how to think like a photon

I thought it was a Jaguar, or a Cougar. Or maybe a Buick Wildcat. Or maybe Toonces, the SNL driving cat. Possibly a Panther or even a Cheetah (<< google "panther car" & "cheetah car")

But that's fodder for a whole 'nother thread.

 

Speaking of avatars, yours seems to suggest that you support environmental degradation and the irresponsible squandering of fossil fuels.

 

CO2 is a harmless gas. Plants love it. I love plants. If plants are deprived of this gas, they suffer. In fact one can purchase commercial CO2 generators to place in greenhouses where levels three of four times normal make the plants thrive. One can fashion a generator with a little know-how.

I have an intimate relationship with CO2. Every time I exhale some of it touches my lips or nostrils. It has a very calming effect. One can only hold one's breath so long.

Your supposition is incorrect. I'm not surprised. By the way, when is squandering responsible?

 

Tom, I responded initially to a comment (one of yours, I believe) after clicking into the thread on the home page under the heading 'latest forum posts'. When I look above I see, "Fred's House of Pancakes Anything unrelated to the Prius. Come chat. First Amendment is your friend in here." This was my first visit to FHOP. I was completely unaware of a separate or sub-forum for politcal comment.

Daniel certainly had no problem commenting on my prior posts. Some will say that 'All is Politics'; I don't go that far, but it is pretty pervasive.

Perhaps you can help me out. If I go to the environmental forum and proclaim that the IPCC computer models and the conclusions drawn from them are pure politics, will I be directed to the political sub-forum?

As far as cheap shots go, I think daniel's comment about our former President in post #14 is pretty cheap.

I think he wimped out.

 

Ooops, double post. But since I'm, here, here's my former avatar. I changed it in poor fibb222's honor. He found it 'creepy'.

 

CO2 is responsible for global warming. Humans burning fossil fuels have caused a massive and rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 many magnitudes greater than anything that has ever before happened due to natural causes. Either you are aware of this, or you have your head in the sand. Yes, CO2 is necessary for plant life. But when the balance changes, the result can be catastrophic to humans. You also are well aware of this, unless you have your head in the sand. Your avatar looks like a glib denial of the above facts about the atmosphere, the balance of gasses, and their effect on climate.

In post 14 I called a spade a spade. Or more precisely, I called a moron a moron.

FHOP was originally established as a place for non-Prius conversations. It was felt by Danny, by the mods, and by the membership that off-topic discussions had a place on PC, but not in the car forums. FHOPol was established much more recently to move the nearly-always rancorous political discussions off of the more general off-topic FHOP forum. I spent a lot of time in FHOPol. until I decided it was a waste of time: nobody convinces anybody of anything, they just hollar at each other.

You posted some very thoughtful things in this thread, and I responded. When it was clear that our disagreements had moved our discussion into the realm of the political, I decided not to participate in that aspect of the discussion. I could not care less if you call that "wimping out." I've been accused of worse here on PC and elsewhere. If you want to discuss politics, FHOPol is open to everyone (though you do have to opt in before you can enter it), and you will find plenty of argumentation to participate in.

 

Wow, did THIS thread get serious and unfunny all of a sudden ....

 

That's for sure. It took a turn down the crapper.

Tom

 

You make concrete assertions unsupported by science. You buy into the politically driven IPCC conclusions that man's contribution of CO2 is the major contributor to global warming. This has NOT been proven. The science is NOT settled regardless how many times it is repeated by Al Gore and other non-scientists or even scientists who should know better.

You are precisely imprecise in another assertion you make. A moron has an I.Q. 50-69. You are free to disagree with the decisions a man makes, but in this case (as is so often the case with so-called Progressives) an ad hominem attack takes the place of factual or truthful rejoinder.

Now that I am aware of the proper place to discuss politics (AGW included) I shall refrain from further discussion on this thread. I apologize for my contribution to serious exchange rather than frivolities. In that spirit:

So a photon a positron and a moron wander into a bar and the bartender says, "Say what is this, some kind of joke?"

 

The Teaching Company has a course on climate change. This is not a politically-driven company. It is an academically-driven one. There is no longer any legitimate scientific opposition to the assertion that the burning of fossil fuels by humans is affecting the climate and that the present unprecedented levels of CO2 in the atmosphere bode ill for any hopes of a stable climate over the course of the next several decades.

