Heat wave over Greenland causing massive ice melt

Discussion in 'Science' started by DennisTate, Aug 3, 2019.

  1. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    We never have been, in billions of years that this planet has existed.

    So why do some believe that is the case now?
     
  2. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I don't "believe" that is the case.

    I accept the preponderance of the evidence from those who spend their lives studying climate in all related sciences not just here in the US but all over the world.

    As for what man has contributed, it's clear that since the industrial revolution humans have mined fossil carbon and pumped it into the atmosphere. That is novel.
     
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  3. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    They have done it for thousands of years prior to that bubba. And burned other fuels for hundreds of thousands of years prior to that.
     
  4. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Very little evidence, a preponderance of computer model projections.
     
  5. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Computer models are the only way to address the number and complexity of factors that affect climate.

    There isn't anything new or different about the many types of models used in climate analysis. Today, even weather reports require massive amounts of computer time from the fastest machines available today.
     
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  6. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Not really. Burning dung and logs is a very different thing. It involves carbon that is already in our environment.

    During the industrial revolution we started mining fossil fuel - carbon that hadn't been in our environment for millions of years. And, we began emitting it into the air by the gigaton.
     
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  7. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Who told you such a crazy story, and why did you fall for it? That falls into the "That's not right. That's not even wrong." category of claims. You're obviously chasing the data. You feel something must be true, so you automatically accept any crazy claim that matches your feelings.

    That's feelgood gaian nonsense. Humans are quite capable of overwhelming natural processes, and the earth is not going to magically save us.

    The reality? When plague wiped out a quarter of the earth's population, vast amounts of unused farmland reforested. That global reforestation event lowered CO2 levels by 7 ppm, less than 3 years worth of current emissions. Your claims are just nuts.
     
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  8. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Ohh, I so absolutely love this kind of post. Where somebody screams that I (or somebody else) is wrong, and attacks us for believing what we do. Yet backs up their claim with absolutely nothing

    Well, unlike you, I do something known as "research". Can you say that word? "Reeee - search. There, I knew you could.

    OK, we know that the Amazon is being deforested at an increasingly rapid rate. How rapid?

    Well, in less than 50 years it has lost over 700,000 square kilometers. And that at the current rate and acceleration of deforestation, the Amazon will be only 60% of it's original pre-industrial size by 2030. 40% by 2060. And if you think I am exaggerating, I am not. I am actually picking some of the lower estimates.

    https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-international/en/publications/reports/slaughtering-the-amazon/

    So unless Greenpeace, the WWF, and the UN and UNESCO are all lying, let's stick with those numbers, alright? Of course, feel free to provide references stating that these amounts of deforestation are incorrect.

    Now, the commonly accepted formula is that a square kilometer can sequester 725 tons of CO2 per year. So let's stick with that, we are not even going to go into the fact that the Amazon is no longer sequestering that much, and may actually be emitting more CO2 than it absorbs according to some new data. So let's stick with that figure.

    https://www.rainforesttrust.org/cli...absorb-store-large-quantities-carbon-dioxide/

    Now for this part, only a calculator is needed. 700,000 square kilometers lost since 1970, multiplied by 725 tons per year, we come up with...

    507.5 million tons of CO2 sequestration per year destroyed in 49 years.

    The amount of CO2 increase due to the use of fossil fuels since 1990?

    15 million tons.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

    Look, this is not rocket science here. So please, there is a basic rundown of the figures, including sources on how they can be arrived at. So please, feel free to give some other sources that are reputable and give different figures than what I have just provided.

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/amazon-rainforest-ability-soak-carbon-dioxide-falling

    So instead of simply going "No you are wrong", please feel free to compile data to show why I am wrong.
     
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  9. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    And this is exactly what I mean. This paragraph is so entirely wrong, it is almost impossible to find anything right in it.

    OK, let's start with your plague claim, and throw in some data, shall we?

    I can only assume you are talking about the Black Death. Which in 20 years decimated Europe, and killed an estimated 30 million people (I am being generous and giving you the high number here). That is an estimated 1/3 of the population of Europe. Up to 50% were killed in England.

    Huh, of Europe. Not world-wide, not global, in Europe.

    Europe was only a percent of the world population at the time (maybe 1/4), at the very most all of Europe was around 100 million individuals (at the top number). And yes, between 1/4 and 1/3 of all Europe died in the Black Death.

    But globally? More like 1/10 of the population at most. More accurately, it was around 1/13.

    In 1400, the population of Ming China alone was over 125 million. India alone was around 80 million. The Americas were around 45 million.

    Yet you make the silly claim that "plague wiped out a quarter of the earth's population". No, no it did not. Yes, it decimated Europe, but most of the world barely blinked at this event.

    Well, that is interesting. Yes, the global population at that time is generally estimated to be around 400 million. Which by the way was also the world population by 1400. And it was around 460 million by 1500.

    Amazing thing about medieval age agrarian cultures, they bred like rabbits.

    As far as the reforestation data, I did look through some of them. And here is the funny thing, most tend to dismiss the claims. Because none of the "reclaimed" land even appears to have returned much past a decade or so of growth before it was cleared once again. And what followed was an even more massive deforestation which followed the breaking of the serf system and other changes in European society in the 1500's.

    Heck, by the time 150 years passed, population pressures were so great that countries were trying to bleed off people by sending them to different continents. A lot of the reason the Colonial system originated in the first place is because a country simply has too many people at home. Both England and France found it a great dumping ground for dissidents and those who did not fit in well back home.

    Yea, I tried to find sources to validate that 7ppm claim, and really could not find any. What is found however is contradictory sources that even other climatologists tend to dismiss as unverifiable and inconsequential considering they occur right at the cusp of the Medievel Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age.

    So yea, at least my claims as given above are accurate. Yours are outright silly at the best.
     
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  10. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    And yes, I broke this up into 3 sections because each of these needed to be discussed on their own I believe.

    No, I am not some kind of "Gaian" who sings Kumbaya and weeps whenever a tree is cut down or a deer killed. If anything my approach to such things is rather brutal and only looking at data. I could not care if 100 square miles of forest is cut down in Europe, because when it comes to sequestering carbon, forests really do not hold back all that much when compared to rainforests. I have experience in both, the forests of North America from the reclaimed kind in the SE to the largely untouched ones in the Rocky Mountains. And when you compare to what a jungle or rainforest has, it is almost like a desert.

    You can run a Battalion of Infantry through a forest in Europe or most of North America without effort. But good luck trying to run more than a platoon through a rainforest or jungle. There is a reason why it is generally called "Triple Canopy". Each layer pretty much has it's own unique ecosystem, and the density of life is hard to believe. In a typical forest as most think of it, visibility is often 1/2 mile or more. In a rainforest or jungle? That visibility is more like 100 meters (at most).

    Yes, humans do indeed make changes. I will never deny that. But nature will also constantly fight to return to what was there before. And when we make changes (dam rivers, cut forests), it will not try to make a new environment as much as return to what it was before.

    Now most of the changes we see have actually been going on for tens of thousands of years. The North Sahara was a rich wetlands with a thriving ecosystem. But that died's on it's own, nothing to do with humans. The same with things like the death of most of the megafauna. Simply put, animals that adapted to life in an ice age mostly could not adapt to a warming climate and the changes in the flora. The plants died and changes, the animals that ate them died or changed, and the animals that ate them followed suit.

    That is why both Camels and Horses (which evolved in the Americas) went extinct (as did all the American pachyderms), but continued on in Asia and Africa.

    I simply recognize change as what it is, change. Ice ages come and go, warming periods come and go. They happened for billions of years before humans, they will continue until the Sun enters it's Red Giant phase and burns the planet to a cinder. I simply recognize this fact, and do not try to romanticize it.
     
  11. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Science is well aware of that genearl characteristic, as it is science that figured that out.

    So, I don't see that as an argument against what climatologiests the world over are stating today.
     
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  12. FlamingLib

    FlamingLib Well-Known Member

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    And herein lies the problem: Earth has never had to deal with billions of people with enormous carbon footprints who depend on mined fossil fuels for their energy. It's overwhelming all the natural CO2 sinks. What humans are doing is new and unprecedented and extremely dangerous.
     
  13. FlamingLib

    FlamingLib Well-Known Member

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    So let's look at that. Let's take a typical hunter-gather person, look at the amount of resources they needed to maintain their lifestyle, and compare that to me, a modern American middle-class person.

    But I really don't need to do that, do I? Isn't it kind of obvious who's had a bigger impact on the planet? By many orders of magnitude?
     
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  14. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    No one on this planet is qualified to render such an assessment.
     
  15. Citizen Cane

    Citizen Cane Newly Registered

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    What "qualification" does one need?
     
  16. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There are many people on this planet "Qualified", that YOU disagree with them is not relevant to this reality.
     
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  17. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    BS. It is a statement of fact based on science.

    And it's more than dangerous. It's too late to stop it.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2019
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  18. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Which ones, the ones you agree with or the ones you don't?
     
  19. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    Your comments are based in ignorance. It is sickening reading such nonsensical posts given the magnitude of the disaster at hand.

    But cheer up. You win! It's too late. The planet is fcked. And and so are your grandchildren.

    No sense arguing anymore. We didn't make it.I'm glad I'll be dead before the worst of it starts to hit.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2019
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  20. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Ah, so not even climatologists but activist alarmists are all you believe in.
     
  21. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    Sure there are, by some metric which is utterly devoid of any consideration of demonstrated competence in the field of climatology - assuming, of course, that collegial approbation doesn't pass for competence.
    No, it's a statement of belief based on the pronouncements of putative scientists.
     
  22. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    You raise a lot of questions here - how to be properly informed by science, the possibility of massive world wide conspiracy, and even whether there are competent scientists.

    I don't see you proposing answers to any of them.
     
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  23. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Hilarious logic failure at your part, your assumption that plague only affected Europe. You don't seem to get that your feelings are not data. It's not debatable that the human population took a major hit, due to severe population losses in both Europe and Asia.

    So, you fail at research as well. Looks like I'll have to help you out. Try this.

    http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/dam/accademia/pdf/sv106/sv106-ruddiman.pdf

    So, I have hard data backing me up, while you just have your feelings and your bad logic.
     
  24. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    In order to pull off the condescending act, you have to actually be intelligent. That's why I can do it. You can't. You get everything wrong, hence you just look crazy when you get belligerent with your bizarre claims.

    Okay. Let's just take your numbers.

    Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, .... I have no idea how you got that number so incredibly wrong, as nothing on the page you linked to supports that lunatic claim. The real number is 37.1 billion tons per year.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-emissions-reached-an-all-time-high-in-2018/
    ---
    The scientists project that fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions will hit a record high of 37.1 billion metric tons by the end of this year.
    ---

    If we divide 37.1 billion by 507.5 million, we see that human CO2 emissions are currently 73 times as much the Amazon deforestation emissions. Your claim that deforestation was over 5 time as much means that your loopy claim was off by a factor of 400 or so.

    I was right. You were wrong. Not just a little wrong, but wildly wrong. If you want to retain any credibility, you'll need to admit to being wrong, and then apologize for how you treat the people who don't share your wrongness.
     
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2019
  25. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I don't see you citing this.

    I'd point out that the population of China declined starting at about 1200, reducing its population by tens of millions (possibly 50%) due to plague and to starvation and upheaval caused by the advent of Mongol rule. That alone counts for a 10% drop in world population in the years leading up to the European climate events. That Chinese population wasn't gained back until sometime during the Ming dynasty, in the 1500's or later.

    The cite by Mamooth has more.
     
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2019

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