how much warming from adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is what we

[Saigon]

To All Environment Posters -

I've started a thread on cleaning up this part of the forum so that we can get beyond the endless accusations of socks, fake IP addresses etc. Have your say here:

http://www.usmessageboard.com/announcements-and-feedback/299403-time-to-clean-up-the-environment-forum.html

 

[Saigon]

A warmer climate is better for food production. When the Roman warm period ended around 500 AD, there was massive famine all over the world.

Yup. Some areas might have to switch to crops more suitable for a somewhat warmer environment and Canada and Siberia could become breadbaskets for the world. But nobody ever seems to want to focus on the potential positives.

I suspect the reason this is not discussed more is because we all agree. Some areas of the world are already moving more into particular forms of agriculture, e.g. England and wine production.

However - we are also seeing some parts of the world abandon particular forms of agriculture, and that will be expensive.

Given you in particular, Fox, seem to oppose any form of contingency planning for a warmer environment in favour of a "lets hope nothing happens" approach, it is worth considering how some US states may cope in a warmer, wetter environment with more intense storms.

What effect would that have on US cotton? Corn? Cattle farming? Wine production?

There is also the impact of diseases and insects which may thrive in the new climate zones.

While there is no question this will be good for some parts of the world, it is also something which needs to bevery carefully managed.

 

[SSDD]

there are a few things that you seem to be confused about. solar input is the stable component of the temperature equilibrium, therefore the surface can be a wide range of temperatures depending on the conditions for heat loss. this is an important point! without GHGs to constrain IR radiation from directly escaping to space the surface would be ~minus 18C. the 496W/m2 from the surface is a combination of solar input and charged heat sinks of the ground and atmosphere. it can have many other values but the net output from the earth must equal the net input from the sun ( to a close degree, the conditions are always changing).

you are also confused about CO2 somehow being equivilent to a half-silvered mirror for IR radiation. it is not. the extinction length for CO2 reactive bands of IR is roughly 10 metres. got that? the IR is totally dispersed in random directions in 33 feet, it cannot become any less ordered. if a CO2 molecule has absorbed a suitable IR photon and is vibrating (quantum vibration, not ordinary vibration), then collides with another molecule, that IR quantum becomes part of the overall energy equation and can be emitted as blackbody radiation. if the CO2 molecule simply emits the same type of photon its direction has been randomized. because we dont care about the lateral component, only the vertical component, we say that half goes up and half goes down on avg. there is no 'reflection', only total dispersion, happening constantly.

while I admire your confidence in your ability to think things through, so do a lot of us here on the message board. I think you need to delve a little deeper because your posts have been very simplistic and in many cases have significant errors in them.

Till that cartoon energy budget is disposed of and replaced with something approaching reality, climate models, and climate science with it will continue to fail. A model that represents the earth as a flat disk with no day or night, and averages out the solar input across the entire globe continuously and arbitrarily puts the sun 4 times further away from the earth than it actually is simply can not be expected to reproduce reality. And that doesn't even get into the incorrect physics it portrays.

 

[IanC]

there are a few things that you seem to be confused about. solar input is the stable component of the temperature equilibrium, therefore the surface can be a wide range of temperatures depending on the conditions for heat loss. this is an important point! without GHGs to constrain IR radiation from directly escaping to space the surface would be ~minus 18C. the 496W/m2 from the surface is a combination of solar input and charged heat sinks of the ground and atmosphere. it can have many other values but the net output from the earth must equal the net input from the sun ( to a close degree, the conditions are always changing).

you are also confused about CO2 somehow being equivilent to a half-silvered mirror for IR radiation. it is not. the extinction length for CO2 reactive bands of IR is roughly 10 metres. got that? the IR is totally dispersed in random directions in 33 feet, it cannot become any less ordered. if a CO2 molecule has absorbed a suitable IR photon and is vibrating (quantum vibration, not ordinary vibration), then collides with another molecule, that IR quantum becomes part of the overall energy equation and can be emitted as blackbody radiation. if the CO2 molecule simply emits the same type of photon its direction has been randomized. because we dont care about the lateral component, only the vertical component, we say that half goes up and half goes down on avg. there is no 'reflection', only total dispersion, happening constantly.

while I admire your confidence in your ability to think things through, so do a lot of us here on the message board. I think you need to delve a little deeper because your posts have been very simplistic and in many cases have significant errors in them.

