global warming

[La Fayette]

Re: I brought somethin to splain myself

Originally posted by Straybow
Back on topic…

[b]LaFayette[/b
I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong
[

Sorry, I think I must correct you:
1) Pollution is caused by overpopulation (cured by mass transit)and/or by excess of production (partly cured by hydroplant, or better by solar plant or recycling).
2) The probability of pollution is given by the chimneys that appear on the city screen (1 chimney=10%).
3) When one square is polluted, pollution must be removed by settlers or (preferably) engineers.
4) If you don't remove it, GW occurs when 9 squares are polluted
5) There is no way to cure GW (though solar plants help preventing it).

That is why I wrote that the combined effect helps us taking into account the long term effects of pollution (ie you may pollute, but you should then take care to get rid of it ASAP)

(La Fayette, having a nice rest after clearing a few squares)

[Marquis de Sodaq]

another OT derailment

Originally posted by Straybow
The way global warming is implemented is stupid. No effect (except the little dot changing color) for a long time, then suddenly dozens of tiles change all at once.

I fully agree. However,

Originally posted by Straybow
...otherwise intelligent folk parroting the media when they could be thinking for themselves and looking at the data. Don't confuse pollution (a genuine problem, esp. in northern Europe) with gw.

As a climatologist (at least I have a piece of paper claiming that ), I have to argue with you a bit. You are correct that sensationalized reports in the media are exagerations giving attention to 'worst case' scenarios. BUT, the data show that global warming is real, and at a minimum is exacerbated by mankind. It's impossible to fairly argue that people are the sole or even primary cause, but equally unrealistic to deny that human activity influences it strongly. Whatever the politically correct stance, the world is warming up - what is unknown is how long it will continue, how great the changes will be, and what the effects will ultimately be - and, of course, if it would be happening even without people fouling everything up. Because there is so much guesswork about the outcome, worst case scenarios pop up more than they should.

[Straybow]

A climatologist, eh?

A few years ago a 5000 year old mummified man was discovered high in the Alps. A forest fire had generated soot that was blown onto a glacier, and the soot raised the solar absorbtion and caused the equivalent of many decades of retreat, and retreat in an uncharacteristic pattern. Thus the body was revealed. While human activity has been measured in ices as ppm concentrations of metals and soots, here a natural event (which was shortened by human intervention, btw) was far more significant in effect.

My father gets AAAS's Science journal review, which reprints journal articles from a wide variety of fields. Often an interesting read. I recall one article that documented the rise in solar output by ground and satellite data. The rate of increase was 0.01W/m² per year over a twenty year period (1979-1999, IIRC).

I had also just stumbled on almanac data on per capita power usage, country by country, that claimed to include all power sources including heating and cooking fires (substantial fraction of power sources in 3rd world). Qatar had the highest, at something like 20kW. USA was about 12kW. Northern Europe about 10kW average. So I did some math with the population figures.

The 0.01W/m² comes to total insolation increase of 1274GW/year, or 25.5TW increase over those 20 years, greater than the entire output of all human power sources for one year. So a blip in the power output of the Sun, ignored by most climatologists chiming in on human influence on global warming, might well be more significant.

Compared to the total spectrum 1370W/m² insolation human effort is on the order of 0.01-0.02%, and it is difficult for me to consider this troublesome.

As for greenhouse effects, every indication is that ruminants generate more methane than industrial sources and significant amounts of CO2… just call me a skeptic on the whole man-is-devastator thing.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Re: A climatologist, eh?

Originally posted by Straybow
...So a blip in the power output of the Sun, ignored by most climatologists chiming in on human influence on global warming, might well be more significant.

The sun is by far the single most important source of energy. Anybody would consider a change in the sun's output to be nothing less than the most important change of all. BUT - Once the sun's energy reaches earth, greenhouse gasses keep the resulting infrared radiation in the atmosphere. The argument is not that humans add more energy on the source side of the equation, but that we allow less energy to radiate out of the system. Result: temps rise, even with zero increase in energy input.

Originally posted by Straybow
As for greenhouse effects, every indication is that ruminants generate more methane than industrial sources and significant amounts of CO2…

Perhaps, but one could argue that there would be billions fewer ruminants on the planet if not for human use of them. Anyway, I think its rather humorous that cow farts (termites actually give off even more methane, btw) are a significant factor.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you are out of line for doubting the significance of human impact on global warming. That humans impact it is not in doubt - but the question of how much is not settled. You argue that it is insignificant, that's fine. Others point out that the industrial revolution coincides perfectly with warming, and take the argument from there.

