re: #48 LudwigVanQuixote

I want to comment on some of the AGW and creationist crossover. This is a repost from another thread that I have edited a bit. There is the same sort of almost religious fervor in the arguments.

As soon as one starts going into one world government conspiracy theory, particularly from the scientific community on AGW, they seriously damage your credibility as a “level headed scientific type.” It is hard enough hanging with the Elders of Zion to keep appeasing my masters at the APS…

Respectfully, “I hate Al Gore” is not a scientific statement. I am not his biggest fan, but please consider that he is not a scientist and he does not really represent the community. He is a politician. The political circus around him is not science either.

To really get at what is going on with AGW you need to know something about that non linear systems. Non-linear dynamics is my field.

If you wish to get into this I will be glad to. However, I wish that you keep the tone respectful.

CO2 really is a greenhouse gas. We know this for a fact from the absorption spectra and we can even calculate said spectra using QM. This is not in debate.

Many point out a lot about carbon from other sources, but they neglect many other facets of the system. For one thing, many different forms of pollution have deeply depleted ocean algae and there has been massive deforestation in the last century. This is caused by man, and it means that there is much less of a carbon sink.

Further, if it were just a matter of natural volcanic cycles, blah, blah, blah, we would not see the steady increases in CO2 from Keeling curves that we do. This is not the hockey stick, but rather direct optical measurement of concentrations in the atmosphere. The rate of eruptions has not been increasing dramatically in the last fifty years. So it must be something else.

[Link: en.wikipedia.org…]

Another issue that is rarely taken into account is methane from vastly increased farm industrial farming operations. This is dismissed smugly as “cow farts” but the problem is not just cow farts at all. Consider a CAFO. A pig produces per day, as much feces as eight adult humans. That means one CAFO in Texas, with two million swine (and there are many CAFOs, and not just in Texas) produces as much feces as the New York metro area. What happens to all of that fecal matter? For one thing legislation was passed to ease regulation on cleaning it up so, unlike New York, there is no waste management or sewage treatment. In fact, there are giant lakes of feces. This releases vast amounts of methane. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

There is also a conversation about water vapor and us silly scientists not noticing it. Again, like the creationists, that like to misquote the Second Law, do people really think that they figured out something really basic, that somehow the whole scientific community missed? Do consider that if it gets warmer for other reasons, there will be more water vapor in the air and now you have a feedback loop.

Finally, there are those who love to cherry pick facts. On a cold day they gloat that Aha, there is no global warming. It is supposed to be cold in winter. What is more accurate is to look at all of the trends and notice a lot of warm days too.

Then there are those who want to say “how can warming possibly cause cooling?” They then smugly discredit anything that might follow. The answer to that question is in most people’s kitchen - and once again goes to not understanding Thermodynamics. How does a refrigerator work?

Quixote asks that when those come to yell at me, we keep it respectful.

Nicely reasoned essay. I would add that glaciers are naturally occurring averagers of temperatures. Their near-universal retreat says something.