Till that cartoon energy budget is disposed of and replaced with something approaching reality, climate models, and climate science with it will continue to fail. A model that represents the earth as a flat disk with no day or night, and averages out the solar input across the entire globe continuously and arbitrarily puts the sun 4 times further away from the earth than it actually is simply can not be expected to reproduce reality. And that doesn't even get into the incorrect physics it portrays.

I concur that Trenberth's energy budget diagram is seriously flawed. do you have a better one? post it up and I will start using it. until then I have to use what is available to make simple points.

 

[SSDD]

What effect would that have on US cotton? Corn? Cattle farming? Wine production?

There is also the impact of diseases and insects which may thrive in the new climate zones.

While there is no question this will be good for some parts of the world, it is also something which needs to bevery carefully managed.

What happened to civilization during the Minoan, the Roman, and the Medieval warm periods which were all warmer than the present?

You people seem to think that civilization is precariously balanced on the edge of a razor. It isn't. Do you live in an agricultural region? Clearly not. Anyone who does knows that crops change at the drop of a hat. It isn't an expensive proposition to plant a different seed in the ground from one year to another. In fact, it is necessary to keep a particular crop from leeching to much of any particular mineral or nutrient out of the ground.

A one degree, or two degree, or even a 5 degree increase in temperature...which is bound to happen at some time due to the natural variability of the climate on earth will not shut down agriculture. It will merely shift, and the equipment will shift with it.

You asked what would happen to the US Cotton crop. Did you bother to look at the range in which cotton grows? There is a several degree spread between the northernmost producers and the southernmost producers. Do just a bit of research on the growing range of the various grains and livestock of all kinds. You will invariably find a spread of several degrees, if not more between the northernmost producers and the southernmost producers.

We are not as delicately balanced as you like to think. A warmer climate would, in general, give farmers a wider choice of crops to plant and open up a world of agricultural opportunity for the cold northern regions which were productive during the warmer periods in history. If you must fear climate change, fear cooling because that would indeed be devastating to mankind as well as the rest of life on earth.

History has already shown us that the benefits of a warmer climate far outweigh the disadvantages while there are few, if any benefits to be found for anyone in a cooling climate.

 

[SSDD]

I concur that Trenberth's energy budget diagram is seriously flawed. do you have a better one? post it up and I will start using it. until then I have to use what is available to make simple points.

Seriously, what's wrong with this one? It is certainly better than trenberth's if for no other reason than it portrays the earth as it actually is. I have read all of the critique of it that I could find and the complaints seem to be nit picky at best and I didn't see anyone prove that it was more flawed than trenberth's cartoon. You tell me where you think he has left the rails and produced a model that is more deeply flawed than trenberth's cartoon.

So seriously. What is wrong with this alternative model?

http://principia-scientific.org/publications/The_Model_Atmosphere.pdf

 

[Saigon]

SSDD -

It is worth trying to think this through with an open mind. Really it is.

The impact on a crop like cotton is not only temperature - it is the cost of water and irrigation. It is the cost of pest control. It is the cost of flood and storm damage.

Have you considered the cost to US farming should the incidence of anything from dengue fever to schistomiasis to leshmaniasis to foot & mouth disease to various forms of moth take hold?

Ask any farmer about these things and they will confirm that those issues can fatally impact the viability of a farm far more than temperature alone can.

