As I understand it, in proportion to the size of the earth, the atmosphere is about as thick as the skin on an apple. The atmosphere is pretty darn thin more than 10 miles up (90% of the atmosphere is below that altitude), and hardly exists more than 50 miles up. You can subtract 5 miles from that if you are standing on the top of Everest, or 6 miles if you are in an airliner. The earth’s diameter is more than 7900 miles. So you can see how small an addition to that the atmosphere makes. Even with all the mountains and trenches, the earth is smoother than the average apple. The air is a scum of gas around it. And all living things exist within that thin envelope! From space, “sky high” is a rather laughable phrase.
There was another show on yesterday about spy planes like the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird. Interesting stuff.The Blackbird could fly at Mach 3.2 at 80,000 ft.Even today that is about as high as a jet can go.
The problem with your argument, Adams, is that the predictions of human-caused global warming have NOT been wrong, they are positive, measurable, seen in almost every branch of earth and life science, and there is no plan to mitigate it at all. The GOP will be seen in the future about as kindly as the guy who released rabbits in Australia, the folks who imported the chestnut and elm diseases to America, only resulting in much greater suffering, cost, and death.
If GW doesn’t make the top ten list of issues of concern to Americans, then people aren’t paying attention. I’ll be dead and gone, but the next couple of generations (at least) are going to be very angry about what our generation has left them. We have to completely rethink how we live on the earth.
Yeah, but you will never convince the fools of that.. As matter of fact the GOP is at it again this year with the Creationism nonsense.. So global warming and all that science is nonstarter with those people.
The Conservative GW Cafe:(Choose one item from Group A, and one from Group B.)
Group A:1) It’s snowing today, so the planet isn’t warming.2) The planet is warming, but humans aren’t responsible.3) The planet is warming, but nothing bad will result.4) The planet is warming, humans are responsible, bad results will follow, but India and China are worse offenders and we can’t afford to lose our industrial competitiveness.(Reuse as necessary)
Group B:1) This incessant “Sky is Falling” hysteria is out of proportion.2) Nobody’s talking about it anymore; it’s a dead issue.(Reuse as necessary)
BONUS:1) Al Gore is an idiot!(Always available, no charge)
My original comment here reflected that the “average American” doesn’t have A CLUE about climate change, or the atmosphere, as Justin Bieber is in their “top ten concerns”, but even the real economy doesn’t make it, and “jobs” isn’t understood any better than AGW. A single year doesn’t mean much, but we’re looking at not just figures for the warmest DECADE, but CENTURY. It’s the direct result of human activity and ignoring CO2, the BIOLOGICAL evidence is overwhelming that HUMANS have drastically changed the planet, in less than 200 years. The impacts are MORE SEVERE than in thousands of years of change under “natural” process.
Sorry, but comparing the “issues” of “average Americans”, I’ll put more faith in my dachshund’s opinion.
Oh, the hysteria at the mention of Obama’s name is a given, but unrelated. Whether in a year or in 5 years Obama will be out of office, but the responses I gave have been time-tested, and will be good indefinitely. The two choices in Group B are mutually exclusive, but at any given time ONE will be appropriate.
It’s what Freud referred to as Kettle Logic, taking the name from a scenario in which one person is accused of breaking another’s kettle:I never borrowed the kettle, the kettle isn’t broken, and furthermore it was already broken when I borrowed it.
www.imo.int www.ipcc.ch The Folly of Fools The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Travers. An interesting read about how we deceive ourselves to deceive others.
“100 years ago people literally choked to death in our big cities’ streets from the coal wood smoke. The warmists are lying morons.”
100 years ago the population of the earth was 1.6 billion, and most of them were still living an agrarian lifestyle. The existence of a few industrial centers such as New York and London made life inside them hell, but had little effect on the atmosphere worldwide. You might as well claim that the improvement in Los Angeles’ air quality over the last 50 years proves that Pheonix’s air quality has not plummeted.
On a global scale we’re pumping more and worse stuff into the air than ever before, and we’re rapidly losing both the forests and the vegetation (both terrestrial and aquatic) to filter it out.
If you can convince me that oceanic oxygen depletion and the cataclysmic loss of rainforests acreage in the last 100 years (A) are part of the natural cycle and (B) have had (and will have) no adverse effect on the global atmosphere, then I’ll start worrying about asteroids and volcanoes.
