It was suggested that I not post statements such as "humans cannot cause
or relieve global warming" without either an IMO or some substantiation.
So I'll explain.

First is what seems to me to be common sense.  What kinds of changes has
the earth been through that we know about?  We know the earth has been a
complete snowball, covered in snow from pole to equator, at least once
before.  In these conditions the only life to be found on the planet is
that weird stuff that grows in the hot water vents at the bottom of the
ocean.

We know that large portions of North America have been under water.
Just a few weeks ago I went fossil hunting in Ft. Worth and found
incomplete fossils of snails that were 2-3 feet in diameter.  Sea
fossils are found around Denver (5000 foot elevation).  We know that the
Pacific has encroached as far west as Arizona more than once, and that
the river in the Grand Canyon has changed directions multiple times as
the land rises and falls.

We know that Indonesia is all that's left of what used to be a large
continent, its tectonic plate being subsumed by its neighbors.  What is
now a tropical island used to be a snowy mountaintop.

We know that greenland used to be green, and the existence of polar ice
caps is unusual, not usual.

The predictions that accompany GW are pretty extreme:  tropical diseases
run rampant, agricultural disasters, flooding, and widespread death.  I
don't find it credible that human activity could create environmental
change on par with plate tectonics, asteroid collisions, and other
"normal" (in geologic terms) environmental excursions.

----------------------------------------------------------

Second is the modeling.  We only have directly measured temperature data
for the last 150-ish years, and most of this data was collected on land
in the western hemisphere.  There is some historical data from the
oceans, but only from shipping lanes.  How accurate is temperature data
collected by laymen, using 150 year old thermometer technology?  Do we
use 150 year old thermometers in science labs today?  How much error is
there when this incomplete and somewhat inaccurate data is integrated to
come up with a global temperature?

Other temperature data is inferred from tree rings, polar ice cores,
etc.  How much error is associated with these measurements, and how is
that quantified?

The scientists (and therefore their models) don't understand the action
of water vapor in the air.  It has both a warming and cooling effect.
They don't understand, and aren't even aware of, all of the feedback
mechanisms that go into global climate.  

I am skeptical that data of unknown accuracy, and a model that is
admittedly incomplete, can make predictions about fractions of a degree
far into the future.  Would you even bother running a spice simulation
if there was this much uncertainty in your transistor models?

-------------------------------------------------------------

Even if it's real, what can we do about it?  Here's a link to an 8 page
footnoted article that raises good questions:

http://www.oism.org/pproject/

The atmosphere as 750 gigatons of CO2 in it.  Other carbon reservoirs
are the surface ocean, deep ocean currents, the land and marine
biomasses.  The sizes of these reservoirs range from hundreds to tens of
thousands of GT.  Transport between these reservoirs ranges from 10s to
hundreds of GT per year.  Human activity contributes about 5 GT per year
to the atmosphere.  The tremendous sizes of these reservoirs, and the
uncertainty in the transport volumes mean that human contributions are
noise in the overall process.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Should we do something anyway?  Bjorn Lomborg, author of the "Skeptical
Environmentalist" notes that a single year of the global cost of the
Kyoto Protocol would pay for water and sewage treatment for everyone in
the world.  Implementing Kyoto is the global equivalent of mortgaging
your house, liquidating all your assets, and borrowing as much money as
possible to build a titanium meteor shield for your house.

--steve

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist