Climate Change | Global Warming | BS or not?

Galbee

very professionally and eloquently put, so nice to have another sensible voice on here.

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stargazer

I hadn't heard of this. This new theory, does it mean it percolated down to where it is from the surface. Do they suggest how it originated?

Many years ago I read Immanuel Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" in which he theorized that hydrocarbons rained onto the earth from celestial bodies and sank into the ground. That idea made oil spills seem like a temporary disaster.

I found his books very interesting, but he was rejected by the status quo who refused to believe that cataclysmic events could happen to earth. He also postulated that the dinosaurs were wiped out by such major celestial disruptions. Personally, I find no problem with the idea of both steady state change and sudden dramatic change.

Twenty years or so ago when Time magazine had a cover story about dinosaurs being wiped out by a collision with another celestial body, not one mention was made of Velikovsky, who wrote exactly that in the late 1940's.

I do know for sure that all the astronomy books used to call Venus our sister planet, the most likely to have life etc. Science fiction often featured Venusians. I just saw one of those astronomy books recently, written in the 60's.

Velikovsky however wrote that Venus would be 600 or 800 degrees (I read this 30 years ago, can't remember the exact numbers) with an atmosphere not supportive of life as we know it. His idea was rejected out of hand.

When our first probe reached Venus we found it to be as Velikovsky predicted. His name was never mentioned. We quietly forgot all about the "sister planet" and now pretend we always knew what Venus was like.

"Science" is really about money, power, grants, prestige, established structures. It is not about the search for truth.

Bob Tooley

While I don't research the sciences too deeply because it tends to confuse things more then explain them,... my understanding of the crude oil is that it requires certain rock and mineral layers to be present between the oil deposit and the surface water, and as the water seeps down through these layers it mixes with the surface components, ending up in the crude oil reserve. I guess sort of like a giant coffee maker...

Here's another thing for you to work on...it's another theory I've been hording, "lower tree limb-loss isn't caused from the lack of light at these lower levels..."
Apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a simple earth science law which the physics science coveted a number of years ago, but has applications in almost all other science fields...stating; "an area of higher concentration will always seek an area of lower concentration"...
The way I look at a number of things is...'the answers aren't in the complexities of the solutions, but rather they are in the simplicity of the problem itself'...

You'll find everything quoted today has been presented before, but for lack of popularity, wasn't in it's own time. Darwin's theories, species evolutions/extinctions, and moving continents...Eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine didn't even exist until North America collided with Africa.. so we now live in a state which is made up of a bunch of 'snow plowed' islands picked up along the way. The difficult part for science and research is the unwritten,...but politically and publicly supported principle of ..."never go against tradition"...don't confuse the already confused and choose your timing for it's presentation very carefully. Don't tread on the infamous "PHD" status of the people who, at one particular time in their entire life had the knowledge to pass an exam,.. and now 'hide behind it'... Most 'smart' people don't even know they are smart because they've never been given an exam, or achieved a 'score'...they just go about their daily routine... yet they actually know more then those who wave the knowledge flag in everyone's face...

stargazer

Well, I can understand the "giant coffee maker" part!!

Bob Tooley

Oh come on, you know the other theory too..you're just not realizing it... If one large tree loses it's lower leaves and limbs due to lack of light in a forested area, how come the younger trees of the same species can find sufficient light to grow under them ? The water in the ground is the area of higher concentration and the trees location determines it's own specific areas of lower concentration....In a drought period, trees retain their uppermost leaves because the top is the area of the most moisture-loss...the area of the lowest concentration, and they will be the first served...other lower leaves will be served or supplied on an 'as-can' basis depending on the water available...
It follows the same principle commonly used to explain osmosis, so the 'action' is well recognized, but what I'm trying to figure out is how the distribution to certain locations within the tree are determined. Commercially this issue has no value, but it's one of those 'unknowns' that tend to bug me because the current explanations don't evenly line up with other visible and recognizable facts...'If we knew everything, this world wouldn't be much fun'...

stargazer

OK, I understand you now. You are suggesting a principle that is the mechanism bringing the juice to the upper branches. And trees growing out in the open would keep their lower branches because they are subject to almost the same exposure as the upper branches.