Personally, I think we are a factor, but we'll need decades more measurements to really understand how much. As for how that affects policy/lifestyle, I prefer to err on the safe side. After all, there is no going back if the wrong choice is made now. I'd rather our generations be seen as silly and overconcerned by our decendants than as having missed a grand opportunity to reduce any harm we might be doing.

[La Fayette]

Re: Re: A climatologist, eh?

Originally posted by Marquis de Sodaq

I'd rather our generations be seen as silly and overconcerned by our decendants than as having missed a grand opportunity to reduce any harm we might be doing.

So said the first president of ACS democracy (long applause).
I would love to listen to those words in the mouth of Mr B (president of that charming country that La Fayette helped acquiring its independence).

I guess Ming is soon going to frown at us

[debeest]

Don't worry, Ming. When we veered way off topic, I went back and edited my first post to insert a notification. Anybody who picks up this thread from the beginning will have had fair warning long before they get to this point.

Personally, I think it's stupid for anyone to dismiss the threat of global warming. 1) The warming is real, hardly anyone seems to doubt that, and there's no reason to assume that it poses no threat. 2) Humans contribute to it (by burning fuels, by raising hordes of ruminants, and by razing the forests that help to counteract the process). We don't know how much, but if we don't want to wreck our only planet, it seems reasonable to study the issue and try to minimize our impact. 3) Who would have thought that spraying DDT in a noble attempt to wipe out malaria would wind up causing birds' eggshells to be too thin and break, nearly wiping out the California brown pelican and numerous other species? It's not a simple universe, and only a simpleton would treat it as one.

The only reason I can see for dismissing the possible importance of the issue is political. Some people just don't want to believe anything that smacks of environmentalism or any other leftist sentiment. Oddly enough, the people who have no interest in conserving our natural resources are called, in the U.S. anyway, "conservatives." Go figure.

[Straybow]

Just so ya know, we call him "Dubya," which is southern for "W," as in George W. Bush.

[Straybow]

Chicken Little deserves to be Chicken Alfredo (yum!)

debeest, it's a little like worrying over growing old. Sure, some things you might do to your body will affect the details, but the process itself isn't going to be seriously affected by any well-intended intervention. Deepak Chopra's mumbo-jumbo can't make you live 150 years, and human activity can't seriously affect world climactic cycles. We are the proverbial drop in the bucket.

In the case of DDT, man introduces an almost infintely persistant chemical with intended harmful effects without thinking about the consequences. D'oh! Chalk it up to experience. But gw being affected by organic chemicals or trace metal pollution? No.

Most political conservatives do want to conserve nature. But we do it by contributing money to Nature Conservancy or WWF to buy land. Liberals want to spend money on lobbying for regulations that deprive property owners without compensation, and that is wrong. Sierra Club and Greenpeace won't get a dime from me, however pretty their calendars may be.

I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh. The pictures of how nasty the air pollution was during the height of the steelmaking boom are scary. Yet my grandmother grew up downwind from Pgh only an hour away, in a rural comunity, and there was no impact.

My grandparents moved to suburban Pgh, and my mom spent her teen years there. But that was on the South side, upwind of the worst of it, and it really wasn't bad at all. In my childhood (same township) the steel industry was on its way down, and pollution controls were just coming into force. Today you wouldn't know anything about it if it weren't for old-timers and museums.

The same can be said for Eastern Europe, but displaced some decades. Atmospheric pollution is so much less now simply because the worst sources have shut down. If this kind of thing affected gw the worst would be over already, and we'd be in global cooling.

As for ruminants, it seems many modern folk forget what the world was like just 1-2 centuries ago. There were hundreds of millions of horses and oxen used for transportation and farm labor. If there are more cattle and sheep now it is a change of proportional numbers among species rather than a dramatic increase in total numbers. Global warming would be worse without internal combustion engines, if methane emissions are your main worry.

The essential component to "political correctness," as differentiated from honest debate, is that debate itself is somehow wrong. Someone invents a problem that doesn't really exist, and then imposes a solution that wouldn't really solve the problem if it did exist. Should anyone point out the fictional nature of the claims or the self-serving solution presented it is worse than the supposed cause.