A warmer climate would, in general, give farmers a wider choice of crops to plant and open up a world of agricultural opportunity for the cold northern regions which were productive during the warmer periods in history

In some areas it will, yes. In others it will drastically reduce the options available. Some areas not currently arable will become so - other areas currently arable will cease to be so. Other areas will not be effected at all. This isn't difficult to understand, really.

And yes, I grew up in a farming area.

 

[SSDD]

SSDD -

It is worth trying to think this through with an open mind. Really it is.

The impact on a crop like cotton is not only temperature - it is the cost of water and irrigation. It is the cost of pest control. It is the cost of flood and storm damage.

First, it has yet to be proven that a warmer world will have more floods and storm damage and there is plenty of peer reviewed research that suggest that there will be less of what you guys like to call extreme weather in a warmer world.

Second, have you looked at the temperature spread between the northern most producers of cotton and the southernmost producers? The range is greater than the temperature increase being predicted. Do the same for the various grains and livestock. You will see that agriculture is not precariously balanced on the edge of a razor.

Have you considered the cost to US farming should the incidence of anything from dengue fever to schistomiasis to leshmaniasis to foot & mouth disease to various forms of moth take hold?

Ask any farmer about these things and they will confirm that those issues can fatally impact the viability of a farm far more than temperature alone can.

Certainly a consideration and dangerous...but as science has shown the spread of such things is more a product of practice than climate.

In some areas it will, yes. In others it will drastically reduce the options available. Some areas not currently arable will become so - other areas currently arable will cease to be so. Other areas will not be effected at all. This isn't difficult to understand, really.

Name a real agricultural area that will have its options drastically reduced. What is it's primary crop now and what will be its only options if the temperature rises.


You guys like to talk in terms of the vague horrors of climate change. Lets get specific. I live in the southern US. The primary crops within 100 miles of me in no particular order are tobacco, wheat, soybeans, milo, cotton, fruit (apples, peaches, grapes, pears) potatoes, sweet potatoes, and rye.

Lets assume an increase in the global mean temperature of 2 degrees. How does my world change? First, if the global mean increases 2 degrees, what is the actual temperature change here? What does my summer look like? What does my winter look like? How does my growing season change? What crops that grow here will no longer grow here? What crops become available to me? What happens with the water situation here?

What does my world look like if the global mean increases 2 degrees.

Take your time. I am leaving for work and won't be home for about 5 hours. Think it through seriously and try, if you can, to actually weigh the good vs the bad. If you like, afterwards, we can continue on to other parts of the world trying to be as specific as possible regarding what a region would actually look like if the global mean increased by 2 degrees.

 

[Saigon]

SSDD -

Agriculture is ALREADY being impacted around the world - and largely negatively. I've posted stories here in the past about Australian wine producers ploughing their grapes under because the increased frequency of droughts and the subsequent cost of water made the crop unsustainable.

Spain is one of Europe's major agricultural suppliers - as well as being one of the countries where climate change is most evident. Tomato and grape crops are under threat there.

First, it has yet to be proven that a warmer world will have more floods and storm damage and there is plenty of peer reviewed research that suggest that there will be less of what you guys like to call extreme weather in a warmer world.

Actually, that was proven around 10 years ago. The latest IIPC report suggests storm frequency is not linked to climate change, but storm intensity is. And the rest of the world knew ten years ago that wet countries can expect wetter weather; drier countries will experience more drought.

As for the US - I'm AMAZED you need to ask how this "will" effect your world. Honestly...do you not have access to a news service?

The 2012-2013 North American Drought, an expansion of the 2010–2012 Southern United States drought, orignated in the midst of a record breaking heat wave. Low snowfall amounts in winter, coupled with the intense summer heat from La Nina, caused drought-like conditions to migrate northward from the southern United States, wreaking havoc on crops and water supply.[1] The drought has inflicted, and is expected to continue to inflict, catastrophic economic ramifications for the affected states. It has exceeded, in most measures, the 1988-1989 North American drought, the most recent comparable drought, and is on track to exceed that drought as the costliest natural disaster in US history.

