Global Warming/Climate Change 2
Re: Global Warming 2
CRV
My brain is like an Internet browser; 12 tabs are open and 5 of them are not responding, there's a GIF playing in an endless loop,... and where is that annoying music coming from?
Re: Global Warming 2
I don't drive at all when I'm not in Thailand; as I stated above, I cycled about 8,000 km last year. I have a pick up in Thailand but it only really gets used when we go up to Issan and I doubt that I drive more than about twenty times a year.So, do you drive a Prius Steve? Do you recycle everything you can? These are valid questions for someone who promotes the global warming agenda. I drive as little as possible (a full tank of gas in my Honda about once every two months).
The reason I've promoted global warming on here has always been in response to those who repeatedly stated that it was some kind of invented scam and I certainly don't have an agenda. I just took some time to learn the physics behind the issue and then realised that it was no invention.
Re: Global Warming 2
GM pulls support for Heartland Institute
"Citing its corporate stance that climate change is real, General Motors announced Wednesday that its General Motors Foundation would no longer be funding the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that has attacked human-caused global warming as “junk science.”"
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/envir ... ronment%29
"Citing its corporate stance that climate change is real, General Motors announced Wednesday that its General Motors Foundation would no longer be funding the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that has attacked human-caused global warming as “junk science.”"
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/envir ... ronment%29
What a shocker! An arm of the obumbles administration agrees with the their view on GW. Who would have ever seen that coming?STEVE G wrote:GM pulls support for Heartland Institute
"Citing its corporate stance that climate change is real, General Motors announced Wednesday that its General Motors Foundation would no longer be funding the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that has attacked human-caused global warming as “junk science.”"
Re: Global Warming 2
WASHINGTON, Apr 11 (IPS) - Moving the global economy off its current decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching four goals: stabilising climate, stabilising population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy's natural support systems.These goals - comprising what the Earth Policy Institute calls 'Plan B' to save civilisation - are mutually dependent. All are essential to feeding the world's people. It is unlikely that we can reach any one goal without reaching the others.
The key to restructuring the economy is to get the market to tell the truth through full-cost pricing. If the world is to move onto a sustainable path, we need economists who will calculate indirect costs and work with political leaders to incorporate them into market prices by restructuring taxes.
This will require help from other disciplines, including ecology, meteorology, agronomy, hydrology, and demography. Full-cost pricing that will create an honest market is essential to building an economy that can sustain civilisation and progress.
For energy specifically, full-cost pricing means putting a tax on carbon to reflect the full cost of burning fossil fuels and offsetting it with a reduction in the tax on income. Some 2,500 economists, including nine Nobel Prize winners in economics, have endorsed the concept of tax shifts.
Harvard economics professor and former chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors N. Gregory Mankiw wrote in Fortune magazine: "Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming- all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer."
The failure of the market to reflect total costs can readily be seen with gasoline. The most detailed analysis available of gasoline's indirect costs is by the International Center for Technology Assessment.
When added together, the many indirect costs to society - including climate change, oil industry tax breaks, military protection of the oil supply, oil industry subsidies, oil spills, and treatment of auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses -total roughly 12 per dollars gallon. That is on top of the price paid at the pump. These are real costs. Someone bears them. If not us, our children.
If we can get the market to tell the truth, to have market prices that reflect the full cost of burning gasoline or coal, of deforestation, of overpumping aquifers, and of overfishing, then we can begin to create a rational economy.
If we can create an honest market, then market forces will rapidly restructure the world energy economy. Phasing in full-cost pricing will quickly reduce oil and coal use. Suddenly wind, solar, and geothermal will become much cheaper than climate-disrupting fossil fuels.
If we leave costs off the books, we risk bankruptcy. A decade ago, a phenomenally successful company named Enron was frequently on the covers of business magazines. It was, at one point, the seventh most valuable corporation in the United States.
But when some investors began raising questions, Enron's books were audited by outside accountants. Their audit showed that Enron was bankrupt - worthless. Its stock that had been trading for over 90 dollars a share was suddenly trading for pennies.
