Climate scientists: it's time for 'Plan B'

[excoriate]

Originally Posted by Meta menardi

No you are not! Tell me where you are and I will get on a plane to come and support you.

Heh, by public transport?
I'm in Hamilton, Scotland

[Amoeba]

Aside from the obvious problems with triggered algal blooms, since when did cloud cover equal cooling? Sure during the day if the sun goes behind the clouds it feels a little cold, but heat in the long term gets trapped - it can't escape back into space at anywhere near the rate it would if there was normal cloud cover, or no clouds. Clouds promote the greenhouse effect.

There is so much we can do that we haven't done, and I'm in agreement with those who say they haven't actually seen the governments or the people make any effort to tackle the problem. I know many people have gotten fed up with the media scaremongering, exaggerating, dumbing down and have stopped believing - or caring - that we are responsible for the problem, the government haven't actually done anything about it. They have plenty of power over the media and I think by now they should know that all scaremongering accomplishes is disinterest, worry and very sketchy panicked and misinformed action.

People need to want to change things and in a big way, quite frankly I can't see that ever happening. Plan B only aims to treat the symptoms.

[Digit]

Based on how unrealistic Plan A is/was I have little faith in Plan B either!

Roy.

[loripo]

And it seems we now have a new gas affecting the ozone layer to worry about - Nitrous Oxide. Emmsions of this gas are not regulated.

[Digit]

And what is totally ignored is the heat generated by day to day living, as we sit at our computers heat will have escaped into the environment from the extraction of the fuel, its transportation, distribution and consumption.
Heat is heat is heat!

Roy.

[harasseddad]

Heat is heat is heat!

No, noit really. In the normal manner of things any heat generated by our technology would just increase the amount radiated into space. It's the CO2 that's trapping the heat here, preventing it being radiated that's the problem.
(To be precise it's the excess CO2 - since of course, if we didn't have any CO2 we'd radiate away all the heat and the earth would be about as cold as Mars)

[Digit]

But you don't get one without the other so there's no point in saying that without the CO2 the heat would escape. It isn't!

Roy.

[Amoeba]

I think what Digit means is that usually where heat is produced, CO2 is also produced and there are very few instances where CO2 is not produced from a heat source.

When our bodies generate heat, it's from our body's metabolic activity and respiration which produces CO2 as a waste product.

When we light a fire the carbon in the fuel reacts with the oxygen in the air triggered by an initial heat source (spark, friction, etc) resulting in the two reactants to combine and form the product CO2.

When our cars run and produce heat one of the waste products to come out of the exhaust pipe is CO2.

However, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere doesn't always produce heat, so it is possible to produce heat and still be able to lower the CO2 levels in the atmosphere (for example, plants produce a negligible amount of heat and can still absorb a lot of CO2). I don't think this is the way to go though, the issue should still be addressed at the source of the CO2 production.

[Cellarman]

We global "warming" sceptics are once again being shown to be on the right track!

Have a look here: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | What happened to global warming?

[harasseddad]

The problem for "skeptics" is that not one has ever come up with an answer to the question "where's the extra heat going?".

We know that covalent molecules with bond angles between 22 and 35 degrees absorb infrared radiation. We know that CO2 has such a bond angle. We know that the concentration of CO2 has increased from roughly 280 to 380 in the last century, and we can calculate therefore the extra heat that has been absorbed by the atmosphere - all that's simple O level physics, chemistry and maths.

So in order to argue that the increase in CO2 is NOT going to affect climate a skeptic has to be able to advance some sort of plausible hypothesis as to where the extra heat is going - we know it isn't being radiated into space because we have satelites directly measuring that. No one has ever come up with any sort of mechanism or process that could make that heat disappear.

And in the absence of any such explanation I can not see how anyone can be a skeptic - after all even the flat earth people have an "explanation" for pictures showing a round earth, while skeptics appear to have collectively opted to put their fingers in the ears and hum whenever the basic science is discussed.