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Discussion Forums » General Discussion
How Green Are You?
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14 Mar 2009, 01:20
King Phantom
Post Count: 34
I'm not green at all, and don't care to be. It's a week til spring and it's 40 outside. Global warming my arse.
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14 Mar 2009, 01:21
King Phantom
Post Count: 34
Oh, and: America.
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14 Mar 2009, 13:25
Acid Fairy
Post Count: 1849
That's why it's called 'climate change' now... because they have no idea what's really going on!

The greenhouse effect, global warming, climate change - make up your mind!
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14 Mar 2009, 13:42
Super Logica
Post Count: 148
They are not all the same thing, as I will now explain (I can only resist commenting for so long you know, and you keep baiting me!).

The Greenhouse effect is when solar radiation is trapped in Earth's atmosphere by a build up of so-called greenhouse gases, thus causing our atmosphere to be compared to a greenhouse (the analogy is actually not wholly accurate, but that's a different topic!). This causes global warming, which is the term used to describe the global trend in rising temperatures easily observed in the last 20/30 years worth of weather data.

Climate change is a legitimate subtopic of meterology/geology devoted to the change in climate over a period of time. As a science, it existed before the current climate concerns were established fact. It does not refer specifically to what we are now experiencing, but both this period of Earth's history and many other periods where Earth's climate has changed. The term has simply been banded by the world's media to "catchphrase" climate concerns at the moment.
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14 Mar 2009, 13:52
Acid Fairy
Post Count: 1849
So then, if the media weren't trying to make me care more about the environment by throwing these different terms around, maybe I would care! Ohhhh how I love being awkward ;D

But anyway... I think this topic does have valid points for both sides. Both sides also have some stupid points. I am definitely not denying that. It just depends on what side of the fence you sit. And I just enjoy doing the opposite to everything I am told to do haha!
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14 Mar 2009, 13:57
Super Logica
Post Count: 148
Both sides have valid points? Who are this "other side", and what exactly are their valid points?
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14 Mar 2009, 14:38
Acid Fairy
Post Count: 1849
That the earth has a cycle of continually heating up and cooling down...

Why did the last ice age end? Wasn't because of Land Rovers back then... (we are still technically in an ice age, as it is defined as any period when there is still extensive ice sheets in both hemispheres)

Scientists are currently recording higher temperatures on other planets in the solar system, which would be down to the sun, not us..

"The climate changes all the time... Get used to it." - Tim Ball, Climatologist

Manmade CO2 emissions are roughly 5% of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals. Annually, volcanoes alone produce more CO2 than all of mankind's activities...

No scientist can say which computer model predicting warm/cool periods is accurate, and what will happen, tis all conjecture...

Now all the media sources are claiming we are cooling, and not heating up, so no one can actually make up their mind. And you can't blame the media, since it was them that originally said we were heating up when everyone jumped on the bandwagon... why disregard one study and believe another? http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause.html

Lindzen wrote in The Wall Street Journal on April 12, 2006,[38]
“But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis."

From a fab article here - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4953981/Climate-denial-is-know-a-mental-disorder.html
'It was generally another bad week for the warmists. The Met Office, which has been one of the chief pushers of the global warming scare for 20 years, had to admit that this has been "Britain's coldest winter for 13 years", despite its prediction last September that the winter would be "milder than average". This didn't of course stop it predicting that 2009 will be one of "the top-five warmest years on record".'

If they can't predict what is going to happen in a few months how the flip do they know what will happen in years to come?

Et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not denying that the climate isn't changing, but I don't buy into it being down to humans. There are FAR too many extraneous sources.
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14 Mar 2009, 14:45
Transit
Post Count: 1096
'dying vegetation' this includes desforestation
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14 Mar 2009, 14:54
Acid Fairy
Post Count: 1849
Yeah, a little bit. As it said, volcanoes more than make up for it.
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14 Mar 2009, 15:00
Transit
Post Count: 1096
The sun causes skin cancer, but we don't use that as an excuse not to bother with sun cream. I'd prefer is species weren't forced into extinction and entire villages forced from their homes myself.
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14 Mar 2009, 16:07
Acid Fairy
Post Count: 1849
That won't happen because it is all based on nice theories, and not proper evidence.

NOBODY can predict the future. I may end up being wrong, then again these computer models may also be wrong.

