The environment thread

[NorthSideSox72]

I have become notorious for unplugging things when not in use.

Notorious? Do you go around to people's houses and unplug things?

 

Sounds like a new comic book hero. The Unplugger!

 

[BigSqwert]

Notorious? Do you go around to people's houses and unplug things?

 

Sounds like a new comic book hero. The Unplugger!

Girlfriend gets annoyed at times. Also do it when I visit my family.

[kapkomet]

 

Nice avatar, BTW. I've really changed my mind about Freddy. He's just as bad, if not worse, then these idiots that are already running.

[BigSqwert]

Seattle is one of the first major U.S. cities to claim it has cut greenhouse-gas emissions enough to meet the targets of the international Kyoto treaty aimed at combating global warming.

[kapkomet]

Seattle is one of the first major U.S. cities to claim it has cut greenhouse-gas emissions enough to meet the targets of the international Kyoto treaty aimed at combating global warming.

How high is the standard of living in Seattle?

[BigSqwert]

How high is the standard of living in Seattle?

From everything I have read over the past few years it is rather high.

 

EDIT: This cost of living calculator has Seattle coming up with a similar standard of living to Chicago and you'll need much more money to maintain your standard of living if moving from Dallas.

 

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/movecalc.asp

 

 

EDIT #2: I guess the economy in Seattle has been crippled now because of this. It's like the Dust Bowl revisited.

Edited November 1, 2007 by BigSqwert

[kapkomet]

From everything I have read over the past few years it is rather high.

 

EDIT: This cost of living calculator has Seattle coming up with a similar standard of living to Chicago and you'll need much more money to maintain your standard of living if moving from Dallas.

 

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/movecalc.asp

EDIT #2: I guess the economy in Seattle has been crippled now because of this. It's like the Dust Bowl revisited.

Edit #2... now there's the point!

 

Seriously, Seattle has always been a high expense city. Portland's another one, but not as high as Seattle.

 

I do think it's applaudable to see the people of the city take this initiative.

[santo=dorf]

I couldn't stand watching "An Inconvient truth." It was obnoxious to see Gore stroke his ego so much. What's so riveting about showing pictures of glaciers 20 years ago and now?

[NorthSideSox72]

I couldn't stand watching "An Inconvient truth." It was obnoxious to see Gore stroke his ego so much. What's so riveting about showing pictures of glaciers 20 years ago and now?

Yeah you're right. It will be much more riveting to watch when 10's of millions of people in Bombay and Miami have to either flee the city or spend trillions of dollars to protect themselves from rising ocean levels.

 

I do agree about Gore though. He's the least interesting part of the film.

 

[southsideirish71]

I couldn't stand watching "An Inconvient truth." It was obnoxious to see Gore stroke his ego so much. What's so riveting about showing pictures of glaciers 20 years ago and now?

 

[Jenksismyhero]

lol, that was great. I liked how he "flew in" to meet all the hippies protesting the nuking of our imagination.

 

"wwsshhhhhhhh"

[southsider2k5]

http://mobile2.wsj.com/beta2/htmlsite/html...in_commentaries

 

My Nobel Moment

 

By JOHN R. CHRISTY

 

November 1, 2007; Page A19

 

I've had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don't think I will add "0.0001 Nobel Laureate" to my resume.

 

The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that's another story.Large icebergs in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. Winter sea ice around the continent set a record maximum last month.

 

Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth's temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.

 

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

 

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming -- around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

 

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.

 

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"

 

I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

 

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

 

One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe. Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.

 

The recent CNN report "Planet in Peril," for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover. CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum (yes, maximum) for coverage since aerial measurements started.

 

Then there is the challenge of translating global trends to local climate. For instance, hasn't global warming led to the five-year drought and fires in the U.S. Southwest?

 

Not necessarily.

 

There has been a drought, but it would be a stretch to link this drought to carbon dioxide. If you look at the 1,000-year climate record for the western U.S. you will see not five-year but 50-year-long droughts. The 12th and 13th centuries were particularly dry. The inconvenient truth is that the last century has been fairly benign in the American West. A return to the region's long-term "normal" climate would present huge challenges for urban planners.

 

Without a doubt, atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing due primarily to carbon-based energy production (with its undisputed benefits to humanity) and many people ardently believe we must "do something" about its alleged consequence, global warming. This might seem like a legitimate concern given the potential disasters that are announced almost daily, so I've looked at a couple of ways in which humans might reduce CO2 emissions and their impact on temperatures.

 

California and some Northeastern states have decided to force their residents to buy cars that average 43 miles-per-gallon within the next decade. Even if you applied this law to the entire world, the net effect would reduce projected warming by about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, an amount so minuscule as to be undetectable. Global temperatures vary more than that from day to day.