2012?13 North American drought - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Do you not think that impacted on farmers?

Do you need proof that it did?

Remember when you used to ask for observable impacts of climate change?!

 

[IanC]

I concur that Trenberth's energy budget diagram is seriously flawed. do you have a better one? post it up and I will start using it. until then I have to use what is available to make simple points.

Seriously, what's wrong with this one? It is certainly better than trenberth's if for no other reason than it portrays the earth as it actually is. I have read all of the critique of it that I could find and the complaints seem to be nit picky at best and I didn't see anyone prove that it was more flawed than trenberth's cartoon. You tell me where you think he has left the rails and produced a model that is more deeply flawed than trenberth's cartoon.

So seriously. What is wrong with this alternative model?

http://principia-scientific.org/publications/The_Model_Atmosphere.pdf

I didnt ask for a link to Joe's manifesto, i asked for a diagram showing energy flow by different pathways. c'mon now....Joe doesnt even take the water cycle into consideration. what diagram am I supposed to be using from that pdf? we all know that sunlight varies according to time and latitude. according to the Slayers, is the average solar input off by 5%, 10%, 50%? which way? I can certainly see the need for two diagrams, night&day, but how many are you proposing? do you guys really ignore clouds, atmospheric gas composition, ocean currents and other effects?

 

[IanC]

SSDD -

Agriculture is ALREADY being impacted around the world - and largely negatively. I've posted stories here in the past about Australian wine producers ploughing their grapes under because the increased frequency of droughts and the subsequent cost of water made the crop unsustainable.

Spain is one of Europe's major agricultural suppliers - as well as being one of the countries where climate change is most evident. Tomato and grape crops are under threat there.

First, it has yet to be proven that a warmer world will have more floods and storm damage and there is plenty of peer reviewed research that suggest that there will be less of what you guys like to call extreme weather in a warmer world.

Actually, that was proven around 10 years ago. The latest IIPC report suggests storm frequency is not linked to climate change, but storm intensity is. And the rest of the world knew ten years ago that wet countries can expect wetter weather; drier countries will experience more drought.

As for the US - I'm AMAZED you need to ask how this "will" effect your world. Honestly...do you not have access to a news service?

The 2012-2013 North American Drought, an expansion of the 2010–2012 Southern United States drought, orignated in the midst of a record breaking heat wave. Low snowfall amounts in winter, coupled with the intense summer heat from La Nina, caused drought-like conditions to migrate northward from the southern United States, wreaking havoc on crops and water supply.[1] The drought has inflicted, and is expected to continue to inflict, catastrophic economic ramifications for the affected states. It has exceeded, in most measures, the 1988-1989 North American drought, the most recent comparable drought, and is on track to exceed that drought as the costliest natural disaster in US history.

2012?13 North American drought - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Do you not think that impacted on farmers?

Do you need proof that it did?

Remember when you used to ask for observable impacts of climate change?!

you guys are insane. you cannot even definitively prove that CO2 has had a direct impact on the temperature yet you are sure that whatever fraction CO2 is responsible for, out of the fraction of a degree of warming since 1880 is causing calamities. witchdoctors cloaked in bogus models rather than grass skirts and bones through their noses.

 

[Saigon]

SSDD -

Certainly a consideration and dangerous...but as science has shown the spread of such things is more a product of practice than climate.

Is it, really? Leshmaniasis is a product of farming practice? Malaria? Dengue? Tse tse fly?

You must realise yourself that your claim here is utter nonsense. While the use of water has an impact on mosquito breeding, we both know that the single biggest factor in insect-borne disease is climate.

This is exactly the kind of phenomena American farmers may face in future - phenomena which I have no doubt you would prefer not to even think about.

 

[gslack]

SSDD -

Certainly a consideration and dangerous...but as science has shown the spread of such things is more a product of practice than climate.