I reckon the earth will stay the same. Not cool down, nor warm up. And hey if it did, we would apparently have the same climate as the south of France - nice!

I was thinking about sun lotion in the shower though, randomly. WHY is sun lotion so expensive? WHY?!
Anyhoo, that has been proven. Climate change has not.
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14 Mar 2009, 16:14
Transit
Post Count: 1096
Sun cream is pricey, which is annoying!!

Well if the earth warms up, polar ice melts right, which would force the gulf stream south, the gulf stream is a major source of heat for the UK, so without it we would become cooler. Whether we warm or cool we will be guaranteed to lose native species.
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14 Mar 2009, 18:04
Super Logica
Post Count: 148
See this I don't get. Climate change has been proven. Like, how much more evidence do you need? There are thousands of documents that prove that it's happening. It's not a theory. We can prove that it's caused by man with at least 90% certainty. That's the same certainty level as the theory that smoking causes lung cancer, and yet you don't see [many] people ignoring that scientific fact.
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14 Mar 2009, 16:14
Super Logica
Post Count: 148
They are not valid arguments against climate change being man-made. It's all simply continually mis-represented science pamphleted by those who either do not know enough to be making public announcements or refuse to acknowledge a problem and twist data to suit their own ends.

Yes Earth does have cycles of warming and cooling, but the current climatic trends do not fit with any of them. In fact, if we were following normal cyclic patterns, we would be entering a colder period at the moment, not a warmer one.

I haven't studied the most recent deglaciation so I don't know why it ended specifically in that case, but we have had many periods of glaciation in Earth's history, and they go through periods of waxing and waning due to concentrations of atmospheric gases, changes in solar activity, changes in land use, changes in land formation, and much more. There are many natural reasons for an ice age to draw to an end, and no it wasn't due to land rovers (I can safely assume that!). As with my previous comment, this period should not be warming up, it should be cooling down.

I don't know about scientists recording temperatures on other planets, so I can't comment on this. However, firstly: how are they recording the temperatures? Because if they are doing it via telescope then they are not recording present day temperatures and the data is irrelevant to modern day climate change. Secondly, we know the sun is getting hotter. Stars get "brighter" over their lifetimes. However solar intensity can not account for the temperature increases over the last few decades, simply because it does not happen quickly enough.

Tim Ball's quote is not an argument against human-induced climate change. It's simply an acknowledgement that the climate does change (which no one is denying). Secondly, we do not live in a world where the minority overrule the majority in matters of science. One scientist saying that climate change is not due to human activity doesn't mean the other 1000+ scientists that say it does are wrong. Most likely, the one scientist whose arguments are contrary to everyone else's is in the wrong.

Volcanoes are not causing climate change, if that is what you are suggesting. They affect weather (short term atmospheric activity - climate is like the long term average of weather, if you like), at most of a period of months or a couple of years and except in exceptional cases they are regional disturbances (not global). An example would be Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which incidentally cooled temperatures the following year - it didn't cause warming. The general trend is that volcanic eruptions cool the Earth (depending on many factors that I can't be arsed to explain, and which would make a whole other reply really. lol. But basically type of eruption and size of eruption are important if you want to measurably change the weather).
Regarding their CO2 output, climate change deniers always forget to mention that volcanoes also remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and that the net balance of their activities is 0.
If only 5% of CO2 is from man-made sources, thats still 5% more than Earth would have if we weren't doing anything. Earth might be large but there are a lot of delicate systems working to keep things ticking over smoothly and everything is balance. CO2 (and most greenhouse gases) can do a lot of damage in very small relative concentrations. It's kind of like comparing salt with arsonic. A small amount of salt will do very little to you, while the same amount of arsonic will kill you instantly. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that was put there by us does not matter if it is more than the system can cope with. CO2 levels are now higher than they have been in Earth's atmosphere for at least the last 500 000 years. If you go over the white line the middle of the road and hit an oncoming car you are still the cause of the accident whether you are over the divider by a foot or an entire car's width.

You don't need a computer model for predicting warm/cool periods as such. You simply input the data from the last 6 million years (or whatever other time you want to study) and extrapolate. For general Earth variations there is consensus on what should happen. It's only conjecture in the sense that it assumes what has happened over X amount of years (whatever the initial data set size is) will happen in the future.