I was partly joking that I could only understand coffee, since I read your post a bit after 5 AM on a Saturday.

Here is yet another example of global warming today, from Accu weather:

"Snow Today, Saturday, June 6, 2009

Sorry to say, but it is so. Snow fell on Saturday over select localities of Montana and North Dakota. In Montana, snow fell at Great Falls and Cut Bank and, in the morning, left a wintry sight on the eastern side of Glacier National Park.
Far to the east, snow fell heavily and laid on the ground at Dickinson in southwestern North Dakota, where the temperature hovered near freezing in the late morning. Hard to believe on a date when the record high, set in 1952, is 100 degrees!
Through Saturday night and into the day on Sunday, cold air more befitting April than June will slide southward into the northern Plains. It will be cold enough for some of the widespread rain wetting the northern Rockies and the northern Plains to mix with or switch to snow. Thus, there could be more "surprise" snowfalls, even with summer only to weeks away."

I hope we don't get any more frost warnings here, too much of my garden is up, too hard to cover the sensitive plants.

Bob Tooley

You've got the principle of the theory I've been trying to work out, and I'll go into it in more detail via a different thread because this one is primarily for Global Warming...

I don't believe weather-bursts and periodic alterations in weather patterns are too alarming, or a direct sign of a Globe-wide crisis... In the late 1800's, Maine had a frost every month through the summer, and I think it was the same time as the Irish famine in Europe.... Both had high commercial impacts, but I wonder if we'd be looking at this weather change we're in now a little differently if heating oil was $ 0.18 per gallon...I think much of the 'pressure' most people are feeling isn't from the differences these changes will make in nature and the natural events as they are by how much it's now going to cost financially to over come them in heating expenses...

I'm not going to pretend to know the exact facts, but it's claimed the last ice age was not the first, and they occur every 12K years or so, but each new ice shield erasers the evidence of the previous one's.. Personally, I feel it's quite arrogant to believe we humans have the ability to alter a mass the size of the earth, and it's surrounding atmosphere, in a one hundred year period.. to the point of creating a critical mass... We are more like fleas on a dog's back...we 'bother' him, but we're not going to control the whole dog..
I'll give us credit for our abilities to create problems...but not 'that' much !

stargazer

I like your "flea on a dog" analogy.

I'm a lot more afraid of global cooling than global warming. Another ice age? No thanks! I like warm weather and growing food, and trees.

Right now we are having a great display of noctilucent clouds. They are very high, way above normal weather (50 miles up -85 kilometers), so they glow with sunlight long into the evening. They must also reflect solar energy away before it can help keep us warm. Here is a quote from "Space Weather" about enjoying seeing these clouds:

"The weeks ahead could be even better. There is a well-known correlation between noctilucent clouds (NLCs) and the solar cycle: NLC activity tends to peak during years of solar minimum, possibly because low solar activity allows the upper atmosphere to cool, promoting the growth of ice crystals that make up the clouds. With a century-class solar minimum underway, the stage is set for NLCs."

Of course, the solar minimum has other effects, all of them cooling.

Bob Tooley

I have a place in Florida I go to from November-to-late May so I can extend the 'too-short' Maine summers out a little further.

I don't believe 'anything' is going to happen with any marked changes within the next 500 years or more because 'nothing' in nature happens very fast... We've learned to condense geological time by watching too many movies where everything has to occur before you get too bored to watch it any longer... Reality is, the effects won't even be realized because they will happen so slowly that one will already be common-place before the next even starts being recognized...

Ekka

Very well said.