Is it, really? Leshmaniasis is a product of farming practice? Malaria? Dengue? Tse tse fly?

You must realise yourself that your claim here is utter nonsense. While the use of water has an impact on mosquito breeding, we both know that the single biggest factor in insect-borne disease is climate.

This is exactly the kind of phenomena American farmers may face in future - phenomena which I have no doubt you would prefer not to even think about.

Next time you decide to make a thread whining about me being mean to you, perhaps you should try NOT editing peoples posts and posting twice to respond to one post.... Pretty lame considering how much whining you do junior...

Again, as you have been told, it's not proven at all. It's just more doomsaying from the eternally morbid...

 

[mamooth]

You will see that agriculture is not precariously balanced on the edge of a razor.

It is. Not by temperature, but by precipitation. Can't grow anything without water. If you're not taking precipitation changes into account, you're ignoring the most important factor.

For example, the aquifiers are running dry in parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Coupled with the chronic low rainfall we now see, that means farms being abandoned.

And you can't just shift north. There's no soil north. Highly acidic Arctic muck on top of bedrock is not a suitable growing medium.

 

[PMZ]

you make the same case as konradv. that CO2 makes it more difficult for the surface to shed radiation therefore it must be causing global warming now, and more global warming in the future. I agree with the basic mechanism and so do all of the major skeptics.

so why is there such a heated argument over 'settled science'? because it is only one factor out of many, many factors in the climate system. calculations suggest ~1C per doubling of CO2 if all other factors remain the same. although this calculation is also a model, the parameters are constrained enough to have confidence in the output.

is it the 1C rise from 280-560 ppm that is causing the hysteria? perhaps the second 1C from 560-1120 ppm? no, it is the 3x feedback factor that climate models have built in that are calling for catastrophe. that positive feedback has been found to be wildly exaggerated in the last few years, as could easily be expected because the earth is full of homeostatic negative feedbacks with very few unstable 'tipping point' positive ones.

if you look at Trenberth's energy budget, what do you see? take a good look at the different pathways, both below and above the clouds.

what did you see?

besides the 40W that directly escapes the surface through the 10 micrometer atmospheric window, how much pinballs its way to the top of the clouds? 26W. what takes most of the energy up to the cloudtop and passed the greenhouse effect blockage? thermals and evapotranspiration, 17W +80W.

you are worried about CO2 blocking some of that 26W out, and you have been told that it is increased by water vapour feedbacks. but water vapour and clouds are what is taking most of the energy away! ever wonder why tropical water gets warm but no warmer? thunderstorms pump the heat out. if you increased the solar input, thunderstorms would start earlier and more often. if you decreased the solar input, thunderstorms would start later and less often.

to reiterate- you are right in a narrow sense that CO2 causes warming by restricting the outward flow of some wavelengths of IR radiation from the surface. but you are wrong to think that it is an independent factor that does not interact with other factors, or that it can be separated out and individually be measured. the effect of CO2 is lost in the uncertainty of our understanding of water vapour and clouds. remember high school science and math? the precision of your result is only as good as your least precise measurement!

I believe that you are looking at the picture incorrectly.

Let's try a mind experiment.

Let's assume that the world including the atmosphere is as it is today, with he sun switched off. Let's replace GHG with a half silvered mirror, transparent to shortwave, instead of the GHG absorption and radiation in all diirections that we know is the truth.

Switch on the sun.

The earth will start warming from the impinging solar energy. When will it stop warming? When the temperature of the surface is hot enough to radiate 396 W/M2 and therefore the net energy out = the energy captured from the sun.

Replace the half silvered mirror with one twice as reflective. What happens? The first thing would be that the net energy out would halve, the world would start warming, until it reaches a new temperature that once again restores the energy out balance with incoming energy.

How many years would that take, and what would be the final temperature?

