Commentary #6: Global Warming

[Jovan Dragisic]

Plus, he debunks many myths and points out how the media falsely portrays the narrative, for example how the polar bear extinction was the major evidence for global warming but once data came out showing there was no or little causation between the two and the main cause was man hunting, it magically disappeared from public awareness.

But by the time they started using polar bears as the GW mascot, the populations were already on an upswing due to conservation efforts, meaning there was never an extinction to begin with. So what does he actually debunk?

Just on a whim, I went to see what the WWF has to say on the matter now and behold:

“By 2040, scientists predict that only a fringe of ice will remain in Northeast Canada and Northern Greenland when all other large areas of summer ice are gone. This ”Last Ice Area” is likely to become important for polar bears and other life that depends on ice.
A projection of sea ice in the archipelago, supported by WWF, shows that much of the region is facing significant ice loss in the coming decades – with potentially serious consequences for polar bears.
Global polar bear numbers are projected to decline by 30% by 2050.”

The old trick of pushing predictions ten to twenty years into the future. The ice will melt because you are riding around in a car. Comedy gold really.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Based on that simple explanation he gave, it seems like the conclusion is that CO2 in the atmosphere has always been and will always be rising because no matter what, some of it will remain "trapped" there and accumulate, but it obviously doesn't make sense or the Earth's temperature would have been rising since it's existed.

Atmospheric CO2 has been falling for the past 4 billion years. It's at 380ppm now, and plants have problems when it's much lower than this.

So is there no data that shows that over the last century the Earth's temperature has risen? Or is it just insignificant data compared to longer time periods and there's no evidence it's effecting or will effect us?

Yes, there is "data." Who collected it and provided it is the important question.

Just on a whim, I went to see what the WWF has to say on the matter now and behold:

“By 2040, scientists predict that only a fringe of ice will remain in Northeast Canada and Northern Greenland when all other large areas of summer ice are gone. This ”Last Ice Area” is likely to become important for polar bears and other life that depends on ice.
A projection of sea ice in the archipelago, supported by WWF, shows that much of the region is facing significant ice loss in the coming decades – with potentially serious consequences for polar bears.
Global polar bear numbers are projected to decline by 30% by 2050.”

The old trick of pushing predictions ten to twenty years into the future. The ice will melt because you are riding around in a car. Comedy gold really.

And they keep forgetting to mention that in this Doomsday Scenario, the freeze line moves farther north, adding huge amounts of arable land to the food production system. Of course, this was already supposed to have happened.

[Barry Charles]

Something else needs to be repeated frequently. (I know this has been on this forum and in some of the podcasts).

Simply and factually said, nuclear energy is a million times better than chemical energy. A million times. Imagine, getting paid a million times more, getting to any where a million times faster, or a “battery”, that lasts a million times longer, squatting a million times the weight of your all time PR….

Solar photovoltaic has MAYBE a factor of two left to be squeezed out of it, likely less. Hydro, thermal, wind, natural gas, you get what you get. That’s it people.

A factor of a million.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Barry, how's that thorium reactor coming along?

[Barry Charles]

Barry, how's that thorium reactor coming along?

Good. Basically same trade offs tossed around in the 1950s. Thorium is seeing a resurgence in advocacy but it could be highlighted by politics and profit.

I think from our point of view, Thorium or Uranium are so vastly superior to anything else that the debate is fairly irrelevant.

I am not a nuclear power engineer at all. I just see the advocacy and hear the hysteria.

[francesco.decaro]

Atmospheric CO2 has been falling for the past 4 billion years. It's at 380ppm now, and plants have problems when it's much lower than this.

Let's take some quotes from a quick internet search to see what the average person finds when looking for "geology levels of atmospheric co2"


7. Is the current level of atmospheric CO2 concentration unprecedented in Earth’s history? Answer | Royal Society
"The present level of atmospheric CO2 concentration is almost certainly unprecedented in the past million years, during which time modern humans evolved and societies developed. The atmospheric CO2 concentration was however higher in Earth’s more distant past (many millions of years ago), at which time palaeoclimatic and geological data indicate that temperatures and sea levels were also higher than they are today."

CO2 Records
"Atmospheric CO2 is higher now than at any time in the past 200,000 years of human history. In fact, studies of past CO2 levels have accumulated evidence of CO2 levels being lower than 400 ppm for the past 23 million years. That makes the CO2 records on this page the highest in human history plus a period that's a hundred times short 200,000-year time that homo sapiens have graced the earth. The higher levels of this planet-heating gas is just one part of the problem. The other is the speed of the changes, more than a hundred times pre-human times, and faster than many ecosystems can adapt to."

A Graphical History of Atmospheric CO2 Levels Over Time | Earth.Org
"The most distant period in time for which we have estimated CO2 levels is around the Ordovician period, 500 million years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s, and those of you who have heard of the runaway hothouse Earth scenario may wonder why it didn’t happen then. Major factors were that the Sun was cooler, and the planet’s orbital cycles were different."

Just How Sensitive Is Earth's Climate to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide? - Scientific American
"Modern-day levels of carbon dioxide were last reached about 15 million years ago," Tripati says, when sea levels were at least 25 meters higher and temperatures were at least 3 degrees C warmer on average. "During the middle Miocene, an [epoch] in Earth's history when carbon dioxide levels were sustained at values similar to what they are today [330 to 500 ppm], the planet was much warmer, sea level was higher, there was substantially less ice at the poles, and the distribution of rainfall was very different."


Do high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2? (this skeptic page calls the following a "climate myth")

"The killer proof that CO2 does not drive climate is to be found during the Ordovician- Silurian and the Jurassic-Cretaceous periods when CO2 levels were greater than 4000 ppmv (parts per million by volume) and about 2000 ppmv respectively. If the IPCC theory is correct there should have been runaway greenhouse induced global warming during these periods but instead there was glaciation."
(The Lavoisier Group)

[VNV]

Something else needs to be repeated frequently. (I know this has been on this forum and in some of the podcasts).

Simply and factually said, nuclear energy is a million times better than chemical energy. A million times. Imagine, getting paid a million times more, getting to any where a million times faster, or a “battery”, that lasts a million times longer, squatting a million times the weight of your all time PR….

Solar photovoltaic has MAYBE a factor of two left to be squeezed out of it, likely less. Hydro, thermal, wind, natural gas, you get what you get. That’s it people.

A factor of a million.

Kinda suggests where we should put our efforts. Energy density rules.

[Jovan Dragisic]

So is there no data that shows that over the last century the Earth's temperature has risen? Or is it just insignificant data compared to longer time periods and there's no evidence it's effecting or will affect us?

The earth has been cooling for about two decades. Have you not noticed how cold the last three or four springs have been?

[Chiaki Nitya]

Something else needs to be repeated frequently. (I know this has been on this forum and in some of the podcasts).

Simply and factually said, nuclear energy is a million times better than chemical energy. A million times. Imagine, getting paid a million times more, getting to any where a million times faster, or a “battery”, that lasts a million times longer, squatting a million times the weight of your all time PR….

Solar photovoltaic has MAYBE a factor of two left to be squeezed out of it, likely less. Hydro, thermal, wind, natural gas, you get what you get. That’s it people.

A factor of a million.

It blows my mind that we've had probably the safest, cleanest energy we'll ever have, for the better part of 50 years, yet it almost always goes unmentioned. Almost like there's an agenda.

[my_back_hurts]

The endocrine crisis is a way bigger problem than global warming even assuming the strongest theory of AGW is completely true, anyway.