Fires

[Luna Bliss]

5 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

2 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

My point of view on fossile fuels is pretty simple. Fossile fuels are nothing more than a biomass "battery", an energy potential accumulated over millions of years.

As long as you use in a year, more than the earth can produce in a year, you have a problem.

Putting the carbon that has been sequestered in that battery for millions of years back into circulation faster than it can be removed produces another problem.

 

[Rolig Loon]

24 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Putting the carbon that has been sequestered in that battery for millions of years back into circulation faster than it can be removed produces another problem.

I think that was Kyrah's point.

As Qie said, this is a very tough problem to analyze properly.  Some of the large factors are easy to identify, but it's hard to get good numbers to quantify them well.  When there are a lot of interacting variables, too, it's not simple to see how one affects the others, so making a realistic numerical model is a challenge.  Finally, global cycles are not static.  Probably the most difficult part of modeling is understanding the kinetic factors that make one part of a system change faster than another.  If we dump a whopping large amount of garbage into the Atlantic Ocean, for example, how long does it take for the water at the bottom of the Pacific to be affected, and how will that change the biomass in the Arctic?  How fast is any of the garbage buried in bottom sediment instead of being consumed by bacteria?  How does it affect seawater pH and the rate of coral reef growth or degradation?  A system as complex as the global carbon cycle has a huge number of feedbacks, many of which we do not understand well, and it is in a dynamic equilibrium at best.  I spent a good chunk of my profession career on small corners of the problem. We've learned an amazing amount in the past 100 years, but I can assure you that it will be a very long time before we run out of serious gaps to fill.

[Gatogateau]

Reaction is a mixture of:

 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

4 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I think that was Kyrah's point.

I thought it was using the energy faster than it gets replenished is an unsustainable plan. My bad. They're both bad though.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

Also, why do you say industrial agriculture is more hazardous than burning fossil fuels regarding climate change. The following statement, by the IPCC, contradicts your assertion:

"One of the first things the IPCC concluded is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, buildings, factories, and power plants. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, or CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills, natural gas and petroleum industries, and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals); nitrous oxide from fertilizers; gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes; and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2".

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/global-warming-causes/

IPCC though doesn't bring any proof to the table with any scientific papers that prove CO2 causes global warming, unlike these papers for example which disprove it:

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics

The Shattered Greenhouse: How Simple Physics Demolishes the "Greenhouse Effect".

Human CO2 Emissions Have Little Effect On Atmospheric CO2

 

Another, simpler proof is to be seen by Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius' 1896 paper on the idea of a greenhouse effect from human produced Co2. Though much of that paper was subsequently falsified by his peers, the one thing he mentioned that was never contested was that the Earth's temperature at that time in 1896 was 15 degrees C. If one contrasts that with the Nasa Earth temperature readings in 2013 of 14.6 C, one readily sees that in spite of 50% more ppm of Co2 today then there was in 1896, the overall Earth's temperature has actually dropped by .4 C

Quote

The average temperature in 2013 was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 degrees Celsius), which is 1.1 °F (0.6 °C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20140121/

For some reason the Earth's temperature had dropped from 1896 to mid 20th century which no doubt led to the fears back then that we were headed for another ice age. That was in spite of C02 increases over the same time period. 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

For some reason the Earth's temperature had dropped from 1896 to mid 20th century which no doubt led to the fears back then that we were headed for another ice age. That was in spite of C02 increases over the same time period. 

[Luna Bliss]

Dear God

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/sep/14/donald-trump-california-wildfires-coronavirus-covid-19-joe-biden-kamala-harris-us-election-politics-live-updates

Edited September 14, 2020 by Luna Bliss

[Rolig Loon]

Global temperature averages have been measured or calculated since the middle of the 19th century, as shown in the graph below.  Not surprisingly, we've become more sophisticated at it over the past 170 years.  If you look at the size of the error bars on values before about 1950, you'll see that they are much larger than the spread of uncertainty on today's measurements.  Technology in the 19th century ( and, in fact, well into the 20th century ) involved using a mercury bulb thermometer, and it was impossible to make large numbers of simultaneous readings at stations all around the world.  Especially since we started ringing the planet with weather satellites in the 1960s, we've been able to make significantly more accurate measurements and to make them of places that were virtually unreachable in the past.

Notice also that the prominent sawtooth nature of the profile below has become dramatically less wild over the past 170 years. We don't see anywhere near as many huge apparent temperature swings from one year to the next as we did back in the years before 1900.  That, too, is an artifact of technological limitations at the time.  When you can't take a lot of good measurements, the ones you take tend to scatter a lot.   Notice, however, that the overall trend has been undeniable.  The Earth's average temperature has been rising inexorably, and the slope of the curve has been increasing with time.

Arrhenius's pioneering work in the 1880s and 90s opened a field of study that has verified a strong connection between global temperature and the concentration of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2 and methane) in the atmosphere. 

