Global Warming

[TomOfSweden]

I had dinner with a environmental journalist a few weeks ago who explained it all to me.

1) We're heading out of an ice-age. It should get warmer no matter what. It has to do with our distance from the sun.
2) We're taking fossil fuels that have been locked up into the ground and releasing them. This is an unnatural state which will increase global warming more than it would otherwise.
3) The release of volcanoes isn't that big of a deal since it's always been like this.

We don't know how much of the global warming is our fault. All we know is that we're adding to global warming, but not how much. With or without our help coast line property is not a good long time investment. No matter what we'll do we will not be able to stabilize the temperature. It's supposed to get warmer.

The latest IPCC report managed to show that our impact was greater than what was previous thought. But it's not all our fault, and above all we're still mostly just guessing.

He said more stuff that for some reason I can't remember. But it was a very enlightening conversation, putting things very much in perspective for me.

Never forget that newspapers sell news. Scientific reports that aren't alarming will either not get coverage or angled in a way to make it worse than they are.

edit: there's also the issue of that we cannot cut down our emissions to zero impact. We can't even get close to denting the rate we burn without severely damaging our economy. It's not doable. It's easy to sit here in the west and have opinions on what poor people in the developing world should do when they're on the brink of starvation. Whether we eat more local produce won't really help much at all.

In my humble opinion we should put our money into research. It's worked in the past for all kinds of problems.

Right now money is being moved from research into all kinds of stupid ass environmental projects which don't do anything except alleviate peoples guilty conscience. That I think is cause for alarm.

[Thorne]

3) The release of volcanoes isn't that big of a deal since it's always been like this.

I have to disagree with you on this one. True, the volcanic activity may tend to average out over time, but one very large eruption can have devastating effects. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted several years ago it blew a massive hole in the ozone layer. Scientists were shocked by this, of course, since none of them had predicted it. But they really haven't been studying the ozone layer for all that long, so nobody knows how often this happens. According to the USGS at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1997/of97-262/of97-262.html -
"It injected a 20- million ton sulfur dioxide cloud into the stratosphere to an altitude of more than 20 miles. The climactic Pinatubo cloud was the largest sulfur dioxide cloud ever observed in the stratosphere since the beginning of such observations by satellites in 1978. It caused what is believed to be the largest aerosol disturbance of the stratosphere this century, although smaller than the estimated disturbances from the eruptions of Tambora in 1815 and Krakatau in 1883. Sulfate aerosol formed in the stratosphere from sulfur dioxide in the Pinatubo cloud increased the reflection of radiation from the Sun back into space. Consequently, the Earth's surface cooled in the three years following the eruption, by as much as 1.3 degrees ( Fahrenheit scale) at the height of the effect. The sulfate aerosols also accelerated chemical reactions that, together with increased stratospheric chlorine levels from man-made chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) pollution, destroyed ozone and led to the lowest ozone levels ever recorded to date in the stratosphere. Scientists now know that the "smoke" from volcanoes, once attributed by poets to be from Vulcan's forge, is actually volcanic gas, and an important agent of global change."

When Krakatoa exploded in 1883 it sent up such a large ash cloud that it circled the globe. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa -
"In the year following the eruption, average global temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius. Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888. The eruption injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas high into the stratosphere which was subsequently transported by high-level winds all over the planet. This led to a global increase in sulfurous acid (H2SO3) concentration in high-level cirrus clouds. The resulting increase in cloud reflectivity (or albedo) would reflect more incoming light from the sun than usual, and cool the entire planet until the suspended sulfur fell to the ground as acid precipitation."

These kinds of major eruptions, though not as common as the normal eruptions happening every day, add significantly to global climate change.