Making global warming 100% dependent on human activity in the game is absurd, and if there were a patch that eliminated it I'd be the first to sign up. To bad eliminating such folly from real life is a bit harder.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Re: Chicken Little deserves to be Chicken Alfredo (yum!)

Originally posted by Straybow

Making global warming 100% dependent on human activity in the game is absurd, and if there were a patch that eliminated it I'd be the first to sign up. To bad eliminating such folly from real life is a bit harder.

Uhh, it's a game

If there was no global warming in CivII, wouldn't everyone throw nukes around like howitzers are used now? If there's no game consequence, then nukes become unbalancing. In the real world, if nukes were used on a massive scale (i.e. Invasion Earth thread) there would be long term environmental consequences that couldn't be restored by engineers over the space of a few years.

Argue all you like about whether GW exists in the real world (and, even if it doesn't, I doubt that many people would say that having factories, cars, and herds of cattle pumping methane and CO into the atomosphere is a GOOD thing ), but it seems to only make sense that an invincible unit should have some checks on it. Call it global warming, or nuclear winter, or whatever. Without some negative consequences... the game becomes one dimensional. IMO.

STYOM

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Re: Chicken Little deserves to be Chicken Alfredo (yum!)

Originally posted by Straybow
... Liberals want to spend money on lobbying for regulations that deprive property owners without compensation,
...
The pictures of how nasty the air pollution was during the height of the steelmaking boom are scary.
...
the steel industry was on its way down, and pollution controls were just coming into force. Today you wouldn't know anything about it if it weren't for old-timers and museums.
...
Atmospheric pollution is so much less now simply because the worst sources have shut down.

And why did that happen? Not by putting aside NC land! The mean liberals are behind it. You remark yourself the tangible positive result of the approach you claim to oppose. Regulation is indeed a messy bureaucratic juggernaut that could probably be streamlined a hundred ways, but is done with the right goals in mind.

You insist that global warming is somehow a politically correct white elephant created by interest groups. It is real, and outside of industry groups, it is accepted as truth. Scientists argue over the details, but few dismiss it as a valid issue. There is nothing fictional about it. How significant it is, I would consider a valid debate - but calling it a fictional creation just shows that you don't really know how much scientists have shown.

Are humans that insignificant? Not at all. Even a 1' rise in global temp can make a big difference on the ground. It results in shifted winds, which causes moisture to be distributed differently. It could change the area a crop could grow by hundreds of miles - that alone would change the economy of any rural area affected. It could result in a wider area affected by certain diseases. The ramifications are wide and subtle. Some areas would be harmed, others might benefit. Eventually, the biosphere should balance everything out. However, the time scale isn't in the best interests of people.

[SlowThinker]

A link to a detailed description of the pollution in Civ2:
Pollution Explanation (by request from Supernaut) - Civilization Fanatics' Forums

[La Fayette]

SlowThinker
Thank you for the link.
VERY interesting indeed

[bellisaurius]

Wow,

I didn't think that this would be such a hot button topic, or that a climatoligist would be in it ( I'm a chemical engineer, BTW). I'm happy to see mainstream (I'm assuming, but it seems reasonable) thought on the topic seems moderated in its conclusions. Except for a rare paper which doesn't seem tilted, I only get stuff from trade magazines (ACS, AIChE, AWWA, etc..) and Discover and its ilk.

I wish I saw more stuff like that. I wouldn't have to spend a lot of time debating questions of GW's severity which always seem to come off as sounding like a denial of existing data, which I wouldn't do. Although I will say this, mankind is quite resiliant. I wouldn't go around screwing with things just to do it, but the inevitable has little scare for me as well. Neither best nor worst case scenarios ever seem to pan out.

[Straybow]

PC is not progress

Originally posted by Marquis de Sodaq

Originally posted by Straybow
the steel industry was on its way down, and pollution controls were just coming into force. Today you wouldn't know anything about it if it weren't for old-timers and museums.
…
Atmospheric pollution is so much less now simply because the worst sources have shut down.

And why did that happen? Not by putting aside NC land! The mean liberals are behind it. You remark yourself the tangible positive result of the approach you claim to oppose…

You insist that global warming is somehow a politically correct white elephant created by interest groups. It is real, and outside of industry groups, it is accepted as truth…

Pollution reductions happened as a byproduct of progress. First, the harm of proven pollutants inspired pollution controls. Although some robber-baron types grated at the thought, most of your average folk could see real value in reducing air pollution. The effects are tangible.