I wouldn't say all media sources are claiming we are cooling. We most certainly are not. One study, which incidentally says temperatures have been flatlining since 2001 and therefore isn't long-term enough to prove that the climate is cooling, does not mean that scientists are now disregarding global warming. Scientists cannot control what the media (and by that leap the public) choose to repeat: just because the press have jumped on an idea ("jumped on the bandwagon") does not mean those with the knowledge in that field are doing the same. Incidentally, I shall just clear this matter up because it really pees me off (my mother likes to say it to wind me up): Global Warming does not mean that everything gets hotter and tropical. It means the global trend is an increase in temperature. It actually exasberates mid-latitude climates, so North America and England should be seeing harsher winters and more variable summers (which for Britain at least, we have done). An easy way to think of it is like this: Global Warming simply exaggerates whatever weather that country already had.

I seriously doubt the statement that grant funds disappear unless you say alarmist things about the climate, or at least doubt that it is happening on a large enough scale to be producing measurable results. Even if some people are pulling the plug on funding if it isn't newsworthy, there are many many many establishments out there funding research and not even the Wall Street Journal can accuse every single funding body of trying to propogate alarmist science. Also science is a peer-review subject, so even if a few scientists being funded by "rogue bodies" are promoting illegitimate scientific research, it would be shot down in the science journals by colleagues who recognised the bogus science, and thus it wouldn't gain credence (unless a dodgy journalist decided to write about it in his weekly magazine, and conveniently "forgot" to discuss what the peers were saying on the matter).

Christopher Booker is a known Climate change denier and therefore the last journalist likely to be presenting a scientifically-sound argument against climate change (some of his "facts" in previous columns have actually be denied by the sources he claimed to have got them from). Also, as I said re: "the media say we are cooling" paragraph above, we shouldn't be seeing milder winters. We should be seeing more extremes. So our crap winter is technically further proof that our climate is changing. Also, this is not an argument against man-made climate change, it is an argument against global warming. I thought you weren't denying that Earth is getting warmer? Because if you are denying that too, that's a whole other kettle of fish! I don't think there is a scientist left in the world that would deny that the datasets prove that temperatures are increasing. Regarding the Met Office predicting it would be a mild winter, that simply shows how poor we are at predicting the weather. No one is denying that! Though, I would wonder why the Met Office predicted that, when my supervisors at uni and most my fellow graduates could probably have told them that was unlikely, given what a bad summer we'd had.

"If they can't predict what is going to happen in a few months how the flip do they know what will happen in years to come?"
Predicting what will happen years down the road is "easier" than predicting what will happen in a few months. This goes back to the difference between weather and climate, which I briefly touched on earlier. Weather is dependant on a lot of atmospheric processes that we don't fully understand, or in some cases don't understand at all. The climate is dependant on long term factors such as solar intensity etc., and these are more cyclical in their nature and therefore easier to predict (all except human activity of course, which is not cyclical. Future predictions on human activity are done by extrapolating present-day activity and predicting things that I don't understand. I think that is done by futurists and industrialists).

I think I shall finish on a quote from the most recent IPCC assessment, which is done by hundreds of the world's leading experts on climate change (you can read the reports yourself on their website, but I warn you that they are very long!):

"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [>90% certainty] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."
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14 Mar 2009, 16:22
Super Logica
Post Count: 148
gosh, that is very long. Sorry!

If it's any consolation, it took me aaaages to write (about 50 mins!).
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14 Mar 2009, 17:11
Acid Fairy
Post Count: 1849
Meh, I'm still not changing my mind.
And anyway, we will be dead, so meh again haha.
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14 Mar 2009, 21:57
Transit
Post Count: 1096
I agree it probably wont effect us as we are that much, but if you plan on children, surely not giving two shits is basically giving your kids a big fuck you.
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17 Mar 2009, 05:32
King Phantom
Post Count: 34
It's been colder here this year than last year.
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17 Mar 2009, 05:33
King Phantom
Post Count: 34
^^ that's my proof :P
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14 Mar 2009, 01:24
& skull.
Post Count: 1701
i do one, but it's enforced. and two i usually do anyway.
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14 Mar 2009, 08:16
Aiure
Post Count: 308
I believe I'm a 3. I live in Canada.