 

Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10% of the world's energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 -- roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 ?176 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It's a dent.

 

But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?

 

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit "global warming."

 

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.

 

Mr. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

[Texsox]

Some people feel better when a vast majority agree, others find the lone wolf, or small group, rallying against the vast, wrong. majority and believe them.

 

I'll assume that overall they are all honest and coming to conclusions that they believe are accurate. Then I will side with protecting out environment over how much abuse can we heap on it and have it keep ticking.

[santo=dorf]

Yeah you're right. It will be much more riveting to watch when 10's of millions of people in Bombay and Miami have to either flee the city or spend trillions of dollars to protect themselves from rising ocean levels.

 

I do agree about Gore though. He's the least interesting part of the film.

We won't be around. Look at the strides civilization has made since the Earth started heating up. The end isn't near.

[Texsox]

Yeah you're right. It will be much more riveting to watch when 10's of millions of people in Bombay and Miami have to either flee the city or spend trillions of dollars to protect themselves from rising ocean levels.

 

I do agree about Gore though. He's the least interesting part of the film.

 

 

We won't be around. Look at the strides civilization has made since the Earth started heating up. The end isn't near.

 

I agree with both of you. It may come down to what we want to turn over to our great great great great grandchildren. What legacy do we want history to show for us? That beginning in the 1960s we turned the tide on pollution and set civilization on a path to protect and preserve the planet, or we ignored the early and primitive findings of our scientists?

[YASNY]

I agree with both of you. It may come down to what we want to turn over to our great great great great grandchildren. What legacy do we want history to show for us? That beginning in the 1960s we turned the tide on pollution and set civilization on a path to protect and preserve the planet, or we ignored the early and primitive findings of our scientists?

 

Personally, I think we did a wonderful job of staving off the coming ice age back in the '70's.

[BigSqwert]

Personally, I think we did a wonderful job of staving off the coming ice age back in the '70's.

Question. I was just a little kid in the 70's so I don't know the answer. Did the overwhelming majority of scientists around the globe think that an ice age was on its way?

[kapkomet]

Question. I was just a little kid in the 70's so I don't know the answer. Did the overwhelming majority of scientists around the globe think that an ice age was on its way?

We've linked it a lot. Yes, is the answer, hopefully someone else can catch a couple of the threads where we posted it. I need to get ready for work.

[NorthSideSox72]

Question. I was just a little kid in the 70's so I don't know the answer. Did the overwhelming majority of scientists around the globe think that an ice age was on its way?

The answer is yes, but the substance is no. If you look at the articles from back then, all they looked at was a few years' of data. That is of course nothing like the research being conveyed now, using eons' worth of information, not to mention a lot of things other than just temperature. But of course, the people in denial would rather point at a few idiots and say, "see, there is nothing there!"

 

[Texsox]

Personally, I think we did a wonderful job of staving off the coming ice age back in the '70's.

 

Scientists have been wrong before. Remember how healthful a cigarette was? Aided digestion and relaxed you.

How about the recommendation that we eat lots of red meat to be healthy?

 

I'll bet if they went back in the 70s and looked at all the computer data, you would see they were lying.

[YASNY]

Scientists have been wrong before. Remember how healthful a cigarette was? Aided digestion and relaxed you.

How about the recommendation that we eat lots of red meat to be healthy?

 

I'll bet if they went back in the 70s and looked at all the computer data, you would see they were lying.

 

And 30 years from now, we'll probably be able to say the same thing about global warming. Well, not we in the sense of me and you Texsox.

[Texsox]

And 30 years from now, we'll probably be able to say the same thing about global warming. Well, not we in the sense of me and you Texsox.

Which is why I look at what is being suggested, like using less carbon energy and think, so big deal if they are wrong. All we will have done is make the planet a little nicer. Too bad it became the Dems against the Reps.

[BigSqwert]

All we will have done is make the planet a little nicer.

But at what economic cost? Look at the disaster that occurred in Seattle now that they have reached Kyoto level emissions of CO2. They may never fully recover.

[FlaSoxxJim]

Scientists have been wrong before. Remember how healthful a cigarette was? Aided digestion and relaxed you.

How about the recommendation that we eat lots of red meat to be healthy?

 

I'll bet if they went back in the 70s and looked at all the computer data, you would see they were lying.

 

Your point notwithstanding, the scientists weren't wrong about cigarettes. Reams of scientific findings from the 1950s and even before plainly show that researchers knew cigarettes would shorten lives. it was the tobacco companies that buried the scientific evidence and spun them as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Edited November 2, 2007 by FlaSoxxJim

[kapkomet]

But at what economic cost? Look at the disaster that occurred in Seattle now that they have reached Kyoto level emissions of CO2. They may never fully recover.

 

You kill me.