For others to determine.

there are a few things that you seem to be confused about. solar input is the stable component of the temperature equilibrium, therefore the surface can be a wide range of temperatures depending on the conditions for heat loss. this is an important point! without GHGs to constrain IR radiation from directly escaping to space the surface would be ~minus 18C. the 496W/m2 from the surface is a combination of solar input and charged heat sinks of the ground and atmosphere. it can have many other values but the net output from the earth must equal the net input from the sun ( to a close degree, the conditions are always changing).

you are also confused about CO2 somehow being equivilent to a half-silvered mirror for IR radiation. it is not. the extinction length for CO2 reactive bands of IR is roughly 10 metres. got that? the IR is totally dispersed in random directions in 33 feet, it cannot become any less ordered. if a CO2 molecule has absorbed a suitable IR photon and is vibrating (quantum vibration, not ordinary vibration), then collides with another molecule, that IR quantum becomes part of the overall energy equation and can be emitted as blackbody radiation. if the CO2 molecule simply emits the same type of photon its direction has been randomized. because we dont care about the lateral component, only the vertical component, we say that half goes up and half goes down on avg. there is no 'reflection', only total dispersion, happening constantly.

while I admire your confidence in your ability to think things through, so do a lot of us here on the message board. I think you need to delve a little deeper because your posts have been very simplistic and in many cases have significant errors in them.

First, hopefully you realized that I understand the GHGs absorb and re-radiate, I was using the half silvered mirror as a metaphor. If you find it confusing, it's not a necessary part of the explanation.

From my perspective you are inclined to confuse things with frequency domain stuff that is both confusing and unnecessary. The only relevant commodity is energy, no matter it's form.

Also, you intoduced Trenbarth's energy budget, so I assumed that you bought into his portrayal of reality.

Considering the energy budget and simple physics, I don't see how anybody can, and certainly nobody has, come up with any rational that denies AGW.

GHGs make it harder, considering outgoing longwave radiation, to achieve energy balance. The force that overcomes that additional resistance is the long term average temperature of the earth and atmosphere. With the incoming solar energy the same, and a reduction of outgoing longwave energy, the earth components will warm. There simply is no other possibility to achieve eventual equilibrium.

The dynamics of the transition are very complex, made more so by the reality of daily massive additions to our atmospheric GHGs, but the stable end can only be achieved by a warmer planet and atmosphere.

 

[PMZ]

A warmer climate is better for food production. When the Roman warm period ended around 500 AD, there was massive famine all over the world.

Yup. Some areas might have to switch to crops more suitable for a somewhat warmer environment and Canada and Siberia could become breadbaskets for the world. But nobody ever seems to want to focus on the potential positives.

I suspect the reason this is not discussed more is because we all agree. Some areas of the world are already moving more into particular forms of agriculture, e.g. England and wine production.

However - we are also seeing some parts of the world abandon particular forms of agriculture, and that will be expensive.

Given you in particular, Fox, seem to oppose any form of contingency planning for a warmer environment in favour of a "lets hope nothing happens" approach, it is worth considering how some US states may cope in a warmer, wetter environment with more intense storms.

What effect would that have on US cotton? Corn? Cattle farming? Wine production?

There is also the impact of diseases and insects which may thrive in the new climate zones.

While there is no question this will be good for some parts of the world, it is also something which needs to bevery carefully managed.

I don't sense any reasonable doubt that mankind can adapt to new and different climates. This issue is economics. Faced with an unfriendly future, every business on earth would look for the path that gets there that consumes the least resources.

Denial is almost without doubt the most expensive position that can be assumed given what is known today. It is simply unaffordable given the challanges. Business is moving ahead with huge investments in sustainable energy. Science is moving ahead with intense research quantifying the transition details so that the economics are more precisely known. Government and democracy are hand in hand removing the obstacles to progress.

Forums like this are the deniers last stand.

 

[westwall]

A warmer climate is better for food production. When the Roman warm period ended around 500 AD, there was massive famine all over the world.