Enron had devised some ingenious techniques for leaving costs off the books. We are doing exactly the same thing, but on a global scale. If we continue with this practice, we too will face bankruptcy.
Another major flaw in our market economy is that it neither recognises nor respects sustainable yield limits of natural systems. Consider, for example, the overpumping of aquifers. Once there is evidence that a water table is starting to fall, the first step should be to ban the drilling of new wells.
If the water table continues to fall, then water should be priced at a rate that will reduce its use and stabilise the aquifer. Otherwise, there is a "race to the bottom" as wells are drilled ever deeper. When the aquifer is depleted, the water-based food bubble will burst, reducing harvests and driving up food prices.
Or consider deforestation. Proper incentives, such as a stumpage tax for each tree cut, would automatically shift harvesting from clearcutting to selective cutting, taking only the mature trees and protecting the forests.
Not only do we distort reality when we omit costs associated with burning fossil fuels from their prices, but governments actually subsidise their use, distorting reality even further. Worldwide, subsidies that encourage the production and use of fossil fuels add up to roughly 500 billion dollars per year, compared with less than 70 billion dollars for renewable energy, including wind, solar, and biofuels.
Governments are shelling out nearly 1.4 billion dollars per day to further destabilise the earth's climate.
Shifting subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal power will help stabilise the earth's climate. Moving subsidies from road construction to high-speed intercity rail construction could increase mobility, reduce travel costs, and lower carbon emissions.
We are economic decisionmakers, whether as corporate planners, government policymakers, investment bankers, or consumers. And we rely on the market for price signals to guide our behaviour. But if the market gives us bad information, we make bad decisions, and that is exactly what has been happening.
We are currently being blindsided by a faulty accounting system, one that will lead to bankruptcy. As Øystein Dahle, former vice president of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea, has observed: "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth."
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/op-e ... -the-truth
The key to restructuring the economy is to get the market to tell the truth through full-cost pricing. If the world is to move onto a sustainable path, we need economists who will calculate indirect costs and work with political leaders to incorporate them into market prices by restructuring taxes.
This will require help from other disciplines, including ecology, meteorology, agronomy, hydrology, and demography. Full-cost pricing that will create an honest market is essential to building an economy that can sustain civilisation and progress.
For energy specifically, full-cost pricing means putting a tax on carbon to reflect the full cost of burning fossil fuels and offsetting it with a reduction in the tax on income. Some 2,500 economists, including nine Nobel Prize winners in economics, have endorsed the concept of tax shifts.
Harvard economics professor and former chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors N. Gregory Mankiw wrote in Fortune magazine: "Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming- all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer."
The failure of the market to reflect total costs can readily be seen with gasoline. The most detailed analysis available of gasoline's indirect costs is by the International Center for Technology Assessment.
When added together, the many indirect costs to society - including climate change, oil industry tax breaks, military protection of the oil supply, oil industry subsidies, oil spills, and treatment of auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses -total roughly 12 per dollars gallon. That is on top of the price paid at the pump. These are real costs. Someone bears them. If not us, our children.
If we can get the market to tell the truth, to have market prices that reflect the full cost of burning gasoline or coal, of deforestation, of overpumping aquifers, and of overfishing, then we can begin to create a rational economy.
If we can create an honest market, then market forces will rapidly restructure the world energy economy. Phasing in full-cost pricing will quickly reduce oil and coal use. Suddenly wind, solar, and geothermal will become much cheaper than climate-disrupting fossil fuels.
If we leave costs off the books, we risk bankruptcy. A decade ago, a phenomenally successful company named Enron was frequently on the covers of business magazines. It was, at one point, the seventh most valuable corporation in the United States.
But when some investors began raising questions, Enron's books were audited by outside accountants. Their audit showed that Enron was bankrupt - worthless. Its stock that had been trading for over 90 dollars a share was suddenly trading for pennies.
Enron had devised some ingenious techniques for leaving costs off the books. We are doing exactly the same thing, but on a global scale. If we continue with this practice, we too will face bankruptcy.
Another major flaw in our market economy is that it neither recognises nor respects sustainable yield limits of natural systems. Consider, for example, the overpumping of aquifers. Once there is evidence that a water table is starting to fall, the first step should be to ban the drilling of new wells.
If the water table continues to fall, then water should be priced at a rate that will reduce its use and stabilise the aquifer. Otherwise, there is a "race to the bottom" as wells are drilled ever deeper. When the aquifer is depleted, the water-based food bubble will burst, reducing harvests and driving up food prices.
Or consider deforestation. Proper incentives, such as a stumpage tax for each tree cut, would automatically shift harvesting from clearcutting to selective cutting, taking only the mature trees and protecting the forests.
Not only do we distort reality when we omit costs associated with burning fossil fuels from their prices, but governments actually subsidise their use, distorting reality even further. Worldwide, subsidies that encourage the production and use of fossil fuels add up to roughly 500 billion dollars per year, compared with less than 70 billion dollars for renewable energy, including wind, solar, and biofuels.
Governments are shelling out nearly 1.4 billion dollars per day to further destabilise the earth's climate.
Shifting subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal power will help stabilise the earth's climate. Moving subsidies from road construction to high-speed intercity rail construction could increase mobility, reduce travel costs, and lower carbon emissions.
We are economic decisionmakers, whether as corporate planners, government policymakers, investment bankers, or consumers. And we rely on the market for price signals to guide our behaviour. But if the market gives us bad information, we make bad decisions, and that is exactly what has been happening.
We are currently being blindsided by a faulty accounting system, one that will lead to bankruptcy. As Øystein Dahle, former vice president of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea, has observed: "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth."
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/op-e ... -the-truth
Re: Global Warming 2
physics
My brain is like an Internet browser; 12 tabs are open and 5 of them are not responding, there's a GIF playing in an endless loop,... and where is that annoying music coming from?
Re: Global Warming 2
Well at the end of the day, the whole issue comes down to the purely physical equation of radiation from the sun and the resistivity of the atmosphere. If you change the properties of the atmosphere, the resultant temperature will rise or fall accordingly and as mankind has known this for well over a century, it should hardly come as such a surprise.hhfarang wrote:physics
Re: Global Warming 2
Thanks, it had been a long dry spell Steve...
My brain is like an Internet browser; 12 tabs are open and 5 of them are not responding, there's a GIF playing in an endless loop,... and where is that annoying music coming from?
Re: Global Warming 2
'Dinosaur flatulence may have led to global warming'
http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/20 ... thane.html
You can't argue the physics...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/20 ... thane.html
You can't argue the physics...
Re: Global Warming 2
Inconceivable! If that were true, then a new study showing the dairy industry in the Los Angeles Air Quality Management District (what us locals call 'the LA basin') produced as least as much Ammonia as all the cars combined might be true.MrPlum wrote:'Dinosaur flatulence may have led to global warming'
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/201 ... n-cars.ars
The version published in a scientific journal
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2 ... 1197.shtml
Re: Global Warming 2
More likely to be true for atmospheres that don't exchange heat or water with their planet, and don't have clouds or wind.STEVE G wrote: Well at the end of the day, the whole issue comes down to the purely physical equation of radiation from the sun and the resistivity of the atmosphere. If you change the properties of the atmosphere, the resultant temperature will rise or fall accordingly and as mankind has known this for well over a century, it should hardly come as such a surprise.
Re: Global Warming 2
I know. I was being mischievous.Homer wrote:Inconceivable!MrPlum wrote:'Dinosaur flatulence may have led to global warming'
Re: Global Warming 2
Climate warming charging water cycle, producing bigger stormsMore likely to be true for atmospheres that don't exchange heat or water with their planet, and don't have clouds or wind.
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/c ... ger-storms
Re: Global Warming 2
Arctic melt releasing ancient methane
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18120093
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18120093
Re: Global Warming 2
Can't imagine how this wasn't reported more widely, or discussed here:
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel
Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.
Quotes from Lovelock:
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... hange?lite
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel
Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.
Quotes from Lovelock:
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... hange?lite
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.