Sun shifts may cause global warming

This should put the cat among the pigeons.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/the-discover-interview-henrik-svensmark

The interview goes on for a few pages but worth the read.

As opposed to now? :flow2:

Climate has heated and cooled for millions of years without our help and will continue to do so regardless of what we do.

It's human arrogance that makes people want to believe we've caused any truly significant warming and actually have any power to stop it.

As I said in that thread... Explain Mars.

It simply amazes me that this subject has become a partisan issue. Why doesn't the right-wing get upset over the Theory of the Atom?

So...uhhhhh....no global warming nonsense for you, eh?!

It would appear he is countering in this thread. Can you poke holes in Svensmark's case?

How is this partisan? I'm not right wing and I have questions.

I didn't say there's anything wrong with having questions.

There goes this thread.

Anyhoo.

So...what is this climate that Earth is "supposed" to be? I mean, where is this static place where we will be able to corral the climate into remaining stable and unchanging?

So what do you thing of the melting glaciers and the melt off at the poles?

It ain't a problem until it's a problem. Until then, don't worry, and smoke lots of pot for medicinal reasons, like a doctor who keeps a bottle of Romulan Ale for medicinal purposes only.

On the one side you got people doing reasearch and people trying to reduce the harmful effects.

Then you got the others that say fooey! if water levels rise, so what. If the Earth gets extremely hot, so what!

All these things that are happening....its nothing! I guess they figure they will be dead and they won;t even see much of a change. Fuck it!!

I think the argument is more along these lines:

GW fundies: man is causing the Earth to warm, the oceans to rise. Man must change his behavior so that the ice bergs can re-emerge.

GW skeptics: Earth is warming, the oceans are rising, we don't know why. Let's figure out how to survive this change, so that we don't waste time trying to fix what we don't really understand.

I used to subscribe to the former point, before I realized that the latter was a more logical approach. All that science can do at this point is measure change. One change we have measured is temperature, another is CO2 content in the atmosphere. The link is not demonstrated yet, and if the cause is something else, but we put our effort into CO2 reduction, we will have done more harm than good. Far better to place our effort with adaptation.

Don't be so fucking exasperating and read something.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

I'm certain humans aren't helping our own cause. But I'm equally certain there are other factors at play.

This is my view:

Global WarmingSkeptic

The world might be warming. I don't know for sure. We need more information.

If it is, then it won't happen so fast that we can't adapt to it. Build dikes around existing city structures. Have future coastal development on higher land. Irrigate farmland that gets too warm and dry.

Once again, if people really believed the Earth was warming and it was critical that we put less CO2 into the air, then they would be marching in the streets demanding more nuclear powerplants.

Until I see the pronuclear marchers in the streets, I will not take claims of global warming seriously.

I guess I'm in the middle. But I do believe in global warming. Some say its all hogwash.

How bout cloud cities?


Build dykes around city structures?! This friggin' guy!

Yes, because it's so much easier to stop the earth's weather from changing than it would be to adapt.

I believe it is happening and has happened in the past. I also believe that cooling happens and will happen again. I think it is likely that man impacts this process but marginally. That said, the most important act for us to undertake is learning how to live with climate change, not figuring out how to stop climate change. That would likely be more catastrophic than any CO2 emissions we output.

That's the point, though, we do not have a good idea of cause, just one theory that is far from proven and is not testable. You are clearly in the fundie camp.

What? How many here work at Cato? A show of hands?
I have an SUV because the weather in New England requires a rugged car and my family is large enough to need something bigger than a Prius. I also ride my bike or take public transportation to work. Your rhetoric proves the point that you can't think outside the box. If you are so wrong about the skeptics (who I should have called carbon skeptics), how can we take you seriously on carbon emissions?

You and your sister are both fundies. Your slavish adherence may be to a different faith, but you are just as incapable of questioning the "truth" you have been presented.

You always side with the dickheads.

What *very* little I (try to) grok about climate, and what little I remember from my geology/planetary geology/sciences classes at the UofA:

Well, one theory is that the climate is supposed to remain in homeostasis (maintained in a relativity stable state by positive feedback loops) until enough energy is added or taken away from the system to knock it into another different metastable state for a while. Until the next change.

In other words, it maintains a kind of feedback-loop that keeps it in a certain range or temperatures, until some big change happens and it changes to a new climate that stays within an new set of temps for however long. (Like an ice age of something.)

This is all very normal, indeed, and none of the changes , even the ice ages and warming periods, are ever (at least in the history of large life forms*) enough to make the world completely uninhabitable.

*("Snowball Earth" may or may not be a time/phase in the early earth where this wasn't so.)

Yes changes WILL happen, that is the nature of the Earth, whole ecologies rise and fall, species go extinct, but the problem is that it doesn't take even anything as drastic as an Ice Age or strong warming period or ELE like an asteroid to really fuck up the living patterns and economies or huge groups of people.

And sometimes even relatively small changes to the feedback loops that keep the Earth's current climate stable can - possibly - have big long-term effects. What those effects are, how much of an impact even relatively small changes can have, and how resilient to them the ecology/climate will be, depends on the theory. Should the Earth's homeostatic feedback loops be able to adapt to X level of changes, as the whole idea of homeostasis implies, or will it all be sent into a new state? Or does the outcome depend on just where and how those little kicks and changes to the system are made.

I personally think it's rather silly and shortsighted to think that billions of humans dumping billions of tons of greenhouses gases into the atmosphere *won't* have some impact. It NOT, IMHO, "arrogant" to think that all of us and all of our actions can have some impact on this *tiny* shell of air that protects us.

Or that even if the changes are non-anthropogenic, that we can't be at least contributing to them...

But even if you disagree with that, and think it's all natural (and maybe it just is) I think it's blind to deny that changes *are* happening, and that we will have to adapt. Maybe the bread-belt moves to Canada, maybe parts of low-lying Florida & LA will become uninhabitable, maybe our coast will be inundated by more major storms...so how can we prepare, and how can we adapt and evolve?

Yabut this article cancels out that one, so we're back to having nothing to fall back upon except our pre-conceptions.

Our contribution to both the problem and the solution to global warming is akin to the contribution of a person blowing on a forest fire trying and put it out.