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Bob Tooley

If the sun is a "Ball of Fire", the third rock from it is the "Ball of Fear"... This entire world has gone straight away from the joy of living to the fear of dying, and as far as I'm concerned...thinking along those lines means we're already dead. Trust is right out the door, and a man's castle is now the man's prison... We've been led so far down the yellow brick road with almost every issue the media want's to lead us with, the road back isn't even there anymore...and 'no',..."I don't think we're in Kansas anymore Toto...".

One of the problems is...we've become so ingrained with all these fear-messages... people now even 'fear' getting away from them.. No one looks for the things that make them happy anymore, but rather for all the reasons to 'fear' doing them. People have become so scared to make a move for fear of rejection, liability and the rest of the list is as long as your arm, so no one 'dares' do or say a thing... It's a sad state of affairs, but Global Warming is, ..."just another fear to dwell on"... it'll never effect you in your lifetime, but it is a useful 'fear', and if you're down a quart..it'll do until something else you can drive yourself crazy with comes along....

FDR said, "You have nothing to fear, but fear itself"...and maybe it's time we started hearing that message and get on with living enjoyably again...Hell, you're going to die someday anyway..you might just as well live until that day comes....

Bob Tooley

Stargazer,

I was wondering, is that a Carl Sagan thing, and are you into 'star gazing' ? I have a few meteorites in my rock and fossil collection which I prize because they are older then the earth and when you hold something that old, and from 'way out there' in your hand...there's a certain 'uniqueness' to it... We can go over to a general BS thread sometime and jaw jack sometime...

stargazer

Excellent post, Bob. Poetic, philosophical, insightful, and humorous. "Ball of Fear"... Maybe you should become a writer! I think you hit the nail on the head with that fear thing, "from the joy of living to the fear of dying", "a man's castle is now the man's prison".

Brave men and women overcame their fears and fought and died to preserve out freedoms, now we are ready to give them up to anyone who promises "safety". We need a bogeyman so we can pay for our "security" by giving up power and money. Global warming is perfect. The bogeyman that lives in your imagination is scarier than one you can see and deal with. Hitler made a big mistake when he used people that could be your neighbor for the bogeyman. Now the whole world is in fearful agreement on global warming. Big improvement for the command and control forces.

The media is waiting for a heat wave on the east coast so they can rant about global warming again. They must be very disappointed that the winter before last was the biggest in many years, last summer was very cool and rainy, last winter was extra cold and steady, and this summer just won't get started. People are beginning to look forward to a little global warming! I need to replant my winter squash and watermelons. Might be too late, but we've been too cool for the ones that I planted earlier.

No "Carl Sagan" thing for me. I read something by him in the early seventies and did not like him. I thought he was likable, but misguided and a bit self righteous. I no longer remember the details, just that I have an aversion to him, or rather, to his ideas.

But I do still remember the first time I looked up at the stars! Back when being carried by adults seemed normal. Got my first telescope at about 5 or 6 yrs. old. Just got my newest and probably final telescope this spring. Twenty inch diameter f4.2 mirror, from Intermountain Optics (high quality glass). Yes, I like stargazing. I like to see the awesomeness of the universe directly. I'm also still immersed in the joy of living.

Edit: Meteorites! That is exciting! I used to go to the museum and look with lust at their meteorites. I had a couple of chips (mini meteorites) that I got at the meteor crator in Arizona, but I abandoned them when I left home as a young adult.

Bob Tooley

Horticulture is actually my second career..I spent fourteen years as the Chief Deputy of Knox County and three years as a trooper in the Ellsworth District, so 'fear' is something I can't quite relate to.. I see it 'everywhere' and I just can't seem to understand why it becomes such a compelling force within the people who are educated enough to know the difference. You hear...."I can't" from more people who have never even tried to see.."if they could", and the same number who do 'nothing' for fear they'll make a mistake if they do 'anything'. People say their lives are 'empty', but I don't know who the hell they think is going to fill it up..maybe more channels on the cable tv systems.. In 2007, I was part of the Maine West Nile control program, and 'no one' was going into the State Parks for fear they'd get it. I blame the media for sensationalizing the problem...and the State for not presenting the 'real facts' on the matter, but just like in a courtroom... once the word is spoken...no amount of.. 'strike that from the record',.. is ever going to clear it from the people's minds. I think it's time people flushed out their heads and started out with a fresh thought process before they start filling it up again. Look at the statistics a little closer and don't imagine you're going to be one of them, but rather..that you're 'not' going to be one... Optimism -vs- pessimism ..........Positive -vs- Negative...etc.,

stargazer

Just ran across a news item that sounds so much like Velikovsky's ideas. No Mention of his name, however.