Not to mention lung cancer from all the other pollutants that result from burning fossil fuels, or the fact that we are squandering a non-renewable resource by burning something that has multiple important uses: We have the technology today to switch to renewable, non-polluting energy sources, but it will be much more difficult to find other sources for raw inputs to pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and much more.

Your "I <heart> CO2" carries with it much more than a denial of global warming. It is a snide comment against conservation in general.

And it is only politics that should not be argued in FHOP. Science and conservation are legitimate subjects here.

 

Wrong about the avatar.

We can exchange these links ad nauseum. What matters is the truth. The truth is that the vast majority (including the professor to whom you link) who believe the science is settled in regard to global warming/climate change have been influenced by non-scientist and moron (oh, sorry) Al Gore and/or the IPCC (yes, that's right).

The initial conclusions drawn from the first IPCC report were largely based on the fraudulent and disproven 'hockey stick' representation of temperature increase and computer models (software) designed to determine whether man was at fault. ;

{The charter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is

"... to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy.".

This makes it a high-profile single-focus organization whose existence depends on its own reports. In other words it has a vested interest in promoting claims that would guarantee its funding and justify its continued existence.

This alone would be reason enough to closely examine its procedures and claims but the situation is made worse by the involvement of governments. These governments not only fund the IPCC but apparently accept its claims without question and allocate funding for climate research on the basis of those findings, then repeat the process when the next IPCC Assessment Report draws on the findings of that government-sponsored research to support its hypothesis.

Shouldn't you also be suspicious of an organization that seeks to imply (or fails to correct false perceptions) that
- it is impartial when it is clearly not,
- that its authors and reviewers have no vested interest when most do,
- that its climate models are accurate when they are not,
- that all reviewers support the IPCC's fundamental claims when very few explicitly do so
- that its authors have a wide range of opinions and experience when many work together or have co-authored papers together
- that all its authors support the critical claim when many merely reported on observations and far more others had to work from the assumption that the claim was correct?}

above from: The IPCC under the Microscope

It is not as if someone said, "Gee, I wonder what may have caused the recent rise in temperature," and then put together a team to look at all the possibilities. No, they chose ONE possibility. That may appear to be true science to you, but fails the smell test with me.

Why am I allowed to <heart> CO2:

C. D. Idso and K. E. Idso
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change​

There is little doubt the air's CO2 concentration has risen significantly since the inception of the Industrial Revolution; and there are few who do not attribute the CO2 increase to the increase in humanity's use of fossil fuels. There is also little doubt the earth has warmed slightly over the same period; but there is no compelling reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that future increases in the air's CO2 content will produce any global warming; for there are numerous problems with the popular hypothesis that links the two phenomena.
A weak short-term correlation between CO2 and temperature proves nothing about causation. Proponents of the notion that increases in the air's CO2 content lead to global warming point to the past century's weak correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global air temperature as proof of their contention. However, they typically gloss over the fact that correlation does not imply causation, and that a hundred years is not enough time to establish the validity of such a relationship when it comes to earth's temperature history.
The observation that two things have risen together for a period of time says nothing about one trend being the cause of the other. To establish a causal relationship it must be demonstrated that the presumed cause precedes the presumed effect. Furthermore, this relationship should be demonstrable over several cycles of increases and decreases in both parameters. And even when these criteria are met, as in the case of solar/climate relationships, many people are unwilling to acknowledge that variations in the presumed cause truly produced the observed analogous variations in the presumed effect.
In thus considering the seven greatest temperature transitions of the past half-million years - three glacial terminations and four glacial inceptions - we note that increases and decreases in atmospheric CO2 concentration not only did not precede the changes in air temperature, they followed them, and by hundreds to thousands of years! There were also long periods of time when atmospheric CO2 remained unchanged, while air temperature dropped, as well as times when the air's CO2 content dropped, while air temperature remained unchanged or actually rose. Hence, the climate history of the past half-million years provides absolutely no evidence to suggest that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 concentration will lead to significant global warming.
Strong negative climatic feedbacks prohibit catastrophic warming. Strong negative feedbacks play major roles in earth's climate system. If they did not, no life would exist on the planet, for some perturbation would long ago have sent the world careening into a state of cosmic cold or horrendous heat; and we know from the fossil record that neither of these extremes has ever occurred, even over billions of years, and in spite of a large increase in the luminosity of the sun throughout geologic time.
Consider, in this regard, the water vapor that would be added to the atmosphere by enhanced evaporation in a warmer world. The extra moisture would likely lead to the production of more and higher-water-content clouds, both of which consequences would tend to cool the planet by reflecting more solar radiation back to space.
A warmer world would also mean a warmer ocean, which would likely lead to an increase in the productivity of marine algae or phytoplankton. This phenomenon, in turn, would enhance the biotic production of certain sulfur-based substances that diffuse into the air, where they are oxidized and converted into particles that function as cloud condensation nuclei. The resulting increase in the number of cloud-forming particles would thus produce more and smaller cloud droplets, which are more reflective of incoming solar radiation; and this phenomenon would also tend to cool the planet.
All of these warming-induced cloud-related cooling effects are very powerful. It has been shown, for example, that the warming predicted to result from a doubling of the air's CO2 content may be totally countered by: (1) a mere 1% increase in the reflectivity of the planet, or (2) a 10% increase in the amount of the world's low-level clouds, or (3) a 15 to 20% reduction in the mean droplet radius of earth's boundary-layer clouds, or (4) a 20 to 25% increase in cloud liquid water content. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the warming-induced production of high-level clouds over the equatorial oceans almost totally nullifies that region's powerful water vapor greenhouse effect, which supplies much of the temperature increase in the CO2-induced global warming scenario.
Most of these important negative feedbacks are not adequately represented in state-of-the-art climate models. What is more, many related (and totally ignored!) phenomena are set in motion when the land surfaces of the globe warm. In response to the increase in temperature between 25°N latitude and the equator, for example, the soil-to-air flux of various sulfur gases rises by a factor of 25, as a consequence of warmth-induced increases in soil microbial activity; and this phenomenon can lead to the production of more cloud condensation nuclei just as biological processes over the sea do. Clearly, therefore, any number of combinations of these several negative feedbacks could easily thwart the impetus for warming provided by future increases in the air's CO2 content.
Growth-enhancing effects of CO2 create an impetus for cooling. Carbon dioxide is a powerful aerial fertilizer, directly enhancing the growth of almost all terrestrial plants and many aquatic plants as its atmospheric concentration rises. And just as increased algal productivity at sea increases the emission of sulfur gases to the atmosphere, ultimately leading to more and brighter clouds over the world's oceans, so too do CO2-induced increases in terrestrial plant productivity lead to enhanced emissions of various sulfur gases over land, where they likewise ultimately cool the planet. In addition, many non-sulfur-based biogenic materials of the terrestrial environment play major roles as water- and ice-nucleating aerosols; and the airborne presence of these materials should also be enhanced by rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Hence, it is possible that incorporation of this multifaceted CO2-induced cooling effect into the suite of equations that comprise the current generation of global climate models might actually tip the climatic scales in favor of global cooling in the face of continued growth of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
There is no evidence for warming-induced increases in extreme weather. Proponents of the CO2-induced global warming hypothesis often predict that extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and hurricanes will become more numerous and/or extreme in a warmer world; however, there is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, many studies have revealed that the numbers and intensities of extreme weather events have remained relatively constant over the last century of modest global warming or have actually declined. Costs of damages from these phenomena, however, have risen dramatically; but this phenomenon has been demonstrated to be the result of evolving societal, demographic and economic factors.
Elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are a boon to the biosphere. In lieu of global warming, a little of which would in all probability be good for the planet, where do the above considerations leave us? Simply with the biospheric benefits that come from the aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment: enhanced plant growth, increased plant water use efficiency, greater food production for both people and animals, plus a host of other biological benefits too numerous to describe in this short statement.
And these benefits are not mere predictions. They are real. Already, in fact, they are evident in long-term tree-ring records, which reveal a history of increasing forest growth rates that have closely paralleled the progression of the Industrial Revolution. They can also be seen in the slow but inexorable spreading of woody plants into areas where only grasses grew before. In fact, the atmosphere itself bears witness to the increasing prowess of the entire biosphere in the yearly expanding amplitude of the its seasonal CO2 cycle. This oscillatory "breath of the biosphere" - its inhalation of CO2, produced by spring and summer terrestrial plant growth, and its exhalation of CO2, produced by fall and winter biomass decomposition - has been documented to be growing greater and greater each year in response to the ever-increasing growth stimulation provided by the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.
Atmospheric CO2 enrichment brings growth and prosperity to man and nature alike. This, then, is what we truly believe will be the result of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content: a reinvigorated biosphere characteristic of those prior periods of earth's history when the air's CO2 concentration was much higher than it is today, coupled with a climate not much different from that of the present. Are we right? Only time will tell. But one thing is certain now: there is much more real-world evidence for the encouraging scenario we paint here than for the doom-and-gloom predictions of apocalypse that are preached by those who blindly follow the manifestly less-than-adequate prognostications of imperfect climate models.