Why is there such a strong correlation between conservative politics and scientific ignorance? I’ve known some smart conservatives — I went to college with Paul Wolfowitz, somewhat to my embarrassment — and though I would not say that he is wise, I do admit that he’s smart. So it’s not true that stupidity is inherent in conservatism. And I’ve certainly known lefties who weren’t so smart, for that matter. But still, all in all, it seems very odd that scientific ignorance — not just about climate — seems to tilt to the right so strongly.
Onguard, if you’re talking about Yellowstone, what do you mean by “due”? An “average” frequency of several hundred millennia can mean a lot of variability from our perspective, as the fact that we’re tens of millennia “overdue” (based on only the last two eruptions) suggests. The other known two were apparently close to a million years apart, so there really isn’t a specific “due” millennium, let alone century. As the USGS noted, “Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption. The probability of a large caldera-forming eruption within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low”.
Maybe in a couple thousand years we’ll be able to predict them, colonize Mars, and stop Earth from freezing with a measured dose of short-lived greenhouse gas/other advanced geo-engineering. That is, if those pointing to natural disaster as an excuse for risking our own lasting hell don’t get their way, and civilization is still in good shape …
Consistently the worse air in the U.S. for particulates:Utah, thanks to the Kennicott Mine. The Air Quality Board that o.k.’s the mines activities (has been set up by the Republican legislature) recently agreed to let the mine increase production quotas of crushed rock by a about a third. This will worsen the air quality. Funny how a board made up of mining interested members votes against the public welfare.
No, not the limit, but one OVER the limit. Did anyone see the National Geographic special about Glaciers?
You know, I am not one of those eco-freaks who believe that Humans are going to kill off all life on the planet; but I am beginning to believe we might do a decent job of wiping ourselves off the orb. <Of course, we’ll probably take a lot of other species down with us.>
Wow, that’s way up there.On the subject of climate change I hear Newt was supposed to have a chapter in his new book written by a female scientist, and he changed his mind.That is funny and sad. She is tweeting that she spent 100 hours writing a chapter for his book and she could have spent it with her young kid.
Re: Supposed “cooling” predictions, the only problem is that the holocene is one of the longer interglacials, and the subtle Milankovitch cycle isn’t in it’s negative phase/won’t be for millennia:http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=24Even a “little ice age”-type event likely wouldn’t stop global warming:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/06/what-if-the-sun-went-into-a-new-grand-minimum/http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/15/246202/sun-hibernation-deniers/And I see the contrarians are still recycling the straw man argument that scientists have predicted catastrophe and got it wrong. So which climatologists said we should have already tipped the system into hopelessly non-linear acceleration, and/or disrupted holocene ecosystems and societies? Last I checked, the models gave a range of potential change over decades (that is, climatic averages, shorter-term ‘internal’ variability aside), based on everything from physics and observational data to paleoclimatology. And this is just the beginning of the process, considering thermal inertia and long-term feedbacks.
Actually, I don’t fear that we will become extinct any time soon through climate change, but I do fear that life will become much harder for lots of people.
The Mayans may have been right after all:Melting Arctic Ocean Raises Threat of a ˜Methane Time Bomb" by Susan Q.Stranahan: Yale Environment 360http://tinyurl.com/bryr3zyThen this:Yale Environment 360: Huge Methane Plumes Are Discovered in Arctic Oceanhttp://tinyurl.com/c5y2vdoThis is Yale, folks, and unfortunately, I’m serious. We’ve screwed the pooch. “It’s the end of the world as we know it”, and I DON’T feel fine!
“BINGO! You have covered most of the reality check answers”
So which of the menu items do you personally profess? Remember, some of them are mutually exclusive, so you will be held to them; no changing horses in midstream.
Global warming may be real, but man is not causing it. This is a socialist movement to take control of the world economy in the name of Environmentalism. We were all fed lies that were broadly published in the media. Go to www.junkscience.com and read the reports on Climategate 2.0. Learn the truth before it costs us our freedom.
www.ucsusa.org/globalwarming/ Here is a site even a 8 year old can understand. Better yet, open an account with National Geographic and catch up to the elementary school children,Doug.
“walking around in shirtsleeves in 60*+ …” The Ice Cores show cold spells are due. When it happens, the ground north of I-70 will never thaw in one person’s life time.
Um, of course the Mayan thing is an obvious shuck and jive. My point is that those “believers” may very well be terribly right for entirely the wrong reason. If one reads those two articles and puts it together, one can see that the mechanism is already well underway and almost certainly unstoppable to give us a VERY rough ride. And very much sooner rather than later. Happy New Year…
Around the world there are many millions of people that still have deep scepticism regarding human-created climate change.
Unfortunately, nearly all of those sceptics are Americans. I was a fading sceptic until the Koch study funded to prove that it was false actually proved it was true.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15373071
1. Turn over your calendars from 2011 to 2012 folks, that’s all the “Mayan calendar” is actually doing, a new cycle.
2. ANYONE mentioning Al Gore with respect to AGW is being purely political, and IS an idiot.
3.Thousands of scientists, and millions of pages of documentation firmly establish that AGW is real. The argument against is purely an effort of “industry” to make higher profits, and even the “industry” falsifying data for a couple decades to try to make “not real” are now turned around, publishing the real data, and claiming THEY are the “good guys”.
Deniers are simply continuing to damage their brains, with Preparation H.
Dtroutma over 12 years ago
Too bad the atmosphere isn’t really that thick in proportion to the size of the planet, only about as deep as the “guys” in the drawing.
aardvarkseyes over 12 years ago
Consider it overkill…
JamesMcW over 12 years ago
actualy I agree.
Doughfoot over 12 years ago
As I understand it, in proportion to the size of the earth, the atmosphere is about as thick as the skin on an apple. The atmosphere is pretty darn thin more than 10 miles up (90% of the atmosphere is below that altitude), and hardly exists more than 50 miles up. You can subtract 5 miles from that if you are standing on the top of Everest, or 6 miles if you are in an airliner. The earth’s diameter is more than 7900 miles. So you can see how small an addition to that the atmosphere makes. Even with all the mountains and trenches, the earth is smoother than the average apple. The air is a scum of gas around it. And all living things exist within that thin envelope! From space, “sky high” is a rather laughable phrase.
rockngolfer over 12 years ago
There was another show on yesterday about spy planes like the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird. Interesting stuff.The Blackbird could fly at Mach 3.2 at 80,000 ft.Even today that is about as high as a jet can go.
ARodney over 12 years ago
The problem with your argument, Adams, is that the predictions of human-caused global warming have NOT been wrong, they are positive, measurable, seen in almost every branch of earth and life science, and there is no plan to mitigate it at all. The GOP will be seen in the future about as kindly as the guy who released rabbits in Australia, the folks who imported the chestnut and elm diseases to America, only resulting in much greater suffering, cost, and death.
walruscarver2000 over 12 years ago
Both side argue from insufficient data.
NDeeZ over 12 years ago
It’s a carTOON—and you’re arguing about accuracy of scale? The phrase, “Time to up your medication” leaps to mind.
lonecat over 12 years ago
If GW doesn’t make the top ten list of issues of concern to Americans, then people aren’t paying attention. I’ll be dead and gone, but the next couple of generations (at least) are going to be very angry about what our generation has left them. We have to completely rethink how we live on the earth.
Mitchtheone over 12 years ago
Yeah, but you will never convince the fools of that.. As matter of fact the GOP is at it again this year with the Creationism nonsense.. So global warming and all that science is nonstarter with those people.
fritzoid Premium Member over 12 years ago
The Conservative GW Cafe:(Choose one item from Group A, and one from Group B.)
Group A:1) It’s snowing today, so the planet isn’t warming.2) The planet is warming, but humans aren’t responsible.3) The planet is warming, but nothing bad will result.4) The planet is warming, humans are responsible, bad results will follow, but India and China are worse offenders and we can’t afford to lose our industrial competitiveness.(Reuse as necessary)
Group B:1) This incessant “Sky is Falling” hysteria is out of proportion.2) Nobody’s talking about it anymore; it’s a dead issue.(Reuse as necessary)
BONUS:1) Al Gore is an idiot!(Always available, no charge)
lonecat over 12 years ago
Another bonus: Doing anything about it is a fundamental attack on our freedoms.
Dtroutma over 12 years ago
My original comment here reflected that the “average American” doesn’t have A CLUE about climate change, or the atmosphere, as Justin Bieber is in their “top ten concerns”, but even the real economy doesn’t make it, and “jobs” isn’t understood any better than AGW. A single year doesn’t mean much, but we’re looking at not just figures for the warmest DECADE, but CENTURY. It’s the direct result of human activity and ignoring CO2, the BIOLOGICAL evidence is overwhelming that HUMANS have drastically changed the planet, in less than 200 years. The impacts are MORE SEVERE than in thousands of years of change under “natural” process.
Sorry, but comparing the “issues” of “average Americans”, I’ll put more faith in my dachshund’s opinion.
fritzoid Premium Member over 12 years ago
Oh, the hysteria at the mention of Obama’s name is a given, but unrelated. Whether in a year or in 5 years Obama will be out of office, but the responses I gave have been time-tested, and will be good indefinitely. The two choices in Group B are mutually exclusive, but at any given time ONE will be appropriate.
It’s what Freud referred to as Kettle Logic, taking the name from a scenario in which one person is accused of breaking another’s kettle:I never borrowed the kettle, the kettle isn’t broken, and furthermore it was already broken when I borrowed it.
agate1 over 12 years ago
www.imo.int www.ipcc.ch The Folly of Fools The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Travers. An interesting read about how we deceive ourselves to deceive others.
fritzoid Premium Member over 12 years ago
“100 years ago people literally choked to death in our big cities’ streets from the coal wood smoke. The warmists are lying morons.”
100 years ago the population of the earth was 1.6 billion, and most of them were still living an agrarian lifestyle. The existence of a few industrial centers such as New York and London made life inside them hell, but had little effect on the atmosphere worldwide. You might as well claim that the improvement in Los Angeles’ air quality over the last 50 years proves that Pheonix’s air quality has not plummeted.
On a global scale we’re pumping more and worse stuff into the air than ever before, and we’re rapidly losing both the forests and the vegetation (both terrestrial and aquatic) to filter it out.
fritzoid Premium Member over 12 years ago
If you can convince me that oceanic oxygen depletion and the cataclysmic loss of rainforests acreage in the last 100 years (A) are part of the natural cycle and (B) have had (and will have) no adverse effect on the global atmosphere, then I’ll start worrying about asteroids and volcanoes.
lonecat over 12 years ago
Why is there such a strong correlation between conservative politics and scientific ignorance? I’ve known some smart conservatives — I went to college with Paul Wolfowitz, somewhat to my embarrassment — and though I would not say that he is wise, I do admit that he’s smart. So it’s not true that stupidity is inherent in conservatism. And I’ve certainly known lefties who weren’t so smart, for that matter. But still, all in all, it seems very odd that scientific ignorance — not just about climate — seems to tilt to the right so strongly.
agate1 over 12 years ago
The Darkening Sea www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/20/061120fa_fact_colbert Dying oceans=DYING PLANET Times almost up.
OregonStream over 12 years ago
Onguard, if you’re talking about Yellowstone, what do you mean by “due”? An “average” frequency of several hundred millennia can mean a lot of variability from our perspective, as the fact that we’re tens of millennia “overdue” (based on only the last two eruptions) suggests. The other known two were apparently close to a million years apart, so there really isn’t a specific “due” millennium, let alone century. As the USGS noted, “Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption. The probability of a large caldera-forming eruption within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low”.
Maybe in a couple thousand years we’ll be able to predict them, colonize Mars, and stop Earth from freezing with a measured dose of short-lived greenhouse gas/other advanced geo-engineering. That is, if those pointing to natural disaster as an excuse for risking our own lasting hell don’t get their way, and civilization is still in good shape …
agate1 over 12 years ago
Consistently the worse air in the U.S. for particulates:Utah, thanks to the Kennicott Mine. The Air Quality Board that o.k.’s the mines activities (has been set up by the Republican legislature) recently agreed to let the mine increase production quotas of crushed rock by a about a third. This will worsen the air quality. Funny how a board made up of mining interested members votes against the public welfare.
agate1 over 12 years ago
www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2011/12/21/228461.htm Utah doctors and mothers sue to keep air quality safer.
agate1 over 12 years ago
A dead issue only if you’re brain dead.
AaronWSmith over 12 years ago
No, not the limit, but one OVER the limit. Did anyone see the National Geographic special about Glaciers?
You know, I am not one of those eco-freaks who believe that Humans are going to kill off all life on the planet; but I am beginning to believe we might do a decent job of wiping ourselves off the orb. <Of course, we’ll probably take a lot of other species down with us.>
rockngolfer over 12 years ago
Wow, that’s way up there.On the subject of climate change I hear Newt was supposed to have a chapter in his new book written by a female scientist, and he changed his mind.That is funny and sad. She is tweeting that she spent 100 hours writing a chapter for his book and she could have spent it with her young kid.
OregonStream over 12 years ago
Re: Supposed “cooling” predictions, the only problem is that the holocene is one of the longer interglacials, and the subtle Milankovitch cycle isn’t in it’s negative phase/won’t be for millennia:http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=24Even a “little ice age”-type event likely wouldn’t stop global warming:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/06/what-if-the-sun-went-into-a-new-grand-minimum/http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/15/246202/sun-hibernation-deniers/And I see the contrarians are still recycling the straw man argument that scientists have predicted catastrophe and got it wrong. So which climatologists said we should have already tipped the system into hopelessly non-linear acceleration, and/or disrupted holocene ecosystems and societies? Last I checked, the models gave a range of potential change over decades (that is, climatic averages, shorter-term ‘internal’ variability aside), based on everything from physics and observational data to paleoclimatology. And this is just the beginning of the process, considering thermal inertia and long-term feedbacks.
lonecat over 12 years ago
Actually, I don’t fear that we will become extinct any time soon through climate change, but I do fear that life will become much harder for lots of people.
AlbertNonyMouse over 12 years ago
The Mayans may have been right after all:Melting Arctic Ocean Raises Threat of a ˜Methane Time Bomb" by Susan Q.Stranahan: Yale Environment 360http://tinyurl.com/bryr3zyThen this:Yale Environment 360: Huge Methane Plumes Are Discovered in Arctic Oceanhttp://tinyurl.com/c5y2vdoThis is Yale, folks, and unfortunately, I’m serious. We’ve screwed the pooch. “It’s the end of the world as we know it”, and I DON’T feel fine!
fritzoid Premium Member over 12 years ago
“BINGO! You have covered most of the reality check answers”
So which of the menu items do you personally profess? Remember, some of them are mutually exclusive, so you will be held to them; no changing horses in midstream.
dougdash over 12 years ago
Global warming may be real, but man is not causing it. This is a socialist movement to take control of the world economy in the name of Environmentalism. We were all fed lies that were broadly published in the media. Go to www.junkscience.com and read the reports on Climategate 2.0. Learn the truth before it costs us our freedom.
agate1 over 12 years ago
www.ucsusa.org/globalwarming/ Here is a site even a 8 year old can understand. Better yet, open an account with National Geographic and catch up to the elementary school children,Doug.
Fuzzy Thinker Premium Member over 12 years ago
“walking around in shirtsleeves in 60*+ …” The Ice Cores show cold spells are due. When it happens, the ground north of I-70 will never thaw in one person’s life time.
Fuzzy Thinker Premium Member over 12 years ago
“…more widely oscillating temperatures…” When 150 year old records are being broken every week- watch out.
Joe1962 Premium Member over 12 years ago
Dead on.
AlbertNonyMouse over 12 years ago
Um, of course the Mayan thing is an obvious shuck and jive. My point is that those “believers” may very well be terribly right for entirely the wrong reason. If one reads those two articles and puts it together, one can see that the mechanism is already well underway and almost certainly unstoppable to give us a VERY rough ride. And very much sooner rather than later. Happy New Year…
Ottodesu over 12 years ago
Around the world there are many millions of people that still have deep scepticism regarding human-created climate change.
Unfortunately, nearly all of those sceptics are Americans. I was a fading sceptic until the Koch study funded to prove that it was false actually proved it was true.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15373071
lonecat over 12 years ago
No, he did his first degree at Cornell, his doctorate at Chicago.
Dtroutma over 12 years ago
1. Turn over your calendars from 2011 to 2012 folks, that’s all the “Mayan calendar” is actually doing, a new cycle.
2. ANYONE mentioning Al Gore with respect to AGW is being purely political, and IS an idiot.
3.Thousands of scientists, and millions of pages of documentation firmly establish that AGW is real. The argument against is purely an effort of “industry” to make higher profits, and even the “industry” falsifying data for a couple decades to try to make “not real” are now turned around, publishing the real data, and claiming THEY are the “good guys”.
Deniers are simply continuing to damage their brains, with Preparation H.