To: Sdgla who wrote (893801 ) 10/14/2015 11:49:40 PM From: Wharf Rat Read Replies (2) | Respond to That nutball is a Dem? How sad.Joe Romm Aug 15, 2007 1:23pm Project Orion — the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs — I kid you not!A Many Colored Glass , that you shouldn’t waste your time and money on, as this extract on global warming makes clear. Dyson has basically joined the famous-confusionist camp with Michael Crichton and Bill Gray . You can read a good debunking of Dyson here . I’ll add my two cents.the warming is not global .” Uhh, no. The warming is global — as every set of data makes clear — that’s why it’s called global warming.over estimate or under estimate climate impacts. So far, they have underestimated things like Arctic ice loss, mass loss of the great ice sheets, and sea-level rise. They don’t model many feedbacks very well, and we know today that most feedbacks are amplifying .We do not know whether intelligent land-management could increase the growth of the topsoil reservoir by four billion tons of carbon per year, the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Actually we kinda do know. The best data suggest we are losing billions of tons of topsoil each year . A major effort will be required just to stop that loss rate from increasing sharply. Indeed, global warming itself is projected to cause both increased flooding, which washes away topsoil, and increased droughts, which destroy topsoil.mistakes and dubious assertions we saw in Crichton’s novel . One final point. Dyson asserts:They [climate models] do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. Uhh, no. Climate modelers are skeptical like all scientists, but contrary to what Dyson says, they do base their models on real-world data, and their models are passable at modeling what has actually happened to the climate so far. As noted, where they have been inadequate is in underestimating the impacts we have felt so far.thinkprogress.org