- Recycling of some items is mandatory, by city bylaw in the very least. I leave my bottles/cans out by my building's dumpsters, for the homeless to pick up.
- I always use public transportation if I'm not walking. I don't even have a driver's license, nor do I want one.
- I buy locally made items when possible, and I will go out of my way to do so, even if it costs more. I can't stand the fact that most local grocery stores even bother to carry imported produce, when a lot of the exact same things are grown within a fifty kilometer radius of the city.
- My heating is water based, but I try to keep it low anyway.

I admit fudge the electrical usage a bit. My bearded dragon watches tv when I'm not home. :P (Srsly! He gets bitchy when I don't leave it on and tuned into the Discovery Channel.) I try to keep air conditioner usage to a minimum in the summer....but that can be extremely difficult to do when day temps are in the high 30's and the night temps are in the high 20's. I'm not built for hot weather. lol
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14 Mar 2009, 16:56
mixie
Post Count: 196
1. I recycle, when I can. They only pick up recycling at single family homes in my city, AND they shut down the public drop-off bins (I know, it's ridiculous). Luckily I just discovered my university has a recycling center so we bring most of our glass and plastic there now. 2. My parents drilled it into my head to always switch things off when they aren't in use, so I'm good on that one. However the public transportation here is terrible (though it's gotten better); for example my friend has to commute 3 hours to her job that is only 15 mi away. I live in Florida so I try to keep my a/c low by leaving the back door open with the fan on when I can stand it; but once May rolls around it is hard not to have the a/c on constantly. In winter I just use blankets, never turn the heat on. 3. I buy local, and usually spend more to do so. Since I don't have an "outside" to my home, it'd be hard to get a garden started. 4. Money is again an issue here. I donate when I can, but it's far from regular or a spectacular amount. 5. It's hard to live in a green home if you really enjoy the luxuries of proper plumbing and electricity and having the 'indoors' in general, and don't want to live in a tree or something, or if you don't have the cash to offset your footprint. Interestingly enough I've just decided to write a paper for school on the unavailability of renewable resources. Hopefully I will learn something :]

Oh and I do all these things because I like to feel that I am being good to my body (by consuming less processed foods and hormone/pesticide-free products), and good to my planet. It seems to me that a lot of humans have lost sight of basic instinct- to reproduce and ensure your offspring will reproduce. How can our species survive if we are creating an unsustainable habitat for future generations? We have the ability and intelligence to grasp the concept of the distant future and how our actions in the present will affect it- but are we giving a shit? Or are we just sitting in denial of the fact that we have an impact on our environment, like every other living organism on the planet?

No matter how much we argue over semantics, climate changes. It does that, sure you can "get used to it," but what does that mean? Does that mean a city remains on the coast if it might be underwater in 100 years? Does it mean that we keep up deforestation and altering water cycle patterns even though it is clearly affecting our own way of life, not to mention that of a larger ecosystem? Do we just take it as it comes and let the population die off that can't handle it? What are we doing to get used to it? Will we just become extinct like so many other species of our genus or will we wake up and try to go on? Phew, I got a little worked up there, eh? :P
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14 Mar 2009, 18:07
Super Logica
Post Count: 148
hehe. I agree with you though. Regardless of what is causing climate change, we might as well try and slow it down (even if it were natural...) simply because life will get very difficult for us if we don't.
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15 Mar 2009, 00:18
mixie
Post Count: 196
Or, if we don't want to mess with earth's cycles, we could at least change what WE are doing so that we aren't speeding it up! But of course, it doesn't exist, so what is there to speed up? hehe.
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15 Mar 2009, 04:18
kein mitleid
Post Count: 592
I'm good and green, I swear! I only drive my H1 Hummer 200 miles a day (it used to be 250!), and I remembered that compact fluorescent light bulbs are more efficient, so I replaced all the lights in my home, yard, swimming pool, golf course, and basketball court with them, and leave them on all the time to make sure I'm maximizing efficiency. I only buy things which come in recyclable packaging, which I promptly throw on the ground so the homeless can scrounge the items for the deposit value. Not only that, but I only heat my outdoor swimming pool on days when the temperature is below 65 degrees, and I got rid of the heat blowers that removed snow from my driveway. Now I just have a heated driveway, which is more efficient!

Oh, and I convinced the company that charters my private jet to fly faster to reduce the contrails created.
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