Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (4433)	2/11/2005 1:55:06 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 36917

Disaster averted Human activities may have averted the next ice age. This conclusion from recent research is sure to make global warming alarmists cringe. Ongoing human activities during the past 8,000 years likely have served to prevent us from falling into an ice age, says William Ruddiman, former chairman of the University of Virginia environmental sciences department and his research team in Quaternary Research Reviews.. “Without any anthropogenic warming,” they write, “earth’s climate would no longer be in a full-interglacial state [warm period] but be well on its way toward the colder temperatures typical of glaciations.” Ruddiman’s team carefully studied carbon dioxide and methane trapped in ice cores extracted from Antarctica. They pieced together a detailed history of those two greenhouse gases’ atmospheric concentrations. When analyzing natural cycles of the concentration of these gases over the past 400,000 years, the researchers noticed anomalous behavior in recent millennia. “Over the past 8,000 years, the CO2 concentration gradually rose to a level of 280ppm-285ppm during an interval when trends observed during the three previous interglaciations suggest that it should have fallen to 240ppm-245ppm.” They found similar behavior in the concentration of methane (Figure 1). Figure 1. Anthropogenic effects on atmospheric concentrations of methane (top) and carbon dioxide (bottom) during the past 10,000 years. (Source: Ruddiman et al., 2005) Ruddiman attributes this anomalous rise in greenhouse gases to massive deforestation of Eurasia, irrigation for rice farming in Southeast Asia, and increases from biomass burning, livestock production, and other sources. Based upon the anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases over the past 8,000 years, as well as climate cycles during the past 400,000 years, Ruddiman and his colleagues suggest the global average temperature otherwise would be about 2ºC lower than now and “roughly one-third of the way toward full-glacial temperatures.” This result, as much as they won’t like it, will place global warmers in an awkward position. Their bedrock belief is that earth’s climate was merrily chugging along the way nature intended before to the Industrial Revolution. Then all sorts of pernicious human activity kicked in and began interfering with the climate’s “natural” behavior. They believe this has led us to the brink of environmental catastrophe due to global warming. In January 2005, a group calling itself the International Climate Change Taskforce claimed that if temperatures were to rise more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, we would be flirting with disaster. “Beyond the 2ºC level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly,” the ICCT warns. Their report stresses “climate change represents one of the most serious and far-reaching challenges facing humankind in the 21st century.” (see www.co2andclimate.org/wca/2004/wca_30c.html for additional coverage of the ICCT report). Ruddiman’s underlying message is that such a world view is opposite what really has happened. Anthropogenic climate change has spared us descent into what would be the most serious and far-reaching challenge facing humankind in the twenty-first century — dealing with a rapidly deteriorating climate plunging us into an ice age. No matter what scary scenarios global warming enthusiasts contrive, they pale in comparison with the conditions an ice age would serve up. Look to our climate past. 21,000 years ago, a mile’s thick ice sheet covered all of North America north of a curve stretching from somewhere near Seattle to Indianapolis and New York City (see Figure 2). Earth has spent about ninety percent of the past 1.8 million years under ice age conditions. Only about ten percent of the time have there been warm conditions. Add that one to your Gratitude List! We’re fortunate and very lucky to live when we do, but luck may have little to do with it. The last 10,000 years well might have been warm because humanity flourishes. Figure 2. Map of the timing of the ice sheet retreat at the end of the last ice age. Numbers represent thousands of years before present. (Source: Ruddiman et al., 2005) Such optimistic perspective place global warming alarmists in a dilemma. They either must admit that “natural” climate is undesirable from a human and life-as-we-know-it perspective or that human influence on the climate is a good thing in preserving all kinds of species’ right to life. Of course it would be a dilemma if they simply ignore or dismiss Ruddiman’s results. The problem that path poses is that his results derive from use of a complex climate model that incorporates not only atmospheric and oceanic components, but also vegetation, soils, snow, and sea ice models. It is very similar to the computer models used to project the future course of climate and which are tweaked to generate scary climate scenarios for the 21st century. The people who rely on models to make their case cannot blithely dismiss a similar model simply because it generates different results. What to do, what to do? The alarmists will prefer that everyone simply ignore Ruddiman’s results and pretend such research never happened. Scores of the world’s finest newspapers and news outlets already abet this strategy. They satisfy themselves with headlines like “Global Warming Called Time Bomb,” “Extinction Tied to Global Warming: Greenhouse Effect Cited in Mass Decline 250 Million Years Ago,” and “Global Warming Twice as Bad as Feared.” Have you seen a headline trumpeting the benefits of human activity of late? We thought last summer’s quick-to-DVD-release blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow” might get people thinking about what a disaster an ice age would be. Apparently that’s so only if it’s caused by “global warming” instead of averted by it. February 4, 2005 greeningearthsociety.org

To: longnshort who wrote (4433)	2/12/2005 2:44:21 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

I was looking up stuff to find more info on 'Rift Valley fever', like West Nile, another mosquito-borne spreader-- now in MiddleEast and might come into America on a airplane ride like some speculate West Nile did -- its a paragraph in this month's glossy Discover mag. But what I did find is even more fascinating and probably be blamed on human activity or somesuch non-sense (last paragraph) Earth’s Core in a Bottle By Zach Zorich January 31, 2005 \| Astronomy & Physics Courtesy of David Lathrop and Santiago Triana/University of Maryland A journey to the center of Earth may soon be as easy as a drive to Daniel Lathrop’s lab at the University of Maryland. To understand the process that generates our planet’s protective magnetic field, Lathrop built the world’s most detailed physical model of where the action happens: Earth’s core. A 10-foot-wide steel sphere filled with 14 tons of liquid sodium stands in for the molten-iron outer core while a 3-foot-wide copper ball substitutes for the solid inner core. The whole contraption will spin four times a second to simulate Earth’s rotation. According to theory, the churning of the molten iron outer core creates electricity, which, in turn, creates the geomagnetic field. “You get a feedback loop—a little bit of magnetic field couples with the motion to cause electrical current, which produces a bit more magnetic field, and it goes around and around,” Lathrop says. But nobody has figured out exactly how fluid motions in the outer core affect the magnetic field. Using an earlier, smaller version of his device, Lathrop simulated the conditions around a black hole, learning that magnetic fluctuations help drag gas out of a safe orbit to a one-way trip into the hole. By adjusting the heat and rotation rate in the new 10-foot model, he hopes to gain similar insights into Earth’s magnetic field. For at least 160 years, our field has been weakening and shrinking; if the trend continues, the North and South poles might switch positions, temporarily exposing us to more of the sun’s energetic particles. Lathrop’s model should clarify whether we need to prepare for the worst.