We seem to be moving in his direction. Critics said planets could "not" alter there course and cause havoc. He said that they caused havoc while settling in to their current orbits.

Study: Earth May Collide With Another Planet - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News - FOXNews.com

Selected quotes:

"New computer simulations reveal a slight chance that a disruption of planetary orbits could lead to a collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus in the next few billion years.

The new model results provide the strongest evidence to date of the solar system's future in this regard.

'These are the first calculations that really answer the question of the long-term stability of the solar system in a truly definitive way,' Laughlin told SPACE.com.

That's because Laskar and Gastineau's model relies on non-averaged equations and accounts for general relativity.

Previous models were based on averaged equations for planetary motion and didn't include the effects of general relativity.

Evidence for such melees has been found in exoplanetary systems, including one in which the object 2M1207B may have formed from the collision and merger of two planets .

Our own moon was created when a Mars-sized object hit Earth about 4 billion years ago, theorists figure."


Interesting YouTube discussion showing that heating preceeded global warming by hundreds of years in ice core studies, thus could not be causitive.


YouTube - Al Gore Debates Global Warming

stargazer

Short article in the newest Sky and Telescope magazine internet edition. Here is a quote:



"Finally, let me note that all of these solar scientists are building on the work of John A. Eddy, who died June 10th at the age of 78.

John A. Eddy, a highly regarded solar physicist, died on June 10, 2009, at the age of 78.
Barbara EddyEddy gained fame in 1976 as the solar sleuth who confirmed that from 1645 to 1715 the Sun remained virtually spotless. During this "Maunder Minimum," as he dubbed it, solar activity essentially ceased, and it remains perplexing for modern-day theorists. Coincidentally, this period closely matches one of the coldest climatic periods on record, the middle of the "Little Ice Age" that plunged Europe into a series of unbearable winters. (I added the underline.)

More recently, Eddy has explored solar-terrestrial relationships, and before his death he finished a book (to be published by NASA) titled The Sun, the Earth and Near-Earth Space: A Guide to the Sun-Earth System."



The full article is at :


SkyandTelescope.com - News Blog - Solar Sleuths Tackle the "Quiet Sun"

Bob Tooley

Stargazer,

I'm starting to become more concerned with 'Global Flooding" up here then with roasting or freezing to death... I drove Rt1 from Rockland to Bucksport in that Firday night rain and 'every' low area had a 'Road Flooded' sign put out. I thought about you and how your plants are probably treading water now just to stay afloat... The central coast got 4-inches of rain that night... and a lot of the secondary roads were under mined in many places... and you could kayak on Rt 1 right through downtown Lincolnville Beach.....

stargazer

Today is no better, keeps pouring rain. Maybe I should make "snorkels" for the emerging plants to breath! I find it hard to believe that plants that emerged a full month ago look like they are a day or two old.

I'm starting to have a hard time enjoying the rain. Everything I need to do is outdoors, and it's hard or impossible to do most of them in the rain. I've already used up most of my "can do in the rain" type jobs. I suppose I could pile cut brush for burning by hand. Bit wet to use the tractor. Hard to enjoy piling brush in the rain though, when it would be so much nicer (and not as heavy) in the sunshine. And with the bucket on the tractor helping out.