The above from:

CO2 Science

 

Denialist web sites can publish all the trash they like, and with plenty of big funders, from religious conservatives to Big Oil, there's no lack of money.

 

P.S. So because you don't like my use of the word "moron" to describe W, who is without a doubt the stupidest man ever to occupy the White House, you display your own misunderstanding of the word by applying it to Al Gore, who by any accounts is extremely intelligent.

I wonder, are you a young-Earth creationist also?

 

The hoaxers have the media, Marxist academia and the government presently on their side pushing trash upon an ignorant public who refuse to do any self-education on the subject.

 

Do you say the same things about evolution?

 

I'm putting on my tinfoil hat.
eep:

Tom

 

I don't misunderstand the word, I use it to counter your misuse of it.

You apparently listen exclusively to only one side of every question. That is what ideologues do. It is how they remain smug in the certainty that they are always correct. Because you have been subjected to the endless mantra from the news media and Hollywood that G.W. Bush is an intellectual inferior (along with Eisenhower, Reagan, etc.), you uncritically believe it. (Same with AGW).

I used to watch Letterman regularly, but every time I turned it on I could not help but notice he and his writers have become nothing more than shills for the left. It seems to pervade entertainment at all levels. Thank God for talk radio where the voices of truth may still be heard by many.

Please note the following:

What proof was there of Gore’s alleged gravitas? How exactly did the media know that Gore was so smart and Bush so dumb? In fact, the record did not indicate any of this was true. It was often alleged, probably with reason, that Bush only got into Yale because his father had gone there and his grandfather had been a Connecticut senator. Yet Gore, with high school Bs and Cs (his only As were in art), got into Harvard in part because (like other politicians’ sons, including a raft of Kennedys) his father was a famous senator. At Harvard, Gore’s grades did not improve. In his sophomore year he earned a D, a C-minus, two Cs, two C-pluses and one B-minus. He was in the bottom fifth of his class his first two years in school. Later he flunked out of divinity school (failing five of his eight classes) and dropped out of Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore was once asked (after having served in the U.S. Senate for several years) to name his favourite president. “President Knox,†he replied.

from: Peter Schweizer: The arrogance of uneducated liberals - Full Comment

Some will argue that grades are not important, that I.Q. is not important and I have no quarrel with the arguments one way or another. One shows how adequately a man applies himself to the task at hand and the other is indicative of what he might accomplish. It is interesting that Bush won two elections against what liberals considered vastly superior intellects.

Want more?

“Some supporters of Bush’s chief opponent in that campaign, Al Gore, often portrayed Bush as intellectually inferior to Gore. Some have attempted to compare their current respective intellectual capacities by going decades back to their academic achievements. According to that criterion, Bush’s academic record and background was by and large comparable to Gore’s. For example, Bush’s verbal SAT score was 566, Al Gore’s was 625. In addition, Gore received lower grades in his sophomore year at Harvard University than any semester recorded on Bush’s transcript from Yale, and Gore earned no degrees higher than a Bachelor of Arts in Government, while Bush earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Harvard...

...UPI's Steve Sailer also went on to investigate George W. Bush's specific IQ:

Linda Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, told United Press International: “I recently converted Bush’s SAT score to an IQ using the high school norms available for his age cohort. Educational Testing Service happened to have done a study of representative high school students within a year or so of when he took the test. I derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile.†In other words, only one out of 20 people would score higher.�...â€

from: PoliPundit.com Rhetorical Self-Delusion

I have seen Gore's I.Q. estimated at 130. This is the huge difference that allows you to malign W? (sarcasm)

To answer your last query - no. Disappointed?

 

Well, time to unsubscribe from *this* little thread ....