less solar energy means less plant life and less CO2. So it is expected that the peak of a warm period corresponds to a peak in CO2, and that the effects cited follow. But it is still the change in solar energy that is the cause. The change in C2 levels is just another effect.

 

Studies have shown that livestock produce more greenhouse gasses than all of the cars in the world. All animals fart methane (grew up on a farm and can personally attest to this, as can my ex wife) and methane traps app. ten times more heat than CO2. Solution? Lets keep our SUVs' and mix beano with the animal feed.

 

I hate to correct your vast knowledge of the subject AL but the truth is that 90% of the methane expelled by a livestock is in the form of burps not farts. The remaining 10% is mostly absorbed by the tissue in the digestive system and only a very small percent is actually farted out. I don't know what you two were doing on those farms but you should have been working on your people skills rather than looking at cow behinds.

 

Chuckle, nearly as much comes out of the bovine as goes in the bovine. I'll add that there is more than burps and farts which exit the other end...

 

Come on now gang, it's because Moen is the end of the horse that is responsble for this extraction, the he bases his knownledge of the subject. Now who can doubt what he says on the subject?

 

Carbon Cycle

Graphic shows carbon cycle, with figures in gigatons (billions of metric tons) per year. The oceans are capable of absorbing and sequestering ~3 gigatons per year. We are putting 6+ gigatons into the atmosphere yearly... resulting in ~3gt/yr surplus. If we were to reduce our global fossil carbon emissions to ~3gt per year, we'd be carbon neutral. Simple stuff.
A tip-of-the-hat to those posters able to use their brains and their hearts in tandem, understanding that there is a problem and seeking solutions. Too bad there seem to be so many others who set their brains and their hearts against each other.
-------
Copper- Man's oldest metal- and still the best.

 

Welcome to the forum Cuprum. It's great to have one more sane voice amongst us. I hope you can tolerate the noise for a while and stick around.

 

Thanks Moen!
Interesting discussion... though there does indeed seem to be a lot of noise. It is interesting to note some of the figures on the graphic I posted, which indicates that the world's oceans already contain more dissolved carbon than is contained in all the world's fossil fuel resources combined! It's also interesting to note that the ability of the ocean to sequester carbon (by precipitating it as calcium or magnesium carbonate on the ocean floor) is very limited with respect to the total quantity of dissolved carbon. Also, the chart does not take into account the variation in solubility of CO2 in seawater as temperature varies. Think about soda pop, which is basically a water solution with dissolved carbon dioxide in it. Cold soda holds more CO2 in solution than warm soda. As water warms it gives up some of the dissolved CO2. In the same way, if the oceans warm for any reason, they tend to release stored CO2 and sequester less, thereby increasing the warming effect beyond the initial amount.

 

Could we get your oppinion on what causes the water to raise in temperature. I would offer an oppinion, but then I'm not a tained professional on the subject.

 

Temperature is a dynamic equilibrium problem. Many temperature examples involve negative feedback stable equilibria. For instance, a pot of water on a stove. Without a fire under it the pot will simply sit there and acquire room temperature after a time. If it starts out cool it will absorb heat from the environment and warm, if it starts out hot it will radiate heat and cool. In either case it reaches a stable equilibrium when it attains the same temperature as the surroundings. If you change conditions by lighting a fire under the pot, the water will warm until it forms a new equilibrium at a higher temperature. The negative feedback mechanism involves enhanced radiation of heat and the increased vaporization of water at higher temperatures. If the heat is reduced, the equilibrium temperature will fall. There is a limit to this example, in that the equilibrium temperature can only increase up to the boiling point of water. Even increasing the fire will only speed the boiling, until all the water is gone. Then as one negative feedback mechanism (water vaporization) is eliminated, the other (thermal radiation) must do all the work. The temperature is free to increase until either radiation equals heat input, or the pot melts. A stable equilibrium can be compared to a beach ball sitting in the bottom of a swimming pool. A bit of wind can push the ball around the bottom of the pool, but when external forces cease it keeps coming back to the lowest part of the pool. We are familiar with stable equilibria as they are common features of everyday life. We understand that there are such non-linear features in common equilibria, the so-called "tipping points" as Vice President Gore refers to them, such as the point in the above example where the water has boiled away.

For many years scientists assumed that the earth was in a stable equilibium with respect to temperature. We knew of negative feedback mechanisms such as the water cycle, in which increased temperatures lead to the formation of increased cloud cover, which can act to reflect more solar radiation and thereby cool things off. But by the 1920s it became apparent that the larger scale fluctuations in the earth's climate could not be explained in such simple terms. There were large scale and relatively sudden events, or "tipping points" which could send the earth from one relatively stable equilibrium to another relatively stable equilibrium, with a large temperature difference in a rather short time. Efforts to understand the dynamics of the system began in earnest, and a great deal has been learned.

