contrails

delboy wrote:
2) There is geological and fossil evidence to suggest that it has been
hotter in previous eras, but life on earth was not wiped out.

Even the alarmists with the widest eyes aren't suggesting life on earth
will be wiped out, only that "business as usual" will result in
significant and substantial changes in the climate and sea level that
will affect all of us.
3) Reasonably accurate temperature measurement has only been possible
for a few hundred years, so to say that there is a trend of increasing
temperatures may only be looking at a very short term and natural
variation in terms of the entire history of the planet. In any case
the average global temperature seems to have stabilised again,
"Seems" ignores the science and the data. That claim is usually based on
the HadCRUT3 data, which tends to under report the warming because it
ignores the polar regions; the other datasets "seem" to show more
warming. The current decade still shows rising temperatures despite
natural warming events like el Nino are at minimums, and the heat
content of the oceans continues to rise at about the same rate, and
that's a lot of heat.
which
is probably why 'global warming' seems to have been relabelled as
'climate change'!

An artifact of uninformed media coverage, and some relabeling effort a
few years ago by people that wanted to direct attention away from global
warming and thought "climate change" didn't sound so scary. The
scientists were never confused about what the words meant.
4) Better technology and better insulated buildings are reducing each
person's carbon footprint.

Yes, and even China has declared important per capita energy reduction
goals, but that will still not stop the rise in their emissions, nor are
these changes elsewhere happening fast enough, and it is unlikely to
without somehow pricing CO2 (and equivalent) emissions.
5) Eventually the coal and oil reserves will run out, so we won't be
able burn any more anyway, which is the best case for conserving them
as much as possible.

"Eventually" is hundreds of years for coal, far beyond the current
danger timelines.
6) Sooner or later, something such as nuclear war, a metorite strike,
famine, an untreatable disease, or another ice age will decimate or
wipe out the human population. I bet the big dinosaurs thought they
had it made!

And all of these will be easier to deal with if we aren't already in big
trouble with climate problems.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

On Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:40:00 -0800, Eric Greenwell wrote:

delboy wrote:
5) Eventually the coal and oil reserves will run out, so we won't be
able burn any more anyway, which is the best case for conserving them
as much as possible.

"Eventually" is hundreds of years for coal, far beyond the current
danger timelines.

You may be surprised. A around 2006 back I wondered about that, dug up
the estimates for global coal reserves and estimates for the then current
rates of increase in coal use (250 years reserve at the 2006 burn rate,
2% annual increase). I plugged those into a standard compound interest
calculation, which predicts all coal will be gone in 85 years.

A recent review (New Scientist, vol 197, no 2639, 19 Jan 2008 page 38) of
coal reserves supports my simplistic analysis. It thinks the coal,
industry reserve figures are twice reality and that we'll pass peak coal
not more than a decade or two after peak oil. IOW coal is unlikely to
become an oil substitute. Peak oil, by some estimates was passed in 2005
or 2006.

6) Sooner or later, something such as nuclear war, a metorite strike,
famine, an untreatable disease, or another ice age will decimate or
wipe out the human population. I bet the big dinosaurs thought they had
it made!

And all of these will be easier to deal with if we aren't already in big
trouble with climate problems.

I couldn't agree more.

I've also been trying to find out who said that technological
civilisation is a one-shot deal - meaning that if our technically-based
civilisation collapses for any reason (climate change, big asteroid
strike, nuclear war, pick your favourite disaster) while we're still
reliant on non-renewable natural resources then its most unlikely that it
will ever be possible to rebuild its replacement.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |