Global Warming Good

[Justin24]

Thats what Former GreenPeace Founder is saying.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060113/BUSINESS11/601130327/1071

Oh and Scientist said today that plants attribute to global warming.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060111/sc_nm/environment_methane_dc

 

[nbcrusader]

If any one weather metric moves up or down in a year, some news source will attribute it to "global warming".

It is environmental dogma

 

[Irvine511]

It is environmental dogma

a contradiction in terms.

weak.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Hardly, abiding faith in absence of evidence, display true believer type behaviour when their beliefs are challenged and with an opposing force against their faith the evil biotech, coal and nuclear lobbies. The shift away from saying global warming towards climate change over the last few years is illustrative, global warming is untenable because we know that some places are getting cooler while others are getting warmer and some are staying the same - climate change is very effective because it doubles your applicability to events; if it is an especially hot year on average then its climate change, if it is wild weather in winter then its climate change, if it's hurricanes then it's climate change. Of course all this "climate change" is minute and not beyond the norm, compared to how things will get when a supervolcano errupts like Toba did, or we pass through a cosmic gas cloud, or when the continents go back into a pangea situation and migrate to the equator leading to runaway polar ice caps and a snowball earth situation. Doomsday is not going to come from human generated CO2 emissions, it is a good thing to reduce dependence upon fossil fuels for far more practical reasons but to present the picture in terms of 5 and 10 years left until everything goes to hell will only look foolish after the fact. From Malthus to Ehrlich this has gone on, these sort of things are not a new thing.

Climate change is happening, it is not unprecidented on the planet and the degree and nature of the antropogenic contribution is uncertain. Until we have models that can adequately deal with cloud formation and methane cycles it is unwise to sacrifice economic development in the pursuit of reduced emissions. Until we know what the effects of climate change will be, how much we are contributing to it and more importantly how much we may reasonably do about it pursuit of central planning systems to curb emissions are futile and arguably dangerous.

The papers dealing with trees as contributing by methane and the darkness of their leaves published over the last fortnight are just two of many that show factors that have not yet been put into the computer models - how will these factors effect predictions of warming and cooling? The disproving of the "Hockey Stick" graph is also illustrative of how bad methodology can lead to bad results (Garbage In Garbage Out).

 

[A_Wanderer]

Heres the abstract taken from the Nature website

Methane emissions from terrestrial plants under aerobic conditions

By Frank Keppler et al. (2005)

Methane is an important greenhouse gas and its atmospheric concentration has almost tripled since pre-industrial times. It plays a central role in atmospheric oxidation chemistry and affects stratospheric ozone and water vapour levels. Most of the methane from natural sources in Earth's atmosphere is thought to originate from biological processes in anoxic environments. Here we demonstrate using stable carbon isotopes that methane is readily formed in situ in terrestrial plants under oxic conditions by a hitherto unrecognized process. Significant methane emissions from both intact plants and detached leaves were observed during incubation experiments in the laboratory and in the field. If our measurements are typical for short-lived biomass and scaled on a global basis, we estimate a methane source strength of 62-236 Tg yr-1 for living plants and 1-7 Tg yr-1 for plant litter (1 Tg = 1012 g). We suggest that this newly identified source may have important implications for the global methane budget and may call for a reconsideration of the role of natural methane sources in past climate change.

link

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, the most important though is water vapour and clouds can have different effects (either trapping or reflecting heat) depending on what type and how/where they are formed.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Heres a paper on climate change in the Holocene (the period beginning since the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years ago)

(in print at Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 230, 17 January 2006, Pages 155-164)

Temperature responses to quasi-100-yr solar variability during the past 6000 years based on ?18O of peat cellulose in Hongyuan, eastern Qinghai-Tibet plateau, China

By Hai Xu et al.

Abstract

During the past 6000 years, the temperature variation trend inferred from d18O of peat cellulose in a peat core from Hongyuan (eastern Qinghai-Tibet plateau, southwestern China) is similar to the atmospheric 14C concentration trend and the modeled solar output trend. The general trend of Hongyuan d18O during the past millennium also coincides well with the atmospheric 14C concentration trend, the 10Be concentration trend in an ice core from the South Pole, the reconstructed total solar irradiance trend, as well as the modeled solar output trend. In addition, temperature events also correspond well to solar perturbations during the past 6000 years. Therefore, the driving force of Holocene temperature variations should be properly ascribed to solar activity. The spectrum analysis further illustrates that quasi-100-yr fluctuation of solar activity was probably responsible for temperature variations in northeast Qinghai-Tibet plateau during the past 6000 years.

link

Just illustrative of when solar output correlates to natural temperature changes.