So, the situation is that climate science has finally discovered that the earth temperature system is NOT a stable equilibrium, but that it is in fact very UNstable due to the presence of several strongly positive feedback systems. Now our allegorical beach ball is sitting in a precarious balance atop a sand dune. Such positive feedback effects as the release of oceanic CO2 (mentioned in the earlier post) can cause any little push in one direction to become amplified so as to cause the climate to change rather drastically, just as a small puff of wind can blow the beachball off the top of the sand dune.

I have read the criticisms of Al Gore on this forum and elsewhere; that he is not a scientist and therefore has no business making scientific claims before the public. He is however an educated man, and because of his public stature and experience he has access to many in the scientific community that others among us would have difficulty contacting, people who are doing real science and are NOT receiving the bulk of their funding from corporate sources which seek to dictate the outcome of the research. Mr. Gore is also very experienced in the process of public discourse and its role as the primary engine in the formulation of policy. His self-appointed role has been to attempt to bring the big-picture of the implications of current climate science to the attention of the public, who will ultimately decide through their votes what course our nation will take. He uses terms like "tipping point" when talking to the public rather than more technical terms like "non-linear discontinuity", not because he thinks people are stupid, but because he realizes that most of the public doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and would not understand the jargon scientists use as a sort of shorthand amongst themselves. But people can and do understand the implications of events which can impinge upon the lives of their children and grandchildren. In fact, it is because Gore respects the ability of the American people to think and understand and reason their way through thorny problems with compassion and wisdom that he has spent such a lot of time trying to bring this important topic before them. He (and the many others standing with him) are faced by a well-funded and orchestrated cadre of nay-sayers, working for those who have a vested economic interest in the staus-quo, and who have no respect at all for the health and welfare of the American people, or their ability to understand a complex issue. They seek simply to put everyone back to sleep by telling people not to worry, everything's okay, it's just a hoax. "Trust us, we'll take care of it."

The situation is not simple and any attempt to deal with it simplistically is doomed to something less than complete success. But refusing to deal with it at all is the fastest recipe for disaster.

 

"Such positive feedback effects as the release of oceanic CO2 (mentioned in the earlier post) can cause any little push in one direction to become amplified so as to cause the climate to change rather drastically, just as a small puff of wind can blow the beachball off the top of the sand dune."

The theory of the global warmists always comes back to an assumption such as this one that is supposed to be accepted without proof. It's just that sometimes it takes a lot of words and jargon to mask the underlying assumption and make it sound "scientific." But in the end, it is the global warmists who are saying, "Trust us, we'll take care of it." The naive just accept it. The folks with a political agenda of control spread the word. The folks searching for a meaningful cause to latch onto in their lives welcome it. The majority ignore it. The rest of the people who are still capable of rational thought in a world that no longer values this trait will see through the facade.

 

I agree with you'r accessment and would also like to hear what you have to say about if there is any correlation between the suns activities and the ocean temperatures? Have these been studied and if so how does this relate to global warming?

 

I'm surprised that you express doubt about the release of CO2 from warmer water. This is basic freshman chemistry stuff. You could look it up or even do the experiment yourself to prove it. It is not an assumption but a basic fact of chemistry that gases are more soluble in cold aqueous solutions than in warm ones.

If you don't want to believe me, do the experiment yourself. You can purchase pressurized containers of a saturated aqueous solution of carbon dioxide at your local store. It's called "club soda". Get three two-liter bottles and leave one in th room, put one in the fridge, and warm the last to a temperature of 120 to 150 degrees f. You can do this in a warm oven (careful!) or more simply by leaving it outside in the hot sun. Get three small balloons and three nails. Wrap the nail heads in tape and put them inside the balloons. Once the three bottles have attained their respective temperatures put the ends of the balloons on over the sealed caps of the bottles. Manipulating the nail inside the balloon, puncture the top of the cap to release pressure into the balloon. (the tape is on the nail head to avoid cutting the balloon in this procedure). Pull off and tie all three balloons and allow five or ten minutes for the temperatures to reach equilibrium, then measure the diameters of the balloons.

The idea is that the cold bottle will yield the least gas (because most of the gas is still held in solution) while the warmest one will release the most. If you want to get tricky you can measure the volumes of gas and calculate the percent released for each one, but just seeing the balloons will be the most vivid demonstration.

Yes there are differences in the solubility of gases in sea water as opposed to fresh water, and yes the oceans are not nearly as sauturated in CO2 as the club soda, but the relationship holds all the way across the phase diagram, and the demonstration is valid as a means of grasping a basic physical principle that operates in the world.

 

Cuprum that was extreemly interesting :thumb: :thumb:

 

You misunderstand. My doubt is that human activity is the cause of global warming. But the idea that a little more CO2 in the atmosphere triggers a one-way extreme move in temperature rather than just being a normal part of climate cycles is also unproven and unsupported by the history of the planet. If you were correct, we wouldn't be here.

 

I believe we are still on the same page and would like to obtain one more piece of information, If I could.

Do you know of any study or data related to the ratio of CO2 being released by the heating of the ocean, and that produced by mankind?

I promise this will be my last question, and thank you for all of your past comments.:thumb: