Wez
DA
No, I can't tell you why, (if you're correct to begin with) but the research at http://www.skepticalscience.com/ may hold some answers for you. I don't try to pretend I'm a Scientist.
Climate and Weather
- Thread starter espola
- Start date
No, I can't tell you why, (if you're correct to begin with) but the research at http://www.skepticalscience.com/ may hold some answers for you. I don't try to pretend I'm a Scientist.
Bruddah IZ
DA
I saw a want add for outrigger rowers.....
Wez
DA
Awesome, in one post you've managed to remind people of what the obvious is and at the same time, make a biblical assertion that despite, man's ability to affect the environment with it's activities, we cannot then control what those activities are.
But wait, are you saying that no matter what man does, we cannot have any affect on our Planet's environment?
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Never caught that movie. Sounds like a form of Inhofe propulsion. You could let him ride shotgun on your sojourns to the past. Always have a source of fuel that way. As long as you don't mind driving with the windows down. Actually, if you topped off before you left, you could leave his ass stranded somewhere in the middle of the Pleistocene, like Magellan abandoning Cartagena to his fate on the lonely shores of an unknown continent. Circle him on the way out, watching him boiling over in rage, spewing forth heat and noxious carbon. All his half-baked conspiracy theories finally emerging from his internal ovens completely cooked and crumbling to creosote before his eyes. When you got back to the present he'd be reduced and compressed into a lovely peat bog, and you could set to work crafting some of the most distinctive single malt whiskies the world has ever known. Bottle it under the name "Mountain Jim". We could get together after a game sometime and toast your success and act of public service. At least that's how I see it.
Bruddah IZ
DA
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Well, I suppose it's also possible Inhofe would survive in his new setting, perhaps interbreeding with a protohuman hominid species. Not a pretty picture. Wake up one morning to find that instead of 1% Neanderthal, we're all 1% Inhofe. And, as one of my son's former coaches (since gone Surfin') used to say, "That, gentleman, is completely unacceptable".
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Come on. CO2 emissions from a jet flight to Hawaii. Divide by number of passengers. One vacation a year so multiply by 1. Compute, say, CO2 released during an average 30 min round trip hauling a kid to soccer practice and games. And for many of us it would clearly be twice that at least, counting drives to Palmdale and so forth. Multiple by what, at least 100. Probably more but 100 makes it easy. Whose got the bigger carbon footprint? Anybody want to run the numbers? Who knows, Wez could argue he was helping to save the planet by taking a vacation and not driving back and forth to soccer for that week. Unless he's got a hybrid. But then's he's accrued carbon credits, no?
Bruddah IZ
DA
Don't worry about Inhofe. He is about as harmless as Ehrlich.
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Bruddah IZ
DA
Perfect!! I knew Wez was getting' all worked up over AGW for nothing.
I appreciate the offer, I really do.
I also appreciate a good pull off the jug. As a matter of fact, some of my old friends still call me "Big Juggy". There has to be enough ammo in that line for anyone of my adversaries to go full metal "Don Rickles" on me for months, but as Ive said before, "Im a giver".
The truth of the matter is, I dont go for the Inhofeses, or the Goreses.
I think they are most of the climate "problem".
Us guys, you and me, who like writing, and thinking, dont really need them.
The truth is so much more entertaining.
Better yet, subtract the co2 CARB has starved the planet from, off the total metabolic output of invertebrates, vertebrates, and gassy bar tend-ebrates, and see what you get.
Bio-fuels are co2 free?
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Space is very cold and the Earth's interior is very hot. Against these extremes, it's amazing to me that the thin layer comprising the mantle, oceans and atmosphere acts as a buffer system that maintains a fairly narrow temperature range. There are forcings that perturb the system and processes that restore homeostasis. Carbon goes from being rock to gas and back again. Like you say, there are cycles, and they play out on different timescales. Here is a graph that shows an ~50 million year sequence during the Cretaceous when the planet appears to have burped out excess thermal energy in the form of intense sea floor spreading, what has been called a super-plume event. Outgassing of the newly formed rock is believed to have given rise to the dramatic greenhouse period commonly associated with the age of dinosaurs. The data depicted here is pure modeling from the 1990's based on the measured volume of seafloor produced and established rates of CO2 release but the overall picture is now supported with a finer granularity from isotope and ice core proxies. Of note, even with a crude treatment the initial ~10 million years of temp rise is sufficiently linear to calculate a tight slope; .000006 °C/year. Also, once the superplume event appears to have subsided, there were two ocean anoxic events that gave rise to hydrocarbon bearing "black shales". It's perhaps a bit ironic that our ability to work out the stratigraphy sequences in these sediments is based in large part on oil exploration. The corpses of all the little marine organism rained down to the bottom, dragging their carbon with them and forming sediments that removed the carbon from equilibrium with seawater. Carbon became rock, and these die offs are postulated to have allowed the oceans to once again act as a sink to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby returning global temperature back to the initial set point. At least that's the general theory.
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
So, as got brought up, another notable cycle-a forcing one- that is acting on a different timescale is the Milankovitch cycles that desribe the wiggling, wobbling and wandering to the Earth in its orbit. Of these cycles, the one that appears to most greatly effect the amount of solar irradiation reaching the planet is the eccentricity. The eccentricity cycle is about 100,000 years, and from what I can tell each cycle equates to an ~3°C net change in the global temp anomaly. I wanted to layer these cycles on top of the larger cycle, which I did just by interpolating a sine wave with a period of 100,000 and amplitude of 1.5. Its obviously more complicated and an assumption is that the temp changes would just track on top of the larger forcing and restorative mechanisms. But my interest is with respect to the x-axis and not the y-axis. So in 50 million years that's about 500 long range Milankovich cycles. So we'll just let it look like this.
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Now I graphed out the standard global temperature anomoly graph derived from measurements from 1880-present. That's easy, all the data can just be downloaded into a spreadsheet from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/. I normalized the value from 1880 to 0. Although there's an obvious inflection in the profile, I calculated an overall slope of 0.0099 °C/year. So that looks like this.
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
Now I can do what I wanted to do which is to plot these different time scale processes on a common x-axis from the same starting point, limiting the cretaceous data to the first 500,000 years. Green is 1880-present, blue is Milankovitch, brown is ocean volcanic forcing during the cretacous. For comparison, I placed a rough slope on the upswing of the Milankovitch cycle, which came out to .00006 °C/year. And I see I made a mistake in typing the Cretaceous slope, which should be .000002 °C/yr. The ratios of the Cretaceous and Milankovitch slopes compared to the slope for the 1880-present data are ~5000 and 165 respectively.
So in saying that the ∆°C from 1880 on is not outside temp anomoly in the past, that's right. But what grabs attention is the ∆time during which the change has happened. Viewed on a geologic time scale, the impression is of a instantaneous oxidation reaction of fixed carbon back to gas (ie an explosion), accompanied by the expected temperature change. So the planet has mechanisms to buffer temperature, but they typically work on a very different timescale. How that plays out for the current forcing perturbing the system is of course the big question.
So in saying that the ∆°C from 1880 on is not outside temp anomoly in the past, that's right. But what grabs attention is the ∆time during which the change has happened. Viewed on a geologic time scale, the impression is of a instantaneous oxidation reaction of fixed carbon back to gas (ie an explosion), accompanied by the expected temperature change. So the planet has mechanisms to buffer temperature, but they typically work on a very different timescale. How that plays out for the current forcing perturbing the system is of course the big question.