One dock I reset in the lake is a just even with the surface, the lake is high even though they are spilling a lot of water. Neighbor's docks are underwater. I truly believe our country should develop water power at every tiny fall of water. Water has so much mass that it totally surpasses wind generation. And it runs all night, unlike solar. Plus, it is not used up and can be reused at every additional fall as it moves to the sea. Yet no one even talks about. At one time water powered all of New England. With almost prehistoric handmade wooden wheels. With today's technology I'm sure we could make small highly efficient water powered generators.

I could almost use one in the fall of rain, here on top of a hill!

Bob Tooley

I can't see why more coastal areas don't use tidal pools for generating electricity... You could harness the tide coming and going with just an hour shutdown between the high and low periods, etc.,... You certainly couldn't get a more reliable 'mass-forced' power source.... Of course the tourists might object because it didn't ...'look nice'... Fun living in the best State money can buy..isn't it ?

When the beavers start dropping full sized poplar trees and having them yarded up close to their dams, you know things are getting bad...

We built a 12vdc powered camp with a gas engine that turned a 12v car alternator to charge up the batteries and an ac inverter to run some of the smaller 110vac items... I suppose you could run a small water wheel, or even a wind mill, to turn an alternator as well...

Ekka

Now, another scientific study of the same thing reckons Ice Age hunters ate them all. Bugger me, seems the experts are so dumb that they should drag brush!

Attached Images

Giantkangaroo585_577719a.JPG (72.9 KB, 41 views)

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stargazer

Really! Where did they "discover" this theory. In a dream?

Typical total lack of understanding of the scientific method. Today's "scientists" are pathetic. At best this idea could be described as a hypothesis, not a theory. A hypothesis must be tested against reality by a repeatable experiment that can be verified by others.

Note the total contradictions in the explanations of what happened. They completely change their minds every time you look. Yet we are supposed to trust that these people not only accurately understand how our earth, climate, and man interact, we are supposed to believe that they know how to "fix" the problem of global climate. The "problem" being that climate fluctuates. Yet everything we know proves that the climate has always fluctuated. If the climate could be stabilized, how do we know that wouldn't destroy life, instead of enhancing it?

Bob Tooley

Every so often we have whales beach themselves in the Carolina State areas, and all attempts to re-float them and 'point them in another direction', fail. 'Naturalists' have blamed everything from coastline radio stations to the sonar on submarines for this rash of 'strange behavior', and they still can't figure why this continues to occur..... If the dumb asses looked at the geological topography of the region in the Silurian Period 425-million years ago, they'd see the exact site where this happens was the inlet to the huge inland ocean which covered most of this country at the time. Whales often travel on ancestral navigation and pre-existing routes. Moose will walk into a number of northern cities because, 'in-their-mind', these structures don't exist, but were rather built in their former ancestral routes.

It goes back to how many people,...including some of the smarter one's who can and will publish information,...have watched too many movies and have adopted the 'Hollywood" history into their own present day reality...

I'm going to adopt Tony Curtis' philosophy... "Where there's confusion, there's profit"............ and keep the "confused", thoroughly """Confused"""
Someone might just as well make money off the problem because it certainly isn't making any sense on it's own....

Bob Tooley

Additional: The TV station in Bangor had a 'trivia' question on the weather portion of the broadcast... "What is the most destructive force in nature ?"

The choices were: "Tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning and tidal waves".

"""Their""" answer was: "Lightning"....
Of course being my usual self,.....I challenged the answer...

I asked Steve MacKay, their weatherman, to qualify lightning's status for that position and his reply was, " Lightning causes fires and deaths mounting into the billions of dollar...ya da, ya da, ya da."

Lightning is the 'only' way that atmospheric nitrogen gets forced into the soil for plant use (nitrogen-fixing plants being the exception)... so without lightning and it's byproduct, nitrogen relocation... there wouldn't be any "nature"..... It's sad when nature and the dollar are considered synonymous, and the rest of that green stuff out there is just getting in the way...

It's hard to see the light of day when so many heads are up so many asses.

stargazer

Excellent point about lightning. If man could "fix" the problem of lightning, the earth could become barren without the added nitrogen.

I'm glad you mentioned that certain plants can fix nitrogen - actually the bacteria living on their roots. I grow clover between the rows of my garden for that purpose. I often pull some clover up by the roots to check for the nodules on the roots where the bacteria live and do their thing.

Interestingly, some trees fix nitrogen. Alder (not much of a tree) and apparently black locust. I'm making this claim based on observation, perhaps there is some other explanation for the fertility surrounding these trees.

Even though Texas through Kansas are really hot, still no emphasis on global warming from the media. It has to be hot in New York, Massachusetts, and Washington DC before they push it on the news. So "global" warming seems to mean east coast warming, as far as media hype and law making here in the USA. Guarantee if they get a big heat wave in DC there will be a push for new laws.





I wish Obama would do something about this enormous and appalling CO2 pollution blasting right up through the atmosphere, photographed by the astronauts in the International Space Station on June 12th, 2009. Here is a chance to prove that mankind can make a real difference, by controlling wasteful production of CO2.



It's from Russia's Sarychev Peak, a volcano.

Attached Images

Volcano from ISS.jpg (20.4 KB, 95 views)

Bob Tooley

Can you imagine the millions of dollars being made on this 'photo op' ? It's like so many other 'panic-equals-funding' programs set up by the government, and it's associated agencies... Notice when it's "fund raising" time, all the issues which 'just have to be addressed and worked on'...come alive..(again)..
You can't get the forest service out of the offices and into the field, even if you use dynamite, but when there's something to sensationalize in the media... look who shows up to grand stand... It's just justifying their existence, because there's no way you can ask for extra money, or prevent job cuts, unless you can prove you're doing something. Generally it doesn't have to be much...given enough time they'll explode it into a statewide epidemic, even if it's only been found on one tree in one isolated area..

The Global Warming issues aren't any different..."panic equals funding", and 'every agency' from the CDC to the FAA have used the same tactic anytime it was necessary to prevent funding cuts... It's becoming too obvious, so watch out for a curve-ball when they wear this one out...

Ekka

Polish Academy of Sciences slam Gore's CO2 theory also.

Polish Academy of Sciences Questions Gore's Man-Made Global Warming Theory | Washington Examiner

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stargazer

Good post, Ekka.

It's a pleasure to read an intelligent discussion for a change. My big problem with the global warming thing is the way people like to imagine they "know" they are completely right, and anyone who is sceptical is a fool. They want to rush forward with half baked plans that could do more harm than good. I'm more fearful of having idiots panicking and rushing to "emergency" "solutions" than I am about global warming.

I am however totally in favor of alternative energy. Just below my home is a dam with 7 miles of water backed up behind it. I hate to think of the energy that could be harvested at the water fall with no effect on the system, the water would still run down to the sea. With the continuous rain we have had for the last month - still ongoing - I've seen them release more water than ever over that dam, they really opened it up at one point.

Water, solar, wind, tides, let's use it all. I'm not in favor of geothermal, however, because I do fear global cooling, and bringing up heat and releasing it into our atmosphere should not even be attractive to the global warming crowd.

I'd like to see thousands of small local energy sources, all types, developed and tied into the grid. This would reduce distribution losses and provide a system that could not be easily knocked out. Every region should use whatever they have available locally.

I don't think using up all the oil for transportation is intelligent. When we finally do run out we will still have to face the problem, so lets start now, but without panic. Then we will always have oil for lubrication and other purposes.

Bob Tooley

Stargazer,

I'm going to check off the site and if you want to contact me direct, my email address is: this-tree@maine.rr.com it's been nice chatting with you and hope we can have additional dialogs ................ Bob Tooley Scarborough

Ekka

I knew the answer would lie in technology, not tree huggers.

Synthetic tree captures carbon 1000 times faster than real trees

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Ekka

Here's a darn good read, do tab along the pages as there's 6 of them.

Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick | The Spectator

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