Why do you think carbon dioxide is dirty?
Saigon was quite clear what he meant by the term "dirty".
Semantic bullshit.
Well yes, it IS semantic bullshit when you say that CO2 is "dirty," because it's not. In fact it is an essential compound needed for all plants to live. Without plants, we can't survive.
You owe me and everyone reading this an apology. You've intentionally manipulated my text to alter what I wrote.
As I stated earlier, YOUR comment that CO2 is not a pollutant is semantic bullshit. I'm perfectly aware of the functions of CO2 and plant and animal life on this planet just as you should be aware what an excess of GHGs will do to temperatures here. No one is suggesting the CO2 levels be dropped below pre-industrial levels - even were that a realistic target. No one with any reasonable intellect is arguing that higher CO2 levels will be of net benefit to humans or even to our crops. So let's cut the shite.
Well yeah, 300 parts per million, is a trace. But CO2 exists all over the universe in abundance because carbon exists all over the universe in abundance.
Well, nah, it doesn't. Oxygen and carbon, together, make up 15 thousandths of the baryonic matter in the universe and thus 63 hundred thousandths of the total matter of the universe. There is 23 times as much helium by mass and 71 times as much hydrogen. And only a fraction of that oxygen and carbon are associated as carbon dioxide. The vast majority of the carbon, for instance, is bound to hydrogen in numerous hydrocarbon compounds which ARE common throughout the universe.
Nature accounts for FAR more CO2 in our atmosphere than humans.
That depends on what you actually mean by "nature". Humans produce more carbon dioxide than the world's volcanoes. The CO2 exhaled by the non-human animal life on this planet is larger than that exhaled by humans, but the CO2 we produce generating electricity, driving our ICE-powered vehicles and manufacturing concrete dwarfs that many, many times over. There is certainly an enormous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, in geological compounds and in the ocean and there is a constant interchange between the various sinks. But the source of the carbon dioxide that has increased the atmospheric levels from 280 ppm to 400 ppm over the last 150 years are, without a doubt, human.
Plant life lives on CO2, so if you want to reduce CO2 levels, plant a tree! It's not harmful to humans at 300ppm, or even 600ppm. OSHA regulations for miners working underground and other hazardous environments, limit human exposure to 800ppm, but this is only the point at which OSHA says it's unsafe, humans can actually breathe up to 1,200~1,500ppm, and not die from it.
Are you under the impression that you're clever? Do you actually think you will score any debating points with irrelevant drivel such as this? Good grief.
We'll never reach these levels in nature because it dissipates into space or is absorbed by the oceans, if it is not used by the plant life on Earth.
And on what do you base those beliefs? CO2 will dissipate into space? CO2 will dissipate into space? ! ? ! You've never passed a science class, have you.
I don't know, I just find it odd that you are waging war against the very thing that plants need to survive. Seems a bit stupid to me.
And I find it more than a little stupid that you would attempt to make this argument in a thread on anthropogenic global warming.
Botanists, (who ARE scientists, btw) claim that, up until this latest 'spike' in atmospheric CO2, that all plant life was STARVING for CO2, and it has only recently increased to a level which enables plants to thrive.
My mother was a botanist. A worthy profession. Just for jollies, why don't you give us a link to a professional botanist making such a statement. And then I will point out that whether or not it's true, human culture will not do well with the temperature up 4C and neither will our crops.
So does it not bother you, that you are actively working against the very element needed to revive the rain forests? Not that eliminating man's contribution will matter much, it's only a small fraction of what causes increased CO2 in the atmosphere, but still... kinda dumb to be fighting so strongly against it.
Are you actually this stupid or are you trying to play polemicist?
I'll bet you money right here and now, that in the United States, more people have died from accidents involving windmills, than have died as a result of nuclear energy.
That would be the first accurate statement you've made in this post.
I am suspect of any studies regarding wind power, because I don't think they account for the enormous maintenance costs, or the 'downtime' involved.
And what makes you think wind generators have enormous maintenance costs?
Again, wind is not reliable, we can't predict when it is going to blow and when it will not blow.
It is most certainly variable. But we CAN predict when and where it will blow and when and where it will not. But that's not the argument currently underway here. The theme of this thread is what proportion of the general public believes global warming is a threat to our well-being. The reliability of wind as an energy source has nothing to do with that point.
Plus, in order to fill the current demand for electricity in a major city, you'd need thousands of miles of windmills, stacked in grids, up and down the coastline. People like the Kennedy's don't want to look out of their exclusive Summer homes and see windmills, so we have a problem there.
One that has nothing to do with the topic of this thread nor the validity of AGW.
No, I was merely asking a question to prove a point. I have no problem with someone wanting to "get off the grid" by installing windmills, but wind power can't replace coal, there are far too many applications where coal is better suited. Plus, coal is our most abundant resource, and we have thousands and thousands of people who work in the coal industry. Again, coal OR wind, is not as efficient as nuclear, so if we're going to retrain all these people in the coal industry, might as well go nuclear.
No one is suggesting that wind replace coal. They are suggesting that a range of sources with reduced carbon output be used to phase out high carbon output sources such as coal-fired generators.
You're totally missing my point. We can say, the Summer months are coming and we know the demand for electricity will be higher, so let's order some more coal... you can't order more wind. You're totally dependent on mother nature, you may not have as much wind this year as last year. What happens when demand spikes and wind doesn't? We can store some power, but what if mother nature decides to freak a little and not produce as much wind for a period of time? It is far too unreliable to ever be our primary source of energy.
Then it's certainly good that no one has ever suggested such a thing.
But it's not so good that it has nothing to do with the topic of this thread.
I don't know, I was just asking a question. I know nuclear power plants don't have a problem producing power during a hurricane.
Fukushima had some issues with environmental effects. Nuke plants are not indestructible. And windmills and solar thermal and PV installations can easily be made strong enough to withstand hurricane force winds. Besides, the entire country is not powered from the southeastern coastline. But you seem to have missed the spot where I said "I SUPPORT NUCLEAR POWER".
Or do you assume we will no longer have hurricanes if we convert to wind power?
Abraham3 said:
I think you need to do a little more reading
Because you have made a large number of erroneous statements.
Don't you have all the answers? Shouldn't I just follow whatever you say, and believe you know what the hell you're talking about?
If you follow what I write, you will see that when I am stating an opinion - something I do NOT know to be a fact - I will almost always tack on qualification: "I think" or "I believe" or "the evidence indicates".
I think my biggest problem here is, I have done a lot of reading, and I am marginally smarter than you.
The number of blatant mistakes you've made and the number of falsehoods you've spouted do not support that contention. If you were smarter than me, you wouldn't suggest excess CO2 will dissipate into space. If you were smarter than me, you wouldn't waste paragraphs talking about CO2 toxicity or optimum levels for plants. If you were smarter than me you wouldn't suggest human CO2 production was trivial or that windmills have enormous maintenance costs or that CO2 was abundant throughout the universe or think that ANY of those arguments had any bearing on the validity of AGW.
This keeps me from being a gullible fool when it comes to AGW, and the effects of man on the climate. If only I could undo all my reading and find a way to make myself dumb again, you might be able to convince me of this lunacy.
What was that syndrome PMZ mentioned? Dunning-Kruger? Yeah... that was it:
From Wikipedia:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".[2]
And from Webster's
Dunnning-Kruger: 1) See the Boss
