This is well-thought out, Steve.

I'm even skeptical that the icepack is actually melting.  About 3 years 
ago, an expedition was launched
to salvage a group of WWII airplanes that were forced down onto an 
icepack in the Artic in 1942.
They were expected to be pristine because the icepack should be 
negligible as a result of GW.

In fact the expedition failed because the airplanes were buried 300 feet 
deep in new icepack. So much
for GW.

--Bob

Steve Ravet wrote:
> 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
>
>   

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