That same connection has been recognized in the geologic record back well into the early Cenozoic era, where CO2 concentration and global temperature have been correlated with volcanic activity.  I've done some of those studies myself and am impressed by how firm the correlation is.  Volcanic activity continues to be a good CO2 source today, occasionally making a dramatic change in the atmosphere -- both because of increased CO2 and increased atmospheric dust, which affect air temperature in opposite directions.  The amount of volcanic activity around the world changes over a period of millions of years, however, not a few decades.  It certainly has not changed between 1850 and today and cannot account for the curve above. 

The same can be said of the Milankovich cycle and several other geological, astronomical, and atmospheric factors that all correlate with long-term changes in global temperature.  In fact, there is no natural geologic process that can account for that steady increase.  The only process that does show a strong correlation is the release of CO2 and methane by human activity.  That correlation has been confirmed by an overwhelming number of rigorously vetted studies since Arrhenius's.  With the exception of a vanishingly small number of people on the fringes of study, the debate now is not about whether anthropogenic CO2 and global temperature are linked, but about the details and about what to do about it.

[Silent Mistwalker]

Some of you are discussing global climate change, the rest of you are talking about global warming. Maybe try getting on the same page?

 

Quote

Although people tend to use these terms interchangeably, global warming is just one aspect of climate change. “Global warming” refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “Climate change” refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time – including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns.

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-difference-between-global-warming-and-climate-change-1?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products

[Rolig Loon]

4 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Some of you are discussing global climate change, the rest of you are talking about global warming. Maybe try getting on the same page?

It's the same page.  It all depends on whether you want to take in the whole page at once or focus on a paragraph on the page.   

Global warming is a good place to start talking, because changes in temperature potentially affect so many other factors (like the solubility of CO2 in seawater and thus its pH, or the partial pressure of water vapor in the atmosphere and thus the amount of cloud cover and storm activity).  As I said somewhat earlier, the farther we get from the observable correlation between CO2 and global temperature, the more complicated the discussion gets, because the global carbon cycle is incredibly complex and involves a number of non-linear feedbacks.  That's where the "details" that I just referred to in my last post are being studied today.  There's a lot of robust disagreement about how dominant the different pathways and processes in the cycle are and, more importantly, about how to predict how they will behave in the years ahead.  That's the Global Climate Change discussion.  

[Talligurl]

6 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Thanks. That is a start.  It doesn't answer the question, though.  To tell whether the dangers are greater than the dangers of using fossil fuels, you'd have to do a careful study to determine exactly how great the risks on both sides of the equation are.  Otherwise, all you're doing is tossing guesses back and forth.  You can't resolve an important question like that without taking a detailed, balanced look at the risks to see which set is really greater.

True, but then it really isn't an issue that has to be addressed. If producing corn using Round Up ready varieties is harmful to the environment, it does not mean all corn production needs to stop, Biofuels can be produced other ways as well. Corn is used to produce ethanol, because it is cheap, and it is cheap because of the way it is produced, that and the fact that the government subsidizes it, which is another whole issue. 

[Silent Mistwalker]

47 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

It's the same page.  It all depends on whether you want to take in the whole page at once or focus on a paragraph on the page.   

Global warming is a good place to start talking, because changes in temperature potentially affect so many other factors (like the solubility of CO2 in seawater and thus its pH, or the partial pressure of water vapor in the atmosphere and thus the amount of cloud cover and storm activity).  As I said somewhat earlier, the farther we get from the observable correlation between CO2 and global temperature, the more complicated the discussion gets, because the global carbon cycle is incredibly complex and involves a number of non-linear feedbacks.  That's where the "details" that I just referred to in my last post are being studied today.  There's a lot of robust disagreement about how dominant the different pathways and processes in the cycle are and, more importantly, about how to predict how they will behave in the years ahead.  That's the Global Climate Change discussion.  

My post wasn't aimed at those who are discussing global climate change. It was aimed at those who discussing global warming as if it were climate change. They're the ones who aren't on the same page as everyone else.

Find a way to eliminate the "everything is disposable" society that exists now (within the past 40 years roughly) and half the battle is won. Humans have become overly wasteful and it needs to slow way down since there is no way to force every single human being to stop wasting so much of, well, everything. Food included.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

I think we all agree that the climate constantly changes, the only real question is, what percentage of the change is caused by man

I say zero, some zealots say all of it

[Rolig Loon]

21 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

I think we all agree that the climate constantly changes, the only real question is, what percentage of the change is caused by man

I say zero, some zealots say all of it

And the answer is somewhere between those extremes.  Nothing is as simple as the absolutes we use to mark the ends of our playing field.  😉

[Talligurl]

5 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Also, why do you say industrial agriculture is more hazardous than burning fossil fuels regarding climate change. The following statement, by the IPCC, contradicts your assertion:

"One of the first things the IPCC concluded is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, buildings, factories, and power plants. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, or CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills, natural gas and petroleum industries, and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals); nitrous oxide from fertilizers; gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes; and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2".

Lets start with the end of the list you quoted, the part right after agriculture. We eat to much meat, and the meat we eat is produced in ways that are harmful. Massive feed lots are used where cattle waste becomes a toxic poison filling huge containment pools which are a major environmental problem. In more traditional agriculture where livestock are raised in smaller quantities along with crops, and the wastes can be composted into fertilizer, After it talks about animals above it talks about nitrous oxide from fertilizer, You had mentioned the health benefits from eating food produced on natural organic soils, but the degraded soils that are typical of large scale farming operations cannot even produce a crop without huge amounts of fertilizer. These dead depleted soils also do not contain carbon, because the organic matter has been destroyed. Healthy soil contains large amounts of carbon which keeps this element out of the atmosphere resulting in fewer greenhouse gasses. Finally there is the massive amounts of fossil fuels needed to produce the crop, harvest it, transport it, and then process it into ethanol. All of which is made economically viable because the corn crop is subsidized by the government to start with to hold it's cost down.

[Talligurl]

11 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

That issue is exactly as laughable.

I by the way do not deny global warming, or deny that it has contributed to the fires. but if you seriously think getting society at large to change their habits to end Global warming. is easier than getting a state agency to improve it's forest management. Well I wont even say what I think.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

On 9/13/2020 at 2:06 PM, animats said:

Fires near the SF bay area were started by lightning, on August 16th. Huge summer thunderstorm. Very little rain, heavy lightning. It was very strange to see.

 

 

I can imagine, In Florida we have lightning all the time hits. Lots of smaller fires. We usually have a lot of rain and that usually keeps it under control.

I witnessed a lightning strike hit the tree of my neighbors yard, it split it in half. So, I can understand. 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

58 minutes ago, Talligurl said:

I by the way do not deny global warming, or deny that it has contributed to the fires. but if you seriously think getting society at large to change their habits to end Global warming. is easier than getting a state agency to improve it's forest management. Well I wont even say what I think.

Unfortunately we won't have any choice.

The fake crisis of "Man Made Global Warming" is the socialist's last best chance to make over the west into their own vision.

You think the coronavirus lockdown was bad. Wait until they get power (not in 2020 thank God) and announce that the climate is only months away from total collapse and the only way to avert it is to have a breather of a few months to allow the climate to "catch up".

Then they shut down everything.

Paranoid fantasy?

Maybe

Maybe not.

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by BilliJo Aldrin

[BilliJo Aldrin]

1 hour ago, Talligurl said:

True, but then it really isn't an issue that has to be addressed. If producing corn using Round Up ready varieties is harmful to the environment, it does not mean all corn production needs to stop, Biofuels can be produced other ways as well. Corn is used to produce ethanol, because it is cheap, and it is cheap because of the way it is produced, that and the fact that the government subsidizes it, which is another whole issue. 

Ironically, now that we are energy self sufficient (thanks to President Trump) we no longer need to add ethanol to our gasoline. Unfortunately once a subsidy is in place it is almost impossible to end it.

 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

And the answer is somewhere between those extremes.  Nothing is as simple as the absolutes we use to mark the ends of our playing field.  😉

It’s a lot closer to one end then the other.

[Rolig Loon]

9 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

It’s a lot closer to one end then the other.

I'm confident that science can come closer to figuring out how close than wishful thinking can, but we all know that science and public policy collide in the world of politics.  I am less confident that political minds can be comfortable shaping public policy when they have to balance science and all the pressures of business and short-term power struggles.  What's true, what's right, and what's possible do not always look the same.  

Edited September 15, 2020 by Rolig Loon
Cleaner wording

[BilliJo Aldrin]

10 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I'm confident that science can come closer to figuring out how close than wishful thinking can, but we all know that science and public policy collide in the world of politics.  I am less confident that political minds can be comfortable shaping public policy when they have to balance science and all the pressures of business and short-term power struggles.  What's true, what's right, and what's possible do not always look the same.  

If it makes you feel any better, EVERY prediction of climate gloom and doom over the last 50 years has not come true. 

Ask yourself why this one should be any different.

[Silent Mistwalker]

No words. Just no words.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/man-arrested-for-starting-at-least-7-brush-fires-along-i-205/ar-BB191bIo?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msedgntp

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

4 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

No words. Just no words.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/man-arrested-for-starting-at-least-7-brush-fires-along-i-205/ar-BB191bIo?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msedgntp

 

So they took him for a mental health evaluation?

Maybe he was driven crazy by "man made global warming".

You can link anything to "man made global warming" if you just try hard enough

Edited September 15, 2020 by BilliJo Aldrin

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 minute ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

So they took him for a mental health evaluation?

Maybe is was driven crazy by "man made global warming".

You can tie anything to "man made global warming" if you just try hard enough

The state is already on fire and this idiot goes around setting more. It has nothing to do with the off topic discussion yet everything to do with the OP topic. Go figure.