Not so with gw; it is "accepted as truth" primarily by those who have no interest in investigating on their own and entirely too much trust in news media hungry for hot-button topics on which they may pontificate. The ozone layer hype didn't pan out, so on to gw. I've had conversations with ordinary folk who can't tell the difference between the two, or even think that the "ozone hole" has caused gw!

Second, much of the reduction occured because outdated plants were shut down for other economic reasons. The cost of adding exhaust scrubbers was a secondary factor in those economic reasons, but most would not have had their lives extended for a decade without that added cost.

Third, some of the contaminants removed have value, such as fly ash. Not enough to justify the expense of compliance, but enough to recover some of the costs. Bottling CO2 has a limited market, but those uses release it back into the atmosphere.

It is gw as an issue is a political manufaction. The best data we have on gw comes from the historical record, and the historical record of the "little optimum" (10th-13th cen AD, IIRC) shows that effects were positive. I don't recall an archeological study to the contrary.

To date, the effect of greenhouse gasses are unquantifiable. The relative effectiveness of a gas can be estimated based on spectral absorbtion. Overall, the thermal balance between atmosphere, oceans, and land is very poorly understood. The roles of individual trace gasses are complete guesses.

For a long time the best data available on high altitude trace gasses was a study (1995??) that comprised a grand total of eleven data points, all taken during two flights that extended no further than 300 miles (or was it 300 km??) of Iceland. It was cited in studies of ozone/CFC effects and gw effects.

That data was extrapolated over the entire arctic & subartic regime, an area 50+ times larger than the sample and not well represented by the sample. That article cited a study of high altitude gasses taken around eruptions of Mt. Pinatubo that showed quicker return to pre-eruption levels than anticipated.

It is gw as the result of human activity that is completely without support. Trace gasses in ice samples do not show a correlation between CO2 and historical warming/cooling cycles. Oxygen isotope ratios extend historic cycles to perhisory, but again no correlation with CO2 fluxuations have been shown. Without that the tie to human activity vanishes completely.
I'm open to evidence, not to PC drivel. Harumph!

6k dude:
To keep this at least a little on topic, I don't think the AI takes gw into consideration when it comes to lobbing nukes. And, yes, most scientists (including most who might fall on the PC side of the gw issue) think that cooling due to high altitude particulates is the more certain result of any extensive nuclear exchange. Again there is historical/archeological evidence from the Krakatoa event and the resulting "year without a summer."

Pollution already causes loss of food, production, and maybe trade (can't remember). What it should also do is cause unhappiness. As for nuclear pollution, it could just be made more persistant.

The scary thing about nukes is that investment in the production capital required has an incredible "bang for the buck." Nukes are far more effective weapons in terms of fiscal and economic cost, both for strategic bombing and for tactical use. If Civ2 were realistic (the word we hate to love) the cost would probably be 40 shields or maybe even less.

That howitzer unit you mentioned would be able to launch nukes. So would bombers, fighters, cruise missiles, and battleships. The only nukes used in war were dropped from bombers, true? The US successfully tested a nuclear shell for the 203mm gun, developed a nuke for the 16" naval gun (never deployed), and actually deployed nuclear air to air rockets on the F-106!

See you in the fall-out shelter.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Re: PC is not progress

Originally posted by Straybow
Not so with gw; it is "accepted as truth" primarily by those who have no interest in investigating on their own and entirely too much trust in news media hungry for hot-button topics on which they may pontificate.

Huh? Those accepting people I refer to are the cadre of atmospheric scientists who do the research. They not only have an interest in investigating on their own, they are the ones ACTUALLY INVESTIGATING THE TOPIC! Why you think they are skewed by news media baffles me. They do the research before anybody reports on it, after all. Ordinary folk can certainly be swayed by news media, that happens with any (every?) topic.

You make good points about other reasons for cleaner air, I just gave a quick knee-jerk reaction in my other post. As for industrial by-products with other uses, I agree with you. I don't advocate blindly regulating everything on a hunch that its by-products might be bad - just those we know are harmful.

I don't have any intention of riling you up on the topic! I'm fine with disagreement. As I wrote before, I prefer a caution approach to the topic, but don't mind if others differ.