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Won't somebody think of the PENGUINS!

Discussion in 'All-Star Threads' started by Nettdata, Dec 20, 2009.

  1. am19psu

    am19psu
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    -The source for the unknown effect of clouds is the IPCC. I don't have the source handy for the recent publications showing clouds to be a negative feedback, but I can explain it. A warmer climate would inherently have more evaporation (because individual water molecules will have more kinetic energy), which would create more vapor available for clouds to form. However, water droplets reflect radiation back to space, which would have a net cooling effect. Overall, more CO2 would cause more clouds, but no net effect on global temperatures.

    -Water vapor is, indeed, much more radiatively active than carbon dioxide. If memory serves me, it's around 50x more effective. You can see it visually with the graph below (more gray area equals more active).

    [​IMG]

    -Warm liquids cannot have as much as gas dissolved in them as cold ones. The mathematical explanation is Henry's Law. It's easier to think about it in terms of kinetic energy, though. Warmer liquids (and the gases dissolved in them) have more kinetic energy and therefore a higher probability of being able to break intermolecular bonds and become gas.

    -One of the biggest arguments that anti-GW people use is that CO2 has always lagged temperature increases, not vice versa. I don't really buy that argument, though, because there has never been an artificial source of CO2 before. Without an artificial source, sure, CO2 increases should lag temperature increases, but the assumptions in the experiment have changed.
     
  2. am19psu

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    Not to stray too far from trained expertise, but this is by far a more convincing argument to me.
     
  3. am19psu

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    Regarding the whole hockey stick debate, the biggest contention I have is with some of the datasets used to produce it. Briffa pretty clearly cherry picked certain pine cones to come up with the dendroclimatology. He cherry picked them because they agreed with the observational record, which makes sense on one level. But, statistically, you can't do that. Either you use the whole sample or not at all. By choosing only those pine cones that showed an acceleration of warming in recent history, Briffa basically washed out any temperature data in the paleohistory (the shaft of the hockey stick).

    Granted, a lot of this is up for debate and some of my opinion is included here. My opinion is skeptical, but not "denialist." I tend to think that man is having a noticeable effect on global temperatures, but not as much as the IPCC would lead you to believe. It's interesting that most private sector meteorologists are generally skeptical of the claims made about global warming, but nearly all academics are strongly in favor of it. We all read the same papers, so it is obviously some sort of assumption based reason why this is so.
     
  4. c_norris

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    This has always been my beef. The world's main energy source has always been changing, isn't ignoring "alternative [that should be called future]" energy (solar mostly) slowing technological evolution in itself?