Yup. Some areas might have to switch to crops more suitable for a somewhat warmer environment and Canada and Siberia could become breadbaskets for the world. But nobody ever seems to want to focus on the potential positives.

I suspect the reason this is not discussed more is because we all agree. Some areas of the world are already moving more into particular forms of agriculture, e.g. England and wine production.

However - we are also seeing some parts of the world abandon particular forms of agriculture, and that will be expensive.

Given you in particular, Fox, seem to oppose any form of contingency planning for a warmer environment in favour of a "lets hope nothing happens" approach, it is worth considering how some US states may cope in a warmer, wetter environment with more intense storms.

What effect would that have on US cotton? Corn? Cattle farming? Wine production?

There is also the impact of diseases and insects which may thrive in the new climate zones.

While there is no question this will be good for some parts of the world, it is also something which needs to bevery carefully managed.

Be careful whay you say when you attempt to denigrate a poster there saggy. Foxfyre has NEVER stated she was against contingency planning. You are lying in a huge way when you make that assertion. Your little attempt to "clean up" the enviro forum is cute and it starts with you.

Outright lies like that have no place in a legitimate arena of discussion.

You, a KNOWN liar, have been warned.

 

[westwall]

SSDD -

It is worth trying to think this through with an open mind. Really it is.

The impact on a crop like cotton is not only temperature - it is the cost of water and irrigation. It is the cost of pest control. It is the cost of flood and storm damage.

Have you considered the cost to US farming should the incidence of anything from dengue fever to schistomiasis to leshmaniasis to foot & mouth disease to various forms of moth take hold?

Ask any farmer about these things and they will confirm that those issues can fatally impact the viability of a farm far more than temperature alone can.

A warmer climate would, in general, give farmers a wider choice of crops to plant and open up a world of agricultural opportunity for the cold northern regions which were productive during the warmer periods in history

In some areas it will, yes. In others it will drastically reduce the options available. Some areas not currently arable will become so - other areas currently arable will cease to be so. Other areas will not be effected at all. This isn't difficult to understand, really.

And yes, I grew up in a farming area.

Once again we can turn to the known historical record and look at that, primitive farmers with no high tech at all actually produced FAR more of EVERYTHING during the aforementioned warming periods. Just imagine what we can do with all this high tech.

Your problem saggy is you are so narrow minded you have no clue of what you speak. EVERYTHING you speak about is couched in terms of desperation. Read some history, find out what really happened during those previous warming times, LEARN something other than the propaganda you spew.

Until you at least get the basics down your myopia will color everything you say. Credibility will forever elude you in that case.

 

[westwall]

You will see that agriculture is not precariously balanced on the edge of a razor.

It is. Not by temperature, but by precipitation. Can't grow anything without water. If you're not taking precipitation changes into account, you're ignoring the most important factor.

For example, the aquifiers are running dry in parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Coupled with the chronic low rainfall we now see, that means farms being abandoned.

And you can't just shift north. There's no soil north. Highly acidic Arctic muck on top of bedrock is not a suitable growing medium.

What chronic low rainfall that we are only now seeing? Read a book dude, drought is a natural way of life in the southwest and Great Plains....history is replete with land barons fighting for water. Until you actually learn something and especially some history your credibility is zero. All you spew is propaganda.

 

[Foxfyre]

Thanks West. I appreciate your correcting our friend Saigon who does seem to have a selective reading comprehension problem.

I have been beating the drum for years and years now that we demand that government, and the scientific community it uses for its own purposes, be honest about it. And we are seeing increasing evidence that they are not honest about showing us all sides of the issue.

If indeed the Earth is still in a warming cycle, and even if human activity is having an affect on that, it is obvious that the current silly authoritarian and coercive measures to deal with it are not working. It makes a whole lot more sense to me to focus most of our research into helping people adapt to climate change rather than try to change our climate.

Let's use government and science to help people, not enslave them or force them to hand over their liberties to powers that so far have not shown me that they have my best interests at heart.